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How about a little bit of history and economics today as we await the South Carolina and Nevada primaries? And if you want to work in those primaries, please click here.
500,000 white lives have been cut short since 1999. Remember what happened in 1999?
The financialization of the American workplace: real jobs being replaced by derivative-based trading on Wall Street (not to mention the automation of many jobs and the outsourcing of jobs based on using cheap labor due to no environmental regulations being enforced in foreign territories).
These statistics are not only telling - they reveal the sea of troubles this country has been gasping/drowning beneath since the financial regulations (protecting the USA! from market chaos since the Great Depression (1930s)) were changed in the waning days of Bill Clinton's administration (and, yes, he was under lots of Republican pressure - ultimately causing him to stand strong again them - NOT - ultimately causing both him and his wife to become grossly overpaid, much sought-after multimillionaire speechmakers/charityists ever after amen).
When people ask you why young people (who don't have good jobs - if they've found a job at all), minorities (who have endured all the discrimination and rage emanating from it that makes the nightly news light up like a Christmas tree sales lot), and the poor/unemployed/part-time employed (who have been scrounging to try to keep their lives afloat for over a decade) are rushing into the Bernie Sanders democratic socialism campgrounds being assembled throughout the USA! USA! USA!, just look confused.
Because they are kidding you.
They know.
Max Keiser has been exposing this financial/economics chicanery for years. Today, Ellen Brown, one of my favorite economists (and an extremely courageous one), is his guest and helps him to illustrate for us exactly what the powers-that-be have in store for those who want to actually understand (and then try to change) this plutocratic USA! USA! USA!!!!
A gentle hint to my gentle readers: You're going to feel cheated if you don't familiarize yourself with the facts about this economic downturn.
Which may be the last (for a very loooonnngg while as we experience another decade or two's slow recovery).
As we've hit rock bottom where the rates can only go to negative numbers (after having the last self-serving-to-the-rich .25% raise quickly retracted), meaning that our government, like the governments of Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria and Finland begins to pay back people who bought their bonds less as interest because, for one reason, the rich and their corporations* are no longer taxed (and the stock market - source of capital for the rich casino devotees - is now going to hell in a wastebasket (again). And you thought the news about 1%/no interest for the last eight years was bad enough . . . .
Hello, Apple.* Google and Facebook! (And GM, and GE, and Owens Corning, and Microsoft, and Merck, and CBS, and Prudential, and Ryder System, and PEPCO, and PG&E, and Mattel, and JetBlue, and Weyerhauser, and Pfizer, and Verizon, and Honeywell and lots. lots more).
[KR874] Keiser Report: Conditions for Anger
Posted on February 11, 2016
by Stacy Herbert — 24 Comments ↓
We discuss the reason that Americans are so angry and the role played by former President Bill Clinton on creating the conditions for their anger. In the second half, Max talks to Ellen Brown, author of “Web of Debt,” about the populist revolution, from Bernie and beyond, and about the citadel being breached as Congress taps the Fed for infrastructure spend.
Are Americans Too Insouciant To Survive? (2/11/2016) **
Nothing new about Donald Trump’s bigotry: He’s just an amplified version of what outlets like Fox News peddle every day
“They think the system’s rigged”: Why millennials love Bernie Sanders (and hate Donald Trump)
Noam Chomsky: “The U.S. is one of the most fundamentalist countries in the world”
Even GOPers can’t stand Ted Cruz: Mike Huckabee unloads on Texas senator, calling him a “low-life” and a “sleazy” politician
The CIA’s ludicrous spying charade: Here’s what you need to know about John Brennan’s angry Senate tirade
Sanders skeptics aren’t stupid: It’s time to stop saying they’re ignorant and need education to bring them in line
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara finally faces the mayhem his actions and those of his cohorts in government caused for "little people." Little dis-empowered people whom they laughed at and/or ignored as they marched against that mayhem for over a decade.
With murderous fools like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Madeleine Albright, we went after our former ally, Saddam Hussein, and destroyed what was probably the most progressive country in the Middle East — certainly, in terms of the way women lived and worked there, far better than Saudi Arabia!
A few years down the bombed-out road, and we’re destroying Libya — probably the most progressive nation in Africa — no real threat to us except that Quadaffi wants to institute a new kind of currency throughout Africa, pay for goods with gold, not dollars, and besides that, he has rather outlandish tastes in men’s clothing! Caught between rehearsed speeches during a TV interview, informed that the former leader has just been sodomized with a bayonet, asinine Hillary Clinton chortles, “We came, we saw, he died.”
“B” Is for “Belligerence”
For most of my “school years” — from 1st grade through Grad School, I heard that the US was a “peaceful” nation whose “God-fearing” citizens only fought when attacked.
Somehow, Jefferson’s epithet of “savages” for the Original Peoples of this land sailed over my high school boy’s head. There it is in our Declaration of Independence, a few paragraphs after “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It seems befuddled King George had supported the “savages” when the Colonists tried to expand into their land!
In fact, our Revolution had much to do with our not-so-peaceful “pilgrims” and the newcomers wanting to “migrate” beyond our borders. Our little cities had become fairly crowded with newcomers/immigrants. Between the end of our “French and Indian War” and the beginning our our Revolution, a scant 13 years or so, the population of the colonies pretty much doubled.
There has never been so great a period of growth in North American history! This was pre-Industrial Revolution, of course, so there wasn’t much for all these farmhand-“migrants” to do except look Westward lustfully to the lands of the undeserving “red-skin” savages. The migrants couldn’t subsist on already subsisting farms, increasingly crowded with post-war kids and babies. (Our first “baby boomers!) One way the Revolutionists convinced the “excess feeders” (as asinine Kissinger might have it) to enlist was to promise new land in the West. The fact that this “new land” was already occupied by old tribes really did not matter._ _ _ _ _ _ _
**Are Americans Too Insouciant To Survive?
Paul Craig Roberts
When one looks at the deplorable state of the world, one cannot help but wonder at the insouciance of the American people. Where are they? Do they exist or are they a myth? Have they been put to sleep by an evil demon? Are they so lost in The Matrix that they cannot get out?
Ever since Clinton’s second term the US has been consistently acting internationally and domestically as a criminal, disregarding its own laws, international laws, the sovereignty of other countries, and the US Constitution. A worse criminal government has never existed. Yet, Americans remain subservient to the criminals that they have placed in power over themselves.
According to polls, Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders are splitting the Democratic vote 50-50 as preferred Democratic presidential candidate. This is extraordinary.
Hillary Clinton represents the interests of Wall Street and the mega-banks, the Israel Lobby, and the interests of the military/security complex. These interests are totally opposed to the interests of the American people.
In his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank raised the question of why Amerians vote against their own interests? Why do Americans go to the voting both and do themselves in?
Whether you agree with Thomas Frank’s answer or not, Americans do, on a regular basis, harm themselves by voting for people who are agents of vested interests diametrically opposed to the interests of American citizens.
How then is it possible that half of Democrats would prefer Hillary? Is it because she is a woman and women want a woman president more than they want their civil liberties, peace, and employment for themselves, their spouses and their children?
Or is it because, given the pressitute character of the American media, the people haven’t a clue?
If you vote for Hillary, you are voting for someone who has been paid off to the tune of $153 million by powerful vested interests who have no concern whatsoever for your interests. In addition, Hillary has the necessary campaign funds from the powerful interest groups for her presidential nomination campaign. As if this isn’t damning enough, Hugh Wharton writes that the National Democratic Committee is in league with Hillary to steal, if necessary, the nomination from Sanders and the voters.
http://usuncut.com/news/the-dnc-superdelegates-just-screwed-over-bernie-sanders-and-spit-in-the-faces-of-voters/
In contrast, the interest groups who rule America are not contributing to Sanders.
Therefore, the choice of Sanders is obvious, but 50% of Democrats are too brain-dead to see it.
Although Hillary is a substantial threat to America, the threat of nuclear war is much greater, and the Democratic Obama regime in the hands of neoconservatives has just greatly amplified the threat of nuclear war.
The United States government, or perhaps we should say the exploiter and deceiver of the American people, has announced a three-fold increase in its military presence on Russia’s borders. The excuse for this great boost in the profits and power of the US military-security complex is “Russian aggression.”
But there is no sign of this aggression. So Washington and its servile presstitutes in the Western media make it up. They proclaim a lie.
“Russia invaded Ukraine” proclaims the propaganda. No mention is made of Washington’s coup in Ukraine that overthrew a democratically elected government and began a war against the Russian populations of eastern and southern Ukraine, former provinces of Russia added to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic by Soviet leaders. In the presstitute media, no mention is made of Washington’s intention of seizing Russia’s only warm water port in Crimea on the Black Sea.
http://www.fort-russ.com/2016/02/us-control-over-crimea-aim-of-coup-in.html
Having created a nonexistant Russian invasion in place of the real US coup in Ukraine in the minds of the indoctrinated Americans, Washington now claims that Russia is going to invade the Baltics and Poland. Nothing could be further from the truth, but this lie from the Obama regime now determines that the US military presence on Russia’s borders will increase three-fold.
The escalation of the US/NATO threat on Russia’s borders forces a Russian response. Considering that the Russophobic governments in Poland and the Baltic States have unstable judgement, military buildups bring risks of miscalculations.
There is a limit to the level of threat that the Russian government can tolerate. The impotent Obama is in the firm grip of the neoconservatives and the military-security complex. The neoconservatives are motivated by their ideology of American world hegemony. The military-security complex is motivated by power and profit. These motives bring the United States and its vassals into conflict with Russia’s (and China’s) sovereign existence.
Within the councils of American foreign policy there is not sufficient weight to counter the neoconservative drive to war with Russia and China. In conventional war, the US is not a military match for the Russian/Chinese strategic alliance. Therefore, the war would be nuclear. The power of hydrogen bombs is immensely more powerful that the atomic bombs that the US dropped on Japan. Nuclear war means the end of life on earth.
Americans can know that democracy has failed them, because there is no check on the neoconservatives’ ability to foment war with Russia and China.
The neocons control the press, and the press portrays Russia as “an existential threat to the United States.” Once this fiction is drilled into the brains of Americans, it is child’s play for propagandists to create endless fears that deplete taxpayers of income in order to create profits for the military-security complex by relaunching the Cold War and an armaments race.
That is what is currently going on. The inability of Americans to realize that they are being taken into a conflict that benefits only the profits and power of the military-security complex and the ideology of a small group of crazies demonstrates the impotence of American democracy.
Universities and think tanks are replete with ambitious people who, chasing grants and influence, fuel the Russophobic hysteria. For example, on February 9 the Washington Post published an article by Michael Ignatieff, the Edward R. Murrow professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, and Leon Wieseltier, the Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. The article is a complete misrepresentation of the facts in Syria and called for US measures that would result in military conflict with Russia. It was irresponsible for the Washington Post to publish the article, but the decision is consistent with the Post’s presstitute nature.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-era-of-us-abdication-on-syria-must-end/2016/02/09/55226716-ce96-11e5-88cd-753e80cd29ad_story.html
The propaganda line maintained by the US government, the neoconservatives, the military/security complex, the presstitutes, and fiction-writers such as Ignatieff and Wieseltier is that Russia is not bombing the Islamic State jihadists who are attempting to overthrow the Syrian government in order to establish a jihadish state that would threaten the Middle East, Iran, and Russia herself. The official line is that the Russians are bombing the democratic “rebels” who are trying to overthrow an alleged “brutal Syrian dictator.” The conflict that the US government started by sending ISIS to Syria to overthrow the Syrian government is blamed on the Russian and Syrian governments.
Ignatieff and Wieseltier say that the US has put its “moral standing” at risk by permitting the Russians to bomb and to starve innocent women and children, as if the US had any moral standing after destroying seven countries so far in the 21st century, producing millions of dead and displaced persons, many of whom are now overrunning Europe as refugees from Washington’s wars.
The recently retired head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Michael Flynn, has said that the Obama regime made a “willful decision” to support ISIS and use ISIS against the Assad government in Syria. That the violence in Syria originated in a US/ISIS conspiracy against Syria is ignored by Ignatieff and Wieseltier. Instead, they blame Russia despite the fact that it is Russia’s air support for the Syrian Army that has rolled back ISIS.
Where were Ignatieff and Wieseltier when Washington and its vassals destroyed Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, much of Pakistan, overthrew the first democratically elected government in Egypt, overthrew the government in Ukraine and started a war against the Russian population, and supplied Israel with the weapons and money to steal Palestine from the Palestinians? Where were they when Clinton destroyed Yugoslavia and Serbia? Where are they when ISIS murders Syrians and eats the livers of its executed victims?
It would be interesting to know who financed the professorship in Edward R. Murrow’s name and the fellowship in Isiah Berlin’s name and how these positions came to be staffed with their current occupants.
Reagan and Gorbachev brought the Cold War to an end. The George H.W. Bush administration supported the end of the Cold War and gave further guarantees to Russia. But Clinton attacked Serbia, a Russian ally and broke the agreement that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe to Russia’s border. When the neoconservatives’ plans to invade Syria and to attack Iran were frustrated by Russian diplomacy, the neocons turned on Russia with fury.
In 1961 President Eisenhower warned the American people of the threat posed by the military-security complex. That was 55 years ago. This complex is so strong today that it is able to divert massive taxpayer resources to its coffers while the living standard and economic prospects of the American people decline.
The military/security complex requires an enemy. When the Cold War ended, the “Muslim Threat” was created. This “threat” has now been superseded by the “Russian Threat,” which is much more useful in keeping Europe in line and in scaring people with prospective invasions and nuclear attacks that are far beyond the power and reach of jihadists.
Superpower America required a more dangerous enemy than a few lightly armed jihadists, so the “Russian threat” was created. To drive home the threat, Russia and her president are constantly demonized. The conclusion is unavoidable that the insouciant American people are being prepared for war.
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