War is bad for nearly everyone. But as long as we allow the leaders of our privatized war economy to reap unlimited rewards, their profit motive for war in Iran or anywhere will persist....Putting some numbers on it.
In thirteen years of hostile decisions, the Roberts Supreme Court has done all it can to legalize corruption. With the Bridgegate case, it gets a chance to wreak even more havoc and possibly end the use of the term “corruption” as a useful legal concept....That the purpose, wasn't it? If this is not judicial activism, what is?
This approach to corruption sets the Roberts Supreme Court apart from other Supreme Courts. For over a century, previous Supreme Courts upheld campaign finance laws and other regulations which try to keep graft and political intimidation at bay precisely because as the Supreme Court recognized in Ex parte Yarbrough in 1884, “[i]n a republican government like ours, where political power is reposed in representatives of the entire body of the people, chosen at short intervals by popular elections, the temptations to control these elections by violence and by corruption is a constant source of danger…. no lover of his country can shut his eyes to the fear of future danger from both sources."...
But wait, there’s more. The Roberts Supreme Court has also rebranded corruption by changing what counts as white-collar crimes. In Skilling v. US (a case brought by disgraced ex-CEO of Enron Jeff Skilling challenging his 24-year prison sentence for defrauding the company’s shareholders), the Supreme Court agreed with Skilling that he should not have been charged with honest services fraud because his crimes did not involve a bribe or a kickback. This Supreme Court decision led to Skilling getting 10 years shaved off of his original sentence. He was released from jail in 2018 and left his halfway house in 2019. He is now a free man....
As I discuss in my article and my book, the Supreme Court’s role in gutting corruption has been keenly watched by shady politicians and their lawyers. If you pull the legal briefs in criminal cases charging politicians of crimes like bribery and fraud, what you will find is citations to white-collar crime cases like Skilling and McDonnell, as well as citations to campaign finance cases like Citizens United and McCutcheon, as reasons why whatever awful thing the politician did is not actually a crime.Is the intent to install plutonomy, the oligarchy of wealth, under the veneer of representative democracy?
Corruption isn’t a partisan matter. Both Democratic and Republican politicians have been accused of abusing their offices for private gain. And using the Roberts Supreme Court cases to their advantage is equally bipartisan....
A new investigation has exposed members of Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó’s inner circle for embezzling tens of thousands of dollars designated for humanitarian aid and spending it on luxury goods and lavish accommodations for themselves. Guaidó had been aware of the fraud for weeks and stubbornly defended his cohorts until a leak from Colombian intelligence forced him to acknowledge the scandal....The Gray Zone
Vecchio’s career did not start in the rough and tumble of Venezuela’s political scene, but instead with a promising career in the oil industry. Indeed, Vecchio entered the political arena in 2007 only after Hugo Chavez successfully drove out ExxonMobil, his employer at the time. For years, Vecchio had been leading Exxon’s legal fight against the Chavez government.From Exxon to “ambassador”: How Carlos Vecchio became Venezuela’s top coup lobbyist
This revealing detail has been curiously omitted in his interviews with sympathetic US outlets and was mentioned only briefly in his autobiography. Yet it is critical to understanding Vecchio’s emerging role, especially as Guaido flounders back home....
Wow. 16 million hits, and counting. Leave it to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) to show how to turn a campaign finance primer into a viral video. Certainly the first time a congressional hearing on strengthening ethics rules for the executive branch reached such a huge audience.
This is a must-watch clip. I hesitate to add much commentary, as anything I write will likely not add all that much, and might instead only distract from the original.Nonetheless, full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes! I will hazard adding some commentary.
I only ask that you watch the clip first. It’ll only take five minutes of your time. Just something to ponder on what I hope for many readers is a lazy, relaxing Sunday. Please watch it, as my commentary will assume you’ve done so.This is a big deal. I have often written previously that without overhauling campaign finance, lasting reform is not possible, if it is even possible to pass in the first place. Getting the money out of politics is a sine qua non of genuine change for the better. And that is just for starters.
We have discovered that Russia has been waging a secret, carefully concealed war for the past 7 years. It is a war against corruption and unfair income distribution. You find this hard to believe? We will tell you in detail immediately after the selection of positive news of the week....The Vineyard of the Saker
Al Capone had a problem: he needed a way to disguise the enormous amounts of cash generated by his criminal empire as legitimate income. His solution was to buy all-cash laundromats, mix dirty money in with clean, and then claim that washing ordinary Americans’ shirts and socks, rather than gambling and bootlegging, was the source of his riches.
Almost a century later, the basic concept of money laundering is the same, but its scale and complexity have grown considerably. Were Capone alive today, he would have to run his washers and dryers around the clock to keep pace with demand; the United Nations recently estimated that the criminal proceeds laundered annually amount to between 2 and 5 percent of global GDP, or $1.6 to $4 trillion a year....IMF
The problem is that when you just define these fiscal aggregates within their own financial terms you’re really losing the purpose and meaning of fiscal policy. The purpose of fiscal policy isn’t to achieve any particular fiscal outcome whether it be a balanced fiscal position, or a deficit of whatever percent or even a surplus of whatever percent. The purpose of fiscal policy as a tool is to advance wellbeing in the economy, to engage in government spending programs which are consistent with its electoral remit, and taxation to manage total expenditure in the non-government sector so that there is space – and what I mean by “space” is real resource space – for the government to basically buy those resources and conduct its programs. Taxation creates that space by depriving the non-government sector of the use of resources...
This is the purpose of fiscal policy. In a cyclical sense – in other words in the variation of economic activity – fiscal policy should play a very important role in being able to offset any fluctuations in non-government spending that would either cause unemployment if it were not offset, or would drive inflation if it were not offset. Fiscal policy has to be flexible enough to allow the government to meet that purpose. If you start imposing rules that are independent of purpose then you are likely to end up not meeting that purpose but also failing to meet your rules....Excellent!
What Private Eye has failed to investigate is how Chernukhin has been able to import and invest a fortune in the UK, with the imprimatur of the British Government, financial regulators, and banks – a fortune whose origin when he was a state official in Moscow Chernukhin declines to explain....
On the say-so of Kasyanov and Kudrin, Chernukhin supervised VEB’s takeover of most Russian pension fund contributions; management of Soviet-era debts owed to Moscow by states like Czechoslovakia and Vietnam; and bail-out loans for companies designated by Kasyanov, Kudrin, or Putin as politically valuable; these included state media companies. When Kasyanov began to threaten Putin with political competition, he was dismissed from the prime ministry in 2004. At the same time Chernukhin was fired from the chairmanship of VEB. He then moved to London.
The High Court papers and media reports indicate that he took with him and then spent at least £150 million acquiring personal and commercial assets. As he did that, Chernukhin was sheltered by the British Government which granted him British citizenship. In 2006 Moscow reporters were asking in print where Chernukhin’s money had come from. “Why”, wrote Semyon Goncharov of KM.ru, “don’t the British authorities ask the Russian oligarchs the question: where, thanks to what, and at the expense of whom did they get their fortunes?… As for Vladimir Chernukhin, the British authorities may have been embarrassed to ask him where the former deputy Minister got 135 million dollars to buy the office building of Midland Bank, because his official salary is clearly not enough to collect such money.”
Chernukhin was asked last month to clarify the appearance of this discrepancy and to account for the origin of his wealth in line with the current British statutes. He refused to reply....
There is one big lesson from the Danske Bank money laundering scandal. Regulating the modern banking system does not work. Modern banks are now primarily giant hedge fund managers speculating on financial assets or they are conduits for tax avoidance havens for the top 1% and the multi-nationals.…
John Horan, senior associate at Maze Investigation, Compliance and Training Ltd. in Belfast, says money laundering is a Europe-wide problem. “dark money will almost certainly continue to flow through the European banking system like sand through a sieve.” It’s a never-ending story. ...
The ‘official’ view that regulation is the only way to control the banks is accepted by most Keynesians or those who see the financial sector as the only enemy of labour. Take Nick Shaxson. Shaxson wrote a compelling book Treasure Islands, tax havens and the men who stole the world, that exposed the workings of all the global tax avoidance schemes and how banks promoted tax havens and tax avoidance for their rich clients.
And more recently, he has done a new piece of research that argues that not only does the City of London and the UK financial sector operate to help tax avoidance and money laundering, it does not provide credit for productive investment.…
As Gabriel Zucman and Thomas Wright have shown in a meticulous and in-depth analysis of the size and extent of tax havens and tax avoidance, far from them being reduced or controlled, on the contrary, such schemes are an increasing part of US corporate profits, organised and transacted by the banks.
About half of all the foreign profits of US multinationals are booked in tax havens with Ireland topping the charts as the favourite (Irish tax rate just 5.7%). And the benefits for the increase in profits have gone to shareholders, the Zucman and Wright showed. “Ireland solidifies its position as the #1 tax haven,”Zucman said on Twitter. “US firms book more profits in Ireland than in China, Japan, Germany, France & Mexico combined.” ...
So those who think that ‘regulating’ the banks and tax evasion using ‘regulators’ will work are expecting pigs to rev up their jet engines for flight.Michael Roberts Blog
The front groups that have been funded for decades by billionaires Charles and David Koch, majority owners of the fossil fuels conglomerate, Koch Industries, are determined to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court because he has demonstrated a willingness to write decisions favorable to gutting regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. Whether Kavanaugh has a history of sexual assaults is irrelevant to that agenda.
As recently as last evening, a dark money group that keeps its donors a secret from the American people, the Judicial Crisis Network, continued running its multi-million dollar ad campaign on television in support of Kavanaugh. This week, its Chief Counsel, Carrie Severino, has made the rounds on cable news shows calling the women’s allegations a smear campaign. The Judicial Crisis Network has been running these ads since July and says it is prepared to spend upwards of $10 million to confirm Kavanaugh. When it takes that kind of an effort to confirm a justice, you know something is seriously wrong. In 2016, just one single anonymous donor contributed a stunning $28.5 million to the Wellspring Committee, another dark money group that funnels the bulk of its money to the Judicial Crisis Network. (See our prior reporting here.)As I have said, the sex scandal is a canard compared with the hidden agenda.
As expected, the corporate media’s coverage of Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment process is disappointingly superficial. While there’s no doubt sexual harassment is a pressing issue in modern-day America, left-leaning establishment outlets and individuals alike are mired in these accusations, as well as partisan political divides as they fail to recognize Kavanaugh’s very troublesome record of court rulings—rulings that show his verifiable proclivity toward using the government to very literally harass the American people and the rest of the world.
While Congress and the people bicker over their disagreements with Kavanaugh as he testifies, few are discussing what he has in common with both factions of the American ruling class....The article makes one wonder, is Kavanaugh a proto-fascist, as the US appears to be sliding down the slippery slope since 9/11?
One of the principle ways in which so-called progressive political parties (particularly those in the social democratic tradition) seek to differentiate themselves from conservatives is to advocate large-scale public infrastructure investment as a way of advancing public good. You can see evidence of that in most nations. Nation-building initiatives tend to be popular and also are less sensitive to the usual attacks that are made on public spending when income support and other welfare-type programs are debated. Capital worked out long ago that public spending on infrastructure provided untold benefits by way of profits and influence. In the neoliberal era, the bias towards ‘competitive tendering’ and public-private partnerships has meant that private profit tends to dictate where and what public infrastructure is built. The problem is that large-scale projects tend to become objects of capture for the top-end-of-town. Research shows that these ‘megaprojects’ typically deliver massive cost overruns and significantly lower benefits than are first estimated when decisions are being made about what large projects to fund. Further, evidence suggests that this is due to corrupt and incompetent behaviour by private project managers (representing their companies) and empire-building public officials. They lie about the costs and benefits so as to distort the decision-making processes in their favour. Any progressive government thus must be mindful of these tendencies and behaviours. A progressive policy agenda needs to be more than just outlining a whole lot of nice sounding public infrastructure projects that the government will pursue. The whole machinery of public procurement that has emerged in this neoliberal era needs to be abandoned and replaced with decision-making processes and rules that privilege the advancement of public well-being over profit.Bill Mitchell – billy blog
'Government' in the UK...and elsewhere...is a function of a corrupt relationship between politicians and vested interests from the corporate sector and foreign lobbyists. Mark GB highlights the depths of the systemic problem.
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You won’t find accountability on an organisational chart; because it is a function of character: it’s not about how ‘smart’ you are, it cannot be ‘bought’, and you’ve either led a life that has nourished it…or you haven’t.
Clearly, this is not just a business thing – people from all walks of life will know exactly what I’m talking about…or they won’t. It’s the same if you’re an academic, a journalist, a craftsman, a manual worker, or if you’ve raised a family. It’s human:
If you believe that conducting yourself with integrity is MORE important than ‘winning’ or ‘getting away with it’…if you believe that ‘means justify ends’ rather than ‘ends justify means’…if you can be counted upon to be true to your word…if you will hold up your hands unprompted when you’ve screwed up…then you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I can say without any doubt in my mind that the British Government is bereft of this quality.
I can say with equal certainty that the leadership of many large corporations in this country, and around the world, are also a few sandwiches short of a joyful picnic in this department. I know this because I have worked closely with more than a few, and observed many others. The good ones are outnumbered....Renegade, Inc.
The problem arises when former officials use their clearances as bona fides to enhance their marketability for non-clearance jobs in the media or corporate world, particularly when those individuals are criticizing current government policies and behaving in a partisan fashion regarding specific candidates for office. Donald Trump was especially assailed by former officials John Brennan, James Clapper, Michael Hayden and Michael Morell before the 2016 election, all of whom continue to attack him currently, most particularly for the recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. During the 2016 campaign, Morell, who openly supported Hillary Clinton and is the designated intelligence on-air contributor for CBS news, deliberately linked the fact that he was ex-CIA Acting Director to his assertion that Trump was somehow an “unwitting agent of the Russian Federation” to establish his credibility. That type of activity should be considered abusive and an exploitation of one’s former office.
Kissinger was talking with Edward Luce of the Financial Times about the current US President: “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time, to mark the end of an era, and to force it to give up its old pretences”. Later in the conversation, he qualifies this assessment by adding, however: “It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.”
Luce, as might be expected, imputes Trump’s meeting with President Putin to signal a possible putative nadir in American diplomacy, and a betrayal of US intelligence claims of Russian disruption of the 2016 elections – even citing the N.Y. Daily News headline that what Trump uttered there, constituted “Open Treason”.
But Kissinger, who briefs both Trump and Putin, evidently refuses to be drawn - to take Luce’s bait. Rather, he says, matter-of-factly, that the Trump summit had to happen: “It was a meeting that had to take place. I have advocated it for several years. It has been submerged by American domestic issues. It is certainly a missed opportunity. But I think one has to come back to something.”
Why was the meeting so crucial? And what is ‘that something’, to which we must “come back”? Luce dwells on Kissinger’s opaqueness of messaging and complains that it is hard to discern the direction of his economical discourse. But in fact, Kissinger lays it all out clearly, and in plain view – and that to which he is leading – is indeed, crucially important.…
