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timothy geithner
Forget Mueller. Forget Impeachment. A Million People Should Surround the White House and Demand Trump's Resignation
Even the master distractor himself could not have distracted the mass dittohead media any better from his true crimes.
Mar 27, 2019
Special Counsel Robert Mueller spent almost two years to produce a $25 million report that is a flat tire. Still unreleased in full to the American people, Trump's acolyte, Attorney General William Barr, a longtime friend of Republican Mueller, gave us what Trump long craved--by stating that "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities" during the 2016 election. As for obstruction of justice by Trump, Attorney General Barr cryptically burped, that "The Special Counsel states that 'while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him"--whatever that means. Give people the whole report now, as the House of Representatives voted 420 to 0 to do.
What a farce and distraction this whole exercise turned out to be! Mueller's assigned subject was Trump. So, does this prosecutor demand to interview Trump, to subpoena Trump? No. Does this special investigator conclude with any legal recommendations at all? No. He just wants to be forgotten as he slinks away into deliberate silence (unless he is made to testify before the House Judiciary Committee).
Really, what should we have expected from someone who, as FBI Director, testified before Congress as part of the Bush/Cheney regime, pushing for the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003?
"Really, what should we have expected from someone who, as FBI Director, testified before Congress as part of the Bush/Cheney regime, pushing for the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003?"
The assignment to Mueller was doomed from the start. Its charge was far too narrow and proof in such matters is very difficult to find. Intent to collude requires direct examination of the President himself. But why would Trump have to collude at all? The Russians interfered in his favor in various ways to the detriment of Hillary Clinton and all he had to do was accept such foreign largess.
An inquiry into Trump and all his business deals and business proposals with various governments point to Trump's disregard for the law. By the way, whatever happened to the IRS audit that Tricky Donald kept using as an excuse in 2016 for not releasing these voluminous tax records depicting suspicious relations that Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston has written about for years (see his book The Making of Donald Trump)?
The endless speculation and successful prosecutions of Trump's associates largely focused on ancillary lies and thefts not leading directly to the White House.
Trump couldn't have distracted the mass dittohead media any better from his true crimes. Those include unlawful war-making, corruption, wasting public funds, and unlawfully handcuffing or firing the federal "cops" whose job is to save the lives, health, safety, and economic assets of all the American people from big corporate predators across the land.
Consider all the print, TV, and radio time the mass media used on the Mueller Russian probe compared to Trump's cruelty and viciousness from his brazen "deregulation," or open flouting of statutorily mandated government missions.
These policies have directly harmed innocent children, the elderly, patients, consumers, and workers and have wreaked environmental ruin, polluting the air, water, and soil with lethal toxins. He proudly took away protections leaving defenseless humans to suffer more deadly coal dust, coal ash, and coal pollution.
"Consider all the print, TV, and radio time the mass media used on the Mueller Russian probe compared to Trump's cruelty and viciousness from his brazen "deregulation," or open flouting of statutorily mandated government missions."
He has blocked our government's responses to the climate crisis looming everywhere.
He has gotten away with massive federal deficits caused by his tax holidays for corporations and the rich, including the Trump family. Take that, next generation of Americans!
He backs for-profit colleges who have committed serial crimes against their impoverished students while heavily subsidizing these corporations with your tax dollars.
He is pushing to weaken or eliminate modest controls over imperial Wall Street, upsetting even Wall Streeters like Timothy Geithner, setting the stage for another Wall Street collapse on the economy, causing workers to lose their pensions and savings, before they, as taxpayers, are required to again bailout the Wall Street speculators and crooks.
He lies repeatedly about current realities, falsely brags about conditions he is actually worsening. He opposes any increase in the frozen federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and does not adequately enforce fair labor standards. He has hired and personally profited from many undocumented workers while attacking their presence in the U.S.
He pays more attention to one golf ball than he does to the estimated $60 billion in annual wage theft or $350 billion a year in the health industry's computerized billing fraud, or the gouging drug prices he falsely promised the people he would reduce.
Never mind impeachment, millions of Trump's victims, regardless of how they voted in 2016, should demand his resignation. A million-people march should surround the White House and peacefully make this demand repeatedly.
"Never mind impeachment, millions of Trump's victims, regardless of how they voted in 2016, should demand his resignation. A million-people march should surround the White House and peacefully make this demand repeatedly."
Enough of lying Trump's slimy bigotry and his snarling, hateful, bullying speech always directed at the powerless. Enough of his destructive impact on millions of children imitating his coarseness toward siblings and parents who, when admonished, blurt out that the President says this and does that. That daily acidic intrusion into family life--a cultural time bomb--has yet to properly interest the media.
Cheating Donald J. Trump has gotten away with everything in his failed businesses and his Electoral College-caused Presidency. In so doing, he has taught us much about ourselves, how much we tolerate with chronic indifference to the flaying of the rule of law, and the principles of decency, helpfulness, peace, and justice.
He has taught us about the costs of not doing our political homework, of staying home civically and electorally. He has taught us that if we do not look ourselves into the mirror, the three horsemen of fascism, lawless plutocracy, and oligarchy will run our beloved country into the ground, if not over the fiscal cliff.
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Trillion Dollar Wall Street Bailouts, Bernie Sanders, and the Washington Post
The newspaper's fact-checker might need to work on his own understanding of the facts, because Sanders seems on pretty solid ground here
Mar 19, 2019
Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post Fact Checker gave Bernie Sanders two Pinocchios yesterday for saying that the Wall Street banks got a trillion dollar bailout. Kessler raises several points of contention. First, whether the Wall Street banks actually got that much money. Second, whether it can really be called a bailout, since the government made a profit on the loans. Third, that the bailout was necessary to keep the financial system running.
Taking these in turn, Kessler points out that the money that went from the TARP to the Wall Street banks, the congressionally approved bailout, was in the low hundreds of billions, far less than $1 trillion. He does note that a much larger amount of loans went from the Federal Reserve Board to the banks, however the piece points out both that the Fed is nominally independent of the government and that many of these loans were short-term, so that rolling them over would count twice. (If a bank got overnight loans for $1 billion for a week, this would count as $7 billion.)
Sanders seems on pretty solid ground here when including the Fed loans. First, the reason the Fed has the power it does is because it is the central bank of the United States. It is true, that when it was established in 1913 it was set up as a mixed public-private entity, with the banks having a direct voice in setting policy. However, its ability to print an essentially unlimited amount of money is due to the fact that it is the central bank of the United States. All the other major central banks (e.g. the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, The Bank of Japan) are fully public institutions. The fact that the United States allows private banks to have a voice in setting Fed policy doesn't really change the fact that it is a government institution and therefore loans from the Fed should be seen as coming from the government.
The fact that many of the loans made by the Fed were very short-term does make adding them up more complicated, but there were many points at which the outstanding loans and guarantees to the banks were well over $1 trillion. In fact, it set up special lending facilities specifically for Bank of America and Citigroup, each of which had well over $100 billion in loans and guarantees at the peak of the crisis in 2009.
As far as the government making a profit on the loans, this is a rather dubious claim. The measure of profit here is the difference between what the banks repaid and the government's cost of borrowing. The latter was of course quite low, since the government was one of the few secure borrowers in the world at that point.
Anyhow, the notion of this being a bailout stems from the fact that these loans were granted at interest rates that were far below the market rate at the time. This allowed banks like Bank of America and Citigroup to stay in business at a point where they would have been pushed into bankruptcy if the market was allowed to work its magic. In fact, then Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, argued at a Brookings forum last fall that all 13 of the country's largest banks would have gone into bankruptcy if the market had been allowed to run its course.
The government quite explicitly acted to save the banks from the market. As then Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says repeatedly in his autobiography, they acted to ensure that there would be no more Lehmans. The fact that they charged an interest rate that was above the rate paid on government borrowing is pretty much irrelevant. The interest rate paid by the banks on their loans was far less than the market rate they would have paid at the time in the absence of government support, and for this reason can accurately be called a "bailout."
Finally, there is the issue of whether the bailout was necessary. There seems unanimity from the people who could not see the $8 trillion housing bubble whose collapse led to the crisis that we would have faced a "Second Great Depression" without the bailout. This is hard to see.
The government has a long history of keeping a bank operating through a bankruptcy. This is the reason the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) exists. The FDIC takes over a bank when it becomes insolvent and, for the most part, its depositors never even know anything has changed until they get a note in the mail. Having the country's largest banks implode would have been a huge burden on the FDIC and there undoubtedly would have been glitches, but having these glitches imply a Second Great Depression (ten years of double-digit unemployment) involves some very serious hand waiving.
There is little doubt that the initial downturn would have been worse if the market was allowed to work its magic and put the Wall Street banks out of business, but there is nothing that would have prevented a large government stimulus from boosting the economy back to more normal levels of output. It is worth noting on this issue that one of the main rationales for the TARP bailout, that the commercial paper market was shutting down, was completely dishonest.
The Fed single-handedly had the ability to support the commercial paper market. The world discovered this fact the weekend after Congress approved the TARP when the Fed announced the creation of a commercial paper market lending facility. Anyhow, in the same way that the fear of a shutdown of the commercial paper market was used to sell the TARP, saving us from a Second Great Depression has repeatedly been used after the fact as a rationale for the larger bailout. Neither is true.
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Siding With 'Loan Sharks' Over Consumers, Trump CFPB Moves to Gut Payday Lender Regulations
"This administration has moved the CFPB away from protecting consumers to protecting the very companies abusing them."
Feb 05, 2019
In what progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups decried as the Trump administration's latest "shameful" attack on vulnerable families, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) unveiled a plan on Wednesday that would gut regulations protecting consumers from predatory payday lenders.
"This decision will put already struggling families in a cycle of debt and leave them in an even worse financial position."
--Vanita Gupta, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, denounced the CFPB's plan as "a slap in the face to consumers--especially people of color--who have been victims of predatory business practices and abusive lenders."
"This decision will put already struggling families in a cycle of debt and leave them in an even worse financial position," Gupta added. "This administration has moved the CFPB away from protecting consumers to protecting the very companies abusing them."
\u201cThis decision will put already struggling families in a cycle of debt and leave them in an even worse financial position. Make no mistake: This administration has moved the @CFPB away from protecting consumers to protecting the very companies abusing them. #StopTheDebtTrap\u201d— Vanita Gupta (@Vanita Gupta) 1549477732
\u201cBorrowers need protections from predatory lenders, not the other way around. @CFPBDirector should fulfill the Bureau\u2019s mission to protect consumers, instead of giving breaks to loan sharks #StopTheDebtTrap #ProtectConsumers\u201d— NCLC (@NCLC) 1549485909
Detailed in a statement by Trump-appointed CFPB director Kathy Kraninger, the agency's proposal would dramatically weaken an Obama-era rule that would have required payday lenders to verify that borrowers have the financial ability to repay their loans--an effort to help vulnerable people avoid falling into debt traps.
"Eliminating these protections would be a grave error and would leave the 12 million Americans who use payday loans every year exposed to unaffordable payments at interest rates that average nearly 400 percent."
--Alex Horowitz, Pew Charitable Trusts
In its explanation of the rule change, the CFPB said it wants consumers to have even more access to payday lenders, despite their long record of exploiting the poor.
"Kraninger is siding with the payday loan sharks instead of the American people," Rebecca Borne, senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, said in a statement. "We urge director Kraninger to reconsider, as her current plan will keep families trapped in predatory, unaffordable debt."
The original rule was initially set to take effect in January, but the Trump administration has delayed implementation until August.
In a tweet responding to the agency's proposed rollback, former CFPB chief Richard Cordray called the plan "a bad move that will hurt the hardest-hit consumers" and predicted that it "will be subject to a stiff legal challenge."
\u201cCFPB is proposing to unwind the core part of its payday loan rule - that the lender must reasonably assess a borrower\u2019s ability to repay before making a loan. It\u2019s a bad move that will hurt the hardest-hit consumers. It should be and will be subject to a stiff legal challenge.\u201d— Rich Cordray (@Rich Cordray) 1549481546
"Eliminating these protections would be a grave error and would leave the 12 million Americans who use payday loans every year exposed to unaffordable payments at interest rates that average nearly 400 percent," concluded Alex Horowitz, senior research officer with Pew Charitable Trusts' consumer finance project. "This proposal is not a tweak to the existing rule; instead, it's a complete dismantling of the consumer protections finalized in 2017."
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