Aug 212016
 
 August 21, 2016  Posted by at 9:13 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,


Dorothea Lange ‘A season’s work in the beans’, Marion County, Oregon 1939

Neo-Liberalism Has Had Its Day. So What Happens Next? (G.)
BOJ’s Kuroda Says Won’t Rule Out Deepening Negative Rate Cut (R.)
EU Officials Ignored Years of Emissions Evidence (Spiegel)
The Sound of Blairite Silence (Paul Mason)
53% Of Clinton Foundation Donors Would Be Barred Under Proposed Rule (ZH)
Leaked Memo Proves Soros Ruled Ukraine In 2014 (Duran)
The Aleppo Poster Child (Paul Craig Roberts)
Refugees In Greek Camps Targeted By Mafia Gangs (G.)
Hundreds Rescued From Overcrowded Migrant Boats In Med (EN)
‘Next Year Or The Year After, The Central Arctic Will Be Free Of Ice’ (G.)

 

 

Long, not terrible but not terribly convincing either.

Neo-Liberalism Has Had Its Day. So What Happens Next? (G.)

The western financial crisis of 2007-8 was the worst since 1931, yet its immediate repercussions were surprisingly modest. The crisis challenged the foundation stones of the long-dominant neoliberal ideology but it seemed to emerge largely unscathed. The banks were bailed out; hardly any bankers on either side of the Atlantic were prosecuted for their crimes; and the price of their behaviour was duly paid by the taxpayer. Subsequent economic policy, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has relied overwhelmingly on monetary policy, especially quantitative easing. It has failed. The western economy has stagnated and is now approaching its lost decade, with no end in sight.

After almost nine years, we are finally beginning to reap the political whirlwind of the financial crisis. But how did neoliberalism manage to survive virtually unscathed for so long? Although it failed the test of the real world, bequeathing the worst economic disaster for seven decades, politically and intellectually it remained the only show in town. Parties of the right, centre and left had all bought into its philosophy, New Labour a classic in point. They knew no other way of thinking or doing: it had become the common sense. It was, as Antonio Gramsci put it, hegemonic. But that hegemony cannot and will not survive the test of the real world.

The first inkling of the wider political consequences was evident in the turn in public opinion against the banks, bankers and business leaders. For decades, they could do no wrong: they were feted as the role models of our age, the default troubleshooters of choice in education, health and seemingly everything else. Now, though, their star was in steep descent, along with that of the political class. The effect of the financial crisis was to undermine faith and trust in the competence of the governing elites. It marked the beginnings of a wider political crisis. But the causes of this political crisis, glaringly evident on both sides of the Atlantic, are much deeper than simply the financial crisis and the virtually stillborn recovery of the last decade. They go to the heart of the neoliberal project that dates from the late 70s and the political rise of Reagan and Thatcher, and embraced at its core the idea of a global free market in goods, services and capital.

Read more …

Yada yada Kuroda.

BOJ’s Kuroda Says Won’t Rule Out Deepening Negative Rate Cut (R.)

The Bank of Japan will not rule out deepening a cut to negative rates it introduced in February, the Sankei newspaper quoted Governor Haruhiko Kuroda as saying, even as the controversial policy has failed to spur inflation or economic growth. In an interview with the daily, Kuroda said the BOJ’s negative rate policy has not reached its limits. “The degree of negative rates introduced by European central banks is bigger than Japan. Technically there definitely is room for a further cut,” Kuroda told the Sankei. The BOJ stunned markets in January when it set a minus 0.1% rate on some deposits that banks place at the central bank, with the move taking effect from February.

While the BOJ hoped the shift to negative rates would encourage banks to lend more, spurring higher spending and inflation, none of that has happened as yet. The BOJ will also consider whether to make any changes to the 80 trillion yen ($798 billion) per year massive asset-purchase plan once the outcome of a comprehensive assessment of its monetary policies is out in September, Kuroda said. The asset purchases are a key plank of the central bank’s “quantitative and qualitative easing” program deployed in 2013, aimed at achieving its 2% inflation target. Despite the aggressive easings, however, inflation is well off the target and growth remains anemic.

Read more …

Just another way to signal the failure of the EU. It’s endemic.

EU Officials Ignored Years of Emissions Evidence (Spiegel)

Meeting minutes, correspondence and conversation records that SPIEGEL ONLINE and the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet have obtained now show that the European Commission and member states knew, since 2010 at the latest, that the extremely harmful emissions from diesel cars were strikingly higher than legal levels. But apparently none of the officials wanted the automakers to tell them why this was the case. According to EU officials, pressure from countries with a strong auto industry, most notably Germany, significantly reduced interest in an investigation. Instead of doing something about the environmental policy violation, the Commission and the member states passed the buck to each other.

This undignified back-and-forth even continued after the VW scandal about manipulated diesel cars in the United States was exposed in September 2015. The EU bureaucracy was one of the first to be informed, through its research organizations, about the high nitric oxide emissions of the VW vehicle fleet. In 2007, experts with European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) tested the emissions from operating diesel cars. Additional tests using the so-called PEMS method were performed in 2011 and 2013. The results were the same each time: Nitric oxide (NOX) emissions were several times higher than the levels measured in type approval tests in the laboratory.

Volkswagen was already making an unfavorable impression at the time. The biggest nitric oxide emitter in the 2011 and 2013 tests was a VW Multivan with a diesel engine. This emerges from the list of names of the car models involved, which were not published at the time but has been obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE. The other eight diesel cars, however, that were randomly selected by the JRC engineers for the PEMS test had the same problem. Be it the Fiat Scudo, Bravo or Punto, the VW Golf or Passat, the Renault Clio or the BMW 120d, not a single model even remotely complied with nitric oxide limits in normal operation.

Read more …

The UK won’t let the US get away with claiming the title of ugliest political story.

The Sound of Blairite Silence (Paul Mason)

With Owen Smith it is never clear where, on the road from BBC Wales, via Pfizer, via the years as a special adviser in Belfast surrounded by all those nice members of MI5, via losing Blaenau Gwent to an independent because he was too identified with Blair … at what point did Owen become converted to Jeremy Lite left radical socialism? This combination of high personal ambition and the lack of a permanent belief system is exactly the right attribute for someone whose purpose is to be a placeholder for the Blairite counter-revolution. Who can forget, after all, that Angela Eagle -the original placeholder- launched her campaign without a single policy. Smith is there to remove the grip of Corbyn, and Corbynism on those few parts of the Labour machine it controls.

After that the money amassed by Saving Labour, Progress and Labour Tomorrow will be used to fund the party’s re-conversion to a safe tool of the global elite. It will be back to normal. At every stage, the pro-1% Labour machine has tried to suppress democracy: it tried to force Corbyn off the ballot paper; it tried to debar new, pro-Corbyn members from voting; it tried to produce a new Labour leader without a vote; it imposed an arbitrary cut-off date for new members voting. At the same time the Labour right is promoting an series of largely unfounded victim narratives: that ‘Corbyn is antisemitic’ (backed up with a defamatory attack on Shami Chakrabarti). It’s promoted the narrative of misogyny, of physical threats, of ‘Trotskyist entrism’, of Corbyn ‘sabotaging’ the Remain campaign.

We must anticipate the outcome of this on the principle that Chekov outlined in theatre: if a gun appears in Act I, by the end of Act III someone is going to get shot. Every signal from the Labour right appears to point towards a second coup against Corbyn, once he wins the leadership election, which will make Owen Smith s current effort look like a sideshow.

Read more …

There is simply too much wrong about this. A Hillary presidency would damage the reputation of America’s political system too severely. Even Trump Jr of all people makes a valid point.

And no, that does not mean I support Trump. Air everyone’s dirty laundry, by all means. Investigate Trump with all you got. But don’t ignore this.

53% Of Clinton Foundation Donors Would Be Barred Under Proposed Rule (ZH)

On Thursday evening, alongside Trump’s unexpected statement of “regret”, Bill Clinton made another just as important announcement when he said that should Hillary become president, the $2 billion Clinton Family foundation will no longer accept money from any corporate and foreign donors and will bring an end to its annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting regardless of the outcome of the November election. To this we responded that this was to be expected: after all “once Hillary is president, she will no longer need a backdoor way of legally receiving Saudi and other foreign money: at that moment, billions in Saudi dollars will be deemed perfectly acceptable for passage through the front door, mostly in exchange for weapons and ammo.”

Other had similar reactions, with the announcement drawing skepticism on Friday mostly from the right left as critics wondered why the Clintons have never before cut off corporate and overseas money to their charity, and more importantly why they would wait until after the election to do so. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus tweeted Friday that the Clintons’ continued acceptance of those dollars during the presidential campaign is a “massive, ongoing conflict of interest.” The left also spoke up, when Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator who was a leading surrogate for Clinton’s rival in the Democratic primary race, Bernie Sanders, said the restrictions were a good step but should be imposed immediately. “In my opinion, and in the opinion of lots of Americans, this should have been done long ago,” she said.

As it turns out, the self-impossed restrictions would be more stringent than those put in place while Clinton was secretary of state – ironically when the temptation to bribe the top US diplomat was far higher – when the foundation was merely required to seek State Department approval to accept new donations from foreign governments, permitting the charity to accept millions of dollars from governments and wealthy interests all over the world. They would also be stricter than the policy adopted when Clinton launched her campaign that placed some limits on foreign government funding but allowed corporate and individual donations, for the simple reason that Hillary was willing the accept cash for any and all future favors.

Others questioned why Clinton had now decided that the foundation should rule out donations that she apparently thought were acceptable during her tenure as the country’s top diplomat. “Is it ok to accept foreign and corporate money when Secretary of State but not when POTUS???” Donald Trump Jr., son of the Republican nominee, tweeted Thursday night.

Read more …

A man so old he could die any moment now gets to shape a future he will not live to see, just because he has some money. If that’s not a damning verdict of our political systems, what is?

Leaked Memo Proves Soros Ruled Ukraine In 2014 (Duran)

We noted in a previous post how important Ukraine was to George Soros, with documents from DC Leaks that show Soros, and his Open Society NGO, scouring the Greek media and political landscape to push the benefits of his Ukraine coup upon a Russian leaning Greek society. Now more documents, in the massive 2,500 leaked tranche, show the immense power and control Soros had over Ukraine immediately following the illegal Maidan government overthrow. Soros and his NGO executives held detailed and extensive meetings with just about every actor involved in the Maidan coup: from US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, to Ukraine’s Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Justice, Health, and Education. The only person missing was Victoria Nuland, though we are sure those meeting minutes are waiting to see the light of day.

Plans to subvert and undermine Russian influence and cultural ties to Ukraine are a central focus of every conversation. US hard power, and EU soft power, is central towards bringing Ukraine into the neo-liberal model that Soros champions, while bringing Russia to its economic knees. Soros’ NGO, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) plays a key role in the formation of the “New Ukraine”…the term Soros frequently uses when referring to his Ukraine project. In a document titled, “Breakfast with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt”, George Soros, (aka GS), discusses Ukraine’s future with: Geoffrey Pyatt (US Ambassador to Ukraine); David Meale (Economic Counsellor to the Ambassador); Lenny Benardo (OSF); Yevhen Bystrytsky (Executive Director, IRF); Oleksandr Sushko (Board Chair, IRF); Ivan Krastev (Chariman, Centre for Liberal Studies); Sabine Freizer (OSF); Deff Barton (Director, USAID, Ukraine)

The meeting took place on March 31, 2014, just a few months after the Maidan coup, and weeks before a full out civil war erupted, after Ukraine forces attacked the Donbass. In the meeting, US Ambassador Pyatt outlines the general goal for fighting a PR war against Putin, for which GS is more than happy to assist. “Ambassador: The short term issue that needs to be addressed will be the problem in getting the message out from the government through professional PR tools, especially given Putin’s own professional smear campaigns.” “GS: Agreement on the strategic communications issue—providing professional PR assistance to Ukrainian government would be very useful. Gave an overview of the Crisis Media Center set up by IRF and the need for Yatseniuk to do more interviews with them that address directly with journalists and the public the current criticisms of his decision making.”

Pyatt pushes the idea of decentralization of power for the New Ukraine, without moving towards Lavrov’s recommendation for a federalized Ukraine. GS notes that a federalization model would result in Russia gaining influence over eastern regions in Ukraine, something that GS strictly opposes.

Read more …

How many more years of this?

The Aleppo Poster Child (Paul Craig Roberts)

Washington’s media presstitutes are using the image of the child to bring pressure on Russia to stop the Syrian army from retaking Alleppo. Washington wants its so-called moderate rebels to retain Alleppo so that Washington can split Syria in two, thereby keeping a permanent pressure against President Assad. As for the little boy in the propaganda picture, he does not seem to be badly injured. Let us not forget the tens of thousands of children that Washington’s wars and bombings of 7 Muslim countries have killed without any tears shed by CNN anchors, and let us not forget the 500,000 Iraqi children that the United Nations concluded died as a result of US sanctions against Iraq, children’s deaths that Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said were worth it.

Let us not forget that Washington’s determination to overthrow the Syrian government has brought many deaths to Syrians of all age groups. Washington alone is responsible for the deaths. The evil Obama regime has stated over and over that “Assad must go” and is prepared to destroy the country and much of the population in order to get rid of him. According to the Obama regime, Assad must go because he is a dictator. Washington tells this lie despite the fact that Assad was elected and re-elected and has far higher support among Syrians that Obama has among Americans. Moreover, whatever Washington accuses Assad of doing to Syrians is nothing compared to the death and destruction that Washington brought to Syria.

Perhaps the tragedy of Aleppo could have been avoided if the Russian government had not prematurely declared “mission accomplished” in Syria and withdrawn only to have to rush back after the Russian government was again deceived by Washington.

Read more …

The EU, Europe as a whole, fails dramatically, and nothing is improving.

Greece by then had already received €181m to help deal with the crisis from Brussels.

Look, Greece estimated the cost to its budget at €2 billion at least 6 months ago. Now, all the money goes to NGOs. Whose track record is not great, to say the least.

Refugees In Greek Camps Targeted By Mafia Gangs (G.)

Fresh evidence is emerging that refugees stranded in camps across Greece are falling victim to rising levels of vice peddled by mafia gangs who see the entrapped migrants as perfect prey for prostitution, drug trafficking and human smuggling. Details of the alarming conditions present in many of the facilities comes as the Greek government – facing criticism after the Observer’s exposé of sexual abuse in camps last week – announced urgent measures to deal with the crisis. A further four refugee centres, it said, would be set up in a bid to improve severe overcrowding, a major source of tensions in the camps. Aid workers say an estimated 58,000 migrants and asylum seekers in Greece are increasingly being targeted by Greek and Albanian mafias.

Tales of criminals infiltrating camps to recruit vulnerable women and men are legion. “If nothing is done to improve the lifestyle of these refugees and to use their time more productively, I see a major disaster,” warned Nesrin Abaza, an American aid worker volunteering at the first privately funded camp known as Elpida (Greek for hope) outside Thessaloniki. “These camps are a fertile breeding ground for terrorism, gangs and violence. It seems like the world has forgotten about them. They are not headline news any more, so therefore they do not exist … but the neglect will show its ugly head.” With an estimated 55 centres nationwide – including “hotspots” on the Aegean islands within view of Turkey – Greece has effectively become a huge holding pen for refugees since EU and Balkan countries closed their borders to shut them out earlier this year.

[..] the EU released €83m in April to improve living conditions for refugees stranded in the country. The UN refugee agency, the International Federation of the Red Cross and six international NGOs were given the bulk of the funding. Greece by then had already received €181m to help deal with the crisis from Brussels. Announcing the emergency support, the EU commissioner for humanitarian aid and crisis management, Christos Stylianides, claimed the assistance was “a concrete example of how the EU delivers on the challenges Europe faces”. “We have to restore dignified living conditions for refugees and migrants in Europe as swiftly as possible,” he said. But four months later, as allegations of sexual abuse and criminal activity envelop the camps, questions are mounting over whether the money was properly administered. In addition to bad sanitary conditions and lack of police protection, the latest revelations have shone a light on whether the humanitarian system is working at all.

“There is no emphasis on humanity, it is all about numbers,” Amed Khan, a financier turned philanthropist who funded Elpida, told the Observer. Elpida, also established in a former factory near Thessaloniki, has a tea room and yoga centre and, seeing itself as a pioneering initiative, encourages refugees to regard it as a home. In the month since the camp opened its doors, it has won plaudits for being the most humane refugee centre in Greece. “Nobody is using money here efficiently or effectively,” lamented Khan. “The humanitarian system is the same one that has been in place since the second world war, it lacks intellectual flexibility and is totally broken. The real question to be asked is, has the aid that has been given been appropriately utilised?”

Read more …

3000 dead so far this year.

Hundreds Rescued From Overcrowded Migrant Boats In Med (EN)

More than 300 people have been rescued from the Mediterranean Sea after migrant boats capsized off the coast of Libya. One small vessel packed with 27 Syrians flipped over and sank, according to humanitarian group Migrant Offshore Aid Station. The bodies of two women and one man were recovered. Among the dead were two girls, aged eight months and five years. The survivors were taken to the Sicilian port of Trapani. Migrants from North Africa are favouring the dangerous voyage toward Italy after last year’s prefered route from Turkey to the Greek islands has been largely shut down. According to the International Organization for Migration, about three thousand migrants have died in the Med so far this year.

Read more …

“You will be able to cross over the North Pole by ship.”

‘Next Year Or The Year After, The Central Arctic Will Be Free Of Ice’ (G.)

Peter Wadhams has spent his career in the Arctic, making more than 50 trips there, some in submarines under the polar ice. He is credited with being one of the first scientists to show that the thick icecap that once covered the Arctic ocean was beginning to thin and shrink. He was director of the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge from 1987 to 1992 and professor of ocean physics at Cambridge since 2001. His book, A Farewell to Ice, tells the story of his unravelling of this alarming trend and describes what the consequences for our planet will be if Arctic ice continues to disappear at its current rate. “You have said on several occasions that summer Arctic sea ice would disappear by the middle of this decade. It hasn’t. Are you being alarmist?”

No. There is a clear trend down to zero for summer cover. However, each year chance events can give a boost to ice cover or take some away. The overall trend is a very strong downward one, however. Most people expect this year will see a record low in the Arctic’s summer sea-ice cover. Next year or the year after that, I think it will be free of ice in summer and by that I mean the central Arctic will be ice-free. You will be able to cross over the North Pole by ship. There will still be about a million square kilometres of ice in the Arctic in summer but it will be packed into various nooks and crannies along the Northwest Passage and along bits of the Canadian coastline. Ice-free means the central basin of the Arctic will be ice-free and I think that that is going to happen in summer 2017 or 2018.

Read more …

Home Forums Debt Rattle August 21 2016

Viewing 11 posts - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #29977

    Dorothea Lange ‘A season’s work in the beans’, Marion County, Oregon 1939 • Neo-Liberalism Has Had Its Day. So What Happens Next? (G.) • BOJ’s Kuroda
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle August 21 2016]

    #29979
    Raleigh
    Participant

    This is a damning article re the Clinton’s. Well worth a read if you really want a get a feel for their evil. These people are absolutely despicable.

    “A Voter’s Guide to Hillary Clinton’s Policies in Latin America – Support for coup regimes, militarization and privatization, trade deals that wreak economic havoc—they reveal the failure of Clintonism.”

    https://www.thenation.com/article/a-voters-guide-to-hillary-clintons-policies-in-latin-america/

    #29980
    Raleigh
    Participant

    Two good articles from Robert Parry re the downing of MH-17 in Ukraine, and how the New York Times and several other U.S. newspapers are blatantly trying to deceive people.

    https://www.opednews.com/articles/Fraud-Alleged-in-NYT-s-M-by-Robert-Parry-Fraud_Mh-17-Airline_Putin_Reporters-160720-969.html

    https://www.opednews.com/articles/1/MH-17-Two-Years-of-Anti-R-by-Robert-Parry-Airlines_Mh17-Aircraft_Propaganda_Russia-160717-160.html

    The second linked article is from July 17, 2016; the first linked article is from July 20, 2016.

    #29981
    Raleigh
    Participant

    I was just reading about Soros the other day, trying to get a feel for who he is. One link led to another, and it doesn’t look pretty. I thought, with his NGO’s helping the refugees and telling them via Twitter and Facebook to run to Europe, that he must really care about these people, but – NO! He doesn’t. Will post what I found later.

    Geoffrey Pyatt, the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (the one who was speaking with George Soros in the article you linked above) was also the vice-consul and economic officer in Honduras (well before the 2009 coup there, mind you). He then went to India and several other places before ending up in Ukraine. He just got appointed to a new position in July of 2016: U.S. Ambassador to Greece.

    Two coups (Honduras and Ukraine). Look out, Greece! Mr. Pyatt’s a coming.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_R._Pyatt

    Hillary Clinton was instrumental in setting up the coup in Ukraine (Victoria Nuland, $5 billion, blah, blah) while she was Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.

    She was also Secretary of State during the coup in Honduras.

    She is a real warmonger. I just hope Assange delivers an early Xmas present – some Clinton Foundation emails.

    #29982
    Raleigh
    Participant

    Really good article on Assange and how the New York Times tries to fry him.

    “While I periodically have written commentaries dissecting and pillorying news articles in the New York Times to expose their bias, hypocrisy half-truths and lies, I generally ignore their editorials since these are overtly opinions of the management, and one expects them to display the elitist and neo-liberal perspective of the paper’s publisher and senior editors.

    That said, the August 17 editorial about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has spent four harrowing years trapped in the apartment-sized Ecuadoran embassy thanks to a trumped-up and thoroughly discredited political rape “investigation” by a politically driven Swedish prosecutor and a complicit right-wing British government, moves far beyond even the routine rampant bias and distortion of a Times editorial into misrepresentation and character assassination. As such it cries out for criticism.”

    He ends with:

    “Maybe that’s because the Times is unhappy that Assange and Wikileaks have been doing what the Times is so clearly unwilling to do: aggressively pursue real journalism that matters.”

    New York Times Shames Itself by Attacking Wikileaks’ Assange

    Touche!

    #29998
    Nassim
    Participant

    “Next year or the year after that, I think it will be free of ice in summer and by that I mean the central Arctic will be ice-free.”

    I am willing to take anyone on this for U$100 – that the above statement will not come about. When I win, because this is a certainty, I will donate the winnings to TAE. You see, IMHO, the sun is what is driving “climate change”

    Here is an article in German, but the graphs make it perfectly clear:

    Eine kleine Sensation, von der Presse unbemerkt: Sonnenaktivität erreichte im späten 20. Jahrhundert nun doch Maximalwerte

    And here is a Google translation:

    A small sensation, ignored by the press: Solar activity reached maximum values in the late 20th century

    It looks like we might be heading for 30+ years of gradual cooling. The North Atlantic has been rapidly cooling over the past 10 years.

    North Atlantic Heat Content Plunges… Meteorologist Warns Of “Serious Implications” On US Climate, Sea Ice!

    #29999
    Nassim
    Participant

    BTW, I have been permanently banned from commenting by the FT – they don’t like their lies about the Middle East and Russia being exposed. Here is their email:

    “Dear Mr. Nassim,

    As you may recall, we revoked your commenting ban in May at your request – at the time, you agreed to abide by the guidelines in the future. We made clear that if you violated those guidelines again, you would be banned permanently. Your comments over the past week have again repeatedly violated our commenting guidelines for being aggressive, repetitive and appearing to be part of an organised campaign. Therefore, we have banned you from posting comments on FT.com.

    From now on, when you post comments, your comments will only remain visible to you and not to other readers.

    Regards,
    Lilah Raptopoulos

    Community Manager
    Financial Times”

    #30000
    Joe Clarkson
    Participant

    Why all the sturm und drang from Zero Hedge about the Clinton Foundation? It’s just another charity from which no Clinton receives any money and which does good work all over the world. The wild eyed commentors at Zero Hedge should try reading the Foundation’s IRS 990 or the PWC Consolidated Financial Statements (all available on line). There is no smoking gun. What’s next from Zero Hedge; dissing the Red Cross, MSF,?

    As far as I am concerned, the more Saudi money that goes to western charities the better. There are far worse things they could spend our oil payment money on than charity.

    P.S. Mr Meijer, I can’t believe you endorsed this ZH post by giving it further exposure.

    And what’s with your statement, “A Hillary presidency would damage the reputation of America’s political system too severely.”? Too severely for what? The reputation of America’s political system can hardly go lower than it is now and the next US president will have no effect on anything of importance except possible nuclear war. I’m no fan of Clinton, but I certainly trust her more in that regard than Trump.

    There are more important things going on than the US presidential election (much less the Clinton Foundation). Please cover those.

    #30001
    Raleigh
    Participant

    Nassim – re FT – funny, yet frustrating and annoying at the same time. Unbelievable! “We here at the Financial Times do not want facts, and we most certainly do not want truth. If you’re inclined this way, you can get stuffed.” I like how you can see your own comments, but no one else can. Great!

    I ended up on a site (don’t know how I got there), and it took me awhile to realize that most of the posters were working together. If I commented with facts and a link, they would quickly bury my comment. Their comments were things like “Derp, wow, you’re an idiot.”

    But before I knew what was going on, I did have some good back-and-forth conversations with them (of course they always disagreed with me), but what struck me was that they were very, very knowledgeable when they wanted to be. They were not your ordinary blogger. Their vocabulary and sentence structure was not ordinary. After reading about Hillary’s super PAC spending $1 million to hire unemployed writers to refute anybody that disagreed with the post, I called them out and accused them of being “paid trolls”.

    “When the Internet’s legions of Hillary hecklers steal away to chat rooms and Facebook pages to vent grievances about Clinton, express revulsion toward Clinton and launch attacks on Clinton, they now may find themselves in a surprising place – confronted by a multimillion dollar super PAC working with Clinton.

    Hillary Clinton’s well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet’s worst instincts. Correct the Record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton’s campaign, is spending some $1 million to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic front-runner.”

    https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-clinton-digital-trolling-20160506-snap-htmlstory.html

    I watched how they talked amongst each other, saying things like, “Trump sure isn’t presidential. No one is going to vote for him.” The other would answer back with something like, “The guy is so far behind Hillary, he hasn’t got a chance.” Back and forth they would go with one-line comments, and I suspected they had multiple names. As I continued to watch, I could almost guarantee that the paid trolls were 90% of the board, just talking back and forth until a stupid fish (like me) came swimming by.

    Anything at all hurtful to Hillary was buried quickly. Interesting times we live in.

    #30002
    Raleigh
    Participant

    Joe Clarkson – yeah, nothing to see here, move along. She just erased over 30,000 emails and then had her hard drive destroyed, her husband “coincidentally” meets up with the Attorney-General for a half hour “grandchildren” conversation while she is under investigation, and you’re trying to tell us that, “Oh, yeah, but they’d never do anything deceitful with the Clinton Foundation.” Yeah, right.

    “The wild eyed commentors at Zero Hedge” are probably wild-eyed because they’ve actually watched the documentary “Clinton Cash”. Here’s the link:

    Here’s an article:

    “Nothing the Clintons do is without strings; there is always some cover-up or shady deal linked to even their most charitable efforts. If the first Clinton Presidency, and now the Clinton Foundation, are any kind of indicator as to what a ‘Hillary Clinton Presidency’ would look like, you can be sure it will include scandals and pay offs, with very little accountability.”

    https://townhall.com/tipsheet/kateandrews/2013/08/14/revealing-nytimes-exposes-clinton-foundation-n1664254

    #30003
    Raleigh
    Participant

    Joe Clarkson – here’s another article re the Clinton Foundation:

    “The Clinton Foundation’s finances are so messy that the nation’s most influential charity watchdog put it on its “watch list” of problematic nonprofits last month.

    The Clinton family’s mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.

    The group spent the bulk of its windfall on administration, travel, and salaries and bonuses, with the fattest payouts going to family friends.

    On its 2013 tax forms, the most recent available, the foundation claimed it spent $30 million on payroll and employee benefits; $8.7 million in rent and office expenses; $9.2 million on “conferences, conventions and meetings”; $8 million on fundraising; and nearly $8.5 million on travel. None of the Clintons is on the payroll, but they do enjoy first-class flights paid for by the foundation. […]

    Charity Navigator, which rates nonprofits, recently refused to rate the Clinton Foundation because its “atypical business model . . . doesn’t meet our criteria.”

    Charity Navigator put the foundation on its “watch list,” which warns potential donors about investing in problematic charities. The 23 charities on the list include the Rev. Al Sharpton’s troubled National Action Network, which is cited for failing to pay payroll taxes for several years.

    Other nonprofit experts are asking hard questions about the Clinton Foundation’s tax filings in the wake of recent reports that the Clintons traded influence for donations.

    “It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons,” said Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group where progressive Democrat and Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout was once an organizing director. […]

    The nonprofit came under fire last week following reports that Hillary Clinton, while she was secretary of state, signed off on a deal that allowed a Russian government enterprise to control one-fifth of all uranium producing capacity in the United States. Rosatom, the Russian company, acquired a Canadian firm controlled by Frank Giustra, a friend of Bill Clinton’s and member of the foundation board, who has pledged over $130 million to the Clinton family charity.

    The group also failed to disclose millions of dollars it received in foreign donations from 2010 to 2012 and is hurriedly refiling five years’ worth of tax returns after reporters raised questions about the discrepancies in its filings last week.”

    https://nypost.com/2015/04/26/charity-watchdog-clinton-foundation-a-slush-fund/

    Most of all it’s the appearance that if you want benefits from the Clinton’s in the form of help securing deals in foreign countries, you just need to provide Slick Willy with speaking fees and make a donation to the Clinton Foundation, and you’re in.

    These are deceitful, I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine underhanded dealings, using their position to elicit a gain for themselves.

    This will follow her, along with all of the other scandals ending in “gate” that the two have been involved in.

Viewing 11 posts - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.