Year: 2016

MSNBC Host Admits Democratic Primary Rigged, While Station Simultaneously Rigs Coverage

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While it might sound strange, a coronation of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary will mark the end of the party as we know it. There’s been a lot written about the “Sanders surge,” with much of it revolving around Hillary Clinton’s extreme personal weakness as a candidate. While this is indisputable, it’s also a convenient way for the status quo to exempt itself from fault and discount genuine grassroots anger. I’m of the view that Sanders’ support is more about people liking him than them disliking Hillary, particularly when it comes to registered Democrats. He’s not merely seen as the “least bad choice.” People really do like him.

The Sanders appeal is twofold. He is seen as unusually honest and consistent for someone who’s held elected office for much of his life, plus he advocates a refreshingly anti-establishment view on core issues that matter to an increasing number of Americans. These include militarism, Wall Street bailouts, a two-tiered justice system, the prohibitive cost of college education, healthcare insecurity and a “rigged economy.” While Hillary is being forced to pay lip service to these issues, everybody knows she doesn’t mean a word of it. She means it less than Obama meant it in 2008, and Obama really didn’t mean it.

– From the post: It’s Not Just the GOP – The Democratic Party is Also Imploding

I just finished watching a surprisingly good and honest 14 minute segment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe which covered how the Democratic National Committee has been rigging the primary in favor of Hillary Clinton. Host Joe Scarborough even went so far as to admit the media’s complicity in the process with regard to superdelegates. He notes:

“And I know the Republican party wishes they rigged the process as well as the Democratic party did right now, because they could rig it against Trump — but the Democratic party rigs their process so that these superdelegates, which by the way can move any direction they want, actually skew the process and the reporting so badly that the voters actually don’t have their say when it comes to voting.”

This is a key issue that has been driving me up a wall lately. It is journalistic malpractice for media outlets to include superdelegates in the total tally when these Democratic operatives can switch their support at any point between now and the convention. As we learned in the post Did Hillary Clinton Really Win More New Hampshire Delegates Than Sanders Despite a Landslide Loss?:

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Top Silicon Valley VC Laments – Startups Being Funded Are “Mostly Crap and Largely Worthless”

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Wall Street is counting its winnings from seven years of easy money.

The results represent a clear victory for Wall Street over Main Street, according to the team of Michael Hartnett, BofA’s chief investment strategist.

“Zero rates and asset purchases of central banks have, thus far, proved much more favorable to Wall Street, capitalists, shadow banks, ‘unicorns,’ and so on than it has for Main Street, workers, savers, banks and the jobs market,” the BofA team wrote.

– From the post: Bank of America Admits – Central Bank Policy Enriched Wall Street While “Steamrolling” Main Street

Recently, Vanity Fair sat down with well known venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya to get his take on the state of affairs in unicorn land.

Here’s some of what he had to say:

Palihapitiya’s firm, Social Capital, has backed numerous tech companies with valuations in the billions, such as Slack, Box, and SurveyMonkey. But that doesn’t mean that he is bullish on unicorn culture. Here, Palihapitiya speaks about Mark Zuckerberg’s secret sauce, which start-ups are going to make it, and the saga between Apple and the F.B.I., among other topics.

Funding is slowing down, both in seed rounds and mega-rounds. There have been fewer tech I.P.O.s recently, more companies are raising down rounds. Are we in a downturn?

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Saudi Arabia Sentences Journalist to Five Years in Prison for Insulting the Kingdom’s Rulers

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Over the weekend, I published a post titled Al Jazeera Presenter to Saudi Ambassador – “Why Support Democracy in Syria but Not Saudi Arabia?” in which the Saudi Ambassador claimed subjects of Saudi Arabia don’t want or need elections because they are so enamored with the absolute monarchy’s management of society. Yes, and I just had lunch with the Easter Bunny.

Here’s the clip if you missed it:

Not that you need additional evidence demonstrating the ridiculousness of his answer, but I’ll provide some anyway. Reuters reports:

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Al Jazeera Presenter to Saudi Ambassador – “Why Support Democracy in Syria but Not Saudi Arabia?”

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This past week, Al Jazeera presenter Mehdi Hasan sat down with Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the UN. He asked him a very pointed question regarding why he supports democracy in Syria but not in Saudi Arabia.

It’s a great question, and let’s just say the answer was not at all convincing.

Too much media these days merely serves as public relations for the status quo. What Mr. Hasan does in this interview is exactly what journalists are supposed to be doing, but very rarely do in these United States:

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Leading Turkish Journalists Face Life in Prison

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Hundreds of Turkish academics are waiting to find out whether they will be prosecuted or sacked for spreading “terrorist propaganda”, after they signed a petition calling for violence to end in Turkey’s southeast, where government forces have been fighting Kurdish separatists.

After the petition provoked a furious response from Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, several universities in the country have begun investigations into signatories among their faculty — which could lead to their dismissal if accusations of unlawful political agitation hold up. On 15 January, police arrested and later released 27 academics, according to local media reports, including economists, physicians and scientists.

Turkey’s government has previously clamped down on scientists and students who question its policies, imprisoned scientists charged with terrorism offenses, and restricted the freedom of funding agencies and scientific academies. But the number of arrests and investigations makes the current episode one of the larger Turkish attacks on freedom of expression in recent years, prompting outrage among human-rights advocates.

– From the post: U.S. Ally Turkey Arrests Academics for the Crime of Signing a Peace Petition

Over the past several months, the nation of Turkey has rapidly devolved into a tyrannical, rogue regime under an increasingly despotic president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. It’s a disturbing reality I’ve highlighted frequently in recent months, particularly since the country remains a close U.S. government ally and is actively attempting to join the EU.

Well the hits just keep on coming. From the AFP via Yahoo News:

Istanbul (AFP) – Two Turkish journalists went on trial in Istanbul Friday facing possible life terms on controversial espionage charges, with the court immediately barring the public from a case seen as a test of press freedom under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

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The World’s Most Famous Economic Hitman Confesses – They’re Coming for Your Democracy

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Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles—who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats—falls firmly in the latter camp. 

But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It’s almost like Game of Thrones to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world…

Absolutely. The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went. He had to build a team of cutthroats and assassins on the ground to go around eliminating the people he wanted to eliminate, who he felt were in the way of American interests. He called them communists. We call them terrorists today. And of course the most controversial part of my book, I’m sure, will be the end, where I say there was blowback from that. Because that killing machine in some way was brought back home.

– From the post: How America’s Modern Shadow Government Can Be Traced Back to One Very Evil Man – Allen Dulles

Most readers will be familiar with John Perkins and his best-selling novel Confessions of an Economic Hitman. What you may not know, is he’s currently making the rounds warning us that all the corporatist mercenary tactics employed against third-world nations to financially benefit U.S. conglomerates are now being turned inward on American communities.

He discussed some of this in a recent interview with Yes. Here are a few excerpts:

Twelve years ago, John Perkins published his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and it rapidly rose up The New York Times’ best-seller list. In it, Perkins describes his career convincing heads of state to adopt economic policies that impoverished their countries and undermined democratic institutions. These policies helped to enrich tiny, local elite groups while padding the pockets of U.S.-based transnational corporations.

If economic pressure and threats didn’t work, Perkins says, the jackals were called to either overthrow or assassinate the noncompliant heads of state. That is, indeed, what happened to Allende, with the backing of the CIA.

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America’s Top Rogue Mercenary – Blackwater’s Erik Prince is Under Federal Investigation

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Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.

–  From the post: New York Times Reports – Blackwater Threatened to Kill a State Dept. Official and the U.S. Government Did Nothing

A little over two years ago, I published a post titled, How Erik Prince, Founder of Blackwater, Will Help China Subjugate Africa. Here’s what we learned at the time:

Shares of DVN Holdings, controlled by Hong Kong businessman Johnson Ko Chun-shun and state-owned Citic Group, surged 7.3 per cent after it appointed Erik Prince – former owner of controversial US security firm Blackwater – as chairman, and granted him more share options.

Prince last November sold to DVN a company that plans to build a pan-Africa provider of aviation, logistics, risk management, security services and exploration support services, needed by many Chinese businesses active in Africa. He received US$3 million plus the first batch of options.

Prince has logistics, aviation, manufacturing, resources and energy business interests in Africa, the Middle East and North America, and is the founder of Frontier Resource Group, a private equity firm active in African aviation, exploration, mining and logistics, DVN said.

The firm subsequently paid US$42 million in fines for hundreds of violations of US export rules, to avoid criminal charges, The New York Times reported.

The writing was on the wall back then, and it appears the Department of Justice has finally picked up on the shadiness of it all.

Earlier today, The Intercept published a detailed account of the ongoing investigation into America’s number one mercenary, Erik Prince. Here are a few excerpts:

Erik Prince, founder of the now-defunct mercenary firm Blackwater and current chairman of Frontier Services Group, is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies for attempting to broker military services to foreign governments and possible money laundering, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the case.

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Liberty Links 3/24/16

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13 links today. Enjoy! A Message to the Elite (Great read, Tax Research UK) Japan’s Bond Market Is Close to Breaking Point (Bloomberg) Gulf States Will Be Forced to Tap Debt Markets (Financial Times) Most Japan Firms Unhappy with Central Bank’s Negative Rate Policy (NIRP has been a total failure, Reuters) Helicopter Money Takes Flight as Latest … Read more

Excellent Interview – A Brief History of Corporate Immunity

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Like so many other cases of egregious financial fraud over the past several years, regulators used softball tactics to go easy on the banks. No bank was even forced to admit wrongdoing in the orders by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Regulators avoided court and settled for cash, which the traders won’t pay – the bank’s shareholders will. Officials presented a minimal amount of evidence, lacking the full details of the traders’ misconduct. They sought no judicial review.

In short, banks got away with their crimes for a pittance; their stocks even rose on the news of the settlements because the market believes the trouble is over. 

The DoJ has increasingly used a relatively new and declawed method to deal with the aftermath of the financial crisis: the deferred prosecution agreement (DPA). 

No one goes to jail and no one ever gets prosecuted. Under a deferred prosecution agreement, the Justice Department allows corporations to pay a fine, then agree to some enhanced supervision and monitoring. The Justice Department appears to admit this in the US Attorney’s manual, when they describe these deals as “agreements not to enforce the law under particular conditions”.

Each deferred prosecution agreement is negotiated individually. There is no thought to creating a future record: no trials, no jury verdicts, no appellate court decisions, no case law and no binding precedent. This makes it impossible to determine the boundaries of the law. The same conduct can be treated differently, depending on the prosecutor.

–  From the post: The U.S. Department of Justice Handles Banker Criminals Like Juvenile Offenders…Literally

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jesse Eisinger is currently on leave from his day job as he finishes a book about “white collar crime & (non)punishment.” He recently sat down with ProMarket to discuss some of what he’s learned.

What follows are some choice excerpts, but I also suggest reading the entire thing here:

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American Democracy – Allegations of Voter Suppression Emerge from the Arizona Primary

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The following is extremely disturbing. If I were a Bernie Sanders supporter in Arizona, I’d be absolutely apoplectic.

AZCentral reports:

By a combination of misjudgment, misplaced priorities and old-fashioned voter suppression, Tuesday’s primary was a disaster.

As reported by The Arizona Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl, Maricopa County reduced the number of polling places from more than the 200 available for the 2012 presidential election to … 60.

Sixty? Are you kidding me.

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