Tag Archives: Donald Trump

She Said That? 9/22/16

Posted on September 22, 2016 | 1 comment

Yesterday, Janet Yellen denied any political influence whatsover on Federal Reserve policy. Donald Trump has suggested otherwise. From Yellen, at a press conference after the Federal Open Market Committee announced its decision not to raise interest rates:

“Well, I think Congress very wisely established the Federal Reserve is an independent agency. In order to insulate monetary policy from short-term political pressures and I can say, emphatically that partisan politics plays no role in our decisions about the appropriate stance of monetary policy. We are trying to decide what the best policy is to foster price stability and maximum employment and to manage the variety of risks that we see is affecting the outlook. We do not discuss politics at our meetings and we do not take politics into account in our decisions.

That should settle it, although a few of SLL’s more stubborn readers may still believe that Trump is right.

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Lifelong Democrat and Former RFK Speechwriter Comes Out For Trump, by Michael Krieger

Posted on September 22, 2016 | Leave a comment

Two prominent Democrats announce their support for Trump. From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

The 2016 election season has been revealing in all sorts of meaningful ways. We’ve seen countless mainstream Republicans, particularly neocons, come out and passionately endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. More interesting than the fact they did this, was that they actually thought this would damage Trump. In contrast, it has helped him more than they could have ever imagined.

Indeed, as I noted in last week’s post, The Status Quo vs. Donald Trump:

The incredible irony of the situation is that in its failed attempts to make him unacceptable, mainstream Republicans have made him palatable. Trump couldn’t convincingly turn himself into “outsider” on his own. He needed help, and he has received it in droves from the GOP establishment. Meanwhile, the most pathetic part of it all is the fact that these so-called “conservative thought leaders” and politicians still don’t understand how absolutely despised they are by the general public. They think their “stand against Trump” hurts him, when in reality it just makes him grow stronger and gives him the street cred he never had before.

This rallying around Hillary by establishment Republicans merely solidified what so many people already suspected. Frustrated that one of their puppets couldn’t get the nomination and provide Americans with another false choice between two bought and paid for stooges, much of the GOP establishment immediately rushed in to support their supposed enemy, Hillary Clinton.

In contrast, we haven’t seen too many hardcore Democrats come out in support of Trump. This should be expected since that would be a far more genuine and significant gesture than neocon Republicans rallying around the neocon candidate. As such, I find it very interesting that in the last 24 hours I’ve come across two separate opinion pieces by lifelong players in the Democratic Party who now support Trump.

Let’s start with some excerpts from yesterday’s piece by Adam Walinsky at Politico, I Was RFK’s Speechwriter. Now I’m Voting for Trump. Here’s Why:

I was a Democrat all my life. I came to Washington to serve President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. When the president was murdered and his brother struck off on his own, I joined his Senate campaign and staff as his legislative assistant and speechwriter, until his presidential campaign ended with his own assassination. I ran on a (losing) Democratic ticket in the New York state elections of 1970. When I was working to enact my own program of police reform in the 1980s and 1990s, then-Governor Bill Clinton was chairman of my National Committee for the Police Corps.

This year, I will vote to elect Donald Trump as president of the United States.

So profound a change, and a decent respect for old friendships, requires me to deliver a public accounting for this decision.

Here it is. John and Robert Kennedy devoted their greatest commitments and energies to the prevention of war and the preservation of peace. To them that was not an abstract formula but the necessary foundation of human life. But today’s Democrats have become the Party of War: a home for arms merchants, mercenaries, academic war planners, lobbyists for every foreign intervention, promoters of color revolutions, failed generals, exploiters of the natural resources of corrupt governments. We have American military bases in 80 countries, and there are now American military personnel on the ground in about 130 countries, a remarkable achievement since there are only 192 recognized countries. Generals and admirals announce our national policies. Theater commanders are our principal ambassadors. Our first answer to trouble or opposition of any kind seems always to be a military movement or action.

To continue reading: Lifelong Democrat and Former RFK Speechwriter Comes Out For Trump

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Never #Never Trump: Not Voting Trump Is Republican Suicide, by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on September 22, 2016 | Leave a comment

From even a traditionalist Republican perspective, Trump is starting to look better than the alternative. From Victor Davis Hanson at national review.com:

The Republican dilemma

Any Republican has a difficult pathway to the presidency. On the electoral map, expanding blue blobs in coastal and big-city America swamp the conservative geographical sea of red. Big-electoral-vote states such as California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are utterly lost before the campaign even begins. The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is necessary to release to arrive at correct views.

In recent elections, centrists, like John McCain and Mitt Romney – once found useful by the media when running against more-conservative Republicans — were reinvented as caricatures of Potterville scoundrels right out of a Frank Capra movie.

When the media got through with a good man like McCain, he was left an adulterous, confused septuagenarian, unsure of how many mansions he owned, and a likely closeted bigot. Another gentleman like Romney was reduced to a comic-book Ri¢hie Ri¢h, who owned an elevator, never talked to his garbage man, hazed innocents in prep school, and tortured his dog on the roof of his car. If it were a choice between shouting down debate moderator Candy Crowley and shaming her unprofessionalism, or allowing her to hijack the debate, Romney in Ajaxian style (“nobly live, or nobly die”) chose the decorous path of dignified abdication.

In contrast, we were to believe Obama’s adolescent faux Greek columns, hokey “lowering the seas and cooling the planet,” vero possumus seal on his podium as president-elect, and 57 states were Lincolnesque.

Why would 2016 not end up again in losing nobly? Would once again campaigning under the Marquess of Queensberry rules win Republicans a Munich reprieve?

The Orangeman Cometh

In such a hysterical landscape, it was possible that no traditional Republican in 2016 was likely to win, even against a flawed candidate like Hillary Clinton, who emerged wounded from a bruising primary win over aged socialist Bernie Sanders.

Then came along the Trump, the seducer of the Right when the Republican establishment was busy early on coronating Jeb Bush. After the cuckolded front-runners imploded, we all assumed that Trump’s successful primary victories — oddly predicated on avoidance of a ground game, internal polling, ad campaigns, sophisticated fundraising, and a sea of consultants and handlers — were hardly applicable to Clinton, Inc. She surely would bury him under a sea of cash, consultants, and sheer manpower.

That Trump was an amateur, a cad, his own worst enemy, cynically leveraging a new business or brand, and at any time could say anything was supposedly confirmation of Hillary’s inevitable victory. Her winning paradigm was seen as simply anti-Trump rather than pro-Hillary: light campaigning to conserve her disguised fragile health, while giving full media attention to allow Trump to elucidate his fully obnoxious self. Her campaign was to be a series of self-important selfies, each more flattering to the beholder but otherwise of no interest to her reluctant supporters.

For insurance, Clinton would enlist the bipartisan highbrow Washington establishment to close ranks, with their habitual tsk-tsking of Trump in a nuanced historical context — “Hitler,” “Stalin,” “Mussolini,” “brown shirt,” etc.

To continue reading: Never #Never Trump: Not Voting Trump Is Republican Suicide

 

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The Day Zero Hedge Goes Dark, by Robert Gore

Posted on September 20, 2016 | 16 comments
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The mainstream media’s (MSM) coverage of Hillary Clinton’s medical travails offers yet another instance of its blatant bias, and its distortion and outright suppression of the news. The roots of the captive MSM stretch back to the 1940s, which helps explain the waning prospects for dissemination of the truth in 2016.

Veracity is the first casualty of war. During World War II, the government openly co-opted the media, including Hollywood, as propaganda organs. Radio and television stations and networks had to obtain permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to operate. They toed the government’s World War II line. A few newspapers and individual journalists, notably H.L. Mencken and John T. Flynn, challenged it, but Roosevelt pretense of being against US involvement in the war, Pearl Harbor’s vulnerability, the alliance with Joseph Stalin, who was at least as bloodthirsty and tyrannical as Hitler, massive fire bombing of civilian populations in Germany and Japan, and the decision to deploy the atomic bomb should have raised far more questions than they did.

Without missing a beat the government transferred its World War II rationales for “managing” the news and media to the Cold War. The key figure of the era was Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA from 1953 until 1961. In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, detailed the CIA’s relationship with the press in the 1950s and 1960s in a lengthy expose for The Rolling Stone. Dulles instituted a partnership, Operation Mockingbird, between the agency and the media. The agency would supply journalists with information and access to situations that would have been otherwise inaccessible in exchange for on-the-ground intelligence and the occasional performance of agency requests. Implicit in the arrangement: journalists would hew to the CIA line.

A veritable who’s who of the media elite embraced the arrangement. Per Bernstein: “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.” No questions were asked in the bland reports that the duly elected leaders of Iran and Guatemala had been deposed, CIA-orchestrated operations. Nor were they asked in the early days of Vietnam, as the CIA set up shop in Saigon and the press worried about falling dominoes in Southeast Asia.

Some of the agency’s screw-ups were too big to whitewash. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy asked Dulles for his resignation. Dulles’ subsequent membership on the Warren Commission, where he stage-managed the investigation to its preordained conclusion, raised eyebrows. However, the raised-eyebrow set were disparaged as “conspiracy theorists,” a term invented by the CIA to discredit anyone questioning the official version of anything.

The Vietnam War was too extensive and lengthy to hide. As the years rolled on and the body count mounted, questions were asked. Journalists had remarkable latitude to roam, often accompanying military units to battle zones. They saw fighting first-hand and talked directly to the fighters. Their stories were a sharp contrast to the military’s bland briefings in Saigon. That Vietnam was, at best, a hopeless quagmire and probably a lost cause was a bottom-up realization; the soldiers and the in-the-field press covering them knew it long before the brass and its house-broken reporters. Publication of The Pentagon Papers in 1971 marked the media’s finest hour in Vietnam. Its revelations of duplicity reinforced America’s mood; by then all it wanted from Vietnam was a graceful exit.

After a ten-year hiatus dating from the end of the Cold War in 1991, the US establishment acquired a new enemy. Despite the pyrotechnics of 9/11, the terrorists presented orders of magnitude less of a threat than the Axis powers in World War II or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. However, a war on a tactic—terrorism—can be waged anywhere and against anybody the government chooses. It can and apparently will go on forever; victory in such a conflict being impossible to define, much less achieve. All this was obvious before the US ventured into Afghanistan and Iraq, but few in the media questioned the conceptual basis of those forays.

Judging by restrictions on civil liberties embedded in the Patriot Act, subsequent legislation, and judicial interpretations, rag-tag terrorists whose main weapons are stolen artillery and firearms, improvised explosive devices, and blowing themselves up pose a greater threat than the US’s World War II and Cold War foes. A measure of how captive the MSM has become: it labeled Edward Snowden a traitor for exposing the government’s Orwellian surveillance in the name of “fighting terrorism.” Snowden should have been hailed. Such surveillance makes a free press impossible; if it cannot shield its secrets from the government it cannot operate.

For the press and freedom of press to mean anything, the media must be outside the government, looking in. Currently, that characterization only applies to the independent segments of the media, mostly the Internet, that takes a reflexively adversarial stance towards the powers that be, including the MSM. Call it the alternative media. What it lacks in the docile MSM’s cherished “access” it more than makes up for in pugnacity.

The Drudge Report made a name for itself publicizing Bill Clinton scandals the MSM ignored. It is the most powerful and widely viewed alternative site. Zero Hedge, like the Drudge Report, aggregates news, analysis, and commentary from a variety of sources, but it also features its own analyses and comments (Zero Hedges has reposted Straight Line Logic articles). Financially oriented, Zero Hedge made its bones during the last crisis, which it saw coming well before it arrived. Its commentary and stories since on the government and Federal Reserve’s responses—the bailouts, stimulus, and quantitative easing—have been scathing.

These two sites are the vanguard of the alternative media: hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sites worldwide that probe virtually every idiocy and prevarication emanating not just from governments and central banks, but large corporations, academia, militaries, intelligence services, and the MSM itself. The alternative media has little capacity to generate original news coverage (although leaks, hacking, and videos have been invaluable), but publicly available material is virtually inexhaustible. It has become a giant thorn in the side of what it variously calls the establishment, the powers that be, the deep state, the Empire, globalists, or the new world order. Although not all in the alternative media support Donald Trump, they are united in their contempt for Hillary Clinton. Their relentless skepticism, disclosures, and editorializing have been bastions for the Trump campaign. It’s probably not an overstatement to say that campaign wouldn’t be where it is without the alternative media.

The established order recognizes the threat. Hillary Clinton’s recent speeches condemning the alt-right and the “basket of deplorables,” and President Obama’s comments Monday about unspecified blogs “churning out a lot of misinformation” confirm the apprehension. The alt-right is part of the alternative media and takes a politically incorrect perspective on the mainstream’s racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender catechism. As such, it makes the easiest target, however, it is not the establishment’s real target. Obama gave up the game with the word “misinformation.” He’s not worried about misinformation—if he were Obamacare never would have become law—he’s worried about correct information, also known as the truth.

The alternative press shatters the cozy arrangement midwifed by Allen Dulles’ between the government and the MSM. The biggest threat to powers that be is always the truth. Just as they will steal everything you’ve got (see “You Will Be Poor”), they will suppress the truth. The alternative media has gone from success to success, but if Trump is elected, it will probably mark an apotheosis. The establishment will neither forgive nor forget, and sooner or later the alternative media will train its sights on Trump himself. It’s hard to believe that he won’t give it reason to do so—power does corrupt—especially for that segment of the alternative media with a more libertarian perspective.

Alternative media hubris is an unaffordable luxury. The counterattack is coming—take Hillary and Barack’s word for it—and the alternative media is extraordinarily vulnerable. It can be silenced by someone pulling the plug on the Internet or parts thereof. Like a “Funds Inaccessible” message on our bank accounts, a “Site Not Available” message may well greet us one morning when we try to pull up Zero Hedge . The rationale could be “deplorable” racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, or Islamophobia, or peddling what has been officially deemed “misinformation,” but make no mistake, the truth that emerges from the alternative media poses a grave threat to those who would rule us, and they know it.

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‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This’ – Donald Trump Raises Huge Sums From Small Donors, by Michael Krieger

Posted on September 19, 2016 | Leave a comment

Donald Trump has raised close to $100 million from small donors who have given less than $200. That’s astounding. From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

I’ll be the first to admit I did not see this coming. Back when it was announced Trump had appointed ex-Goldman Sachs banker, Steven Mnuchin, to be his national finance chairman, I assumed this would mean Hillary Clinton-esque oligarch pandering would rapidly ensure. Surprisingly (to me), this has not really been the case.

Indeed, when it comes to raising money from small donors, Trump may have a little Bernie Sanders in him.

Politico reports:

Donald Trump has unleashed an unprecedented deluge of small-dollar donations for the GOP, and one that Republican Party elders have dreamed about finding for much of the last decade as they’ve watched a succession of Democrats — Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and, to a lesser extent, Hillary Clinton — develop formidable fundraising operations, $5, $10 and $20 at a time.

Trump has only been actively soliciting cash for a few months, but when he reveals his campaign’s financials later this week they will show he has crushed the total haul from small-dollar donors of the last two Republican nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney — during the entirety of their campaigns.

Love him or hate him, Donald Trump has an actual political movement behind him. John McCain and Mitt Ronmey did not, and neither does Hillary Clinton.

All told, Trump is approaching, and has possibly already passed, $100 million from donors who have given less than $200, according to an analysis of available Federal Election Commission filings, the campaign’s public statements and people familiar with his fundraising operation. It is a threshold no previous Republican has ever achieved in a single campaign. And Trump has done so less than three months after signing his first email solicitation for donors on June 21 — a staggering speed to collect such a vast sum.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said a senior Republican operative who has worked closely with the campaign’s small-dollar fundraising operation. “He’s the Republican Obama in terms of online fundraising.”

Clinton counted 2.3 million donors as of the end of August, the result of decades of campaigning, a previous presidential bid and allies who painstakingly built her an email file of supporters even before she formally announced her second run. But Trump had zoomed to 2.1 million donors in the last three months alone, his campaign has said.

The question now is what the gusher means for the GOP. The Republican National Committee, through a deal struck with Trump in May, is getting 20 percent of the proceeds from its small-donor operation for Trump plus access to this invaluable new donor and email file. But can Trump’s candidacy help close the Republican Party’s small-donor divide in one fell swoop? Will these donors — 2.1 million and counting — give to other Republicans? Will they drag the Republican Party in Trump’s direction for years to come? Or, if he loses, will they simply vanish?

Is this actually a real question? Trump’s entire popularity is fueled by the fact he has gone against so much of what was considered mainstream GOP orthodoxy. If Trump wins the Presidency, Donald Trump is the GOP.

To continue reading: ‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This’ – Donald Trump Raises Huge Sums From Small Donors

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Slowly, Then All at Once, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on September 19, 2016 | Leave a comment

We’re on the cusp of a painful adjustment to the end of growth. Neither Trump nor Clinton are reason for optimism. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

The staggering incoherence of the election campaign only mirrors the shocking incapacity of the American public, from top to bottom, to process the tendings of our time. The chief tending is permanent worldwide economic contraction. Having hit the resource wall, especially of affordable oil, the global techno-industrial economy has sucked a valve in its engine.

For sure there are ways for human beings to inhabit this planet, perhaps in a civilized mode, but not at the gigantic scale of the current economic regime. The fate of this order has nothing to do with our wishes or preferences. It’s going down whether we like it or not because it was such a violent anomaly in world history and the salient question is: how do we manage our journey to a new disposition of things. Neither Trump or Clinton show that they have a clue about the situation.

The quandary I describe is often labeled the end of growth. The semantic impact of this phrase tends to paralyze even well-educated minds, most particularly the eminent econ professors, the Yale lawyers-turned-politicos, the Wall Street Journal editors, the corporate poobahs of the “C-Suites,” the hedge fund maverick-geniuses, and the bureaucratic errand boys (and girls) of Washington. In the absence of this “growth,” as defined by the employment and productivity statistics extruded like poisoned bratwursts from the sausage grinders of government agencies, this elite can see only the yawning abyss. The poverty of imagination among our elites is really something to behold.

As is usually the case with troubled, over-ripe societies, these elites have begun to resort to magic to prop up failing living arrangements. This is why the Federal Reserve, once an obscure institution deep in the background of normal life, has come downstage front and center, holding the rest of us literally spellbound with its incantations against the intractable ravages of debt deflation. (For a brilliant gloss on this phenomenon, read Ben Hunt’s essay “Magical thinking” at the Epsilon Theory website.)

One way out of this quandary would be to substitute the word “activity” for “growth.” A society of human beings can choose different activities that would produce different effects than the techno-industrial model of behavior. They can organize ten-acre farms instead of cell phone game app companies. They can do physical labor instead of watching television. They can build compact walkable towns instead of suburban wastelands (probably even out of the salvaged detritus of those wastelands). They can put on plays, concerts, sing-alongs, and puppet shows instead of Super Bowl halftime shows and Internet porn videos. They can make things of quality by hand instead of stamping out a million things guaranteed to fall apart next week. None of these alt-activities would be classifiable as “growth” in the current mode. In fact, they are consistent with the reality of contraction. And they could produce a workable and satisfying living arrangement.

To continue reading: Slowly, Then All at Once

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The Status Quo vs. Donald Trump, by Michael Krieger

Posted on September 15, 2016 | 1 comment

The Trump juggernaut is “Much More Than Trump.” From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

Unless something dramatic happens (certainly possible in this election), I believe Donald Trump will win the 2016 election quite easily, and I believe this victory will be driven by the resentment vote. Forget card-carrying Democrats and Republicans, they will vote along party lines. The key to this election is, and always has been, independent voters. I believe the following chart from Gallup tells you all you need to know about who will decide this thing:

http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Screen-Shot-2016-09-15-at-9.37.11-AM.jpg

By definition, most of the 43% of Americans who identify as independents have serious misgivings about the two-party system and its so-called “luminaries.” As such, both Trump and Clinton should be battling aggressively for this key voting bloc. Unfortunately for Hillary supporters, only one of them is. The other candidate is rallying the status quo from both parties under one large, oligarch-funded tend of cronyism, militarism and business as usual. Earlier this week, I highlighted how the resentment vote against mainstream media would play a key role in tipping the scales to a Trump victory (see: The Death of Mainstream Media). Today, I want to look at how the resentment vote also targets the two-party political oligarchy.

Taking a step back, it’s become clear to me that many members from the corrupt status quo of both useless political parties are making a huge calculated error by coming together so publicly against Trump. By rallying so aggressively and passionately around Hillary Clinton, the worst of the worst from America’s oligarchy have succeeded in the impossible. They have made a billionaire reality tv star look like a counter culture iconoclast.

When Trump first ran for President, I looked on incredulously as he attempted to portray himself as an anti-status quo stalwart. As someone raised in New York City, I literally grew up with this man’s face plastered all over the papers. In my particular corner of the planet, he was more ubiquitous in the media than the President. Yet as we stand here in September 2016, less than two months away from this momentous national election, the man has remarkably morphed into an anti-status quo symbol in real life. How did this happen?

The incredible irony of the situation is that in its failed attempts to make him unacceptable, mainstream Republicans have made him palatable. Trump couldn’t convincingly turn himself into “outsider” on his own. He needed help, and he has received it in droves from the GOP establishment. Meanwhile, the most pathetic part of it all is the fact that these so-called “conservative thought leaders” and politicians still don’t understand how absolutely despised they are by the general public. They think their “stand against Trump” hurts him, when in reality it just makes him grow stronger and gives him the street cred he never had before.

As an example of what I mean, let’s take a look at some excerpts from yesterday’s Politico article: Clinton’s GOP Supporters Expect Something in Return:

Republicans backing Hillary Clinton want history to reflect they didn’t help Donald Trump win the White House. But that’s not the only reason they’re bucking their party’s line.

Access, appointments and influence over a Clinton administration’s policies is the just dessert that a growing slate of conservative policy wonks, Capitol Hill veterans and former GOP administration officials say they expect for endorsing and in some cases raising money for the Democratic presidential nominee.

And they’re already getting it. From messaging help delivered by Clinton’s communications team to direct and regular access to senior staffers and in-person meetings to discuss policy and strategy, Republicans who have abandoned Trump say the Democrat has given every indication that the GOP view will be reflected in her administration.

To continue reading: The Status Quo vs. Donald Trump

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The World Is Turning Ugly As 2016 Winds Down, by Brandon Smith

Posted on September 15, 2016 | 1 comment

Brandon Smith reasserts his hypothesis that disaster is coming and the globalists want Trump to win so they can blame it on him and his liberty-minded and conservative supporters. If the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee, contrary to market expectations and the clearly deteriorating economy, raises the interest rate target on overnight fed funds next week, as Smith expects, then the plausibility of this hypothesis goes way up, although it probably doesn’t kill it if the FOMC stands pat. From Smith at alt-markets.com:

I have to say that the negative reverberations in our current economic and political environment are becoming so strong that it is impossible for people to not feel at least some uneasiness in their gut. I imagine this is the same kind of sensation many felt from 1914 to 1918 during World War I and the terrible birth of communism, or perhaps in the early 1930s at the onset of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Some global changes are so disturbing that they send shockwaves through the collective unconscious before they ever hit the mainstream. People know that something is about to happen, even if they cannot yet clearly define it.

At the beginning of August in my article “2016 Will End With Economic Instability And A Trump Presidency” I stated that:

“I believe a softer downturn will begin before the election (the U.S. presidential election) takes place, most likely starting in September. This will give a boost to the Trump campaign, or at least, that is what the polls will likely say. I would also watch for some banking officials and media pundits to blame this downturn on Trump’s rise in the polling data. The narrative will be that just the threat of a Trump presidency is “putting the markets on edge.”

Unfortunately, it would seem so far that this prediction was correct. Currently global markets have crossed into severe volatility with a vengeance after around three months of eerie calm. Why? Well, as I warned in the same article linked above as well as numerous others since the beginning of this year, the Federal Reserve is determined to continue raising interest rates into a recessionary environment as they almost always do, and equities markets addicted to cheap debt cannot tolerate even one additional rate hike from the central bank.

So far all evidence suggests that the Fed plans to raise rates again soon; I believe at the end of this month. The only seemingly “anti-hike” voice at the Fed so far has been board member Lael Brainard, but even her statements promote a false narrative that a America is on track to “recovery”.

Many normally “dovish” members of the Fed have openly suggested that now is the time to hike. Voting members at the Fed have been vocal about a shift in policy. The latest example being head of the Bank of Cleveland, Loretta Mester. She argues that rates have remained “too low for too long,” and rejected notions that lower rates are necessary to maintain stability.

This is the same kind of language Fed members used right before the rate hike in December 2015, the first rate hike in around a decade. And, to add to the fervor, even JP Morgan Chase head Jamie Dimon is calling for interest rates to rise.

Get ready folks, because all the naysayers that claimed another rate hike is “impossible” are probably about to be proven wrong yet again.

My warning on an accelerating Trump campaign being blamed for weak stock markets has also come true. Already, Bloomberg is launching the meme that the idea of Hillary Clinton losing the election to Trump “because of her health” is a “landmine for vulnerable markets.”

This is some incredible spin by the elitist controlled media, but again, very predictable. The globalists are setting the stage to blame the economic collapse they created on conservative movements. Clinton’s “health issues” are being set up as the scapegoat for a Trump win, which conjures additional social unrest as many on the Left will argue (in the event of a Trump win) that Trump prevailed on a technicality. That is to say, the extreme Left will argue that Trump’s presidency is not legitimate.

To continue reading: The World Is Turning Ugly As 2016 Winds Down

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Hillary Clinton’s ‘Exceptionalist’ Warpath, by Daniel Lazare

Posted on September 8, 2016 | 1 comment

SLL has said that Hillary Clinton is the most dangerous candidate. Daniel Lazare reaches the same conclusion, at consortiumnews.com:

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the most right-wing presidential candidate of all?

The answer used to be Donald Trump, famous for his naked bigotry toward Mexicans and Muslims. But that was before Hillary Clinton supporters took a page from the old Joe McCarthy handbook and began denouncing their Republican opponent as “an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation” or arguing that criticism of Clinton and NATO somehow emanates out of Moscow.

Now comes Clinton’s speech at an American Legion convention in Cincinnati, her most bellicose to date, in which she savages Trump for failing to embrace the ultra-imperialist doctrine of “American exceptionalism.”

“My opponent in this race has said very clearly that he thinks American exceptionalism is insulting to the rest of the world,” she said Wednesday. “In fact, when Vladimir Putin, of all people, criticized American exceptionalism, my opponent agreed with him, saying, and I quote, ‘if you’re in Russia, you don’t want to hear that America is exceptional.’ Well maybe you don’t want to hear it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

Good people, she went on, do not take exception to the doctrine – only enemies do:

“When we say America is exceptional, it doesn’t mean that people from other places don’t feel deep national pride, just like we do. It means that we recognize America’s unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress, a champion for freedom and opportunity. Our power comes with a responsibility to lead, humbly, thoughtfully, and with a fierce commitment to our values. Because, when America fails to lead, we leave a vacuum that either causes chaos or other countries or networks rush in to fill the void.”

It’s either American tutelage or Armageddon, in other words, which is why countries that are smart and sensible know better than to resist. To round out her pro-war package, Clinton also promised to respond to foreign cyberattacks with military means – perhaps sending out drones to bomb Wikileaks? – and promised to deal with the world’s bullies as well.

“I know that we can’t cozy up to dictators,” she said. “We have to stand up to them.”

All this from a woman whose family foundation has received up to $25 million from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, perhaps the most repressive government on earth, plus up to $50 million from other Persian Gulf sources. (The Saudis also donated $10-million to the construction of the Bill Clinton presidential library.)

American Legion’s Dubious History

Moreover, it was before an organization, born amid the post-World War I Red Scare that:

–So admired Mussolini that it invited him to address its annual convention in 1923.

–Proclaimed to the world that “the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is the United States,” in the words of founder Alvin Owsley.

–Took part in the notorious Centralia massacre in Washington State in which Wesley Everest, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, was lynched from a railway trestle and then shot for good measure.

–Called for Communists to be tried for treason in the 1950s and pushed for a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning in the 1990s.

To continue reading: Hillary Clinton’s ‘Exceptionalist’ Warpath

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The Anti-Cinderella Man (Part Two), by Jim Quinn

Posted on September 7, 2016 | Leave a comment

This is the second part of Jim Quinn’s two-part article examining the similarities between the Great Depression and today’s Greater Depression. For Part One, click here. From Quinn at theburningplatform.com:
In Part One of this article I made a fact based case that most Americans are experiencing an economic depression on par with the Great Depression of the 1930’s. In Part Two I will compare and contrast two very different men who raised the spirits of the common man during difficult economic times. As we approach the perilous portion of this Fourth Turning, it will take more than hope to get us through to the other side.

Cinderella Man

Likening Braddock to Trump might seem far-fetched, until you think about parallels between the economic conditions during the 1930’s and today, along with the deepening mood of crisis, despair and anger at the establishment. Braddock’s career coincided with the last Fourth Turning. James J. Braddock was born in 1905, to Irish immigrant parents Joseph Braddock and Elizabeth O’Toole Braddock in a tiny apartment on West 48th Street in New York City. His life personified that of a GI Generation hero. One of seven children, Jimmy enjoyed playing marbles, baseball and hanging around the old swimming hole on the edge of the Hudson River as a youngster. He discovered his passion for boxing as a teenager.

Braddock refined his skills as an amateur fighter and in 1926 entered the professional boxing circuit in the light heavyweight division. Braddock overwhelmed the competition, knocking out multiple opponents in the early rounds of most fights. As a top light heavyweight, he stood over six feet two inches, but seldom weighed over 180 pounds. But his powerful right hand was no match for opponents that weighed close to 220 pounds. His star was ascending. He earned a shot at the title in 1929. On the evening of July 18th 1929, Braddock entered the ring at Yankee Stadium to face Tommy Loughran for the coveted light heavyweight championship. Loghran avoided Braddock’s deadly right hand for 15 rounds and won by decision. Less than two months later the stock market crashed and the country plunged into the Great Depression.

As thousands of banks failed and unemployment swept over the land like a plague, Braddock, like so many other millions of Americans lost everything. He labored to win fights so he could put food on the table for his wife and three young children. His career hit the skids as he lost sixteen of twenty-two fights and shattered his right hand landing a punch. As his boxing career spiraled downward, like the economy, he ended up working on the docks as a longshoreman. When even that job couldn’t feed his family, Jim swallowed his pride, hung up his boxing gloves and filed for government relief to help support his family. The strength, spirit and tenacity that had made him a contender were drained from his demeanor. He became just another down on his luck palooka struggling to survive during the Great Depression.

Thanks to a last-minute cancellation by another boxer, Braddock’s longtime manager and friend, Joe Gould, offered him a chance to fill in for just one night and earn cash. The fight was against the number-two contender in the world, Corn Griffin, on the undercard of the heavyweight championship fight between Max Baer and Primo Carnera. Braddock stunned the boxing experts and fans with a third-round knockout of his formidable opponent. He believed that while his right hand was broken, he became more proficient with his left hand, improving his boxing ability. Over the next nine months he upset John Henry Lewis and Art Lasky to become an unlikely contender for the heavyweight title of the world.

To continue reading: The Anti-Cinderella Man (Part Two)

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