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Michael Cohen, Tony Podesta, and the Nauseating Corruption Enabled by Big Government

May 15, 2018

Michael Cohen, Tony Podesta, and the Nauseating Corruption Enabled by Big Government

Corruption and big government have always gone hand-in-hand.

Ordinary Americans have a low opinion of Washington, but they’re underestimating the extent of the problem.

The nation’s capital is basically a playpen for special interests. It’s now the richest region of the country, with lobbyists, bureaucrats, contractors, politicians, and other insiders and cronies getting fat and happy thanks to money that is taken from people in the productive sector of the economy.

Republicans play the game and Democrats play the game, with both sides getting undeserved wealth at our expense.

Let’s take an up-close look at how this sordid game is played.

Here are some excerpts from a column by Catherine Rampell in today’s Washington Post.

The GOP is no longer the Party of Reagan. It’s the Party of Michael Cohen. …the Cohen blueprint for achieving the American Dream: Work minimally, if you can, and leverage government connections whenever possible. …following Donald Trump’s unexpected presidential victory, Cohen cashed in. …Cohen told companies that he could provide valuable “insights” into the new administration. Huge multinational corporations lined up to purchase these “insights,” dumping millions into Essential Consultants LLC… Cohen is hardly the only prominent Trumpster invoking White House connections… Cabinet members and other senior government officials, too, have enjoyed a sweetheart apartment deal, lobbyist-arranged vacations and private jet rides. These are not amenities secured through brains, honesty and hard work, the virtues that Republicans traditionally say are required for upward mobility and financial comfort. They are the fruits of luck, cronyism and a loose approach to ethical lines.”

This is disgusting. Republicans often come to Washington claiming they’re going to “drain the swamp.” Many of them, however, quickly decide it’s a hot tub.

But don’t forget that sleaze is a bipartisan activity in Washington.

Here are excerpts from a Wall Street Journal report about influence-peddling on the other side of the aisle.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Blood Sports

May 12, 2017

Blood Sports

What you’re seeing in the political miasma of “RussiaGate” is an exercise in nostalgia. Apart from the symbolic feat of getting a “black” president freely elected in 2008 (remember, Mr. Obama is also half-white), the Democratic Party hasn’t enjoyed a political triumph in half a century to match the Watergate extravaganza of 1972-74, which ended in the departure of Mr. Nixon, the designated Prince of Darkness of those dear dead days. Watergate had had a more satisfying finale than The Brides of Dracula.

So, in its current sad state, devoid of useful political ideas, mired in the mostly manufactured conflicts of race and gender, psychologically crippled by the election loss of a miserable candidate to the Golden Golem of Greatness, the Democratic Party is returning full steam to a gambit that worked so well years ago: beating the devil by congressional inquiry.

In President Trump (uccchhh, the concept!), they’ve got a target much juicier even than Old Nixie. It wasn’t for nothing that they called him “Tricky Dick.” He came back from political near-death twice in his career. The first time, running as Dwight Eisenhower’s veep, he was accused of accepting the gift of a vicuna coat for his wife, Pat, and other secret cash emoluments. He overcame that with one of the first epic performances of the TV age, the “Checkers Speech” — Checkers being the family’s cocker spaniel, who Nixon invoked as a proxy for his own guileless innocence. It worked bigly.

The second near-death was his defeat in the California governor’s race of 1962, following his 1960 squeaker presidential election loss to John F. Kennedy. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore…” he told the press. But he rose from the grave in 1968 — after fortifying his bank account in a Wall Street law practice — when the Vietnam War was tearing the country apart (and wrecking the Democratic Party of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Any of this Sound Familiar?

April 5, 2017

Any of this Sound Familiar?

 


Ramón Casas Decadence 1899
Reading up on the Syria ‘chemical attack’ issue (is that the right term to use?). The headlines are entirely predictable, and by now that probably won’t surprise anyone, no matter where they are or what views they adhere to. We know there’s been an attack and that some kind of chemical was used. The media talk about sarin.

They also, almost unanimously, blame the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad for it. But that’s the same government that just this week saw both US Foreign Secretary Rex Tillerson and US UN enjoy Nikki Haley point to a significant shift in American policy, towards a view that removing Assad is no longer a priority in US Middle-East policy.

That comes after many years of insisting that Assad must be removed. And after many years of US involvement in removing other regimes in the region, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi. It also comes on the eve of a large Syria conference, the first in a long time, due to start today. Russia and the States send only lower-level representatives, politically sensitive etc., but still.

The question arises what reason the Syrian government could possibly have to launch a chemical attack anywhere on its territory, gruesome pictures of which, with many child casualties, were posted soon after the attack supposedly too place. And that’s where logic at least seems to break down.

Syria was not supposed to have any chemical warfare arsenals left, far as I understand, there was an accord to that extent in 2013. Did they hide any (Saddam WMD style?!), or did they recently obtain them (from Russia?!). But most of all, why use them on the eve of a conference where you have everything to gain?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Republican insider: Trump is creating Deep State 2.0, but it might crash the economy (EXCLUSIVE)

March 5, 2017

Republican insider: Trump is creating Deep State 2.0, but it might crash the economy (EXCLUSIVE)

Former GOP staffer says American president is a ‘mutation’ of unaccountable oligarchy pulling the strings of Democrats and Republicans alike

Mike Lofgren is a former Republican Congressional aide who spent 28 years as a Congressional staff member before retiring in 2011. During the last 16 years of his career, he held a high level national security clearance as a senior analyst for the House and Senate budget committees. His position gave him a first-hand insider’s perspective on a wide range of US government policies, from the lucrative bank bailouts, to accelerating Pentagon spending; from botched disaster relief after Hurricane Katrine, to the contradictions of the ‘war on terror’.

Now Lofgren is speaking out about the Donald Trump administration, its dangerous relationship with the American Deep State — and what it means for the future of the American Republic.

Mike Lofgren, 28-year veteran GOP staffer. Source: BillMoyers.com

Oligarchy

Last year, Lofgren released his second book, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, in which he drew on his insider experience on Capitol Hill to reveal the inner workings of the US government.

His chief contention is that the US political system has, for all intents and purposes, become an oligarchy — with different Democrat and Republican administrations pursuing policies that remain constrained within the same defunct paradigm of extractive finance in service to the burgeoning bureaucracies of private defense firms, giant corporations, and global banks — benefiting the few at the expense of the many.

I caught up with Lofgren to find out the former longtime Republican operative’s prognosis for how the Deep State will fare in the Age of Trump.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Collapse of the Left

January 23, 2017

The Collapse of the Left

The Left is not just in disarray–it is in complete collapse because the working class has awakened to the Left’s betrayal and abandonment of the working class in favor of building personal wealth and power.
The source of the angry angst rippling through the Democratic Party’s progressive camp is not President Trump–it’s the complete collapse of the Left globally. To understand this collapse, we turn (once again) to Marx’s profound understanding of the state and capitalism.
We turn not to the cultural Marxism that is passingly familiar to Americans, but to Marx’s core economic analysis, which as Sartre noted, is only taught to discredit it.
Cultural Marxism draws as much from Engels as Marx. In today’s use, cultural Marxism describes the overt erosion of traditional values–the family, community, religious faith, property rights and limited central government–in favor of rootless Cosmopolitanism and an expansive, all-powerful central state that replaces community, faith and property rights with statist control mechanisms that enforce dependence on the state and a mindset that the individual is guilty of anti-state thinking until proven innocent by the state’s own rules.
Marx’s critique of capitalism is economic: capital and labor are in eternal conflict. In Marx’s analysis, capital has the upper hand until the internal contradictions of capitalism consume capital’s control from the inside.
Capital not only dominates labor, it also dominates the state. Thus the state-cartel version of capitalism that is dominant globally is not a coincidence or an outlier–it is the the only possible outcome of a system in which capital is the dominant force.
To counter this dominance of capital, social democratic political movements arose to  wrest some measure of control out of the hands of capital in favor of labor.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

2016: The Year the Americans Found out Our Elections Are Rigged

April 13, 2016

2016: The Year the Americans Found out Our Elections Are Rigged

– Former President Jimmy Carter

(ANTIMEDIA) Denver, CO — The 2016 election has been a wild ride, with two insurgent grassroots campaigns literally giving the political establishment a run for its money. But as the events of this presidential primary season play out, it’s becoming clear the U.S. election — and even more so, the presidential race — is a big scam being perpetrated on the American people.

Events from the last week have exposed the system as an illusion of choice and a farce. They have reinforced at least one study showing the U.S. is an oligarchy rather than a democratic republic.

The Wyoming democratic caucus took place on Saturday, purportedly to allow voters to have their voices heard in the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Sanders lost the Wyoming caucus by winning it with a 12 percent margin.

Wait, what?

How does one lose by winning 56 percent of the votes? This happens when the political process is, according to the New York Post, “rigged” by superdelegates. The Postsummed up this “strange” phenomenon:

“[U]nder the Democratic Party’s oddball delegate system, Sanders’ winning streak — he has won seven out of the past eight contests — counts for little.

“In fact, despite his win, he splits Wyoming’s 14 pledged delegates 7 to 7 under the caucus calculus.

“Clinton, meanwhile, also gets the state’s four superdelegates — who had already pledged their allegiance to her in January. So despite ‘losing,’ she triumphs 11-7 in the delegate tally.”

Even media pundits on MSNBC openly called the process rigged:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The War Against Change

August 13, 2015

The War Against Change

Last week’s post explored the way that the Democratic party over the last four decades has abandoned any claim to offer voters a better future, and has settled for offering them a future that’s not quite as bad as the one the Republicans have in mind. That momentous shift can be described in many ways, but the most useful of them, to my mind, is one that I didn’t bring up last week: the Democrats have become America’s conservative party.

Yes, I know. That’s not something you’re supposed to say in today’s America, where “conservative” and “liberal” have become meaningless vocal sounds linked with the greedy demands of each party’s assortment of pressure groups and the plaintive cries of its own flotilla of captive constituencies. Still, back in the day when those words still meant something, “conservative” meant exactly what the word sounds like: a political stance that focuses on conserving some existing state of affairs, which liberals and radicals want to replace with some different state of affairs. Conservative politicians and parties—again, back when the word meant something—used to defend existing political arrangements against attempts to change them.

That’s exactly what the Democratic Party has been doing for decades now. What it’s trying to preserve, of course, is the welfare-state system of the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society programs of the 1960s—or, more precisely, the fragments of that system that still survive. That’s the status quo that the Democrats are attempting to hold in place. The consequences of that conservative mission are unfolding around us in any number of ways, but the one that comes to mind just now is the current status of presidential candidate Bernard Sanders as a lightning rod for an all too familiar delusion of the wing of the Democratic party that still considers itself to be on the left.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Suicide of the American Left

August 6, 2015

The Suicide of the American Left

Regular readers of this blog know that I generally avoid partisan politics in the essays posted here. There are several reasons for that unpopular habit, but the most important of them is that we don’t actually have partisan politics in today’s America, except in a purely nominal sense. It’s true that politicians by and large group themselves into one of two parties, which make a great show of their rivalry on a narrow range of issues. Get past the handful of culture-war hot buttons that give them their favorite opportunities for grandstanding, though, and you’ll find an ironclad consensus, especially on those issues that have the most to say about the future of the United States and the world.

It’s popular on the disaffected fringes of both parties to insist that the consensus in question comes solely from the other side; dissident Democrats claim that Democratic politicians have basically adopted the GOP platform, while disgruntled Republicans claim that their politicians have capitulated to the Democratic agenda. Neither of these claims, as it happens, are true. Back when the two parties still stood for something, for example, Democrats in Congress could be counted on to back organized labor and family farmers against their corporate adversaries and to fight attempts on the part of bankers to get back into the speculation business, while their opposite numbers in the GOP were ferocious in their opposition to military adventurism overseas and government expansion at home.

Nowadays? The Democrats long ago threw their former core constituencies under the bus and ditched the Depression-era legislation that stopped kleptocratic bankers from running the economy into the ground, while the Republicans decided that they’d never met a foreign entanglement or a government handout they didn’t like—unless, of course, the latter benefited the poor.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

Good Economic News, but Democrats Differ on Whether to Take Credit – NYTimes.com

December 16, 2014

Good Economic News, but Democrats Differ on Whether to Take Credit – NYTimes.com.

WASHINGTON — Democrats would like some credit for the run of good economic news. Yet the better those reports are, the more divided the party has become over how — even whether — to take any.

In one camp are Democrats who argue that if they do not take some credit, they will continue to receive little. Others counter that boasting would backfire, infuriating millions of Americans who do not see the economy improving for them or their children.

Many, including President Obama, fall in the middle: still seeking to strike some balance, more than five years after the recovery officially began, between extolling progress and recognizing the pain that lingers.

The debate simmered behind the scenes for months leading to the midterm elections. It intensified afterward, as the defeated party scrambled for a new direction, and then again when the report of 321,000 new jobs in November confirmed that after 57 straight months of growth, employment gains were at their highest levels since the 1990s.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If Republicans Win Control of the Senate in November, Nuclear War with Russia Will Be More Likely. Here’s Why. Washington’s Blog

October 20, 2014

If Republicans Win Control of the Senate in November, Nuclear War with Russia Will Be More Likely. Here’s Why. Washington’s Blog.

Senate Bill S. 2277 is sponsored by 26 Republicans and no Democrats, and it would give President Obama the virtually unlimited authority to take U.S. to war against Russia in defense of the Ukrainian Government that Obama’s February 2014 coup established in Ukraine, the government that’s controlled by a coalition of one fascist party and two nazi (or racist-fascist) parties in northwest Ukraine. (Southeast Ukraine isn’t represented in the coalition; southeast Ukraine had voted overwhelmingly — and you can see the exact percentages here – for the President that Obama’s coup toppled in February 2014.)

Paul Roderick Gregory headlined at the Forbes site on October 10th, “A Republican Senate Can Help Send U.S. Weapons to Ukraine,” and he condemned Obama for backing off on Ukraine, and said:

“I recently gave five compelling reasons for U.S. lethal aid to Ukraine, and I explained why inaction on Ukraine threatens the destruction of NATO as we know it. The American establishment elite have increasingly concluded the same: that we must give Ukraine the means to defend itself against Russian aggression. Add former defense secretary and CIA head, Leon Panetta, to a long list of diplomats (Mike McFaul, Strobe Talbot), generals (Martin Dempsey, Philip Breedlove et al.), congressmen and senators (Ben Nelson, Sander Levin, Jim Gerlach, Gerland Connoly, Robert Menendez, Bob Corker, to name just a few) who disagree with the president on Ukraine.”

…click on the link above to read the rest of the article…

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