Thursday, April 14, 2016

Free Market Oligarchy, Free-Market Theocracy

In November, Choose One.

Hillary The Inevitable and Little Lloyd, 2014 (Photo: Shannon Stapelton / Reuters)

From NYRB, via the Soul Of America:
Why is Hillary Clinton refusing to release the transcripts of her Goldman Sachs speeches? After losing eight of the last nine contests to Bernie Sanders, Clinton is trying to reassure voters that she is a reform-minded politician who can be trusted. Yet she has repeatedly refused requests to make public the texts of the three speeches she gave to executives of the Goldman Sachs ... in the fall of 2013, for which she was paid a total of $675,000. First she said she would look into it; then she said that she would release the transcripts only if all the other presidential candidates of both parties released the paid speeches they had given ...

... Why was she giving these speeches at all -- and accepting such hefty payments for them -- given Goldman Sachs’s record during the Great Recession of 2007–2008?...  On the stump, Clinton’s criticisms of Wall Street can sound ... radical ... During a CNN debate with Bernie Sanders in March, Clinton said that ... “no bank is too big to fail, and no executive too powerful to jail” and that she has “the tools” to do it ...

Yet Clinton’s repeated dealings with Goldman Sachs and its top executives since the financial crisis -- including the 2013 speeches and more recent events involving the Clinton Foundation -- run counter to such claims. To understand the significance of these dealings we have to bring together two strands of history. One concerns Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long-running connections to Goldman, among their closest with any US corporation. The second concerns Goldman’s activities leading up to and during the Wall Street crash of 2007 - 2008, including its deceptive marketing of contaminated mortgage derivatives.
And, even the Right doesn't trust Grand Turtlebear Greg Stillson.

Mandatory Prayer In Schools; The Hour Of Power From The White House Bunker;
And Global 'Finance' Will Be Allowed A Free Hand
Cruz, in Mr. Haney from Green Acres voice, declared to one of the moderators, “The opening question [moderator Jerry Seib] asked — would you bailout the big banks again — nobody gave you an answer to that. I will give you an answer — absolutely not.”
What else would you expect a scoundrel to say who had secretly secured big sweetheart loans from Goldman and Citibank — by leveraging his retirement accounts –– to fund his 2012 U.S. Senate campaign. Loans which the Calgary Ted conveniently forgot to disclose to the Federal Election Commission. These are the very retirement accounts that he said he and his wife said he cashed in to fund his senate race. In other words, Ted lied.
At the same time Ted’s bulging 2016 campaign accounts and supporting Super-PACs are stuffed with big oil and gas money. He knows how to play the game.
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Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, 
weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden.
-- Thomas Mann, 
"Doktor Faustus; Das Leven des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn" (1947)
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MEHR, MIT "STUFF":  The discussion plaint passive-aggressive argelbargle continues. Yes of course I am aware of All Internet Conventions. Even the Secret ones the Kool Kids cooked up.
HILLCOL:  Are you serious? You think Clinton is an Oligarch?
DOG: Yes.
HILLCOL: You put her in the same category as someone in the Russian Mafia?
DOG:  If your definition of an Oligarch is someone who amasses and exercises power in such a way that the interests of the many are given lip service, and they claim to be acting in the spirit of FDR while the few become wealthier and more exclusive?  Fuck, Yes.
HILLCOL: That's bullshit.
DOG:  Okay -- it's bullshit. America and the world operates in the same way as the plot of It's A Wonderful Life. Mr Potter gets his just deserts and dies alone, while the rest of Bedford Falls is poor, but morally superior.
HILLCOL:  Here we go.
DOG: And in the fullness of time, Americans will get all they deserve. I agree with that, by the way. It frightens the hell out of me.
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UND NOCH IMMER MEHR, MIT SICHERHEITSTRUPPEN:  The Inevitable One steamrolled into Kiddietown late yesterday afternoon, for a very special, high-donor, mover and shaker dinner at the Fairmont hotel on Tinytown's famed Nob Hill, organized and hosted by the bashful Mr George Clooney and his lovely wife, Ehrgrud. 

Remind me never to see another one of his films -- which, with the exception of Good Night And Good Luck, aren't that good, anyway. His version of one of my favorite books, Joseph Kanon's The Good German, stunk. I mean, it smelled like someone tossed a twenty-pound Salmon into the backseat of a car with all its windows up, locked the doors , and walked away for a few weeks. And, Monuments Men? Very disappointing.

When Herr Obama appears at the same venue, one helicopter to provide security hovers above the Fairmont. The Prestident Of The Free Market World rates one helicopter -- The Ineviatble One had three -- especially after a smallish group of Sanders supporters gathered near the hotel, and traffic was snarled by the attendant many, many Polizei and guys in suits who suddenly appeared to counter the massive threat. 

Many of them must be schizophrenic, because they hold one-sided conversations with imaginary friends, or mutter angrily into their shirtcuffs. Don't try to give them money; it just makes them upset.

But, Saul Goodman. It was important those awful supporters of the Stupid Old Man not be allowed to spoil the festivities and treats available for People Who Matter. Wonder who from Goldman-Sachs attended?

3 comments:

  1. america is the land of the free

    freedom means you can get anything you can pay for

    i keep hoping that my acronym MICFiC will catch on - sure, it's not as short as MIC, but it's more inclusive

    it hasn't made it to http://www.acronymfinder.com/

    it IS in the urban dictionary

    http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=MICFiC

    may the Creative Forces of the Universe stand beside us (metaphorically speaking), and guide us, through the Night with the Light from Above

    and speaking of those things which are above, like Higher Love -

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsS4xlHKnpw

    ReplyDelete
  2. 1)and now for something completely different, and yet connected step by step -

    i left youtube playing the above song and went and did something else for about half an hour - when i got back the link by link algorithm had got to

    100 Bass Riffs: A Brief History of Groove on Bass and Drums

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-RjmUFec40

    it's seventeen minutes long

    2) and now returning to politics - there's a guy who writes for the dallas observer whose most recent article is a must-read - you know i don't say this every day:

    Young Bernie Supporters Nationally Look Naive, but Here in Dallas They Look Cool FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2016 AT 4:02 A.M. BY JIM SCHUTZE

    http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/young-bernie-supporters-nationally-look-naive-but-here-in-dallas-they-look-cool-8216187


    Weird. The whole phenomenon of young people supporting Bernie is dispiriting when I look at it nationally. But when I look at it in terms of what I have witnessed on the ground in my own hometown over the last 10 or 15 years, it’s enormously encouraging.


    When I try to examine it through a national lens, the startling popularity of Bernie Sanders among the younger demographic cohorts, from Gen X to millennial, looks naive. I’m with Rolling Stone Publisher Jann Wenner (of my own age cohort), who said three weeks ago in his endorsement of Hillary Clinton: “Idealism and honesty are crucial qualities for me, but I also want someone with experience who knows how to fight hard.”

    Yeah. The things Sanders says to young people and they cheer, quoting Pope Francis on the need for a “moral economy,” for example, seem terribly soft and naive. What the hell is a moral economy? Isn’t that an oxymoron?

    [snip]

    When I look at the support of young people for Bernie, I also see, among other things, the complete explosion and execration of most of the strategies that marketers, media and politicians have employed since Mad Men days for reaching young people. The big light-bulb idea has always been that the young people are all young, so just give them young stuff. That’s what they get.

    Look, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Bernie is old. He’s hunched. He talks too loud, like he needs to reach up and dial his hearing aid in better. So what do they love about him?

    Isn’t it possible that they love his ideas? Or maybe more to the point, they may love the fact that he speaks to their ideas and to their hearts.

    The economic realities to which they were born were way more harsh than what my own generation of Americans inherited in the mid-20th century, when the nation was rich on the spoils of World War II. We could throw good jobs away. They may need years to get a decent job.


    In fact, if we really look honestly at the whole kettle of fish we are leaving to them, their outlook could be viewed as incredibly bleak and daunting, and yet here in Dallas I see in them a wonderfully quiet joy as they go about creating their own new city on the bones of the old. Shouldn't we be hugely encouraged by what we hear in them, not discouraged?

    ReplyDelete
  3. and also, too


    Bernie Sanders meets Pope Francis at the Vatican

    Pontiff and US presidential hopeful discussed need for morality and justice in world economy, Sanders tells reporters

    The encounter was not Pope Francis’s first brush with the US presidential race. In February, the leader of the Catholic church waded into the contest when he questioned Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s faith. “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not of building bridges, is not Christian,” the Pope said, alluding to Trump’s pledge to build a wall between the US and Mexico.

    Sanders and his wife, Jane, stayed overnight at the papal residence, in the Domus Santa Marta hotel in the Vatican gardens, on the same floor as the pope, and were spotted at the hotel reception carrying their own bags.

    Dr Jeffrey Sachs, a Sanders foreign policy adviser and adviser to the UN on climate change, said there were no photographs taken of the meeting.

    He said the couple met Pope Francis in the foyer of the hotel as he was leaving for Greece. The meeting lasted about five minutes, Sachs said.

    Sanders travelled to Rome to attend a Vatican conference on economic inequality and climate change. He is an admirer of the pope and has praised the pope’s views on poverty and the environment.

    http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/16/bernie-sanders-meets-pope-francis-at-the-vatican

    ReplyDelete