One thing's for sure, "local" gangsters Meinder and Sat in Whistler, Canada weren't Italian

 

Nothing sank NeverTrump lower in the estimation of the voters than its "blithe indifference to the Clintons' gangsterism"

Yes indeed.

Here:

"Trump’s base was fighting a war; these guys were sipping tea." 

The article insists much of NeverTrump is Jewish, agnostic and libertarian, which is true, while failing to mention its many Christian, especially Catholic, representatives, the very same crowd which mercilessly destroyed conservative Presbyterian minister Todd Akin of Missouri. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The narrowness of Trump's 2016 victory continues unexamined in the cold light of reason. Though badly outnumbered, Protestant America proved it isn't dead yet. Trump's partisans naturally would rather talk about why their winner won than why the loser lost. But Hillary lost primarily because 5 million former Obama voters failed to show up, a fact Trump himself acknowledged in the immediate aftermath. They were as disgusted with her as the rest of us were. Had just some of them shown up in the right places, we'd be in year ten of the biggest political disaster this country has faced since FDR.

Trump proves the dictum that one man can change history when all the rest cannot. And for this they hate him. He might as well be Martin Luther. 

When We Said Both America And China Had Fascist Economies, It Didn't Make News Like Tom Easton Made Wednesday

2nd generation type 094 missile boats can now threaten US

OK, call us early (here and here).

Tom Easton, American Finance editor for The Economist, here:

... [H]e declared that he had recently moved to the U.S. from China, but “didn’t leave a state-run economy. ... Everyone talks about how all-pervasive the Chinese economy and government is inside of it,” he says. The Chinese government “directs capital, controls the banking system and the ‘highlands’ of important industries. I’m still in China when I came back to America.”

--------------------------------------------

The next war will be like the last war, a clash between iterations of socialism, but there won't be a more or less free market economy around afterwards, as there was last time, to pick up the pieces.

Yep, That Could Be Obama's Boy Alright

"If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."

Obama's Gangster Government Of, By And For The Banks

Matt Taibbi provides a pretty thorough look at the recent history of the bailout alliance between the federal government and the big banks for Rolling Stone, here, from which this excerpt:

All of this – the willingness to call dying banks healthy, the sham stress tests, the failure to enforce bonus rules, the seeming indifference to public disclosure, not to mention the shocking­ lack of criminal investigations into fraud committed by bailout recipients before the crash – comprised the largest and most valuable bailout of all. Brick by brick, statement by reassuring statement, bailout officials have spent years building the government's great Implicit Guarantee to the biggest companies on Wall Street: We will be there for you, always, no matter how much you screw up. We will lie for you and let you get away with just about anything. We will make this ongoing bailout a pervasive and permanent part of the financial system. And most important of all, we will publicly commit to this policy, being so obvious about it that the markets will be able to put an exact price tag on the value of our preferential treatment.

But Taibbi goes pretty easy on Obama's role in all of this, who has profited handsomely from it with reelection, focusing instead mostly on underlings like Geithner and Summers. Taibbi seems to hate only the big bankers for their profiteering, not the administration responsible for the continuing massive bailouts. He never connects Obama's admiration for dictatorship in China with our gangster government's stick up of the American people, and even gives Obama credit for some success with HAMP. It's as if the imperial president is merely an accessory to the crime, which Taibbi calls right up front "one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people."

By the way, Taibbi endorsed Elizabeth Talking Bull for president.

Peter Morici: Obama Threatens To Shakedown Everybody If The Rich Don't Cough It Up

Once again, Peter Morici of the University of Maryland gets it exactly right, here:

"The president, by being so persistent that it's my way or the highway, no spending cuts, taxes on folks over $250,000 or nothing, has basically put a pistol to the head of the middle class. It's threatened them with financial extortion if he doesn't get his way to satisfy the populist wing of the Democratic Party."

Translation: Obama is a gangster who threatens to take everyone's money if we don't give him rich people's money.

Somebody should call the cops.

Obama's Gangster Auto Tsar Admires China, The Largest Expression of Crony Capitalism In History

As pointed out by Joel Kotkin for The Daily Beast, here, who refrains from using the still radioactive term "fascist" in lieu of which the euphemism "crony capitalism" will still have to do:

Obama’s financial tsar on the GM bailout, Steven Rattner, took to The New York Times to stress that Obamians see nothing systemically wrong with the banking system we have now, blaming the 2008 market meltdown on “old-fashioned poor management.” ... 

Rattner ... paid $6.2 million and accepted a two-year ban on associating with any investment adviser or broker-dealer to settle with the SEC over the agency’s claims that he had played a role in a pay-to-play scheme involving a $50,000 contribution to the now-jailed politician who controlled New York State’s $125 billion pension fund. He’s also expressed unlimited admiration for the Chinese economic system, the largest expression of crony capitalism in history. Expect Rattner to be on hand in September, when Democrats gather in Charlotte, the nation’s second-largest banking city, inside the Bank of America Stadium to formally nominate Obama for a second term.

Obama's Financial Fascism At Work At DOJ: Not A Single Prosecution Since 2008

'Between 2002 and 2008, for instance, [the] GAI [Government Accountability Institute] points out how a Bush administration task force “obtained over 1,300 corporate fraud convictions, including those of over 130 corporate vice presidents and over 200 CEOs and corporate presidents.”

'“Clinton’s DOJ prosecuted over 1,800 S&L [savings and loans] executives, senior officials, and directors, and over 1,000 of them were sent to jail,” GAI adds.

'But, despite having “promised more of the same,” especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the Obama administration’s DOJ has not brought criminal charges against a single major Wall Street executive.'

Read the whole sordid tale here at The Daily Caller, implicating Attorney General Eric

'Holder, Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli, Associate Attorney General Tony West, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, Deputy Attorney General James Cole and Deputy Associate Attorney General Karol Mason — who “all came to the DOJ from prestigious white-collar defense firms where they represented the very financial institutions the DOJ is supposed to investigate.”'

MAKING AFGHANISTAN SAFE FOR THE OPIUM TRADE

Not that long ago, going to war meant destroying the enemy's ability to make it on you.

That quaint idea has been replaced by the asshats' better idea of "winning hearts and minds."

In Afghanistan we're trying to do that with electricity, which the Taliban in turn steals in areas it controls and "sells" to the locals, who use it to power irrigation pumps which help the opium poppies grow. Like good organized criminals, the Taliban then also skims the drug trade pipeline to Iran to fund its insurgency.

The electricity skimming operation nets the Taliban about $4 million annually, according to this report in The Wall Street Journal. But the drug skimming must net them far more. The United Nations estimates the export value of Afghanistan's opium production at $4 billion annually, only a quarter of which may actually go to the growers.

You'd think "shoot 'em all, let God sort 'em out" would be the appropriate response to this situation, if it were a real war. But then you would be wrong. Instead, America is making Afghanistan safe for the Taliban gangsters and for the world's primary source of heroin.

So far the Kajaki hydroelectric power plant in the south has gotten $100 million in upgrades from the US. $400 million more is being requested for 2011, some of which will go to fund electricity generation also in the southern city of Kandahar.

In a real war the dams and power plants would be targets. That we can't even imagine the necessity of destroying them explains why there's not going to be a victory in Afghanistan for the US.

Obama's Gangster Government To Become Law In Dodd Bill

In "Gangster Government Becomes a Long-Running Series," Michael Barone writes:

Almost a year ago, in a Washington Examiner column on the Chrysler bailout, I reflected on the Obama administration's decision to force bondholders to accept 33 cents on the dollar on secured debts while giving United Auto Worker retirees 50 cents on the dollar on unsecured debts.

This was a clear violation of the ordinary bankruptcy rule that secured creditors are fully paid off before unsecured creditors get anything. The politically connected UAW folk got preference over politically unconnected bondholders. "We have just seen an episode of Gangster Government," I wrote. "It is likely to be a continuing series." ...

The Dodd bill['s] ... provisions promise to give us one episode of Gangster Government after another.

At the top of the list is the $50 billion fund that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp could use to pay off creditors of firms identified as systemically risky -- i.e., "too big to fail."

"The Dodd bill," writes Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman, "has unlimited executive bailout authority. That's something Wall Street desperately wants but doesn't dare ask for."

Be sure to read the rest here.