Gawd how much more bat shit crazy can it get in America?  America is in worse shape than it has ever been.  Everything has been destroyed and it just keeps getting worse.  The absolute destruction has been taking place since our inception, but the complete collapse started on December 12, 2000 when five corrupt justices on the U.S. Supreme Court launched a domestic terror attack on America and installed George W. Bush as president. 

That day should lie in infamy and those justices should go down in history as the most vile of traitors ever.  But they didn’t do it alone, they had co-conspirators from both parties in the United States Senate.

Now we are on the verge of another presidential election, wherein the Globalist oligarchs select a politician whose entire career was created and financed by them.  The two parties go along with the charade that is an election and install the next lackey who will head up the seamless transition to perpetuate the bat shit crazy destruction of America.  So what bat shit crazy events have recently taken place?  Here’s a rundown.

THE BAT SHIT CRAZY STATE OF THE NATION

From Charles Hugh Smith:

Excerpt:

Here’s Why the “Impossible” Economic Collapse Is Unavoidable

This is why denormalization is an extinction event for much of our high-cost, high-complexity, heavily regulated economy.

A collapse of major chunks of the economy is widely viewed as “impossible” because the federal government can borrow and spend unlimited amounts of money because the Federal Reserve can create unlimited amounts of money: the government borrows $1 trillion by selling $1 trillion in Treasury bonds, the Fed prints $1 trillion dollars to buy the bonds. Rinse and repeat to near-infinity.

With this cheery wind at their backs, conventional pundits are predicting super-rebounds in auto sales and other consumption as consumers weary of Covid-19 and anxious to blow their recent savings borrow and spend like no tomorrow.

As for the 30+ million unemployed–they don’t matter. Conventional analysts write them off because they weren’t big drivers of “growth” anyways–they didn’t have big, secure salaries and ample wealth/credit lines.

What this happy confidence in near-infinite money-printing and V-shaped spending orgies overlooks is what I’ve termed denormalization, an implosion of the Old Normal so complete that the expected minor adjustment to a New Normal is no longer possible.

The “New Normal” Is De-Normalization

We’re already in a post-normal world because the expansion of globalization and financialization needed to fuel the Old Normal has reversed into contraction. This reversal is an extinction event for all sectors and institutions with high fixed costs: air travel, resort tourism, healthcare, higher education, local government services, etc. because their fixed cost structures are so high they are no longer financially viable if they’re operating at less than full capacity.

Only getting back to 70% of previous capacity, revenues, tax receipts, etc. dooms them to collapse.  And there’s no way to cut their fixed costs without fatally disrupting all the sectors that are dependent on them.

Most operational costs are mandated and cannot be reduced: union contracts, property taxes, regulatory burdens, tax accounting, debt service, employee healthcare costs, minimum wages, etc. Other essential expenses such as commercial rent are difficult to renegotiate lower, as the landlord also has the same high fixed costs and any reduction comes directly out of his pocket.

A good example of this collapse dynamic is a restaurant with high fixed costs. It can’t survive financially at 50% of capacity because it can’t reduce its expenses by 50%. The owners can reduce staff but there are operational limits on this: even if there are only 10 customers rather than 100, you still need a kitchen and wait staff. Stripped to the bone, the owners might be able to reduce costs by 15% to 20%. In other words, if business rebounds to 80% of pre-pandemic levels, the restaurant can survive but not generate any profit.

It might survive at 70% if the owners do double shifts, but that isn’t sustainable. Eventually the overworked owners burn out and collapse.

Reducing costs is even more difficult for institutions such as hospitals, colleges and government agencies. Most of these institutions are unable to cut more than a few percent of expenses; a 10% reduction in expenses would require the closure of entire departments and eliminating core services.

Denormalization is an interlocking series of self-reinforcing feedbacks. People have less money and more insecurity, so they spend less. Those living off the fixed costs paid by the private sector (landlords, local government, insurers, etc.) can’t survive on less than their full measure, and this inability to absorb massive cuts causes everyone in the food chain above them to collapse, which eventually triggers their own collapse.

The restaurant can’t cut any of the big-ticket expenses: rent, taxes, wages, benefits, healthcare, tax accounting, insurance, etc. It can only lay off some staff and reduce its purchase of ingredients. Those variable costs are too small a percentage of total expenses to be consequential.

The restaurants collapse first, and since there’s no way anyone can afford to pay current rents and survive on a shrinking customer base, the landlord goes bust next. These collapses cut local government tax revenues. Each of these reductions means everyone down the food chain– enterprises that depended on restaurants, landlords and local government contracts–lose a critical chunk of their own revenues. Since there are no replacement sources of revenues, these collapse as the line of dominoes topple.

Few sectors or institutions have any buffers. They’ve been running at full capacity or higher and burning every dollar to keep from imploding. As a result, any deep cuts are extinction events: no income from college football means eliminating entire sports down the food chain. There is no stair-step down, there’s only binary triage: save this program as is or eliminate it entirely.

Federal/Fed subsidies don’t fully replace what’s been lost. Giving the restaurant owner a subsidy to pay rent and stay open doesn’t mean the restaurant has enough customers to keep staffing and purchases at pre-crisis levels, and giving consumers subsidies such as Universal Basic Income (UBI) doesn’t mean these households won’t decide to save some of that subsidy rather than spend every dime, as the zeitgeist has shifted from complacent confidence to uncertainty: any subsidy is subject to change, as it is ultimately a political decision that can be amended or cancelled.

The production of goods and services stagnates as demand declines. When money-printing expands while goods and services contract, the result is inflation–the purchasing power of the newly issued money declines as too much money starts chasing a pool of goods and services that’s shrinking as small businesses dry up and blow away and the dominoes fall down the supply chain of dependent industries.

As the newly issued subsidy-money buys fewer goods and services, demands for increased subsidies rise. The Universal Basic Income (UBI) payment doubles from $1,000 to $2,000 a month, but it still only buys $750 of goods and services as the declining purchasing power of the newly printed money accelerates… 

The Fed’s project of lowering the cost of capital to zero doesn’t generate this virtuous cycle; all it does is encourage socially useless speculative predation as Tim Cook et al. sell Apple bonds in order to buy back more shares of Apple, further enriching Tim Cook et al. This is not a virtuous cycle, it is the denormalization of what remains of free markets, which require capital be priced by markets, not central banks.

Collapse isn’t “impossible,” it’s unavoidable.

There was no New Normal for the dinosaurs. A few winged species survived and evolved into the birds of today, but that is by no stretch of the imagination a New Normal that included all the other dinosaur species. For them, denormalization meant extinction.

De-Normalization: everything that was normal is gone and will not be replaced with some new normal.

Yikes, bat shit crazy de-normalization of America has reached its zenith.  The globalist created and funded American congress is destroying America at a rapid pace.  The destruction of the American postal service has been going on for a long time. 

THE BAT SHIT CRAZY PLAN TO PRIVATIZE THE POST OFFICE

From Matt Taibbi:

Taibbi: The Press That Cried Wolf

Suddenly, the Postal Service is the biggest story in America. Donald Trump’s latest “assault on our democracy” jockeyed for the lead theme on the first night of the virtual Democratic National Convention. Multiple speakers used the phrase “defund the post office” to describe efforts by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy – the latest in a long line of Trump acolytes occupying the Oil Can Harry role in news coverage – to pull a seeming postal slowdown.

Hashtags like #SaveThePostOffice are flying around social media. John Ratzenberger, the actor who played beer-drinking mailman Cliff Clavin on Cheers, recorded an Instagram video on behalf of the beleaguered service. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis described seeing a man wearing a “red cap” with “white letters” towing a postal truck away made her wonder:

Conspiracy? Outright attempt at stealing the election by denying the access of the USPS?

Pictures of mailboxes being moved or warehoused behind fencing rocketed around the Internet. Another tweet making the rounds looked like a graphic made by the postal workers’ union, and was retweeted by the likes of Hillary Clinton:

The graphic wasn’t made by the postal union, but whatever. The post office’s journey from America’s most serially-ignored public institution to subject of a massive international sympathy campaign – the U.S.P.S. is currently the world’s largest baby trapped at the bottom of the world’s largest well – is the latest bizarro development of the Trump years, when news coverage has devolved into a never-ending procession of moral panics, some real, some less so. Which is this?

In April, Trump called the U.S.P.S. a “joke” and tied a $10 billion emergency loan to a request that the it quadruple prices on packages, ostensibly as a way of sticking it to Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and the “fake news” Washington Post. I hate Bezos as much as the next red-blooded American, but Trump’s comments ended up mostly serving as kindling for a later national wig-out.

On May 9th, the Postal Service’s Board of Governors announced that DeJoy, the CEO of a company called New Breed Logistics and a major Trump donor, would become the new Postmaster General. Almost immediately, DeJoy began implementing a series of moves that seemed designed to reduce the efficiency of the post office, from removing 20% of letter sorting machines to moving or removing large quantities of mailboxes. Then on July 29th, the U.S.P.S. appears to have sent letter to multiple states warning that mail-in ballots might not be received on time to be counted, because the states’ deadlines are incompatible with the postal service’s “delivery standards.”

This was followed by Trump going on Fox and announcing he was unwilling to spend money to keep funding the Post Office as part of a Covid-19 relief package, saying, “They want $25 billion… if they don’t get [it], that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because you they’re not equipped to have it.”

Even by Trumpian standards, this was a semi-crazy thing to say out loud. It gave outlets like The Week the ammo to say Trump was “sandbagging the Post Office to prevent Americans from voting by mail.” The logic is simple: about 72 percent of Democrats say they are at least somewhat likely to vote by mail, compared to 22 percent of Republicans. A slowdown of the post office means a torpedo in the hull of the Biden campaign.

By this week, images of mailboxes became synonymous with voter suppression, and the postal service supplanted the Muslim ban, “kids in cages,” Muellermania, the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco, the campaign to save the job of Jeff Sessions, the Ukraine whistleblower, and a dozen other episodes to become the latest all-consuming Media Fire That Never Dies.

In the Trump years, the news has been covered as an ongoing emergency, borrowing from techniques pioneered by Fox News and perfected through episodes like Benghazi. That story was blown into a frenzy for years, as Fox created the impression that litigating every detail of the Libyan mission narrative was at least 95% of what the average person should be caring about at any given moment.

CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post are now following the same script with the Trump panics. The pattern is consistent. Day one involves spectacular claims of corruption. By day two, placard-bearing protesters are hitting the streets (“You can’t fire the truth!” a protester in Times Square proclaimed in the Sessions affair), celebrities are taping video appeals, and experts are quoted suggesting Trump is already guilty of crime: OPEN TREASON in Helsinki, “bribery” in Ukraine, or in this case, election interference (SOME ARE ALREADY SPECULATING THAT TRUMP COULD GET A YEAR FOR THE MAIL SLOWDOWN).

Almost always, by day three or four, key claims are walked back: maybe there was no direct “promise” to a foreign leader, or the CIA doesn’t have “direct evidence” of Russian bounties, or viral photos of children in cages at the border were from 2014, not 2017. By then it doesn’t matter. A panic is a panic, and there are only two reportable angles in today’s America, total guilt and total innocence. Even when the balance of the information would still look bad or very bad for Trump, news outlets commit to leaving out important background, so as not to complicate the audience response.

That’s the situation with this story, where the postal slowdown is probably more serious than other Trump scandals, but people pushing it are also not anxious to remind readers of their own histories on the issue.

Take the New York Times, currently cranking out about a feature an hour about the U.S.P.S. Paul Krugman is now telling us “The Postal Service facilitates citizen inclusion. That’s why Trump hates it.” Apparently, until recently, all decent Americans had bottomless affection for the communal spirit of the Postal Service and supported it without hesitation. Yet in April, 2012, in the middle of the Obama presidency, the Times ran a very different house editorial. 

The paper argued mounting losses necessitated swift action to reduce costs. The Times worried that “lawmakers in both houses” would “procrastinate as usual,” and blasted the Senate for devising a bill that “timorously aims at part-time ‘downsizing,’ not closing, lightly used post offices.” The paper added that decreased revenue thanks to email could mean losses of “more than $20 billion a year by 2016,” and hoped that, so long as “courage trumps procrastination,” the U.S.P.S. could be granted the “flexibility of a modern business.”

If you look back, you’ll find the overwhelming consensus in both the Bush and Obama years was that a fully-staffed post office was a money pit, and “flexibility” was needed to allow the service to budget-slash its way back to relevance in the Internet age…

During the Bush years, the U.S.P.S. was put on the “high risk” list by the General Accounting Office, headed at the time by a future Pete Peterson foundation CEO named David Walker who would later come out in favor of privatizing the post office. The GAO recommended cuts and other measures to address the “rapidly deteriorating” financial situation of the U.S.P.S.

But when an analysis by the Office of Personnel Management was released in November, 2002, it turned out the U.S.P.S. had a “more positive picture” than was believed. The U.S.P.S. was massively over-paying into its retirement fund, headed for a $70 billion surplus. Then in 2003 the Postal Pension Funding Reform Act was passed, which among other things forced the U.S.P.S. to pay the pension obligations of employees who had prior military service.

A few years after that, in 2006, the “Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act” passed with overwhelming support in both houses, forcing a series of incredible changes, the biggest being a requirement that the U.S.P.S. fully fund 75 years worth of benefits for its employees. The provision cost $5.5 billion per year and was unique among government agencies. “No one prefunds at more than 30%,” said Anthony Vegliante, the service’s executive vice president, at the time.

The bill also prevented the post office from offering “nonpostal services” as a way to compete financially. This barred it from establishing a postal banking service, but also nixed creative ideas like Internet cafes, copy services, notaries, even allowing postal workers to offer to wrap Christmas presents. Coupled with the pre-funding benefit mandate and other pension changes, this paralyzed the post office financially, making it look ripe for reform.

By 2012, those took the form of calls for the U.S.P.S. to eliminate 3,700 post offices (a first step toward eventually closing as many as 15,000) and 250 mail processing centers. Sanders, along with other Senators with large rural constituencies like Jon Tester and Claire McCaskill, managed to change the bill and save a lot of the mail processing centers. The Senate that year also cut the amount of required pre-funding for benefits and began refunding the U.S.P.S. for about $11 billion in overpayment for retirement costs.

A few years after that, in 2015, the Post Office Inspector General issued a blistering report about CBRE, the company that had served as sole real estate broker to the U.S.P.S. from 2011 on. The report found that CBRE had been selling and/or leasing post office properties at below-market prices, often to clients of CBRE – a company chaired by Richard Blum, the husband of California Senator Dianne Feinstein. This chronic problem had a financial impact on the Postal Service, and would have become a much bigger problem had the U.S.P.S. been forced earlier on to sell off a massive quantity of infrastructure through that broker, as originally hoped.

The thread running through all of these stories was that panic over the financial condition of the U.S.P.S. was often a significantly artificial narrative, caused by a bipartisan mix of stupidity, greed, and corruption. This high-functioning civil service organization, which provided tremendous value to the public through everything from subsidized news deliveries in the Pony Express years to the well-maintained public meeting places built in remote rural locations, HAS NOT HAD REAL BACKERS IN EITHER PARTY FOR MOST OF THE LAST THIRTY OR FORTY YEARS.

None of this means the Trump-DeJoy story isn’t serious. It just means that Trump is not the first person to try to gut the U.S. Postal Service. Going back decades, it’s been stuck with impossible funding mandates, used as a piggy bank by both parties in congress (which refused to let it stop making massive retirement overpayments for fear of the “adverse” impact on the federal budget), ARTIFICIALLY PREVENTED FROM EXPANDING OR INNOVATING BY LOBBYISTS, AND RIPPED OFF BY CONNECTED CONTRACTORS.

Combine that with the maddening sloppiness of these panic stories – one wild report after another of mailboxes ripped from the streets “right before our eyes” in a “plan to steal the election” turns out later to be another old photo or a shot of a routine maintenance operation – and it becomes increasingly difficult for nonpartisan news audiences to know what they’re dealing with.

Is this unprecedented corruption, something a little worse than normal, or just the usual undisguised? If press outlets never dial back excesses, we may miss it when we’re actually supposed to panic.

Yes, all the hoopla about the Post Office is just another media driven, bat shit nuts, panic inducing scheme to divert the American people’s attention away from the great heist that is currently going on. 

BAT SHIT CRAZY COVID-19 CRONYISM:

From Andrew Dickens:

Excerpt:

Covid-19 hasn’t been about capitalism or socialism, it’s been about crapitalism and cronyism as corrupt elites destroy lives

Governments are dishing out lucrative Covid-related contracts to their woefully underqualified pals. As Johnson, Trump et al waste taxpayers’ money, their cronyism and incompetence is costing lives and livelihoods.

In African or South American countries, they’d call it corruption. In countries like the UK and the US, however, it’s called ‘networking.’ Scratch the right back, kiss the right arse, go to the right school, and life gets a lot easier and more lucrative, often thanks to a hefty wedge of public money.

Even now, despite – in fact because of – the Covid-19 pandemic that has torn through the planet, wrecking lives and economies, the leaders of these countries have still been dishing out power and public cash to their hapless besties.

Being bent isn’t new, of course. It’s their thing. But when the crisis dropped its gargantuan banana skin in front of every government and industry on the planet, with the stakes so high and the scrutiny so forensic (even when they point at people in dinghies to distract us), you’d have thought they’d have changed tack. Perhaps not ‘networked’ things quite so much, at least for a bit.

Instead, they’ve networked the living daylights out of them.

Capitalism or socialism?’ and whether ostensibly pro-market governments have suddenly gone all Trot by handing out billions to keep their sinking ships from exploding instead, the only isms really in play are cronyism and crapitalism (I made that up and am very proud).

It’s jobs for the boys (or girls) as usual, experience and talent not required.

More stories emerged this week of how the UK government led by Boris Johnson – a man whose entire life and career is based on who he knows rather than what he knows – has used catastrophe to grease the palms of its pals.

First, it announced that Public Health England, the executive body whose aim is to ‘protect and improve the nation’s health and wellbeing,’ is to be replaced by the National Institute for Health Protection.

Apart from the obvious buck-passing over the British balls-up of a response to Covid, the exercise seems to be nothing more than giving PHE a new name and a new boss: Baroness Harding of Winscombe. Or Dido to her friends, among whom you’ll find former prime minister David Cameron, who gave her the title (which comfortably beats an iTunes voucher in the gifting stakes).

Dido’s qualifications for the job? Well, she has kind of worked in the NHS before. She was in charge of the government’s Covid-19 ‘track-and-trace’ response. The really expensive one that doesn’t work and which is still trying to develop a functioning app whose first flawed iteration was revealed on May 5.

Her experience away from government? In 2017, she quit as boss of telecoms company Talk Talk after a major data breach that led to 157,000 customers having data stolen. But it’s fine, it’s not like she’s working on an app that will hold loads of personal data…

What else? Oh yes, she’s married to Tory MP John Penrose and has a close relationship with Health Secretary Matt Hancock.

Then we learned, in the light of the UK’s exams debacle,that the company Public First had been working with the now much-maligned regulator Ofqual. PublicFirst – a research firm that “influences public opinion” – is run by two former employees/colleagues of Michael Gove and Dominic ‘Rebel with a Land Rover’ Cummings. Its contract was awarded without going to tender and the amount of money involved hasn’t been disclosed. You know, the taxpayers’ money. Our money.

It was also given £840,000 ($1.1 million) by the Cabinet Office, notionally run by Gove and actually run by Cummings, to research public opinion of the government’s coronavirus performance. And another £116,000 ($151,925) by the Department of Health and Social Care to find out how it could “lock in the lessons learned” during the crisis.

I’m pretty sure I could have done all this just as effectively – and I’d have charged half the price.

Apparently skipping any kind of proper procedure with these contracts was OK because of  “exceptional circumstances” surrounding Covid. Because in an emergency, why would you want to get the best people on the job when you can? And there’s so much money being chucked around, who wouldn’t see their mates right, eh?

Hiring incompetents might be incompetence by an incompetent administration. It’s so incompetent that its incompetence since being elected – over Covid, Brexit, migration and pretty much everything else – has baffled and enraged even the UK’s almost uniquely right-wing and conservative mainstream press. When Fleet Street turns on a Tory regime, you know they’re in trouble.

Or perhaps it’s a master plan: hire people even worse than you and you can use them as a scapegoat. And boy does this government love a scapegoat (see PHE above).  Cronyism is a way of life in the UK. People get jobs through the ‘old school tie’ and the right handshake. We’re so cronyistic that we even make it part of our law-making process.

The House of Lords is a cathedral to the notion of rewarding your pals with power and money. Leaders get to hand out lifelong seats in parliament to pretty much anyone they like. Johnson’s latest additions include Evgeny Lebedev, the son of a KGB agent, and Jo Johnson, the son of Boris Johnson’s dad, aka Boris’s brother.

It’s not a solely British trait, obviously. There are few people more cronyistic than Donald Trump; a narcissist who has a track record of screwing his businesses with some choice appointments and promotions of flatterers, ‘yes men,’ and friends.  And now he gets to screw his country with those same techniques.

Once elected US president, he didn’t hesitate to hand jobs to family members of varying intelligence – and he’s happily hit the eject button on anyone daring to question whether the world revolves around him.

His original 17-strong Covid task force, set up in February, contained a whopping four people with scientific or medical backgrounds. He also has a ‘shadow’ task force run by failed businessman and son-in-law of the president, Jared Kushner.

This crack squad of Kushner’s absolutely unqualified pals, according to the New York Times, “were told to prioritize tips on PPE availability from political allies and associates of President Trump.” It also allegedly pulled a much-needed testing programme in order to aid Trump’s election chances.

The relationship between people and cronyism is similar to that between the British and the monarchy. We know it’s wrong but we’re so used to it and there are so many larger and more pressing issues that it gets a pass. Why worry about a slow puncture when the engine’s on fire?

The problem now is that the puncture is making us veer off a cliff.

There are no larger or more pressing issues than the pandemic and its multitude of negative effects on our lives – and the people in charge, a tight-knit breed of elitists, are leaving the management of it in the hands of a few chancers and chums who know how to mutually scratch backs, wear the right tie or deliver a mirror-like shine to the right boots.

Like I said, if this was happening in Africa or South America, we’d be calling it corruption. So, to paraphrase, if it looks like corruption, walks like corruption, and stinks of corruption, then maybe we should call it corruption, too.

Yes the Covid-19 scamdemic has given cover for more looting of the treasury not only in the UK but in America.  Here in America every crisis ends up with the Federal Reserve Bank and the Congress bailing out our zombie banks.  There is no justice for white collar crime

BAT SHIT CRAZY LEGAL SYSTEM

From Ari  Rabin-Havt

Excerpt:

We Need to Throw More Criminal Businesspeople in Jail

White-collar crime is barely prosecuted in the United States. It’s time for that to change.

Donald Trump loves tweeting the words “law and order,” fully committed to the idea that communicating to his base with racist dog whistles at the volume of a jet engine is the best way to win reelection.

Unsurprisingly, his cries of “law and order” don’t apply to criminals from his own social strata. The Trump administration has been a boon to white-collar criminals whose lawbreaking is basically being ignored by its Justice Department. The data is staggering.

Prosecutions over the first three years of Donald Trump’s term, when compared with Barack Obama’s last twenty months in office, are down between 26 and 30 percent. Taking into account the Obama Justice Department saw sharp declines in white-collar prosecutions after 2010, the Trump administration’s inaction is staggering.

It’s not just prosecutions that are in decline. Corporate fines have fallen 76 percent over the same period. Additionally, IRS criminal investigations dropped 36 percent between 2015 and 2019.

After the 2008 financial crisis, the total lack of criminal accountability for those who crashed the economy was one of the chief complaints about the Obama Justice Department. Even Ted Kaufman, who was Joe Biden’s Senate chief of staff for two decades, was appointed to replace him in the Senate, and currently heads his transition team, was vocal about his criticisms, writing in 2013,

“‘Have we really gotten to the point where we are afraid to prosecute a Wall Street executive for stealing millions while we send some teenager who steals $20 from the corner store to prison?” He continued, “The fact is, the behavior of some on Wall Street led directly to millions of Americans losing their jobs or their houses. We must do all we can to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Kaufman was particularly incensed with the DOJ’s Criminal Division leader Lanny Breuer’s explanation that “In reaching every charging decision, we must take into account the effect of an indictment on innocent employees and shareholders, just as we must take into account the nature of the crimes committed and the pervasiveness of the misconduct.”

Now in 2020 it is clear that corporate criminals are hard at work looting this country, and in the Trump Justice Department, they don’t even need the get-out-of-jail-free card of being too big to jail. His justice department seems intent on doing nothing.

Writing in the New Republic, former financial fraud prosecutor Ankush Khardori listed the problems he has seen in the Trump Justice Department: “Relative disinterest in real-world fraud; an obliviousness to the sophistication of criminals who many see as nuisances but who are in fact wreaking widespread havoc; and high-level ineptitude by previously low-level prosecutors who somehow managed to rise quickly in recent years. Together, these trends point to the precarious state of our white-collar criminal enforcement program under the Trump administration.”

When your boss is a financial criminal, how likely are you to want to put financial criminals in prison?

Joe Biden on the other hand should heed the advice of his friend and former chief of staff. Cracking down on white-collar crime is the right thing to do both morally and legally. The political argument for increased white-collar crime prosecutions is even stronger.

While tens of millions remain out of work, and millions lose their health care, housing, and don’t know where their next meal will come from, wealthy corporations and individuals profited immensely from the generous corporate bailouts, that they often were not entitled to.

After talking a big game of prosecuting those who improperly took Paycheck Protection Program loans, the Trump administration decided to give safe harbor to those who simply returned the ill-gotten money — no questions asked. But PPP is just one example of the unscrupulous corporate behavior that has made headlines lately.

The brazenness of the insider trading surrounding the now “paused” government loan to Kodak that resulted in a bonanza for those with nonpublic knowledge was only surprising to those who believe anyone will face actual criminal accountability for their actions. On the day before the loan was announced, eight times as many shares in the company were traded than on an average day. The stock price gained as much as 500 percent after the loan was made public.

This is exactly the type of behavior insider trading laws were designed to prevent. Furthermore, the company’s CEO and a board member purchased thousands of shares while the company was negotiating the loan with the federal government.

There is a deep understanding that there are two different worlds of justice. One for the wealthy and well-connected, and one for the poor and marginalized. So while we denounce the reactionary rhetoric of “law and order,” we must push the next administration to the pursuit of the criminals, Trump included, who have been allowed to run amuck.

It is true that the regular, legal sort of exploitation that is commonplace in the United States is an outrage in and of interest. But the billionaire looting that has taken place during this pandemic has gone to new extremes. Making it clear that it will have consequences is an important political act that can help us secure more expansive social rights in the future.

As Ted Kaufman put it, “Criminal prosecutions are not just about punishing the guilty. They also send a message that we as a society will not allow similar misconduct in the future.”

There will be no prosecutions for insider trading, if there were almost all of the people in our government would be in prison. The Bush/Obama Administration were completely beholding to Wall Street bankers.  President Trump has been hamstrung by the Deep State apparatchiks permanently embedded in the Executive Branch of government.  Their foreign policy has been bat shit crazy.

BATSHIT CRAZY IRAN POLICY

From Finian Cunningham at Information Clearinghouse:

Excerpt:

US Snapback From Humiliation

American President Donald Trump has darkly warned of something big this week, vowing to apply “snapback” international sanctions on Iran. It would be a drastic move and likely to further isolate Washington in the eyes of the world.

But the real snapback is Washington’s fury after the United States was subjected to a humiliating diplomatic defeat at the UN Security Council last week.

A proposal by the US for the United Nations to extend an arms embargo on Iran was decisively rejected by the Security Council comprised of five permanent members and 11 non-permanent members. Russia and China voted against the resolution while even American allies Britain and France abstained, along with nine others.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed the rejection as “inexcusable”. Then the day after the defeat, President Trump expressed his chagrin by saying he would not be attending a summit proposed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Iran and Middle East security.  Moreover, Trump issued a threatening vow to push ahead with the US forcing the UN to reimpose sanctions on Iran…

The legal argument by the US side is tenuous at best, if not ridiculous. Washington claims it is still a participant in the 2015 international nuclear accord along with Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany and Iran. That is in spite of the fact that the Trump administration pulled out of the accord in May 2018.

The US position amounts to wanting its cake and eating it. Washington doesn’t want to work the nuclear deal, having repudiated it as the “worst ever”, but at the same time, it wants to use provisions contained in the accord for snapping back sanctions on Iran. That snapback idea, as noted above, is impelled by the humiliating defeat the US suffered at the Security Council in not being able to extend an arms embargo on Iran.

Originally imposed by the UN on Iran in 2007, the embargo is due to expire in October as part of the nuclear accord, which was signed in July 2015 and endorsed by the UN Security Council. Washington wants to extend the arms restrictions on Iran even though Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal has earned it the right to have the embargo lifted.

Washington’s line of reasoning is illogical and rife with double standards. It is parallel-universe stuff. You know it is whenever super-hawk warmonger John Bolton admits there are no legal grounds for the US position.

The nuclear deal – formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – continues to be widely recognized as a diplomatic achievement for ensuring nuclear non-proliferation. Iran has been in full compliance with onerous restrictions on its nuclear program. Where the deal has failed is in delivering substantive relief from economic sanctions imposed on Iran. Washington has used every manoeuvre to maximize pressure on Tehran in an attempt to sabotage the JCPOA.

Lamentably, European members have not been strong enough in standing up to Washington’s bullying and threats of secondary sanctions. The lack of European resolve – unlike the more forthright support from Russia and China – has understandably undermined Iran’s confidence in the nuclear accord.     

But the tyrannical bullying from Washington has gone too far. The embarrassing, spectacular defeat at the UN Security Council last week demonstrates that the US is increasingly viewed as a rogue state. It is also a demonstration of how much its global power has waned.

Digging itself deeper into a hole it has already dug, the Trump administration is blaring threats of forcing the UN into toeing Washington’s illogical line for applying a sanctions “snapback” on Iran.

It’s not a good idea to pursue a policy on a whim of bruised ego and imperial hubris. That’s what the US is doing with regard to Iran and the rest of the world. Sooner or later, the delusions and deceptions pile up in a crescendo of absurdity whereby even normally dutiful allies can no longer go along with the perverse pretence of the United States as a law-abiding democratic nation. Its power, frenetically and desperately, relies more and more on coercion and diktat. And those days are numbered.

Mike Pompeo has to be the worst Secretary of State America has ever had.  His entire career has been funded by the Koch Brothers.  He’s a disgrace and Trump would be wise to get rid of him, but there’s always a clone waiting in the wings.  As could have been predicted, Iran has just given the finger to the Trump Administration.  From Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge:

Excerpt:

Iran Unveils New Ballistic Missile Named After Soleimani Days After UN Vote To Drop Arms Embargo

In timing sure to make things awkward at the UN where the Security Council just voted down the United States’ bid to extend the weapons embargo on the Islamic Republic, Tehran has unveiled a new ballistic missile named after Gen. Qassem Soleimani, killed last January in a US drone strike.

“Iran displayed locally made ballistic and cruise missiles – a move certain to anger the United States as it prepares to demand that all UN sanctions be reimposed on the country,” Al Jazeera reports. State media featured a ballistic missile launch test in the desert Thursday.

The other missile is named after Iraq’s top Shia militia leader who was killed in the same convoy while traveling with Soleimani through the Baghdad airport, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

Defense Minister Amir Hatami touted the ballistic missile’s range of 1,400km (or 600 miles), with the cruise missile at an estimated 1,000km (400 miles), which flies in the face of Washington’s demands that Iran shut down its advanced missile program.

Indeed the Iranians almost seem positively boastful, choosing this moment to show off the new missiles as a thumb in the eye to the United States, given it was only last Friday night the UN vote was announced wherein the US utterly failed to achieve its objective. The only “yes” vote the US could muster in its favor was from the Dominican Republic.

“Missiles and particularly cruise missiles are very important for us… The fact that we have increased the range from 300km to 1,000km in less than two years is a great achievement,” Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said on the occasion of the new weapons roll out Thursday. “Our military might and missile programs are defensive,” he emphasized.

Though Iran hawks have consistently warned these ballistic missile pursuits go hand in hand with Tehran’s alleged nuclear weapons aspirations, and could be used to attack US allies like Israel or even American bases in the region (as happened earlier this year in response to the Soleimani assassination), it must be remembered that the two countries immediately bordering Iran on either side have both been attacked by the United States and are still being occupied.

BATSHIT CRAZY COUPS FOR BILLIONIARE PROFITS

From Information Clearinghouse:

Excerpt:

Elon Musk Confesses to Lithium Coup in Bolivia

The billionaire CEO of Tesla and lithium-exploiting capitalist has admitted his role in the November coup.  The CEO of the U.S.-based Telsa car manufacturer has admitted to involvement in what President Morales has referred to as a “Lithium Coup.”

We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” was Elon Musk’s response to an accusation on twitter that the U.S. government organized a coup against President Evo Morales, so that Musk could obtain Bolivia’s lithium.  Foreign plunder of Bolivia’s lithium, in a country with the world’s largest known reserves, is widely believed to be among the main motives behind the November 10, 2019 coup.

Lithium, a critical component of the batteries used in Tesla vehicles, is set to become one of the world’s most important natural resources as manufacturers seek to obtain it for use in batteries for electric cars, computers, and industrial equipment.

The defacto administration of Jeanine Añez has already announced its plan to invite numerous multinationals into the Salar de Uyuni, the vast salt flats in Potosi, which holds the precious soft metal.  Right-wing Vice Presidential candidate and running mate to Añez, Samuel Doria Medina, proposed a Brazilian-Bolivian project which would use lithium from the town of Uyuni.

Meanwhile, letter from the coup regime’s Foreign Minister Karen Longaric to Elon Musk, dated march 31st, says “any corporation that you or your company can provide to our country will be gratefully welcomed.”

Social movements have repeatedly warned that lithium and natural resources would be surrendered to foreign capital by coup authorities, in a reversal of plans by Evo Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) administration to process the lithium within Bolivia rather than exporting the raw material to the global north.

The project represented a rejection of the neocolonial relationship Latin American countries have often had with the imperialist cores.  Bolivia’s former MAS government oversaw the production of batteries and its first electric car by the Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB) state company, in partnership with German company ACISA. In the deal, the Bolivian state kept majority control.

With the agreement now scrapped along with countless other state projects, and with elections now thrice delayed by the illegitimate defacto authorities, the people of Uyuni and social movements around the country say they’ll continue to oppose the ongoing privatization and are organizing against the return of looting of Bolivia’s natural resources by ruthless and exploitative foreign capital.

The only reason the U.S. has been able to launch endless attacks, coups ad wars is because they have a fiat currency backed by nothing.  While Russia, China and a number of other nations have their currency backed by gold, the Federal Reserve Bank just prints up trillions of dollars with nothing to back it.  President Trump has nominated Judy Shelton for a seat on the Federal Reserve board which has sent the bat shit crazy Globalists headed for the fainting couches.

BATSHIT CRAZY FISCAL POLICY

From Zero Hedge:

Excerpt:

“Extreme, Ill-Considered Views” – 38 Fed Alum Urge Senate To Reject Judy Shelton Nomination

Is the establishment panicking at the nomination of someone that clearly thinks for herself and refuses to accept as writ the groupthink of The Federal Reserve?

Judging by the wording of the following open-letter to The Senate urging Shelton be rejected, because her “views are so extreme and ill-considered as to be an unnecessary distraction from the tasks at hand,” and of course, the fact that she has not publicly disavowed the President as #OrangeManBad:

” She has advocated for a return to the gold standard; she has questioned the need for federal deposit insurance; she has even questioned the need for a central bank at all. Now, she appears to have jettisoned all of these positions to argue for subordination of the Fed’s policies to the White House – at least as long as the White House is occupied by a president who agrees with her political views. “

President Trump has nominated Judy Shelton to one of the vacancies on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The nomination recently cleared the Senate Banking Committee and will soon reach the Senate floor. We urge the Senate to reject this nomination.

The undersigned all served on the staffs of either the Board of Governors or the Federal Reserve Banks. We have served in various capacities as economists, lawyers, bank supervisors, and in other professional capacities. We know and appreciate the unique position of the Federal Reserve in our nation’s economy and the need to preserve its nonpartisan approach to its many responsibilities.

The Federal Reserve is a vital part of our government and has been particularly important during our current crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has required the suspension of much of the nation’s and the world’s economic activity. The Fed’s quick action to provide the markets with the necessary liquidity was crucial to restoring order to those markets and ensuring that the economic crisis that we are enduring did not become much, much worse. However, like the pandemic, the economic challenges persist.

Ms. Shelton has a decades-long record of writings and statements that call into question her fitness for a spot on the Fed’s Board of Governors. She has advocated for a return to the gold standard; she has questioned the need for federal deposit insurance; she has even questioned the need for a central bank at all. Now, she appears to have jettisoned all of these positions to argue for subordination of the Fed’s policies to the White House — at least as long as the White House is occupied by a president who agrees with her political views.

The Fed has serious work ahead of it. While we applaud the Board having a diversity of viewpoints represented at its table, Ms. Shelton’s views are so extreme and ill-considered as to be an unnecessary distraction from the tasks at hand.

The late Chairman Paul Volcker was noted for advising new governors that “when you enter this building, you leave your politics at the door.” Sound advice that, from her record, Ms. Shelton is incapable of following.

In an attempt to provide some balance, here is The Mises Institute’s Robert Aro explaining the reason why the establishment hates Judy Shelton…

Imagine if a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors said the following :

“When governments manipulate exchange rates to affect currency markets, they undermine the honest efforts of countries that wish to compete fairly in the global marketplace. Supply and demand are distorted by artificial prices conveyed through contrived exchange rates.

Or something honest like:

“The Fed should focus on stable money as a key factor in economic performance. Given that central banks today are the world’s biggest currency manipulators, it’s imperative that the next chairman prioritize the integrity of the dollar.”

And what if they showed an understanding of both history and sound money principles with something intelligent:

“For all the talk of a “rules-based” system for international trade, there are no rules when it comes to ensuring a level monetary playing field. The classical gold standard established an international benchmark for currency values, consistent with free-trade principles.

While she’s not a governor yet, the quotes were from Trump’s appointee Judy Shelton, approved this week by the Senate banking committee on party line at a vote of 13-12. To be nominated to the board of directors, Ms. Shelton will now be put forward to be voted on by the full senate, 53 of the 100 being Republicans.

Yet below, we can see everything wrong with the Mainstream Media (MSM), mainstream economists, and American politics starting with theNew York Times article entitled, God Help Us if Judy Shelton Joins the Fed. Former counselor to the Treasury secretary during the Obama administration, Steven Rattner began with:

Trump’s latest unqualified nominee to the Federal Reserve Board must be rejected.

The defaming article shows Mr. Rattner has no care nor understanding of economics. According to him, Ms. Shelton is known for taking “long-discredited positions in the monetary system,” referring to the gold standard, as he claims it was the “culprit in deepening the Great Depression.” Clearly he is no fan of (or perhaps isn’t educated enough to have heard of) Mises or Rothbard.

In what some may described as laudable on Ms. Shelton’s behalf, Mr. Rattner, fueled by ignorance, continues:

Among other heretical stances, she has supported the abolition of the Federal Reserve itself, putting her in a position to undermine the very institution she is being nominated to serve.

A similar tone was found in the National Review, a magazine which defines itself using the highly nebulous and ill-defined “modern conservative movement.” Going back several months the “controversy” surrounding Judy Shelton was shared in an oxymoronic write-up called: The Wrong Kind of ‘Intellectual Diversity’ at the Fed. It is nothing more than a rant showing the senior editor also knows little about history or economics, but being in a position to publish, does so with a vociferous opinion. He begins with the usual appeal to popularity:

First, she has been a single-minded advocate of a policy that most economists rightly reject: the revival of the gold standard.

What is popular is not always true, especially regarding economics. The article cites quotes from 2009 to the Wall Street Journal in an attempt to discredit her by showing she has not always been consistent in her stances over the span of the past decade. By contrast, the rant implies all other members of the Fed and economists have.

Unfortunately, some people claim to like diversity, but not when it’s different from their own bias. The senior editor who wrote the hit piece can be found on twitter.

Unlike the New York Times and National Review, surprising as it may seem, CNBC’s position was more neutral when discussing the senate hearing, noting :She faced persistent and at-times hostile questions about her support for the gold standard, her beliefs on whether bank deposits should be insured and whether the Fed should be independent of political influences.

Last but not least, the Wall Street Journal wrote it best , much to the chagrin of its rivals:

the news write-ups inevitably described her with adjectives like “controversial.” She should take it as a badge of honor, given how she would provide needed intellectual diversity at the Fed.

Only in a world this backwards where, in a supposed free country, socialism is considered good and capitalism bad that Shelton could receive so much scorn. To think, 1 out of 7 members of the board could have ideas other than inflationist dogma but they would be shunned for speaking up, says a lot of the society in which we are living. Perhaps the real reason is, if appointed, it could set Judy Shelton in line to the position of Federal Reserve Chair?

Ironically enough, as long Congress stays partisan, we may see her in one of the most powerful central banking positions in the world. It won’t “End the Fed” overnight, but maybe it’s one step closer!

And finally, as  Mark Hendrickson concludes, Shelton is 100 percent correct when she questions why a dozen people (the Federal Reserve Board of Governors) should set the prices of capital (interest rates) any more than they should set the price of cars, houses, or bubble gum.

Markets can do that and do it better – as they did before there even was a Federal Reserve system. Shelton opposes policies that would be more at home in a centrally planned economy. THAT ALONE IS REASON ENOUGH TO CONFIRM HER.

If anyone is under the delusion that the Democrats’ policies will be any different that should have been shattered after the saber rattling DNC convention.  Elect us for endless war, endless looting of the treasury and restoration of the Bush/Obama lunacy.  As a matter of fact, war criminals from George W. Bush’s administration were advocating for Joe Biden.  It was bat shit crazy.

BAT SHIT CRAZY DEMOCRAT NON-CONVENTION CONVENTION

From Real Clear Politics:

Jimmy Dore: Democratic Party Is The Pro-War Party, Biden’s Career Has Been Nothing But Imperialism

YouTube personality Jimmy Dore called Tuesday night’s DNC a “war rally” due to several pro-Syria war speakers and said the Democratic party is the “pro-war party.” In an interview with Tucker Carlson on FOX News tonight, Dore said Joe Biden’s entire career has been about imperialism and the Obama-Biden administration took the U.S. from 2 wars to 7 wars.

“Last night, I’m sure there are lots of things in the Democratic platform you agree with but the emphasis last night on pure neoconservatism, just flat out we are going to get us more involved in Syria, where did this come from, exactly?” host Tucker Carlson asked.

“That was like a war rally at their convention,” Dore responded. “I was waiting for a football game to break out. You know, one thing John Kerry is right about his Trump’s foreign policy is kind of incoherent but Joe Biden, his entire career has been nothing but imperialism. Joe Biden not only voted for the Iraq war, he shamed Democrats who weren’t supporting it. He was a vocal supporter of it.”

“How about when he became the vice president, they took us from two wars to seven,” he said. “He did Libya. Then he wanted to do Syria. We’re still in Yemen. So these guys are nothing but saber-rattling, warmongering maniacs.”

“We have one party in this country, Tucker, it’s the military-industrial complex party and that’s what we are seeing,” Dore added.

“Even when Trump tried to take us, he kind of was threatening to take us out of Afghanistan, threatening to take us out of Syria, the Democrats jumped in to stop it,” Dore continued. “So we have one party and its a war party and it’s amazing, they got Colin Powell to endorse them, a bona fide war criminal who lied us into the Iraq war.”

“The one piece of policy it seemed that everybody agreed on was that the Iraq war was a good idea, that’s what it seemed like,” he said. “Those are the people that they have come on to endorse Joe Biden, the architects of the Iraq war and you don’t think this is a failed party?”

OTHER BATSHIT CRAZY NEWS:

From LaRouch.pub:

Steve Bannon Indicted: Good News for the Republic

Aug. 20, 2020 (EIRNS)—Steve Bannon was arrested today on a wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy indictment from the Southern District of New York. Despite what will surely be Bannon’s play—that this is an anti-Trump indictment

delivered straight from the coven of Trump enemies in the Southern District of New York—the indictment itself makes clear that these are substantial fraud allegations.

According to the Wall Street Journal of Aug. 19, Bannon is also under federal investigation concerning a $300 million private offering he engineered with Chinese dissident and fugitive billionaire Guo Wengui, a/k/a Miles Kwok.

No doubt, the struggling Democrats will use this to impugn President Donald Trump’s judgment and claim that he surrounded himself with crooks. This is as much a fraud as the allegations in Bannon’s indictment.

Bannon is a prime suspect as one of the many British intelligence chess pieces foisted early on, on Trump’s campaign to discredit Trump and steer his supporters down a variety of self-defeating and toxic rabbit holes. He is also a key creator of the so-called Alt Right, a British intelligence-inspired movement which takes genuine aspirations to preserve the nation-state and channels them into deviant social movements, including overt racism.

The former strategist has made his fame and fortune by suckering the unsuspecting into believing that he actually supports Donald Trump. He claimed that it was he, not Donald Trump, who created Trump’s 2016 electoral victory. When Trump fired the ego-obsessed former Goldman Sachs partner, Bannon, working with New York gossip novelist Michael Wolff, penned two novellas painting the President as an unhinged criminal.

He told Congressional committees that Donald Trump, Jr. was guilty of the crime of treason and his trial testimony against long-time Trump associate Roger Stone is credited as a significant cause of Stone’s conviction.

Lately, Bannon, ever in pursuit of fame and fortune, has taken up with Chinese billionaire fugitive Guo Wengui in an inflammatory and bellicose campaign against China, reflecting the nonsense coming from Britain’s Henry Jackson Society and the circles of former MI6 Chief Sir Richard Dearlove. Dearlove and his protégés Christopher Steele and Sir Andrew Wood, among other British intelligence sponsors, are the actual authors of the coup against the President.

Bannon was on a yacht off the coast of Connecticut when he was arrested. He and Guo are known to hang out on Guo’s yacht, but it is unclear whether this was the yacht where Bannon was arrested…

The indictment involves a scheme by Bannon and three others to use “GoFundMe” to raise funds for building the southern border wall at the point where Congress and the courts were holding up the project. President Trump publicly opposed the private project at its inception, saying that no private funding should be provided for the wall and that Bannon was “showboating.”

The indictment, quoting directly from exchanged text messages and emails, has Bannon and his co-conspirators promising donors to the project, which raised millions, that not a dime of the money would go to Bannon or his co-defendants. All of the money would go to the private effort to construct the border wall, according to their repeated representations to donors. Instead, Bannon and others diverted millions to personal uses, including $1 million to Bannon personally. They concocted a series of sham invoices and transactions to disguise their diversions of funds…

Bannon became a luminary in U.S. political circles when he took over as editor of Breitbart News following the untimely death of its founder, Andrew Breitbart. In 2016, Bannon and his Breitbart sponsors, the billionaire family of Robert Mercer, supported Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for the presidency.  When Cruz lost the Indiana primary in May, Bannon and his sponsors offered their services to the Trump Campaign.

That is the state of America today, bat shit crazy. Hold on to your hats, we are in for a bumpy ride.  Trump is far from being an ideal president, but Biden would be so much worse.   Voting for Biden would really be bat shit crazy.