What Are Sanders and Obama Going To Discuss

Apparently President Obama and Senator Sanders are going to have an 'informal one-on-one meeting with no agenda' and no press today.

This presidential election has really framed up as an attempt at a popular revolt against a Big Money political establishment. And it is fascinating to watch.

Although the mainstream media keeps feigning astonishment, the broader public is clearly seeking two non-establishment candidate who, for better or worse, they think cannot be bought off by Big Money and the revolving door.

This meeting is an informal one with no set agenda.

Perhaps Obama will share the insight he allegedly had early in his Presidency about reformers as recounted by the ex-CIA whistleblower Ray McGovern.

"He’s afraid of what happened to Martin Luther King Jr. And I know from a good friend who was there when it happened, that at a small dinner with progressive supporters – after these progressive supporters were banging on Obama before the election, Why don’t you do the things we thought you stood for? Obama turned sharply and said, “Don’t you remember what happened to Martin Luther King Jr.?” That’s a quote, and that’s a very revealing quote."

Ray McGovern

I am sure Obama was being flip.   They was no need to buy him because he was a well-crafted brand backed by Big Money from the very start.  What he was voicing, if indeed he said this, was the time honored motto of political corruption, to go along to get along.  This was the great lesson to the Democratic party from the Clintons.

I have included a short but interesting video at the very bottom about how things work in Washington these days as recounted by Neil Barofsky to Bill Moyers.

And finally I include a short video describing the state of politics in the US from that wild eyed radical, former President Jimmy Carter.

Bernie Sanders Meets With Obama Today: What They Might Talk About
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
January 27, 2016

Expensive media real estate is reporting that presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, will meet with President Obama in the Oval Office today. Much is being made of the fact that the meeting comes less than a week before the politically important Iowa caucuses and just two days after Politico published an exclusive interview with the President in which he appeared to favor a Clinton presidency. (Memo to the President: this election is about finding an authentic non-establishment candidate, so your opinion as the quintessential establishment figure is not likely to sway folks – at least not in a good way.)

The first thing that came to mind when we heard about the meeting was that one or more kingpins on Wall Street might have asked the President to whisper in Senator Sanders’ ear to stop repeating at every campaign stop that the business model of Wall Street is fraud. Sanders is also regularly stating on the stump that one of his top priorities as President will be to break up those Wall Street banks that would require another taxpayer bailout if they should fail.

Would Wall Street actually be brazen enough to try to censor the message of a sitting U.S. Senator? Back in March of last year, Reuters reported that representatives of Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America “have met to discuss ways to urge Democrats, including [Elizabeth] Warren and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, to soften their party’s tone toward Wall Street.” The article noted that withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats was one option that was on the table at the Wall Street banks...

Read the entire story at Wall Street On Parade.

Matt Taibbi: Everything Is Rigged - The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

“The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more, and tolerated by all.”

Tacitus

There are more scandals to come.   Wall Street is now a pathological environment, and the City of London is as bad or worse.

When someone raises their voice over these abuses they are often met with stony denial and ridicule.  That is the credibility trap at work.  Those who owe their positions to the system, as corrupt as it may be, feel the need to defend it rather than reform it.

There will be no sustainable recovery until the system is reformed.  

Rolling Stone
Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
By Matt Taibbi
April 25, 2013

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps...

All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings ­ in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP ­ are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati ­ this is the real thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.


Read the entire story here.

Bill Moyers and Trevor Potter On Big Money's Election Effect

Simon Johnson: Money, Power, and the Rule of Law

The dominant political parties in the US or the UK really 'get this,' because they do not want to. They are fine with collaborating with the status quo as long as it serves them.

They have become a brothel for the monied interests and nationless corporations.

They seem to have lost their sense of honor and civic duty. It has been choked by greed and selfishness, a lack of empathy and proportion. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds

NY Times
Money, Power and the Rule of Law
By Simon Johnson
October 4, 2012

Economic policy is always torn between helping the broader social interest – lots of ordinary people – and favoring particular special interests. Unfortunately, special interests typically win out in the kind of situation we have in America in 2012, when it’s all about spending money to win friends and influence people.

The most effective way to push back against powerful special interests is to have the same rules for everyone – and to enforce those rules fairly, even when they are broken by the richest and most politically connected people in the land. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of New York took a major step toward restoring the rule of law this week, by bringing a case against JPMorgan Chase. But it will be an uphill battle; the forces against him are incredibly strong, including some within the Obama administration.

Special interests always want to take over and organize society for their own benefit. In the terminology of economics, there are always some “rents” to be had – meaning some form of extra compensation that you get from tilting the playing field in your favor. Powerful people are always “rent-seeking,” another way of saying that they would like to feather their own nests. And such activities impose costs on society, lowering incomes and limiting opportunities for everyone else.

When money is the primary source of power, the special interests win hands down. They can create advantages for themselves. One way is through the market mechanism – as monopolists did with railroads and industrial sectors at the end of the 19th century.

Or they can capture the government and use state policies to help themselves – for example, by deregulating the financial sector and allowing excessive risk-taking in big banks. The ability to take such risks hurts all consumers and taxpayers while helping the special interests who get this advantage...

Read the rest here.

Glenn Greenwald On the Rule of Law: With Liberty and Justice For Some

"Most of the events that we consider to be progress in American history were driven by the reverence for this concept that we are all equal under the law, that equality under the law is how we determine if we are perfecting the union...And what I think is radically different about today is not that the rule of law suddenly is not always being applied faithfully, because that has always been true. What is different about today, radically, is that we no longer bother to affirm that principle...

You can often, and I would say more often than not, in leading opinion-making elite circles, find an expressed renouncement or repudiation of that principle...All of these acts entail very aggressive and explicit arguments that the most powerful political and financial elites in our society should not be, and are not, subject to the rule of law because it is too disruptive, it is too divisive, it is more important that we should look forward, that we find ways to avoid repeating the problem...the rule of law is not that important of a value any longer...

The law is no respecter of persons, but the law is also a respecter of reality, meaning if it is too disruptive or divisive that it is actually in our common good, not the elite criminals, but in our common good, to exempt the most powerful from the consequences of their criminal acts, and that has become the template used in each of these instances."

Glenn Greenwald

I have been thinking along these lines for some time, that the rule of law in the West is becoming supplanted by a new kind of utilitarianism, relying on expediency in the service of power and the faux science of amoral economics, in order to excuse the massive frauds and criminal acts of the Anglo-American Empire that seems to be increasing.

Any concerns about the rule of law are roundly dismissed as a false concern with moral hazard as we saw so clearly in the great push for $700 Billion TARP based on a couple of handwritten sheets of paper, and a general amnesty for the perpetrators.

Hey Rube, Here's Why Your Lawmakers Ignored All Those Calls and Faxes

"The financial industry has spent $251 million on lobbying so far this year as lawmakers hammered out new rules of the road for Wall Street, according to the latest lobbying reports compiled by a watchdog group."

Money Talks. And money in the hands of the man who is sitting in the offices and standing in the halls of Congress is an effective tool for buying the influence and the laws that you want.

Political campaign financing reform, including stricter limitation of direct contributions by special interests to targeted lawmakers, is at the heart of it.

Does the First Amendment cover soft bribery? That is how they will spin it.

Goldman Sachs has the right to express its opinion to your congressman, while wrapping it in a thick rolls of hundred dollar bills, charged to expenses, and paid for by you.

And while it is a nice cushion, $251 million is small potatoes compared to the real payoff in jobs and speaking engagements with huge stipends, consulting fees, and sinecures after leaving office. And that is on top of their fat pensions and cadillac benefits.

Corporatism is the parternship of big business and government. And in the organizational state, the individual (that's you Mr. Potato Head) is irrelevant. Except for comic relief, someone to be played for the fool, the emotional plaything of paid pundits and party politics. Someone whom they can whip into a frenzy, who really enjoys the show.

Yeah boy, we'll show those new crooks a thing or two, and vote the old crooks back in November. Especially the ones that make no bones about being in it for the money and the power, and appeal to the worst in us with stereotypes and caricatures. That will teach Washington something about us.

You bet it will.

CNN
Wall Street's lobbying pricetag: $251 million
By Jennifer Liberto
August 2, 2010: 2:08 PM ET

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney.com) -- The financial industry has spent $251 million on lobbying so far this year as lawmakers hammered out new rules of the road for Wall Street, according to the latest lobbying reports compiled by a watchdog group.

The financial sector spent more than any other special interest group from April through the end of June -- a whopping $126 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics' latest estimates. Wall Street banks, as well as insurance and real estate firms, hiked the amount they spent on lobbying by 12% in the second quarter compared to the same period last year.

"Financial reform certainly drove Wall Street lobbying efforts," said Dave Levinthal, spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics. "Even as the economy remains beaten and bruised, with some financial institutions continuing to struggle, most banks and securities houses found it in their budgets to hire lobbyists - and lots of them."

In the first half of 2010, Goldman Sachs spent $2.7 million, just $100,000 shy of the total the firm spent on lobbying in all of 2009. The firm's reports to the federal government said it lobbied Treasury, White House and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, as well as Congress...

There was plenty of evidence of financial sector lobbying throughout in the period leading up to final passage of the Wall Street reform bill last month.

In June, during the final 20-hour meeting of the panel to reconcile differences between the House and Senate reform bills, lobbyists suddenly packed a congressional office meeting room a bit after midnight, as lawmakers started tackling the final details of making derivatives more transparent. In hallways, they cornered House members who serve on the Agriculture Committee, in particular.

In late May, JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon made calls to a couple of lawmakers who were expected to be named to the conference panel.JP Morgan Chase spent $3 million on lobbying in the first half of the year, about the same as in 2009, according to the Center.

While the financial sector was active, other industries also dug deep into their wallets to talk to lawmakers. Despite the fact that the health care bill passed in March, the Center said health firms spent nearly as much as Wall Street firms did in the second quarter, $125 million. So far this year, the health care industry has spent $267 million on lobbying.

Overall, all lobbying totaled $1.78 billion in the first half of the year, up 7.5% in from the same six months in 2009. If it continues at that pace, 2010 will be a record year for lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

However, fewer lobbyists are pounding the pavement, as the number of lobbyists dropped 5% compared to the same period in 2009.