There is no kind way of saying it. President Obama is a phony. But
we so wanted him to be a believer in Peace and Guardian of the Poor,
that we failed to look behind his smooth and well educated veneer.
Obama, it turns out, is the amazing Wizard of Oz. And we bought his
smoke and mirrors, hook, line and sinker. And we will talk ourselves
into buying the same from Hillary Clinton.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/30/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well, the US has officially apologized for imprisoning Japanese Americans.
Our president clearly stated that it was wrong. Of course, the apology
doesn't undo what was done and it hasn't prevented our subsequent unjust
imprisonment of people for political reasons. So, I think it would have
been
fitting and appropriate to apologize for dropping those damnable bombs.
Japan had already offered to surrender. Our government said that surrender
wasn't enough. Their emperor needed to give up his ceremonial throne. The
Japanese bawked. So the humane democratic American nation obliterated a
city with an atomic bomb, paused for breath, and dropped another bomb. And
then our kind and gentle government accepted the Japanese surrender without
requiring their emperor to give up his throne. I've read people's guesses
about why and it comes down to this. The US wanted to test this new weapon
and who better to test it on than the Japanese? But our government refuses
to bear responsibility for the worst war crime in human history. So for
Obama to make that very articulate speech about peace and nuclear weapons
is, as far as I'm concerned, pure hypocrisy. He has this phrase that he
uses when he is lecturing us about bad behavior, "That's not who we are".
Well, in fact, he's full of shit. That is who we are. He manages to
suppress
whole gobs of reality when he talks, perhaps even when he thinks. He can
talk about the rule of law while choosing a list of potential terrorists
for
assassination without trial each week, people who will be targeted by their
cell phones, who may not even be in possession of their cell phones so that
the folks who are blown up are not the potential terrorists, but friends or
relatives. And keep that word, potential, in mind because there isn't even
any proof that all of these people have done or will do something to
endanger the United States. So George W. Bush couldn't speak a grammatical
sentence while Barak Obama speaks poetry, yet both of them are destructive
forces.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Alice Dampman
Humel
Sent: Monday, May 30, 2016 9:44 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Hillary Clinton's New Anti-Trump Ad Misses
the Mark
But the Japanese apparently did not. Neither the "official" nor the people.
Nor, for that matter, do I.
Yes, Obama is a brilliant speaker, and while his actions do not always
measure up to his rhetoric, I, for one, vote for the rhetoric at least as
an
ideal. He neither justified the bombing, nor did he "apologize" for it, for
doing that is really just empty, stinking words. He did express deep sorrow
at the suffering and pleaded that nothing like it ever happen again. This,
I
agree with. Would I like to see more of a match-up between the words and
the
reality of our existence? You bet I would. But, particularly after
listening
to the crude, vulgar, bellicose Trump and the equally bellicose, although
not quite as crude and vulgar, Shillary, I'll take those Obama words and
look for ways to help make them reality. Good luck with that, you say?
Agreed. When the words are blatant lies, that's one thing. But I don't
think
they are lies. I think Obama, no less than any of us here on this list,
wants them to be true.but they're not, you say? Can't argue completely,
@optonline.net> wrote:
Cornell West would most probably agree with your point.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl
Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, May 28, 2016 12:23 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Hillary Clinton's New Anti-Trump Ad
Misses
the Mark
Words words words.
If they smell, then they're political crap.
I listened to our Prince of Peace give his, "Non Apology" to the
Japanese
the other day. What a fine and polished speaker Barak Obama is.
And what a
pile of crap dribbles out of his mouth. If he hadn't told me that
he is
supporting Peace and the Working Class, I'd have thought him to be a
White,
Wall Street Executive. They say that color is only skin deep, and
this man
proves the point, and then some.
If I had enough money, I'd pay Obama to go out after his term is
finished,
and live in the Detroit slums, created by his Wall Street friends
and old
Bill Clinton's NAFTA.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/27/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Taibbi writes: "A new attack ad put out by the Hillary
Clinton
campaign this week achieves the near-impossible, making
Donald Trump
look wronged and
(almost) like a victim. More believably, it makes the
Democrats look
sleazy and disingenuous in comparison."
A new Hillary Clinton campaign ad hits Donald Trump for
saying in 2006
that he hoped the real-estate market would crash because
'you could
make a lot of money.' (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Hillary Clinton's New Anti-Trump Ad Misses the Mark By Matt
Taibbi,
Rolling Stone
27 May 16
Clinton accuses Trump of "rooting" for a crash caused by her
own
donors new attack ad put out by the Hillary Clinton
campaign this
week achieves the near-impossible, making Donald Trump look
wronged
and (almost) like a victim. More believably, it makes the
Democrats
look sleazy and disingenuous in comparison.
The ad begins with a picture of a grinning Trump and the
words, "In
2006, Donald Trump was hoping for a real estate crash."
It proceeds to a series of grim scenes from the financial
crisis.
Against a Roger and Me-esque montage of blighted
neighborhoods, it reads
off stats:
"9
million Americans lost their jobs. 5 million people lost
their homes."
Then it returns to a grinning Trump, and another line:
"And the man who could be our next president.
was rooting for it to happen."
Then we hear Trump talking about how a bursting of the
real-estate
bubble would be an opportunity for rich folks like himself.
"I sort of hope that happens, because then people like me
would go in
and buy," Trump says, in an interview from 2006. "If there
is a bubble
burst, as they call it, you know, you could make a lot of
money."
Cut to: "If Donald wins, you lose."
This ad is disingenuous in a dozen different ways. For one
thing, the
destruction that the Clinton campaign describes was not
caused by
people swooping in after the bubble burst, buying at the
bottom of the
market.
It was caused by the existence of a speculative bubble in
the first place.
And that bubble was inflated not by Donald Trump, but by the
people
who have at least in part bankrolled Hillary Clinton's
career: namely,
Wall Street banks.
In the mid-2000s, a speculative mania swallowed up the
real-estate
markets largely because Wall Street discovered a new (and
often
criminally
fraudulent) way to peddle mortgage securities.
The basic trick involved big banks buying up the risky home
loans of
subprime borrowers - the loans of people who often lacked
verified
incomes and had poor credit histories - and repackaging them
as highly
rated mortgage securities.
Basically they took risky loans and presented them as
somewhat safer
investments to a range of investors, all of whom later got
clobbered:
pension funds, hedge funds, unions, even Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac.
This technique, of turning rancid home loans into a kind of
financial
hamburger and then selling it off as grade-A beef to
institutional
investors, created artificial demand in the real-estate
markets, which
in turn led to the speculative mania.
The bubble stayed inflated for a few years because a
continual influx
of new investors kept the old investors from losing their
shirts for a
while. The layman's term for this is a Ponzi scheme.
So when Donald Trump in 2006 says, "If there is a bubble
burst, you
could make a lot of money," he might sound crass, but he
wasn't wrong.
That bubble was always going to burst. Those investors who
got creamed
were always going to get creamed.
And the fault was with the people who drove this speculative
craze by
knowingly peddling bad merchandise and continually driving
the markets
upward. Think, for example, of Citigroup, which was selling
huge
masses of mortgage securities even as its traders were
saying things
to each other like, "We should start praying. I would not be
surprised
if half of these loans went down."
We know the names of many of these companies because many of
them have
agreed to pay huge settlements for their involvement in
selling
mismarked mortgage securities.
Four of them - the aforementioned Citigroup, along with
Goldman Sachs,
Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan Chase - are among Hillary
Clinton's top
six contributors for her career.
The new Clinton ad references people in foreclosure - it
even shows a
big, scary foreclosure sign. Many of the same banks also
agreed to
massive settlements for, among other things, using
fraudulent
documents to kick people out of their houses. Major Clinton
donors
Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase were signatories to the
original $25
billion foreclosure settlement, for instance.
As for the whole issue of "rooting" for a crash so as to
make money
off the misery of others, what Donald Trump was talking
about - and
it's galling to the point of being physically painful to
have to
defend him here - may sound scummy, but was neither illegal
nor even
unethical, unless you want to call this kind of capitalism
unethical
(which some might).
Trump wasn't rooting for an avoidable disaster, like a 9/11.
With this
bubble, the disaster had already happened. The properties
were already
overvalued. Trump or not, that pain was coming.
Taking advantage of market inefficiencies is what investors
are
supposed to do, a la the traders in The Big Short who
spotted the
corruption in the real-estate markets early and bet
accordingly.
Personally I doubt Trump was smart enough to bet so much as
a penny
out of his alleged billions on the market collapsing, but if
he did,
it wouldn't have been unethical, just cold.
The same can't be said for Goldman Sachs, the company famous
for
paying Hillary Clinton $675,000 for three speeches.
In the spring of 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations, led by Michigan's Carl Levin, released a
giant report
about the way Goldman profited from the crash by shorting
the market
even as it was advising clients in the opposite direction.
This report detailed how in 2006, the same year that Donald
Trump was
talking out loud about the bubble bursting, Goldman found
itself stuck
with what amounted to a $6 billion bet on the housing
market.
But at the end of the year the firm analyzed its position,
saw the
coming trouble, and realized it needed a change in strategy.
Goldman's
leaders, including CEO Lloyd Blankfein (seen here warmly
embracing
Hillary Clinton) and CFO David Viniar, decided that they
needed to
unload as many of their mortgage holdings as possible.
One particular quote the Senate investigators dug up stands
out. In
late December of 2006, Viniar wrote an email to his chief
mortgage
officer (emphasis mine):
"Let's be aggressive distributing things," he said, "because
there
will be very good opportunities as the markets [go] into
what is
likely to be even greater distress, and we want to be in a
position to
take advantage of them."
This, coming from the chief financial officer of a firm that
has been
among Hillary Clinton's top donors, is exactly what Donald
Trump said.
The difference was, Donald Trump was just talking about
making money
for himself. Goldman executives were talking about making
money at
their own clients' expense.
Two months after that Viniar memo, in February of 2007,
Blankfein
wrote an email of his own.
"Could/should we have cleaned up these books before,"
Blankfein wrote,
"and are we doing enough right now to sell off cats and dogs
in other
books throughout the division?"
By "cats and dogs," Blankfein meant the toxic mortgage
holdings he
wanted off his company's books. How did they get rid of
them? They
sold them off to customers.
In one particular deal, called Hudson, Goldman unloaded $1.2
billion
worth of "cats and dogs." They neglected to tell the client
that these
came from their own inventory, saying instead that the
holdings were
"sourced from the street."
By the spring of 2007, Goldman executives were in a panic
about the
likely meltdown of the real-estate markets. In May, a senior
exec gave
a presentation saying, "There is real meltdown potential."
The execs scanned the earth for suckers willing to buy up
their doomed
products. They found a hedge fund in Australia willing to
buy a $100
million mortgage-based deal called Timberwolf, promising
returns as
high as 60 percent while privately laughing about finding
the ultimate
sucker.
"I found a white elephant, flying pig and unicorn all at
once,"
clucked one of the bank's sales reps. A few days later,
after the deal
was off their books, another Goldman exec famously
trumpeted, "Boy,
that Timberwolf was one shitty deal."
I spent most of the last eight years poring through
disgusting stories
like this, reporting on the dreary question of what caused
the 2008
crash. All of that work was done before Hillary Clinton
announced she
would run for president. This isn't about Hillary Clinton
for me. It's
about the continuing influence of these companies.
These firms have mostly avoided blame for the crisis, partly
because
this subject is complicated, but also because mainstream
politicians
from both parties have refused to point a finger at them.
For that,
Hillary Clinton probably is at fault now, contributing to a
failure
among major-party politicians to be straight with the public
that
dates back to the first days of the crisis.
It's bad strategy. Trump is a lunatic, but he's gaining
strength
because his supporters believe his story about being so rich
that he's
free to tell it like it is. They equally believe his windy
diatribes
about Beltway pols like Jeb Bush and Hillary being
compromised by the
great gobs of money they take from corporate donors.
By blaming Trump for a problem caused by their own political
patrons,
Hillary and the Democrats are walking face-first into
Trump's
rhetorical buzz-saw. Couldn't they find something else to
hit him with?
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not
valid.
A new Hillary Clinton campaign ad hits Donald Trump for
saying in 2006
that he hoped the real-estate market would crash because
'you could
make a lot of money.' (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/hillary-clintons-new-anti-tr
ump-ad
-misses-the-mark-20160525 -
ixzz49m6FCn00http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/hillary-clinton
s-new-
anti-trump-ad-misses-the-mark-20160525 - ixzz49m6FCn00
Hillary
Clinton's New Anti-Trump Ad Misses the Mark By Matt Taibbi,
Rolling
Stone
27 May 16
Clinton accuses Trump of "rooting" for a crash caused by her
own
donors new attack ad put out by the Hillary Clinton
campaign this
week achieves the near-impossible, making Donald Trump look
wronged
and (almost) like a victim. More believably, it makes the
Democrats
look sleazy and disingenuous in comparison.
The ad begins with a picture of a grinning Trump and the
words, "In
2006, Donald Trump was hoping for a real estate crash."
It proceeds to a series of grim scenes from the financial
crisis.
Against a Roger and Me-esque montage of blighted
neighborhoods, it reads
off stats:
"9
million Americans lost their jobs. 5 million people lost
their homes."
Then it returns to a grinning Trump, and another line:
"And the man who could be our next president.
was rooting for it to happen."
Then we hear Trump talking about how a bursting of the
real-estate
bubble would be an opportunity for rich folks like himself.
"I sort of hope that happens, because then people like me
would go in
and buy," Trump says, in an interview from 2006. "If there
is a bubble
burst, as they call it, you know, you could make a lot of
money."
Cut to: "If Donald wins, you lose."
This ad is disingenuous in a dozen different ways. For one
thing, the
destruction that the Clinton campaign describes was not
caused by
people swooping in after the bubble burst, buying at the
bottom of the
market.
It was caused by the existence of a speculative bubble in
the first place.
And that bubble was inflated not by Donald Trump, but by the
people
who have at least in part bankrolled Hillary Clinton's
career: namely,
Wall Street banks.
In the mid-2000s, a speculative mania swallowed up the
real-estate
markets largely because Wall Street discovered a new (and
often
criminally
fraudulent) way to peddle mortgage securities.
The basic trick involved big banks buying up the risky home
loans of
subprime borrowers - the loans of people who often lacked
verified
incomes and had poor credit histories - and repackaging them
as highly
rated mortgage securities.
Basically they took risky loans and presented them as
somewhat safer
investments to a range of investors, all of whom later got
clobbered:
pension funds, hedge funds, unions, even Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac.
This technique, of turning rancid home loans into a kind of
financial
hamburger and then selling it off as grade-A beef to
institutional
investors, created artificial demand in the real-estate
markets, which
in turn led to the speculative mania.
The bubble stayed inflated for a few years because a
continual influx
of new investors kept the old investors from losing their
shirts for a
while. The layman's term for this is a Ponzi scheme.
So when Donald Trump in 2006 says, "If there is a bubble
burst, you
could make a lot of money," he might sound crass, but he
wasn't wrong.
That bubble was always going to burst. Those investors who
got creamed
were always going to get creamed.
And the fault was with the people who drove this speculative
craze by
knowingly peddling bad merchandise and continually driving
the markets
upward. Think, for example, of Citigroup, which was selling
huge
masses of mortgage securities even as its traders were
saying things
to each other like, "We should start praying. I would not be
surprised
if half of these loans went down."
We know the names of many of these companies because many of
them have
agreed to pay huge settlements for their involvement in
selling
mismarked mortgage securities.
Four of them - the aforementioned Citigroup, along with
Goldman Sachs,
Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan Chase - are among Hillary
Clinton's top
six contributors for her career.
The new Clinton ad references people in foreclosure - it
even shows a
big, scary foreclosure sign. Many of the same banks also
agreed to
massive settlements for, among other things, using
fraudulent
documents to kick people out of their houses. Major Clinton
donors
Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase were signatories to the
original $25
billion foreclosure settlement, for instance.
As for the whole issue of "rooting" for a crash so as to
make money
off the misery of others, what Donald Trump was talking
about - and
it's galling to the point of being physically painful to
have to
defend him here - may sound scummy, but was neither illegal
nor even
unethical, unless you want to call this kind of capitalism
unethical
(which some might).
Trump wasn't rooting for an avoidable disaster, like a 9/11.
With this
bubble, the disaster had already happened. The properties
were already
overvalued. Trump or not, that pain was coming.
Taking advantage of market inefficiencies is what investors
are
supposed to do, a la the traders in The Big Short who
spotted the
corruption in the real-estate markets early and bet
accordingly.
Personally I doubt Trump was smart enough to bet so much as
a penny
out of his alleged billions on the market collapsing, but if
he did,
it wouldn't have been unethical, just cold.
The same can't be said for Goldman Sachs, the company famous
for
paying Hillary Clinton $675,000 for three speeches.
In the spring of 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations, led by Michigan's Carl Levin, released a
giant report
about the way Goldman profited from the crash by shorting
the market
even as it was advising clients in the opposite direction.
This report detailed how in 2006, the same year that Donald
Trump was
talking out loud about the bubble bursting, Goldman found
itself stuck
with what amounted to a $6 billion bet on the housing
market.
But at the end of the year the firm analyzed its position,
saw the
coming trouble, and realized it needed a change in strategy.
Goldman's
leaders, including CEO Lloyd Blankfein (seen here warmly
embracing
Hillary Clinton) and CFO David Viniar, decided that they
needed to
unload as many of their mortgage holdings as possible.
One particular quote the Senate investigators dug up stands
out. In
late December of 2006, Viniar wrote an email to his chief
mortgage
officer (emphasis mine):
"Let's be aggressive distributing things," he said, "because
there
will be very good opportunities as the markets [go] into
what is
likely to be even greater distress, and we want to be in a
position to
take advantage of them."
This, coming from the chief financial officer of a firm that
has been
among Hillary Clinton's top donors, is exactly what Donald
Trump said.
The difference was, Donald Trump was just talking about
making money
for himself. Goldman executives were talking about making
money at
their own clients' expense.
Two months after that Viniar memo, in February of 2007,
Blankfein
wrote an email of his own.
"Could/should we have cleaned up these books before,"
Blankfein wrote,
"and are we doing enough right now to sell off cats and dogs
in other
books throughout the division?"
By "cats and dogs," Blankfein meant the toxic mortgage
holdings he
wanted off his company's books. How did they get rid of
them? They
sold them off to customers.
In one particular deal, called Hudson, Goldman unloaded $1.2
billion
worth of "cats and dogs." They neglected to tell the client
that these
came from their own inventory, saying instead that the
holdings were
"sourced from the street."
By the spring of 2007, Goldman executives were in a panic
about the
likely meltdown of the real-estate markets. In May, a senior
exec gave
a presentation saying, "There is real meltdown potential."
The execs scanned the earth for suckers willing to buy up
their doomed
products. They found a hedge fund in Australia willing to
buy a $100
million mortgage-based deal called Timberwolf, promising
returns as
high as 60 percent while privately laughing about finding
the ultimate
sucker.
"I found a white elephant, flying pig and unicorn all at
once,"
clucked one of the bank's sales reps. A few days later,
after the deal
was off their books, another Goldman exec famously
trumpeted, "Boy,
that Timberwolf was one shitty deal."
I spent most of the last eight years poring through
disgusting stories
like this, reporting on the dreary question of what caused
the 2008
crash. All of that work was done before Hillary Clinton
announced she
would run for president. This isn't about Hillary Clinton
for me. It's
about the continuing influence of these companies.
These firms have mostly avoided blame for the crisis, partly
because
this subject is complicated, but also because mainstream
politicians
from both parties have refused to point a finger at them.
For that,
Hillary Clinton probably is at fault now, contributing to a
failure
among major-party politicians to be straight with the public
that
dates back to the first days of the crisis.
It's bad strategy. Trump is a lunatic, but he's gaining
strength
because his supporters believe his story about being so rich
that he's
free to tell it like it is. They equally believe his windy
diatribes
about Beltway pols like Jeb Bush and Hillary being
compromised by the
great gobs of money they take from corporate donors.
By blaming Trump for a problem caused by their own political
patrons,
Hillary and the Democrats are walking face-first into
Trump's
rhetorical buzz-saw. Couldn't they find something else to
hit him with?
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
