Tag Archives: Politics

BlackRock – The Fed’s Wall Street Croupier, by David Stockman

Posted on November 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

The House always wins. From David Stockman at davidstockmanscontracorner via lewrockwell.com:

Central banks have not merely inflated the bejesus out of assets prices. They have also caused the very foundations of financial markets to metastasize, yielding an endless array of new products that have no real economic function except to facilitate new forms of pure wagering.

Foremost among these are exchange traded funds (ETFs). If you are inclined to give the latter the benefit of the doubt, you might well ask why the world was so benighted as recently as 2003 that only $204 billion of these swell financial instruments existed – a figure which is just 2.6% of the $7.74 trillion currently outstanding.

That is to say, if ETFs were the spawn of free markets and actually facilitated honest price discovery in primary and secondary capital markets, they would have been invented and institutionalized long ago; and upwards of 80% of outstandings would most certainly not have materialized just during the past eight years.

Total Assets Of Outstanding ETFs, 2003-2020

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Posted in Banking, Business, Financial markets, Government, Politics

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Lockdown Politics: The Great Travesty, by Carl Boggs

Posted on November 22, 2020 | Leave a comment

Lockdowns are about power and control, not health, and they’re part of a bigger plan. From Carl Boggs at zerohedge.com:

Nearly one year into the COVID pandemic, even a modicum of critical thinking should tell us that lockdown politics as practiced in the United States is an unmitigated disaster, and with no end in sight. The reference here to lockdown politics is meant to signify a particularly assaultive, tyrannical set of government policies that in less than a year have brought severe harm to millions, more likely tens of millions of Americans and others across the world. Sadly, a Joe Biden presidency is only bound to aggravate this already intolerable repression and misery.

One grievous problem with the lockdown mania is that by obsessively fixating on the virus, a power-mad elite has ignored what must drive any public intervention: the need for a comprehensive, detailed cost-benefit analysis informing social policy. Stale rhetoric about “following the science” turns out to be not only one dimensional and useless, yet it remains a justification for continuing mass shutdowns, in state after state. The worst consequences include millions of lost jobs and businesses, escalating poverty, record numbers of bankruptcies, educational chaos, new health crises, a sharp rise in addictions and myriad psychological problems.

Meanwhile, it has become abundantly clear that lockdown rules – the very rules overlooked at times of street demonstrations and upheavals – apply only to Trump supporters, the great “super-spreaders”, wherever they gather. Those arbitrary directives have been cynically used by Democratic governors, mayors, and their health czars as a dictatorial political weapon – in part to bolster their own power, in part to subvert Trump’s second presidential run. For them, the pandemic is welcomed as a godsend, to be leveraged for a “global reset” on the road to maximum power, an incipient fascism. What we have here is what C. Wright Mills long ago called the “higher immorality” in his classic The Power Elite.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Economics, Governments, Law, Medicine, Politics, Uncategorized

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The American Nightmare, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer and Byron Bishop

Posted on October 13, 2020 | Leave a comment

A Canadian’s analysis of the US. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

How their beloved neighbors see America, a comment by Automatic Earth commenter ByronBishop. I don’t think I need to add much. Took the title from a comment on the comment.

ByronBishop: I live in rural Canada and I do not have television, so my information on the American presidential election comes from newspapers and some online blogs. But what impresses me the most in this cycle is what good theatre it is!

It is my view that the choice for American voters is simply this: which collection of billionaires will run the country? The Democrats or Republicans? At root, their policies are not very different; their principal goal is to maintain and extend their privilege, and to continue to develop the legal and fiscal framework that supports their activities. This framework consists of, among other things, the following policies, and most crucially, broad public acceptance of the righteousness of these policies:

• To maintain very low taxes on income and capital gains, favourable treatment of dividend and interest income, and no inheritance tax

• In the financial manipulation field, improve public and regulatory acceptance of the attitude usefully articulated by JH Kuntsler as “nothing matters and anything goes”. This allows (among many other things) private equity firms to buy up useful and productive enterprises, strip out all the assets in fees and special dividends and through the sale of high-yield (and chancy) bonds, and to then release the debt-ridden hulk back into the marketplace to sink (mostly) or swim (rarely). Also supports share buybacks, collateralised debt instruments, relocation of factories to low-wage states and countries.

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ESPN To Make Sweeping Layoffs In Effort To Save “Tens Of Millions” In Salaries, by Tyler Durden

Posted on October 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

How about that, most sports fans want to watch their sports without a heavy, or even a light dose of political hectoring. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Things look like they are going just splendidly in the world of sports in 2020.

In addition to having to deal with the public’s incessant fear of coronavirus (despite the fact that none of the scores of professional athletes in the U.S. that have tested positive have wound up visibly sick or in the hospital, let alone dead, from the virus), major professional sports leagues have also decided to play politics, injecting themselves into the heart of a nationwide racism uproar, instead of basketball and football.

In addition to ratings plunging for both the NBA and the NFL this year, the “get woke, go broke” results continue to take hold.

Now, ESPN is making another round of sweeping layoffs. It’s blaming the coronavirus, naturally, because it certainly can’t blame its own politicized discussions during almost every major sporting event it has broadcast over the last few months.

According to NJ.com, the network is trying to cut “tens of millions” in salary:

One source pegged the potential number of job losses between 300 and 700 employees. Another estimated 400 possible lost jobs. The cuts are expected to hit hardest among ESPN employees who work behind the camera. But some on-camera TV and radio talents could be impacted — particularly if their contracts are expiring this year. The network may also ask its highest-earning talent and executives to take a reduction in salary. The goal is to potentially cut tens of millions in salary, said sources.

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Joe Biden in 2020 Duplicates Hillary Clinton in 2016, by Eric Zuesse

Posted on March 8, 2020 | 2 comments

A major flaw of polls is that they measure quantities but not quality—how passionately respondents either favor or oppose a person or proposition. From Eric Zuesse at thesaker.is:

Hillary Clinton, of course, received the Democratic Party nomination in 2016 and was widely expected to beat Trump but she lost to him (though she won California by 4,269,978 in the popular vote, and so beat Trump by 2,864,974 in the nationwide popular vote, while she lost all other states by 1,405,002 votes, and so she would have been California’s President if she had won, but the rest of the nation wouldn’t have been happy).

Among the top reasons why Democrats in primaries and caucuses voted for Clinton was that they thought she would have a higher likelihood of beating the Republican nominee than Sanders did. This was the impression that the Democratic National Committee spread, and the Party’s voters believed in it. However, by the time when Election Day rolled around, the passion that Republicans felt for their nominee, Trump, was much stronger than was the passion that Democrats felt for their nominee, Clinton. During the Democratic primaries, polls were showing that the Democrats who were voting for Sanders to become their Party’s nominee were far more passionate in their support of him than was the case regarding the Democrats who were voting for Clinton to become the Democratic nominee. And nobody questions that Trump was the passion-candidate in the Republican Party’s primaries and caucuses.

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America Will Lose The Trade War Because That Is What Globalists Want To Happen, by Brandon Smith

Posted on May 16, 2019 | Leave a comment

The US losing the trade war will be an important part of the globalist plan to take down the dollar and reorder the world under global governance. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.com:

Times of great political and social crisis can almost always be linked back to a common root cause – false paradigms. There are many people out there who have no clue what this phrase means, just as they have no clue what the phrase “controlled opposition” means. Some of these people are new activists to the liberty movement who recently joined because of the fervor of the Trump presidential campaign. They think the world of sovereignty and nationalism revolves around Trump, because frankly, they have been duped by a false paradigm themselves.

False paradigms are a base tactic of what is known as “4th Generation Warfare”. The purpose of 4th Gen warfare is described in the document ‘From Psyop To Mindwar’. A document circulated within the DoD by the 7th Psychological Operations Group and written by now former General Paul Vallely (spelled “Valley” in the document) and now former Lt. Colonel Michael Aquino (a self professed satanist, believe it or not). I recommend it as a means to understand how globalists tend to think, how they use division to conquer populations, and to come to terms with the fact that these people are not held in check by empathy, morality or reason.

As far as 4th Gen warfare is concerned, Mindwar describes a method of psychological manipulation and propaganda used by governments and militaries as a means to turn a target population against itself. The goal is to win a war against a group of people by causing them to destroy each other so that the government does not have to combat them directly.

False paradigms are a premier tool for pursuing this outcome. They are achieved by dividing a population through false leadership, fake and sometimes real outside threats, as well as manufactured crisis events. Globalist institutions and the political puppets they control use false paradigms as a means to distract the public away from their criminal endeavors. While we are focused on the political Left, or the political Right, or the Russians, or the Iranians, or the Chinese, they are exploiting our fear and doubt to gain more centralization and more power.

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Posted in Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Government, Politics, Trade

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FBI, DOJ roiled by Comey, Lynch decision to let Clinton slide by on emails, says insider, by Malia Zimmerman and Adam Housley

Posted on October 13, 2016 | 1 comment

By now it’s a foregone conclusion: FBI Director James Comey’s decision not to proceed against Hillary Clinton was politically motivated. From Malia Zimmerman and Adam Housley at foxnews.com:

The decision to let Hillary Clinton off the hook for mishandling classified information has roiled the FBI and Department of Justice, with one person closely involved in the year-long probe telling FoxNews.com that career agents and attorneys on the case unanimously believed the Democratic presidential nominee should have been charged.

The source, who spoke to FoxNews.com on the condition of anonymity, said FBI Director James Comey’s dramatic July 5 announcement that he would not recommend to the Attorney General’s office that the former secretary of state be charged left members of the investigative team dismayed and disgusted. More than 100 FBI agents and analysts worked around the clock with six attorneys from the DOJ’s National Security Division, Counter Espionage Section, to investigate the case.

“No trial level attorney agreed, no agent working the case agreed, with the decision not to prosecute — it was a top-down decision,” said the source, whose identity and role in the case has been verified by FoxNews.com.

A high-ranking FBI official told Fox News that while it might not have been a unanimous decision, “It was unanimous that we all wanted her [Clinton’s] security clearance yanked.”

“It is safe to say the vast majority felt she should be prosecuted,” the senior FBI official told Fox News. “We were floored while listening to the FBI briefing because Comey laid it all out, and then said ‘but we are doing nothing,’ which made no sense to us.”

The FBI declined to comment directly, but instead referred Fox News to multiple public statements Comey has made in which he has thrown water on the idea that politics played a role in the agency’s decision not to recommend charges.

“I know there were many opinions expressed by people who were not part of the investigation – including people in government – but none of that mattered to us,” Comey said July 5 in announcing the FBI’s decision on the Clinton emails. “Opinions are irrelevant, and they were all uninformed by insight into our investigation, because we did the investigation the right way. Only facts matter, and the FBI found them here in an entirely apolitical and professional way.”

Andrew Napolitano, former judge and senior judicial analyst for Fox News Channel, said many law enforcement agents involved with the Clinton email investigation have similar beliefs.

“It is well known that the FBI agents on the ground, the human beings who did the investigative work, had built an extremely strong case against Hillary Clinton and were furious when the case did not move forward,” said Napolitano. “They believe the decision not to prosecute came from The White House.”

The claim also is backed up by a report in the New York Post this week, which quotes a number of veteran FBI agents saying FBI Director James Comey “has permanently damaged the bureau’s reputation for uncompromising investigations with his cowardly whitewash of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information using an unauthorized private email server.”

To continue reading: FBI, DOJ roiled by Comey, Lynch decision to let Clinton slide by on emails, says insider

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