Chuck and All,
Articles like this one tickle my funny bone. First, the writer sets
up his points so the answers reflect his position. Second, he takes
Sander's words and reads his interpretation into them.
But that's the way many "Journalists" now report the "news". And
granted, objectivity is hard to come by. Each of us puts our own spin
on the spin put on the story. I am, for lack of a better term, a
Radical Reformed democrat(with a small d), with conservative fiscal
leanings. But I answer as easily to labels such as, "Loose Cannon".
But that's beside the point. My point is that all of this
conversation regarding what Bernie means, or what Hillary says, or
where Ted is coming from, or if the real Donald will please stand up,
does not address the central problem. The Corporate Capitalist System
is not serving the majority of Americans. The Corporate Capitalist
System is doing one Hell of a fine job defending the Oligarchy that is
the American Corporate Empire.
And while Hillary, Ted and Donald are ignoring the central problem, at
least Bernie understands that the only way to reach change is through
a revolution. Perhaps Bernie is using the wrong term for what appears
more to be a People's take over of the government, without changing
the existing system. That's not really a revolution as much as it is
a political change of guard.
To me, a revolution is the overthrow of the existing Establishment.
We normally think of such an uprising as being violent, but it can be
a non violent overthrow. Our own Republic has been turned into an
Oligarchy with only nominal violence. The Republican majority has
been a moving force, blocking any of the weak efforts by the Obama
forces to make social changes on behalf of the Working Class.
The United States is now controlled by the Corporate American Empire.
The profiteers, the Industrial/Military Corporations are the major
beneficiaries of this new System.
Despite who wins, all of the candidates being allowed to be
considered, will be controlled to a greater or lessor degree by the
Oligarchy. They are part of it.
While I plan to vote for Bernie, it is as if I were at a wrestling
match and someone asked me, "Who do you think will win? The Mad Hatter
or the March Hare?" And I say, "I bet on the Mad Hatter". I have no
stake in that match. I am simply a spectator being entertained by two
half naked behemoths. I will walk away to resume my normal life no
matter who wins.
Perhaps in this up coming political wrestling match, I will not have
quite such a "normal" life under Ted or...God forbid, Donald, but
Hillary has already promised me that under her "leadership" we will go
slow. Which in my mind translates, "We will hold the line...unless we
are told to tighten control just a bit".
What Working Class Americans need to do is to pull together a special
Constitutional Convention, and begin exploring just what sort of all
inclusive government they could produce. Presently we have no idea of
what to do if this current, out of control government failed. And it
will fail simply by draining all of its national resources away.
Naturally such a Constitutional Convention would be declared as
Treason, by the existing gang. But such a movement would need to
declare that we no longer will play by their rules. We will continue
to go to work, pay our taxes and abide by the social laws. But we
will exercise our Right as Citizens to gather and determine how a
government might better serve All its People. After that it won't
matter if Hillary, Bernie, Ted or even Donald are tucked away in the
oval office. We'll have our hands full.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/31/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Chuck,
>
> But the Democratic Party has changed radically in the past 30 years. Given
> your political orientation, I wonder if you would have supported FDR and
> his
> New Deal because actually, that is what Ssanders is talking about, old
> fashioned FDR New deal politics. He's using the word, "revolution", to
> indicate that in order to get the party and the country back on track, very
> large numbers of people must be involved. The current Democratic Party is
> very much like the Republican Party used to be. Perhaps back 30 or 40 years
> ago, you would have been comfortable in the Republican Party.
>
> Miriam
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Charles Krugman
> (Redacted sender "ckrugman" for DMARC)
> Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2016 7:44 AM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Could President Sanders defeat a Republican
> congress
>
>
> this article does a better job than I could of putting my thoughts in to
> perspective as to why I haven't jumped on the Sanders bandwagon and why I'm
> having trouble buying in to his campaign. To start I must that I am a proud
> liberal Democrat (note the differentiation from progressive). My goal is
> not
> a political revolution but is to elect Democrats and further the Democratic
> Party locally and nationally by making sure that Republicans are voted out
> of office. While the Obama Administration could have done some things
> better
> I am not ashamed of its performance. I have said in earlier posts that I
> believe the problem has been the Tea Party in Congress and in state and
> local government. I believe that at the time the banks and auto industry
> needed to be bailed out to protect America as a whole and the economy. Yes
> the bail out might not have gone far enough for the average consumer but
> the
> consequences of not having it might have been much worse. I want a
> candidate
> to show partisanship which is why I supported O'Malley until he dropped out
> of the race. Perhaps I'm promoting the status quo but I just can't get
> excited about the issues that the Sanders campaign presents and the
> solutions that it offers.
> Chuck
>
> From: Frank Ventura <mailto:frank.ventura@littlebreezes.com>
> Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2016 1:12 PM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] Could President Sanders defeat a Republican
> congress
>
>
> From:
>
> https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/01/25/could-president-sanders-defea
> t-republican-congress/SflnJZh7gwLqHtNEaNOF0N/story.html
>
> Could President Sanders defeat a Republican Congress? - The Boston Globe
> Page 2 of 6
>
> Cohen writes:
>
> Surely, because he serves in the Senate, Sanders knows that a public option
> in Obamacare didn't fail because Obama didn't advocate for it; it failed
> because Democrats in Congress refused to go along with it.
>
>
>
>
>
> Bernie Sanders listened to a question at a town hall apoearance in Iowa
> Falls, Iowa, on Monday.
>
>
>
> Mark Kauzlarich/REUTERS
>
>
>
> Bernie Sanders listened to a question at a town hall apoearance in Iowa
> Falls, Iowa, on Monday.
>
>
>
> By Michael A. Cohen January 26, 2016
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Bernie Sanders on the campaign trail is quite good. His rap on income
> inequality and the distorting effects of big money in American politics is
> persuasive and effective. But as I listened to him speak in Nashua last
> week, I couldn't help notice there was something missing from his stump
> speech: Republicans.
>
>
>
> It's a bit of an odd omission, seeing as Sanders is running for the
> Democratic nomination for president. But it also speaks to one of the
> fundamental problems with Sanders' campaign and his theory of political
> change.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Now to be sure, it's not as if Sanders fails to criticize Republicans (he
> does); it's that his focus lies elsewhere.
>
>
>
> He says, "What we've got to do is create a political revolution which
> revitalizes American democracy; which brings millions of young people and
> working people into the political process." In a recent speech on Wall
> Street, he listed the iniquities of the One Percent, but never mentioned
> the
> GOP.
>
>
>
> This language is at pace with a campaign message that views money, not
> Republicans, as the true impediment to transformative political change. But
> just a cursory review of the past seven years of American politics suggests
> that Sanders is wrong.
>
> First and foremost, to say that nothing real will happen until we have a
> political revolution is refuted by history. Since President Obama took
> office, Congress passed a health care law that expanded access to 20
> million
> people, reformed the student loan program, made massive investments in
> clean
> energy and infrastructure, and strengthened financial regulation. What
> allowed this to happen wasn't a political revolution. It also wasn't even
> the election of a Democratic president. The simple fact is that much of
> this
> happened because Democrats, for a brief period, had a filibuster-proof
> majority in the Senate and control of the House.
>
>
>
> Democrats have enjoyed far less success now that Republicans control
> Congress. GOP opposition on Capitol Hill is not simply a result of campaign
> donations from Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, and Wall Street - three
> of Sanders' key bogeymen. It wasn't these folks that had the most to lose
> from health care reform; and indeed many on Wall Street and in the business
> community disagreed with Republican opposition to immigration and watched
> in
> horror as Republicans in Congress played chicken with the debt limit. The
> driver for these efforts is politics and the ideological preferences of
> Republican politicians and voters.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> But the second problem here is that Sanders, though running as a Democrat,
> is diminishing, even disrespecting, the accomplishments of Democrats.
> Implicit in Sanders' call for single-payer health care is that Obamacare is
> simply inadequate to the challenge of ensuring greater access to care and
> cutting costs. Implicit in Sanders' call for greater financial regulation
> is
> that Dodd-Frank is inadequate reform. Implicit in Sanders' call for free
> higher education is that Democratic efforts to improve the student loan
> program and ensure free tuition for community college is that these
> measures
> are insufficient.
>
>
>
> Now of course Sanders would likely suggest that one needs a political
> revolution to ensure the kind of changes that go beyond these
> half-measures.
> But if one believes that, why is Sanders running for president?
>
>
>
> Surely, because he serves in the Senate, Sanders knows that a public option
> in Obamacare didn't fail because Obama didn't advocate for it; it failed
> because Democrats in Congress refused to go along with it.
>
>
>
> If it is Congress - particularly Republicans - that has blocked reform,
> shouldn't Sanders' focus be on electing more liberal Democrats to Congress?
>
>
>
> I asked his campaign how much time he's spent over the years helping
> Democrats get elected to Congress. I didn't get a response. But it bears
> noting that Sanders isn't even a Democrat, and from my admittedly crude
> Google searches I couldn't find much evidence that he's actively campaigned
> on behalf of Democratic House and Senate candidates.
>
>
>
> That stands in contrast to his opponents, Martin O'Malley and Hillary
> Clinton. O'Malley criticized Sanders during the last Democratic debate for
> not campaigning on behalf of Democratic candidates in South Carolina. For
> her part, Clinton campaigned in 20 states at the tail end of the 2014
> midterm election. In fact, while Clinton helped to raise $18 million for
> Democrats in 2015, Sanders didn't raise a dime for the DNC - and she's
> identified helping down-ballot Democrats and rebuilding local Democratic
> parties as top priorities.
>
>
>
> As Sanders, who has been in Washington for decades surely must know,
> Congress today is a dysfunctional mess, one in which Republicans block
> pretty much every single reform effort proposed by Democrats. Why would
> President Sanders be successful in overcoming Republican obstructionism? If
> he believes the key to creating a political revolution would come through
> overturning Citizen United or ending the influence of super PACS or moving
> toward public funding of elections or ending redistricting, how exactly
> would he accomplish that?
>
>
>
> The point of course is that he wouldn't, not without a solid majority of
> Democrats in Congress and even then much of his agenda would be open to
> negotiation.
>
>
>
> Now, in fairness, lots of presidential candidates talk about legislation on
> the campaign trail that has no chance of becoming law. Clinton is just as
> guilty of this, but she's not the one talking about a political revolution
> or being indifferent about electing more Democrats to Congress.
>
>
>
> If anything, political change in America rarely begins with the actions of
> presidents - it usually ends with them, as political leaders, pushed by
> activists and social movements, are often the last group to jump on a
> political bandwagon. This has been true from enacting laws to protect
> workers and the civil rights movement to more modern fights in support of
> same-sex marriage.
>
>
>
> Sanders' focus on the presidency as a spark for massive political change is
> a particular affliction that affects the Democratic Party, where more
> emphasis is placed on electing a president than on the hard work of
> electing
> Democrats not just to Congress but at the state and local level, too.
>
>
>
> In a sense, this is what is so troubling about what Sanders is doing. It's
> not just that he is presenting his supporters with a simplistic
> understanding of how political change happens, he is merely setting them up
> for crushing disappointment. If, by some outside chance, Sanders became
> president, his agenda would be dead on arrival. We'd see four more years of
> gridlock and four more years of dysfunction. If Sanders really wanted to
> push his agenda, he would have spent the last few years electing
> like-minded
> Democrats to Congress. But I suppose that's less fun than running for
> president.
>
>
>
> Michael A. Cohen's column appears regularly in the Globe. Foll0w him on
> Twitter @speechboy71.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Thursday, March 24, 2016
Re: [blind-democracy] Re: The Cult of the Reagans
So here's a good example of the shaping of history for the purpose of
serving the current Ruling Class. The question is not whether you
loved the glitter and gilding that was Ronnie and Nancy, or whether
you bought hook line and sinker the Reagan approach to government, or
whether you believe that Ronald Reagan was a major player in moving
our American democracy toward that of an Oligarchy.
(Oligarchy: a form of government in which all power is vested in a few
persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few.)
The question is whether or not we can trust our historians to
accurately present events in an open forum and in a way that the
students of history are able to come to their own conclusions, rather
than those of the writer.
I grew up in a world that still worshiped Kings and Royalty, and
Captains of Industry, and Generals and the Great Wars of history. The
backbone of America, the Working Class was barely mentioned in the
books I learned my history from. Some mention of the brave explorers
and pioneers, but little was mentioned regarding the events that drove
these people out into the Wilderness.
Howard Zinn does as fine a job as I've read, in putting together his
report of American history in, A People's History of the United
States.
But even so, Zinn's work should be read with an open mind, exploring
rather than taking as Gospel.
So called historians who simply pander to the current Ruling Class, do
serious students a major disservice by attempting to precondition the
student's thinking.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/24/16, Charles Krugman <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> definitely an accurate portrayal of Reagan as well as Nancy. I wonder if
> Donald Trump studied Reagan at all as they're not much different.
> Chuck
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Miriam Vieni
> Sent: Sunday, March 20, 2016 6:45 PM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] The Cult of the Reagans
>
> Obama has cited Reagan's greatness. Hillary praised Nancy the other day,
> apparently telling an untruth which she had to walk back.
> Miriam
>
> Excerpt: "The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his
> popularity and his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he 'ended
> the Cold War'. He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union's sclerotic
> economy having doomed it long before Reagan became president."
>
> Ronald and Nancy Reagan. (photo: unknown)
>
>
> The Cult of the Reagans
> By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch
> 20 March 16
>
> The queen of head is dead. At 94, the life of Nancy Reagan, the pin-up girl
> for the genocidal War on Drugs, finally blinked out. Rat Pack actor Peter
> Lawford, who frequently appeared on Ronald Reagan's General Electric
> Theatre, wrote in his memoir that Nancy gave the best blowjobs in
> Hollywood.
> It's one of the most benign things you could say about the woman who saw
> herself as a kind of Catherine the Great for the American Imperium.
>
> Already the airwaves are throbbing with misty tributes to the Reagan years,
> an age than never really was. Here then is a corrective to the manufactured
> history of Ron and Nancy and their court that Alexander Cockburn and I
> wrote
> on the centenary of Reagan's birth. –JSC
> he script of the recurring homages to the Reagans remains unchanging: with
> the Gipper's straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks can-do style
> the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In less flattering
> terms,
> Reagan and his PR crew catered expertly to the demands of the American
> national fantasy: that homely common sense could return America to the
> vigor
> of its youth and the economy of the 1950s.
> When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66 whatever powers of
> concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of
> Staff
> mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with
> simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan
> found these briefings much too complicated and dozed off.
> The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The
> balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with
> Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their
> launch-pads,
> with the miniscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon
> bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted to hammer into
> Reagan's brain, most of them to the effect that "we need more money". The
> president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.
> Reagan had abolished any tiresome division of the world into fact or
> fiction
> in the early 1940s when his studio's PR department turned him into a war
> hero, courtesy of his labors in "Fort Wacky" in Culver City, where they
> made
> training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness of R.R.'s first wife,
> Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home by
> suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.'s hatred of the foe.
> "She'd seen Ronnie's sick face," Modern Screen reported in 1942, "bent over
> a picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to death in
> Poland. 'This,' said the war-hating Reagan between set lips, 'would make it
> a pleasure to kill.'" A photographer for Modern Screen recalled later that,
> unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer themselves to his lens in
> "hero's" garb, Reagan insisted on being photographed on his front step in
> full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.
> Years later Reagan boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the Nazi death
> camps, even as he was forced to defend his deranged decision to bestow
> presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, final
> resting place for the blood-drenched butchers of the Waffen SS. Reagan
> possessed a special talent for the suspension of disbelief when it came to
> the facts of his own life. Perhaps, if the earth in Simi Valley ever
> decides
> to disgorge his corpse, the custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph
> for
> Reagan on those chilly grounds.
> The problem for the press was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd been
> caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote. Truth,
> for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. When the
> Iran/contra
> scandal broke, he held a press conference in which he said to Helen Thomas
> of UPI, "I want to get to the bottom of this and find out all that has
> happened. And so far, I've told you all that I know and, you know, the
> truth
> of the matter is, for quite some time, all that you knew was what I'd told
> you." He went one better than George Washington in that he couldn't tell a
> lie and he couldn't tell the truth, since he couldn't tell the difference
> between the two.
> His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science, SF
> magazines (the origin of "Star Wars", aka the Strategic Defense Initiative)
> lines from movies and homely saws from the Reader's Digest and the Sunday
> supplements.
> Like his wife Nancy, Ronnie had a stout belief in astrology, the stars
> being
> the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the "free market,"
> with
> whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. He believed Armageddon was
> right
> around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be classified as a
> school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd who, as Stevie Earle
> once
> said, spent the Seventies trying to get cocaine classified as a vegetable.
> Reagan's view of Nature was strictly utilitarian. When Reagan was governor
> of California, David Brower, the great arch-Druid, goaded him into making
> his infamous declaration: "Once you've seen one redwood, you've seen them
> all." That Zen koan-like pronouncement pretty much summed up Reagan's
> philosophy of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan propounded the thesis
> that trees generated more air pollution than coal-fired power plants. For
> Reagan, the only excuse for Nature was to serve as a backdrop for
> photo-ops,
> just like in his intros for Death Valley Days, the popular western TV
> series
> that served as a catwalk for the rollout of the B-movie actor as a national
> politician.
> To execute his rapine environmental policies, Reagan turned to his Interior
> Secretary James Watt, whose approach to the plunder of the planet seethed
> with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to Washington a gang of
> libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the Adolf Coors-funded
> Mountain
> States Legal Foundation, who referred to themselves as "The Colorado
> Crazies." Their mission: privatize the public estate. Many of them were
> transparent crooks who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal
> prison for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions in
> public timber, coal, and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic
> scars where there used to be wild forests, trout streams, and deserts.
> These
> thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who demonized
> welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury.
> Watt, who was himself charged with twenty-five felony counts of lying and
> obstruction of justice, never hid his rapacious agenda behind soft,
> made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win solutions,
> ecological forestry, or sustainable development. From the beginning, James
> Watt's message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God wills it so.
> Hearing all the cosy talk about the Gipper, young people spared the
> experience of his awful sojourn in office, probably imagine him as a
> kindly,
> avuncular figure. Not so. He was a callous man, with a breezy indifference
> to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. This indifference was
> so
> profound that Dante would surely have consigned him to one of the lowest
> circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in front of a TV set on the
> blink
> and a dinner tray swinging out of reach like the elusive fruits that
> tormented Tantalus.
> It was startling, back in 2004 when he died, to see the lines of people
> sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagan's casket. How could any of
> them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it was the
> hysteria over Princess Di.
> The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986, a
> disaster that prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that
> was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation
> thus: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this
> morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped
> the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God'."
> In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her
> companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event
> required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while
> Reagan was delivering his state of the union address. He was to tilt his
> head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance half of his
> spectacles, (one lens was close-up, for speech reading,) send a
> presidential
> greeting to the astronauts. But this schedule required an early morning
> launch from chill January Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the
> Challenger aloft, with the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.
> Reagan dozed through much of his second term, his day easing forward
> through
> a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early
> bed. He couldn't recall the names of many of his aides, even of his dog.
> Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered from
> time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Reagan's sons,
> Michael and Ronnie, disagreed whether or not his Alzheimer's began when he
> was president. "Normalcy" and senile dementia were hard to distinguish. The
> official onset was six years after he left Washington DC.
> As an orator or "communicator" Reagan was terrible, with one turgid cliché
> following another, delivered in a folksy drone. His range of rhetorical
> artifice was terribly limited.
> The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his popularity and
> his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he "ended the Cold War".
> He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union's sclerotic economy having
> doomed it long before Reagan became president.
> He lavished money on the rich and the Pentagon. The tendencies he presided
> over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political forces after
> the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then it was a matter of
> triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their position.
> It was a straight line from Reagan's crude attacks on welfare queens to
> Clinton's compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as RR's) as he
> swore to "end welfare as we know it". As a PR man, it was Reagan's role, to
> reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not only might but right was
> on
> their side, and that government, in whatever professed role, was utterly
> malign.
>
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
>
> Ronald and Nancy Reagan. (photo: unknown)
> http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/07/the-cult-of-the-reagans/http://www.co
> unterpunch.org/2016/03/07/the-cult-of-the-reagans/
> The Cult of the Reagans
> By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch
> 20 March 16
> The queen of head is dead. At 94, the life of Nancy Reagan, the pin-up girl
> for the genocidal War on Drugs, finally blinked out. Rat Pack actor Peter
> Lawford, who frequently appeared on Ronald Reagan's General Electric
> Theatre, wrote in his memoir that Nancy gave the best blowjobs in
> Hollywood.
> It's one of the most benign things you could say about the woman who saw
> herself as a kind of Catherine the Great for the American Imperium.
>
> Already the airwaves are throbbing with misty tributes to the Reagan years,
> an age than never really was. Here then is a corrective to the manufactured
> history of Ron and Nancy and their court that Alexander Cockburn and I
> wrote
> on the centenary of Reagan's birth. –JSC
> he script of the recurring homages to the Reagans remains unchanging: with
> the Gipper's straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks can-do style
> the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In less flattering
> terms,
> Reagan and his PR crew catered expertly to the demands of the American
> national fantasy: that homely common sense could return America to the
> vigor
> of its youth and the economy of the 1950s.
> When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66 whatever powers of
> concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of
> Staff
> mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with
> simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan
> found these briefings much too complicated and dozed off.
> The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The
> balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with
> Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their
> launch-pads,
> with the miniscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon
> bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted to hammer into
> Reagan's brain, most of them to the effect that "we need more money". The
> president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.
> Reagan had abolished any tiresome division of the world into fact or
> fiction
> in the early 1940s when his studio's PR department turned him into a war
> hero, courtesy of his labors in "Fort Wacky" in Culver City, where they
> made
> training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness of R.R.'s first wife,
> Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home by
> suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.'s hatred of the foe.
> "She'd seen Ronnie's sick face," Modern Screen reported in 1942, "bent over
> a picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to death in
> Poland. 'This,' said the war-hating Reagan between set lips, 'would make it
> a pleasure to kill.'" A photographer for Modern Screen recalled later that,
> unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer themselves to his lens in
> "hero's" garb, Reagan insisted on being photographed on his front step in
> full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.
> Years later Reagan boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the Nazi death
> camps, even as he was forced to defend his deranged decision to bestow
> presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, final
> resting place for the blood-drenched butchers of the Waffen SS. Reagan
> possessed a special talent for the suspension of disbelief when it came to
> the facts of his own life. Perhaps, if the earth in Simi Valley ever
> decides
> to disgorge his corpse, the custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph
> for
> Reagan on those chilly grounds.
> The problem for the press was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd been
> caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote. Truth,
> for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. When the
> Iran/contra
> scandal broke, he held a press conference in which he said to Helen Thomas
> of UPI, "I want to get to the bottom of this and find out all that has
> happened. And so far, I've told you all that I know and, you know, the
> truth
> of the matter is, for quite some time, all that you knew was what I'd told
> you." He went one better than George Washington in that he couldn't tell a
> lie and he couldn't tell the truth, since he couldn't tell the difference
> between the two.
> His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science, SF
> magazines (the origin of "Star Wars", aka the Strategic Defense Initiative)
> lines from movies and homely saws from the Reader's Digest and the Sunday
> supplements.
> Like his wife Nancy, Ronnie had a stout belief in astrology, the stars
> being
> the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the "free market,"
> with
> whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. He believed Armageddon was
> right
> around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be classified as a
> school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd who, as Stevie Earle
> once
> said, spent the Seventies trying to get cocaine classified as a vegetable.
> Reagan's view of Nature was strictly utilitarian. When Reagan was governor
> of California, David Brower, the great arch-Druid, goaded him into making
> his infamous declaration: "Once you've seen one redwood, you've seen them
> all." That Zen koan-like pronouncement pretty much summed up Reagan's
> philosophy of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan propounded the thesis
> that trees generated more air pollution than coal-fired power plants. For
> Reagan, the only excuse for Nature was to serve as a backdrop for
> photo-ops,
> just like in his intros for Death Valley Days, the popular western TV
> series
> that served as a catwalk for the rollout of the B-movie actor as a national
> politician.
> To execute his rapine environmental policies, Reagan turned to his Interior
> Secretary James Watt, whose approach to the plunder of the planet seethed
> with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to Washington a gang of
> libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the Adolf Coors-funded
> Mountain
> States Legal Foundation, who referred to themselves as "The Colorado
> Crazies." Their mission: privatize the public estate. Many of them were
> transparent crooks who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal
> prison for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions in
> public timber, coal, and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic
> scars where there used to be wild forests, trout streams, and deserts.
> These
> thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who demonized
> welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury.
> Watt, who was himself charged with twenty-five felony counts of lying and
> obstruction of justice, never hid his rapacious agenda behind soft,
> made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win solutions,
> ecological forestry, or sustainable development. From the beginning, James
> Watt's message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God wills it so.
> Hearing all the cosy talk about the Gipper, young people spared the
> experience of his awful sojourn in office, probably imagine him as a
> kindly,
> avuncular figure. Not so. He was a callous man, with a breezy indifference
> to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. This indifference was
> so
> profound that Dante would surely have consigned him to one of the lowest
> circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in front of a TV set on the
> blink
> and a dinner tray swinging out of reach like the elusive fruits that
> tormented Tantalus.
> It was startling, back in 2004 when he died, to see the lines of people
> sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagan's casket. How could any of
> them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it was the
> hysteria over Princess Di.
> The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986, a
> disaster that prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that
> was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation
> thus: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this
> morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped
> the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God'."
> In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her
> companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event
> required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while
> Reagan was delivering his state of the union address. He was to tilt his
> head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance half of his
> spectacles, (one lens was close-up, for speech reading,) send a
> presidential
> greeting to the astronauts. But this schedule required an early morning
> launch from chill January Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the
> Challenger aloft, with the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.
> Reagan dozed through much of his second term, his day easing forward
> through
> a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early
> bed. He couldn't recall the names of many of his aides, even of his dog.
> Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered from
> time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Reagan's sons,
> Michael and Ronnie, disagreed whether or not his Alzheimer's began when he
> was president. "Normalcy" and senile dementia were hard to distinguish. The
> official onset was six years after he left Washington DC.
> As an orator or "communicator" Reagan was terrible, with one turgid cliché
> following another, delivered in a folksy drone. His range of rhetorical
> artifice was terribly limited.
> The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his popularity and
> his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he "ended the Cold War".
> He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union's sclerotic economy having
> doomed it long before Reagan became president.
> He lavished money on the rich and the Pentagon. The tendencies he presided
> over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political forces after
> the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then it was a matter of
> triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their position.
> It was a straight line from Reagan's crude attacks on welfare queens to
> Clinton's compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as RR's) as he
> swore to "end welfare as we know it". As a PR man, it was Reagan's role, to
> reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not only might but right was
> on
> their side, and that government, in whatever professed role, was utterly
> malign.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
serving the current Ruling Class. The question is not whether you
loved the glitter and gilding that was Ronnie and Nancy, or whether
you bought hook line and sinker the Reagan approach to government, or
whether you believe that Ronald Reagan was a major player in moving
our American democracy toward that of an Oligarchy.
(Oligarchy: a form of government in which all power is vested in a few
persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few.)
The question is whether or not we can trust our historians to
accurately present events in an open forum and in a way that the
students of history are able to come to their own conclusions, rather
than those of the writer.
I grew up in a world that still worshiped Kings and Royalty, and
Captains of Industry, and Generals and the Great Wars of history. The
backbone of America, the Working Class was barely mentioned in the
books I learned my history from. Some mention of the brave explorers
and pioneers, but little was mentioned regarding the events that drove
these people out into the Wilderness.
Howard Zinn does as fine a job as I've read, in putting together his
report of American history in, A People's History of the United
States.
But even so, Zinn's work should be read with an open mind, exploring
rather than taking as Gospel.
So called historians who simply pander to the current Ruling Class, do
serious students a major disservice by attempting to precondition the
student's thinking.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/24/16, Charles Krugman <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> definitely an accurate portrayal of Reagan as well as Nancy. I wonder if
> Donald Trump studied Reagan at all as they're not much different.
> Chuck
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Miriam Vieni
> Sent: Sunday, March 20, 2016 6:45 PM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] The Cult of the Reagans
>
> Obama has cited Reagan's greatness. Hillary praised Nancy the other day,
> apparently telling an untruth which she had to walk back.
> Miriam
>
> Excerpt: "The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his
> popularity and his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he 'ended
> the Cold War'. He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union's sclerotic
> economy having doomed it long before Reagan became president."
>
> Ronald and Nancy Reagan. (photo: unknown)
>
>
> The Cult of the Reagans
> By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch
> 20 March 16
>
> The queen of head is dead. At 94, the life of Nancy Reagan, the pin-up girl
> for the genocidal War on Drugs, finally blinked out. Rat Pack actor Peter
> Lawford, who frequently appeared on Ronald Reagan's General Electric
> Theatre, wrote in his memoir that Nancy gave the best blowjobs in
> Hollywood.
> It's one of the most benign things you could say about the woman who saw
> herself as a kind of Catherine the Great for the American Imperium.
>
> Already the airwaves are throbbing with misty tributes to the Reagan years,
> an age than never really was. Here then is a corrective to the manufactured
> history of Ron and Nancy and their court that Alexander Cockburn and I
> wrote
> on the centenary of Reagan's birth. –JSC
> he script of the recurring homages to the Reagans remains unchanging: with
> the Gipper's straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks can-do style
> the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In less flattering
> terms,
> Reagan and his PR crew catered expertly to the demands of the American
> national fantasy: that homely common sense could return America to the
> vigor
> of its youth and the economy of the 1950s.
> When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66 whatever powers of
> concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of
> Staff
> mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with
> simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan
> found these briefings much too complicated and dozed off.
> The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The
> balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with
> Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their
> launch-pads,
> with the miniscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon
> bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted to hammer into
> Reagan's brain, most of them to the effect that "we need more money". The
> president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.
> Reagan had abolished any tiresome division of the world into fact or
> fiction
> in the early 1940s when his studio's PR department turned him into a war
> hero, courtesy of his labors in "Fort Wacky" in Culver City, where they
> made
> training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness of R.R.'s first wife,
> Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home by
> suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.'s hatred of the foe.
> "She'd seen Ronnie's sick face," Modern Screen reported in 1942, "bent over
> a picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to death in
> Poland. 'This,' said the war-hating Reagan between set lips, 'would make it
> a pleasure to kill.'" A photographer for Modern Screen recalled later that,
> unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer themselves to his lens in
> "hero's" garb, Reagan insisted on being photographed on his front step in
> full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.
> Years later Reagan boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the Nazi death
> camps, even as he was forced to defend his deranged decision to bestow
> presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, final
> resting place for the blood-drenched butchers of the Waffen SS. Reagan
> possessed a special talent for the suspension of disbelief when it came to
> the facts of his own life. Perhaps, if the earth in Simi Valley ever
> decides
> to disgorge his corpse, the custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph
> for
> Reagan on those chilly grounds.
> The problem for the press was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd been
> caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote. Truth,
> for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. When the
> Iran/contra
> scandal broke, he held a press conference in which he said to Helen Thomas
> of UPI, "I want to get to the bottom of this and find out all that has
> happened. And so far, I've told you all that I know and, you know, the
> truth
> of the matter is, for quite some time, all that you knew was what I'd told
> you." He went one better than George Washington in that he couldn't tell a
> lie and he couldn't tell the truth, since he couldn't tell the difference
> between the two.
> His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science, SF
> magazines (the origin of "Star Wars", aka the Strategic Defense Initiative)
> lines from movies and homely saws from the Reader's Digest and the Sunday
> supplements.
> Like his wife Nancy, Ronnie had a stout belief in astrology, the stars
> being
> the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the "free market,"
> with
> whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. He believed Armageddon was
> right
> around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be classified as a
> school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd who, as Stevie Earle
> once
> said, spent the Seventies trying to get cocaine classified as a vegetable.
> Reagan's view of Nature was strictly utilitarian. When Reagan was governor
> of California, David Brower, the great arch-Druid, goaded him into making
> his infamous declaration: "Once you've seen one redwood, you've seen them
> all." That Zen koan-like pronouncement pretty much summed up Reagan's
> philosophy of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan propounded the thesis
> that trees generated more air pollution than coal-fired power plants. For
> Reagan, the only excuse for Nature was to serve as a backdrop for
> photo-ops,
> just like in his intros for Death Valley Days, the popular western TV
> series
> that served as a catwalk for the rollout of the B-movie actor as a national
> politician.
> To execute his rapine environmental policies, Reagan turned to his Interior
> Secretary James Watt, whose approach to the plunder of the planet seethed
> with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to Washington a gang of
> libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the Adolf Coors-funded
> Mountain
> States Legal Foundation, who referred to themselves as "The Colorado
> Crazies." Their mission: privatize the public estate. Many of them were
> transparent crooks who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal
> prison for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions in
> public timber, coal, and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic
> scars where there used to be wild forests, trout streams, and deserts.
> These
> thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who demonized
> welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury.
> Watt, who was himself charged with twenty-five felony counts of lying and
> obstruction of justice, never hid his rapacious agenda behind soft,
> made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win solutions,
> ecological forestry, or sustainable development. From the beginning, James
> Watt's message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God wills it so.
> Hearing all the cosy talk about the Gipper, young people spared the
> experience of his awful sojourn in office, probably imagine him as a
> kindly,
> avuncular figure. Not so. He was a callous man, with a breezy indifference
> to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. This indifference was
> so
> profound that Dante would surely have consigned him to one of the lowest
> circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in front of a TV set on the
> blink
> and a dinner tray swinging out of reach like the elusive fruits that
> tormented Tantalus.
> It was startling, back in 2004 when he died, to see the lines of people
> sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagan's casket. How could any of
> them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it was the
> hysteria over Princess Di.
> The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986, a
> disaster that prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that
> was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation
> thus: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this
> morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped
> the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God'."
> In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her
> companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event
> required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while
> Reagan was delivering his state of the union address. He was to tilt his
> head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance half of his
> spectacles, (one lens was close-up, for speech reading,) send a
> presidential
> greeting to the astronauts. But this schedule required an early morning
> launch from chill January Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the
> Challenger aloft, with the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.
> Reagan dozed through much of his second term, his day easing forward
> through
> a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early
> bed. He couldn't recall the names of many of his aides, even of his dog.
> Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered from
> time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Reagan's sons,
> Michael and Ronnie, disagreed whether or not his Alzheimer's began when he
> was president. "Normalcy" and senile dementia were hard to distinguish. The
> official onset was six years after he left Washington DC.
> As an orator or "communicator" Reagan was terrible, with one turgid cliché
> following another, delivered in a folksy drone. His range of rhetorical
> artifice was terribly limited.
> The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his popularity and
> his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he "ended the Cold War".
> He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union's sclerotic economy having
> doomed it long before Reagan became president.
> He lavished money on the rich and the Pentagon. The tendencies he presided
> over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political forces after
> the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then it was a matter of
> triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their position.
> It was a straight line from Reagan's crude attacks on welfare queens to
> Clinton's compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as RR's) as he
> swore to "end welfare as we know it". As a PR man, it was Reagan's role, to
> reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not only might but right was
> on
> their side, and that government, in whatever professed role, was utterly
> malign.
>
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
>
> Ronald and Nancy Reagan. (photo: unknown)
> http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/07/the-cult-of-the-reagans/http://www.co
> unterpunch.org/2016/03/07/the-cult-of-the-reagans/
> The Cult of the Reagans
> By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch
> 20 March 16
> The queen of head is dead. At 94, the life of Nancy Reagan, the pin-up girl
> for the genocidal War on Drugs, finally blinked out. Rat Pack actor Peter
> Lawford, who frequently appeared on Ronald Reagan's General Electric
> Theatre, wrote in his memoir that Nancy gave the best blowjobs in
> Hollywood.
> It's one of the most benign things you could say about the woman who saw
> herself as a kind of Catherine the Great for the American Imperium.
>
> Already the airwaves are throbbing with misty tributes to the Reagan years,
> an age than never really was. Here then is a corrective to the manufactured
> history of Ron and Nancy and their court that Alexander Cockburn and I
> wrote
> on the centenary of Reagan's birth. –JSC
> he script of the recurring homages to the Reagans remains unchanging: with
> the Gipper's straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks can-do style
> the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In less flattering
> terms,
> Reagan and his PR crew catered expertly to the demands of the American
> national fantasy: that homely common sense could return America to the
> vigor
> of its youth and the economy of the 1950s.
> When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66 whatever powers of
> concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of
> Staff
> mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with
> simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan
> found these briefings much too complicated and dozed off.
> The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The
> balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with
> Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their
> launch-pads,
> with the miniscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon
> bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted to hammer into
> Reagan's brain, most of them to the effect that "we need more money". The
> president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.
> Reagan had abolished any tiresome division of the world into fact or
> fiction
> in the early 1940s when his studio's PR department turned him into a war
> hero, courtesy of his labors in "Fort Wacky" in Culver City, where they
> made
> training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness of R.R.'s first wife,
> Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home by
> suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.'s hatred of the foe.
> "She'd seen Ronnie's sick face," Modern Screen reported in 1942, "bent over
> a picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to death in
> Poland. 'This,' said the war-hating Reagan between set lips, 'would make it
> a pleasure to kill.'" A photographer for Modern Screen recalled later that,
> unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer themselves to his lens in
> "hero's" garb, Reagan insisted on being photographed on his front step in
> full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.
> Years later Reagan boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the Nazi death
> camps, even as he was forced to defend his deranged decision to bestow
> presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, final
> resting place for the blood-drenched butchers of the Waffen SS. Reagan
> possessed a special talent for the suspension of disbelief when it came to
> the facts of his own life. Perhaps, if the earth in Simi Valley ever
> decides
> to disgorge his corpse, the custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph
> for
> Reagan on those chilly grounds.
> The problem for the press was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd been
> caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote. Truth,
> for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. When the
> Iran/contra
> scandal broke, he held a press conference in which he said to Helen Thomas
> of UPI, "I want to get to the bottom of this and find out all that has
> happened. And so far, I've told you all that I know and, you know, the
> truth
> of the matter is, for quite some time, all that you knew was what I'd told
> you." He went one better than George Washington in that he couldn't tell a
> lie and he couldn't tell the truth, since he couldn't tell the difference
> between the two.
> His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science, SF
> magazines (the origin of "Star Wars", aka the Strategic Defense Initiative)
> lines from movies and homely saws from the Reader's Digest and the Sunday
> supplements.
> Like his wife Nancy, Ronnie had a stout belief in astrology, the stars
> being
> the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the "free market,"
> with
> whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. He believed Armageddon was
> right
> around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be classified as a
> school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd who, as Stevie Earle
> once
> said, spent the Seventies trying to get cocaine classified as a vegetable.
> Reagan's view of Nature was strictly utilitarian. When Reagan was governor
> of California, David Brower, the great arch-Druid, goaded him into making
> his infamous declaration: "Once you've seen one redwood, you've seen them
> all." That Zen koan-like pronouncement pretty much summed up Reagan's
> philosophy of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan propounded the thesis
> that trees generated more air pollution than coal-fired power plants. For
> Reagan, the only excuse for Nature was to serve as a backdrop for
> photo-ops,
> just like in his intros for Death Valley Days, the popular western TV
> series
> that served as a catwalk for the rollout of the B-movie actor as a national
> politician.
> To execute his rapine environmental policies, Reagan turned to his Interior
> Secretary James Watt, whose approach to the plunder of the planet seethed
> with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to Washington a gang of
> libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the Adolf Coors-funded
> Mountain
> States Legal Foundation, who referred to themselves as "The Colorado
> Crazies." Their mission: privatize the public estate. Many of them were
> transparent crooks who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal
> prison for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions in
> public timber, coal, and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic
> scars where there used to be wild forests, trout streams, and deserts.
> These
> thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who demonized
> welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury.
> Watt, who was himself charged with twenty-five felony counts of lying and
> obstruction of justice, never hid his rapacious agenda behind soft,
> made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win solutions,
> ecological forestry, or sustainable development. From the beginning, James
> Watt's message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God wills it so.
> Hearing all the cosy talk about the Gipper, young people spared the
> experience of his awful sojourn in office, probably imagine him as a
> kindly,
> avuncular figure. Not so. He was a callous man, with a breezy indifference
> to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. This indifference was
> so
> profound that Dante would surely have consigned him to one of the lowest
> circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in front of a TV set on the
> blink
> and a dinner tray swinging out of reach like the elusive fruits that
> tormented Tantalus.
> It was startling, back in 2004 when he died, to see the lines of people
> sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagan's casket. How could any of
> them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it was the
> hysteria over Princess Di.
> The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986, a
> disaster that prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that
> was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation
> thus: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this
> morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped
> the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God'."
> In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her
> companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event
> required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while
> Reagan was delivering his state of the union address. He was to tilt his
> head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance half of his
> spectacles, (one lens was close-up, for speech reading,) send a
> presidential
> greeting to the astronauts. But this schedule required an early morning
> launch from chill January Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the
> Challenger aloft, with the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.
> Reagan dozed through much of his second term, his day easing forward
> through
> a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early
> bed. He couldn't recall the names of many of his aides, even of his dog.
> Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered from
> time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Reagan's sons,
> Michael and Ronnie, disagreed whether or not his Alzheimer's began when he
> was president. "Normalcy" and senile dementia were hard to distinguish. The
> official onset was six years after he left Washington DC.
> As an orator or "communicator" Reagan was terrible, with one turgid cliché
> following another, delivered in a folksy drone. His range of rhetorical
> artifice was terribly limited.
> The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his popularity and
> his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he "ended the Cold War".
> He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union's sclerotic economy having
> doomed it long before Reagan became president.
> He lavished money on the rich and the Pentagon. The tendencies he presided
> over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political forces after
> the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then it was a matter of
> triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their position.
> It was a straight line from Reagan's crude attacks on welfare queens to
> Clinton's compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as RR's) as he
> swore to "end welfare as we know it". As a PR man, it was Reagan's role, to
> reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not only might but right was
> on
> their side, and that government, in whatever professed role, was utterly
> malign.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
Monday, March 21, 2016
A clearer picture of the fuzzy mind of Ronald Reagan
When the expression, "Plastic People" came into being, describing
those people who had no real depth to them, I always had a mental
picture of the great "B" actor, Ronald Reagan in mind.
While I must admit, I had no idea the Gippers Brain had deteriorated
to the point of being challenged by basic information, I still knew
that he was all front with nothing behind that familiar face. I will
have to admit that Ronald Reagan did his Handlers good, playing the
part of President of the United States of America with more ability
than he ever showed in his "also ran" movies. He gained popularity
by hosting the Death Valley Days, a popular TV show of the day. "At
General Electric, Progress is Our Most Important Product", became his
most often spoken line. And he had it down pat, proving to the Ruling
Class that he could be a very manageable shill.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/20/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Obama has cited Reagan's greatness. Hillary praised Nancy the other day,
> apparently telling an untruth which she had to walk back.
> Miriam
>
> Excerpt: "The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his
> popularity and his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he 'ended
> the Cold War'. He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union's sclerotic
> economy having doomed it long before Reagan became president."
>
> Ronald and Nancy Reagan. (photo: unknown)
>
>
> The Cult of the Reagans
> By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch
> 20 March 16
>
> The queen of head is dead. At 94, the life of Nancy Reagan, the pin-up girl
> for the genocidal War on Drugs, finally blinked out. Rat Pack actor Peter
> Lawford, who frequently appeared on Ronald Reagan's General Electric
> Theatre, wrote in his memoir that Nancy gave the best blowjobs in
> Hollywood.
> It's one of the most benign things you could say about the woman who saw
> herself as a kind of Catherine the Great for the American Imperium.
>
> Already the airwaves are throbbing with misty tributes to the Reagan years,
> an age than never really was. Here then is a corrective to the manufactured
> history of Ron and Nancy and their court that Alexander Cockburn and I
> wrote
> on the centenary of Reagan's birth. –JSC
> he script of the recurring homages to the Reagans remains unchanging: with
> the Gipper's straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks can-do style
> the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In less flattering
> terms,
> Reagan and his PR crew catered expertly to the demands of the American
> national fantasy: that homely common sense could return America to the
> vigor
> of its youth and the economy of the 1950s.
> When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66 whatever powers of
> concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of
> Staff
> mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with
> simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan
> found these briefings much too complicated and dozed off.
> The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The
> balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with
> Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their
> launch-pads,
> with the miniscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon
> bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted to hammer into
> Reagan's brain, most of them to the effect that "we need more money". The
> president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.
> Reagan had abolished any tiresome division of the world into fact or
> fiction
> in the early 1940s when his studio's PR department turned him into a war
> hero, courtesy of his labors in "Fort Wacky" in Culver City, where they
> made
> training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness of R.R.'s first wife,
> Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home by
> suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.'s hatred of the foe.
> "She'd seen Ronnie's sick face," Modern Screen reported in 1942, "bent over
> a picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to death in
> Poland. 'This,' said the war-hating Reagan between set lips, 'would make it
> a pleasure to kill.'" A photographer for Modern Screen recalled later that,
> unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer themselves to his lens in
> "hero's" garb, Reagan insisted on being photographed on his front step in
> full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.
> Years later Reagan boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the Nazi death
> camps, even as he was forced to defend his deranged decision to bestow
> presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, final
> resting place for the blood-drenched butchers of the Waffen SS. Reagan
> possessed a special talent for the suspension of disbelief when it came to
> the facts of his own life. Perhaps, if the earth in Simi Valley ever
> decides
> to disgorge his corpse, the custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph
> for
> Reagan on those chilly grounds.
> The problem for the press was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd been
> caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote. Truth,
> for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. When the
> Iran/contra
> scandal broke, he held a press conference in which he said to Helen Thomas
> of UPI, "I want to get to the bottom of this and find out all that has
> happened. And so far, I've told you all that I know and, you know, the
> truth
> of the matter is, for quite some time, all that you knew was what I'd told
> you." He went one better than George Washington in that he couldn't tell a
> lie and he couldn't tell the truth, since he couldn't tell the difference
> between the two.
> His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science, SF
> magazines (the origin of "Star Wars", aka the Strategic Defense Initiative)
> lines from movies and homely saws from the Reader's Digest and the Sunday
> supplements.
> Like his wife Nancy, Ronnie had a stout belief in astrology, the stars
> being
> the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the "free market,"
> with
> whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. He believed Armageddon was
> right
> around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be classified as a
> school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd who, as Stevie Earle
> once
> said, spent the Seventies trying to get cocaine classified as a vegetable.
> Reagan's view of Nature was strictly utilitarian. When Reagan was governor
> of California, David Brower, the great arch-Druid, goaded him into making
> his infamous declaration: "Once you've seen one redwood, you've seen them
> all." That Zen koan-like pronouncement pretty much summed up Reagan's
> philosophy of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan propounded the thesis
> that trees generated more air pollution than coal-fired power plants. For
> Reagan, the only excuse for Nature was to serve as a backdrop for
> photo-ops,
> just like in his intros for Death Valley Days, the popular western TV
> series
> that served as a catwalk for the rollout of the B-movie actor as a national
> politician.
> To execute his rapine environmental policies, Reagan turned to his Interior
> Secretary James Watt, whose approach to the plunder of the planet seethed
> with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to Washington a gang of
> libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the Adolf Coors-funded
> Mountain
> States Legal Foundation, who referred to themselves as "The Colorado
> Crazies." Their mission: privatize the public estate. Many of them were
> transparent crooks who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal
> prison for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions in
> public timber, coal, and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic
> scars where there used to be wild forests, trout streams, and deserts.
> These
> thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who demonized
> welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury.
> Watt, who was himself charged with twenty-five felony counts of lying and
> obstruction of justice, never hid his rapacious agenda behind soft,
> made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win solutions,
> ecological forestry, or sustainable development. From the beginning, James
> Watt's message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God wills it so.
> Hearing all the cosy talk about the Gipper, young people spared the
> experience of his awful sojourn in office, probably imagine him as a
> kindly,
> avuncular figure. Not so. He was a callous man, with a breezy indifference
> to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. This indifference was
> so
> profound that Dante would surely have consigned him to one of the lowest
> circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in front of a TV set on the
> blink
> and a dinner tray swinging out of reach like the elusive fruits that
> tormented Tantalus.
> It was startling, back in 2004 when he died, to see the lines of people
> sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagan's casket. How could any of
> them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it was the
> hysteria over Princess Di.
> The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986, a
> disaster that prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that
> was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation
> thus: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this
> morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped
> the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God'."
> In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her
> companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event
> required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while
> Reagan was delivering his state of the union address. He was to tilt his
> head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance half of his
> spectacles, (one lens was close-up, for speech reading,) send a
> presidential
> greeting to the astronauts. But this schedule required an early morning
> launch from chill January Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the
> Challenger aloft, with the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.
> Reagan dozed through much of his second term, his day easing forward
> through
> a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early
> bed. He couldn't recall the names of many of his aides, even of his dog.
> Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered from
> time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Reagan's sons,
> Michael and Ronnie, disagreed whether or not his Alzheimer's began when he
> was president. "Normalcy" and senile dementia were hard to distinguish. The
> official onset was six years after he left Washington DC.
> As an orator or "communicator" Reagan was terrible, with one turgid cliché
> following another, delivered in a folksy drone. His range of rhetorical
> artifice was terribly limited.
> The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his popularity and
> his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he "ended the Cold War".
> He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union's sclerotic economy having
> doomed it long before Reagan became president.
> He lavished money on the rich and the Pentagon. The tendencies he presided
> over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political forces after
> the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then it was a matter of
> triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their position.
> It was a straight line from Reagan's crude attacks on welfare queens to
> Clinton's compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as RR's) as he
> swore to "end welfare as we know it". As a PR man, it was Reagan's role, to
> reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not only might but right was
> on
> their side, and that government, in whatever professed role, was utterly
> malign.
>
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> Ronald and Nancy Reagan. (photo: unknown)
> http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/07/the-cult-of-the-reagans/http://www.co
> unterpunch.org/2016/03/07/the-cult-of-the-reagans/
> The Cult of the Reagans
> By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch
> 20 March 16
> The queen of head is dead. At 94, the life of Nancy Reagan, the pin-up girl
> for the genocidal War on Drugs, finally blinked out. Rat Pack actor Peter
> Lawford, who frequently appeared on Ronald Reagan's General Electric
> Theatre, wrote in his memoir that Nancy gave the best blowjobs in
> Hollywood.
> It's one of the most benign things you could say about the woman who saw
> herself as a kind of Catherine the Great for the American Imperium.
>
> Already the airwaves are throbbing with misty tributes to the Reagan years,
> an age than never really was. Here then is a corrective to the manufactured
> history of Ron and Nancy and their court that Alexander Cockburn and I
> wrote
> on the centenary of Reagan's birth. –JSC
> he script of the recurring homages to the Reagans remains unchanging: with
> the Gipper's straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks can-do style
> the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In less flattering
> terms,
> Reagan and his PR crew catered expertly to the demands of the American
> national fantasy: that homely common sense could return America to the
> vigor
> of its youth and the economy of the 1950s.
> When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66 whatever powers of
> concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of
> Staff
> mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with
> simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan
> found these briefings much too complicated and dozed off.
> The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The
> balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with
> Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their
> launch-pads,
> with the miniscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon
> bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted to hammer into
> Reagan's brain, most of them to the effect that "we need more money". The
> president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.
> Reagan had abolished any tiresome division of the world into fact or
> fiction
> in the early 1940s when his studio's PR department turned him into a war
> hero, courtesy of his labors in "Fort Wacky" in Culver City, where they
> made
> training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness of R.R.'s first wife,
> Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home by
> suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.'s hatred of the foe.
> "She'd seen Ronnie's sick face," Modern Screen reported in 1942, "bent over
> a picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to death in
> Poland. 'This,' said the war-hating Reagan between set lips, 'would make it
> a pleasure to kill.'" A photographer for Modern Screen recalled later that,
> unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer themselves to his lens in
> "hero's" garb, Reagan insisted on being photographed on his front step in
> full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.
> Years later Reagan boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the Nazi death
> camps, even as he was forced to defend his deranged decision to bestow
> presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, final
> resting place for the blood-drenched butchers of the Waffen SS. Reagan
> possessed a special talent for the suspension of disbelief when it came to
> the facts of his own life. Perhaps, if the earth in Simi Valley ever
> decides
> to disgorge his corpse, the custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph
> for
> Reagan on those chilly grounds.
> The problem for the press was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd been
> caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote. Truth,
> for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. When the
> Iran/contra
> scandal broke, he held a press conference in which he said to Helen Thomas
> of UPI, "I want to get to the bottom of this and find out all that has
> happened. And so far, I've told you all that I know and, you know, the
> truth
> of the matter is, for quite some time, all that you knew was what I'd told
> you." He went one better than George Washington in that he couldn't tell a
> lie and he couldn't tell the truth, since he couldn't tell the difference
> between the two.
> His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science, SF
> magazines (the origin of "Star Wars", aka the Strategic Defense Initiative)
> lines from movies and homely saws from the Reader's Digest and the Sunday
> supplements.
> Like his wife Nancy, Ronnie had a stout belief in astrology, the stars
> being
> the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the "free market,"
> with
> whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. He believed Armageddon was
> right
> around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be classified as a
> school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd who, as Stevie Earle
> once
> said, spent the Seventies trying to get cocaine classified as a vegetable.
> Reagan's view of Nature was strictly utilitarian. When Reagan was governor
> of California, David Brower, the great arch-Druid, goaded him into making
> his infamous declaration: "Once you've seen one redwood, you've seen them
> all." That Zen koan-like pronouncement pretty much summed up Reagan's
> philosophy of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan propounded the thesis
> that trees generated more air pollution than coal-fired power plants. For
> Reagan, the only excuse for Nature was to serve as a backdrop for
> photo-ops,
> just like in his intros for Death Valley Days, the popular western TV
> series
> that served as a catwalk for the rollout of the B-movie actor as a national
> politician.
> To execute his rapine environmental policies, Reagan turned to his Interior
> Secretary James Watt, whose approach to the plunder of the planet seethed
> with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to Washington a gang of
> libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the Adolf Coors-funded
> Mountain
> States Legal Foundation, who referred to themselves as "The Colorado
> Crazies." Their mission: privatize the public estate. Many of them were
> transparent crooks who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal
> prison for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions in
> public timber, coal, and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic
> scars where there used to be wild forests, trout streams, and deserts.
> These
> thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who demonized
> welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury.
> Watt, who was himself charged with twenty-five felony counts of lying and
> obstruction of justice, never hid his rapacious agenda behind soft,
> made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win solutions,
> ecological forestry, or sustainable development. From the beginning, James
> Watt's message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God wills it so.
> Hearing all the cosy talk about the Gipper, young people spared the
> experience of his awful sojourn in office, probably imagine him as a
> kindly,
> avuncular figure. Not so. He was a callous man, with a breezy indifference
> to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. This indifference was
> so
> profound that Dante would surely have consigned him to one of the lowest
> circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in front of a TV set on the
> blink
> and a dinner tray swinging out of reach like the elusive fruits that
> tormented Tantalus.
> It was startling, back in 2004 when he died, to see the lines of people
> sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagan's casket. How could any of
> them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it was the
> hysteria over Princess Di.
> The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986, a
> disaster that prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that
> was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation
> thus: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this
> morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped
> the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God'."
> In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her
> companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event
> required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while
> Reagan was delivering his state of the union address. He was to tilt his
> head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance half of his
> spectacles, (one lens was close-up, for speech reading,) send a
> presidential
> greeting to the astronauts. But this schedule required an early morning
> launch from chill January Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the
> Challenger aloft, with the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.
> Reagan dozed through much of his second term, his day easing forward
> through
> a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early
> bed. He couldn't recall the names of many of his aides, even of his dog.
> Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered from
> time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Reagan's sons,
> Michael and Ronnie, disagreed whether or not his Alzheimer's began when he
> was president. "Normalcy" and senile dementia were hard to distinguish. The
> official onset was six years after he left Washington DC.
> As an orator or "communicator" Reagan was terrible, with one turgid cliché
> following another, delivered in a folksy drone. His range of rhetorical
> artifice was terribly limited.
> The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his popularity and
> his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he "ended the Cold War".
> He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union's sclerotic economy having
> doomed it long before Reagan became president.
> He lavished money on the rich and the Pentagon. The tendencies he presided
> over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political forces after
> the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then it was a matter of
> triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their position.
> It was a straight line from Reagan's crude attacks on welfare queens to
> Clinton's compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as RR's) as he
> swore to "end welfare as we know it". As a PR man, it was Reagan's role, to
> reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not only might but right was
> on
> their side, and that government, in whatever professed role, was utterly
> malign.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
those people who had no real depth to them, I always had a mental
picture of the great "B" actor, Ronald Reagan in mind.
While I must admit, I had no idea the Gippers Brain had deteriorated
to the point of being challenged by basic information, I still knew
that he was all front with nothing behind that familiar face. I will
have to admit that Ronald Reagan did his Handlers good, playing the
part of President of the United States of America with more ability
than he ever showed in his "also ran" movies. He gained popularity
by hosting the Death Valley Days, a popular TV show of the day. "At
General Electric, Progress is Our Most Important Product", became his
most often spoken line. And he had it down pat, proving to the Ruling
Class that he could be a very manageable shill.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/20/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Obama has cited Reagan's greatness. Hillary praised Nancy the other day,
> apparently telling an untruth which she had to walk back.
> Miriam
>
> Excerpt: "The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his
> popularity and his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he 'ended
> the Cold War'. He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union's sclerotic
> economy having doomed it long before Reagan became president."
>
> Ronald and Nancy Reagan. (photo: unknown)
>
>
> The Cult of the Reagans
> By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch
> 20 March 16
>
> The queen of head is dead. At 94, the life of Nancy Reagan, the pin-up girl
> for the genocidal War on Drugs, finally blinked out. Rat Pack actor Peter
> Lawford, who frequently appeared on Ronald Reagan's General Electric
> Theatre, wrote in his memoir that Nancy gave the best blowjobs in
> Hollywood.
> It's one of the most benign things you could say about the woman who saw
> herself as a kind of Catherine the Great for the American Imperium.
>
> Already the airwaves are throbbing with misty tributes to the Reagan years,
> an age than never really was. Here then is a corrective to the manufactured
> history of Ron and Nancy and their court that Alexander Cockburn and I
> wrote
> on the centenary of Reagan's birth. –JSC
> he script of the recurring homages to the Reagans remains unchanging: with
> the Gipper's straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks can-do style
> the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In less flattering
> terms,
> Reagan and his PR crew catered expertly to the demands of the American
> national fantasy: that homely common sense could return America to the
> vigor
> of its youth and the economy of the 1950s.
> When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66 whatever powers of
> concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of
> Staff
> mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with
> simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan
> found these briefings much too complicated and dozed off.
> The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The
> balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with
> Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their
> launch-pads,
> with the miniscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon
> bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted to hammer into
> Reagan's brain, most of them to the effect that "we need more money". The
> president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.
> Reagan had abolished any tiresome division of the world into fact or
> fiction
> in the early 1940s when his studio's PR department turned him into a war
> hero, courtesy of his labors in "Fort Wacky" in Culver City, where they
> made
> training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness of R.R.'s first wife,
> Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home by
> suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.'s hatred of the foe.
> "She'd seen Ronnie's sick face," Modern Screen reported in 1942, "bent over
> a picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to death in
> Poland. 'This,' said the war-hating Reagan between set lips, 'would make it
> a pleasure to kill.'" A photographer for Modern Screen recalled later that,
> unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer themselves to his lens in
> "hero's" garb, Reagan insisted on being photographed on his front step in
> full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.
> Years later Reagan boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the Nazi death
> camps, even as he was forced to defend his deranged decision to bestow
> presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, final
> resting place for the blood-drenched butchers of the Waffen SS. Reagan
> possessed a special talent for the suspension of disbelief when it came to
> the facts of his own life. Perhaps, if the earth in Simi Valley ever
> decides
> to disgorge his corpse, the custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph
> for
> Reagan on those chilly grounds.
> The problem for the press was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd been
> caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote. Truth,
> for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. When the
> Iran/contra
> scandal broke, he held a press conference in which he said to Helen Thomas
> of UPI, "I want to get to the bottom of this and find out all that has
> happened. And so far, I've told you all that I know and, you know, the
> truth
> of the matter is, for quite some time, all that you knew was what I'd told
> you." He went one better than George Washington in that he couldn't tell a
> lie and he couldn't tell the truth, since he couldn't tell the difference
> between the two.
> His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science, SF
> magazines (the origin of "Star Wars", aka the Strategic Defense Initiative)
> lines from movies and homely saws from the Reader's Digest and the Sunday
> supplements.
> Like his wife Nancy, Ronnie had a stout belief in astrology, the stars
> being
> the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the "free market,"
> with
> whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. He believed Armageddon was
> right
> around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be classified as a
> school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd who, as Stevie Earle
> once
> said, spent the Seventies trying to get cocaine classified as a vegetable.
> Reagan's view of Nature was strictly utilitarian. When Reagan was governor
> of California, David Brower, the great arch-Druid, goaded him into making
> his infamous declaration: "Once you've seen one redwood, you've seen them
> all." That Zen koan-like pronouncement pretty much summed up Reagan's
> philosophy of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan propounded the thesis
> that trees generated more air pollution than coal-fired power plants. For
> Reagan, the only excuse for Nature was to serve as a backdrop for
> photo-ops,
> just like in his intros for Death Valley Days, the popular western TV
> series
> that served as a catwalk for the rollout of the B-movie actor as a national
> politician.
> To execute his rapine environmental policies, Reagan turned to his Interior
> Secretary James Watt, whose approach to the plunder of the planet seethed
> with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to Washington a gang of
> libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the Adolf Coors-funded
> Mountain
> States Legal Foundation, who referred to themselves as "The Colorado
> Crazies." Their mission: privatize the public estate. Many of them were
> transparent crooks who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal
> prison for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions in
> public timber, coal, and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic
> scars where there used to be wild forests, trout streams, and deserts.
> These
> thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who demonized
> welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury.
> Watt, who was himself charged with twenty-five felony counts of lying and
> obstruction of justice, never hid his rapacious agenda behind soft,
> made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win solutions,
> ecological forestry, or sustainable development. From the beginning, James
> Watt's message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God wills it so.
> Hearing all the cosy talk about the Gipper, young people spared the
> experience of his awful sojourn in office, probably imagine him as a
> kindly,
> avuncular figure. Not so. He was a callous man, with a breezy indifference
> to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. This indifference was
> so
> profound that Dante would surely have consigned him to one of the lowest
> circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in front of a TV set on the
> blink
> and a dinner tray swinging out of reach like the elusive fruits that
> tormented Tantalus.
> It was startling, back in 2004 when he died, to see the lines of people
> sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagan's casket. How could any of
> them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it was the
> hysteria over Princess Di.
> The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986, a
> disaster that prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that
> was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation
> thus: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this
> morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped
> the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God'."
> In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her
> companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event
> required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while
> Reagan was delivering his state of the union address. He was to tilt his
> head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance half of his
> spectacles, (one lens was close-up, for speech reading,) send a
> presidential
> greeting to the astronauts. But this schedule required an early morning
> launch from chill January Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the
> Challenger aloft, with the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.
> Reagan dozed through much of his second term, his day easing forward
> through
> a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early
> bed. He couldn't recall the names of many of his aides, even of his dog.
> Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered from
> time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Reagan's sons,
> Michael and Ronnie, disagreed whether or not his Alzheimer's began when he
> was president. "Normalcy" and senile dementia were hard to distinguish. The
> official onset was six years after he left Washington DC.
> As an orator or "communicator" Reagan was terrible, with one turgid cliché
> following another, delivered in a folksy drone. His range of rhetorical
> artifice was terribly limited.
> The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his popularity and
> his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he "ended the Cold War".
> He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union's sclerotic economy having
> doomed it long before Reagan became president.
> He lavished money on the rich and the Pentagon. The tendencies he presided
> over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political forces after
> the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then it was a matter of
> triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their position.
> It was a straight line from Reagan's crude attacks on welfare queens to
> Clinton's compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as RR's) as he
> swore to "end welfare as we know it". As a PR man, it was Reagan's role, to
> reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not only might but right was
> on
> their side, and that government, in whatever professed role, was utterly
> malign.
>
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> Ronald and Nancy Reagan. (photo: unknown)
> http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/07/the-cult-of-the-reagans/http://www.co
> unterpunch.org/2016/03/07/the-cult-of-the-reagans/
> The Cult of the Reagans
> By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch
> 20 March 16
> The queen of head is dead. At 94, the life of Nancy Reagan, the pin-up girl
> for the genocidal War on Drugs, finally blinked out. Rat Pack actor Peter
> Lawford, who frequently appeared on Ronald Reagan's General Electric
> Theatre, wrote in his memoir that Nancy gave the best blowjobs in
> Hollywood.
> It's one of the most benign things you could say about the woman who saw
> herself as a kind of Catherine the Great for the American Imperium.
>
> Already the airwaves are throbbing with misty tributes to the Reagan years,
> an age than never really was. Here then is a corrective to the manufactured
> history of Ron and Nancy and their court that Alexander Cockburn and I
> wrote
> on the centenary of Reagan's birth. –JSC
> he script of the recurring homages to the Reagans remains unchanging: with
> the Gipper's straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks can-do style
> the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In less flattering
> terms,
> Reagan and his PR crew catered expertly to the demands of the American
> national fantasy: that homely common sense could return America to the
> vigor
> of its youth and the economy of the 1950s.
> When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66 whatever powers of
> concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of
> Staff
> mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with
> simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan
> found these briefings much too complicated and dozed off.
> The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The
> balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with
> Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their
> launch-pads,
> with the miniscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon
> bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted to hammer into
> Reagan's brain, most of them to the effect that "we need more money". The
> president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.
> Reagan had abolished any tiresome division of the world into fact or
> fiction
> in the early 1940s when his studio's PR department turned him into a war
> hero, courtesy of his labors in "Fort Wacky" in Culver City, where they
> made
> training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness of R.R.'s first wife,
> Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home by
> suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.'s hatred of the foe.
> "She'd seen Ronnie's sick face," Modern Screen reported in 1942, "bent over
> a picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to death in
> Poland. 'This,' said the war-hating Reagan between set lips, 'would make it
> a pleasure to kill.'" A photographer for Modern Screen recalled later that,
> unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer themselves to his lens in
> "hero's" garb, Reagan insisted on being photographed on his front step in
> full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.
> Years later Reagan boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the Nazi death
> camps, even as he was forced to defend his deranged decision to bestow
> presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, final
> resting place for the blood-drenched butchers of the Waffen SS. Reagan
> possessed a special talent for the suspension of disbelief when it came to
> the facts of his own life. Perhaps, if the earth in Simi Valley ever
> decides
> to disgorge his corpse, the custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph
> for
> Reagan on those chilly grounds.
> The problem for the press was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd been
> caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote. Truth,
> for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. When the
> Iran/contra
> scandal broke, he held a press conference in which he said to Helen Thomas
> of UPI, "I want to get to the bottom of this and find out all that has
> happened. And so far, I've told you all that I know and, you know, the
> truth
> of the matter is, for quite some time, all that you knew was what I'd told
> you." He went one better than George Washington in that he couldn't tell a
> lie and he couldn't tell the truth, since he couldn't tell the difference
> between the two.
> His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science, SF
> magazines (the origin of "Star Wars", aka the Strategic Defense Initiative)
> lines from movies and homely saws from the Reader's Digest and the Sunday
> supplements.
> Like his wife Nancy, Ronnie had a stout belief in astrology, the stars
> being
> the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the "free market,"
> with
> whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. He believed Armageddon was
> right
> around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be classified as a
> school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd who, as Stevie Earle
> once
> said, spent the Seventies trying to get cocaine classified as a vegetable.
> Reagan's view of Nature was strictly utilitarian. When Reagan was governor
> of California, David Brower, the great arch-Druid, goaded him into making
> his infamous declaration: "Once you've seen one redwood, you've seen them
> all." That Zen koan-like pronouncement pretty much summed up Reagan's
> philosophy of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan propounded the thesis
> that trees generated more air pollution than coal-fired power plants. For
> Reagan, the only excuse for Nature was to serve as a backdrop for
> photo-ops,
> just like in his intros for Death Valley Days, the popular western TV
> series
> that served as a catwalk for the rollout of the B-movie actor as a national
> politician.
> To execute his rapine environmental policies, Reagan turned to his Interior
> Secretary James Watt, whose approach to the plunder of the planet seethed
> with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to Washington a gang of
> libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the Adolf Coors-funded
> Mountain
> States Legal Foundation, who referred to themselves as "The Colorado
> Crazies." Their mission: privatize the public estate. Many of them were
> transparent crooks who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal
> prison for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions in
> public timber, coal, and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic
> scars where there used to be wild forests, trout streams, and deserts.
> These
> thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who demonized
> welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury.
> Watt, who was himself charged with twenty-five felony counts of lying and
> obstruction of justice, never hid his rapacious agenda behind soft,
> made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win solutions,
> ecological forestry, or sustainable development. From the beginning, James
> Watt's message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God wills it so.
> Hearing all the cosy talk about the Gipper, young people spared the
> experience of his awful sojourn in office, probably imagine him as a
> kindly,
> avuncular figure. Not so. He was a callous man, with a breezy indifference
> to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. This indifference was
> so
> profound that Dante would surely have consigned him to one of the lowest
> circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in front of a TV set on the
> blink
> and a dinner tray swinging out of reach like the elusive fruits that
> tormented Tantalus.
> It was startling, back in 2004 when he died, to see the lines of people
> sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagan's casket. How could any of
> them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it was the
> hysteria over Princess Di.
> The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986, a
> disaster that prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that
> was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation
> thus: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this
> morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped
> the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God'."
> In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her
> companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event
> required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while
> Reagan was delivering his state of the union address. He was to tilt his
> head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance half of his
> spectacles, (one lens was close-up, for speech reading,) send a
> presidential
> greeting to the astronauts. But this schedule required an early morning
> launch from chill January Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the
> Challenger aloft, with the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.
> Reagan dozed through much of his second term, his day easing forward
> through
> a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early
> bed. He couldn't recall the names of many of his aides, even of his dog.
> Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered from
> time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Reagan's sons,
> Michael and Ronnie, disagreed whether or not his Alzheimer's began when he
> was president. "Normalcy" and senile dementia were hard to distinguish. The
> official onset was six years after he left Washington DC.
> As an orator or "communicator" Reagan was terrible, with one turgid cliché
> following another, delivered in a folksy drone. His range of rhetorical
> artifice was terribly limited.
> The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his popularity and
> his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he "ended the Cold War".
> He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union's sclerotic economy having
> doomed it long before Reagan became president.
> He lavished money on the rich and the Pentagon. The tendencies he presided
> over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political forces after
> the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then it was a matter of
> triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their position.
> It was a straight line from Reagan's crude attacks on welfare queens to
> Clinton's compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as RR's) as he
> swore to "end welfare as we know it". As a PR man, it was Reagan's role, to
> reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not only might but right was
> on
> their side, and that government, in whatever professed role, was utterly
> malign.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
Saturday, March 19, 2016
Re: [blind-democracy] It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
What The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II points out in the following
article is spot on. But I would include Religion as one of the
corruptions in our crumbling American Corporate Empire. Even though I
am an Agnostic, I do have an oar in these muddied Religious Waters.
It is long past time for us to throw off the oppressive chains of
Religion, any religion, and declare that each of us, to the best of
our individual ability, is responsible for our own life. We need to
take ownership for our actions, not putting them onto the back of some
All Knowing God. We have been trained for centuries to duck our share
of the burden by pretending that we are given Divine Guidance from
Above. Of course our political life reflects this deep seated
conditioning. We turn over our lives to the current strong man,
hoping that this time he will lead us to a better life, and learning
too late that he is leading us to support His Good Life, not ours.
The marriage between Religion and Earthly Government has left us with
no ability to steer our own ship. Nor are we any longer able to
gather in support of one another. Our Leaders have so driven hatred,
fear, suspicion, and mistrust toward others that we are left to the
mercy of our Masters. And since our Masters proclaim themselves to be
the Chosen Ones, well above the Common Masses, they have little mercy
to shed upon us.
And yet, we turn to their God, seeking mercy. We need to turn inward
for mercy, and then learn to trust one another and unite. Our hope
for a better life will only come when we have the numbers and the
strength of our convictions to take command of our own lives.
Carl Jarvis
3/19/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> ________________________________________
> It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II [1] / The Nation [2]
> March 15, 2016
> Trumpism was created in the crucible of the "Southern strategy." We have
> sown to the wind, reaping the whirlwind.
> We can't isolate Donald Trump and his supporters, because that is a
> simplification. When you unpack the policies of all of his competitors,
> most
> of their disagreement is in tone, not substance. It is not as though they
> are moderate and he is extreme. Trump is not the problem; it's all of the
> xenophobia and racist innuendo and othering of immigrants that is the
> problem. It is all of the coded language about people who want free stuff,
> from the Southern-strategy lexicon of Wallace, Nixon, Reagan, and Atwater
> that has been spewed for years. That is the problem. Add to it the more
> recent rhetoric that says President Obama is unfit. Long before Trump, all
> of this rhetoric created a kind of us-against-them mob mentality, which
> after it is loosed can manifest in the violence that we now see.
> These were tactics used to end the first Reconstruction in America, too,
> when many white elites began to fear a black-white coalition. And they were
> used in the late 1968, to create the so-called solid South and push back
> against the gains of the 1960s, brought about by black, white, Latino, and
> interfaith relationships. We need to understand all of this as we approach
> this election and think about about kinds of questions we ask the
> candidates.
>
> Recently, Senator Ted Cruz was in Raleigh, North Carolina's Calvary Baptist
> Church when FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly asked him about his moral values:
> "How do you manage to keep your integrity working in Washington?" Cruz said
> as president, he intended to "pass a simple flat tax and abolish the IRS,"
> "prosecute Planned Parenthood," and end the Common Core educational
> standards instantly.
>
> Presidential candidates of all political stripes have long courted what the
> media calls the "evangelical voters" in the South, using the language of
> morality. Well, I am an evangelical. I have been born again. I don't think
> it is because I have African and Native American and some European blood
> flowing in my veins that I have a different view of evangelism. Yes, I
> learned my evangelism from my father, a Disciples of Christ minister. But I
> also learned it from Duke Divinity School, from Union Theological Seminary,
> and from great philosophical thinkers and Biblical scholars across this
> country. I learned that persons who claim to be evangelicals are anointed
> to
> preach good news to the poor.
>
> As the Gospel of Luke says, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me for he hath
> anointed me to preach good news to the Poor." The word poor here is
> "ptochos," a Greek word that means those who have been made poor by
> economic
> exploitation. Evangelism always starts with Jesus' words: "When I was
> hungry
> did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me?" In North Carolina,
> even our state constitution notes, in Article 11, "Beneficent provision for
> the poor, the unfortunate, and the orphan is one of the first duties of a
> civilized and a Christian state."
>
> So as the presidential campaign comes to North Carolina on Tuesday, we in
> the Forward Together Moral Movement and the North Carolina NAACP urge the
> media not to take a positive or negative stance toward specific candidates,
> but to ask deep moral questions of all of them. We encourage media and
> voters to ask about public morality-determined by policy choices and budget
> choices, by concerns like Medicaid expansion, voting rights, and poverty.
>
> Ask them how they "manage to keep their integrity" when 500,000 low-income
> North Carolinians-including roughly 30,000 veterans-have no health
> insurance
> because Governor Pat McCrory and the legislature have chosen not to expand
> Medicaid. Medical authorities at UNC Hospitals estimate that as a result of
> this immoral choice, each year 2,500 North Carolinians will die
> unnecessarily due to lack of health care. Most will die because a lack of
> preventive care leads to needless strokes and heart attacks. Ask them why
> they place their political ideology over human needs.
>
> Ask state legislators how they manage to keep their integrity when they
> passed a voter suppression bill the afternoon after the US Supreme Court
> gutted the Voting Rights Act in the morning. Their voter suppression law
> made dozens of changes to voting policies, aiming to hold down turnout. Ask
> candidates what they are doing to expand voting, not restrict access to the
> ballot.
>
> Ask them what they will do to raise real wages, which have dropped steadily
> since the 1970s, leading to the greatest economic inequality in America
> since the Great Depression? Ask them if they support the fundamental
> principle of all great religions and ethical systems in the world: To love
> one's neighbor. Ask them whether they can name three or four policies that
> they believe would be the logical outgrowth of a social ethos grounded in
> love for one's neighbor. How would they act to bring those policies about?
> And in that context, what would a moral, comprehensive immigration policy
> look like?
>
> Few moral issues are more pressing than public education. We might ask
> candidates if they support the use of public money to pay for private
> schools, including voucher or tax credit programs. Do candidates support
> the
> unlimited replacement of traditional public schools with charter schools
> and
> how do they see the impact of charter schools on public education? What are
> some ways that candidates would support public school teachers?
>
> Most citizens increasingly support equality and justice for all citizens,
> including those of different sexual or gender orientations. One moral
> question for candidates is how they would safeguard the rights of LGBTQ
> citizens to be free of discrimination or attack because of their sexual or
> gender orientation.
>
> These are a few of the moral questions the Forward Together Moral Movement
> and the North Carolina NAACP believe the media should be asking candidates
> today. If we are to "prosecute Planned Parenthood," what will we prosecute
> them for? Would we prosecute those who slandered Planned Parenthood with
> doctored film footage? What kind of educational standards would best serve
> our children and nurture them for the world in which they are growing up?
> It
> is time that we asked serious moral questions of all of our candidates.
> The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is co-author of The Third Reconstruction:
> Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics and the Rise of a New Justice Movement [3],
> published in January 2016 by Beacon Press. In January 2016 he also began
> filing regular dispatches from the southern movement for racial justice for
> The Nation, resuming a role Martin Luther King Jr. once filled for the
> magazine. Rev. Barber II is the architect of the Forward Together Moral
> Monday Movement, president of the North Carolina NAACP and pastor of the
> Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Goldsboro. He is also
> president of Repairers of the Breach [4]. In 2015, he was the recipient of
> the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship.
> Share on Facebook Share
> Share on Twitter Tweet
>
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [5]
> [6]
> ________________________________________
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/its-not-about-trump-our-political-cult
> ure-corrupt
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rev-dr-william-j-barber-ii
> [2] http://www.thenation.com
> [3] http://www.beacon.org/The-Third-Reconstruction-P1139.aspx
> [4] http://www.breachrepairers.org/
> [5] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on It's Not About
> Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> [6] http://www.alternet.org/
> [7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
>
> It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II [1] / The Nation [2]
> March 15, 2016
> Trumpism was created in the crucible of the "Southern strategy." We have
> sown to the wind, reaping the whirlwind.
> We can't isolate Donald Trump and his supporters, because that is a
> simplification. When you unpack the policies of all of his competitors,
> most
> of their disagreement is in tone, not substance. It is not as though they
> are moderate and he is extreme. Trump is not the problem; it's all of the
> xenophobia and racist innuendo and othering of immigrants that is the
> problem. It is all of the coded language about people who want free stuff,
> from the Southern-strategy lexicon of Wallace, Nixon, Reagan, and Atwater
> that has been spewed for years. That is the problem. Add to it the more
> recent rhetoric that says President Obama is unfit. Long before Trump, all
> of this rhetoric created a kind of us-against-them mob mentality, which
> after it is loosed can manifest in the violence that we now see.
> These were tactics used to end the first Reconstruction in America, too,
> when many white elites began to fear a black-white coalition. And they were
> used in the late 1968, to create the so-called solid South and push back
> against the gains of the 1960s, brought about by black, white, Latino, and
> interfaith relationships. We need to understand all of this as we approach
> this election and think about about kinds of questions we ask the
> candidates.
>
> Recently, Senator Ted Cruz was in Raleigh, North Carolina's Calvary Baptist
> Church when FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly asked him about his moral values:
> "How do you manage to keep your integrity working in Washington?" Cruz said
> as president, he intended to "pass a simple flat tax and abolish the IRS,"
> "prosecute Planned Parenthood," and end the Common Core educational
> standards instantly.
>
> Presidential candidates of all political stripes have long courted what the
> media calls the "evangelical voters" in the South, using the language of
> morality. Well, I am an evangelical. I have been born again. I don't think
> it is because I have African and Native American and some European blood
> flowing in my veins that I have a different view of evangelism. Yes, I
> learned my evangelism from my father, a Disciples of Christ minister. But I
> also learned it from Duke Divinity School, from Union Theological Seminary,
> and from great philosophical thinkers and Biblical scholars across this
> country. I learned that persons who claim to be evangelicals are anointed
> to
> preach good news to the poor.
>
> As the Gospel of Luke says, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me for he hath
> anointed me to preach good news to the Poor." The word poor here is
> "ptochos," a Greek word that means those who have been made poor by
> economic
> exploitation. Evangelism always starts with Jesus' words: "When I was
> hungry
> did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me?" In North Carolina,
> even our state constitution notes, in Article 11, "Beneficent provision for
> the poor, the unfortunate, and the orphan is one of the first duties of a
> civilized and a Christian state."
>
> So as the presidential campaign comes to North Carolina on Tuesday, we in
> the Forward Together Moral Movement and the North Carolina NAACP urge the
> media not to take a positive or negative stance toward specific candidates,
> but to ask deep moral questions of all of them. We encourage media and
> voters to ask about public morality-determined by policy choices and budget
> choices, by concerns like Medicaid expansion, voting rights, and poverty.
>
> Ask them how they "manage to keep their integrity" when 500,000 low-income
> North Carolinians-including roughly 30,000 veterans-have no health
> insurance
> because Governor Pat McCrory and the legislature have chosen not to expand
> Medicaid. Medical authorities at UNC Hospitals estimate that as a result of
> this immoral choice, each year 2,500 North Carolinians will die
> unnecessarily due to lack of health care. Most will die because a lack of
> preventive care leads to needless strokes and heart attacks. Ask them why
> they place their political ideology over human needs.
>
> Ask state legislators how they manage to keep their integrity when they
> passed a voter suppression bill the afternoon after the US Supreme Court
> gutted the Voting Rights Act in the morning. Their voter suppression law
> made dozens of changes to voting policies, aiming to hold down turnout. Ask
> candidates what they are doing to expand voting, not restrict access to the
> ballot.
>
> Ask them what they will do to raise real wages, which have dropped steadily
> since the 1970s, leading to the greatest economic inequality in America
> since the Great Depression? Ask them if they support the fundamental
> principle of all great religions and ethical systems in the world: To love
> one's neighbor. Ask them whether they can name three or four policies that
> they believe would be the logical outgrowth of a social ethos grounded in
> love for one's neighbor. How would they act to bring those policies about?
> And in that context, what would a moral, comprehensive immigration policy
> look like?
>
> Few moral issues are more pressing than public education. We might ask
> candidates if they support the use of public money to pay for private
> schools, including voucher or tax credit programs. Do candidates support
> the
> unlimited replacement of traditional public schools with charter schools
> and
> how do they see the impact of charter schools on public education? What are
> some ways that candidates would support public school teachers?
>
> Most citizens increasingly support equality and justice for all citizens,
> including those of different sexual or gender orientations. One moral
> question for candidates is how they would safeguard the rights of LGBTQ
> citizens to be free of discrimination or attack because of their sexual or
> gender orientation.
>
> These are a few of the moral questions the Forward Together Moral Movement
> and the North Carolina NAACP believe the media should be asking candidates
> today. If we are to "prosecute Planned Parenthood," what will we prosecute
> them for? Would we prosecute those who slandered Planned Parenthood with
> doctored film footage? What kind of educational standards would best serve
> our children and nurture them for the world in which they are growing up?
> It
> is time that we asked serious moral questions of all of our candidates.
> The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is co-author of The Third Reconstruction:
> Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics and the Rise of a New Justice Movement [3],
> published in January 2016 by Beacon Press. In January 2016 he also began
> filing regular dispatches from the southern movement for racial justice for
> The Nation, resuming a role Martin Luther King Jr. once filled for the
> magazine. Rev. Barber II is the architect of the Forward Together Moral
> Monday Movement, president of the North Carolina NAACP and pastor of the
> Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Goldsboro. He is also
> president of Repairers of the Breach [4]. In 2015, he was the recipient of
> the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [5]
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[6]
>
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/its-not-about-trump-our-political-cult
> ure-corrupt
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rev-dr-william-j-barber-ii
> [2] http://www.thenation.com
> [3] http://www.beacon.org/The-Third-Reconstruction-P1139.aspx
> [4] http://www.breachrepairers.org/
> [5] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on It's Not About
> Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> [6] http://www.alternet.org/
> [7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
>
>
article is spot on. But I would include Religion as one of the
corruptions in our crumbling American Corporate Empire. Even though I
am an Agnostic, I do have an oar in these muddied Religious Waters.
It is long past time for us to throw off the oppressive chains of
Religion, any religion, and declare that each of us, to the best of
our individual ability, is responsible for our own life. We need to
take ownership for our actions, not putting them onto the back of some
All Knowing God. We have been trained for centuries to duck our share
of the burden by pretending that we are given Divine Guidance from
Above. Of course our political life reflects this deep seated
conditioning. We turn over our lives to the current strong man,
hoping that this time he will lead us to a better life, and learning
too late that he is leading us to support His Good Life, not ours.
The marriage between Religion and Earthly Government has left us with
no ability to steer our own ship. Nor are we any longer able to
gather in support of one another. Our Leaders have so driven hatred,
fear, suspicion, and mistrust toward others that we are left to the
mercy of our Masters. And since our Masters proclaim themselves to be
the Chosen Ones, well above the Common Masses, they have little mercy
to shed upon us.
And yet, we turn to their God, seeking mercy. We need to turn inward
for mercy, and then learn to trust one another and unite. Our hope
for a better life will only come when we have the numbers and the
strength of our convictions to take command of our own lives.
Carl Jarvis
3/19/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> ________________________________________
> It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II [1] / The Nation [2]
> March 15, 2016
> Trumpism was created in the crucible of the "Southern strategy." We have
> sown to the wind, reaping the whirlwind.
> We can't isolate Donald Trump and his supporters, because that is a
> simplification. When you unpack the policies of all of his competitors,
> most
> of their disagreement is in tone, not substance. It is not as though they
> are moderate and he is extreme. Trump is not the problem; it's all of the
> xenophobia and racist innuendo and othering of immigrants that is the
> problem. It is all of the coded language about people who want free stuff,
> from the Southern-strategy lexicon of Wallace, Nixon, Reagan, and Atwater
> that has been spewed for years. That is the problem. Add to it the more
> recent rhetoric that says President Obama is unfit. Long before Trump, all
> of this rhetoric created a kind of us-against-them mob mentality, which
> after it is loosed can manifest in the violence that we now see.
> These were tactics used to end the first Reconstruction in America, too,
> when many white elites began to fear a black-white coalition. And they were
> used in the late 1968, to create the so-called solid South and push back
> against the gains of the 1960s, brought about by black, white, Latino, and
> interfaith relationships. We need to understand all of this as we approach
> this election and think about about kinds of questions we ask the
> candidates.
>
> Recently, Senator Ted Cruz was in Raleigh, North Carolina's Calvary Baptist
> Church when FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly asked him about his moral values:
> "How do you manage to keep your integrity working in Washington?" Cruz said
> as president, he intended to "pass a simple flat tax and abolish the IRS,"
> "prosecute Planned Parenthood," and end the Common Core educational
> standards instantly.
>
> Presidential candidates of all political stripes have long courted what the
> media calls the "evangelical voters" in the South, using the language of
> morality. Well, I am an evangelical. I have been born again. I don't think
> it is because I have African and Native American and some European blood
> flowing in my veins that I have a different view of evangelism. Yes, I
> learned my evangelism from my father, a Disciples of Christ minister. But I
> also learned it from Duke Divinity School, from Union Theological Seminary,
> and from great philosophical thinkers and Biblical scholars across this
> country. I learned that persons who claim to be evangelicals are anointed
> to
> preach good news to the poor.
>
> As the Gospel of Luke says, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me for he hath
> anointed me to preach good news to the Poor." The word poor here is
> "ptochos," a Greek word that means those who have been made poor by
> economic
> exploitation. Evangelism always starts with Jesus' words: "When I was
> hungry
> did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me?" In North Carolina,
> even our state constitution notes, in Article 11, "Beneficent provision for
> the poor, the unfortunate, and the orphan is one of the first duties of a
> civilized and a Christian state."
>
> So as the presidential campaign comes to North Carolina on Tuesday, we in
> the Forward Together Moral Movement and the North Carolina NAACP urge the
> media not to take a positive or negative stance toward specific candidates,
> but to ask deep moral questions of all of them. We encourage media and
> voters to ask about public morality-determined by policy choices and budget
> choices, by concerns like Medicaid expansion, voting rights, and poverty.
>
> Ask them how they "manage to keep their integrity" when 500,000 low-income
> North Carolinians-including roughly 30,000 veterans-have no health
> insurance
> because Governor Pat McCrory and the legislature have chosen not to expand
> Medicaid. Medical authorities at UNC Hospitals estimate that as a result of
> this immoral choice, each year 2,500 North Carolinians will die
> unnecessarily due to lack of health care. Most will die because a lack of
> preventive care leads to needless strokes and heart attacks. Ask them why
> they place their political ideology over human needs.
>
> Ask state legislators how they manage to keep their integrity when they
> passed a voter suppression bill the afternoon after the US Supreme Court
> gutted the Voting Rights Act in the morning. Their voter suppression law
> made dozens of changes to voting policies, aiming to hold down turnout. Ask
> candidates what they are doing to expand voting, not restrict access to the
> ballot.
>
> Ask them what they will do to raise real wages, which have dropped steadily
> since the 1970s, leading to the greatest economic inequality in America
> since the Great Depression? Ask them if they support the fundamental
> principle of all great religions and ethical systems in the world: To love
> one's neighbor. Ask them whether they can name three or four policies that
> they believe would be the logical outgrowth of a social ethos grounded in
> love for one's neighbor. How would they act to bring those policies about?
> And in that context, what would a moral, comprehensive immigration policy
> look like?
>
> Few moral issues are more pressing than public education. We might ask
> candidates if they support the use of public money to pay for private
> schools, including voucher or tax credit programs. Do candidates support
> the
> unlimited replacement of traditional public schools with charter schools
> and
> how do they see the impact of charter schools on public education? What are
> some ways that candidates would support public school teachers?
>
> Most citizens increasingly support equality and justice for all citizens,
> including those of different sexual or gender orientations. One moral
> question for candidates is how they would safeguard the rights of LGBTQ
> citizens to be free of discrimination or attack because of their sexual or
> gender orientation.
>
> These are a few of the moral questions the Forward Together Moral Movement
> and the North Carolina NAACP believe the media should be asking candidates
> today. If we are to "prosecute Planned Parenthood," what will we prosecute
> them for? Would we prosecute those who slandered Planned Parenthood with
> doctored film footage? What kind of educational standards would best serve
> our children and nurture them for the world in which they are growing up?
> It
> is time that we asked serious moral questions of all of our candidates.
> The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is co-author of The Third Reconstruction:
> Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics and the Rise of a New Justice Movement [3],
> published in January 2016 by Beacon Press. In January 2016 he also began
> filing regular dispatches from the southern movement for racial justice for
> The Nation, resuming a role Martin Luther King Jr. once filled for the
> magazine. Rev. Barber II is the architect of the Forward Together Moral
> Monday Movement, president of the North Carolina NAACP and pastor of the
> Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Goldsboro. He is also
> president of Repairers of the Breach [4]. In 2015, he was the recipient of
> the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship.
> Share on Facebook Share
> Share on Twitter Tweet
>
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [5]
> [6]
> ________________________________________
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/its-not-about-trump-our-political-cult
> ure-corrupt
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rev-dr-william-j-barber-ii
> [2] http://www.thenation.com
> [3] http://www.beacon.org/The-Third-Reconstruction-P1139.aspx
> [4] http://www.breachrepairers.org/
> [5] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on It's Not About
> Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> [6] http://www.alternet.org/
> [7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
>
> It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II [1] / The Nation [2]
> March 15, 2016
> Trumpism was created in the crucible of the "Southern strategy." We have
> sown to the wind, reaping the whirlwind.
> We can't isolate Donald Trump and his supporters, because that is a
> simplification. When you unpack the policies of all of his competitors,
> most
> of their disagreement is in tone, not substance. It is not as though they
> are moderate and he is extreme. Trump is not the problem; it's all of the
> xenophobia and racist innuendo and othering of immigrants that is the
> problem. It is all of the coded language about people who want free stuff,
> from the Southern-strategy lexicon of Wallace, Nixon, Reagan, and Atwater
> that has been spewed for years. That is the problem. Add to it the more
> recent rhetoric that says President Obama is unfit. Long before Trump, all
> of this rhetoric created a kind of us-against-them mob mentality, which
> after it is loosed can manifest in the violence that we now see.
> These were tactics used to end the first Reconstruction in America, too,
> when many white elites began to fear a black-white coalition. And they were
> used in the late 1968, to create the so-called solid South and push back
> against the gains of the 1960s, brought about by black, white, Latino, and
> interfaith relationships. We need to understand all of this as we approach
> this election and think about about kinds of questions we ask the
> candidates.
>
> Recently, Senator Ted Cruz was in Raleigh, North Carolina's Calvary Baptist
> Church when FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly asked him about his moral values:
> "How do you manage to keep your integrity working in Washington?" Cruz said
> as president, he intended to "pass a simple flat tax and abolish the IRS,"
> "prosecute Planned Parenthood," and end the Common Core educational
> standards instantly.
>
> Presidential candidates of all political stripes have long courted what the
> media calls the "evangelical voters" in the South, using the language of
> morality. Well, I am an evangelical. I have been born again. I don't think
> it is because I have African and Native American and some European blood
> flowing in my veins that I have a different view of evangelism. Yes, I
> learned my evangelism from my father, a Disciples of Christ minister. But I
> also learned it from Duke Divinity School, from Union Theological Seminary,
> and from great philosophical thinkers and Biblical scholars across this
> country. I learned that persons who claim to be evangelicals are anointed
> to
> preach good news to the poor.
>
> As the Gospel of Luke says, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me for he hath
> anointed me to preach good news to the Poor." The word poor here is
> "ptochos," a Greek word that means those who have been made poor by
> economic
> exploitation. Evangelism always starts with Jesus' words: "When I was
> hungry
> did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me?" In North Carolina,
> even our state constitution notes, in Article 11, "Beneficent provision for
> the poor, the unfortunate, and the orphan is one of the first duties of a
> civilized and a Christian state."
>
> So as the presidential campaign comes to North Carolina on Tuesday, we in
> the Forward Together Moral Movement and the North Carolina NAACP urge the
> media not to take a positive or negative stance toward specific candidates,
> but to ask deep moral questions of all of them. We encourage media and
> voters to ask about public morality-determined by policy choices and budget
> choices, by concerns like Medicaid expansion, voting rights, and poverty.
>
> Ask them how they "manage to keep their integrity" when 500,000 low-income
> North Carolinians-including roughly 30,000 veterans-have no health
> insurance
> because Governor Pat McCrory and the legislature have chosen not to expand
> Medicaid. Medical authorities at UNC Hospitals estimate that as a result of
> this immoral choice, each year 2,500 North Carolinians will die
> unnecessarily due to lack of health care. Most will die because a lack of
> preventive care leads to needless strokes and heart attacks. Ask them why
> they place their political ideology over human needs.
>
> Ask state legislators how they manage to keep their integrity when they
> passed a voter suppression bill the afternoon after the US Supreme Court
> gutted the Voting Rights Act in the morning. Their voter suppression law
> made dozens of changes to voting policies, aiming to hold down turnout. Ask
> candidates what they are doing to expand voting, not restrict access to the
> ballot.
>
> Ask them what they will do to raise real wages, which have dropped steadily
> since the 1970s, leading to the greatest economic inequality in America
> since the Great Depression? Ask them if they support the fundamental
> principle of all great religions and ethical systems in the world: To love
> one's neighbor. Ask them whether they can name three or four policies that
> they believe would be the logical outgrowth of a social ethos grounded in
> love for one's neighbor. How would they act to bring those policies about?
> And in that context, what would a moral, comprehensive immigration policy
> look like?
>
> Few moral issues are more pressing than public education. We might ask
> candidates if they support the use of public money to pay for private
> schools, including voucher or tax credit programs. Do candidates support
> the
> unlimited replacement of traditional public schools with charter schools
> and
> how do they see the impact of charter schools on public education? What are
> some ways that candidates would support public school teachers?
>
> Most citizens increasingly support equality and justice for all citizens,
> including those of different sexual or gender orientations. One moral
> question for candidates is how they would safeguard the rights of LGBTQ
> citizens to be free of discrimination or attack because of their sexual or
> gender orientation.
>
> These are a few of the moral questions the Forward Together Moral Movement
> and the North Carolina NAACP believe the media should be asking candidates
> today. If we are to "prosecute Planned Parenthood," what will we prosecute
> them for? Would we prosecute those who slandered Planned Parenthood with
> doctored film footage? What kind of educational standards would best serve
> our children and nurture them for the world in which they are growing up?
> It
> is time that we asked serious moral questions of all of our candidates.
> The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is co-author of The Third Reconstruction:
> Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics and the Rise of a New Justice Movement [3],
> published in January 2016 by Beacon Press. In January 2016 he also began
> filing regular dispatches from the southern movement for racial justice for
> The Nation, resuming a role Martin Luther King Jr. once filled for the
> magazine. Rev. Barber II is the architect of the Forward Together Moral
> Monday Movement, president of the North Carolina NAACP and pastor of the
> Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Goldsboro. He is also
> president of Repairers of the Breach [4]. In 2015, he was the recipient of
> the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [5]
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[6]
>
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/its-not-about-trump-our-political-cult
> ure-corrupt
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rev-dr-william-j-barber-ii
> [2] http://www.thenation.com
> [3] http://www.beacon.org/The-Third-Reconstruction-P1139.aspx
> [4] http://www.breachrepairers.org/
> [5] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on It's Not About
> Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> [6] http://www.alternet.org/
> [7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
>
>
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Re: [blind-democracy] The Clintons' $93 Million Romance With Wall Street
My income comes from three sources, Social Security, State Retirement
and the Department of Education. The source of my income has no
bearing on the fact that I am very pro social security, strongly in
favor of our state retirement program, and an advocate of the US
Department of Education.
Yes siree, if any of them did anything suspect I would be among the
first to call for an investigation, and if they were found to be
guilty, I'd advocate appropriate penalties, after all appeals were
exhausted.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/15/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > The Clintons' $93 Million Romance With Wall Street
> ________________________________________
> The Clintons' $93 Million Romance With Wall Street
> By Richard Behan [1] / AlterNet [2]
> March 11, 2016
> For 24 years Bill and Hillary Clinton have courted Wall Street money with
> notable success. During that time the New York banks contributed:
> . $11.17 million to Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992.
> . $28.37 million for his re-election in 1996.
> . $2.13 million to Hillary Clinton's senatorial campaign in 2002.
> . $6.02 million for her re-election in 2006.
> . $14.61 million to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2008.
> . $21.42 million to her 2016 campaign.
> The total here is $83.72 million for the six campaigns,i [3] ii [4]
> disbursed from 11 banks: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, UBS, Bank of
> America/Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, Barclay's, JP Morgan Chase, CIBC,
> Credit
> Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley.iii [5] iv [6]
> Then there were the speeches. Sixteen days after leaving the White House in
> 2001, Mr. Clinton delivered a speech to Morgan Stanley, for which he was
> paid $125,000. That was the first of many speeches to the New York banks.
> Over the next 14 years, Mr. Clinton's Wall Street speaking engagements
> earned him a total of $5,910,000:v [7]
> . $1,550,000 from Goldman Sachs.
> . $1,690,000 from UBS.
> . $1,075,000 from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch.
> . $770,000 from Deutsche Bank.
> . $700,000 from Citigroup
> After she resigned as Secretary of State in 2012, Hillary Clinton took to
> the lecture circuit as well. Some of her income has come to light during
> the
> current presidential campaign, like the $675,000 she was paid for three
> speeches to Goldman Sachs. That disclosure, however, belittles her
> financial
> achievement and the scope of her audiences. She also addressed the Bank of
> America/Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Ameriprise,
> Apollo Management Holdings, CIBC, Fidelity Investments, and Golden Tree
> Asset Management, earning another $2,265,000.vi [8]
> No other political couple in modern history has enjoyed so much money
> flowing to them from Wall Street for such a long time-$92.57 million over a
> quarter century.
> During a CNN forum on February 3, Anderson Cooper wondered if Goldman
> Sachs'
> $675,000 might impact her prospective presidential decisions. Defending her
> integrity with undisguised indignation, she described her independence from
> the banks:
> Anybody who knows me, who thinks that they can influence me, name anything
> they've influenced me on. Just name one thing. I'm out here every day
> saying
> I'm going to shut them down, I'm going after them. I'm going to jail them
> if
> they should be jailed. I'm going to break them up.vii [9]
> Her campaign website confirms her fierce determination to oversee the banks
> and hold them strictly to account. "Wall Street must work for Main Street,"
> the website claims, outlining her program for "Wall Street Reform":
> . Veto Republican efforts to repeal or weaken Dodd-Frank
> . Tackle dangerous risks in the big banks and elsewhere in the
> financial system.
> . Hold both individuals and corporations accountable when they break
> the law.viii [10]
> $675,000 might be insufficient to elicit Ms. Clinton's sympathetic ear, but
> a quarter century of accepting tens of millions of dollars is not so easily
> dismissed. It might have some impact on the Clintons' sense of gratitude
> and
> certainly on their social, cultural and political environments.
> Over that period of time, while one or the other held public office almost
> continuously, the couple accumulated a net worth of $125 million.ix [11] x
> [12] Measured by family wealth, this inserted the couple into the top 1% of
> American families by a factor of 16 ($7.88 million is the threshold).
> In New York, their home upon leaving the White House, the Clintons moved
> easily among other multimillionaires, the celebrated, wealthy, and
> accomplished people of the city, such as Lloyd Blankfein, Robert Rubin and
> Henry Paulson, CEOs of the benefactor Wall Street banks. The couple could
> scarcely avoid adopting the mindset and political perspectives of the
> people
> who now constituted their peer group.
> Breaking up banks, jailing the lawless executives, forcing Wall Street to
> work for Main Street: Hillary Clinton's stern proclamations of impartial
> law
> enforcement and strict regulation are difficult to take seriously.
> Wall Street doesn't. One bank executive assured his clients, "We continue
> to
> believe Clinton would be one of the better candidates for financial firms."
> He was quoted in a CNN Money article, "Wall Street Isn't Worried about
> Hillary Clinton's Plan," which stated,
> Hillary Clinton unveiled her big plan to curb the worst of Wall Street's
> excesses. The reaction from the banking community was a shrug.xi [13]
> There is good reason for the banks' sanguine view. Over the 24 years of the
> romance, the Clintons first reoriented their political party, gave it a new
> name, the New Democratic Party, and put it at Wall Street's service. Then
> they engineered financial opportunities for the New York banks of immense
> value, running into the hundreds of billions. And through the years as
> president, senator and secretary of state, the Clintons supported Wall
> Street's interests at every necessary turn.
> In the early 1990s, chairing the Democratic Leadership Council, Bill
> Clinton
> ushered in the centrist, triangulating New Democratic Party, explicitly to
> be more business-friendly and to attract the financial support of corporate
> America. Wall Street supported his 1992 campaign handsomely, and Bill
> Clinton became the first president under the new banner, with Hillary
> Clinton at his side.
> When he appointed Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs as Secretary of the
> Treasury
> Department, Clinton established a precedent. For the next 24 years, every
> administration would find Wall Street executives to serve in the position.
> But the working families of America and the African-American and Hispanic
> communities-the party's historic constituencies-were betrayed and
> abandoned,
> deprived of effective representation in Washington. The Clintons' political
> campaigns over the next decades became monumental hypocrisies, Bill donning
> sunglasses to play his saxophone for Arsenio Hall, Hillary visiting black
> churches to hug the parishioners. They speak warmly to the traditional
> constituencies with carefully scripted political rhetoric, currying their
> favor, depending on them for electoral victory, but effectively obscuring
> the truth of their betrayal.
> On taking office Mr. Clinton announced, "The era of big government is
> over."
> On that cue he co-opted two issues long used by Republicans to mask their
> party's racism: "welfare" and "crime." To address the issues, two laws were
> passed in Clinton's first term that savaged the betrayed constituencies.
> The first was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
> Reconciliation Act, which fulfilled Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we
> know it." Since the end of the Clinton administration, poverty in the U.S.
> has nearly doubled: "...the number of Americans living in high-poverty
> areas
> rose to 13.8 million in 2013 from 7.2 million in 2000, with African
> Americans and Latinos driving most of the gains."xii [14]
> To show how tough on crime he could be, Clinton next guided the Violent
> Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 through Congress. A flurry of
> prison construction quickly followed, an industry of private for-profit
> prisons took hold and flourished, and a skyrocketing population mostly of
> young black males soon filled them, most frequently charged with nonviolent
> drug offenses.
> Sixteen years later, the effects of the law were described by Michelle
> Alexander in her searing book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the
> Age of Colorblindness. Alexander well understands how the Clintons and
> their
> creation, the New Democratic Party, left working families and communities
> of
> color without a political voice. Her latest work is an article, "Black
> Lives
> Shattered," in the Feb. 29, 2016 issue of The Nation, in which she details
> how the two Clinton laws have devastated African-American families and sent
> millions to prison. In the article's caption, she asks, "The Clinton's
> legacy has been the impoverishment of black America-so why are we still
> voting for them?"
> From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted-and
> Hillary Clinton supported-decimated black America. Hillary Clinton now
> apologizes for the laws, suggesting they are no longer quite so
> appropriate.
> But she has not, cannot and will not mention two other laws passed at the
> bidding of President Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin. These laws
> enriched the Wall Street banks by hundreds of billions of dollars, but they
> too devastated working families, African Americans and Latinos.
> The first was the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, repealing
> the Glass-Steagall legislation of 1933. Now it was legal once more for
> financial institutions to mix commercial and investment banking. Goldman
> Sachs et al. could now use depositor's funds, insured by the Federal
> Deposit
> Insurance Corporation, to buy up "subprime" mortgages, the high-interest
> debt obligations of typically low-income, black and Latino families.
> The next law was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Now Goldman Sachs
> et al. could transform packages of those subprime mortgages into
> complicated
> derivatives called mortgage-backed-obligations, have them fraudulently
> rated
> as AAA investments, and sell them around the world, without limit,
> restriction or regulation, at immense profit.
> For eight years the bubble inflated, and then it collapsed in the last year
> of George Bush's administration. Real estate values plummeted. The stock
> market was hammered. So was the U.S. economy. And so tragically were many
> low-income, African American and Latino families. $13 trillion in household
> wealth vaporized. Nine million workers lost their jobs. Five million
> families were evicted from their homes.xiii [15]
> This is what the Clinton administration, and the New Democratic Party, had
> wrought. The banks were caught with hundreds of billions in mortgage-backed
> derivatives still in the pipeline, the market values dropping like stones.
> Wall Street's prospective losses were horrific; bankruptcies loomed. But
> George Bush's Treasury Secretary was the obligatory Wall Streeter: Hank
> Paulson, recently CEO of Goldman Sachs. In a heartbeat, Paulson rammed
> through Congress the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It was
> known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and it handed Paulson $700
> billion of taxpayers' money to buy the near-worthless securities from the
> banks.
> Hillary Clinton, now the U.S. senator from New York, voted for the bill,
> telling a New York radio station the next day, "I think the banks of New
> York...are probably the biggest winners in this."xiv [16]
> Paulson started buying, typically paying the banks half again the market
> value of the "troubled assets."xv [17] But a presidential campaign was
> underway, and soon he would have to stop.
> Barack Obama, overcoming Hillary Clinton in the primaries, was elected as
> the second president from the New Democratic Party. Obama's campaign
> contributions from Wall Street:
> . Goldman Sachs: $1,034,615
> . JP Morgan Chase: $847,855
> . Citigroup: $755,057
> . Morgan Stanley: $528,182
> The total is $3.7 million.xvi [18] (Hillary Clinton's campaign, apparently
> thought more likely to succeed, was supported with $14.6 million from the
> banks.xvii [19])
> President Obama's choice of Wall Street bankers to head his Treasury
> Department was Timothy Geithner, lately the president of the Federal
> Reserve
> Bank of New York. Geithner wasted no time in resuming the troubled asset
> purchases, and his execution of the program was no less profitable for the
> banks than Paulson's.xviii [20]
> Wall Street's grip on the New Democratic Party, however, and its influence
> in the Obama administration, appeared in the Department of Justice as well.
> Eric Holder joined the administration from the law firm of Covington
> Burling, which represents in Washington most of the Wall Street banks.
> Charged with prosecuting their criminal behavior, Holder found the banks
> "too big to fail." Instead of criminal indictments and lawsuits, Holder
> negotiated with each of the banks a financial penalty to be paid from
> corporate funds. No corporate executives were jailed, no personal fines
> levied, no records of criminal conduct filed, no salaries reduced, no
> bonuses denied.
> Today the Wall Street banks are larger and more powerful than ever, and
> Holder has returned to Covington Burling. President Obama-of the New
> Democratic Party-has provided no similar relief to the working families and
> communities of color. Their struggles continue, the crime and welfare laws
> have not been repealed, and the title of a recent study tells the tragic
> truth: "During Obama's Presidency, Wealth Inequality has Increased and
> Poverty Levels are Higher."xix [21]
> i [22]"Two Clintons. 41 years. $3 Billion," Washington Post, November 19,
> 2015
> ii [23]"Occupy Hillary Clinton's Wall Street Speeches," Huffpost Politics,
> February 28, 2016
> iii [24]"Hillary Clinton. Top 20 Contributors, 1999-2002,"
> http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php/type==C&cid [25].
> iv [26]"Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush Still Favorites of Wall Street Banks,"
> Huffpost Politics, October 22, 2015
> v [27]"$153 Million in Bill and Hillary Speaking Fees, Documented," Robert
> Yoon, CNN, Updated February 6, 2016.
> vi [28]"Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks That Most of
> Us Earn in a Lifetime,"
> https://theintercept.com/2016/01/08/hillary-clinton-earned-more-from-12-spee
> ches-to-big-banks-than-most-americans-earn-in-their-lifetime/ [29]
> vii [30]"Clinton Defends Wall Street Speeches at CNN Town Hall," Time,
> February 4, 2016
> viii [31]From Hillary Clinton's campaign website, under "Wall Street
> Reform," http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street [32]
> ix [33]"Hillary Clinton net worth: $45 Million,"
> http://www.celebritynetworth.com/ [34]
> x [35]"Bill Clinton net worth: $80 Million,"
> http://www.celebritynetworth.com/ [34]
> xi [36]"Wall Street Isn't Worried about Hillary Clinton's Plan," CNN
> Money,
> October 8, 2015.
> xii [37]"Poverty Has Nearly Doubled Since 2000 in America," International
> Business Times, August 9, 2015
> xiii [38]"Wall Street Reform: Wall Street must work for Main Street,"
> http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street [32]
> xiv [39]"Hillary Clinton's Tough Talk on Wall Street,"
> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/13/hillary-clinton [40]..
> xv [41]"Troubled Asset Relief Program," Wikipedia
> xvi [42]"Barack Obama. Top Contributors, 2008 Cycle,"
> http;//www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php/cid= [43]...
> xvii [44]Washington Post, "Two Clintons. 41 Years. $3 Billion"
> xviii [45]See Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main
> Street While Rescuing Wall Street, by Neil Barofsky, passim.
> xix
> [46]http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/during-obamas-presidency-wealth-i
> nequality-has-increased-and-poverty-levels-are-higher/ [47]
>
> Richard Behan lives in Corvallis, Oregon. He can be reached at
> rwbehan(at)comcast.net [48].
> Share on Facebook Share
> Share on Twitter Tweet
>
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [49]
> [50]
> ________________________________________
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/clintons-93-million-romance-wall-stree
> t
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/richard-behan
> [2] http://alternet.org
> [3] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote1sym
> [4] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote2sym
> [5] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote3sym
> [6] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote4sym
> [7] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote5sym
> [8] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote6sym
> [9] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote7sym
> [10] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote8sym
> [11] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote9sym
> [12]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote10sym
> [13]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote11sym
> [14]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote12sym
> [15]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote13sym
> [16]
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> [17]
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> [18]
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> [19]
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> [20]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote18sym
> [21]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote19sym
> [22] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote1anc
> [23] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote2anc
> [24] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote3anc
> [25] http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php/type==C&cid
> [26] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote4anc
> [27] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote5anc
> [28] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote6anc
> [29]
> https://theintercept.com/2016/01/08/hillary-clinton-earned-more-from-12-spee
> ches-to-big-banks-than-most-americans-earn-in-their-lifetime/
> [30] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote7anc
> [31] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote8anc
> [32] http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street
> [33] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote9anc
> [34] http://www.celebritynetworth.com/
> [35]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote10anc
> [36]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote11anc
> [37]
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> [38]
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> [39]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote14anc
> [40] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/13/hillary-clinton
> [41]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote15anc
> [42]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote16anc
> [43] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php/cid=
> [44]
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> [45]
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> [46]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote19anc
> [47]
> http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/during-obamas-presidency-wealth-inequ
> ality-has-increased-and-poverty-levels-are-higher/
> [48] http://comcast.net/
> [49] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Clintons' $93
> Million Romance With Wall Street
> [50] http://www.alternet.org/
> [51] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > The Clintons' $93 Million Romance With Wall Street
>
> The Clintons' $93 Million Romance With Wall Street
> By Richard Behan [1] / AlterNet [2]
> March 11, 2016
> For 24 years Bill and Hillary Clinton have courted Wall Street money with
> notable success. During that time the New York banks contributed:
> . $11.17 million to Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992.
> . $28.37 million for his re-election in 1996.
> . $2.13 million to Hillary Clinton's senatorial campaign in 2002.
> . $6.02 million for her re-election in 2006.
> . $14.61 million to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2008.
> . $21.42 million to her 2016 campaign.
> The total here is $83.72 million for the six campaigns,i [3] ii [4]
> disbursed from 11 banks: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, UBS, Bank of
> America/Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, Barclay's, JP Morgan Chase, CIBC,
> Credit
> Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley.iii [5] iv [6]
> Then there were the speeches. Sixteen days after leaving the White House in
> 2001, Mr. Clinton delivered a speech to Morgan Stanley, for which he was
> paid $125,000. That was the first of many speeches to the New York banks.
> Over the next 14 years, Mr. Clinton's Wall Street speaking engagements
> earned him a total of $5,910,000:v [7]
> . $1,550,000 from Goldman Sachs.
> . $1,690,000 from UBS.
> . $1,075,000 from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch.
> . $770,000 from Deutsche Bank.
> . $700,000 from Citigroup
> After she resigned as Secretary of State in 2012, Hillary Clinton took to
> the lecture circuit as well. Some of her income has come to light during
> the
> current presidential campaign, like the $675,000 she was paid for three
> speeches to Goldman Sachs. That disclosure, however, belittles her
> financial
> achievement and the scope of her audiences. She also addressed the Bank of
> America/Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Ameriprise,
> Apollo Management Holdings, CIBC, Fidelity Investments, and Golden Tree
> Asset Management, earning another $2,265,000.vi [8]
> No other political couple in modern history has enjoyed so much money
> flowing to them from Wall Street for such a long time-$92.57 million over a
> quarter century.
> During a CNN forum on February 3, Anderson Cooper wondered if Goldman
> Sachs'
> $675,000 might impact her prospective presidential decisions. Defending her
> integrity with undisguised indignation, she described her independence from
> the banks:
> Anybody who knows me, who thinks that they can influence me, name anything
> they've influenced me on. Just name one thing. I'm out here every day
> saying
> I'm going to shut them down, I'm going after them. I'm going to jail them
> if
> they should be jailed. I'm going to break them up.vii [9]
> Her campaign website confirms her fierce determination to oversee the banks
> and hold them strictly to account. "Wall Street must work for Main Street,"
> the website claims, outlining her program for "Wall Street Reform":
> . Veto Republican efforts to repeal or weaken Dodd-Frank
> . Tackle dangerous risks in the big banks and elsewhere in the
> financial system.
> . Hold both individuals and corporations accountable when they break
> the law.viii [10]
> $675,000 might be insufficient to elicit Ms. Clinton's sympathetic ear, but
> a quarter century of accepting tens of millions of dollars is not so easily
> dismissed. It might have some impact on the Clintons' sense of gratitude
> and
> certainly on their social, cultural and political environments.
> Over that period of time, while one or the other held public office almost
> continuously, the couple accumulated a net worth of $125 million.ix [11] x
> [12] Measured by family wealth, this inserted the couple into the top 1% of
> American families by a factor of 16 ($7.88 million is the threshold).
> In New York, their home upon leaving the White House, the Clintons moved
> easily among other multimillionaires, the celebrated, wealthy, and
> accomplished people of the city, such as Lloyd Blankfein, Robert Rubin and
> Henry Paulson, CEOs of the benefactor Wall Street banks. The couple could
> scarcely avoid adopting the mindset and political perspectives of the
> people
> who now constituted their peer group.
> Breaking up banks, jailing the lawless executives, forcing Wall Street to
> work for Main Street: Hillary Clinton's stern proclamations of impartial
> law
> enforcement and strict regulation are difficult to take seriously.
> Wall Street doesn't. One bank executive assured his clients, "We continue
> to
> believe Clinton would be one of the better candidates for financial firms."
> He was quoted in a CNN Money article, "Wall Street Isn't Worried about
> Hillary Clinton's Plan," which stated,
> Hillary Clinton unveiled her big plan to curb the worst of Wall Street's
> excesses. The reaction from the banking community was a shrug.xi [13]
> There is good reason for the banks' sanguine view. Over the 24 years of the
> romance, the Clintons first reoriented their political party, gave it a new
> name, the New Democratic Party, and put it at Wall Street's service. Then
> they engineered financial opportunities for the New York banks of immense
> value, running into the hundreds of billions. And through the years as
> president, senator and secretary of state, the Clintons supported Wall
> Street's interests at every necessary turn.
> In the early 1990s, chairing the Democratic Leadership Council, Bill
> Clinton
> ushered in the centrist, triangulating New Democratic Party, explicitly to
> be more business-friendly and to attract the financial support of corporate
> America. Wall Street supported his 1992 campaign handsomely, and Bill
> Clinton became the first president under the new banner, with Hillary
> Clinton at his side.
> When he appointed Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs as Secretary of the
> Treasury
> Department, Clinton established a precedent. For the next 24 years, every
> administration would find Wall Street executives to serve in the position.
> But the working families of America and the African-American and Hispanic
> communities-the party's historic constituencies-were betrayed and
> abandoned,
> deprived of effective representation in Washington. The Clintons' political
> campaigns over the next decades became monumental hypocrisies, Bill donning
> sunglasses to play his saxophone for Arsenio Hall, Hillary visiting black
> churches to hug the parishioners. They speak warmly to the traditional
> constituencies with carefully scripted political rhetoric, currying their
> favor, depending on them for electoral victory, but effectively obscuring
> the truth of their betrayal.
> On taking office Mr. Clinton announced, "The era of big government is
> over."
> On that cue he co-opted two issues long used by Republicans to mask their
> party's racism: "welfare" and "crime." To address the issues, two laws were
> passed in Clinton's first term that savaged the betrayed constituencies.
> The first was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
> Reconciliation Act, which fulfilled Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we
> know it." Since the end of the Clinton administration, poverty in the U.S.
> has nearly doubled: "...the number of Americans living in high-poverty
> areas
> rose to 13.8 million in 2013 from 7.2 million in 2000, with African
> Americans and Latinos driving most of the gains."xii [14]
> To show how tough on crime he could be, Clinton next guided the Violent
> Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 through Congress. A flurry of
> prison construction quickly followed, an industry of private for-profit
> prisons took hold and flourished, and a skyrocketing population mostly of
> young black males soon filled them, most frequently charged with nonviolent
> drug offenses.
> Sixteen years later, the effects of the law were described by Michelle
> Alexander in her searing book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the
> Age of Colorblindness. Alexander well understands how the Clintons and
> their
> creation, the New Democratic Party, left working families and communities
> of
> color without a political voice. Her latest work is an article, "Black
> Lives
> Shattered," in the Feb. 29, 2016 issue of The Nation, in which she details
> how the two Clinton laws have devastated African-American families and sent
> millions to prison. In the article's caption, she asks, "The Clinton's
> legacy has been the impoverishment of black America-so why are we still
> voting for them?"
> From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted-and
> Hillary Clinton supported-decimated black America. Hillary Clinton now
> apologizes for the laws, suggesting they are no longer quite so
> appropriate.
> But she has not, cannot and will not mention two other laws passed at the
> bidding of President Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin. These laws
> enriched the Wall Street banks by hundreds of billions of dollars, but they
> too devastated working families, African Americans and Latinos.
> The first was the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, repealing
> the Glass-Steagall legislation of 1933. Now it was legal once more for
> financial institutions to mix commercial and investment banking. Goldman
> Sachs et al. could now use depositor's funds, insured by the Federal
> Deposit
> Insurance Corporation, to buy up "subprime" mortgages, the high-interest
> debt obligations of typically low-income, black and Latino families.
> The next law was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Now Goldman Sachs
> et al. could transform packages of those subprime mortgages into
> complicated
> derivatives called mortgage-backed-obligations, have them fraudulently
> rated
> as AAA investments, and sell them around the world, without limit,
> restriction or regulation, at immense profit.
> For eight years the bubble inflated, and then it collapsed in the last year
> of George Bush's administration. Real estate values plummeted. The stock
> market was hammered. So was the U.S. economy. And so tragically were many
> low-income, African American and Latino families. $13 trillion in household
> wealth vaporized. Nine million workers lost their jobs. Five million
> families were evicted from their homes.xiii [15]
> This is what the Clinton administration, and the New Democratic Party, had
> wrought. The banks were caught with hundreds of billions in mortgage-backed
> derivatives still in the pipeline, the market values dropping like stones.
> Wall Street's prospective losses were horrific; bankruptcies loomed. But
> George Bush's Treasury Secretary was the obligatory Wall Streeter: Hank
> Paulson, recently CEO of Goldman Sachs. In a heartbeat, Paulson rammed
> through Congress the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It was
> known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and it handed Paulson $700
> billion of taxpayers' money to buy the near-worthless securities from the
> banks.
> Hillary Clinton, now the U.S. senator from New York, voted for the bill,
> telling a New York radio station the next day, "I think the banks of New
> York...are probably the biggest winners in this."xiv [16]
> Paulson started buying, typically paying the banks half again the market
> value of the "troubled assets."xv [17] But a presidential campaign was
> underway, and soon he would have to stop.
> Barack Obama, overcoming Hillary Clinton in the primaries, was elected as
> the second president from the New Democratic Party. Obama's campaign
> contributions from Wall Street:
> . Goldman Sachs: $1,034,615
> . JP Morgan Chase: $847,855
> . Citigroup: $755,057
> . Morgan Stanley: $528,182
> The total is $3.7 million.xvi [18] (Hillary Clinton's campaign, apparently
> thought more likely to succeed, was supported with $14.6 million from the
> banks.xvii [19])
> President Obama's choice of Wall Street bankers to head his Treasury
> Department was Timothy Geithner, lately the president of the Federal
> Reserve
> Bank of New York. Geithner wasted no time in resuming the troubled asset
> purchases, and his execution of the program was no less profitable for the
> banks than Paulson's.xviii [20]
> Wall Street's grip on the New Democratic Party, however, and its influence
> in the Obama administration, appeared in the Department of Justice as well.
> Eric Holder joined the administration from the law firm of Covington
> Burling, which represents in Washington most of the Wall Street banks.
> Charged with prosecuting their criminal behavior, Holder found the banks
> "too big to fail." Instead of criminal indictments and lawsuits, Holder
> negotiated with each of the banks a financial penalty to be paid from
> corporate funds. No corporate executives were jailed, no personal fines
> levied, no records of criminal conduct filed, no salaries reduced, no
> bonuses denied.
> Today the Wall Street banks are larger and more powerful than ever, and
> Holder has returned to Covington Burling. President Obama-of the New
> Democratic Party-has provided no similar relief to the working families and
> communities of color. Their struggles continue, the crime and welfare laws
> have not been repealed, and the title of a recent study tells the tragic
> truth: "During Obama's Presidency, Wealth Inequality has Increased and
> Poverty Levels are Higher."xix [21]
> i [22]"Two Clintons. 41 years. $3 Billion," Washington Post, November 19,
> 2015
> ii [23]"Occupy Hillary Clinton's Wall Street Speeches," Huffpost Politics,
> February 28, 2016
> iii [24]"Hillary Clinton. Top 20 Contributors, 1999-2002,"
> http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php/type==C&cid [25].
> iv [26]"Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush Still Favorites of Wall Street Banks,"
> Huffpost Politics, October 22, 2015
> v [27]"$153 Million in Bill and Hillary Speaking Fees, Documented," Robert
> Yoon, CNN, Updated February 6, 2016.
> vi [28]"Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks That Most of
> Us Earn in a Lifetime,"
> https://theintercept.com/2016/01/08/hillary-clinton-earned-more-from-12-spee
> ches-to-big-banks-than-most-americans-earn-in-their-lifetime/ [29]
> vii [30]"Clinton Defends Wall Street Speeches at CNN Town Hall," Time,
> February 4, 2016
> viii [31]From Hillary Clinton's campaign website, under "Wall Street
> Reform," http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street [32]
> ix [33]"Hillary Clinton net worth: $45 Million,"
> http://www.celebritynetworth.com/ [34]
> x [35]"Bill Clinton net worth: $80 Million,"
> http://www.celebritynetworth.com/ [34]
> xi [36]"Wall Street Isn't Worried about Hillary Clinton's Plan," CNN Money,
> October 8, 2015.
> xii [37]"Poverty Has Nearly Doubled Since 2000 in America," International
> Business Times, August 9, 2015
> xiii [38]"Wall Street Reform: Wall Street must work for Main Street,"
> http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street [32]
> xiv [39]"Hillary Clinton's Tough Talk on Wall Street,"
> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/13/hillary-clinton [40]..
> xv [41]"Troubled Asset Relief Program," Wikipedia
> xvi [42]"Barack Obama. Top Contributors, 2008 Cycle,"
> http;//www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php/cid= [43]...
> xvii [44]Washington Post, "Two Clintons. 41 Years. $3 Billion"
> xviii [45]See Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main
> Street While Rescuing Wall Street, by Neil Barofsky, passim.
> xix
> [46]http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/during-obamas-presidency-wealth-i
> nequality-has-increased-and-poverty-levels-are-higher/ [47]
> Richard Behan lives in Corvallis, Oregon. He can be reached at
> rwbehan(at)comcast.net [48].
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [49]
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[50]
>
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/clintons-93-million-romance-wall-stree
> t
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/richard-behan
> [2] http://alternet.org
> [3] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote1sym
> [4] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote2sym
> [5] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote3sym
> [6] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote4sym
> [7] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote5sym
> [8] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote6sym
> [9] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote7sym
> [10] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote8sym
> [11] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote9sym
> [12]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote10sym
> [13]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote11sym
> [14]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote12sym
> [15]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote13sym
> [16]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote14sym
> [17]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote15sym
> [18]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote16sym
> [19]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote17sym
> [20]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote18sym
> [21]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote19sym
> [22] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote1anc
> [23] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote2anc
> [24] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote3anc
> [25] http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php/type==C&cid
> [26] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote4anc
> [27] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote5anc
> [28] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote6anc
> [29]
> https://theintercept.com/2016/01/08/hillary-clinton-earned-more-from-12-spee
> ches-to-big-banks-than-most-americans-earn-in-their-lifetime/
> [30] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote7anc
> [31] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote8anc
> [32] http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street
> [33] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote9anc
> [34] http://www.celebritynetworth.com/
> [35]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote10anc
> [36]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote11anc
> [37]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote12anc
> [38]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote13anc
> [39]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote14anc
> [40] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/13/hillary-clinton
> [41]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote15anc
> [42]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote16anc
> [43] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php/cid=
> [44]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote17anc
> [45]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote18anc
> [46]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote19anc
> [47]
> http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/during-obamas-presidency-wealth-inequ
> ality-has-increased-and-poverty-levels-are-higher/
> [48] http://comcast.net/
> [49] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Clintons' $93
> Million Romance With Wall Street
> [50] http://www.alternet.org/
> [51] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
>
>
and the Department of Education. The source of my income has no
bearing on the fact that I am very pro social security, strongly in
favor of our state retirement program, and an advocate of the US
Department of Education.
Yes siree, if any of them did anything suspect I would be among the
first to call for an investigation, and if they were found to be
guilty, I'd advocate appropriate penalties, after all appeals were
exhausted.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/15/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > The Clintons' $93 Million Romance With Wall Street
> ________________________________________
> The Clintons' $93 Million Romance With Wall Street
> By Richard Behan [1] / AlterNet [2]
> March 11, 2016
> For 24 years Bill and Hillary Clinton have courted Wall Street money with
> notable success. During that time the New York banks contributed:
> . $11.17 million to Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992.
> . $28.37 million for his re-election in 1996.
> . $2.13 million to Hillary Clinton's senatorial campaign in 2002.
> . $6.02 million for her re-election in 2006.
> . $14.61 million to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2008.
> . $21.42 million to her 2016 campaign.
> The total here is $83.72 million for the six campaigns,i [3] ii [4]
> disbursed from 11 banks: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, UBS, Bank of
> America/Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, Barclay's, JP Morgan Chase, CIBC,
> Credit
> Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley.iii [5] iv [6]
> Then there were the speeches. Sixteen days after leaving the White House in
> 2001, Mr. Clinton delivered a speech to Morgan Stanley, for which he was
> paid $125,000. That was the first of many speeches to the New York banks.
> Over the next 14 years, Mr. Clinton's Wall Street speaking engagements
> earned him a total of $5,910,000:v [7]
> . $1,550,000 from Goldman Sachs.
> . $1,690,000 from UBS.
> . $1,075,000 from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch.
> . $770,000 from Deutsche Bank.
> . $700,000 from Citigroup
> After she resigned as Secretary of State in 2012, Hillary Clinton took to
> the lecture circuit as well. Some of her income has come to light during
> the
> current presidential campaign, like the $675,000 she was paid for three
> speeches to Goldman Sachs. That disclosure, however, belittles her
> financial
> achievement and the scope of her audiences. She also addressed the Bank of
> America/Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Ameriprise,
> Apollo Management Holdings, CIBC, Fidelity Investments, and Golden Tree
> Asset Management, earning another $2,265,000.vi [8]
> No other political couple in modern history has enjoyed so much money
> flowing to them from Wall Street for such a long time-$92.57 million over a
> quarter century.
> During a CNN forum on February 3, Anderson Cooper wondered if Goldman
> Sachs'
> $675,000 might impact her prospective presidential decisions. Defending her
> integrity with undisguised indignation, she described her independence from
> the banks:
> Anybody who knows me, who thinks that they can influence me, name anything
> they've influenced me on. Just name one thing. I'm out here every day
> saying
> I'm going to shut them down, I'm going after them. I'm going to jail them
> if
> they should be jailed. I'm going to break them up.vii [9]
> Her campaign website confirms her fierce determination to oversee the banks
> and hold them strictly to account. "Wall Street must work for Main Street,"
> the website claims, outlining her program for "Wall Street Reform":
> . Veto Republican efforts to repeal or weaken Dodd-Frank
> . Tackle dangerous risks in the big banks and elsewhere in the
> financial system.
> . Hold both individuals and corporations accountable when they break
> the law.viii [10]
> $675,000 might be insufficient to elicit Ms. Clinton's sympathetic ear, but
> a quarter century of accepting tens of millions of dollars is not so easily
> dismissed. It might have some impact on the Clintons' sense of gratitude
> and
> certainly on their social, cultural and political environments.
> Over that period of time, while one or the other held public office almost
> continuously, the couple accumulated a net worth of $125 million.ix [11] x
> [12] Measured by family wealth, this inserted the couple into the top 1% of
> American families by a factor of 16 ($7.88 million is the threshold).
> In New York, their home upon leaving the White House, the Clintons moved
> easily among other multimillionaires, the celebrated, wealthy, and
> accomplished people of the city, such as Lloyd Blankfein, Robert Rubin and
> Henry Paulson, CEOs of the benefactor Wall Street banks. The couple could
> scarcely avoid adopting the mindset and political perspectives of the
> people
> who now constituted their peer group.
> Breaking up banks, jailing the lawless executives, forcing Wall Street to
> work for Main Street: Hillary Clinton's stern proclamations of impartial
> law
> enforcement and strict regulation are difficult to take seriously.
> Wall Street doesn't. One bank executive assured his clients, "We continue
> to
> believe Clinton would be one of the better candidates for financial firms."
> He was quoted in a CNN Money article, "Wall Street Isn't Worried about
> Hillary Clinton's Plan," which stated,
> Hillary Clinton unveiled her big plan to curb the worst of Wall Street's
> excesses. The reaction from the banking community was a shrug.xi [13]
> There is good reason for the banks' sanguine view. Over the 24 years of the
> romance, the Clintons first reoriented their political party, gave it a new
> name, the New Democratic Party, and put it at Wall Street's service. Then
> they engineered financial opportunities for the New York banks of immense
> value, running into the hundreds of billions. And through the years as
> president, senator and secretary of state, the Clintons supported Wall
> Street's interests at every necessary turn.
> In the early 1990s, chairing the Democratic Leadership Council, Bill
> Clinton
> ushered in the centrist, triangulating New Democratic Party, explicitly to
> be more business-friendly and to attract the financial support of corporate
> America. Wall Street supported his 1992 campaign handsomely, and Bill
> Clinton became the first president under the new banner, with Hillary
> Clinton at his side.
> When he appointed Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs as Secretary of the
> Treasury
> Department, Clinton established a precedent. For the next 24 years, every
> administration would find Wall Street executives to serve in the position.
> But the working families of America and the African-American and Hispanic
> communities-the party's historic constituencies-were betrayed and
> abandoned,
> deprived of effective representation in Washington. The Clintons' political
> campaigns over the next decades became monumental hypocrisies, Bill donning
> sunglasses to play his saxophone for Arsenio Hall, Hillary visiting black
> churches to hug the parishioners. They speak warmly to the traditional
> constituencies with carefully scripted political rhetoric, currying their
> favor, depending on them for electoral victory, but effectively obscuring
> the truth of their betrayal.
> On taking office Mr. Clinton announced, "The era of big government is
> over."
> On that cue he co-opted two issues long used by Republicans to mask their
> party's racism: "welfare" and "crime." To address the issues, two laws were
> passed in Clinton's first term that savaged the betrayed constituencies.
> The first was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
> Reconciliation Act, which fulfilled Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we
> know it." Since the end of the Clinton administration, poverty in the U.S.
> has nearly doubled: "...the number of Americans living in high-poverty
> areas
> rose to 13.8 million in 2013 from 7.2 million in 2000, with African
> Americans and Latinos driving most of the gains."xii [14]
> To show how tough on crime he could be, Clinton next guided the Violent
> Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 through Congress. A flurry of
> prison construction quickly followed, an industry of private for-profit
> prisons took hold and flourished, and a skyrocketing population mostly of
> young black males soon filled them, most frequently charged with nonviolent
> drug offenses.
> Sixteen years later, the effects of the law were described by Michelle
> Alexander in her searing book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the
> Age of Colorblindness. Alexander well understands how the Clintons and
> their
> creation, the New Democratic Party, left working families and communities
> of
> color without a political voice. Her latest work is an article, "Black
> Lives
> Shattered," in the Feb. 29, 2016 issue of The Nation, in which she details
> how the two Clinton laws have devastated African-American families and sent
> millions to prison. In the article's caption, she asks, "The Clinton's
> legacy has been the impoverishment of black America-so why are we still
> voting for them?"
> From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted-and
> Hillary Clinton supported-decimated black America. Hillary Clinton now
> apologizes for the laws, suggesting they are no longer quite so
> appropriate.
> But she has not, cannot and will not mention two other laws passed at the
> bidding of President Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin. These laws
> enriched the Wall Street banks by hundreds of billions of dollars, but they
> too devastated working families, African Americans and Latinos.
> The first was the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, repealing
> the Glass-Steagall legislation of 1933. Now it was legal once more for
> financial institutions to mix commercial and investment banking. Goldman
> Sachs et al. could now use depositor's funds, insured by the Federal
> Deposit
> Insurance Corporation, to buy up "subprime" mortgages, the high-interest
> debt obligations of typically low-income, black and Latino families.
> The next law was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Now Goldman Sachs
> et al. could transform packages of those subprime mortgages into
> complicated
> derivatives called mortgage-backed-obligations, have them fraudulently
> rated
> as AAA investments, and sell them around the world, without limit,
> restriction or regulation, at immense profit.
> For eight years the bubble inflated, and then it collapsed in the last year
> of George Bush's administration. Real estate values plummeted. The stock
> market was hammered. So was the U.S. economy. And so tragically were many
> low-income, African American and Latino families. $13 trillion in household
> wealth vaporized. Nine million workers lost their jobs. Five million
> families were evicted from their homes.xiii [15]
> This is what the Clinton administration, and the New Democratic Party, had
> wrought. The banks were caught with hundreds of billions in mortgage-backed
> derivatives still in the pipeline, the market values dropping like stones.
> Wall Street's prospective losses were horrific; bankruptcies loomed. But
> George Bush's Treasury Secretary was the obligatory Wall Streeter: Hank
> Paulson, recently CEO of Goldman Sachs. In a heartbeat, Paulson rammed
> through Congress the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It was
> known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and it handed Paulson $700
> billion of taxpayers' money to buy the near-worthless securities from the
> banks.
> Hillary Clinton, now the U.S. senator from New York, voted for the bill,
> telling a New York radio station the next day, "I think the banks of New
> York...are probably the biggest winners in this."xiv [16]
> Paulson started buying, typically paying the banks half again the market
> value of the "troubled assets."xv [17] But a presidential campaign was
> underway, and soon he would have to stop.
> Barack Obama, overcoming Hillary Clinton in the primaries, was elected as
> the second president from the New Democratic Party. Obama's campaign
> contributions from Wall Street:
> . Goldman Sachs: $1,034,615
> . JP Morgan Chase: $847,855
> . Citigroup: $755,057
> . Morgan Stanley: $528,182
> The total is $3.7 million.xvi [18] (Hillary Clinton's campaign, apparently
> thought more likely to succeed, was supported with $14.6 million from the
> banks.xvii [19])
> President Obama's choice of Wall Street bankers to head his Treasury
> Department was Timothy Geithner, lately the president of the Federal
> Reserve
> Bank of New York. Geithner wasted no time in resuming the troubled asset
> purchases, and his execution of the program was no less profitable for the
> banks than Paulson's.xviii [20]
> Wall Street's grip on the New Democratic Party, however, and its influence
> in the Obama administration, appeared in the Department of Justice as well.
> Eric Holder joined the administration from the law firm of Covington
> Burling, which represents in Washington most of the Wall Street banks.
> Charged with prosecuting their criminal behavior, Holder found the banks
> "too big to fail." Instead of criminal indictments and lawsuits, Holder
> negotiated with each of the banks a financial penalty to be paid from
> corporate funds. No corporate executives were jailed, no personal fines
> levied, no records of criminal conduct filed, no salaries reduced, no
> bonuses denied.
> Today the Wall Street banks are larger and more powerful than ever, and
> Holder has returned to Covington Burling. President Obama-of the New
> Democratic Party-has provided no similar relief to the working families and
> communities of color. Their struggles continue, the crime and welfare laws
> have not been repealed, and the title of a recent study tells the tragic
> truth: "During Obama's Presidency, Wealth Inequality has Increased and
> Poverty Levels are Higher."xix [21]
> i [22]"Two Clintons. 41 years. $3 Billion," Washington Post, November 19,
> 2015
> ii [23]"Occupy Hillary Clinton's Wall Street Speeches," Huffpost Politics,
> February 28, 2016
> iii [24]"Hillary Clinton. Top 20 Contributors, 1999-2002,"
> http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php/type==C&cid [25].
> iv [26]"Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush Still Favorites of Wall Street Banks,"
> Huffpost Politics, October 22, 2015
> v [27]"$153 Million in Bill and Hillary Speaking Fees, Documented," Robert
> Yoon, CNN, Updated February 6, 2016.
> vi [28]"Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks That Most of
> Us Earn in a Lifetime,"
> https://theintercept.com/2016/01/08/hillary-clinton-earned-more-from-12-spee
> ches-to-big-banks-than-most-americans-earn-in-their-lifetime/ [29]
> vii [30]"Clinton Defends Wall Street Speeches at CNN Town Hall," Time,
> February 4, 2016
> viii [31]From Hillary Clinton's campaign website, under "Wall Street
> Reform," http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street [32]
> ix [33]"Hillary Clinton net worth: $45 Million,"
> http://www.celebritynetworth.com/ [34]
> x [35]"Bill Clinton net worth: $80 Million,"
> http://www.celebritynetworth.com/ [34]
> xi [36]"Wall Street Isn't Worried about Hillary Clinton's Plan," CNN
> Money,
> October 8, 2015.
> xii [37]"Poverty Has Nearly Doubled Since 2000 in America," International
> Business Times, August 9, 2015
> xiii [38]"Wall Street Reform: Wall Street must work for Main Street,"
> http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street [32]
> xiv [39]"Hillary Clinton's Tough Talk on Wall Street,"
> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/13/hillary-clinton [40]..
> xv [41]"Troubled Asset Relief Program," Wikipedia
> xvi [42]"Barack Obama. Top Contributors, 2008 Cycle,"
> http;//www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php/cid= [43]...
> xvii [44]Washington Post, "Two Clintons. 41 Years. $3 Billion"
> xviii [45]See Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main
> Street While Rescuing Wall Street, by Neil Barofsky, passim.
> xix
> [46]http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/during-obamas-presidency-wealth-i
> nequality-has-increased-and-poverty-levels-are-higher/ [47]
>
> Richard Behan lives in Corvallis, Oregon. He can be reached at
> rwbehan(at)comcast.net [48].
> Share on Facebook Share
> Share on Twitter Tweet
>
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [49]
> [50]
> ________________________________________
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/clintons-93-million-romance-wall-stree
> t
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/richard-behan
> [2] http://alternet.org
> [3] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote1sym
> [4] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote2sym
> [5] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote3sym
> [6] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote4sym
> [7] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote5sym
> [8] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote6sym
> [9] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote7sym
> [10] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote8sym
> [11] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote9sym
> [12]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote10sym
> [13]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote11sym
> [14]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote12sym
> [15]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote13sym
> [16]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote14sym
> [17]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote15sym
> [18]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote16sym
> [19]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote17sym
> [20]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote18sym
> [21]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote19sym
> [22] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote1anc
> [23] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote2anc
> [24] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote3anc
> [25] http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php/type==C&cid
> [26] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote4anc
> [27] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote5anc
> [28] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote6anc
> [29]
> https://theintercept.com/2016/01/08/hillary-clinton-earned-more-from-12-spee
> ches-to-big-banks-than-most-americans-earn-in-their-lifetime/
> [30] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote7anc
> [31] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote8anc
> [32] http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street
> [33] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote9anc
> [34] http://www.celebritynetworth.com/
> [35]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote10anc
> [36]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote11anc
> [37]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote12anc
> [38]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote13anc
> [39]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote14anc
> [40] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/13/hillary-clinton
> [41]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote15anc
> [42]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote16anc
> [43] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php/cid=
> [44]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote17anc
> [45]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote18anc
> [46]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote19anc
> [47]
> http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/during-obamas-presidency-wealth-inequ
> ality-has-increased-and-poverty-levels-are-higher/
> [48] http://comcast.net/
> [49] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Clintons' $93
> Million Romance With Wall Street
> [50] http://www.alternet.org/
> [51] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > The Clintons' $93 Million Romance With Wall Street
>
> The Clintons' $93 Million Romance With Wall Street
> By Richard Behan [1] / AlterNet [2]
> March 11, 2016
> For 24 years Bill and Hillary Clinton have courted Wall Street money with
> notable success. During that time the New York banks contributed:
> . $11.17 million to Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992.
> . $28.37 million for his re-election in 1996.
> . $2.13 million to Hillary Clinton's senatorial campaign in 2002.
> . $6.02 million for her re-election in 2006.
> . $14.61 million to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2008.
> . $21.42 million to her 2016 campaign.
> The total here is $83.72 million for the six campaigns,i [3] ii [4]
> disbursed from 11 banks: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, UBS, Bank of
> America/Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, Barclay's, JP Morgan Chase, CIBC,
> Credit
> Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley.iii [5] iv [6]
> Then there were the speeches. Sixteen days after leaving the White House in
> 2001, Mr. Clinton delivered a speech to Morgan Stanley, for which he was
> paid $125,000. That was the first of many speeches to the New York banks.
> Over the next 14 years, Mr. Clinton's Wall Street speaking engagements
> earned him a total of $5,910,000:v [7]
> . $1,550,000 from Goldman Sachs.
> . $1,690,000 from UBS.
> . $1,075,000 from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch.
> . $770,000 from Deutsche Bank.
> . $700,000 from Citigroup
> After she resigned as Secretary of State in 2012, Hillary Clinton took to
> the lecture circuit as well. Some of her income has come to light during
> the
> current presidential campaign, like the $675,000 she was paid for three
> speeches to Goldman Sachs. That disclosure, however, belittles her
> financial
> achievement and the scope of her audiences. She also addressed the Bank of
> America/Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Ameriprise,
> Apollo Management Holdings, CIBC, Fidelity Investments, and Golden Tree
> Asset Management, earning another $2,265,000.vi [8]
> No other political couple in modern history has enjoyed so much money
> flowing to them from Wall Street for such a long time-$92.57 million over a
> quarter century.
> During a CNN forum on February 3, Anderson Cooper wondered if Goldman
> Sachs'
> $675,000 might impact her prospective presidential decisions. Defending her
> integrity with undisguised indignation, she described her independence from
> the banks:
> Anybody who knows me, who thinks that they can influence me, name anything
> they've influenced me on. Just name one thing. I'm out here every day
> saying
> I'm going to shut them down, I'm going after them. I'm going to jail them
> if
> they should be jailed. I'm going to break them up.vii [9]
> Her campaign website confirms her fierce determination to oversee the banks
> and hold them strictly to account. "Wall Street must work for Main Street,"
> the website claims, outlining her program for "Wall Street Reform":
> . Veto Republican efforts to repeal or weaken Dodd-Frank
> . Tackle dangerous risks in the big banks and elsewhere in the
> financial system.
> . Hold both individuals and corporations accountable when they break
> the law.viii [10]
> $675,000 might be insufficient to elicit Ms. Clinton's sympathetic ear, but
> a quarter century of accepting tens of millions of dollars is not so easily
> dismissed. It might have some impact on the Clintons' sense of gratitude
> and
> certainly on their social, cultural and political environments.
> Over that period of time, while one or the other held public office almost
> continuously, the couple accumulated a net worth of $125 million.ix [11] x
> [12] Measured by family wealth, this inserted the couple into the top 1% of
> American families by a factor of 16 ($7.88 million is the threshold).
> In New York, their home upon leaving the White House, the Clintons moved
> easily among other multimillionaires, the celebrated, wealthy, and
> accomplished people of the city, such as Lloyd Blankfein, Robert Rubin and
> Henry Paulson, CEOs of the benefactor Wall Street banks. The couple could
> scarcely avoid adopting the mindset and political perspectives of the
> people
> who now constituted their peer group.
> Breaking up banks, jailing the lawless executives, forcing Wall Street to
> work for Main Street: Hillary Clinton's stern proclamations of impartial
> law
> enforcement and strict regulation are difficult to take seriously.
> Wall Street doesn't. One bank executive assured his clients, "We continue
> to
> believe Clinton would be one of the better candidates for financial firms."
> He was quoted in a CNN Money article, "Wall Street Isn't Worried about
> Hillary Clinton's Plan," which stated,
> Hillary Clinton unveiled her big plan to curb the worst of Wall Street's
> excesses. The reaction from the banking community was a shrug.xi [13]
> There is good reason for the banks' sanguine view. Over the 24 years of the
> romance, the Clintons first reoriented their political party, gave it a new
> name, the New Democratic Party, and put it at Wall Street's service. Then
> they engineered financial opportunities for the New York banks of immense
> value, running into the hundreds of billions. And through the years as
> president, senator and secretary of state, the Clintons supported Wall
> Street's interests at every necessary turn.
> In the early 1990s, chairing the Democratic Leadership Council, Bill
> Clinton
> ushered in the centrist, triangulating New Democratic Party, explicitly to
> be more business-friendly and to attract the financial support of corporate
> America. Wall Street supported his 1992 campaign handsomely, and Bill
> Clinton became the first president under the new banner, with Hillary
> Clinton at his side.
> When he appointed Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs as Secretary of the
> Treasury
> Department, Clinton established a precedent. For the next 24 years, every
> administration would find Wall Street executives to serve in the position.
> But the working families of America and the African-American and Hispanic
> communities-the party's historic constituencies-were betrayed and
> abandoned,
> deprived of effective representation in Washington. The Clintons' political
> campaigns over the next decades became monumental hypocrisies, Bill donning
> sunglasses to play his saxophone for Arsenio Hall, Hillary visiting black
> churches to hug the parishioners. They speak warmly to the traditional
> constituencies with carefully scripted political rhetoric, currying their
> favor, depending on them for electoral victory, but effectively obscuring
> the truth of their betrayal.
> On taking office Mr. Clinton announced, "The era of big government is
> over."
> On that cue he co-opted two issues long used by Republicans to mask their
> party's racism: "welfare" and "crime." To address the issues, two laws were
> passed in Clinton's first term that savaged the betrayed constituencies.
> The first was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
> Reconciliation Act, which fulfilled Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we
> know it." Since the end of the Clinton administration, poverty in the U.S.
> has nearly doubled: "...the number of Americans living in high-poverty
> areas
> rose to 13.8 million in 2013 from 7.2 million in 2000, with African
> Americans and Latinos driving most of the gains."xii [14]
> To show how tough on crime he could be, Clinton next guided the Violent
> Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 through Congress. A flurry of
> prison construction quickly followed, an industry of private for-profit
> prisons took hold and flourished, and a skyrocketing population mostly of
> young black males soon filled them, most frequently charged with nonviolent
> drug offenses.
> Sixteen years later, the effects of the law were described by Michelle
> Alexander in her searing book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the
> Age of Colorblindness. Alexander well understands how the Clintons and
> their
> creation, the New Democratic Party, left working families and communities
> of
> color without a political voice. Her latest work is an article, "Black
> Lives
> Shattered," in the Feb. 29, 2016 issue of The Nation, in which she details
> how the two Clinton laws have devastated African-American families and sent
> millions to prison. In the article's caption, she asks, "The Clinton's
> legacy has been the impoverishment of black America-so why are we still
> voting for them?"
> From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted-and
> Hillary Clinton supported-decimated black America. Hillary Clinton now
> apologizes for the laws, suggesting they are no longer quite so
> appropriate.
> But she has not, cannot and will not mention two other laws passed at the
> bidding of President Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin. These laws
> enriched the Wall Street banks by hundreds of billions of dollars, but they
> too devastated working families, African Americans and Latinos.
> The first was the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, repealing
> the Glass-Steagall legislation of 1933. Now it was legal once more for
> financial institutions to mix commercial and investment banking. Goldman
> Sachs et al. could now use depositor's funds, insured by the Federal
> Deposit
> Insurance Corporation, to buy up "subprime" mortgages, the high-interest
> debt obligations of typically low-income, black and Latino families.
> The next law was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Now Goldman Sachs
> et al. could transform packages of those subprime mortgages into
> complicated
> derivatives called mortgage-backed-obligations, have them fraudulently
> rated
> as AAA investments, and sell them around the world, without limit,
> restriction or regulation, at immense profit.
> For eight years the bubble inflated, and then it collapsed in the last year
> of George Bush's administration. Real estate values plummeted. The stock
> market was hammered. So was the U.S. economy. And so tragically were many
> low-income, African American and Latino families. $13 trillion in household
> wealth vaporized. Nine million workers lost their jobs. Five million
> families were evicted from their homes.xiii [15]
> This is what the Clinton administration, and the New Democratic Party, had
> wrought. The banks were caught with hundreds of billions in mortgage-backed
> derivatives still in the pipeline, the market values dropping like stones.
> Wall Street's prospective losses were horrific; bankruptcies loomed. But
> George Bush's Treasury Secretary was the obligatory Wall Streeter: Hank
> Paulson, recently CEO of Goldman Sachs. In a heartbeat, Paulson rammed
> through Congress the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It was
> known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and it handed Paulson $700
> billion of taxpayers' money to buy the near-worthless securities from the
> banks.
> Hillary Clinton, now the U.S. senator from New York, voted for the bill,
> telling a New York radio station the next day, "I think the banks of New
> York...are probably the biggest winners in this."xiv [16]
> Paulson started buying, typically paying the banks half again the market
> value of the "troubled assets."xv [17] But a presidential campaign was
> underway, and soon he would have to stop.
> Barack Obama, overcoming Hillary Clinton in the primaries, was elected as
> the second president from the New Democratic Party. Obama's campaign
> contributions from Wall Street:
> . Goldman Sachs: $1,034,615
> . JP Morgan Chase: $847,855
> . Citigroup: $755,057
> . Morgan Stanley: $528,182
> The total is $3.7 million.xvi [18] (Hillary Clinton's campaign, apparently
> thought more likely to succeed, was supported with $14.6 million from the
> banks.xvii [19])
> President Obama's choice of Wall Street bankers to head his Treasury
> Department was Timothy Geithner, lately the president of the Federal
> Reserve
> Bank of New York. Geithner wasted no time in resuming the troubled asset
> purchases, and his execution of the program was no less profitable for the
> banks than Paulson's.xviii [20]
> Wall Street's grip on the New Democratic Party, however, and its influence
> in the Obama administration, appeared in the Department of Justice as well.
> Eric Holder joined the administration from the law firm of Covington
> Burling, which represents in Washington most of the Wall Street banks.
> Charged with prosecuting their criminal behavior, Holder found the banks
> "too big to fail." Instead of criminal indictments and lawsuits, Holder
> negotiated with each of the banks a financial penalty to be paid from
> corporate funds. No corporate executives were jailed, no personal fines
> levied, no records of criminal conduct filed, no salaries reduced, no
> bonuses denied.
> Today the Wall Street banks are larger and more powerful than ever, and
> Holder has returned to Covington Burling. President Obama-of the New
> Democratic Party-has provided no similar relief to the working families and
> communities of color. Their struggles continue, the crime and welfare laws
> have not been repealed, and the title of a recent study tells the tragic
> truth: "During Obama's Presidency, Wealth Inequality has Increased and
> Poverty Levels are Higher."xix [21]
> i [22]"Two Clintons. 41 years. $3 Billion," Washington Post, November 19,
> 2015
> ii [23]"Occupy Hillary Clinton's Wall Street Speeches," Huffpost Politics,
> February 28, 2016
> iii [24]"Hillary Clinton. Top 20 Contributors, 1999-2002,"
> http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php/type==C&cid [25].
> iv [26]"Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush Still Favorites of Wall Street Banks,"
> Huffpost Politics, October 22, 2015
> v [27]"$153 Million in Bill and Hillary Speaking Fees, Documented," Robert
> Yoon, CNN, Updated February 6, 2016.
> vi [28]"Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks That Most of
> Us Earn in a Lifetime,"
> https://theintercept.com/2016/01/08/hillary-clinton-earned-more-from-12-spee
> ches-to-big-banks-than-most-americans-earn-in-their-lifetime/ [29]
> vii [30]"Clinton Defends Wall Street Speeches at CNN Town Hall," Time,
> February 4, 2016
> viii [31]From Hillary Clinton's campaign website, under "Wall Street
> Reform," http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street [32]
> ix [33]"Hillary Clinton net worth: $45 Million,"
> http://www.celebritynetworth.com/ [34]
> x [35]"Bill Clinton net worth: $80 Million,"
> http://www.celebritynetworth.com/ [34]
> xi [36]"Wall Street Isn't Worried about Hillary Clinton's Plan," CNN Money,
> October 8, 2015.
> xii [37]"Poverty Has Nearly Doubled Since 2000 in America," International
> Business Times, August 9, 2015
> xiii [38]"Wall Street Reform: Wall Street must work for Main Street,"
> http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street [32]
> xiv [39]"Hillary Clinton's Tough Talk on Wall Street,"
> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/13/hillary-clinton [40]..
> xv [41]"Troubled Asset Relief Program," Wikipedia
> xvi [42]"Barack Obama. Top Contributors, 2008 Cycle,"
> http;//www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php/cid= [43]...
> xvii [44]Washington Post, "Two Clintons. 41 Years. $3 Billion"
> xviii [45]See Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main
> Street While Rescuing Wall Street, by Neil Barofsky, passim.
> xix
> [46]http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/during-obamas-presidency-wealth-i
> nequality-has-increased-and-poverty-levels-are-higher/ [47]
> Richard Behan lives in Corvallis, Oregon. He can be reached at
> rwbehan(at)comcast.net [48].
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [49]
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[50]
>
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/clintons-93-million-romance-wall-stree
> t
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/richard-behan
> [2] http://alternet.org
> [3] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote1sym
> [4] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote2sym
> [5] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote3sym
> [6] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote4sym
> [7] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote5sym
> [8] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote6sym
> [9] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote7sym
> [10] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote8sym
> [11] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote9sym
> [12]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote10sym
> [13]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote11sym
> [14]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote12sym
> [15]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote13sym
> [16]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote14sym
> [17]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote15sym
> [18]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote16sym
> [19]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote17sym
> [20]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote18sym
> [21]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote19sym
> [22] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote1anc
> [23] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote2anc
> [24] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote3anc
> [25] http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php/type==C&cid
> [26] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote4anc
> [27] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote5anc
> [28] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote6anc
> [29]
> https://theintercept.com/2016/01/08/hillary-clinton-earned-more-from-12-spee
> ches-to-big-banks-than-most-americans-earn-in-their-lifetime/
> [30] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote7anc
> [31] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote8anc
> [32] http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street
> [33] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote9anc
> [34] http://www.celebritynetworth.com/
> [35]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote10anc
> [36]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote11anc
> [37]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote12anc
> [38]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote13anc
> [39]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote14anc
> [40] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/13/hillary-clinton
> [41]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote15anc
> [42]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote16anc
> [43] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php/cid=
> [44]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote17anc
> [45]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote18anc
> [46]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote19anc
> [47]
> http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/during-obamas-presidency-wealth-inequ
> ality-has-increased-and-poverty-levels-are-higher/
> [48] http://comcast.net/
> [49] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Clintons' $93
> Million Romance With Wall Street
> [50] http://www.alternet.org/
> [51] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
>
>
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