Group items tagged

Congressman Walter Jones, a Republican who represents a wide swath of eastern North Carolina, might not strike you as a populist. But as a lawmaker, the veteran politician with a slow Southern drawl has become a gadfly in his own party for thumbing his nose at powerful political interests. He is the only GOP co-sponsor of the DISCLOSE Act, a measure to reveal the donors of dark-money campaign advertisements. He is among the loudest critics of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, telling an audience one that “Lyndon Johnson’s probably rotting in hell right now because of the Vietnam War, and he probably needs to move over for Dick Cheney.” And Speaker John Boehner removed Jones from the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees Wall Street. His sin? Bucking leadership and supporting many bills to further regulate the financial sector, along with serving as the last remaining House Republican to have voted for the Dodd-Frank reform package. The Republican establishment has attempted to remove Jones from office by dispatching a number of primary challengers over the years. For this cycle, a former Bush administration aide named Taylor Griffin is the party favorite to finally wipe out Jones. Several outlets, such as Bloomberg News, have reported that Griffin’s candidacy is being heavily promoted by the financial industry. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other banks helped fuel the $114,000 fundraising haul Griffin reported in his first campaign disclosure report. Earlier this week, a Super PAC financed in part by hedge fund titan Paul Singer went on air with a negative ad against Jones.

What hasn’t been reported, however, is that Griffin himself is a longtime political consultant for the biggest predators on Wall Street. Republic Report has obtained a disclosure report that shows that Griffin’s client list reads like a who’s who of financial interests that have preyed upon North Carolina families for short term gain.

Senator Bernie Sanders announced legislation Wednesday that would break up the country’s largest financial institutions. It’s the third time he’s introduced such a measure, but this time around he wields the large microphone of a presidential candidate. The bill, titled the “Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act,” will also be introduced in the House by Representatives Brad Sherman and Alan Grayson. If passed, it would require regulators at the Financial Stability Oversight Council to come up with a list of too-big-to-fail institutions whose failure would threaten the economy. One year later, those banks would be broken up by the secretary of the Treasury. Sure to be included on that list, based on the standards outlined in the legislation, would be JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley.

It also unavoidably poses a test for Hillary Clinton, the other declared Democratic candidate. Much of the Draft Warren movement launched by progressive activists focused on the Massachusetts senator’s advocacy for combating the financial sector’s power generally, and breaking up the big banks in particular—and Clinton’s perceived weakness on that front.

Another likely Democratic candidate, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, wrote an op-ed in The Des Moines Register in March that also called for the biggest financial institutions to be broken up. Elsewhere, Senators Sherrod Brown and David Vitter have introduced similar legislation in the past, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Tom Hoenig also favors break-ups. Sanders and Sherman cited the danger posed to the economy by big banks, many of which are dramatically larger than they were before the 2008 financial crisis. JPMorgan Chase, for example, has increased its assets by $1.1 trillion since 2007. “In 2008 we learned that if Wall Street calls and says ‘bail us out or we’re going to take the economy down with us,’ that even if there is no statutory provision for bailouts, which there really isn’t today, Congress will pass as we did in 2008 a bill mandating the bailout,” said Sherman. “So ‘too big to fail’ means you will be bailed. That isn’t capitalism. That is socialism for the wealthy.”

The past, especially the political past, doesn’t just provide clues to the present. In the realm of the presidency and Wall Street, it provides an ongoing pathway for political-financial relationships and policies that remain a threat to the American economy going forward. When Hillary Clinton video-announced her bid for the Oval Office, she claimed she wanted to be a “champion” for the American people. Since then, she has attempted to recast herself as a populist and distance herself from some of the policies of her husband. But Bill Clinton did not become president without sharing the friendships, associations, and ideologies of the elite banking sect, nor will Hillary Clinton.  Such relationships run too deep and are too longstanding.

To grasp the dangers that the Big Six banks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) presently pose to the financial stability of our nation and the world, you need to understand their history in Washington, starting with the Clinton years of the 1990s. Alliances established then (not exclusively with Democrats, since bankers are bipartisan by nature) enabled these firms to become as politically powerful as they are today and to exert that power over an unprecedented amount of capital. Rest assured of one thing: their past and present CEOs will prove as critical in backing a Hillary Clinton presidency as they were in enabling her husband’s years in office.  In return, today’s titans of finance and their hordes of lobbyists, more than half of whom held prior positions in the government, exact certain requirements from Washington. They need to know that a safety net or bailout will always be available in times of emergency and that the regulatory road will be open to whatever practices they deem most profitable. 

Whatever her populist pitch may be in the 2016 campaign -- and she will have one -- note that, in all these years, Hillary Clinton has not publicly condemned Wall Street or any individual Wall Street leader.  Though she may, in the heat of that campaign, raise the bad-apples or bad-situation explanation for Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis of 2007-2008, rest assured that she will not point fingers at her friends. She will not chastise the people that pay her hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop to speak or the ones that have long shared the social circles in which she and her husband move. She is an undeniable component of the Clinton political-financial legacy that came to national fruition more than 23 years ago, which is why looking back at the history of the first Clinton presidency is likely to tell you so much about the shape and character of the possible second one.

In 1945 it was easy to get a defeated Europe to agree to Bretton Woods Gold Exchange Standard in which all currencies would be fixed to the US dollar and the dollar alone fixed to gold at $35 an ounce, where it remained until the system collapsed in August 1971 and Nixon abandoned gold-dollar convertibility. By then Europe was booming with modern reconstructed industry and the USA was becoming a rustbelt. France and Germany demanded US gold bullion instead of inflated dollars, and US gold reserves were vanishing. After 1971, the dollar flooded the world unfettered by gold reserve requirements and US military might during the Cold War forced Japan, Western Europe and others including OPEC to accept constantly inflating paper US dollars. From 1970 until about 2000 the volume of dollars in the world had risen some 2,900%. Because the dollar was the world “reserve currency” needed by all for trade in oil, goods, grains, the world was forced to swallow a de facto mammoth inflation after 1971.First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/01/22/watch-out-moody-s-here-we-come/

June 25, 2014. A final number for real US GDP growth in the first quarter of 2014 was released today. The number is not the 2.6% growth rate predicted by the know-nothing economists in January of this year. The number is a decline in GDP of -2.9 percent. The negative growth rate of -2.9 percent is itself an understatement. This number was achieved by deflating nominal GDP with an understated measure of inflation. During the Clinton regime, the Boskin Commission rigged the inflation measure in order to cheat Social Security recipients out of their cost-of-living adjustments. Anyone who purchases food, fuel, or anything knows that inflation is much higher than the officially reported number. It is possible that the drop in first quarter real GDP is three times the official number. Regardless, the difference is large between the January forecast of +2.6 percent growth and the decline as of the end of March of -2.9 percent.

Any economist who is real and unpaid by Wall Street, the government, or the Establishment knew that the +2.6 percent forecast was a crock. Americans’ incomes have not grown except for the one percent, and the only credit growth is in student loans, as those many who cannot find jobs mistakenly turn to “education is the answer.” In an economy based on consumer demand, the absence of income and credit growth means no economic growth. The US economy cannot grow because corporations pushed by Wall Street have moved the US economy offshore. US manufactured products are made offshore. Look at the labels on your clothes, your shoes, your eating and cooking utensils, your computers, whatever. US professional jobs such as software engineering have been moved offshore. An economy with an offshored economy is not an economy. All of this happened in full view, while well-paid free market shills declared that Americans were benefiting from giving America’s middle class jobs to China and India.

An official decline of -2.9 percent in the first quarter implies a second quarter GDP decline. Two declines in a row is the definition of recession. Imagine the consequences of a recession. It means that years of unprecedented Quantitative Easing failed to revive the economy. It means that years of Keynesian fiscal deficits failed to revive the economy. Neither fiscal nor monetary policy worked. What then can revive the economy? Nothing except to force the return of the economy that the anti-American corporations moved offshore. This would require credible government. Unfortunately, the US government has been losing credibility since the second term of the Clinton regime. It has none left.

It’s easy to strike a pose of cynicism when contemplating Hillary Clinton’s inevitable (and terribly imminent) presidential campaign. As a drearily soulless, principle-free, power-hungry veteran of DC’s game of thrones, she’s about as banal of an American politician as it gets. One of the few unique aspects to her, perhaps the only one, is how the genuinely inspiring gender milestone of her election will (following the Obama model) be exploited to obscure her primary role as guardian of the status quo. That she’s the beneficiary of dynastic succession – who may very well be pitted against the next heir in line from the regal Bush dynasty (this one, not yet this one) - makes it all the more tempting to regard #HillaryTime with an evenly distributed mix of boredom and contempt. The tens of millions of dollars the Clintons have jointly “earned” off their political celebrity - much of it speaking to the very globalists, industry groups, hedge funds, and other Wall Street appendages who would have among the largest stake in her presidency - make the spectacle that much more depressing (the likely candidate is pictured above with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein at an event in September).

But one shouldn’t be so jaded. There is genuine and intense excitement over the prospect of (another) Clinton presidency. Many significant American factions regard her elevation to the Oval Office as an opportunity for rejuvenation, as a stirring symbol of hope and change, as the vehicle for vital policy advances. Those increasingly inspired factions include: Wall Street Politico Magazine, November 11, 2014 (“Why Wall Street Loves Hillary”):

The Israel Lobby Foreign Policy, Aaron David Miller, November 7, 2014 (“Would Hillary Be Good For the Holy Land?”):

Latvia is presently building a metal fence, 90 kilometres long and 2.5 metres high, along its frontier with Russia. It will be finished before the end of the year, and will be extended in 2019 along more than 190 kilometres of the frontier, for a planned cost of 17 million Euros. A similar 135 kilometre fence is being built by Lithuania along its frontier with the Russian territory of Kaliningrad. Estonia has announced the impending construction of a wall, also along the frontier with Russia, 110 kilometres long and also 2.5 metres high. Planned cost – more than 70 million Euros, for which the Estonian government intends to ask for finance from the European Union.

The recent economic “correction” in the U.S. markets, which saw stocks drop back down from recent record-highs, has begun to spread to the east, reaching the stock exchanges in Tokyo, Taiwan and Shanghai. While all three of these markets depend, to some extent, on the performance of Wall Street, one is likely to emerge stronger as the U.S. market corrects itself. Many Western economic analysts — such as those at the pillar of U.S. financial journalism, Bloomberg — have continued to predict future financial downturns would be caused by Chinese debt, or the country’s massive “shadow” economy (or, more specifically, low level loans that aren’t tightly regulated by the central government). This latest downturn, however, shows once again that Wall Street is still the primary factor in sinking global markets. China has been faced with — and continued to grow throughout — a previous U.S.-triggered global recession just under a decade ago. While the current condition of the markets is nothing like the end of 2008, there is still the same fear in the West that China is somehow on the brink of catastrophe. Yet China pulled through the Great Recession, despite a huge decrease in demand for Chinese export goods. Beijing presided over GDP growth only falling below 8 percent in the last quarter of 2008 and first of 2009 and made a faster recovery than any Western nation.

China is obviously in a position much different now from that of 2008. Now — as a clear competitor with the U.S. in key economic sectors such as cutting-edge technology, and playing a unifying role for a large portion of the global population — Beijing is making even more major domestic economic reforms and preparing to project its new prosperity outward. In order to better understand how China is likely not just to survive any fluctuations in the U.S. market but also to thrive, it is best to understand both how China managed to recover from the last recession faster than any other country and the new economic policies of President Xi Jinping, which will harness the power of the world’s largest planned economy in its march into the future.

Like most lefty journalists, I assumed that George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq to buy up its oil fields, cheap and at gun-point, and cart off the oil. We thought we knew the neo-cons true casus belli: Blood for oil. But the truth in the Options for Iraqi Oil Industry was worse than "Blood for Oil". Much, much worse.

Within days, our chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, delivered to my shack in the woods outside New York a 323-page, three-volume programme for Iraq's oil crafted by George Bush's State Department and petroleum insiders meeting secretly in Houston, Texas. I cracked open the pile of paper – and I was blown away.

I'd already had in my hands a 101-page document, another State Department secret scheme, first uncovered by Wall Street Journal reporter Neil King, that called for the privatisation, the complete sell-off of every single government-owned asset and industry. And in case anyone missed the point, the sales would include every derrick, pipe and barrel of oil, or, as the document put it, "especially the oil". That plan was created by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists and neo-cons working for the Heritage Foundation. In 2004, the plan's authenticity was confirmed by Washington power player Grover Norquist. (It's hard to erase the ill memory of Grover excitedly waving around his soft little hands as he boasted about turning Iraq into a free-market Disneyland, recreating Chile in Mesopotamia, complete with the Pinochet-style dictatorship necessary to lock up the assets – while behind Norquist, Richard Nixon snarled at me from a gargantuan portrait.) The neo-con idea was to break up and sell off Iraq's oil fields, ramp up production, flood the world oil market – and thereby smash OPEC and with it, the political dominance of Saudi Arabia.

Just months after the FBI launched an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, Democratic Party operatives made a generous donation to the political campaign of the wife of the FBI official who would eventually oversee that investigation. The FBI ultimately cleared Clinton of any criminal wrongdoing, creating the impression that the Democrats may have bribed the Bureau to keep their nominee out of trouble. According to a report published Monday by The Wall Street Journal, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a long-time associate of the Clintons, helped funnel over $675,000 of donations into the 2015 Virginia state Senate campaign of Jill McCabe, the wife of Andrew McCabe, who is now the deputy director of the FBI. Of the total, $467,500 came directly from Common Good VA, McAuliffe’s PAC, while an additional $207,788 came out of the coffers of the Virginia Democratic Party, over which McAuliffe exerts almost total control. Devlin Barrett, a Wall Street Journal reporter who covers the Justice Department, noted that Andrew McCabe was promoted as deputy director after the donations were made. He added: “Mr. McAuliffe and other state party leaders recruited Dr. McCabe to run, according to party officials. She lost the election to incumbent Republican Dick Black.” According to Barrett, the donations represented about one-third of Jill McCabe’s total campaign war chest.

Representatives from the three branches of the Mexican government meet today at the presidential residence of Los Pinos in Mexico City to coordinate a joint plan of action in response to attacks by U.S. President Donald Trump against Mexico. 

According to official sources, some businessmen will also attend Friday’s meeting and the president will hold a separate gathering with the governors of Mexico’s 32 states.  The emergency meeting was called by President Enrique Peña Nieto following the cancellation of a planned visit to Washington in which he was going to meet with Trump to discuss bilateral issues of importance to the neighboring countries. 

On Thursday, Trump warned Peña Nieto that if he was unwilling to pay for his key election campaign pledge of building a barrier along the U.S. southern border, it was better to cancel the visit. Trump also threatened to impose a 20 percent tax on Mexican imports to force the government to pay for his 2,000-mile planned border wall. 

As U.S. President Donald Trump ramps up his attack on immigration, his executive order to cut federal funding to so-called “sanctuary cities” protecting immigrants could face a number of legal and logistical loopholes.

The executive order signed on Wednesday orders federal agencies to withhold grant money from around 300 cities and counties that block local law enforcement from targeting undocumented immigrants, or as White House Press Secretary Sean Spice put it, “harbor illegal immigrants.” Spicer said that Trump will look at means to strip funding to cities and counties that “willfully refuse to comply” with his new plan to crack down on immigration, which also included ordering the construction of the infamous border wall between Mexico and the U.S. and increasing immigration authorities' power to deport people from the U.S., often without due process. These measures have sparked outrage among many immigrant rights organizations and caused city mayors to speak out against them. Opponents likely have the law on their side. Politico reported that the White House failed to consult the proper federal agencies and lawmakers before signing the executive orders. This means the orders are likely fraught with contradictions to current laws that can be easily exploited by opponents to dismantle them. The legal fight has already begun. Mayors of targeted cities are teaming up with immigration advocacy groups and attorneys to gear up for a legal battle against the presidential orders. Opponents of Trump’s order say that federal money allocated to cities can only be cut if the funding is directly linked to behavior that opposes the federal government’s plan for immigration.

Trump's plan to make police and other key services exempt from any funding cuts has also sparked legal debate. Trump had previously stated that even if a city was stripped of funding for non-compliance, police departments' funding would not be cut. Opponents also say that making police exempt would make it possible for a judge to deem parts of the order unconstitutional. Richard Doyle, city attorney in San Jose, California, argues that Trump cannot cut a city's funding for healthcare and education while protecting the police force from cuts because its function relates more closely to immigration enforcement, adding that it was uncertain whether only future or existing federal funding would be targeted under the order. Others have argued that there would be significant barriers and a long process for the federal government to cut off funding to sanctuary cities that would first have to go through states and local government where targeted jurisdictions have rights to appeal. Edward Waters from Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell in Washington told Reuters that for the Trump administration, “It’s fair to say that they don't understand the scope and reach of federal grants law.”