Mark Zaid, JFK and Trump

[Cliff Varnell]

37 minutes ago, Bob Ness said:

The Sergeant at Arms is responsible for the Capitol police but whether he commands them I'm not certain. They have cells as do the DC police who can also jail them. Either way the SAA has jurisdiction. The other remedies for enforcing subpeonas mentioned by the DC District Court have huge hurdles in today's political climate.

My thinking was throw one of his recalcitrant former staffers in jail (Bolton maybe?) rather than a current member just to fire a warning shot across the bow to others.

Okay. Maybe it would fly. Unless the Administration could get a friendly judge to issue an injunction for release prior to a judicial resolution of executive privilege claims. In which case it would have to go up to the Supreme Court — right where they are now.

Edited February 29, 2020 by Cliff Varnell

[James DiEugenio]

Sandy:

What you just said shows how far gone the Democratic Party is today after 16 years of Obama and Clintonism.

Roosevelt's New Deal was not socialism.  It was the welfare state.  And even at that, it did not go anywhere are far as Scandinavia, not even as far as Bismarck.

FDR had to be pushed to even pass a Social Security law when he got pressured from the Townsend Clubs. Keynes had to harangue FDR into spending more money since he knew that what he was spending was not enough to lick the calamity.  Its the same reason Huey Long was going to run against him when he was killed under odd circumstances. 

As per Obama, I sure as heck do think he could have done much more with the banking system, with the auto industry, and in creating jobs than he did.  And I also think he should have gone after the perpetrators of the crash in criminal terms.   In that regard, what did he do? In that regard, how much more equitable is the system today?  How much more safe are we from it happening again?  Did he restore Glass Steagall?  Did he outlaw derivatives? He never took the bully pulpit on any of these issues as far as I could see.  Even during the interval between the election and his inauguration, Barry was making excuses for the things he could not do.  He was meeting with representatives of the conservative establishment to convince them he was not FDR.  And man did he deliver. 

Caroline Kennedy made a mistake comparing Obama with her father.  Take a look at what Kennedy did during the Steel Crisis.   And that was simply over a broken deal on a wage price settlement.

Edited February 29, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[Sandy Larsen]

3 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Roosevelt's New Deal was not socialism.  It was the welfare state.

 

When you said Obama could have really changed the economy, but didn't, I thought you meant by moving it further toward socialism. (BTW I didn't think that the New Deal was socialism. Though in practice it does contain elements of socialism. For example, Social Security is essentially an insurance/retirement company run by the government.)

 

Quote

As per Obama, I sure as heck do think he could have done much more with the banking system, with the auto industry, and in creating jobs than he did.  And I also think he should have gone after the perpetrators of the crash in criminal terms.   In that regard, what did he do? In that regard, how much more equitable is the system today?  How much more safe are we from it happening again?  Did he restore Glass Steagall?  Did he outlaw derivatives? He never took the bully pulpit on any of these issues as far as I could see.  Even during the interval between the election and his inauguration, Barry was making excuses for the things he could not do.  He was meeting with representatives of the conservative establishment to convince them he was not FDR.  And man did he deliver. 

 

This stuff lies way outside my areas of expertise, so I can't debate it. But it seems to me that most (if not all) of these issues were a matter of opinion, not a matter of right vs. wrong. For example, did Obama restore Glass Steagall? Apparently not. Should he have? Apparently you think so. Did he outlaw derivatives? Apparently not. Should he have? Apparently you think so. I'm sure there were plenty of experts who debated both sides of these issues.

EDIT:  Out of curiosity I googled the words "glass steagall obama" and discovered, according to this news article,

     Obama takes on America's banks with new Glass-Steagall act

that Obama enacted a law called the Volcker Rule that was designed to do what Glass-Steagall had done before. And I found in the following investment dictionary entry that the Volcker Rule makes it illegal for banks to use their accounts for trading derivatives.

     https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/volcker-rule.asp

So it looks like Obama actually did do something to keep banks from engaging in risky practices.

 

Edited February 29, 2020 by Sandy Larsen

[W. Niederhut]

People tend to forget about the dire straits of the U.S. economy when Bush and Cheney skipped town and Obama was inaugurated in January of 2009. 

I remember it well.  Major investment banks (Lehman Brothers, Bear-Sterns, et.al.) were collapsing right and left, and equities had plummeted by roughly 35%.  Millions of Americans were losing their homes through mortgage foreclosures.  It was a complete disaster-- a train wreck.

Unemployment rates surged.   A number of my former patients were losing their jobs, health insurance, and homes in the Great Bush-Cheney Recession.

Then the Republicons who were left in Congress after the Bush-Cheney debacle spent the next eight years frantically sabotaging Obama and the country in any way that they could-- dragging their feet in cooperating with the Stimulus Recovery Act of 2009 and the remedial Dodd-Frank bill to restore the Glass Steagall  regulation of investment bank fraudulence on Wall Street.  GOP Senators on the Senate Finance Committee (with a major assist by Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman) were able to block the original Obamacare legislation that included a "public option" in the Affordable Care Act.

Fast forward to 2010.   The Koch brothers bought the House for their Tea Party GOP Goon Squad, and John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, et.al. proceeded to sabotage EVERYTHING Obama attempted.  The lowest of the Congressional low points occurred in July of 2011, when Boehner and Ryan refused any and all Obama proposals to raise the debt ceiling--including what David Brooks called "the Mother of All No Brainers" deal.*

This GOP Tea Party House sabotage of Obama and the recovery from the Great Bush-Cheney Recession in the summer of 2011 directly triggered the downgrade of the U.S. credit rating (by Moody's) and a 10% drop in the stock markets in August of 2011.

It was a disgraceful maneuver by the Koch GOP to sabotage the country in order to sabotage Obama.

Fortunately, it failed.  Obama presided over seven years of sustained private sector employment and GDP growth, and a near TRIPLING of the stock markets from 2010-17.  It was this Great Obama Recovery of 2010-17 that Donald Trump inherited in January of 2017.  And annual U.S. GDP growth rates since January of 2017 have been less than 3%-- no different than the growth rates of the Great Obama Recovery of 2010-17-- despite Trump's massive tax cuts for billionaires and corporations!

The "booming Trump economy" is an illusion.  In reality, the "booming Trump economy" is merely the tail-end of the Great Obama Recovery.

*  https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/opinion/05brooks.html

 

 

Edited February 29, 2020 by W. Niederhut

[Dennis Berube]

54 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

So it looks like Obama actually did do something to keep banks from engaging in risky practices.

Yes he did the minimum politically necessary to say he did something.

It's been awhile, but I remember that derivatives were largely made illegal or close to it under FDR through the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936. As with many of the other New Deal policies that gave us the highest standard of living until the late 60's, this was mostly de-regulated in/by 1982 (Reagan, shocker). Immediately, you get the 1987 crash. " It was the sale of S&P 500 futures contracts in Chicago that caused sellers in the 500 stocks underlying the index to panic and dump stocks as fast as possible." But no serious legislation was passed then either. Clinton made it worse of course. I found this quote by Warren Buffet in 1982 regarding derivatives to be fairly telling.

"In my judgment, a very high percentage, probably at least 95% and more likely much higher, of the activity generated by these contracts will be strictly gambling in nature." --Warren Buffett to Hon. John Dingell, March 5, 1982

 

https://www.forbes.com/2010/05/25/warren-buffett-derivatives-markets-streettalk-lenzner-john-dingell.html#a57ddf7a8939

 

So no, I don't think Obama really did anything meaningful. I view it as a Wall Street Democrat window dressing a bill he had to produce due to the political climate at the time. Something meaningful would have been something like a national Tobin Tax, who was a Keynes follower. A tax on financial speculation which would have the simultaneous effect of reducing wall street gambling which causes so many crises, and giving the treasury a large check every year. A progressive president might use this to build a national maglev train network or even rebuild infrastructure generally with a TVA type program. This is the type of opportunity Obama had that he completely wasted.

 

For those interested, some good (albeit lengthy) videos regarding derivatives/speculation in the oil markets...

They are from 2008 and you will hear a bipartisan group basically suggest financial regulations! That's how obviously bad some of this speculation was/is. Most of the witnesses agreed that speculation accounted for 30-50% of the price of oil! This happens in so many markets now that one wonders what the DJIA would be if you had to price it on physical value alone.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?206134-2/oil-price-speculation-opening-statements

https://www.c-span.org/video/?206134-1/oil-price-speculation

4 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

What you just said shows how far gone the Democratic Party is today after 16 years of Obama and Clintonism.

Agreed.

47 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Though in practice it does contain elements of socialism.

It is a shame that this country has been fear mongered into thinking that socialism means something distinctly negative. You never hear the word "corporatism" on television, but I would submit it is a far worse adjective to describe political policies than socialism. I hear countless people, even in Massachusetts, even though they are in a union, recently say things about Bernie and socialism as though it would be the end of the country somehow. This attitude of "he'll take all our money" which puts them in the Trump camp, neglects so many national economic factors that it seems difficult to unwind that philosophy to the average person watching television.

 

9 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Everyone should read that article on Bloomberg.  Its devastating. 

I wasn't a Bloomberg fan before, but after reading that, if the DNC goes with this guy..... look out.

 

 

I just realized how long this post is.... You gotta love leisurely Saturday mornings.

 

[Douglas Caddy]

From the article: Nouriel Roubini, a New York University business professor and market prognosticator who foretold the housing bubble burst, told Yahoo Finance on Friday to expect "severe" consequences as the coronavirus continues to rattle markets. How severe? He told Der Spiegel it could be worse than investors even believe at this point, predicting "global equities to tank by 30 to 40 percent this year."

 

https://theweek.com/speedreads/899110/stock-markets-are-headed-40-percent-plunge-says-economist-who-predicted-financial-crisis

[Douglas Caddy]

Maddow guest predicts one-third of Congress will catch coronavirus — and Capitol Hill will close

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/02/maddow-guest-predicts-one-third-of-congress-will-catch-coronavirus-and-capitol-hill-will-close/

 

[David Andrews]

2 hours ago, Robert Wheeler said:

Maddow guest predicts one-third of Congress will catch coronavirus — and Capitol Hill will close

I think Maddow is batting about .037 in the correct prediction category.

Why not?  Congress almost caught Anthrax once.

What was it Eugene Dinkin said about "psychological sets" in media?  We'd call them memes today.

Edited February 29, 2020 by David Andrews

[W. Niederhut]

1 hour ago, W. Niederhut said:

People tend to forget about the dire straits of the U.S. economy when Bush and Cheney skipped town and Obama was inaugurated in January of 2009. 

I remember it well.  Major investment banks (Lehman Brothers, Bear-Sterns, et.al.) were collapsing right and left, and equities had plummeted by roughly 35%.  Millions of Americans were losing their homes through mortgage foreclosures.  It was a complete disaster-- a train wreck.

Unemployment rates surged.   A number of my former patients were losing their jobs, health insurance, and homes in the Great Bush-Cheney Recession.

Then the Republicons who were left in Congress after the Bush-Cheney debacle spent the next eight years frantically sabotaging Obama and the country in any way that they could-- dragging their feet in cooperating with the Stimulus Recovery Act of 2009 and the remedial Dodd-Frank bill to restore the Glass Steagall  regulation of investment bank fraudulence on Wall Street.  GOP Senators on the Senate Finance Committee (with a major assist by Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman) were able to block the original Obamacare legislation that included a "public option" in the Affordable Care Act.

Fast forward to 2010.   The Koch brothers bought the House for their Tea Party GOP Goon Squad, and John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, et.al. proceeded to sabotage EVERYTHING Obama attempted.  The lowest of the Congressional low points occurred in July of 2011, when Boehner and Ryan refused any and all Obama proposals to raise the debt ceiling--including what David Brooks called "the Mother of All No Brainers" deal.*

This GOP Tea Party House sabotage of Obama and the recovery from the Great Bush-Cheney Recession in the summer of 2011 directly triggered the downgrade of the U.S. credit rating (by Moody's) and a 10% drop in the stock markets in August of 2011.

It was a disgraceful maneuver by the Koch GOP to sabotage the country in order to sabotage Obama.

Fortunately, it failed.  Obama presided over seven years of sustained private sector employment and GDP growth, and a near TRIPLING of the stock markets from 2010-17.  It was this Great Obama Recovery of 2010-17 that Donald Trump inherited in January of 2017.  And annual U.S. GDP growth rates since January of 2017 have been less than 3%-- no different than the growth rates of the Great Obama Recovery of 2010-17-- despite Trump's massive tax cuts for billionaires and corporations!

The "booming Trump economy" is an illusion.  In reality, the "booming Trump economy" is merely the tail-end of the Great Obama Recovery.

*  https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/opinion/05brooks.html

 

 

Addendum:  One thing I should mention in the context of discussing this historical U.S. economic data is that the recent "correction" in the markets is about more than the coronavirus.  The mainstream media has been typically myopic about this.

Anyone who has been paying attention to economic fundamentals knows that the Trump Stock Bubble was long overdue for an implosion.  The coronavirus is the needle that finally popped the bubble.

Trump is, essentially, an illusionist-- always has been.

He's a huckster-- a snake oil salesman who travels from town to town convincing the local suckers that his elixir will cure whatever ails them.

[James DiEugenio]

The Volcker Rule:

 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/02/a-republican-plutocrat-tries-to-buy-the-democratic-nomination

 

BTW William, I agree with you that the stock market drip is more of a correction than a reaction to coronavirus.

 

Recall this via Jim Harwood : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_Against_Sponsors_of_Terrorism_Act#:~:text=On%20September%2028%2C%202016%2C%20both,veto%20override%20of%20Obama's%20administration.

Edited February 29, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[Douglas Caddy]

Disease X Meets Planet X

 

Excerpt from The New York Times:

We Knew Disease X Was Coming. It’s Here Now.

We need to stop what drives mass epidemics rather than just respond to individual diseases.

By Peter Daszak

Mr. Daszak is a disease ecologist.

Feb. 27, 2020

In early 2018, during a meeting at the World Health Organization in Geneva, a group of experts I belong to (the R&D Blueprint) coined the term “Disease X”: We were referring to the next pandemic, which would be caused by an unknown, novel pathogen that hadn’t yet entered the human population. As the world stands today on the edge of the pandemic precipice, it’s worth taking a moment to consider whether Covid-19 is the disease our group was warning about.

Disease X, we said back then, would likely result from a virus originating in animals and would emerge somewhere on the planet where economic development drives people and wildlife together. Disease X would probably be confused with other diseases early in the outbreak and would spread quickly and silently; exploiting networks of human travel and trade, it would reach multiple countries and thwart containment. Disease X would have a mortality rate higher than a seasonal flu but would spread as easily as the flu. It would shake financial markets even before it achieved pandemic status.

In a nutshell, Covid-19 is Disease X.

 

 From Robert Merritt’s third and final meeting with President Nixon in July 1972 as recounted in the original posting here on page 1:

In essence, Nixon talked about “life as we do not know it.” He said that during the previous twenty years Knowledge had been obtained that could make the human race on Earth “the supreme beings in the universe.” This Knowledge came in part from helpful information provided from an extra-terrestrial being from Planet X, Nibiro, who was in a secure location in a building in the U.S.  Nixon said the Knowledge came as the result of discovery made by scientists working at the Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico who studied the extraterrestrial being’s information.  Nixon said, “This all important Knowledge that we possess came from our discovery.”

Nixon declared whoever possessed this Knowledge could be the most important person in the world. All would bow down to whoever possessed this Knowledge. The Knowledge was “astronomical, nefarious and devastating.”

Nixon said that possession of the Knowledge had to be structured so that it was used only for the good of mankind.  His fear was that a small group seeking power would get hold of it and utilize it to the group’s evil benefit only…..

 .It was then at Nixon made a cryptic remark, apparently to emphasize the importance of the assignment that he had given Merritt. Nixon said, “I

took my order from above and have followed it to the T.”

Merritt was taken aback by the remark and asked Nixon what he meant. Nixon did not reply directly but instead declared that “the year 2020 would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the world.”

Merritt asked Nixon how he knew this would happen. Nixon replied, “Think of me a prophet.”

 

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/25917-watergate-trump’s-space-force-and-2020/

[Joe Bauer]

23 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

The Volcker Rule:

 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/02/a-republican-plutocrat-tries-to-buy-the-democratic-nomination

 

BTW William, I agree with you that the stock market drip is more of a correction than a reaction to coronavirus.

If Bloomberg is allowed to buy the nomination I swear I will not vote this coming November for the office of president.

Not as a democrat as I have been all my life.

I will not be a part of such a perverse, corrupt and unAmerican scheme.

The link you provided Jim says it all about Bloomberg.

The idea of a mega-rich billionaire ascending to our highest elective office by kidnapping the Democratic Party nomination ( when he isn't even a democrat!) through the most massive expenditure media and bought off support manipulation campaign ever created is a deeply disturbing scenario to me. To a gut wrenching degree.

Meg Whitman tried to do the same thing of buying the Governorship of California a few years ago. The amount of her own money she pumped into her Republican campaign broke all records. It got her the candidacy.

She lost of course, but this was in California where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a wide margin and always have.

The rest of the country is much more susceptible to the big money manipulation imo.

How could the national Democratic Party come to this breakdown state? Where we may only have a choice between two 1% ruling priority billionaire ego-maniacs to choose from this next November?

 

Edited March 1, 2020 by Joe Bauer

[James DiEugenio]

Trump's version of JFK and Vietnam

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-to-sign-historic-deal-with-taliban-trump-announces-beginning-end-of-us-war-in-afghanistan-and-withdrawal-of-american-troops/ar-BB10nNZu?li=BBnb7Kz

[Bob Ness]

2 hours ago, Robert Wheeler said:

This is why Trump was elected. 

You are correct here. I don't think many people actually voted "for" Trump. They voted "against" Hillary.

I think there is truth to that but remember she won the popular vote by a lot and the difference was really only about 70,000 in a few critical states.

You're over stating the case is what I mean to say but it's safe to say a potted plant may have been better than either hahaha.

[Bob Ness]

8 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Okay. Maybe it would fly. Unless the Administration could get a friendly judge to issue an injunction for release prior to a judicial resolution of executive privilege claims. In which case it would have to go up to the Supreme Court — right where they are now.

IANAL but the Constitutional authority which has been held up by the Supremes a couple times can't get injunctive relief from a lower court. Executive privilege isn't specifically mentioned in the Constitution but the SCOTUS has upheld the principle particularly in regards to separation of powers but even that has limits. The Nixon tapes for example. Several of the differing types of privilege claims such as deliberative, communications and national security haven't been truly tested in court and gray fog surrounds the issue. The courts don't like to weigh in on these disputes because it requires that they take what can be interpreted as a political position. In a skins versus shirts game of basketball it would be akin to the refs changing the height of the hoop to favor the taller team at half time. They often times defer back to the other two branches and say grow up!

In this scenario the court has said "figure out your own way of getting him to comply, there are remedies". The remedies to enforce the subpoena outside of accommodation rely on an executive branch and congress with roughly equal power. In this case, since the Republicans in the Senate won't bat an eye even for the most egregious of outrages perpetrated on the Country, most of the remedies are unavailable. One remedy for instance that has been used to leverage the Executive is the refusal to confirm appointments. Trump couldn't care a less!

Another, the purse strings gag, has seen Trump swipe money for the Military appropriations to use for his border wall in spite of the clear intent of the House to limit funding for it.

There are inherent problems with the "cuff him and clang him" routine to enforce compliance but at least the courts could see that their nonchalant attitude could eventually create a crisis and force them to act. It looks to me though that they couldn't act to interrupt the House's enforcement either. He either appears, makes the EP claim, pleads the fifth or does not pass go and heads to jail.

The other issue is these actions typically don't extend past the House's term. Perhaps the best thing to do now is throw everything into winning the Senate and Presidency and keeping the House.