Impeachment - the desperate Hail Mary Pass to promote corrupt Oligarchs’ Manchurian Candidate Joe Biden

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” ― Franklin D. Roosevelt

The impeachment of President Donald Trump is based on the fantasy fact that Joe Biden is a shoo-in for the un-Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential candidate.  Joe Biden is and has been a handmaiden of the banking industry for his entire career.  For all the flowery talk, and fractured fairy tales about America being a Democracy, today America is anything but.  Our presidential candidates are chosen by a handful of oligarchs and installed through a corrupt system that allows candidates to choose their voters, not voters choosing their candidates.

It is this banking cartel of oligarchs that controls the New World Order foisted upon the world in 2000 and refuses to loosen their grip on the American government.  From TheStreet:

Excerpt:

What Is an Oligarchy and What Does It Mean in 2019?

An oligarchy is a style of government or management where the few rule over the rest. It may surprise you how contemporary this system actually is.

When you hear the word "oligarchy," you very well may think of the age-old political system that has lorded over dozens of civilizations. But oligarchies aren't just found in Greece or Italy - oligarchies can even be found in the highest-grossing companies and corporations in the world.

Despite the fact that many of the key players on the world stage boast democratic or parliamentary governments, it is important to understand how different styles of government and management operate - and to be able to recognize them when they may not be obvious. 

But while democracies or monarchies are among the most popular forms of government, oligarchies have had a fascinating historical and present-day run. But what is an oligarchy anyway? And how does it operate?

The word "oligarchy" comes from the Greek word "oligarkhes" - meaning "few to rule or command." According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, an oligarchy is a "government by the few," being "a small group [that] exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes."  Given the dictionary definition, the term seems to carry a negative connotation.  But how does this system work?

Oligarchy Structure

As per its definition, an oligarchy is a system of government where the few - be it families, businesses, scholars, or individuals - rule.  However, in many cases, even governments that have democracies or monarchies actually have oligarchies controlling them.

In this case, a government may be structured as having democratic or monarchical systems, but is actually influenced by rich, powerful, or persuasive people, families, or corporations that can levy a good amount of authority.

Along the same lines, oligarchies pose a threat to free market practices, as they can decide to change or fix trading and economic regulations to benefit themselves. Often, oligarchies can collude to fix prices or violate other healthy economic standards…

How are oligarchies formed, and why?

Historically, oligarchies have formed for many reasons, but mostly when an elite class (either those who are very skilled or informed in certain areas, very rich, or very powerful by other means) decide to take over control of a government or corporation...

…OLIGARCHIES TEND TO INCREASE INCOME INEQUALITY, which helps the oligarchy grow in power and wealth. Along those lines, oligarchies can often manipulate the financial markets to their advantage, even if they are not natural or do not comply with the rules of supply and demand.

Additionally, OLIGARCHIES CAN PERPETUATE BAD POLICIES BY KEEPING THOSE WHO ARE SIMILAR TO THEM IN POWER, which can create an unhealthy corporate or government community…

My, my yes indeed “, oligarchies can perpetuate bad policies by keeping those who are similar to them in power” which is exactly why President Donald Trump is being impeached.  Before Biden announced his run for president, gaff-prone Biden actually told the truth:  

“During a foreign policy speech in London, former U.S. vice president Joe Biden said Russian president Vladimir Putin wants to 'destroy the new world order...'

Turning his attention to the situation in his own country, [Biden] said: “The democracy, freedom and openness which we cherish is under threat from within and from without by the siren calls of phony nationalism, populism and xenophobia which exists in many western democracies today, including the UK and the US.”

Nice slam against Bernie Sanders.  Yes, according to Oligarch Joe Biden ““The democracy, freedom and openness which we cherish is under threat from within and from without by the siren calls of phony nationalism, populism…”  Really?  Is America threatened by populism or is the Oligarchy threatened by populism?

 The 2020 Presidential race is not Biden’s first gig as the Deep State’s rodeo clown diverting attention away from the Deep State banker’s control over America’s elections.  Biden’s bid for the presidency has been rejected by the American people every time he has run but all of a sudden we are to believe that Trump requested Ukraine to “dig up dirt” on Biden because Biden presented an imminent danger to Trump’s reelection.  What a joke. 

As a matter of fact, in the 2016 election supporters of Joe Biden were working in the background to bring down the candidacy of Hillary Clinton so that Joe Biden and his corrupt financial oligarch backers could launch a last minute Biden candidacy to defeat Trump and continue with the Zionist’s New World Order.”  From Down theRabbit Hole October 4, 2015:

Excerpt:

Murdoch’s Fox News, Wall Street Journal as well as CNN, NBC and a myriad of media have launched attack after attack against Hillary Clinton with faux scandal after faux scandal from Benghazi to e-mails bringing the fervor to a crescendo.

The relentless attacks along with Murdoch’s minions in congress with subpoena power have had investigation after investigation.  It doesn’t matter that the accusations are baseless, it’s the “appearance” of wrong doing, the “appearance” that there must be a there, there that have caused Hillary’s popularity to drop.   It appears that Murdoch’s goal has been to drag Hillary through the mud opening the door to a Biden candidacy.  From Politico:

Excerpt:

Murdoch: Biden to run ... and win

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of 21st Century Fox and News Corp., believes Joe Biden has already started running for president and is "very likely" to win the Democratic nomination.

"Looks like Biden already running," Murdoch tweeted on Monday evening. "Very likely he wins nomination and be hard to beat."

If such a prognostication seems like nefarious meddling to some Hillary Clinton supporters, it's worth remembering that Murdoch is never one to troll. He tweets earnestly, often pushing on politicians' weaknesses—Republicans and Democrats alike—or rallying for pet causes like immigration reform. His observations often seem less like opinion and more like unsourced intelligence picked up from political power brokers.

Murdoch's remark comes as Biden approaches a deadline for entry into the race. Bolstered by Clinton's waning approval rating, Biden and his aides have been aggressively considering a run….

It's not clear what intel, if any, Murdoch has on Biden's presidential ambitions. What is clear is that the media mogul is eager to see someone shake up the 2016 race. Late last month, he argued that it was time for "greatest mayor" Michael Bloomberg to throw his hat into the ring.  Murdoch is no fan of Trump, either, despite the fact that his cable news network has done much to fuel Trump's rise.

The impeachment of Donald Trump for supposedly “seeking help from a foreign government to dig up dirt on his ‘political rival’ Joe Biden” is a Deep State rouse.  The elected government of Ukraine was overthrown by a CIA coup with Joe Biden, John McCain and Victoria Nuland leading the charge.  The CIA installed government of Victor Poroshenko opened the door for American oligarchs and their politician toadies and their families to participate in the financial plunder of Ukraine. 

Who knows what a second presidential term of Donald Trump might uncover with regard to the illegal actions brought against the Trump campaign by the CIA, FBI, MI6 and Mossad through Ukraine.

In America Joe Biden’s entire career has been one of self-dealing and servitude to the oligarchs who control banking industry that has enriched his family and friends.  While Biden’s family basked in ill-gotten riches the American people’s fortunes plummeted much like that of the people of Ukraine.  From The Nation:

Excerpt:

Joe Biden’s Friends and Backers Come Out on Top—at the Expense of the Middle Class That’s the “Delaware Way.”

Delaware is a small place. Two days after statewide elections, the winners and losers pair up in horse-drawn carriages and rattle through Georgetown (population 7,427) to literally bury a ceremonial hatchet. School bands play. The crowd chews ox roast sandwiches.

It’s a ritual expression of what locals call the Delaware Way, a bipartisan contrast to angry national politics. The Delaware Way can be useful for elected officials—and their friends in business. And family. There’s an axiom often repeated in his Senate years by Joe Biden’s staff: “Joe says that when someone helps his family, it’s just like helping Joe,” recited Sam Waltz, a Wilmington business consultant who covered Biden’s first Senate reelection campaign as a young reporter.

Soon after Biden was first elected in 1972, banks from three states lined up to finance his brother James Biden’s new disco in suburban Wilmington. When the club defaulted, Joe Biden blamed the banks for exploiting his 23-year-old sibling and for pressing his office to get their money back. (They didn’t.) Despite this, over the years, many Biden-related projects have proved irresistible to local, national, and lately, Chinese businesspeople.

Joe Biden often talks about his father’s difficult career selling used cars. John Hynansky, the son of Ukrainian World War II refugees, had better luck: He built the Delaware-based car dealership Winner Auto Group. State and federal records show Hynansky, his wife, and his children have donated more than $230,000 to US political campaigns since the 1980s, including at least $49,000 to Biden.

At a Ford executive’s suggestion, in 1994, Hynansky opened an auto import office in the newly independent Ukraine. Five years later, he opened Winner Ford Kyiv. He later added Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover, Porsche, and what Bentley called “its biggest exclusive dealership in Europe.”

In 2008, a month before Biden was elected vice president, Hynansky made his biggest political donation: $28,500 to the Democratic National Committee. The next summer, Biden told a roomful of Ukrainian leaders in Kyiv, “My very good friend John Hynansky, a very prominent businessman from Delaware, is here.” That fall, Winner won its first US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) loan, in the amount of $2.5 million.

A federal agency, OPIC had actually halted lending to Ukraine in 1999 over a disputed insurance claim. The Winner deal helped kick off a round of approvals. Three years later, OPIC boosted the loan to $20 million, so Hynansky could build Winner Autocity in Kyiv.

In backing him, OPIC was funding jobs—not in the United States but for Ukrainian salespeople to move cars made mostly in Germany, Sweden, and Britain. By 2011, HYNANSKY’S FIRM WAS SELLING 20 PERCENT OF THE PREMIUM CARS IN UKRAINE.

Blurred lines: John Hynansky, a donor with deep ties to Ukraine, lent Joe Biden’s brother over $500,000. (The News Journal via USA Today Network)

Hynansky has bet not just on Biden but also on members of his inner circle. In 2015, Biden’s former chief of staff Dennis Toner was a leading promoter of the Delaware Board of Trade (DBOT), A DIGITAL PENNY-STOCK MARKET STARTED AFTER BARACK OBAMA SIGNED A SECURITIES DEREGULATION LAW.

Failing to raise money on Wall Street, the group persuaded Tom Gordon, then head of the county government where Biden held his first elected office, to lend DBOT $3 million. Hynansky then joined Toner, a United Arab Emirates sheikh, and a Republican state representative as investors.

Also that year, according to Florida property records, Hynansky lent $500,000 to James Biden, secured by the latter’s $2.5 million home on Keewaydin Island off Florida’s Gulf Coast. Biden had landed an executive position at HillStone, a subsidiary of the construction project manager Hill International, which later got a contract to build modular housing in Iraq.   

Hill chief executive Irvin Richter, convicted of embezzlement in New Jersey 40 years earlier, told Fox Business that the Biden name “helps him get in the door”—and that he would have put Obama on the board if he could have. Alas, the Iraq deal fell apart.

On Keewaydin, the Bidens added a solar power system, ran up an IRS lien for $589,000, and sought to flip the property for almost $6 million. After it was swamped by Hurricane Irma in 2017, they sold the home to a group that included a Pennsylvania car dealer for just $1.35 million. Hynansky released his mortgage.

By that time, Delaware’s cozy business-political relations had suffered a scare. After a property dispute between Hynansky and developer Christopher Tigani, the ensuing litigation exposed records of Tigani illegally funneling over-the-limit contributions through his low-level employees to then-Senator Joe Biden; his elder son Beau Biden, then Delaware’s attorney general; and others from both parties.

In 2011, Tigani pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and was sentenced to two years in prison. Assistant US Attorney Robert Kravetz blamed the Delaware Way, which he defined as politicians doing favors for well-connected business owners in exchange for contributions after the fact…

 Democrats controlled both the presidency and Congress in the late 1970s, when a combination of high inflation and low profits fueled a corporate push to ease federal regulation.

Biden worked hard on the 1978 bankruptcy reform bill that first limited recent graduates from claiming bankruptcy protection, and he served on the banking committee that produced the Financial Institutions Regulatory and Interest Rate Control Act of 1978, which stopped states from capping interest charges by out-of-state banks. The Supreme Court’s Marquette v. First of Omaha ruling that year cemented the banks’ freedom to export high interest rates to places that had tried to limit usury.

Biden’s bank-friendly approach came at a key time. Guided by lawyers from New York, Delaware would soon pass the Financial Center Development Act, cutting bank taxes and ending rate restrictions. Within a few years, many of the biggest banks in at least 10 of the 12 Federal Reserve districts moved their credit card arms to Delaware.

The largest, MBNA Corporation, was spun off from Maryland National Bank by chairman Alfred Lerner, whose friend Ace Greenberg, chairman of the now defunct Bear Stearns, issued credit-card-backed bonds, rocket-fueling new loans.

MBNA offered accounts to people on mailing lists it bought from colleges and professional organizations, eventually passing DuPont to become Delaware’s largest for-profit employer.

MBNA EXECUTIVES CONTRIBUTED OVER $212,000 TO BIDEN’S SENATE CAMPAIGNS, though CEO Charles Cawley and all but two of his 28 top executives were Republicans and gave even more to the national GOP.

In 1996, Biden’s cozy relationship with the banks was used against him. A Republican challenger for his Senate seat complained that MBNA’s No. 3 executive, John R. Cochran, had bought Biden’s Greenville house for the full $1.2 million list price, despite a weak housing market. MBNA stuck with Biden; even after Wilmington’s News Journal published an internal MBNA letter coordinating employee donations to him, he won reelection easily.

MBNA then hired his son Hunter Biden, fresh out of Yale Law School, as a management trainee. (He stuck out among the mostly state and Catholic college alumni who worked at the bank.) The New York Times reported that WHEN HUNTER BIDEN LEFT IN 2000 for Washington, DC, and a new lobbying firm, Oldaker, Biden & Belair, MBNA KEPT HIM ON A $100,000 ANNUAL RETAINER—not to lobby his father, he said, but for advice on “Internet and privacy law.”

With US credit card debt doubling every five years, defaults and bankruptcies rose, too. Joe Biden joined the Republican lawmakers pushing new bankruptcy reforms that would make it tougher for individuals to write off a range of consumer loans…

Researchers like Wenli Li of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia blame the loss of bankruptcy protections for the sharp rise in home defaults and foreclosures that sparked the Great Recession…

Biden had been vice president for less than a year when his son Hunter started an investment firm with Christopher Heinz, a stepson of Senator John Kerry, who had replaced Biden as head of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Devon Archer, an investor and Heinz’s classmate from Yale. They called their group Rosemont Seneca Partners.

In 2012, Archer and Hunter Biden met with Jonathan Li, who ran Bohai Capital, an investment subsidiary of the China-based travel giant HNA Group. When Joe Biden visited China in 2013, Hunter Biden, who accompanied his father, introduced him to Li.

Shortly after, Li and Rosemont Seneca announced a new venture, BHR (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Company…  The investors paid $4.2 million for a stake in the firm, with the Chinese partners as the two largest shareholders, according to the South China Morning Post. 

BHR focused on “ultra-large-scale and internationally influential projects,” Li told a Chinese newspaper. He picked Archer’s group, he added, because of the partners’ “deep” ties to US politics—including Hunter Biden’s…

When other Biden-related investments turned sour, Chinese investors were ready to help. In 2009, Joe Biden announced more than $500 million in Energy Department financing and $21.5 million from the state of Delaware for a California start-up, Fisker Automotive (which at the time was backed by future Biden donor John Doerr’s venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins), so it could manufacture electric cars at a factory 3,000 miles from its headquarters—and just five miles from Biden’s Greenville home.

Addressing more than 1,000 laid-off GM employees at the plant site, Biden presented the funding as payback for years of autoworkers’ union support.  BUT THE DELAWARE PLANT NEVER OPENED…  (One blow was the 2012 bankruptcy of Fisker’s battery supplier, which was sold at auction to the Wanxiang Group of Shanghai in a deal that required approval from the Obama-Biden administration.

DESPITE BORROWING $300 MILLION FROM THE ENERGY DEPARTMENT, Fisker itself filed for bankruptcy the next year. Wanxiang bought the firm’s remaining assets.

PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRATS WHO THINK 2020 IS THEIR YEAR WON’T SOON FORGET BIDEN’S LONG FIGHT FOR THE BANKS AND CREDIT CARD COMPANIES AGAINST CREDIT CARD AND STUDENT DEBT RELIEF. China hawks will keep pointing to how Chinese investors always seem ready to buy troubled investments from Biden allies.

President Trump’s conflicts may be bigger and bolder and more likely to spark criminal charges or even corrupt US policy. But is this really the best Democrats can do: to point out that Trump is worse? They tried that in 2016—and it didn’t end well.

Tsk, tsk, tsk.  Is there anyone in the Democrats’ party establishment that isn’t completely and totally corrupt and beholden to the oligarchy?  There is no daylight between the GOP establishment and the DNC establishment.  Trump withholding funds from Ukraine was taking U.S. taxpayer money out of the pockets of the oligarchs and thus the pockets of the politicians’ family members. 

Now we are to believe that Joe Biden and his family weren’t on the take, no not at all.  Biden was actually a champion of cleaning up corruption in Ukraine.  Bullshit.  The oligarch’s have tried every trick in the book to remove Trump from office short of assassination.  Is assassination now on the oligarch’s table since their Manchurian candidate is a doddering old fool who keeps revealing the true hands steering the American Titanic?  From Zero Hedge:

Excerpt:

Dead President Walking?

I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I’m a little worried about Donald Trump. I’m worried he may be on the verge of a sudden, major heart attack, or a stroke, or a fatal golfing accident. Food poisoning is another possibility.  Or he could overdose on prescription medication.  A tanning bed mishap is not out of the question. 

He could accidentally hang himself during autoerotic asphyxiation, or get shot by a lone-wolf white supremacist terrorist trying to start the RaHoWa.  The Russians could spray him with that Novichok perfume.  There are any number of ways he could snuff it.

I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but the Resistance is running out of non-lethal options for removing Donald Trump from office.  Here they are, in no particular order...

RESISTANCE NON-LETHAL OPTION NO. 1

Resistance Non-Lethal Option No. 1 is winning the 2020 election, which isn’t looking very promising. The Democratic Party is in shambles. According to the polls, their current front-runner is a senile, hair-sniffing, finger-sucking freak who never met a credit card company or a healthcare lobbyist he didn’t like, and who rivals even Donald Trump when it comes to incoherent babbling.

Yes, that’s right, folks, it’s “Smilin’ Joe” Biden, vanquisher of the razor-wielding, swimming-pool-gangster “Corn Pop” to the rescue!

As far as I’ve been able to gather, the plan is for Joe to out-“crazy” Trump (and thus win back the “bull goose loony” demographic) by going completely off his medication and having a series of scary-looking petit mal seizures on national television.

That is, unless the impossible happens, and Biden is vanquished by Bernie Sanders (a/k/a “The Magic Socialist”), who Democratic Party bigwigs would sooner publicly immolate themselves than nominate, and who the corporate media are already accusing of being a lying, sexist. communist, crypto-Trump-loving, Jew-hating Jew.

Sanders, it seems, has gone totally “native.”  He’s out there, in the heart of the American darkness, like a geriatric Colonel Kurz, operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct.

According to the latest reconnaissance, he is building another “revolutionary” army of fanatical, doped-up, hacky-sacking “socialists” that he will lead into the convention in July and deliver to Biden, or Elizabeth Warren, or whichever soulless corporate puppet the party honchos eventually nominate, and then obsequiously stump for them for the next five months. (Or, who knows, maybe Michael Bloomberg will put the Democrats out of their misery and just buy the party and nominate himself.)

The “Crush Bernie” movement is just getting started, but you can tell the Resistance isn’t screwing around. Hillary Clinton just officially launched her national “Nobody Likes Bernie” campaign at the star-studded 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Influential Jewish journalists like Bari Weiss and Jeffrey Goldberg, and Ronald Lauder’s newly-founded Anti-Semitism Accountability Project, have been Hitlerizing him, or, rather, Corbynizing him.

Obama has promised to “stop him,” if necessary.

MSNBC anchor Joy Reid brought on a professional “body language expert” to phrenologize Sanders “live” on the air … and, as I said, they’re just getting started.  In any event, no matter who they nominate, they have no chance of winning in November.  How could they, given the total stranglehold the Russians now have on American democracy?..

NON-LETHAL OPTION NO. 2

Resistance Non-Lethal Option No. 2 is, of course, the current impeachment circus. I don’t even know where to start with this one.

After three and a half years of corporate-media-manufactured mass hysteria and Intelligence Community propaganda designed to convince the American public that Donald Trump is a “Russian asset” (and possibly Putin’s homosexual lover) and also literally the Resurrection of Hitler, the Democrats are trying to impeach the man for something that most Americans either (a) believe is common practice among members of the political class, (b) don’t entirely understand, or (c) do, but don’t give a shit about.

Seriously, it’s like they held a contest to see if anyone could think of something that would out-anticlimax the Mueller report, and this is what the winner came up with … an over-acted, sanctimonious snooze-fest, the stakes of which could not possibly be lower.

Sure, the corporate media are doing their best to cover every twist and turn of the “drama” as if the fate of democracy were hanging in the balance, but everybody knows it’s a joke … or, all right, almost everybody.

So we’re down to...

NON-LETHAL OPTION NO. 3

Resistance Non-Lethal Option No. 3 is to whip up so much mass hysteria over “white supremacist terrorism,” “the sudden resurgence of anti-Semitism,” “the imminent Putin-Nazi Apocalypse” (which has been imminent since the summer of 2016), and other iterations of Hitler hysteria, that people can’t really even think anymore, and will join the Resistance and pour into the streets in their millions and demand Trump resign.

The Resistance has been at this for over three years now, i.e., casting the neo-Nazi subculture that has always been part of the political landscape as a powerful, worldwide fascist movement that is going to rise up any minute and Hitlerize the entire Western world.  It isn’t working. People aren’t buying it. OK, sure, some liberals are still buying it. But most people aren’t, not anymore.

For example, the hysteria leading up to the recent gun rights rally in Richmond, which according to the corporate media had been infiltrated by “Nazi terrorists” who were plotting to publicly mass murder each other in a desperate attempt to finally launch the “Boogaloo,” or the “RaHoWa” … or whatever.

Apparently, a few days before the rally, the FBI got some neo-Nazis to agree to conspire to murder some people and then violently overthrow the U.S. government with their arsenal of homemade machine guns.  These neo-Nazi masterminds were allegedly members of “the Base,” i.e., one of these little neo-Nazi clubs that we’re all supposed to live in mortal fear of now … this one, as it turns out, run by a former (and possibly current) “security contractor.”

The governor declared a state of emergency. Anti-Terror forces were put on alert. A “no-fly zone” was implemented, presumably to prevent the Russians from dropping a division of Putin-Nazi paratroopers onto the lawn of the Capitol. The corporate media warned that it was probably going to be a bloodbath.

Well, the day came and went, and no Boogaloo. No bloodbath. No Putin-Nazi Apocalypse. Just a lot of gun owners and militia types parading around with their guns and gear. Antifa didn’t even show up this time … or, rather, the few “anti-fascists” that did were also armed and supporting the rally.

And that’s the problem with Non-Lethal Option No. 3... there are only so many times you can have the corporate media scream, “THE NAZIS ARE COMING!” and then not produce any actual Nazis. The Resistance has exceeded that allotment.

Which brings me back to where I started, and my concerns about Donald Trump, and his health, and the assorted tragic accidents that could befall him before we get to November. Because, unless you believe that the Intelligence Community (and the transnational empire it is part and parcel of) is prepared to sit by and allow Donald Trump to serve another four years as president … well, I wouldn’t be sharing any Diet Cokes or riding in any motorcades with him.

I don’t know, maybe I’ve been reading too much of that “conspiracy theory” stuff on the Internet, but Senator Schumer’s warning to Trump back in 2017 keeps playing in my head:  Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Relax, folks. I’m just kidding, of course. The Intelligence Community would never dream of doing anything … you know, illegal.  The Community doesn’t assassinate people, and commit all sorts of other atrocities.  That’s just a thing they do in the movies.

In reality, they would never assassinate a president, especially not one they had been telling everyone is a “Russian asset,” and “literally Hitler,” and a “traitor,” and a “dictator,” for over three years.  OK, those are pretty harsh words, but they probably don’t really mean all that stuff. Odds are, they’re just horsing around.  They’re a notorious bunch of jokesters, those CIA guys.

Yes folks, this impeachment snore is just the latest desperate Hail Mary Pass to promote corrupt oligarchs’ Manchurian Candidate Joe Biden for president.  Like our assassinated President Franklin D. Roosevelt said before his untimely death “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”  President Donald J. Trump would be wise to get a food taster lest he meet the fate of FDR.

It’s all about the Benjamins - Weapons makers behind Ukraine, Impeachment and Assassination of Soleimani

US foreign policies are a vast sales-promotion scheme, for America’s billionaires, who crave to control Russia, above all...  How much more can the world take?  How much death and destruction is enough?  What level of evil and destruction, is enough?  Do we need more?  How much more money do the top 1% need?  How many billions will it take?  ~ Veterans Today

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. ~ Major General Smedley Butler USMC in his speech delivered in 1933

It’s all about the Benjamins baby.  The 911 attacks, the endless regime change wars, the impeachment of Donald Trump, the assassination of Soleimani, it’s all about the Benjamins baby.  The United States government and all its cabinets serve only the interests of Wall Street’s war industry who then fill the coffers of the politicians and think tanks.  Through insider trading, campaign contributions, under the table payoffs and quid pro quo weapons deals, the interests of the American people are of no concern to politicians of either party.   What is good for America is never a consideration.

While America plunges deeper and deeper into despair due to crushing debt, hopelessness, homelessness, addiction, joblessness, and polluted disrepair, the politicians ignore America’s plight shoveling trillions more into endless regime change wars on behalf of their billionaire Zionist overlords.  America has been continuously lied to by the congressional and media servants of the Defense Industry. 

From Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to almost 20 years of “winning the war in Afghanistan”, from regime change in Libya to the assassination of General Soleimani none of it was to make America safer, to the contrary.  It was all to endanger America providing an excuse to plow trillions annually into the coffers of the weapons industry.  It’s all about the Benjamins baby.  From Strategic Culture:

Excerpt:

New York Times Reveals America’s Weapons-Makers Drive Trump-Impeachment

A remarkably non-propagandistic news-report, in the New York Times, by Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and Mark Mazzetti, included powerful evidence that the impeachment-effort against US President Donald Trump is motivated, in part if not totally, by a desire by US Senators and Representatives — as well as by career employees of the US Departments of Defense, State Department, and other agencies regarding national defense — to increase the sales-volumes of US-made weapons to foreign countries.

Whereas almost all of the contents of that article merely repeat what has already been reported, this article in the Times states repeatedly that boosting corporations such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop-Grumman, has been a major — if not the very top — motivation driving US international relations, and that at least regarding Ukraine, Trump has not been supporting, but has instead been trying to block, those weapons-sales — and creating massive enemies in the US Government as a direct consequence.

The article, issued online on Sunday, December 29th, is titled “Behind the Ukraine Aid Freeze: 84 Days of Conflict and Confusion”, and it quotes many such individuals as saying that President Trump strongly opposed the sale of US weapons to Ukraine, and that,

In an Oval Office meeting on May 23, with Mr. Sondland, Mr. Mulvaney and Mr. Blair in attendance, Mr. Trump batted away assurances that [Ukraine’s current President] Mr. Zelensky was committed to confronting corruption. “They are all corrupt, they are all terrible people,” Mr. Trump said, ACCORDING TO TESTIMONY IN THE IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY.

In other words, Trump, allegedly, said that he didn’t want “terrible people” to be buying, and to receive, US-made weapons (especially not as US aid — FREE OF CHARGE, A GIFT FROM AMERICA’S TAXPAYERS)…

Clearly, the standard line in the US-and-allied media, that the February 2014 overthrow and replacement of Ukraine’s democratically elected Government was a ‘democratic revolution’, instead of a US coup, is based on blatant lies, and THE US-IMPOSED COUP-REGIME THERE IS STILL IN FORCE, AND HAS BEEN PERPETRATING AN ETHNIC CLEANSING in order to be able to remain in power.

In fact, the current Ukrainian President, Volodmyr Zelensky, is the self-described “business partner” of, and was brought to power by, the brutal Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, who helped the ‘former’ “Social Nationalist’ (National Socialist or Nazi) Arsen Avakov, plan and execute on 2 May 2014 the burning-alive inside the Odessa Trade Unions Building, of dozens or perhaps over a hundred people who had been printing and distributing leaflets against the coup.

For the New York Times, in its ’news’-report — even this article that’s less prejudiced than most of mainstream US ’news’-reporting is — to simply presume that Trump had no valid reason for asserting what he did against Ukraine’s present (the Obama-installed) Government of Ukraine, constitutes merely anti-Trump (and pro-Obama) propaganda, on their part, and it would be more appropriate in an editorial or op-ed from them than in an alleged news-article, such as here…

Kurt Volker, the US special representative for Ukraine, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a Tuesday hearing. “I think it’s also important that Ukraine reciprocate with foreign military purchases from us as well, and I know that they intend to do so.”

The assistance comes at a pivotal moment for Ukraine’s newly minted president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a popular comedian who won a landslide victory in April. Zelensky has made ending the Russian-backed insurrection in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region his top political priority…

In other words: Volker was saying that Ukraine’s Government would follow through with America’s war against Russia, next door to Ukraine, and that therefore, US taxpayers should pay for Ukraine’s purchases of US-made weapons, such as from Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

HE WAS SAYING THAT MILKING US TAXPAYERS TO BOOST THOSE US CORPORATIONS’ PROFITS IS GOOD, NOT BAD.

He was saying that Ukraine is on US taxpayers’ dole, as if the Obama-installed, rabidly anti-Russian, Ukrainian Government is a charity-case which is the US Government’s business (and not merely those private stockholders’ business), and that therefore, Trump should continue Obama’s policy toward Ukraine, of using Ukraine in order ultimately to place on Ukraine’s border with Russia, missiles against Moscow, right across that border.              

“THIS IS IN AMERICA’S INTEREST,” MR. BOLTON ARGUED, according to one official briefed on the gathering.

“THIS DEFENSE RELATIONSHIP, WE HAVE GOTTEN SOME REALLY GOOD BENEFITS FROM IT,” MR. ESPER ADDED, noting that most of the money was being spent on military equipment made in the United States.

AMERICA’S WAR AGAINST RUSSIA IS DESIGNED TO ENRICH INVESTORS IN US ‘DEFENSE’-CONTRACTORS.

Isn’t it clear, then, what was actually behind 9/11, and behind America’s invasion of (instead of merely Special-Forces operation regarding) Afghanistan in 2001, and invasions of Iraq in 2003, and of Libya in 2011, and of Syria in 2012-now, etc., and coup against Ukraine in 2014?..

US foreign policies are a vast sales-promotion scheme, for America’s billionaires, who crave to control Russia, above all. Trump won’t buck them. Instead, he’s continuing Obama’s policy on Ukraine.

When is enough, enough?  How much more can the world take?  How much death and destruction is enough?  What level of evil and destruction, is enough?  Do we need more?  How much more money do the top 1% need?  How many billions will it take? 

When is enough, enough indeed?  Soleimani was assassinated to stop Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia peace talks which would put a dent into the extremely grotesque profits of the weapons manufacturers, thus putting a dent in the cash flow to think tanks and members of congress. 

Congress and the Defense Industry are not willing to cede control of Iraq back to the Iraqi people, there’s too much money to be made.  The US has done nothing to repair the war damage in Iraq and has no interest in doing so.  For the weapons manufacturers, Iraq is a springboard to war in Iran and to continue forever wars of regime change.  From The Grayzone:

Excerpt:

Iraqi PM reveals Soleimani was on peace mission when assassinated, exploding Trump’s lie of ‘imminent attacks’

The Trump administration claimed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was planning “imminent attacks” on US interests when it assassinated him. That lie was just destroyed, but not before countless corporate media outlets transmitted it to the public.

Desperate to justify the US drone assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted that Washington had made an “intelligence-based assessment” that Soleimani was “actively planning in the region” to attack American interests before he was killed.

President Donald Trump justified his fateful decision to kill the Iranian general in even more explicit language, declaring that Soleimani was planning “imminent attacks” on US diplomatic facilities and personnel across the Middle East.

“We took action last night to stop a war,” Trump claimed. “We did not take action to start a war.”

Trump’s dubious rationale for an indisputably criminal assassination has been repeated widely across corporate media networks, and often without any skepticism or debate.  At a January 3 State Department briefing, where reporters finally got the chance to demand evidence for the claim of an “imminent” threat, one US official erupted in anger.

“Jesus, do we have to explain why we do these things?” he barked at the press.

Two days later, when Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi addressed his country’s parliament, Trump’s justification for killing Soleimani was exposed as a cynical lie.   According to Abdul-Mahdi, he had planned to meet Soleimani on the morning the general was killed to discuss a DIPLOMATIC RAPPROACHMENT THAT IRAQ WAS BROKERING BETWEEN IRAN AND SAUDI ARABIA.

Abdul-Mahdi said that Trump personally thanked him for the efforts, even as he was planning the hit on Soleimani – thus creating the impression that the Iranian general was safe to travel to Baghdad…

Mustafa Salim

@Mustafa_salimb

“I was supposed to meet Soleimani at the morning the day he was killed, he came to deliver me a message from Iran responding to the message we delivered from Saudi to Iran” Iraqi PM said.

8:02 AM - Jan 5, 2020 · Iraq

SOLEIMANI HAD ARRIVED IN BAGHDAD NOT TO PLAN ATTACKS ON AMERICAN TARGETS, BUT TO COORDINATE DE-ESCALATION WITH SAUDI ARABIA. Indeed, he was killed while on an actual peace mission that could have created political distance between the Gulf monarchy and members of the US-led anti-Iran axis like Israel.

The catastrophic results of Soleimani’s killing recall the Obama administration’s 2016 assassination of Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur, a Taliban leader who was eager to negotiate a peaceful end to the US occupation of Afghanistan. Mansur’s death wound up empowering hardline figures in the Taliban who favored a total military victory over the US and triggered an uptick in violence across the country, dooming hopes for a negotiated exit.

Since Soleimani’s assassination, Iraq’s parliament has voted to expel all US troops from the country and Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has sworn to exact a “severe revenge” on the “the criminals who have stained their hands with [Soleimani’s] and the other martyrs’ blood…” 

Trump, for his part, tweeted a litany of gangster-like threats, promising to destroy Iranian cultural sites if it retaliated and pledging to sanction Iraq “like they’ve never been before” if it ousted US troops…

Trump’s treacherous assassination has brought the US closer to war than ever before against a country more militarily potent than any adversary it has faced since the Korean War. And as with the failed US invasion of Iraq, Washington’s casus belli for triggering this conflict was based on falsified intelligence SOLD TO AMERICANS BY ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS, AND ON A PLIANT BELTWAY MEDIA ACTING AS THEIR MEGAPHONE.

With its claim of “imminent attacks,” the Trump administration has essentially re-mixed Condoleeza Rice’s 2003 warning that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Back then, the US attacked a sovereign state to rid it of WMD that did not exist. This time, it killed the second-most important Iranian official to prevent a killing spree that was not on the way. AND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS KNEW THEY WERE LYING.

In fact, Pompeo pitched assassinating Soleimani to Trump several months ago, well before any attacks were “imminent.” And in the wake of the general’s killing, a US official revealed to the New York Times that the NSA had intercepted “communications the United States had between Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and General Suleimani showing that the ayatollah had not yet approved any plans by the general for an attack.”

But the preponderance of evidence exposing Trump’s basis for killing Soleimani as a titanic lie has not generated the same level of media interest as the lie itself…

No president in recent history has been despised more viscerally by the Beltway press corps than Trump. Nearly everything he says is met with disdain and suspicion, even when he is telling the truth.  But when Trump and his administration attempt to lie the public into war against a designated evildoer, a swath of the corporate media responds with reflexive trust, then shrugs when the lie is exposed in broad daylight.

It’s all about the Benjamins baby.  If there is any doubt that the illegal assassination of Soleimani was based on starting World War III for Wall Street and the weapons industry then look at Wall Street’s reaction.  From Mint Press:

Excerpt:

Military Contractors Raytheon, Lockheed Martin See Stock Prices Soar Amid Iran Crisis 

War. Motown singer Edwin Starr claimed it was nothing but a heartbreaker and good news only for the undertaker. But another group rubbing their hands at increased tensions with Iran are military contractors, who saw their stock prices soar at the increased chance of conflict.

Lockheed Martin, famous for its fighter planes, helicopters and missiles, saw its stock price spike to over $416, a jump of seven percent almost overnight. Other defense corporations like Raytheon and General Dynamics saw similar increases in their companies’ value. Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman saw a nine percent rise in its share price, as the stock market rushed to buy a piece of a highly profitable company.

On January 3, the United States carried out a successful assassination attempt of Lt. General Qassem Soleimani via drone, as the Iranian officer and statesman left Baghdad airport to join a peace mission between Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi revealed that President Trump had personally thanked him for organizing peace efforts, even as he was planning the assassination attempt, giving him the mistaken belief that the U.S. gave its blessing to the event and would not attack the Iranian General.

Soleimani, respected and admired as a capable and dynamic soldier, was widely considered to be one of the most powerful and influential men in Iran behind Ayatollah Khamenei. The move is almost universally expected to increase tensions in the Middle East, prompting potential wars or other “chaos…”

However, economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic Policy Research Dean Baker pointed out that Lockheed Martin’s stock went up by over two percent and Northrop Grumman by nearly four percent on Thursday, THE DAY BEFORE SOLEIMANI’S KILLING.

“Looks like a lot of people should go to jail,” he remarked, suggesting THERE WAS SOME SERIOUS INSIDER TRADING AFOOT. (MintPress recently spoke to Baker about how pharmaceutical corporations are withholding life saving drugs from the public for profit...)

THE BIGGEST BENEFICIARIES OF AN UNFAIR STOCK MARKET ARE OFTEN POLITICIANS, whose portfolios, for decades, have done far better than is statistically plausible. Using the financial disclosures of politicians, Professor Alan Ziobrowski of Georgia State University found that members of the House earn “abnormal returns” on their stocks, outperforming the market by six percentage points.

Senators, in higher office than House members, perform even better, “showing some of the highest excess returns ever recorded over a long period of time, significantly outperforming even hedge fund managers,” in Ziobrowski’s study’s words. “IT’S NOT RATIONAL TO ASSUME THAT THEY ARE JUST PLAIN DUMB-LUCKY,” he concluded. In the five years to 1998, senators’ stock portfolios beat the market by an average of 12 percent a year.

The global wave of right-wing populism has been very good for weapons producers. Despite presenting himself as an antiwar candidate, Trump has greatly increased the military budget and expanded the U.S. role in Yemen. More than half of all discretionary spending goes to the military, with America spending almost as much on arms as the rest of the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

The president often likes to remind the country that the stock market is at an all time high. Military contractors are among the best performing of those; Yahoo! Finance notes that if you had bought Northrop Grumman stock five years ago, you would have seen a 146 percent gain today. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, nine of the ten largest weapons manufacturers saw their stock prices increase immediately after Conservative Boris Johnson defeated socialist antiwar candidate Jeremy Corbyn in December’s General Election.

The recent rocketing of military contractors’ stock values highlights the growing contrast between the profit motive of capitalism and human survival. So often, what is bad news for the world is good news for the military-industrial complex.

It’s all about the Benjamins baby.  More than half of discretionary spending goes to the military and by attrition directly into the pockets of the members of congress.  No wonder the members of congress approve a trillion dollars a year for military spending.  Members of congress make no money off of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, infrastructure spending, education spending, etc.  What interest do they have in funding programs to promote human dignity and general well-being? 

Where is the fourth estate?  Why are the media not asking tough questions, demanding iron clad proof before sending our troops to die in some god-forsaken country?  Where are the Pentagon Papers?  Where is Deep Throat?  Oh yeah, todays’ Pentagon Papers are called the Afghanistan Papers.  From the Guardian:

Excerpt:

Afghanistan papers reveal US public were misled about unwinnable war

Interviews with key insiders reveal damning verdict on conflict that cost 2,300 US lives

Hundreds of confidential interviews with key figures involved in prosecuting the 18-year US war in Afghanistan have revealed that the US public has been consistently misled about an unwinnable conflict.

Transcripts of the interviews, published by the Washington Post after a three-year legal battle, were collected for a Lessons Learned project by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), a federal agency whose main task is eliminating corruption and inefficiency in the US war effort.

The 2,000 pages of documents reveal the bleak and unvarnished views of many insiders in a war THAT HAS COST $1TN (£760BN) AND KILLED MORE THAN 2,300 US SERVICEMEN AND WOMEN, WITH MORE THAN 20,000 INJURED. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have died in the conflict.

The documents have echoes of the Pentagon Papers – the US military’s secret history of the Vietnam war that were leaked in 1971 and told a similarly troubling story of the cover-up of military failure.

Negotiations are taking place between the Trump administration and the Taliban as the US debates whether to withdraw 13,000 troops who remain in Afghanistan.  The interviews were collected, beginning in 2014, in addition to Sigar’s regular audits to identify what could be learned from successive policy failures in Afghanistan.

While many of the failures of the war in Afghanistan have been exposed by Sigar’s work, often in highly technical reports, the cache of interviews offers an easily accessible fly-on-the-wall account.  In his own damning intervention John Sopko, the head of Sigar, told the paper the assessments contained in the project suggested that “the American people have constantly been lied to”.

Two major claims in the documents are that US officials manipulated statistics to suggest to the American public that the war was being won and that successive administrations turned a blind eye to widespread corruption among Afghan officials, allowing the theft of US aid with impunity…

In one scathing assessment Douglas Lute, a lieutenant general who served as the White House Afghan war tsar during the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations, told interviewers in 2015: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan – we didn’t know what we were doing.”

Speaking frankly, like other interviewees, on the understanding that what he was saying at the time was confidential, he added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.  “If the American people knew THE MAGNITUDE OF THIS DYSFUNCTION … 2,400 LIVES LOST.”

In another interview Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy Seal and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, said: “WHAT DID WE GET FOR THIS $1TN EFFORT? WAS IT WORTH $1TN?”  “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan...”

“What did we get for this $1tn effort and was it worth $1tn?” Indeed.  Is America safer?  Is Afghanistan better off than before?  Why are the media nothing more than war cheerleaders?  The recent revelations that the Pentagon knew the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable and lied about it to prolong the wars was received a yawn from the corporate media.  Why?  From The Intercept:

Excerpt:

TV PUNDITS PRAISING SULEIMANI ASSASSINATION NEGLECT TO DISCLOSE TIES TO ARMS INDUSTRY

SINCE FRIDAY, a loud chorus of voices has appeared in the media to celebrate President Donald Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a move that has sparked renewed tension in the Middle East, a new deployment of U.S. forces, and predictions of increased military spending.

Many of the pundits who appeared on national television or were quoted in major publications to praise the president’s actions have undisclosed ties to the defense industry — the only domestic industry that stands to gain from increased violence.

Jack Keane, a retired Army general, appeared on Fox News and NPR over the last three days to praise Trump for the strike on Suleimani. “The president acted responsibly,” Keane said during an appearance with Fox News host Lou Dobbs. “It should have happened a long time ago.” Keane has worked for military companies, including General Dynamics and Blackwater, and currently serves as a partner at SCP Partners, a venture capital firm that invests in defense contractors.

Van Hipp, chair of the lobbying firm American Defense International, which represents more than two dozen defense contractors — including Raytheon, Palantir, and General Atomics, the manufacturer of the MQ-9 Reaper drone used in the Suleimani slaying — published an opinion column on Fox News’s website praising Trump and suggesting increased pressure on the Iranian government.

David Petraeus, the retired general who once commanded U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, was quoted by multiple outlets in support of the slaying. “This is a very significant effort to reestablish deterrence,” he told Foreign Policy. On Public Radio International, Petraeus declared that “this particular episode has been fairly impressively handled,” and praised the Trump administration for moving “to shore up our defenses and our offensive capabilities.” He also appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Petraeus, notably, works for Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Co., the investment firm with holdings in several major defense contractors that is reportedly moving to “build up its defense portfolio at a time when military budgets are skyrocketing.”

John Negroponte, a former State Department official who now serves as vice chair of the defense and aerospace lobbying firm McLarty Associates, appeared on Fox News to dispute the claim by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., that the strike represented a threat of war. “I think it’s an act of self-defense,” countered Negroponte.

Jeh Johnson, former Homeland Security secretary in the Obama administration, appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to offer measured support, countering progressive critics who have claimed that the strikes lacked legal and congressional authorization…

Johnson joined the board of directors of Lockheed Martin, one of the largest defense contractors in the world, in 2017. The part-time position pays him $310,000 a year in cash and stock awards, according to disclosures. NONE OF THE DEFENSE CONTRACTING TIES WERE DISCLOSED ON AIR FOR KEANE, HIPP, NEGROPONTE, PETRAEUS, OR JOHNSON…

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, stock prices for major defense contractors soared on the expectation of further conflict. The Trump administration has won more than $130 billion in additional Pentagon spending, but analysts expect a renewed push for even greater levels of weapons spending.

One key area for military growth in government defense spending could be the Overseas Contingency Operations fund, a special account used to fund wartime operations. The OCO had been largely frozen in place and expected to flatline in the 2021 budget.

The OCO account “was likely on a lower trajectory over the next several years. We doubt that’s the case now,” the Cowen Group’s Roman Schweizer wrote in a memo to investors on Friday. “The U.S. will likely increase deployments of forces to the region in coming weeks and could make additional strikes depending on Iran’s response.”

It’s not the first time defense contractor pundits have failed to disclose their vested stake in the military policies they advocate…  Keane, for instance, was tapped by the contractor AM General to pressure lawmakers to support a plan to purchase new Humvee vehicles from the company rather than refurbish older models.

Former military leaders play a decisive role in shaping public opinion around military escalation. In the buildup to the Iraq War, the Pentagon maintained a secret effort to deploy former generals and other high-ranking officials on television news programs to drum up support for the invasion. The New York Times, which reported on the communications campaign, noted that the military pundits maintained financial ties to defense contractors, a financial stake in the war policies they sought to promote.

Yes folks, it’s all about the Benjamins.  Whether it was the 911 attacks, the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, the overthrow of the Libya government, the death squads currently marauding across South America, the overthrow of the government of Ukraine, the impeachment of President Trump or the illegal Assassination of General Soleimani or the endless regime change wars, it’s all about the Benjamins.  When will the American people ever learn?  It’s all about the Benjamins.