- Why American Military Doctrine Is Doomed For Failure
Submitted by Federico Pieraccini via Strategic-Culture.org,
An analysis of US generals’ growing dissatisfaction with the political leadership in Washington sheds new light on the direction in which the American military machine is heading. In particular, it is interesting to observe the military planning for the future of the sea, air, space, cyberspace, and land forces.
At the end of the Cold War, the US armed forces found themselves without any real peer, causing them to gradually alter their strategy and investments in war and conflicts. They transitioned from being a large numerical force geared toward fighting opponents of a similar caliber (the USSR) in accordance with a specific military strategy, to a force focused on hybrid adversaries (regular or militia forces) or foes that were not their equal (Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and Libya). The US military accordingly proceeded to change its planning and tactics to satisfy the demands of the new tenants in the White House, the notorious Neoconservatives. What resulted was a military doctrine centered on the concept of a unipolar world and aimed at global domination.
Since the early 90s, policy-makers in Washington have had as their objective the utopian goal of global hegemony, and in order to accomplish this the US armed forces had to expand and create new control centers (USAFRICOM, USNORTHCOM), in addition to those already in existence (USEUCOM, USPACOM, USSOUTHCOM, USSOCOM, USSTRATCOM, USTRANSCOM), in every corner of the planet.
This is a typical example of imperial overreach, which has historically been the impetus for the collapse of several kingdoms and empires over the centuries.
The operational capabilities of the US military machine from the 90s to the mid-2000s remained more or less unchanged in every major conflict in which it was involved: Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003. These were conflicts in which the defense forces of these nations could not hope to match the attacker's power. Weak air defences were a common denominator for all these nations – a vulnerability that has always been the prerequisite for wars such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the US ability to attain air superiority and thus subsequently enjoy unchallenged air space.
Carpet bombing, coupled with the use of staggering numbers of cruise missiles, destroyed the anti-aircraft defenses of both countries, paving the way for massive ground or airborne invasions. One example still fresh in everyone’s mind was the intensity of the US strike in the early days of the Iraq war in 2003, which brought unprecedented levels of death and destruction.
Yet despite this advantageous position, the number of dead American and allied soldiers during the years of occupation was enough to shock the American public, perhaps forever changing the perception of the military conflict. The consequences were predictable, with popular pressure forcing a withdrawal of troops from Iraq and a significant reduction of the contingent stationed in Afghanistan.
After a 70-year history of warfare, the old strategy of bombing, invading, and occupying a conquered territory had outlived its usefulness.
Time to change. New Goal: World Domination
The pursuit of a new global strategy required changes. A numerically smaller force was now needed, which would could be deployed on short notice to any corner of the world. US military strategists began to develop plans for new operational training methods and procedures, based on rapid-reaction forces and the ability to reach any theater of war with ease. To this end, US special forces, drones used for reconnaissance and attack, and reliance on the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and National Security Agency (NSA) ended up almost totally replacing the previous approach and tactics that had been focused on protecting ground troops.
This organizational change, which allowed the regional command centers a high-degree of strategic and decision-making autonomy, increased the complexity of the American military machine on a devastating scale. The practical results of these transformations could be seen in the control centers’ reduced ability to respond to external threats as a single military power under a single flag.
In less than 10 years the United States had gone from a largely ground force able to invade foreign countries with sizable numbers of troops – thanks to its uncontested mastery of the airspace – to an organized military force compartmentalized into small units, which has rarely been asked to intervene directly in a conflict. Thus there has been less emphasis on a search for means and technologies to protect soldiers on the battlefield.
Instead, air power has continued to be the decisive weapon in the war scenarios for several years, especially in North Africa and the Middle East. In 2011 in Libya, one of its latest demonstrations of air superiority, the power of the USAF, combined with that of its allies, provided the necessary cover allowing ground forces (consisting of terrorists who later invaded Syria and the Sinai Peninsula) to conquer and occupy that territory.
To an attentive observer, all these nations that have found themselves in the US military’s crosshairs in recent years share a common characteristic, namely a pronounced inability to defend their own airspace. Once the skies were conquered, which provided protection for the troops during ground operations, most of the work was already done.
But this is a formula that has not always had a successful impact on the course of the fighting. Ukraine and Syria are proof, despite representing two very different scenarios.
A new situation
For entirely different reasons, the two scenarios have highlighted the shortcomings and the strategic and structural weaknesses of the unified military command. In the case of Syria, the air-defense capabilities of the forces loyal to Damascus, rated among the top ten in the world, forced analysts in Washington in 2013 to develop a strategy based on the need to destroy the air-defense systems with the use of numerous cruise missiles that were launched from their fleet in the Mediterranean. Unless the surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems are disabled, the USAF cannot operate with impunity above Syrian skies and risks heavy losses. Syrian anti-aircraft systems are still quite able to neutralize not only an air attack but also a cruise-missile barrage, making any US assault enormously expensive (each Tomahawk costs about a million dollars), counterproductive, and ineffective. This new situation prompted Obama to seek Moscow's help to avoid a conflict that would have caused more than one headache for the Pentagon.
In the case of Ukraine, control of the airspace was uncontested as the Donbass does not possess an air force that can rival that of the Ukrainian military, and thus the military plan was more focused on effective coordination between ground troops, heavy vehicles, and reconnaissance. The goal was to make tactical advances and to conquer the territories in dispute. Yet despite advisors sent from Washington and the technology offered by the United States (the NSA and NRO), Kiev’s army suffered grim setbacks at the hands of irregular forces far more poorly armed in terms of quality and quantity.
Soon, a series of new situations began to unfold for the United States. Its inability to control the airspace over Syria or gain ground in Ukraine was symptomatic of a deeper malaise affecting the capabilities of the US military and its allies to fight certain battles.
Back to the old school
In the minds of US generals and military advisers, these developments were an unprecedented wake-up call. After 70 years of wars and conflicts, the US found itself for the first time in situations where it could neither afford the luxury of intervening directly (Ukraine) nor be able to provide a concrete solution that would reverse the situation on the battlefield (Syria). This was a cause for concern, forcing American political leaders to rethink their entire approach to military confrontation and to formulate a new strategy to face these new challenges.
In some public meetings conducted by General Robert Neller (Commandant of the Marine Corps) and General Joseph Dunford (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), both men have highlighted the most important challenge for the future of the United States military. They foresee a transformation, over just 15 years, into a military force capable of fighting not only enemies that are well equipped (as in Syria and Ukraine) but also on par with the US (Russia and China). It is a revolution, or more precisely, a return to the past.
In defining these challenges, Dunford spoke of what is referred to in military jargon as the “4+1,” i.e., the nations that the US Strategic Command sees as posing major challenges over the next 10 years, in other words: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran + Terrorism. In describing this approach, Dunford has outlined a future war scenario mainly involving short-, medium-, and long-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs, MRBMs, and ICBMs, respectively), anti-ballistic systems (ABMs), cyber attacks, and the ability to deny access or airspace (A2/AD).
What will surprise the reader is the admission by Neller and Dunford that the United States has some operational issues that could easily be exploited by opponents. Rival countries (peer competitors) have made technological strides in the past decade allowing them to almost close the gap with the US military in vital sectors for future war scenarios in many fields, such as the following:
• Fifth-generation aircraft (J-31 and PAK FA) with stealth capabilities.
• Long-range ballistic missiles (R-36M) and short-/medium-range missiles (Iskander).
• ICBMs with supersonic speed (unable to be intercepted by current and future ABMs).
• The ability to produce cybernetic damage with real-world effects.
• Increasingly advanced technology to deny airspace to an opponent either electronically (EW) or mechanically (S-300, S-400, S-500).
In all these challenges we can see America’s advantages being diminished. Another worrying aspect, of which both commanders are aware, is the need to have an Internet/intranet connection in order to operate at full capacity. The interconnection between men and means for the United States is a force multiplier, just as is the need to project power on enemy shores through naval forces. Strategies to deny these advantages are essential components of Russia’s and China’s military doctrines.
The new generation of anti-ship missiles (DF-26, BrahMos II, Qader and P-900) offer a clear example of how Beijing and Moscow are reacting to the steady degradation of the frameworks for global peace. If the US Navy is denied a radius of several hundred kilometers, which is needed in order to control ships and aircraft carriers close to an enemy coast, this is a big problem for American military planners. The anti-ship missiles also offer an economic advantage: they cost little but can sink ships worth billions of dollars. They are thus ideal for challenging the US Navy, whose unparalleled power can be seen in its 10 aircraft carriers. Furthering this strategy, Russia and China are working on beyond-visual-range (BVR) missiles that, combined with stealth aircraft (J-20 and PAK FA), can deny the United States the essential ability to anticipate a lethal attack on its aircraft carriers that can be launched from a safe distance.
The goal for Beijing, Moscow, or Tehran is always the same: to keep Washington from being able to approach their shores or operate in international waters, in order to prevent the huge American aircraft carriers from being used as a launch pad for military operations.
In terms of strategic security, the protection of the skies is the first priority for any military planner. ABM systems, like Chinese or Russian S-300, S-400, and S-500s, are, as stated, designed with the goal of creating an impenetrable airspace for ICBMs and/or fourth- or fifth-generation stealth aircraft. Without air cover and naval platforms, the functional capabilities of any ground troops are drastically reduced. Add to this SRBMs such as Iskander missiles, which can wipe out whole platoons, and one can easily understand why Dunford is worried that he has already lost his technological and operational edge when faced with a competitor of similar stature.
Certainly the evolution of the American military-industrial complex (MIC) has not facilitated the task of the strategists at the Pentagon. Programs such as the F-35 (fifth-generation stealth aircraft) that were supposed to compete with equivalent Sino-Russian projects have been beset by numerous problems and massive cost overruns, probably the result of a widespread system of corruption, leaving the United States at a disadvantage in future contests for air supremacy.
Even the US nuclear arsenal (nuclear triad) could use some upgrades to keep it on par with Russia’s, and those modernizations are estimated to cost about a trillion dollars over 10 years, a figure the US Treasury does not currently possess (without printing extra money, but that's another story). Recently Moscow conducted a long list of tests of its ballistic missiles that are capable of achieving unprecedented speed (Mach 6-7), able to change direction after launch, and which possess a significantly increased operating range (17,000 kms), making all current and future anti-ballistic systems ineffective and useless.
Closing the gap
Moscow and Beijing have practical considerations (but which are, in a way, almost philosophical) based on the enormous difference in their military spending compared to Washington. This has forced them to aim for inexpensive systems that are nevertheless just as effective.
A perfect example, already fully operational, is the development and use of Kalibr missiles – the Russian response to the US cruise missile. Similar to the American version, its main difference is that it can be fired from small ships. To understand Washington’s level of anxiety, one need only analyze its reaction to the Black Sea launch of the first Kalibr missiles in 2015 toward targets in Syria. The Pentagon declared its surprise at Russia’s “new” ability to launch such missiles at a distance of thousands of kilometers from such small ships (with consequently reduced costs). This inability to recognize an opponent’s capabilities is perhaps symptomatic of underlying problems.
The Kalibr missiles allowed Moscow to gain a tactical advantage, which, according to US military advisers, changed the strategic balance in the Middle East. This was enough to dramatically reduce one of the US’s largest advantages: cruise missiles. Top US advisors panicked, realizing they needed to immediately offer an adequate response to this new situation. Moreover, the strategy of equipping small ships with Kalibr missiles has allowed Moscow to produce a large number of corvettes, vastly expanding the total power of the Russian fleet. Moscow currently has quite a number of these ships, all armed in this way.
The United States prefers the opposite philosophical stance in terms of its projects. Long-term projects are being promoted that offer massive opportunities for price gouging and extra profits for contractors and brokers: stealth ships (USS Zumwalt), mega carriers (Gerald R. Ford class), and the F-35 are just a few examples. Without offering any immediate technological advances, especially in relation to the countermoves of the “4 + 1,” it seems that this is where the moderization efforts of the US armed forces are focused.
Paradoxically, although the US cannot even deploy a few F-35s, nations such as North Korea and Iran already have strategies in place to use deterrence to nullify the current American operational supremacy. In this sense, despite sanctions and the international climate of hostility, Pyongyang has managed to produce a submarine equipped with nuclear SLBMs – a big step forward that greatly expands its ability to deter the United States and South Korea. In Iran, the mass production of domestically developed weapons (Bavar-373) similar to the S-300 system (and just as effective) have been designed to deny any operational capacity over the skies of the Islamic Republic and its allies (Hezbollah and Syria) in the immediate future.
An impossible request
Washington is asking its generals to be prepared for a large-scale conflict with opponents of a stature equal to its own, but the reality behind the scenes is troubling, and the desperate cries of Dunford and Neller, appropriately kept hidden from the media, offer proof of this. Just a simple comparison of the military doctrines of China, Russia, and the United States – in regard to their long-term trajectory – shows that Washington, although possessing a numerical advantage in terms of the forces and means at its disposal, lacks the necessary capability to properly unify the powerful components of the US military in order to dominate its rivals.
This is probably why General Dunford said recently that subsequent strategic plans by US armed forces will not be made public. Evidently, hiding these endemic weaknesses is necessary to avoid jeopardizing a cornerstone of the strategy of US forces: the ability to project power and intimidate opponents without having to take real action.
Conclusions and today's conflicts
Because they have effectively taken advantage of all the above factors, Russia, Iran, and their allies have attained the necessary skills to prevent direct US intervention in various contexts, from Ukraine to Syria.
In analyzing what has not worked in the Middle East or Eastern Europe, the US is blinded by the complexity of its military system and is focusing mostly on its inability to rapidly devise a workable strategy that is inexpensive in terms of human casualties. This is the main reason Washington has been forced to lean on outside actors to influence events on the ground (mercenary battalions in Ukraine and Salafis and Wahhabis in Syria). As we can see, these are all choices that do not pay off in the long run, instead allowing other rising powers to dominate the United States without necessarily resorting to a direct confrontation.
The wars of the third millennium AD also heavily rely on psychological factors and deterrence, as well as the essential ability to influence an opponent with false information. Take the example of Syria and the Russian intervention. No one at the Pentagon or CIA was able to predict Russia’s air and naval deployment, which was accomplished in less than 48 hours. No one, least of all Dunford, was ready at the time with a well-defined plan to respond to this move. In addition to technical and organizational inefficiencies, there is a clearly inadequate ability to decipher an opponent’s moves such as one does in chess. The ability to catch an opponent off guard has already proved its effectiveness in the conflict in Ukraine, in which Crimea was reunified with Russia without a shot being fired and with full popular support.
Dunford and Neller have grasped that any future battlefield will be a hostile environment in terms of air superiority, Internet connectivity, and the simultaneous management of resources across a broad geographical spectrum. It is a challenge with – by the general’s own admission – a far from obvious outcome. Washington's policy, which is dominated by lobbies and corruption, requires an unprecedented turnaround in its military apparatus. But this is what is needed in order to meet the future challenges of a multipolar world with different nations (allied together) with capabilities equal to that of the US military machine.
The truth, which is difficult for US policymakers to accept, is that the current environment of the military-industrial complex (MIC) leaves little room to maneuver, given the gargantuan projects that are in place. The F-35 is unlikely to be put on hold while the project is completely revised and its actual ability to carry out the tasks required of a fifth-generation fighter reviewed. The same could be said about the development of expensive ships such as the USS Enterprise and USS Zumwalt, in which several hundred billion dollars have already been invested.
Military spending is an essential gear in the machine of the US system of oligarchy, but the consequences are starting to drag down the future military capabilities of the United States. Its rivals are catching up, using systems that are more advanced, more economical, and more effective, while also easier to use or replicate. The military leaders at the Pentagon are starting to show telling signs of impatience, calling for a transformation that will be difficult to achieve, since it will require a sea change in the country's top-brass establishment. The ultimate consequences are evidence of a pattern that is slowly draining Washington’s wallet and greatly reducing the competitive advantage that Washington possesses.
- General Market Commentary 10-2-2016 (Video)
By EconMatters
The week starts off both the month and the quarter for fund flows as money managers allocate capital to their best ideas for the 4th quarter of 2016. The ISM, European Bank News, and the Job`s Report set the tone for this week.
© EconMatters All Rights Reserved | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | Email Digest | Kindle
- ALERT: US Real Estate Crash Imminent as Matthew threatens Miami Luxury Market
It isn’t often such a clear market signal is painted such as the impending real estate market collapse. It doesn’t take sophistocated algorithms or an MBA from Harvard to add up the math and the data and see that we’re on the precipice of a historic real estate asset cliff; and that the market is waiting for an ‘event’ to tip it over. That event, it can be Hurricane Matthew. That means this can all unfold THIS WEEK. For those of us who have been following this trend for a long time (like, more than 10 years) this isn’t news, it’s just the obvious result of bad planning and decades of building a foundation on the wrong things (this is an educational metaphor – Real Estate Investors built their knowledge on the wrong ideals, the false axioms, and thus – invested in the wrong markets, on markets build on soft, unstable foundations…).
As we explain in Splitting Pennies – Understanding Forex; the entire world’s economy, both micro and macro, can be explained through the prism of monetary policy. Or in other words, if you master FOREX, you can master any market, because all markets are denominated in Forex. Or in yet other words, markets are only able to function as a derivative of money markets – which Forex is.
Bubbles have persisted for years, but this last bubble that caused the 2008 crisis was based on real estate. For a long time, US real estate prices always went up; until they didn’t. So what changed in 2008? Enter Quantitative Easing, a program designed by the Fed to create ‘liquidity’ in the market that was otherwise illiquid. Starting out buying ‘toxic’ assets no one wanted, now the Fed has a diversified portfolio of many assets, much of which is real estate. This is not the only thing propping up the real estate market. Also, the Fed has given banks and hedge funds HUGE access to cheap capital, or free capital, in large quantities. Let’s take the world’s largest, as the best example; Blackstone, with $100 Billion + to invest in real estate:
Blackstone, helmed by global head of real estate Jon Gray, is the largest real estate private equity firm in the world. Since raising their first opportunistic real estate fund in 1997, Blackstone has been a dominant player in the industry with their simplified opportunistic philosophy of “buy it, fix it, sell it”. Just this month, Blackstone real estate surpassed a staggering $100 billion in assets under management. As part of a push towards a longer hold, core plus strategy, they recently closed the largest ever PE real estate fund at $15.8 billion. Furthermore, Blackstone recently acquired Chicago’s iconic Willis Tower, which they plan to enhance through value add renovations and a repositioning of the tower’s retail space.
Well, not all $100 Billion is invested in Real Estate, but remember, they are leveraged, so they don’t buy for cash, so it’s not known what they’re real ‘real’ estate portfolio is. Between the Fed buying MBS (Mortage Backed Securities), Hedge Funds & Private Equity Funds like Blackstone, and your typical foreign buyers fleeing corruption or a crashing economy in their own market – real estate is highly inflated. This is of course, exaggerated in niche areas; Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Boston, New York, Miami, Greenwich CT, and many, many others. Just take a look at what you get in Ohio for $4M and what you get in San Francisco for $4M. Hmm… Something doesn’t add up here. People in CA shocked at non-CA market values. Hmm… and there’s high state taxes in CA, and pollution, a water drought, and fallout from Fukushima irradiating the crops and population, explosion of cancers. Where do I sign?
Years ago, analysts said that in 50 years Florida will be underwater. Real Estate investors didn’t feel that their feet were wet, so they ignored this. Well, these analysts were wrong – it’s happening much, much, much faster. Miami-Dade County is going to be hit the hardest. If you don’t know about this issue, read this article here “A Rising Tide” :
“This whole beautiful landscape’s going to change,” he said. Miami Beach consists of a long, low barrier island accompanied by a scattering of manmade islets. It’s one of the lowest-lying municipalities in the country, and its residents are leading the way into the world’s wetter future. Along the island’s low western side bordering Biscayne Bay, people have come to dread full-moon high tides, when salt water seeps into storm-drain outlets and the porous limestone that provides the island’s foundation, forcing water up and out into the streets and sidewalks and threatening buildings and infrastructure. And Miami Beach is just one small part of a region that’s in big trouble. If sea levels rise as projected, no major U.S. metropolitan area stands to rack up bigger losses than Miami-Dade County. Almost 60 percent of the county is less than six feet above sea level. Even before swelling of the seas is factored in, Miami has the greatest total value of assets exposed to flooding of any city in the world: more than $400 billion. Once you account for future sea-level rise and continued economic growth, Miami’s exposed property will far outstrip that of any other urban area, reaching almost $3.5 trillion by the 2070s. The sea level around the South Florida coast has already risen nine inches over the past century. Among experts, the optimists expect it to edge up another three to seven inches in the next 15 years and nine inches to two feet in the next 45 years. More pessimistic (some say increasingly realistic) predictions say the rise will be much faster. Even the very gradual rise of recent decades will make extensive infrastructure reengineering necessary—Mowry’s job. However, according to a report published by the Florida Department of Transportation, it will become difficult, expensive, and maybe impossible for these efforts to keep up with the accelerated sea-level rise that is actually expected.
Miami is spending $500 Million building walls and drainage to address this problem. Read the 2012 Presentation in PDF here. But will it be enough? And what about Hurricanes? A Category 5 hurricane can have a storm surge of 20 – 30 feet, such as Camille in 1969. Storm Surge is when the water rises, completely – that means the ocean will rise 24 feet (Read about it here). Matthew, if it struck Florida, would really be Biblical. Billions of Dollars in damage would occur, just from the storm. And this information is not ‘priced in’ to this already ‘frothy’ market, just see spring articles about Miami’s real estate crash here, here, and here.
The other info that you need to know, since the early 90’s, the US Government manipulates the weather. If you’re not up to date on this topic, you can read about it here in this groundbreaking book Chemtrails, HAARP, and the Full Spectrum Dominance of Planet Earth. Or for a simple primer on Geo-engineering, checkout No Natural Weather: Geoengineering 101. Then, why would they allow a hurricane to smash into South Florida? Who knows, but if you want to look at the strange correlation between military events and Hurricanes, take a deeper look at 911 and Hurrican Erin – This book Black 911 is a great start.
Matthew is now heading toward Jamaica, at which point it may settle down; Jamaica has mountains which Hurricanes don’t like. But Florida is being warned.
Traders, tomorrow’s trade is easy; put in your buy limits above the MAs on HD, LOW, and get ready to short homebuilders, and other South Florida real estate companies. This week is going to be a wild ride for real estate, regardless if Matthew hits FL or not.
The market now is quiet, sales are down 80% in some areas (i.e. Greenwich, CT “Billionaire Capital”), but the panic selling hasn’t started yet. An event such as a Hurricane in FL, or a big Earthquake in CA, can be the tipping point that starts it.
This will hit the rent market too – as values collapse, rents will too. Not only that, but a bad economy will put pressure on renters and their ability to pay. This recent bubble, in both housing values, rent prices, and other assets – is just that. A bubble. It will pop. And as we saw in 2008, each time the bubble bursts, the drawdown is a little deeper. But real estate in particular recovered with the help of the Fed and numerous Fed players, as this was a political victory as well as an economic one. It was seen as helping Main St. as well as Wall St.
There’s other investments, other ways to make money than real estate, such as Forex algorithms. But it seems that as usual, investors will need to have a huge loss before learning this lesson.
Pain – is the only real teacher!
To learn more about the financial markets, checkout Splitting Pennies – Understanding Forex – your pocket guide to make you a Forex genius! Or visit Fortress Capital Forex, and broaden your horizons.
- "I'm A Bernie Sanders Voter.. Here's Why I'll Vote Trump"
Authored by Eric Zuesse,
Sometimes, things in politics are the opposite of the way they seem. The Presidential contest between the ‘liberal’ Hillary Clinton’ and the ‘conservative’ Donald Trump is perhaps the most extreme example of this — for ten reasons that will be documented here.
I have never voted Republican in my life, starting with my first vote in the 1960s. I’ve consistently supported Bernie Sanders for President (even before he entered the contest). The reason for that support is his record in public office, regarding especially these ten key issues, where Sanders’s actions in public office contrast sharply against Hillary Clinton’s actions in public office. (Her policy-words lie often; but her policy-actions never have lied — actions speak the truth.) Trump has no record at all in public office. Even if he’s as bad as he sometimes projects to be, he’s not as bad as Hillary’s policy-record already is. But his clear superiority over her isn’t merely his lack of any record in public office; because, as will be demonstrated here, his words on some of the crucial public-policy issues have been consistently far more progressive than her actions on those same issues have been (and sometimes more progressive than her words on these issues have been) — and, in Donald Trump’s case, words are all that we have to go by, because his record as a businessman displays nothing about his authentic views about public policy, but only about his self-interest. Both of these two candidates are liars, and any intelligent voter knows it by now.
First, here, will be stated these ten key issues, on each of which issues Bernie and Hillary are opposites, and then Trump’s stated position regarding each of the ten will be presented.
At the end will be presented the reason I won’t vote for Jill Stein.
Here are the ten key issues:
1: Sanders favors “breaking up the big banks.” Hillary Clinton opposes that.
2: Sanders has fought consistently against Obama’s mega-‘trade’ deals. Hillary consistently favored them.
3: Sanders favors working with Russia against jihadists in Syria. Hillary opposes that.
4: Sanders says jihadists are America’s top foe. Hillary says both jihadists and Russia are equally anti-American, equally dangerous to America. Hillary is simply a neoconservative; Sanders isn’t. Her having voted to invade Iraq was no mistake on her part; it was consistent with her entire international outlook, all of which is neoconservative, like invading Libya, Syria, etcetera. Bernie’s vote against invading Iraq was likewise consistent with his international outlook.
5: Sanders has been consistently opposed to fossil fuels. Hillary has aggressively supported them.
6: Sanders says that the system is rigged. Hillary says that it’s not.
7: Sanders says the system is rigged specifically against the poor. Hillary says the problem that keeps people poor is instead individual bigots — against Blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, etc. Not the system itself. She is proud to represent the system. She’s not against it. She’s for it.
8: Sanders’s political career has been financed by small-dollar donations. Hillary’s has been financed by mega-donations.
9: Sanders favors every possible means of reducing the influence big-money donations to politicians has over politics. Hillary opposes that idea.
10: Sanders favors socialized health insurance, like exists in the European nations that spend per-capita half what America does but have higher life-expectancy than America does. Hillary opposes that — she favors the existing profit-based system of health-care, and opposes the European system where basic healthcare is a right, no privilege (that’s based only on ability-to-pay).* * *I support Sanders not because his rhetoric on these matters is correct in my view, but because his record on them is correct: he has voted in Congress consistently in the ways that his rhetoric has said he believes — and I agree with his record, and thus too with his rhetoric (since it’s the same as his rhetoric). Hillary has instead contradicted herself frequently — and even voted in Congress, and acted as the U.S. Secretary of State — in ways that directly contradict her mealy-mouthed progressive statements. Her record shows that she’s actually the anti-Bernie, the opposite of Bernie. Trump (as I shall document here) is definitely not that (despite his frequent appeals to conservatives for their votes). This article will document the reasons why any reasonable and well-informed progressive will vote for Donald Trump.* * *Here are the positions of Trump and of Clinton on these ten key issues:1: Sanders favors “breaking up the big banks.” Hillary Clinton opposes that.
The real meaning of “breaking up the big banks” is separating investment banks from commercial banks: it has nothing actually to do with a bank’s size. It has to do with a bank’s function. It’s structural, not an issue of mere size (which Bernie’s opponents pretend it to be).As Morning Consult reported on 18 July 2016, Bernie Sanders required as a precondition in order for him to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, the inclusion in the Democratic Party platform of a recommendation that the FDR-era Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated investment banking (stock-brokerage) from commercial banking (checking and savings accounts), be restored. Bill Clinton had killed Glass-Steagall, and that’s one big reason why Wall Street heavily funds the Clintons. The elimination of Glass-Steagall returned the U.S. in 2000 to the structure that had produced the Great Depression, in which billionaires were gambling with the money of depositors — gambling with depositors’ checking accounts and savings accounts. That ending of Glass-Steagall set the groundwork for building the bubble which ended with the 2008 economic crash. Both Clintons have been against restoring Glass-Steagall, but Sanders forced this into the platform, even though a party’s platform is pure PR, no real policy-statement. This was purely Bernie’s statement, not at all Hillary’s. (In fact, at the very same time she did this merely nominal act, she selected as her VP pick Senator Tim Kaine, who is a longtime agent for Wall Street and international corporations, and who just before she selected him, was the subject of an article by Zach Carter at Huffington Post, on July 20th, headlined “Tim Kaine Calls To Deregulate Banks As He Campaigns To Be Clinton’s VP”. Kaine also had provided one of the 60 votes to pass Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority, the enabling act for ultimate passage of Obama’s TPP, which will give international corporations unprecedented power if passed. Fast Track needed 60 votes in order to pass, and that’s exactly what it got; each of those 60 votes, including Tim Kaine’s, was essential for it. Hillary supported Fast Track. Clearly, she also will deregulate further the financial firms; what her husband did in 1999 wasn’t bad enough to suit her. With this VP pick, she was stabbing Sanders in the back, right at the start of the Democratic National Convention.)When Bill Clinton ended Glass-Steagall, it was by his signing a piece of legislation titled the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and all three of those names attached to it were Republicans — this was the fulfillment, the very culmination, of a longtime Republican Party effort to end Glass-Steagall. Bill Clinton was a right-wing Democrat (though not as far-right as Hillary) who, by moving the Democratic Party to the right, forced the Republican Party even farther to the right than it had been, in order for Republican candidates to be able to continue to attract conservative voters. Barack Obama has perfected this strategy (of moving America’s political center toward the right) even further. Hillary Clinton would carry it much farther still. The congressional vote on Gramm-Leach-Bliley occurred near the end of Bill Clinton’s Presidency, by which time, there was almost as high a percentage of congressional Democrats who voted to repeal that Democratic Party (FDR) milestone law as there was of Republicans who voted to repeal it, but only Republicans would attach their names to this far-right bill. Gramm-Leach-Bliley was a sell-out to Wall Street. Hillary Clinton always supported strongly that sell-out; Bernie forced her now to nominally oppose it.That same Morning Consult article also reported that, “Paul Manafort, campaign chairman of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, told reporters in Cleveland today that the Republican platform will include language calling for the reinstatement of the law that was repealed in 1999.” That was shocking news.When Donald Trump forced into the Republican platform a restoration of the Democratic Glass-Steagall Act, this was his statement, not something that somebody else forced upon him. He knew that doing this would antagonize Wall Street, but he did it anyway. Trump actually wants to ‘break up the big banks’. He would allow the traditional Republican lower-class voter-base favorites of banning abortions, etc. (he needs those people’s votes in order to win), but he wouldn’t allow Gramm-Leach-Bliley to continue (he apparently doesn’t think he’ll need those people’s money in order to win).On 9 August 2016, the far-right American Enterprise Institute headlined “How Can Trump Support Deregulation and Glass-Steagall?” and opened by saying, “The Republican platform’s proposal to reinstate Glass-Steagall is hard to understand, even in the confused policy mishmash created by Donald Trump. The best interpretation is that it’s an awkward outreach to the disappointed ‘progressive’ supporters of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. The worst is that it calls into question whether Donald Trump really supports financial deregulation. The key problem for those Republicans who are now warily supporting their presidential nominee is that it is not clear where he will lead the party in this election — and the country — if he wins.” That’s precisely true. Conservatives view this with alarm. By contrast, few progressives have yet been equally smart, to even recognize that it exists — the fact that Donald Trump is, perhaps, as much of a closeted progressive, as Hillary Clinton is a closeted fascist (servant of international corporations, their chosen government dictator).The AEI article continued: “But how can we believe any of this [Trump’s anti-regulatory statements]? More than anything else, the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall suggests that the government, and not private decision-making, should determine the structure of the economy. One can’t believe in the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall and still believe in the repeal or significant modification of Dodd-Frank. It’s like saying free markets work, but price controls can help.”The answer to that is: Trump recognizes “that the government, and not private decision-making, should determine the structure of the economy,” and that this is one of the fundamental reasons government even exists — to establish “the rules of the road” for the economy.On 28 January 2016, Chris Arnade headlined in Britain’s Guardian, “I worked on Wall Street. I am skeptical Hillary Clinton will rein it in”, and he wrote: "Ask anyone who has spent the last two decades on Wall Street which politicians have worked for them the hardest and most will grudgingly admit it’s the Clintons.” Those millions of dollars didn’t come from Occupy Wall Street — they came from Wall Street.Any really well-informed progressive knows that Dodd-Frank was largely a sell-out to the mega-corporations, which competitively gain, from the enormously complex Dodd-Frank Act, a huge advantage against the smaller firms, because the more complex a regulatory law is, the more that the required paperwork to comply with it will cripple small firms and so provide added competitive advantage to large firms (for which such paperwork is inevitably a far smaller percentage of their total costs of doing business). Dodd-Frank is a Wall Street monstrosity, and AEI knows it, but they’re appalled that the Republican Presidential nominee stands against the mega-firms that pay AEI’s bills. This is not something that AEI is accustomed to, from a Republican Presidential nominee. After all: the Dodd-Frank Act was Barack Obama’s law he wanted to pass in order to placate Democrats who were demanding restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act. It’s not something that a progressive would support. It was the way to avoid doing what progressives wanted to be done — restoring Glass-Steagall. (Similarly: Obamacare was the way for Obama to avoid pushing a single-payer health insurance plan, such as by opening Medicare to everyone.)The AEI commentary closed: “The Trump proposal to reinstate Glass-Steagall — only a technical idea of no particular consequence to most American voters — has major implications for the credibility of the candidate in whom so many Republicans have now placed their trust. Like the canary in the coal mine, it’s small but significant.” They know that though the public don’t pay attention to such things (the things that are important), the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall is an enormous threat to the ability of America’s billionaires to gamble with the money in the public’s checking accounts and savings accounts — their ability to take the gambling-profits and to leave the government holding the bag in the event that those aristocrats’ gambles don’t pay off (like the Wall Street bailouts in 2008). They favor ‘socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor’. So does the Democratic Presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton; and, thus, AEI is part of the Republican Party elite’s move away from Trump, toward Hillary. They’re increasingly recognizing such “canaries in the coal mines,” from Trump. Progressive Democratic voters should recognize it too, before they help elect Wall Street’s favorite candidate by not voting for Trump.2: Sanders has fought consistently against Obama’s mega-‘trade’ deals. Hillary consistently favored them.
Hillary Clinton was instrumental in getting the “Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority” law approved by congressional Democrats, and that’s the enabling law which now makes likely the ability of Obama to get his TPP ‘trade’ treaty with Pacific countries passed into lawduring the upcoming “lame duck” session of Congress, November 9th through January 3rd. She was a part of it, and she has always acted behind the scenes to push for passage of such treaties, including her own husband’s NAFTA.Like Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump has passionately condemned those treaties, and is urging members of Congress to vote against TPP if and when Obama tries to get it passed into law right after the November 8th elections (which is when members of Congress are maximally willing to do what their funders want and their voters oppose).Hillary's 2003 Living History (p. 182) actually bragged about her husband’s having passed NAFTA, and she said: “Creating a free trade zone in North America — the largest free trade zone in the world — would expand U.S. exports, create jobs and ensure that our country was reaping the benefits, not the burdens, of globalization.” This was one of, supposedly, her proudest achievements, which were (p. 231) “Bill’s successes on the budget, the Brady bill and NAFTA.” But Hillary in her 2008 primary campaign against Obama was demanding that he apologise for his campaign flyer’s having said: “Only Barack Obama fought NAFTA and other bad trade deals.” That statement was just a fact. (Only after Obama started his second Presidential term in 2012 did he staff-up for, and start an operation to institute, mega-‘trade’ agreements that are much bigger, and much worse, even than NAFTA. For that purpose, he hired Michael Froman, who had been the Clinton-operative and longtime Obama friend who had personally introduced Obama in 2004 to the top people on Wall Street who had financed the Clintons’ political careers.)On 20 March 2008, the day after Hillary finally released her schedule during her White House years, The Nation’s John Nichols blogged “Clinton Lie Kills Her Credibility on Trade Policy”, and he said: “Now that we know from the 11,000 pages of Clinton White House documents released this week that [the] former First Lady was an ardent advocate for NAFTA; … now that we know she was in the thick of the maneuvering to block the efforts of labor, farm, environmental and human rights groups to get a better agreement; … now that we know from official records of her time as First Lady that Clinton was the featured speaker at a closed-door session where 120 women opinion leaders were hectored to pressure their congressional representatives to approve NAFTA; now that we know from ABC News reporting on the session that ‘her remarks were totally pro-NAFTA’ and that ‘there was no equivocation for her support for NAFTA at the time’; … what should we make of Clinton’s campaign claim that she was never comfortable with the militant free-trade agenda that has cost the United States hundreds of thousands of union jobs?”The next day, Jennifer Parker at Jake Tapper’s “Political Punch” blog, headlined “From the Fact Check Desk: The Clinton Campaign Misrepresents Clinton NAFTA Meeting”, and she reported: “I have now talked to three former Clinton Administration officials whom I trust who tell me that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton opposed the idea of introducing NAFTA before health care, but expressed no reservations in public or private about the substance of NAFTA. Yet the Clinton campaign continues to propagate this myth that she fought NAFTA.” Hillary continued this lie even after it had been repeatedly and soundly exposed to be a lie. Her behavior in this regard was reminiscent of George W. Bush’s statements on WMD in Iraq, and on many other issues.Only a sucker would believe Hillary’s statements in which she says she has changed her mind and now opposes TPP. She knows that when she helped Obama to win Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority, she had the only impact on that matter which she will ever have, and that it’s because of that law, which she helped Obama to pass, that TPP might be approved in Congress even before the next President enters the White House.Those ‘trade’ deals are actually transfers of national sovereignty to international corporations. TPP, if it passes into law will be the biggest and worst such of them all, even worse than NAFTA — it would virtually end democracy in America.3: Sanders favors working with Russia against jihadists in Syria. Hillary opposes that.
Trump says: “The approach of fighting Assad and ISIS simultaneously was madness, and idiocy. They’re fighting each other and yet we’re fighting both of them. You know, we were fighting both of them. I think that our far bigger problem than Assad is ISIS, I’ve always felt that. Assad is, you know I’m not saying Assad is a good man, ’cause he’s not, but our far greater problem is not Assad, it’s ISIS. … I think, you can’t be fighting two people that are fighting each other, and fighting them together. You have to pick one or the other.” Assad is allied with Russia against the Sauds, so the U.S. (in accord with a policy that George Herbert Walker Bush initiated on 24 February 1990 and which has been carried out by all subsequent U.S. Presidents) is determined to overthrow Assad, but Trump is firmly opposed to that policy.Months before that, Trump had said: “I think Assad is a bad guy, a very bad guy, all right? Lots of people killed. I think we are backing people we have no idea who they are. The rebels, we call them the rebels, the patriotic rebels. We have no idea. A lot of people think, Hugh, that they are ISIS. We have to do one thing at a time. We can't be fighting ISIS and fighting Assad. Assad is fighting ISIS. He is fighting ISIS. Russia is fighting now ISIS. And Iran is fighting ISIS. We have to do one thing at a time. We can't go — and I watched Lindsey Graham, he said, I have been here for 10 years fighting. Well, he will be there with that thinking for another 50 years. He won't be able to solve the problem. We have to get rid of ISIS first. After we get rid of ISIS, we'll start thinking about it. But we can't be fighting Assad. And when you're fighting Assad, you are fighting Russia, you're fighting — you're fighting a lot of different groups. But we can't be fighting everybody at one time.”In that same debate (15 December 2015) he also said: “In my opinion, we've spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could've spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we've had, we would've been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now. We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we've done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away, and for what? It's not like we had victory.It's a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized. A total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.”His thinking about this matter is in the same direction as Bernie Sanders’s but far more fully thought-out, with the connections being made in a prominent way even to domestic spending. If there is anything that is clearly and carefully thought-out in Trump’s policy-positions — and war-peace and the avoidance of precipitating a nuclear war is the very biggest single issue of all — then this issue is it.Here was the debate-segment about this issue between Bernie and Hillary:Hillary Clinton, in a debate with Bernie on 19 December 2015, argued for her proposal that the U.S. impose in Syria a “no-fly zone” where Russians were dropping bombs on the imported jihadists who have been trying to overthrow and replace Assad: "I am advocating the no-fly zone both because I think it would help us on the ground to protect Syrians; I'm also advocating it because I think it gives us some leverage in our conversations with Russia.” She said there that allowing the jihadists to overthrow Assad “would help us on the ground to protect Syrians,” somehow; and, also, that, somehow, shooting down Russia’s planes in Syria (the “no-fly zone”) "gives us some leverage in our conversations with Russia.”Bernie Sanders’s response to that was: "I worry too much that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be. Yes, we could get rid of Saddam Hussein, but that destabilized the entire region. Yes, we could get rid of Gadhafi, a terrible dictator, but that created a vacuum for ISIS. Yes, we could get rid of Assad tomorrow, but that would create another political vacuum that would benefit ISIS. So I think, yeah, regime change is easy, getting rid of dictators is easy. But before you do that, you've got to think about what happens the day after. And in my view, what we need to do is put together broad coalitions to understand that we're not going to have a political vacuum filled by terrorists, that, in fact, we are going to move steadily — and maybe slowly — toward democratic societies, in terms of Assad, a terrible dictator. But I think in Syria the primary focus now must be on destroying ISIS and working over the years to get rid of Assad. That's the secondary issue.”4: Sanders says jihadists are America’s top foe. Hillary says both jihadists and Russia are equally anti-American, equally dangerous to America. Hillary is simply a neoconservative; Sanders isn’t. Her having voted to invade Iraq was no mistake on her part; it was consistent with her entire international outlook, all of which is neoconservative, like invading Libya, Syria, etcetera. Bernie’s vote against invading Iraq was likewise consistent with his international outlook.
Trump has repeatedly said that jihadists are America’s #1 foe. He constantly says that fundamentalist Muslims — jihadists, such as have been sent out and paid by the Sauds to countries around the world to punish and conquer people who don’t share the Sauds’ particular fundamentalist faith — are the biggest danger to American national security. On this basis, Trump says that America’s invasion of Iraq was wrong:He also said: “Saddam Hussein was a bad guy but he was good at one thing: Killing terrorists. He killed terrorists like nobody, all right? Now it’s Harvard of terrorism. You want to be a terrorist you go to Iraq. But he killed terrorists. O.K., so we destroyed that.” Leaders of the Republican Party condemned him for saying this.The Intercept headlined on 29 February 2016, “Neoconservatives Declare War on Trump”. On 21 March 2016, the Washington Post bannered, “Trump Questions Need for NATO, Outlines Noninterventionist Foreign Policy”. On 23 March 2016, William Greider headlined inThe Nation, “Donald Trump Could Be the Military-Industrial Complex’s Worst Nightmare”.This is called by some people ‘non-interventionist’, but actually it’s more correctly called opposition to the continuing take-over of the U.S. government by the military-industrial complex. Trump says: “Right now we’re protecting, we’re basically protecting Japan, and we are, every time North Korea raises its head, you know, we get calls from Japan and we get calls from everybody else, and ‘Do something.’ And there’ll be a point at which we’re just not going to be able to do it anymore. Now, does that [intervention] mean nuclear? It could mean nuclear. It’s a very scary nuclear world. Biggest problem, to me, in the world, is nuclear, and proliferation.” On the same basis, he especially wants to ratchet-down, not up (like Clinton does), the U.S. arms-race with Russia, which restoration of the ‘Cold War’ is beneficial to arms-makers and their investors, but not to anyone else. And he’s especially against continuing our existing relationship with the Sauds, the royal family who own Saudi Arabia. He says: “We’re not being reimbursed for the kind of tremendous service that we’re performing by protecting various countries. Now Saudi Arabia’s one of them. I think if Saudi Arabia was without the cloak of American protection, … I don’t think it would be around. It would be, whether it was internal or external, it wouldn’t be around for very long. And they’re a money machine, they’re a monetary machine, and yet they don’t reimburse us the way we should be reimbursed. So that’s a real problem.” The Saud family, the royal owners of their nation, compete against the government of Russia as the leading suppliers of oil to the world. Russia’s main export market was Europe, and the Sauds have wanted to replace Russia’s oil and gas dominance there. The Saud family are also the world’s leading buyer of weaponry. U.S. weapons-makers profit enormously from continuing this relationship — the Sauds buy America’s weapons, and the U.S. joins the Sauds’ wars, which are basically against the allies of Iran and of Russia, the Sauds’ chief competitors. The Sauds helped us end the Soviet Union, by sending Osama bin Laden into Afghanistan etc. and creating Islamic terrorism, both there and subsequently inside Russia, in Chechnia. After King Fahd had a stroke in 1995, Osama bin Laden’s advice was even sought by the Saud Princes to determine which of them should become the next king, and he supplied that advice to them in a letter, which was delivered by a private courier. Since the U.S.-Saudi creation of Islamic terrorism helped end the Soviet Union by 1991, the Sauds have been just a huge drain and embarrassment to America. Only the armaments firms benefit from continuing the campaign, now directed against Russia and its allies (such as were Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Viktor Yanukovych), instead of against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact (which are gone).Trump says: “Many people in countries that you think are our allies, are giving ISIS tremendous amounts of money and it’s going through very dark banking channels. And we should have stopped those banking channels long ago and I think we’ve done nothing to stop them, and that money is massive. … And money is coming in from people that we think are our allies.” By “our allies,” he certainly means the Sauds, but he might also be referring to the royal families of Qatar, UAE, and Kuwait, all of whom likewise are competitors against Russia, and share essentially the same fundamentalist-Islamic faith the Sauds do.Trump is much more explicit about these things than Sanders has been, and Trump has been even so bold as to assert: “I have two problems with NATO. No. 1, it’s obsolete. When NATO was formed many decades ago we were a different country. There was a different threat. Soviet Union was, the Soviet Union, not Russia, which was much bigger than Russia, as you know. And, it was certainly much more powerful than even today’s Russia, although again you go back into the weaponry. But, but – I said, I think NATO is obsolete, and I think that – because I don’t think – right now we don’t have somebody looking at terror, and we should be looking at terror. And you may want to add and subtract from NATO in terms of countries. But we have to be looking at terror, because terror today is the big threat.”Though there was his usual incoherence — NATO is “obsolete” but “you may want to add and subtract from NATO in terms of countries” (instead of to end it) — his statement isn’t nearly as incoherent as, for example, Hillary’s proposing to bring peace to Syria by going to war there against Russia. And he clarified his view further when he went on to say of NATO, that not only are its member-countries wrong for today’s challenges, but that “it was set up to talk about the Soviet Union,” and the big problem today is terrorism, and “I think, probably a new institution maybe would be better for that than using NATO which was not meant for that.” So: he actually knows that it’s got to be ended. A military alliance that’s “obsolete” is dangerous. Perhaps no U.S. Presidential candidate has spoken in such depth about foreign affairs. In this matter, he has delved far beyond the fashionable political platitutudes, to the basic realities, which no politician wants to talk about. Doing this requires guts. He’s correct not only regarding TPP etc., but regarding fundamental military strategy.On 18 May 2016, the Republican Robert Kagan, scion of (along with the Kristols) the most famous neoconservative family, and also the husband of Victoria Nuland (Hillary’s friend who ran Obama’s coup in Ukraine and installed racist fascists or nazis into control there), headlined in the Washington Post, “This Is How Fascism Comes to America”, and he opened, with his usual sanctimonious pomposity, “The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic.”Then, the May/June 2016 issue of Politico magazine headlined “The Kremlin’s Candidate”, and Michael Crowley, formerly of The New Republic (the top Democratic Party neoconservative magazine), portrayed Trump in the way that Joseph R. McCarthy had been famous in the old days for portraying people such as Robert La Follette Jr.: as being a traitor. The far-right ‘media-watchdog’ organization, Accuracy In Media (AIM), headlined on 20 April 2016, 25 years after the end of the Soviet Union, “Trump Hires ‘Fixer’ With Soviet Connections”. Hillary Clinton’s shills are all over the newsmedia proclaiming Trump to be Putin’s fool, or Putin’s secret agent, or even to be both at once (which simply exposes how little respect they have for the people who believe their lies).Trump’s basic message is that the actual Cold War against the Soviet Union and its communism ended in 1991 when the U.S.S.R. and its Warsaw Pact ended, and that until Islamic terrorism arose after that, America really had no enemy after the end of communism — that Islamic jihadists are America’s real enemy, and Mitt Romney was profoundly wrong to allege that "Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe.” Mitt supported the invasion of Iraq, just as did Hillary. Hillary was also the one member of the Obama Administration who most effectively argued for and persuaded President Obama to invade Libya. (Both Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi were friendly toward Russia, which neoconservatives especially and viscerally hate. Thus, there was Hillary’s famous “We came, we saw, he died — ha, ha!!”) Trump says something that Sanders himself has merely hinted at: NATO’s emphasis against Russia — the very basis of NATO — is, after 1991, outdated, and needs to be replaced by an entirely new U.S. defense-strategy, one directed instead against jihadists, no longer against Russia, which isn’t even communist anymore, and doesn’t even have the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact military alliance anymore. He’s looking long-term, and saying that national security against jihadists is a real concern, but that the war against Russia needs to stop and has no reason to continue, and that, to the contrary, the U.S. and Russia have shared interests in eliminating jihadists and jihadism. He says we’ll need to work together in order to end Islamic terrorism, which will mean a profound change in today’s Islamic world — a change that will benefit Moslems even more than anyone else, but that will also benefit us enormously. The idea of fighting both jihadists and Russians makes no sense at all to him: “You can’t be fighting two people. … You have to pick one or the other.” That’s a stronger statement than Sanders’s (“I think in Syria the primary focus now must be on destroying ISIS and working over the years to get rid of Assad. That's the secondary issue.”), but it’s in exactly the same direction.Already, the Obama Administration and NATO have pushed the anti-Russian agenda, and are expanding NATO, to such an extent that “The US leadership has done everything it could to push the situation to the brink of disaster.” Beyond that brink is nuclear war. A potential ally in the global war against jihadists is thus instead “without question, our number one geopolitical foe,” and declared by Obama to be the world’s most “aggressive” nation. That’s being said of a nation which wants to be America’s strongest ally, in America’s — and Russia’s — real war: against jihadism.In addition, the U.S. military are now starting to push for the necessity of going to war as soon as possible against China, so as not to permit the Chinese to arm themselves enough to be able to survive and remain an independent power. Trump has said that as President he will respect China’s independence, though he will negotiate with them a new agreement regarding trade between the two countries. Neoconservatives, by contrast, are only slightly less hostile toward China than they are toward Russia.5: Sanders has been consistently opposed to fossil fuels. Hillary has aggressively supported them.
Trump, like all Republican Presidential contenders (except for Ted Cruz), is no longer outright, and with certainty, denying that global warming is a real problem. On 11 February 2016, MSNBC headlined about this, “How Trump and company warmed to climate change”. However, no Republican Presidential candidate can afford to speak about the necessity to end reliance on fossil fuels, which constitute that Party’s chief and most reliable financial support. A Democrat, such as Hillary Clinton, can afford to speak about it, even if, like Clinton, the given candidate is actually also in the bag for fossil fuel companies. The Trump-Clinton rhetorical difference on global warming can’t be evaluated in a vacuum that’s devoid of these funding-realities. During all of Hillary’s time in public office, she has — by heractions though not always by her words — been a reliable supporter of fossil fuels, and fossil-fuels companies have responded with their money. Trump has no policy-record at all, but only rhetoric (pro-fossil-fuels, of course), and even his rhetoric hasn’t been consistently Republican on this quintessentially Republican issue. The biggest organizer of fossil-fuels political donations, the Koch brothers, are directing all of the Presidential-campaign cash to the Clinton campaign, none to Trump.On 17 July 2015, Paul Blumenthal and Kate Sheppard at Huffington Post bannered, “Hillary Clinton's Biggest Campaign Bundlers Are Fossil Fuel Lobbyists” and the sub-head was "Clinton's top campaign financiers are linked to Big Oil, natural gas and the Keystone pipeline.”Her record does show that she represents those lobbyists, not the public. As I had reported previously, the Hillary Clinton State Department’s two environmental impact statements on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline were triple-hoaxes that totally and scandalously ignored the proposed pipeline’s impact on climate-change but that did discuss the impact of climate-change on the proposed pipeline (as if anybody even cared about that); neither of the two studies had even one climatologist on the team that prepared the report; and the State Department didn’t do either of the reports themselves, but instead hired two oil-industry contractors that were proposed to the State Department by TransCanada Corporation, which is the company that was proposing to build and own the pipeline. So: those ‘studies' were rigged to enable the President to approve the Pipeline — which he ultimately decided not to do.Furthermore, on 2 May 2013, Steve Horn headlined, "Digging Into TransCanada's Lobbying History,” and he found that, indeed, Hillary Clinton was surrounded by TransCanada lobbyists while the reports were being prepared by TransCanada’s chosen oil-industry contractors.Hillary Clinton is also a big champion of fracking. In September 2014, Mariah Blake bannered "How Hillary Clinton's State Department Sold Fracking to the World,” and reported that, "As part of its expanded energy mandate, the State Department hosted conferences on fracking from Thailand to Botswana. It sent US experts to work alongside foreign officials as they developed shale gas programs.” The energy-companies didn’t pay for those sales-calls by the U.S. Secretary of State; taxpayers did.Though Clinton verbally endorses the view that global warming is the world’s biggest problem, she doesn’t care about it in her actual actions as a public official. It’s mere rhetoric to her. Trump seems more honest, by saying: “When people talk global warming, I say the global warming that we have to be careful of is the nuclear global warming [blowing up the world]. Single biggest problem that the world has. Power of weaponry today is beyond anything ever thought of, or even, you know, it’s unthinkable, the power. You look at Hiroshima and you can multiply that times many, many times, is what you have today. And to me, it’s the single biggest, it’s the single biggest problem.” Furthermore, that statement was his response to an interviewer’s question, “Would you be willing to have the U.S. be the first to use nuclear weapons in a confrontation with adversaries?” Trump’s response indicated that the nuclear-war issue brought to his mind the issue of global warming: it showed that the mental association in his mind is that these two issues are the two most important issues that a U.S. President must address. He answered the question about nuclear war, by asserting that nuclear war is an even bigger concern for him than is global warming. That’s the correct priority, but it also shows that Trump is no conservative when the issue is global warming. No conservative thinks “global warming” when being asked about nuclear war.In order for Trump to hold his conservative base, he must include among his nominal ‘economic advisors’ some rabid anti-environmentalists. One of them is the libertarian Stephen Moore, chief economist for the Heritage Foundation, and founder of the Club for Growth. On 10 August 2016, Morning Consult bannered, “Trump Adviser Not Sweating Consequences of Promised Coal Boom”, and Moore criticized Trump for not being sufficiently pro-fracking. Moore even condemned environmentalists by saying “Fracking reduces global warming, you morons!” Of course, that statement of his is false. He then lambasted Barack Obama: “I think he believes totally in this lunatic idea that somehow everything’s going to be underwater in 20 years. … I think Obama is the most fanatical politician I’ve ever met on global warming.” The kicker in the article was this: “Hillary Clinton, however, appears to be ‘less extreme’ than Obama in opposing fossil fuels, Moore said.” Moore, a ‘former’ lobbyist himself, knows that she’s in the fossil-fuels industries’ pockets. Trump, on the other hand, is just a question-mark. Clearly, Trump is seen as the enemy, by the biggest anti-environmentalist political spenders of all: the strongly pro-Hillary Koch brothers.Furthermore, though the issue of global warming wasn’t raised by the interviewer or anyone else in the September 26th U.S. Presidential nominees’ debate between Hillary and Donald; Trump, and he alone, chose to bring it up during the discussion of nuclear war, when Hillary said there that, “his cavalier attitude about nuclear weapons is so deeply troubling. That is the number-one threat we face in the world.” He replied: “I agree with her on one thing. The single greatest problem the world has is nuclear armament, nuclear weapons, not global warming, like you think and your — your president thinks. Nuclear is the single greatest threat.” Yet again, he was showing the link that exists in his mind between these two premier issues; he was showing an implicit acknowledgement that though nuclear war is the top threat, global warming — if it is occurring — would be #2. If he becomes President, then not only the scientific consensus that it’s happening and is human-caused would be constantly pressing in upon him to acknowledge this reality publicly, but his ‘yielding to it’ and ‘changing his mind’ (if that’s really what it would be) about it, will be far more effective at reducing the shockingly high percentage of the American public who deny this terrible reality, than would a President Clinton’s acknowledgement that it’s real. It could cause the entire Koch-Exxon-etc. campaign of lies about it to collapse (much as happened with regard to the lies that the tobacco industry so successfully had peddled for so long about smoking). The U.S. would become far more cooperative with the international movement against fossil fuels than this country ever has been.The fossil-fuels industries are smart to be pouring funds into ads against Trump. They’ve been doing that for a long time.6: Sanders says that the system is rigged. Hillary says that it’s not.
Trump says, “It's not just the political system that's rigged, it's the whole economy. … Hillary Clinton's message is old and tired. Her message is that things can't change. My message is that things have to change.” That’s basically the same message as Sanders was promoting.7: Sanders says the system is rigged specifically against the poor. Hillary says the problem that keeps people poor is instead individual bigots — against Blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, etc. Not the system itself. She is proud to represent the system. She’s not against it. She’s for it.
On 18 March 2016, Jason Linkins at Huffington Post bannered “How To Explain Hillary Clinton’s Fundraiser With Failed Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes: Scenes from the wreckage of the Democratic party”, and he reported that, “‘At some point,’ [Thomas] Frank tells the Huffington Post, ‘[the Democrats] decided that they weren’t all that interested in the concerns of working people anymore.’ Rather, Frank says, they became fixated on ‘the concerns of the professional class, people with advanced degrees, people at the very top of our economic society.’” Those are the voters whom Hillary Clinton’s policies aim to please. Trump, like Bernie, is pitching to working people. By making economic regulations so complex that only large corporations can afford the costs of compliance with them, more lawyers are needed, and more accountants are needed. By reducing and blocking taxpayer-funded healthcare, more doctors and more bill-collection agencies and more lobbyists are hired at higher salaries, in order to produce any given quality-level of healthcare.8: Sanders’s political career has been financed by small-dollar donations. Hillary’s has been financed by mega-donations.
Trump’s stated positions are basically like Sanders’s: Trump has stated:As regards proposed solutions, Trump’s focus is different from Sanders’s, which proposes both limits on donations, and also total transparency of mega-donations so that the public will accurately know who actually was behind each particular mega-donation. Trump recognizes that the Republicans on the Supreme Court have eliminated the former (size-limits), and that they have also opened up a huge door to increased non-transparency, regarding whom the actual mega-donors to a candidate are. Trump has said:Hillary Clinton has opposed Sanders’s proposal regarding limiting the size of campaign-contributions, and she has been vague on everything else except “Overturn Citizens United”, which is one of the Republican judges’ decisions (starting with Buckley v. Valeo in 1976) that unleashed mega-donations by declaring that in political campaigns, money is first-amendment-protected “speech,” and that therefore the more money that’s spent advertising any candidate, the more “free speech” there is, and therefore, the better it is. In other words: Clinton has no actual position on money-in-politics (the idea that ‘money is speech’), she has only empty rhetoric, though she’s long been in public office collecting mega-donations. Clinton made it all the way through the primaries against Sanders and never even asserted (as if one can even trust what she says) a coherent position on the matter, other than the bumper-sticker “Overturn Citizens United,” to please liberal fools to vote for her. Meanwhile, the lawyer Glenn Greenwald has pointed out that Hillary was lying, even on the little she says about Citizens United — the one money-in-politics decision she condemns. Greenwald wrote: “The Clinton argument actually goes well beyond the Court’s conservatives: In Citizens United, the right-wing justices merely denied the corrupting effect of independent expenditures (i.e., ones not coordinated with the campaign). But Clinton supporters in 2016 are denying the corrupting effect of direct campaign donations by large banks and corporations and, even worse, huge speaking fees paid to an individual politician shortly before and after that person holds massive political power.” Donald Trump has spoken clearly against all of that — he opposes, in principle, the type of opacity in donations, which the Democratic Party under Clinton encourages; and he also opposes, in principle, the opacity (such as Clinton’s being allowed to hide from the public her 91 paid secret speeches to mega-corporations and to their lobbying organizations). Trump, like Bernie, says the system itself is corrupt and corruptiing. The corruptors don’t like him much more than they liked Bernie.The Washington Post headlined on 1 March 2016, “GOP Super PAC’s Ad Portrays Donald Trump as a Predatory Huckster”. The next day, Politico reported:These people are now donating to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and were donating to it even during the primaries.The Washington Post reported that “Money Raised as of June 30” of 2016, produced the following ratios, advantaging Clinton over Trump:Ratio of Hillary Clinton Campaign $ divided by Donald Trump campaign $ = 3.21Ratio of Clinton Super PACs $ divided by Trump Super PACs $ = 12.7118% of Clinton-campaign money came from donations of $200 or less. 27% of Trump-campaign money did. But that 27/18 ratio, of Trump/Clinton small donations, under-represents the true extent to which Trump was being backed by small donations, because Super PACS are almost entirely big-money donations, and an additional $106.8 million of Super PAC money helped Clinton’s campaign, whereas an additional mere $8.4 million of Super PAC money helped Trump’s campaign. Clearly: Clinton attracts the big money; Trump repels it. (He even condemns it.)With Trump, there is at least the possibility of a President who opposes the existing corrupt-and-corrupting system. With Clinton, there is a long and continuing, thoroughly convincing, record of her participating in, and sustaining, corruption in public office. Her top donors are employed by the companies that benefit the most from complexification of our laws, eliminating simplification, adding counter-productive bureacratization, which crushes everyone but the top 1%.9: Sanders favors every possible means of reducing the influence big-money donations to politicians has over politics. Hillary opposes that idea.
Trump during the Republican primaries was so averse to selling the Presidency to his fellow-billionaires, that he ran his campaign, against his competitors, on a virtual shoestring. After the primaries, he needs lots more money to campaign, especially against Hillary’s campaign that’s funded more heavily than any political campaign in history, from almost every special-interest group (and see here the list of closed-to-the-public speeches she’s given to the various lobbying organizations). She’s offering the U.S. government for sale. Trump is thus-far getting very few billionaires to pony up for his campaign. That’s extraordinary: normally, Republican candidates get even more from mega-donations than Democratic candidates do. However, Trump’s being starved by his fellow-billionaires means that he needs to rely even more heavily upon the Republican Party’s grassroots voting base: especially fundamentalist Christians, gun-rights fanatics, and anti-immigrant voters. The more that he can rely upon Bernie’s voters to win, the less he’ll need to rely upon those traditional Republican groups. If Bernie’s voters show up at the polls for him, this will greatly encourage a future President Trump to surprise the nation with how progressive he actually is. But he can’t afford, right now, to make any overt policy-pitches to Bernie’s voters, because that could scare away lots of the Republican voting-base he’ll definitely need in order to win.Also, Trump, unlike Sanders, is running in the traditional big-money Party, the Republican Party. Though Sanders was able to be viable while categorically refusing any assistance from Super PACs, Trump wasn’t, and isn’t. Trump, if he wins, will pull the Republican Party toward the “peace and justice” left; congressional Democrats will then need to move along with them in that same direction, in order to be able to retain their existing base. By contrast, a Clinton victory would move the Democratic Party to the right, and then congressional Republicans will need to move even farther to the right, in order to retain their existing voting-base. To move America’s center in the direction of progressivism, Trump is the clear choice.Hillary Clinton is the Democrats’ deceiver-in-chief; she is actually the Democratic Party’s Richard Nixon. By contrast, the “huckster” Trump is, if anything, too honest for his own good. Maybe he thinks that he’s a good-enough sheer salesman to be able to do that and still win, but he’ll need a lot more support from Bernie-voters in order to make it happen.10: Sanders favors socialized health insurance, like exists in the European nations that spend per-capita half what America does but have higher life-expectancy than America does. Hillary opposes that — she favors the existing profit-based system of health-care, and opposes the European system where basic healthcare is a right, no privilege (that’s based only on ability-to-pay).
Trump says he favors taxpayer-paid healthcare for Americans who cannot afford to pay for the basic healthcare they need:Here’s what that “so much money on the other side” might refer to:The latest OECD data on healthcare costs show that the U.S. spends by far the world’s highest percentage of GDP on healthcare, 16.9 percent; and also show that the average U.S. life expectancy is 78.7 years; by contrast, Canada spends 10.2 percent, and their life expectancy is 81.0 years. The OECD average expenditure is 9.3 percent , and life expectancy is 80.1 years. So: the U.S. spends almost twice as high a percentage of GDP as every other OECD nation, and gets markedly inferior results. This makes the U.S. far less economically competitive than it otherwise would be; but, the healthcare industries finance conservative politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and all Republicans; so, those politicians don’t like single-payer — it would take much of the excess profits out of exploiting the sick, and those excess profits help to fund their campaigns.The American people’s financial losses produce exceptional financial gains for the investors in healthcare-related stocks, and also inflate the pay for executives in those firms. This helps to fund lots of what conservatives such as Antonin Scalia lovingly call “free speech” — campaign commercials.Here are the latest available data, and they show that, still, the U.S. is somewhat worse than average, for quality of care, and astronomically higher than any nation on both per-capita healthcare costs, and the percentage of GDP that goes to healthcare costs. For examples: across 45 countries tabulated by the OECD, the U.S. healthcare-expenditure per capita was $8,713 and 16.4% of GDP, whereas the average OECD country paid $3,453 and 8.9% of GDP. France paid $4,124 and 10.9% of GDP, and Japan paid $3,713 and 10.2% of GDP. The U.S. also was tied with Brazil, Chile, and South Africa, for having the highest percentage of healthcare-costs that’s paid privately rather than by the government.In any case, with our existing healthcare-for-profit, instead of healthcare-as-a-right, system, the U.S. ends up paying lots more than our competing nations, yet getting inferior results. (Apparently, postponing care until one is being rushed into an emergency-room is both atrociously poor care, and extremely expensive care. But it’s the most profitable for the healthcare-industries.)Trump might have been referring to data such as those. If so, then he was correct about “we’re going to save so much money on the other side.” Hillary’s statements against the European-Canadian-Japanese system — basic healthcare as a right, instead of as a privilege — are false, and she knows it, she simply lies (for money).Hillary condemns Bernie Sanders’ support of taxpayer-funded health isurance for all (or ‘Medicare for all’ or “single-payer” health insurance). She says, "People who have health emergencies can't wait for us to have a theoretical debate about some better idea that will never, ever come to pass.” (There is no ‘theoretical debate’: many of those other countries do retain a role for private insurance, but not as big a role as ours, and not the same role.) That CBS News story, 29 January 2016, by a reporter who clearly favored Hillary, was headlined “Hillary Clinton: Single-payer health care will ‘never, ever’ happen”, and that reporter summarized by saying, “The debate over health care underscores the difference between Clinton's campaign pitch as a pragmatic, effecitve leader and Sander's pitch as a candidate with vision,” or, in other words, Clinton was saying, and CBS was simply assuming to be true, and not challenging at all: the U.S. must stay with its existing system, which produces lower life-expectancies and twice the cost; Bernie’s belief that we can do what Europe, Japan, etc. have done, is impossible for Americans; our country is too corrupt for that, she’s saying (and CBS reported without questioning or challenging). The CBS news-report continued by approvingly quoting Hillary: “'As someone who has a little bit of experience standing up to the health insurance industry, that spent, you know, many, many millions of dollars attacking me, and probably will so again. … I think it's important to point out that there are a lot of reasons we have the health care system we have today,’ she said. ‘I know how much money influences the political decision-making. … However, we started a system that had private health insurance.’” That news-report closed by quoting, also approvingly, Hillary’s statement in 1994: “‘If, for whatever reason, the Congress doesn't pass health care reform, I believe, and I may be totally off base on this, but I believe that by the year 2000 we will have a single payer system,’ she said. ‘I don't even think it's a close call politically. I think the momentum for a single payer system will sweep the country. … It will be such a huge popular issue … that even if it's not successful the first time, it will eventually be.’” Back in 1994, she was citing single-payer as being a threat — never a goal. Wall Street knows where she stands, even if her voters don’t.Obamacare continues this status-quo, but adds, to it, more federal and state regulations, which make the system even more complex, and thereby further disadvantages small businesses, in their competing against big ones. Hillary Clinton likes Obamacare, and opposes single-payer health insurance. Back in 2008, she said regarding both her own 1993 Hillarycare proposal, and her then-current 2008 campaign proposal: “I never seriously considered a single payer system. … I think that, you know, there’s too many bells and whistles that Americans want that would not be available.” She said, “Talking about single payer really is a conversation ender for most Americans, because then they become very nervous about socialized medicine and all the rest of this.” However, that too was a lie. She reads polls. Just months earlier, on 14-20 December 2007, an Associated Press/Yahoo poll of 1,523 registered voters, including 847 Democrats and 655 Republicans — about the same proportions Democratic and Republican as the U.S. population generally, at that time — asked respondents whether “the United States should adopt a universal health insurance program in which everyone is covered under a program like Medicare that is run by the government and financed by taxpayers,” and also asked them “Do you consider yourself a supporter of a single-payer health care system, that is a national health plan financed by taxpayers in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan”; and 65 percent said yes to the first, and 54 percent said yes to the second. The public wanted single-payer. Hillary had designed her 1993 Hillarycare proposal for the Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) industry; and she designed her 2008 position for the drug companies and the private insurance companies. Single-payer would replace those big political contributors, which she doesn’t want to do; she wants their money.What she had said in 1994 about Hillarycare needing to be passed into law because of the danger that “by the year 2000 we will have a single-payer system,” was being said by her in private to the top people at Lehman Brothers Health Corporation. She knew that single-payer was popular and would become more so. Consequently, when she said to the public, in her 2008 Presidential campaign, that “single payer really is a conversation ender for most Americans,” she was just blatantly lying. Her real masters are clear: it’s not the public. She instead treats the public like suckers. (Trump just has a different way of doing it, and evidently not so clearly a malignant purpose for it.)Furthermore, she implicitly has condemned the Canadian and other nations’ single-payer healthcare systems by saying, “We don’t have one size fits all; our country is quite diverse. What works in New York City won’t work in Albuquerque.” (In 2015, according to the OECD, in 2015, the U.S. spent 16.9% of its GDP on healthcare, and Canada spent 10.2%. Canada also has higher life-expectancy.) Her presumption was that what works in Canada or some other large single-payer country cannot work here — that local control must trump everything in order to fix what’s wrong with American health care. She was implying that our healthcare system delivers superior healthcare at a lower cost than those single-payer countries’. However, as we’ve shown, that too is a lie: we pay more, and get less, and she knows it; she lies.This is how the Clinton scam works: most of the Democratic Party voters are either totally ignorant of it, or else in denial about it. They think that because she’s not nominally a “Republican,” she’s less right-wing than Republicans are. That’s the reason why she won the votes of enough Democrats to become the nominee: they are fooled by her public rhetoric, and don’t know about her actual record in public office, which is simply atrocious.A Washington Post interview published on August 11th, was titled “The Donald Trump interview that should terrify national Republicans”, and the questioners there were shocked at the extent to which Trump’s economic proposals reflected Democratic and not Republican economic policies — far more so than Hillary Clinton’s do. Trump in this interview made the distinction between the U.S. government borrowing money at record all-time-low interest rates such as now, versus when interest rates are high, and he said that in a time like this, the repairing and rebuilding of our infrastructure will repay maximum returns for the future, because of those record-low interest-rates. He was proposing to more than double the amount that Hillary Clinton is proposing to spend to restore America’s crumbling infrastructure up to world-class standards, because doing this now will reduce instead of increase costs long-term. “Roads, tunnels, hospitals. I mean, everything. We have to fix the airports. Our airports are like third world countries.”The health of the public is America’s human-resources infrastructure (notice that he included there “hospitals”), and Trump — not Hillary — is the candidate who recognizes this fact, and who thinks in this way. It’s something that the great Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the creator of Social Security, and of the Works Progress Administration), recognized and put into practice starting in 1938, and immediately the U.S. economy boomed, from then on. The FDR boom didn’t start on December 7, 1941, with World War II; it started when FDR first came into office in 1933, and really sped up in 1938 going full speed ahead with Keynesianism. (Keynes’s theory wasn’t even published until 1936.) Trump is correct to say (in effect) that now is the time for FDR2 — not another Herbert Hoover (or, since Hillary is corrupt, Warren Harding).* * *My vote for Trump will be the first Republican vote in my life, and I hope that this will be the only time in my life when the Democratic candidate is so abysmal that I’ll have to do this. It’s not because I like Trump; it’s because he’s vastly better than the Democratic nominee, whom I consider to be by far the worst Democrat ever. To me, choosing between Trump, who has no political record, and Hillary, who has the worst record in public office of any Democrat ever, is easy. On all other ballot lines, I shall, as always, vote Democratic. In fact, that will be the best way to block from getting to President Trump’s desk the Republican bills that he’ll likely be wanting to sign, such as any bill to eliminate the estate-tax. But I don’t expect that Democrats will at all oppose what might be his boldestprogressive initiatives, such as, perhaps, a European-style healthcare system. If Democrats would block something like that, they’d then be killing their own Party (and cursing their country), and there aren’t many Democrats who are (like Hillary Clinton would be) corrupt enough to carry things quite that far in the conservative direction, as to persist in sustaining healthcare-by-corruption. (As former President Jimmy Carter says of today’s U.S.: “Now it's just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president.”) Perhaps a President Trump would get so many congressional Democrats and Republicans to vote for a single-payer health insurance proposal, that such a piece of legislation could be signed into law much likelier than if a President Sanders (who would be voted against in Congress by virtually every Republican member) were to be pushing for exactly the same type of legislation and getting only some congressional Democrats (and no Republicans then) to vote for it. Indeed, we all might even turn out to be surprised to find that a President Trump will be the most effective progressive President since FDR. If Democrats control Congress, then he might turn out that way, and become widely revered — and the neoconservatives, who are America’s fascists, will then have to become curses upon some other land, perhaps Israel, because they wouldn’t be able, any more, to make life hell for Americans (such as by our invading Iraq and Libya). They’ll then be like the Soviet Union’s die-hard communists were, after communism ended: failed ‘prophets’ without a country.Hillary Clinton’s constant refrain against Trump is that he’s a racist. However, as the progressive John V. Walsh argued, on 29 December 2015, in a superb essay, “Who Is the Arch Racist: The Donald or Hillary?” the answer to that question is clearly Clinton, not clearly Trump, despite Trump’s frequent use of racist rhetoric in order to hold enough of the Republican base to be able to win the election. Anyone who believes what either of the two candidates asserts is believing a confirmed and persistent liar, but only Hillary is a consistent liar for the biggest-money interests. With Trump, we really don’t know what his policies would be, because he has no record in public office, but with Hillary Clinton, we do — and it’s truly horrific.John Pilger said, “Trump's views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.” (Pilger’s disgust against liars and hypocrites such as Obama, reflects his extraodinarily pure progressivism. Obama has been the most effective — and effectively closeted — Republican President; he has been the ultimate deceiver. For example, Blacks have actually lost wealth under Obama, the most of any ethnic group, yet they constantly support him the most of any ethnic group.) And anyone who thinks that Hillary Clinton would be less conservative than Barack Obama has been, is in for a sore disappointment if she becomes the next President. By contrast, a President Donald Trump could well surprise strongly on the upside, because, unlike Hillary, whose record in public office makes clear that she would be horrifying, Trump has no such record at all, and the people who are demonizing him are themselves individuals whose records in public office (or else as journalists) are as despicable as Hillary Clinton’s record is.Both sides in this election are concentrating on personal attacks against the other, but the ten issues that have been discussed here are vastly more important than, for examples, whether Donald Trump (and/or Bill Clinton) is a rapist (or whether Hillary Clinton hired thugs to make life hell for Bill’s rape-victims), or whether the Trump University scam from which Trump profited, is worse than the Laureate International Universities scam from which Bill and Hillary Clinton profited. At the economic top in America, is unimaginable corruption and rampant psychopathy; and, so, one can reasonably question whether this nation is still a democracy at all, but the scummiest people have funded Hillary Clinton’s career, vastly more than Donald Trump’s. Hillary owes a lot of billionaires a lot of money on their investments in her. Trump does not.We’re going to be placing this country into the hands of either Hillary Clinton’s enemies, or else Donald Trump’s enemies, and the latter group are by far the worse of the two. Not to vote, in such a situation, or else to vote for a ‘protest’ candidate and so throw one’s vote away (even if the voting-machine will only be programmed to misreport it), is irresponsible. If America is not a democracy, then, still, a voter’s obligation is to do whatever he or she can in order to maximize the chance that it might become one. As between the two viable options here, Clinton is the clear police-state option, but Trump might possibly fight to restore America’s democracy. The choice of Trump over Clinton is easy to make, because, even in the reasonable worst-case scenario, the damage Trump would likely cause the country (and the world) is vastly less than the damage — nuclear war against Russia — that Clinton would likely cause. This is certainly no ‘Tweedledee, Tweedledum’ election. Not even close to that.The progressive journalist Bill Blum put the case succinctly: "I would vote for Trump. My main concern is foreign policy. American foreign policy is the greatest threat to world peace, prosperity, and the environment. And when it comes to foreign policy, Hillary Clinton is an unholy disaster. From Iraq and Syria to Libya and Honduras the world is a much worse place because of her; so much so that I’d call her a war criminal who should be prosecuted."By voting for Trump, you add 1 vote to him, and 0 vote to Hillary, and so that’s a real action in the real world of electoral politics: it puts Trump up 1. By voting for Hillary, you add 1 vote to her, and 0 vote to Trump, and so that too is a real action in the real world of electoral politics: it puts Hillary up 1. Either vote is a real vote.* * *The real world of electoral politics is the foundation of democracy, without which it can’t function at all. Fantasy votes are not votes that can even possibly participate in democracy. For example: by voting instead for Jill Stein, you add 0 vote to each of the two real-world contestants, just the same as you would be doing by staying home on Election Day.
Regarding the question of whether voting for Jill Stein is at all rational:The U.S. Presidency is determined in the Electoral College, in which each state’s entire delegation votes the given state’s Election-Day choice, winner-take-all for all of that state’s electors.Neither Nader nor Perot won even one state, neither of them came even close to winning even a single state.Jill Stein definitely won’t win even one state.Voting for her is nothing but a sucker-punch on the ballot there.When Nader ran, and received 2.74% of the nationwide vote at his peak in 2000, he was on the ballot in 49 states, yet still he won not even a single state. Instead, because he drew off more than enough Gore voters in both New Hampshire and Florida so as to throw NH to Bush and to cause FL to be so close that the outcome there was decided by the 5-4 Republican-majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, Nader made George W. Bush President. If Nader hadn’t been on the FL ballot and drawn 97,488 votes there, Gore would have won FL decisively; Bush’s ‘537 vote win’ couldn’t even possibly have occurred, because Gore’s winning margin there would have precluded any recount at all. (Gore would have won FL by around ten thousand votes.) There would have been no invasion of Iraq. The problem of global warming wouldn’t have been shunted off to the side, as it was by Bush.Furthermore, Nader also threw NH to Bush, and Gore would have won the Presidency even if only one of those two states, NH and FL, hadn’t been thrown to Bush by Nader. Bush needed both of those two states in order to eke out his 271-266-vote win of the Electoral College, and that’s what Nader’s participation in the contest handed Bush — both states. Nader sucked away enough voter-fools, most of them to the left of center, so as to move the electoral result (the electoral advantage) far to the right of center.In a Presidential system such as the U.S. (though not in a parliamentary system), only fools vote third-party. These people are either so ignorant they can’t count, or so stupid they think that to ‘register a protest’ is somehow more patriotic than to register a vote that might make an actual difference in the resulting winner, the resulting President.The stakes in the current election are actually huge: the Tweedledee Tweedledom argument certainly doesn’t apply here (neither did it apply in 2000) to excuse a voter from really participating in the ultimate outcome. It’s our duty to vote only for candidates who might possibly win, even if the electoral system is rigged (such as it is in Iran, to eliminate from having even a real chance to win the Presidency, all candidates who are so good they’d pose a threat to the behind-the-scenes dictators). If the electoral system is rigged, voting is the only way to protest, that has even a possibility of being effective (unless a violent revolution might improve matters, which seems unlikely here). To be a fool is never good. It harms everyone. It’s certainly not an ethical choice, if anyone actually chooses it. (Of course, if the person is too stupid to be said to ‘choose’ it, then one can’t blame the person, but merely feel sorry for his unintended victims.)The only realistic choice that is offered is either Clinton or else Trump. Even if it’s a choice between two bad candidates, one of them is far worse than is the other. With Trump as President, there is a realistic possibility of getting a reasonably good President, someone who won enough independents and fooled enough Republicans, to enable him to win the Republican Party’s nomination. With Clinton as President, there’s a realistic possibility of nuclear war with Russia, but a virtual certaintly that this nation will be ruled behind-the-scenes, by-and-for America’s international corporations. That is the real choice we have, if we have any at all. Fantasists have the freedom to stay with their fictions, but realists are obliged not to. Realism is a prerequisite to progressivism. Trump is the clear, and the only reasonable, choice for progressives in this election.Our choice, Bernie, didn’t make it to the finals. (Hillary and her big-money people beat him — sometimes cheated him.) We are stunningly fortunate that the voters in the other Party’s primaries ended up giving us (for once) a realistic chance to have, as the next U.S. President, a person who is at least no worse than, and is on many of the most important issues far better than, the atrocity (Hillary) that is being offered to us by the Democratic Party. How often does the Republican Party provide the better candidate? In the opinion of this Bernie-supporter, such a thing has never happened since the time of Abraham Lincoln. Donald Trump might not be another Abraham Lincoln, but he might be another Franklin Delano Roosevelt — the greatest progressive of them all. Thank you, Donald Trump, for having given us this opportunity — the realistic possibility to salvage, for America, a progressive future. It couldn’t have happened without you — if it does happen, at all.On September 16th, the conservative Ramesh Ponnuru headlined an op-ed at Bloomberg News, “Trump Throws Out the Republican Litmus Tests”, and he wrote about what The Week magazine titled “The End of Republican Dogma?” Ponnuru said:“Over the span of two days, the Republican nominee for president has proposed new child-care subsidies, new mandatory benefits to be provided by business, the removal of millions of families from the income-tax rolls, and an increase in tax rates on single people making from $112,500 to $190,000 a year. Oh, and he put in a good word for Medicaid too, leaving the impression with many people that he favors expanding it. … None of these positions seem to be costing him any of his supporters, just as his opposition to entitlement reform and free trade did not keep him from winning the Republican nomination. … He has exercised more [ideological] freedom than Republican politicians dreamed they had. For years, they have been complaining that purists had imposed a series of litmus tests that kept their party from winning elections or governing well. … That stranglehold now appears to be broken.”Trump is rapidly moving America’s political center in the opposite direction from the direction that Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, did, which was toward conservatism, away from progressivism: those conservative Democratic Presidents and (now) would-be President, have moved America’s political center considerably toward the right (the international-corporate agenda). A President Trump would reverse the political direction that this country has been heading in ever since 1993.If we progressives don’t help Trump to do that, we shall be throwing away the only such opportunity that the U.S. oligarchy (slipped-up and) allowed us to have. A President Hillary Clinton would have the support of almost all congressional Democrats no matter how right-wing her proposals are, and her big-money financial backers will buy enough congressional Republicans to make her the most effective most conservative Democratic President in decades if not centuries. The prospect is chilling.
* * *Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity - Meanwhile, Saudi Stocks Crash Near 7 Year Lows
Despite the Deutsche-driven bounce in Western markets on Friday, the 'panic in The Kingdom' that we highlighted earlier in the week is accelerating fast. Following demands from officials for banks to reschedule loans to clients affected by last week's decision to cut salaries and bonuses for state employees, Middle-East bank stocks are collapsing and Saudi's Tadawul Index is back near its 2009 lows…
The weakness – despite crude strength – was driven by Saudi Arabia’s central bank decision to direct local lenders to reschedule the consumer loans of clients affected by last week’s decision to scrap the bonuses and allowances of many state employees. As Bloomberg reports,
The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, as the central bank is known, said in a statement on its website on Sunday that the step was part of efforts to “reduce pressure on borrowers” whose income was cut by the government’s Sept. 26 package of measures to further trim spending.
The agency said local banks must obtain the client’s approval before rescheduling a loan. Borrowers should present proof that their income has been affected by the recent cuts to the nearest bank branch, the regulator said. Loans taken after the cabinet decision to end the payments won’t be rescheduled.
Under Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the world’s biggest oil exporter has already delayed payments owed to contractors and started cutting fuel subsidies as it tries to manage lower oil prices. The measures may help narrow the budget deficit to 13 percent of gross domestic product this year and below 10 percent in 2017, according to International Monetary Fund estimates.
The cancellation of bonuses and allowances — and a simultaneous decision to lower ministers’ salaries by 20 percent — further spread the burden of shoring up public finances to a population accustomed to years of government largesse. Yet analysts have warned the cuts risk deepening the kingdom’s economic slowdown by damaging consumer confidence.
Which collapsed Saudi banking stocks to record lows…
And trust is rapidly being lost in the Saudi interbank markets…
And this is a major problem…
No help at all as oil prices rebounce post-Algiers.
As the forward market implies dramatic devaluation is looming…
And investors are loading up on record amounts of CDS protection (red line)…
Charts: Bloomberg
- Here's Why You May Want To Tiptoe Out Before The Party Ends
Submitted by The Wall Street Examiner's Lee Adler, via Contra Corner blog,
Private spending on capital goods is a measure of business confidence in the economy. If business people believe the economy will grow, they invest more in plant and equipment. If they are not optimistic, they pull in their horns. This week’s Commerce Department report on Durable Goods orders contains a nugget or two that help us to see how business people are behaving in that regard.
The picture isn’t good. Apparently business people have been growing less confident in the growth potential of the US economy for the past 16 years. That belief, and the reduction in investment that follows from that belief, runs the risk of being a self fulfilling prophecy. This isn’t just a long term phenomenon. Business investment in capital goods has been flat since 2011, and has been declining for the past 2 years. Meanwhile, over the 5 years that growth in business capital spending has stalled, stock prices went to the moon. The disconnect matters.
Capital goods have a limited life. Most need replacement within 10 years. If such replacement is delayed, as was the case during the 2008-09 crash and depression, a strong rebound is inevitable. Replacement can only be delayed for so long, until pent up demand reaches the point where it begins to actualize.
This is inherent in the natural business cycle. Such rebounds do not require 0% interest rates to occur. Economists and central bankers may argue that ZIRP was needed to trigger such a turn in 2009, but the turn would have come whether rates were 0% or 5%. They always did so in the past, and would have done so again in 2009. The recovery that began in 2002 was a case in point.
Even assuming ZIRP was needed as a trigger, after a few months it would no longer have been. In fact, 0% interest rates have had no effect since that initial rebound. The growth phase slowed in 2012, settled into a trend of replacement only, with zero growth, and then began to steadily contract in late 2014, a trend that remains in force today.
It appears that since 2011 we have gone through an entire business cycle with rates pinned at zero for no reason. The Fed has put us in a box. It can no longer even pretend to enhance a rebound by lowering rates.
Capital goods aren’t the only aspect of business investment. In addition to equipment, there’s also physical plant, that is, the buildings that house the business, whether commercial, industrial, retail, or service. To get an idea whether investment in buildings changed the picture any, I created a combined index of non defense capital goods plus private investment in commercial and industrial property. I converted that index to real terms using the PPI for construction.
The housing bubble generated a commercial construction bubble that sent total real business investment to a record high in 2008. But the crash followed and the recovery was weak, fizzling out altogether in 2014. Real investment is now down 5% over the last 2 years, and by 20% since 2008 when real business investment hit its lagging peak. Compare that to the current 49% gain in stock prices from the 2007 peak to the August 2016 level. It’s hard to fathom any rationale for a 49% rise in stock prices while real business investment has shrunk by 20%.
There should be a connection between business investment and Commercial and Industrial Loans. Businesses typically borrow the funds for purchases of equipment or to fund construction of physical plant. From 1999 through 2014, such borrowing moved roughly concurrently with business investment. Not only the timing, but the relative directions were similar. But in 2012 the relative directions of the curves of the two series began to diverge as growth in business investment slowed while C&I Loans soared. In 2014-15, the normal relationship became completely unhinged. Businesses pulled in their horns in making real investments, but they continued to increase their borrowing exponentially.
Business borrowing had always tracked real business investment until 2014. Then businesses stopped investing in plant and equipment. But they continued borrowing at a breakneck pace. It was as if the borrowed funds were disappearing into a black hole. But in spite of there apparently being no tangible assets to back the new borrowing, banks have been all too happy to take the business. The credit bubble has been expanding at a breathtaking pace as a result.
At one point in early 2015 C&I lending was growing at a 13% annual rate. That has only slowed to a 9.5% growth rate today while real business investment has been shrinking.
Where’s it going? We should all know the answer to that question by now. Driven by ZIRP and massive amounts of excess cash in the system, corporations are borrowing to buy back their own stocks. CEOs, CFOs, and their fellow executives conspire to issue massive stock option grants to themselves. Then the have their companies borrow the funds for free to buy the stock issued under those option grants. They shrink the shares outstanding and drive their stock prices higher in the process. As they raid their companies, everybody’s happy because their stock prices go higher. Corporate boards and regulatory bodies do nothing to stop the looting because the scam looks like a win win for everybody.
But it’s not. It’s just another massive bubble, a financial engineering bubble. It is a bubble driven by the cold calculations of the criminal masterminds in the C-suites of America’s corporations. It is a bubble enabled and funded by the mass insanity of central bankers and clueless investors around the world. And it is a bubble egged on by the cheerleaders on Wall Street and their financial media handmaidens.
So party on, Garth! Party on! But you might want to consider tiptoeing out the back door before they lock the exits.
- WSJ Reports "No Settlement Deal" Between Deutsche, DOJ As German Econ Minister Slams Deutsche Bank
As we predicted on Friday, and as we reported earlier today, the AFP “story” of a $5.4 billion revised settlement between DB and DOJ was indeed “sources” on Twitter, and had no basis in reality. The reason: not only has John Cryan barely started the negotiations with the DOJ, and is set to arrive in the US this week to beg for mercy, but as the WSJ, which broke the original settlement story more than two weeks ago just reported, Deutsche Bank’s settlement talks with the DOJ are continuing, “with no deal yet presented to senior decision makers for approval on either side.“
The talks are moving forward, but they have “not progressed to a degree that a proposed deal has reached senior-level review at the Justice Department or with Deutsche Bank’s supervisory board, people familiar with the matter said.”
While there is much more information one could hope for in what is now the most important litigation in capital markets, we will gladly take what the WSJ reports over the market-manipulating garbage spewed by AFP with the sole intent of getting both DB and the market to close higher.
Some more details from the WSJ:
“People familiar with the continuing settlement talks say details remain in flux. Justice Department lawyers have floated the possibility of also reaching accords with other European banks who have yet to resolve similar investigations and announce them at once, but no such move is certain, the people say.”
The WSJ also adds that CEO John Cryan plans to be in Washington, D.C. this week for meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The visit has stoked speculation that he could delve in person into ongoing talks with the Justice Department. The Deutsche Bank spokesman declined to comment on any matters related to talks with Justice Department.
Meanwhile, as Deutsche ponders what rumors it will have to unleash tomorrow to provide another much needed boost to the stock, especially if the market sells off on today’s denial of the settlement speculation, German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel accused Deutsche Bank on Sunday of blaming speculators for last week’s plunge in its share price when the bank had itself made speculation its business.
Cited by Reuters, he said that “I did not know if I should laugh or cry that the bank that made speculation a business model is now saying it is a victim of speculators,” Gabriel told reporters on a plane to Iran, which he is visiting with a business delegation.
That does not sound like the soothing words of a government willing to backstop its biggest lender.
Gabriel, who is also leader of the Social Democrats the junior partner in Angela Merkel’s coalition government, also said he was worried about those who were employed by the lender. As Reuters repeats, the problems of Deutsche Bank are awkward for Berlin, which has berated many euro zone peers for economic mismanagement and taken a hard line on other EU nations giving state aid to bail out their problem banks.
Last week the German finance ministry moved swiftly to dismiss a report that a government rescue plan was being prepared in case Deutsche Bank was unable to raise sufficient new capital to settle litigation which includes cases dating back to its expansion before the financial crisis.
However, if now that the rumors of a revised settlement have been taken off the table if only for the time being, and if the selling once again resumes – if for no other reason that to prompt precisely such a discounted settlement borne out of existential fears for the German bank – the German finance ministry may find itself busy once again: on one hand denying it would bailout Deutsche Bank, on the other scrambling to round up all possible resources – listed in a previous post – to boost confidence in the German bank, just in case another fake rumor of an imminent “fix” doesn’t restore the public’s, and counterparties’, confidence in the ailing lender with tens of trillions of derivatives on its books.
- David Stockman: America Now Lives Under A "Perverted Regime"
Submitted by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity.com,
The rise of Trump – and Bernie Sanders too – vastly transcends ordinary politics. In fact, it reaches deep into a ruined national economy that has morphed into rank casino capitalism under the misguided policies and faithless rule of the Washington and Wall Street elites.This epic deformation has delivered historically unprecedented set-backs to the bottom 90% of American households. They have seen their real wealth and living standards steadily deteriorate for several decades now, even as vast financial windfalls have accrued to the elite few at the very top.In fact, during the last 30 years, the real net worth of the bottom 90% has not increased at all. At the same time, the top 1% has experienced a 300% gain while the real wealth of the Forbes 400 has risen by 1,000%.That’s not old-fashioned capitalism at work; it’s the fruit of a perverted regime of printing press money and debt-fueled faux prosperity that has been foisted on the nation by the bipartisan ruling elites.To be sure, the proximate cause of this year’s election upheaval is similar to that in Reagan’s time. Back then, an era of drastic bipartisan mis-governance generated an electoral impulse to sweep out the Washington stables.Now, however, it is not just the Beltway political class that is under attack. The very foundations of American economic life are imperiled. What remained of healthy market capitalism in Reagan’s time is no more.It has been battered by 30 years of madcap money printing at the Fed. It labors under the $50 trillion of new public and private debt generated by that monetary eruption. And it staggers from the destructive blows of serial financial bubbles.These bubbles have self-evidently resulted in a destructive boom-and-bust cycle in the financial system, but also much more. Bubble Finance has drained productivity and efficiency from the Main Street economy and has channeled vast resources to speculators and wasteful malinvestments.~ "Trumped!" by David StockmanDavid Stockman, former director of the OMB under President Reagan, former US Representative, and veteran financier is an insider's insider. Few people understand the ways in which both Washington DC and Wall Street work and intersect better than he does.
In his upcoming book, Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin…And How to Bring it Back, Stockman lays out how we have devolved from a free market economy into a managed one that operates for the benefit of a privileged few. And when trouble arises, these few are bailed out at the expense of the public good.
Stockman brings us his report of what 30 years of politics, degenerative crony capitalism and “bubble finance” have finally wrought. The upheaval and crossroads represented by Donald Trump’s candidacy spell economic disaster or resurgence, depending on the steps America chooses to take from here:
This election is enormously important but it’s not entirely about the candidates, per se, but about the fact that much of the country is beginning to recognize that we’ve been on the wrong path for a long time and we’re reaching a dead end. And that’s why, you know, on the cover of this new book, I have a map of America and the east and west coast are colored, shaded, and the vast area in between is in white. I call it Flyover America.
And part of the book is to try to explain the phenomena of the Trump campaign, which came out of nowhere, and why there seems to be such an unexpected ground swell of economically driven support. Of course, the elite media wants to blame it on racism and xenophobia and, you know, small-mindedness of one type or another. But I think the underlying driver here, the underlying alienation comes from an economic policy that has benefitted enormously the bicoastal elites and we go through that, a very small share of the population that lives off finance venture capital and the enormous expansion of the warfare state and welfare state in Washington. Versus the rest of America – call it the 90% to use a general term.
But the thing that I try to demonstrate in the book is that since 1987 when Greenspan arrived at the Fed in this era of bubble finances I call it incepted, we basically have a bifurcated economy. The bottom 90% of the population has no more real net worth today if you use an honest inflation measure to deflate nominal values. It has no more net worth today than it did in 1987. That’s nearly 30 years of going nowhere. The top 1% has gained 300% in net worth, which the Forbes 400 to take the final clip on this, is 1,000% gain.
Now, that’s not market capitalism at work. That is a, as I called it, a deformed or mutant system of crony capitalism and finance-driven economic life coming right out of the central bank and that whole complex of unsound policy that has produced a result that is very unsustainable. Not only has there been no net worth gain as we lay out in the book but if you just go to the year 2000, real median household income – again, deflated with, I think, an accurate measure of the cost of living faced by most households – is down nearly 20% from where it was when Bill Clinton was shuffling out of the White House.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with David Stockman (49m:26s)…
- JPMorgan Joins Yellen and Summers In Hinting The Fed May Buy Stocks Next
During her latest testimony in Congress, when asked by rep Mick Mulvaney if the Fed has considered buying equities, Janet Yellen had a cryptic, yet open to interpretation answer: “the Federal Reserve is not permitted to purchase equities. We can only purchase U.S. treasuries and agency securities. I did mention in a speech in Jackson Hole, though, where I discussed longer term issues and difficulties we could have in providing adequate monetary policy. Accommodation may be somewhere in the future, down the line that this is the kind of thing that Congress might consider.”
Then, the very next day, during a video conference Q&A, Yellen once again unexpectedly latched on to the topic of the Fed buying stocks, saying that “the idea of expanding into areas like equities might be “good thing to think about,” noting that (for now) The Fed is more restricted in which assets it can purchase than other central banks. If we found, I think as other countries did, that they could reach the limits in terms of purchasing safe assets like longer-term government bonds, it could be useful to be able to intervene directly in assets where the prices have a more direct link to spending decisions.“
Assets such as equities.
Then, jumping on to the idea of nationalizing the stock market, none other than the world’s most farcical former econopundit, Larry Summers, who has plunged to such recent depths he has to retweet himself on Twitter to get page views for his blog, “floated the idea of continuous purchases of stocks as a potential ingredient in a recipe for the developed world to strengthen economies struggling with subdued growth and inflation.”
Cited by Bloomberg, Summer said that among the proposals that deserve “serious reflection” is the purchase of a “wider range of assets on a sustained and continuing basis,” Summers said in a lecture at a Bank of Japan conference in Tokyo Friday. “I’m not prepared to make a policy recommendation at this point,” he told reporters later.
It got even funnier when Summers said that “there are obviously important political and economic questions associated with government ownership of companies,” adding that “some critics could term such a policy as “socialism, while others could highlight that governments already buy stocks in other ways, such as in the U.S. for federal employee pension funds.“
Still others could term such a policy as utter idiocy, because once a price-indiscriminate entity is unleashed on stocks directly and legally (as opposed to the current framework whereby the Fed merely intervenes by way of its HFT proxy, Citadel, at key inflection points to break selling momentum), it is game over for price discovery and for the concept of capitalism.
However, one would not find JPM among the “others.” In a note released on Friday, the otherwise serious commentator Nick Panigirtzoglou, author of the closely followed “Flows and Liquidity” weekly publication, when discussing the limits of QE – a topic prominently touched upon by Bridgewater this past week, said the following:
How big are the QE capacity constraints facing central banks? One of the arguments put forward by some in explaining the BoJ’s shift away from QE to yield targeting is for the BoJ to avoid finding itself in the same position as the ECB is currently: i.e. facing a QE cliff at a not too distant point in the future.
We believe that QE constraints are rather artificial. One of the channels via which QE operates is via bolstering the capacity of debt capital markets. Indeed, this year’s big increase in spread product supply coincided with more QE by the ECB and the BoJ relative to the previous year. More bond issuance not only implies more credit creation, helping the economy, but also more QE capacity allowing central banks to purchase more assets in the future.
But QE need not be confined to bond instruments in our mind. By limiting themselves to bonds, central banks are indeed deemed to face quantitative constraints given declining government bond issuance even as spread product issuance has increased. This year’s purchases by the ECB, BoJ and the BoE account for 75% of total net bond issuance globally excluding EM local debt.
And there you have it: first, a central banker, then a still somewhat prominent (if recently discredited) economist, and now a respected sell-side analyst, have all jumped on the “Fed should buy equities” bandwagon. We point this out just because it increasingly appears that the Fed is launching trial balloons at what its next, emergency policy may be at a time when the US central bank should, according to experts, be getting ready to hike rates. Which is why, something tells us that the market’s 59% odds of a December rate hike as of December will be, as usually, dramatically wrong.
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...