Boxer Booed off Stage in Nevada

[Woodsman]

[shiny!]

Re: Boxer Booed off Stage in Nevada

I couldn't understand most of it, but... yay?

[jk]

Re: Boxer Booed off Stage in Nevada

i thought i was going to see Wladimir Klitschko.

[Woodsman]

Re: Boxer Booed off Stage in Nevada

Some context from Yves...

Democratic Establishment’s Thuggish Power Grab at Nevada Convention


Apparently annoyed at Sanders supporters having managed to take advantage of Clinton delegate candidate no-shows to obtain more spots, the Nevada state party put through rule changes weeks before the state convention that gave the meeting chair complete and arbitrary control of the final step in the delegate certification process. That in turn produced a convention that was entirely undemocratic in the small d sense, with some Sanders delegates who had won their positions via the then-existing rules being stripped of their standing. In addition, the meeting was run on authoritarian lines, with party members offering pro-Sanders motions having the microphones cut off and the meeting being terminated with motions still on the floor. Don’t buy Twitterverse claims that the meeting was run in accordance with Robert’s Rules of Order; accepting a motion to adjourn without a second was one of many dubious procedures.
As Lambert remarked, “This is Clinton’s idea of a party unity strategy.”

[shiny!]

We are Here

Democratic Establishment’s Thuggish Power Grab at Nevada Convention


Apparently annoyed at Sanders supporters having managed to take advantage of Clinton delegate candidate no-shows to obtain more spots, the Nevada state party put through rule changes weeks before the state convention that gave the meeting chair complete and arbitrary control of the final step in the delegate certification process. That in turn produced a convention that was entirely undemocratic in the small d sense, with some Sanders delegates who had won their positions via the then-existing rules being stripped of their standing. In addition, the meeting was run on authoritarian lines, with party members offering pro-Sanders motions having the microphones cut off and the meeting being terminated with motions still on the floor. Don’t buy Twitterverse claims that the meeting was run in accordance with Robert’s Rules of Order; accepting a motion to adjourn without a second was one of many dubious procedures.
As Lambert remarked, “This is Clinton’s idea of a party unity strategy.”

Denial and normalcy bias are wondrous things. For as long as I can remember, people have been predicting terrible times down the road if such-and-such continues: We'll lose our standing as the moral leader of the world, we'll lose our Constitution, our free press, our democracy, we'll become a surveillance state, we'll become a police state...

These things aren't going to happen. They have happened already. Those in positions of power and priveledge aren't even trying to hide it anymore.

Given that Trump will likely be the next president, I would like to hope that he will roll back these tides. But since he likes the surveillance state he will probably be the charismatic leader who finishes the job of dismantling the Constitution. History doesn't repeat but it rhymes. This time isn't exactly the same as the National Socialists and Fascists of Europe in the 1930's and 1940's but the parallels and their implications are chilling.

How is this cycle different? The Soviet Union fell in the very end becase the demonstrators co-ordinated their movements with fax machines. Now we have the internet and social media. Social media is biased and manipulated (and filled with 99% useless information), yet those biases and manipulations are being exposed through the self-same internet. TPTB can't control this massive flow of information unless they shut off electricity altogether. It's a new paradigm and they haven't caught up with it.

[Mega]

Re: We are Here

"They" may want you to...................remember the Russian revolution was planned in an office above Woolworths in New York (Was told that as a kid).
Mike

[Woodsman]

Re: We are Here

"They" may want you to...................remember the Russian revolution was planned in an office above Woolworths in New York (Was told that as a kid).
Mike

Whoever told you that didn't lie. It's a fact of history.



Cartoon by Robert Minor in St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1911).
Karl Marx surrounded by an appreciative audience of Wall Street financiers:
John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, John D. Ryan of National City Bank,
and Morgan partner George W. Perkins

We find there was a link between some New York international bankers and many revolutionaries, including Bolsheviks. These banking gentlemen — who are here identified — had a financial stake in, and were rooting for, the success of the Bolshevik Revolution. What motive explains this coalition of capitalists and Bolsheviks?

Russia was then — and is today — the largest untapped market in the world. Moreover, Russia, then and now, constituted the greatest potential competitive threat to American industrial and financial supremacy. (A glance at a world map is sufficient to spotlight the geographical difference between the vast land mass of Russia and the smaller United States.) Wall Street must have cold shivers when it visualizes Russia as a second super American industrial giant.

But why allow Russia to become a competitor and a challenge to U.S. supremacy? In the late nineteenth century, Morgan/Rockefeller, and Guggenheim had demonstrated their monopolistic proclivities. In Railroads and Regulation 1877-1916 Gabriel Kolko has demonstrated how the railroad owners, not the farmers, wanted state control of railroads in order to preserve their monopoly and abolish competition. So the simplest explanation of our evidence is that a syndicate of Wall Street financiers enlarged their monopoly ambitions and broadened horizons on a global scale. The gigantic Russian market was to be converted into a captive market and a technical colony to be exploited by a few high-powered American financiers and the corporations under their control. What the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Trade Commission under the thumb of American industry could achieve for that industry at home, a planned socialist government could achieve for it abroad — given suitable support and inducements from Wall Street and Washington, D.C."

[jk]

Re: We are Here

given the ideology of the bolsheviks, not to mention marx's statement that the last capitalist would sell the rope that the proles would use to hang him, what made the financiers think they could enforce any agreements?

[santafe2]

Re: We are Here

given the ideology of the bolsheviks, not to mention marx's statement that the last capitalist would sell the rope that the proles would use to hang him, what made the financiers think they could enforce any agreements?

It's all about the money jk and if there's enough money to be made on the Bolsheviks little war the future is just details, musical chairs.

[shiny!]

Re: We are Here

given the ideology of the bolsheviks, not to mention marx's statement that the last capitalist would sell the rope that the proles would use to hang him, what made the financiers think they could enforce any agreements?

Psychopaths believe themselves to be special. They're immune to the Law of Gravity, or any law for that matter. They fail to forsee negative consequences and fail to learn from past mistakes, thus they tend to make really bad choices. When their plans go pear-shaped they're often the most surprised of anyone... "Who could have seen this coming?"

We're seeing this now among the Republocrat elites. They are genuinely confused as to why the voters aren't following their playbook. They don't grasp that when you spend decades screwing people, eventually the people wise up. They honestly don't know how close they are to getting lynched.

I'm enjoing their discomfiture immensely.

[Woodsman]

Re: We are Here

It's all about the money jk and if there's enough money to be made on the Bolsheviks little war the future is just details, musical chairs.

"When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion." - Voltaire

[jk]

Re: We are Here

It's all about the money jk and if there's enough money to be made on the Bolsheviks little war the future is just details, musical chairs.

i understand that. as i read the article, however, it appeared that the money was supposed to come AFTER the bolsheviks took power in russia. i was asking why they thought that any agreements would be honored in the future. i.e. wasn't it a certainty that the bolsheviks would stiff them?

[lektrode]

Re: We are Here

Psychopaths believe themselves to be special. They're immune to the Law of Gravity, or any law for that matter. They fail to forsee negative consequences and fail to learn from past mistakes, thus they tend to make really bad choices. When their plans go pear-shaped they're often the most surprised of anyone... "Who could have seen this coming?"

We're seeing this now among the Republocrat elites. They are genuinely confused as to why the voters aren't following their playbook. They don't grasp that when you spend decades screwing people, eventually the people wise up. They honestly don't know how close they are to getting lynched.

I'm enjoing their discomfiture immensely.

+2
can hardly wait for the slugfest/debates tween the trumpster and hitlery!

but the writing was splattered, graffiti-style, all over the walls of all 3 branches of the .gov - the day obozo put holder (along with lynch, both of whom were clinton apaRATchix) in charge of the dept of 'juicetess' (mob slang definition) - never mind when in dec2012 he muttered the most outrageously fraudulant statement... uhhh... i mean,next to, that is - 'if you like what you have, you can keep it and most families will save 2500/year' with obomba-care - on 60minutes when he said:

"can tell you, just from 40,000 feet, that some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street, in some cases, some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street, wasn't illegal...."

which has given way to:
America's Age Of Impunity

Authored by Jeffrey Sachs, originally posted at The Boston Globe,

The Panama Papers opened yet another window on the global system of financial corruption, showing how political leaders and businesses use shell companies in secrecy havens like the British Virgin Islands and many US states to evade taxes and hide corruption and other crimes. Yet the system of corruption depends on another factor beyond secrecy, one that is perhaps even more important: impunity. Impunity means that the rich and powerful escape from punishment even when their malfeasance is in full view.

Impunity is epidemic in America. The rich and powerful get away with their heists in broad daylight. When a politician like Bernie Sanders calls out the corruption, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal double down with their mockery over such a foolish “dreamer.” The Journal recently opposed the corruption sentence of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell for taking large gifts and bestowing official favors — because everybody does it. And one of its columnists praised Panama for facilitating the ability of wealthy individuals to hide their income from “predatory governments” trying to collect taxes. No kidding.
Our major institutions, the ones that should know better, are often gross enablers of impunity. Consider my alma mater, Harvard University, and its recent nuptial with hedge-fund manager John Paulson. Paulson was the coconspirator with Goldman Sachs of one of the most notorious scams of the recent financial bubble.
Paulson and Goldman constructed and marketed a portfolio of toxic assets to sell to unwitting investors so that Paulson could bet against the portfolio. Goldman and Paulson thereby turned the sucker investors’ quick $1 billion loss into an equivalent $1 billion gain for Paulson, with Goldman collecting on fees. The SEC fined Goldman but left Paulson untouched. As one disillusioned SEC investigator put it: The SEC is “an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors.” Yet Harvard was delighted last year to take $400 million of Paulson’s ill-gotten gains, leave Paulson with the rest, name its engineering school after Paulson, and declare Paulson to be “the epitome of a visionary leader.”
Impunity. Paulson remains a much-celebrated figure on Wall Street. He has many kindred spirits, such as his partner in crime, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who has described himself as just a banker “doing God’s work.” Or consider JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, whose bank has paid well over $30 billion in fines while Dimon remains CEO with a $27 million salary for 2015. The hedge-fund industry itself is a case study of impunity. With few exceptions, it is domiciled in tax and secrecy havens, enjoys crass tax breaks brokered by cronies in Congress (such as Wall Street Senator Chuck Schumer), and pays itself billion-dollar-plus paychecks even while leaving investors with below-market returns or outright losses over the years.
The recourse to cheating within the financial industry now seems to be deeply ingrained, part of the corporate culture, and enabled by the prevailing impunity. An ingenious scientific study published in December 2014 showed the rot. Employees of a major international bank were divided into a control group and a treatment group. All subjects were asked to flip a coin 10 times and report truthfully on the number of heads, with more heads resulting in a bigger monetary prize. The treatment group was subtlety reminded they were bankers, while the control group was not. Simply reminding them that they were professional bankers was enough to induce the employees to cheat by exaggerating the number of heads they flipped.
Impunity is of course not limited to banking. Consider the poster-child of impunity in Big Pharma, Gilead Sciences. Gilead brazenly bought the patents on a life-saving cure for Hepatitis C and then gouged patients and taxpayers by charging $1,000 per pill — for a drug that costs $1 per pill to manufacture. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are unable to afford treatment, and many are dying, while Gilead earns far more in profits each year than it paid for the patents. Gilead adds to this deadly effrontery by booking its profits in an offshore tax haven.
Or consider another tech company in the health sector, Theranos, led by Elizabeth Holmes, until recently much lionized on Wall Street. Holmes, it now seems, may have been lying about Theranos’s supposed high-tech blood-testing technology and reporting faulty blood test results to boot. Yet when confronted with these serious concerns, Theranos board member and famed lawyer David Boies expressed his view that the board has “complete confidence in Elizabeth Holmes as a founder of the company, as a scientist, and as an administrator.” It seems not to have dawned on Boies and the board to call for an urgent, impartial, and complete investigation of the serious allegations swirling around the company.
Impunity is not an accidental or incidental defect of American society. It is a system foisted on us by the rich and powerful, and it continues to work its magic. It has enabled Hillary Clinton to come within reach of the presidential nomination without releasing the transcripts of her highly paid speeches to Wall Street banks. The Clintons long ago perfected the art of impunity, becoming rich and powerful by blurring the lines between their campaign fund-raising, public policies in office, Clinton Foundation work, big-money speeches, and off-the-record favors for foreign governments.
This week British Prime Minister David Cameron hosted an Anti-Corruption Summit in London in the wake of the Panama Papers. He was speaking accurately when he was caught on an open microphone telling the Queen that leaders of two “fantastically corrupt countries,” Nigeria and Afghanistan, would be at the summit. Nigeria’s new president, Muhammadu Buhari, himself a corruption-fighter, concurred with Cameron’s assessment, but called on the UK to return the money stolen by Nigeria’s former leaders and deposited in British and other Western banks. He might well have added the historic role, for more than a half century, of Royal Dutch Shell in Nigeria’s oil-sector corruption.
Buhari is, in fact, making a much larger point. While there is enough top-level political corruption to go around — from Afghanistan and Nigeria to Malaysia, Brazil, South African, FIFA, and many more places — the channels of corruption and secrecy havens are largely owned and operated by the big boys — the United States and the UK — and depend absolutely on the gross impunity that prevails at the highest reaches of power and finance in the United States.

and what do we get outa the LAMERSTREAM MEDIA ???