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Government of the Rich, by the Rich, and for the Rich.
Cartoon by Alfred Crozier from 1912 or thereabouts:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~histecon/crisis-next/1907/images.html
Here's a modern example, Elizabeth Warren describes briefing Sen. Hillary Clinton about a bankruptcy bill would hurt single mothers and children:
In this excerpt from Warren and Tyagi's 2003 book The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke, the authors lay out their arguments against the "predatory" lending practices of the mortgage and credit card industries and their effect on American families. The authors maintain that re-regulation of consumer lending is needed to level the playing field between creditors and families and reverse a disturbing trend: the transfer of wealth away from lower- and middle-income families, "directly into the pockets of giant lenders and their shareholders." Read Elizabeth Warren's interview with FRONTLINE elsewhere on this site.
EXCERPT...
Mrs. Clinton's newfound opposition to the bankruptcy bill surprised me. Given her legal training and her devotion to women's causes, I had certainly expected her to grasp the importance of the issue. But President Clinton's staff had been quietly supporting the bankruptcy bill for several months. Bill Clinton wanted to show that he and other "New Democrats" could play ball with business interests, and the major banks were lobbying hard for changes in the bankruptcy laws. I had expected that it would take a lot more than thirty minutes to convince Hillary Clinton to depart from the position widely rumored to be supported by her husband.
But Mrs. Clinton stayed firm in her fight against "that awful bill." She was convinced that the bill was "unfair to women and children," and she intended to stand by her principles, even if it cost some Democratic party candidates campaign contributions. Over the ensuing months, she was true to her word. With her strong support, the Democrats slowed the bill's passage through Congress. When Congress finally passed the bill in October 2000, President Clinton vetoed it. The following summer, an aide explained to me the abrupt about-face: "A couple of days after Mrs. Clinton met with you, we changed sides (on the bankruptcy bill) so fast that you could see skid marks in the hallways of the White House." Thanks to Mrs. Clinton, families still had one financial refuge left -- at least for the moment.
But the story doesn't end there. The banking lobbyists were persistent. President Clinton was on his way out, and credit card giant MBNA emerged as the single biggest contributors to President Bush's campaign. In the spring of 2001, the bankruptcy bill was reintroduced in the Senate, essentially unchanged from the version President Clinton had vetoed the previous year.
This time freshman Senator Hillary Clinton voted in favor of the bill.
Had the bill been transformed to get rid of all those awful provisions that had so concerned First Lady Hillary Clinton? No. The bill was essentially the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not. As First Lady, Mrs. Clinton had been persuaded that the bill was bad for families, and she was willing to fight for her beliefs. Her husband was a lame duck at the time he vetoed the bill; he could afford to forgo future campaign contributions. As New York's newest senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn't coming from families in financial trouble. Senator Clinton received $140,000 in campaign contributions from banking industry executives in a single year, making her one of the top two recipients in the Senate. Big banks were now part of Senator Clinton's constituency. She wanted their support, and they wanted hers -- including a vote in favor of "that awful bill."
CONTINUED...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/credit/more/cement.html
Government that serves the Rich is not a Democracy. It is an Oligarchy. And the Oligarchs already owned one major political party. They have no business in mine, the party that stands for those who believe all people are equal under law, the Democratic Party.
32 replies
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Now in its 35th year...
"You can't help those who simply will not be helped. One problem that we've had, even in the best of times, is people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice." -- President Reagan, 1/31/84, on Good Morning America, defending his administration against charges of callousness.
You want more Trickle-Down Voodoo Reaganomics?
Then Friend Larry Summers.
Evidence of an American Plutocracy: The Larry Summers Story
By Matthew Skomarovsky
LilSis.org
Jan 10, 2011 at 19:31 EST
EXCERPT...
Another new business model Rubin and Summers made possible was Enron. Rubin had known Enron well through Goldman Sachs’s financing of the company, and recused himself from matters relating to Enron in his first year on the Clinton team. He and Summers went on to craft policies at Treasury that were essential to Enron’s lucrative energy trading business, and they were in touch with Enron executives and lobbyists all the while. Enron meanwhile won $2.4 billion in foreign development deals from Clinton’s Export-Import Bank, then run by Kenneth Brody, a former protege of Rubin’s at Goldman Sachs.
Soon after Rubin joined Citigroup, its investment banking division picked up Enron as a client, and Citigroup went on to become Enron’s largest creditor, loaning almost $1 billion to the company. As revelations of massive accounting fraud and market manipulation emerged over the next years and threatened to bring down the energy company, Rubin and Summers intervened. While Enron’s rigged electricity prices in California were causing unprecedented blackouts, Summers urged Governor Gray Davis to avoid criticizing Enron and recommended further deregulatory measures. Rubin was an official advisor to Gov. Davis on energy market issues at the time, while Citigroup was heavily invested in Enron’s fraudulent California business, and he too likely put pressure on the Governor to lay off Enron. Rubin also pulled strings at Bush’s Treasury Department in late 2001, calling a former employee to see if Treasury could ask the major rating agencies not to downgrade Enron, and Rubin also lobbied the rating agencies directly. (In all likelihood he made similar attempts in behalf of Citigroup during the recent financial crisis.) Their efforts ultimately failed, Enron went bust, thousands of jobs and pensions were destroyed, and its top executives went to jail. It’s hard to believe, but there was some white-collar justice back then.
SNIP...
Summers also starting showing up around the Hamilton Project, which Rubin had just founded with hedge fund manager Roger Altman. Altman was another Clinton official who had come from Wall Street, following billionaire Peter Peterson from Lehman Brothers to Blackstone Group, and he left Washington to found a major hedge fund in 1996. The Hamilton Project is housed in the Brookings Institution, a prestigious corporate-funded policy discussion center that serves as a sort of staging ground for Democratic elites in transition between government, academic, and business positions. The Hamilton Project would go on to host, more specifically, past and future Democratic Party officials friendly to the financial industry, and to produce a stream of similarly minded policy papers. Then-Senator Obama was the featured political speaker at Hamilton’s inaugural event in April 2006.
Summers joined major banking and political elites on Hamilton’s Advisory Council and appeared at many Hamilton events. During a discussion of the financial crisis in 2008, Summers was asked about his role in repealing Glass-Stegall, the law that forbade commercial and investment banking mergers like Citigroup. “I think it was the right thing to do,” he responded, noting that the repeal of Glass-Stegall made possible a wave of similar mergers during the recent financial crisis, such as Bank of America’s takeover of Merrill Lynch. He was arguing, in effect, that financial deregulation did not cause the financial crisis, it actually solved it. “We need a regulatory system as modern as the markets,” said Summers — quoting Rubin, who was in the room. “We need a hen house as modern as the food chain,” said the fox.
CONTINUED...
http://blog.littlesis.org/2011/01/10/evidence-of-an-ame... /
These are the richest times in history, with seven-eighths of all wealth ever, per David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's own Budget Director. Until we see economic fairness restored through fiscal and other government policies, laws and regulations; the rich will keep getting richer, the middle class will continue dissolving into the new poor, and the poor will become the super-majority. Of course, as money pays for lobbyists who write the laws and speech and cash are the same thing when it comes to elections, the majority perspective on policy will be silent as the grave.
Frog and J Edgar Hoover by Robbie Conal.
Frank Church warned us, Gwhittey.
Hillary Clinton and the Demise of the Working Class
by ROB URIE
CounterPunch, APRIL 1, 2016
EXCERPT...
In the early 1990s Republican ‘revolutionary’ Newt Gingrich joined Bill and Hillary Clinton to pass the NAFTA ‘free-trade’ pact with an articulated vision of what this gig economy might look like. Individual ‘producers’ would sell their individually produced wares without regular incomes, health care or pensions in a world where actual human needs are but a matter of opinion. Messrs. Katz and Krueger are more circumspect, but to repeat: labor flexibility of the contingent employment sort has long been a shibboleth of capitalist economics.
In the particular terms of the report, the modern workforce is a world of independent contractors, temporary workers, Uber drivers and piece workers all plying their respective trades in the ether of the internet. The rate of growth of these contingent jobs, over 100% in a decade, is testament to the ingenuity of employers once all constraints of social accountability have been removed from consideration. And most certainly the assumption of student debt, thirty-year home mortgages and car payments takes on new meaning when the certainty of a paycheck has a half-life measured in minutes.
Where Hillary Clinton fits into all of this is as stalwart of a Democratic Party establishment that long ago assumed the role of ‘liberating’ labor from a steady paycheck so as to get in the good graces of Wall Street and the corner suites of corporate America. And this program didn’t arise in a vacuum— the policies behind the shift are a mix of neoliberal orthodoxy with longstanding IMF ‘workout’ practices crafted for the benefit of Wall Street. That Democrats are the more effective proponents of ruling class interests remains a conceptual challenge for the Party’s more fact-averse constituents.
Hillary Clinton can criticize Wall Street all she cares to but her economic policies have proceeded from the very same economic premises. Old style corruption, the exchange of money for specific acts, has been traded for a theology of eternally fluid market relationships— a competition of all against all, that never got around to ‘liberating’ the dependent class of connected insiders that now runs things from its dependence. And in fact, it was her ability to navigate this realm of connected insiders that only a few short weeks ago was touted as her ‘comparative advantage.’
The American labor market, to the extent that such a thing has a clear line of demarcation around it, is partially a reflection of the state of labor globally. ‘Flexible’ labor that isn’t paid and does what ‘it’ is told is a partial description of slavery. That the ‘new economy’ envisioned by establishment Democrats is premised in business management practices developed and used on Southern plantations to ‘manage’ slave labor ties to the broader neoliberal tendencies of the Democratic establishment.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/01/hillary-clinton-and-the-demise-of-the-working-class/
by ROB URIE
CounterPunch, APRIL 1, 2016
EXCERPT...
In the early 1990s Republican ‘revolutionary’ Newt Gingrich joined Bill and Hillary Clinton to pass the NAFTA ‘free-trade’ pact with an articulated vision of what this gig economy might look like. Individual ‘producers’ would sell their individually produced wares without regular incomes, health care or pensions in a world where actual human needs are but a matter of opinion. Messrs. Katz and Krueger are more circumspect, but to repeat: labor flexibility of the contingent employment sort has long been a shibboleth of capitalist economics.
In the particular terms of the report, the modern workforce is a world of independent contractors, temporary workers, Uber drivers and piece workers all plying their respective trades in the ether of the internet. The rate of growth of these contingent jobs, over 100% in a decade, is testament to the ingenuity of employers once all constraints of social accountability have been removed from consideration. And most certainly the assumption of student debt, thirty-year home mortgages and car payments takes on new meaning when the certainty of a paycheck has a half-life measured in minutes.
Where Hillary Clinton fits into all of this is as stalwart of a Democratic Party establishment that long ago assumed the role of ‘liberating’ labor from a steady paycheck so as to get in the good graces of Wall Street and the corner suites of corporate America. And this program didn’t arise in a vacuum— the policies behind the shift are a mix of neoliberal orthodoxy with longstanding IMF ‘workout’ practices crafted for the benefit of Wall Street. That Democrats are the more effective proponents of ruling class interests remains a conceptual challenge for the Party’s more fact-averse constituents.
Hillary Clinton can criticize Wall Street all she cares to but her economic policies have proceeded from the very same economic premises. Old style corruption, the exchange of money for specific acts, has been traded for a theology of eternally fluid market relationships— a competition of all against all, that never got around to ‘liberating’ the dependent class of connected insiders that now runs things from its dependence. And in fact, it was her ability to navigate this realm of connected insiders that only a few short weeks ago was touted as her ‘comparative advantage.’
The American labor market, to the extent that such a thing has a clear line of demarcation around it, is partially a reflection of the state of labor globally. ‘Flexible’ labor that isn’t paid and does what ‘it’ is told is a partial description of slavery. That the ‘new economy’ envisioned by establishment Democrats is premised in business management practices developed and used on Southern plantations to ‘manage’ slave labor ties to the broader neoliberal tendencies of the Democratic establishment.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/01/hillary-clinton-and-the-demise-of-the-working-class/
Frank Church warned us, Gwhittey.
The Powell Memo (also known as the Powell Manifesto)
The Powell Memo was first published August 23, 1971
Introduction
In 1971, Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memorandum was dated August 23, 1971, two months prior to Powell’s nomination by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Powell Memo did not become available to the public until long after his confirmation to the Court. It was leaked to Jack Anderson, a liberal syndicated columnist, who stirred interest in the document when he cited it as reason to doubt Powell’s legal objectivity. [font color="red"]Anderson cautioned that Powell “might use his position on the Supreme Court to put his ideas into practice…in behalf of business interests.”[/font color]
Though Powell’s memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration’s “hands-off business” philosophy.
Most notable about these institutions was their focus on education, shifting values, and movement-building — a focus we share, though often with sharply contrasting goals.* (See our endnote for more on this.)
So did Powell’s political views influence his judicial decisions? The evidence is mixed. [font color="red"]Powell did embrace expansion of corporate privilege and wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a 1978 decision that effectively invented a First Amendment “right” for corporations to influence ballot questions.[/font color] On social issues, he was a moderate, whose votes often surprised his backers.
CONTINUED...
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/
Corporate McPravda owns the airwaves.
And Corporate Tee Vee is still where most Americans get most of their information, including their ideas about these two statues. Wonder what people would think were they to learn from the tee vee what pater and fils have really done with their power?
The Propaganda System That Has Helped Create a Permanent Overclass Is Over a Century in the Making
Pulling back the curtain on how intent the wealthiest Americans have been on establishing a propaganda tool to subvert democracy.
Wednesday, 17 April 2013 00:00
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, AlterNet | News Analysis
Where there is the possibility of democracy, there is the inevitability of elite insecurity. All through its history, democracy has been under a sustained attack by elite interests, political, economic, and cultural. There is a simple reason for this: democracy – as in true democracy – places power with people. In such circumstances, the few who hold power become threatened. With technological changes in modern history, with literacy and education, mass communication, organization and activism, elites have had to react to the changing nature of society – locally and globally.
From the late 19th century on, the “threats” to elite interests from the possibility of true democracy mobilized institutions, ideologies, and individuals in support of power. What began was a massive social engineering project with one objective: control. Through educational institutions, the social sciences, philanthropic foundations, public relations and advertising agencies, corporations, banks, and states, powerful interests sought to reform and protect their power from the potential of popular democracy.
SNIP...
The development of psychology, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines increasingly portrayed the “public” and the population as irrational beings incapable of making their own decisions. The premise was simple: if the population was driven by dangerous, irrational emotions, they needed to be kept out of power and ruled over by those who were driven by reason and rationality, naturally, those who were already in power.
The Princeton Radio Project, which began in the 1930s with Rockefeller Foundation funding, brought together many psychologists, social scientists, and “experts” armed with an interest in social control, mass communication, and propaganda. The Princeton Radio Project had a profound influence upon the development of a modern "democratic propaganda" in the United States and elsewhere in the industrialized world. It helped in establishing and nurturing the ideas, institutions, and individuals who would come to shape America’s “democratic propaganda” throughout the Cold War, a program fostered between the private corporations which own the media, advertising, marketing, and public relations industries, and the state itself.
CONTINUED...
http://truth-out.org/news/item/15784-the-propaganda-system-that-has-helped-create-a-permanent-overclass-is-over-a-century-in-the-making
Thankfully, to help spread light when the protectors of the First Amendment won't, Maria Galardin's TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) Radio. The podcast helps explain how we got here and what we need to do to move forward, starting with putting the "Public" into Airwaves again:
Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda
The Attack on Democracy
The 20th century, said Carey, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. Carey wrote that the people of the US have been subjected to an unparalleled, expensive, 3/4 century long propaganda effort designed to expand corporate rights by undermining democracy and destroying the unions. And, in his manuscript, unpublished during his life time, he described that history, going back to World War I and ending with the Reagan era. Carey covers the little known role of the US Chamber of Commerce in the McCarthy witch hunts of post WWII and shows how the continued campaign against "Big Government" plays an important role in bringing Reagan to power.
John Pilger called Carey "a second Orwell", Noam Chomsky dedicated his book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. And even though TUC Radio runs our documentary based on Carey's manuscript at least every two years and draws a huge response each time, Alex Carey is still unknown.
Given today's spotlight on corporations that may change. It is not only the Occupy movement that inspired me to present this program again at this time. By an amazing historic coincidence Bill Moyers and Charlie Cray of Greenpeace have just added the missing chapter to Carey's analysis. Carey's manuscript ends in 1988 when he committed suicide. Moyers and Cray begin with 1971 and bring the corporate propaganda project up to date.
This is a fairly complex production with many voices, historic sound clips, and source material. The program has been used by writers and students of history and propaganda. Alex Carey: Taking the Risk out of Democracy, Corporate Propaganda VS Freedom and Liberty with a foreword by Noam Chomsky was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1995.
SOURCE: http://tucradio.org/new.html
If you find a moment, here's the first part (scroll down at the link for the second part) on Carey.
http://tucradio.org/AlexCarey_ONE.mp3
Thank you for the succinct political-economic analysis, Baobab. It's critical for there to be more than a handful of companies providing "news." Democracy depends on Truth.
Insane.
You are most welcome, SalviaBlue! Here is the message given a few of the Players...
Hillary Clinton Speaks from Peter G. Peterson Institute on Foreign Aid
C-SPAN aired Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's remarks at the Peter G. Peterson Institute. Pete Peterson made billions as a private equity underwriter (PEU). He used $1 billion to establish his institute, focused on getting America's financial house of cards in order (without asking corporations or the rich to step up in any major way.)
[font color="green"]America believes government cannot do anything competently, thus the private sector is the answer. That goes for international development.[/font color]
SNIP...
That requires partners. Giants of philanthropy gathered in New York in 2009. This list included Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Pete Peterson, George Soros, David Rockefeller, and Oprah Winfrey.
SNIP...
Clinton stated in her talk:
[font color="green"]She mentioned the Clinton Foundation as a partner. President Bill Clinton privatized government functions during his two terms, benefiting multiple private equity underwriters.[/font color]
CONTINUED...
http://stateofthedivision.blogspot.com/2010/01/hillary-clinton-speaks-from-peter-g.html
C-SPAN aired Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's remarks at the Peter G. Peterson Institute. Pete Peterson made billions as a private equity underwriter (PEU). He used $1 billion to establish his institute, focused on getting America's financial house of cards in order (without asking corporations or the rich to step up in any major way.)
[font color="green"]America believes government cannot do anything competently, thus the private sector is the answer. That goes for international development.[/font color]
SNIP...
That requires partners. Giants of philanthropy gathered in New York in 2009. This list included Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Pete Peterson, George Soros, David Rockefeller, and Oprah Winfrey.
SNIP...
Clinton stated in her talk:
[font color="green"][font size="5"]Aid chases need, investment chases opportunity.[/font size][/font color]
[font color="green"]She mentioned the Clinton Foundation as a partner. President Bill Clinton privatized government functions during his two terms, benefiting multiple private equity underwriters.[/font color]
CONTINUED...
http://stateofthedivision.blogspot.com/2010/01/hillary-clinton-speaks-from-peter-g.html
And money trumps peace.
1209 North Orange Street, Wilmington, DE, 19801.
This Delaware Address Is Home to 200,000 Shell Companies—Including Hillary Clinton’s
In wake of ‘Panama Papers’ scandal, renewed interest in tax avoidance efforts
BY: Alana Goodman
FreeBacon, April 11, 2016 5:00 am
EXCERPT...
The Clinton campaign declined to comment on why the Clintons, who live in New York and have no evident residential ties to Delaware, set up companies in the state. But the presidential candidate isn’t alone. Experts say Delaware is the most popular place to register a company in the United States, due in part to its established system of business case law and tax incentives for intellectual property and real estate holdings.
SNIP...
Hillary Clinton has promised to crack down on tax havens on the campaign trail. Referring to the Panama Papers last Wednesday, Clinton condemned “outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere.”
The Clinton Foundation also has three shell companies in Delaware, according to its amended financial disclosures released last year.
One is the Acceso Fund, LLC, which was registered by the Corporation Trust Company at 1209 North Orange Street in 2009. The Clinton Foundation has used the company to channel money to its Colombia-based private equity fund, Fondo Acceso.
The private equity fund, which is run out of the Clinton Foundation’s Bogota office, has invested in telecom and food processing companies in Colombia, the Free Beacon reported last November.
Another Clinton Foundation company, Acceso Worldwide Fund, Inc., was registered in 2013 by the Corporation Services Company, located in Wilmington, Delaware.
A third company, the Haiti Development Fund, LLC, was registered in 2010 by National Corporate Research, Ltd, located in Dover.
CONTINUED...
http://freebeacon.com/issues/delaware-address-home-200000-shell-companies-including-hillary-clintons/
But Hillary and those like her couldn't give fewer fucks.
Their kids educations are paid for so fuck everyone else
I thank you very much!
Do you want to go back to that time?
