12/13/16

Elizabeth Warren speaks out against president-elect Donald Trump at terror-linked Boston mosque

By: Renee Nal | New Zeal

Senator Elizabeth Warren addressing Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center December 11, 2016 via Facebook

“I must say I am really discouraged by the people he’s bringing into his administration.  He starts with someone like Steve Bannon, who celebrates white supremacy.” -Senator Elizabeth Warren, Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, December 11, 2016

Imagine if a prominent mayor and senator spoke at an organization founded by white supremacists convicted of plotting to murder [name religious or ethnic group here]. Imagine that the organization also happened to have prior members who murdered innocent people in the name of white supremacy and yet additional members who were serving prison sentences for their roles in various plots to hurt [name religious or ethnic group here].

Would there be questions?

But there is precious little discussion in the mainstream media about the attendance of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh at the terror-linked Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center on Sunday night at an event sponsored by the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization.

Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh “joined a crowd of more than 2,000 people at Boston’s largest mosque on Sunday night for a rousing conversation about diversity and solidarity as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take over the White House.” Photo via JIM DAVIS/GLOBE STAFF

The event was evidently organized to publicly distort the intentions of President-Elect Donald Trump. “For those feeling disenfranchised by the election last month of President-elect Donald Trump,” reported CBS Boston, “the goal was to come together and heal.”

Speakers such as Senator Elizabeth Warren parroted the blatant lies about 1.) an uptick of “hate crimes” since Donald Trump’s election and 2.) the #FakeNews about Trump proposing a so-called “National Muslim Registry.”

Both of these allegations are verifiably false.

And there is the minor detail that the Islamic Society of Boston has ties to numerous Islamic terrorists.

As reported at the NY Post by Paul Sperry in September, 2014, the most famous members of the Islamic Society were Boston Bombers Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother Dzhokhar.

Other worshipers at the Islamic Society of Boston have included:

  •  Abdurahman Alamoudi, the mosque’s founder and first president, who in 2004 was sentenced to 23 years in prison for plotting terrorism. In 2005, the Treasury Department issued a statement saying Alamoudi raised money for al Qaeda in the US.
  •  Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT scientist-turned-al Qaeda agent, who in 2010 was sentenced to 86 years in prison for planning a New York chemical attack. Known as “Lady al Qaeda,” she is related to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. ISIS has tried to trade her release for journalist hostages.
  •  Tarek Mehanna, who in 2012 got 17 years in prison for conspiring to use automatic weapons to murder shoppers in a suburban Boston mall.
  • Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a mosque trustee and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader banned from the US after issuing a fatwa that called for the killing of US soldiers.
  • Jamal Badawi, another former trustee who in 2007 was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a plan to funnel more than $12 million to Palestinian suicide bombers.
  • Ahmad Abousamra, …a “top propagandist for ISIS” whose father “sat on the board of directors of the Muslim organization that runs the mosque.”

Image via Facebook

Sperry points out that “investigators found a mosque prayer card for [ Tarek] Mehanna tucked in a Russian dictionary in Tsarnaev’s Cambridge apartment.”

Patrick Poole of PJ Media wrote that the mosque’s founder and first president Abdurahman Alamoudi “was tasked with founding and developing the Defense Department’s first-ever Muslim chaplain program. Alamoudi himself handpicked the Pentagon’s Muslim chaplain corps.

Abdurahman Alamoudi with Al Gore, Bill Clinton

One of the trainers of the chaplains was Anwar Al-Awlaki, (aka Anwar al-Aulaqi) who influenced the Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan, the “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, San Bernadino terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook, Tennessee Navy terrorist Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, the Tsarnaev brothers and Ahmad Khan Rahami, the radical terrorist “accused of planting a bomb that injured two dozen people in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood….”

Abdurahman Alamoudi with George Bush

Al-Awlaki “was also said to inspire would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad” and preached at the mosques attended by 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Hani Hanjour. As reported at Fox News, the three hijackers “were all onboard Flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon.”

But these minor details are not mentioned in news coverage of the event, described at the local WBUR news outlet as “a rousing conversation about diversity and solidarity as President-Elect Donald Trump prepares to take over the White House.” The article continues with the #FakeNews that President-Elect Donald Trump supports “the idea of a national Muslim registry.”

During her speech, Elizabeth Warren warned against “bigotry:”

“We’re here to stand against bigotry in all of it’s forms. Yes. These are challenging times and many people are afraid. Since the election, hate crimes have been on the rise. Attacks on religious and racial groups have sky-rocketed. And now is a time when we must be willing to say, loud and clear, ‘there is no room for bigotry anywhere in the United States of America.’ None. Let us be clear, let us say it as many times as we need to. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. And we will fight back against discrimination whenever and wherever it occurs. We will fight back calmly, we will fight back deliberately, and we will fight back with absolute resolution.”

These words would be inspirational if they were not based on an entirely false premise, and that is that the election of Donald Trump has empowered racist white Americans to commit hate crimes. It is a lie reminiscent of that which fuels the “Black Lives Matter” movement, similarly based on the entirely false premise that white police officers are indiscriminately murdering black Americans.

It should be noted that several prominent citizens published an open letter to Senator Elizabeth Warren and Mayor Martin Walsh expressing concerns about their appearance at a terror-linked mosque. But it went ignored.

Watch the entire event here:

06/10/16

Trump Seen as Vehicle to Destroy GOP

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

Trump

While showing an image of Donald Trump as a wrecking ball, veteran leftist operative Webster Tarpley told the recent Left Forum in New York City, “If we play this right, he can destroy the Republican Party.” The comments, delivered at the major left-wing gathering of the year, reflect the belief among “progressive” activists that the Donald J. Trump candidacy can be used to destroy the Republican Party and usher in a major period of Democratic Party rule, under the increasing influence of an openly socialist faction.

“This party must be destroyed,” Tarpley said, referring to the Republicans.

Tarpley’s analysis of the political scene takes on additional significance as we see evidence of communists and Mexican nationals protesting outside Trump rallies and assaulting Trump supporters. Tarpley’s audience was the Left Forum, which is described as “the largest annual conference of a broad spectrum of left and progressive intellectuals, activists, academics, organizations and the interested public.” The theme for this year’s event was “Rage, Rebellion, Revolution: Organizing Our Power.”

Those participating included the Democratic Socialists of America (which supported Barack Obama and now Bernie Sanders), the Southern Poverty Law Center, representatives of the governments of Cuba and Venezuela, the “Exonerate Ethel Rosenberg” campaign, CodePink, the Palestine Solidarity Committee, the Workers World Party, the Trans Queer Liberation Movement, and the Greek Communist Party.

A former operative in the movement led by Lyndon H. LaRouche, an aging Marxist ideologue who served time in prison on fraud charges, Tarpley is viewed by the left as an expert on the class struggle that defines the evolution of the American political system. He has been a prominent figure in the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement, which blames unnamed U.S. officials for carrying out the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. He is today associated with the Tax Wall Street Party, a group backing the Sanders proposal to raise taxes on financial transactions in order to finance a socialist super state.

Drawing on historical sources and stories about turmoil in the Trump campaign and the GOP, Tarpley predicted that Trump’s candidacy will divide the Republicans and result in one of its factions merely surviving as a regional party based in the Deep South, rural areas, and the intermountain West. However, he said the party itself has become so dependent on “aging white men,” a shrinking percentage of the electorate, that it may be “demographically doomed” in the long term.

Tarpley, who thinks Sanders has not gone far enough to the left, believes opposing Trump and calling him a fascist is a smart organizing tactic by the left. In his talk, “Destroy the GOP—Split the Dems,” Tarpley describes the Sanders campaign and associated groups as “New Deal Democrats,” as opposed to the “Wall Street Democrats” backing Hillary Clinton. Eventually, if everything goes according to plan, the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party will take control in a “progressive realignment,” and a “new progressive coalition” could emerge and dominate American politics for decades.

“Trump is the trigger” for this dramatic series of developments, he told the leftist conference, and it means the Republican Party could go “extinct,” since it is perceived as being hostile to the new immigrants who have flooded into the country. He is predicting a complete political realignment for the period 2016 to 2046.

However, left unsaid in his presentation is whether after Mrs. Clinton is presumably done with her first term as president, she could be challenged for another term by the Sanders wing of the party, possibly represented at that time by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

But the idea that Warren is somehow against the interests of Wall Street and finance capital is, of course, complete nonsense. She ran for the Senate with the support of hedge fund billionaire George Soros and other big money liberals.

While Tarpley is not a supporter of Mrs. Clinton or President Obama, he gives Obama, a skilled Marxist-trained operative, enormous credit for assembling a winning coalition in the presidential campaigns of 2008 and 2012. He explained, “2008 was a watershed election, and in retrospect that will become more obvious than it is now.” He said Obama had ushered in “a new phase” of politics that has put tremendous pressure on the Republican Party to generate support from enough of the electorate to survive as a national political entity.

“That future is what you have to keep your eyes on,” he emphasized. “That’s where you have to get. It means a crushing defeat for Trump, if we can do it.”

At the same time, Tarpley acknowledged that Trump supporters have “legitimate economic beefs,” based on the declining standard of living, and the fact that “deindustrialization” has harmed the middle class by destroying millions of factory jobs. But the Republican ideology is “in crisis,” as factions of the party disagree over the benefits of free trade and solutions to other economic problems. Other major Republican donors have libertarian tendencies that threaten the GOP coalition as well, he stated.

While the demise of the Republican Party may seem like wishful thinking, Tarpley outlined a political scenario that is plausible to outside experts and which could mean that the GOP would meet the fate of other political parties in American history—such as the Federalists, Whigs, and Know-Nothings — “by breaking apart” and losing the presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court in the process.

Tarpley’s predictions about Trump’s negative impact on the Republican Party came just a few weeks before Trump unleashed a series of attacks on a “Mexican” judge, who was actually born in the United States, prompting more concern from current and former Republican officials that the Trump presidential campaign could jeopardize Republicans prospects in November.

The destruction of the GOP also means the defeat of what Tarpley called the “neocon warmongers,” defined as those who favor U.S. military intervention against radical regimes and terrorist groups in the Middle East.

Continuing the pro-Russian bent that has long characterized the LaRouche movement, Tarpley favors the destruction of NATO. He was a speaker at the “No to War, No to NATO,” conference in Rome, Italy, which also included a representative of the old Soviet front, the U.S. Peace Council. Tarpley then participated in a forum on “good relations with the Russian Federation” held in St. Petersburg, Russia.

While Trump has been critical of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East and has questioned the need for NATO, a one-time anti-Soviet alliance, these positions were not of any interest or concern to Tarpley. Instead, Trump was viewed as an opportunity to divide and weaken the Republican Party.

With the Republican Party out of the way, the activists making up the Left Forum would be able to consolidate their power in the Democratic Party and move it even further to the left, in terms of more socialism at home and more accommodation of “anti-imperialist” and “anti-capitalist” forces abroad.


Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected].View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

05/15/16

TIMELINE: Flip-flopping Donald now wants to raise the federal minimum wage (video)

By: Renee Nal | New Zeal

Trump tweets that he wants to raise federal minimum wage

Trump tweets that he wants to raise federal minimum wage

Donald Trump repeatedly blatantly changes his positions on a whim and his position on whether or not there should be a federal minimum wage is no exception. The idea of a “minimum wage” is antithetical to conservatism, as it interferes with the free market. A minimum wage, particularly one unconstitutionally set by the federal government, puts young people out of work, as it removes the bottom rung of the ladder.

Donald Trump has expressed his support for the federal minimum wage. Donald Trump also said he wanted the minimum wage to be set by the states. Donald Trump said the current federal minimum wage is too low. Donald Trump also said a low minimum wage is a good thing.

Here is a list of Donald Trump’s actual words on the minimum wage:

  • August 20, 2015: ““Now, I want to create jobs so that you don’t have to worry about the minimum wage, you’re doing a great job, and you’re making much more than the minimum wage,” he said via phone on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “But I think having a low minimum wage is not a bad thing for this country.”
  • November 10, 2015: “…But, taxes too high, wages too high, we’re not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum. But we cannot do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can’t do it.”

Read more here…

09/7/15

Biden Gets The Commie Vote

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Joe Biden

I come from a family of Christians who are loyal union members. My father belonged to the Millwright/Carpenter Union his whole life. My cousin and uncle were both Ironworkers. The sad part is, big parts of my family voted for Barack Obama… not once, but twice. Even sadder is that if Joe Biden runs, they’ll vote for him as well. Why? Because he’s pro-labor and that’s all they can see. It doesn’t matter if pro-labor means pro-worker or not. They have one issue and have blinders on. It has now caused an insurmountable schism in my family which saddens me greatly. If my father were still alive, as pro-union as he was until the last decade or so of his life, there’s no way he would have ever supported these craven Marxists. No way.

I fully expect Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren to run on the Democratic ticket for the presidency in 2016. Hillary Clinton is damaged goods and cratering in the polls. She’s also under investigation by the FBI and sooner or later, she’ll be charged. Then some type of pardon will be forthcoming. The Democrats can’t abide Sanders, so Biden will fill the breach most likely. But trust me, if the nominee were to be Socialist Sanders, my family would vote for him. Once again, because he’s pro-labor.

Biden hasn’t declared yet, but today, on Labor Day, the Vice President spoke at an AFL-CIO Labor Day event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He marched with Richard Trumka arm in arm in that event. Biden thundered, “I’m mad, I’m angry!” He railed that the U.S. economy is “devastating for workers.” Well, duh… you helped Barack Obama create that ‘devastating economy,’ Joe. Now you point the finger at who? Bush? After 7 years, really? Or do you point at Barack Obama, claiming you had nothing to do with it? That’s ridiculous. Oh, I’ve got it! Blame the Republicans in Congress – impotent, lame, water boys that they are for Barack Obama. Yeah, that’s the ticket. No one is buying it except the brainwashed, feeble and communist. There seem to be plenty of those voters out there though.

Biden thanked “my friend” Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO. There wouldn’t be a single basic right, from a 40-hour week to sick leave, there wouldn’t be a single basic right out there … but for labor,” Biden said. “You build the middle class. That’s not an exaggeration.” Then Biden turned his invective rhetoric on the straw man of growing economic inequality. “Let me tell you something, man,” Biden said. “The tax code’s not fair. The wealthy aren’t paying their fair share. There used to be one America. Today 1 percent of Americans owns 40 percent of all wealth in America,” the Vice President said. “A level playing field doesn’t exist. It’s the way the tax code has been setup,” Biden charged.

Some are saying the unions are playing coy, courting both Biden and Sanders, when they fully intend to support Hillary Clinton. I wouldn’t count on that. The unions have always loved Joe Biden and he loves them right back. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the unions throw in behind Biden. Trumka met with Biden last week in DC and declared the race wide open. “Biden’s a good friend — he’s been a champion of working people,” Trumka said this week during a breakfast with reporters. “He would be a good candidate. He would be a good president.” Biden will commit to not only fight for trade protections, but also push for an increase in the minimum wage and expand union membership.

Amid chants of “run Joe, run,” Biden marched in Pittsburgh’s annual Labor Day parade on Monday as speculation swirled about a potential late entry into the Democratic presidential race. He donned a black-and-gold United Steelworkers Union hat. That must have had my cousins cheering energetically.

Biden later walked along the city’s downtown with a large contingent of steelworkers, hearing encouraging words along the parade route. “Give it a go, Joe!” shouted one delusional woman. Biden is playing hard to get and said last week he wasn’t certain if he and his family had the “emotional energy” for another campaign. Right. That’s why he’s expending all his energies at these events. For the sheer ‘fun’ of it.

The campaign was clearly on the minds of his adoring fans. During a speech before a few hundred steelworkers, Biden said the media liked to portray him as a populist. “They’ll probably say (I’m) competing with Bernie Sanders, who is doing a helluva job by the way.” May I just say, commies of a feather. They really want the same thing.

When one man shouted that Biden should run for president, the Vice President responded, “You gotta talk to my wife about that. I gotta talk to my wife about that.” Tell me, Joe… will she have her shotgun when you talk? His wife, Jill Biden, is said to share some of her husband’s misgivings about whether the family should pursue another presidential bid following the death of their 46 year-old son, Beau Biden. It’s shameful how Biden is using the death of his son in all this – he brings it up over and over again. It’s simply disgusting.

The media is just drooling over this. Wearing a white polo shirt and looking fit and trim, Biden had earlier repeatedly flitted from side to side of the downtown streets clogged with union workers, floats and the thunderous brass of marching bands in Pennsylvania. He was pressing the flesh and probably hugging babies, while slapping union workers on the back. He certainly had their ear: “Why in God’s name should a man or woman working in a steel mill making $50,000 pay a higher rate than someone that makes tens of millions of dollars a year on Wall Street? I mean, I am serious.” Once again, he would know, as he’s one of the wealthy ones he’s railing against. It’s pandering and hypocritical.

And if this isn’t damned close to a union endorsement, I don’t know what is:

Rich Trumka, the President of the AFL-CIO, who controls a valuable political endorsement for Democratic candidates introduced Biden as a friend, a brother and “a great champion of working men and working women.”

Leo Gerard, of the United Steelworkers Union meanwhile made the implicit case that he was the true heir of the post-Great Recession era of job creation under President Barack Obama.

“Joe Biden has been in the room, he has been the voice of working people in that room.”

Trumka said the Vice President got a strong response from the city’s workers. “If you’re looking for energy, this is a great place to get energy today,” the labor leader said. You betcha! They’ve got the moron and union vote sown up. Biden definitely gets the commie vote – the unions love him and he’s their guy.

05/28/15

The Ironic Tie Between Elizabeth Warren’s Hypocritical Home Flipping and Mitt Romney

By: Benjamin Weingarten
TheBlaze

Massachusetts political roots aside, you might think that the comparison of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former governor and failed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is absurd.

Warren, the progressive populist who in both rhetoric and regulation has sought to shackle “predatory” financial institutions as a means of supposedly protecting “the little guy,” and Romney, the patrician and wealthy denizen of the financial establishment of 47 percent infamy, would appear to be polar opposites.


Elizabeth Warren delivers her famous “You didn’t build that” speech.
(Image Source: YouTube screengrab)

But alas, as is so often is the case in politics, Warren’s public face is contradicted by her private actions – actions that we will soon see are similar in nature to those that made Romney a millionaire.

Warren, like Romney, profited by buying assets at low prices and through either improving said assets or waiting for the market to strengthen, selling them at higher prices.

As Jillian Kay Melchior and Eliana Johnson lay out in a recent National Review exposé, Warren “bought and sold at least five [residential] properties for profit,” generating at least $240,500 before accounting for remodeling costs.

Several of the homes Warren purchased and then flipped had been foreclosed upon.

The focus of the piece is the rank hypocrisy that Warren would execute such profit-seeking transactions, given that she has called the idea of buying and selling properties quickly for profit a “myth” that contributed to our economic woes, and decried the banks that foreclosed on the homes of working class Americans.

Rightfully, the column closes with the following flourish:

In her 2014 autobiography, Warren wrote of the events that precipitated the financial crisis that “everyone seemed to have a story about someone they knew who was getting rich by flipping houses.”

She omitted a crucial one.

But it ought to be pointed out that not only were Warren’s actions counter to her stated principles – they mimicked those of the private equity companies and other financial institutions that she has spent her entire public life railing against.

What private equity professionals like Mitt Romney, and investors in general seek to do is “buy low and sell high.”

Firms like Romney’s Bain Capital scour the market for businesses they believe are undervalued and/or have significant growth potential. They seek to buy these businesses at a low price, and grow them while making them more profitable and efficient by cutting costs, closing non-core operations while strengthening core ones and implementing new and improved strategies and practices to better their business models.


Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

By improving the companies in which they invest, the end goal is to sell them for many times the price at which they were bought.

What Romney did at the macro level in investing in businesses worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, Warren did at the micro level in investing in homes worth thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The difference however is that Romney’s investing in many cases led to the creation of ever-better goods and services at ever-lower prices, with the benefits accruing to not only Romney, Bain’s investors, and the employees of the strengthened companies, but all consumers – that is, you and me.

Certainly Warren’s investments in home remodeling may have created work for construction companies and home suppliers, but those benefits pale in size and scope to the benefits to the public of successful private equity investments.

Too, many progressives are queasy about the idea of gentrification, which they argue prices poorer people out of their neighborhoods, replacing them with the more “privileged,” all supposedly to the detriment of the character of said communities. Warren supported this process by improving several of the homes she purchased that had been in disrepair, and selling them at a significant premium.

No one should begrudge Elizabeth Warren for her apparent investing acumen.

And one suspects that no one on the left will begrudge her for her home-flipping hypocrisy, given that the truly ill-gotten riches of the Clintons who partnered with all manner of tinpot dictators and civil rights squelchers do not seem to offend the left’s sensibilities.

But all should recognize that the very business for which Romney was castigated by large swaths of the public is in essence the same business in which Warren was an active participant, only at a smaller scale and with far more modest benefits.

This is not an indictment, but a compliment, even if Warren herself would not like to hear it.

More broadly, we should be celebrating those who create wealth, and crucifying those who destroy it — namely government bureaucrats whose resources only exist because they bilk the individuals and businesses that did build that.

05/19/15

Sessions: No More Lost Jobs To Poorly-Negotiated Trade Deals

“The day when we can enter into a trade agreement that costs one job as a result of unfair trade practices by our trading allies is over. That needs to end. We need to defend the American worker and American manufacturing on the world stage.”

“I’ve got to say, colleagues, first and foremost I don’t know why we have to create a new transnational commission that has the ability to discipline the United States, to impose penalties on the United States, and create additional constraints on the ability of this great nation to function… So I’m disappointed that we are not going to be able to have that amendment called up now, because if they can block this amendment from being called up, this amendment can be shut out altogether.”

05/12/15

This one policy has correlated with higher unemployment, more bankruptcies and greater inequality. Can you guess what it is?

By: Benjamin Weingarten
TheBlaze

In a new book titled “The Floating Kilogram,” former long-time Wall Street Journal editor and founder of the New York Sun Seth Lipsky makes an impassioned, reasoned, common sense case for returning America to sound money in the form of the gold standard.

Much like Steve Forbes and Jim Grant with whom we have touched on this issue before, as Seth and I discussed during an in-depth interview, Lipsky believes there is significant economic and moral merit to backing currency with a tangible asset, with benefits for all Americans.

One of his more interesting and overlooked arguments concerns some of the devastating consequences for the country since we officially severed the link between the dollar and gold under President Nixon in 1971. Lipsky explains:

From 1947 when [the] Bretton Woods System really got operating to 1971, when the dollar was convertible into gold at a 35th of an ounce, unemployment in America averaged 4.7 percent. And then we got rid of the Bretton Woods system — we defaulted on it — we went to fiat money, and in the years from 1971 to today, unemployment has averaged significantly above 6 percent. Low unemployment: gold standard. High unemployment: fiat money.

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Title: The Floating Kilogram: … and Other Editorials on Money from the New York Sun
Author: Seth Lipsky
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But it’s not just unemployment. The bankruptcy rate which Elizabeth Warren likes to focus on was one point something per thousand for years, and suddenly it shot up. When did it do that? The mid-1970s when we went off the gold standard and moved to the age of fiat money.

And you’ve no doubt read about this economic Thomas Piketty who likes to warn about the inequality rate. It was trending gently downward for years and suddenly it began to shoot up. That was the mid-1970s when we abandoned the gold standard and went to a system of fiat money.

So there are a lot of reasons to start looking at this and to see whether the absence of a sound dollar is the root cause of our system of growing inequality and high unemployment and lack of jobs and high bankruptcy rate, and to see whether something can be reformed so as to bring us back to a system of sound money. [Links ours]

The title for Lipsky’s book, “The Floating Kilogram,” reflects an editorial published in 2011 in his New York Sun, in which Lipsky asked the question, “Why don’t we let the kilogram float?” The implication is that if weights and measures are no longer defined, why shouldn’t the kilogram — a man-made measure which the New York Times noted may have been losing mass — fluctuate just as a dollar fluctuates in value. Lipsky wrote:

[H]ere in the modern age, the members of the Federal Reserve Board don’t worry about how many grains of silver or gold are behind the dollar. They couldn’t care less. And when the value of a dollar plunges at a dizzying rate, the chairman of Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, goes up to Capitol Hill and, in testimony before the House, declares merely that he is “puzzled.” No “new urgency” to redefine the dollar for him. The fact is that we’ve long since ceased to define the dollar, and it can float not only against other currencies but against the 371 ¼ grains of pure silver.

So why not the kilogram? After all, when you go into the grocery to buy a pound of hamburger, why should you worry about how much hamburger you get — so long as it’s a pound’s worth. A pound is supposed to be .45359237 of a kilogram, of course. But if the Congress can permit Mr. Bernanke to use his judgment in deciding what a dollar is worth, why shouldn’t he — or some other PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology — be able to decide from day to day what a kilogram is worth?

During our interview which you can listen to in full below, we discuss the fundamental flaws in and immorality of floating fiat money and several other topics including:

Note: The link to the book in this post will give you an option to elect to donate a percentage of the proceeds from the sale to a charity of your choice. Mercury One, the charity founded by TheBlaze’s Glenn Beck, is one of the options. Donations to Mercury One go towards efforts such as disaster relief, support for education, support for Israel and support for veterans and our military. You can read more about Amazon Smile and Mercury One here.

03/10/15

Obama and Hillary: What Did They Know, and When Did They Know It?

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

The latest revelations about Hillary Clinton’s use of private emails while Secretary of State for the Obama administration have proven “politically problematic,” and invited discomfort by some of her fellow Democrats, possibly encouraging other ambitious Democratic hopefuls to contend for the presidential primary, according to some in the media.

By defining the problem as just “political,” these reporters can cast the issue as one dividing political parties to distract from the pressing issues of the day. This media frenzy works in the Obama administration’s favor. “…why did Hillary Clinton become the Obama administration’s bête noire this very week…? questions Lee Smith writing for Tablet Magazine. Perhaps because Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech before Congress reflected badly on the administration’s plan for an Iran deal. “This week’s tarring of Hillary Clinton is part of the White House’s political campaign to shut off debate about its hoped-for deal,” he asserts.

Smith’s suspicions are raised by the fact that Gawker’s John Cook emailed then-deputy White House press secretary Josh Earnest, now White House press secretary, about the issue of Clinton’s private email account back in 2013—two years ago!

Yet on Saturday, President Barack Obama told CBS News’ Bill Plante in an interview that he learned about Mrs. Clinton’s private email system at “The same time everybody else learned it through news reports,” much like he claims to have learned about so many others of his scandals.

The most recent claim apparently didn’t stand up to common sense scrutiny. After all, one needed only to ask if the President and Secretary of State hadn’t exchanged emails for years. On Monday Josh Earnest told the press that President Obama and Secretary Clinton had exchanged emails, that the President had noticed the private address, and that “The point that the President was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address… But he was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

But few in the media seem to be asking about who actually saw Cook’s email back in 2013. Either the White House has known about the potential political fallout for years, or someone failed to pass the word up the chain of command.

Some members of the media prefer to view this latest scandal, like so many others, as some sort of right-wing conspiracy, with conservatives out to get Mrs. Clinton. Michael Tomasky of The Daily Beast stubbornly refuses to define this growing debacle as a “scandal,” writing instead, “If she does become president, the right is going to be gunning for her from Day One, sniffing around for impeachable offenses from the second she takes the oath.” This implies, again, that opposition to Clinton’s lack of transparency is rooted in politics and ideology, as if real outrage were impossible or unjustified.

It’s not just the right this time, with people like Ruth Marcus, Mark Halperin, Mika Brzezinski, Maureen Dowd and Ron Fournier also taking Hillary to task. It’s enough to suggest a different conspiracy theory: that the left wants to dump Hillary for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), or someone they believe would be more electable, and more to their liking.

And while some in the media may have tacitly admitted that there is already blood in the proverbial water, and that Clinton may see greater challenges coming from other candidates, the narrative persists that the Select Committee on Benghazi was established simply to damage Mrs. Clinton. So the villain in this growing scandal, for Clinton acolytes, is not Clinton herself. It is, instead, the Select Committee on Benghazi, which apparently had known about her multiple private email accounts since at least last summer, according to National Review’s Andy McCarthy.

“The panel’s Republican House members are seizing on the revelations regarding Clinton’s private e-mail domain to expand their committee’s mandate, delay Clinton’s testimony and extend their investigation indefinitely,” write Josh Rogin and Eli Lake for Bloomberg. Similarly, Tomasky writes that “… it smells like the Times may have been rolled by the Republican staff of the Benghazi panel. And hey, great work by them and Chairman Trey Gowdy to use the nation’s leading liberal newspaper in this way.”

Mrs. Clinton and President Barack Obama were some of the main decision-makers during the 2012 Benghazi attacks, and have always dominated the heart of the Benghazi scandal—as inconvenient as this may be for some in the media.

The media are, once again, accusing the Republicans on the Select Committee of engaging in run-away politicking during an election season. “Republican Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy has insisted he wants his investigation to be impartial, not to be partisan nor about Hillary Clinton personally,” reports The Daily Beast. “But the pull of conservatives clamoring for answers regarding the scandal has focused the committee’s attention on the presumptive front-runner for the Democratic nomination.”

These politicized assessments ignore and minimize the valid security and transparency concerns raised by Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email account during her entire term as Secretary. But the lack of transparency revealed by this latest Clinton scandal demonstrates that Mrs. Clinton has a problem with humility, and as “heir apparent” for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination may have internalized a feeling of invincibility—as if she is above public accountability and standards of conduct.

The additional debate about fairness to Mrs. Clinton in The New York Times reporting also ignores the larger, overlooked picture: the Obama administration’s culpability in enabling Mrs. Clinton’s behavior. In cases where Clinton’s email was requested by citizens’ groups and news reporters, “the State Department acknowledged receipt of the [Freedom of Information Act] requests and assigned case numbers but did not produce any of the requested documents,” The New York Times reported.

According to the Associated Press, the State Department “never suggested that it didn’t possess all her emails” when the A.P. requested records more than a year ago. That is a scandal in and of itself.

To put it mildly, the fact that there were no records to produce from Mrs. Clinton’s service until this recent date likely proved politically convenient for the administration, and provides further evidence of a government cover-up on Benghazi. Now-public records have already demonstrated Mrs. Clinton’s guilty knowledge about the attacks. Her pro-active attempts at concealing her communications through the use of a private email server have already been thwarted by the Freedom of Information Act.

The newly released Judicial Watch emails documenting correspondence sent to Cheryl Mills (then-Chief of Staff to Sec. Clinton), Jacob Sullivan (then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy), and Joseph McManus (then-Hillary Clinton’s Executive Assistant) provided ample evidence that Mrs. Clinton had guilty knowledge of the nature of the terrorist attack in Benghazi as early as a half an hour after the attack.

“Also littered throughout the State Department emails, obtained by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, are references to a so-called Benghazi Group,” reports Catherine Herridge for Fox News. “A diplomatic source told Fox News that was code inside the department for the so-called Cheryl Mills task force, whose job was damage control.”

And as I have previously reported, the President was told this was an attack by terrorists—not the result of a spontaneous demonstration that got out of control—by his military advisors on September 11, 2012, shortly after the attacks began.

Mrs. Clinton has now requested her emails’ public release, and may hold a press conference in the next several days, according to Politico. Perhaps it was the ridicule from Saturday Night Live that convinced her to speak up, or the sting from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) on Meet the Press calling on Hillary to come clean if she expects to be the party’s standard bearer. But the process of releasing her emails could take months, according to Reuters, which reports that “The email controversy could intensify long-standing Republican criticism of Clinton’s transparency and ethics.”

Clinton’s request to make her emails public should be treated with urgency, and may yet yield additional information regarding the Benghazi attacks and other administration policies during her time as Secretary. But in a real sense it may not matter now whether the State Department actually releases this set of emails, as they were first vetted by Clinton’s advisers. One must ask: What did these advisers choose to omit?

The media shouldn’t be fooled by these “latest [Clinton] efforts to demonstrate transparency” if they are designed to conceal politically damaging material from the public while appearing to be open and fair. Neither should they accept platitudes from Mrs. Clinton if and when she does hold her press conference. But in an even greater sense, the media spotlight shouldn’t be on Mrs. Clinton—it should be on President Obama. What did he know, and when did he know it?

02/13/15

Warring Factions Threaten Clinton White House Bid

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

Ongoing rivalries and dissension among Clinton loyalists have percolated up through the mainstream media, even The New York Times—whose own investigative reporting may have set off the latest salvo. It seems despite the president-in-waiting status often accorded to Mrs. Clinton, there might not be enough money to go around, evoking harsh internal criticisms.

David Brock, founder of the far-left Media Matters, “is a cancer,” argued John Morgan, a Florida lawyer connected to both President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton, according to recent reporting by Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick at the Times. Brock made headlines earlier this week, when in response to their reporting, he sent out a letter that alleged “current and former Priorities officials were behind this specious and malicious attack on the integrity of these critical organizations” and “resigned from the board of the super PAC Priorities USA Action,” according to Politico’s Kenneth Vogel.

Brock is considering a return to Priorities USA, The Washington Post noted shortly thereafter. “People are starting to worry that Priorities could be a weak link,” one strategist told Vogel for his February 10 story about how this super PAC is “struggling in its early efforts to line up cash toward a fundraising goal of as much as $500 million.”

But one wonders whether the criticisms expressed in the media will sabotage Brock’s and other loyalists’ peacemaking. “If you care about your party and our country, you just do what you are asked,” said Morgan, according to Confessore and Chozick. “If you care about yourself, you take your toys and go home.” Morgan is apparently “close” to the co-chair of Priorities USA Action, Jim Messina. Messina served as President Obama’s campaign manager in 2012.

Confessore, a liberal writer/editor transplanted from Washington Monthly to The New York Times, seems to have access to a considerable circle of influential Democrats connected to the Clintons. After all, he sat down with John Podesta in 2003 and 2005. And his August 2013 exposé on mismanagement at the Clinton Foundation, co-authored with Chozick, included interviews with “more than two dozen former and current foundation employees, donors and advisers to the family”—most unwilling to speak on the record.

Like the 2013 piece, Confessore and Chozick report for the Times on February 10 that “most people interviewed for this article declined to speak on the record for fear of angering either the president or the woman who hopes to replace him.” But these persons are willing to speak to the Times about their frustrations.

“The Hillary people were more in it for themselves,” said Jonathan Alter, MSNBC political analyst, when he appeared on the February 10 Ed Schultz show on MSNBC. Alter was referring to the 2008 Democratic primary campaign against Obama. “If we get a repeat of that this time, she won`t have the passion and a genuine commitment that she needs to go the distance.”

“…what this is about is that is that there was a fundraiser who raised millions of dollars for these different groups including David Brock`s, but she was taking a 12.5 percent commission,” Alter said. Democratic strategist Bob Shrum described Mary Pat Bonner’s reported 12.5% commission as “way over the top.”

Confessore and Chozick cast this Democrat infighting differently. They describe the latest meltdown among Clinton movers and shakers as a conflict between two worlds: former Obama staffers who have been imported as strategists for Clinton, and long-time Clinton loyalists. But these writers aren’t the only ones with conflicted interests. The reality appears to be that many in the liberal media, including some reporters at The Washington Post and New York Times, want to tear Hillary and the Clintons down for being too close to Wall Street. But on the other hand, they realize that Mrs. Clinton is the overwhelming favorite to get the Democratic nomination, meaning they will undoubtedly support her when it comes down to her vying against any Republican candidate.

As I’ve reported in the past, The Washington Post—even amidst Mrs. Clinton’s “worst week in Washington” and her tone-deaf comments about being “dead broke” after leaving the White House—still gave her favorable coverage in order to ensure that a Democrat would retain the presidency. “The Post has issued wall-to-wall coverage of this subject, but most of it is about ensuring Hillary’s chances,” I wrote last July.

But when Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) launched her populist offensive in the Senate, hope sprang anew among die-hard liberals and some in the media that Mrs. Clinton, with all her baggage, might not be a shoo-in. The Post’s Paul Kane practically salivated over Sen. Warren’s presidential chances back during the December revolt. Sen. Warren has said she’s not running, but the Post continues to run articles like this: “Democrats suffering from Clinton fatigue say they’re ready for Warren.” Chozick recently described Sen. Warren as “an effective tool in moving Mrs. Clinton off message” whom Republicans favor as a candidate to create dissension within the Democratic primary.

Accuracy in Media has argued in the past that the Times’ David Kirkpatrick piece on Benghazi was a way of inoculating Mrs. Clinton while trying to make the definitive case supporting the Obama administration’s actions and justifications for Benghazi. But that obviously didn’t work, and revelations confirming the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi’s conclusions continue to break, implicating Mrs. Clinton not only for poor security preceding the 2012 Benghazi attacks, but her blind push to intervene in Libya in the first place. When Mrs. Clinton most likely appears before the Select Committee on Benghazi, an even greater spotlight will shine on her role in these attacks.

It looks like Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is very tempted to run against Mrs. Clinton from the left, and former Virginia Senator James Webb might run more or less from her right. The sharks are circling this establishment candidate; will Mrs. Clinton successfully fend them off?

And clearly others at the Times aren’t so interested in inoculating her. But in the meantime, the left is having a catfight, and it may be that some reporters are interested in stirring the pot for dramatic effect—and to cause some angst for Mrs. Clinton from their end.

Confessore’s bio from the Times states that he covers the “intersection of money, power and influence.” A visit to his Twitter page reveals that he, like many liberals, doesn’t like the Citizens United ruling very much.  His twitter feed recently stated, “Thanks to Citizens United, we can now have campaign infighting without the campaign.” He also has tweeted about the Clinton Foundation’s $81 million received from “clients of HSBC’s controversial Swiss bank.”

He also wrote an article with Chozick in July of last year which stated, “Few political families are closer to Wall Street than the ClintonsAnd the Clintons often interact with the titans of finance on the Manhattan charity circuit and during their vacations in the Hamptons.”

Could it be that at least one New York Times staffer doesn’t favor Mrs. Clinton for her entrenched, big-money establishment ties much, either? Or perhaps it’s just that Confessore, Chozick, and the Times itself want to go around poking sleeping tigers before an election to see what they can stir up.

These aren’t Mrs. Clinton’s only problems. She also has what might become known as a “Brian Williams problem,” meaning she “misremembered” coming under sniper fire on a runway in Bosnia, and she repeated the story on more than one occasion, yet there were plenty of eyewitnesses who knew it was a complete fabrication. It cost Williams his esteemed position, and a lot of money. Will Hillary pay a similar price?

Plus, former President Bill Clinton is becoming a problem again based on his being linked in the media to a sex scandal involving a good friend of his who is a convicted pedophile. It’s certainly never dull when the Clintons are involved.