(Koch Prefers Clintons to GOP Presidencies) Why Is the Progressive Left Helping the Elite Elect Hillary? (Internationalization of Neoliberalism Berserkianism)

Hillary’s Defense of Big Money Won’t Cut It

Charles Koch Prefers Clinton to a GOP Presidency - Likes Bill Too

As Elizabeth Warren has stated, personnel is policy. President Obama staffed his administration at its highest levels with former bankers and corporate lawyers. The Attorney General and the head of the criminal division came from and returned to a corporate law firm representing many of the bankers that should have been prosecuted. Not surprisingly, they worried publicly that prosecuting the banks might endanger the recovery.

Citibank received the largest bailout from the federal government. It would have gone belly up without it. It misled investors about the billions in toxic mortgage bonds it held. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission called on the Justice Department to consider criminal charges against its leaders, including Robert Rubin, Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary, and one of Obama’s major patrons. The referral was not pursued.

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Interesting tidbit from Europe, found at  Paul Craig Roberts' blog, educates us a bit about the internationalization of the neoliberalism berserkianism which has been loosed upon the world.  The writer's English isn't perfect, but the meaning comes through crystal clear.

Dear Sir,

Inside of 25 years I’ve observed the shift of the mass-media in Europe from somehow different and somehow independent /original and free as much the official media can be in this “democracy-capitalism” to a “European Media” which is absolutely identical and absolutely uniformity qua content, being different only the name of that media and the country language. Does not matter the language I read (English, Dutch, Romanian, French, Italian …) it is almost the same text, very badly translated from a general source, I suppose. The only “free” journal in the West it is “Le Monde Diplomatique” from France!

Mass media in Europe is an Imperial Orthodoxy of an Orwellian informational terrorism in one absolute monotone monologue of one schizophrenic world. About your Dutch correspondent, he said the truth, but I would like to add that according to my experience a lot of Dutch people don’t agree with the Dutch gov. and Parliament, which are only a machine to repeat what USA/Israel and Bruxelles has to say! The manipulation, brainwashing and the diktat of “political correctness” and “we know better, always” are the perfect picture of our political ruling class.

It is sometime worst than some periods of Stalin proletcultism or Mao’s so called “cultural revolution”. Yes it is a Western democracy “cultural revolution” of His Majesty The LIE ! About anti- Russian propaganda, the insanity has reached the infinite! Even Shakespeare/Dostoevsky/Kafka and Cervantes are out of words to explain such insanity.

To me as a doctor it is crystal clear that all politicians in West are really psycho-sociopaths. No chance left! I can say this because I was living 38 years on the other side of the Iron Curtain, I know perfectly all it was about in all former Communist Socialist systems, but sometime painfully I discovered that the Western democracy (if exists) is worst then that! Therefore I highly appreciate what are you doing. I would like to thank you and to all like you, trying to do something positive for this world.

The progressive left?

Ah, I remember those halcyon days when we marched thinking we were helping our country to become a stronger democracy through an informed citizenry.

Ha! We were so young.

April 21, 2016

Why Is the Progressive Left Helping the Elite Elect Hillary?

Paul Craig Roberts

Have you noticed that it is not only the presstitute media and the two establishment political parties that are beating up on Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump but also the progressive left? Sometimes the messages overlap so much that the progressive left sounds like the One Percent. But mainly the progressive left is down on Sanders because he is “not pure,” and they don’t like Trump because he hurts people’s feelings and doesn’t apologize.

This is astounding. Here we are faced with the corrupt media and the corrupt party establishments determined to put in the Oval Office a tried and proven agent of the One Percent, and the progressive left is beating up on the only two alternatives!

I doubt that Sanders or Trump would be able to achieve much for the American people except to reduce the flow of official lies that the presstitutes turn into truths by constant repetition. The Oligarchy is too strong. It was more than a half century ago that President Eisenhower warned us of the threat to American democracy from the military-security complex.

That complex is much stronger today, and, in addition, we have Wall Street and the mega-banks that control the US Treasury and Federal Reserve, the Israel Lobby that has the US Congress wrapped around its little finger, the extractive industries (energy, mining, timber) that prevail over the environment and preservation, and agribusiness that poisons our food, exterminates honey bees and butterflies and produces chemical fertilizer runoff into waters that result in massive fish kills from algae.

None of these powerful interests will permit the welfare of the American people to get in the way of their agendas and profits.

Nevertheless, the election of Sanders or Trump is important, because it demonstrates that American citizens are emerging from The Matrix and have no confidence in the two corrupt political parties that betrayed them. The message would go out to the world as well that the American people have no confidence in the Washington Establishment. These messages are very important and can only have beneficial effects.

So why is the progressive left helping the One Percent keep the lid on the rest of us? Has the progressive left sold out or is the progressive left putting its emotional needs above the general welfare?

And after all that marching and being so hopeful . . . we live in a world that is so deadly divided (and I mean this in the sense that so little good health care is being directed at the impoverished end of the spectrum) between the haves and have-nots that it's hardly recognizable as the world we thought we had when we started that first march.

In 1 Out Of Every 5 American Families, Nobody Has A Job

By Michael Snyder, on April 24th, 2016 

If nobody is working in one out of every five U.S. families, then how in the world can the unemployment rate be close to 5 percent as the Obama administration keeps insisting? The truth, of course, is that the U.S. economy is in far worse condition than we are being told. Last week, I discussed the fact that the Federal Reserve has found that 47 percent of all Americans would not be able to come up with $400 for an unexpected visit to the emergency room without borrowing it or selling something. But Barack Obama and his minions never bring up that number. Nor do they ever bring up the fact that 20 percent of all families in America are completely unemployed. The following comes directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In 2015, the share of families with an employed member was 80.3 percent, up by 0.2 percentage point from 2014. The likelihood of having an employed family member rose in 2015 for Black families (from 76.4 percent to 77.7 percent) and for Hispanic families (from 85.9 percent to 86.4 percent). The likelihood for White and Asian families showed little or no change (80.1 percent and 88.6 percent, respectively).

For purposes of this study, families “are classified either as married-couple families or as families maintained by women or men without spouses present” and they include households without children as well as children under the age of 18.

Digging into the numbers, we find that there were a total of 81,410,000 families in America during the 2015 calendar year.

Of that total, 16,060,000 families did not have a single member employed.

So that means that in 19.7 percent of all families in the United States, nobody has a job.

And of course there are lots more families that are “partially employed”. In other words, maybe the wife has a job but the husband does not.

So based on these numbers, it would appear to me that the true rate of unemployment in this country is vastly higher than 5 percent, and John Williams of shadowstats.com agrees with me. According to his calculations, the broadest measure of unemployment in the U.S. would actually be sitting at 22.9 percent if honest numbers were being used.

But let’s not just focus on where we are.

Let’s take a look at where we are going.

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, job cut announcements by big companies in the United States were up 32 percent during the first quarter of 2016 compared to the first quarter of 2015, and it appears that the job losses are going to continue to mount as we roll into the second quarter. For instance, late last week Intel announced that it is going to be laying off 12,000 workers…

As it navigates its path into the future, Intel, the 47-year-old corporation best known for making microprocessor chips that power personal computers, has announced significant changes to its business.

On Tuesday, Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich said in a letter to employees that the company over the next year will cut its 107,300-person global workforce by 12,000 people, or 11 percent.

Those are good middle class jobs, and they are exactly the kind of jobs that we cannot afford to be losing.

Meanwhile, the “retail apocalypse” appears to be accelerating once again.

Bloomberg is reporting that teen clothing chain Aeropostale is preparing to file for bankruptcy. Aeropostale currently operates more than 800 stores across the nation, and it is unclear if any of them will be able to stay open as this process plays out. But of course it isn’t just Aeropostale that has gone bankrupt lately. Here are a few more examples of major retailers that have recently filed for bankruptcy…

April 16, 2016: Vestis Retail Group, the operator of sporting goods retailers Eastern Mountain Sports (camping, hiking, skiing, adventure sports), Bob’s Stores (family clothing and shoes), and Sport Chalet (general sporting goods), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It will close all 56 stores and stop online sales.

In the filing, it blamed the going-out-of-business sales at “certain Sports Authority locations,” plus the weather, which had been too warm, and trouble with switching to a new software platform. It’s owned by private equity firm Versa Capital Management LLC.

April 7, 2016: Pacific Sunwear of California, clothing retailer with nearly 600 stores and derailed ambitions of skate-and-surf cool, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. PE firm Golden Gate Capital, a lender to the company, agreed to convert over 65% of its loan into equity of the reorganized company and add another $20 million in financing. Wells Fargo agreed to provide $100 million of debtor-in-possession financing.

March 2, 2016: Sports Authority filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It said it would close 140 of its 450 stores, including all stores in Texas.

Just because the stock market has been doing well in recent weeks does not mean that the crisis has passed.

In fact, many experts believe that the crisis of 2016 is just getting started.  Albert Edwards of Societe Generale is one of them…

But what I do know is when in the last few weeks I have heard that Janet Yellen sees no bubble in the US, when Ben Bernanke hones and restates his helicopter money speech, and when Mario Draghi says that the ECB’s policy of printing money and negative interest rates was working, I feel utterly depressed (I could also quote similar nonsense from Japan, the UK and China).

I have not one scintilla of doubt that these central bankers will destroy the enfeebled world economy with their clumsy interventions and that political chaos will be the ugly result. The only people who will benefit are not investors, but anarchists who will embrace with delight the resulting chaos these policies will bring!

All over the world, the underlying economic fundamentals continue to deteriorate. Here in the U.S., retail sales have been extremely disappointing, total business sales have been steadily falling, corporate revenues and corporate profits continue to plunge, and corporate debt defaults have soared to their highest level since the last financial crisis.

All of these numbers are screaming that a major economic downturn is here, and with each passing week things look even more ominous for the second half of 2016.

Hillary Clinton’s Million Dollar Professional Internet Troll Army

U.S. Trade Policy: Populist Anger or Out-of-Touch Elites? (Secrets of TTIP and TPP) Hillary Clinton’s Support Base As Bogus As US Democracy (Marquis de Sade and Modern Bankers) Max and Stacy Pounce!

Bernie’s Donation Windfall:  Sanders’ Campaign Has Raised $182 Million, Eclipsing Hillary Clinton’s Total

Sanders had a $720,000 edge at the end of March, CNN reports.

. . . Federal Election Commission filings indicate Sanders’ campaign has out-raised Clinton’s “by at least 50%” every month this year — and in so doing, steadily reeled in Hillary’s more than $30-million head start.
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Don't miss Lee Camp's "Redacted Tonight!"

If you do, it's a pity as you will have missed the only real news show worth the title in the USA USA USA!







I've long thought of the coming dark (purposely kept dark, and vastly oversold) trade policies (TTP, TTiP, TPA, FTAAP, RCEP) as the "ensure the raising of prices to astronomical heights now because the populace will have too much information later (due to the internet) to be able to hoodwink them so easily" economic policy gift to the sponsoring/funding industries (which will benefit enormously from the universal change in existing laws that will obviate local control).

U.S. Trade Policy:   Populist Anger or Out-of-Touch Elites?

Just how disconnected is the business elite and Washington policy class fro&nm the way most Americans actually experience the U.S. economy?

By Jeff Faux, April 18, 2016

The presidential primary campaigns of both political parties have exposed widespread voter anger over U.S. global trade policies. In response, hardly a day has recently gone by without the New York Times, the Washington Post and other defenders of the status quo lecturing their readers on why unregulated foreign trade is good for them.

The ultimate conclusion is always the same – that voters should leave complicated issues like this to those intellectually better qualified to deal with them. So much for democracy.

U.S. Elites: Self-Contradictory Positions on Trade
 1. Trade deficits do not cost jobs.
 2. If trade deficits do cost jobs, it doesn’t matter.
 3. If trade deficits do cost jobs and it does matter, don’t blame it on trade.

 

Trade experts, according to Binyamin Appelbaum of the Times have been “surprised” at the popular discontent over this issue. Their surprise only shows how disconnected the elite and the policy class that supports it is from the way most people actually experience the national economy.

The United States has always been a trading nation. But until the 1994 North American Trade Agreement, trade policy was primarily an instrument to support domestic economic welfare and development.

A lop-sided deal:  Investment vs. jobs

Starting with NAFTA, pushed through not by a Republican president, but by the Bill Clinton in 1994, it became a series of deals in which profit opportunities for American investors were opened up elsewhere in the world in exchange for opening up U.S. labor markets to fierce foreign competition.

As Jorge Castañeda, who later became Mexico’s foreign minister, put it, NAFTA was “an agreement for the rich and powerful in the United States, Mexico and Canada, an agreement effectively excluding ordinary people in all three societies.”

For 20 years, leaders of both parties have assured Americans that each new NAFTA-style deal would bring more jobs and higher wages for workers, and trade surpluses for their country. It was, they were told, an iron law of economics.

Warm words, harsh reality

What actually followed were outsourced jobs, wage declines, shrunken opportunities and rising trade deficits. The result has been a dramatic weakening of the bargaining power of American workers.

So it should come as no surprise when the large parts of the U.S. workforce now conclude that these trade deals may have had something to do with the redistribution of income from their pockets to the bank accounts of the top 1% who own and manage large multinational corporations.

Whatever sticks

Despite this embarrassing record, the policy class remains loyal to the interests of its political and financial sponsors. They have, however, modified their arguments.

To promote the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership, for example, they now put more stress on geopolitics, claiming that the TPP is essential for maintaining American political influence in Asia — which of course is also something that should be left to the “experts.”

The economic case has downshifted, from promising workers that life will be better to assuring them that it won’t be worse. But even this somewhat deflated claim is a hard sell to those who listen carefully.

The main point now is to convince Americans that they should not worry that they chronically import more that they export, and have to make up the difference by borrowing.

To accept this argument, one also has to accept the following contradictory propositions:

1. -Trade deficits do not cost jobs.

The central evidence for this assertion is that “most economists” believe it. True, but only because most economists are trained to think about trade in stylized models in which laid-off workers instantly find new jobs (typically at lower wages).

Thus, the lobby for TPP regularly cites “studies” which define the problem away — by assuming permanent full employment (and then concluding there will be no job loss).

Eduardo Porter of the New York Times adds some circular reasoning to the debate. Sending jobs to Mexico under NAFTA, he writes, may have avoided sending more jobs to China where labor costs are even cheaper than they are in Mexico. (Of course, that wouldn’t be a problem if Bill Clinton hadn’t made a similar trade and investment deal with China a few years later.)

Unfortunately for many self-described trade experts, this argument also stumbles over Economics 101. Growth, the generator of jobs, is measured by changes in the Gross Domestic Product.
A component of GDP is the trade balance. When imports exceed exports, GDP drops by that amount.
That, by the way, is an iron law of economics.

2. If trade deficits do cost jobs, it doesn’t matter.

Why? Because, as Neil Irwin of the Times tells its U.S. consumers get cheaper goods in exchange for dollars. Economic theory considers merely IOUs to be paid back, maybe, sometime in the future.

However, even credit card addicted Americans have a hard time believing that you never have to pay back borrowed money.

Moreover, polls regularly show that most voters think jobs are more important than cheap underwear and I-phones. But, of course, what matters to most people is apparently not what matters most economists.

3. If trade deficits do cost jobs and it does matter, don’t blame it on trade.

Paul Krugman, as part of his relentless critique of Bernie Sanders, notes that total trade is an even greater share of GDP in some of Sanders’ favorite democratic socialist countries like Denmark. Yet, Danish living standards remain high. Why? Because they are protected by government and promoted by unions.

We aren’t Denmark

Thus, according to Krugman, the fundamental problem is not trade; it is the lack of appropriate domestic policies in the United States.

What Krugman fails to tell his readers is that, unlike the United States, Denmark runs trade surpluses. Still, he has a point. Trade deficits would not have such a negative impact here if we had social policies like they have there.

But liberal free traders have been saying this for decades. Perversely, Krugman’s point has been used to rationalize the cynical alliance between Democratic presidents and Republican congresses to pass investor-privileged trade deals.

Before each vote, there are promises that this time it will be different. Generous assistance will be provided to help older workers adjust and make sure younger workers get new opportunities — later.

“Later,” of course, never comes. As everyone should know by now, Republicans have no intention of supporting government programs to bolster income and job security – ever.

It is therefore left to liberal Democrats to express their sorrow that things haven’t quite worked out, and to “feel the pain” of the ex-steelworker who is mopping floors at Burger King and the college graduate waiting on tables, as they remind them that, sadly, the United States is not Denmark.

Democrats don’t even try to bargain

It is long past the time when Krugman and other liberal “free-traders” should have connected the dots of their own analysis.

If the problem is not trade, per se, but the lack of domestic progressive policies to adjust to global markets, then the rational response is to force the investor class and their Republican agents to the political bargaining table.

Democrats should be demanding an immediate freeze, and where possible a rollback, of trade agreements until the other side of the aisle is ready to accept programs similar to those in Denmark that will allow workers to share the benefits of expanded trade.

Until that happens, we can expect American voters to become more protectionist, while the country’s policy elite remains disconnected from the lives of ordinary Americans — and continually surprised that so many of them feel betrayed.

More on this topic

• Innovation Economics and Trade Policy
• Memo to U.S. Democrats on Upcoming Trade Deals
• “Bernie Slanders:” How the Democratic Party Establishment Suffocates Progressive Change

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[KR905] Keiser Report:  Secrets of TTIP & TPP

Posted on April 23, 2016 by Stacy Herbert— Comments

We discuss that if man is what he hides, as André Malraux said, then the EU is a corporatist, monopolist loving intellectual land-grabber, for the EU hides secret trade deals. We also discuss Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan instructing his coalition not to ‘forcibly’ proceed with ratifying the TPP (another secret trade deal) until after elections this summer as voters are against it. In the second half, Max interviews independent Irish politician and MEP, Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan, about the top secret TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

April 22, 2016

Hillary Clinton’s Support Base As Bogus As US Democracy

by Eric Draitser

US elections, despite all the media hype and endless rhetoric about ‘democracy in action,’ are in fact little more than manufactured political theater. The country that ceaselessly trumpets democratic values and transparency practices neither when it comes to its own elections.

As New Yorkers go to the polls in Democratic and Republican primaries this week, it is critical to once again highlight the myriad ways that democracy in the United States is, like most other things, a commodity to be bought and sold. From corporate control of the infrastructure of elections, to the creation of mass bases of support out of whole cloth, the candidates, as well as the system itself, cannot be trusted to be genuine.

Perhaps nothing illustrates this point more clearly than the results of multiple studies on Hillary Clinton’s online following which reveal that the majority of her Twitter fans, and indeed her social media following in general, are completely fake. Consider the implications of these findings from StatusPeople.com, and well-respected analytical tool TwitterAudit, which both found that no more than 44 percent of Clinton’s followers were actually real, active users of Twitter.

This may seem something trivial, but in fact it cuts to the very heart of the notion of democracy, and the legitimacy of a candidate who is perhaps the most obvious embodiment of the political and financial establishment in the US. Indeed, Bernie Sanders, among many others, has correctly noted that Clinton is in many ways the epitome of the ruling elite.

In a blistering commentary on Clinton during a nationally televised debate, Sanders proclaimed, “I will absolutely admit that Secretary Clinton… has the entire establishment or almost the entire establishment behind her. That’s a fact. I don’t deny it. I’m pretty proud that we have over a million people who have contributed to our campaign averaging 27 bucks a piece.” Sanders highlighted the fact that the political and financial elites back Hillary, and in so doing noted that his campaign is backed by millions of ordinary Americans.

But Sanders was equally, though perhaps inadvertently, illustrating the fact that the Clinton campaign is, in effect, being manufactured; that she has no real support except for a near consensus of establishment policy-makers and powerful individuals. And yet, here’s Hillary marching into yet another major primary with a double-digit lead. How much of that is based on a perception shaped – at least in part – by social media?

This phenomenon is not relegated only to Clinton’s campaign, however; this is true of most of America’s leading political figures. In 2013, it was revealed President Obama’s Twitter following was made up of a majority (53 percent) fake accounts. The Daily Mail at the time noted that Vice President Joe Biden, First Lady Michelle Obama, and the White House communications shop all had online followings consisting of mainly non-existent people. So too did the State Department under Hillary Clinton, which spent at least $630,000 to buy Facebook "likes," essentially manufacturing a public following for itself.

But who cares, right? What does it matter if Twitter accounts and Facebook likes are fraudulent? How does that impact anything other than social media image?

How social media manipulation serves the Establishment agenda

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media have become very potent tools in the arsenal of the US Government as it wages a relentless information war in the service of the military-industrial complex and the agenda of the elite. In fact, social media goes far beyond just an image. Today, it has been made into an effective tool for the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation that conveniently buttresses whatever narrative the establishment wants.

Take for example the lead-up to the criminal war on Libya. In early 2011, with the narrative of the ‘Arab Spring’ ubiquitous in western social media, the US-NATO machine set its sights on regime change in Libya, with social media as one of the critical tools used to achieve it. Close followers of that conflict will recall that dozens of Twitter accounts, purportedly from anti-Gaddafi Libyans, mysteriously emerged in the lead-up to the war that toppled the Libyan government, providing much of the “intelligence” relayed on western media including CNN, NBC, the New York Times, et al.

At that time (February 2011), "PC World" published a little publicized article entitled “Army of Fake Social Media Friends to Promote Propaganda” which noted that:  “… the U.S. government contracted HBGary Federal for the development of software which could create multiple fake social media profiles to manipulate and sway public opinion on controversial issues by promoting propaganda. It could also be used as surveillance to find public opinions with points of view the powers-that-be didn’t like. It could then potentially have their “fake” people run smear campaigns against those “real” people.”

Clearly the US Government and intelligence community have known from the beginning the power of social media, and its ability to influence public opinion and lay the groundwork for policies, as well as its potential as a weapon.

In fact, the CIA has taken its social media arsenal much further in recent years. There are literally dozens of companies that have received seed money from the CIA’s investment arm, known as In-Q-Tel, in order to provide the intelligence and security establishment the ability to do everything – from real-time surveillance of social media users to data mining and more. In effect then, social media has become the playground of the elite, the terrain upon which their manipulation and social engineering takes root.

Is This Democracy?

OK, so social media followings are meaningless as they can be manufactured, as we see currently with Hillary Clinton. But surely the actual mechanisms of voting in the US are clean? Well, not exactly.

In this election season alone there have been massive failures in multiple states that have left countless thousands of Americans without the right to vote for their candidates of choice, or victims of outright fraud. Even Arizona’s Secretary of State recently admitted that fraud had taken place on a large scale in her state. The hacktivist collective "Anonymous" has provided detailed analysis pointing to the fact that state databases were likely hacked and manipulated.

And then of course there’s the issue of the voting machines themselves. Recently the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law issued a comprehensive report entitled "America’s Voting Machines at Risk" which found that the voting machines currently in use are outdated, running the risk of catastrophic failures. The report highlighted many shocking examples that should give anyone pause when considering the validity of election results. The authors of the report noted that “Virginia recently decertified a voting system used in 24 percent of precincts after finding that an external party could access the machine’s wireless features to record voting data or inject malicious data.”

This finding only further substantiates the claims made by many experts that the hacking of voting machines and election databases is all but assured, not just in the US but internationally.

A case in point is Andrés Sepulveda, a Colombian hacker who literally stole the Mexican presidential election for the current president Enrique Peña Nieto. Sepulveda, who is linked with Miami-based political power-broker Juan José Rendón (the right wing king-maker widely seen as the engineer of numerous fraudulent elections in Latin America), has laid bare the utterly fraudulent machinations just behind the artifice of so-called democracy. Does anyone really believe that US elections are not equally suspect?

Finally, were the problem just the age of the voting machines and the ability of outside hackers to manipulate them, the machines could simply be replaced with more advanced, high-security equipment, and the elections could be deemed legitimate, right? Not so fast.

The fact is that nearly all electronic voting machines are designed and manufactured by companies such as ES&S (owned by Warren Buffett), Dominion (previously Diebold), Smartmatic, and Hart Intercivic, all of which are connected to very powerful interests within the ruling elite circles. In fact, researchers at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University demonstrated that in under 60 seconds, anyone could bypass the lock and replace the memory card with another. As the researchers in the video explain, “Any desired algorithm can be used to determine which votes to steal and to which candidate or candidates to transfer the stolen votes.”

Put simply, there is little reason to trust the results of any election in the US. As Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis succinctly wrote:  “There is no way to verify the official tally on the electronic machines on which the majority of Americans will vote this fall. Nearly all the machines are a decade old, most are controlled by a single company (ES&S, owned by Warren Buffett) and the courts have ruled that the software is proprietary, making the vote counts beyond public scrutiny.”

Given these inescapable facts, there is little reason to wonder why Hillary Clinton, the darling of the establishment, is always smiling. She knows the game is rigged in her favor.

Despite the momentum Sanders has generated with his grassroots support, the Clinton machine is alive and well thanks to a fake support base, dodgy election infrastructure, and elite-controlled nomination process; in other words, corporate control of the election circus.
Think of these things the next time you hear President Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or anyone else spouting off about America’s democracy and its “exceptional” place in the world.

This piece first appeared at RT.

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Eric Draitser is the founder of StopImperialism.org and host of CounterPunch Radio. He is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City. You can reach him at ericdraitser@gmail.com.

More articles by:  Eric Draitser

next – How Chernobyl Led to Austria’s Nuclear-Free Utopia,

previous – After Sanders — A Path to Electoral Revolution

[KR904] Keiser Report:  Marquis de Sade & Modern Bankers

Posted on April 21, 2016 by Stacy Herbert — 104 Comments 

We discuss how the Marquis de Sade would approve the modern banker for their joy of making off with the substance of others. We also look at Deutsche Bank turning on their co-conspirators in gold and silver rigging and they also cover the New York pension funds telling hedge funds to ‘shove it’. In the second half Max interviews Arthur Hayes of Bitmex.com about making leveraged bets on China with bitcoin without being Zhou Tonged.

Still Voting for the Entrenched Elites/Bankster Friends? SUCKERS! (Voting for Power Elites Can Get You Killed Early) Iceland To Stop Letting Commercial Banks Create Money (Plutocracy Kicks Ass/Ass Metric Through the Roof - Redacted Tonight) Good-bye, Sweet Prince

Eagles' Joe Walsh Cancels Concert After Finding Out It Is Tied to the Republican National Convention

Israeli News Program Pulls Back The Curtain On Beloved General’s Sordid Past

UK Spies On Citizens More Than Suspects

How Zac Goldsmith Imported Donald Trump’s Politics Into Britain

Across Nearly All Demographics, Thirty-Year Trend Shows Increasing Numbers of People Living in the United States Would Rather Not Live At All

Clinton’s Digital Task Force Breaks Barriers To Defend Her Donors

Do you believe that any of the "elite" candidates would tell you the truth about the financial trouble the U.S. government's taxpayers are in and how they plan to solve it? Because that's what should ultimately determine for whom you should be voting. If your candidate isn't brave enough to give you some bad news (sometimes, very bad news), why would you trust him (or her) to solve it to your (or your country's) best interests?

The public has been led to believe that the $187.5 billion bailout of the pair was the full extent of the taxpayers’ tab. But in an astonishing acknowledgement on February 25 of this year, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, issued an audit report of the U.S. government’s finances, revealing that the government’s “remaining contractual commitment to the GSEs, if needed, is $258.1 billion.”

This suggests that somehow, without the American public’s awareness, the U.S. government is on the hook to two failed companies for $445.6 billion dollars.

And that may be just the tip of the iceberg of this story.

The official narrative around the bailout of Fannie and Freddie is that they were loaded up with toxic subprime debt piled high by the Wall Street banks that sold them dodgy mortgages.

While that is factually true, the other potentially more important part of this story is the counterparty exposure the Wall Street banks had to Fannie and Freddie’s derivatives if the firms had been allowed to fail.

. . . According to Fannie and Freddie’s regulator of 2003, OFHEO, “The notional amount of the combined financial derivatives outstanding of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac increased from $72 billion at the end of 1993, the first year for which comparable data were reported, to $1.6 trillion at year-end 2001.”  A 2010 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis updates that information as follows . . .

Did the bailout of Fannie and Freddie save the same cast of characters on Wall Street as were saved under the bailout of AIG (which funneled more than half the money out the backdoor  to Wall Street banks and hedge funds who were counterparties to AIG)?

According to Fannie and Freddie’s prior regulator, OFHEO:  “At year-end 2001, five counterparties accounted for almost 60 percent of the total notional amount of Fannie Mae’s OTC derivatives, and 58 percent of Freddie Mac’s.” The report also notes that “The market for OTC derivatives is highly concentrated among a small number of dealers, primarily brokerage firms and commercial banks that are counterparties for at least one side of virtually all contracts. The largest dealers include JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup … Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.”

According to a current report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, those same banks (minus Deutsche and Lehman) account for the vast majority of derivatives in the U.S.

Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy one week after the government placed Fannie and Freddie into conservatorship. Merrill Lynch was taken over by Bank of America the same week. If you’re looking for a potential list of names of Wall Street players that needed a quick bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the above list is an excellent start.

Matt Taibbi reported at Rolling Stone three days ago that the government has been fighting a pitched battle to keep 11,000 documents pertaining to Fannie and Freddie under seal in a court case. You can rest assured that some of those documents relate to Fannie and Freddie derivatives and counterparties. But that pile of 11,000 documents pales in comparison to the 25 million documents the Justice Department withheld from the public when it settled its case against Citigroup in 2014 for $7 billion. What the public got instead was a meaningless 9-page statement of facts.

Thanks to Occupy Wall Street and Senator Bernie Sanders, the public knows two concrete things about Wall Street:  banks got bailed out, we got sold out and, the business model of Wall Street is fraud.

But until we have a President in the Oval Office who believes that the citizens of a genuine democracy deserve the right to sift through the documents of the most epic fraud in the history of financial markets so they can reach their own conclusions, all we really have are slogans, including the one that says we live in a democracy.

Imagine a similar situation during the 1950's. Eisenhower would have issued another encyclical.

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Redacted Tonight