Kamala Harris and the RFK assassination

[Douglas Caddy]

I agree with Jim about what he said about the presidents. My friend, Alice Widener, met with General MacArthur in his suite in the Waldorf Towers and he told her that after Eisenhower asked for his advice on foreign policy at their meeting just after Ike was elected, John Foster Dulles cut in and reminded Ike of how MacArthur and Ike had differences in the past and then tried to end the meeting.

Rank-and-file loyal Democrats got played by Bill Clinton and Obama. I was ready to drop out if Biden chose Susan Rice but the more I learn about Kamala Harris the more I come to admire her. She is brilliant and multi-talented.

[Ron Bulman]

Given the topic of this thread is Harris and the RFK assassination then this thread is relevant.

Lisa ought to send Kamala an autographed copy of the book.

Edited August 13, 2020 by Ron Bulman

[Cliff Varnell]

8 minutes ago, Douglas Caddy said:

Rank-and-file loyal Democrats got played by Bill Clinton and Obama.

I got played so hard by Obama that my $1261 a month Kaiser Permanente Silver health care plan cost me $62 a month.

And that net neutrality business — boy oh boy did we get played!

And I sure felt left out when the NSA had to stop feeding my electronic communications to the DEA.

And all those poor folks who got Medicaid because of Obamacare— poor bastards sure got played!

<insert jacking off emoji>

[W. Niederhut]

16 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Sandy:

Obama had the opportunity of a lifetime to really do something  big about the American economy.  If you recall, as I do, some people-- like Michael Moore--were talking about a second New Deal.  There was never a time like that that I can recall in my lifetime.  The GOP was discredited, homes were being lost, investment banks were going under, commercial banks were going BK.  Some of the largest BK's in history took place at that time.  There was never a better time to do a restructure. Even better than today.  Did Obama call in Stieglitz?  Nope.

What does Obama do instead?  He has a meeting with a bunch of conservative writers, e.g. Kristol, to try and gain their backing on his action.  

He didn't have to.  Once he called in Geithner and Summers, everyone knew what was going to happen.  They were acolytes of Bob Rubin (Mr. Goldman Sachs) who started the Hamilton Project. Of which Obama attended a few meetings.  Do I really have to say anything more?

One of the biggest bail outs in history took place for the  pet Wall Street investment banks.  Who went to jail?  (Sound of crickets chirping.).

Obama settled on the weakest remedy:  a stimulus package and a bail out package.  Kristol could not have hoped for anything more.  What the GOP really feared was a second New Deal.  They realized that if such a thing happened, it would redefine the political party system much like FDR did. I mean, to say Obama was better than W, I mean what does that mean?  W was the  worst president in history.  Until that time. Give me a break.

Let us never forget: it was Clinton who signed off on derivatives, and Clinton who signed off on the repeal of Glass Steagall,  Obama once introduced Clinton as a "great president"🤮

The Harris/Biden ticket is simply the Bill and HIllary/DNC dream team.  If you liked the Clintons and Obama--with HRC as secretary of state--this is your ticket. Go ahead and celebrate.  

If you preferred Sanders and Warren, well, vote Green in California.  Which I will.

The thing to celebrate today is Ilhan winning.  The squad will be intact.  That is the real hope of the Democratic party.

Jim,

      Are you familiar with Alan Blinder's analysis of the effectiveness of the Obama/Dem Stimulus Recovery Act of 2009? *  The reason I ask is that there was a deluge of Republican disinformation in the mainstream media from 2009 onward about the Great Recession and the Great Obama Recovery of 2010-17.

      Krugman's main criticism at the time was that the Democratic stimulus plan didn't go far enough, but it was, certainly, effective in reversing the economic ship wreck of the Great Recession of 2008-10.   It was enacted with ZERO support or cooperation from the Republicans left in Congress after the 2008 debacle.   Galbraith & Keynes would have approved of it.

     People tend to forget about the severity of the economic crash that Obama inherited from Bush and Cheney in January of 2008-- widespread bank failures, plunging GDP, and surging unemployment.  Obama deserves an A+ for managing that disaster.

      Also, the role of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in causing the Great Crash of 2008 is somewhat controversial.  The causes of the crash were complex--  mainly having to do with investment banking fraudulence in the ratings and sales of sub-prime mortgage-backed derivatives and lax sub-prime mortgage lending standards-- what Alan Greenspan described as, "the failure of banks to regulate themselves."  As Bill Clinton and others pointed out, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, if anything, actually mitigated the Great Crash of 2008 by allowing commercial banks like Bank of America to buy failing investment banking firms like Merrill Lynch.

*  https://www.cbpp.org/research/economy/the-financial-crisis-lessons-for-the-next-one

[James DiEugenio]

William:

I have read more than one book on the great crash of 2007-2008.  One of the best was The Devils are all Here by Mclean and Nocera. Another good one is Gillian Tett's Fool's Gold. 

The latter is about how derivatives were created and how they played a serious role in the crash.  The former is more of an overall view and history of how it happened and how the investment banks understood what they were creating before the crash happened. That book has 21 references in the index to derivatives.

If you watch the film or read the book The Big Short, you will also see how derivatives were part of the casino that was created by Phil Gramm. As Tett writes, when Lehman Brothers fell, they were so connected to AIG through credit derivatives and repo mortgages that the Fed had to step in because it threatened a chain reaction. ( p. 258, expanded trade paper edition.). And by this time, the government understood that survival of the fittest did not apply to Wall Street.  Through years of neglect and campaign contributions  and accumulation of power, Wall Street now necessitated socialism. (ibid). Therefore a whole battery of capital  injections were used.  As I wrote, Geithner went beyond what Paulson had originally designed. By the autumn of 2009, the IMF estimated that western governments had pledged close to 11 trillion to prop up the financial markets and banking system. (ibid)

When you pledge that kind of money, yes there will be a recovery. But as Tett writes, the government had propped up the banks but they were still in private hands: "So while taxpayers were shouldering the risks, bankers or bank shareholders were receiving most of the gains." (p. 259)

In other words, what did the public get for their gigantic investment to save Wall Street from itself?  After all, it was JP Morgan that invented derivatives. Yet, Morgan and Goldman Sachs emerged as the big winners from the bailout. Some money was returned to the Treasury, but not nearly what was spent. As Krugman noted, these amounted to non-recourse loans.  So what emerged from all this sound and fury was that now, the concentrations of wealth were even worse than before.(ibid)

In 1936, after the first New Deal, FDR made his famous speech upon being nominated. He said words to the effect that in his first term he had tamed the wild beasts of corporate greed.  In his second he planned on bringing them to their knees.  With the Obama/Biden actions of 2009, Wall Street brought Washington, the White House and the American taxpayers to their knees.The annual deficits rose under Obama as compared to Bush, and they were pretty bad under W. They did not begin to stabilize until about 2013. But even then, they were worse than they were under W. 

The price of all this is pretty simple, America became a bankrupt country. To do anything now one needs to use the Fed.  And we have learned that socialism is fine for Wall Street. But it does not apply to the taxpayers who did their bail out. And will be paying for it for a long time.

 

Edited August 13, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

I should add this one from Huffpost on how much time AOC is getting at the convention:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-dnc-speech_n_5f347b56c5b6960c06702042?fbclid=IwAR0hNiz8BuRSCQj8SX1IIAz2nUVZXgGauWXXZ9kYXhC_jto7tEjlEdufSIg

In another article there on how Harris was chosen, it turns out that Obama told Biden she was the favorite. The favorite to who? Him? 

Great. Obama got Perez in at the DNC and how this.  What a  guy.

Edited August 13, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[Cliff Varnell]

On 8/12/2020 at 7:44 PM, James DiEugenio said:

.  With the Obama/Biden actions of 2009, Wall Street brought Washington, the White House and the American taxpayers to their knees.The annual deficits rose under Obama as compared to Bush, and they were pretty bad under W. They did not begin to stabilize until about 2013. But even then, they were worse than they were under W.

 

Trump has wrecked the economy with his criminal incompetence but DiEugenio reserves his wrath for Obama.

Go figure.

 

Edited April 12 by Cliff Varnell

[Cliff Varnell]

Household incomes have resumed growing following the Great Recession

[Cliff Varnell]

3 minutes ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Household incomes have resumed growing following the Great Recession

Note the periods when household incomes grew the fastest: Clinton and Obama.

[James DiEugenio]

DC: My friend, Alice Widener, met with General MacArthur in his suite in the Waldorf Towers and he told her that after Eisenhower asked for his advice on foreign policy at their meeting just after Ike was elected, John Foster Dulles cut in and reminded Ike of how MacArthur and Ike had differences in the past and then tried to end the meeting.

 

Thanks for this Doug.  DId not know that one.

[Cliff Varnell]

The Obama Recovery

By Paul Krugman December 28, 2014

Suppose that for some reason you decided to start hitting yourself in the head, repeatedly, with a baseball bat. You’d feel pretty bad. Correspondingly, you’d probably feel a lot better if and when you finally stopped. What would that improvement in your condition tell you?

It certainly wouldn’t imply that hitting yourself in the head was a good idea. It would, however, be an indication that the pain you were experiencing wasn’t a reflection of anything fundamentally wrong with your health. Your head wasn’t hurting because you were sick; it was hurting because you kept hitting it with that baseball bat.

And now you understand the basics of what has been happening to several major economies, including the United States, over the past few years. In fact, you understand these basics better than many politicians and commentators.

Let’s start with a tale from overseas: austerity policy in Britain. As you may know, back in 2010 Britain’s newly installed Conservative government declared that a sharp reduction in budget deficits was needed to keep Britain from turning into Greece. Over the next two years growth in the British economy, which had been recovering fairly well from the financial crisis, more or less stalled. In 2013, however, growth picked up again — and the British government claimed vindication for its policies. Was this claim justified?

No, not at all. What actually happened was that the Tories stopped tightening the screws — they didn’t reverse the austerity that had already occurred, but they effectively put a hold on further cuts. So they stopped hitting Britain in the head with that baseball bat. And sure enough, the nation started feeling better.

To claim that this bounceback vindicated austerity is silly. As Simon Wren-Lewis of Oxford University likes to point out, if rapid growth after a gratuitous slump counts as success, the government should just close down half the economy for a year; the next year’s growth would be fantastic. Or as I’d put it, you shouldn’t conclude that hitting yourself in the head is smart because it feels so good when you stop. Unfortunately, the silliness of the claim hasn’t prevented its widespread acceptance by what Mr. Wren-Lewis calls “mediamacro.” 
 

Meanwhile, back in America we haven’t had an official, declared policy of fiscal austerity — but we’ve nonetheless had plenty of austerity in practice, thanks to the federal sequester and sharp cuts by state and local governments. The good news is that we, too, seem to have stopped tightening the screws: Public spending isn’t surging, but at least it has stopped falling. And the economy is doing much better as a result. We are finally starting to see the kind of growth, in employment and G.D.P., that we should have been seeing all along — and the public’s mood is rapidly improving.

What’s the important lesson from this late Obama bounce? Mainly, I’d suggest, that everything you’ve heard about President Obama’s economic policies is wrong.

You know the spiel: that the U.S. economy is ailing because Obamacare is a job-killer and the president is a redistributionist, that Mr. Obama’s anti-business speeches (he hasn’t actually made any, but never mind) have hurt entrepreneurs’ feelings, inducing them to take their marbles and go home. 

This story line never made much sense. The truth is that the private sector has done surprisingly well under Mr. Obama, adding 6.7 million jobs since he took office, compared with just 3.1 million at this point under President George W. Bush. Corporate profits have soared, as have stock prices. What held us back was unprecedented public-sector austerity: At this point in the Bush years, government employment was up by 1.2 million, but under Mr. Obama it’s down by 600,000. Sure enough, now that this de facto austerity is easing, the economy is perking up.

And what this bounce tells you is that the alleged faults of Obamanomics had nothing to do with the pain we were feeling. We weren’t hurting because we were sick; we were hurting because we kept hitting ourselves with that baseball bat, and we’re feeling a lot better now that we’ve stopped.

Will this improvement in our condition continue? Britain’s government has declared its intention to pick up the baseball bat again — to engage in further austerity, which does not bode well. But here the picture looks brighter. Households are in much better financial shape than they were a few years ago; there’s probably still a lot of pent-up demand, especially for housing. And falling oil prices will be good for most of the country, although some regions — especially Texas — may take a hit.

So I’m fairly optimistic about 2015, and probably beyond, as long as we avoid any more self-inflicted damage. Let’s just leave that baseball bat lying on the ground, O.K.?

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/29/opinion/paul-krugman-the-obama-recovery.html

 

Edited August 13, 2020 by Cliff Varnell

[Cliff Varnell]

DiEugenio only quotes Krugman’s criticism of Obama but not the praise.

 

 

Edited August 13, 2020 by Cliff Varnell

[W. Niederhut]

Apologies for this non sequitur, but some memes are simply too good to withhold from Rob Wheeler and the forum.  🤥

 

[David Andrews]

On 8/11/2020 at 8:17 PM, David Andrews said:

Birth certificate!

You all think I'm kidding with this comedy...

https://www.salon.com/2020/08/13/newsweek-criticized-for-publishing-a-new-birther-conspiracy-about-kamala-harris_partner/

https://www.salon.com/2020/08/12/birther-conspiracy-theories-circulate-on-facebook-after-joe-biden-taps-kamala-harris-as-running-mate_partner/

"If it exists, there is porn birther conspiracy of it."

And birther conspiracy is really starting to play like political porn.

Edited August 13, 2020 by David Andrews

[James DiEugenio]

Dave, its not just article 2, but also the 14th amendment. Larry Tribe also answered this during the primaries.

I wonder, is Trump going to start saying this stuff too?

The NY Times just did an article about how QAnon is making headway on FB by infiltrating other groups.  Plus this nutcase QAnon follower from Georgia, Greene, defeated her opponent in the GOP primary for congress.  

Its crazy, QAnon is pure and utter baloney.  But this is how schizoid our culture has become.  Thank Alex Jones. 

Edited August 13, 2020 by James DiEugenio