Would You Trust Trump Not To Foment Violence In Venezuela To Enhance His Own Collapsing Electoral Prospects?

Before retiring and joining the shady international private equity firm, the Carlyle Group, Admiral James Stavridi had been Commander of U.S. Southern Command and then Supreme Allied Commander at NATO. Yesterday he penned an OpEd for Time, I Commanded the U.S. Military in South America. Deploying Soldiers to Venezuela Would Only Make Things Worse. His attitude towards the Chavez and Maduro governments is as negative as you would expect from someone at the center of the Military Industrial Complex. But even he knows how catastrophic a Trump invasion of Venezuela would be.

It is clearly time for Maduro to go. But America should be cautious. Even though he is repressing the population and rounding up opponents, a full-blown invasion by the U.S. would foment rage in the region and internationally.

Everywhere I went as a four-star Admiral in the region while commanding U.S. Southern Command, I would be reminded of America’s history of intervention. A good example was the reaction there when we created the Navy’s Fourth Fleet in 2008. We intended for it to focus on disaster relief, humanitarian operations, medical diplomacy and counter-narcotics. But from Brasilia to Havana, the negative responses were stunning... Even the Colombian Minister of Defense (and later President of Colombia) Juan Manuel Santos-- my best friend and partner in the region-- counseled me against the initiative. Too many people there truly felt that standing up a new fleet was a return to gunboat diplomacy and a prelude to military action in Venezuela. Good intentions do not make old ghosts disappear.

...There may come a time for more dramatic military activities, perhaps an international peacekeeping force. But for the moment, our efforts are best served by supporting the brave Venezuelans fighting the Maduro regime through the overall efforts of the international community. As Simon Bolivar, the liberator of Venezuela and a revered figure there, said, “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion is a right.”

Today Pence and top Florida Republicans were in Miami at a rally to show off the Trump Regime's anti-Maduro stance. Marc Caputo wrote that the rally is "an opportunity to open a door with Hispanic voters in a state that’s critical to the president’s reelection. The Hispanic vote here is far from monolithic: About 17 percent of Florida’s active registered voters are Hispanic, about a third of whom are estimated to be of Cuban-American descent and a third of Puerto Rican descent, followed by those whose families have roots throughout Latin America: Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico."

Between ongoing strife in Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega and the unrest in Venezuela under dictator Nicolás Maduro-- which has also led to troubles in neighboring Colombia-- Republicans see a window to send a hardcore anti-socialist message-- one that, some say, helped the GOP win just enough of the overall Hispanic vote in November’s midterm elections to keep Florida’s governorship in Republican hands and take a Senate seat from the Democrats.

The Friday event-- which could feature Gov. Ron DeSantis, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart and Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott-- follows the Trump administration’s decision last week to lead a multinational coalition to formally recognize Juan Gerardo Guaidó Márquez as the legitimate acting president of Venezuela amid what many nations see as an unconstitutional power grab by Maduro.

In Florida, Trump’s decision was cheered by Republicans as well as Democrats. But some Florida Democrats fret that Trump could politically benefit both from the policy and from the critical reaction to it by a few national members of their party-- including Sen. Bernie Sanders, a likely presidential candidate-- who have raised the specter of a U.S.-led “coup” taking place in Venezuela.

...Diaz-Balart (R-FL) is co-sponsoring legislation with Democrat Darren Soto (New Dei-FL) to extend Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelans, about 3 million of whom have fled amid food shortages and hyperinflation of more than 1 million percent under Maduro.

Amid the crisis in Venezuela, Maduro last year held what critics say was a sham election and took office Jan. 10. But since they don’t see his election as legitimate, the Venezuelan opposition, democracy activists, the Trump administration and most South American countries say there’s a vacancy in the Venezuelan presidency, thereby elevating Guaidó to acting president under the country’s constitution because he’s the leader of the National Assembly.

The day after Trump’s recognition of Guaidó, Sen. Sanders issued a three-tweet thread on Twitter that urged caution while criticizing Maduro’s “violent crackdown.”

“But,” Sanders wrote, “we must learn the lessons of the past and not be in the business of regime change or supporting coups-- as we have in Chile, Guatemala, Brazil and the Dominican Republic. The US has a long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American nations; we must not go down that road again.”

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, also a Democratic presidential hopeful, warned on Twitter that the “United States needs to stay out of Venezuela.” Of the Democratic responses, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s tweet most outraged Venezuelan exiles by suggesting Guaidó was part of a “US backed coup” in Venezuela and saying he was part of “Trump's efforts to install a far right opposition” in the country.

Guaidó isn’t a conservative politician. He’s a member of the social-democratic Popular Will Party, which would look far left in the U.S. political system.

“I am disgusted by some of the statements Democrat lawmakers around the country have made,” said Helena Poleo, a Florida Democrat and Venezuelan exile and commentator, citing the “ignorant and damaging statements” from Omar, Gabbard and Sanders.

“When it comes to facilitating democracy in Venezuela, my party has historically dropped the ball,” she said. “This will absolutely help the Republicans in Florida if this keeps up. In Florida, Democrats are saying the right things. But nationally, some of them don’t know what they’re talking about and the damage they’re doing to our party.”

To Venezuelan exiles in Florida, the national Democrats criticizing Trump sound as if they’re echoing Maduro, who took to social media Wednesday with this message: “People from #USA, I ask for your support in order to reject the interference of Donald Trump's administration which intends to turn my Homeland into a ‘Vietnam war’ in Latin America. Don't allow it! today compared US intervention with Vietnam.”

Also on Wednesday, Trump congratulated Guaidó in a phone call, according to a White House spokeswoman.

Juan Escalante, an undocumented immigrant and activist whose family fled the Chavez regime 19 years ago, has little love for the Trump administration’s policies on immigration, but he said its actions in Venezuela and the “wall-to-wall” coverage on Spanish-language media lauding the work of Rubio, Diaz-Balart, Scott and DeSantis could have an impact in 2020.

“If you compare and contrast actions and say who showed up at the end of the day, people remember these things,” he said. “It’s going to be imprinted in a lot of people’s minds.”

Another Trump critic, former Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Miami, said he doesn’t like the president’s position on immigration but no one can ignore the positive effect that administration’s policy on Venezuela could have in 2020.

“For all those people bewildered that so many Hispanics in South Florida are Republican-leaning, now we’re seeing why,” Curbelo said.

“There’s a great camaraderie with different groups that have been victims of leftist movements: Colombians who fled FARC, and Nicaraguans who fled Ortega twice,” Curbelo said. “So yeah, there are just a few thousand Venezuelan voters. But everyone in Miami hates Nicolás Maduro. And if Trump wins by 20,000 votes, this will be why.”

Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism post on Thursday is based on the article, U.S. Push To Oust Venezuela's Maduro Marks First Shot In Plan To Reshape Latin America Wednesday inWall Street Journal by reporters Jessica Donati, Vivian Salama and Ian Talley. Rubio is eager to turn Venezuela into a fascist state like Bolsonaro's Brazil. "The Trump Administration," wrote Smith, "has apparently decided to embark on a large-scale interventionist campaign to reverse supposed undue influence of Russia, China, and Iran in Latin America. Venezuela and Cuba are the first targets, and Nicaragua is next on the list. John Bolton, in too obvious a nod to Bush’s 'axis of evil' has called them the 'troika of tyranny'. One would think the fact that our 'remake the world in our image' plans worked out so well in the Middle East might curb US adventurism. And it isn’t just that we made a mess of Iraq, failed to break Iran, and failed to install new regimes in Afghanistan and Syria. The New American Century types are deep in denial that this geopolitical tussle not only cost the US greatly in terms of treasure, but it also wound up considerably enhancing Russia’s standing."

Consider another bad outcome from US war-making in the Middle East: the rise of the radical right in Europe. American nation-breaking had produced a flood of refugees trying to enter Europe. In a misguided show of humanitarianism, European countries welcomed the over one million migrants that arrived in 2015, with the upsurge due mainly to the civil war in Syria. Angela Merkel in particular backed the idea of taking in the refugees, in part because German has a lower-than-replacement birth rate, and Syrian has a high level of public education. However, the EU members had patchy and generally poor programs for helping the migrants assimilate and find jobs. The result was what one hard core left wing political scientist who has spent a considerable amount of time in Germany calls “Merkelization”: a rise of nativist right wing parties like AfD in response to large-scale, poorly-managed migrant inflows.

Consider how this tendency might play into US nation-breaking near our border. Many readers have pointed out that the “caravans” from Central America are heavily populated with people from countries like Honduras that our tender ministrations have made much worse. My colleague was warning of Merkelization of the US even before the US launched its coup attempt, that it is one thing to have an immigration process that is generous towards asylum-seekers, and quite another to have open borders when political and economic conditions in countries to the South are unlikely to get better.

Bernie Sanders was browbeaten into holding his tongue after pointing out early in his Presidential campaign that “open borders” is a Koch Brothers position, and that the top 10% professional class that has become the base of the Democratic party are now heavy employers of servants, in the form of nannies and yard men. When I was a kid, even the few times we lived in middle/upper middle class suburbs full of senior corporate managers and professionals, no one had servants. Men worked full time and wives did the housework; the most you’d see would be a housekeeper in once a week to give the wife some relief.

As Peter Beinart pointed out in The Atlantic in 2017:

In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”

The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.

Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”

A larger explanation [for the change] is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge...

Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers...

According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.

Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations.

...I had really hoped that Trump would tire of Bolton’s aggressiveness and need for the limelight, but that clearly isn’t happening fast enough, if at all. In the meantime, kicking small and poor countries who pose no threat is not the behavior of a confident superpower. And grabbing Venezuela’s oil because we can is theft. It’s been depressing to be an American for a very long time, and there’s no prospect for improvement.

Ready For Kamala?

Kamala Harris... Climbing by Nancy Ohanian

Tarini Parti had a cute report at BuzzFeed yesterday: Here’s Trump Allies’ Plan To Meddle In The 2020 Democratic Primary. Through 2 neo-fascist organizations, Carl Higbie's, Katie Walsh's and the Mercers' America First Policies and America Rising, Trump wants to smother strong candidates in the crib and pick a weak 2020 opponent for himself. Parti wrote that "The early move is part of Trump and his allies’ plan to dominate the Democratic presidential primary and push to have the nominating contest play out on their terms."

Wednesday night, Kamala Harris' hometown radio station, KCBS reported that she's likely to officially enter the presidential race "on or around Martin Luther King Jr. Day, probably at a campaign rally in Oakland."

The debate within her camp is how, and where, to launch her campaign. The tentative plan is for Harris to enter the race for the Democratic presidential nomination with a campaign rally, most likely in Oakland, where she was born and began her legal career.

Harris risks appearing indecisive, or worse, disingenuous, if she demurs about her plans much longer, warns veteran Democratic strategist Darry Sragow, the publisher of the nonpartisan California Target Book, who teaches political science at USC.

"If she really has decided to run," said Sragow, "my advice would be, announce. Don't drag this out."

Harris' team wants maximum exposure for her campaign kickoff, and has been scouting for a telegenic location that could give her a "Springfield moment" akin to Barack Obama's campaign launch in 2007 at the Old State Capitol in Illinois.

Harris' advisors want to avoid identifying her too closely with San Francisco, where she first made her political mark as a two-term district attorney.

"San Francisco is viewed as a very nutty place by people outside of California, and frankly, by a lot of people inside California," Sragow said.

Berkeley, where Harris was raised before her parents divorced and she moved with her mother and sister to Montreal, Canada, has also been dismissed by her strategists as not projecting the image they're looking for. That leaves Oakland, where Harris was born, and where she returned after law school to become a deputy district attorney for Alameda County.

"I'm not sure what Oakland's image is around the country these days," said Sragow, but the city, one of the nation's most diverse, is seen as on the rise. Launching her national campaign there would let Harris emphasize her roots and identify with the hardscrabble city's gritty energy, creativity and even the Golden State Warriors, who've won three NBA championships since 2015.

  The sources caution that Harris' planned rollout is still being finalized. The location and timing could change. But the current plan is for Harris to throw her hat into the ring sometime over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, perhaps even on MLK Day itself, which is Monday, January 21.

Sragow notes that as a statewide official whose husband is a prominent Los Angeles attorney, Harris could announce her candidacy anywhere in the state, from L.A. to Sacramento to Silicon Valley.

But the sources tell KCBS Radio the Bay Area is the preferred backdrop. The next stop would probably be Iowa, where Harris would go on an introductory campaign swing to begin in earnest her quest for the White House.

Wow, does that ever sound like someone who should be kept as far from the nomination as possible! I can imagine that this is one that Team Trumpanzee is just dying to get their hands on-- unless they decide she'd be the weakest of the feasible Democrats for Trump to take on. There's virtually nothing to recommend her as a president at this point in her career. She might make a good senator, but we don't know yet.

How about PTA President instead?

So how bad? Well, I don't want to add her to the Worst Democraps series because-- as much as I hope he doesn't-- Bernie may pick her as an eventual VP. But... she's pretty bad. Yves Smith captured the essence of who she is yesterday at Naked Capitalism. "The Big Whopper season is already upon us," she reminded her readers, "in the form of presidential aspirants telling egregious lies about their track records. The Wall Street Journal tonight covers a section from Kamala Harris’ new book, in which she touts what a great deal she got for California homeowners in the so-called Federal-49 state National Mortgage Settlement in 2012. The officials who played meaningful roles the mortgage settlement negotiation should be run out of public life, rather than failing upwards, as Harris has. Hopefully, the millions who lost their homes to foreclosure will vigorously oppose her Presidential bid. But being a successful politician apparently means having no sense of shame... [I]t is fair to say that Harris got a better deal for California than the other state attorneys generals got. But that is what the Japanese would call a height competition among peanut."

The recap from the Journal:

Ms. Harris writes that under the initial settlement offer, California would have received between $2 billion and $4 billion, calling it “crumbs on the table” that would have failed to properly compensate homeowners…

Ms. Harris describes a testy phone call in early 2012 with Mr. Dimon as they discussed the deal. “We were like dogs in a fight,” she writes.

“‘You’re trying to steal from my shareholders!’ he yelled, almost as soon as he heard my voice,” Ms. Harris writes of Mr. Dimon. “I gave it right back. ‘Your shareholders? Your shareholders? My shareholders are the homeowners of California! You come and see them. Talk to them about who got robbed.’”…

Two weeks later, Ms. Harris writes, the five banks relented and eventually agreed to a settlement that year of $26 billion, which ultimately provided about $50 billion in gross relief to homeowners. California’s share of the deal reached $20 billion in aid to the homeowners, a significant increase over the original settlement offer. The agreement involved 49 states and the District of Columbia and five major banks: Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo & Co. and Ally Financial Inc

This is nonsense. Harris did get a good bit more for California but the claim that she was responsible for a ginormous increase and that the total value of the settlement was on the order of $50 billion is unadulterated tripe. The larded settlement gross number was up to $19 billion with New York and California still dickering. Even though California, by virtue of having more foreclosures than any other state, did have more leverage than other states, Schneiderman filed a MERS suit that got folded into the settlement that also resulted in more concessions.

Curiously, Harris does not mention that Governor Jerry Brown raided most of the settlement money and diverted it to fill state budget gaps, with the legislatures’s approval. Last year, a state appeals court ordered California to use the funds for their intended purpose: to help victims of foreclosures. This is now so many years after the fact that any monies will come after the former homeowners are past theh point of their most acute distress.

But the piece de resistance comes from a Jacobin story on Harris’ record:

At the time [when Harris decided to push for a better deal], Harris was under pressure from union leaders, other politicians, and housing rights activists. As one member of the progressive coalition of groups put it, “It wasn’t like she was some hard-charging AG that wanted to take on the banks”-- rather, “it took a lot of work to get her where we needed her to be.” Harris withdrew the day after these groups sent her a letter, signed on by Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential future rival, calling the deal “deeply flawed” and “outrageous.”

Even a Wall Street Journal reader was offended by the article:

Daniel Skoglund

MAGA idiots spamming this thread with BS talking points.

I’m a “librul”, and I detest Harris for legitimate reasons:

-Didn’t prosecute Steve Mnuchin when she was CA AG.

-Is meeting with Wall Street donors while she claims to be AGAINST Wall Street?

-Endorsed Hillary and met with her donor network.

She’s another corporate Democrat. I’m interested in grassroots people.

If this is the best story Harris has to tell, it doesn’t bode well to her holding up under meaningful oppo.

And... please God, we can do better than this. She needs to try being a senator for a decade or at least few years and prove she's not as terrible as many suspect. Right now, there aren't many reasons to believe she's any good-- and persuasive reasons to believe she isn't. One thing the Democratic Party does not need as a presidential candidate right now is the ultimate identity politics climber. Even on The View, most of the applause came from her identifying herself with what she really herself isn't, but desperately wants to be part of. Watch:

Would You Feel Safer With Bernie And Elizabeth Warren Running America? You Would If You Use Medicine

I just got back from the hospital, where I go every 4 months for a little tune-up chemo-light infusion. Not fun, but... well, worth it to stay alive and functioning. And I love seeing my doctor and the nurses-- especially Cindy, the nurse who takes my blood samples before the infusion. The first thing she does is flush my port with saline. And at the end of the blood drawing she cleans the port with Heperin. It's the last thing everyone does before an IV. So, really important for a national hospital system that is always struggling to keep up to begin with.

And wasn't I surprised just as I was getting ready to head out, when a friend sent me this post at Naked Capitalism by Yves Smith, China Rx: How the US Depends on China for Its Drugs. Her post was passed a recent book, China RX: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine by Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prasad Singh. Gibson describe some of the key points from the book in the interview below:



With a madman, moron and trade warrior sitting in the White House-- Putin's dream president-- there's more than just steel and aluminum on the trade agenda that Trump is screwing up so badly. It turned out that the U.S. relies on China for the production of active ingredients in drugs and in many cases, of the medications themselves, to the degree that we would have a public health crisis if supplies were interrupted. From the interview above: "if China shut the door on exports, within months, pharmacy shelves in the United States to be empty, and hospitals would cease to function.

And don’t assume generics king India would step into the breach. India gets many of the active ingredients for its pharmaceuticals from China. Gibson forecasts that China will overtake India in generics manufacture within a decade.

As Gibson explains, the US no longer makes its own penicillin, in part because China dumped penicillin in 2004, driving the last US plant out of business.

The medications where the US relies on China include heparin, a blood thinner that among other things is used for IV drips. No heparin, no IV treatments. Due to the difficulty in tracing the source of drug company ingredients, the authors could make only case by case investigations, but they China production to be critical for treatments for Alzheimer’s HIV, depression, schizophrenia, cancer, epilepsy, and high blood pressure.

Dependency is not the only risk. US drug companies shifted production to China not just to save cost but to escape regulation. The FDA has only limited access to Chinese factories, with the Chinese having well over 700, yet the FDA able to inspect only 15 a year on average. As Gibson said on C-SPAN:

The FDA is trying to get inspection on site in China. The Chinese have severely restricted the number of inspections that they will allow and the whole program has become completely ineffective.

And the Chinese are often less than cooperative. Gibson describes even then how the agency has been directed to a Potemkin facility, as in the goods were made somewhere else…and the FDA was not able to figure out where. Similarly, reports presented by the health authorities to the FDA is understood to be as reliable as Chinese economic data.

This picture is particularly troubling given China’s poor record on production quality and sanitation. And worse, the US can’t even afford to bar imports of all substandard products. Gibson again:

In 2015, the FDA inspected a plant in China. It did that because it was getting a lot of customer complaints, presumably industry complaints, about the active ingredients that they were getting from this plant. There was bacterial contamination, some of the products. They did not have full therapeutic value. If that’s an antibiotic or chemotherapy, that could be devastating.

So the FDA went in and they found what they called systemic data manipulation. This is a plant that had passed muster by the FDA, the Chinese FDA and other inspections over many years. So the FDA banned 29 different products from coming into the United States. But because the United States is so dependent, the FDA had to exempt 14 of those products from its own ban. Some of those included antibiotics or ingredients for antibiotics and ingredients for chemotherapies, because the FDA was concerned about drug shortages in the United States. That is how dependent we are as a country.

It’s telling with the trade battle of wills with China a daily news item for months, that this critical piece of the picture is absent from the debate. One has to assume that it’s because Big Pharma doesn’t mind.

One of my friends at the hospital today told me that if the standards aren't meticulously upheld-- for example, if a company seeks to fatten the bottom line by replacing highly skilled compliance workers, with less expensive ones who dodn't know what they're doing-- well, mold is one problem. And the facilities don't like shutting down even when mold is discovered. Alas, this isn't a hypothetic situation-- and it happens in the U.S., where rules and regulations force the reluctant bottom line-oriented pharmaceutical companies to address it. In China, who knows how long it takes to be addressed-- or how far bribes go to make sure it isn't addressed. My friend who sent me Yves' article mentioned that "Lenin wrote about how capitalists would sell you the rope you use to hang them. The Chinese have taken this to heart."

Friday House Conservatives Granted Private Equity Firms A License To Defraud Their Customers

As we get closer to November, we've been spending more time warning readers about the consequences of electing Blue Dogs and New Dems-- the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- to Congress. Thursday we singled out the 2016 poster child for the Republican wing of the party, corrupt California Blue Dog/New Dem Lou Correa, as he marches into Congress with the almost unanimous backing of the Democratic Party establishment. Correa's record is stunningly right-wing but none of our politicians are warning the low-info voters in his district DESPITE the fact that the general election will pit Correa against a progressive Democrat, Bao Nguyen, not a Republican!

Friday there was another example of what happens when the Democratic Party gets infiltrated by these New Dems and Blue Dogs. The Republicans are loudly touting how they passed the BIPARTISAN Investment Advisers Modernization Act of 2016. The vote was 261-145. 142 Democrats (joined by 3 mainstream Republicans) voted against it, but 35 Democrats-- basically the Wall Street owned New Dems-- crossed the aisle to vote with the GOP. I'll get into the bill itself in a moment, but these are the bad Dems who voted with the GOP Friday. (The dollar amount next to their names is the amount of bribes they've taken from the financial sector so far this cycle alone.)

• Pete Aguilar (New Dem-CA)- $310,370
• Brad Ashford (New Dem-NE)- $290,300
• Don Beyer (New Dem-VA)- $230,750
• John Carney (New Dem-DE)- $164,550
• Jerry Connolly (New Dem-VA)- $179,211
• Jim Cooper (New Dem-TN)- $79,280
• Jim Costa (New Dem-CA)- $122,133
• Henry Cuellar (New Dem-TX)- $156,350

• John Delaney (New Dem-MD)- $526,100
• Suzan DelBene (New Dem-WA)- $166,790
• Elizabeth Esty (New Dem-CT)- $218,125
• Bill Foster (New Dem-IL)- $533,405
• Gwen Graham (New Dem-FL)- $261,816
• Denny Heck (New Dem-WA)- $365,813
• Jim Himes (New Dem-CT)- $873,700
• Derek Kilmer (New Dem-WA)- $246,750
• Ron Kind (New Dem-WI)- $465,364
• Ann Kirkpatrick (New Dem-AZ)- $196,930
• Rick Larsen (New Dem-WA)- $53,600
• Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY)- $804,293
• Seth Moulton (New Dem-MA)- $576,347
• Ed Perlmutter (New Dem-CO)- $622,012
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)- $383,629
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)- $112,950
• Jared Polis (New Dem-CO)- $161,050
• Mike Quigley (New Dem-IL)- $177,000
• Kathleen Rice (New Dem-NY)- $505,830
• Dutch Ruppersberger (MD)- $123,950
• Kurt Schrader (New Dem-OR)- $180,125
• David Scott (New Dem-GA)- $572,490
• Terri Sewell (New Dem-AL)- $625,950
• Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ)- $879,087
• Juan Vargas (New Dem-CA)- $397,799
• Marc Veasy (TX)- $120,180
• Filemon Vela (Blue Dog-TX)- $101,350

OK, so now, what is this Investment Advisors Modernization Act of 2016? Modernization sounds good-- even progressive-- no? No, not in the Orwellian sense it's being used. Alan Grayson, who of course, voted against it, told us yesterday that "basically, the bill dictates to the SEC how to protect, or not to protect, investors. It repeals by statute investor-safety regulations that, in some cases, date back half a century. One would have to think that in general, the SEC knows more about how to safeguard investors than Congress does. The SEC should be applauded, not hogtied, for protecting investors from predators." As Yves Smith pointed out at Naked Capitalism last June, this bill, if Obama signs it, "would allow the hedge fund and private equity industry, which are rich enough to pay for the few parking-ticket-level fines the SEC hands out, to escape from virtually all enforcement efforts. Worse, it would considerably weaken protections meant to stop Madoff-type frauds, and leave retail investors exposed." Yves was concerned in June that a dozen of the bad Democrats-- again, these New Dems-- on the House Financial Services Committee had voted in favor of the bill, the effect of which is to condone embezzlement in the already corrupt financial sector. It's worth noting that when the vote was taken inside the far less public confines of the Financial Services Committee, 3 of Congress' most corrupt Wall Street shills voted for the bill, but because of the impending election were too scared to vote for it Friday:

• Patrick Murphy (New Dem-FL)- $1,795,561
• Gregory Meeks (New Dem-NY)- $424,800
• Joyce Beatty (OH)- $382,250

Maxine Waters (D-CA) is the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee and she noted that the measure is a "bad bill that would put Americans’ savings and investments at risk by opening the door to further abuses in the private equity industry... When it comes to private equity funds and hedge funds, it is clear that more regulation is needed, not less. Yet this bill takes us in the wrong direction." As Jim Baker from Unite Here explained in an OpEd at The Hill right after the bill passed the House-- and just after the news broke about Wells Fargo ripping off its customers for millions of dollars-- this bill is simply "a license to defraud."

Giving big Republican campaign contributors on Wall Street this kind of license to defraud, is the heart and soul of Paul Ryan's #BetterWay repackaged austerity garbage that he claims he endorsed Trump for.

This little-noticed and cryptically named piece of legislation would be a huge gift to the $4 trillion private equity fund industry, but one that would put the rest of us at risk. It would “modernize” the private equity world by rolling back the clock and eliminating important elements of fund oversight and fraud protection.

H.R. 5424 would reduce the amount of information that private equity and hedge fund managers have to disclose either to investors or to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). They don’t disclose enough information as it is. But thanks to some modest requirements imposed on them by the Dodd-Frank Act, we know more now than we used to, and nothing we’ve learned so far has been reassuring.

Two years ago, in a first round of post-Dodd-Frank scrutiny, the SEC found “violations of law or material weaknesses in controls” in how more than half of all fund managers handled fees and expenses. The SEC has since brought more than ten enforcement actions against private equity funds, reaching settlements totaling more than $150 million. The deceptions in which various funds have been implicated include charging 10 years of fees for "monitoring” a company that a fund owned only for a few years (that was Apollo, an industry giant that has agreed to pay $52.7 million in penalties for various shady practices); sticking investors with the cost of a senior partner’s personal expenses (Apollo again); and failing to disclose conflicts of interests and payments to companies owned by firm principals (Fenway Partners).

It is hard to imagine why anyone not directly employed in the private fund industry would want to let it become even more slippery and opaque than it already is. Yet H.R. 5424 would do just that by, for example, eliminating the SEC’s ability to apply anti-fraud protection to sales materials distributed by funds; and allowing ads to include cherry-picked testimonials or recommendations-- a practice long associated with dishonesty.

Some of the people who stand to be damaged by HR 5424 are wealthy individual investors. But far too many are teachers, firefighters, police officers, hotel workers, housekeepers, cooks, and other workers, public and private, whose retirement savings are heavily invested in private equity  funds.

Last year a coalition of 13 state Treasurers, Comptrollers, and public pension funds sent a letter to the SEC calling for better enforcement and disclosure of fee practices by private equity funds. Two of the country’s largest pension funds, CalPERS and CalSTRS, strongly oppose this bill, as do a wide range of investor groups and labor unions, including the Council of Institutional Investors, the AFL-CIO, and Unite Here.

One of the major lessons of the 2008 financial crisis concerned the risks created by non-bank capital market players and the need to bring them under closer regulatory oversight. This bill would do the opposite.

Given the growing role that private equity plays in our economy and the retirement security of millions of Americans, more, not less, needs to be done to ensure that private equity managers are honest and transparent. The last thing we need is for Congress to pass legislation that, in the words of a strong statement issued by the White House earlier this week, would “enable private fund advisers to slip back into the shadows.”

UPDATE-- Ted Lieu Urges Obama To Use His Veto Pen

This morning Ted told us that "Rather than fund Zika or pass a budget, the Republican controlled House prioritized reducing SEC regulations on private fund investment advisors and rolling back parts of Dodd-Frank. Are you kidding me? The lack of regulations on Wall Street last decade nearly collapsed our economy. Doing the same thing again and expecting a different result is one definition of insanity. We should not be rolling back regulations on Wall Street. Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us. I urge the President to veto this dangerous legislation."

Do You Vote Democratic As A Default Position? BIG Mistake!

How Wall Street Screws America

What do these 13 Democrats have in common?

• Brad Sherman (CA)
• Gregory Meeks (New Dem-NY)
• David Scott (New Dem-GA)
• Ed Perlmutter (New Dem-CO)
• Jim Himes (New Dem-CT)
• John Carney (New Dem-DE)
• Terri Sewell (New Dem-AL)
• Bill Foster (New Dem-IL)
• Patrick Murphy (New Dem-FL)
• John Delaney (New Dem-MD)
• Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ)
• Joyce Beatty (OH)
• Juan Vargas (New Dem-CA)

Let's not start with "they all belong in prison for corruption" because that's the end of this post. And, not every single one of them is a New Dem; two aren't. But they all made a concerted effort to get on the House Financial Services Committee-- the well-spring of congressional corruption-- and, as members of that committee, they all voted for H.R. 5424 last week. And they all take significant bribes from the very Finance Sector that they're meant to be keeping from ripping off consumers. These 13, in fact, have been among the worst enablers of the financial sector when it comes to ripping off consumers and endangering the country's financial health. Let's reorder the list in terms of how much in bribes each one has gotten-- this cycle alone-- from the Finance Sector:

• Patrick Murphy- $1,413,950
• Jim Himes- $618,150
• Kyrsten Sinema- $589,388
• Ed Perlmutter- $455,157
• Bill Foster- $401,935
• Terri Sewell- $379,400
• David Scott- $368,640
• John Delaney- $351,750
• Gregory Meeks- $338,550
• Brad Sherman- $300,750
• Juan Vargas- $247,549
• Joyce Beatty- $225,050
• John Carney- $164,450

So what is this H.R. 5424 to which I referred? Well, let's turn to Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism to get a good read on what Wall Street lobbyists, the Republican Party and these corrupt Democrats called the "investment Advisers Modernization Act." If it passes and Obama signs it, it "would allow the hedge fund and private equity industry, which are rich enough to pay for the few parking-ticket-level fines the SEC hands out, to escape from virtually all enforcement efforts. Worse, it would considerably weaken protections meant to stop Madoff-type frauds, and leave retail investors exposed."

Dodd Frank stipulated that private equity and hedge funds beyond a modest size be regulated as investment advisers. That subjected them to SEC examinations. The initial round exposed widespread misconduct in private equity, including what would normally be called embezzlement.

Yet the agency has fined remarkably few sanctions, and the fines have been light relative to the extent of the misconduct alleged by the SEC and unearthed by the press.

To make a bad situation worse, the SEC retreated from its tough enforcement talk within months, and more recently, has been trying to fool the chump public into believing that its weak enforcement actions are having an impact when private equity form ADV filings with the SEC reveal the reverse, that many firms are continuing to engage in precisely the same conduct that the SEC has deemed to be a securities law violation.

But even this cronyistic enforcement charade is an offense to these Masters of the Universe. HR 5424 would gut Dodd Frank oversight. I’ve attached a letter from Americans for Financial Reform at the end of the post, which sets forth how this bill makes a mockery of the idea of investor protection.

...[T]he bill creates exemptions to the requirement that investment advisers have their holdings independently audited at least annually. The exemptions on the surface appear to apply to closely-held funds. It carves out ones whose investors are “officers, directors, and employees” of not just the fund manger, but also of “affiliated persons,” their “officers, directors, and employees,” current and former family members, and “officers, directors, and employees,” who provide or have entered into contracts to provide services….and not just to the investment vehicle itself, but to any of its clients!

It’s easy to see how this provision could be abused by, say, having someone enter into a sham or trivial service agreement to get access to a supposedly hot manager. You can even hear the patter: “The only people who can invest are friends and employees, and OMG have they made boatloads, but the SEC will allow you to invest if we are your client. And that’s really easy to do. Just sign this contract…”

As professor Jennifer Taub stated in her testimony on the bill last month:

Just when private equity funds are in the sunlight thanks to Dodd-Frank and many have been exposed in SEC examinations as in violation of the law, you are now proposing that they be able to hide their tracks. Instead of encouraging a culture of compliance, this bill would provide a loophole for investment adviser recordkeeping requirements. Subjecting communications to confidentiality agreements or keeping them in-house would allow advisers to destroy critical investment records…

The Investment Advisers Modernization Act of 2016 is misnamed. Instead of ushering in modernity, it would send the SEC and investors back to the Dark Ages. Like the other bills today, it is misaligned with the hearing’s title, “Legislative Proposals to Enhance Capital Formation, Transparency, and Regulatory Accountability.” This bill would not enhance capital formation. Instead it would undermine investor protection and trust, which could inhibit or drive up the cost of capital. It would not promote transparency, but allow certain private equity advisers and other private fund advisers that have been exposed as lacking in recent SEC examinations to hide their tracks. It would not encourage regulatory accountability. Instead it would punish regulatory success, depriving the SEC of the information and tools it has been using to monitor system-wide risks, identify firm-specific risk, investigate fraud, and enforce the law.

It was funny yesterday when Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) sent out an e-mail moaning about how the Republicans are trying to destroy Dodd-Frank. "Dodd-Frank," he wrote, "is the package of safeguards Democrats passed after Wall Street devastated our economy in 2008. It’s designed to protect consumers and homeowners, and make sure the risky behavior that triggered the Great Recession doesn’t happen again. Make no mistake about it: Republicans in Congress are trying to take a jackhammer to those safeguards. They don’t have a problem putting Main Street back on the hook for Wall Street’s greed."

Is it too difficult for Brown to acknowledge that it isn't only Republicans but the Republican-wing of his own party-- the New Dems and Blue Dogs primarily-- who are working steadily to erode and, in his words, "destroy" Dodd-Frank. That is certainly why Wall Street has given more money to Patrick Murphy than any other non-incumbent running for the Senate this year-- more, by far, than any Republican. He has shown Wall Street his willingness-- actually eagerness-- to serve their interests on the House Financial Services Committee. Sherrod Brown is very aware of Patrick Murphy's record and behavior and his devotion to the Wall Street banksters. And Sherrod Brown endorsed him-- not against a Republican, but against a proven and effective fighter against Wall Street excess, Alan Grayson. He also refuse dto endorse Bernie and gave an early nod to Hillary, another conservative Democrat whose affinity towards Wall Street is hardly secret.

"Demand Congressional Republicans leave the Dodd-Frank financial reforms in place," continued Brown. "I'm more than willing to admit that there are portions of Dodd-Frank that can be improved. We still have banks in this country that are “Too Big To Fail”-- that’s something we should fix.But Republicans aren’t talking about improvements, they’re talking about going back to the same practices that caused the Great Recession." Yeah... and so are the New Dems like Brown-endorsee Patrick Murphy.

Can we, as voters, fight back against Wall Street dominance? It's not easy... but you can start here:

Greece and the European Project: What's Next?

The State Department's Victoria Nuland explains to Greek President Tsipras that there are certain lines he won't be permitted to cross.

by Gaius Publius

When it comes to coverage of the Greek crisis, there's no better source than Naked Capitalism. I'm going to quote from three recent (post-election) pieces hosted there, along with my own comments.

First, for the overview, something written by Joseph Stiglitz summarizes the situation going into the election perfectly. As quoted here, Stiglitz writes this about Greece (my emphasis everywhere):

Europe’s Attack on Greek Democracy

The rising crescendo of bickering and acrimony within Europe might seem to outsiders to be the inevitable result of the bitter endgame playing out between Greece and its creditors. In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics.

Of course, the economics behind the program that the “troika” (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) foisted on Greece five years ago has been abysmal, resulting in a 25% decline in the country’s GDP. I can think of no depression, ever, that has been so deliberate and had such catastrophic consequences: Greece’s rate of youth unemployment, for example, now exceeds 60%.

It is startling that the troika has refused to accept responsibility for any of this or admit how bad its forecasts and models have been. But what is even more surprising is that Europe’s leaders have not even learned. The troika is still demanding that Greece achieve a primary budget surplus (excluding interest payments) of 3.5% of GDP by 2018.

Economists around the world have condemned that target as punitive, because aiming for it will inevitably result in a deeper downturn. Indeed, even if Greece’s debt is restructured beyond anything imaginable, the country will remain in depression if voters there commit to the troika’s target in the snap referendum to be held this weekend.

In terms of transforming a large primary deficit into a surplus, few countries have accomplished anything like what the Greeks have achieved in the last five years. And, though the cost in terms of human suffering has been extremely high, the Greek government’s recent proposals went a long way toward meeting its creditors’ demands.

Fast recap: After the crash of 2008, the government of Greece found itself increasingly unable to pay the interest on its debt. A crisis occurred in 2010 and again in 2012. A great deal of that debt was held outside the country and in private hands (think German and French banks, hedge funds, and the like).

The reasons for this inability to repay are many, only a few of which were the fault of the Greeks themselves. The worst of the Greek internal problems is the corruption of the Greek elite class, who have made tax evasion an art form. After the recession, the country went increasingly into recession and then depression, the economy shrank, and government revenues became insufficient to meet all demands on it. Various Greek governments have sought loans from the European "troika" as defined above, and those loans were granted, but with many cruel strings.

In a triangular arrangement, the troika would insure that the Greeks had enough money not to default on bankers and hedge funds (etc.), but in exchange the Greeks had to agree to "run a primary surplus" (have more revenue than expenses), cut spending drastically, including on social services and pensions, and sell off private property, like their airports.

Doing this allowed the troika — an assembly of European public elites very much allied with private elites like the aforementioned bankers — to accomplish two goals:

• Bail out all at-risk bankers and other investors with public money, so no big investor loses on a loan.
  
  Stiglitz: "We should be clear: almost none of the huge amount of money loaned to Greece has actually gone there. It has gone to pay out private-sector creditors – including German and French banks. Greece has gotten but a pittance, but it has paid a high price to preserve these countries’ banking systems. The IMF and the other “official” creditors do not need the money that is being demanded. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the money received would most likely just be lent out again to Greece."
   
• Advance the privatizing "neo-liberal project" in which everything owned by any country should be converted into a source of private profit (think Shock Doctrine in New Orleans and the privatization of the public school system).
  
  Stiglitz: "Many European leaders want to see the end of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s leftist government. After all, it is extremely inconvenient to have in Greece a government that is so opposed to the types of policies that have done so much to increase inequality in so many advanced countries, and that is so committed to curbing the unbridled power of wealth. They seem to believe that they can eventually bring down the Greek government by bullying it into accepting an agreement that contravenes its mandate."

For Western neo-liberal elites, that's a win-win. The only way this plan would fail is if Greece failed to knuckle under. Greece tried to knuckle under, but it hurt so much that they elected a "leftist," anti-austerity government, and the elites took offense (thus Stiglitz's analysis of the troika response as an attack on Greek democracy). The new leftist government also tried to knuckle under, but the demands became too great (and the government too wishy-washy).

So a referendum on the latest austerity offer was called, the Greek people rejected it 61%–39%, and here we are. The remaining choices are to default on the debt or to borrow on terms less punitive. In case of a default on some or all of it — in the business world, that's called a "restructuring via bankruptcy," but morality-neutral language applies only to corporate behavior — the Greek depression will continue, Greece may leave the E.U., and it seems increasingly likely that the drachma will return, perhaps first in an intermediate form, such as government IOUs.

Again, here we are. It's post-referendum, Greek banks are still closed as of last report, and ATMs are running out of money to dispense. For a look at the state of the Greece economy just prior to the referendum, Naked Capitalism offers this report. It's painful reading.

What comes next? Hard-hearted Germans and regime-changing Americans? Could well be.

Eurozone Leaders May Further Harden Their Hard Hearts

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism on the way European (and German) elites are handling this rejection:

[D]espite the responses of media outlets and many pundits that the Eurocrats will have to beeat a retreat and offer Greece concessions, it’s not clear that this event strengthens the Greek government’s hand with its counterparties. Remember, Tsipras enjoyed popularity ratings of as high as 80% and has always retained majority support in polls. And it’s all too easy to forget that “the creditors” are not Merkel, Hollande, Lagarde and Draghi. The biggest group of “creditors” are taxpayers of the 18 other countries of the Eurozone. The ugly design of the Eurozone means that the sort of relief that Greece wants most, a reduction in the face amount of its debt (as opposed to the sort of reduction they’ve gotten, which is in economic value, via reductions in interest rates and extensions of maturities) puts the interest of those voters directly at odds with those in Greece. Our understanding is that a reduction in principal amount, under the perverse budgetary and accounting rules of the Eurozone, would result in those losses showing up as losses for budget purposes, now. They would need to be funded by increased taxes. Thus a reduction in austerity for Greece, via a debt writeoff, simply transfers austerity from Greece to other countries. It’s not hard to see why they won’t go for that. And Eurozone rules require unanimous decisions.

Even though the ruling coalition had said it wanted to restart negotiations immediately upon getting a “no” vote, the lenders have asked Greece to send a new proposal, apparently deeming the one it submitted on June 30 to be out of date. It’s doubtful anything will happen before the Eurogroup meeting tomorrow [July 7].

The remarks from European leaders have been mixed.

Among those mixed responses, Smith notes these. First, from Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem:

I take note of the outcome of the Greek referendum. This result is very regrettable for the future of Greece.

For recovery of the Greek economy, difficult measures and reforms are inevitable. We will now wait for the initiatives of the Greek authorities.

And via the Financial Times, this from a high German government official:

Sigmar Gabriel, deputy German chancellor, said Mr Tsipras had “torn down the last bridges on which Greece and Europe could have moved towards a compromise”.

“With the rejection of the rules of the eurozone … negotiations about a programme worth billions are barely conceivable,” he told Tagesspiegel newspaper.

Shorter Eurozone: "The beatings will continue..." Good luck with that. The meetings will also continue, in what looks like a month of failed incremental half steps that nevertheless march to the sea.

And the American Reaction? Failed State or Vladimir Putin

Obama's U.S. government has been noticeably quiet as this plays out, but with Putin on their minds, you have to know they have thoughts. Smith on what some of those thoughts might be:

Nuland’s Nemesis: Will Greece Be Destroyed to Save Her From Russia, Like Ukraine?

Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have been far more quiet than you’d expect given their attentiveness to the needs of the investing classes and the threat that protracted wrangling with Greece might pose to that. Of course, they might believe that Draghi’s bazooka is more effective than Hank Paulson’s proved to be in the runup to the final phase of the financial crisis. But John Helmer indicates below that the Greek referendum has intensified the Administration’s interest in regime change in Greece. He confirms what we’d noticed, that Putin has been quite pointedly avoided being seen as meddling in Greece now; he can always pick up any pieces later. Also note that the anti-Greek government interests have connections to Hillary Clinton.

The rest of Smith's piece is an essay by John Helmer, "the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties" (full credits at the link). He starts:

A putsch in Athens to save allied Greece from enemy Russia is in preparation by the US and Germany, with backing from the non-taxpayers of Greece – the Greek oligarchs, Anglo-Greek shipowners, and the Greek Church.

You really want to read that twice. He's not speculating, but asserting. Then he continues:

At the highest and lowest level of Greek government, and from Thessaloniki to Milvorni, all Greeks understand what is happening. Yesterday they voted overwhelmingly to resist. According to a high political figure in Athens, a 40-year veteran, “what is actually happening is a slow process of regime change.”

Until Sunday afternoon it was a close-run thing. The Yes and No votes were equally balanced, and the margin between them razor thin. At the start of the morning, Rupert Murdoch’s London Times claimed “Greek security forces have drawn up a secret plan to deploy the army alongside special riot police to contain possible civil unrest after today’s referendum on the country’s future in Europe. Codenamed Nemesis, it makes provision for troops to patrol large cities if there is widespread and prolonged public disorder. Details of the plan emerged as polls showed the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ camps neck and neck.” Greek officers don’t speak to the Murdoch press; British and US government agents do.

“It was neck to neck until 3 pm,” reports the political veteran in Athens, “then the young started voting.”

Can the outcome — the 61% to 39% referendum vote, with a 22% margin for Οχι (No) which the New York Times calls “shocking” and a “victory [that] settled little” – defeat Operation Nemesis? Will the new Axis – the Americans and the Germans – attack again, as the Germans did after the first Greek Οχι of October 28, 1940, defeated the Italian invasion?

The U.S., via the State Department's Victoria Nuland, has been deeply involved, according to Helmer, both with Operation Nemesis and with warning off Tsipras. Helmer again:

What Nuland [photo at top] was doing with her hands is in the small print of the release. She told Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras (right) not to break ranks with the NATO allies against Russia. “Because of the increasing rounds of aggression in eastern Ukraine” she reportedly said the US is “very gratified that we’ve had solidarity between the EU and the U.S., and that Greece has played its role in helping to build consensus.”

Nuland also warned Tsipras not to default on its debts to Germany, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Tsipras was told “to make a good deal with the institutions”. The referendum Tsipras called on June 27 was a surprise for Nuland. The nemesis in Operation Nemesis is the retribution planned for that display of Greek hubris.

All of this loops the Greek story into the Ukraine story, which most people still don't realize isn't just about Putin, though that makes a convenient (and cartoonish) Us vs. The Villain cautionary tale. It's about continuing the ... yes, neo-liberal project ... deeper into eastern Europe.

There's much more at the Naked Capitalism link, and it makes fascinating reading. Also, there's more about Victoria Nuland and her apparent revelations about U.S. meddling in Ukraine as well. Here's one relatively staid write-up; the google has many more.

The Hillary Clinton Connection

Yves Smith noted in her introduction to this piece that there was a Hillary Clinton connection. Near the bottom, after working through the myriad of corporate- and billionaire-funded think tanks (funding which comes from much of the real wealth of Greece, its predatory shipping billionaires), he notes this:

[Robert] Kaplan’s think-tank in Washington [Center for New American Security] reports that its funding comes from well-known military equipment suppliers, US oil companies, the governments of Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore; NATO; the US Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force; plus George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Chief executive of CNAS is Michele Flournoy, a founder of the think-tank which is serving as her platform to run for the next Secretary of Defense, if Hillary Clinton wins the presidential election next year. Flournoy is one of the drafters of a recent plan for the US to escalate arms and troop reinforcements in Ukraine and along the Russian frontier with the Baltic states. Here’s her plan for “What the United States and NATO Must Do” . For more on Flournoy, read this.

I personally have no trouble assigning Hillary Clinton, whatever else her virtues, to an inner circle of the "privatizing neo-liberal project," as previously noted here and here and here. Victoria Nuland is a State Department warrior when it comes to advancing that project, and CNAS is as well. For CNAS, the ties to the military-industrial complex are clear, implying military means — "boots on the ground," though preferably boots filled with other nations' soldiers.

Watch the name of that think tank — CNAS. It's come up before and will do again, especially if Clinton is elected president. Also, watch for the name Michele Flournoy. If she does become Secretary of Defense, she'll be sold as the "first woman Secretary of Defense" so you can cheer her on through confirmation.

Bottom Line — Remaking the World

There are two ways to look at the bottom line noted above. First, from the point of view of the Western ruling classes, the high-level servants of the neo-liberal project, the "war" in Greece is a war they feel they can win (by forcing regime change in the face of crushing economic chaos), or at least drive to a stalemate. I suspect they feel good, on the march, that they continue to remake the world. That's certainly the tone coming from the European elites quoted above, like Jeroen Dijsselbloem and Sigmar Gabriel.

But from the point of view of the Greeks and the resistance to Shock Docrine-style neo-liberal takeover, it's possible that the "standstill" in Greece will widen cracks in the glued-together European Union that will break apart Europe itself. That will remake the world.

As David Dayen, generally not given to editorials, put it in a piece called "The end of Europe as we know it":

[In the Euro or Drachma decision] I put myself firmly on Team Drachma ...

Eurozone nations don’t want to really stick together. The northern countries (read Germany) don’t want to pay for whom they regard as lazy, profligate southern countries; conversely, the southern countries don’t want to take dictation on their national policies. So the wars never really ended, they just transferred to the economic sphere, substituting bombs with bonds.

A No vote, therefore, reveals to European citizens an escape hatch, a way out of a terribly misbegotten currency union. The euro would no longer be irreversible.

I recently wrote that TPP was the biggest hot story in the country, and Greece was the biggest cold story. The cold story in Greece has just warmed up.

GP