Category: MK

Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.

– Thomas Jefferson’s Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

Many people voted for Donald Trump based on his pledge of “America First.” The idea behind this partly relates to the very legitimate concern that the U.S. Empire and its military-industrial-contractor benefactors have been squandering an enormous amount of treasure and tax money on foreign adventurism, funds which could be of much greater use at home helping struggling Americans, fixing our broken economy and infrastructure. I’m starting to become increasingly concerned that rather than winding down America’s foreign adventures, Trump and his team are preparing to expand them.

The always excellent Robert Parry at Consortium News got me thinking about this with his recent post. Here are a few excerpts:

The Kagan family, America’s neoconservative aristocracy, has reemerged having recovered from the letdown over not gaining its expected influence from the election of Hillary Clinton and from its loss of official power at the start of the Trump presidency.

Back pontificating on prominent op-ed pages, the Family Kagan now is pushing for an expanded U.S. military invasion of Syria and baiting Republicans for not joining more enthusiastically in the anti-Russian witch hunt over Moscow’s alleged help in electing Donald Trump.

In a Washington Post op-ed on March 7, Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a key architect of the Iraq War, jabbed at Republicans for serving as “Russia’s accomplices after the fact” by not investigating more aggressively.

Then, Frederick Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, and his wife, Kimberly Kagan, president of her own think tank, Institute for the Study of War, touted the idea of a bigger U.S. invasion of Syria in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on March 15.

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On the positive front, America is really good at dropping bombs on foreigners.

MarketWatch reports:

The American dream — the idea that anyone can own their own home and do better than the previous generation with the right amount of hard work — has been fading for years, with rising house prices and stagnant wages. Now, people who want to achieve it may be better off seeking it in Canada, the U.K. or Denmark according to a new study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

At least the Fed is admitting its total failure.

The study, authored by Raj Chetty, professor of economics at Stanford University, defined the concept as the ability for children born in the bottom fifth of income distribution to reach the top fifth. In the U.S. the likelihood of that is 7.5%, whereas in Canada children born in that group are twice as likely to rise to the top — at 13.5%. In the U.K. the likelihood of achieving that move from the bottom fifth to the top fifth is 9% and in Denmark it is 11.7%.

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The evidence is overwhelming and indisputable at this point. Donald Trump is a phony, who has given his administration over to Wall Street crooks even more enthusiastically than his predecessors, and his predecessors were very enthusiastic.

I’ve written about this many times, and I warned throughout the campaign that my biggest fear was that Trump was far too cozy with the finance industry, fake populist statements aside. His latest hire for the number two position at the Treasury Department once again proves the point.

As David Dayen reports in his excellent article at The Intercept, Donald Trump Isn’t Even Pretending to Oppose Goldman Sachs Anymore:

The continuity of Wall Street’s dominant role in American politics — regardless of what party sits in power or how reviled the financial industry finds itself across the country — was perhaps never more evident than when Jake Siewert, now a Goldman Sachs spokesperson, on Tuesday praised the selection of Jim Donovan, a Goldman Sachs managing director, for the No. 2 position in the Treasury Department under Steve Mnuchin, himself a former Goldman Sachs partner.

America will never recover until this is dealt with, and Trump has made it perfectly clear he will not deal with it.

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Crazy John McCain is at it again. Not to be outdone by his conspiracy obsessed neoliberal Democratic friends, the increasingly unhinged Senator from Arizona just accused his colleague Rand Paul of “working for Vladimir Putin.”

The Daily Beast reports:

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Recently dismissed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, is suddenly being celebrated as an aggressive warrior in the fight against Wall Street corruption. Really? You could’ve fooled me. Perhaps I was in a coma when a string of big bank executives were arrested and sent to prison.

No, what actually happened is one of the most powerful attorneys in the nation came up with a mealy-mouthed, cowardly rationale for why he let these financial thieves off the hook.

Crain’s reports:

Bharara was nowhere to be found when it came to charging the top executives whose actions led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG, and who made all manner of misleading statements to cover up how sick their firms were. Goldman Sachs executives sold institutional investors a mortgage-backed security that sales staffers described as “one shitty deal.” Where was Bharara when it mattered most?

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On March 3rd, at approximately 9pm, hackers stole my phone number. I didn’t become aware of this until a little more than 24 hours later, but hacking attempts on my other accounts began right away. Prior to this nightmarish experience, I had never heard of this happening to anyone else; however, in the days that followed I quickly became aware of its rapidly growing popularity and frightening ease of execution. Pulling off this attack requires virtually no technical skills, rather it relies entirely on social engineering, persistence, and an incompetent telecom employee. If this can happen to me, it can happen to virtually anybody.

The 48 hour period beginning at around 5am on March 4th was one of the most trying, confusing and frightening of my life. At that point, my wife and I had been up pretty much all night due to our son being in the midst of a horrible sleep regression. In fact, his crying was so hysterical I ended up calling our pediatrician’s office to ensure he wasn’t suffering from something more serious. I was going on two hours of sleep, the sun was about to rise and I was dealing with an inconsolable child. I thought things couldn’t get much worse. Boy was I wrong.

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New Interview: I have a little bonus this week, an interview entirely about Bitcoin with Adam Meister. Adam has a daily show covering the latest in the cryptocurrency world, and it was a very fun and different experience chatting with him.

Enjoy: Bitcoin talk with Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg- 3-8-2017

Must Reads

The Deep State and the Dark Arts (Excellent article which gets better toward the end, CounterPunch)

“Civil War” Breaks Out At White House Over Trade… And Goldman Is Winning (I always warned Trump was in bed with Wall Street, Zerohedge)

Leading Putin Critic Warns of Xenophobic Conspiracy Theories Drowning U.S. Discourse and Helping Trump (Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept)

Why the Russia Story Is a Minefield for Democrats and the Media (Rolling Stone)

Who is Judge Gorsuch? (Many good questions posed, Just Security)

Former NSA Whistleblower: “Trump Is Absolutely Right, Everything Was Being Monitored” (Zerohedge)

How Millions of Kids are Being Shaped by Know-It-All Voice Assistants (The Washington Post)

Marijuana Could Hold the Key to Treating Alzheimer’s but Drug Laws Stand in the Way, Say Scientists (The Independent)

U.S. Politics

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This week’s episode of “Empire Gone Wild” features our freshly inaugurated dear leader, Donald Trump, who appears determined to enthusiastically continue the Obama administration’s policy of recklessly arming Saudi war criminals.

First, here’s a little background from The Washington Post:

The State Department has approved a resumption of weapons sales that critics have linked to Saudi Arabia’s bombing of civilians in Yemen, a potential sign of reinvigorated U.S. support for the kingdom’s involvement in its neighbor’s ongoing civil war.

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I’m really grateful Angus Deaton was willing to come out and state the obvious. That is, the fact this economy isn’t what we’ve been told. In reality, it’s largely a rent-seeking based system, in which a meaningful percentage of the people who earn the most money are not just not adding value to society, they’re in fact parasites feeding off the general public.

Market Watch reports:

Income inequality is not killing capitalism in the United States, but rent-seekers like the banking and the health-care sectors just might, said Nobel-winning economist Angus Deaton on Monday.

If an entrepreneur invents something on the order of another Facebook, Deaton said he has no problem with that person becoming wealthy.

“What is not OK is for rent-seekers to get rich,” Deaton said in a luncheon speech to the National Association for Business Economics.

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The following video is making the rounds…

As everyone knows, Alexa is a product of Amazon, and Amazon is most certainly connected to the CIA.

As was detailed in an Atlantic article published in 2014:

The intelligence community is about to get the equivalent of an adrenaline shot to the chest. This summer, a $600 million computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services for the Central Intelligence Agency over the past year will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community. If the technology plays out as officials envision, it will usher in a new era of cooperation and coordination, allowing agencies to share information and services much more easily and avoid the kind of intelligence gaps that preceded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

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