Country Trumped? Seems To Be (So Tom Hayes Is Guilty. Who Else Is?)

Yes, there is an argument to be made for Donald Trump's triumph in the midst of the Republican fakers.

He's the best.

August 7, 2015

Trump’s Triumph:  Billionaire Blowhard Exposes Fake Political System

by Mike Whitney

Last night’s FOX News GOP Presidential Debate Extravaganza featured the most riveting two-minute political exchange ever heard on national television.

During a brief colloquy between Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and Fox moderator Brett Baier, the pugnacious casino magnate revealed the appalling truth about the American political system, that the big money guys like Trump own the whole crooked contraption lock, stock, and barrel, and that, the nation’s fake political leaders do whatever they’re told to do.  Without question, it was (the) most illuminating commentary to ever cross the airwaves. Here’s the entire exchange direct from the transcript:

FOX News Brett Baier (talking to Trump):  Now, 15 years ago, you called yourself a liberal on health care. You were for a single-payer system, a Canadian-style system. Why were you for that then and why aren’t you for it now?

TRUMP: As far as single payer, it works in Canada. It works incredibly well in Scotland. It could have worked in a different age, which is the age you’re talking about here.

What I’d like to see is a private system without the artificial lines around every state. I have a big company with thousands and thousands of employees. And if I’m negotiating in New York or in New Jersey or in California, I have like one bidder. Nobody can bid.

You know why?

Because the insurance companies are making a fortune because they have control of the politicians, of course, with the exception of the politicians on this stage. (uneasy laughter) But they have total control of the politicians. They’re making a fortune.

Get rid of the artificial lines and you will have…yourself great plans…

BAIER: Mr. Trump, it’s not just your past support for single-payer health care. You’ve also supported a host of other liberal policies….You’ve also donated to several Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton included, and Nancy Pelosi. You explained away those donations saying you did that to get business-related favors. And you said recently, quote, “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.”

TRUMP: You’d better believe it.

BAIER: — they do?

TRUMP: If I ask them, if I need them, you know, most of the people on this stage I’ve given to, just so you understand, a lot of money.

TRUMP:  I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people, before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me. And that’s a broken system.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE:  What did you get from Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi?

TRUMP: Well, I’ll tell you what, with Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she came to my wedding. You know why?

She didn’t have a choice because I gave. I gave to a foundation that, frankly, that foundation is supposed to do good. I didn’t know her money would be used on private jets going all over the world. It was.

BAIER: Hold on…..We’re going to — we’re going to move on.” (Transcript Read the Full Text of the Primetime Republican Debate, "Time")

There it is, two glorious minutes of pure, unalloyed truth on national television. How often does that happen?

How often does a fatcat billionaire-insider appear on TV and announce that the whole system is a big-fat scam run by crooks and patsies?



Never, that’s when. But that’s what Trump did last night. And that’s why the clatter of ruthless miscreants who run the system behind the smokescreen of fake politicians are sharpening their knives right now before Manhattan’s rogue elephant does even more damage to their precious system.

Just think about what the man said. He not only explained that the whole system is rigged (Baier: “And when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.”…TRUMP: “You’d better believe it.”), he also said that the politicians will do whatever they’re told to do. (TRUMP: Well, …with Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she came to my wedding. You know why? She didn’t have a choice because I gave.”)

Doesn’t that confirm your darkest suspicions about the way the system really works, that money talks and that elections are just a way to get the sheeple to rubber-stamp a corrupt, fraudulent system?

Of course, it does.

So, let’s summarize:  Moneybags capitalist loudmouth explains to 80 million dumbfounded Americans watching prime time TV, that the system is a total fraud, that the big money runs everything, and that even he thinks the system is broken.

How do you beat that? Seriously, my wife and I were laughing and high-fiving and like we just won the lottery.

Thanks for that, Don. We owe you one.

(MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless:  Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.)

Speaking of fatcat billionaire insider scammers . . . .

Do you think this really was the only guilty banker?

Or, as we were told, the only one whose guilt could be proved?

← More Misinformation about Banking Regulation

So Tom Hayes Is Guilty. Who Else Is?

Posted on August 4, 2015
by James Kwak | Comments

By James Kwak

Tom Hayes was a trader at UBS and Citigroup who was very, very good … at rigging LIBOR. This week, he was convicted in the United Kingdom of conspiring to manipulate the benchmark interest rate and sentenced to fourteen years in prison.

There’s little doubt that Hayes was guilty as charged. In his defense, he argued that he had no idea what he was doing was wrong. But contrary to what some armchair attorneys think, that doesn’t matter. In general, the famous mens rea (guilty mind) requirement isn’t that you know you are breaking the law at the time; it suffices if (a) you know you are doing a thing and (b) that thing is against the law. There’s no question that Hayes knew he was conspiring to rig LIBOR, and that’s enough for the prosecution.

And on one level, it’s good that he was convicted and got a stiff sentence. That prospect should help deter criminal activity of all kinds by bankers and traders who have historically been shielded by prosecutors’ unwillingness to go after individual defendants (except in insider trading cases).

But  … Tom Hayes as the evil architect of the LIBOR-fixing scheme? Not so much.

As in so many cases, there are only two logical possibilities. Either Tom Hayes’s bosses at UBS and Citi knew what he was doing, in which case they are guilty as well. Or they didn’t know about a widespread conspiracy being conducted across the electronic communications systems of some of the most technologically sophisticated companies in the world, in which case they are recklessly incompetent.

When it comes to Tom Hayes, there is a lot of evidence for the former. Apparently, when he was being recruited from UBS in 2010, he boasted to a Citi executive about how he rigged LIBOR. Back in 2007, that same executive had said in an internal email, “We will continue to pressure the brokers to talk [LIBOR] down and generally press lower” — when asked by a colleague to help lower Citi’s own LIBOR submissions. When Citi attempted to hire Hayes, his boss at UBS tried to arrange a large bonus for him to stay, citing his “strong connections with Libor setters in London.”

It’s hard to believe that senior executives at UBS and Citi didn’t know that LIBOR was being fixed. If they weren’t in on it directly, it’s likely that they turned a blind eye — precisely because they knew that it was good for the bottom line. Hayes himself generated $260 million in profits for UBS in just three years.

When people make that kind of money for the bank — in markets that are supposed to be highly competitive — executives don’t want to know too much about what they’re doing.

As time goes by, it gets harder and harder to figure out how much of the largest banks’ profits is due to their legitimate operations and how much is due to their tolerance of illegal activity (money laundering, rate fixing, bribery, etc.). Maybe bank executives are so inept when it comes to internal wrongdoing because they like things that way. They want their employees pushing the limits of the law to maximize profits. (“If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.”) And when people like Tom Hayes get caught, the bank itself gets away with a slap on the wrist because it’s too big to jail — and the CEO gets away by claiming ignorance. It’s a win-win strategy.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki:  Gratuitous Mass Murder

The atomic age began on August 6, 1945 in real time – after its July 16 pre-dawn open-air birth in successful Alamogordo, NM testing.

At the time, perhaps prophetically General Thomas Farrell said “(w)e were reaching into the unknown, and we did not know what might come of it.”

Called by some “the father of the atomic bomb,” Robert Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita saying: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

August 6 marks the 70th anniversary of one of history’s great crimes, followed three days later by incinerating Nagasaki.

At least 200,000 died, many others scarred for life, future generations to this day harmed by radiologically caused birth defects and other serious health problems.

Big Lies still claim bombing both cities hastened war’s end and saved many lives. Truman informed the public deceitfully saying bombing Hiroshima “destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.”

“It was to spare the Japanese people from (further) utter destruction…If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the likes of which has never been seen on this earth.”

Nuclear bombing both cities were two of numerous American genocides – beginning with a conquering the new world from sea to shining sea, ravaging and destroying one country after another ever since, endless wars of aggression continuing today.

Japan was defeated ready to surrender when Truman authorized testing America’s new toy in real time – twice, not once. Not to win a war already won. To show Soviet Russia America’s new might, what its leadership already knew, what might follow against its cities if Washington turkelgoodwardecided to attack its wartime ally.

US leaders always considered human lives expendable. Many thousands of Japanese victims were considered a small price to pay.

Follow the Radiation

“The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers”

–Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Today I feel like David and Energy NW, the owners of a large nuclear reactor in Washington State, the Columbia Generating Station(CGS), is my Goliath. My slingshot, Truth and I fight against Goliath, symbolic here of Radiation.

I have now figured out how to win this fight if only others would join me along with those of us who have also been fighting Goliath for almost 70 years and the answer was waiting for me to find it. It took 3 years of following radiation readings around the US to figure this out.

Sometimes we are told to follow the money. In this case, I had to follow the radiation. After tracking readings and following how the NRC and the EPA work I realized the symbiotic relationship between these two groups were where the answers were hidden and where the answers could be found. I will explain.

Since writing my first article 4 months ago published in "CounterPunch" titled, Why Fukushima Ended the Nuclear Debate, there have been about 11 reported NRC Events from CGS. I ask myself each time a new Event occurs, how many near misses can one nuclear plant have before the next Fukushima attacks us from within? When does the luck run dry? I also ask daily, why won’t the Nuclear Regulatory Commission shut down nuclear power plants before luck turns to corium, molten nuclear core?

In order for you to understand what is truth and what is pure fiction, you must know a few key factors. Obfuscation is an imperative, a must have tool used by the EPA, the NRC and by nuclear companies to “protect” you from what you should not know. I’ll repeat that last part: to protect you from what you should not know. Let me explain further.

To understand viscerally the truth behind how much radiation leaks at a nuclear plant under “normal” operations, I pulled graphs of radiation leaks directly from the EPA’s site from their Radnet Monitors which were placed in this case, in Richland, WA. I then went to the NRC’s website to gather the Nuclear Events that occurred from the planned refueling shut down at the Columbia Generating Station from just before May 9th- July 23rd.

I’ve listed the NRC Events as they were posted on the NRC event page from which I copied the data, followed by these Events superimposed onto the radiation graphs themselves so you can see how they relate to each other and see what radiation “looks” like to the EPA. (The measurements on the EPA’s site are in Counts Per Minute, reading the amount of ambient radiation in the air. For comparison purposes, EPA counts in Seattle hover around 50 – 80 CPM. Seattle is 200 miles West of Richland. Notice the baseline counts on these graphs from Richland.)