Under Trump Wall Street Regulations are Virtually Unenforced

The Wall Street Journal reported a few days ago that the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) has significantly reduced the number of regulations it is supposed to enforce. Quite naturally, as was shown in 1929, 2007-09, 2001, the entire 1980s and 1990s, as well as many other times in US and world history, Wall Street millionaires and billionaires will break the law while redistributing income from the 99 percent to themselves. Then the taxpayers (that’s us folks) will bail them out after the financial disaster, and this will make the rich even richer, and not a soul will go to jail.

The Journal reports that Trump’s appointees to the SEC have significantly slowed down on enforcement. Trump, along with every Republican office holder in the US congress, wants to eliminate the weak Dodd-Frank legislation that makes it a little bit harder than before to screw over the US public.

The Republicans chief economic policy is to unleash Wall Street as a destructive force in the world, allow it to wreck financial on everybody else, in order to knock the economy flat on its face. That is the Republican Party economic policy in a nutshell.

Of course, the Republicans have always had help from the Democratic Party, which is largely, if not completely, controlled by Wall Street billionaires. Many Democrats have been instrumental in helping the Republicans achieve the desires of their Wall Street masters. President Clinton signed legislation repealing Glass-Steagal, as well as NAFTA. The president was supported in this by Hillary Clinton. Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden. These folks continued to serve Wall Street’s interest under then Wall Street President Barack Obama.

The Clinton’s get $225,000 a piece for making speeches from Wall Street, while Obama gets $400,000.

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Automation: The Wall Street Democratic National Committee and the Wall Street Owned Democratic Party’s Biggest Lie

Wall Street Democrats, such as Wall Street-owned president’s Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as Wall Street’s senator’s Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ron Wyden, have led the way toward trade deals that have exported tens of millions of US jobs overseas, with the difference between the old higher US paying jobs and the new lower paying US jobs going directly into the pockets of the rich via higher corporate earnings, rising share prices and surging dividends.

These income redistribution scams are the primary reason income and wealth inequality have grown so lopsided in favor of the billionaires over the previous 35 years or so. Most of the Republican Party have stood right behind the Clinton’s, Wyden and Obama on these income redistribution scams. 86 percent of Republican voters understand these trade scams are intended to export US jobs, compared to 52 percent of Democratic voters. So the Republican leadership is happy to negotiate with the Wall Street DNC Democrats to take the lead on these trade scams. In fact, the two sides have worked together to create the income and wealth inequality in which we now suffer. That’s why Donald Trump is president.

So how do the Democrats get out of being blamed for exporting tens of millions of jobs and creating such massive income and wealth inequality? They lie and spread these lies using a number of corporate news outlets and fake academic studies that come from real universities.

When Barack Obama became president, and for a few years afterward, the US failed to create any net jobs. And so members of the Democratic Party came up with the ingenious lie; automation killed the jobs. Since then the economy has created twelve million new jobs, and you will notice automation hasn’t killed those jobs. Nor has automation killed the tens of millions of US jobs that have been exported to China, Vietnam, Mexico and elsewhere.

I’ve written about this Democratic Party lie many times.

Now in a new report, economists Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute challenge the Democratic Party lie that the pace of automation is accelerating and that the use of robots will lead to much higher unemployment and greater inequality. They also point out that there is not one shred of evidence in any study showing that technology and automation are killing more jobs than they are creating. The authors argue that if automation actually led to higher overall joblessness, the United States would have seen consistently increasing unemployment over the last 70 years. That didn’t happen because technology and its offshoot called automation actually create more jobs than they displace.

Likewise, if automation were indeed surging and leading to joblessness in recent years, we would not have been able to reduce the unemployment rate from 10 percent in 2010 to under 4.3 percent now. The authors encourage policymakers to focus on the immediate need to create good jobs and robust wage growth—instead of getting worked up about a hypothetical “robot apocalypse.”

The imbalance of political power between the 1 and the 99 percent are the current reason why income and wealth inequality has grown over the last 3 1/2 decades.

For more information, click on the report at “The Zombie Robot Argument Lurches On; There is no evidence that automation leads to joblessness and or Inequality–Economic Policy Institute

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US Supreme Court Stunningly Turns Against Further Reductions on Campaign Finance Restrictions

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday turned away a Republican Party challenge to a federal campaign finance restriction that prevents political parties from raising unlimited amounts of cash to spend on supporting candidates.

The Republican Party of Louisiana had argued that a provision of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act violates free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution. But the justices let stand a lower court’s ruling that rejected the Republican challenge.

Apparently, the Court’s corrupt class warfare corporate wing (John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito) has decided that only corporations and people have constitutionally guaranteed free speech rights and not political parties. This is stunning inasmuch as corporations and political parties are not mentioned in the US Constitution, and the only reason why any court would approve of giving corporations any kind of personhood rights is to shift the balance of political power from individual voters to the rich and powerful via their wealth accumulation legal tools known as corporations.

In other words, the court’s corporate wing, whose members have historically come from well-to-do families, is playing class warfare by perverting the meaning of the great document in favor of the rich. By playing make believe that corporations have constitutionally guaranteed legal rights, the court is able to provide a legal lie that corporations have free speech rights, and then by insisting that spending money is free speech, they’ve effectively and deliberately given the airwaves to the only organizations and people who can afford to take them, which happens to be the corporations and rich people with all the money.

This is precisely why the corporate-leaning court in recent years has rolled back campaign finance restrictions. In 2010, the court paved the way to unlimited outside spending on elections in a case called FEC v. Citizens United that concerned corporate spending. Given its bias toward class warfare against the 99 percent, it is shocking the court turned this new case away.

Since the corporate wing of the Supreme Court is in the majority, the US Supreme Court is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the most powerful US corporations and billionaires. Actually, it has been for quite some time.

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Will the Republican Party Allow Itself to Become the Big Giant Death Panel In Order to Give Its Billionaire Owners a Big Giant Tax Cut?

The Republican Party is about to determine whether or not it will become the biggest death panel since Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party tried to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

US House of Representatives leader Paul Ryan pulled out his new American Health Care Act last week, which he is hoping will be used to replace the Affordable Care Act. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) yesterday, within a decade as many as 24 million US citizens will lose their health care coverage and premiums will go up for the rest of us if Ryan’s plan is passed, and especially for low income people and the elderly. Many grandmas and grandpas will have to chose between starving to death, or not paying their overpriced healthcare premiums, thanks to the Ryan plan.

Obamacare has only added slightly more than 19 million people to the rolls of the health insured. That means another 4 million US citizens beyond Obamacare may lose their coverage with Ryan’s carefully thought out health care bill. And it has been carefully thought out.

March 8, 2017

The primary purpose of this bill by all appearances is to provide tax cuts to the rich, the only people who have been the beneficiary of thirty-six years of economic expansions, and deliberately so. Currently, there is a 0.9 percent tax on income over $200,000 a year to help fund Obamacare. There is also a 3.5 percent tax on capital gains for the same purpose, such as the profits from the sale of stocks and bonds. This is why Wall Street hedge funds and big investment firms want Obamacare gone.

Many Republicans are prepared to make the Republican Party and all it stands for into a giant death panel in order to make its billionaire masters richer. Herr Ryan is one of these. Yet, other Republicans want to get reelected.

Florida Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, for example, said Tuesday that she wouldn’t be able to support Ryan’s health care legislation after the CBO score revealed the high number of people who would lose insurance.

“I plan to vote NO on the current #AHCA bill. As written the plan leaves too many from my #SoFla district uninsured,” the Florida congresswoman wrote in two consecutive tweets. “As #AHCA stands, it will cut much needed help for #SoFla’s poor + elderly populations. Need a plan that will do more to protect them.”

This shows several things. The legislation is not likely going to pass. The Republicans are going to find it difficult to give their billionaire masters tax cuts by replacing Obamacare. So they will likely try a different tack.

The most likely scenario is simply keeping Obamacare largely intact, but shifting the tax burden from the rich to the middle and lower classes, and then marketing this plan as replacing Obamacare. One thing is certain; replacing Obamacare and taking health insurance from tens of millions of people in the process is not going to be politically palatable.

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The Real Reason the Republicans Want to Abolish the Affordable Care Act

Abolishing the Affordable Care Act will provide tax breaks for the rich. According to the LA Times, “the Affordable Care Act’s tax provisions, and the discovery that repeal would provide the wealthiest taxpayers with an immediate tax cut totaling $346 billion over 10 years. Every cent of that would go to taxpayers earning more than $200,000 a year ($250,000 for couples). As Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan observed a few days after the election, the imperative of handing their wealthy patrons a gift of this magnitude may well outweigh their solicitude for the mostly middle- and low-income constituents whose individual insurance plans would be at risk from repeal.”

All of the income gains of the last 35 years have gone to the 1 percent, and this has been achieved by government legislation and international trade scams that export jobs overseas, and the difference between the old higher US wages and the new lower overseas wages has always gone straight into the pockets of the 1 percent. Income from performing labor is taxed at a higher rate than just sitting on your ass doing nothing, and this has come about due to tax legislation.

See the link below for the whole story.

The Real Reason Republicans Want to Abolish the Affordable Care Act–LA Times

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President Donald Trump: The Civil War Now Begins Within the Republican Party

The civil war for the soul of the Republican Party may only grow more bitter.

The Tea Party-establishment battle has wreaked havoc on the party establishment for over a half-decade. The rise of Trumpism — nationalist, populist, at times racist — further scatters any chances of party unification following the most toxic presidential campaign in modern history.

“It’s not going away, it’s going to have major implications, and it is a giant cry in the dark,” said Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), a hardline conservative who doesn’t like Trump but has promised to back the nominee.

“I don’t think [voters] are far from the pitchforks level of frustration. … What exists in the political marketplace these days is dynamite, nitroglycerine, it’s extremely explosive and can go many different ways,” he said.

The establishment is greatly at odds with the Republican base. 85 percent of Republican voters are against trade agreements. Those agreements redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent. Trump railed against these scams. And so now the establishment is at odds with its base and its soon-to-be president.

The establishment has problems with the Koch Brothers Tea Party, and both have serious problems with Trump and the base.

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Get it Straight! Both Political Parties are Rotted to the Core with Corruption, but this Story is Only About the Democratic Party and How Wall Street Controls It

Citibank of Wall Street pretty much chose who was going to serve on President Obama’s cabinet, as well as who was going to fill the key positions elsewhere in his administration.

John Podesta is the campaign manager for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

WikiLeaks released some of Podesta’s emails, many of which go back to 2008 when Podesta was the co-chair of the transition team for President-elect Barack Obama. A month before the election, the primary staffing of the key positions in the Obama administration was almost complete.

In 2008, Michael Froman was an executive at Citibank. According to the New Republic, Froman “wrote an email to Podesta on October 6, 2008, with the subject “Lists.” Froman used a Citigroup email address. He attached three documents: a list of women for top administration jobs, a list of non-white candidates, and a sample outline of 31 cabinet-level positions and who would fill them. “The lists will continue to grow,” Froman wrote to Podesta, “but these are the names to date that seem to be coming up as recommended by various sources for senior level jobs.

The cabinet list ended up being almost entirely on the money. It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more. For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.

This was October 6. The election was November 4. And yet Froman, an executive at Citigroup, which would ultimately become the recipient of the largest bailout from the federal government during the financial crisis, had mapped out virtually the entire Obama cabinet, a month before votes were counted. And according to the Froman/Podesta emails, lists were floating around even before that.

These revelations also reinforce the need for critical scrutiny of Hillary Clinton, and for advocacy to ensure the next transition doesn’t go like the last, at least with respect to the same old Democrats scooping up all the positions of power well in advance.”

In 2016, Michael Froman was the US Trade Representative negotiating the Trans Pacific Partnership, the largest income and political power redistribution scam in world history. Froman was negotiating to export millions of US jobs to third world nations. The difference between the old higher US wages and the new lower third world wages will go straight into the pockets of the wealthy via higher corporate profits, surging share prices and rising dividends. Wall Street banks would be a primary beneficiary at the expense of the 99 percent.

Obama is doing exactly what his Wall Street masters want him to do, just like Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden does. Will Hillary do the same if she is elected?

As an aside, I mention Wyden because he is the Democrat who will lead the charge for the TPP in the US senate on behalf of Wall Street and Nike.

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