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Post by 3bid on Jan 6, 2019 12:26:24 GMT -5
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Post by imSINGLEruRICH on Feb 11, 2019 13:36:59 GMT -5
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Post by imSINGLEruRICH on Feb 14, 2019 9:48:30 GMT -5
friendofafriend DIAMOND DIGGER FWIW: Attorney for "Global Reset" Will NOT Fund CMKX 11 hours ago Post by friendofafriend on 11 hours agoAll, There is a new Youtube video from Karen Hudes entitled: "Network of Global Corporate Control1 29 19". Karen Hudes is the attorney for the Global Debt Facility. At the 5:30 mark of the video, she explains how the CIA allegedly tried to bribe her with 1 million shares of CMKX. As a result, she and her organization will not fund CMKX.
Here is the link to the video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FcKoz4-Vns This is the link for the written transcript: s3.amazonaws.com/khudes/dctvteleprompt1.29.19.pdf For what it's worth, other video sources say the U.S. Treasury has been moved to Nevada to begin the Quantum Financial System (QFS) for the NEW Gold Backed Currency.
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Post by imSINGLEruRICH on Feb 15, 2019 16:19:03 GMT -5
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Post by tnc6362 on Feb 15, 2019 19:29:16 GMT -5
friendofafriend DIAMOND DIGGER FWIW: Attorney for "Global Reset" Will NOT Fund CMKX 11 hours ago Post by friendofafriend on 11 hours agoAll, There is a new Youtube video from Karen Hudes entitled: "Network of Global Corporate Control1 29 19". Karen Hudes is the attorney for the Global Debt Facility. At the 5:30 mark of the video, she explains how the CIA allegedly tried to bribe her with 1 million shares of CMKX. As a result, she and her organization will not fund CMKX.
Here is the link to the video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FcKoz4-Vns This is the link for the written transcript: s3.amazonaws.com/khudes/dctvteleprompt1.29.19.pdf For what it's worth, other video sources say the U.S. Treasury has been moved to Nevada to begin the Quantum Financial System (QFS) for the NEW Gold Backed Currency. In MHO when we get the new financial system there will be new people running it so who cares what Karen Hudes has to say about funding CMKM T.
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Post by e362 on Feb 16, 2019 13:08:27 GMT -5
friendofafriend DIAMOND DIGGER FWIW: Attorney for "Global Reset" Will NOT Fund CMKX 11 hours ago Post by friendofafriend on 11 hours agoAll, There is a new Youtube video from Karen Hudes entitled: "Network of Global Corporate Control1 29 19". Karen Hudes is the attorney for the Global Debt Facility. At the 5:30 mark of the video, she explains how the CIA allegedly tried to bribe her with 1 million shares of CMKX. As a result, she and her organization will not fund CMKX.
Here is the link to the video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FcKoz4-Vns This is the link for the written transcript: s3.amazonaws.com/khudes/dctvteleprompt1.29.19.pdf For what it's worth, other video sources say the U.S. Treasury has been moved to Nevada to begin the Quantum Financial System (QFS) for the NEW Gold Backed Currency. So let me get this straight, Hudes says her Org won't "fund" cmkx, yet AH says the money has been collected and is in a trust waiting for disbursement...........anyone else see the conflict between those two statements?
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Post by 3bid on Feb 19, 2019 18:38:04 GMT -5
A clip from GONZO: American Stonehenge
[...] In Denton, TX, they meet banker and author, Mitch Feierstein, on an old, rickety bridge. They discuss the myths of America being Big Oil once again as figments of our imagination built upon a real pile of unpayable debt.
Full show: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAC-kK7jKXQ
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Post by jcagney on Feb 24, 2019 10:16:06 GMT -5
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Post by jcagney on Feb 24, 2019 20:55:06 GMT -5
This OP link was posted by one of the commentaries from the link above: 'Grotesque putsch' against Trump now in 'collapse' A couple of excerpts from the link below: Conrad Black, Lord Black of Crossharbour in the British House of Lords and one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, wrote for the website American Greatness that if there’s any collusion, it’s between the media and the Democrats under the doctrine “that anything was justifiable, no matter how dishonest” to destroy Trump. ========= “The broad swath of the Trump-hating media that has participated in what has amounted to an unconstitutional attempt to overthrow the government, ” he wrote, “are reduced to reporting the events and revelations of the scandal in which they have been complicit, in a po-faced ho-hum manner to impart to the misinformed public that this is as routine as stock market fluctuations or the burning of an American flag in Tehran.” ========= The problems with Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, likewise, were ignored, he said. “It has to be summarized. The fact that the officially preferred candidate lied to federal officials about her emails and acted in outright contempt of Congress and the legal process in the destruction of evidence, was simply ignored by the FBI director, who announced that she would not be prosecuted, though he had no authority to make that determination,” Black wrote. Her campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for a “dossier of salacious gossip and defamatory falsehoods amassed by a retired British spy from the lowest grade of intelligence sources in Russia.” The document was given to the media, and used in “illegal and dishonest applications to authorize surveillance of the campaign of the other presidential candidate.” If interested read the rest here: www.wnd.com/2019/02/grotesque-putsch-against-trump-now-in-collapse/PS: I could post another 5 link to OPs or videos just from what I've read or viewed today alone. We all need to think for ourselves.
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Post by 3bid on Feb 26, 2019 11:09:12 GMT -5
Why Are These Professional War Peddlers Still Around?
Pundits like Max Boot and Bill Kristol got everything after 9/11 wrong but are still considered "experts."
By Tucker Carlson • February 15, 2019
One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America. Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn’t exist outside of a select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict.”
None of this, it turns out, means anything. The professional requirements for being one ofthe world’s Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict do not include relevant experience with armed conflict. Leading authorities on the subject don’t need a track record of wise assessments or accurate predictions. All that’s required are the circular recommendations of fellow credential holders. If other Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict induct you into their ranks, you’re in. That’s good news for Max Boot.
Boot first became famous in the weeks after 9/11 for outlining a response that the Bush administration seemed to read like a script, virtually word for word. While others were debating whether Kandahar or Kabul ought to get the first round of American bombs, Boot was thinking big. In October 2001, he published a piece in The Weekly Standard titled “The Case for American Empire.”
“The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition,” Boot wrote. “The solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.” In order to prevent more terror attacks in American cities, Boot called for a series of U.S.-led revolutions around the world, beginning in Afghanistan and moving swiftly to Iraq.
“Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul,” Boot wrote. “To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim. Is this an ambitious agenda? Without a doubt. Does America have the resources to carry it out? Also without a doubt.”
In retrospect, Boot’s words are painful to read, like love letters from a marriage that ended in divorce. Iraq remains a smoldering mess. The Afghan war is still in progress close to 20 years in. For perspective, Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of France, crowned himself emperor, defeated four European coalitions against him, invaded Russia, lost, was defeated and exiled, returned, and was defeated and exiled a second time, all in less time than the United States has spent trying to turn Afghanistan into a stable country.
Things haven’t gone as planned. What’s remarkable is that despite all the failure and waste and deflated expectations, defeats that have stirred self-doubt in the heartiest of men, Boot has remained utterly convinced of the virtue of his original predictions. Certainty is a prerequisite for Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict.
In the spring of 2003, with the war in Iraq under way, Boot began to consider new countries to invade. He quickly identified Syria and Iran as plausible targets, the latter because it was “less than two years” from building a nuclear bomb. North Korea made Boot’s list as well. Then Boot became more ambitious. Saudi Arabia could use a democracy, he decided.
“If the U.S. armed forces made such short work of a hardened goon like Saddam Hussein, imagine what they could do to the soft and sybaritic Saudi royal family,” Boot wrote.
Five years later, in a piece for The Wall Street Journal, Boot advocated for the military occupation of Pakistan and Somalia. The only potential problem, he predicted, was unreasonable public opposition to new wars.
“Ragtag guerrillas have proven dismayingly successful in driving out or neutering international peacekeeping forces,” he wrote. “Think of American and French troops blown up in Beirut in 1983, or the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident in Somalia in 1993. Too often, when outside states do agree to send troops, they are so fearful of casualties that they impose rules of engagement that preclude meaningful action.”
In other words, the tragedy of foreign wars isn’t that Americans die, but that too few Americans are willing to die. To solve this problem, Boot recommended recruiting foreign mercenaries. “The military would do well today to open its ranks not only to legal immigrants but also to illegal ones,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. When foreigners get killed fighting for America, he noted, there’s less political backlash at home.
♦♦♦
American forces, documented or not, never occupied Pakistan, but by 2011 Boot had another war in mind. “Qaddafi Must Go,” Boot declared in The Weekly Standard. In Boot’s telling, the Libyan dictator had become a threat to the American homeland. “The only way this crisis will end—the only way we and our allies can achieve our objectives in Libya—is to remove Qaddafi from power. Containment won’t suffice.”
In the end, Gaddafi was removed from power, with ugly and long-lasting consequences. Boot was on to the next invasion. By late 2012, he was once again promoting attacks on Syria and Iran, as he had nine years before. In a piece for The New York Times, Boot laid out “Five Reasons to Intervene in Syria Now.”
Overthrowing the Assad regime, Boot predicted, would “diminish Iran’s influence” in the region, influence that had grown dramatically since the Bush administration took Boot’s advice and overthrew Saddam Hussein, Iran’s most powerful counterbalance. To doubters concerned about a complex new war, Boot promised the Syria intervention could be conducted “with little risk.”
Days later, Boot wrote a separate piece for Commentary magazine calling for American bombing of Iran. It was a busy week, even by the standards of a Leading Authority on Armed Conflict. Boot conceded that “it remains a matter of speculation what Iran would do in the wake of such strikes.” He didn’t seem worried.
Listed in one place, Boot’s many calls for U.S.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“I’ll invade you!!!”) Republicans in Washington didn’t find any of it amusing. They were impressed. Boot became a top foreign policy adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, to Mitt Romney in 2012, and to Marco Rubio in 2016.
Everything changed when Trump won the Republican nomination. Trump had never heard of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He had no idea Max Boot was a Leading Authority on Armed Conflict. Trump was running against more armed conflicts. He had no interest in invading Pakistan. Boot hated him.
As Trump found himself accused of improper ties to Vladimir Putin, Boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with Russia. Boot demanded larger weapons shipments to Ukraine. He called for effectively expelling Russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. The stakes were high, but with signature aplomb Boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the Russian government would react badly to the provocation. Those who disagreed Boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for Putin and the mullahs in Iran.
Boot’s stock in the Washington foreign policy establishment rose. In 2018, he was hired by The Washington Post as a columnist. The paper’s announcement cited Boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”
It is possible to isolate the precise moment that Trump permanently alienated the Republican establishment in Washington: February 13, 2016. There was a GOP primary debate that night in Greenville, South Carolina, so every Republican in Washington was watching. Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump articulated something that no party leader had ever said out loud. “We should never have been in Iraq,” Trump announced, his voice rising. “We have destabilized the Middle East.”
Many in the crowd booed, but Trump kept going: “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”
Pandemonium seemed to erupt in the hall, and on television. Shocked political analysts declared that the Trump presidential effort had just euthanized itself. Republican voters, they said with certainty, would never accept attacks on policies their party had espoused and carried out.
Republican voters had a different reaction. They understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. They themselves had come to understand that the Iraq war was a mistake. They appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
Rival Republicans denounced Trump as an apostate. Voters considered him brave.
Trump won the South Carolina primary, and shortly after that, the Republican nomination.
Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. They hated him for that.
Some of them became so angry, it distorted their judgment and character.
♦♦♦
Bill Kristol is probably the most influential Republican strategist of the post-Reagan era. Born in 1954, Kristol was the second child of the writer Irving Kristol, one of the founders of neoconservatism.
The neoconservatism of Irving Kristol and his friends was jarring to the ossified liberal establishment of the time, but in retrospect it was basically a centrist philosophy: pragmatic, tolerant of a limited welfare state, not rigidly ideological. By the time Bill Kristol got done with it 40 years later, neoconservatism was something else entirely.
Almost from the moment Operation Desert Storm concluded in 1991, Kristol began pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 1997, The Weekly Standard ran a cover story titled “Saddam Must Go.” If the United States didn’t launch a ground invasion of Iraq, the lead editorial warned, the world should “get ready for the day when Saddam has biological and chemical weapons at the tips of missiles aimed at Israel and at American forces in the Gulf.”
After the September 11 attacks, Kristol found a new opening to start a war with Iraq. In November 2001, he and Robert Kagan wrote a piece in The Weekly Standard alleging that Saddam Hussein hosted a training camp for Al Qaeda fighters where terrorists had trained to hijack planes. They suggested that Mohammad Atta, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was actively collaborating with Saddam’s intelligence services. On the basis of no evidence, they accused Iraq of fomenting the anthrax attacks on American politicians and news outlets.
Under ordinary circumstances, Bill Kristol would be famous for being wrong. Kristol still goes on television regularly, but it’s not to apologize for the many demonstrably untrue things he’s said about the Middle East, or even to talk about foreign policy. Instead, Kristol goes on TV to attack Donald Trump.
Trump’s election seemed to undo Bill Kristol entirely. He lost his job at The Weekly Standard after more than 20 years, forced out by owners who were panicked about declining readership. He seemed to spend most of his time on Twitter ranting about Trump.
Before long he was ranting about the people who elected Trump. At an American Enterprise Institute panel event in February 2017, Kristol made the case for why immigrants are more impressive than native-born Americans. “Basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two, three, four generations of hard work, everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever.” Most Americans, Kristol said, “grew up as spoiled kids and so forth.”
In February 2018, Kristol tweeted that he would “take in a heartbeat a group of newly naturalized American citizens over the spoiled native-born know-nothings” who supported Trump.
By the spring of 2018, Kristol was considering a run for president himself. He was still making the case for the invasion of Iraq, as well as pushing for a new war, this time in Syria, and maybe in Lebanon and Iran, too. Like most people in Washington, he’d learned nothing at all.
Tucker Carlson is the host of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight and author of Ship of Fools: How A Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (Simon & Schuster). This excerpt is taken from that book.
www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-are-these-professional-war-peddlers-still-around-tucker-carlson-max-boot-bill-kristol/
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Post by imSINGLEruRICH on Feb 26, 2019 18:07:08 GMT -5
Uncle Jed Junior Miner Post by Uncle Jed on yesterday at 1:09pm"So once this Declass is activated.... maybe the Declass would take one month or so to have all 3 chapters of the FISA release to complete." Adam Schiff threatens to bring in Robert Mueller for testimony if Russia report doesn't go public - Updated Feb 24, 2019, 10:59 AM House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., says his panel plans to bring in special counsel Robert Mueller to testify on the Russia investigation if the Justice Department does not release his entire report to the public. “We will obviously subpoena the report. We will bring Bob Mueller in to testify before Congress. We take it to court if necessary,” the California Democrat said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday when asked about about transparency of any underlying evidence if someone has not been prosecuted. www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/adam-schiff-threatens-to-bring-in-robert-mueller-for-testimony-if-russia-report-doesnt-go-publicUncle Jed Ps. I think we’re going to need more popcorn… soon!
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Post by e362 on Feb 27, 2019 6:50:42 GMT -5
Uncle Jed Junior Miner Post by Uncle Jed on yesterday at 1:09pm"So once this Declass is activated.... maybe the Declass would take one month or so to have all 3 chapters of the FISA release to complete." Adam Schiff threatens to bring in Robert Mueller for testimony if Russia report doesn't go public - Updated Feb 24, 2019, 10:59 AM House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., says his panel plans to bring in special counsel Robert Mueller to testify on the Russia investigation if the Justice Department does not release his entire report to the public. “We will obviously subpoena the report. We will bring Bob Mueller in to testify before Congress. We take it to court if necessary,” the California Democrat said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday when asked about about transparency of any underlying evidence if someone has not been prosecuted. www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/adam-schiff-threatens-to-bring-in-robert-mueller-for-testimony-if-russia-report-doesnt-go-publicUncle Jed Ps. I think we’re going to need more popcorn… soon! I would laugh my ass off if Schiff forces the whole report out or forces Mueller to testify and it/he points all the collusion evidence at Hillary an the dems.
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Post by 3bid on Feb 27, 2019 8:27:12 GMT -5
Wall Street loses faith in shale 26 Feb, 2019 | RT To Wall Street, the shale industry has lost a lot of its allure. A decade’s worth of promises have failed to materialize, and Big Finance is cutting some of its ties with smaller shale drillers who have not delivered. The Wall Street Journal reports that the shale industry only saw $22 billion in new bond and equity deals, down by more than half from 2016 levels, which was a much worse time for the market.
The steep decline in new debt and equity issuance is a sign that major investors are no longer rushing to finance unprofitable shale drilling. It’s worth noting that this is a new development. For years Wall Street financed unprofitable drilling, holding out on the promise that rapid production growth would eventually pay off.
Shale wells suffer from precipitous decline rates, with as much as three quarters of a well’s total lifetime production coming out in the first year or two. After an initial burst of output, shale wells enter a steep decline.
Of course, this has been known since the beginning and Wall Street has long been fully aware. But major investors hoped that shale companies would scale up, achieve efficiencies and lower breakeven prices to the point that they could turn a profit.
However, that has not been the case. While there are some drillers that are profitable, taken as a whole the industry has been cash flow negative essentially since its beginning in the mid-2000s. For instance, the IEA estimates that the shale industry posted cumulative negative free cash flow of over $200 billion between 2010 and 2014.
The red ink has narrowed since then, but so too has the patience from Wall Street. In 2018, even as oil prices hit their highest levels in years, new debt and equity issuance plunged. That makes it harder for small and even medium-sized companies to finance growth. It’s not all that surprising, then, that a wave of spending cuts have cropped up in the last few months.
The WSJ notes that the credit environment also worsened when the market hit its nadir in 2016. Regulators tightened lending requirements, raising the cost of capital for indebted drillers. That, of course, made it even more difficult for these drillers to turn a profit.
To top it off, all of these pesky investors are much more demanding than they used to be, calling on companies to stop spending so much and instead return cash to shareholders. That leaves less capital available to inject back into the ground. Earlier this month Barclays issued a double-downgrade to Occidental Petroleum, lowering it from Overweight to Underweight, citing the company’s deficit after dividends at a time when the driller still expected to aim for an aggressive production target.
But some companies are between a rock and a hard place. The WSJ notes that CNX Resources has lost over 20 percent since late January when it announced that it was bowing to investor pressure to cut spending. That led to speculation that the company wouldn’t meet its production target. It’s a no-win situation for some.
What to make of all of this? As Liam Denning of Bloomberg Opinion put it, “the prevailing financial model for many frackers has hit a wall.” Denning points out that the shale industry has not posted a return on capital above 10 percent any year since 2006, which says is a “feature of shale, not a bug.”
According to Rystad Energy, the 33 largest publicly-traded shale companies, accounting for 39 percent of US shale output, will struggle to please shareholders while also trimming debt. “Shale E&Ps struggle to please equity investors and reduce leverage ratios simultaneously. Despite a significant deleverage last year, estimated 2019 free cash flow barely covers operator obligations, putting E&Ps on thin ice as future dividend payments remain in question,” Rystad Energy senior analyst Alisa Lukash said in a statement.
Taking a step back, explosive shale growth was only possible because in the context of the post-2008 financial crisis and the response by the Federal Reserve to drop interest rates close to zero, something Bethany McLean argues in her book, “Saudi America.” Cheap money financed the debt-fueled shale revolution.
Rystad finds that over half of the total debt pile for the 33 companies it analyzed is due within the next seven years. Ultimately, the industry may have to erase $4 billion in promised dividend payments. “The obvious gap in expected versus likely dividend payments confirms the industry’s inability to deliver sustained investors’ payback while simultaneously deleveraging,” Lukash said.
That doesn’t mean that production is going to fall off of a cliff. These days, the shale drilling frenzy is being pushed along increasingly by the oil majors, who have gobbled up smaller companies. ExxonMobil and Chevron, for instance, can take a long view, and put mountains of cash into drilling. Investor pressure is different for these multinationals and, in any event, they are much more profitable than smaller shale companies due to various assets in refining, chemicals, offshore and otherwise conventional production.
As such, production growth will continue for a while longer. But the go-go days are over.
This article was originally published on Oilprice.com................. www.rt.com/business/452421-wall-street-loses-faith-shale/
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Post by jcagney on Mar 7, 2019 3:32:54 GMT -5
BENGHAZI EXPOSED: Charles Woods - Father of Benghazi Hero Ty Woods Published on Mar 5, 2019 By popular demand of the Operation Freedom audience, we present the moving full length interview with the father of Benghazi hero Ty Woods. In this interview, hear Charles Woods talk about incidents surrounding the events in Benghazi as well as corruption in government. This interview is simply not to be missed. www.youtube.com/watch?v=obBTZS8susg====== "This interview is simply not to be missed." 35 people were saved from Benghazi and made to sign NDA. Sickening Jcagney
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Post by 3bid on Apr 14, 2019 8:35:19 GMT -5
Lady Justice blinked: America’s flunking legal system reveals a nation divided by money and power
12 Apr, 2019
Imagine sweating through 12 years of school, or investing heavily in the stock market, only to discover that the elite are gaming the system to their advantage. Worse, their power allows them to escape justice.
These days, an outsider attempting to understand the United States may come to the conclusion that the ‘American Dream’ is best obtained through bribery, backstabbing and cheating, so long as the actor doesn’t do something really stupid, you know, like get caught. Considering the college admissions scam now rocking the heartland, such a harsh indictment doesn’t appear too far from the mark.
This week, the Department of Justice released a statement saying that 13 parents and one university employee pleaded guilty to “using bribery and other forms of fraud to facilitate their children’s admission to a number of colleges and universities.” One of the named is Felicity Huffman, 56, an American movie actress who is accused of paying a middleman to boost her daughter’s college entrance exam scores.
Huffman has some glitzy celebrity company in this modern walk of shame. Actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, are accused of paying $500,000 to a bogus charity to get their two daughters into the University of Southern California as crew recruits, even though the women probably couldn’t tell the difference between an oar and a pitchfork.
This scandal speaks volumes about the ‘double-faced’ nature of the US cultural scene when a parent can fork over thousands of dollars in bribe money to guarantee their child gets into a top-notch university at a time when the majority of college students are buried under a tuition debt mountain. Meanwhile, the spoiled-rotten offspring of the ultra-wealthy class are flashing their undeserved elite-school status on Instagram and YouTube as if it were the latest-model Mercedes or a vacation along the French Riviera.
On a brief side note, the fact that altering the nationally recognized SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test) is even possible is an extremely worrying revelation and suggests that corruption is endemic throughout the educational system.
So, what sort of legal fate awaits these well-heeled parents and their children who cheated the educational system? CNN quoted a source close to one family who said, [Loughlin and Giannulli] are “hoping to just let this play out in the judicial system. They are innocent until proven guilty.”
In other words, the possibility is high that many of these affluent parents – who under ‘normal’ circumstances would face up to 40 years in prison – will never spend a single day behind bars despite such egregious gaming of the system. If recent history is a reliable guide, the defendants will receive the obligatory slap on the wrist, pay some exorbitant lawyer fees, perform a few hours of community service and then continue their opulent lifestyles without missing a thingytail.
This is not simply misplaced cynicism. We’ve seen such examples of ‘justice’ US-style in the not-so-distant past. In February, Jussie Smollett, another Hollywood actor, was charged by a grand jury with a Class 4 felony for reporting a hate crime that in fact never happened. Several weeks later, Smollett, with no small help from celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos, was back on the street. Even the FBI is at a loss to explain why the serious charges against the actor were dropped without the benefit of a jury trial.
It is not just wealthy celebrities, of course, who are escaping the jaws of justice. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the worst economic disaster to make landfall since the Great Depression of 1929, aside from Kareem Serageldin, not a single Wall Street banker, broker or white collar suit, got to sample prison food for their shenanigans, which included rigging the housing market with a ticking time bomb known as subprime mortgages.
Following the eventual implosion of the housing market, billions of dollars were lost and untold lives irreversibly affected. Today, the lawbreakers are free, continuing to pocket record bonuses and pay packages, while the ‘too big to fail’ banks and financial institutions – bailed out of foreclosure to the tune of trillions of dollars – are bigger and badder than ever.
The financial crisis was a profound learning experience for many Americans, who were taught that crime really does pay, but only for those powerful elite with the financial clout and personal connections to avoid persecution. Many Americans were betting that former president Barack Obama, who assumed office right after the outbreak of the crisis, would take disciplinary measures against the lawbreakers. They were to be sorely disappointed.
“Americans needed their president to tell them… that he would track down those responsible for their pain and suffering, and that he would restore order and safety,” wrote Drew Westen, professor of psychology at Emory University, at a time when much of the nation was clamoring for justice. “Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, [then president Barack Obama] put them in charge of it.”
Americans have become oddly immune to the regular news of ultra-powerful, ultra-wealthy elite brazenly avoiding punishment for their high crimes. We take it for granted that the wealthy class, who are able to afford the very best legal representation, are somehow privileged enough to remain above the law no matter how reckless their actions and deeds. This only serves to reinforce the notion that America is a house divided when it comes to not only finances, but on the legal front as well.
“There are two Americas,” said Remington Gregg, a lawyer who serves at the Washington-based consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen, in an interview with RT’s Boom Bust. “There is one set of rules for the wealthy and there is another set of rules for everyone else.”
Gregg added that the “shocking” thing about the situation is that those who already enjoy [financial] advantages “still refuse to abide by rules.” How long average Americans can stay patient amid such a dual living arrangement with the elite remains to be seen.
Lady Justice, the famous symbol of the US legal system, is depicted by a blindfolded goddess who wields a sword in one hand and a set of scales in the other. The blindfold is meant to convey the idea that all people are equal before the law, and everyone will be judged without bias or preconceived notions. Today, however, the blindfold appears to have slipped, and Lady Justice is increasingly meting out justice according to status and financial well-being of the person appearing before her.
In order to avoid imminent disaster, it’s time to firmly affix the blindfold and ensure that all Americans – not just those who can afford it – are seen as truly equal before the law.
www.rt.com/op-ed/456335-justice-wealthy-us-bribery/
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