It appears mysterious cartoons mocking “Goldman Rats” and Hillary Clinton are appearing all over NYC. The best one I’ve seen, is the image which shows the two entities as the unified oligarch oppressors they are. See: below:
Business Insider notes that:
Although I continue to believe that Hillary Clinton will be the next President of these United States unless the Republicans nominate Rand Paul (read why I think he is the only candidate who can beat her here), the public’s plunging distrust in her is a very positive development for the nation.
For example, if crowned, I mean elected, she will enter the office severely damaged with almost no credibility. A large percentage of the population will see her as the illegitimate oligarch puppet that she is, which is good, because as James Baldwin accurately noted:
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
We learn from the National Journal that:
The only real information we have about the shady corporate giveaway known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), is via three chapters released by Wikileaks. Now, the whistleblower organization is raising $100,000 as a reward for additional leaked draft chapters. From Wikileaks.org:
America’s most wanted secret. The TPP is a multi-trillion dollar international treaty that is being negotiated in secret by the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico and others. This massive agreement has 29 chapters, of which 26 are still secret. It covers 40% of global GDP and is the largest agreement of its kind in history. The treaty aims to create a new international legal regime that will allow transnational corporations to bypass domestic courts, evade environmental protections, police the internet on behalf of the content industry, limit the availability of affordable generic medicines, and drastically curtail each country’s legislative sovereignty. US Senator Elizabeth Warren has said “[They] can’t make this deal public because if the American people saw what was in it, they would be opposed to it.” Over the last two years WikiLeaks has published three chapters of this super-secret global deal, despite unprecedented efforts by negotiating governments to keep it under wraps. The remaining 26 chapters of the deal are closely held by negotiators and the big corporations that have been given privileged access. The TPP is also noteworthy as the icebreaker agreement for the proposed ‘T-treaty triad’ of TPP-TISA-TTIP which would see TPP style rules placed on 53 nations, 1.6 billion people and 2/3rds of the global economy.
$24,000 has already been raised, which is pretty impressive considering I only heard about the campaign this morning.
If you want to see how completely disconnected Hillary Clinton is from the “everyday Americans” she claims to represent, you need to look no further than her recent campaign invitation to a Boston fundraiser where attendees are asked to shell out $2,700 per person for a “ticket.”
It was only just yesterday that I highlighted a recent Federal Reserve study that showed that 47% of Americans couldn’t handle an unexpected expense of $400. In the post, Use of Alternative Financial Services, Such as Payday Loans, Continues to Increase Despite the “Recovery,” we learned that:
The most frightening finding in the Federal Reserve’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2014 concerns a matter of $400. Four-hundred bucks. Twenty twenties. Four Benjamins.
Or just enough to crush half of all American households.
“Forty-seven percent of respondents say they either could not cover an emergency expense costing $400, or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money,” reads this year’s annual report.
Here’s a very interesting case in which Bergen County Superior Court Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca issued an order directing the Bergen Dispatch to remove a news article. The newspaper refused the demand. Techdirt reports:
This seems to happen all too often, but a local judge has forgotten about the whole 1st Amendment thing. Last week, Bergen County Superior Court Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca ordered the Bergen Dispatch to take down a news article. The article was about a specific family court case, involving custody of a child. It’s not surprising that there might be some concern over privacy rights in such cases, but even so, that does not allow a judge to flat out order a newspaper to take down an article — even more so when the order came out of a closed hearing where no one from the newspaper was even present. In response, the Bergen Dispatch posted a fairly snarky article that reiterates some of the details from the case, and concludes with this wonderful paragraph:
While the Bergen Dispatch reviews its options we have confirmed that Bergen County does currently remain part of the State of New Jersey and that currently New Jersey is still part of the Union of states that is governed by the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. As such, Bergen County citizens continue to enjoy the right to freedom of speech and the right to a free press.
Families’ savings not where they should be: That’s one part of the problem. But Mills sees something else in the recovery that’s more disturbing. The number of households tapping alternative financial services are on the rise, meaning that Americans are turning to non-bank lenders for credit: payday loans, refund-anticipation loans, pawnshops, and rent-to-own services.
According to the Urban Institute report, the number of households that used alternative credit products increased 7 percent between 2011 and 2013. And the kind of household seeking alternative financing is changing, too.
– From the Citylab article: Half of All American Families Are Staring at Financial Catastrophe
It’s an economic recovery so lopsided, corrupt and fraudulent only an oligarch could love it.
One of the key themes at Liberty Blitzkrieg since inception has been to point out that the current economic recovery is largely a sham. While there are certainly meaningful innovations happening in the less regulated and corrupt parts of the economy, such as the technology sector, much of the landscape is riddled with waste, fraud, cronyism and stagnation. So much so, that I have gone ahead and characterized the entire post crisis economic environment to be the “oligarch recovery.”
Nowhere is this more evident than within the many statistics demonstrating that things for the growing American underclass are getting worse, not better. An article published last week by Citylab makes the point. It notes:
In a press release, the groups highlighted the links between Citigroup—which has lobbied extensively on the TPP, TTIP, and Fast Track authority—and Froman, who they note “received a more than $4 million golden parachute from Citigroup upon leaving the large financial institution to join the Obama administration in 2009.”
In particular, the letter’s signatories are concerned that provisions in proposed trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) or the TransAtlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP) would weaken or rollback existing U.S. financial regulations, for the benefit of big banks.
– From the Common Dreams article: Is US Trade Rep a Wall Street Crony? Groups Demand Transparency.
No one is pushing harder to pass the multi-national corporate giveaway masquerading as a free trade deal, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), than Obama’s top trade representative, Michael Froman. Therefore, we probably should know a little bit about him. What do you know? Probably not much.
Here’s something you should know. From the New York Times:
The disclosure forms also shed further light on the compensation received by a top Obama aide who previously worked for Citigroup, one of the largest recipients of taxpayer bailout money. The aide, Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, received more than $7.4 million from the company from January 2008 to when he joined the White House this year [2009].
In early 2013, before Mary Jo White was confirmed as the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), I wrote a post predicting she would be a bankster codling fraud in the post, Meet Mary Jo White: The Next SEC Chief and a Guaranteed Wall Street Patsy. Here’s an excerpt:
Obama’s nominee to head the SEC, Mary Jo White, is just another gatekeeper appointed to make sure no one ever goes after the Wall Street crime syndicate. As I have written about many times in the past, Obama does not nominate anyone to a high position of power in government who will not behave like a good little lapdog for Wall Street.
Despite Obama’s propagandist statement about how “you don’t want to mess with Mary Jo,” her background implies she will function as a useful servant to the financial oligarchs. Forget for a second about that fact at her recent firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP her clients included the usual suspects such as such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Morgan Stanley (MS), and UBS AG, but she is actually known as the prosecutor who popularized the “slap Wall Street on the wrist” approach.
This list could grow to 1,000 ideas, but I’ve kept it down to ten. In the future, I might update it and add some more.
There are a lot of bad ideas that dominate the world we live in today, most of which are uncritically accepted as the norm and fully embraced by society.
As a millennial myself, I’ve noticed my peers seem to accept most of these as conventional wisdom. Hook, line, and sinker.
Here are some ideas I was propagandized with that I hope my children will never have to “unlearn.”
1. Violence is normal.
Presidential candidates today are fighting over who can kill better by using drones or boots on the ground. By constantly threatening the use of violence against other countries, statists have conditioned the population into thinking that killing tens of thousands of people is normal behavior, instead of the immoral, dangerous provocation it is. Rather than being charged with murder, politicians and others that help support this behavior are often paid $250,000 or more a speech after they leave office, and referred to as Mr. President or former Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Video games, movies, television shows, and even toys all have a common theme: death and destruction. For example, there’s nothing like teaching your child about policing in 2015 America via these Playmobil toys:
Mr. Gowdy’s chief interest, according to people briefed on the inquiry, is a series of memos that Mr. Blumenthal — who was not an employee of the State Department — wrote to Mrs. Clinton about events unfolding in Libya before and after the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. According to emails obtained by The New York Times, Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials in Libya and Washington and at times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.
But an examination by The Times suggests that Mr. Blumenthal’s involvement was more wide-ranging and more complicated than previously known, embodying the blurry lines between business, politics and philanthropy that have enriched and vexed the Clintons and their inner circle for years.
While advising Mrs. Clinton on Libya, Mr. Blumenthal, who had been barred from a State Department job by aides to President Obama, was also employed by her family’s philanthropy, the Clinton Foundation, to help with research, “message guidance” and the planning of commemorative events, according to foundation officials.
Much of the Libya intelligence that Mr. Blumenthal passed on to Mrs. Clinton appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government. The venture, which was ultimately unsuccessful, involved other Clinton friends, a private military contractor and one former C.I.A. spy seeking to get in on the ground floor of the new Libyan economy.
– From the New York Times article: Clinton Friend’s Memos on Libya Draw Scrutiny to Politics and Business
Keeping tabs on the shadiness, cronyism and ineptitude of Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State alone is a full time job. I’m not even kidding, it feels like every day I wake up to another story that in itself should be enough to disqualify her as a Presidential candidate. Yet she remains the front runner to win in 2016, which proves without a shadow of a doubt that America is not a functioning democracy, but a clownish oligarch-owned Banana Republic.
Before I get into the many disturbing and dangerous angles to the Sidney Blumenthal story, it’s important to highlight what a complete and total disaster U.S. foreign policy in Libya has been during the Obama Administration. Rather than helping the situation, NATO destroyed the nation and left it far worse than it ever was under Qaddafi. I highlighted this fact in detail earlier this year in the post, The Forgotten War – Understanding the Incredible Debacle Left Behind by NATO in Libya. Here’s an excerpt: