What If The Republicans Win?

[don]

Re: The GOP Clown Car



Michael Krieger

At this point, it almost feels like kicking someone while he’s down. Jeb Bush can’t even stand up to Donald Trump, let alone his own growing series of scandals.

In the latest revelation from David Sirota and team at International Business Daily, we learn that:

For Florida taxpayers, the move by the administration of then-Gov. Jeb Bush to forge a relationship with Lehman Brothers would ultimately prove disastrous. Transactions in 2005 and 2006 put the Wall Street investment bank in charge of some $250 million worth of pension funds for Florida cops, teachers and firefighters. Lehman would capture more than $5 million in fees on these deals, while gaining additional contracts to manage another $1.2 billion of Florida’s money. Then, in the fall of 2008, Lehman collapsed into bankruptcy, leaving Florida facing up to $1 billion in losses.

But for Jeb Bush personally, his enduring relationship with Lehman would prove lucrative. In 2007, just as he left office, Bush secured a job as a Lehman consultant for $1.3 million a year, Bloomberg reported.

Next time, please just ride off into the sunset and paint landscapes with your brother.

Weeks after Bush took the Lehman job, the Florida State Board of Administration (SBA) — a three-member body that makes investment decisions about state pension funds and whose ranks had recently included one Jeb Bush — gave Lehman additional business: SBA purchased $842 million worth of separate investments in Lehman’s mortgage-backed securities. Over the course of one year from June 2007 to June 2008, the SBA would shift an additional $420 million of pension money into the same fund in which the state had begun investing under Bush.

In short, during Bush’s first year working for Lehman, his former colleagues in Tallahassee, the state capital, moved vast sums of Florida pension money into the doomed Wall Street investment bank, even as warnings about its financial troubles began to emerge.

“This is a breathtaking conflict of interest going on here,” said Craig Holman, governmental ethics lobbyist with Public Citizen, a good-government group. “This cost Florida very dearly, and it enriched Jeb Bush.”

Jeff Connaughton, author of the book “The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins,” said the transactions illustrate a larger culture that dominates the politics of finance.

Florida originally began investing money in Lehman in 2005, while Bush was the highest profile member of the SBA, which oversees the $150 billion pension fund. The Bush-led SBA that year committed $176 million to Lehman; in 2006, as Florida moved another $87 million into the Lehman investment, the firm hired Jeb Bush’s cousin, George Herbert Walker, to run the firm’s investment management division.

The next year, Lehman offered the outgoing Florida governor the consulting job. Bush had worked briefly at a Texas-based bank after college, but he lacked significant Wall Street experience.

Fortunately for Jeb, being a crony doesn’t take any real skill.

Most of the investment losses that hit Florida starting in July 2007 were tied to the Lehman mortgage-backed securities bought the year Bush began his employment at the firm.

[Southernguy]

Re: The GOP Clown Car

Yes, China is a very corrupt country

[littleshark]

Re: The GOP Clown Car

Ditto, Santa, and thanks for posting.

Taibbi is both insightful and witty, a double-down rarity.

On Rick Santorum:

"Dressed in jeans, a blue oxford and a face so pious that Christ would be proud to eat a burrito off it ...."

Taibbi is good, but I wish some of these guys would also try and discuss solutions, or alternatives instead of just the absurdity/corruptness/cronyism of the system, we all know that by now. John Stewart very much the same. Our alternative to the GOP Clown Car is Hilary, Biden, Gore, Sanders??? Come on, there have to be alternatives.

Is there anyone in this country you'd like to see run that maybe isn't on a ballot? Is there not one person in this country that can do anything to help or do we just sit and complain and watch it all get taken down?

Some may think I'm nuts, but I'd love to see Michael Bloomberg run. Principled, can't be bought, socially liberal, fiscally conservative. Compassionate to the poor. Did an admirable job in NY. He's the anti-Trump billionaire. I think he could bring people together and lead and get things done. Would this country elect someone Jewish? I don't know.

[don]

Re: The GOP Clown Car

Admirable sentiments, shark, but I have to agree with Woody:

Election 2016 - The Choice is Clear. You have no choice.

[vt]

Re: The GOP Clown Car

Shark,

The left always complains but never offers a viable alternative. That's because they have none. Socialism, Fascism, Communism are all miserable failures. Crony Capitalism doesn't work either.

Take the money out of the political system, have reasonable, enforced regulation, free, fair economic markets; then you'd get progress. Unfortinately no one has tried this solution before.

[littleshark]

Re: The GOP Clown Car

Shark,

The left always complains but never offers a viable alternative. That's because they have none. Socialism, Fascism, Communism are all miserable failures. Crony Capitalism doesn't work either.

Take the money out of the political system, have reasonable, enforced regulation, free, fair economic markets; then you'd get progress. Unfortinately no one has tried this solution before.

What's amazing to me that nobody talks about or points to is the technology sector in this country. You'd think it would at least be a talking point of someone like Carly Fiorina. Exactly as you said, not dependent on government, not burdened by regulation good or bad, free markets, creative destruction, and look how it thrives. The government unfortunately is starting to realize and will start to take a bite out of the internet through crony regulation, and the Sergi Brin's of the world will have to start to play the game which is stifling and unfortunate.

[Woodsman]

Re: The GOP Clown Car

Some may think I'm nuts, but I'd love to see Michael Bloomberg run. Principled, can't be bought, socially liberal, fiscally conservative. Compassionate to the poor. Did an admirable job in NY. He's the anti-Trump billionaire. I think he could bring people together and lead and get things done. Would this country elect someone Jewish? I don't know.

I suppose if one has a media company at their command it's a simple matter to go from plutocrat to man of the people.



Isn't that right Mr Kane?

With Trump at least there's no attempt at subtlety or guile. Bloomberg is another story, but they're two sides of the same coin in my opinion.

The Carlin Thesis remains untouched

WHAT’S WRONG WITH BLOOMBERG?

Where to begin? It’s easy to see the Koch brothers, Roger Ailes, the right wing political operative masquerading as a TV executive, Rupert Murdoch, and the rest of the villains. They are the iron fist. Bloomberg occupies the “progressive” space–the velvet glove. But the agenda is the same: gaining and holding power through propaganda when possible, violence when necessary.



THE PLAN: LUXURY CITY NEW YORKAttracting and servicing high-value businesses and those who can afford to live and work here has always been the plan. That’s what explains the proliferation of luxury condominiums, the erosion of the city’s affordable housing, the small businesses driven out in favor of large retail chains, the high-end commercial and office space, and the billion dollar sports stadiums subsidized by New Yorkers who already live here and can’t afford to live in the condominiums, dine in the upscale restaurants, or attend the stadiums they helped pay for.
Maybe the starkest example of this misguided vision is the demise of St. Vincent’s in Greenwich Village. The 758-bed hospital that served the community for more than 150 years will be replaced by 450 luxury condominiums. The rich will always have top-notch health care. In Mike’s World, that’s progress.
Despite the relentless self-promotion regarding his fiscal and management skills, when this mayor leaves office we will be looking at large budget deficits as far as the eye can see. The city’s outstanding debt has passed $100 billion, an increase of 83 percent since 2002, the year he took office. Debt service is projected to be 10 percent of the city’s expense budget by 2015.
After almost twelve years under his control, our public schools are by far the most policed and remain among the most segregated in the nation. He claims to have worked miracles, but by all credible measures our schools are failing as badly as ever. He claims to be sympathetic to the poor and working hard for the middle class, but the city’s wealth and income disparities are the most extreme we’ve ever known. He says New York is a glitzy, happening place, but a shocking number of people are barely surviving:
• 3.1 million New Yorkers now live at or near the poverty line ($22,314 for a family of four).
• About 900,000 New Yorkers live in deep poverty, which is half of the federal poverty line; for a four-person family that means an income of little more than $10,500.
• 1,100,000 households pay at least half their income for rent. They have about $30 a week per family member for food, medical expenses, transportation, education, and anything else they need.
• The city’s average rent is more than 50 percent higher than the second most expensive city in the United States, San Francisco.
• If you earn $50,000 in Houston, you’d need at least $125,000 in New York to maintain the same lifestyle.
Everything families need—rent, schooling, childcare, utility bills, groceries, have risen dramatically. The skyrocketing costs New Yorkers have experienced during the past decade aren’t a law of nature; they are in substantial part the result of man-made policies—one man in particular. Michael Bloomberg, the city’s richest man.
He rejects the notion that Wall Street created the financial wreckage, vehemently opposes higher taxes on the rich, and fights against stricter regulations of Wall Street. In his world, it was the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, the business cycle, congress, people who bought homes they couldn’t afford, Freddie Mac, and so forth, that brought the country to its knees. Sure, some Wall Street firms made “mistakes” but the stockholders and bondholders paid for them so let’s move on.
New York’s 58 billionaires and countless multimillionaires, who travel the city streets in chauffeured limousines behind tinted windows, hail Bloomberg as The Best Mayor Ever. Black kids walking in their own neighborhoods better be carrying identification and even if they are, they just might be slammed up against a wall, humiliated, searched, and abused in ways big and small. The mayor and his police chief deny it, but cops have arrest quotas and the places they go to fill them are poor neighborhoods of color.
Each year hundreds of thousands of innocent young black and Hispanic young men are illegally stopped, frisked, searched, and arrested…because they’re black and Hispanic…in New York…in 2012.
No, Bloomberg isn’t entirely to blame. We’ll always have rich people and poor people; crooked and brutal cops; racists and meretricious politicians; killer real estate operators and Wall Street hustlers wearing five thousand dollar suits who will rip your face off—but we’ve never had a mayor like this. Wall Street’s war on America, its assault on the poor, on people of color, on working-and middleclass people, and its ownership of our political and civic institutions can be seen nowhere more clearly than right here in New York City—in City Hall. But many good people still don’t see it.
BLOOMBERG, THE STRAIGHT-TALKING, NON-PARTISAN PROGRESSIVE
In his book On Bullshit, Dr. Harry G. Frankfurt, Princeton University philosophy professor emeritus, writes, “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows it, and most people think they can recognize it, but often they can’t.”
You can’t understand Michael Bloomberg without having Professor Frankfurt’s caution in mind. And when you understand Michael Bloomberg—or “Mike,” as his handlers prefer—you understand much of what’s gone wrong with America. Not that understanding Mike is easy: his character, his ideology, and his methods have been obscured by a decade-long campaign of propaganda and payoffs. Even Howard Dean, a man I admire and respect, called him a great mayor. Dean wasn’t paying attention.
The nearly $300 million that Bloomberg officially poured into his three campaigns has blown through any semblance of democratic elections, but that figure doesn’t begin to tell the whole story. It doesn’t count the influence of his “charitable” contributions, which rose from $100 million in 2000 to $235 million in 2008, much of it concentrated on New York’s civic institutions. Nor does it include the vast sums of taxpayer dollars—our money—that he’s awarded in contracts, grants and subsidies to his supporters. Nor does it take into account the retinue of hacks and flacks on his private payroll and those on the city payroll who are paid to trumpet his accomplishments.
The Republican and Independence Party leaders who sold him their ballot lines and the union presidents, politicians, and clergymen who took his money and sang his praises have payrolls to meet, grants and government contracts they want, labor negotiations to worry about, and careers to advance. They have been indispensable in promoting his narrative: Just Mike, the incorruptible, $1-a-year public servant who wants to give something back. Their reasons for supporting him may have once been understandable, but that time is long past.
The mega-billionaire with his thumb in your citizen’s eye isn’t Boss Tweed. We won’t find $50,000 in small bills stashed in his freezer. Mike is a buyer of political power, not a seller of political favor. Nonetheless, since becoming mayor his personal fortune has soared from an estimated $3–$4 billion to $18–$20 billion. His is a private company, and even the most skilled and motivated reporters have had trouble uncovering just how he’s done it. But they’ve found some things that are included in this book.
I think of New York’s mayor as Mark Twain thought about William Clark, who in his time was also one of the country’s wealthiest men. Clark wanted to be a US Senator. At the time, they were chosen by state legislatures. He bribed the Montana legislature to give him a Senate seat, and he sat in it from 1901 until 1907. His rationale? “I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.”
Mark Twain said this about Clark:
He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a ball and chain on his legs. To my mind he is the most disgusting creature that the republic has produced since Tweed’s time.
Tweed took bribes and ended up in jail. Clark was on the other side of the transactions and didn’t. Mike won’t go to jail either. “Corrupt” is not the same as “illegal.” Its literal meaning is morally unsound or debased. But he’s taken things farther than Tweed or Clark dreamed of. Mike represents the transition from the super-rich influencing government to being the government.
His domination of the nation’s financial and media capital is unprecedented. When he pointed out that “I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have,” what we heard was not pride but petulance that his leadership qualities hadn’t propelled him to a spot on the national ticket—at least.
When he didn’t get it, he overturned term limits. That’s when all New Yorkers should have understood that his disdain for voters wasn’t an aberration. It was Mike being Mike, the city’s CEO. If we didn’t like what he was doing, he said, we could “boo him at parades.”


Before his first term began, I found myself in a four-year struggle as the head of a 3,500-person tenant association in a rent-regulated complex in Manhattan. Our landlord was making life hell for us. It was the 2001 mayoral election. We needed political help. Mike was the only politician who didn’t need the real estate money; I urged tenants to support him.
I was naive. I soon discovered that the notorious real estate predator, Laurence (“Call me Larry”) Gluck, had an enthusiastic ally in Mike, the Affordable Housing Mayor. That struggle was my introduction to Mike and his administration, and it was the catalyst for this book.
Some who have read the early drafts suggested that they are different stories and don’t belong in the same book. I think they’re mistaken. What happened at Independence Plaza is the kind of story—if it is told at all—that gets filtered through public relations and political professionals and filtered again through the reporting and editorial conventions of the New York Times and other mainstream media. The distortions, omissions, and flat out lies become the official history. And that as we’ll see in the reporting of the Independence Plaza story is a story in itself.
I’m told too that unless I take a more nuanced approach, search for and write about the good things he’s done, all the people and institutions he’s supported, that my credibility will be diminished. I stipulate to those good things. I’m sure there are some. My intention has been not to write the definitive biography of one of the most important figures in the city’s history. Historians will do that in due course.
The purpose of this book is to point up some (by no means all) of the negative aspects of his character and career that aren’t as widely known as they should be, and by explaining why they aren’t, to reveal aspects of New York’s insider political culture.
I have no “isms” to advance, no manifestos to proclaim, no theories of urban government to propound. I write from the perspective of someone who was once a political insider, an angle of vision that’s hard to come by without suffering the blunted ethical sensibility that comes from being one. For years I headed a university- based research institute that was funded through contracts, foundation grants, and legislative appropriations. Before that, I had been a counsel to the Republican state senate majority leader.
The money I made and the benefits I enjoyed all came from insiders. When a group of foundations led by the Ford Foundation asked me to take over a magazine on New York government and politics that they had financed, I did it gladly. When it came to publishing everything I knew, I didn’t. I even hired a couple of people at the research institute that I wouldn’t have hired but for the fact that these same insiders asked me to do it. It’s hard to unbundle self-interest from genuine feelings of friendship toward people who have helped you, but as with those who take Mike’s money, there’s always a rationale. Nobody wants to live an ignoble life.
There’s also hypocrisy. When you’ve dined at the king’s table and then throw the plate in his face from a safe distance, the charge is legitimately made. I worry about it. I can only say in mitigation that it wasn’t until he went to prison that Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa became a passionate advocate for prison reform. And it wasn’t until I experienced how Mike and a host of Democratic politicians dealt with people whose homes were at stake that I understood what it felt like to be an outsider.
I was fortunate to discover a brilliant cartoonist, Keith Seidel, whose images contribute so much to bringing Mike’s story to life.
The Occupy Movement has been criticized for not having leaders. If the Bloomberg story – and for that matter the Obama presidency — teaches us anything, the lesson is, first the Movement, then the leaders. But we do have a villain, and maybe that’s more important.

[don]

The Dem's Clown Car Is Wobbling . . .

While perhaps too early for Democratic elites to panic and begin bailing out on Hillary Clinton’s campaign as a doomed vessel, they would be well advised not to miss any of the lifeboat drills.

For Hillary’s campaign is taking on water at a rate that will sink her, if the leakage does not stop, and soon.

Initially, the issue of Hillary and the emails she sent and received as secretary of state seemed too wonkish, too complex, too trivial a matter to sink a candidacy as strong as hers.

Her nomination was considered as assured as any since Vice President Richard Nixon ran unopposed in 1960.

But since it was revealed that as secretary of state she used a private server for her emails, located in her home in Chappaqua, the bleeding of public trust has been unabated.

Her tortured explanation as to why she installed her own server only raised suspicions. Her erasure of 30,000 “personal emails,” her initial refusal to turn her server over to State, her denials she ever received confidential information, her wiping of the server clean, her stonewalling, have all ravaged her reputation for truthfulness. And truthfulness was never Bill or Hillary’s long suit.

And the issue of Clintonian entitlement and privilege has arisen again.

For Hillary showed a casualness in handling the nation’s secrets that would have cost a civil servant at State, Defense or CIA his or her security clearance and job. And they would be facing charges and potentially jail time.

Indeed, now that Justice and the FBI have been called in to look at Hillary’s handling of state secrets, it is not impossible that at the end of this road lies a federal indictment.

Should that happen, her campaign and career would be over. And should that indictment come later rather than sooner, the Democratic Party could be headed into the election of 2016 led by a Brooklyn-born septuagenarian Socialist.

Every day that new revelations come about Hillary and her emails, and every week that passes between now and when the filing deadlines for the primaries begin to fall, this becomes a real possibility.

Again, the problem here for Hillary and the Democratic Party is that the investigators at Justice, the FBI, and in a hostile Congress and the media, are far from wrapping this up.

They all have their teeth in it, and they are not going away. And there is nothing Hillary can do to halt the investigations, or plug the leaks, or, it seems, to change the subject.

What, really, is the relevance of her $350 billion plan to get the super-rich to pay off student loans, if Hillary is being lawyered up?
The Democratic Party is approaching the fail-safe point.

If it appears that Hillary is headed for the knacker’s yard, then to whom do the Democratic elites turn, and, equally important, when do they move?

For they cannot wait too long.

Hence, a “Draft Biden” movement has begun, and veterans of President Obama’s campaigns are signing on.

Yet the vice president should think long and hard about whether and when he plunges into the Democratic race. For his announcement of availability would be a signal that Joe Biden thinks Hillary is politically dead, or close to it, and he is coming in to drop the hammer.

This would be seen as act of crass political opportunism, seizing upon Hillary’s travails, shouldering her aside, and seizing a nomination millions of Democrats have long believed was hers by right.

How would the millions of Democratic women who have looked forward to the first woman president respond to Biden’s barreling in and finishing her off? How enthusiastic would those women and feminists be for a Candidate Biden who had delivered the deathblow to Hillary and blocked for another decade any chance of a woman as president?

Joe would certainly be up for Chauvinist of the Year 2015.

And other problems would arise for a Biden candidacy.

Would Bill and Hillary Clinton be out there stumping to help Joe win the presidency, when both had dreamed of her having it?

Joe would have to beat Bernie Sanders and rout the Elizabeth Warren liberals. He would have to woo back the big contributors in the Jewish community who believe Barack Obama and John Kerry threw Israel and Bibi under the bus to cut a deal that empowers the world’s leading “state sponsor of terrorism.”

If Joe is having second thoughts about getting in, who can blame him?

As the old saw goes, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

But for Democrats, such counsel comes too late. Hillary is carrying their basket of eggs, and slipping all over the sidewalk.

If they procrastinate in designating someone else to catch the basket if it falls, they get Bernie. But if they move too soon, they will be charged with sabotaging the last best chance for America to elect a woman president.

A nice problem for those ubiquitous cable TV talking heads who identify themselves as “Democratic strategists.”

Buchanan

[don]

Re: The Dem's Clown Car Is Wobbling . . .

Hilary's emails . . . .

*Image courtesy of William Banzai7

[lektrode]

Re: The Dem's Clown Car Is Wobbling . . .

Hilary's emails . . . ....

whoooo HAAAAA!!

BEST SPOOF TO DATE!!!

[don]

Re: The Dem's Clown Car Is Wobbling . . .

for those who like to track such things . . .

Jake Anderson
October 2, 2015

(ANTIMEDIA) – It’s a new era of American politics. With regard to campaign finance, the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling — and the arguably worse McCutcheon v. FEC ruling — opened the doors to unrestricted corporate funding of our national elections.

The primary mechanism in place facilitating this flood of private money is the super PAC. You’ve probably heard of super PACs and how they’ve essentially taken over the role traditionally filled by individual campaign donors in Political Action Committees (PACs). But super PACs aren’t the end of it. There are puppet political non-profits, business associations, and now, single-candidate “dark money” outfits that, as of September 21, have already raised $25.1 million — five times the amount spent by this time in the 2012 election cycle.

Small, private donors still exist, of course. Their campaign contributions are still capped at about $5,000 per individual, making them the tip of the iceberg in political campaign spending. Enter super PACs and single-candidate committees, who, because of the aforementioned SCOTUS rulings, have the ability to slither in between campaign finance laws and flood our elections with unlimited corporate money. The “dark money” 501(c) groups, sometimes known as “social welfare” organizations, are particularly insidious because, unlike super PACs, they are not required to disclose their donors to the public. Since they are legally viewed as a type of business, they don’t have to disclose disbursements until the IRS requires it. This means there is essentially a network of politically advantageous winks and nods, whereby candidates receive unlimited parallel spending from an interconnected syndicate of super PACs, non-profits, and business associations.

Of the 20 biggest spenders, only one is openly committed to a liberal viewpoint, which gives conservatives an advantage. That said, while Democrats have questioned the legality of “dark money” groups, they have not discounted the possibility of utilizing this tactic in addition to super PACs, which must legally disclose the source of their funds within a few weeks (though several groups have found loopholes allowing them to wait up to 7 weeks).

Needless to say, this is an election in which most of the candidates are seeking support from wealthy donors instead of the citizens they are supposed to be representing.
Despite the arguably undemocratic, obfuscating nature of our nation’s campaign finance laws and the blatant corporatist agenda mandated by the Supreme Court, let’s attempt to break down the major sources of political spending so far in the 2016 presidential election. You may be surprised to find out who is donating money to your candidate — and how that contribution may affect future policy positions.

http://theantimedia.org/who-owns-your-candidate/

[lektrode]

Re: The Dem's Clown Car Is Wobbling . . .

for those who like to track such things . . .....
http://theantimedia.org/who-owns-your-candidate/

kinda lookin like the squid is betting on an upset this one, eh?
(meaning they hafta make nice with jeb&co vs their usual faves)

[BlackVoid]

Re: The Dem's Clown Car Is Wobbling . . .

American naivity is touching. You still think it matters who wins the election. LOL.

[don]

Re: The Dem's Clown Car Is Wobbling . . .

American naivity is touching. You still think it matters who wins the election. LOL.

Nowhere is the planning and influence of the ruling class of the world’s and history’s most powerful capitalist state, the United States, more evident than in the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). There are hundreds of institutions and organizations in which elite planning and networking occurs both at home and abroad. But, as the left historian Shoup shows in his indispensable new book Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council of Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014 (Monthly Review Press, 2015), no such group remotely approximates the CFR in scale, reach, and influence when it comes to articulating the national and global class interests of the U.S. capitalist elite and a growing transnational capitalist ruling class. With an individual membership of 5000 (boasting an average household worth of $1.4 million), a top Fortune 500 corporate membership of 170, a staff over 330, a budget of $60 million, and assets of $490 million, the Council is “the largest and most powerful of all U.S. private think tanks that presume to discuss and decide the future of humanity in largely secret meetings behind closed doors in the upper-class neighborhoods of New York and Washington. During the last four decades,” Shoup observes, “the CFR has not only successfully continued its central position as the most important private organization in the United States, one with no real peer in the country. It has succeeded in expanding its key role, and remains at the center of the small plutocracy that runs the United States and much of the world.”






Consistent with that description, CFR members have long played prominent roles in the U.S. executive branch. Some among the many examples (what follows is a small sample) include President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of treasury (Michael Blumenthal), national security adviser (Zbigniew Brzezinski), secretary of state (Cyrus Vance), and arms control director (Paul Warnke), vice president (Walter Mondale), secretary of defense (Harold Brown), and CIA director (Stansfield Turner); President RonaldReagan’s secretaries of state (Alexander Haig and George Schultz), national security advisers (Colin Powell and Frank Carlucci), secretary of treasury (Donald Regan), secretaries of defense (Casper Weinberger and Frank Carlucci) and CIA directors (William Casey and William Weber); ten of CFR member George H.W. Bush’s eleven top foreign policymakers; fifteen of CFR member Bill Clinton’s top seventeen foreign policymakers along with two of three of Clinton’s treasury secretaries; fourteen of George W. Bush’s top foreign policy officials; twelve of Obama’s top foreign policy positions along with CFR members in five of his domestic policy cabinet positions.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/...-ruling-class/

[don]

The Year of Living Dangerously . . .

The Republicans’ Ugly Revolt

OCT. 10, 2015

OVER the last two decades, through Bob Dole and George W. Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney, it has become an article of faith that the Republican presidential nominee is a person blessed by, or acceptable to, the party’s establishment, meaning the elders, the bankers, the cool heads, the deep pockets.
There’s mess along the way — brief tantrums by restive voters, fleeting triumphs by renegade candidates — but order and obeisance in the end.

Is this the election cycle when that changes?

The twilight of the Republican elite?

Donald Trump’s stamina and the ascendance of Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina suggest as much. The three of them, who have led national polls since mid-September, aren’t just political outsiders, which is the label hung on them most frequently. They’re instruments of protest by Republican voters unwilling to heed the prompts and protocol that they’re expected to.

For Republicans (and perhaps for Democrats, too) this is a season of rebellion, as the chaos in the House of Representatives vividly illustrates. A consequential share of the Republican majority there have made it clear that they will not bow to precedent, not follow any conventional script, not have anyone foisted on them. No, they’ll do the foisting themselves.

Glenn Thrush of Politico captured this dynamic in an article following the withdrawal of Representative Kevin McCarthy from the race to be the next speaker of the House. Enumerating the reasons no sane person would seek the job, Thrush wrote that “if you have any chance of winning, you’re automatically the ‘establishment,’ ” and you’re thus anathema to a group of bomb throwers in the Republican caucus who are “leery of anybody who followed the preordained lines of succession.”

(think of this as "from the blood" term limit Gotterdammerung )

Those bomb throwers are mirrors of the voters who are saying no to Jeb Bush, no to Chris Christie, no to John Kasich, no to anyone who was once or could soon be the darling of the northeastern Acela corridor.

And they’re pointing the Republican primary in a genuinely unpredictable direction.

This isn’t a mere replay of four years ago, when Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum had their moments. They were middle fingers raised one at a time, in succession (even if Santorum was really more a pinkie). Trump, Carson and Fiorina are parallel, simultaneous phenomena, constituting a gesture of more profound rebuke.

I still don’t believe that any of them will be the nominee. Each has too many peculiarities and too big a potential to crash and burn. Carson seems to be on the verge of doing that right now.

But then who? If the electorate really is more defiant than ever, Bush is done. Scott Walker and Rick Perry are already gone. Voters, it appears, prefer someone brattier.

Someone like Ted Cruz.

“He’s perfectly positioned himself to own that space when Trump and Carson disappear,” said a Republican operative who is among the smartest analysts I know. “He’ll be a force to be reckoned with. I think that he has a very clear path to the nomination, as much as that horrifies me.”

This is a strange season, in which old rules and truths seem to be going up in flames. It’s a bonfire of the verities.

Remember the longtime thinking that governors made the best presidential candidates, being able to cite executive experience and run on clear records? Well, Perry was and Walker is a governor, and none of the former or current governors still in the hunt is meeting expectations.

Remember how much money was supposed to matter, partly for the commercials it could buy? Well, the ads didn’t have, or aren’t having, the intended effect for Bush, Perry, Kasich, Bobby Jindal (another floundering governor) and — on the Democratic side — Hillary Clinton.

Remember the “shock and awe” of the Bush rollout, in which his speedy commandeering of wealthy donors and prominent advisers was supposed to scare off or marginalize other contenders?

He’s the marginalized one, at odds with the populist zeitgeist, laboring ludicrously to present himself as the skunk at the garden party and not the one sipping a cold Tom Collins in the gazebo’s shade.

Party leaders have begun to wonder if he can overcome voters’ resistance to him, the potency of which was suggested by a private internal poll that some of them have been buzzing about. It put Trump in hypothetical head-to-head primary matchups against each of the five next most popular candidates, according to the Real Clear Politics average of national polls: Carson, Fiorina, Marco Rubio, Bush and Cruz. Each beat Trump by at least 10 points — except Bush, who lost narrowly to him.

Bush finds himself in an almost impossible bind. In order to distance himself sufficiently from Washington, to dispel any notion that he’s not conservative enough and to make the case that he’s earned rather than inherited the Republican presidential nomination, he has understandably begun to emphasize the past and Florida — he governed that state from January 1999 through January 2007 — at the expense of tomorrow and America.

“Jeb’s talking about things he worked on more than a decade ago: ‘Let me tell you what I did in the late 1990s,’ ” said the operative I mentioned before, a Bush fan. “It’s a local story, and it’s so backward-looking.”

What’s more, he, Kasich, Christie and others are selling themselves as potentially effective leaders to a Republican electorate that may be more interested in fantasists who set out on futile quests, which is the modus operandi of the troublemaking House Republicans — and of Trump, with his grand delusions.

“When pressed about how he’s going to round up 12 million immigrants, his answer is: Don’t worry!” one veteran Republican strategist marveled. “How will you get Mexico to pay for the wall? I’ll do it! The idea that you have to compromise and eventually govern — that there’s a Constitution and we pass laws and sign treaties and have courts that can say no — is thrown out the window.”

Cruz is more like Trump, outrageous and unyielding, than like the governors. And in a radio interview on Thursday, he predicted that he’d inherit Trump’s supporters because he’d “stood up to Washington” and “taken on leaders” of his own party.

A day earlier in National Review, Eliana Johnson called Cruz “the most under-covered serious candidate in the race — and the most underestimated.” Johnson noted that he’s a good fit for voters in primaries in the South, where he’s been diligently organizing and spending time.

In Politico, the conservative soothsayer Rich Lowry recently observed that Cruz, who is not yet halfway through his first Senate term, just needs “voters to become slightly, and only slightly, more desirous of political experience” and he’s “sitting pretty,” as the headline on Lowry’s column read.

Ted Cruz sitting pretty?

This could get even uglier than I’d feared.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/op...f=opinion&_r=0