Gawd how much more bat shit crazy can it get in America? America is in worse shape than it has ever been. Everything has been destroyed and it just keeps getting worse. The absolute destruction has been taking place since our inception, but the complete collapse started on December 12, 2000 when five corrupt justices on the U.S. Supreme Court launched a domestic terror attack on America and installed George W. Bush as president.
That day should lie in infamy and those justices should go
down in history as the most vile of traitors ever. But they didn’t do it alone, they had
co-conspirators from both parties in the United States Senate.
From Charles Hugh Smith:
This is why denormalization is an extinction event for much of our high-cost, high-complexity, heavily regulated economy.
With this cheery wind at their backs, conventional pundits are predicting super-rebounds in auto sales and other consumption as consumers weary of Covid-19 and anxious to blow their recent savings borrow and spend like no tomorrow.
As for the 30+ million unemployed--they don't matter. Conventional analysts write them off because they weren't big drivers of "growth" anyways--they didn't have big, secure salaries and ample wealth/credit lines.
What this happy confidence in
near-infinite money-printing and V-shaped spending orgies overlooks is what
I've termed denormalization, an
implosion of the Old Normal so complete that the expected minor adjustment to a
New Normal is no longer possible.
THE BAT SHIT CRAZY PLAN TO PRIVATIZE THE POST OFFICE
Taibbi: The Press That Cried Wolf
Suddenly, the Postal Service is the
biggest story in America. Donald Trump’s latest “assault on our democracy”
jockeyed for the lead theme on the first night of the virtual Democratic
National Convention. Multiple speakers
used the phrase “defund the post office” to describe efforts by Postmaster
General Louis DeJoy – the latest in a long line of Trump acolytes occupying the
Oil Can Harry role in news coverage – to pull a seeming postal slowdown.
Hashtags like #SaveThePostOffice are flying around social media.
John Ratzenberger, the actor who played beer-drinking mailman Cliff Clavin on
Cheers, recorded an Instagram video on behalf of the beleaguered service.
Actress Jamie Lee Curtis described seeing a man wearing a “red cap” with “white
letters” towing a postal truck away made her wonder:
Conspiracy? Outright attempt at stealing the election by denying the
access of the USPS?
Pictures of mailboxes being moved or warehoused behind fencing rocketed
around the Internet. Another tweet making the rounds looked like a graphic
made by the postal workers’ union, and was retweeted by the likes of Hillary
Clinton:
The graphic wasn’t made by the
postal union, but whatever. The post office’s journey from America’s most
serially-ignored public institution to subject of a massive international
sympathy campaign – the U.S.P.S. is
currently the world’s largest baby trapped at the bottom of the world’s largest
well – is the latest bizarro development of the Trump years, when news coverage has devolved into a
never-ending procession of moral panics, some real, some less so. Which is
this?
In April, Trump called the U.S.P.S. a “joke” and tied a $10 billion
emergency loan to a request that the it quadruple prices on packages,
ostensibly as a way of sticking it to Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and the “fake
news” Washington Post. I hate Bezos as much as the next red-blooded American,
but Trump’s comments ended up mostly serving as kindling for a later national
wig-out.
On May 9th, the Postal Service’s
Board of Governors announced that DeJoy, the CEO of a company called New Breed
Logistics and a major Trump donor, would become the new Postmaster General.
Almost immediately, DeJoy began implementing a series of moves that seemed
designed to reduce the efficiency of the post office, from removing 20% of
letter sorting machines to moving or removing large quantities of mailboxes. Then on July 29th, the U.S.P.S. appears to
have sent letter to multiple states warning that mail-in ballots might not be
received on time to be counted, because the states’ deadlines are incompatible
with the postal service’s “delivery standards.”
This was followed by Trump going on Fox and announcing he was unwilling
to spend money to keep funding the Post Office as part of a Covid-19 relief
package, saying, “They want $25 billion… if they don't get [it], that means
you can't have universal mail-in voting because you they're not equipped to
have it."
Even by Trumpian standards, this was a semi-crazy thing to say out
loud. It gave outlets like The Week the ammo to say Trump was “sandbagging
the Post Office to prevent Americans from voting by mail.” The logic is simple:
about 72 percent of Democrats say they are at least somewhat likely to vote by
mail, compared to 22 percent of Republicans. A slowdown of the post office
means a torpedo in the hull of the Biden campaign.
By this week, images of mailboxes became synonymous with voter
suppression, and the postal service supplanted the Muslim ban, “kids in cages,”
Muellermania, the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco, the campaign to save the job of Jeff
Sessions, the Ukraine whistleblower, and a dozen other episodes to become the
latest all-consuming Media Fire That Never Dies.
In the Trump years, the news
has been covered as an ongoing emergency, borrowing from techniques
pioneered by Fox News and perfected through episodes like Benghazi. That
story was blown into a frenzy for years, as Fox created the impression that
litigating every detail of the Libyan mission narrative was at least 95% of
what the average person should be caring about at any given moment.
CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and
the Washington Post are now following the same script with the Trump panics.
The pattern is consistent. Day one
involves spectacular claims of corruption. By day two, placard-bearing
protesters are hitting the streets (“You can’t fire the truth!” a protester in
Times Square proclaimed in the Sessions affair), celebrities are taping video
appeals, and experts are quoted suggesting Trump is already guilty of crime: OPEN
TREASON in Helsinki, “bribery” in Ukraine, or in this case, election
interference (SOME ARE ALREADY SPECULATING THAT TRUMP COULD GET A
YEAR FOR THE MAIL SLOWDOWN).
Almost always, by day three or four, key claims are walked back: maybe
there was no direct “promise” to a foreign leader, or the CIA doesn’t have
“direct evidence” of Russian bounties, or viral photos of children in cages at
the border were from 2014, not 2017. By then it doesn’t matter. A panic is
a panic, and there are only two reportable angles in today’s America, total
guilt and total innocence. Even when the balance of the information would still
look bad or very bad for Trump, news outlets commit to leaving out important
background, so as not to complicate the audience response.
That’s the situation with this
story, where the postal slowdown is probably more serious than other Trump
scandals, but people pushing it are also
not anxious to remind readers of their own histories on the issue.
Take the New York Times, currently cranking out about a feature an hour about the U.S.P.S. Paul Krugman is now telling us “The Postal Service facilitates citizen inclusion. That’s why Trump hates it.” Apparently, until recently, all decent Americans had bottomless affection for the communal spirit of the Postal Service and supported it without hesitation. Yet in April, 2012, in the middle of the Obama presidency, the Times ran a very different house editorial.
The paper argued mounting losses
necessitated swift action to reduce costs.
The Times worried that “lawmakers in both houses” would “procrastinate as
usual,” and blasted the Senate for devising a bill that “timorously aims at
part-time ‘downsizing,’ not closing, lightly used post offices.” The paper
added that decreased revenue thanks to email could mean losses of “more than
$20 billion a year by 2016,” and hoped that, so long as “courage trumps
procrastination,” the U.S.P.S. could be granted the “flexibility of a modern
business.”
If you look back, you’ll find the
overwhelming consensus in both the Bush and Obama years
was that a fully-staffed post office was a money pit, and “flexibility” was
needed to allow the service to budget-slash its way back to relevance in the
Internet age…
During the Bush years, the U.S.P.S. was put on the “high risk” list by
the General Accounting Office, headed at the time by a future Pete Peterson
foundation CEO named David Walker who would later come out in favor of
privatizing the post office. The GAO recommended cuts and other measures to
address the “rapidly deteriorating” financial situation of the U.S.P.S.
But when an analysis by the Office
of Personnel Management was released in November, 2002, it turned out the
U.S.P.S. had a “more positive picture” than was believed. The U.S.P.S. was massively over-paying into its retirement fund, headed
for a $70 billion surplus. Then in 2003 the Postal Pension Funding
Reform Act was passed, which among other things forced the U.S.P.S. to pay the
pension obligations of employees who had prior military service.
A few years after that, in 2006, the “Postal Accountability and
Enhancement Act” passed with overwhelming support in both houses, forcing a
series of incredible changes, the biggest being a requirement that the U.S.P.S.
fully fund 75 years worth of benefits for its employees. The provision cost
$5.5 billion per year and was unique among government agencies. “No one prefunds at more than 30%,” said
Anthony Vegliante, the service's executive vice president, at the time.
The bill also prevented the
post office from offering “nonpostal services” as a way to compete financially.
This barred it from establishing a postal banking service, but also
nixed creative ideas like Internet cafes, copy services, notaries, even
allowing postal workers to offer to wrap Christmas presents. Coupled with the pre-funding benefit
mandate and other pension changes, this paralyzed the post office financially,
making it look ripe for reform.
By 2012, those took the form of calls for the U.S.P.S. to eliminate
3,700 post offices (a first step toward eventually closing as many as 15,000)
and 250 mail processing centers. Sanders, along with other Senators with
large rural constituencies like Jon Tester and Claire McCaskill, managed to
change the bill and save a lot of the mail processing centers. The Senate that
year also cut the amount of required pre-funding for benefits and began
refunding the U.S.P.S. for about $11 billion in overpayment for retirement
costs.
A few years after that, in 2015,
the Post Office Inspector General issued a blistering report about CBRE, the
company that had served as sole real estate broker to the U.S.P.S. from 2011
on. The report found that CBRE had been
selling and/or leasing post office properties at below-market prices, often to
clients of CBRE – a company chaired by
Richard Blum, the husband of California Senator Dianne Feinstein. This
chronic problem had a financial impact on the Postal Service, and would have
become a much bigger problem had the U.S.P.S. been forced earlier on to sell
off a massive quantity of infrastructure through that broker, as originally
hoped.
The thread running through all of these stories was that panic over the
financial condition of the U.S.P.S. was often a significantly artificial
narrative, caused by a bipartisan mix of stupidity, greed, and corruption.
This high-functioning civil service organization, which provided tremendous
value to the public through everything from subsidized news deliveries in the
Pony Express years to the well-maintained public meeting places built in remote
rural locations, HAS NOT HAD REAL
BACKERS IN EITHER PARTY FOR MOST OF THE LAST THIRTY OR FORTY YEARS.
None of this means the Trump-DeJoy
story isn’t serious. It just means that Trump is not the first person to try to
gut the U.S. Postal Service. Going back
decades, it’s been stuck with impossible funding mandates, used as a piggy bank
by both parties in congress (which refused to let it stop making massive
retirement overpayments for fear of the “adverse” impact on the federal budget),
ARTIFICIALLY
PREVENTED FROM EXPANDING OR INNOVATING BY LOBBYISTS, AND RIPPED OFF BY
CONNECTED CONTRACTORS.
Combine that with the maddening sloppiness of these panic stories – one
wild report after another of mailboxes ripped from the streets “right before
our eyes” in a “plan to steal the election” turns out later to be another old
photo or a shot of a routine maintenance operation – and it becomes
increasingly difficult for nonpartisan news audiences to know what they’re
dealing with.
Is this unprecedented corruption,
something a little worse than normal, or just the usual undisguised? If press outlets never dial back
excesses, we may miss it when we’re actually supposed to panic.
Yes, all the hoopla about the Post Office is just another
media driven, bat shit nuts, panic inducing scheme to divert the American
people’s attention away from the great heist that is currently going on.
BAT SHIT CRAZY COVID-19 CRONYISM:
From Andrew Dickens
Excerpt:
Covid-19 hasn’t been about capitalism or socialism, it’s been about
crapitalism and cronyism as corrupt elites destroy lives
Governments are dishing out lucrative Covid-related contracts to their
woefully underqualified pals. As Johnson, Trump et al waste taxpayers’
money, their cronyism and incompetence is costing lives and livelihoods.
In African or South American
countries, they’d call it corruption. In
countries like the UK and the US, however, it’s called ‘networking.’ Scratch
the right back, kiss the right arse, go to the right school, and life gets
a lot easier and more lucrative, often thanks to a hefty wedge of public money.
Even now, despite – in fact because
of – the Covid-19 pandemic that has torn through the planet, wrecking lives and
economies, the leaders of these
countries have still been dishing out power and public cash to their hapless
besties.
Being bent isn’t new, of course.
It’s their thing. But when the crisis dropped its gargantuan banana skin in
front of every government and industry on the planet, with the stakes so high
and the scrutiny so forensic (even when they point at people in dinghies to
distract us), you’d have thought they’d
have changed tack. Perhaps not ‘networked’ things quite so much, at least for a
bit.
Instead, they’ve networked the
living daylights out of them.
Capitalism or socialism?’ and
whether ostensibly pro-market governments have suddenly gone all Trot by handing out billions to keep their
sinking ships from exploding instead, the only isms really in play are cronyism
and crapitalism (I made that up and am very proud).
It’s jobs for the boys (or girls)
as usual, experience and talent not
required.
More stories emerged this week of
how the UK government led by Boris
Johnson – a man whose entire life and career is based on who he knows rather
than what he knows – has used catastrophe to grease the palms of its pals.
First, it announced that Public
Health England, the executive body whose
aim is to ‘protect and improve the nation’s health and wellbeing,’ is to be
replaced by the National Institute for Health Protection.
Apart from the obvious buck-passing over the British balls-up of a
response to Covid, the exercise seems to be nothing more than giving PHE a new
name and a new boss: Baroness Harding of Winscombe. Or Dido to her friends,
among whom you’ll find former prime minister David Cameron, who gave her the
title (which comfortably beats an iTunes voucher in the gifting stakes).
Dido’s qualifications for the job?
Well, she has kind of worked in the NHS before. She was in charge of the
government’s Covid-19 ‘track-and-trace’ response. The really expensive one that doesn’t work and which is still trying
to develop a functioning app whose first flawed iteration was revealed on May
5.
Her experience away from
government? In 2017, she quit as boss of
telecoms company Talk Talk after a major data breach that led to 157,000
customers having data stolen. But it’s fine, it’s not like she’s working on
an app that will hold loads of personal data…
What else? Oh yes, she’s married to Tory MP John Penrose and has a close relationship with Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
Then we learned, in the light of
the UK’s exams debacle,that the company Public First had been working with the
now much-maligned regulator Ofqual. PublicFirst – a research firm that
“influences public opinion” – is run by two former employees/colleagues of
Michael Gove and Dominic ‘Rebel with a Land Rover’ Cummings. Its contract was awarded without going to tender and the amount of
money involved hasn’t been disclosed. You know, the taxpayers’ money. Our
money.
It was also given £840,000 ($1.1 million) by the Cabinet Office,
notionally run by Gove and actually run by Cummings, to research public opinion
of the government’s coronavirus performance. And another £116,000
($151,925) by the Department of Health and Social Care to find out how it could
“lock in the lessons learned” during the crisis.
I’m pretty sure I could have done
all this just as effectively - and I’d have charged half the price.
Apparently skipping any kind of proper procedure with these contracts
was OK because of “exceptional
circumstances” surrounding Covid. Because in an emergency, why would you
want to get the best people on the job when you can? And there’s so much money
being chucked around, who wouldn’t see their mates right, eh?
Hiring incompetents might be
incompetence by an incompetent administration. It’s so incompetent that its incompetence since being elected – over
Covid, Brexit, migration and pretty much everything else – has baffled and
enraged even the UK’s almost uniquely right-wing and conservative mainstream
press. When Fleet Street turns on a Tory regime, you know they’re in trouble.
Or perhaps it’s a master plan: hire people even worse than you and you
can use them as a scapegoat. And boy does this government love a scapegoat
(see PHE above). Cronyism is a way of
life in the UK. People get jobs through the ‘old school tie’ and the right
handshake. We’re so cronyistic that we even make it part of our law-making
process.
The House of Lords is a cathedral to the notion of rewarding your pals
with power and money. Leaders get to hand out lifelong seats in parliament
to pretty much anyone they like. Johnson’s
latest additions include Evgeny Lebedev, the son of a KGB agent, and Jo
Johnson, the son of Boris Johnson’s dad, aka Boris’s brother.
It’s not a solely British trait, obviously. There are few people
more cronyistic than Donald Trump; a narcissist who has a track record of
screwing his businesses with some choice appointments and promotions of
flatterers, ‘yes men,’ and friends. And
now he gets to screw his country with those same techniques.
Once elected US president, he didn’t hesitate to hand jobs to family
members of varying intelligence – and he’s happily hit the eject button on
anyone daring to question whether the world revolves around him.
His original 17-strong Covid task force, set up in February, contained a whopping four people with scientific or medical backgrounds. He also has a ‘shadow’ task force run by failed businessman and son-in-law of the president, Jared Kushner.
This crack squad of Kushner’s absolutely unqualified pals, according to
the New York Times, “were told to prioritize tips on PPE availability from
political allies and associates of President Trump.” It also allegedly
pulled a much-needed testing programme in order to aid Trump’s election
chances.
The relationship between people and
cronyism is similar to that between the British and the monarchy. We know it’s
wrong but we’re so used to it and there are so many larger and more pressing
issues that it gets a pass. Why worry
about a slow puncture when the engine’s on fire?
The problem now is that the puncture is making us veer off a cliff.
There are no larger or more
pressing issues than the pandemic and its multitude of negative effects on our
lives – and the people in charge, a
tight-knit breed of elitists, are leaving the management of it in the hands of
a few chancers and chums who know how to mutually scratch backs, wear the
right tie or deliver a mirror-like shine to the right boots.
Like I said, if this was happening in Africa or South America, we’d be calling it
corruption. So, to paraphrase, if it looks like corruption, walks like
corruption, and stinks of corruption, then maybe we should call it corruption,
too.
Yes the Covid-19 scamdemic has given cover for more looting
of the treasury not only in the UK but in America. Here in America every crisis ends up with the
Federal Reserve Bank and the Congress bailing out our zombie banks. There is no justice for white collar crime
BAT SHIT CRAZY LEGAL SYSTEM
From Ari Rabin-Havt
Excerpt:
We Need to Throw More Criminal Businesspeople in Jail
White-collar crime is barely
prosecuted in the United States. It’s time for that to change.
Donald Trump loves tweeting the words “law and order,” fully
committed to the idea that communicating to his base with racist dog whistles
at the volume of a jet engine is the best way to win reelection.
Unsurprisingly, his cries of “law and order” don’t apply to
criminals from his own social strata. The Trump administration has been a
boon to white-collar criminals whose lawbreaking is basically being ignored by
its Justice Department. The data is staggering.
Prosecutions over the first three
years of Donald Trump’s term, when compared with Barack Obama’s last twenty
months in office, are down between 26 and 30 percent. Taking into account the Obama Justice Department saw sharp declines in
white-collar prosecutions after 2010, the Trump administration’s inaction
is staggering.
It’s not just prosecutions that are
in decline. Corporate fines have fallen
76 percent over the same period. Additionally, IRS criminal investigations
dropped 36 percent between 2015 and 2019.
After the 2008 financial crisis, the total lack of criminal
accountability for those who crashed the economy was one of the chief
complaints about the Obama Justice Department. Even Ted Kaufman, who was
Joe Biden’s Senate chief of staff for two decades, was appointed to replace him
in the Senate, and currently heads his transition team, was vocal about his
criticisms, writing in 2013,
“‘Have we really gotten to the
point where we are afraid to prosecute a Wall Street executive for stealing
millions while we send some teenager who steals $20 from the corner store to
prison?” He continued, “The fact is, the
behavior of some on Wall Street led directly to millions of Americans losing
their jobs or their houses. We must do all we can to make sure this doesn’t
happen again.”
Kaufman was particularly incensed
with the DOJ’s Criminal Division leader Lanny Breuer’s explanation that “In reaching every charging decision, we
must take into account the effect of an indictment on innocent employees and shareholders, just as we must
take into account the nature of the crimes committed and the pervasiveness of
the misconduct.”
Now in 2020 it is clear that corporate criminals are hard at work
looting this country, and in the Trump Justice Department, they don’t even
need the get-out-of-jail-free card of being too big to jail. His justice
department seems intent on doing nothing.
Writing in the New Republic, former
financial fraud prosecutor Ankush Khardori listed the problems he has seen in
the Trump Justice Department: “Relative disinterest in real-world fraud; an
obliviousness to the sophistication of criminals who many see as nuisances but
who are in fact wreaking widespread havoc; and
high-level ineptitude by previously low-level prosecutors who somehow managed
to rise quickly in recent years. Together, these trends point to the
precarious state of our white-collar criminal enforcement program under the
Trump administration.”
When your boss is a financial criminal, how likely are you to want to
put financial criminals in prison?
Joe Biden on the other hand should
heed the advice of his friend and former chief of staff. Cracking down on
white-collar crime is the right thing to do both morally and legally. The political argument for increased
white-collar crime prosecutions is even stronger.
While tens of millions remain out of work, and millions lose their
health care, housing, and don’t know where their next meal will come from,
wealthy corporations and individuals profited immensely from the generous
corporate bailouts, that they often were not entitled to.
After talking a big game of
prosecuting those who improperly took Paycheck Protection Program loans, the
Trump administration decided to give safe harbor to those who simply returned
the ill-gotten money — no questions asked. But
PPP is just one example of the unscrupulous corporate behavior that has made
headlines lately.
The brazenness of the insider trading surrounding the now “paused”
government loan to Kodak that resulted in a bonanza for those with nonpublic
knowledge was only surprising to those who believe anyone will face actual
criminal accountability for their actions. On the day before the loan was
announced, eight times as many shares in the company were traded than on an
average day. The stock price gained as much as 500 percent after the loan was
made public.
This is exactly the type of behavior insider trading laws were designed
to prevent. Furthermore, the company’s CEO and a board member
purchased thousands of shares while the company was negotiating the loan with
the federal government.
There is a deep understanding that there are two different worlds of
justice. One for the wealthy and well-connected, and one for the poor and
marginalized. So while we denounce the reactionary rhetoric of “law and
order,” we must push the next administration to the pursuit of the criminals,
Trump included, who have been allowed to run amuck.
It is true that the regular, legal
sort of exploitation that is commonplace in the United States is an outrage in
and of interest. But the billionaire
looting that has taken place during this pandemic has gone to new extremes. Making
it clear that it will have consequences is an important political act that can
help us secure more expansive social rights in the future.
As Ted Kaufman put it, “Criminal prosecutions are not just about
punishing the guilty. They also send a message that we as a society will not
allow similar misconduct in the future.”
There will be no prosecutions for insider trading, if there
were almost all of the people in our government would be in prison. The
Bush/Obama Administration were completely beholding to Wall Street
bankers. President Trump has been
hamstrung by the Deep State apparatchiks permanently embedded in the Executive
Branch of government. Their foreign
policy has been bat shit crazy.
BATSHIT CRAZY IRAN POLICY
From Finian Cunningham at Information Clearinghouse:
Excerpt:
US Snapback From Humiliation
American President Donald Trump has darkly warned of something big this
week, vowing to apply “snapback” international sanctions on Iran. It would
be a drastic move and likely to further isolate Washington in the eyes of the
world.
But the real snapback is Washington’s fury after the United States was
subjected to a humiliating diplomatic defeat at the UN Security Council
last week.
A proposal by the US for the United
Nations to extend an arms embargo on Iran was decisively rejected by the
Security Council comprised of five permanent members and 11 non-permanent
members. Russia and China voted against
the resolution while even American allies Britain and France abstained, along
with nine others.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
slammed the rejection as “inexcusable”. Then the day after the defeat,
President Trump expressed his chagrin by saying he would not be attending a
summit proposed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Iran and Middle East
security. Moreover, Trump issued a threatening vow to push ahead with the US forcing the
UN to reimpose sanctions on Iran…
The legal argument by the US side is tenuous at best, if not
ridiculous. Washington claims it is still a participant in the 2015
international nuclear accord along with Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany
and Iran. That is in spite of the fact that the Trump administration pulled out
of the accord in May 2018.
The US position amounts to wanting
its cake and eating it. Washington doesn’t want to work the nuclear deal,
having repudiated it as the “worst ever”, but at the same time, it wants to use provisions contained in the
accord for snapping back sanctions on Iran. That snapback idea, as noted
above, is impelled by the humiliating defeat the US suffered at the Security Council
in not being able to extend an arms embargo on Iran.
Originally imposed by the UN on
Iran in 2007, the embargo is due to expire in October as part of the nuclear
accord, which was signed in July 2015 and endorsed by the UN Security Council. Washington wants to extend the arms
restrictions on Iran even though Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal has
earned it the right to have the embargo lifted.
Washington’s line of reasoning is
illogical and rife with double standards. It is parallel-universe stuff. You
know it is whenever super-hawk warmonger
John Bolton admits there are no legal grounds for the US position.
The nuclear deal – formally known
as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – continues to be widely
recognized as a diplomatic achievement for ensuring nuclear non-proliferation. Iran has been in full compliance with
onerous restrictions on its nuclear program. Where the deal has failed is
in delivering substantive relief from economic sanctions imposed on Iran.
Washington has used every manoeuvre to maximize pressure on Tehran in an
attempt to sabotage the JCPOA.
Lamentably, European members have not been strong enough in standing up
to Washington’s bullying and threats of secondary sanctions. The lack of
European resolve – unlike the more forthright support from Russia and China –
has understandably undermined Iran’s confidence in the nuclear accord.
But the tyrannical bullying from Washington has gone too far. The
embarrassing, spectacular defeat at the UN Security Council last week
demonstrates that the US is increasingly viewed as a rogue state. It is
also a demonstration of how much its global power has waned.
Digging itself deeper into a hole
it has already dug, the Trump
administration is blaring threats of forcing the UN into toeing Washington’s
illogical line for applying a sanctions “snapback” on Iran.
It’s not a good idea to pursue a policy on a whim of bruised ego and
imperial hubris. That’s what the US is doing with regard to Iran and the
rest of the world. Sooner or later,
the delusions and deceptions pile up in a crescendo of absurdity whereby even
normally dutiful allies can no longer go along with the perverse pretence of
the United States as a law-abiding democratic nation. Its power,
frenetically and desperately, relies more and more on coercion and diktat. And
those days are numbered.
Mike Pompeo has to be the worst Secretary of State America has ever had. His entire career has been funded by the Koch Brothers. He’s a disgrace and Trump would be wise to get rid of him, but there’s always a clone waiting in the wings. As could have been predicted, Iran has just given the finger to the Trump Administration. From Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge:
Excerpt:
Elon Musk Confesses to Lithium Coup in Bolivia
The billionaire CEO of Tesla and
lithium-exploiting capitalist has admitted his role in the November coup. The
CEO of the U.S.-based Telsa car manufacturer has admitted to involvement in
what President Morales has referred to as a “Lithium Coup.”
We will coup whoever we want! Deal
with it.” was Elon Musk’s response to an accusation on twitter that the U.S. government organized a coup
against President Evo Morales, so that Musk could obtain Bolivia’s lithium. Foreign plunder of Bolivia’s lithium, in
a country with the world’s largest known reserves, is widely believed to be
among the main motives behind the November 10, 2019 coup.
Lithium, a critical component of
the batteries used in Tesla vehicles, is set to become one of the world’s most important natural
resources as manufacturers seek to obtain it for use in batteries for electric
cars, computers, and industrial equipment.
The defacto administration of
Jeanine Añez has already announced its plan to invite numerous multinationals
into the Salar de Uyuni, the vast salt flats in Potosi, which holds the
precious soft metal. Right-wing Vice Presidential candidate and
running mate to Añez, Samuel Doria Medina, proposed a Brazilian-Bolivian
project which would use lithium from the town of Uyuni.
Meanwhile, letter from the coup
regime’s Foreign Minister Karen Longaric to Elon Musk, dated march 31st, says “any corporation that you or your
company can provide to our country will be gratefully welcomed.”
Social movements have repeatedly warned that lithium and natural
resources would be surrendered to foreign capital by coup authorities, in a
reversal of plans by Evo Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism (MAS)
administration to process the lithium within Bolivia rather than exporting the
raw material to the global north.
The project represented a rejection
of the neocolonial relationship Latin American countries have often had with
the imperialist cores. Bolivia’s former
MAS government oversaw the production of batteries and its first electric car
by the Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB) state company, in partnership with
German company ACISA. In the deal, the
Bolivian state kept majority control.
With the agreement now scrapped
along with countless other state projects, and with elections now thrice
delayed by the illegitimate defacto
authorities, the people of Uyuni and social movements around the country say
they’ll continue to oppose the ongoing privatization and are organizing
against the return of looting of Bolivia’s natural resources by ruthless and
exploitative foreign capital.
The only reason the U.S. has been able to launch endless
attacks, coups ad wars is because they have a fiat currency backed by
nothing. While Russia, China and a number
of other nations have their currency backed by gold, the Federal Reserve Bank just
prints up trillions of dollars with nothing to back it. President Trump has nominated Judy Shelton for
a seat on the Federal Reserve board which has sent the bat shit crazy Globalists
headed for the fainting couches.
BATSHIT CRAZY FISCAL POLICY
From Zero Hedge:
"Extreme, Ill-Considered Views" - 38 Fed Alum Urge Senate To
Reject Judy Shelton Nomination
Is the establishment panicking at the
nomination of someone that clearly thinks for herself and refuses to accept as
writ the groupthink of The Federal Reserve?
Judging by the wording of the
following open-letter to The Senate urging Shelton be rejected, because her "views are so extreme and
ill-considered as to be an unnecessary distraction from the tasks at
hand," and of course, the fact that she has not publicly disavowed the
President as #OrangeManBad:
" She has advocated for a return to the gold standard; she has questioned
the need for federal deposit insurance; she has even questioned the need for a
central bank at all. Now, she appears to have jettisoned all of these
positions to argue for subordination of the Fed’s policies to the White House -
at least as long as the White House is occupied by a president who agrees with
her political views. "
President Trump has nominated Judy
Shelton to one of the vacancies on the Board of Governors of the Federal
Reserve System. The nomination recently cleared the Senate Banking Committee
and will soon reach the Senate floor. We
urge the Senate to reject this nomination.
The undersigned all served on the
staffs of either the Board of Governors or the Federal Reserve Banks. We have
served in various capacities as economists, lawyers, bank supervisors, and in
other professional capacities. We know
and appreciate the unique position of the Federal Reserve in our nation’s
economy and the need to preserve its nonpartisan approach to its many
responsibilities.
The Federal Reserve is a vital part
of our government and has been particularly important during our current
crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has
required the suspension of much of the nation’s and the world’s economic
activity. The Fed’s quick action to provide the markets with the necessary
liquidity was crucial to restoring order to those markets and ensuring that the
economic crisis that we are enduring did not become much, much worse. However,
like the pandemic, the economic challenges persist.
Ms. Shelton has a decades-long record of writings and statements that
call into question her fitness for a spot on the Fed’s Board of Governors. She
has advocated for a return to the gold standard; she has questioned the need
for federal deposit insurance; she has even questioned the need for a central
bank at all. Now, she appears to have jettisoned all of these positions to
argue for subordination of the Fed’s policies to the White House — at least as
long as the White House is occupied by a president who agrees with her
political views.
The Fed has serious work ahead of
it. While we applaud the Board having a diversity of viewpoints represented at
its table, Ms. Shelton’s views are so extreme and ill-considered as to be an
unnecessary distraction from the tasks at hand.
The late Chairman Paul Volcker was
noted for advising new governors that
“when you enter this building, you leave your politics at the door.” Sound
advice that, from her record, Ms. Shelton is incapable of following.
In an attempt to provide some
balance, here is The Mises Institute's Robert Aro explaining the reason why the
establishment hates Judy Shelton...
Imagine if a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors said
the following :
“When governments manipulate exchange rates to affect currency markets,
they undermine the honest efforts of countries that wish to compete fairly in
the global marketplace. Supply and demand are distorted by artificial prices
conveyed through contrived exchange rates.
Or something honest like:
“The Fed should focus on stable money as a key factor in economic
performance. Given that central banks today are the world’s biggest currency
manipulators, it’s imperative that the next chairman prioritize the integrity
of the dollar.”
And what if they showed an understanding of both history and sound
money principles with something intelligent:
“For all the talk of a “rules-based” system for international trade,
there are no rules when it comes to ensuring a level monetary playing field.
The classical gold standard established an international benchmark for currency
values, consistent with free-trade principles.
While she’s not a governor yet, the quotes were from Trump’s appointee
Judy Shelton, approved this week by the Senate banking committee on party line
at a vote of 13-12. To be nominated to the board of directors, Ms. Shelton
will now be put forward to be voted on by the full senate, 53 of the 100 being
Republicans.
Yet below, we can see everything wrong with the Mainstream Media (MSM),
mainstream economists, and American politics starting with theNew York
Times article entitled, God Help Us if Judy Shelton Joins the Fed. Former
counselor to the Treasury secretary during the Obama administration, Steven
Rattner began with:
Trump’s latest unqualified nominee to the Federal Reserve Board must be
rejected.
The defaming article shows Mr.
Rattner has no care nor understanding of economics. According to him, Ms.
Shelton is known for taking “long-discredited positions in the monetary
system,” referring to the gold standard,
as he claims it was the “culprit in deepening the Great Depression.” Clearly he
is no fan of (or perhaps isn’t educated enough to have heard of) Mises or
Rothbard.
In what some may described as
laudable on Ms. Shelton’s behalf, Mr. Rattner, fueled by ignorance, continues:
Among other heretical stances, she has supported the abolition of the
Federal Reserve itself, putting her in a position to undermine the very
institution she is being nominated to serve.
A similar tone was found in the
National Review, a magazine which defines itself using the highly nebulous and
ill-defined “modern conservative movement.” Going back several months the
“controversy” surrounding Judy Shelton was shared in an oxymoronic write-up
called: The Wrong Kind of ‘Intellectual Diversity’ at the Fed. It is nothing more than a rant showing
the senior editor also knows little about history or economics, but being in a
position to publish, does so with a vociferous opinion. He begins with the
usual appeal to popularity:
First, she has been a single-minded advocate of a policy that most
economists rightly reject: the revival of the gold standard.
What is popular is not always true, especially regarding economics. The
article cites quotes from 2009 to the Wall Street Journal in an attempt to discredit
her by showing she has not always been consistent in her stances over the span
of the past decade. By contrast, the rant implies all other members of the Fed
and economists have.
Unfortunately, some people claim to
like diversity, but not when it’s different from their own bias. The senior
editor who wrote the hit piece can be found on twitter.
Unlike the New York Times and
National Review, surprising as it may seem, CNBC’s position was more neutral
when discussing the senate hearing, noting :She
faced persistent and at-times hostile questions about her support for the gold
standard, her beliefs on whether bank deposits should be insured and whether
the Fed should be independent of political influences.
Last but not least, the Wall Street Journal wrote it best , much to the chagrin of its rivals:
the news write-ups inevitably described her with adjectives like
“controversial.” She should take it as a badge of honor, given how she would
provide needed intellectual diversity at the Fed.
Only in a world this backwards where, in a supposed free country,
socialism is considered good and capitalism bad that Shelton could receive so
much scorn. To think, 1 out of 7 members of the board could have ideas
other than inflationist dogma but they would be shunned for speaking up, says a
lot of the society in which we are living. Perhaps the real reason is, if
appointed, it could set Judy Shelton in line to the position of Federal Reserve
Chair?
Ironically enough, as long Congress
stays partisan, we may see her in one of the most powerful central banking
positions in the world. It won’t “End the Fed” overnight, but maybe it’s one
step closer!
And finally, as Mark Hendrickson concludes, Shelton
is 100 percent correct when she questions why a dozen people (the Federal
Reserve Board of Governors) should set the prices of capital (interest rates)
any more than they should set the price of cars, houses, or bubble gum.
Markets can do that and do it better - as they did before there even
was a Federal Reserve system. Shelton opposes policies that would be more
at home in a centrally planned economy. THAT
ALONE IS REASON ENOUGH TO CONFIRM HER.
If anyone is under the delusion that the Democrats’ policies
will be any different that should have been shattered after the saber rattling DNC
convention. Elect us for endless war,
endless looting of the treasury and restoration of the Bush/Obama lunacy. As a matter of fact, war criminals from
George W. Bush’s administration were advocating for Joe Biden. It was bat shit crazy.
BAT SHIT CRAZY DEMOCRAT NON-CONVENTION CONVENTION
Jimmy Dore:
Democratic Party Is The Pro-War Party, Biden's Career Has Been Nothing But
Imperialism
YouTube personality Jimmy
Dore called Tuesday night's DNC a "war rally" due to several pro-Syria
war speakers and said the Democratic party is the "pro-war party."
In an interview with Tucker Carlson on FOX News tonight, Dore said Joe Biden's
entire career has been about imperialism and the Obama-Biden administration
took the U.S. from 2 wars to 7 wars.
"Last night, I'm sure there are lots of things in the
Democratic platform you agree with but
the emphasis last night on pure neoconservatism, just flat out we are going to
get us more involved in Syria, where did this come from, exactly?"
host Tucker Carlson asked.
"That was like a war rally at their convention,"
Dore responded. "I was waiting for a football game to break out. You know,
one thing John Kerry is right about his Trump's foreign policy is kind of
incoherent but Joe Biden, his entire
career has been nothing but imperialism. Joe Biden not only voted for the
Iraq war, he shamed Democrats who weren't supporting it. He was a vocal
supporter of it."
"How about when
he became the vice president, they took us from two wars to seven," he
said. "He did Libya. Then he wanted to do Syria. We're still in Yemen. So
these guys are nothing but saber-rattling, warmongering maniacs."
"We have one
party in this country, Tucker, it's the military-industrial complex party and
that's what we are seeing," Dore added.
"Even when Trump
tried to take us, he kind of was threatening to take us out of Afghanistan,
threatening to take us out of Syria, the Democrats jumped in to stop it,"
Dore continued. "So we have one party and its a war party and it's
amazing, they got Colin Powell to endorse them, a bona fide war criminal who
lied us into the Iraq war."
"The one piece
of policy it seemed that everybody agreed on was that the Iraq war was a good
idea, that's what it seemed like," he said. "Those are the people
that they have come on to endorse Joe Biden, the architects of the Iraq war and
you don't think this is a failed party?"
Aug. 20, 2020 (EIRNS)—Steve Bannon was arrested today on a wire
fraud and money laundering conspiracy indictment from the Southern District of
New York. Despite what will surely be Bannon’s play—that this is an
anti-Trump indictment delivered straight from the coven of Trump enemies in the
Southern District of New York—the indictment itself makes clear that these are
substantial fraud allegations.
According to the Wall Street
Journal of Aug. 19, Bannon is also under
federal investigation concerning a $300 million private offering he engineered
with Chinese dissident and fugitive billionaire Guo Wengui, a/k/a Miles Kwok.
No doubt, the struggling Democrats will use this to impugn President
Donald Trump’s judgment and claim that he surrounded himself with crooks. This
is as much a fraud as the allegations in Bannon’s indictment.
Bannon is a prime suspect as one of the many British intelligence chess
pieces foisted early on, on Trump’s campaign to discredit Trump and steer
his supporters down a variety of self-defeating and toxic rabbit holes. He is also a key creator of the so-called
Alt Right, a British intelligence-inspired movement which takes genuine
aspirations to preserve the nation-state and channels them into deviant social
movements, including overt racism.
The former strategist has made his
fame and fortune by suckering the unsuspecting into believing that he actually
supports Donald Trump. He claimed that it was he, not Donald Trump, who created
Trump’s 2016 electoral victory. When
Trump fired the ego-obsessed former Goldman Sachs partner, Bannon, working with
New York gossip novelist Michael Wolff, penned two novellas painting the
President as an unhinged criminal.
He told Congressional committees
that Donald Trump, Jr. was guilty of the crime of treason and his trial testimony against long-time Trump
associate Roger Stone is credited as a significant cause of Stone’s conviction.
Lately, Bannon, ever in pursuit of
fame and fortune, has taken up with Chinese billionaire fugitive Guo Wengui in
an inflammatory and bellicose campaign against China, reflecting the nonsense
coming from Britain’s Henry Jackson Society and the circles of former MI6 Chief
Sir Richard Dearlove. Dearlove and his
protégés Christopher Steele and Sir Andrew Wood, among other British
intelligence sponsors, are the actual authors of the coup against the
President.
Bannon was on a yacht off the coast of Connecticut when he was
arrested. He and Guo are known to hang out on Guo’s yacht, but it is
unclear whether this was the yacht where Bannon was arrested…
The indictment involves a scheme by
Bannon and three others to use “GoFundMe” to raise funds for building the
southern border wall at the point where Congress and the courts were holding up
the project. President Trump publicly
opposed the private project at its inception, saying that no private funding
should be provided for the wall and that Bannon was “showboating.”
The indictment, quoting directly
from exchanged text messages and emails, has Bannon and his co-conspirators
promising donors to the project, which raised millions, that not a dime of the
money would go to Bannon or his co-defendants. All of the money would go to the
private effort to construct the border wall, according to their repeated
representations to donors. Instead,
Bannon and others diverted millions to personal uses, including $1 million to
Bannon personally. They concocted a series of sham invoices and transactions to
disguise their diversions of funds…
Bannon became a luminary in U.S.
political circles when he took over as editor of Breitbart News following the
untimely death of its founder, Andrew Breitbart. In 2016, Bannon and his Breitbart sponsors, the billionaire family of
Robert Mercer, supported Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for the presidency. When Cruz lost the Indiana primary in May,
Bannon and his sponsors offered their services to the Trump Campaign.
That is the state of America today, bat shit crazy. Hold on
to your hats, we are in for a bumpy ride.
Trump is far from being an ideal president, but Biden would be so much
worse. Voting for Biden would really be bat shit
crazy.
