Have Iran And Russia Set A Trap In Palestine?

thecradle  |    Hamas has called on the millions of Palestinians in the diaspora, as well as the whole Arab world and all lands of Islam, to unite. Slowly but surely, a pattern may be discerned: could the Arab world – and great swathes of Islam – be on the verge of significantly uniting to avenge their own “century of humiliation” – much as the Chinese did after WWII with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping? Beijing, via its sophisticated diplomacy, is certainly hinting at it to key players, even before the ground-breaking, Russia-China brokered Iran-Saudi rapprochement was struck earlier this year. That by itself won’t thwart the perpetual US neocon obsession to bomb critical infrastructure in Iran. Worth less than zero when it comes to military science, these neocons ignore how Iranian retaliation would – accurately – target each and every US base in Iraq and Syria, with the Persian Gulf an open case.

Peerless Russian military analyst Andrei Martyanov has shown what could happen to those expensive American iron bathtubs in the Eastern Mediterranean in case of an Israeli-threatened attack on Iran. Moreover, there are at least 1,000 US troops in northern Syria stealing the country’s oil – which would also become an instant target. Ali Fadavi, IRGC’s deputy commander-in-chief, cut to the chase: “We have technologies in the military field that no one knows about, and the Americans will know about them when we use them.” Cue to Iranian hypersonic Fattah missiles – cousins to the Khinzal and the DF-27 – traveling at Mach 15, and able to reach any target in Israel in 400 seconds. And add to it sophisticated Russian electronic warfare (EW). As confirmed in Moscow six months ago, when it comes to military interconnection, the Iranians told the Russians at the same table, “whatever you need, just ask.”

The same applies vice-versa, because the mutual enemy is one and the same. The heart of the matter in any Russian-Iran strategy is the Strait of Hormuz, through which transits at least 20 percent of the world’s oil (nearly 17 million barrels a day) plus 18 percent of liquified natural gas (LNG), which amounts to at least 3.5 billion cubic feet a day. Iran is able to block the Strait of Hormuz in a flash. For starters, that would be some sort of poetic justice retribution for Israel aiming to gobble up, illegally, all the multibillion-dollar natural gas discovered offshore Gaza: this is, incidentally, one of the absolutely key reasons for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Yet the real deal will be to bring down the Wall Street-engineered $618 trillion derivative structure, as confirmed for years by analysts at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, as well as independent Persian Gulf energy traders.

So when push comes to shove – and way beyond the defense of Palestine and in a scenario of Total War – not only Russia-Iran but key players of the Arab world about to become members of BRICS 11 – such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE – do have what it takes to bring down the US financial system anytime they choose. As an old school Deep State higher up, now in business in Central Europe, stresses: “The Islamic nations have the economic advantage. They can blow up the international financial system by cutting off the oil. They do not have to fire a single shot. Iran and Saudi Arabia are allying together. The 2008 crisis took 29 trillion dollars to solve but this one, should it happen, could not be solved even with 100 trillion dollars of fiat instruments.” As Persian Gulf traders told me, one possible scenario is OPEC starting to sanction Europe, first from Kuwait and then spreading from one OPEC country to another and to all countries that are treating the Muslim world as enemies and war fodder.

The Dollar Is Finally Being Dethroned

unherd  |  In short, America is bankrupt. Our governments from the federal level down, our big corporations and a very large number of our well-off citizens have run up gargantuan debts, which can only be serviced given direct or indirect access to the flows of unearned wealth the US extracted from the rest of the planet. Those debts cannot be paid off, and many of them can’t even be serviced for much longer. The only options are defaulting on them or inflating them out of existence, and in either case, arrangements based on familiar levels of expenditure will no longer be possible. Since the arrangements in question include most of what counts as an ordinary lifestyle in today’s US, the impact of their dissolution will be severe.

In effect, the 5% of us in this country are going to have to go back to living the way we did before 1945. If we still had the factories, the trained workforce, the abundant natural resources and the thrifty habits we had back then, that would have been a wrenching transition but not a debacle. The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have those things anymore. The factories were shut down in the offshoring craze of the Seventies and Eighties, when the imperial economy slammed into overdrive, and the trained workforce was handed over to malign neglect.

We’ve still got some of the natural resources, but nothing like what we once had. The thrifty habits? Those went whistling down the wind a long time ago. In the late stages of an empire, exploiting flows of unearned wealth from abroad is far more profitable than trying to produce wealth at home, and most people direct their efforts accordingly. That’s how you end up with the typical late-imperial economy, with a governing class that flaunts fantastic levels of paper wealth, a parasite class of hangers-on that thrive by catering to the very rich or staffing the baroque bureaucratic systems that permeate public and private life, and the vast majority of the population impoverished, sullen, and unwilling to lift a finger to save their soi-disant betters from the consequences of their own actions.

The good news is that there’s a solution to all this. The bad news is that it’s going to take a couple of decades of serious turmoil to get there. The solution is that the US economy will retool itself to produce earned wealth in the form of real goods and non-financial services. That’ll happen inevitably as the flows of unearned wealth falter, foreign goods become unaffordable to most Americans, and it becomes profitable to produce things here in the US again. The difficulty, of course, is that most of a century of economic and political choices meant to support our former imperial project are going to have to be undone.

The most obvious example? The metastatic bloat of government, corporate and non-profit managerial jobs in American life. That’s a sensible move in an age of empire, as it funnels money into the consumer economy, which provides what jobs exist for the impoverished classes. Public and private offices alike teem with legions of office workers whose labour contributes nothing to national prosperity but whose pay cheques prop up the consumer sector. That bubble is already losing air. It’s indicative that Elon Musk, after his takeover of Twitter, fired some 80% of that company’s staff; other huge internet combines are pruning their workforce in the same way, though not yet to the same degree.

The recent hullaballoo about artificial intelligence is helping to amplify the same trend. Behind the chatbots are programs called large language models (LLMs), which are very good at imitating the more predictable uses of human language. A very large number of office jobs these days spend most of their time producing texts that fall into that category: contracts, legal briefs, press releases, media stories and so on. Those jobs are going away. Computer coding is even more amenable to LLM production, so you can kiss a great many software jobs goodbye as well. Any other form of economic activity that involves assembling predictable sequences of symbols is facing the same crunch. A recent paper by Goldman Sachs estimates that something like 300 million jobs across the industrial world will be wholly or partly replaced by LLMs in the years immediately ahead.

Another technology with similar results is CGI image creation. Levi’s announced not long ago that all its future catalogues and advertising will use CGI images instead of highly-paid models and photographers. Expect the same thing to spread generally. Oh, and Hollywood’s next. We’re not too far from the point at which a program can harvest all the footage of Marilyn Monroe from her films, and use that to generate new Marilyn Monroe movies for a tiny fraction of what it costs to hire living actors, camera crews and the rest. The result will be a drastic decrease in high-paying jobs across a broad swathe of the economy.

The outcome of all this? Well, one lot of pundits will insist at the top of their lungs that nothing will change in any way that matters, and another lot will start shrieking that the apocalypse is upon us. Those are the only two options our collective imagination can process these days. Of course, neither of those things will actually happen.

What will happen instead is that the middle and upper-middle classes in the US, and in many other countries, will face the same kind of slow demolition that swept over the working classes of those same countries in the late 20th century. Layoffs, corporate bankruptcies, declining salaries and benefits, and the latest high-tech version of NO HELP WANTED signs will follow one another at irregular intervals. All the businesses that make money catering to these same classes will lose their incomes as well, a piece at a time. Communities will hollow out the way the factory towns of America’s Rust Belt and the English Midlands did half a century ago, but this time it will be the turn of upscale suburbs and fashionable urban neighbourhoods to collapse as the income streams that supported them disappear.

 

George Santos Insists He's Still Gay And Jewish

NYTimes |  George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.

His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.

But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.

Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.

There was also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Mr. Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: The Internal Revenue Service could locate no record of a registered charity with that name.

His financial disclosure forms suggest a life of some wealth. He lent his campaign more than $700,000 during the midterm election, has donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the last two years and reported a $750,000 salary and over $1 million in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization.

Yet the firm, which has no public website or LinkedIn page, is something of a mystery. On a campaign website, Mr. Santos once described Devolder as his “family’s firm” that managed $80 million in assets. On his congressional financial disclosure, he described it as a capital introduction consulting company, a type of boutique firm that serves as a liaison between investment funds and deep-pocketed investors. But Mr. Santos’s disclosures did not reveal any clients, an omission three election law experts said could be problematic if such clients exist.

And while Mr. Santos has described a family fortune in real estate, he has not disclosed, nor could The Times find, records of his properties.

The Twitter Drop Elicited Orchestrated Subjective Responses

mediaite |  27 tweets that are essentially identical

Construct Tweet: [Say formerly respected or once great, etc.] Matt Taibbi [call it PR or comms or like that] for the [world’s richest man, the richest person in the world, so on]. Quote tweet thread.
eg
Wajahat Ali
@WajahatAli
·
Follow
Matt Taibbi…what sad, disgraceful downfall. I swear, kids, he did good work back in the day. Should be a cautionary tale for everyone. Selling your soul for the richest white nationalist on Earth. Well, he’ll eat well for the rest of his life I guess. But is it worth it?

Watching some of the most famous, most powerful and richest men red-pill themselves into disaster. Pretty wild!

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 2, 2022

Imagine volunteering to do online PR work for the world's richest man on a Friday night, in service of nakedly and cynically right-wing narratives, and then pretending you're speaking truth to power.

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) December 3, 2022

From calling Goldman Sachs a “vampire squid” to giving free PR to the world’s richest billionaire. Man, what a career journey

— Simon Owens (@simonowens) December 3, 2022

Finance Won The Darwinian Struggle On The Corporatist Evolutionary Threshing Floor

theatlantic |  Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world’s most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.

In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin, once the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as Treasury secretary under Clinton, and later became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee. Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury secretary under George W.Bush. John Snow, Paulson’s predecessor, left to become chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan Greenspan, after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant to Pimco, perhaps the biggest player in international bond markets.

These personal connections were multiplied many times over at the lower levels of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the ties between Washington and Wall Street. It has become something of a tradition for Goldman Sachs employees to go into public service after they leave the firm. The flow of Goldman alumni—including Jon Corzine, now the governor of New Jersey, along with Rubin and Paulson—not only placed people with Wall Street’s worldview in the halls of power; it also helped create an image of Goldman (inside the Beltway, at least) as an institution that was itself almost a form of public service.

Wall Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an air of power. Its executives truly believe that they control the levers that make the world go round. A civil servant from Washington invited into their conference rooms, even if just for a meeting, could be forgiven for falling under their sway. Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.

A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Alan Greenspan’s pronouncements in favor of unregulated financial markets are well known. Yet Greenspan was hardly alone. This is what Ben Bernanke, the man who succeeded him, said in 2006: “The management of market risk and credit risk has become increasingly sophisticated. … Banking organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to measure and manage risks.”

Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t. AIG’s Financial Products division, for instance, made $2.5 billion in pretax profits in 2005, largely by selling underpriced insurance on complex, poorly understood securities. Often described as “picking up nickels in front of a steamroller,” this strategy is profitable in ordinary years, and catastrophic in bad ones. As of last fall, AIG had outstanding insurance on more than $400 billion in securities. To date, the U.S. government, in an effort to rescue the company, has committed about $180 billion in investments and loans to cover losses that AIG’s sophisticated risk modeling had said were virtually impossible.

Wall Street’s seductive power extended even (or especially) to finance and economics professors, historically confined to the cramped offices of universities and the pursuit of Nobel Prizes. As mathematical finance became more and more essential to practical finance, professors increasingly took positions as consultants or partners at financial institutions. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, Nobel laureates both, were perhaps the most famous; they took board seats at the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1994, before the fund famously flamed out at the end of the decade. But many others beat similar paths. This migration gave the stamp of academic legitimacy (and the intimidating aura of intellectual rigor) to the burgeoning world of high finance.

The Special Military Operation Seeks To End Decades Of Khazarian Deviltry

thesaker  |  Make no mistake about it: The tragic war that is currently taking place on Ukrainian battlefields is not between the Russian Federation and the Ukraine, but between the Russian Federation and the US-controlled NATO. The latter, also called ‘the collective West’, promotes an aggressive ideology of organised violence, a politically- economically- and militarily-enforced doctrine euphemistically known as ‘Globalism’. This means hegemony by the Western world, which arrogantly calls itself ‘the international community’, over the whole planet. NATO is losing that war, which uses NATO-trained Ukrainians as its proxy cannon fodder, in three spheres, political, economic and military.

Firstly, politically, the West has finally understood that it cannot execute regime change in Moscow. Its pipedream of replacing the highly popular President Putin with is CIA stooge Navalny is not going to happen. As for the West’s puppet-president in Kiev, he is only a creature of Washington and its oligarchs. A professional actor, he is unable to speak for himself, but is a spokesman for the NATO which he loves.

Secondly, economically, the West faces serious resistance to the 6,000 sanctions it has imposed on Russia and Russians. Those sanctions have backfired. In the West, we can testify to this every time we buy fuel or food. The combination of high inflation (10% +) and even higher energy prices, caused almost solely by these illegal anti-Russian sanctions, are threatening the collapse of Western economies, much more than threatening Russia or China. As a result of this reverse effect of sanctions against Russia, the rouble is at a three-year high, standing at about 64 to the US dollar and rising, though immediately after the sanctions it had briefly gone down to 150 to the dollar.

After strenuously denying that they would do it, already most countries in Europe (at least 17 for now), including Germany and Italy, have agreed to open accounts with Gazprombank, as Russia advised them to do and to pay for oil and gas in roubles. And this number is growing by the week. The problems will be even greater with food shortages, as the world food chain is highly integrated and the agricultural production of Russia and the Ukraine (now controlled by Russia) is at least 40% of the world’s grain production.  Just days ago it was announced that Russia expects record grain production this year (130 million tonnes). Russia may yet demand payment in roubles for all this as well.

The sanctions against Russia have divided Europe and are threatening to divide NATO.  President Erdogan of Turkey, a NATO member, has announced that he would veto the entry to NATO of Finland and Sweden into NATO. At the same time, Russia has announced that it will cut off Finland’s natural gas supply. Swedish leaders are re-thinking their entry to NATO.

Thirdly, militarily, it is clear that the Ukraine, with huge numbers of desertions and surrenders, has no chance of winning the war against Russia. Most of its military equipment has already been wiped out and newly-delivered and often antiquated Western equipment will make little difference, even if it is not destroyed by Russian missiles as soon as it reaches the Ukraine. The conflict could now be over within weeks, rather than months. The US ‘Defense Secretary’ (= Minister for Offense), Lloyd Austin, has desperately called the Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu to beg for a ceasefire. Would you agree to a ceasefire when in less than three months and with only 10% of your military forces you have already occupied an area greater than England inside the Ukraine, an area that produces 75% of Ukrainian GDP?

The panic of financial disaster in the West has begun to set in. As a result, the French President Macron has told President Zelensky (that is, told Washington) to give up part of Ukraine’s sovereignty and at last start serious negotiations with Russia. Macron is also trying to free French mercenaries from Azovstal in Mariupol, but the problem is much bigger than this, as the whole of Europe is facing economic meltdown. And the Italian Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, has asked President Biden to contact President Putin and ‘give peace a chance’. Note that Mario Draghi is a former president of the European Central Bank and a Goldman Sachs puppet – just as Macron is a Rothschild puppet.

There have always been empires and invasions throughout history. However, they have always been local and not been justified as the only possible global ideology, a ‘New World Order’, to be imposed by violence all over the planet. After the NATO war is over, lost by ‘the collective West’, NATO Centralism, the ideology of a ‘Unipolar World’, controlled from Washington, must end. However, Centralism must also come to an end everywhere else, like that under Soviet-period Moscow (1).

Nobody Thought The "Rules-Based" World Order Would Give Way This Fast...,

thesaker  |  So I am somewhat chagrined as I watch the speed at which this U.S.-centered financialized system has de-dollarized over the span of just a year or two. The basic theme of my Super Imperialism has been how, for the past fifty years, the U.S. Treasury-bill standard has channeled foreign savings to U.S. financial markets and banks, giving Dollar Diplomacy a free ride. I thought that de-dollarization would be led by China and Russia moving to take control of their economies to avoid the kind of financial polarization that is imposing austerity on the United States.^[2] But U.S. officials are forcing Russia, China and other nations not locked into the U.S. orbit to see the writing on the wall and overcome whatever hesitancy they had to de-dollarize.

I had expected that the end of the dollarized imperial economy would come about by other countries breaking away. But that is not what has happened. U.S. diplomats themselves have chosen to end international dollarization, while helping Russia build up its own means of self-reliant agricultural and industrial production. This global fracture process actually has been going on for some years, starting with the sanctions blocking America’s NATO allies and other economic satellites from trading with Russia. For Russia, these sanctions had the same effect that protective tariffs would have had.

Russia had remained too enthralled by free-market neoliberal ideology to take steps to protect its own agriculture and industry. The United States provided the help that was needed by imposing domestic self-reliance on Russia. When the Baltic states obeyed American sanctions and lost the Russian market for their cheese and other farm products, Russia quickly created its own cheese and dairy sector – while becoming the world’s leading grain exporter.

Russia is discovering (or is on the verge of discovering) that it does not need U.S. dollars as backing for the ruble’s exchange rate. Its central bank can create the rubles needed to pay domestic wages and finance capital formation. The U.S. confiscations of its dollar and euro reserves may finally lead Russia to end its adherence to neoliberal monetary philosophy, as Sergei Glaziev has long been advocating, in favor of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

The same dynamic of undercutting ostensible U.S aims has occurred with U.S. sanctions against the leading Russian billionaires. The neoliberal shock therapy and privatizations of the 1990s left Russian kleptocrats with only one way to cash out on the assets they had grabbed from the public domain. That was to incorporate their takings and sell their shares in London and New York. Domestic savings had been wiped out, and U.S. advisors persuaded Russia’s central bank not to create its own ruble money.

The result was that Russia’s national oil, gas and mineral patrimony was not used to finance a rationalization of Russian industry and housing. Instead of the revenue from privatization being invested to create new Russian means of protection, it was burned up on nouveau-riche acquisitions of luxury British real estate, yachts and other global flight-capital assets. But the effect of sanctions making the dollar, sterling and euro holdings of Russian billionaires hostage has been to make the City of London too risky a venue in which to hold their assets – and for the wealthy of any other nation potentially subject to U.S. sanctions. By imposing sanctions on the richest Russians closest to Putin, U.S. officials hoped to induce them to oppose his breakaway from the West, and thus to serve effectively as NATO agents-of-influence. But for Russian billionaires, their own country is starting to look safest.

For many decades now, the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury have fought against gold recovering its role in international reserves. But how will India and Saudi Arabia view their dollar holdings as Biden and Blinken try to strong-arm them into following the U.S. “rules-based order” instead of their own national self-interest? The recent U.S. dictates have left little alternative but to start protecting their own political autonomy by converting dollar and euro holdings into gold as an asset free from political liability of being held hostage to the increasingly costly and disruptive U.S. demands.

U.S. diplomacy has rubbed Europe’s nose in its abject subservience by telling its governments to have their companies dump their Russian assets for pennies on the dollar after Russia’s foreign reserves were blocked and the ruble’s exchange rate plunged. Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and other U.S. investors moved quickly to buy up what Shell Oil and other foreign companies were unloading.

Public Opinion Has Zero-Impact On U.S. Law

upworthy |  Their study took data from nearly 2,000 public-opinion surveys and compared what the people wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America has essentially no impact at all.

Put another way, and I'll just quote the Princeton study directly here:

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

Really think about that for a second.

If you've ever felt like your opinion doesn't matter and that the government doesn't really care what you think, well … you're right.

But, of course, there's a catch.

...unless you're an "economic elite."

If there's one thing that still reliably gets politicians' attention, it's money. While the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America have a "statistically non-significant impact," Gilens and Page found that economic elites, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists still carry major influence.

How could it be that our government, designed to function as a representative democracy, is only good at representing such a small fraction of the population? Just follow the money.

Why? Because purchasing political influence is 100% legal.

For example: Let's say a big bank wants a law that would force taxpayers to bail them out again if they repeat the exact same reckless behavior that crashed the global economy in 2008.

It's perfectly legal for our bank to hire a team of lobbyists whose entire job is to make sure the government gives the bank what it wants. Then, those lobbyists can track down members of Congress who regulate banks and help raise a ton of money for their re-election campaigns. Its also perfectly legal for those lobbyists to offer those same politicians million-dollar jobs at their lobbying firms.

Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kansas), shown speaking at an event in 2012, recently attached language originally drafted by lobbyists for CitiGroup to a financial services appropriations bill. Members of Congress who voted "yes" on the bill received, on average, 2.8 times more money from the PACs of CitiGroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase than members who voted "no." Image by Information Technology Innovation Foundation/Flickr.

They can also literally write the language of this new bailout law themselves, then hand it off to the politicians they just buttered up with campaign money and lucrative job offers. And it's perfectly legal for those politicians to sneak the lobbyist-written language through Congress at the last second.

If that example sounds oddly specific, that's because it happened in December 2014. And it happens all the time, on almost every single issue, with politicians of both parties.

Is Capitalism Succumbing to Techno Feudalism?

yanisvaroufakis |  This is how capitalism ends: not with a revolutionary bang, but with an evolutionary whimper. Just as it displaced feudalism gradually, surreptitiously, until one day the bulk of human relations were market-based and feudalism was swept away, so capitalism today is being toppled by a new economic mode: techno-feudalism.

 capitalism has undergone extreme makeovers at least twice since the late nineteenth century. Its first major transformation, from its competitive guise to oligopoly, occurred with the second industrial revolution, when electromagnetism ushered in the large networked corporations and the megabanks necessary to finance them. Ford, Edison, and Krupp replaced Adam Smith’s baker, brewer, and butcher as history’s prime movers. The ensuing boisterous cycle of mega-debts and mega-returns eventually led to the crash of 1929, the New Deal, and, after World War II, the Bretton Woods system – which, with all its constraints on finance, provided a rare period of stability.

The end of Bretton Woods in 1971 unleashed capitalism’s second transformation. As America’s growing trade deficit became the world’s provider of aggregate demand – sucking in the net exports of Germany, Japan, and, later, China – the US powered capitalism’s most energetic globalization phase, with a steady flow of German, Japanese, and, later, Chinese profits back into Wall Street financing it all.

To play their role, however, Wall Street functionaries demanded emancipation from all of the New Deal and Bretton Woods constraints. With deregulation, oligopolistic capitalism morphed into financialized capitalism. Just as Ford, Edison, and Krupp had replaced Smith’s baker, brewer, and butcher, capitalism’s new protagonists were Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Lehman Brothers.

While these radical transformations had momentous repercussions (the Great Depression, WWII, the Great Recession, and the post-2009 Long Stagnation), they did not alter capitalism’s main feature: a system driven by private profit and rents extracted through some market.

Yes, the transition from Smithian to oligopoly capitalism boosted profits inordinately and allowed conglomerates to use their massive market power (that is, their newfound freedom from competition) to extract large rents from consumers. Yes, Wall Street extracted rents from society by market-based forms of daylight robbery. Nevertheless, both oligopoly and financialized capitalism were driven by private profits boosted by rents extracted through some market – one cornered by, say, General Electric or Coca-Cola, or conjured up by Goldman Sachs.

Then, after 2008, everything changed. Ever since the G7’s central banks coalesced in April 2009 to use their money printing capacity to re-float global finance, a deep discontinuity emerged. Today, the global economy is powered by the constant generation of central bank money, not by private profit. Meanwhile, value extraction has increasingly shifted away from markets and onto digital platforms, like Facebook and Amazon, which no longer operate like oligopolistic firms, but rather like private fiefdoms or estates.

Americans Need To Wake Up And Realize Where What Little Power We Have Lies!!!

power-grid |  Worldwide, similar experiences occur when electric utilities deregulate. Percentage increases in residential electricity prices from 2000 to 2010, as a result of deregulation and privatization of electric utilities, in the following countries are:

Chile, +166 percent; Canada, +72 percent; Czech Republic, +133 percent; Ireland, +100 percent; Hungary, +117 percent; Norway, +106 percent; New Zealand, +203 percent; Sweden, +88 percent; U.S., +42 percent; and the U.K., +86 percent. Electricity price increases globally after deregulation far exceed general price and wage gains, making the general population poorer but power generators and retailers richer.

Cold weather during February 2011 and ineffective weatherization that did not protect the plants caused many Texas electric power plants to shut down. Electricity prices spiked much higher, and Texas experienced prolonged and frequent rolling blackouts that primarily affected residential customers.

During another Texas cold snap in January 2014, two large power plants unexpectedly closed down because of incomplete weatherization, which resulted in the danger of rolling blackouts. As a result, Texas wholesale electricity market prices spiked higher–from a usual $30 to $100 per megawatt-hour to more than $4,500 per megawatt-hour. Under existing rules, all generators receive the same $4,500 per megawatt-hour regardless of their average costs.

The current incentives in electricity markets harm residential electricity consumers. Texas electricity generators, with multiple plants on the interconnection grid, receive much more money if they do not weatherize a few of their plants properly. As a consequence, these poorly weatherized plants must shut down during cold weather. All generating plants that remain online receive the spiking electricity prices, and the generating company makes much more money than if all their plants were operating properly. This is only one way privatizers are gaming the Texas electricity market: using laws and rules set up by their lobbyists.

Seven years ago at the top of the most recent credit bubble, it was believed that electricity prices would rise dramatically. Consequently, privatizers overpaid when purchasing electric utilities. Instead, U.S. natural gas prices unexpectedly dropped–a result of the nationwide shale gas fracking boom – and pushed many privatized Texas electricity generating companies into bankruptcy.

Houston-based Dynegy Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection in July 2012. Edison Mission Energy, which operated electric generating plants in 12 states, filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2012 and exited Chapter 11 in March 2014, when the company sold for $2.64 billion to NRG Energy, which has operations headquarters in Houston. Texas electricity generating company Optim Energy LLC – which is owned by ECJV Holdings LLC, which is owned by Cascade Investment LLC, a Bill Gates investment company – filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 2014.

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Texas Pacific Group and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners took TXU – at that time, the main electricity supplier in Texas – private in 2007 in the largest private equity leveraged buyout (LBO) on record and renamed the new company Energy Future Holdings Corp. (EFHC), headquartered in Dallas. In one of the largest nonfinancial bankruptcies in history, EFHC filed a prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2014.

Although these generating companies are dealing with bankruptcies, they cannot plan for and invest in new power plants to meet expected electricity demand in Texas. This results in below-standard reserve margins, which threaten Texas electricity supply and system reliability.

The North American Electric Reliability Corp.’s (NERC‘s) goal is to safeguard North America’s electric power system reliability. The nonprofit reports on insufficient electrical power level capacity during peak load periods. Energy emergency alerts indicate electrical capacity shortfalls and are a leading indicator of inadequate system reliability. Texas is under increasing stress and has had three NERC Energy Emergency Alert 2 incidents and two more serious NERC Energy Emergency Alert 3 incidents since 2006.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ (ERCOT‘s) reserve margin forecasts for 2014-2023 are used as an indicator of Texas’ electrical system reliability. ERCOT’s forecast reserve margins show that Texas will fall significantly below the NERC reference reserve margin standard of 13.75 percent beginning in 2015 and continuing through 2023. New electric power plants are not being built fast enough to keep up with growing electricity demand in Texas because of the deregulation and privatization of Texas electric utilities. NERC and ERCOT predict the increased probability of brownouts and rolling blackouts in Texas.

Short Seller Hedge Funds Were The Good Guys In Gamestop Pissant Insurrection...,

WaPo  |  The particular targets of the GameStop crowd are hedge funds and short sellers. Here, a couple of definitions may be useful. Generally speaking, a hedge fund is a small-to-medium-size company that makes money by choosing smart investments. There is nothing nefarious about this. To the contrary, if you don’t like too-big-to-fail banks that get backstopped by taxpayers, small-enough-to-fail hedge funds ought to be celebrated. If you worry about complex financial conglomerates with corrupting conflicts of interest, single-purpose investment boutiques are simpler and healthier. On the online forums where the GameStoppers congregate, you read complaints about hedge funds being bailed out during the crisis of 2008. Actually, banks, brokers, insurers, mortgage providers, money market funds and even car companies got rescues. Hedge funds got nothing.

What about short sellers? These are specialists who research stocks that might go down, sometimes because bosses are illegally covering up bad news about their companies. When short sellers identify a case of fraud or similar, they borrow and sell the stock, hoping to buy it back at a lower price later. Again, there is nothing evil about this. To the contrary, it’s a way of keeping prices honest. A market without short sellers is like a political system without investigative journalists.

This, however, is not how GameStoppers see things. They have gone after a short seller named Andrew Left, hacking into his social media accounts, sharing his personal information online, ordering dozens of pizzas to be delivered to his home in the middle of the night, and texting his children with threatening and profane language, according to the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps not surprisingly, Left has announced he will stop playing the game. Irrational stock prices will be that much likelier.

The worry is that the GameStoppers will now target others. Short sellers operate in the open: You can check short-selling volumes for any given stock on Yahoo. By whipping up frenzied buying of a heavily shorted company, speculators can cost the shorts billions and maybe put them out of business. Already, GameStoppers are buying other beaten-down companies, such as cinema giant AMC. A Goldman Sachs index of heavily shorted stocks is up sharply this month because the shorts have been routed.

Hedge funders and short sellers are out to get rich: They are certainly not angels. But there is a difference between trading based on evidence and research and trading based on conspiracy theories and mob tactics. Over the past week, it’s been tempting to celebrate the colorful rebels — they represent the democratization of finance, the revenge against the fat cats. Now it is time to remember that truth matters.

I Had No Idea Peter Strzok's Wife Melissa Hodgman Was The SEC's Insider Trading Point Man....,

CTH |  Most people who are not in the securities industry would NOT understand how this works. But Trump certainly does and Mnuchin definitely does. Bannon for sure understands this.

If you are a big trader – like Soros, Gates, Goldman Sachs, or a major bank – having inside information is a freebie – no risk – goldmine.

If you are a greedy political family like Pelosi, Clinton, Bushes, Feinstein, Burr, McCain, Obama; Biden Family – inside information is a freebie no risk goldmine for the entire family.

I guess if you are John Brennan or a foreign intelligence service, and you want to finance a nefarious off the books black op operation FOR FREE, outside of your normal budget, you can use inside information and stock trades to finance your operations.

What kind of inside information can be freely gleened from the NSA database? Correspondence between PUBLIC COMPANY CEO’s who are looking to do a merger, acquisition or spinoff of another public company; confidential audits of a company that may be in discussions to be acquired by a public company; confidential emails, phonecalls, texts between CEO’s, their accountants, their lawyers, their bankers, their competitors; their R & D department; their patent department.

Once the secret NSA information is obtained, stock trades are placed (by the ELITES and their families/cohorts) to capitalize and monetize the information. On any stock exchange anywhere in the world.

It would be great to have a securities lawyer or an outstanding journalist – who is familiar with insider securities trading – write an ariticle on this topic. So far, I have not seen anything. Everyone is too focused on the big distractions: russia, impeachment, racism, covid, election.

But my instincts tell me this is a BIG DEAL COVER UP. per Hillary, “If revealed, they will all hang.” They’s why the elites want Trump out so badly. This is about money & theft on a GRAND GLOBAL SCALE.

Han Elite Rule Epitomizes The Full Neoliberal And Surveillance Capitalist Agenda

strategic-culture |  For decades, we were led to believe that the world-system put in place after WWII provided the U.S. with unrivalled structural power. Now, all that’s left is structural fragility, grotesque inequalities, unpayable Himalayas of debt, and a rolling crisis.

No one is fooled anymore by the Fed’s magic quantitative easing powers, or the acronym salad – TALF, ESF, SPV – built into the Fed/U.S. Treasury exclusive obsession with big banks, corporations and the Goddess of the Market, to the detriment of the average American.

It was only a few months ago that a serious discussion evolved around the $2.5 quadrillion derivatives market imploding and collapsing the global economy, based on the price of oil skyrocketing, in case the Strait of Hormuz – for whatever reason – was shut down.

Now it’s about Great Depression 2.0: the whole system crashing as a result of the shutdown of the global economy. The questions are absolutely legitimate: is the political and social cataclysm of the global economic crisis arguably a larger catastrophe than Covid-19 itself?  And will it provide an opportunity to end neoliberalism and usher in a more equitable system, or something even worse?

 

Wall Street, of course, lives in an alternative universe. In a nutshell, Wall Street turned the Fed into a hedge fund. The Fed is going to own at least two thirds of all U.S. Treasury bills in the market before the end of 2020.

The U.S. Treasury will be buying every security and loan in sight while the Fed will be the banker – financing the whole scheme.

So essentially this is a Fed/Treasury merger. A behemoth dispensing loads of helicopter money.

And the winner is BlackRock—the biggest money manager on the planet, with tentacles everywhere, managing the assets of over 170 pension funds, banks, foundations, insurance companies, in fact a great deal of the money in private equity and hedge funds. BlackRock — promising to be fully  “transparent” — will buy these securities and manage those dodgy SPVs on behalf of the Treasury.

BlackRock, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink, may not be as big as Vanguard, but it’s the top investor in Goldman Sachs, along with Vanguard and State Street, and with $6.5 trillion in assets, bigger than Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank combined.

Now, BlackRock is the new operating system (OS) of the Fed and the Treasury. The world’s biggest shadow bank – and no, it’s not Chinese.

Compared to this high-stakes game, mini-scandals such as the one around Georgia Senator Kelly Loffler are peanuts. Loffler allegedly profited from inside information on Covid-19 by the CDC to make a stock market killing. Loffler is married to Jeffrey Sprecher – who happens to be the chairman of the NYSE, installed by Goldman Sachs.

While corporate media followed this story like headless chickens, post-Covid-19 plans, in Pentagon parlance, “move forward” by stealth.

The price? A meager $1,200 check per person for a month. Anyone knows that, based on median salary income, a typical American family would need $12,000 to survive for two months. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in an act of supreme effrontry, allows them a mere 10 percent of that. So American taxpayers will be left with a tsunami of debt while selected Wall Street players grab the whole loot, part of an unparalleled transfer of wealth upwards, complete with bankruptcies en masse of small and medium businesses.

Fink’s letter to his shareholders almost gives the game away: “I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.”

And right on cue, he forecasted that, “in the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant reallocation of capital.”

Bloomberg: Vampire Squids Are My Peeps - Defending The Squid My First Priority

independent |  Michael Bloomberg called Goldman Sachs bankers his ‘peeps’ and promised to defend them, leaked tape reveals. Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is being criticised for telling bankers he would have defended them as president in a leaked audio from a private Goldman Sachs event in 2016.

At the event, Mr Bloomberg first described the audience as his “peeps”, and said that had he run for president that year, his “first campaign platform” would have been “to defend the banks.”

But, he added, “you know how well that’s gonna go down in this country”.

Mr Bloomberg then defended the banks more seriously: “Somebody's gotta stand up and do what we need. A healthy banking system that's going to take risks because that's what creates the jobs for everybody. And nobody's willing to say that.”

The audio was uploaded to hosting platform Soundcloud and sent to CNN and several journalists. The sender used the email address and username “CancelGoldman”, and claimed to have worked at Goldman Sachs for 14 years.

The Bloomberg campaign has confirmed that the audio is real. In an email to CNN, spokesperson Stu Loeser said that much of what Mr Bloomberg said was in jest, and that his remarks were of an analytical standard almost unheard of in current politics.

Yanis Varoufakis Takedown Of Corporatist Facism Derails Amy Goodman's Propaganda

democracynow |  Look, Amy, in slaves-owning societies or in the Middle Ages, we had production. People worked, toiled the land. Then we had distribution. The lord would send his henchmen in, his sheriff, to take his cut. So you had distribution—production, distribution. The lord’s cut would then be sold in markets. He would get money out of it, and then you would have finance. So we had production, distribution, finance.

With capitalism, we had the reversal of that. First you’d get the debt, to set up the—you know, to employ people. So you have finance, then distribution, and the last thing that happens is production. So, debt is central to capitalism. Now, that means one thing: The banker, the financier, has an exorbitant privilege. He’s like the sorcerer who has the capacity to push his hand through the time line, snatch value from the future, that has not been produced yet, and bring it in to the present to help orchestrate the production that will create the value that will be repaid in the future. But, effectively, you’re creating a class of people, the financiers, who then have complete control over society. And they can keep doing this a lot more, until the present can no longer repay the future, and there is a huge crash. And then what happens? Because they have this privileged position, they can make you and me, President Obama, whoever, Larry Summers, bail them out. So, they win if their bets succeed, and they win if their bets lose. What kind of political economy is this, when you have one class of people who win, whatever they do, and everybody else loses, whatever they do?

AMY GOODMAN: Is this what you refer to the black magic of banking?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: That’s exactly right.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what’s the cure for this?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, the cure of this is, effectively, to do that which FDR did in the 1930s.

AMY GOODMAN: President Roosevelt.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: President Roosevelt—to put the financial genie back in the bottle. Make banking boring again. Put huge constraints upon them. Nationalize the banks and turn them into institutions for public purpose. And if even—you don’t necessarily need to nationalize, as long as you really keep them under strict control. Remember Bretton Woods, which designed the golden era of capitalism. Bretton Woods was a conference in 1944, and there 120 different countries agreed on the system which saw, in the 1950s and 1960s, the longest period of steady growth, with shrinking inequality and low unemployment and low inflation. FDR had one condition slapped onto membership of that Bretton Woods Conference. Do you know what it was? No banker was allowed in the Washington—the Mount Washington Hotel. So you had a monetary and financial system that was designed in the absence of bankers. That’s what we should do again.

AMY GOODMAN: What is apolitical money?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: In this country, you have a lot of people, good people, who are fed up with politicians, who are fed up with the Fed, and who believe that—they believe in true money, in honest money, that money should be somehow independent of the political process. Remember the gold standard? They still hanker after the gold standard. They would like the quantity of dollars printed to be linked to the quantity of gold that the Fed owns, so that there would be no political influence of the quantity of money, because they fear that—they fear the government will print too much money, and there will be inflation, and the value of money will be effectively eaten away—the gold bugs, as you call them in this country. Bitcoin—Bitcoin is a digital form of the gold standard. And so, the backlash against political control—

AMY GOODMAN: The Bitcoin folks are moving into Puerto Rico right now, has been devastated by Maria.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Of course it’s been devastated. But the solution is not Bitcoin.

AMY GOODMAN: But they’re moving in fast.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Yes, but it’s—you know, it’s just a bubble. It will burst. And the reason is, however much we loathe the political process because it is controlled by oligarchs and by the same old financiers who are behind the politicians who are bailing them out whenever the finance is needed—however much we dislike that, there is no alternative to political money. Why? Because the quantity of money must be in sync with the quantity of output of goods and services. If those two go out of sync, you have deflationary bouts. You have to—that will lead to depression. So, to put it very bluntly and simply, the quantity of money must be decided democratically. At the moment, it’s not being decided democratically. It’s decided politically, but oligarchically. The solution is not to take it and tie it to some algorithm.

AMY GOODMAN: In the United States, you—in the United States, you only refer to oligarchy when you’re talking about Russia, the oligarchs. But billionaire businessmen in the United States, you do not refer to as oligarchs.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: But the United States of America is the prime oligarchy. The difference between the United States of America and Russia is that the United States is a more successful oligarchy. But it is an oligarchy nevertheless.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, think of 2008. President Obama is sworn in on a wave of expectation by the victims of the financiers. And what does he do? First thing he does is he appoints Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, the very same people who had actually unshackled the financiers in the late 1990s, allowing them to do everything that brought so much discontent to the very same people who then entrusted President Obama. President Obama, very soon after that, lost his credibility with those people, and the result is Donald Trump. That’s an oligarchy.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, why is Donald Trump so fiercely opposed to President Obama—is it just racial?—given that he laid the groundwork for the oligarchs, for people like Donald Trump, if, in fact, he does have money?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, the ruling class has a fantastic capacity, like the working class, to be divided. Donald Trump was never in the pocket of Wall Street. He used Wall Street. He used Deutsche Bank. He used all the people he dislikes, in order to keep, effectively, bankrupting his companies and profiting from it. So he’s really very good at that. But he was never very successful as a businessman, certainly not as successful as Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan. And he was always on the margins of the capitalist order of things in the United States. He understood that in order for him to gain more power, more—both discursively and politically and economically, he had to ride the wave of discontent against Obama. And he did this magnificently. And the Democrats let him. The Democrats brought their own distress and failure upon themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: So I want to talk about the rise of the right, but go back to World War II—actually, between World War I and World War II in Germany. How do you see the growth of the support for Hitler and how he took power in Germany, going back to World War I and the devastation of Germany?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: The combination—the combination of a humiliated populace. The humiliation is very important, Amy. When you humiliate a whole people in the middle of a great depression, great economic crisis, you have a political crisis. So the political center implodes, which is what happened with the Weimar Republic, and then all sorts of political monsters ride up—rise up from that. We saw this in the 1920s, the 1930s, in the midwar period in Germany. But we saw it in—we see it in Greece today, after—do you know we have a Nazi party in Greek Parliament—in the country that, along with Yugoslavia, fought tooth and nail against Nazism in the 1940s. We had a magnificent resistance movement against Nazism. In that country now, the third-largest party is a—not a neo-Nazi party, fully old-fashioned Nazi party.

AMY GOODMAN: And this came into the Parliament when?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: They came into Parliament in 2012, at the time of a humiliated public in the clasp of a great depression, just like in Germany in the 1930s.

But allow me to make a point, because there is a great misunderstanding about Germany of the midwar period. Usually people say, “Oh, it was hyperinflation. It was the fact that prices were rising exponentially that brought Hitler to power.” Not true. It is true that hyperinflation depleted the middle class, effectively destroyed the middle class’s savings and shook the system and made the Weimar Republic extremely fragile and ready for the taking. But if you look at the electoral performance of the Nazi Party in Germany, there is a direct correlation, not with inflation, but with deflation. You had Chancellor Brüning, who in 1930 decided to slam the brakes on the economy and to use large doses of austerity in order to make inflation go away—a bit like Paul Volcker when he pushed interest rates up in the early '80s, remember, to 20-something percent—and a lot more fiscal austerity, not just monetary austerity. It was at that point when prices started falling in Germany. Prices started falling, and unemployment ballooned. And that is when you have a major jump in the support for Nazis. Deflation breeds fascism. And that is something that we've got to remember. And I’m making this point because, unfortunately, the European Union’s economic policies today are producing deflationary forces that are being exported to the United States and to China. And that does not augur well for progressive international politics.

AMY GOODMAN: So talk now about the far right in Europe and also in the United States. But in Europe, you’re talking about Poland, you’re talking about Hungary. You’ve got Golden Dawn, not to mention the Nazi party, in Greece.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Oh, that’s the Golden—the Golden Dawn is a Nazi party. That’s the Nazi party I was referring to.

They Won't Cure You

arstechnica |  One-shot cures for diseases are not great for business—more specifically, they’re bad for longterm profits—Goldman Sachs analysts noted in an April 10 report for biotech clients, first reported by CNBC.

The investment banks’ report, titled “The Genome Revolution,” asks clients the touchy question: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” The answer may be “no,” according to follow-up information provided.

Analyst Salveen Richter and colleagues laid it out:

The potential to deliver “one shot cures” is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically engineered cell therapy, and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies... While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.

For a real-world example, they pointed to Gilead Sciences, which markets treatments for hepatitis C that have cure rates exceeding 90 percent. In 2015, the company’s hepatitis C treatment sales peaked at $12.5 billion. But as more people were cured and there were fewer infected individuals to spread the disease, sales began to languish. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that the treatments will bring in less than $4 billion this year.

“[Gilead]’s rapid rise and fall of its hepatitis C franchise highlights one of the dynamics of an effective drug that permanently cures a disease, resulting in a gradual exhaustion of the prevalent pool of patients,” the analysts wrote. The report noted that diseases such as common cancers—where the “incident pool remains stable”—are less risky for business.

To get around the sustainability issue overall, the report suggests that biotech companies focus on diseases or conditions that seem to be becoming more common and/or are already high-incidence. It also suggests that companies be innovative and constantly expanding their portfolio of treatments. This can “offset the declining revenue trajectory of prior assets." Lastly, it hints that, as such cures come to fruition, they could open up more investment opportunities in treatments for “disease of aging.”  Fist tap Dale

Harold Ford Jr. Clipped For Being An Overpriced Underperforming Token

CNBC |  Finally, it's important to remember that the actions that constituted serious misconduct several years ago are not the same as they are now. The resignations of Sen. Al Franken and Rep. Trent Franks on Thursday seem to be much more the result of something closer to a new zero-tolerance policy on harassment and lower-level assault.

That doesn't excuse Franken, Franks, Ford or anyone else recently ensnared in this wave of scandals. And there's a lot to be said for holding our elected leaders to a much higher standard on this issue. But it's also fair to say that Wall Street may have only purged itself from the most egregious examples of bad behavior toward women based on standards from the 1990s or even the early 2000s.

That's the assessment financial journalist Susan Antilla, author of the groundbreaking book, "Tales From the Boom-Boom Room: The Landmark Legal Battles that Exposed Wall Street's Shocking Culture of Sexual Harassment." Antilla has recently spoken out about how she believes Wall Street has made strides to battle harassment over the past two decades, but adds that bias still very much exists. 

In a world where sitting senators and congressmen can be forced out in a matter of days over unproven allegations, that means Wall Street is still very vulnerable. This is something everyone from the lawyers fighting for Goldman Sachs in federal court to the H.R. departments at every other big firm need to realize.

Getting back to Ford, it's important to note he isn't going quietly. "I have never forcibly grabbed any woman or man in my life," Ford said in a statement released Thursday. In an even more telling comment, a lawyer for Ford said that, "Morgan Stanley has still not told Harold directly of his termination, and unlike every other circumstance I've been in, the company has refused to provide me with a reason. This all demonstrates how this was a matter of convenience during a hyper-sensitive time and not based on real facts."

Those comments stand as very strong proof that rules are already starting to change on Wall Street. If the standards for Ford are extended industry wide, expect a dozen or so managing partners and higher-level executives to be ousted in the coming year. 

Once the dust settles from those firings and resignations, Wall Street will have to join Congress, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Main Street in a major re-evaluation of its workplace rules. Anyone who thinks we're even halfway through this process is fooling themselves. 

Trump Off-Script On Bankster Bondage of Puerto Rico

nakedcapitalism  |  And speaking of Goldman, notice that Trump takes an explicit swipe at the investment bank turned Beltway heavyweight. He must be chafing at have been leashed and collared by the generals and the Goldmanites.

From Reuters:

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday while on a trip to Puerto Rico to observe hurricane recovery efforts that the island’s massive debt will have to be wiped out.
“They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street and we’re going to have to wipe that out. You’re going to say goodbye to that, I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is you can wave goodbye to that,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News.

CNBC picked up on the Reuters story quickly and highlighted the bleak fundamentals:

Even before the storm brought Puerto Rico to a near standstill, the government there already struggled with an economy in shambles and a default on billions of dollars of public debt.
Today, the U.S. territory has nearly $70 billion in debt, an unemployment rate 2.5 times the U.S. average, a 45 percent poverty rate, nearly insolvent pension systems and a chronically underfunded Medicaid insurance program for the poor.
Puerto Rico’s job base continues to shrink, taking its economy along with it. Since the recession ended, a lack of job prospects has sent many Puerto Ricans fleeing to the mainland, where the job market is much stronger.

However, it is unlikely that Goldman would suffer much, if at all, in a Puerto Rico bankruptcy. It might hold some bonds in its trading inventory, but its big exposure would come via funds it manages. On those, under the Volcker Rule, Goldman is limited to owning a small percentage of the equity investment in the fund (3% is the nominal amount, although there may be some tricks of the trade for increasing the exposure). 

But David Dayen has found one of the big owners of Puerto Rico debt, as reported in a new story at the Intercept. If you read the article in full, tracking down the who was behind the shell company used to hide the ultimate owners is very reminiscent of the sort of gumshoe work that Richard Smith does chasing international scammers.

Revolving Doors - Transition Teams - 4th Branch's Attack on Trump

Started Off at Naked Capitalism Revolving Door Continues then fell through the comments to wind up at the more important and illuminating treatment found at The New Republic The Most Important Wikileak Revelation. 

New Republic |  The wing of the Democratic Party concerned about personnel decisions made its opinion known almost two years ago. Dan Geldon, now chief of staff to Senator Elizabeth Warren, met with Dan Schwerin, a top adviser to Clinton’s campaign, in January 2015. According to an email follow-up with Podesta and others, Geldon “was intently focused on personnel issues, laid out a detailed case against the Bob Rubin school of Democratic policy makers.” He was also “very critical of the Obama administration’s choices.”

The “Bob Rubin school” is named for the former top executive at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and first Clinton administration Treasury secretary. It is composed precisely of the kinds of Democrats that the Warren wing opposes on domestic policy, particularly on financial matters. In the Obama administration, that school won out. Froman, chief of staff to Rubin at Treasury, gave options for Treasury secretary that ranged from Rubin himself to Summers and Geithner, two of his key protégés. In another 2008 email Rubin imagined for himself a “Harry Hopkins” position in the Obama administration, referring to Franklin Roosevelt’s top adviser.

The Rubin school dictated the Obama administration’s light-touch policy on bank misconduct (which resulted in no serious legal or fiduciary consequences for the major players) and its first-term approach to the financial crisis (which was defined by a stimulus package that even at the time was criticized for being woefully inadequate, as well as a premature turn to budget-cutting). These are exactly the flaws that Geldon, Warren’s emissary, stressed. According to Schwerin, he “spoke repeatedly about the need to have in place people with ambition and urgency who recognize how much the middle class is hurting and are willing to challenge the financial industry.”