Renewable Revolution

Agelbert NOTE: The true history of the well entrenched Plutocracy in the USA is simply NOT taught in the schools OR admitted in the media. How many Americans know that the only reason state and municipal police forces were legislated into existence was as effective anti-labor strike forces? Very few!

And WHY didn't corporations want to keep murdering and brutalizing workers with their private armies like the Pinkertons, as they had done before? Because passing the costs of enslaving the worker to we-the-people (i.e. socializing the costs while privatizing the profits) is what Plutocracy has always been all about. Trump is, as Marx predicted, the logical final stage of these psychopathic Plutocrats.






Posted on Jan 1, 2017

By Chris Hedges

SNIPPET:

The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx predicted, would be marked by global capital being unable to expand and generate profits at former levels. Capitalists would begin to consume the government along with the physical and social structures that sustained them.

Democracy, social welfare, electoral participation, the common good and investment in public transportation, roads, bridges, utilities, industry, education, ecosystem protection and health care would be sacrificed to feed the mania for short-term profit.

These assaults would destroy the host. This is the stage of late capitalism that Donald Trump represents.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/defying_donald_trumps_kleptocracy_20170101

Quote from: Eddie on January 06, 2017, 12:29:33 pm

I think there is no reason why we should not be able to feed, clothe, shelter, educate, and provide medicine for all people on Earth regardless of their abilities.  I think we have the technology now, and we still have the energy, to do this.  Providing these things for all people would not remove the desire to perform in society.

I would be the first to come out in favor of taking the money we waste on war (and give to the Daddy Warbucks of the world), and spend it on social services. No problem with that.

But...I think that cheap energy creates a positive feedback loop for population growth, that can't be solved by doing the good works you're suggesting. Most people in the world have no control whatsoever over their reproduction. What prevents them from having 20 kids is just the limits imposed by reality, money, and in some cases, starvation and famine.

I also truly believe that in the absence of a need to work hard, most people have little interest in bettering themselves with education and innovation and entrepreneurship. My kids will never do what I did, because...they've never been as hungry as I once was.

That creates a negative feedback loop too, btw. They know they will likely never make the money I do, and their response is to NOT reproduce. We see this big time in Japan, but it's happening here too among the upper middle class, because they do have control over their reproduction. And what happens is that the people with some of the best opportunities, best brains, and best educations just die off without passing on anything to anybody.

It doesn't solve the population problem. It just dumbs down the whole planet.

For ten points and 25 words or less.

Would incentives solve the problem of shaping desirable behavior and if so what would the incentives be?

The 25 words or less only applies to the first part of the question.



Fear not, natural selection will return.

Natural Selection never went away. Rex Tillerson and Trump provide EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE OF THAT.


The future is bright - FOR Tardigrades - extremophiles inherits earth

Quote

Why you should worry: Pruitt has bragged about suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) multiple times, has often decried its decisions and now he's on deck to run it. His troubling history includes:

He opposed attempts to regulate fracking on federal lands.
He condemned the EPA's attempts to study fracking's impact on drinking water as politically motivated.

Um.  Well.   YEAH!  What with the Right Wing Creepazoids doing everything they possibly can to turn the EPA into the precise opposite of what it was ostensibly created to be... Well, YEAH!  Does anyone really believe there is anything not touched by political motivation?  How about the US Supreme Court? No politics there? A firewall is there to keep politics out?

These people!  Have they no shame?  (Rhetorical question, obviously.)

Agreed. Trump's fossil fuel government swamp creatures are a cancer on we-the-people.

January 8, 2017


SHARMINI PERIES: It's The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore.

   The final monthly jobs report for the Obama Presidency is out. Obama is leaving office with an unemployment rate of 4.7%, down from the 10% he inherited after the 2007 to 2008 financial crises. Over 11.3 million union jobs were created during the Obama years, and over two million of those jobs were created in 2016.

But these new stats should be put in context of a recent economic study done by Princeton and Harvard University by Lawrence Katz and Allen Krueger, the paper titled, "The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 2005 to 2015." And it shows that almost 95% of the jobs created in the decade were positions that often lack legal protections, health insurance, pensions and job security, essentially what we call contract work.

Here to take a longer view of Obama's legacy for workers, is Richard Wolff. Richard is a Professor Emeritus in Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and currently a visiting Professor of Graduate Program, in International Affairs, at the New School University, in New York. His latest book is "Capitalism's Crisis Deepens". Richard, good to have you with us.

RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you.

SHARMINI PERIES: Richard, let's get your response to these latest figures, and how we should understand Obama's legacy, or record of 75 months of straight job growth in the United States?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I think the way to understand it is to draw a parallel. If you go to a doctor and you want to have an assessment of your health, how you are doing, and how your body is behaving. If the doctor gave you one measure, one test, for example, your blood pressure or, for example, some test of the sugar in your blood, or whatever it was, and said, "Well, that's it. You're in great health," because this one measure makes you look good, you would never see that doctor again.

   This is not a serious way to assess your health. There have to be many measures, of the many dimensions, that go into a healthy person's situation. And the same is true of the economy.

   Yes, it is wonderful for Mr. Obama and his defendants, and Mrs. Clinton, in the race, to talk about one of the measures, one of the relatively few measures that things have gotten better over the last 10 to 12 years that they're trying to talk about. But the reality is the minute you look at a normally diverse set of measures, the story changes, and dramatically. And that's why it's very important to refer to the Katz and Krueger papers. Because they are a measure of how good the jobs are, that were gotten -- how secure they are, what benefits go with them. And on almost all of those measures, the situation has deteriorated over the last 10 years.

And even, if I have a moment to go a bit further, one of the reasons the unemployment number is down, is not because unemployed people got jobs, but because unemployed people stopped looking for jobs, they were so depressed. And when that happens, the way we calculate unemployment in the United States, the unemployment number goes down, because the number of people without work looking has gone down. But it's not because they got jobs.

When you put it all together, the reality is, that, for working people in the United States, the last 10 years have been very, very bad. And what's worse is they come on top of the previous 20 years, when they weren't very good either -- which is why the gap between rich and poor has gotten so much more extreme.

And to put it all in a blunt way, it's why the predictions that Mr. Obama's successor, Mrs. Clinton, would win the election, that assumption was destroyed. And, in large part, it was because the reality of what has happened to working people's situation turned them against the Democratic Party, made them leave the Democratic Party, and particularly the central wing, the Clinton wing. And so we can see in a very dramatic way that these one set of numbers of unemployment simply fail to grasp the reality.

SHARMINI PERIES: And, Richard, these illusions that are created for us with these kinds of job creation numbers, or unemployment numbers, people like you and other good economists at your university, CEPR, Centre for Economic Policy Research, in Washington, they have all been critiquing these kinds of numbers for so long, because it does create the illusion that this problem is being addressed.

Why isn't it getting through? I know you're going to say for political reasons, but give us some specifics of how they're playing with us.

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, it's because so much of our culture has been invaded by the logic of advertising. You know, it's one thing to have professors, experts in various ways, can have all kinds of disagreements, but they're trying to understand a phenomenon. But it's a very different story when someone enters the conversation, not in order to put forward an explanation among others, but in order to sell something. Advertising enters the discourse with an ulterior motive to market something.

So, for example, Mr. Obama wants a legacy, which I understand. Wants to be thought of as a great success, which I understand. And so he fastens on something that makes him look good -- the way the seller of a soda pop will tell you how refreshing it is, but will not tell you about the calories in it, or the damage to obesity numbers in the country, and so on.

So, we are full of a society in which the people with the most money, the big institutions, the big corporations, long ago learned that they can overwhelm scientific analysis -- whether it be of cigarettes, whether it be of obesity -- it can overwhelm the science, the effort to understand, with the effort to market.

And that makes it very difficult for those who are still trying to understand something, to have a reasoned debate with people they disagree with. Because both sides of the disagreement tend to be overwhelmed by the much better funded approaches that have something to sell, something to prove, and therefore, distort the conversation.

SHARMINI PERIES: Right. So, not only in terms of creation of jobs and dealing with the unemployment rate, Obama also managed, while he was doing all of that, to also make sure that the market and the stock markets did well again, incredibly, in terms of the period he has governed. What was the impact of these gains on working people?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I think it can be summarized as the following: Every major index that I look at, and I look at quite a few, indicates that both before Obama, and before the crisis of 2008, and afterwards, the gap between rich and poor has widened in the United States.

What was done to restock and to recapitalize the banks? What was done to flood the economy with money that would find its way into bidding up stock prices? All of those things brought a real recovery to the very people at the top most responsible for the crisis in the first place. So, they got through it, they were helped by the government the most. They were the ones who were most responsible for it. They've enjoyed a recovery.

For the mass of the American people, there has been no recovery. They continue to see the gap between themselves and the richest 5% of the population get wider. The jobs they have now are not as good, not as secure as the ones they had before the crisis. They're wondering about this recovery they hear about, which seems to have passed them by.

Which is why we have Mr. Trump. Which is why we have a society straining, as comparable societies in Europe and elsewhere are also doing. But the end result is to say, "We are in a society whose capitalistic structure is straining the acceptability of this system. The instability, the inequality is simply more than the people of this society can tolerate." They don't yet have a clear way out, they don't have a clear way forward, but their anger, their rage, their dislike for the establishment they hold responsible, is obvious.

From the elections in Italy -- they got rid of that government -- to the Brexit vote in England, to Mr. Trump's election here, to the forthcoming elections in France and elsewhere, you can see percolating this sense that there is something fundamentally no longer working in modern capitalism. And that, I think, is shaping more of what's going on than anything else I can point to.

SHARMINI PERIES: Right. It's wonderful that some of your analysis, offline we were talking about, Richard, your radio program, and other things you're doing to educate ordinary workers about these kinds of issues. But overwhelmingly it's difficult for people to understand, because this is rather abstract.

So when I, over the holidays, every time I met anyone, I asked them about Obama's legacy and specifically, what they think his obstacles were in terms of making lives better for ordinary people like us. And often they cite that he inherited a great depression, and he had to work through all the economic turmoil that Bush had left behind. And also they make excuses for what he didn't do. So, let's try to address that question. What could he have done?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I think it's fair to be fair to him, and it's fair to say that he certainly did inherit an economic system in severe crisis. The last four months of 2008, here in New York City, where I live and work, were times when the people in the know, working in the Federal Reserve, working in the biggest banks, really wondered whether the system was about to break down and not function. And I mean not function in the practical way. The truck's not coming into the city with bread and milk for people, all of that because everything was in such terrible shape.

And, yes. Mr. Obama comes into office right in the middle of all of that, and so has a hard row to hoe. I get that. And we're through it. We're not as bad now as we were then. But what could he have done?

Well, he could have gotten us to a much, much better place than he chose to do. And let me give you just two concrete examples. He followed what really ought to be called Trickle-Down Economics. He helped the people at the top -- whether it was by flooding them with money through a Federal Reserve, or flooding the big companies with wonderful contracts, so that they could do things that were a stimulus to the economy and so on.

Helped all those at the top. Recapitalized the banks. Give the people at the top all the resources, in the hope that it would trickle down to everybody else. And as has always happened when you proceed in that way, the trickling is disappointing.

The folks at the top say, "Thank you, very much," and keep most of it for themselves. That's certainly what happened here. He could have chosen an alternative, called Trickle-Up, rather than Trickle-Down. Helped the people at the bottom, the ones who clearly need it most -- working people, unemployed people, poor people. Give them the way to spend more money, to have a better life, and that will create the demand for jobs and the profits for the companies who make the things that the mass of people can be empowered to buy. Rather more like what Franklin Roosevelt did, the last time capitalism collapsed, in the 1930s. Obama could have tried to go in that direction. Well, he didn't.

   Second point. Sometimes when you say that to the Obama folks, they come back with, what you called an "excuse" and I think you're right. "Well, I couldn't do it because the Republicans wouldn't let me." "I didn't have the support from below that would have been sufficient to overcome the obstacles placed in my way by the Republicans who undermined everything I tried to do."

Yes, he has a point, there's a grain of truth there. But let's be really honest here. A president who wanted to overcome the opposition of the Republican Party, and to build a support from below to do that, would have had to go out into this country and be the leader folks had hoped he might be when they elected him in 2008.

He would have had to respond to all the initiatives from below that showed a population angry and determined to change things. Had he chosen to be their leader, then there would have been a groundswell from below. That might have had a chance to break through the obstacles of the Republican Party. And in 2011 he was given that opportunity. It's called Occupy Wall Street.

In 350 cities across America -- Real News Network covered it too -- there were movements that showed masses of people who wanted fundamental change, and would have been the mass base for a change and a confrontation with the Republicans. But Mr. Obama chose not to respond to that. In fact, he coordinated the destruction by bulldozers, in many, many of the major cities of America, of the encampments that came to symbolize Occupy Wall Street.

That is, not only did he not welcome the support from below that he said was missing, but when it actually appeared, he helped to destroy it. He can't then come back and say to us, "I didn't have the support from below that might have made it possible for me to go in another direction." He, unfortunately, missed the opportunity created by his own election, and by the momentum of that moment, he missed the opportunity to become the kind of leader in this economic collapse of capitalism that Roosevelt was back in the 1930s.

And that's not to argue that everything Roosevelt did was wonderful and complete, it wasn't. But compared to what Mr. Obama tried, Mr. Roosevelt went much further. And Mr. Roosevelt proved that if you tax corporations and the rich, which he did, to help the mass of people with social security, unemployment compensation and a public jobs program, which Mr. Roosevelt did, not only do you get out of the Depression with trickle-up, rather than trickle-down, but you become the popular president, the most popular president in American history. Roosevelt was re-elected three times. No president had ever had an experience like that -- you don't fail politically if you do that, you succeed.

So Mr. Obama, who wants a legacy, now has to face the daunting reality that he didn't take the steps early in his campaign, in the face of this crisis, didn't learn from his predecessor as a Democratic president, and now suffers from a weak legacy. But part of the fault therein, lies with him.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right, Richard. We have many more topics to talk about. I want to get into the Dodd-Frank Act and its success or failure, in our next segment. Let's continue our discussion in part two, many more topics to take up.

RICHARD WOLFF: My pleasure. I'll be glad to.

SHARMINI PERIES: Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=18086

Right Wing Christians are Starting to Get Buyer's Remorse
Agelbert NOTE: Chuck Baldwin is a Pastor in Montana. He is more of an honest (liberty for everyone, not just the elite) Libertarian than a Republican. He is also A Christian that talks straight about how wrong war is, how wrong scaring us into hating Muslims is, and what ACTUAL Christian behavior is and is not. So, I post this here as a evidence that the more rational people among the Christians are realizing that, like many of us leftists with Obama the fake populist, they have been conned by the fake populism of Trump. I don't agree with everything Chuck says, but I think he is talking a LOT of sense here.


Published: Thursday, December 1, 2016 

Conservatives and Christians who supported Donald Trump need to wake up to the reality that the election is over. The Wicked Witch of the West, Hillary Clinton, lost, and their guy won. What that amounts to is, campaign rhetoric means absolutely NOTHING now. Donald Trump is the President-Elect. From this moment on, we must stop judging Trump on his rhetoric and start judging him on his actions. And the man is busy right now putting his presidential administration together. These are the men and women that are going to be in control of trillions of taxpayer dollars and are going to have their own gigantic sphere of authority and influence over our lives. The kind of people Donald Trump selects for these key leadership posts speaks volumes about the kind of administration he will have. And it is on this exact point that conservatives and Christians greatly contribute to the demise of our liberties: when a Republican is elected President, they tend to go to sleep and refuse to hold the President accountable for his unconstitutional, big-government, neocon decisions and policies.

And speaking of going to sleep, did I miss something? I thought Donald Trump, not Jeb Bush, won the election. But looking over the list of people that have been selected to serve in the new administration, I see mostly establishment insiders. The vast majority of people selected by Trump could easily have been (and probably would have been) selected by Jeb Bush. In fact, Trump’s newly formed administration is shaping up to be an almost carbon copy of the ultimate neocon administrations of George Bush Sr. and Jr. In other words, the people Trump is appointing have track records that are completely contrary to what Trump told us he was going to do when he was elected President.

Let’s review what we have so far:

*Attorney General: Senator Jeff Sessions

Sessions is good on immigration and other issues, but he is terrible on Fourth Amendment issues. From TechDirt.com: “He's a huge supporter of increased surveillance, and not a fan of civil liberties. Going back a decade ago, Sessions very publicly supported President George W. Bush’s surveillance programs that included warrantless wiretapping of Americans. . . .Just this year, Sessions spoke out against encryption on mobile phones in discussing the legal fights between Apple and the FBI.”

“He's also spoken out vehemently against NSA reform that limits surveillance, complaining about the very modest changes in the USA Freedom Act.”

“On top of that, just recently, Sessions tried to massively expand the surveillance powers of the Justice Department, in an amendment he tried to attach to ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act) Reform. We've been calling for ECPA Reform for many, many years, but to stop warrantless surveillance and data collection. But Sessions' plan was to make it even easier for law enforcement to get data, so long as they ‘declared it was an emergency.’”

See the report here:

Trump's Picks For AG & CIA Happy To Undermine Civil Liberties, Increase Surveillance

*Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): Congressman Mike Pompeo

This man is an absolute disaster! He is a major proponent of the surveillance society; he supports unlimited government spying on American citizens. He supports the indefinite detention sections of the NDAA that authorize federal agents or military troops to seize American citizens and hold them indefinitely without a warrant, without providing the person seized with an attorney, and without even the right of Habeas Corpus. He calls government whistleblower Edward Snowden a traitor who should be executed. The Police State has no better friend than Congressman Mike Pompeo. (See the TechDirt.com report above.)

*National Security Adviser: General Michael Flynn

Flynn is a rabid supporter of the global “war on terror.” He will enthusiastically expand the global “war on terror” to levels never before seen. He has totally bought into the anti-Muslim hysteria that has swept through the conservative, Christian, and Republican worlds. It is anti-Muslim hysteria--created by our own CIA, the Israeli Mossad, British MI6, Wahhabi terrorists from Saudi Arabia (most of whom couldn’t even find Mecca on a map), and professional agitators from Turkey--which the neocon establishment uses to foment all of these endless wars of aggression that Trump said he opposes on the campaign trail. If Mr. Trump truly wanted to put an end to the perpetual war doctrine created by the Bush family, he would never have chosen General Flynn.

Personal Adviser: Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner

Jared is the son of Zionist billionaire Charles Kushner, who is a convicted criminal and, I suspect, an integral part of the Jewish mafia. The establishment media is now promoting the idea that it was Jared Kushner who masterminded Trump’s election victory. This is a 35-year-old young man that nobody even heard of before election night. Now, Kushner is on the front cover and is the center of the featured article of the current edition of the very influential Forbes Magazine. Let me quote a little bit from this article in Forbes. The title of the article is “How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House.”

“Winners will emerge shortly. But today’s focus is on the biggest loser: New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who has just been fired from his role leading the transition, along with most the people associated with him. The episode is being characterized as a ‘knife fight’ that ends in a ‘Stalinesque purge.’

“The most compelling figure in this intrigue, however, wasn’t in Trump Tower. Jared Kushner was three blocks south, high up in his own skyscraper, at 666 Fifth Avenue, where he oversees his family’s Kushner Companies real estate empire. . . .”

“The speculation was well-founded, given the story’s Shakespearean twist: As a U.S. attorney in 2005, Christie jailed Kushner’s father on tax evasion, election fraud and witness tampering charges. Revenge theories aside, the buzz around Kushner was directional and indicative. A year ago he had zero experience in politics and about as much interest in it. Suddenly he sits at its global center. Whether he plunged the dagger into Christie . . . is less important than the fact that he easily could have. And that power comes well-earned.”

See the article here:

Exclusive Interview: How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House

I suggest that anyone who thinks that the Kushner Empire’s world headquarters’ address is mere coincidence is truly not paying attention to how New World Order mystics operate. Numerology may not be a big deal to you, but it is a big deal to THEM.

Kushner is a major player in the Zionist/Neocon agenda. And in all likelihood, this young man will be the most influential adviser that Trump will have. NOT GOOD.

*Ambassador to The United Nations: South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley

Haley was a strong critic of Donald Trump throughout the campaign. She was an avid supporter of neocon globalist Marco Rubio. As governor of South Carolina, she has zero experience in international affairs. The only experience Haley has in international affairs is when she eats breakfast at the International House of Pancakes. Why, then, would Trump select her as Ambassador to the U.N.? The senior senator from South Carolina gave us the answer. High-level neocon globalist Lindsey Graham said that Haley is “a strong supporter of Israel,” adding that her presence at the U.N. “will be reassuring to all of those who are concerned about the increasing hostility of the United Nations toward Israel.” (Egad! The United Nations was instrumental in creating the modern State of Israel.)

In other words, Nikki Haley is there to promote the interests of Israel--NOT the interests of the United States. I’m sure we can already thank Jared Kushner for this appointment.

*Secretary of Education: Betsy DeVos

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump was emphatic in his opposition to the Department of Education curriculum known as “Common Core.” Well, ladies and gentlemen, Betsy DeVos is a longstanding advocate of Common Core. Breitbart.com has the report:

“President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team announces the choice of Common Core and charter school supporter Betsy DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education.

“Anti-Common Core grassroots groups of parents and teachers urged Trump to abandon DeVos as his choice, citing her support for the education reform policies of pro-Common Core Jeb Bush and her influence through the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP) in favor of Common Core.”

“DeVos, whose family founded Amway, was an at-large delegate for pro-Common Core Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Kasich received a grade of “F” at The Pulse 2016 for his support of the controversial standards.”

“Frank Cannon, president of American Principles Project, said in a statement prior to the announcement of DeVos’ nomination:

‘President-elect Trump rightly slammed Governor Jeb Bush for his support of Common Core on the campaign trail. Betsy DeVos would be a very Jeb-like pick, and the idea that Trump would appoint a Common Core apologist as Secretary of Education seems unlikely.’”

See the report here:

Donald Trump Announces Pro-Common Core Betsy DeVos As Education Secretary

Obviously, Frank Cannon thought he knew Donald Trump better than he does, because Trump did indeed select Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. All of her current backpedaling aside, she is a TERRIBLE appointee to be trusted with the anti-Common Core agenda promised by Trump on the campaign trail. Of course, Jeb Bush gave Trump high praise for selecting DeVos.

On November 22, I said this on my Facebook page:

"Folks, from this point onward, keep an eye out for how many CFR members Trump appoints. Over the past several decades, both Democrat and GOP administrations have been littered with CFR members. This is one of the BIGGEST reasons that nothing much changes regardless of which person is elected president."

See and “Like” my Facebook page here:

Chuck Baldwin's Facebook Page

Well, folks, it didn’t take long for Donald Trump to join his presidential predecessors from both parties and start appointing members of the globalist agenda-driven Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) to his administration.

*Deputy National Security Adviser: K. T. McFarland

McFarland is CFR. AND THE CFR IS THE SWAMP!

Let me remind readers of what Rear Admiral Chester Ward warned about the CFR. Admiral Ward was the Judge Advocate General of the Navy from 1956-1960 and a former member of the CFR who pulled out after realizing what they were all about. He warned the American people about the dangers of this and similar organizations (such as the Trilateral Commission).

Admiral Ward said, “The most powerful clique in these elitist groups have one objective in common--they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the United States. A second clique of international members in the CFR . . . comprises the Wall Street international bankers and their key agents. Primarily, they want the world banking monopoly from whatever power ends up in the control of global government.”

Admiral Ward also said, “The main purpose of the Council on Foreign Relations is promoting the disarmament of U.S. sovereignty and national independence and submergence into an all powerful, one world government.”

Plus, the short list for Trump’s selection to the office of Secretary of State are said to be Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, Mitt Romney, and General David Petraeus. Each of these men is totally and thoroughly an establishment neocon. And if Trump picks Petraeus, it will be another CFR member picked by Trump.

Besides being a globalist CFR member, Petraeus is an anti-Second Amendment gun-grabber and convicted criminal.

Petraeus hates guns so much that he teamed up with anti-gun leader Mark Kelly and his wife, Gabrielle Giffords, to co-found the Veterans Coalition for Common Sense, an anti-gun organization devoted to "do[ing] more to prevent gun tragedies" by "urging lawmakers to toughen gun laws." (Source: Gun Owners of America)

Petraeus was convicted (and pled guilty) to sharing classified information with his lover, Paula Broadwell. He was fined $100,000 and sentenced to two years on probation. On the campaign trail, Trump used Petraeus as an example of the kind of carelessness and criminality that Hillary Clinton was guilty of as Secretary of State. During the campaign, Trump said that Hillary “has to go to jail” for what she did. Is Trump really going to turn around and appoint a CFR globalist and a man who was convicted of the same kind of crimes that he accused Hillary Clinton of committing to the very same office? God help us if he does. It’s bad enough already.

Senator Rand Paul has hinted that he will oppose the nomination of David Petraeus should Trump appoint him. Good for Rand!

*Secretary of Transportation: Elaine Chao

Chao is another longstanding CFR member. She served in the cabinets of both G.H.W. Bush and G.W. Bush. She is a high-level neocon and globalist. She is a horrible pick! She is also the wife of the Senate Majority Leader, neocon Mitch McConnell. Gee! Why is that not surprising?

*Secretary of The Treasury: Steven Mnuchin

Talk about a globalist banking elite: no one personifies it more than Mnuchin. He was an Investment Professional with Soros Fund Management LLC and spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs. No single individual is more responsible for the attempted surrender of the United States to global government than George Soros. And no institution on the planet has done more to promote globalism than Goldman. When Mnuchin is confirmed as Treasury Secretary (and he will be), he will be the third Goldman alumnus to hold that position. The other two are Henry Paulson under President G.W. Bush and Robert Rubin under President Bill Clinton.

Goldman, JP Morgan, Rothschild, Warburg, Lehman Brothers, Lazard Brothers, Israel Moses Seif,  Rockefeller, and Kuhn Loeb control the Federal Reserve; and no institution on the planet is more responsible for the surrender of U.S. sovereignty and independence than the Federal Reserve. Talk about a swamp: the Federal Reserve bankers are the ones who are most financially responsible for filling the swamp.

For Donald Trump to say he intends to drain the swamp and to then appoint a Goldman-Sachs partner as Secretary of the Treasury is the height of either simplicity or duplicity. Either way, it’s BAD for America. If Trump truly wanted to drain the swamp, he would have appointed Ron Paul as Secretary of the Treasury.

*Secretary of Commerce: Wilbur Ross

Here we go again! Ross worked for Rothschild for twenty-four years. When Trump’s three casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, were going bankrupt, it was Wilbur Ross who stepped in and fronted the monies needed to keep them afloat and rebuild his business. Ross also served under President Bill Clinton on the board of the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund.

As I said at the beginning of this column: conservatives and Christians who supported Donald Trump need to wake up to the reality that the election is over. Hillary Clinton lost, and their guy won. What that amounts to is, campaign rhetoric means absolutely NOTHING now. Donald Trump is the President-Elect. From this moment on, we must stop judging Trump on his rhetoric and start judging him on his actions. And the man is busy right now putting his presidential administration together. These are the men and women that are going to be in control of trillions of taxpayer dollars and are going to have their own gigantic sphere of authority and influence over our lives. The kind of people Donald Trump selects for these key leadership posts speaks volumes about the kind of administration he will have. And it is on this exact point that conservatives and Christians greatly contribute to the demise of our liberties: when a Republican is elected President, they tend to go to sleep and refuse to hold the President accountable for his unconstitutional, big-government, neocon decisions and policies.

What I am seeing right now is another G.W. Bush administration developing. The vast majority of Trump’s appointments so far could easily have been selected by either Bush, either Clinton, or Barack Obama. They are the same establishment insiders that have been running the federal government for decades. Even perceived outsider Steve Bannon is a Goldman-Sachs alumnus, so I am very skeptical of exactly what he will bring to the table. 

And the reason that Republican administrations generally do so much more damage to our liberties than Democratic ones is because once they are in office, they have no meaningful opposition. Christians and conservatives lie down and go to sleep. But if they go to sleep on Donald Trump, they may wake up in an enslaved country.

Accordingly, I call on Alex Jones to be honestly objective about Donald Trump. I call on Steve Quayle to be honestly objective about Donald Trump. I call on Bradlee Dean to be honestly objective about Donald Trump. I call on Joseph Farah to be honestly objective about Donald Trump. I call on Ann Coulter to be honestly objective about Donald Trump. I call on the writers on NewsWithViews.com (most of whom I hold in high regard) to be honestly objective about Donald Trump.

The fact is, we owe Donald Trump NOTHING. He owes us his fidelity to constitutional government. Therefore, as radio hosts, writers, and opinion makers in the alt-media, we owe it to our country to be as faithful to constitutional government as we expect our civil magistrates to be. When the day comes that we lose our honest objectivity, we also lose our credibility and integrity.

I like Trump’s stated decision to ban former government office holders and employees from being lobbyists for five years. I like his stated position that America does not need any additional gun control laws and that Americans have an individual right to keep and bear arms. Obviously, he said many things on the campaign trail that sounded good, including investigating and prosecuting Hillary Clinton--a promise he has recanted since being elected.

I will happily give Donald Trump all due praise when he acts constitutionally and in the interest of the liberties protected in our Bill of Rights. I give him praise for convincing the Carrier company to keep their manufacturing plant in Indianapolis and not moving it to Mexico. But I will NOT give him a pass simply because he is a Republican or because he said a bunch of good things on the campaign trail. And giving him a pass by comparing him to Hillary Clinton is now moot. He’s not candidate Donald Trump any longer; he is now President Donald Trump. As such, I find it SCARY that Trump would suggest that burning the American flag in protest should result in the loss of citizenship or a year in jail. That’s Hitlerian kind of talk. The freedom to protest--even by burning the flag (as despicable as that is)--is what America is all about. For the government to punish peaceful protest is a huge step down the slippery slope to oppression. This is the kind of thing that has always bothered me about Donald Trump.

Again, Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric means nothing now. As President of The United States, he has one main responsibility: to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. And to the people he convinced to vote for him on November 8, he has one major promise to fulfill: to drain the swamp! But he is not going to drain the swamp with the people he is choosing to help him thus far.

 
http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/Articles/tabid/109/ID/3540/Did-Jeb-Bush-Win-The-Election.aspx

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

July, 2016 and a very disorganized Trump campaign is headed into an equally chaotic Republican National Convention. The latest fundraising numbers for June are dismal, and according to CNBC, Trump is second guessing his decision to make Mike Pence his running mate, making last minute phone calls to assess the pick just days before the event. Past GOP candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney have decided to skip the convention. So have both former Bush presidents. One day before the convention and there’s still no official list of speakers. Nevertheless, July 18th roles around and the GOP has to move forward with the show.

GOP Convention

“Keep on singing […] USA, USA”

The convention is considered a disaster. It exposes a party in disarray. Delegations from Iowa and Colorado stage a walkout over a critical rules vote.

Delegates chanting, Denver 7 Broadcast

“Roll call vote, roll call vote […] Right there in the top right you can actually see Kendal Unruh in blue. She’s one of the leaders of the never Trump or dump Trump movement, trying to get the rules changed at the start of the convention to let delegates vote their conscience.”

Subsequent polls show Trump trailing Clinton in need-to-win swing states. Coupled with a string of bad press stories, including Trump’s fight with the family of a fallen Iraq vet, the Trump campaign seems to have lost its momentum.

Joe Scarborough, MSNBC

“Donald Trump is just not doing what is required to win.”

In a surprise move, the Trump campaign shakes up it’s leadership at the eleventh hour, bringing on far-right editor in chief of Breitbart News Steve Bannon along with former Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway. Days later, David Bossie, head of the corporate advocacy group Citizens United, is brought on as deputy manager of the campaign. The campaign also hires the data mining firm Cambridge Anayltica tasked with probing the American voters mind.

At a glance, these last-minute developments look desperate and disjointed.

Dana Perino, FOX

“I don’t know what they’re doing. I wish I could tell you.”

But a closer look reveals something different. It reveals a hidden connection between these players, a thread between this seemingly random cast of actors.

Enter billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah. They’ve been eyeing Trump ever since their first choice, Ted Cruz, dropped out of the primaries back in May.

SOT — Ted Cruz

“We are suspending our campaign.”

Robert Mercer is part of a new class of billionaires, along with the Koch brothers for example, who’ve used the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allows for unlimited amounts of cash contributions in US elections, to set up their own powerful political infrastructures that today they rival that of the two major parties.

The fuel behind Mercer’s influence, along with most of the top activist billionaires in America, is the absurd sums of money he accrues at the investment company he runs, Renaissance Technologies, based on Long Island, New York. Its famed Medallion fund is one of the most successful hedge funds in investing history, averaging 72 percent returns before fees over more than 20 years, a statistic that baffles analysts, and outranks the profitability of other competing funds, like the ones George Soros and Warren Buffet run.

In 2015, Mercer had single-handedly catapulted Cruz to the front of the Republican field, throwing more than $13 million into a super PAC he created for the now failed candidate.

But with the Trump campaign faltering and struggling for support, there’s a second chance for the Mercers to make a big bet. The Trump campaign is well aware of this. In fact, sources within Mercer’s super PAC would later tell Bloomberg news that moments after Cruz drops out of the race, Ivanka Trump and her wealthy developer husband, Jared Kushner, approach the Mercers, asking if they’d be willing to shift their support behind Trump. The answer is an eventual but resounding yes.

In the months leading up to Trump’s presidential win, the Mercers would prove a formidable force. Beginning after the disastrous Republican convention in July, they would furnish the Trump campaign not only with millions of dollars but with new leadership. But they would furnish him with something more: a vast network of non profits, strategists, media companies, research institutions and super PACs that they themselves funded, and largely controlled.

Carrie Levine, Center for Public Integrity

“I think what you’ve seen is a lot of these organizations in this network come out to play a role in the 2016 elections.”

With the Mercer family in the picture, the post-convention shake-up starts to make sense. Take Steve Bannon. He and Robert Mercer have been close for years. And Mercer is a top investor in Breitbart news, where Bannon was chief editor. Mercer’s also funded a number of Bannon’s media projects. Kellyanne Conway also comes out of this network. Before becoming co manager of Trump’s campaign, she headed up operations for Robert Mercer’s super PAC when it was supporting Ted Cruz. Deputy campaign manager David Bossie was president of Citizens United before joining the campaign, an organization Mercer has heavily funded since at least 2010. Cambridge Analytica, the mysterious data mining firm that received grudging praise after predicting the race’s outcome more accurately than any other polling company, is also heavily funded by Robert Mercer, and was employed by the Cruz campaign before Mercer switched over to Trump. In fact, the Mercers’ political infrastructure is so entrenched, that Rebekah Mercer herself sits on the 16 person executive committee of Trump’s transition team.

Mercer’s foray into the White House may seem to have been born partly out of luck, especially with Trump instead of Cruz as his stalking horse. But his rise to power was systematic, and it was years in the making.

The web of connections Mercer’s built over the last decade is vast and complex. It includes efforts to dismantle tax law and weaken the IRS; it’s about funding quack scientists and conspiracy theorists who blame the government for, among other things, playing a role in the San Bernadino massacre and of colluding with the United Nations in using climate change as an excuse to implement environmental laws meant to depopulate America’s midwest. It’s about pouring money into the neoconservative John Bolton Super PAC, which props up candidates who ascribe to Bolton’s very hawkish foreign policy.

But one of Mercer’s earliest activist ventures was financing a slew of fringe documentary projects that’ve helped raise the profiles of people like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann and most notably, the director of those films, Steve Bannon.

Bannon, who was previously a naval officer and Goldman Sachs investment banker, made his first documentary in 2004 about Ronald Reagan. It retold his biography using washed out, black and white archival footage of the Hollywood actor, painting him as brave protector of western democracy from the threat communism.

In the Face of Evil

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this the last best hope of man on earth or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

The film wasn’t a commercial success. According to the reviews, it was a flop. But it developed a cult following. And it revealed that there was an untapped audience for this sort of film, which demonized America’s current establishment while lamenting the death of old-time conservatism under Reagan.

In the Face of Evil would also connect Bannon to conservative author Peter Schweizer, who’s namesake book the film was based on.  It would also connect him to another rising conservative figure Bannon met at a screening of his Reagan film in Beverly Hills, a man Bannon recalled in a Bloomberg piece who came up to him after the showing like a “bear,” he said “who’s squeezing me like my head’s going to blow up and saying how we’ve gotta take back the culture.” His name: Andrew Breitbart, a conservative commentator who for the next few years would join Bannon and Schweizer in their efforts to establish a fresh conservative narrative, with Breitbart himself focusing on an idea for a new media company, something partly inspired by a trip to Jerusalem and the need to create an outlet "that would be unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel", something that would come to fruition in 2007 and that he would call breitbart.com.

“One of the things I admired about [Breitbart],” Bannon said in that Bloomberg story, “was that the dirtiest word for him was ‘punditry’ […] Our vision—Andrew’s vision—was always to build a global, center-right, populist, anti-establishment news site.”

But that wasn’t all. What Bannon, Schweizer and Breitbart really wanted to forge was a multi-teared effort to push their agenda. They wanted to fund Schweizer’s books and Bannon’s films. They wanted a research wing. Ultimately, they wanted to create a media infrastructure big enough to pump their ideology into America’s national discourse.

But they needed more investors. And they needed large investors, people who could fund this giant operation for a sustained period of time, because what this right-wing trio had set out to do wasn’t to simply start a business. It was to transform America’s rage, it’s largely white, rural, working class discontent into a political movement that would storm Washington, first in the form of the Tea Party, and again six years later in the form of Trump.


That influx of cash would come from the organization more famous now for the Supreme Court decision it inspired than for the media and political work it’s done for decades, thanks in part to funders like the Koch brothers and, of course, Robert Mercer. The pro-corporate advocacy group Citizens United was created in 1988, and for years it had pumped out television ads, films and other forms of media content that sought to put pressure both on Democrats as well as more moderate Republicans to embrace a far-right, corporate-friendly approach to politics.

Citizens United Promo

“Remember that the left controls Hollywood. They control entertainment. They control the movies. They control television. They control mass media. They control certainly journalism. And so, what Citizens United has figured out is that through the media, they can in fact move public opinion. They can shape America, and thereby shape Washington.”

It was that effort that gave rise to the film Hillary: The Movie, which in turn lead to the supreme court case that changed the way politics is done in the United States.

It’s worth noting that the Citizens United decision to allow for unlimited campaign contributions through super PACs didn’t originate from any billionaire or corporation directly complaining about contribution limits. It originated from this documentary, which Bannon directed, and which FEC rules barred from being shown because it fell under the category of “electioneering communications.” Essentially, union and corporate funded groups like Citizens United couldn’t air anything critical about a candidate within 30 days of the primaries, and 60 days of the general elections.

The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down that rule opened up the floodgates for unlimited campaign spending, which Citizens United and its billionaire and corporate donors seized upon.

Citizens United has been heavily funded by the Koch Brothers and their network of donors, which Mercer joined early on. But in 2010, Mercer decides to extend his reach and influence beyond the confines of that network, beginning first with Breitbart News, which at the time had hit a bit of a rough patch.

Andrew Breitbart had put out a misleading video that showed a Department of Agriculture official, Shirley Sherrod, making what people characterized as racist remarks towards white people. Sherrod was fired, and when it came out afterwards that the clip had been manipulated, Sherrod sued Andrew Breitbart. The lawsuit fell on the heels of another false video exposé Breitbart had done a year earlier involving the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN, which had resulted in their loss of private and government funding. After the Sherrod video, the media virtually blacklisted him along with his site from mainstream.

The hiccup prompted Mercer to capitalize on the event. According to Bloomberg news, he puts upwards of $10 million in the company later that year, making him a top investor.

The next two years are spent expanding and sharpening these media connections. Bannon continues to produce documentaries, including The Undefeated, featuring the rise of Sarah Palin, as well as Occupy Unmasked, which aimed to discredit the 2011 protest movement.

Occupy Unmasked

(Breitbart): “These people feel morally justified to commit crimes.”

Schweizer continues publishing his books, most notably Clinton Cash in 2015, which Bannon adapted into a documentary and which fueled the right’s obsession with Hillary Clinton and the sources for her foundation. Meanwhile, Mercer is quietly lubricating his political and financial empire, doling out money to a whole slew of conservative non profits such as the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the CATO Institute, Citizens United and many more.

Then, in 2012, Andrew Breitbart dies suddenly from a heart attack.

Wolf Blitzer, CNN

“[…] dead at the age of 43. Breitbart was certainly a driving force in the Tea Party movement as well as a very influential political voice on the internet.”

Mercer and Bannon, who was a board member at Breitbart, quickly rearrange leadership roles in an effort to not lose any momentum. In fact, Breitbart’s death seemed to have been a morbid blessing for the group. Breitbart, unlike his compatriots, had always been more of an old-school, more moderate conservative. He’d worked at the Drudge Report, which many saw as a bullhorn for the Bush administration. More surprisingly, he’d been a researcher for Arianna Huffington, and helped create an early model for what would become the liberal Huffington Post.

So: Mercer, Bannon and Schwiezer crank up the heat. In the months after Breitbart dies, Bannon is made executive chairman of breitbart.com. Schweizer, meanwhile, founds a new research group that focuses on feeding content to Breitbart news and Citizens United for their documentary projects called the Government Accountability Institute, where Mercer is a top funder while Bannon sits on the board.

These shifts are all taking place in the shadows of the presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Romney epitomized the GOP establishment, and Mercer must have been reluctant to give to his campaign: he ended up throwing about a million dollars into a super PAC supporting Romney, a paltry number compared to the $15 million he spent on Trump, and the $13 million he spent on Cruz.

Romney’s loss was a heavy defeat for Republican voters around the country. With so many Americans still struggling to get back on their feet after the 2008 economic crisis, his defeat angered many GOP voters. Some blamed Obama and the Democrats. Others blamed the Republican establishment, including Romney himself.

But at the NYU Club in New York, moments after the news of Obama’s reelection, one unsuspecting voice would take a small group of wealthy donors by storm, blasting the Romney team for dropping the ball on their data mining and canvassing operations. That woman was Rebekah Mercer, Robert Mercer’s daughter.

After Romney, Rebekah became her father’s right hand. Before that, Robert Mercer’s role in his political dealings was to supply money to the people he admired and trusted, people like Bannon, Schweizer and Breitbart. Rebekah wanted to change that. She wanted accountability over the money her father spent. And Romney’s failure provided an opportunity to step into the republican arena and assert her and her father’s agenda.

Between 2012 and 2016, she would take formal leadership positions at the think tanks and non profits her father funded. She became a director at Peter Schweizer’s Government Accountability Institute. She took over the Mercer Family Foundation. And more recently, she managed her father’s super PAC, alongside Kellyanne Conway.

She and her father began to engage more in what you might call a kind of sniper fire politics, investing money in very specific races and causes.

Carrie Levine

“We’ve seen Robert Mercer put money into super pacs in races that have something to do with often tax. This cycle he gave money to a super pac backing a primary challenger to senator John McCain in Arizona. McCain is a Republican and he was the cochair of the senate committee that investigated Renaissance’s tax strategies.”

McCain would later say he thought Mercer was doing this because of that investigation, which was looking into whether RenTec had avoided more than $6 billion in taxes over the course of 14 years.

For the 2016 Republican primaries, Robert Mercer decided to put his support behind Ted Cruz and so did Bannon. But as Cruz faltered and took positions that ran counter to Bannon’s conservative agenda, like supporting the TPP, Mercer and Bannon began questioning their support of a candidate who was too obviously trying to appease both the disgruntled American voter as well as corporate interests in Washington. In the end, Cruz’s evangelical christian persona failed to cover up his true identity, which was as a Harvard-educated lawyer who’d worked for years in Washington including as a young clerk in the Supreme Court.

Robert Mercer seldom makes public appearances and he never talks to the press. The only time he’s spoken publicly was in 2014, after he received a lifetime achievement award from the Association for Computational Linguistics. In the hour-long acceptance speech he gives in Baltimore, Maryland, Mercer spends almost all of his time talking about his passion for computers.

Robert Mercer

“I loved everything about computers. I loved the solitude of the computer lab late at night. I loved the air-conditioned smell of the place. I loved the sound of the discs whirring and the printers clacking.”

None of his remarks are political, except for one comment he makes, when he’s talking about the time he worked at the Air Force weapons lab in New Mexico, and the one day he discovered how to make their computers run 100 times faster.

Robert Mercer

“A strange thing happened. Instead of running the old computations in 1/100 of the time, the powers that be at the lab ran computations that were 100 times bigger. I took this as an indication that one of the most important goals of government-financed research is not so much to get answers as it is to consume the computer budget. Which has left me ever since with a jaundiced view of government-financed research.”

Mercer doesn’t quite fit into an established upper class. He isn’t exactly a Wall Street type, and neither are the 300 employees, many of whom are, like him, advanced mathematicians and physicists, who work at Renaissance Technologies’ brainchild, the Medallion fund.

Carrie Levine

“I think it’s interesting to note that this is a guy who has a programming background, a coding background who didn’t start out on Wall Street and so he’s come to this through sort of a different route […] He’s spoken very little about his political giving and so we can’t say a lot about his motives, at least not [from] what he’s said.”

The fund is known for its secrecy. It’s been closed to outside investors since 2005, and what exactly they trade isn’t fully understood. What is known is that what Mercer along with retired Renaissance Technologies founder James Simons and co CEO Peter Brown have done is master the math behind something called quantitative trading, which involves gaming the stock market using advanced algorithms and data analysis to create unprecedented profits. 

Bill Black, former bank regulator

“All they do is make one group of literally billionaires slightly richer than another group of billionaires […] but they add absolutely nothing to the economy or the world effectively.”

2016’s list of biggest political donors is stacked with billionaires who’ve made their money by engaging in what amount to different forms of gambling. The largest donor of the cycle, Tom Steyer is a hedge fund manager. The second, Sheldon Adelson, is a casino magnate. The third, Donald Sussman, is a quant fund manager. Strangely enough, founder of Renaissance Technologies James Simons, who’s one the Democrats’ largest donors, is number 5 on the list, while his colleague and Republican counterpart Robert Mercer is number 7.

Bill Black

“It’s not a coincidence that the enormous amounts of wealth go to people who are connected with gambling, but recall that they don’t ga mble. Adelson is the House. The House, mathematically, is going to win. And the idea at the hedge fund is that is, again, to have better math than the other billionaires so that you have — statistically you’re going to win.”

Casino capitalism has given people like Robert and Rebekah Mercer riches and power beyond most people’s imagination. But the role of activist billionaires in American politics isn’t new. It’s just become stronger as wealth is concentrated in fewer hands, with the top 1 percent of Americans today holding on to 40 percent of the country’s wealth, and with much of that increase taking place in the finance and energy sectors of the economy. The rise of people like Robert Mercer and the Koch brothers reflects how billionaires have gradually taken more direct control over politicians and the state.

Bill Black
“One of the things that is really useful if you’re a billionaire and that you get your money by doing nothing socially useful, is to valorize what you’re doing and to demonize anyone that might actually restrict it by law, regulation even social mores. And propaganda is historically, the answer to that.”

http://therealnews.com/t2/component/content/article/250-article-with-comment/3021-the-bizarre-far-right-billionaire-behind-trumps-presidency

Agelbert NOTE: Check out the comments section at the above link. I enjoyed the discourse and participated with some nice (brief but pointed) rants.