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by 82_28 » Mon Aug 15, 2016 6:18 am
by kelley » Mon Aug 15, 2016 7:37 am
by divideandconquer » Mon Aug 15, 2016 8:48 am
PufPuf93 » Fri Aug 12, 2016 8:13 pm wrote:Recall Fall 2008 and the financial crisis?
I expect a Fall 2016 crisis.
What could it be?
Surreal. This is one of the adjectives which comes to mind in viewing economic circumstances, in general, and the U.S. economy in particular.
In the fall of 2014; a previous commentary broadcast a warning titled The Next Crash in 2016. It was not so much a “prediction” as mere observation and extrapolation. We had just finished witnessing (and enduring) two, previous, eight year bubble-and-crash cycles, orchestrated by the Big Bank crime syndicate known as “the One Bank”.
The reason for the length and timing of these cycles, as noted by another commentator, was to coincide with the U.S. election cycle. As one half of the Two-Party Dictatorship nears the end of its eight-year reign of power, it becomes the scapegoat for the crash, allowing the other puppet-party to portray themselves as the White Knights who then rescue the U.S. economy. The fact that these “White Knights” were the scapegoats for the previous crash is long forgotten by the zombie-electorate.
A more recent commentary pointed to proof that the owners/controllers of these Big Banks were the perpetrators of the Crash of ’08. For four, solid months at the end of 2008; the Top 0.1% pounded U.S. markets with “excessive selling.” Specifically, at a time when all classes of investors were selling, this one category (of major shareholders) was dumping stocks onto these plunging markets at an anomalous rate.
Based on the previous, eight-year patterns (and the reason for those patterns), the ideal window for the Next Crash is right about now. Thus some readers may already be asking themselves “where is it?”
Precisely. U.S. equity markets already “rolled over” at the end of last year. After peaking at an all-time record, “margin” debt in U.S. equity markets plunged sharply. In normal markets, this is one of the most-certain indicators of a crash.
However, as regular readers know, our so-called markets are anything but normal (or legitimate). What we call “markets” are now nothing more than systemic price-rigging operations, under the complete control of the One Bank. The means of this manipulation are the computer trading algorithms which now dominate trading in virtually all markets.
The evidence of such manipulation is clear. More than 75% of all U.S. equities have been shown to be manipulated by these computerized algorithms. Of even more significance, there is clear evidence that this systemic manipulation is “correlated”, i.e. it is all perpetrated by a single Invisible Hand.
The One Bank possesses the clear means, motive, and opportunity to perpetrate the Next Crash. Its proprietors have already been shown to have perpetrated the Last Crash. The (apparent) best time for this manufactured crash is now.
This brings us to the surreal element of this scripted theater: the headlines which greet us on now a near-daily basis. Almost four weeks ago; we received this warning from the infamous market-riggers of Goldman Sachs:Six Reasons Why Goldman Sachs Is Suddenly Warning About A “Large Drop” In The Market
The reason for the insertion of the word “suddenly” into that title is that as recently as February, GS banksters were still in full, market-pumping mode.Goldman Sachs Says Defy ‘Mr. Market’ as Recession Risk Still Low
Lest any readers think this is mere, capricious flip-flopping, Goldman Sachs reiterated its warning yesterday:Goldman Says There’s an Elevated Risk of a Big Market Selloff
Wall Street’s most strident market-pumpers are now in full “bear” mode. If that is not enough to cause S&P 500 gamblers to quake in their boots, how about this? Today, another notorious U.S. market-pumper, Dennis Gartman, has also just flip-flopped from bull to bear, as well.
We begin by noting that the CNN Fear & Greed Index is still above 80 in openly “greedy” and thus openly over-extended-to-the-upside territory. Some night call this “nose-bleed” territory [i.e. time to fleece the Sheep] and we shall strongly…indeed very strongly…suggest that buying equities here shall be in the end an ill-advised philosophy or action.
Only the Chumps are still buying U.S. equities. The markets have clearly signalled that a crash is coming, in numerous ways. So where is the Crash? And why are perennial U.S. market-bulls now going out of their way to point out how vulnerable U.S. markets are, at present?
It seems there has been a change in the Script for the current bubble-and-crash cycle. What is the primary reason for detonating these crashes suddenly, and (more or less) without warning? To shear the Sheep. So why, then, are these market-rigging criminals now going out of their way to warn the very same Sheep that a crash is not only likely, but likely imminent?
It is instructive to re-examine these previous cycles of crime:1) The last, two bubble-and-crash cycles ended with a crash which was economics-oriented, i.e. the crash was due to a (supposed) sudden downturn in the economy, and thus the need for a political scapegoat – so that the bankers themselves were not blamed
2) If the One Bank repeats the same pattern-of-crime precisely, again and again, even the most dim-witted Sheep will begin to see through the scam.
3) Therefore this time, the “crash” will not be blamed on economic factors, but rather some exogenous event.
By its very (ambiguous) nature, an “exogenous event” could be almost anything. Fortunately, however, we have plenty of clues as to what is the most-likely exogenous event which will be manufactured as a pretext for the Next Crash.
Ever since the One Bank instructed George Bush Jr. to invent “the War on Terror”, U.S. neo-cons have been playing one of their favorite games, on a regular basis: the false-flag attack. In the 21st century, these events are inevitably “terrorist attacks” – i.e. attacks by mysterious Boogeymen (hired mercenaries), whose actions never have to make any sense, because (we’re told) they are all “crazy radicals.”
Now let us start to put these pieces together. The One Bank’s attack-dog, the United States, has been launching regular false-flag attacks (directed at various “allies”). Individuals and entities in the U.S. who are normally the most-rabid market-pumpers are now warning emphatically that U.S. markets are now vulnerable to a crash. And then we get another “terrorist attack.”
Presto! The Boogeymen get blamed for the crash, not the bankers, not the politicians, and so there is no need to manufacture a scapegoat – other than the perennial scapegoat: “the terrorists.”
This explains the emphatic “warnings” we are now seeing regularly from Wall Street icons. It explains why we have not seen the Next Crash already. It is no longer imperative for the Next Crash to tightly mesh with the U.S. election cycle. Indeed, it is no longer certain we will continue to see the clockwork rotation between Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumb every eight years. (Maybe Tweedle-Dee will be allowed to continue its reign of power?)
This means that we are without any obvious clue as to precisely when the Next Crash will be triggered. There are apparently two, countervailing forces now at work which are determinative of precisely when the crash will be manufactured.
On the one hand; the Corporate media propaganda machine generally goes out of its way to telegraph these scripted events. If they want to make their political/economic theater plausible, it must be based on fictional pretexts which are common knowledge, i.e. “everybody knew” U.S. markets were vulnerable to a “terrorist attack”.
On the other hand; since market Sheep don’t (yet) volunteer to be fleeced, they must generally be caught by surprise, or the flock will flee at the first inkling of shearing. If Goldman Sachs, Dennis Gartman, and other foot soldiers of the banking crime syndicate “warn us” too loudly and too often that a crash is coming, there will be no Sheep left to fleece.
Maybe this is the point? Already, most of the Sheep have been impoverished to the point where they no longer have any excess wealth remaining to “invest” in these rigged markets. Globally, the bottom-50% of the population collectively hold less than 1% of total wealth. As noted in previous commentaries, extreme poverty is rising faster in North America than anywhere else in the world.
Maybe the old game of crashing-the-bubbles-to-shear-the-Sheep has become obsolete – as the Sheep have no wool remaining? If there is no longer much “profit” to be made by the oligarchs when they implode their old bubbles (so they can then inflate new bubbles), this changes the bubble-and-crash game entirely.
Suddenly, it is a game which is no longer economically oriented at all, but rather a purely political game of power and control. Crash the markets, blame “the terrorists”, strip away more of our rights, and tighten the fascist straitjacket which now grips the entire Corrupt West
And so we wait...
by seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 15, 2016 8:56 am
by JackRiddler » Mon Aug 15, 2016 9:25 am
82_28 » Mon Aug 15, 2016 3:16 am wrote:Nordic » Sun Aug 14, 2016 11:48 pm wrote:I am finally starting to think that Trump is probably a ploy, part of the overreaching conspiracy to guarantee a Clinton White House. This all seems so set up.
It's even more fake than a lot of us realized.
Indeed, Nordic. 8bit and I have been talking about this for months. He has to be a ploy. But the reason I started this thread way back when is that the normalization of a new and more modern racism will live on.
by JackRiddler » Mon Aug 15, 2016 9:28 am
by Cordelia » Mon Aug 15, 2016 2:04 pm
Nordic » Mon Aug 15, 2016 6:48 am wrote:I am finally starting to think that Trump is probably a ploy, part of the overreaching conspiracy to guarantee a Clinton White House. This all seems so set up.
It's even more fake than a lot of us realized.
by Luther Blissett » Mon Aug 15, 2016 2:27 pm
by tapitsbo » Mon Aug 15, 2016 2:49 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 15, 2016 3:01 pm
by JackRiddler » Mon Aug 15, 2016 3:49 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Aug 15, 2016 4:27 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 15, 2016 4:34 pm
by brekin » Mon Aug 15, 2016 4:52 pm
stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Aug 15, 2016 3:27 pm wrote:OK, this is coming from a source on DU I ordinarily loathe, but it made me laugh:
by Agent Orange Cooper » Mon Aug 15, 2016 7:31 pm
Evan McMullin: Raising the Neocon Flag
The neocons and the rule-or-ruin principle
by Justin Raimondo, August 15, 2016
When one thinks of the neoconservatives what comes to mind is their warmongering, and they have indeed been the War Party’s brains since their incubation inside the Democratic party and their defection to the GOP during the Vietnam era. Yet there are other aspects of the neooconservative mind – or, rather, the neoconservative personality – that are significant, and one of these is their viciousness.
These guys (and gals) fight dirty: the smear, the ad hominem argument, is their signature method. Remember the campaign against Chuck Hagel that targeted him as an “anti-Semite” They lost that one, yet they are not the type to change their ways. They tried the same tack with Donald Trump, throwing every smear in the book at him, and their reaction to his amazing victory in the primaries underscores both the primal hatred they feel for their enemies, and their obsession with control of the institutions they infiltrate.
For many months now, Bill Kristol, the neocons’ little Lenin, has been trying to gin up a fifth party candidate who will take enough votes away from Trump to deny him the White House. First there was Mitt Romney, and then was Sen. Ben Saase being floated as the chosen sacrificial lamb, and when they demurred the Kristolians turned to one David French, a scribbler for National Review – who backed out after a week.
But now, finally, the #NeverTrump movement – which was always a neocon front group – has come forth with a willing candidate: Evan McMullin, a 40-something year-old former CIA agent, former House Republican foreign policy director, and former investment banker at Goldman Sachs.
To be sure, the McMullin campaign won’t be emphasizing the Goldman Sachs connection: the candidate’s Twitter bio merely mentions that he has been a “businessman.” And with good reason: memories of the Big Bank Bailout are still fresh in the minds of the very constituency he hopes to cultivate. And McMullin’s role at Goldman Sachs was in the investment banking division, where the underwriting of foreign government bonds and some pretty dicey financial shenanigans occur mostly in the dark.
He is the archetypal neoconservative: a full-bore interventionist, who is clearly making foreign policy the centerpiece of his campaign, citing his experience in “fighting terrorism” as his chief talking point – aside, that is, from attacking Trump almost exclusively. In a speech he declared that the US role is to police the world in order to stop “genocide.” Echoing the new cold war rhetoric of the Clinton campaign, and his former boss, ex-CIA director Michael Morrell, he declares that Trump is “bought and paid for by Vladimir Putin.” And as a key player in the neocon wing of the CIA, which ginned up phony “intelligence” to drag us into the Iraq war, McMullin wants us to re-invade Iraq,overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and longs for a US confrontation with Russia in eastern Europe.
He is, in short, the perfect neocon candidate, which is why Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard back him to the hilt.
What is the purpose of the McMullin campaign? After all, as ballot access expert Richard Winger informs us, at this late date he could only petition for ballot status in less than half the states – and so his stated aim, the White House, is impossible. Yes, this piece in National Review lays out a scenario where the election is thrown into the House of Representatives and McMullin comes away with the prize – but how likely is that? I would say next to impossible.
So if McMullin in the White House isn’t going to happen, even under the most favorable circumstances, then what is the point of his candidacy?
There are three goals, and they are, in descending order of importance:
1) Deny Trump the White House – The neocons hate Trump, as their voluble participation in the Never Trump movement makes clear enough. They hate his populism; they hate his “America First” foreign policy. And they hate him personally: his “blue collar billionaire” persona offends their delicate sensibilities in the same way it offends their brothers-under-the-skin, the liberal elites of which they are a dissident faction.
2) Assert their power – The neocons have been having a very rough time of it lately. The Iraq war discredited them, and, indeed, made the word “neocon” synonymous with warmongering loser and liar par excellence. By raising their independent banner in this election, they are showing the world that they’re still around, and still a force to be reckoned with.
3) Destroy the GOP – The neocons cannot let a Trumpified Republican party stand. Trump’s “America First” foreign policy views – which are essentially “isolationist,” i.e. noninterventionist – are anathema to them. In this long rant by #NeverTrump GOP operative Rick Wilson, a key player in the “Better for America” PAC that is backing McMullin, writes:
“When it’s over, Trumpkins, remember: You’re not purging us. We’re purging you.”
This is nonsense: what the Republican primaries showed is that the power of the neocons to determine who is to be “purged” and who is to be anointed is over. Bush Republicanism is a dead as phrenology and non-Copernican theories of the solar system. In short, Republican primary voters, like most Americans, are sick and tired of endless wars, and elitist domestic policy, which is another reason why the McMullin campaign is going to go nowhere. It’s why Marco Rubio went nowhere. And it’s why any Republican candidate who takes his or her talking points from the latest issue of the Weekly Standard won’t stand a chance in the GOP primaries of the future.
Some of the neocons – the ones who value proximity to power over their ostensible commitment to the Republican party – recognize this, and moved quickly to endorse Hillary Clinton. Kristol and his followers, however, are reluctant to give up their hard-won gains in the GOP, and, in a fit of pique, are trying to organize a rearguard defense, which, even if it doesn’t succeed, gives them sufficient cover so that they don’t reveal themselves for the unprincipled power-seekers they truly are. If they can’t continue to control the Republican party, then it must be destroyed – and this is where their inherent viciousness comes into play.
“Rule or ruin” has always been the operative strategic principle of the neoconservatives. If you go back into their history, their long rightward hegira didn’t begin in the Democratic party, but on the far left fringes of American politics – in the Trotskyist movement. (I wrote about this at length in my book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.) Their strategic vision has always been organized around the tactic of “entryism” – an old Trotskyist trick, in which they enter a larger body, infiltrate the leadership, and then either seize the reins of power or else destroy their unwilling host.
This is what happened back in the 1930s, when Trotsky urged his followers to infiltrate the old Socialist Party. The original neocons (including Bill Kristol’s father, Irving) were “anti-Stalinist socialists,” followers of Max Shachtman, who eventually wound up in the Democratic party. Centered around Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Boeing), the neocons quit the Democratic party during the Vietnam war era, and entered the GOP. This replicated the strategy of the Trotskyists in the 1930s, who abandoned their independent existence as an isolated Marxist sect and entered the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas.
The idea was to increase their ranks and, if they couldn’t take over the party, split from it greatly enhanced. They stayed in the Socialist Party about a year, until their endless factionalism caused them to be expelled. James P. Cannon, their longtime leader, summing up the Trotskyist incursion, boasted that not only had they doubled their membership, but they had also knocked out the Socialists as a viable party:
“The Socialist Party was put on the sidelines. This was a great achievement, because it was an obstacle in the path of building a revolutionary party. The problem is not merely one of building a revolutionary party, but of clearing obstacles from its path. Every other party is a rival, every other party is an obstacle.”
In summing up the results of their entry, Cannon reported that Trotsky “said that alone would have justified the entry into the organization even if we hadn’t gained a single new member.”
“Every other party is a rival, every other party is an obstacle” – and must be destroyed. And surely a Republican party that doesn’t buy into the new cold war with Russia, doesn’t want to invade Syria, and raises the banner of “America First” – the old slogan of American anti-interventionists, so hated by the neocons – is going to be targeted for destruction by Kristol & Co. And that is precisely the purpose of the McMullin campaign: the end of the GOP as a viable national party.
However, as usual, the neocons may be biting off their noses to spite their faces. Because the entry of McMullin into the race means that there are now no less than four anti-Trump candidates vying for votes. And if, like me, you see this election as a referendum on Trump, with the GOP candidate dominating and defining the election-year discourse, then that means the anti-Trump vote is going to be split four ways, with McMullin, Libertarian Gary Johnson, Green Party nominee Jill Stein, and of course Hillary divvying up the #NeverTrump electorate. Which means that Trump, in spite of his terrible poll numbers, could pull this off in spite of everything.
And I have to wonder how long before Trump, with his capacity for inventing insulting and very effective nicknames for his opponents, comes up with a good one for McMullin. If I may make a suggestion: the shaved head, and the mockery-inducing pretentious solemnity of what is clearly a spoiler candidacy, practically beg us to call him Egghead McMuffin.
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