The evil that lurks, Deep State drags America into World War III Armageddon

Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship.

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” ~Hermann Göring

There is evil in this world and it has seized control of the United States of America.  On December 12, 2000 evil overthrew America’s government and installed the most heinous, dangerous, murderous cabal to ever roam the earth.  America was no longer a beacon of light standing up in the world against tyranny and oppression, now America became the ultimate tyrannical oppressor, torturer and murderer.  The evil that lurks is known as the Deep State, a dark and shadowy government that operates in tandem with America’s “elected” government and paid for by taxpayers’ dollars. 

The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine, Syria, Georgia, Lebanon, and more were all the side shows perpetrated by the Deep State building up to the main feature, all out World War III against Russia and China.  America is a hollowed out shell, $20 trillion in debt from bankrolling the Deep State shadow government whose ill-conceived plans for empire were thrust upon us by the Deep States’ neoconservative and neoliberal minions.

The American people have been rendered impotent after 18 years of kangaroo court elections with outcomes preordained by the Deep State.  Every election since 2000 has been a sham, a scam orchestrated by the corrupt two-party system created by the Deep State.  The 911 attacks were a Deep State theater production, planned and carried out by the evil that lurks.  President Donald Trump understands this and that is why the Deep State is desperate to remove him from power before he exposes the depths of evil that lurks within the American Government.

The 2018 election was supposed to be just another kangaroo court election with the Deep State minions in both parties chosen through a corrupt primary system that stretches out over several months.  Moving at a snail’s pace, the primaries are fertile grounds for corruption, if an undesirable wins a race and is moving ahead in one state’s primary they are struck down in the next state. 

The primary in 2016 was an anomaly, an apolitical celebrity candidate smacked down the Deep State’s stable of proven lackey’s by speaking the unspeakable, political heresy.  The Heretic Donald Trump spoke the forbidden words, “the Deep State’s George W. Bush did not keep America safe, 911 happened on his watch.” 

After Trump won the GOP primary, the Deep State put all its chips on the candidate they spent two years trying to destroy, Hillary Clinton.  The Deep State’s first choice for Democratic candidate the “self-proclaimed Zionist Joe Biden” was to be substituted for Clinton after the FBI indicted her. 

That plan was blown out of the water by Donald J. Trump so the Deep State had to abort the indictment plan leaving FBI Director James Comey holding the bag.  When Trump won the election an old plot was re-hatched, a plot so ridiculously insidious that it would take a massive media blitzkrieg to pull off.

A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth ~ Joseph Goebbels

From The Federalist Papers:

Excerpt:

Pentagon Whistleblower Says FBI’s Russia Probe Was “All a Set-Up”

In what should have been the biggest story of the day, new documents from a Pentagon whistleblower show that the FBI / Russia probe was a set up from the beginning:

New documents obtained by investigative journalist Sara Carter show that the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign –dubbed Operation Crossfire Hurricane — heavily relied upon faulty intelligence gathered by longtime FBI informant Cambridge Professor Stefan Halper after he tried to set up several members of the Trump campaign.

Adam Lovinger, a former Defense Department analyst, never expected that what he stumbled on during his final months at the Pentagon would expose an integral player in the FBI’s handling of President…

In the fall of 2016, Adam Lovinger, a former senior official of the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), stumbled upon evidence that the deep state wanted buried — documents exposing Halper’s role in the frame-up job. He voiced his concerns about what he had found and paid dearly for it.

Lovinger, a DoD analyst turned whistleblower, had his security clearance suspended on May 1, 2017, after he raised concerns about the roughly $1 million in tax-payer funded money Halper had received to write Defense Department foreign policy reports.

“It was a topic of conversation within the office,” Lovinger’s attorney, Sean M. Bigley, told the Washington Times earlier this month. “What is Halper doing, and why is he being paid astronomically more than others similarly situated?”

According to Bigley, Lovinger was suspended shortly after he began asking questions about the suspicious DoD contracts with Halper… He was then relegated to a make-work desk job until April 3, 2018, when he was indefinitely suspended from duty and pay.  Lovinger, a husband and father of three, was the primary breadwinner of his family, according to Carter.

“When Mr. Lovinger raised concerns about DoD’s misuse of Stefan Halper in 2016, he did so without any political designs or knowledge of Mr. Halper’s spying activities,” Bigley told SaraACarter.com. “Instead, Mr. Lovinger simply did what all Americans should expect of our civil servants: he reported violations of law and a gross waste of public funds to his superiors.”

Bigley told Carter that they had expected some degree of retaliation for the whistleblowing, but were taken aback by the “ferocity” of it…   Bigley now suspects that it was his focus on Harper that made the deep state panic because it was in the process of trying to frame Trump.

While the idea that the Trump / Russia probe was a setup from the beginning is not new to any of us, these new documents confirm our suspicion.  Time for the President to shut Rosenstein and Mueller down.

So, why would the Department of Defense be so deeply involved in a plot to frame President Trump and remove him from office?  Could it be because he expressed a desire to end all these wars of aggression and normalize relations with the Pentagon’s number one straw man, Vladimir Putin?  From one of my fav’s Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report:

Excerpt:

Chaos in the Imperial Big House

Trump campaigned in 2016 for normal relations with Russia, an end to the U.S. regime change offensive, and opposition to so-called “free” trade, thus uniting most of the ruling class against him. It turned out that Trump’s wholly unexpected appeal for peaceful relations with Russia did not deter huge majorities of Republicans from voting for him in the primaries and the general election.

The political conclusion was inescapable: If white Republicans were not wedded to the permanent war agenda -- or cared more about maintaining white supremacy at home than funding endless hostilities abroad -- then where was the mass constituency for the bipartisan War Party? If Trump’s “deplorables” weren’t wedded to the War Party, then who was?

Trump’s surprise election threw the bulk of the elite, the corporate media, the military-industrial complex, and the spooks of the intelligence agencies, into panic, as they confronted a crisis of legitimacy for the Warfare State.

Now firmly aligned with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, their response was to pre-empt Trump’s threatened rapprochement with Russia with a massive anti-Putin campaign. The elites realized they had to recreate -- on the fly, with no factual basis -- a war fervor that no longer existed among the masses of people, through Russiagate. In the chaotic process, they have further delegitimized virtually every U.S. institution, all the while putting the onus for the damage on the Vladimir Putin…

Trump has vacillated on “free trade,” speaking out of whichever side of his mouth works quicker… According the New York Times, Trump sent “a 24-year-old deputy to meet with a delegation that was expected to include representatives from more than 50 of the largest American companies and organizations, including Walmart, U.P.S., the Walt Disney Company, General Electric, General Motors, Caterpillar and Boeing” -- the titans of industry to whom both corporate parties pay homage, but whom Trump is disrespecting, big time…

Much more crucially, the advent of Trump has revealed the stark reality that there is no mass base for “free trade”-- a euphemism for allowing the ruling class to do whatever they want with their money and everyone’s jobs. Support for “free trade” is an illusion conjured by the two corporate parties, who are writhing in a crisis of legitimacy…

The real crisis for the Lords of Capital arrives when the people demand nationalization of the banks and the permanent dethroning of finance capital, the actual ruling class.

Trump, of course, wants none of that. But, under his presidency, the contradictions of late stage imperial capitalism are becoming both much more intense, and more obvious to folks on the ground. And that’s scaring the hell out of the ruling class -- which will make them a lot meaner.

The Deep State is having a hard time convincing the American people that regime change and endless wars are necessary to their freedom.  In fact, more and more Americans are seeing that wars and regime change are the antithesis of freedom at home.  But the evil that lurks is currently conjuring up another false flag “chemical weapons attack” in Syria to try to breathe new life into their regime change agenda and kick off World War III called Armageddon.

Remember the false flag attack earlier this year when we were told “Assad gassed his own people” and that justified lobbing the “mother of all bombs” on Syria?  One America News provided the following video exposing the Deep State’s lies.

Now, the Deep State’s nastiest handmaiden, John Bolton is setting the stage for another, more massive bombing attack on Assad’s Syria for a chemical weapons attack being planned by the Deep State in order to force Trump to launch World War III.  The weapons, the U.S. funded and trained terrorists and “White Helmets” with their camera crew are being placed in Syria as Bolton spews his threats.  From Strategic Culture:

Excerpt:

US Poised to Hit Syria Harder

The US warned Russia it would attack Syria again if chemical weapons (CW) were used by the government forces. According to Bloomberg, National Security Adviser John Bolton told his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev, at a meeting in Geneva on Aug. 23 that the US “is prepared to respond with greater military force than it has used against Assad’s regime in the past.”  US officials supposedly “have information” that the Syrian military is preparing a chemical attack in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib.

Mr. Bolton had also stressed publicly the US readiness to use force on a larger scale before the meeting with his Russian counterpart. On Aug. 21, the US, the UK, and France issued a joint statement likewise threatening military action against Syria if a chemical attack occurred. The US has delivered strikes against Syria twice before, in 2017 and 2018. No evidence to confirm the allegations that the Syrian government was behind the chemical attacks has ever been presented.

Russia believes a potential attack is nothing more than a provocation to justify military action. The Russian Defense Ministry issued a statement on Aug. 25 stating that the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham militants had brought eight containers of chlorine to Idlib in order to stage a false-flag attack with the help of UK intelligence agencies…

This prompts some questions. The Syrian government forces are winning the war. They control most of the country and continue to make advances. Why would they use CW now if they did not use them in 2014 or 2015 when they were retreating? The political and military gains the rebels could win by staging provocations are obvious, while the Syria military has no reason to use CW even if it had them. After all, the Syrian army has no trouble winning with conventional weapons wherever it goes…

The US global standing has suffered as a result of unimpressive operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It needs to be burnished. Heading an international coalition against Syria, an Iranian ally, is the way to restore the US image as an indispensable nation in the Middle East.

If Syria establishes full control over Idlib province, the hope, no matter how slim, of overthrowing Syrian President Assad will be dead. Any pretext would do to justify an intervention to prevent such a turn of events. The rebels in Idlib are viewed as allies in the fight against Iran. Besides, the alleged CW in the hands of Assad fuels the narrative of Russian cheating in 2013 during the elimination of the Syrian CW stockpile. “Losing” Syria would lead to diminishing US influence in Iraq, which is also viewed as a battlefield against Iran.

The US administration has frozen some $200 million in funds earmarked for Syria’s recovery but it is ready to spend money on military actions against that country…

A staged “chemical attack” is the way to invent a pretext for using force against Syria and pressing for a rollback of Russia and Iran. With Idlib liberated and an agreement reached between Damascus and the Kurds, Syria will have fundamentally regained its territorial integrity, making it “lost” to the West and its Persian Gulf allies. Russia, Iran, and Turkey will act as mediators promoting a peaceful settlement. The “chemical attack” provocation will be staged as an attempt to scuttle such a development.

Peace is the last thing that the evil that lurks desires.  Misery and suffering are the Deep State’s life’s blood.  Death and destruction are the Deep State’s mother’s milk that keeps it sustained.  It is the reason there will never be peace in Afghanistan until the Deep State ceases to exist.  From Mint Press:

Excerpt:

Why US Imperialism Loves the Afghanistan Quagmire

Afghanistan may be a seething swamp of suffering. But it’s a swamp that is at the same time spawning immense advantages for a select few overseeing US imperialist interests…  In short, what US interests are there in prolonging this appalling war?

While the occupation of Afghanistan by US troops is a deadweight for the American national economy and citizen-taxpayers – adding up to $5 trillion to the country’s total debt load of $21 trillion – we have to bear in mind that for weapons manufacturers and suppliers, the war is a boon. It keeps the military-industrial complex humming with super profitable business.

Companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, which are among the top lobbyists to Congress, using a coldly rational logic would not want this war to stop. Ever. Their corporate interests are starkly divergent from ordinary US citizens and foot-soldiers on the ground. So what if the nation is $21 trillion in debt when mega profits are being scooped up by executives and shareholders of the weapons companies?

It is also well-documented that the CIA depends on lawlessness in Afghanistan to run its trillion-dollar opium drugs racket. As with the notorious Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, the CIA uses global drugs trafficking as a way to fund its “black operations” in others parts of the world, finances that are kept hidden from political oversight by Congressional lawmakers… 

So, yes, by any normal reckoning, Afghanistan has been a catastrophe for US citizens, as well as of course for millions of Afghanis who have lost loved ones, homes, jobs, and livelihoods only to eke a subsistence in grinding poverty.  But in a more sinister reckoning, there are powerful American interests which view the suffering and calamity of Afghanistan as a lucrative, strategic venture that must be kept going.

Afghanistan may be a seething swamp of suffering. But it’s a swamp that is at the same time spawning immense advantages for a select few overseeing US imperialist interests. That makes the tragedy of the country more poignant. Heinously, crucial incentives are not to stop the war, but to keep it going.

How very sad yet sickeningly true.  That is what the evil that lurks bestows upon the American people.  Evil knows no bounds, evil learns nothing from history.  Evil thy name is Deep State.  One Deep State agent that never learns from the many, many failures of empire is John Bolton.  Bolton is the epitome of the Deep State’s minions of ignorance.  From The Saker:

Excerpt:

What Bolton needs to understand about Russia and history

On 23 August, 2018, National Security Adviser to the President of the United States of America J. R. Bolton, using his auspices as the representative of the President of the United States of America, officially declared war on Russia... 

One would hope that someone of Bolton’s long service would have developed somewhat of a sense of who is doing what, with which and to whom, but it is apparent that his distinguished service in the Maryland National Guard from 1970-1976 (odd, he managed to stay out of Vietnam during those turbulent times) and his appointment oriented times under R.Reagan and both Presidents Bush, did little to educate him in regards to the current, and perhaps past, world. That being said, perhaps Mr. Bolton needs a little education in regards to recent, and not so recent, history concerning Russia and USA…

In the early eighteen hundreds, a rather well known general named Napoleon had roughly the same attitude and designs on Russia as USA has today. When Russia did not knuckle under to the ever increasing and strident demands emanating from Paris, nothing would do but for General Napoleon to invade Russia, using the entire French army…

On the route leading from Moskau west, then and today the Capitol of Russia, to what is eastern Poland today, if one is observant, one will see curious small, and some not so small, hillocks and mounds visible from the main road. Those are the burial mounts of the ‘French’ Army. As the army retreated with ever increasing speed, the roads were littered with the dead from the continuous skirmishes, the savage Russian Winter, and the ever more indignant locals whose villages and towns were looted to the very ground by the ‘French’ army advancing and retreating.

Napoleon was dumb enough to retreat along the same route he took to Moskau, that route being picked clean for 30 kilometers on each side on the way to Moskau. On the retreat, there was nothing left but the local citizenry, those who survived, and their revenge was the stuff of legend. Read up on that, Mr. Bolton, and remember well what you read. Less than 20% of the ‘French army’ returned to Europe, the rest are buried or moldering in the forests of Russia.

As a curious little aside, the ‘French’ army crossed the river Berezina in it’s retreat. At that crossing point are two small islands in the river. Those islands were formed over the large numbers of dead, carriages and equipment that fell off the two hastily thrown up bridges over the Berezina or who tried to cross the freezing and ice filled waters of the river as the Russian Army approached and fought the French rear guard…

These islands are still there, Mr. Bolton. And to this day, ‘French’ remains are being found in that AO along with a never ending plethora of accouterments, weapons, bits and pieces of equipment, and French medals. Lots of French medals. Unbelievable numbers of French medals, decorations, ‘shoulder brushes’, remains of carriages, wagons, limbers, you name it.

In 1941, Germany invaded Russia, again with some of the same pretexts and in general, in my opinion, out of pure stupidity and cussedness. In November of 1941, the fighting was in the outskirts of Moskau…  They died in their millions, as did Russians, and Germany died, too, never to rise again. To this day, we are finding the soldiers, and civilians, killed in that horrid epoch of history.

But Russia did not die, nor did USA. Russia and USA were the only two powers to survive that hideous war, and Russia was in ruins from Moskau to her west borders, as was Europe. To your never ending horror, RUSSIA REBUILT HERSELF. SANS HELP FROM YOU.

However, since mid May of ’45, US has embarked on a somewhat adventurous international policy. And what has that brought you?

·        Korea. When they are shooting at you as you retreat to the demarcation line, you lost.

·        Vietnam. When they are shooting at you when you leave, you lost.

·        Afghan. When they are shooting at you when you run, you lost.

·        Iraq. When they are shooting at you when you withdraw, you lost.

Gruzya. Your HUMMV’s were kind of cute running around our village for a few days, but they were rapidly relegated to the scrap iron pile. You were also kind of cute when you asked for your equipment back after Gruzya, at your urging, went stupid and got their nostrils braided. If I remember correctly, President Putin told you that Russia is not in the habit of returning war trophies.

Libya. What happened to your gomik ‘ambassador’ there? And what bright light decided to send an openly gomik as ‘ambassador’ to a Muslim country? Have you taken leave of your senses?

Serbia. How many airframes did you lose? We know how many thousands of civilians you killed, and you can rest assured, the Serbians have not forgotten a single one of those many thousands of dead civilians.

Afghan, yet again. What, you learned nothing the first time? How many more body bags do you want?

Syria. You are still there, illegally by international law, UN regulations and Syrian law, and everyone is shooting at you.

And now, with your resurrection from the dead, you personally are back in play again, and your target this time, as ever, is Russia. Your demands, not all and not a request for negotiations but DEMANDS, during the meeting with Patroshev, N. P., were:

Get out of Syria. Sorry, but the Government of the Sovereign State of Syria invited Russia’s assistance to fight against your paid minions. You and yours, sir, were NOT invited to Syria and now you are standing there with your skivvies in your hands and The World is laughing at you.

Bitter laughter, yes, but laughter just the same. As for the chemical attacks and countless atrocities against both civilians and Syrian Armed Forces, you and yours did it, you know it, Russia knows it, The World knows it, and you, like some fugitive from the insane asylum, continue with outright lies knowing full well The World knows you are lying.

Admit, and apologize, for the idiotic Brit mess with Skripal. Get real, you and the Brits poisoned that ex, and unsuccessful, spy, if he was indeed poisoned, no one has seen him since. Did you kill him? If Mother wanted him dead, he’d have been run over by a garbage truck or had a heart attack after eating one too many plates of those hideous fish and chips, or simply disappeared. Not all The World is as stupid as your electorate.

Return Krimea and Sevastopol to Ukraine. Are you on drugs? Do you have mental problems? The entire process of giving the administration of the Autonomous Republic of Krimea and the Federal City of Sevastopol to the Ukraine by Kruschov 60 year ago was and is illegal, ergo the process is null and void. Besides, The People have spoken.

You want both entities back? Send in your best and try it. See above, ‘when they are shooting at you when you when you leave, you lost’. Problem in Krimea is, you will not leave, anyone you send to Krimea and Sevastopol will be counting trees for a long, very long, time if they don’t get thrown them off the cliffs of 35th Battery, just like your German and Romanian friends did to Russian wounded and prisoners on 03 July 1942.

Abandon Novorossiya to it’s fate. See above concerning drugs and mental problems. Do you honestly thing Russia will abandon 3 million people to the tender mercies of the Ukrainians, those who have publicly stated they will kill all the citizens of Novorossiya?

Here is a flash piece of news for you, Bolton. Russia has armed up. Your repeated violations of agreements, both written and ‘gentleman’s’, have left Russia no other choice but to assume you are planning an aggression. I cannot fathom why you or your neocon buddies would think that Russia would sit and idly watch you move your weapons, including nuclear capable, to the very borders of Russia, and Russia would not arm up.

Now, here’s a little truism for you, sir, you who have not faced cold steel and the roar of the guns. You are working day and night to provoke Russia in to fighting. Even a functional idiot locked up in Yellow Dome knows that The World as we know it will cease to exist within 24 hours if it comes to war between US and Russia, and I can guaranty you, sir, that Russia will not back down. Ever.

Neither I, nor you, nor our respective families, will survive a war between the two. You can wish, you can plan, you can pray (doubtful), but you and I won’t survive. However, the odds are I, my wife and most of our wonderful children will be gone before you are, and trust me, my friend, I’ll be sitting at the gates of Hell waiting for you.

To quote a quote from my writings in 2014, just for you. Damn your eyes, damn your soul, damn you to Hell, back to where you came from.

Love that article it really lays out the ugly that is the evil that lurks devoid of conscience, devoid of intelligence, devoid of heart and soul.  The election of Donald Trump temporarily knocked the Deep State back on its heels.  On the campaign trail Trump ridiculed the very “free” trade policies the Deep State convinced Americans they needed and the people cheered.  Trump called for normal relations with Russia, the very country the Deep State had tried to convince the American people was our worst enemy, and the people cheered.  With the election of Donald Trump the verdict was in, the people no longer believed the Deep States lies.  

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ~ Edmond Burke

According to Glen Ford the Deep State’s response to Trump’s election was to “pre-empt Trump’s threatened rapprochement with Russia with a massive anti-Putin campaign. The elites realized they had to recreate -- on the fly, with no factual basis -- a war fervor that no longer existed among the masses of people, through Russiagate.” 

That is the conundrum Americans find themselves in.  The evil that lurks, the Deep State is planning on dragging America into World War III which will inevitably be Armageddon.  Our brave troops will be led to their slaughter by the evil that lurks because there’s no profit in peace.  Only the American people can stop it, but will they or will good men do nothing?

By Patricia Baeten

Spooks gone wild, the unprecedented US/UK conspiracy to destroy a presidency

“I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.”― President Harry Truman

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” – Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer

As mostly but not exclusively Democrats clutch their pearls and head for the fainting couches over the revoking of ex-CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance, it becomes more evident every day that all the ex-spooks should have their security clearance revoked and reinstated on a need-to-know basis.  This courtesy perk was never meant to enhance the monetary benefits of ex-CIA directors as they become politically motivated cable news commentators hell-bent on destroying an elected president. 

There are inherent dangers posed by allowing the availability of America’s most guarded secrets to political hacks that have a proven record of lying under oath, colluding with foreign intelligence to overthrow an elected president and tawdry history of dirty tricks, illegal espionage against the United States Senate as well as illegal spying on American citizens.  One must turn a wary eye toward any retired or active spook who would defend the spooks gone wild who conspired with British Intelligence to throw the American election and enthrone their preordained presidential candidate.  What insanity has overtaken America? 

There is incontrovertible evidence that those in the highest echelons of the FBI, CIA, State Department and Executive Branch of the American government under the Obama Administration presented unproven, unsubstantiated “evidence” of Russian collusion before the FISA court in order to obtain search warrants to entrap members of Donald Trump’s campaign and destroy Trump’s run for the Presidency.   In the event that their plot to destroy the presidency of Trump failed they devised a secret “insurance policy” as their back-up.  From Sharyl Attkisson:

Excerpt:

What would the intelligence community's 'insurance policy' against Trump look like?

  

Let’s begin in the realm of the fanciful.  Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that a wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.

What exactly might an “insurance policy” against Donald Trump look like?

He would have to be marginalized at every turn. Strategies would encompass politics, the courts, opposition research and the media. He’d have to become mired in lawsuits, distracted by allegations, riddled with calls for impeachment, hounded by investigations. His election must be portrayed as the illegitimate result of a criminal or un-American conspiracy.

To accomplish this, bad actors in the intel community could step up use of surveillance tools as a weapon to look for dirt on Trump before his inauguration. They could rely on dubious political opposition research to secretly argue for wiretaps, plant one or more spies in the Trump campaign, then leak to the press a mix of true and false stories to create a sense of chaos.

Once Trump is in office, a good insurance policy would call for neutralizing the advisers seen as most threatening, including his attorney general. The reigning FBI director could privately send the implicit message that as long as Trump minds his own business, he won’t be named as a target…

All would be well unless the president removes the FBI director. Then, a rider on the insurance policy would kick in. After months of assuring Trump he’s not under investigation, he must now become a focus to keep him away from the Justice Department and the FBI; once an investigation opens, all of Trump’s attempts to affect policy or to dig into allegations against the intelligence community could be portrayed as obstruction of justice.

How to open an investigation after all these months? Appoint a special counsel. (Easy to get the right one, with Trump’s attorney general out of the way.)…  The chosen special counsel should be an insider with his own legacy to protect. Anti-Trump FBI officials who secretly vowed to “stop” Trump could be assigned to the investigation.

As crazy as it all sounds, it becomes slightly more plausible when we examine the record and find self-described conspiracies to develop “insurance policies.”  On Aug. 15, 2016, after FBI counterespionage chief Peter Strzok and his FBI girlfriend Lisa Page met with Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Strzok texted Page that they couldn’t take the risk of Trump getting elected without having “an insurance policy” in place.

Another figure, Benjamin Wittes, chose the same phrase. In October 2016, in his Lawfare blog, Wittes wrote: “What if Trump wins? We need an insurance policy against the unthinkable: Donald Trump’s actually winning the Presidency.”

As it happens, Wittes has acknowledged being a good friend of fired FBI Director James Comey... Wittes spoke to a New York Times reporter about Comey's interactions with President Trump, right after Robert Mueller's appointment as special counsel…  In his 2016 blog post, Wittes wrote that his vision of an “insurance policy” against Trump would rely on a “Coalition of All Democratic Forces” to challenge and obstruct Trump, using the courts as a “tool” and Congress as “a partner or tool…”

If there really were an insurance policy against Trump, it might include having ex-intel officials getting hired at national news outlets where they’d monitor and influence news organizations, and be invited to give daily spin on controversies surrounding their own actions.

Figures such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Comey aide Josh Campbell and others could get hired by CNN; former CIA Director John Brennan and ex-Mueller/Comey aide Chuck Rosenberg could get hired by NBC and MSNBC.

President Trump vowed to drain the swamp when he was elected president.  I guess when you drain the swamp, the swamp creatures end up flopping and snapping on the shore lashing out for one last gasp of the putrid, rancid waters they rely on to survive.  These despicable swamp creatures have been navigating the polluted waters of Washington and London for a long time.  From LaRouche pub:

Excerpt:

Fish Stinks from the Head Down: An Update on the Mueller Inquisition

Aug. 9—The question to be answered here is, to which “head” do we refer, when citing this ancient cross-cultural metaphor in our headline? We have insisted, since we began covering the continuing regime change operation in the United States, that the “head” is the Anglo-Dutch imperial system, whose capital is the City of London and whose leading colonial administrators here in the United States, were led most recently by Barack Obama and those he chose to run his intelligence agencies: John Brennan, James Comey, and James Clapper.

The torso associated with this “head” here in the United States includes the establishment wing of the Republican Party and the neo-conservatives, who, through such institutions as the American Enterprise Institute and the Koch Brothers, are fonts of British geopolitical schemes. The Anglo-Dutch Empire is the entity which has dedicated its intelligence agencies, its controlled media, its think tanks and foundations, Hollywood and all of its other institutions engaged in manipulating mass popular opinion, and its bought-and-paid-for Senators and Congressmen, to removing Donald Trump from the Presidency, by whatever means necessary.

Trump has completely and repeatedly enraged them by laughing off their power and taking his case directly to the people, ridiculing these “elites” publicly in front of mass audiences, and by threatening to produce a world in which China, Russia, the United States, and similar rational populations fully develop the economies of the world.

According to reliable reporting, the President is also engaged in serious discussions with Vladimir Putin about eliminating nuclear weapons, while maintaining the technological capacities of both Russia and the United States. This is a policy… which the British view as a mortal threat to the financial containment, regime change, and information warfare operations by which they maintain their power.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is simply the designated amoral legal assassin for this imperial entity, the blunt instrument by which Donald Trump is to be delivered for impeachment, if all goes as planned, at the conclusion of the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.

Trump has been so mercilessly targeted because he threatens to end the decades-long reign of terror, poverty, and endless war emanating from the deliberate destruction of Franklin Roosevelt’s Bretton Woods system in August 1971, and the founding of the new speculative Anglo-Dutch Empire on its ruins…

The physical hollowing out of the United States economy, the outsourcing of our productive economy to China, Mexico, and other countries whose economies we attempted to freeze in cheap labor manufacturing, raw materials extraction, or worse—all of these horrors flow from the system which Donald Trump now threatens to overthrow…

To put a fine point on how public relations bilge conceals and confuses, hiding the actual essence of people and institutions from those without the time to study them—in July 2018, the supposedly “right wing” and “pro-business” American Enterprise Institute and John Podesta’s “left wing” “cradle of the Resistance,” Center for American Progress, merged programs to unite against a common target—the “authoritarian populism” they ascribe to President Donald Trump…

Happily, new and explosive revelations in the last few weeks about the British and American actors in this coup, have brought us ever closer to exposing the “head” here, and beginning wholesale dismantlement.

These include the revelation that Christopher Steele, the MI6 author of the anti-Trump dirty information warfare dossier financed by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, and a major long-term asset of the Empire, was working as a human source for the FBI as of February 2016, if not earlier, well before the launch of the “official” FBI counterintelligence investigation of the Trump Campaign in late July 2016, and that Steele was in a back channel relationship with the number four official at the U.S. Department of Justice, Bruce Ohr, long after Steele was fired by the FBI in late October 2016, for his leaks to the news media.

The Steele/Ohr relationship lasted through May 2017 or later, according to documents recently obtained by Congress. After Donald Trump’s election, Steele’s work was funded, to the tune of $50 million, by George Soros, and by Tom Steyer and other Silicon Valley billionaires. These funders were seeking the President’s impeachment. Christopher Steele and his British masters wanted Trump’s impeachment also, but they had two motives.

Their other motive was to mobilize U.S. public opinion to support the ongoing British destabilization and regime change operation against Vladimir Putin, in which Steele had been a major and continuous player since at least 2006.  These new revelations, and others, show that, by no later than late 2015, British intelligence was operating against the Trump campaign, feeding information to a task force convened by John Brennan at the CIA, and to Victoria Nuland and Jonathan Winer at the Department of State.

Peter Strzok, the now notorious and biased lead FBI case agent on Russiagate, was the FBI’s liaison to John Brennan, generally, and to John Brennan’s anti-Trump task force specifically. John Brennan, of course, didn’t blow his nose without reporting it to President Barack Obama…

 To put what I just told you in boldface: A foreign government (the British), conducted entrapment operations on U.S. persons associated with an American presidential candidate (Donald Trump), on foreign soil (Great Britain), in coordination with the sitting President of the United States (Barack Obama) and his intelligence agencies, in order to fabricate a pretext for an FBI investigation, in which the target (Donald Trump) could be effectively defamed in the U.S. media as a Russian puppet, to wit, as implicitly engaged in treason against the United States…

Given what we now know about Steele, and the dodgy, completely fake British intelligence dossier used to conduct a new British insurrection against the United States, why should the President tolerate the sanctions imposed by his State Department and manufactured by the same group of people who have tried to destroy him?

It is really now time to take up LaRouche PAC’s call, Mr. President: End the Special Relationship and Declassify All British-Spawned Documents Concerning Your 2016 Campaign. Fish really does stink from the head down.

Ahh, the best laid plans of mice and men.  President Trump has really kicked up a shit storm in revoking CIA spook John Brennan’s security clearance.  How is Brennan supposed to further the attacks on President Trump over at Trump-hating CNN if he doesn’t have access to the latest information on how close Trump is to exposing the treasonous cabal that seeks to destroy him? 

CNN and MSNBC as well as the other CIA trumpets are bleating out the meme that Brennan’s free speech rights are being violated because his ability to sell his wares is severely affected by his loss of security clearance.  As if his security clearance is an inalienable right.  Well Brennan has more to worry about than loss of his security clearance.  From Ray McGovern at Lew Rockwell:

Excerpt:

Trump Strikes Back at ‘Ringleader’ Brennan

There’s more than meets the eye to President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke the security clearances that ex-CIA Director John Brennan enjoyed as a courtesy customarily afforded former directors. The President’s move is the second major sign that Brennan is about to be hoisted on his own petard. It is one embroidered with rhetoric charging Trump with treason and, far more important, with documents now in the hands of congressional investigators showing Brennan’s ringleader role in the so-far unsuccessful attempts to derail Trump both before and after the 2016 election.

Brennan will fight hard to avoid being put on trial but will need united support from his Deep State co-conspirators–a dubious proposition. One of Brennan’s major concerns at this point has to be whether the “honor-among-thieves” ethos will prevail, or whether some or all of his former partners in crime will latch onto the opportunity to “confess” to investigators: “Brennan made me do it.”

Well before Monday night, when Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani let a small bomb drop on Brennan, there was strong evidence that Brennan had been quarterbacking illegal operations against Trump.  Giuliani added fuel to the fire when he told Sean Hannity of Fox news:

“I’m going to tell you who orchestrated, who was the quarterback for all this. … The guy running it is Brennan, and he should be in front of a grand jury.  Brennan took … a dossier that, unless he’s the biggest idiot intelligence agent that ever lived … it’s false; you can look at it and laugh at it. And he peddled it to [then Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid, and that led to the request for the investigation. So you take a false dossier, get senators involved, and you get a couple of Republican senators, and they demand an investigation—a totally phony investigation.”

The Fix Brennan Finds Himself In

After eight years of enjoying President Barack Obama’s solid support and defense to do pretty much anything he chose—including hacking into the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee—Brennan now lacks what, here in Washington, we refer to as a “Rabbi” with strong incentive to advance and protect you… 

So, unlike his predecessors, most of whom also left under a dark cloud, Brennan is bereft of anyone to protect him. He lacks even a PR person to help him avoid holding himself up to ridicule—and now retaliation—for unprecedentedly hostile tweets and other gaffes. Brennan’s mentor, ex-CIA Director George Tenet, for example, had powerful Rabbis in President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as a bizarrely empathetic establishment media, when Tenet quit in disgrace 2004.

The main question now is whether the chairs of the House oversight committees will chose to face down the Deep State. They almost never do, and the smart money says that, if they do, they will lose—largely because of the virtually total support of the establishment media for the Deep State. This often takes bizarre forms. The title of a recent column by Washington Post “liberal” commentator Eugene Robinson speaks volumes: “God Bless the Deep State…”

Unfortunately Ray McGovern is probably right, if the House Oversight Committee does take on the Deep State they will probably lose because the media and our bought and paid for congress completely supports the Deep State Swamp.  They have become wealthy beyond imagination by doing so.  If Brennan goes down it would be the undoing of all of them and they know it.  From The American Conservative:

Excerpt:

John Brennan, Melting Down and Covering Up

He accuses Trump of treason. But what's his bluster really about?

It isn’t a pretty face, but one scarred from a dark past, repackaged now by the frenzy of “resistance.” Accusing Donald Trump recklessly, implying he knows more than he lets on, promising redemption: John Brennan is the face of American politics in 2018.

But before all that, Brennan lived in a hole about as far down into the deep state as one can dwell while still having eyes that work in the sunlight. He was director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, helping the president decide who to kill every week, including American citizens.

He spent 25 years at the CIA, and helped shape the violent policies of the post-9/11 Bush era. He was a fan of torture and extrajudicial killing to the point that a 2012 profile of him was entitled, “The Seven Deadly Sins of John Brennan...”

On Twitter this week, Brennan cartoonishly declaimed, “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”

Because it is 2018, Brennan was never asked to explain exactly how a press conference exceeds the threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors the Constitution sets for impeachment, nor was he asked to lay a few cards on the table showing what Putin has on Trump. No, Brennan is a man of his times, all bluster and noise, knowing that so long as he says what a significant part of the country apparently believes—that the president of the United States is under the control of the Kremlin—he will never be challenged…

Brennan’s bleating has the interesting side effect of directing attention away from who was watching the front door as the Russians walked in to cause what one MSNBC analyst described as a mix of Pearl Harbor and Kristallnacht. During the 2016 election, Brennan was head of the CIA.

His evil twin, James Clapper, who also coughs up Trump attacks for nickels these days, was director of national intelligence. James Comey headed the FBI, following Robert Mueller into the job. Yet the noise from that crowd has become so loud as to drown out any questions about where they were when they had the duty to stop the Russians in the first place…

Only after Clinton lost did it become necessary to create a crisis that might yet be inflated (it wasn’t just the Russians, as originally thought, it was Trump working with them) to justify impeachment. Absent that need, Brennan would have disappeared alongside other former CIA directors into academia or the lucrative consulting industry. Instead he’s a public figure with a big mouth because he has to be. That mouth has to cover his ass.

Brennan is part of the whole-of-government effort to overturn the election… On cue, leaks poured out implying the Trump campaign worked with the Russian government. It is now a rare day when the top stories are not apocalyptic, rocketed from Raw Story to the Huffington Post to the New York Times. Brennan, meanwhile, fans the media’s flames with a knowing wink that says “You wait and see. Soon it’s Mueller time.”

Yet despite all the hard evidence of treason that only Brennan and his supine journalists seem to see, everyone appears resigned to have a colluding Russian agent running the United States. You’d think it would be urgent to close this case. Instead, Brennan admonishes us to wait out an investigative process that’s been underway now through two administrations…

If Trump is under Russian influence, he is the most dangerous man in American history. So why isn’t Washington on fire? Why hasn’t Mueller indicted someone for treason? If this is Pearl Harbor, why is the investigation moving at the pace of a mortgage application? Why is everyone allowing a Russian asset placed in charge of the American nuclear arsenal to stay in power even one more minute?

Treason, traitor, coup, the empire striking back—those are just words, Third World stuff, clickbait, right? So the more pedestrian answer must then be correct. The lessons of Whitewater and Benghazi learned, maybe the point is not to build an atmosphere of crisis leading to something undemocratic, but just to have a perpetual investigation, tickled to life as needed politically.

Because, maybe, deep down, Brennan (Clapper, Hayden, Comey, and Mueller) really do know that this is all like flying saucers and cell phone cameras. At some point, the whole alien conspiracy meme fell apart because somehow when everyone had a camera with them 24/7/365, there were no more sightings and we had to admit that our fears had gotten the best of us. The threat was inside us all along. It is now, too.

So as the politicians and media go shrilly screaming clutching their pearls and heading for the fainting couches, desperately trying to drag the public along with them, deep inside they know the gig is up.  The Blue Wave the Democrats are desperately trying to convince America is coming will turn out to be a “wave goodbye”, adios, sayonara, Auf Wiedersehen.  The party of FDR and JFK is no more, what is left is a party of self-serving, egomaniacal war mongers.  Good Riddance.  And all it took was a brunch of half-rate spooks gone wild, in an unprecedented US/UK conspiracy to destroy a presidency.

By Patricia Baeten

Who do they serve? Congress rife with insider trading, lavish trips, lavish pensions, cushy jobs

As Republicans and Democrats try to woo the American voters to vote for their team, the American people are suffering from the devastating results of their past legislation.  Special interest written legislation enacted by their lackeys in congress has left ordinary Americans bankrupt, unemployed, ignorant and hopeless. 

It’s hard to fathom why they even woo the people when they don’t count their votes anyway.  As American taxpayers fund their lavish lifestyles, trips, health insurance, pension, vacations, retirement as well as that of their extended families, American citizens get austerity.   We’re called takers, lazy slackers looking for a handout by our congressional overlords.  

Through legislation they have cut Social Security payments to people with government pensions, such as teachers who work part-time in the private sector when they cannot afford to live on their salary.  Even though they pay into Social Security for years, lawmakers called them “double dippers”.    Union pensions have been cannibalized and they have been taxed for having “Cadillac” healthcare plans.  Food Stamps have been slashed, Medicare premiums have risen and cuts have been made to the Medicaid program.  There are work requirements for food stamps even though most people on food stamps already work but can’t afford to eat.  But what of congress, are they governed by the same standards?  From Fiscal Times:

Excerpt:

Here’s the true story of what we provide our elected representatives and how that compares to the real world.

Pay:  Members of Congress set their own, not unlike some state assemblies… the rank and file members now receive a tidy $174,000 salary, which is automatically adjusted each year based on changes in the employment cost index. The automatic pay increase was nixed in 2010, partly as a response to the uproar when Social Security payments were held stagnant.

If you’re a House or Senate leader, you get more.  The Speaker of the House gets $223,500, while both minority and majority leaders in the House and Senate take home $193,400.

To put that in perspective, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that just 5.1 million Americans earn more than $150,000 annually out of the nation’s 240.1 million workers. That means members of Congress earn more than 97 percent of the country.

Pensions: Back in 1984—the end of another great recession—furor over legislative pensions ushered in reform. Legislative exemptions from contributing to the Social Security system were eliminated and over-the-top pensions that would pay 50 percent of your highest salary after 20 years of service were replaced with a less-generous pension, plus Social Security.

Now, if you retire at age 55 with 30 years in Congress, you’ll get just 44 percent of your pay—roughly $76,560—versus 71.3 percent ($124,062) of pay under the old formula. Of course, now legislators also get Social Security payments, which can add another $20,000 or $30,000 annually to their retirement income, so they still come out ahead of the game.|

Congressional pensions also are adjusted for inflation. In private industry, where just one in every five workers has access to a traditional pension, payments are about half as generous as legislator’s pensions and retirees rarely get annual boosts to account for the rising cost of living…

More pensions: In addition to the traditional pension, members of Congress participate in the government’s Thrift Savings Plan. If legislators don’t want to save any of their own money, the government will still set aside 1 percent of their pay—that’s $1,740 annually—into the Thrift plan. If members do decide to contribute, Uncle Sam will match another 5 percent of pay for a total contribution from taxpayers amounting to 6 percent of total income, or $10,440. The closest thing that private industry has to the Thrift Savings Plan is your 401(k).

Health care: While about 15 percent of the population is without health insurance, members of Congress are all covered. Their plan is similar to the subsidized plans offered by big companies. In this case, the government pays about 70 percent of the cost of coverage, while legislators pick up the remaining 30 percent. In addition, they have access to dental insurance, vision care, health savings accounts, life and long-term care insurance—that’s similar to the cacophony of lucrative benefits offered by the best American companies.

Perks: There’s free parking, both at the office and at Washington, D.C.-area airports. You get a cheap membership to the house gym, subsidized daycare and access to legislative dining rooms that were once subsidized to the tune of $2 million annually, but are now supposed to be operating at cost, says Sepp…   And like most other executive fringe benefits, the bulk of the perks provided to members of Congress are tax free.

Travel: But the legislative perk to trump all others is travel, says Singer. Not only do you get to fly between D.C. and your home district on taxpayers through the “members representational allowance,” there are lots of ways you can globe-trot on somebody else’s dime. Join a committee, for example, and you can participate in fact-finding trips all over the globe.

Last year’s Congressional junket to talk about climate change in Copenhagen cost taxpayers $550,000, which included so-called “per diem” allowances for hotels and meals that worked out to $2,200 per person, per day.

Technically, legislators are supposed to return any per diem payments that they don’t need to spend, but a recent Wall Street Journal investigation found that rarely happens. One legislator quoted by the WSJ said he’d hesitate to travel so much if he thought he couldn’t just pocket the taxpayer money.

Members say their trips are all about business and fact finding, but they usually take their spouses, Singer says. And it’s tough to figure out just how much members are spending and whether American taxpayers are getting their money’s worth. That’s because international travel comes out of what Singer calls a “bottomless mystery account” operated by the Treasury…

The above is just a fraction of what congress get.  Now a Republican representative has been indicted for insider trading, I’m shocked.  I’m shocked that he was so overt about the insider trading, members of congress are involved in insider trading all the time with no ramifications.  Insider trading was enabled by a quietly passed law that exempted members of congress, their staff and family from laws against insider trading.  From NPR:

Excerpt:

How Congress Quietly Overhauled Its Insider-Trading Law

The legislative process on Capitol Hill is often slow and grinding. There are committee hearings, filibuster threats and hours of floor debate. But sometimes, when Congress really wants to get something done, it can move blindingly fast.  That's what happened when Congress moved to undo large parts of a popular law known as the STOCK Act last week.

A year ago, President Obama signed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act into law at a celebratory ceremony attended by a bipartisan cast of lawmakers.  "I want to thank all the members of Congress who came together and worked to get this done," he said.

The law wouldn't just outlaw trading on nonpublic information by members of Congress, the executive branch and their staffs. It would greatly expand financial disclosures and make all of the data searchable so insider trading and conflicts of interest would be easier to detect.

But on Monday, when the president signed a bill reversing big pieces of the law, the emailed announcement was one sentence long. There was no fanfare last week either, when the Senate and then the House passed the bill in largely empty chambers using a fast-track procedure known as unanimous consent.

In the House, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., shepherded the bill through. It was Friday afternoon at 12:52. Many members had already left for the weekend or were on their way out. The whole process took only 30 seconds. There was no debate.

Isn’t that the way it is, pass a bill reigning in unlawful behavior by politicians with lots of hoopla, backslapping, and self-congratulating only to revoke it in the dark like cockroaches.  So when we saw the recent indictment of GOP congressman Chris Collins for insider trading it merits looking at what he actually did that was so over-the-top, to get him in trouble. From Business Insider:

Excerpt:

Indicted Rep. Chris Collins shows why members of Congress should not trade stocks

Rep. Chris Collins, a prominent backer of President Donald Trump in Congress, has been indicted on allegations of insider trading, along with his son and his son's fiancée's father.

Collins is on the board of an Australian pharmaceutical company. The US Securities and Exchange Commission alleges that he tipped his son about a failed clinical trial and that the son and associates saved $750,000 by trading on the tip.   This is a really stupid thing to allegedly have done…

Anyway: Rep. Chris Collins, a New York Republican who gave President Donald Trump his first congressional endorsement, has been indicted on allegations of insider trading in a case with an extremely obvious, how-were-you-dumb-enough-to-try-this fact pattern.

Get a load of this

Here's what's laid out in complaints from the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York (Collins has pleaded not guilty):

Collins sits on the board of Innate Immunotherapeutics, an Australian biopharmaceutical company in which he is also the largest shareholder.

On June 22, 2017, Collins learned that Innate's main drug had failed clinical trials, a grave outcome for Innate's financial condition.  Literally seconds after learning this news, Collins contacted his son, Cameron, who at the time owned 2% of Innate.

Over the following four days, Cameron Collins and several other associates of the Collinses proceeded to liquidate their positions in Innate before the public announcement of the drug failure on June 26, after which the stock fell 92%...

Innate is not an especially large company. As a result, per the SEC: "The sales by Cameron Collins, his girlfriend, and her parents, including Stephen Zarsky, made up more than 53% of the stock's trading volume [on June 23] and exceeded Innate's 15-day average trading volume by more than 1,454%..."

This leads me to a question.  Is Chris Collins an idiot?...  Was it because the trading wasn't on his own account and he thought the SEC wouldn't be able to draw a link between him and [checks notes] his son — even though Collins was already the focus of a congressional ethics investigation related to Innate?

Was it because he thought he and his son could just talk the FBI into the idea that the sales were unrelated to the clinical-trial news? Oops, now Collins and his associates have also been indicted on allegations they lied to the FBI…  

Collins' public defense against these charges has focused on a fact prosecutors do not dispute: Even as his associates were selling, he did not liquidate his own, much larger stake in Innate. That might seem like a tiny bit of prudence in a sea of recklessness — among other matters, Collins would have had to publicly disclose the dates and amounts of his sales under rules pertaining specifically to members of Congress.

But as the SEC complaint says, it's possible Collins didn't sell because he literally couldn't. Unlike his son, he had not completed paperwork to transfer his stock to the US, where one could trade it on the over-the-counter market. His stock was stuck in Australia, where trading of Innate on the Australian Securities Exchange had been halted — because of the impending announcement of the clinical-trial failure.

Open Secrets estimated, based on disclosure forms, that Collins' net worth was nearly $70 million as of 2015.

Is Chris Collins an anomaly?  Are other members of congress humble public servants there to ensure the overall well-being of the “people” they serve?  That question brings me to an article written by one of my fav’s Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone about the dubious, lucrative trading of Senator Bob Corker, who ahem, is retiring this year.

Excerpt:

So Tennessee Senator Bob Corker is in trouble now, because he flip-flopped to vote for Donald Trump’s tax bill after a provision was included that reportedly helps him personally.  Color me not shocked. I spent most of this past summer investigating Corker, whose personal finances have been the subject of inquiry for years…

How do you increase your net worth so significantly while you’re working full-time as a Senator? That is not an easy story to explain.  According to his own disclosure forms, Corker in 2006 carried a series of huge loans.

Corker took office in January, 2007, during the last gasp of the Bush/Rove political juggernaut. The Iraq war had gone south and the Republicans had just been routed in midterms. The financial crisis was just around the corner. And nobody paid attention to the smooth-talking freshman Senator from Tennessee, who turned out to have some financial issues…

It wasn’t until Corker took office and filled out disclosure forms that his finances became public – sort of. Few in the media seem ever to have read the “liabilities” section of Corker’s first disclosure, where the former mayor and construction magnate listed a series of massive outstanding loans. At the low end, Corker appeared to owe a hair-raising $24.2 million. At the high end, $120.5 million.

He had been in debt to some of the nation’s biggest lenders – including somewhere between $12 million and $60 million in debt to GE Capital alone.   Corker had been a construction magnate in Tennessee before taking office, a sort of mini-Trump. Before he ran for office, he sold off his business to a local developer named Henry Luken…

Ten years before reporters would swarm over Trump for (among other things) raising fees at his Mar-a-Lago resorts before making a series of taxpayer-funded visits, Corker tested the limits of the moonlighting possibilities in the legislative branch, essentially becoming a full-time day-trader who did a little Senator-ing in his spare time.

In the first nine months of 2007, Corker made an incredible 1,200 trades, over four per day, including 332 over a two-day period… 

By 2014, when Corker sat on the Senate Banking Committee, a position that gave him regular access to prime information about the future direction of the markets, the Tennessee Senator still had his foot on the gas. He made 930 stock trades that year.

Of his colleagues on the committee, Rhode Island’s Jack Reed made 39 trades, Pennsylvania’s Patrick Toomey 26, and nobody else made any – meaning Corker made 93.5% of all trades made by the legislators most plugged-in to the country’s finances…

Corker’s activities didn’t go completely unnoticed. A few ethics groups and reporters cried foul over the years. He had to amend his Senate disclosures after the Wall Street Journal in 2015 found unreported income from “quick” trades in a Chattanooga company called CBL enterprises. As Fortune noted at the time, Corker went back and made “dozens” of amendments to earlier disclosures, to reveal about $3.8 million in previously unreported income.

Meanwhile, Bethany McLean of Yahoo! News later reported that Corker had invested in a Tennessee hedge fund that made profitable short bets against the housing market with Goldman Sachs… 

Until this week, Corker’s history has been scrutinized only occasionally, and most often because of the role he’s played in an unrelated controversy known colloquially as #Fanniegate.  

This monstrous dispute over the future of the “government sponsored entities” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in which Corker played a loud and conspicuous part, made him enemies among investors who are embittered over the unilateral seizure of the two companies’ profits six years ago, on August 17th, 2012. Corker supported that controversial and unprecedented move, known as the “revenue sweep…”

 When Corker took on Trump this fall – saying the White House was “an adult day care center” and that Trump’s behavior threatened “World War III” – he suddenly became a darling of sorts in the liberal media.  Now, to his critics, he’s a bad guy again, for reportedly doing what he’s always done, acting in his own financial interest while earning a paycheck as a U.S. Senator.

Corker is the norm in congress, they’re like pigs at the trough.  Corker is retiring after engorging himself on America’s largess.  And, he’s not alone.  So when congress critters announce their exit do they lay low and pull their snouts from the taxpayer trough?  No hardly.  From USA Today:

Excerpt:

These lame ducks still fly – on the taxpayer’s dime – often to faraway countries

WASHINGTON – Last September, Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania became the latest in a large cohort of members of Congress to announce his retirement.  About a month later, Dent, a seven-term Republican and former chairman of the House ethics committee, arrived in Italy on the first leg of a six-day, three-nation trip at taxpayer expense that included stops in Belgium and Luxembourg.

The cost to taxpayers for Dent’s trip: nearly $7,000.

His post-retirement announcement travel habits are hardly unique. At least 17 retiring members of Congress have gone on overseas trips after announcing they were not going to seek re-election, according to travel information included in the Congressional Record. All were on the taxpayer’s dime with a total cost of nearly $190,000.

There is nothing illegal about these trips, and all were signed off on by the chairman of the committee under whose authority the trip was taken. But they do raise the issue of how much benefit the constituents in these cases get when their representatives travel shortly before they leave office.

"The problem is many of these trips are really much more like paid vacations than fact-finding trips,” said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for the good-government group Public Citizen.  “Then when you take a look at retiring members of Congress suddenly jetting around the globe, it really does have every appearance that they’re just in the last minute getting the most of what they can out of the perks of being a member of Congress,” Holman said….

Dent ended up resigning on May 8 of this year and in June began as a senior policy adviser at the international law firm DLA Piper. He also serves as a political commentator for CNN... Dent declined to comment for this story because, he said, he has an exclusivity agreement with CNN that prevents him from talking to other media.

Five retiring members traveled as members of congressional foreign affairs committees, including House committee chairman Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif. and Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as well as Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. and Ted Poe, R-Texas…

In many cases, details of these taxpayer-financed trips by members of Congress are not generally available. And what is available in the Congressional Record can be hard to find.

So congressman Charlie Dent resigned on May 8^th as he segued into his new job as a policy adviser at the international law firm of DLA Piper as well as a political commentator for CNN.  How prevalent is this practice?  From The Atlantic:

Excerpt:

An Exodus From Congress Tests the Lure of Lobbying

There’s a wave of lawmakers fleeing Capitol Hill this year, but if recent history is a guide, many of them will put down roots in the D.C. swamp.  There’s a particular moment Representative Tom Rooney can see in his mind, when his fifth and final term in the House comes to an end and he leaves Washington, D.C., for the last time as a member of Congress.

He’ll drive south toward Georgia, crossing over into Florida north of Jacksonville.  He’ll pass that familiar sign, the blue one that says “Welcome to the Sunshine State,” when he reaches the border.  “I made it,” he’ll think to himself.

Every two years, retiring lawmakers like Rooney face a choice: Do they return home to their states and districts, or stay where the political action—and the money—is in Washington? The last several months have seen a rush to the Capitol exits like none other in more than a quarter century: Rooney, a Republican, is one of three dozen members of the House and Senate who aren’t running for reelection or another office this fall...

Some in this year’s class of retirees are more junior members who’ve grown disenchanted with national politics. Rooney, 47, is one of them: “The D.C. rat race has run its course for me,” he told me in a recent interview.

But if recent history is a guide, many of Rooney’s fellow congressional retirees won’t be leaving the Beltway at all…. But once their terms are up, a surprising number of these same politicians don’t return home. They stick around town, joining law firms, think tanks, and lobbying shops. On any given day, ex-lawmakers stalk the corridors of the Capitol complex, kibitzing with their old colleagues as they prod them for votes…

Ex-lawmakers can cash in on their policy expertise and friendships in the Capitol, earning two or three times their $174,000 base salary as a member of Congress…

Members point out that lobbying allows them to use the experience and issue expertise they’ve built over many years in Congress to continue to advocate for causes they believe in. But while that might attract ex-lawmakers to lobbying, it’s not what draws high-paying companies to them: They want the relationships.

The American people are not lazy slackers.  As a matter of fact Baby Boomers largely did everything that was expected of them.  They worked hard, saved, earned pensions, invested in 401K’s, raised their children and took care of their elderly parents.  Now that their well-earned twilight years have arrived, what do they have?  FromZero Hedge:

Excerpt:

"Their Wealth Has Vanished": Baby Boomers File For Bankruptcy In Droves

An alarming number of older Americans are being forced into bankruptcy, as the rate of people 65 and older who have filed has never been higher - at three times what it was in 1991, while the rate of bankruptcies among Americans age 65 and older has more than doubled, according to a new study by the The Bankruptcy Project…

The magnitude of growth in older Americans in bankruptcy is so large that the broader trend of an aging U.S. population can explain only a small portion of the effect. The median senior filing bankruptcy enters the system $17,390 in debt, vs. an average net worth of $250,000 for their non-bankrupt peers.

According to the study, a three-decade shift of financial risk from government and employers to individuals is at fault, as aging Americans are dealing with longer waits for full Social Security benefits, 401(k) plans replacing employer-provided pensions and more out-of-pocket spending on items such as health care.

“When the costs of aging are off-loaded onto a population that simply does not have access to adequate resources, something has to give,” the study says, “and older Americans turn to what little is left of the social safety net — bankruptcy court.”

“You can manage O.K. until there is a little stumble,” said Deborah Thorne, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Idaho and an author of the study. “It doesn’t even take a big thing…”  

The questionnaire asked filers what led them to seek bankruptcy protection. Much like the broader population, people 65 and older usually cited multiple factors. About three in five said unmanageable medical expenses played a role. A little more than two-thirds cited a drop in income. Nearly three-quarters put some blame on hounding by debt collectors…

Meanwhile, by 2013 the average Medicare beneficiary's out-of-pocket health care expenses ate up around 41% of the average Social Security payment, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Moreover, more people are entering their senior years in debt. For many, that means a mortgage - roughly 41% of senior debt in 2016, which is nearly double the 21% rate from 1989, according to the Urban Institute…

What isn't helping is that many older parents report that helping their children contributed to their bankruptcies. Seattle bankruptcy attorney Marc Stern says he's seen parents co-sign loans for $10,000 or $20,000 for their kids, only to find themselves on the hook when their offspring couldn't service the debt.

“When you are living on $2,000 a month and that includes Social Security — and you have rent and savings are minuscule — it is extremely difficult to recover from something like that,” he said.   Others parents had had co-signed their children’s student loans. “I never saw parents with student loans 20 or 30 years ago,” Mr. Stern said.

“It is not uncommon to see student loans of $100,000,” he added. “Then, you see parents who have guaranteed some of these loans. They are no longer working, and they have these student loans that are difficult if not impossible to pay or discharge in bankruptcy, and these are the kids’ loans.”

“They worked all of their lives, and did what they were supposed to do,” he said, “and through circumstances like a late-life divorce or a death of a spouse or having to raise grandkids, have put them in a situation where they are not able to make the bills.”

Every bit of the reasons Baby Boomers wealth has disappeared is the result of legislation written by special interests and enacted by their lackeys in congress.  The Joe Biden Bankruptcy protection for banks legislation made it impossible for student loans to be forgiven in bankruptcy.  Biden’s bankruptcy bill was an onerous thing that protected predatory banks from any losses regardless of their risky actions. 

Just who do they serve?  Baby Boomers wealth hasn’t disappeared, it has been transferred to the very top which includes members of congress.  Almost every member of congress is a millionaire.  They have pensions and savings plans regular people can’t even dream about.  Just who do they serve?  Answer, they serve themselves.

By Patricia Baeten