If you want to understand Trump a bit more, download that book, Never
Enough, from BARD. It describes his personality and how he functions in his
business dealings. It omitted some of the details about his associations
with organized crime that I read about in an article the other day. Also, I
can't get over the insanity of the Democratic Party establishment that
insists on running a candidate that so many people dislike. It's really
suicidal.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of joe harcz Comcast
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2016 7:38 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Hillary Clinton's New Anti-Trump Ad Misses
the Mark
This is again right on target. The only thing that really troubles me is
this: "Trumpt is the ultimate Mussolini/Hitler factor as he is at once seen
at first a pawn of the powers that be and that he is a wild card of
pathological exploitation.
Don't get me wrong here I'm scared to death of both Hillary and Trumpt and
for reasons associated with this story amonst others.
Thus it is very, very and more very hard to discern the lessor amonst two
evils.
I want to go in to the woods and to hold a loved one very, very close
nowadays.
It is hard, very hard not to think of armegeddon.
It really is.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2016 4:21 PM
Subject: [blind-democracy] Hillary Clinton's New Anti-Trump Ad Misses the
Mark
market.
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
It was caused by the existence of a speculative bubble in the first place.market.
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
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
