GOP Includes Reinstatement of Glass-Steagall Into Party Platform

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I remain unconvinced that Donald Trump will be as hard on Wall Street as many of his supporters think he’ll be if elected President, but some of the following from the Washington Post certainly represents a breath of fresh air.

CLEVELAND — Donald Trump is adding fuel to Wall Street anxiety about his candidacy, jabbing directly at big banks this week with new language in the official Republican party platform that calls for the restoration of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a move that would force the break-up of large financial institutions.

The embrace of the controversial law, long championed on the left, is deepening the estrangement of the financial services sector from the presumptive Republican nominee, according to industry leaders and lobbyists, who are now struggling to assess what role and influence they would have in a Trump administration.

Absolutely none would be the right amount.

Tony Fratto, a former Treasury and White House official in the George W. Bush administration, called the embrace of Glass-Steagall “really dumb.” He suggested it could push pragmatically-oriented bankers toward Democratic contender Hillary Clinton.

“Push” bankers to Clinton. Are you kidding me? If they were pushed any closer together they’d be fused at the hip

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Hillary Clinton’s Full Speech to Goldman Sachs (Satire)

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Since we’re never going to get to see the full transcripts of Hillary Clinton’s multiple paid-for pandering sessions to Wall Street fraudsters, I bring you the next best thing.

What follows are excerpts from a piece of satirical brilliance composed by K.J. Noh, and published in full at Counterpunch, titled simply: Hillary Clinton’s Speech to Goldman Sachs.

Enjoy it, I sure did:

CLINTON: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Lloyd [Blankfein], and thanks to everyone at Goldman Sachs for welcoming me today. I’m delighted to be back among friends, colleagues, collaborators, supporters, kindred spirits…

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Camille Paglia – “Enough with the Hillary Cult”

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We’re going to war — either hybrid in nature to break the Russian state back to its 1990s subordination, or a hot war (which will destroy our country). Our citizens should know this, but they don’t because our media is dumbed down in its “Pravda”-like support for our “respectable,” highly aggressive government. We are being led, as C. Wright Mills said in the 1950s, by a government full of “crackpot realists: in the name of realism they’ve constructed a paranoid reality all their own.” Our media has credited Hillary Clinton with wonderful foreign policy experience, unlike Trump, without really noting the results of her power-mongering. She’s comparable to Bill Clinton’s choice of Cold War crackpot Madeleine Albright as one of the worst Secretary of States we’ve had since … Condi Rice? Albright boasted, “If we have to use force it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”

Hillary’s record includes supporting the barbaric “contras” against the Nicaraguan people in the 1980s, supporting the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia, supporting the ongoing Bush-Iraq War, the ongoing Afghan mess, and as Secretary of State the destruction of the secular state of Libya, the military coup in Honduras, and the present attempt at “regime change” in Syria. Every one of these situations has resulted in more extremism, more chaos in the world, and more danger to our country. Next will be the borders of Russia, China, and Iran. Look at the viciousness of her recent AIPAC speech (don’t say you haven’t been warned). Can we really bear to watch as Clinton “takes our alliance [with Israel] to the next level”? Where is our sense of proportion? Cannot the media, at the least, call her out on this extremism? The problem, I think, is this political miasma of “correctness” that dominates American thinking (i.e. Trump is extreme, therefore Hillary is not).

– From the post: “We’re Going to War” – Oliver Stone Opines on the Dangerous Extremism of Neocon Hillary Clinton

I’ve really enjoyed reading Camille Paglia this election season, and I find her to be one of the most astute cultural and political observers in America today. She also happens to be a wordsmith.

What follows are a few choice excerpts from her latest masterpiece, Enough With the Hillary Cult: Her Admirers Ignore Reality, Dream of Worshipping a Queen:

What is it with the Hillary cult?

As a lifelong Democrat who will be enthusiastically voting for Bernie Sanders in next week’s Pennsylvania primary, I have trouble understanding the fuzzy rosy filter through which Hillary fans see their champion. So much must be overlooked or discounted—from Hillary’s compulsive money-lust and her brazen indifference to normal rules to her conspiratorial use of shadowy surrogates and her sociopathic shape-shifting in policy positions for momentary expedience.

Hillary’s breathtaking lack of concrete achievements or even minimal initiatives over her long public career doesn’t faze her admirers a whit. They have a religious conviction of her essential goodness and blame her blank track record on diabolical sexist obstructionists. When at last week’s debate Hillary crassly blamed President Obama for the disastrous Libyan incursion that she had pushed him into, her acolytes hardly noticed. They don’t give a damn about international affairs—all that matters is transgender bathrooms and instant access to abortion.

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A Tale of Two Fundraisers – Clinton vs. Sanders

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

By now, most of you will have heard about political oligarch Hillary Clinton’s pair of “obscene” California fundraisers hosted by George Clooney this past weekend. For those of you who aren’t up to speed, here’s a quick recap from Variety:

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The Real Reason Hillary Clinton Refuses to Release Her Wall Street Transcripts

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“It was pretty glowing about us,” one person who watched the event said. “It’s so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.”

– From the post: What Clinton Said in Her Speeches – “She Sounded More Like a Goldman Sachs Managing Director”

We’ve seen bits and pieces emerge from Hillary Clinton’s infamous $225,000 speech to Goldman Sachs in October 2013, but an article published by the Huffington Post yesterday adds some additional perspective. In a nutshell, the author believes that a release of these transcripts would be so damaging it would end her bid for the presidency. 

Here are a few excerpts from the Huffington Post piece:

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The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale for Hillary Improves

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The more Bernie Sanders rises in the polls, the more obvious it becomes that he’s being given the “Ron Paul treatment” by the Democratic Party. By that, I am referring to the way Ron Paul was ignored, derided and marginalized by the GOP establishment during his run for the Presidency in 2012.

Now it’s Mr. Sanders turn, and nowhere is this more evidenced than within the corridors of various unions.

We learn from Politico:

Top brass of the 3 million-strong National Education Association, the country’s largest union, are recommending an endorsement of Hillary Clinton, according to an email obtained by POLITICO — a move that has many state leaders and rank-and-file members planning to protest the early endorsement.

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