Pelosi Demonstrating How Democrats Have Lost Touch With the Rust Belt

newsmax |  Paul Pelosi Jr. was president and chief operating officer of Natural Blue Resources, which specializes in environmentally-friendly ventures, and in 2009 he was listed as owning 10 million shares in the company, according to the Free Beacon.

Four executives with the company, including former New Mexico Gov. Toney Anaya, have been charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which suspended trading in the company’s stock.

The charges were handed down after the SEC learned that the company was "secretly controlled" by Joseph Corazzi and James Cohen, who had previous fraud convictions, according to the Free Beacon.

dailybail |  House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s husband bought up to a quarter million dollars of stock in SunEdison, a now financially troubled green energy company just weeks before it announced a major 2014 acquisition that sent its stock price soaring. SunE's 2014 purchase of wind energy company First Wind “further bolstered the reputation of the company,” wrote one market-watcher at the time. “Perhaps unsurprisingly, SunEdison’s stock soared 29% on news of this acquisition alone.” 

Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, had invested just in time. He bought between $100,000 and $250,000 in SunEdison stock on Oct. 24, 2014, according to congressional financial disclosures. The company announced its First Wind acquisition on Nov. 17.

Pelosi has previously been accused of trading stock based on information gleaned through her official duties. A law passed in the wake of that controversy prohibits members of Congress from using nonpublic information for personal gain. Language in that measure was informally dubbed the 'Pelosi Provision.'

Inked and Swole American KILLER Contractor Says "They Don't Love Us!"

fmshooter |  Plenty of mainstream media outlets have been critical of the Trump executive orders regarding immigration and “vetting” of refugees.  There are too many to list, but I will use an excerpt from a U.S. News article to drive the general point home:

When the United States accepts refugees from countries with a significant Muslim population, we undermine the anti-American hatred that underlies Islamic State group recruitment. Closing America’s door to Syrian refugees, therefore, is not only a heartless hiccup in our nation’s history, it also validates Islamic State group propaganda, advances the group’s agenda and drives refugees back into the arms of dangerous terrorists. By turning away Syrian refugees, Trump is plunging America into a national security nightmare.

The “fact-check” website Snopes (which has previously been outed as being heavily liberal-biased, being run by a “failed liberal blogger”) also gets in on the act, saying that Syrian kids aren’t holding guns, instead labeling them as “Pakistani”:

Trump: U.S. Not As Innocent As You All Pretend

RT |  In an interview to be aired ahead of the Super Bowl later on Sunday, Bill O’Reilly asked if Trump respects Russian President Vladimir Putin, to which the he replied, “I do respect him. Well, I respect a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean I’ll get along with them.”

Seemingly surprised, O’Reilly goes on to ask him why.

"He is the leader of his country. I say it’s better to get along with Russia than not, and if Russia helps us in the fight against ISIS – which is a major fight – and the Islamic terrorism all over the world, that’s a good thing,” Trump answered.

“Will I get along with him? I have no idea.”

O’Reilly then challenged Trump, calling the Russian president “a killer.”

Trump shrugged the comment off, saying: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country is so innocent?”

It is not the first time that Trump has made such comments when journalists question his stance regarding the Russian leader.

At the end of 2015, the host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe told Trump that Putin “kills journalists,” to which the unfazed then-presidential candidate replied, “I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe.”

“I’ve always felt fine about Putin. He’s a strong leader. He’s a powerful leader,” Trump added.

Real Democrats Work With Trump For Peace - And Are Demonized For It

facebook |  I have dedicated my life to peace. As a member of Congress I led efforts to avert conflict and end wars in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Iran. And yet those of us who work for peace are put under false scrutiny to protect Washington’s war machine. Those who undermine our national security by promoting military attacks and destroying other nations are held up as national leaders to admire.

Recently Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and I took a Congressional Ethics-approved fact finding trip to Lebanon and Syria, where we visited Aleppo and refugee camps, and met with religious leaders, governmental leaders and people from all sides of the conflict, including political opposition to the Syrian government.

Since that time we have been under constant attack on false grounds. The media and the war establishment are desperate to keep hold of their false narrative for world-wide war, interventionism and regime change, which is a profitable business for Washington insiders and which impoverishes our own country.

Today, Rep. Gabbard came under attack yet again by the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin who has been on a tear trying to ruin the reputations of the people and the organization who sponsored our humanitarian, fact-finding mission of peace to the Middle East. Rogin just claimed in a tweet that as community organization I have been associated with for twenty years does not exist.

The organization is in my neighborhood. Here’s photos I took yesterday of AACCESS-Ohio’s marquee. It clearly exists, despite the base, condescending assertions of Mr. Rogin.

Enough of this dangerous pettiness. Let’s dig in to what is really going on, inside Syria, in the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon. In the words of President Eisenhower, let’s beware (and scrutinize) the military-industrial-complex. It is time to be vigilant for our democracy.

Boston Judge Bish Slaps the Identity Politics Propaganda Over Trump Executive Order

GMANetwork |  Which left the judge to decide (as the full docket explains here),

“The language in Section 5 of the EO is neutral with respect to religion,

"The provisions of Section 5, however, could be invoked to give preferred refugee status to a Muslim individual in a country that is predominately Christian. Nothing in Section 5 compels a finding that Christians are preferred to any other group.”

Gorton wrote there is a rational reason for the Trump administration’s policies. The federal Immigration and Naturalization Act gives the president broad power over immigration.

“The order provides a reasonably conceivable state of facts (which concerns national security and) that could provide a rational basis for the classification,” he wrote. “Accordingly, this Court declines to encroach upon the “delicate policy judgment” inherent in immigration decisions.”

ORDER

For the forgoing reasons, the Court declines to impose any injunctive relief and will not renew the temporary restraining order that was entered on January 29, 2017 (Docket No. 6).

Military Industrial Congressional Complex Pushes War With Russia

mishtalk |  This bit of asininity just came in from McCain: Send Weapons to Ukraine.

McCain also repeated idiotic comments on Russian interference in the US election.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is calling on President Trump to send lethal aid to Ukraine after attacks this week were blamed on Russia-backed rebels.

“Vladimir Putin’s violent campaign to destabilize and dismember the sovereign nation of Ukraine will not stop unless and until he meets a strong and determined response,” wrote McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

McCain also reiterated his call for Trump to maintain sanctions on Russia and impose new ones for Russia’s interference in the U.S. election.

Failing to provide more help to Ukraine, McCain said, risks the country’s sovereignty and American credibility.

“Ukrainians are not asking Americans to do their fighting,” McCain said. “Nearly 10,000 Ukrainians have died to protect their homeland and many more are serving and have sacrificed for the cause of a free and united Ukraine. But America does have a proud history of helping free people to defend themselves.”

Just after I published Preposterous Rumors From Pelosi on Russia, Trump, Sanctions, McCain started yapping.

Military Industrial Congressional Complex Pushes War With Iran

craigmurray |  So what are the Clinton gang doing while Trump introduces anti-Muslim immigration discrimination? Oh, they are pushing for war with Iran, which might give pause to some who think the world would have been less awful had Hillary won.

Here is the front page of the resolution introduced into the House of Representatives by Democrat Alcee L Hastings, an extremely close ally of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who had to resign in disgrace as chair of the Democratic National Committee after WikiLeaks published emails establishing her corrupt endeavours to fix the primary elections for Hillary against Bernie Sanders.

The Resolution reads “To authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces to achieve the goal of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.”

There is in fact no evidence that Iran is continuing a covert programme to produce nuclear weapons. British, French and Russian intelligence all assess that Iran is sticking to its agreements and – here is a key point – so do the CIA. But when did politicians ever let facts stand in their way?

Trump’s mad visa ban, which excludes Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States which are the main financiers, armers, ideologues and exporters of Salafist terrorism, turns out to be imposed on the countries which were on Obama’s watchlist. As the Hastings resolution shows, the anti-Iranian and pro-Saudi madness is bipartisan. To include Iran but exclude Saudi Arabia is further evidence of the twisting of US foreign policy to serve the interests of Saudi Arabia and its ally Israel.

Need More Rex Tillerson and Omarosa - Less of DJT's Dipsticks....,

thesaker |  It is a rare privilege to be able to criticize a politician for actually fulfilling his campaign promises but Donald Trump is a unique President and this week he offered us exactly this opportunity with not one, but three different SNAFUs to report.

First, there was the botched raid against an alleged al-Qaeda compound in Yakla, Yemen. First, let me commit a crimethink here and remind everybody that for all the great Hollywood movies, Americans have a terrible record of doing special ops. The latest one was typical. First, it involved Navy SEALS, one of the most disaster-prone US special forces. Second, it involved special forces from the United Arab Emirates (don’t ask why, just don’t). I am pretty sure that using US Rangers alone would have yielded better results. Third, as always, they got detected early. And then they began taking casualties. This time from female al-Qaeda fighters. Finally, they botched the evacuation. They did kill some kids and, so they say, an al-Qaeda leader. More about this raid here and here. As I said, this is pretty much par for the course. But I am sure that some Hollywood movie will make it look very heroic and “tactical”. But the real world bottom line remains unchanged: Americans should give up on special ops, they just can do it right.

Second, there was the absolutely terrible press conference by General Flynn.

So not only did Flynn put Iran “on notice” like a high-school principal would do to a rowdy teenager, but FOX TV is already speaking about “lines in the sand”. Wait – were “lines in the sand” not one of the dumbest features of the Obama Presidency? And now, just one week in the White House, we see Trump doing exactly the same?

This also begs the question of whether a very intelligent man like Flynn seriously and sincerely believes that he can bully or otherwise scare Iran. If he does – then we are all in a lot of trouble.

There is also the troubling aspect of the language chosen. Instead of speaking about “international concern” or the will of the UN Security Council, Flynn decided to use the kind of language typical of a wannabe World Hegemon. Again, been there – done that. Do they really think that this kind of imperial hubris will work better for them than it did for the Neocons?

Lastly, the Ukronazis are apparently back on the warpath. For many months now they have been shelling the Novorussians, and they even have tried a few, rather pathetic, local attacks. This time around this is different: incoming artillery strikes are counted not by the tens, but by the thousands and the shelling is happening all along the line of contact. Of course, this is not directly Trump’s fault, but it does show that the Ukronazis in Kiev are taking their cues from the former power configuration – that is the Germans, the Neocons, and the East European cry-babies à la Poland and Lithuania. At the time of writing, there are no signs that Trump is taking the situation under control. The good news is that the Russians are still waiting, but with that level of violence there is only that much they can wait before having to give the Novorussians the green light for a counter-attack (the Novorussian forces are already engaging in strong counter-battery fire, but they have not yet pushed their forces forward).

I sure hope that this week is not a harbinger of what the rest of the Trump Presidency will look like.

Sean Spicer's Replacement Shows How It's Done

DJT and the Establishment's Replacement Negroes Dilemma

thesaker |  A very brief and quick look at the post USSR Western “left” reveals that it did everything BUT stick to its original principles and ideals.

To elaborate, we must look at certain examples; beginning with the highly controversial subject of refugees. The “left” in the West continues to uphold the principle of aiding and welcoming refugees, and this is good and ought to be applauded. However, the “left” does not even seem to question how those refugees have become refugees in the first place! Whilst it is a fact that most refugees are in essence political refugees who have been displaced due to wars inflicted upon their countries, mostly seeking regime change, the Western “left” seems to turn a blind eye to this reality. Even worse, when the Western “left” gets democratically elected and assumes power, it does not try to reverse the course of events that create refugees.

It gets even worse. Take the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as examples. Both wars were initiated by the “right” wing Republican American President GWB. However, his partner in crime in Iraq was Britain’s Labour leader Tony Blair; who was meant to be from the Western “left”.

And whilst the Australian Labor Party (ALP) can hold its head high because it was an ALP Prime Minister (Gough Whitlam) who bailed Australia out of the infamous Vietnam War, other ALP administrations have followed the USA into wars without too many questions asked about their legitimacy and whether or not they conform with the foundations and principles upon which the ALP is based.

Such views and politics have nothing to do with the original “left” values of promoting freedom, supporting the oppressed and working towards social justice; none what-so-ever, and quite the opposite, if anything.

And even though APHEDA, an organization sponsored by Australian trade unions, supports and sponsors humanitarian projects in Palestine, the current ALP leader Bill Shorten has recently described Israeli PM Netanyahu as a friend.

The contradictions within the Western “left” are not the result of a deliberate attempt to create confusion, but rather the direct outcome of loss of identity and soul, and an inability to reinvent itself in the post-USSR New World Order era.

A proper reinvention process requires new ideas, but instead of undergoing a serious process of soul-searching, the Western “left” shopped around for existing populist issues to capitalize on.

Elite Establishment Unhappy About What DJT is Cooking...,

FP |  Believe it or not, President Donald Trump has a grand strategy. According to some analysts, Trump’s endless streams of erratic and apparently improvisational ideas don’t add up to anything consistent or purposeful enough to call a grand strategy. We see it otherwise. Beneath all the rants, tweets, and noise there is actually a discernible pattern of thought — a Trumpian view of the world that goes back decades. Trump has put forward a clear vision to guide his administration’s foreign policy — albeit a dark and highly troubling one, riddled with tensions and vexing dilemmas.

Grand strategy is the conceptual architecture that lends structure and form to foreign policy. A leader who is “doing grand strategy” is not handling global events on an ad hoc or case-by-case basis. A grand strategy, rather, represents a more purposeful and deeply held set of concepts about a country’s goals and orientation in international affairs.

At a minimum, a grand strategy consists of an understanding of the basic contours of the international environment, a country’s highest interests and objectives within that environment, the most pressing threats to those interests, and the actions that a country can take in order to address threats and promote national security and well-being. Grand strategy, then, is both diagnostic and prescriptive. It combines an analysis of what is happening in the world and how it impacts one’s country, with a more forward-looking concept of how a country might employ its various forms of power — hard or soft, military or economic — to sustain or improve its global position. Every grand strategy has a “what” dimension, a notion of what constitutes national security in the first place, and a “how” dimension, a theory of how to produce security in a dynamic international environment and given the tools at hand.

DJT Had Some Black Visitors Today

boston |  President Donald Trump raised more than a few eyebrows with his remarks Wednesday — the first day of Black History Month — during an “African American History Month Listening Session” at the White House.

Sitting beside Housing secretary nominee Ben Carson in the Roosevelt Room, Trump began the session with a circuitous speech in which the president, among other things, lambasted the media and rehashed a recent controversy involving a Martin Luther King Jr. statue in the Oval Office.

“Donald Trump just gave a Black History Month speech about the persecution of Donald Trump,” reads the headline of the Toronto Star‘s account of the speech. A few highlights below, as noted by reporters:

Dr. Changelove’s Legacy In Latin America: Militarization, Right-Wing Coups, & The Rule Of Wall St.

mintpressnews |  But the United States is not the only “America.” 

Indeed, crossing the southern border and entering into that mysterious place called “Latin America,” one encounters a very different Obama legacy, one that is defined by the same policies that Yankee imperialists have employed for more than a century: destabilization, militarization, and exploitation.

Yes We Can!…continue to pursue a neocolonial agenda in Central and South America.  

A mural in Lithuania depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin and President-elect Donald Trump embracing in a passionate kiss has gone viral. The meaning of the image is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the skull, but it is no less perspicacious for its lack of subtlety. And while Russia has indeed tacitly, and rather shamefully, supported far-right candidates and causes for its own coldly pragmatic political reasons — Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, etc. — the truth is that Obama’s administration has also backed right-wing reactionaries and extremists where it has suited its interests.

Throughout Latin America, President Obama has been a driving force behind the resurgence of right-wing forces that have rolled back the gains of socialist and social democratic governments, targeted indigenous and African diaspora communities, assassinated activists, and toppled governments where they could.

So, yes, let’s talk about “legacy.”

Dr. Changelove's Legacy In Africa: Terrorism, Civil War & Military Expansion

mintpressnews |  The corporate media is predictably churning out nauseating retrospectives of Obama’s presidency, gently soothing Americans to sleep with fairy tales about the progressive accomplishments of President Hope and Change.

 

But amid the selective memory and doublethink which passes for sophisticated punditry within the controlled media matrix, let us not forget that in Africa the name Barack Obama is now synonymous with destabilization, death, and destruction.

The collective gasps of liberals grow to a deafening roar at the mere suggestion that Obama is more sinner than saint, but perhaps it would be useful to review the facts and the record rather than the carefully constructed mythos being shoehorned into history books under the broad heading of “Legacy.” 

In the summer of 2009, little more than six months after being inaugurated, President Obama stood before the Ghanaian Parliament to deliver a speech intended to set the tone for his administration’s Africa policy. In addressing a crowd of hundreds in the Ghanaian capital, he was, in fact, speaking directly to millions of Africans all over the continent and throughout the diaspora. For if Obama represented Hope and Change for the people of the United States, that was doubly true for African people.

In that mostly forgettable speech, Obama declared:

“We must start from the simple premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans … the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants.”

Building prosperity, shedding corruption and tyranny, and taking on poverty and disease, he said
“can only be done if you take responsibility for your future. And it won’t be easy. It will take time and effort. There will be suffering and setbacks. But I can promise you this: America will be with you every step of the way, as a partner, as a friend.”

Despite being the First Black President™, Obama’s words and deeds with respect to Africa perfectly embody “the White Man’s Burden” — that desire to help those poor, lowly wretches whose poverty, corruption, disease, and violence must be the product of some natural deficiency. Surely, five centuries of colonialism, combined with Obama-style imperial arrogance, had nothing to do with it.

Does Nancy Pelosi Take Her Face Off Before She Goes to Bed at Night?

lewrockwell |  Throughout Mexico, millions of communities depend on the “remesas” (remittances) sent home every year from relatives, legal and illegal, in the U.S. Amounting to tens of billions of dollars a year, these funds are Mexico’s only welfare system; the government’s version is so riddled with corruption that it’s virtually nonexistent.

The Corruptos also tax the remittances as soon as they arrive: recipient families must pay off the police chief, the mayor, and the local gang leader(s) – or fear for their lives and their livelihood.

This is the foul sewer of graft that will collapse in ruins when Trump’s Wall goes up to stay.

Peña Nieto laments that illegals in the U.S. are “at risk,” but the truth is darker: they’ll really be at risk if they return home.

Wait – wouldn’t they be safer there?

No way, José. If ten to twenty million illegals return to their family homes south of the border, it could bring down the entire Corrupto cartel.

For generations, the Corruptos have driven northwards millions of their fellow citizens so Enrique and his pals won’t have to take care of them at home.

That’s why Catholic bishops on both sides of the border routinely refer to Mexicans heading north to cross the border as “desperate.”

And who made them desperate?

Not us. After all, they’ve never been here.

Enrique’s pals made them desperate.

The Corruptos oppressed and exploited them as a way of life – that’s why they had to leave!

Moreover, there are tens of millions more Mexicans right there in Mexico who are “at risk” – terrorized by the corrupt multi-party elites that are allied with the drug gangs, the crime-infested military, the murderous Coyotes, and bought-off local officials. All these tentacles of the Mexican Deep State live on bribes, terror, and fraud.

Mexican Globalists Running Mouth-Reckless, Fitna Get Mexico Annexed and Depopulated

shtfplan |  There will be war in the streets, or at least there could be.

The strong armed tactics against Mexico are not making officials happy south of the border.

Now, with an executive order facilitating the deportation of illegal immigrants – and especially those who have committed criminal offenses – as well as building a wall on the border, President Trump has many Mexicans up in arms.

Jorge Castañeda Gutman, former Secretary of Foreign Affairs in Mexico, took things a step further during an interview on CNN with Fareed Zakaria when he suggested that Mexico’s previous cooperation with the U.S. in curbing the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants could end.

Instead, the cartels could be essentially unleashed upon the U.S. – retribution for tough policies on Mexico and other immigrant-producing countries in the Latin American world.

These astonishing words could open up an economic gang war against the U.S. –  very irresponsible words that reveal just how connected Mexico’s leadership is with the violent drug cartels who operate from their territories:

Mexico has a lot of negotiating chips in this matter, Fareed, but it also has measures we could take in other areas. For example, the drugs that come through Mexico from South America, or the drugs that are produced here in Mexico all go to the United States. This is not our problem. We have been cooperating with the United States for many years on these issues because they’ve asked us to and because we have a friendly, trustful relationship. If that relationship disappears, the reasons for cooperation also disappear.

The implications are astoundingly clear – Mexico would consider exporting chaos and violence into the United States as a form of payback for immigration restrictions and controls against the instability that the southern border has brought to the country for decades.

Trump Gave the Body Politic an Immigration Enema

kunstler |  It’s only taken a week for President Trump to give the body politic an immigration enema. The aim, perhaps, was to flush out a set of bad ideas that Barack Obama had managed over eight years to instate as “normal.” Namely, that it’s unnecessary to enforce the immigration laws, or cruel and unusual to do so, or that national borders are a barbarous anachronism, or that federal laws are optional in certain self-selected jurisdictions.

But Trump’s staff sure fucked up the details carrying out his refugee and immigration ban, most particularly detaining people with green cards, and those already granted visas. The blunder provoked an impressive blowback of airport protests, and finally a stay from a federal judge, which muddied the legality of Trump’s executive order — all in all, a tactical stumble for Prez DT, who apparently omitted to consult with an array of government agencies and their lawyers before issuing the decree at close-of-business Friday. For the record, I’m down with the complaint that Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and Afghanistan were left off the no-come list, since those lands produce more radical Islamic maniacs than anywhere else.

The reader by now probably detects my ambivalent feelings in this bundle of issues and grievances, so let me try to clarify my basic positions: I think borders matter and they need to be protected. I think our immigration law enforcement under Obama has been deeply dishonest and damaging to our politics in ways that go far beyond the question of who gets to come here. I believe we are under no obligation to take in everybody and anybody who wants to move here. I believe we need an official time out from the high-volume immigration of recent decades. I believe we have good reasons to be picky about who we let in.

The most dishonest and damaging trope of recent years is the widely-accepted idea on the Left that illegal immigrants are merely “undocumented” — as if they were the hapless victims of some clerical error made by the government and therefore deserving of a pass. Language matters. The acceptance and repetition of this lie has in effect given permission to the Left to lie whenever it suits their purposes about all kinds of things, for instance the delusion that Russia stole the election from Hillary Clinton and that Radical Islam doesn’t pose a threat to western values (or even exist). And it is certainly true that they are assisted by legacy media giants such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR. The Times, especially is keen to provoke a national crisis that might unseat Trump, by simply declaring it so in a three-column headline

CIA's Lying, Diseased Media Organ Goes After Tulsi Gabbard

WaPo |  The Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria has had a quiet but well-funded lobbying effort in Washington since well before he began murdering his own people. But that influence campaign’s clearest triumph came only this month, when it succeeded in bringing Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) to Damascus and having her parrot Assad’s propaganda on her return.

Gabbard was not the first U.S. elected official to meet Assad. In the early years of Assad’s presidency, several senior U.S. lawmakers publicly traveled to see the young English-speaking optometrist-turned-ruler, in the hope that he might be a reformer, break with Iran and even make peace with Israel. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) visited Assad in 2007. Then-Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) led a delegation in 2009.

After the killing began in 2011, however, Assad’s friends in Washington largely went underground and a covert influence and intimidation campaign blossomed. The FBI began investigating Syrian ambassador Imad Moustapha, due to evidence he was keeping tabs on Syrian Americans who showed disloyalty so the Syrian government could threaten their families back home. Moustapha departed for Beijing in 2012, but he left in place a network of friends, Syrian Americans who nurtured close ties to the regime and worked on Assad’s behalf.

BCG and Google Behind India's Ban on Cash

Washingtonsblog |  Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the omnipresent US-consulting company, and Google, the global data miner, issued a joint report in July 2016 on the “$500 bn Pot of Gold”, which is the Indian digital payment market. Even though the authors deny it, the report gives much reason to suspect that the authors knew that something radical was imminent from the Indian government. The report is remarkably honest about the aims of the whole exercise.

There is no statement in the BCG-Google-report “Digital Payments 2020” to the effect that it is related to the joint initiative of USAID and the Indian ministry of finance, formally established in 2015, to push back the use of cash and promote digital payments. Rather it is presented as a freestanding initiative of BCG and Google. I reached out to one of the authors, BCG’s senior partner Alpesh Shah, to ask about this and he insisted:  “This was a joint BCG-Google report, with no connection / relation to USAID/Indian Ministry of Finance.” However, there is much to suggest that there was a connection. First of all, the subject so perfectly fits with the program of that partnership. The subtitle of the report is “The Making of a $500 bn ecosystem in India”. The steering committee for the report included a representative of Visa, member of the Better Than Cash Alliance together with USAID and affiliate of the partnership of USAID and Indian finance ministry to advance digital payments. It also included PayTM and Vodafone, which are also part of the CATALYST coalition, a project, which according to USAID, is a “next step” in said partnership of USAID and the Indian finance ministry.

The report is a call to arms for all payment service providers. They are alerted that things are going to be shaken up in India. On page three it says:

 “We expect the digital payments space to witness significant disruption in the days ahead.”

The disruption came on November 8, when Prime Minister Modi decreed that most of the cash notes by value were no longer legal means of payment. By itself, the remark about the “disruption in the days ahead” might be considered suggestive but weak evidence that BCG and Google new something of those plans. However, combine this with the fact that they forecast a tenfold increase of digital payments and of the merchant acceptance network by 2020 without giving any real compelling reason why such an unlikely development should come to pass.

Democrat Losers: Pathologically Incapable of Getting It

Counterpunch |  In 2008, the American people overwhelmingly voted for “change” in Washington. They never got it. Hence, Trump. To pretend that there’s not a straight line connecting the failed policies of Barack Obama and the subsequent rise of Donald John Trump, is to ignore the obvious and to shrug off responsibility for the situation the country is in today.

Obama created Trump, the man didn’t simply appear from the ether. Had Obama acted in good faith and kept his promises to shake up the status quo, end the foreign wars, restore civil liberties, hold Wall Street accountable or relieve the economic insecurity that working families across the country now feel, Hillary Clinton would have been a shoe-in on November 8th. As it happens, Obama made no effort to achieve any of these goals, which is why Hillary was defeated in the biggest political upset of the last century.

The point we need to underscore here, is that the Democratic leadership is responsible for Trump, not the working class people in the red states who merely did what they had to do to effect change.  These people can’t be blamed for voting their own best interests. That’s what people do. Had Obama done anything to genuinely improve the economy, things might have turned out differently. But he didn’t, in fact– as popular as Obama was– a full two thirds of the American people thought the country was headed in the wrong direction. In other words, the election was a referendum on Obama’s performance as the primary steward of the US economy. Obama lost that referendum.

Even so, the DNC could have reloaded and taken a different approach to the economy under Hillary. They didn’t. They thought the “recovery” meme was effective enough to put them over the finish line. But it wasn’t effective enough, because too many people saw that the recovery was a fraud, that there was no recovery,  it was all a slick Madison Avenue public relations campaign aimed at concealing the fact that Obama had restructured the US economy in a way that deliberately kept growth at-or-below 2 percent so the Fed could continue pumping cheap money to its constituents on Wall Street while everyone else saw their personal debtload grow, their retirement savings vanish, and their standards of living slip.  Isn’t that what really happened? Obama’s grand restructuring project has resulted in perennial economic stagnation and widespread pessimism about the future. The former president  oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from working class people to parasitic plutocrats in the history of the nation. It wasn’t an accident. Obama was following a blueprint that was given to him by his handlers at the DNC.

So now the country is to be led by a brash billionaire reality TV celebrity who has no previous political experience and who seems unusually sensitive to any kind of personal criticism. Not surprisingly, there’s no sign that the Democratic leadership feels any responsibility for this extraordinary development.

Why is that? Why hasn’t anyone in the DNC admitted their failure, admitted that they didn’t accurately gage the mood of the country or the hunger for change? Why haven’t they acknowledged that putting the most untrustworthy candidate of all time –a thoroughly dislikable, warmongering harridan– on the ticket was a mistake? Why?

It’s because this vile collection of corporate Dems who run the party are incapable of self reflection, right? It’s because the Podesta throng — who still hold the party in their deathgrip –truly believe that bamboozling their base with Potemkin executives like Barack Obama, is a terrific model for running the government. They think Obama’s tenure as president was a success story, mainly because  his grandiloquent bloviating and larking around on stage with sleeves rolled up like an overpaid athlete– diverted attention from the trillions of dollars  that were being sluiced to the banking whores on Wall Street. Isn’t that why the Dems haven’t changed?