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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Feb 14, 2016 7:22:45 GMT -6
Hillary Clinton continues to be Wall Street's darling, as evidenced by the continuing mega-buck contribution from Wall Street. www.yahoo.com/politics/hillarys-financial-armada-233033648.htmlMeet the lobbyists, donors and bundlers behind Hillary’s $157 million juggernautFeb 4, 2016 by Michael Isikoff "On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly said she will stand up to big banks, drug companies and other special interests. “Democracy can’t just be for billionaires and corporations,” she proclaims. But she has struggled to answer questions about her ties to Wall Street, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper Wednesday night she accepted $675,000 in speaking fees from one investment bank because “that’s what they offered” and that financial firms are not giving her “very much money now.” In fact, as new campaign disclosure reports filed this week reveal, Clinton has been fueled by millions from a network of well-connected Washington lobbyists, Wall Street bundlers and billionaire donors. Here is a Yahoo News guide to some of the key players in Clinton’s $157 million campaign: A savvy political operative who was once chief of staff to Democratic Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, Elmendorf now runs Subject Matter, a go-to Democratic lobbying firm for corporate interests, raking more than $10 million in fees last year. Among its top clients: Wall Street banks (Goldman Sachs and Citigroup), the casino industry (the American Gaming Association), telecoms (Verizon and Time Warner), tech firms (Facebook and Microsoft), agribusiness (Monsanto) and the NFL. The superlobbyist brother of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, he runs Podesta Group — a powerhouse firm for defense contractors (Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Bechtel), pharmaceutical and health insurance giants (Merck and Blue Cross-Blue Shield) and banking and private equity firms (Well Fargo, Credit Suisse Group, KKR). Podesta has used his D.C. mansion, famously decorated with expensive modern art, to host a Clinton fundraiser (offering fine Italian cooking by him and his brother) as well as a book party for Clinton super-PAC attack dog David Brock (co-hosted by Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias and Clinton email pal Sidney Blumenthal.) Another branch of Podesta’s portfolio: foreign governments, including several — Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Burma and the Maldives — accused by the State Department of human rights abuses. A new senior partner working on the firm’s new $1.68 million a year Saudi account: David Adams, former assistant secretary for legislative affairs while Clinton was secretary of state. The stylish ex-wife of Tony Podesta, who battled with him over the expensive art in their home during a messy divorce, she runs her own rival firm, Heather Podesta & Partners. It raked in $7.5 million last year lobbying for MacAndrews & Forbes (the Wall Street investment firm owned by billionaire Ronald Perelman) as well as Marathon Oil, the Cigna Corp. and the National Pork Producers Council, among others. But one of her new clients has raised the most eyebrows: the National Cannabis Industry Association, making her the pot lobbyist in chief on Capitol Hill. Sullivan is the former DNC finance chair who first got attention as the supervisor of John Huang, the fundraiser convicted of campaign finance violations during Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection. Sullivan, who is Clinton’s most prolific Lobbyist bundler, now is a partner at Capitol Counsel, which specializes in protecting tax breaks for private equity and real estate investment firms (Blackstone, Beacon Capitol Partners and the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts.) Other big clients include the PhRMA, the drug industry’s lobbying arm, and two of its leading members (Roche Holdings and Amgen.) Sullivan recently dropped one of his clients, a firm that electronically monitors prison inmates, after Clinton met with a racial justice group and said she would not take money from lobbyists for private prison companies. Sullivan’s partner at his lobbying firm, David Jones, another longtime Democratic fundraiser, has bundled another $386,000. When the former Indiana Democratic senator announced his retirement in 2010, he bemoaned the “corrosive” impact of money in politics. But since then, Bayh has become a K Street fixture as a “strategic adviser” to the business clients of McGuireWoods, the legal, lobbying and fundraising juggernaut that represents Exxon Mobil, Duke Energy and the National Association of Manufacturers, among others. Bayh, who hosted a fundraiser for Clinton at the McGuireWoods K St. office last spring, also serves as a strategic adviser to Apollo Management, the Wall Street private equity firm (which paid Clinton $225,000 for a speech after she left office.) Two of his McGuireWoods colleagues, Andrew Smith and former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, are also bundlers who have raised $240,000 for the Clinton campaign while lobbying for clients that include Smithfield Foods (now owned by the Chinese-based Shuanghui Group) and Dandong Port Group, a Hong Kong-registered port and grain importing firm owned by secretive Chinese billionaire Wenliang Wang, who has donated $2 million to the Clinton Foundation. After serving as Hillary Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, Nides returned through the Wall Street revolving door to become vice chairman of Morgan Stanley. A top Clinton bundler, he has helped raise $205,198 from the investment bank’s executives and employees, including donations from the firm’s chief operating officer, its chiefs of fixed income and wealth management, two managing directors and four members of its board of directors. Morgan Stanley, which last year agreed to pay a $2.6 billion fine to settle U.S. government claims over its role in the 2008 financial crisis, has donated $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. It also paid Hillary Clinton $225,000 for a speech in 2013, two and a half months afar (after) she stepped down as secretary of state. He is the chairman of Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street colossus that last month agreed to pay a $5.1 billion fine to settle a Justice Department investigation for its role in marketing subprime mortgage bonds in the runup to the 2008 financial crisis. Among the Goldman executives who helped Blankfein’s firm profit from the crash: Donald Mullen, the former chief of its credit department, who last year made a $1 million donation to Clinton’s super-PAC, Priorities USA Action. “Sounds like we will make some serious money,” Mullen wrote in an email in the fall of 2007, after learning the subprime mortgage market was about to crash, according to a 2011 Senate report. The firm has also been the single biggest source of funds for Hillary Clinton’s post-government speaking career, paying her $625,000 for three speeches since she stepped down as secretary of state in 2012. Blankfein so far has been sitting out the 2016 race. “I don’t want to help or hurt anybody by giving them an endorsement,” he said in a rare TV interview this week. But his wife, Laura, gave the legal maximum of $2,700 to Clinton, and Blankfein, in his interview this week, said that Sanders’ candidacy has “the potential to be a dangerous moment.” Goldman Sachs’ ties to the Clintons have been personal and political: Goldman’s executives and employees have contributed $750,000 to Clinton’s political campaigns, including $100,616 to this year’s run. The firm itself has donated at least $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation and paid $1.2 million to Bill Clinton for speeches dating back to 2001. Blankfein, who has described himself as a friend of Hillary Clinton, has lent a helping financial hand to the Clinton family: He (along with two other former Goldman executives) is among the investors in Eaglevale Partners, the hedge fund founded in 2011 by Marc Mezvinsky, husband of Chelsea Clinton, and the former secretary’s son in law." And there's still more (continued here)
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Feb 7, 2016 0:01:12 GMT -6
Probably not, but the results are even closer than initially reported.
And there is still much uncertainty about the actual vote count.from the Des Moines Register www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/02/02/missing-iowa-precinct-sanders-clinton/79693834/Iowa nightmare revisited: Was correct winner called on caucus night?Feb 3, 2016 by Jennifer Jacobs "It's Iowa's nightmare scenario revisited: An extraordinarily close count in the Iowa caucuses — and reports of chaos in precincts and computer glitches — are raising questions about accuracy of the count and winner. This time it's the Democrats, not the Republicans. Even as Hillary Clinton trumpeted her Iowa win in New Hampshire on Tuesday, aides for Bernie Sanders said the eyelash-thin margin raised questions and called for a review. The chairwoman of the Iowa Democratic Party rejected that notion, saying the results are final. The situation echoes the events on the Republican side in the 2012 caucuses, when one winner (Mitt Romney, by eight votes) was named on caucus night, but a closer examination of the paperwork that reflected the head counts showed someone else pulled in more votes (Rick Santorum, by 34 votes). But some precincts were still missing entirely. Like Republican party officials in 2012, Democratic party officials worked into the early morning on caucus night trying to account for results from a handful of tardy precincts. But at 2:30 a.m. Tuesday, Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Andy McGuire announced that Clinton had eked out a slim victory, based on results from 1,682 of 1,683 precincts. After voters from the final missing Democratic precinct tracked down party officials Tuesday morning to report their results, Sanders won by two delegate equivalents over Clinton in the final missing precinct, Des Moines precinct No. 42. The Iowa Democratic Party said the updated final tally of delegate equivalents for all the precincts statewide was: Clinton: 700.59 Sanders: 696.82. That's a 3.77-count margin between Clinton, the powerful establishment favorite who early on in the Democratic race was expected to win in a virtual coronation, and Sanders, a democratic socialist who few in Iowa knew much about a year ago. Sanders campaign aides told the Register they've found some discrepancies between tallies at the precinct level and numbers that were reported to the state party. The Iowa Democratic Party determines its winner not based on a head count like in the Republicans' straw poll, but based on delegate equivalents tied to a math formula. And there was enough confusion, and untrained volunteers on Monday night, that errors may have been made. "We feel like that there’s a very, very good chance that there is," said Rania Batrice, a Sanders spokeswoman. "It's not that we think anybody did anything intentionally, but human error happens." Team Sanders had its own app that allowed supporters and volunteers to send precinct-level results directly to the campaign. At the same time, caucus chairs sent their official results to the state party, either over a specially built Microsoft app or via phone. Sanders aides hope to sit down with the state parties and review the paperwork from the precinct chairs, Batrice said. "We just want to work with the party and get the questions that are unanswered answered," she said. McGuire, in an interview with the Register, said no. "The answer is that we had all three camps in the tabulation room last night to address any grievances brought forward and we went over any discrepancies. These are the final results," she said. McGuire in her 2:30 a.m. statement said: "Hillary Clinton has been awarded 699.57 state delegate equivalents, Bernie Sanders has been awarded 695.49 state delegate equivalents, Martin O’Malley has been awarded 7.68 state delegate equivalents and uncommitted has been awarded .46 state delegate equivalents. We still have outstanding results in one precinct — Des Moines 42 — which is worth 2.28 state delegate equivalents. We will report that final precinct when we have confirmed those results with the chair." Team Clinton quickly embraced that news, and flatly stated that nothing could change it. Clinton's Iowa campaign director, Matt Paul, said in a statement at 2:35 a.m.: "Hillary Clinton has won the Iowa caucus. After thorough reporting — and analysis — of results, there is no uncertainty and Secretary Clinton has clearly won the most national and state delegates. Statistically, there is no outstanding information that could change the results and no way that Senator Sanders can overcome Secretary Clinton's advantage." McGuire repeated that Tuesday afternoon, saying the reporting app had a built-in failsafe to prevent volunteers from reporting more delegates than were assigned to each precinct. Clinton, who saw her expected Iowa win slip away in 2008, grasped the prize Tuesday. "I can tell you, I've won and I've lost there, and it's a lot better to win," she said at a rally in New Hampshire, the state that votes next on the presidential nominating calendar. But that didn't quell doubts back in Iowa. “Politics is a contact sport with few referees, so torturing your opponents with questions about the transparency of an election can be very harmful and damaging,” said Steffen Schmidt, a longtime political observer and professor at Iowa State University in Ames. Discrepancies can occur in official elections, and caucuses are not even official election events run by the secretary of state's office, noted Dennis Goldford, a Drake University professor who closely studies the Iowa caucuses. "The caucus system isn't built to bear the weight placed on it," he said. "There aren't even paper ballots (in the Democratic caucuses) to use for a recount in case something doesn't add up." Democrats have never released actual head counts, and McGuire said they would not be released this time, either. Determining a winner based on state delegate equivalents rather than head count is a key distinction between how the Democrats conduct their caucuses versus conducting a primary, she said. New Hampshire and Iowa are generally careful to maintain such distinctions as part of their effort to preserve their status as the first caucus state and first primary state. There were reports of disorganization and lack of volunteers Monday evening. Party officials reported a turnout of 171,109, far less than the record of 240,000 seen in 2008. Democratic voters reported long lines, too few volunteers, a lack of leadership and confusing signage. In some cases, people waited for an hour in one line, only to learn their precinct was in a different area of the same building. The proceedings were to begin at 7 p.m. but started late in many cases. The scene at precinct No. 42 — the one with the final missing votes — was "chaos" Monday night, said Jill Joseph, a rank-and-file Democratic voter who backed Sanders in the caucuses. None of the 400-plus Democrats wanted to be in charge of the caucus, so a man who had shown up just to vote reluctantly stepped forward. As Joseph was leaving with the untrained caucus chairman, who is one of her neighbors, "I looked at him and said, 'Who called in the results of our caucus?' And we didn't know." USA TODAY Elections 2016 | USA TODAY Network The impromptu chairman hand-delivered the results to Polk County Democratic Party Chairman Tom Henderson Tuesday. Sanders won seven state delegates, Clinton won five. Ames precinct 1-3 started caucusing two hours late, at 9 p.m., because the crowd was so big and the check-in line so slow, said Peter D. Myers, a finance major and member of the student government at Iowa State University, who caucused for the first time. “There wasn't a clear person in charge,” Myers said. Capacity at the caucus site, Heartland Senior Center, was 115, but 300 people turned out, Myers said. At one point, they considered moving to the parking lot of the Hy-Vee grocery store. “It was so chaotic that we ended up making the building work even though capacity was doubled,” he said. Myers said he registered to vote in August but “was alarmed to find out I wasn't on the list, so I had to go to the back of the line. The gentleman in front of me has caucuses the past three cycles and he wasn't on the list, either.” No one was there to lead the caucus, so “a pregnant lady took charge and counted the Bernie supporters, and a Hillary captain took the small group to a corner and counted the supporters,” he said. Sanders ended up with four delegates and Clinton one, he said. USA TODAY Hillary's New Hampshire nightmare: Jill Lawrence An Indianola precinct that gathered in Hubbell Hall at Simpson College had a discrepancy between the number who checked in, and people counted in the first vote. “The chair and secretary knew the count was off but proceeded anyway,” said Paige Godden, a reporter for The Record Herald and Indianola Tribune. “We did the final count at least three times. People were very frustrated by the end.” New voters made up nearly 40% of the caucusgoers — 207 of 521 — at Democratic precinct No. 59 on at Des Moines Central Campus, organizers said. The precinct ran out of voter registration forms and had to print more. When the caucus began, the one-by-one head count discovered 58 more people voting than had checked in. Organizers asked anyone who had not signed in to do so, and then recounted. Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, a Clinton supporter who lives in the precinct, stepped in to help with the recount. The precinct’s caucus chair, Mark Challis, wasn’t sure if the counts were accurate, but changes wouldn’t have affected the final vote tally, which had Sanders substantially ahead. Democrat Mary Ann Dorsett of Des Moines told the Register that 492 voters turned out in her precinct, but there were only a handful of people assigned to check people in. “It was a very large room, so clearly they expected a large turnout,” Dorsett said. “The lines snaked through the corridor and out the door. It took over an hour to check in. Republicans in the same precinct were seated long before this, and already listening to speeches.” Dorsett thinks the one-by-one head-counting system is “a real head-scratcher in terms of the possibility of inaccuracy as well as time wasted.” “If all the smartphones were eliminated, it could have been 1820, and we were re-enacting the roles of a bunch of farmers sitting in a church hall, counting heads. Is this the 21st century?” she said. “This may well be my last caucus unless the Democratic Party cleans up its act.” Meanwhile, Republican Party of Iowa officials are doing a review — they’re comparing the app results for each candidate with what the precinct chairs jotted down on their “e-forms” on caucus night. “When you’re counting thousands of votes you’ve always got to be careful,” Iowa GOP spokesman Charlie Szold said. Microsoft, one of the premier tech companies in the world, had developed websites to deliver results in real time. But both the Democratic website, idpcaucuses.com, and GOP website, iagopcaucuses.com, struggled intermittently throughout the night, crashing for periods of time and locking out the public from access to the results. McGuire said the app system the volunteers in the precincts used to file their numbers was never down. "They (Microsoft) had plenty of capacity for our results," she said. Microsoft spokeswoman Angela Swanson-Henry said: "National interest in the Iowa Caucuses was high, and some who attempted to access websites may have experienced delays which were quickly addressed." "
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Feb 4, 2016 23:42:28 GMT -6
If Donald Trump has any positives, his biggest is his Tariff proposals--especially regarding China. Trump has spoken out against our trade deficit with China, which was $315 billion in 2014, according to the New York Times "fact check" from the New York Times www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/07/donald-trump-says-he-favors-big-tariffs-on-chinese-exports/"Donald J. Trump said he would favor a 45% tariff on Chinese exports to the United States, proposing the idea during a wide-ranging meeting with members of the editorial board of The New York Times.... In addressing the trade imbalance with China, Mr. Trump addressed an issue that has been a focus of his speeches going back to 2011, when he considered running for president when President Obama was seeking re-election. In the editorial board meeting, which was held Tuesday, Mr. Trump said that the relationship with China needs to be restructured. “The only power that we have with China,” Mr. Trump said, “is massive trade.” “I would tax China on products coming in,” Mr. Trump said. “I would do a tariff, yes — and they do it to us.”.... “I would do a tax. and the tax, let me tell you what the tax should be … the tax should be 45 percent,” Mr. Trump said. China is on a path this year to surpass Canada as the biggest single trading partner of the United States... In early November, Mr. Trump released a little-noticed plan about changing the United States economic dynamic with China. The tariff number was not featured in the plan, but Mr. Trump called for, among other proposals, pressing to give “American workers a level playing field” to restore the manufacturing base."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Feb 4, 2016 0:59:36 GMT -6
from commondreams.org www.commondreams.org/news/2016/02/03/countries-line-sign-toxic-deal-warren-leads-call-reject-tppWed, Feb 03, 2016 As Countries Line Up to Sign Toxic Deal, Warren Leads Call to Reject TPPElizabeth Warren warns agreement 'would tilt the playing field even more in favor of big multinational corporations and against working families' by Deirdre Fulton With 12 nations expected to sign the corporate-friendly Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) in New Zealand on Thursday, opponents in the U.S. and beyond are renewing their criticisms of the deal's worst provisions, which they warn pose serious dangers to the climate, working families, and democracy. The signatures mark the end of the negotiating process, with a broad agreement on the deal having been reached in October. Now, all 12 Pacific Rim countries will be able to begin their respective domestic ratification processes, which in the U.S. means passage by Congress. "The final text of the agreement, released in November, is even worse than we imagined, with loopholes in labor enforcement and rewards for outsourcing," writes AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.// "The TPP is a giveaway to big corporations, special interests and all those who want economic rules that benefit the wealthy few. It is no wonder the presidential front-runners from both political parties oppose
Recent reporting suggests Congress won't take up the issue until after the November elections—which gives opponents time to hone their arguments against the toxic deal. "I urge my colleagues to reject the TPP and stop an agreement that would tilt the playing field even more in favor of big multinational corporations and against working families," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said on the U.S. Senate floor on Tuesday. Noting that "most of the TPP's 30 chapters don't even deal with traditional trade issues," she argued, "most of TPP is about letting multinational corporations rig the rules on everything from patent protection to food safety standards—all to benefit themselves." Warren was one of 38 senators who voted against a bill last year allowing the president to "Fast Track" trade agreements like the TPP through Congress on a simple majority vote, with senators unable to amend the deals or challenge specific provisions. "A rigged process produces a rigged outcome," she continued, blasting the composition of advisory committees that were made up of industry executives and the cloak of secrecy that surrounded the negotiations. Warren specifically called out the TPP's Investor-State Dispute Settlement, or ISDS, provisions, which she said give "big companies...the right to challenge laws they don't like—not in court, but in front of industry-friendly arbitration panels that sit outside any court system. Workers, environmentalists, human rights advocates, they don't get that special right—only corporations do."....
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 26, 2016 0:02:11 GMT -6
We need to stop Free Trade.
It allows capital from the richest countries to flow into the poorest countries to set up production facilities in those countries, using the lowest-paid, most easily exploitable labor worldwide.
When the wages of those lowest-paid workers rise enough, capital simply moves to the new lowest-wage country and sets up production facilities there.
Capital continues to flow to the lowest-wage countries & labor markets, dragging average aggregate wages of all workers down, thus perpetuating the upward shift of wealth to the richest global investors and their financiers.
We need to impose high Tariffs on all foreign imports of manufactured goods to protect our domestic production (and workers)--exactly the way our forefathers did in the 1700's and 1800's.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 13, 2016 23:49:15 GMT -6
from the Huffington Post www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/democrats-pick-sandersrep_b_8972810.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592Democrats Pick Sanders Republicans Pick TrumpElites Freak Out: It Could HappenJan 13, 2016 by Mile Mogulescu "Game on. What 6 months ago seemed impossible and two months ago seemed improbable would then become not only possible but probable: Voters' rejection of the governing elite and the donor class in both political parties. Indeed, most recent polling already indicates a Sander/Trump match-up as far from impossible. On the Republican side, Trump leads national polls by a large margin, is neck and neck with Cruz in Iowa, and holds a substantial lead in New Hampshire. Sanders trails Clinton by the margin of error in 2 recent Iowa polls and is leading by the margin of error in another; Sanders leads Clinton by 4%-13% in various New Hampshire polls; and in at least one national poll is within 4 points of Clinton. Polls also show Sanders defeating Trump in a general election by larger margins than Clinton. Other than being outsiders in their respective parties, there's little in common between Sanders's policy-specific social democracy to combat economic inequality and Trump's vague nationalistic nativism that promises to make his supporters as rich as he is. But the divide between Democratic and Republican Party elites and large donors, on the one hand, and grass-roots voters, on the other, has nearly reached the breaking point in both parties. It's conceivable that this could become the most transformative and disruptive American election since...well...maybe 1860. That election ended the Whig Party, split the Democratic Party in two, and established the Republicans as one of the 2 major national parties for the past century and a half. Ultimately, Lincoln's election led to the secession of Southern States and a Civil War that killed 750,000 Americans and reshaped American politics and economics for the next century. No one is predicting that America will descend into bloody civil war. But the country hasn't been this politically polarized in ages. And the federal government is gridlocked, unable to grapple with the country's biggest problems including slow economic growth, stagnating wages, the collapse of the middle class, a political system dominated by big money and the revolving door, climate change, the descent of large swatches of the Middle East into anarchy, and America's diminished ability to dominate world events. Elected Republicans have spent decades promising their base that they'd shrink government, eliminate deficits, abolish the Affordable Care Act, and ban abortion and gay marriage. Instead Republican-elected officials have enacted tax breaks and special interest legislation for the corporate class that fund the party. Democratic leaders have promised to reduce economic inequality, but while unemployment has been halved under Obama, wages have stagnated, almost all the economic gains since the Great Recession have gone to the top 10%, the Obama administration has seen a parade of Wall Street operatives go back and forth through the revolving door between government and business, and the Clintons have collected tens of millions in speaking fees from the likes of Goldman Sachs. One of the few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on is that the rich have more influence on the government than average voters. A recent New York Times poll indicates that 66% of Americans think the wealthy have a greater chance to influence elections that ordinary Americans and only 31% think they have an equal chance. 84% think money has too much influence in politics, 5% think it has too little, and 10% thinks it's about right. 85% think the system of funding elections needs either fundamental change or to be completely rebuilt, and 13% think it only needs minor change. Moreover, the latest research shows that the majority of Americans are correct in their belief that the wealthy have a greater chance to influence elections than the average voter. A 2014 study by Princeton' Martin Gilens and Northwestern's Benjamin Page concluded that the influence of ordinary Americans registers as "non -significant, near zero level" after controlling for the power of economic elites and organized interest groups. The policy preferences of business and the rich sharply diverge from those of common citizens, and when they do, the economic elites and business interest almost always win and the ordinary Americans lose. They conclude, "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impact on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass based-interest groups have little or no independent influence." Increasingly, voters in both parties are saying, in Bernie Sander's words, "enough is enough". Will it be sufficient for Trump and Sanders to capture their respective nominations? It's possible, but both also have roadblocks in their road to the nomination. With a multi-candidate primary, even if Trump wins the most delegates coming into the Republican convention, he's likely to have only a plurality. The Republican establishment could rally around an alternative to deny him the nomination. The result could be a split in the Republican Party as much of the base feels betrayed and deserts the party. Or a Trump nomination could also split the Republican Party, with the establishment abandoning their party's Presidential nominee. The Democrats are slightly less divided than the Republicans between the Sanders/Warren wing and the corporate elite wing. But a Sanders victory in Iowa and New Hampshire would throw Democratic elites into full panic mode. Hillary's operatives on the Democratic National Committee, let by Debbie Wasserman Shultz, have slanted the rules to place major potholes in front of an insurgent campaign. They've limited Democratic debates to only 6, mostly appearing when few people are watching TV, in order to prevent the less-known Sanders from gaining the visibility that the more famous Clinton has. They've scheduled a series of Southern primaries--where Clinton is far better known among African American voters than Sanders--to follow quickly on the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, which except in the case of Obama, have proved the trip-wire for insurgent Democratic candidates in recent decades. If worst comes to worst, unelected Superdelegates, who make up nearly 20% of voters at the Democratic convention, would swing a closely contested primary race to Clinton. But party leaders must also recognize that such a move is the likeliest way to split the Democratic Party. So it's now becoming increasingly possible that the Republicans could nominate Trump and the Democrats could nominate Sanders, creating one of the greatest disruptions to the established political order in American history. Even if the elites manage to stave off the challenge and the parties nominate status quo candidates like Clinton or Rubio, it will be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. Either or both political parties will be dramatically changed, and could even split apart. The political ramifications of ordinary Americans asserting their voices against organized elites will continue to be felt in American politics for years to come, whatever the outcome in 2016 This is indeed an historical election."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 10, 2016 23:33:33 GMT -6
The European Union has apparently mandated that all members adopt "bail-in" policies for banks-- where the banks are allowed to confiscate depositors money to re-capitalize themselves. There are some who say this policy has already been put into place in the U.S. New G20 Financial Rules: Cyprus-style Bail-ins to Confiscate Bank Deposits & Pension Fundswww.globalresearch.ca/new-g20-financial-rules-cyprus-style-bail-ins-to-confiscate-bank-deposits-and-pension-funds/5417351Dec 2, 2014 by Ellen Brown "On the weekend of November 16th (2014), the G20 leaders whisked into Brisbane, posed for their photo ops, approved some proposals, made a show of roundly disapproving of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and whisked out again. It was all so fast, they may not have known what they were endorsing when they rubber-stamped the Financial Stability Board’s “Adequacy of Loss-Absorbing Capacity of Global Systemically Important Banks in Resolution,” which completely changes the rules of banking. Russell Napier, writing in ZeroHedge, called it “the day money died.” In any case, it may have been the day deposits died as money. Unlike coins and paper bills, which cannot be written down or given a “haircut,” says Napier, deposits are now “just part of commercial banks’ capital structure.” That means they can be “bailed in” or confiscated to save the megabanks from derivative bets gone wrong. Rather than reining in the massive and risky derivatives casino, the new rules prioritize the payment of banks’ derivatives obligations to each other, ahead of everyone else. That includes not only depositors, public and private, but the pension funds that are the target market for the latest bail-in play, called “bail-inable” bonds. “Bail in” has been sold as avoiding future government bailouts and eliminating too big to fail (TBTF). But it actually institutionalizes TBTF, since the big banks are kept in business by expropriating the funds of their creditors. It is a neat solution for bankers and politicians, who don’t want to have to deal with another messy banking crisis and are happy to see it disposed of by statute. But a bail-in could have worse consequences than a bailout for the public. If your taxes go up, you will probably still be able to pay the bills. If your bank account or pension gets wiped out, you could wind up in the street or sharing food with your pets. In theory, US deposits under $250,000 are protected by federal deposit insurance; but deposit insurance funds in both the US and Europe are woefully underfunded, particularly when derivative claims are factored in.... Bail-in in Plain English The Financial Stability Board (FSB) that now regulates banking globally began as a group of G7 finance ministers and central bank governors organized in a merely advisory capacity after the Asian crisis of the late 1990s. Although not official, its mandates effectively acquired the force of law after the 2008 crisis, when the G20 leaders were brought together to endorse its rules. This ritual now happens annually, with the G20 leaders rubberstamping rules aimed at maintaining the stability of the private banking system, usually at public expense. According to an International Monetary Fund paper titled “From Bail-out to Bail-in: Mandatory Debt Restructuring of Systemic Financial Institutions”: bail-in . . . is a statutory power of a resolution authority (as opposed to contractual arrangements, such as contingent capital requirements) to restructure the liabilities of a distressed financial institution by writing down its unsecured debt and/or converting it to equity. The statutory bail-in power is intended to achieve a prompt recapitalization and restructuring of the distressed institution. The language is a bit obscure, but here are some points to note: What was formerly called a “bankruptcy” is now a “resolution proceeding.” The bank’s insolvency is “resolved” by the neat trick of turning its liabilities into capital. Insolvent TBTF banks are to be “promptly recapitalized” with their “unsecured debt” so that they can go on with business as usual. “Unsecured debt” includes deposits, the largest class of unsecured debt of any bank. The insolvent bank is to be made solvent by turning our money into their equity – bank stock that could become worthless on the market or be tied up for years in resolution proceedings. The power is statutory. Cyprus-style confiscations are to become the law. Rather than having their assets sold off and closing their doors, as happens to lesser bankrupt businesses in a capitalist economy, “zombie” banks are to be kept alive and open for business at all costs – and the costs are again to be to borne by us. The Latest Twist: Putting Pensions at Risk with “Bail-Inable” Bonds First they came for our tax dollars. When governments declared “no more bailouts,” they came for our deposits. When there was a public outcry against that, the FSB came up with a “buffer” of securities to be sacrificed before deposits in a bankruptcy. In the latest rendition of its bail-in scheme, TBTF banks are required to keep a buffer equal to 16-20% of their risk-weighted assets in the form of equity or bonds convertible to equity in the event of insolvency. Called “contingent capital bonds”, “bail-inable bonds” or “bail-in bonds,” these securities say in the fine print that the bondholders agree contractually (rather than being forced statutorily) that if certain conditions occur (notably the bank’s insolvency), the lender’s money will be turned into bank capital. However, even 20% of risk-weighted assets may not be enough to prop up a megabank in a major derivatives collapse. And we the people are still the target market for these bonds, this time through our pension funds. In a policy brief from the Peterson Institute for International Economics titled “Why Bail-In Securities Are Fool’s Gold”, Avinash Persaud warns, “A key danger is that taxpayers would be saved by pushing pensioners under the bus.” It wouldn’t be the first time. As Matt Taibbi noted in a September 2013 article titled “Looting the Pension Funds,” “public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its fraud-riddled mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.” Wall Street-based pension fund managers, although losing enormous sums in the last crisis, will not necessarily act more prudently going into the next one. All the pension funds are struggling with commitments made when returns were good, and getting those high returns now generally means taking on risk. Other than the pension funds and insurance companies that are long-term bondholders, it is not clear what market there will be for bail-in bonds. Currently, most holders of contingent capital bonds are investors focused on short-term gains, who are liable to bolt at the first sign of a crisis. Investors who held similar bonds in 2008 took heavy losses. In a Reuters sampling of potential investors, many said they would not take that risk again. And banks and “shadow” banks are specifically excluded as buyers of bail-in bonds, due to the “fear of contagion”: if they hold each other’s bonds, they could all go down together. Whether the pension funds go down is apparently not of concern. Propping Up the Derivatives Casino: Don’t Count on the FDIC Kept inviolate and untouched in all this are the banks’ liabilities on their derivative bets, which represent by far the largest exposure of TBTF banks. According to the New York Times: American banks have nearly $280 trillion of derivatives on their books, and they earn some of their biggest profits from trading in them. These biggest of profits could turn into their biggest losses when the derivatives bubble collapses. Both the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005 and the Dodd Frank Act provide special protections for derivative counterparties, giving them the legal right to demand collateral to cover losses in the event of insolvency. They get first dibs, even before the secured deposits of state and local governments; and that first bite could consume the whole apple, as illustrated in the above chart. The chart also illustrates the inadequacy of the FDIC insurance fund to protect depositors. In a May 2013 article in USA Today titled “Can FDIC Handle the Failure of a Megabank?”, Darrell Delamaide wrote: [T]he biggest failure the FDIC has handled was Washington Mutual in 2008. And while that was plenty big with $307 billion in assets, it was a small fry compared with the $2.5 trillion in assets today at JPMorgan Chase, the $2.2 trillion at Bank of America or the $1.9 trillion at Citigroup. . . . There was no possibility that the FDIC could take on the rescue of a Citigroup or Bank of America when the full-fledged financial crisis broke in the fall of that year and threatened the solvency of even the biggest banks. That was, in fact, the reason the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve had to step in to bail out the banks: the FDIC wasn’t up to the task. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act was supposed to ensure that this never happened again. But as Delamaide writes, there are “numerous skeptics that the FDIC or any regulator can actually manage this, especially in the heat of a crisis when many banks are threatened at once.” All this fancy footwork is to prevent a run on the TBTF banks, in order to keep their derivatives casino going with our money. Warren Buffett called derivatives “weapons of financial mass destruction,” and many commentators warn that they are a time bomb waiting to explode. When that happens, our deposits, our pensions, and our public investment funds will all be subject to confiscation in a “bail in.” Perhaps it is time to pull our money out of Wall Street and set up our own banks – banks that will serve the people because they are owned by the people." .............................. Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 2, 2016 11:53:08 GMT -6
www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/djia?mod=MW_story_hoverquoteActually, the Dow closed down -926 points from its 52 week high. That's a -5% decline from it's peak. 52 week High 18351 2015 Close.. 17425 This drop is significant, because there's always much ballyho and manic exuberance when the Dow reaches a new high, but little acknowledgement of how far it's dropped from that high.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 2, 2016 11:21:43 GMT -6
from Wall Street on Parade wallstreetonparade.com/2015/12/larry-summers-lectures-bernie-sanders-on-financial-and-monetary-policy/Larry Summers Lectures Bernie Sanders on Financial & Monetary PolicyDec 30, 2015 By Pam & Russ Martens "Yesterday Larry Summers penned an opinion piece for the Washington Post, lecturing Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a Presidential candidate, on what Sanders should actually be saying in his own op-eds about reforming the Federal Reserve. No one will ever accuse Larry Summers of being short on arrogance. After promising the American people in 1999, as Treasury Secretary in the Bill Clinton administration, that pushing through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act would be “the right framework for America’s future financial system,” then watching that system collapse as a result of that repeal just nine years later in the worst economic upheaval since the Great Depression, one would think Summers would find some obscure hole in academia and crawl into it. Instead, Summers went on to become President of Harvard where, in 2005, he suggested at an economics conference that women might lack an innate aptitude for math and science, serving up a potential explanation for women’s low numbers as scientists at elite universities. This produced world-wide notoriety for Summers and a vote of no-confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. A year later, facing a likely second no-confidence vote from the same body, Summers resigned his post as President of Harvard. Instead, Summers went on to become President of Harvard where, in 2005, he suggested at an economics conference that women might lack an innate aptitude for math and science, serving up a potential explanation for women’s low numbers as scientists at elite universities. This produced world-wide notoriety for Summers and a vote of no-confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. A year later, facing a likely second no-confidence vote from the same body, Summers resigned his post as President of Harvard. In an article explaining his resignation at Harvard, the New York Times wrote that Summers “alienated professors with a personal style that many saw as bullying and arrogant,” adding that he had created “the intense ill will and even loathing toward him within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the university’s largest unit.” With that heady reference in his vitae, President Obama decided in 2013 that Summers was ready to assume the second most important post in the U.S. government as Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors – a post requiring consensus and respect for the views of fellow members of the Federal Open Market Committee. At the time Summers was salivating for this new role, the Fed was mired in its zero bound interest rate policy and the disgrace of secretly funneling a cumulative $16 trillion in below-market rate loans to U.S. and foreign banks to prop them up – all because of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act bullied through by Summers and his fellow Clintonites. The country was saved by saner Democratic minds than the President. A significant number of Democrats wrote to Obama urging him to nominate Janet Yellen, then Vice Chair of the Fed. According to Bloomberg News, the letter stated that “Our nation badly needs a chairman with a solid record as a bank regulator,” noting that Yellen, as a former president of the San Francisco Fed, had “identified the impending threats that both the housing bubble and the shadow banking sector posed to our entire economy.” The letter also noted Yellen’s “willingness to challenge conventional wisdom regarding deregulation,” clearly something that Summers had failed to do in 1999. When Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee made it publicly known that they would not vote for Summers’ confirmation, Summers was forced to notify the President that he was withdrawing his name from consideration for Fed Chair. None of this hubris, however, has dampened Summers’ ego or his willingness to blot out the disastrous economic consequences of his bad judgment calls on deregulation. In yesterday’s opinion piece at the Washington Post (which sounds like he is still campaigning for the post of Fed Chair, hoping that perhaps a new Clinton administration might lead to that eventuality) Summers chides Sanders that reforming the Federal Reserve “requires careful reflection if it is not to be counterproductive.” Summers also uses the opinion piece to bolster both his and Hillary Clinton’s self-serving view that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act was not responsible for the financial crisis in 2008 and ensuing economic collapse that caused millions of foreclosures and job losses. Summers writes: “Sanders asserts, as many do, that Glass Stegall’s [sic] repeal contributed to the crisis. I may not be objective, as I supported this measure as Treasury Secretary, but I do not see a basis for this assertion. Virtually everything that contributed to the crisis was not affected by Glass Steagall even in its purest form. Think of pure investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, or the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or the banks Washington Mutual and Wachovia or American International Group or the growth of the shadow banking system. Nor were the principle lending activities that got Citi and Bank of America in trouble implicated by Glass Stegall [sic].” Aside from the fact that “Steagall” is misspelled twice in the three times it is used in the above paragraph, Summers is dead wrong on every other premise as well. First of all, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were not “pure investment banks.” Bear Stearns owned Bear Stearns Bank Ireland, which became part of JPMorgan after the collapse of Bear Stearns. In 2012, JPMorgan wrote that this bank “is the only EU passported bank in the non-bank chain of JPMorgan and provides the firm with direct access to the European Central Bank repo window. It has also been added to the JPMorgan Jumbo issuance programs to issue structured securities for distribution outside the United States.” As we have previously reported on multiple occasions, Lehman Brothers owned two FDIC insured banks, Lehman Brothers Bank, FSB and Lehman Brothers Commercial Bank, which together held $17.2 billion in assets as of June 30, 2008, 75 days before Lehman went belly up. That was only possible because of the repeal of Glass-Steagall and allowed Lehman to dramatically leverage up its balance sheet. Thanks to Summers and his Wall Street sycophants, the Glass-Steagall Act, passed in 1933, which had barred investment banks and securities dealers from merging with FDIC-insured deposit taking banks, thus protecting the U.S. financial system for 66 years, was not around to stop the explosive mixture of securities gambling with deposit-taking. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which was the legislation Clinton signed in 1999 to repeal Glass-Steagall, also voided portions of the 1956 Banking Holding Company Act, allowing insurance companies and securities firms to be housed under the same umbrella in financial holding companies. This is how AIG blew itself up. As we previously reported: “AIG owned, in 2008 at the time of the crisis, the FDIC insured AIG Federal Savings Bank. On June 30, 2008, it held $1 billion in assets. AIG also owned 71 U.S.-based insurance entities and 176 other financial services companies throughout the world, including AIG Financial Products which blew up the whole company selling credit default derivatives.” As for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they were buried under derivatives and toxic mortgage products sold to them by the Frankenbanks on Wall Street – which would not have been able to accumulate that level of toxic sludge without the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Notably, Summers gives short shrift to Citigroup’s (Citi’s) role in the financial crash. It was a toxic blend of investment bank, brokerage firm, insurance company, and FDIC-insured bank only because of the repeal of Glass-Steagall. And, it received the largest taxpayer bailout during the crash than anything remotely akin to it in U.S. history: $45 billion in equity infusions, over $300 billion in asset guarantees, and more than $2 trillion cumulatively in below-market rate loans from 2007 through 2010, despite the fact that it was insolvent much of that time. One wonders if the revisionist history on Citigroup might have something to do with the fact that Summers’ former boss in the Clinton administration, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, went directly from that post to Citigroup where he received more than $120 million in compensation over the next decade as the bank’s stock price went from $55 to 99 cents. Summers himself was a paid consultant to Citigroup for a period of time according to Bloomberg News. Senator Bernie Sanders Senator Bernie Sanders Senator Bernie Sanders, the man to whom Summers feels it necessary to lecture on the finer points of Federal Reserve and financial policy, is the Senator who forced the Federal Reserve to reveal the trillions in loans it had made to Wall Street and foreign banks by placing an amendment in the financial reform legislation. Sanders was also one of only 57 members of the House of Representatives (he was in the House prior to the Senate) who voted against the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed Glass-Steagall. From the floor of the House during the legislative debate, Sanders said the revocation of Glass-Steagall “will lead to fewer banks and financial service providers; increased charges and fees for individual consumers and small businesses; diminished credit for rural America; and taxpayer exposure to potential losses should a financial conglomerate fail. It will lead to more mega-mergers; a small number of corporations dominating the financial service industry; and further concentration of economic power in our country.” Every prediction that Sanders made became a reality while Summers’ prediction that the repeal would be “the right framework for America’s future financial system” was disastrously dead wrong. Viewed in that light, should Larry Summers simply STFU?"
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 2, 2016 11:01:54 GMT -6
ThomHartman.comwww.thomhartmann.com/Thom Hartmann discusses many economics issues, but from a non-economist's viewpoint. Hartmann is a Historian, and an excellent one at that. His review of Economic topics provide extensive historic references and events regarding economics, while providing the how's & why's of where we were previously, and where we are today. His economic commentary focuses on big picture Macroeconomics. He omits the typically inapplicable, theoretical, & often misleading minutia of economic academia. He leaves that to so-called "professional" Economists.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 2, 2016 10:45:29 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 2, 2016 10:01:22 GMT -6
In Feb of 2010, software engineer Joe Stack crashed his small plane into a Texas IRS office.
Stack was killed instantly, along with 1 IRS worker. ............
Stack's software business had been failing, as the financial crisis took its toll.
Unlike Wall Street & the Financial Industry, Stack's business had received NO Federal handouts.
Stack left a suicide note--which was particularly insightful & compelling about this point.
Below are quotes from Stack's note, taken from the Introduction in Thom Hartmann's "The Crash of 2016".
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 1, 2016 14:17:44 GMT -6
from Paul Craig Roberts www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/12/30/america-is-being-destroyed-by-problems-that-are-unaddressed-paul-craig-roberts/America Is Being Destroyed By Problems That Are UnaddressedDec 30, 2015 by Paul Craig Roberts "One hundred years ago European civilization, as it had been known, was ending its life in the Great War, later renamed World War I. Millions of soldiers ordered by mindless generals into the hostile arms of barbed wire and machine gun fire had left the armies stalemated in trenches. A reasonable peace could have been reached, but US President Woodrow Wilson kept the carnage going by sending fresh American soldiers to try to turn the tide against Germany in favor of the English and French. The fresh American machine gun and barbed wire fodder weakened the German position, and an armistice was agreed. The Germans were promised no territorial losses and no reparations if they laid down their arms, which they did only to be betrayed at Versailles. The injustice and stupidity of the Versailles Treaty produced the German hyperinflation, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Hitler. Hitler’s demands that Germany be put back together from the pieces handed out to France, Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, comprising 13 percent of Germany’s European territory and one-tenth of her population, and a repeat of French and British stupidity that had sired the Great War finished off the remnants of European civilization in World War II. The United States benefitted greatly from this death. The economy of the United States was left untouched by both world wars, but economies elsewhere were destroyed. This left Washington and the New York banks the arbiters of the world economy. The US dollar replaced British sterling as the world reserve currency and became the foundation of US domination in the second half of the 20th century, a domination limited in its reach only by the Soviet Union. The Soviet collapse in 1991 removed this constraint from Washington. The result was a burst of American arrogance and hubris that wiped away in over-reach the leadership power that had been handed to the United States. Since the Clinton regime, Washington’s wars have eroded American leadership and replaced stability in the Middle East and North Africa with chaos. Washington moved in the wrong direction both in the economic and political arenas. In place of diplomacy, Washington used threats and coercion. “Do as you are told or we will bomb you into the stone age,” as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told President Musharraf of Pakistan. Not content to bully weak countries, Washington threatens powerful countries such as Russia, China, and Iran with economic sanctions and military actions. Consequently, much of the non-Western world is abandoning the US dollar as world currency, and a number of countries are organizing a payments system, World Bank, and IMF of their own. Some NATO members are rethinking their membership in an organization that Washington is herding into conflict with Russia. China’s unexpectedly rapid rise to power owes much to the greed of American capitalism. Pushed by Wall Street and the lure of “performance bonuses,” US corporate executives brought a halt to rising US living standards by sending high productivity, high value-added jobs abroad where comparable work is paid less. With the jobs went the technology and business knowhow. American capability was given to China. Apple Computer, for example, has not only offshored the jobs but also outsourced its production. Apple does not own the Chinese factories that produce its products. The savings in US labor costs became corporate profits, executive remuneration, and shareholder capital gains. One consequence was the worsening of the US income distribution and the concentration of income and wealth in few hands. A middle class democracy was transformed into an oligarchy. As former President Jimmy Carter recently said, the US is no longer a democracy; it is an oligarchy. In exchange for short-term profits and in order to avoid Wall Street threats of takeovers, capitalists gave away the American economy. As manufacturing and tradeable professional skill jobs flowed out of America, real family incomes ceased to grow and declined. The US labor force participation rate fell even as economic recovery was proclaimed. Job gains were limited to lowly paid domestic services, such as retail clerks, waitresses, and bartenders, and part-time jobs replaced full-time jobs. Young people entering the work force find it increasingly difficult to establish an independent existence, with 50 percent of 25-year old Americans living at home with parents. In an economy driven by consumer and investment spending, the absence of growth in real consumer income means an economy without economic growth. Led by Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve in the first years of the 21st century substituted a growth in consumer debt for the missing growth in consumer income in order to keep the economy moving. This could only be a short-term palliative, because the growth of consumer debt is limited by the growth of consumer income. Another serious mistake was the repeal of financial regulation that had made capitalism functional. The New York Banks were behind this egregious error, and they used their bought-and-paid-for Texas US Senator, whom they rewarded with a 7-figure salary and bank vice chairmanship to open the floodgates to amazing debt leverage and financial fraud with the repeal of Glass-Steagall. The repeal of Glass-Steagall destroyed the separation of commercial from investment banking. One result was the concentration of banking. Five mega-banks now dominate the American financial scene. Another result was the power that the mega-banks gained over the government of the United States. Today the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve serve only the interests of the mega-banks. In the United States savers have had no interest on their savings in eight years. Those who saved for their retirement in order to make paltry Social Security benefits liveable have had to draw down their capital, leaving less inheritance for hard-pressed sons, grandsons, daughters and granddaughters. Washington’s financial policy is forcing families to gradually extinguish themselves. This is “freedom and democracy “ America today. Among the capitalist themselves and their shills among the libertarian ideologues, who are correct about the abuse of government power but less concerned with the abuse of private power, the capitalist greed that is destroying families and the economy is regarded as the road to progress. By distrusting government regulators of private misbehavior, libertarians provided the cover for the repeal of the financial regulation that made American capitalism functional. Today dysfunctional capitalism rules, thanks to greed and libertarian ideology. With the demise of the American middle class, which becomes more obvious each day as another ladder of upward mobility is dismantled, the United States becomes a bipolar country consisting of the rich and the poor. The most obvious conclusion is that the failure of American political leadership means instability, leading to a conflict between the haves—the one percent—and the dispossessed—the 99 percent. The failure of leadership in the United States is not limited to the political arena but is across the board. The time horizon operating in American institutions is very short term. Just as US manufacturers have harmed US demand for their products by moving abroad American jobs and the consumer income associated with the jobs, university administrations are destroying universities. As much as 75 percent of university budgets is devoted to administration. There is a proliferation of provosts, assistant provosts, deans, assistant deans, and czars for every designated infraction of political correctness. Tenure-track jobs, the bedrock of academic freedom, are disappearing as university administrators turn to adjuncts to teach courses for a few thousand dollars. The decline in tenure-track jobs heralds a decline in enrollments in Ph.D. programs. University enrollments overall are likely to decline. The university experience is eroding at the same time that the financial return to a university education is eroding. Increasingly students graduate into an employment environment that does not produce sufficient income to service their student loans or to form independent households. Increasingly university research is funded by the Defense Department and by commercial interests and serves those interests. Universities are losing their role as sources of societal critics and reformers. Truth itself is becoming commercialized. The banking system, which formerly financed business, is increasingly focused on converting as much of the economy as possible into leveraged debt instruments. Even consumer spending is reduced with high credit card interest rate charges. Indebtedness is rising faster than the real production in the economy. Historically, capitalism was justified on the grounds that it guaranteed the efficient use of society’s resources. Profits were a sign that resources were being used to maximize social welfare, and losses were a sign of inefficient resource use, which was corrected by the firm going out of business. This is no longer the case when the economic policy of a country serves to protect financial institutions that are “too big to fail” and when profits reflect the relocation abroad of US GDP as a result of jobs offshoring. Clearly, American capitalism no longer serves society, and the worsening distribution of income and wealth prove it. None of these serious problems will be addressed by the presidential candidates, and no party’s platform will consist of a rescue plan for America. Unbridled greed, short-term in nature, will continue to drive America into the ground."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Dec 26, 2015 13:09:08 GMT -6
It looks like the Bull Run is pretty much over, and has been for the last year. The Dow is down -501 points from what it was this time last year. On Dec 26, 2014, the Dow closed at 18,053. On Dec 24, 2015, the Dow closed at 17,552. That's a nice, neat 501 point loss over the last year, or -2.77%. DJIDJI
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Dec 17, 2015 23:41:43 GMT -6
from PaulCraigRoberts.com www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/12/16/what-does-todays-rate-hike-mean-paul-craig-roberts/What Does Today’s “Rate Hike” Mean?December 16, 2015 by Paul Craig Roberts "The Federal Reserve raised the interbank borrowing rate today by one quarter of one percent or 25 basis points. Readers are asking, “what does that mean?” It means that the Fed has had time to figure out that the effect of the small “rate hike” would essentially be zero. In other words, the small increase in the target rate from a range of 0 to 0.25% to 0.25 to 0.50% is insufficient to set off problems in the interest-rate derivatives market or to send stock and bond prices into decline. Prior to today’s Fed announcement, the interbank borrowing rate was averaging 0.13% over the period since the beginning of Quantitative Easing. In other words, there has not been enough demand from banks for the available liquidity to push the rate up to the 0.25% limit. Similarly, after today’s announced “rate hike,” the rate might settle at 0.25%, the max of the previous rate and the bottom range of the new rate. However, the fact of the matter is that the available liquidity exceeded demand in the old rate range. The purpose of raising interest rates is to choke off credit demand, but there was no need to choke off credit demand when the demand for credit was only sufficient to keep the average rate in the midpoint of the old range. This “rate hike” is a fraud. It is only for the idiots in the financial media who have been going on about a rate hike forever and the need for the Fed to protect its credibility by raising interest rates. Look at it this way. The banking system as a whole does not need to borrow as it is sitting on $2.42 trillion in excess reserves. The negative impact of the “rate hike” affects only smaller banks that are lending to businesses and consumers. If these banks find themselves fully loaned up and in need of overnight reserves to meet their reserve requirements, they will need to borrow from a bank with excess reserves. Thus, the rate hike has the effect of making smaller banks pay higher interest expense to the mega-banks favored by the Federal Reserve. A different way of putting it is that the “rate hike” favors banks sitting on excess reserves over banks who are lending to businesses and consumers in their community. In other words, the rate hike just facilitates more looting by the 1%.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Dec 12, 2015 14:50:03 GMT -6
www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/the-fed-audit"The Fed Audit Thursday, July 21, 2011 The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Wall Street reform law passed one year ago this week directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study. "As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world," said Sanders. "This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else." Among the investigation's key findings is that the Fed unilaterally provided trillions of dollars in financial assistance to foreign banks and corporations from South Korea to Scotland, according to the GAO report. "No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the president," Sanders said. The non-partisan, investigative arm of Congress also determined that the Fed lacks a comprehensive system to deal with conflicts of interest, despite the serious potential for abuse. In fact, according to the report, the Fed provided conflict of interest waivers to employees and private contractors so they could keep investments in the same financial institutions and corporations that were given emergency loans. For example, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase served on the New York Fed's board of directors at the same time that his bank received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the Fed. Moreover, JP Morgan Chase served as one of the clearing banks for the Fed's emergency lending programs. In another disturbing finding, the GAO said that on Sept. 19, 2008, William Dudley, who is now the New York Fed president, was granted a waiver to let him keep investments in AIG and General Electric at the same time AIG and GE were given bailout funds. One reason the Fed did not make Dudley sell his holdings, according to the audit, was that it might have created the appearance of a conflict of interest. To Sanders, the conclusion is simple. "No one who works for a firm receiving direct financial assistance from the Fed should be allowed to sit on the Fed's board of directors or be employed by the Fed," he said. The investigation also revealed that the Fed outsourced most of its emergency lending programs to private contractors, many of which also were recipients of extremely low-interest and then-secret loans. The Fed outsourced virtually all of the operations of their emergency lending programs to private contractors like JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. The same firms also received trillions of dollars in Fed loans at near-zero interest rates. Altogether some two-thirds of the contracts that the Fed awarded to manage its emergency lending programs were no-bid contracts. Morgan Stanley was given the largest no-bid contract worth $108.4 million to help manage the Fed bailout of AIG. A more detailed GAO investigation into potential conflicts of interest at the Fed is due on Oct. 18, but Sanders said one thing already is abundantly clear. "The Federal Reserve must be reformed to serve the needs of working families, not just CEOs on Wall Street.""
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Dec 12, 2015 12:25:36 GMT -6
from practiceupdate.com Health Care Spending Increased 5.3% in 2014 www.practiceupdate.com/content/us-health-care-spending-increased-in-2014/33093/23/5/2Dec. 8, 2015 (from HealthDay News) -- "The expansion of insurance coverage and increases in retail prescription drug spending contributed to an increase in total national health care expenditures in 2014, according to a report published online Dec. 2 in Health Affairs. Noting that U.S. health care spending increased by 5.3 percent in 2014 to $3.0 trillion, Anne B. Martin, Ph.D., from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in Baltimore, and colleagues examined the increase in spending. The researchers found that there was a 4.5% increase in health spending on a per capita basis, with spending of $9,523 per individual, in 2014. The share of the gross domestic product devoted to health care spending increased from 17.3% in 2013 to 17.5% in 2014. The faster growth in 2014...was attributed to major coverage expansions under the Affordable Care Act, mainly through Medicare and private health insurance.... Retail prescription drug expenditure growth...increased by 12.2% in 2014. In 2014, spending by the federal government grew at a faster rate than spending by other health care sponsors, leading to a 2 percent increase in its share of total health care spending from 2013 to 2014. " The expansion of insurance coverage, particularly through Medicaid and private health insurance, and rapid growth in retail prescription drug spending fueled a 5.3% increase in total national health care expenditures in 2014," the authors write.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Dec 12, 2015 12:06:01 GMT -6
from TheNation.com www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-is-whitewashing-the-financial-catastrophe/ Hillary Clinton Is Whitewashing the Financial CatastropheDec 11, 2015 by William Greider "She has a plan that she claims will reform Wall Street—but she’s deflecting responsibility from old friends and donors in the industry. Hillary Clinton’s recent op-ed in The New York Times, “How I’d Rein In Wall Street,” was intended to reassure nervous Democrats who fear she is still in thrall to those mega-bankers of New York who crashed the American economy. Clinton’s brisk recital of plausible reform ideas might convince wishful thinkers who are not familiar with the complexities of banking. But informed skeptics, myself included, see a disturbing message in her argument that ought to alarm innocent supporters. Candidate Clinton is essentially whitewashing the financial catastrophe. She has produced a clumsy rewrite of what caused the 2008 collapse, one that conveniently leaves her husband out of the story. He was the president who legislated the predicate for Wall Street’s meltdown. Hillary Clinton’s redefinition of the reform problem deflects the blame from Wall Street’s most powerful institutions, like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, and instead fingers less celebrated players that failed. In roundabout fashion, Hillary Clinton sounds like she is assuring old friends and donors in the financial sector that, if she becomes president, she will not come after them. The seminal event that sowed financial disaster was the repeal of the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had separated banking into different realms: investment banks, which organize capital investors for risk-taking ventures; and deposit-holding banks, which serve people as borrowers and lenders. That law’s repeal, a great victory for Wall Street, was delivered by Bill Clinton in 1999, assisted by the Federal Reserve and the financial sector’s armies of lobbyists. The “universal banking model” was saluted as a modernizing reform that liberated traditional banks to participate directly and indirectly in long-prohibited and vastly more profitable risk-taking. Exotic financial instruments like derivatives and credit-default swaps flourished, enabling old-line bankers to share in the fun and profit on an awesome scale. The banks invented “guarantees” against loss and sold them to both companies and market players. The fast-expanding financial sector claimed a larger and larger share of the economy (and still does) at the expense of the real economy of producers and consumers. The interconnectedness across market sectors created the illusion of safety. When illusions failed, these connected guarantees became the dragnet that drove panic in every direction. Ultimately, the federal government had to rescue everyone, foreign and domestic, to stop the bleeding. Yet Hillary Clinton asserts in her Times op-ed that repeal of Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with it. She claims that Glass-Steagall would not have limited the reckless behavior of institutions like Lehman Brothers or insurance giant AIG, which were not traditional banks. Her argument amounts to facile evasion that ignores the interconnected exposures. The Federal Reserve spent $180 billion bailing out AIG so AIG could pay back Goldman Sachs and other banks. If the Fed hadn’t acted and had allowed AIG to fail, the banks would have gone down too. These sound like esoteric questions of bank regulation (and they are), but the consequences of pretending they do not matter are enormous. The federal government and Federal Reserve would remain on the hook for rescuing losers in a future crisis. The largest and most adventurous banks would remain free to experiment, inventing fictitious guarantees and selling them to eager suckers. If things go wrong, Uncle Sam cleans up the mess. Senator Elizabeth Warren and other reformers are pushing a simpler remedy—restore the Glass-Steagall principles and give citizens a safe, government-insured place to store their money. “Banking should be boring,” Warren explains (her co-sponsor is GOP Senator John McCain). That’s a hard sell in politics, given the banking sector’s bear hug of Congress and the White House, its callous manipulation of both political parties. Of course, it is more complicated than that. But recreating a safe, stable banking system—a place where ordinary people can keep their money—ought to be the first benchmark for Democrats who claim to be reformers. Actually, the most compelling witnesses for Senator Warren’s argument are the 2 bankers who introduced this adventure in “universal banking” back in the 1990s. They used their political savvy and relentless muscle to seduce Bill Clinton and his so-called New Democrats. John Reed was CEO of Citicorp and led the charge. He has since apologized to the nation. Sandy Weill was chairman of the board and a brilliant financier who envisioned the possibilities of a single, all-purpose financial house, freed of government’s narrow-minded regulations. They won politically, but at staggering cost to the country. Weill confessed error back in 2012: “What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking. Have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not going to be too big to fail.” John Reed’s confession explained explicitly why their modernizing crusade failed for 2 fundamental business reasons. “ One was the belief that combining all types of finance into one institution would drive costs down—and the larger institution the more efficient it would be,” Reed wrote in the Financial Times in November. Reed said, “We now know that there are very few cost efficiencies that come from the merger of functions—indeed, there may be none at all. It is possible that combining so much in a single bank makes services more expensive than if they were instead offered by smaller, specialized players.” The 2nd grave error, Reed said, was trying to mix the two conflicting cultures in banking—bankers who are pulling in opposite directions. That tension helps explain the competitive greed displayed by the modernized banking system. This disorder speaks to the current political crisis in ways that neither Dems nor Republicans wish to confront. It would require the politicians to critique the bankers (often their funders) in terms of human failure. “Mixing incompatible cultures is a problem all by itself,” Reed wrote. “It makes the entire finance industry more fragile…. As is now clear, traditional banking attracts one kind of talent, which is entirely different from the kinds drawn towards investment banking and trading. Traditional bankers tend to be extroverts, sociable people who are focused on longer term relationships. They are, in many important respects, risk averse. Investment bankers and their traders are more short termist. They are comfortable with, and many even seek out, risk and are more focused on immediate reward.” Reed concludes, “As I have reflected about the years since 1999, I think the lessons of Glass-Steagall and its repeal suggest that the universal banking model is inherently unstable and unworkable. No amount of restructuring, management change or regulation is ever likely to change that.” This might sound hopelessly naive, but the Democratic Party might do better in politics if it told more of the truth more often: what they tried do and why it failed, and what they think they may have gotten wrong. People already know they haven’t gotten a straight story from politicians. They might be favorably impressed by a little more candor in the plain-spoken manner of John Reed. Of course it’s unfair to pick on the Dems. Republicans have been lying about their big stuff for so long and so relentlessly that their voters are now staging a wrathful rebellion. Who knows, maybe a little honest talk might lead to honest debate. Think about it. Do the people want to hear the truth about our national condition? Could they stand it?"
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 27, 2015 23:09:49 GMT -6
"Cash saved at home" is the key.
If banks shut down, that's all people will have.
And eventually--as happened during the 1st Great Depression--banks will shut down.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 27, 2015 23:01:07 GMT -6
from WallStreetOnParade.com wallstreetonparade.com/2015/03/warren-citigroup-morgan-stanley-merrill-lynch-received-6-trillion-backdoor-bailout-from-fed/Warren: Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch Received $6 Trillion Backdoor Bailout from FedMarch 4, 2015 By Pam Martens & Russ Martens: March 4, 2015 "Yesterday, the Senate Banking Committee held the first of its hearings on widespread demands to reform the Federal Reserve to make it more transparent and accountable. Senator Elizabeth Warren put her finger on the pulse of the growing public outrage over how the Federal Reserve conducts much of its operations in secret and appears to frequently succumb to the desires of Wall Street to the detriment of the public interest. Warren addressed the secret loans that the Fed made to Wall Street during the financial crisis as follows: “During the financial crisis, Congress bailed out the big banks with hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money; and that’s a lot of money. But the biggest money for the biggest banks was never voted on by Congress. Instead, between 2007 and 2009, the Fed provided over $13 trillion in emergency lending to just a handful of large financial institutions. That’s nearly 20 times the amount authorized in the TARP bailout. “Now, let’s be clear, those Fed loans were a bailout too. Nearly all the money went to too-big-to-fail institutions. For example, in one emergency lending program, the Fed put out $9 trillion and over two-thirds of the money went to just three institutions: Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. “Those loans were made available at rock bottom interest rates – in many cases under 1 percent. And the loans could be continuously rolled over so they were effectively available for an average of about two years.” One of the key reasons that the Fed wanted to keep this information buried from the public is that Citigroup was insolvent during the period it was receiving loans from the Fed. There is also growing distrust of how some Fed personnel appear to cozy up to Wall Street. During Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s appearance before the Senate Banking Committee a week earlier, Senator Warren severely criticized the actions of Scott Alvarez, the General Counsel of the Federal Reserve. Warren said Alvarez had delivered a speech before the American Bar Association challenging Dodd-Frank’s so-called push-out rule that would bar insured depository banks from holding dangerous derivatives and swaps on their books. Not long thereafter, Citigroup slipped a repeal of the provision into the must-pass spending bill that would keep the government running through this September. Warren noted that the Dodd-Frank legislation was passed in 2010 but the Fed had stalled the implementation of the push-out rule until 2016 – long enough for Citigroup to eventually have it repealed, a feat which it has now accomplished. Warren also revealed that Alvarez was stonewalling her office in making his findings public on his investigation into a leak of information from a September 2012 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting. The Senator noted that Wall Street firms can make significant profits trading on leaked FOMC information ahead of public disclosure. Warren said the public was still waiting two and a half years later for Alvarez to disclose the details of what occurred. One of the four panelists at the hearing, Peter Conti-Brown, an Academic Fellow at Stanford Law School whose forthcoming book, The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve, will be published by Princeton University Press, also weighed in on the Fed’s General Counsel. Conti-Brown said in his written statement: “…while other general counsels at administrative agencies are not subject to presidential appointment, the Fed’s chief lawyer makes judgments of extraordinary importance that are unlikely to ever be subject to judicial review. Courts have made clear for eighty years that they will not review the Fed’s decision about monetary policy, including when those decisions require novel interpretations of law. And in the crisis, emergency decisions were made that have been effectively removed from judicial review, including violations of state corporate law and issues raised by the Constitution. While judicial review still occurs in many of the Fed’s regulatory determinations, in places where value judgments are of the most consequence, the Fed’s lawyer is the first and last word on what the law allows or forbids. For this reason, the Fed’s chief lawyer should be a presidential appointment…” Given the public’s disgust with President Obama’s Wall Street appointments, this hardly seems like a solution that will curry favor with the citizenry. A far more pragmatic solution would be to strip the Fed of any regulatory role and let it get back to its Congressional mandate of setting monetary policy. In answer to a question on regulatory capture at the Federal Reserve banks, Conti-Brown said “the very idea that bankers are selecting their regulator – not through Congress but directly through the exercise of vote should give us all pause…How could the Reserve Bank presidents do anything but dance with the one that brung them.” (Dodd-Frank eliminated the ability of Class A Directors which consist of banking interests to vote on the selection of the regional Fed Bank Presidents. However, Class A Directors elect three Class B Directors who do get to vote on the selection of the Bank President along with Class C Directors who are chosen by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.) Senator Richard Shelby Delivering His Opening Statement at the Senate Banking Hearing on Fed Accountability and Reform Senator Richard Shelby Delivering His Opening Statement at the Senate Banking Hearing on Fed Accountability and Reform One area of complete agreement among the four panelists at the hearing is that the New York Fed has far too much power and it must be reined in. Senator Richard Shelby, Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, quoted a passage from a recent speech delivered by retiring President of the Dallas Fed, Richard Fisher. Shelby said Fisher had stated that “too much power is concentrated in the New York Fed.” Paul Kupiec of the conservative American Enterprise Institute who appeared on the panel said that moving the market desk from the New York Fed across other regional Fed banks would help to diversify the New York power base. Conti-Brown said that anything that would deemphasize the influence of the financial institutions in New York would be good. The other two panelists, Allan Meltzer, Professor of Political Economy at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon and John Taylor, Economics Professor at Stanford University, agreed with the assessment that the New York Fed has too much power."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 27, 2015 19:01:11 GMT -6
from blog.nader.org blog.nader.org/2015/10/30/an-open-letter-to-chairwoman-yellen-from-the-savers-of-america/An Open Letter To Chairwoman Yellen From the Savers of AmericaOct 30, 2015 "Dear Chairwoman Janet Yellen: We are a group of humble savers in traditional bank savings and money market accounts who are frustrated because, like millions of other Americans over the past six years, we are getting near zero interest . We want to know why the Federal Reserve, funded and heavily run by the banks, is keeping interest rates so low that we receive virtually no income for our hard-earned savings while the Fed lets the big banks borrow money for virtually no interest. It doesn’t seem fair to put the burden of your Federal Reserve’s monetary policies on the backs of those Americans who are the least positioned to demand fair play. We follow the reporting on your tediously over-dramatic indecision as to when interest rates will be raised – and no one thinks that when you do, it will be any more than one quarter of one percent. We hear the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors and the various regional board presidents regularly present their views of the proper inflation and unemployment rate, and on stock market expectations that influence their calculations for keeping interest rates near-zero. But we never hear any mention of us – the savers of trillions of dollars who have been forced to make do with having the banks and mutual funds essentially provide a lock-box for our money while they use it to make a profit for their firms and, in the case of the giant banks and large mutual funds, pay their executives exorbitant salaries.. We are tired of this melodrama that exploits so many people who used to rely on interest income to pay some of their essential bills. Think about the elderly among us who need to supplement their social security checks every month. On October 27, the Wall Street Journal headlined the latest rumors of twists and turns inside the secretive Federal Reserve: “Fed Strives For Clear Signal on Rate Move: As 2016 approaches, the central bank hopes to better manage market expectations.” What about the expectations of millions of American savers? It is unfortunately true that we are not organized; if we were, we would give you and the Congress the proper signals! Please, don’t lecture us about the Fed not being “political.” When you are the captives of the financial industry, led by the too-big-to-fail banks, you are generically “political.” So political in fact that you have brazenly interpreted your legal authority as to become the de facto regulator of our economy, the de facto printer of money on a huge scale (“quantitative easing” is the euphemism for artificially boosting the stock market) and the leader of the Washington bailout machine crony capitalism when big business, especially a shaky Wall Street firm, indulges in manipulative, avaricious, speculative binges with our money. When it comes to the Fed, Congress is mired in hypocrisy. The anti-regulation, de-regulation crowd on Capitol Hill shuts its mouth when it comes to the most powerful regulators of all – you and the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, Congress goes along with the out-of-control, private government of the Fed—unaccountable to the national legislature. Moreover, your massive monetary injections scarcely led to any jobs on the ground, other than stock and bond processors. So what do you advise us to do? Shop around? Forget it. The difference between banks, credit unions and mutual funds may be one-twentieth or one-tenth of one percent! That is, unless you want to tie up money, that you need regularly, in a longer term CD or Treasury. Even then interest rates are far less than they were ten years ago. Maybe you’re saying that we should try the stock market to get higher returns. Some of us have been impelled to do that, but too many have lost their peace of mind and much money in the market. The Fed’s near-zero interest rate policy isn’t helping younger people with student loans (now over 1.3 trillion dollars), whose interest rate ranges from six to nine percent. It doesn’t help millions of pay-day loan borrowers or victims of installment loan rackets – mostly the poor – whose interest rates, rolled over, can reach over 400 percent! Chairwoman Yellen, I think you should sit down with your Nobel Prize winning husband, economist George Akerlof, who is known to be consumer-sensitive. Together, figure out what to do for tens of millions of Americans who, with more interest income, could stimulate the economy by spending toward the necessities of life. For heaven’s sake, you’re a “liberal” from Berkeley! That is supposed to mean something other than to be indentured by the culture and jargon of the Federal Reserve. If you need further nudging on monetary and regulatory policies of the Fed, other than interest rate decisions, why not invite Berkeley Professor Robert Reich, one of your long-time friends and admirers, to lunch on your next trip home? Start imagining what we, the savers, have to endure because of plutocratic, crony capitalism for which the Federal Reserve has long been a leading Tribune. Can we expect your response? Sincerely yours, Savers of America"
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 27, 2015 18:42:11 GMT -6
from Wall Street on Parade wallstreetonparade.com/2015/11/obscene-golden-parachutes-are-part-of-americas-rising-wealth-inequality/Obscene Golden Parachutes Are Part of America’s Rising Wealth InequalityNov 25, 2015 by Pam Martens & Russ Martens "Golden Parachute PhotoAmerica’s new gilded age has been lined with Golden Parachutes with pathological underpinnings. On September 11, 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought charges against the three top executives of Tyco International. The complaint began with this: “This is a looting case.” The SEC charged that Tyco’s CEO, Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Schwartz, its CFO, “took hundreds of millions of dollars in secret, unauthorized and improper low interest or interest-free loans and compensation from Tyco.” The transactions were concealed from shareholders and, according to the SEC, “Kozlowski and Swartz later pocketed tens of millions of dollars by causing Tyco to forgive repayment of many of their improper loans” and “engaged in numerous highly profitable related party transactions with Tyco and awarded themselves lavish perquisites — without disclosing either the transactions or perquisites to Tyco shareholders.” USA Today reported that the Manhattan apartment that Tyco had been providing to Kozlowski “includes a $6,000 shower curtain, coat hangers valued at $2,900, two sets of sheets for $5,960 and a $445 pincushion.” The SEC also charged that the General Counsel of Tyco, Mark Belnick, a former partner of the corporate law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, “defrauded Tyco shareholders of millions of dollars through egregious self-dealing transactions.” According to the SEC, “from 1998 into early 2002, Belnick received approximately $14,000,000 in interest-free loans from Tyco to buy and renovate a $4,000,000 apartment on Central Park West and to buy and renovate a $10,000,000 ski chalet in Park City, Utah.” The SEC noted that “by failing to disclose his self-dealing to investors, Belnick violated the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws.” Kozlowski and Schwartz were eventually tried by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and sent to prison. (Both are out now.) Belnick was acquitted by a jury on fraud and larceny charges brought by the D.A. The jury believed that Belnick had internal company approvals for the loans. The SEC eventually settled its civil case against Belnick with a civil penalty in the amount of $100,000 and the prohibition that he not serve as an officer or director of a public company for a period of five years. He was allowed to retain his law license. One of the most striking revelations in the Belnick case was the retention agreement Belnick had with Tyco. It guaranteed Belnick a payment of at least $10.6 million should he commit a felony and be fired before October 2003. Another obscene Golden Parachute that came to light involved a Dow Jones Industrial Average blue chip company: General Electric. On September 23, 2004, the Securities and Exchange Commission settled charges against General Electric for failure to report to shareholders the details of the retirement package it had provided to its retiring Chairman and CEO, Jack Welch. The Golden Parachute guaranteed Welch “for the remainder of his life, continued access to Company facilities and services comparable to those provided to him prior to his retirement.” What exactly were those facilities and services? When Welch retired on September 30, 2001, according to the SEC, he was going to enjoy the following for the rest of his life: “(a) access to GE aircraft for unlimited personal use and for business travel; (b) exclusive use of a furnished New York City apartment that, according to GE, in 2003, had a rental value of approximately $50,000 a month and a resale value in excess of $11 million; (c) unrestricted access to a chauffeured limousine driven by professionals trained in security measures; (d) a leased Mercedes Benz; (e) office space in both New York City and in Connecticut; (f) the services of professional estate and tax advisors; (g) the services of a personal assistant; (h) communications systems and networks at Welch’s homes, including television, fax, phone and computer systems, with technical support; (i) bodyguard security for various speaking engagements, including a book tour to promote his autobiography Jack: Straight from the Gut; and (j) installation of a security system in one of Welch’s homes and continued maintenance of security systems GE previously installed in three of Welch’s other homes.” The SEC settled its Cease and Desist order against GE for failing to adequately report these perks to shareholders without fining GE. Welch gave up most of the perks after being assailed in the media. This obscene Golden Parachute only came to light because Jack Welch was going through a divorce and his wife made the details public, including that GE was picking up his living expenses in the Manhattan apartment “from wine and food to laundry, toiletries and newspapers,” according to the New York Times. A study by Paul Hodgson and Greg Ruel on behalf of GovernanceMetrics International found that since 2000, there have been 21 corporate CEOs who have received Golden Parachutes in excess of $100 million. One of the most stunning examples was Viacom’s Thomas Freston who received more than $100 million for just nine months as CEO. Today, Wall Street has added another insidious practice to Golden Parachutes. As we reported in 2013, the sitting U.S. Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, received a $940,000 parting bonus from a Wall Street bank which was predicated on “full time high level position with the United States Government or a regulatory body,” terms that were spelled out in his employment agreement. Lew accepted the funds even though his employer at the time, Citigroup, was being propped up with the largest taxpayer bailout in U.S. history. Now, the AFL-CIO has submitted shareholder proposals to six Wall Street banks and investment banks, asking for this practice of Government Service Golden Parachutes to end. The Wall Street firms involved are Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Lazard and Morgan Stanley. In addition to Jack Lew’s deal, the AFL-CIO states that Morgan Stanley’s “Chairman and CEO James Gorman was entitled to $9.35 million in vesting of equity awards if he had a government service termination on December 31, 2013.” And while we’re on the subject of Golden Parachutes, it’s also time to end these obscene payments for office space for departing Presidents of the United States. According to the Congressional Research Service, former President Bill Clinton received a whopping $429,000 for office space from the taxpayer for fiscal year 2015 while George W. Bush received $434,000. That’s on top of the pensions and Secret Service expense also doled out on former Presidents. A nation with 46.7 million people living in poverty, including one in every five children, simply cannot continue to tolerate these institutionalized wealth transfer systems. When our government begins to mimic the obscenities of Wall Street, we know it’s time for meaningful reform."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 27, 2015 12:54:02 GMT -6
from the economicpopulist.org www.economicpopulist.org/content/economic-serfdom-continues-5876The Economic Serfdom ContinuesNov 22, 2015 by Paul Craig Roberts "The re-enserfment of Western peoples is taking place on several levels. One about which I have been writing for more than a decade comes from the offshoring of jobs. Americans, for example, have a shrinking participation in the production of the goods and services that are marketed to them. On another level we are experiencing the financialization of the Western economy about which Michael Hudson is the leading expert (Killing The Host). Financialization is the process of removing any public presence in the economy and converting the economic surplus into interest payments to the financial sector. These two developments deprive people of economic prospects. A third development deprives them of political rights. The Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic Partnerships eliminate political sovereignty and turn governance over to global corporations. These so called “trade partnerships” have nothing to do with trade. These agreements negotiated in secrecy grant immunity to corporations from the laws of the countries in which they do business. This is achieved by declaring any interference by existing and prospective laws and regulations on corporate profits as restraints on trade for which corporations can sue and fine “sovereign” governments. For example, the ban in France and other counries on GMO products would be negated by the Trans-Atlantic Partnership. Democracy is simply replaced by corporate rule. I have been meaning to write about this at length. However, others, such as Chris Hedges, are doing a good job of explaining the power grab that eliminates representative government. The corporations are buying power cheaply. They bought the entire US House of Representatives for just under $200 million. This is what the corporations paid Congress to go along with “Fast Track,” which permits the corporations’ agent, the US Trade Representative, to negotiate in secret without congressional input or oversight. In other words, a US corporate agent deals with corporate agents in the countries that will comprise the “partnership,” and this handful of well-bribed people draw up an agreement that supplants law with the interests of corporations. No one negotiating the partnership represents the peoples’ or public’s interests. The governments of the partnership countries get to vote the deal up or down, and they will be well paid to vote for the agreement. Once these partnerships are in effect, government itself is privatized. There is no longer any point in legislatures, presidents, prime ministers, judges. Corporate tribunals decide law and court rulings. It is likely that these “partnerships” will have unintended consequences. For example, Russia and China are not part of the arrangements, and neither are Iran, Brazil, India, and South Africa, although separately the Indian government appears to have been purchased by American agribusiness and is in the process of destroying its self-sufficient food production system. These countries will be the repositories for national sovereignty and public control while freedom and democracy are extinguished in the West and the West’s Asian vassals. Violent revolution throughout the West and the complete elimination of the One Percent is another possible outcome. Once, for example, the French people discover that they have lost all control over their diet to Monsanto and American agribusiness, the members of the French government that delivered France into dietary bondage to toxic foods are likely to be killed in the streets. Events of this sort are possible throughout the West as peoples discover that they have lost all control over every aspect of their lives and that their only choice is revolution or death." This article was originally published at the Paul Craig Roberts website.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 22, 2015 16:21:50 GMT -6
Interesting chart.
The shrinking capital expenditure percentage tells the whole story.
Money is increasingly going into increasing market price, instead of productive capacity.
It's no longer the value of what you produce that counts.
It's the price you can get for your stocks shares, or even your entire company.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 22, 2015 10:41:52 GMT -6
from Globalresearch www.globalresearch.ca/us-congresswoman-introduces-bill-to-stop-illegal-war-on-syria-to-oust-assad-says-cia-ops-must-stop/5490705US Congresswoman Introduces Bill To Stop “Illegal” War On Syria to Oust Assad; Says CIA Ops Must Stop Nov 21, 2015 By Tyler Durden "Last month, US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard went on CNN and laid bare Washington’s Syria strategy. In a remarkably candid interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gabbard calls Washington’s effort to oust Assad “counterproductive” and “illegal” before taking it a step further and accusing the CIA of arming the very same terrorists who The White House insists are “sworn enemies.” In short, Gabbard all but tells the American public that the government is lying to them and may end up inadvertently starting “World War III.”... That was before Paris. Well, in the wake of the attacks, Gabbard has apparently had just about enough of Washington vacillating in the fight against terror just so the US can ensure that ISIS continues to destabilize Assad and now, with bi-partisan support,the brazen Hawaii Democrat has introduced legislation to end the “illegal war” to overthrow Assad. Gabbard, who fought in Iraq - twice - has partnered with Republican Adam Scott on the bill. Here’s AP: In an unusual alliance, a House Democrat and Republican have teamed up to urge the Obama administration to stop trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad and focus all its efforts on destroying Islamic State militants. Reps. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat, and Austin Scott, a Republican, introduced legislation on Friday to end what they called an “illegal war” to overthrow Assad, the leader of Syria accused of killing tens of thousands of Syrian citizens in a more than four-year-old civil war entangled in a battle against IS extremists, also known as ISIS. “The U.S. is waging 2 wars in Syria,” Gabbard said. “The 1st is the war against ISIS and other Islamic extremists, which Congress authorized after the terrorist attack on 9/11. The 2nd war is the illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government of Assad.” Scott said, “Working to remove Assad at this stage is counter-productive to what I believe our primary mission should be.” Since 2013, the CIA has trained an estimated 10,000 fighters, although the number still fighting with so-called moderate forces is unclear. CIA-backed rebels in Syria, who had begun to put serious pressure on Assad’s forces, are now under Russian bombardment with little prospect of rescue by their American patrons, U.S. officials say. For years, the CIA effort had foundered — so much so that over the summer, some in Congress proposed cutting its budget. Some CIA-supported rebels had been captured; others had defected to extremist groups. Gabbard complained that Congress has never authorized the CIA effort, though covert programs do not require congressional approval, and the program has been briefed to the intelligence committees as required by law, according to congressional aides who are not authorized to be quoted discussing the matter. Gabbard contends the effort to overthrow Assad is counter-productive because it is helping IS topple the Syrian leader and take control of all of Syria. If IS were able to seize the Syrian military’s weaponry, infrastructure and hardware, the group would become even more dangerous than it is now and exacerbate the refugee crisis. And make no mistake, Tulsi’s understanding of Washington’s absurd Mid-East policy goes far beyond Syria. That is, Gabbard fully grasps the big picture as well. Here’s what she has to say about the idea that the US should everywhere and always attempt to overthrow regimes when human rights groups claim there’s evidence of oppression: People said the very same thing about Saddam (Hussein), the very same thing about (Moammar) Gadhafi, the results of those two failed efforts of regime change and the following nation-building have been absolute, not only have they been failures, but they’ve actually worked to strengthen our enemy. Somebody get Langley on the phone, this woman must be stopped.... So there’s hope for the US public after all. Perhaps if the clueless masses won’t listen to “lunatic” fringe blogs or Sergei Lavrov, they’ll listen to a US Congresswoman who served two tours of duty in Iraq and who is now telling Americans that The White House, The Pentagon, and most especially the CIA are together engaged in an “illegal” effort to overthrow the government of a sovereign country and in the process are arming the very same extremists that are attacking civilians in places like Paris. Good luck Tulsi, and thanks for proving that there’s at least one person inside that Beltway that isn’t either dishonest or naive. * * * From Gabbard “Here are 10 reasons the U.S. must end its war to overthrow the Syrian government of Assad: 1)Because if we succeed in overthrowing the Syrian government of Assad, it will open the door for ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other Islamic extremists to take over all of Syria. There will be genocide and suffering on a scale beyond our imagination. These Islamic extremists will take over all the weaponry, infrastructure, and military hardware of the Syrian army and be more dangerous than ever before. 2)We should not be allying ourselves with these Islamic extremists by helping them achieve their goal because it is against the security interests of the United States and all of civilization. 3)Because the money and weapons the CIA is providing to overthrow the Syrian government of Assad are going directly or indirectly into the hands of the Islamic extremist groups, including al-Qaeda affiliates, al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, and others who are the actual enemies of the United States. These groups make up close to 90 percent of the so-called opposition forces, and are the most dominant fighters on the ground. 4)Because our efforts to overthrow Assad has increased and will continue to increase the strength of ISIS and other Islamic extremists, thus making them a bigger regional and global threat. 5)Because this war has exacerbated the chaos and carnage in Syria and, along with the terror inflicted by ISIS and other Islamic extremist groups fighting to take over Syria, continues to increase the number of Syrians forced to flee their country. 6)Because we should learn from our past mistakes in Iraq and Libya that U.S. wars to overthrow secular dictators (Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi) cause even more chaos and human suffering and open the door for Islamic extremists to take over in those countries. 7)Because the U.S. has no credible government or government leader ready to bring order, security, and freedom to the people of Syria. 8)Because even the ‘best case’ scenario—that the U.S. successfully overthrows the Syrian government of Assad—would obligate the United States to spend trillions of dollars and the lives of American service members in the futile effort to create a new Syria. This is what we have been trying to do in Iraq for twelve years, and we still have not succeeded. The situation in Syria will be much more difficult than in Iraq. 9)Because our war against the Syrian government of Assad is interfering with our being one-pointedly focused on the war to defeat ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and the other Islamic extremists who are our actual enemy. 10)Because our war to overthrow the Assad government puts us in direct conflict with Russia and increases the likelihood of war between the United States and Russia and the possibility of another world war.”
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 5, 2015 23:14:36 GMT -6
www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/11/05/the-war-on-terror-is-the-hoax-foundation-of-the-policespy-state-paul-craig-roberts/The “War On Terror” Is The Hoax Foundation Of The Police/Spy StateThurs, Nov 5, 2015 Paul Craig Roberts "The “war on terror” was a hoax. Americans were deceived by policymakers, who are pursuing a hegemonic agenda. The American people were too trusting and too gullible and, consequently, Americans were easily betrayed by Washington and by the presstitute media. The consequences of the deceit, gullibility, and betrayal are horrendous for Americans, for millions of peoples in the Middle East, Africa, Ukraine, and for Washington’s European vassals. The consequences for Americans are an aborted Constitution, a police/spy state and rising resentment and hatred of America around the world. The consequences for peoples in Somolia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, Palestine, and Ukraine have been massive deaths and dislocations, infrastructure destruction, internal conflicts, birth defects, invasions, bombings, drones. Millions of peoples have been murdered by Washington’s pursuit of hegemony, and millions have been turned into refugees. The consequences for Washington’s European vassals is that the millions of refugees from Washington’s wars are now overrunning Europe, causing social and political discord and threatening the European political parties that enabled, and participated in, Washington’s massive war crimes in eight countries. The populations of the eight countries and Washington’s vassals are stuck with the consequences of Washington’s evil, vicious, and illegal actions. And Americans are stuck with the police/spy state and militarized police who murder three Americans each day and brutalize countless others. The countries we have destroyed have no recourse to restitution. Our European vassals will have to provide from their own pockets for the refugees that Washington’s wars are sending to them. As for Americans, they seem to have settled into acquiescence to the brutal police/spy state that has crowded out freedom and democracy. But Americans could do something about it. It is a proven fact that the police/spy state rests on a foundation of lies and deceptions, and these lies and deceptions are now known. Even George W. Bush has admitted that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Thousands of independent experts consisting of physicists, nanochemists, structural engineers, highrise architects, fire fighters and first responders, and military and civilian pilots have provided the detailed explanations of September 11, 2001, that Washington failed to provide. Today not even an idiot believes the official explanation. The corrupt neoconservative Bush regime created a false reality and sold it to a trusting population that was anxious to prove its patriotism. The American electorate knew that the Bush/Cheney regime had deceived them about many things, and the people, believing Obama’s promises of change, put him in office to rectify the situation. Instead, Obama protected the criminal Bush/Cheney regime and continued with the neoconservatives agenda. We don’t have to stand for this. We can turn off Fox “News,” CNN, NPR and all the rest of the presstitutes who lie for a living. We can cease purchasing the useless newspapers. We can demand that the police/spy state that was created entirely on the basis of lies and deceptions be rolled back. Who can possibly believe that the massive PATRIOT Act was written so quickly in the aftermath of 9/11? It is not possible that every member of Congress and the staff does not know that such a massive document was sitting on the shelf waiting its opportunity. Who can possibly believe that a handful of Saudi Arabians acting without the support of any state and any intelligence service could outwit the entire apparatus of the American National Security State and inflict a humiliating defeat on the world’s only superpower? 9/11 is the worst national security failure in world history. Who can possibly believe that not a single one of the national security officials who so totally failed in their responsibilities was held accountable for their failures that brought total humiliation to the proud United States? Who can possibly believe that the Bush regime’s invasion and destruction of Iraq was a response to 9/11 when Bush’s Treasury Secretary publicly stated that the invasion of Iraq was the topic of the Bush regime’s first cabinet meeting long prior to 9/11? Are the American people really such washed-up sheeple, such cowards, that they acquiesce to a police/spy state, the foundation of which consists of nothing but lies told by criminals and repeated endlessly by whores pretending to be journalists? If so, the American people are not a people who any longer matter, and they will continue to be treated by Washington and by their local police as people who do not matter."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Oct 31, 2015 9:03:18 GMT -6
www.cnbc.com/2015/10/01/us-layoffs-surge-43-in-sept-to-58877-challenger.htmlJob Layoffs Skyrocket - Worst Quarter in 6 yearsOct 1, 2015 "The number of announced layoffs by U.S.-based companies surged in September from the previous month, and Hewlett-Packard's outsized cuts raise a red flag, John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Thursday. "It's interesting that we are beginning to see some big layoff announcements this year," he said. "One of the things you start to see as you get near the end of a period of expansion, but before it really turns, is you start to see major layoffs occurring, big mega-layoffs like we're seeing now." U.S.-headquartered companies put 58,877 jobs on the chopping block last month, up 43% from just more than 41,000 in August and the third highest monthly total this year, Challenger's global outplacement firm reported. Challenger said the computer sector led all other industries in layoffs in September. Hewlett-Packard accounted for nearly all of the 32,500 reductions. Last month, Hewlett-Packard announced it would cut 25,000 to 30,000 positions as part of its restructuring, which will split the company into one firm focused on enterprise services and one dedicated to its legacy hardware business.... The 1st day of October saw further cuts from big companies. Reuters reported that Wal-Mart is planning to lay off hundreds of people at its headquarters in Arkansas as part of the retail giant's efforts to pare costs.... ConAgra announced it is cutting about 1,500 jobs, or approximately 30% of its global, office-based workforce, and moving its headquarters to Chicago from Omaha, Nebraska.... On Tuesday, Chesapeake Energy, the nation's second largest producer of natural gas, announced it would lay off about 15% of its workforce after it reported a $4 billion quarterly loss in August. The energy industry remained the biggest job-cutting sector for the year, with 72,708 cuts announced since January, Challenger said.... The September reductions in the Challenger report pushed the layoff count in the 3rd quarter to 205,759, making it the worst quarter for job cuts in 6 years. Year to date, employers have announced plans to hand out 493,431 pink slips, more than the full-year total of 483,171 in 2014." Art Cashin, director of NYSE floor operations for UBS, said the layoffs are part of the financial engineering market watchers have seen U.S. corporations engage in. "You buy back your own shares, you take a look around, you can't get revenues up, and you start to pare back some of the help," he told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." "It's unfortunate, but we've been seeing it despite the quote, unquote recovery that we're in." (The attachment below is a pdf list of planned layoffs.)10-31-15artJobLayoffs.pdf (284.45 KB)
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Oct 24, 2015 17:03:09 GMT -6
This same author wrote a interesting article describing the 2-century shift from Feudalism to Industrial Capitalism to Financial capitalism. In the article he also addresses much of Michael Hudson's forays into "rent extraction" and how economies shifted from pure Rentier-dominated Feudalism, to non-rentier dominated Industrial Capitalism, back to Rentier-dominated Financial Capitalism. Again, the 1st few paragraphs are a little slow, but he hits his stride after that. from Global Research www.globalresearch.ca/ideological-foundations-of-mainstream-neoclassical-economics-class-interests-as-economic-theory/5413961Ideological Foundations of Mainstream Neoclassical Economics: Class Interests as “Economic Theory”14-Nov-2014 By Prof. Ismael Hossein-Zadeh "There is now a widespread consensus that mainstream/neoclassical economists failed miserably to either predict the coming of the 2008 financial implosion, or provide a reasonable explanation when it actually arrived. Not surprisingly, many critics have argued that neoclassical economics has created more confusion than clarification, more obfuscation than elucidation. Economic “science” has, indeed, become “an ideological construct which serves to camouflage and justify the New World Order” [1]. Also not surprisingly, an increasing number of students who take classes and/or major in economics are complaining about the abstract and irrelevant nature of the discipline. For example, a group of French graduate students in economics recently wrote an open letter, akin to a manifesto, critical of their academic education in economics as “autistic” and “pathologically distant from the problems of real markets and real people”: “We wish to escape from imaginary worlds! Most of us have chosen to study economics so as to acquire a deep understanding of the economic phenomena with which the citizens of today are confronted. But the teaching that is offered . . . does not generally answer this expectation. . . . This gap in the teaching, this disregard for concrete realities, poses an enormous problem for those who would like to render themselves useful to economic and social actors” [2]. The word “autistic” may be offensive and politically incorrect, but it certainly provides an apt description of mainstream economics. Interestingly, most economists do not deny the abstract and irrelevance feature or property of their discipline; but argue that the internal consistency of a theory—in the sense that the findings or conclusions of the theory follow logically from its premises or assumptions—is more important than its relevance (or irrelevance) to the real world. Nobel Laureate economist William Vickery, for example, maintains: “Economic theory proper, indeed, is nothing more than a system of logical relations between certain sets of assumptions and the conclusions derived from them. . . . The validity of a theory proper does not depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real world. . . . In any pure theory, all propositions are essentially tautological, in the sense that the results are implicit in the assumptions made” [3]. Paul Samuelson, another Nobel Laureate in Economics, likewise writes, “In pointing out the consequences of a set of abstract assumptions, one need not be committed unduly as to the relation between reality and these assumptions.” How or why did economics as a crucially important subject of inquiry into an understanding of social structures evolve in this fashion, that is, as an apparently rigorous and technically elaborate discipline without much usefulness in the way of understanding or solving economic problems? Perhaps a logical way to answer this question is to look into the origins of the neoclassical economics, and how it supplanted the classical economics that prevailed from the early stages of capitalism until the second half of the 19th century—supplanted not as an extension or elaboration of that earlier school of economic thought but as a deviation from, or antithesis, to it. Well-known classical economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx sought to understand capitalism in fundamental ways: they studied the substance of wages and prices beyond supply and demand; they also examined the foundations of economic growth and accumulation—that is, the sources of the “wealth of nations,” as Smith put it, or “the laws of motion of capitalist production,” as Marx put it. They further sought to understand the basis or logic of the distribution of economic surplus, that is, the origins of the various types of income: wages/salaries, interest income, rental income, and profits. To this end, they distinguished two major types of work or economic activity: productive and unproductive, that is, productive labor and productive enterprise (manufacturing) versus unproductive labor and unproductive enterprises (buying and selling, or speculation). Accordingly, they saw the capitalist social structure as consisting of different classes of conflicting or antagonistic interests: capitalists, workers, landlords, tenants/renters, and the poor. These classical economists wrote in an era that could still be considered a time of transition: transition from feudalism to capitalism. Although feudalism was in decline, the powerful interests vested in that older mode of production and social structure still fiercely resisted the rising new mode of production, the modern industrial capitalism, and its champions, called the “bourgeoisie.” In the second half of the 18th and first half of 19th centuries, the conflicting interests of these 2 rival factions of the ruling elites served as powerful economic grounds for a fierce political/ideological struggle between the partisans of the two sides. Whereas the elites of the old system viewed the rising bourgeoisie as undermining their traditional rights and privileges, the modern capitalist elites viewed the old establishment as hindering rapid industrialization, “proletarianization” and urbanization. In the ensuing ideological battle between the champions of the old and new orders, the writings of classical economists such as Smith, Ricardo and Mill proved quite helpful to the proponents or partisans of the new order. As influential intellectuals who were concerned that the hindering influences and extractive businesses of the old establishment may hamper a clean break from pre-capitalist modes of economic activity, they wrote passionately about what created real values and/or “wealth of nations,” and what was wasteful and a drain on economic resources. To this end, their writings included lengthy discussions of the labor theory of value—the theory that human labor constitutes the essence of value—and related notions of productive and unproductive activities. Accordingly, they characterized the propertied classes that reaped income by virtue of controlling the assets (that the economy needed in order to function) as the “rentier,” “unproductive” or “parasitic” classes. Rentier classes collect their unearned proceeds from ownership “without working, risking, or economizing”, wrote John Stuart Mill of the landlords and money-lenders of his day, arguing that “they grow richer, as it were in their sleep” [4]. Unsurprisingly, during the early stages of industrial revolution, when the old establishment still posed serious challenges to the relatively new and evolving capitalist mode of production, the view of human labor as the source of real values, expounded by Karl Marx and other classical economists, provided a strong theoretical case for industrial expansion and/or capitalist development. “In its earliest formulations, the labor theory of value reflected the perspective of, and was serviceable in the fulfillment of the objective needs of, the industrial capitalist class” [5]. Although the rising capitalist class found the labor theory of value (and its logical implications for class conflicts) potentially “disconcerting,” that concern was temporarily pushed to the backburner, as the main threat at this stage of capitalist development came from the landowning/rentier classes, not the working class. Indeed, history shows that in nearly all the so-called “bourgeois-democratic” revolutions, signifying the historical transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist formations, the burgeoning working class, the newly proletarianized peasants, sided with the bourgeoisie against its pre-capitalist nemesis. By the mid-19th century, however, this pattern of social structure and/or class alliances was drastically changed. Concentration of capital and the rise of corporation had by the last 3rd of the 19th century gradually overshadowed the role of individual manufacturers as the drivers of the industrial development. In place of owners/managers, more and more “corporate managers were hired to direct and oversee industrial enterprises and to channel profits automatically as part of a perpetual accumulation process. . . . Increasingly, profits and interest came to be the result of passive ownership,” similar to absentee landownership of the feudal days [6]. Along with agricultural production on an increasingly capitalistic basis, these developments meant a radical reconfiguration of social and/or class alliances: the industrial bourgeoisie and the landowners were no longer adversaries, as they were all now capitalists and allies; and the working class, which had earlier supported the bourgeoisie against the landed aristocracy, was their class enemy. What added to the fears of the capitalist class of the growing and relatively militant working class was the spread of Marx’s theory of “labor as the essence of value and economic surplus,” which was by the mid- to late-19th century frequently discussed among the leading circles of industrial workers. These changes in the actual social and economic developments, in turn, prompted changes in the ruling class’s preferences regarding theories of capitalist production and/or market mechanism. Industrial capitalists who had earlier used the labor theory of value to their advantage in their struggle against the old, pre-capitalist establishment were now quite fearful of and hostile to that theory. Instead, “ the theoretical and ideological needs of the owners of industrial capital became identical with those of the landlords and merchant capitalists. They all needed a theory that sanctioned their ownership” [7]; a theory that obfuscated, instead of clarifying, the origins of real values and the sources of wealth and/or income—hence, the shift from classical to neoclassical economics. The formal theoretical shift from classicism to neoclassicism was pioneered (in the last 3 decades of the 19th century) by three economists: William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger and Leon Walras. A detailed discussion of these pioneers of neoclassical economics is beyond the purview of this essay. Suffice it to say that all three categorically shunned the labor theory of value in favor of utility theory of value, that is, “value depends entirely upon utility,” as Jevons put it. At the heart of the theoretical/philosophical shift was, therefore, the move from labor to utility as the source of value: a commodity’s value no longer came from its labor content, as classical economists had argued, but from its utility to consumers. The new paradigm thus shifted the focus of economic inquiry from the factory and production to the market and circulation, or exchange. By the same token as the new school of economic thought abandoned the classicals’ labor theory of value in favor of the utility theory of value, it also discarded the concept of value, which comes from human labor, in favor of price, which is formed (in the sphere of circulation or market) by supply and demand interactions. Henceforth, there was no difference between value and price; the two have since been used interchangeably or synonymously in the neoclassical economics. Once the focus of inquiry was thus shifted from how commodities are produced to how they are bought and sold, the distinction between workers and capitalists, between producers and appropriators, became invisible. In the marketplace all people appear as essentially identical: they are all households, consumers or “economic agents” who derive utility from consuming commodities, and who pay for those commodities “according to the amount of the utility/pleasure they derive from their consumption.” They are also identical in the neoclassical sense that they are all “rational,” “calculating,” and utility “maximizing” market players. An obvious implication (and a major advantage to the capitalist class) of this new perspective was that in the marketplace social harmony and “brotherhood,” not class conflict, was the prevailing mode of social structure. “The supposed conflict of labor with capital is a delusion,” Jevons asserted, arguing that “We ought not look at such subjects from a class point of view,” because “in economics at any rate [we] should regard all men as brothers” [8]. It should be pointed out (in passing) that the utility theory of value did not start with Jevons. The theory had already been spelled out in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by earlier economists such as Jeremy Bentham, Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus and Claude Frédéric Bastiat. However, Jevons and his utilitarian contemporaries of the 2nd half of the 19th century added a new concept to the received theory: the concept of marginal utility or, more specifically, diminishing marginal utility. According to this concept, the utility derived from the use or consumption of a commodity diminishes with every additional unit consumed.Despite the fact that Jevons’ addition of the concept of marginal utility to the received utility theory of value was conceptually very simple (indeed, the whole concept of utility and the so-called “law of diminishing marginal utility” are altogether banalities or truisms), it nonetheless proved to be instrumentally a very important notion in the neoclassical economics. For, the term “marginal” was soon extended to other economic categories such as marginal cost, marginal revenue, marginal propensity to consume, and the like; thereby paving the way for the application of differential calculus to economics. “By introducing the notion of marginalism into utilitarian economics, Jevons had found a way in which the utilitarian view of human beings as rational, calculating maximizers could be put into mathematical terms” [9]. Whereas the utilitarian views of the earlier economists had been firmly discredited in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by proponents of the labor theory of value as truisms that did not explain much of the real world economic developments, the math-coded utilitarianism of Jevons (and his fellow neoclassicals since then) has been shielded from such criticisms by a protective cover of mathematical veneer. Despite the fact that, aside from the mathematical mask, the new notion of utility represented no conceptual or theoretical advances over the earlier version, it was celebrated as a “revolution” in economic thought, the so-called “neoclassical revolution.” Presenting a body of largely axiomatic principles, or religious-like normative guidelines (such as how “rational” consumers should behave), by means of elaborate and mesmerizing mathematics is like covering weeds with Astroturf. Despite its irrelevance and uselessness, neoclassical economics is neither uninteresting nor illogical. Within its own premises and presuppositions it is both logical and mathematically rigorous, which explains why it is packaged as a scientific discipline. But, again, it falls pitifully short of explaining how real world markets or economies work, or how economic crises, as inherent occurrences to a capitalist economy, take place; or what to do to counter such crises that would help not only the capitalist/financial elites but the society at large. Although most mainstream economists proudly characterize their discipline as scientific, adornment of the discipline by a façade of mathematics does not really make it scientific. In reality, the math superstructure simply masks the flawed or unreliable theoretical foundation of the discipline. It follows from the discussion presented in this essay that a driving force behind the evolution of economics as a dismal and obscuring discipline is the role of influential vested interests and/or the dominant ruling ideology. In a critique of mainstream/neoclassical economists’ blatant disregard for actual developments in the real world, economics Professor Michael Hudson writes: “Such disdain for empirical verification is not found in the physical sciences. Its popularity in the social sciences is sponsored by vested interests. There is always self-interest behind methodological madness. That is because [professional] success requires heavy subsidies from special interests who benefit from an erroneous, misleading or deceptive economic logic. Why promote unrealistic abstractions, after all, if not to distract attention from reforms aimed at creating rules that oblige people actually to earn their income rather than simply extracting it from the rest of the economy?” [10]. Why or how is it that most economists are either unaware or pretend to be unaware of the specious theoretical foundations of their discipline? A charitable answer is that perhaps the majority of economists who teach their discipline or otherwise work as economic professionals are not necessarily guilty of obfuscation, or deliberately promoting a faulty paradigm. Many economists sincerely believe in the integrity of their discipline as they carry out highly specialized research or produce scholarly publications. Economists’ confidence or faith in their discipline, however, does not make it any less flawed. They simply teach or carry out elaborate scholarly research work within a faulty paradigm without questioning, or even detecting, some of the submerged defects that makes the discipline not only irrelevant and useless but indeed harmful, as it tends to create more confusion than illumination or understanding. It can also be argued that since most economists are deeply wedded to their profession, and are dependent on it as the source of both intellectual and financial survival, they would most likely be in denial, and would continue working within the only academic tradition or professional path they know how to navigate, even if they suspected or realized the esoteric and irrelevant nature of their discipline."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Oct 24, 2015 15:47:42 GMT -6
Below is a truly outstanding article describing the damage done to the US economy by its conversion from Productive Capitalism to Finance Capitalism.
The opening paragraphs are a little slow, but the author really nails it later on.
from Global Research www.globalresearch.ca/the-age-of-finance-capital-and-the-irrelevance-of-mainstream-economics/5475588The Age of Finance Capital — and the Irrelevance of Mainstream Economics12-Sept-2015 By Prof. Ismael Hossein-Zadeh "Despite the fact that the manufacturers of ideas have elevated economics to the (contradictory) levels of both a science and a religion, a market theodicy, mainstream economics does not explain much when it comes to an understanding of real world developments. Indeed, as a neatly stylized discipline, economics has evolved into a corrupt, obfuscating and useless—nay, harmful—field of study. Harmful, because instead of explaining and clarifying it tends to mystify and justify. One of the many flaws of the discipline is its static or ahistorical character, that is, a grave absence of a historical perspective. Despite significant changes over time in the market structure, the discipline continues to cling to the abstract, idealized model of competitive industrial capitalism of times long past. Not surprisingly, much of the current economic literature and most economic “experts” still try to explain the recent cycles of financial bubbles and bursts by the outdated traditional theories of economic/business cycles. Accordingly, policy makers at the head of central banks and treasury departments continue to issue monetary prescriptions that, instead of mitigating the frequency and severity of the cycles, tend to make them even more frequent and more gyrating. This crucially important void of a dynamic, long-term or historic perspective explains why, for example, most mainstream economists fail to see that the financial meltdown of 2008 in the United States, its spread to many other countries around the world, and the consequent global economic stagnation represent more than just another recessionary cycle. More importantly, they represent a structural change, a new phase in the development of capitalism, the age of finance capital. A number of salient features distinguish the age of finance capital from earlier stages of capitalism, that is, stages when finance capital grew and/or circulated in tandem with industrial capital. One such distinctive feature of the age of finance capital is that, freed from regulatory constraints, finance capital at this stage can and often does grow independent of industrial or productive capital. Prior to the rise of big finance and the dismantlement of regulatory constraints, the role of finance was considered to be largely greasing the wheels of the economy. Commercial banks consolidated people’s savings as bank deposits and funneled them as credit to manufacturing and commercial enterprises. Under these circumstances, where regulatory standards stipulated the types and quantities of investments that commercial banks and other financial intermediaries could undertake, finance capital largely shadowed industrial capital; they grew or expanded more or less apace. Not so in the age of finance capital where buying and selling of ownership titles, instead of producing real values, has become the primary field of investment, and asset price inflation constitutes the main source of profit making and (parasitic) expansion. Not only has this slowed down the traditional flow of national savings (through the banking system) into productive investment in the real sector of the economy, it has, indeed, reversed that flow of funds into productive investment. Today, there is a net outflow of funds from the real into the financial sector. The financial sector, properly functioning, primarily recycles idle balances into additional capital formation. Years of financial deregulation fostered the creation of new instruments, ever more reliant on Ponzi-like methods of profit acquisition, by reversing this dynamic and sucking profits out of production to expand the financial sector at the expense of productive investment. . . . The relationship between the financial sector and the nonfinancial sector had effectively morphed from symbiotic to parasitic [1]. A clear indication of this ominous trend of capital flight from the real to the financial sector is reflected in the glaring divergence between corporate profitability and real investment. Prior to 1980s, the two moved in tandem—both about 9% of GDP. Since then whereas corporate profits have increased to about 12% of GDP, real investment has declined to about 4% of GDP [2]. This obviously means that as larger and larger portions of corporate earnings are funneled out of the real sector into the financial sector (mostly through stock buybacks, dubious mergers and predatory takeovers), real investment has been dwindling accordingly. A closely related hallmark of the age of finance capital is that the draining mechanism of the real [sector] by the financial sector is facilitated by monetary policy, which is crafted by the financial aristocracy’s proxies at the head of central banks and treasury departments. Every sign of a market downturn is met with generous injections of cheap money into the banking and other financial institutions—ostensibly to stimulate production and employment by extending low-cost credit to real sector businesses/producers. In reality, however, the nearly interest-free funds thus bestowed upon the financial sector hardly leaks out to the real sector. Instead, it is invested in asset price inflation, or creation of market booms and busts. Each bust is “remedied,” once again, by injections of larger doses of public money and, thus, creation of a bigger bubble that, in turn, would entail higher social costs of bailing out the next bust—and so on.Thus, when the so-called Third World debt bubble burst in the 1980s, big finance abandoned the debt-burdened nations in South–Central America and moved to new markets in Russia, Turkey, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea and others in South-East Asia in search of fresh speculative ventures. After blowing a series of financial bubbles in these new markets, which were followed by bursts and economic crises in the 2nd half of the 1990s, international financial speculators, once again, packed and hurriedly left the scene of their crimes, so to speak, in the hunt for newer fields of speculation. Technology sector was considered a favorable candidate for this purpose. Following the implosion of the tech- or dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, speculative finance moved to yet another market, the housing/real estate market, whose fantastically huge bubble burst in 2008, with disastrous consequences for the 99%. It is therefore no exaggeration to argue that, in the age of finance capital, central banks have evolved as institutions designed to subsidize the powerful financial interests with public money. Win-win gambling is, of course, an oxymoronic expression. Yet, that’s exactly what Wall Street banks and other financial institutions are enjoying nowadays: they win as long as the financial bubbles they create continue expanding, but they also win when the bubbles burst; as they are then compensated for their losses with bail-out monies and all kinds of other shady rescue plans.
And who would ultimately pay for the blackmailing moneys thus bestowed upon the too-big-to-fail banks and other financial entities? The answer is, of course, the people—through extensive measures of austerity cuts. Under liberal capitalism of the competitive industrial era, a long cycle of economic contraction would usually wipe out not only jobs and production, but also the debt burdens that were accumulated during the expansionary cycle that preceded the cycle of contraction. Although such massive debt destructions were often painful, especially to giant financial speculators, they also occasioned much larger salutary effects of unburdening the society/economy of unsustainable debts and, thus, bringing about a fresh start, or a clean slate. By contrast, in the age of finance capital debt overhead is artificially propped up through its monetization, or socialization. Indeed, due to the influence of powerful financial interests, national debt burden is often exacerbated by governments’ generous bailout plans of the bankrupt financial giants and the transfer or conversion of private to public debt. It follows that, in the age of finance capital, monetary policy has turned into an instrument of redistribution of income and/or wealth from the bottom up. This is, of course, diametrically opposed to conventional monetary (and fiscal) policies of the New Deal/Social Democratic era where such policies were designed to temper income/wealth inequality in favor of the grassroots. Not surprisingly, in all the core capitalist countries inequality became slightly less lopsided from the late 1940s to late 1970s but has become increasingly more uneven since the late 1970 and early 1980. It also follows that, in general, financial capitalism is more conducive to inequality than the earlier stages of capitalism, or even the pre-capitalist socioeconomic formations. Under pre-capitalist modes of production as well as in the earlier stages capitalism, that is, under manufacturing or industrial capitalism, profit making required commodity/industrial production and, thus, employment of labor force. This meant that although labor was still exploited, it nonetheless benefitted from production—poverty or subsistence levels of wages notwithstanding. In the age of finance capital, however, profit making is largely divorced from real production and employment, as it comes mostly from speculative investment, or through parasitic extraction from the rest of the economy. As such, it employs no or a very small percentage of labor force, which means that the financial sector generates income/profits without sharing it with the overwhelming majority of labor force and/or society. Not surprisingly, chronic stagnation and chronically high rates of unemployment signify another hallmark of the age of finance capital. As the financial sector systematically appropriates the major bulk of a society’s economic surplus, it thereby undermines that society’ productive capacity. At the heart of the persistent stagnation, as mentioned earlier, is an acute decline in productive investment. By steadily absorbing a society’s economic surplus and engaging in financial manipulations to augment their own personal wealth at the expense of the public, the financial elites deprive the society of expanding its productive capacity and providing employment and income for its citizens. The result is protracted economic sluggishness, chronically high rates of unemployment, steadily declining standards of living, and growing poverty and inequality. ------------------------- Ismael Hossein-zadeh is Professor Emeritus of Economics (Drake University). He is the author of Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Financial Crisis (Routledge 2014), The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave–Macmillan 2007), and the Soviet Non-capitalist Development: The Case of Nasser’s Egypt (Praeger Publishers 1989). He is also a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. References [1]Barry Finger, “The Limits of State Intervention,” <http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2927>. [2] Robin Harding, “Corporate investment: A mysterious divergence,” Financial Times, <http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8177af34-eb21-11e2-bfdb-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2dN45MG7r>.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Oct 24, 2015 10:01:46 GMT -6
The proposed ban on "Assault Weapons" is even more illogical. Assault weapons are a subset of Rifles. Just 285 of 8,454 firearm homicides were due to Rifles. That's < 1/day. If we assume ½ of those rifles were Assault Weapons, that's 143/year. That's less than 1 person every other day killed by an Assault Weapon. Assault weapons are already banned for the 35+ million residents of California (about 1/8th of the US population). In addition to California, many other states (such as New York) aleady ban high capacity magazines. The following states already have bans on 10+ round magazines. California New York Connecticut DC Hawaii Maryland Massachusetts ................. The following states already ban 15+ round magazines Colorado New Jersey ............... 2 states already ban "detachable" magazines. California Maryland This means banning magazines that can be removed by hand, without the use of an additional tool. Instead, rifles must have a magazine lock--requiring a screwdriver or special tool to remove it. Rifles in California & Maryland can not be sold without already having this magazine lock installed. Subsequent removal of the lock would make the gun Illegal in those states. "Assault Weapon" bans are fallaciously justified to "prevent mass shootings" --which is illogical based on statistics noted above. But it's a nice hot-button issue to distract from real problems, such as Wealth Inequality & the Economy. (Note all the air-time & news-reporting space devoted to this issue by Hillary Clinton). But there's another, conveniently ignored reason. And it is not about the safety or well-being of "We, the People." Rather, it's about the safety of the rich & powerful--such as Diane Feinstein & Michael Bloomberg-- who rarely get close enough to anyone with a simple handgun to be endangered. Meanwhile, the rich & powerful have their own heavily-armed Private Security (Private Police) forces. (Jim Webb made this point in the Democratic Presidential debate.) No, Assault Weapon Bans are not about protecting "We, the People." To the contrary, They're about protection FROM "We, the People."It's about protection against domestic unrest. It's about protecting the Government & the 1% from the wrath of "We, the People." It may sound over-the-top, conspiratorial, and even a little corny to state this. But it's about protection from overthrow of the Corporate Plutocracy & Government by "We, the People." It's about protection against an armed uprising. And that's exactly what the Founding Fathers intended to protect with the 2nd Amendment: the ability of "We, the People" to overthrow an un-representative government--by force if necessary. And that's really what the Feinsteins, Clintons, Bloombergs are worried about. They're worried about Assault Weapons because of their longer-range that can hit from a distance. Because they're private police forces can protect them from everything else. Bans on Assault Weapons are designed to protect the American ruling class--not it's less-affluent subjects. And not "We, the People." handgunlaw.us/documents/NoHiCapChemSpray.pdf
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