The Senate voted Tuesday night to kill a rule that would have allowed Americans to file class-action suits against banks instead of being forced in many cases into private arbitration. As US Senator Elizabeth Warren puts it, “This is how the game is rigged against the middle class.”
The move by the Senate followed a similar action by the US House in July to rescind the rule. President Trump is expected to sign the repeal legislation, providing a major victory for the rich in their war against the rest of the United States citizens.
The Republican’s did this to protect the profits, share prices, and home mortgage-backed bond prices of the big banks, and to ensure that the current stock market bubble, doomed to massive deflation anyway within the foreseeable future, continues its upward trajectory without the burden of potentially bubble deflating class action lawsuits on the part of members of the 99 percent.
By its action, the US Congress and President Trump are helping the rich continue its vicious financial assaults against the 99 percent through the use of fraud, lies, providing misinformation and other illegal activities by the banks by putting up this firewall (ending class action lawsuits against the banks) and ending one of the most significant leverages the 99 percent has against the financial raping and pillaging by the big banks.
Most, if not all, of the corporate news media, failed to report that this action of Congress was not a victory for the “financial industry,” it was a victory for the rich. That’s because this action of Congress will ensure the banking industry can redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent more easily while increasing income and wealth inequality in the USA. The US is a nation that rates lower than many third world nations in income and wealth inequality, and this inequality will have massive economic repercussions in the coming months.
Former President George W. Bush recently came out in a public speech with veiled criticism of President Donald Trump. I remember Bush as president really well. Bush shouldn’t be allowed to criticise Trump since Trump hasn’t lied us into a war, nor has he ignored the warnings of his own intelligence agencies and those of several other nations of an impending attack on the United States, like Bush did. While Trump may turn out to be the 2nd worst US president in US history, (Trump haters can rejoice at that possibility), it would take more than stupid tweets for him to overcome the corruption and or complete incompetence of President George W. Bush.
Below is a list of some of President Bush’s finest accomplishments as President of the United States. As I look at them, it makes me realize Bush is the worst and most corrupt US president in history, even more so than President Herbert Hoover. Let’s face it. Trump has a long way to fall to overcome our worse US president.
Bush’s Greatest Accomplishments
*Bush presided over the worst attack on the US by ignoring repeated warnings from his own Counterterrorism Chief Richard Clarke, CIA Director, FBI Director, Israel’s Mossad, Britain’s M16, and others, and instead of responding to the warnings, went on one of the longest presidential vacations in US history. The incompetence and or stupidity of Bush made it appear he wanted that attack to happen. This is why many people believe Bush—
Attacked the wrong country in retaliation, but it had lots of oil.
Only president in US history to launch a sado-sexual torture program in violation of the US Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations, and Christian beliefs.
Only US president who, along with most members of his cabinet and former Vice President Dick Cheney, cannot travel to Europe, South America and most nations of Asia for fear of being apprehended and tried as a war criminal.
Attacked and took over two other countries.
Began the NSA program allowing for the unwarranted spying and breakin’s of US households and businesses in violation of the US Constitution, a policy continued by president’s Obama and Trump.
Spent the Clinton surplus and bankrupted the treasury.
Shattered record for biggest annual deficit in history.
Set economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12 month period.
His economic policies produced the first negative US private sector job growth in any eight-year period in US history.
Presided over the biggest housing bubble in US history and didn’t do anything about it.
His economic policies redistributed more income and wealth from working Americans to the super rich more than any president, with the exception of President Bill Clinton.
Set all-time record for biggest drop in the history of the stock market.
First president in decades to execute a federal prisoner.
First president in US history to enter office with a criminal record.
First year in office set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in US history.
Set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips than any other president in US history.
In his first two years in office over 2 million Americans lost their jobs.
Cut unemployment benefits for more out of work Americans than any president in US history.
Set the all-time record for most home foreclosures in a 12 month period.
* Appointed more convicted criminals to administration positions than any president in US history.
* Set the record for the least amount of press conferences than any president since the advent of television.
* Signed more laws and executive orders amending the Constitution than any president in US history.
* Presided over the biggest energy crises in US history and refused to intervene when corruption was revealed. (Think Enron and the California energy shortage)
* Presided over the highest gasoline prices in US history and refused to use the national reserves as past presidents have.
* Cut healthcare benefits for war veterans.
* Set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously take to the streets to protest him (15 million people), shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of humankind.
* Dissolved more international treaties than any president in US history.
* His presidency was the most secretive and un-accountable of any in US history until President Barack Obama came along.
* Members of his cabinet were the richest of any administration in US history up to its time. (the ‘poorest’ multi-millionaire, Condoleeza Rice has an Exxon oil tanker named after her). Trump’s cabinet has beaten that record.
* Presided over the biggest corporate stock market fraud of any market in any country in the history of the world. (He hated regulations and they had to be dispensed with)
* First president in US history to order a US attack and military occupation of a sovereign nation.
* Created the largest government department bureaucracy in the history of the United States.
* Set the all-time record for biggest annual budget spending increases, more than any president in US history.
* First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the human rights commission.
* First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the elections monitoring board.
* Removed more checks and balances, and had the least amount of congressional oversight of any presidential administration in US history.
* Rendered the entire United Nations irrelevant.
* Withdrew from the World Court of Law.
* Refused to allow inspectors access to US prisoners of war and by default no longer abided by the Geneva Conventions.
* First president in US history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 US elections).
* All-time US (and world) record holder for most corporate campaign donations. This has since likely been beaten by Obama, Hillary and Trump.
* His biggest life-time campaign contributor presided over one of the largest corporate bankruptcy frauds in world history (Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron Corporation).
* Spent more money on polls and focus groups than any president in US history.
* First president in US history to unilaterally attack a sovereign nation against the will of the United Nations and the world community.
* First president to run and hide when the US came under attack (and then lied saying the enemy had the code to Air Force 1)
* First US president to establish a secret shadow government.
* Took the biggest world sympathy for the US after 9-11, and in less than a year made the US the most resented country in the world (possibly the biggest diplomatic failure in US and world history).
* With a policy of ‘dis-engagement’ created the most hostile Israeli-Palestine relations in at least 30 years.
* First US president in history to have a majority of the people of Europe (71%) view his presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and stability.
* First US president in history to have the people of South Korea feel more threatened by the US than their immediate neighbor, North Korea.
* Changed US policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.
* Set all-time record for the number of administration appointees who violated US law by not selling huge investments in corporations bidding for government contracts.
* Failed to fulfill his pledge to get Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive’.* Failed to capture the anthrax killer who tried to murder the leaders of our country at the United States Capital building. Many people think those attacks were secretly ordered by Bush or his Vice President Richard Cheney.
* In the 18 months following the 9-11 attacks, he successfully prevented any public investigation into the biggest security failure in the history of the United States.
* Removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in US history.
* In a little over two years created the most divided country in decades, possibly the most divided the US has ever been since the civil war.
* Entered office with the strongest economy in US history and in less than two years turned every single economic category straight down, and wound up with negative and wage job growth.
* Bush and Trump’s lack of response to Hurricane Katrina and the hurricane that leveled Puerto Rico and pretty much about the same.
* Only president in US history that cannot travel to South America and European nations because he will be arrested and tried for war crimes the moment he steps on their soil.
One of the main components of Nazi Germany was the collusion between industry and government against the interests of the German public. Historians have long noted that the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany could not have occurred without the consent of Germany’s rich folks and powerful corporations.
The rise of Ronald Reagan to the US presidency marked the most important inroad into political power by the rich in the USA since the 1920s. By the 1990s, the rich controlled both major political parties. Since then, we’ve had nothing but bubbles fueling US economic expansions. So in this corruption and collusion, we clearly have a fascist government of the rich, with spokespeople whose jobs are to divide us along a large number of lines, including race, ethnicity, guns, abortion, transgender bathrooms, etc….
One of the best examples of the power of this corruption is with Genetically Modified Foods (GMOs). They have been linked to tumors, asthma, obesity, liver damage, allergies, cancer, and other health issues since they entered the US food chain during President Bill Clinton’s reign of error; Clinton, many Republicans, and Democrats such as Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, obviously considered corporate profits more important than the health of the US people.
Our health is a product to be redistributed to major corporations, such as Monsanto (now owned by Bayer), and morphed into corporate profits, higher share prices and surging dividends.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved placing GMO foods into the US food chain despite limited testing, and the only testing that was accepted by the FDA was provided by the GMO corporations, like Monsanto. Needless to say, the CEO and rich shareholders at Monsanto had wonderful incentives to limit testing and any scientists whose research showed the harm of GMOs would be smeared with GMO corporate lies.
A recent posting on GMO Free USA (Facebook) recounts one of the victims of corporate smears and lies.
“1998: The year Biotech launched its war on science. Arpad Pusztai, an impeccably qualified scientist, received a grant to develop standard animal feeding trial testing methods to assess possible toxicological effects arising from the GMO plant transformation process. The rats fed the GMO potatoes in his feeding study developed organ damage, immune defects, and other health problems. Dr. Pusztai’s response to the study finding was to say… “If I had the choice, I would certainly not eat it. I find it’s very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs.”
Dr. Pusztai was humiliated, discredited, fired and legally silenced. Biotech’s anti-science campaign continues to this day. Feel like eating one of those Simplot GMO potatoes? Or how about some GMO Arctic apple slices?”
Two academic studies have been made about the effect of Seattle’s minimum wage increase from $9.47 to $15 an hour on food service workers. The increase is taking place over seven years.
A study from Jacob Vigdor of the University of Washington (UW) showed the minimum wage increase was bad for everybody in just about every way. Vigdor, of course, has a clear right-wing political ax to grind. Besides the UW, Vigdor is also a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an institute funded by the Koch brothers and other billionaires opposed to the minimum wage in general. The principal purpose of AEI is to influence public opinion in favor of the billionaires with lies and distortions, as well as truths if possible, disguised as scholarly research papers. It’s all patently propaganda coming from this think tank.
Vigdor has also been a contributing scholar with the Manhatten Institute, another right-wing billionaire-funded so-called think tank, whose principal purpose is the same as the right-wingers at AEI. The sponsors are also opposed to the minimum wage in general.
Quite naturally, the corporate media, both liberal and conservative, reported Vigdor’s negative findings on Seattle’s minimum wage rise as a fact when, in reality, they were fiction. This is how corrupt academia and the corporate news media have become with the influence of billionaire dollars into those fields.
Another, almost completely unreported study of the effects of Seattle’s minimum wage increase from the University of California-Berkeley (UC) showed the exact opposite of Vigdor’s lying propaganda on behalf of Wall Street and other billionaires. Note that the last thing most editors of conservative and liberal news sources, as well as fake news sources such as Fox News, want you to know is that the increase in minimum wages is good for the nation’s economy because it raises the demand for goods and services, rather than provide rising dividends and share prices for billionaire shareholders, which sucks the power out of the economy. That’s why the result of the UC study is unmentionable in the propaganda news media.
According to Michael Reich, lead researcher on the UC team, Vigdor’s research made certain to carefully gerrymander the statistics by omitting nearly half of Seattle’s low paid workers, “by omitting franchises and other businesses with more than one establishment. Seattle’s ordinance is aimed at low-wage, multistate companies, requiring the fastest wage increase to be paid by firms with more than 500 employees worldwide that do not provide health insurance.” In addition, Vigdor’s lying propaganda included only those jobs paying $19 an hour or less in food service, but job gains in higher paid positions in food service far outnumbered job losses in lower paid positions.
What happened? Seattle’s lowest-paid workers began spending their newly raised wages and local businesses began to thrive. When low-wage workers earn more they spend more.
Last February, Marketplace reported that Bill Phelps, CEO of Wetzel’s Pretzels, which grossed $165 million in 2016 from over 300 stores, had opposed minimum wage increases because he feared it would hurt profits, and that sales would fall if he needed to raise prices to compensate. Both times California raised its minimum wage, sales at his California stores immediately shot up. “I was stunned by the business,” Phelps told Marketplace.
This is precisely why all Americans, including wealthy shareholders, have a stake in raising the minimum wage above $15 an hour.
Watch out for the conservative propaganda in which its sole propose is to persuade you of something that benefits the billionaires only and at your expense.
President Donald Trump has proposed tax cuts for the rich and corporations, which is another way of saying Trump wants tax cuts for the rich and then more tax cuts for the rich. In other words, the person who will most likely benefit from the Donald Trump tax cuts is billionaire Donald Trump. The 99 percent will get virtually nothing. In other words, Trump’s tax plan is designed to create greater income and wealth inequality in a nation that already has the most income and wealth inequality among the industrialized nations.
You will note in the video above, while they make some good points about Trump’s tax cuts for the rich, the folks at MSNBC fail to mention growing income and wealth inequality because the Wall Street controlled Democratic leadership doesn’t want its station MSNBC to mention it any more than the billionaires who control the Republican Party want their news outlets to mention it. Currently, the rich steal anywhere from 24 to 38 percent of all income produced in the United States, compared to 8 percent in 1980. In addition, the richest 10 percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, a historic and still growing record.
As corporations get tax cuts, much of those tax savings will go to the rich via higher corporate profits, rising dividends, and surging stock prices. The rest of us will suffer the consequences. In addition, of course, corporations will have more money to invest, supposedly to create jobs, as if giving corporations tax cuts will magically increase consumer demand. That’s not likely. So what will they invest in?
Historically, US corporations buy other corporations, especially rivals, when they receive tax cuts or higher profits. This, of course, creates redundancies in a variety of job areas, such as accounting and computer technicians. When mergers occur, employees are the first thing to go in order to eliminate those redundancies. Of course, to help pay for these mergers, income will be redistributed from those who work for a living to the idle rich as US jobs are exported to low-wage nations and the difference between the higher paying US jobs and the new lower wage jobs in China, India and elsewhere will fuel corporate profits, and push up dividends and share prices. This fuels the bank portfolios of the rich, and this obviously creates greater income inequality. That’s what those free trade treaties have been negotiated to do, and Democrats, like Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, are not stupid little boys and girls who are ignorant of this fact.
This is one of the reasons why there is not a shred of evidence that supply-side economics, otherwise known as tax cuts for the rich, has ever created a single job, but there is plenty of evidence tax cuts for the rich and corporations have destroyed US jobs. Under President George W. Bush, tax cuts were enacted for the rich, making certain that the growth in jobs and real wages were negative, the only time in US history that has occurred under a single president since Republican Herbert Hoover.
Naturally, there are other things the Republicans are refusing to mention.
Gary Markstein / Creators Syndicate
There will be an increased federal deficit of $2.5 trillion, which is typical under irresponsible Republican administrations and Congress, just like the Reagan years, and the other twelve years under the Bush presidents. Naturally, cutbacks in federal spending will be proposed.
Republicans and some Democrats will insist the US is not spending a sufficient number of dollars on its military, so that will not be subject to reductions. The US spends more on the military than the next 25 nations combined, 24 of whom are US allies, but clearly, that’s insufficient because US military spending is quite profitable. However, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other less profitable programs that help the politically powerless will be on the table for cuts if Trump’s tax cuts for the rich sails through Congress.
The rich, of course, have stolen just about all real income and wealth increases over the last thirty-five years, thanks to their financial abilities to corrupt both major political parties and the federal government in the process. Naturally, their dirty money has also corrupted most state and city governments. So, obviously, the financial and political deck is completely stacked against the 99 percent.
Luckily, the Democrats in the US Senate will object to this irresponsible behavior because the billionaires of Wall Street who control the party will object to it. That’s the only reason why Democratic senators like Ron Wyden will likely oppose the legislation. Even some Republicans may oppose Trump’s tax plan because it is completely against the national interest, that is if one assumes the citizens of the United States who make up 99 percent of the population are a part of that national interest.
The Rigged Game: Corporate America and A People Betrayed
The Rigged Game: Corporate America and a People Betrayed
Wall Street is up to no good, and has been since 1980, when it took over the Republican Party, and then the Democratic Party in 1994. Income has been massively redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent via legislative scam after scam, from tax cuts for the rich to international income redistribution schemes falsely labeled as trade agreements. In The Rigged Game, John Hively exposes how this has all come about starting with a revolutionary, but simple reality, all recessions begin in the financial markets.
In his first two years in office over 2 million Americans lost their jobs.
John Hively's Blog: News and Analysis of the War Against the Middle Class 