President Donald Trump campaigned on a platform to restore
power to the people. He claimed to be a
champion of the working people who have been pillaged by the Deep State since
2000. Trump declared that under his tutelage
the rich, including himself would pay their fair share of taxes and that he
would extract America from wars that ensure the existence of the Federal
Reserve Bank.
Candidate Trump barnstormed across the country endearing
himself to the long suffering every man, promising to drain the swamp of the
bottom feeders who have enslaved them.
Now President Trump is restocking the swamp one bankster at a time. From Mike Adams at Natural News:
Excerpt:
$1 trillion budget deal confirms America’s horrifying swamptopian
future, hopelessly beyond the zenith of reform or reason
(Natural News) It’s over for
America. The “hail Mary” Trump
revolution has been suffocated by a hoard of spineless, incompetent
corporate prostitutes known as “Congress.”
The $1 trillion spending bill now nearing final approval in Washington
D.C. proves beyond any doubt that Washington
cannot be fixed by Washington. It is
beyond reform… and beyond the hope of even the most optimistic.
The corruption is so deeply
ingrained in the system that even
well-meaning individuals like Rand Paul are overrun by the swamp monsters who dominate the establishment.
Republican or Democrat, it’s all one big, fat, corrupt party now: THE PARTY OF
BIG GOVERNMENT…
No matter who we elect, no matter
what the intention of the new people going into the system, the swamp suffocates the good intentions
out of them, turning even the most well-meaning individuals into war mongers,
statists and betrayers of the American people….
We’ve all been conned yet again, which frankly isn’t that
surprising. Our election of Donald Trump was primarily an effort to block the
coronation of Hillary Clinton, who would have terminated the Republic as we
know it today and gutted the Bill of Rights. Most of us strongly suspected Trump was walking into a cesspool of corruption
and incompetence, and now we know for sure just how impossible it will ever
be to drain the swamp at all…
What Trump’s victory and subsequent swampification has demonstrated
beyond all doubt is that it doesn’t matter whom we elect, because the swamp is
more powerful than any candidate. Even the most well-meaning individual who
dares to enter the swamp becomes subsumed by it, fighting for air while being
drowned by the sheer mass of the swamp creatures who inhabit the murky waters… America’s
swamptopian future will be bathed in misery unless the swamp can be
defeated…
Notably, I do not place the blame for all this at Trump’s feet… Now, the swamp monsters themselves are so far
beyond recognition that they don’t even appear to be of human origin. They have
transformed into wretched creatures of
the corporate elite, sucking off the teats of corporate power while thrashing
violently at the edges of the swamp, ensnaring well-meaning legislators into
their sticky tentacles.
Mike Adams is right the swamp creatures cannot
reform themselves they are too far gone. As Dr. Paul Craig Roberts puts it “AmericanDemocracy is dead man walking.”
Excerpt:
American Democracy: A Dead Man Walking
Trump’s “sell-out,” as it is
called, coming on top of Obama’s eight-year “sell-out,” is instructive. We have
now had a Democratic president who sold out the people who elected him and a
Republican president who has done the same thing. This is a very interesting
point, the meaning of which most people miss.
But not Russia’s president,
Vladimir Putin. At the Valdai discussion club, Putin summed up Western democracy, which I paraphrase as follows:
In
the West, voters cannot change policies through elections, because the ruling elites control whoever is
elected. Elections give the appearance of democracy, but voting does not
change the policies that favor war and the elites. Therefore, the will of the
people is impotent.
People
are experiencing that they and their
votes have no influence on the conduct of affairs of the country. This
makes them afraid, frustrated, and angry, a combination of emotions that is
dangerous to the ruling elite, who in response organize the powers of the state
against the people, while urging them with propaganda to support more wars.
Obama promised to get out of
Afghanistan or Iraq or perhaps it was both. He promised to reverse the police
state created by the George W. Bush regime. He promised to focus American
resources on American domestic problems, such as health care.
But what did he do? He expanded the
wars and launched new ones, destroyed Libya and attempted to destroy Syria… Obama overthrew democratic governments in
Honduras and Ukraine. He expanded the police state… He betrayed the American people again by allowing the private insurance industry to
write his health care plan known as Obamacare. The private interests wrote
a plan that diverts public monies from health care to their profits…
All of this is forgotten when the
ruling elites and the presstitutes that serve only them refocused the
demonization on Trump. Suddenly, it was
the president-elect of the United States who was the main danger to the US and
the American people…
Trump succumbed to pressure and
sacrificed his National Security Advisor, who was supportive of Trump’s promise
to normalize relations with Russia. Trump
replaced him with a Russophobic idiot who apparently cannot wait to see
mushroom clouds over cities all over the Western world…
Why did two presidents in
succession completely sell out the people who voted for them?
The answer is that presidents are not as powerful as the
interest groups who make the decisions.
So let’s take a look at the swamp monster banksters who are
running the Trump Administration. Where
better to start than with my favorite writer on the subject Matt Taibbi at
Rolling Stone:
Excerpt:
Man Trump Named to Fix Mortgage Markets Figured in Infamous Financial
Crisis Episode
Former Morgan Stanley banker once
dumped "shitbag" CDOs on clients
In early 2007, a group of Morgan
Stanley bankers bundled a group of subprime mortgage instruments into a package
they hoped to sell to investors. The only problem was, they couldn't come up
with a name for the package of mortgage-backed
derivatives, which they all knew were doomed.
The bankers decided to play around
with potential names. In a series of emails back and forth, they suggested
possibilities. "Jon is voting for 'Hitman,'" wrote one. "How
about 'Nuclear Holocaust 2007-1?'" wrote another, adding a few more
possible names: Shitbag, Mike
Tyson's Punchout and Fludderfish.
Eventually they stopped with the
comedy jokes, gave the pile of "nuclear" assets a more respectable
name – "Stack" – and sold the
$500 million Collateralized Debt Obligation with a straight face to the
China Development Industrial Bank. Within three years, the bank was suing a
series of parties, including Morgan Stanley, to recover losses from the toxic
fund.
The name on the original
registration document for Stack? Craig
S. Phillips, then president of Morgan Stanley's ABS (Asset-Backed
Securities) division…
This is just another detail in the
emerging absurd narrative that is Donald
Trump naming Phillips, of all people, to head up the effort to reform the
Government-Sponsored Entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
As ace investigative reporter
Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times noted in a piece back on April 7th, Phillips headed a division that sold
billions of dollars of mortgage-backed investments to Fannie and Freddie.
Many of those investments were as bad as the ones his unit sold to the Chinese.
In fact, as Morgenson noted, Phillips
became a named defendant in a lawsuit filed by the Federal Housing Finance
Authority (FHFA), which essentially charged, as the Chinese did, that MORGAN
STANLEY KNOWINGLY SOLD FANNIE AND FREDDIE A PILE OF CRAP.
Morgan Stanley ended up having to
pay $625 million apiece to Fannie and Freddie to settle securities fraud
charges in that case.
Phillips worked in an area of investment banking that was highly
lucrative and highly predatory. The
basic scam in the subprime world in particular was buying up mortgages from
people who couldn't possibly afford them, making those bad mortgages into
securities, and then turning around and hawking
those same mortgages to unsuspecting institutional dopes like the Chinese
and Fannie and Freddie.
Phillips had a critical role in this activity. As Morgan Stanley's
ABS chief, he was among other things responsible for liaising with fly-by-night subprime mortgage lenders
like New Century, who fanned into low-income neighborhoods and handed out
subprime mortgages to anyone with a pulse…
Of those bad actors, there is a subset of still-worse actors,
who not only sold these toxic investments to institutional investors like
pension funds and Fannie and Freddie, but helped
get a generation of home borrowers – often minorities and the poor – into deadly mortgages that ended up
wiping out their equity.
Phillips, who helped Fannie and Freddie into substantial losses and
worked with predatory firms like New Century, belongs in this second category. As Beavis and Butthead would put
it, Phillips comes from the "ass of the ass."
Yes, another bankster swamp monster at the ready to begin
the great heist of American Treasury 2.0.
With Phillips, who Matt Taibbi classifies as “in the category of the ass
of the ass” in charge of Fanny and Freddie we can expect another mortgage bailout. Maybe the swamp monsters can learn a lesson
from Canada, who is going through a mortgage implosion right now. From Natural News:
Excerpt:
Of Bunkers, Bankers and Black Swans
A calm surface is exactly what
Black Swans like to land on, though by definition we will not know they’re out
there until our reveries are broken by the sound of wings flapping. Some kind
of dirty bird showed up on Canada’s thawing pond last week when that country’s biggest home loan lender suffered a 60 percent
pukage of shareholder equity and had to be bailed out — not by the Canadian
government directly, but by the Ontario Province’s Health Care Workers Pension
Fund, a neat bit of hocus pocus that
amounts to a one-year emergency loan at ten percent interest.
If that’s a way for insolvent
public employee pension plans to find enough “yield” to meet their obligations,
then maybe that could be the magic
bullet for the USA’s foundering pension funds. The next time Citibank,
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and friends get a case of the Vapors, let them be bailed
out by the Detroit School Bus Drivers’ Pension Fund at ten percent interest.
That ought to work. And let Calpers take care of Wells Fargo.
The situation across Western
Civilization is as follows: virtually
every major financial institution has become a check-kiting operation or a
Ponzi scheme, and we’ve reached the point where they can only pretend to be
rescued. Bailout or not, the Toronto-based Home Capital Group is still stuck
with shit-loads of non-performing sub-prime mortgage loans — its specialty —
and Canada’s spectacular real estate
bubble has hardly begun to pop. The collateral is starting to turn, like
dead meat in the May sunshine, and the odium will waft across the border.
It doesn’t take much to blow things
up, as the world discovered in several other historically recent episodes.
The 1998 banking contagion started with the collapse of Thailand’s
currency, called the baht. I doubt you could count on one hand the number
of people in Wall Street or the Federal Reserve (with its 300-plus PhD
economists) who gave a flying fuck about the Thai baht. Before you knew it, South Korea and Indonesia started whirling around
the drain. And then Russia felt the suck.
And then the Nobel Prize winning
economists at a Connecticut hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management
found out the hard way that their “secret sauce” investment formula which
“could not fail in the life of this universe or several like it,” fatally
poisoned its balance sheet on a repast of Russian sovereign bonds after only
about eighteen months. And it took all the poobahs of American banking to paper
over the firm’s death about five minutes before the global banking system would
shut down via the greatest daisy chain
of cross-collateralized financial booby-traps ever assembled.
And ten years later, there was the fiasco of 2008, starring
Lehman Brothers and a demonic host of grifters trafficking in worthless bonded
debt around the sub-prime mortgage racket tied into a toxic web of
“derivative financial products” — i.e. bad bets between insolvent
counter-parties masquerading as “insurance” against unsound investment. Trillions of bailout monies conjured out
of thin air fixed that, oh yes it did!
So enjoy the festivities around the
Maypole today, and the suddenly calm waters of global affairs, and keep your
ears pricked for the sound of wings flapping.
Now the same swamp monsters are crafting another budget
busting $1-7 trillion dollar tax cut for their bankster masters. The money is flowing and the good times are
here for the fat cats that is. From
Truthout:
Excerpt:
Another GOP Tax Plan for Captains
of Industry
As he ran for office, Donald Trump
repeatedly reminded audiences that he was "really, really rich," but
assured voters that as president he would be a working man's champion, a
blue-collar Superman.
He said he would stop corporations
from offshoring manufacturing jobs with a border adjustment tax on imports. He
would end trade cheating and declare China a currency manipulator on his first
day in office. He would launch within
his first 100 days a $1 trillion infrastructure improvement program to create
millions of jobs fixing the nation's airports, bridges and roads.
Trump's record of promise-keeping
to America's working men and women in his first 100 days is this: So far, no
good…
The tax plan rewards the captains of industry, the captains of Wall Street, the captains
of real estate, like, well, like Trump himself. But the middle class,
not so fast. The poor, not at all. Someone needs to tell Donald Trump that
banksters and real estate tycoons sporting navy golf polos aren't blue-collar
workers. The tax scheme, like so many of Trump's other pledges to workers, is a stab in the back of that indigo shirt.
On the campaign trail, Trump said
rich people like him should pay more in taxes. Yet, the tax plan he offered
last week would cut his taxes -- by tens of millions a year. That's because it would eliminate the alternative minimum tax. This
is a levy intended to require billionaires like Trump to pay at least something
after subtracting their multitude of special-rich-people deductions.
Trump has refused to release his
tax returns -- the first American president to keep them secret since Gerald
Ford, who provided summaries. But Trump's 2005 return, uncovered in part by a
newspaper, shows that he had to pay $31
million as a result of the alternative minimum tax.
Trump's plan also calls for eliminating the estate tax. That is paid
only by people who inherit more than $5.5 million -- as Trump's children
will. And it calls for cutting by more than half, to 15 percent, the tax paid
by entities called pass-through corporations. Trump's attorneys indicated in
his presidential financial disclosures that his approximately 500 businesses are almost all pass-throughs… A 2015 study by the nonpartisan National
Bureau of Economic Research found that the top 1 percent gets 69 percent of
pass-through income.
Right now, a worker can't get in on
that low 15 percent tax rate unless reporting income below $37,950. But doctors
and lawyers and investment bankers would
get that special discount rate, no matter how much they make, as long as
they pay a few bucks to establish a pass-through corporation. Trump's plan
would allow a lawyer paid $1 million a year to cut his taxes by $180,000 by
setting up a pass-through.
Certainly, with all of those perks
going to the nation's most wealthy, Trump's tax men would assure workers that
they will benefit too.
Not really. When asked on ABC's
"Good Morning America" last week whether
the middle class would pay more under the plan, Treasury Secretary Steven
Mnuchin said: "I can't make any guarantees."
And the director of Trump's
National Economic Council, Gary D. Cohn, could not say how much of a break --
if any -- a middle-income American would get under the plan.
Trump's money men, Mnuchin and Cohn, said slashing levies on
the wealthy will pay for itself because giving the rich more cash will spur
economic growth. So, no need to worry about Trump's tax cuts ballooning the
national debt, they assured…
Maya MacGuineas, president of the
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, put it this way: "It seems the
administration is using economic growth like magic beans: the cheap solution to
all our problems."
Ronald Reagan, who like Trump was adored by blue-collar workers,
promised that benefits from his massive
tax cuts for the rich would trickle down to the rest. That never worked. But
now Trump is taking advice from the same Svengali and promoting the same
flim-flam plan.
Those heartland workers can't tolerate another hit. But it's not just
taxes. The health insurance proposal Trump is pushing would cost many low- and
middle-income workers thousands of dollars more a year.
It now costs a billion dollars to run a two-year
presidential campaign controlled by billionaires. After the billionaires’ handmaiden presidents
leave office their largess awaits them.
From Cal Thomas at USA Today:
Excerpt:
Cal Thomas: Exploiting the presidency
Every president since Nixon has used the office as a stepping stone to
great wealth. Ronald Reagan was paid $2 million for two speeches in Japan.
George W. Bush has made an estimated 200 speeches since leaving office, some to
benefit wounded warriors and others to benefit himself. Bush once told The New
York Times, "I don't know how much my dad gets, but it's more than 50, 75
thousand dollars a speech." According to Politico, Bush 43 makes between
$100,000 and $175,000 per appearance.
Then there are the Clintons, who
took post-presidential moneymaking to new heights (or depths, depending on your
perspective).
Now comes former President Barack Obama, who is receiving
$400,000 for a one-hour speech at a conference run by Cantor Fitzgerald, a Wall Street firm. Like his Nobel
Peace Prize, which was awarded soon after he took office with no
accomplishments to warrant it, Obama is getting the money primarily for his
celebrity, not his deeds.
As Time magazine noted, "Obama's annual presidential pension
is $205,700," which is what the other living ex-presidents get. Like
the others, Obama will receive subsidies for travel, office staff and supplies,
as well as Secret Service protection. Ex-vice presidents also receive pensions
after leaving office, though not protection from the Secret Service.
Since 1958, Congress has generously
provided for our ex-presidents, including transition money for office and staff
expenses, good for seven months after leaving office, as well as Secret Service
protection for life. To Carter's credit,
however, of all the modern presidents, he cashes in the least, if he can be
said to at all. He rarely accepts speaking fees, and when he does he usually donates the proceeds to his
charitable foundation…
Congress should consider reducing
payments in direct proportion to how much presidents make in
"retirement." With the debt
approaching $20 trillion, taxpayers shouldn't be on the hook for underwriting lifestyles of former
presidents that would have outraged Coolidge and Truman and probably most
presidents since George Washington.
Here’s words I never thought I’d write, Cal Thomas is right. If you are collecting Social Security benefits
and you are 65 or younger and you earn more than $$16,920 you will have $1 in
benefits withheld for every $2 in earned income over the limit. Yet if you are a swamp monster you can make unlimited wealth on top of your
presidential pension of $205,700 for life.
Does that seem fair? President
Trump isn’t draining the swamp he’s restocking the swamp one bankster swamp
monster at a time.
By Patricia Baeten
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