Wordt Hillary Clinton de volgende president, dan moet ze er rekening mee houden dat ‘het machtigste land ter wereld’ zich in een volstrekt nieuwe rol bevindt. Amerika is veranderd en hetzelfde geldt voor de wereld. Dat zullen de Amerikanen moeten beseffen, net als de bondgenoten. Niet de rest van de wereld maar het Westen zal zich moeten aanpassen, nog altijd bij voorkeur onder Amerikaanse leiding, als het een Democraat is.
Henk Hofland. Hillary’s nieuwe wereld. 15 april 2015
Inmiddels plaatst Hofland in De Groene Amsterdammer 'het machtigste land ter wereld' tussen aanhalingstekens om aan te geven dat anderen dit zeggen en hij deze mening op zijn minst betwijfelt. Dit maakt zijn bewering nog raadselachtiger dat de westerse aanpassing 'bij voorkeur onder Amerikaanse leiding,' moet gebeuren, dat wil zeggen: in 'Hillary's nieuwe wereld.' Het feit dat de rijken haar verkiezingscampagne van tenminste één miljard dollar betalen, zal voorkomen dat het massale geweld van de VS om grondstoffen en markten, gestopt zal worden. De enige die zullen profiteren van 'Hillary's' beleid, of van wie dan ook die president wordt, zullen wederom de banken en het militair-industrieel complex zijn. Met het oog daarop zijn de westerse politici en hun woordvoerders als H.J.A. Hofland nu al druk doende de nieuwe 'vijanden' aan te wijzen, te weten: de Russische Federatie, China, en andere mogendheden die hun eigen belangen willen dienen. Vandaar Hoflands 'voorkeur' om de westerse aanpassing te laten regisseren door zijn 'Hillary,' die hij nu al als 'de ideale kandidaat' aan zijn publiek presenteert. De 'beste journalist van de twintigste eeuw' verzwijgt angstvallig dat het beleid van president Obama, (gekozen op zijn belofte 'change we can believe in'), naadloos aansluit op de eisen van de corrupte bankwereld. Immers, ook in Washington en op Wall Street geldt: voor wat hoort wat:
Under the Obama Administration, in 2009 alone, Goldman Sachs took more than $20 billion in taxpayer cash through bailouts, payments and backstops; and then turned around and paid out $16.2 B as 2009 bonuses, plus an additional $5 B more in bonuses in 2010 [Without Obama Administration’s 'help' Goldman’s bonuses would have been zip, zero, zilch.]
Did you know corporations, like Goldman Sachs, can buy “help elect” a majority of Congress by donating a mere $1.6 B in bribes “campaign donations”? That’s less than 10% of the $20 B 'bailout' Goldman Sachs received. Easily affordable, with a 10x return on investment.
Multi-Billion dollar give-aways bailouts don’t just happen by themselves . . .
Goldman Sachs is lovin’ it.
En:
Obama Packs Debt Commission with Social Security Looters
Obama has filled his new 'debt commission' with Wall Street insiders determined to gut Social Security.
March 28, 2010
A decade of wars, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the fallout from Wall Street's housing bubble have almost tripled U.S. public debt since 2001, from $5 trillion to $14 trillion. Big, scary numbers like this, along with carefully timed downgrade warnings from Wall Street's obedient rating agencies and continuing worries about the financial collapse of Greece, Portugal and other nations have changed the political climate in Washington, breathing new life into decades-old schemes to slash Social Security and Medicare entitlements.
En:
Goldman's White House connections raise eyebrows
BY GREG GORDON
McClatchy Newspapers
April 21, 2010
WASHINGTON — While Goldman Sachs' lawyers negotiated with the Securities and Exchange Commission over potentially explosive civil fraud charges, Goldman's chief executive visited the White House at least four times.
White House logs show that Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein traveled to Washington for at least two events with President Barack Obama, whose 2008 presidential campaign received $994,795 in donations from Goldman's employees and their relatives. He also met twice with Obama's top economic adviser, Larry Summers.
No evidence has surfaced to suggest that Blankfein or any other Goldman executive raised the SEC case with the president or his aides. SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro said in a statement Wednesday that the SEC doesn't coordinate enforcement actions with the White House or other political bodies.
Meanwhile, however, Goldman is retaining former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig as a member of its legal team. In addition, when he worked as an investment banker in Chicago a decade ago, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel advised one client who also retained Goldman as an adviser on the same $8.2 billion deal.
Goldman's connections to the White House and the Obama administration are raising eyebrows at a time when Washington and Wall Street are dueling over how to overhaul regulation of the financial world.
Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political scientist, said that 'almost everything that the White House has done has been haunted by the personnel and the money of Goldman… as well as the suspicion that the White House, particularly early on, was pulling its punches out of deference to Goldman and its war chest.'
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Dit is slechts een willekeurige greep uit de berichtgeving van kritische Amerikaanse journalisten of van de mainstream-pers die onmogelijk de openbare feiten kon negeren. Desondanks doet Hofland het nog steeds voorkomen alsof Amerikaanse politici, inclusief de Amerikaanse president, autonoom van hun geldschieters opereren. De vraag hoe deze mainstream-houding te verklaren is, werd eens door de Amerikaanse geleerde Noam Chomsky ter sprake gebracht in een interview van de BBC-journalist Andrew Marr. Chomsky zei:
'There's a filtering system that starts in kindergarten and goes all the way through and -- it doensn't work a hundred per cent, but it's pretty effective -- it selects for obedience and subordination.'
Marr: 'So, stroppy people (dwarsliggers. svh) won't make it to positions of influence.'
Chomsky: 'There'll be "behavior problems" or... if you read applications to a graduate school, you see that people will tell you "he doesn't get along too well with his colleagues" -- you know how to interpret those things.'
Marr: 'How can you know that I'm self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are...'
Chomsky: 'I don't say you're self-censoring - I'm sure you believe everything you're saying; but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting.'
Hetzelfde geldt voor H.J.A. Hofland. Door een combinatie van intellectuele corruptie en onwetendheid gelooft hij werkelijk in zijn eigen propaganda. Hier is sprake van wat George Orwell in de roman 1984 kortweg ‘doublethink’ noemt, de kwaal waaraan het merendeel van de Nederlandse mainstream-pers lijdt. Orwell zet het verschijnsel als volgt uiteen:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself –- that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.
The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies –- all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
Dit is exact wat opiniemaker Hofland en zijn 'politiek-literaire elite' jaar in jaar uit doen. Degene die de moeite neemt zijn teksten naast elkaar te leggen ontdekt al snel dat hij aan 'doublethink' lijdt door voortdurend 'deliberate lies' te verspreiden, 'while genuinely believing in them,' en 'to forget any fact that has become inconvenient.' De drijfveer van de patiënt is niet het vertellen van de waarheid, maar de macht. Hij wil behagen om bewonderd te worden, hij wil aandacht, status en geld. Krijgt hij die dan reageert hij voortaan reflexmatig. Het gevolg is dat de éminence grise van de polderpers zichzelf permanent kan tegenspreken, zonder te hoeven vrezen daarvoor bekritiseerd te worden. Hij beseft niet dat, zoals Hans Magnus Enzensberger benadrukte,
het lot niet, zoals Napoleon nog dacht, door de politiek, maar door de economie [wordt] bepaald. Die presenteert zichzelf als een hogere macht die door niets wordt tegengehouden, en zeker niet door de eeuwenoude tradities, mentaliteiten en constituties van de Europese landen.
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein with Hillary Clinton at an event for the Clinton Global Initiative. (Photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
Hofland denkt dat zijn 'Hillary' als ze president wordt in staat zal zijn haar geldschieters te dwingen hun agressieve, neoliberale economie aan te passen aan de verlangens van de rest van de wereld. Hij lijkt ook niets te begrijpen van de consequenties van de economische omslag die in de jaren tachtig begon en die professor Jan Nederveen Pieterse in zijn in 2008 verschenen boek Is There Hope For Uncle Sam? als volgt uiteenzet:
in international development policies the Keynesian consensus that had prevailed made way for the Washington Consensus and IMF and World Bank policies prompting the same policy package of deregulation, liberalization, and privatization that had become dominant in the Anglo-American economies, along with export-oriented growth… that profound shifts in American and British politics and culture are reducible to the needs of capitalist reorganization.
Na de val van de Sovjet-Unie hoefde de kapitalistische macht geen tegenmacht meer te vrezen en kreeg zij vrij spel in het 'democratische' Westen, met als gevolg dat '[g]overnment regulation was cut back for many reasons — undoing the New Deal was the aim of the conservative South all along.' Het interessante en scherpzinnige van de analyse van Nederveen Pieterse is de complexiteit van het probleem, omdat het hier allereerst een cultureel fenomeen betreft. Hij laat zien dat
the main reasons were cultural and political before they were economic. It was a cultural backlash against the 1960s (protest, sex, drugs, and rock and roll) and a political backlash against pro-government Democrats (undoing the New Deal).
In 1995 Norman Podhoretz, founder of Commentary magazine and godfather of the neoconservative movement, looked back:
'If anti-communism was the ruling passion of the neoconservatives in foreign affairs, opposition to the counterculture of the 1960s was their ruling passion at home. Indeed, I suspect that revulsion against the counterculture accounted for more concerts to neoconservatism than any other single factor.
Met talloze voorbeelden bewijst de hoogleraar Global Studies and Sociology at the University of California dat telkens weer 'the same subtext emerges: prejudice and tandem revulsion of the counterculture and the welfare state.' Zo beschouwden
[p]olitical scientists like Samuel Huntington the civil rights, students, and anti-war movements of the 1960s as 'excesses of democracy.'
Nog meer dan in Europa zag de Amerikaanse elite de jaren zestig als een frontale aanval op de meest heilige principes van het imperium. Sneller dan in het Avondland spreekt de intelligentsia in de VS, als beschermers van de elite, van 'democratische uitwassen.' Huntington raakte een gevoelige snaar. Om dit goed te kunnen aanvoelen, dient de lezer te weten dat de VS niet is gesticht als een ware 'democratie,' maar als een soevereine 'republiek,' onafhankelijk van de Britse koning die wel steeds meer belasting hief, maar de kolonisten geen stemrecht gaf. 'No taxation without representation,' was voor de rijke handelselite en de speculerende grootgrondbezitters in de aanloop naar de onafhankelijkheidsoorlog één van de eerste eisen. Zich realiserend over onmetelijke rijkdommen te beschikken, wilde zij niet langer als melkkoe functioneren om de Britse oorlogen met Frankrijk te financieren. Het geld kon beter in haar eigen zak verdwijnen. Onder de 'Founding Fathers' van de VS
were some of the wealthiest property owners in the United States, slave holders, well-known lawyers and merchants. James Madison, credited as being the 'father' of the Constitution, wrote in The Federalist Papers #10: 'Democracies have ever been… incompatible with… the rights of property…[because it would threaten] the unequal distribution of property.' The founders were concerned with 'the excess of democracy' as one delegate to the convention said. The new Constitution put property rights ahead of human rights.
The 'founders' proposed a new system of national power that discouraged the 'American demos,' removed people from the councils of government and reduced the power of states. The Constitution favored elite rule and protection of property. It established a republic in which courts protected minority rights and property rights from majority sentiment, and government power was limited.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/14489-lifting-the-veil-of-mirage-democracy-in-the-united-states
Kortom, de democratiseringsgolf van de jaren zestig -- vooral een middenklasse fenomeen, -- werd door de Amerikaanse elite gezien als een ernstige bedreiging van de status quo die hen zo rijk en dus machtig had gemaakt. Professor Nederveen Pieterse beklemtoont dat:
The Reagan reforms, which are now called neoliberalism, thus originated not in economic designs but primarily in cultural sentiments and political schemes that sought to use market forces — unleashing market forces was a way of disciplining society. If the problem is excess of democracy and government is democratic, then trimming government is a easy of bringing democracy back under control. Thus the general thrust was to instill social discipline by cutting social welfare and unleashing the 'free market' (also known as cooperate rule).
In tegenstelling tot Henk Hoflands simplistische voorstelling van zaken (in het fotoboek Platter & Dikker (2011), waarbij volgens hem het ‘consumentisme,’ een ‘ideologie’ is die ‘iets meer dan een halve eeuw geleden spontaan is ontkiemd,’ waardoor 'een nieuwe mens tot ontwikkeling' is gekomen, die ‘iedereen [zal] laten weten dat hij hier op aarde is, een god die als zodanig erkend wil worden' en een combinatie is van ‘hufterigheid, agressie, consumentisme en exhibitionisme,’ toont professor Nederveen Pieterse aan dat het consumentisme geenszins 'spontaan is ontkiemd,' maar het logische gevolg is van een economisch proces:
As capitalism matures to a mass consumption stage, media and marketing promote consumerist, hedonistic values that are fundamentally different from the work ethic that is the underpinning of capitalism's production stage, the ethic of deferred gratification and savings and investment rather than consumption. Thus the irony is that the permissiveness that conservatives blamed on parents and liberal elites was in part built into the dynamics of American capitalism. The second irony is that the turn to authoritarianism was implemented in the name of 'freedom' and corporate rule was established in the name of the 'free market,' recycling the antis-communist rhetoric of the Free World. The third irony is that deregulation set in motion a different kind of permissiveness. Commenting on the widening income inequality, Paul Krugman faults 'permissive capitalism': 'Since 1980 the U.S. political scene had been dominated by a conservative movement firmly committed to the view that what's good for the rich is good for America.' In effect, the 'liberal elite' and those who sought to use government to help the poor were pushed aside for an elite that was business-friendly (lobbyists, lawyers), upwardly mobile (yuppies), invested in Wall Street and the defense industries, and innovative (financial wizards, dot com entrepreneurs)… Thus began the great corporate give-away and the return to the gilded age — the shift from social welfare to corporate welfare, the shift from the welfare society to the warfare society, the shift from entrepreneurial capitalism to crony capitalism.
Het is juist deze revolutionaire omslag die de afgelopen drie decennia de belangrijkste 'democratische' verworvenheden heeft vernietigd, waaraan Henk Hofland zijn intellectuele steun verleent door de werkelijkheid te verzwijgen, dan wel op haar kop te draaien, zoals ik al 52 dagen lang probeer duidelijk te maken aan de hand van zijn uitspraken in De Groene Amsterdammer. En wanneer hij de onderkaste ‘hebzucht,’ verwijt, benevens ‘hufterigheid, agressie,' en 'exhibitionisme,’ dan kan ik als onafhankelijke waarnemer alleen maar concluderen dat Hofland al die jaren als spreekbuis van de neoliberale macht medeverantwoordelijk is geweest voor deze ontwikkeling, en dat zijn 'hufterigheid,' en 'agressie,' en zijn niet aflatende steun aan het massale westerse geweld in het Midden-Oosten en de Maghreb en nu weer in Oekraïne veel meer doden, gewonden en verminkten hebben veroorzaakt dan de paar bloedneuzen en blauwe ogen, die het tuig op de Nederlandse straten ooit zal kunnen toebrengen. Wat dat betreft mag Hofland met gepaste trots zich de titel aanmeten van de opperhufter van de polderpers.
Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, shakes hands with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during the International Women of Courage Awards ceremony at the State Department in Washington on March 8, 2011. UPI/Roger L. Wollenberg.
Hoewel Henk Hofland 'Hillary' tot 'ideale kandidaat' betitelt, is belangrijk te weten dat
the first president to begin 'reforming' Social Security was Bill Clinton, who targeted the disabled.
En dat
President Clinton was strongly considering the partial privatization of Social Security
Tegelijkertijd verklaarde president Bill Clinton publiekelijk dat 'the Glass–Steagall law is no longer appropriate,' waardoor 'securities firms and investment banks' onbeperkt konden speculeren met het geld van hun klanten en tenslotte met niet bestaand geld, hetgeen in 2008 onvermijdelijk leidde tot de kredietcrisis, waarmee onder andere Lloyd Blankfein van Goldman Sachs, die Hillary Clinton financieel steunt, miljarden wist binnen te slepen. Ons kent ons. Voor wat hoort wat. Dat geldt zeker voor een 'ideale kandidaat' voor het Amerikaanse presidentschap.
Goldman Sachs Group Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein (C) leaves the White House after a meeting with President Barack Obama
The Economic Devastation Fueling The Anger In Baltimore
BY BRYCE COVERT POSTED ON
"The Economic Devastation Fueling The Anger In Baltimore"
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A demonstrator at Monday night’s protests after the death of Freddie Gray
CREDIT: AP/PATRICK SEMANSKY
Last night, peaceful protests after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man killed in police custody, turned into more violent unrest when protesters were met with phalanxes of police.
The protesters’ anger was fueled, at least in large part, by the Baltimore police department’s long history of ugly violence against the city’s residents and a pattern of officers facing few, if any, repercussions. But the protests also take place in the context of a city that has been ravaged economically, most recently by the foreclosure crisis and predatory lending.
Freddie Gray grew up in a neighborhood particularly plagued by the problems that have long faced the city of Baltimore. In Sandtown-Winchester, more than half of the people between the ages of 16 and 64 are out of work and the unemployment rate is doublethat for the city at one in five. Median income is just $24,000, below the poverty line for a family of four, and nearly a third of families live in poverty. Meanwhile, somewhere between a quarter to a third of the buildings are vacant, compared to 5 percent in the city as a whole.
Each of these conditions — high unemployment, low incomes, and widespread foreclosure — has a long history in the city of Baltimore. It was once a thriving economy built on the steel industry. Bethlehem Steel set up shop in the early 1900s with the Sparrow Point mill, and the industry boomed during World War II, employing 35,000 workers at its peak in 1959, according to a 2004 report from the 1199E-DC union. But American manufacturing began its precipitous decline in the 1970s, and Sparrows Point laid off 3,000 workers in 1971, then another 7,000 in 1975. Just 8,000 people were employed at the mill by the 1980s. Overall, the city lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs between 1950 and 1995.
The city never really recovered from that loss and the effects can still be seen today. The country’s unemployment rate stood at 5.8 percent in February, down from 7 percent a year earlier, and the rate for the greater Baltimore area was the same. Yet in the city itself, the rate was 8.4 percent, just one percentage point lower than the 8.9 percent rate it had experienced a year earlier.
Those rates also mask huge racial differences. As of 2012, just 5.6 percent of white people living in the state of Maryland were out of work and looking for a job; the unemployment rate was in the double digits for the state’s black residents. In the city of Baltimore itself, the share of employed black men between the ages of 16 and 64 dropped more than 15 percent from about three-quarters in 1970 to just 57.5 percent by 2010. Yet more than three-quarters of white men of in the city were employed by 2010. That racial gap has grown steadily since the 1970s, from a 10 percentage point difference in how many men had work to a 20 percentage point one.
As with other cities that have experienced unrest, like Ferguson, economic decline was paired with white flight. The city’s black population nearly doubled between 1950 and 1970 but whites began moving away: Almost a third of the city’s population left the city between 1950 and 2000. The city’s population peaked at 949,708 in 1950 but began dropping quickly after 1970, falling 118,984, or 13 percent, between 1970 and 1980.
Aiding that flight were real estate agents who would play up racial fears and worries about falling property values, getting white residents near expanding black neighborhoods to sell their houses and then turning around and selling them to black families at a much higher price. A fair housing coalition discovered in 1969 that the Morris Goldeker Company, a developer, had bought homes for an average of $7,320 and sold them for $12,387 to black families, a 69 percent markup. Today, more than half of black men between the ages of 16 and 64 in the Baltimore area live in the city; just 11.5 percent of white men do. Black people make up less than a third of the state’s population but two-thirds of Baltimore residents.
Housing discrimination came in another form just before the financial crisis: predatory lenders. In 2012, a former loan officer with Wells Fargo testified that she and the other officers targeted majority black communities in Baltimore and nearby areas, forging relationships with churches and community groups. They pushed homeowners with perfect credit into loans that had higher interest rates than they should have been paying and also gave mortgages to people with low incomes who couldn’t afford them without any income paperwork or down payments. Bank employees called their clients “mud people” and called the subprime mortgages “ghetto loans.” The Department of Justice eventually found out that 4,500 homeowners in Baltimore and Washington, DC had been affected by these practices.
When the housing market crashed, many of these borrowers with adjustable rates or mortgages they simply couldn’t afford ended up facing foreclosure. Maryland foreclosures surged 280 percent between the end of 2012 and 2013, likely delayed some years by the state’s requirement that foreclosed homes be processed through the judicial system. More than half of Baltimore properties subject to foreclosure on a Wells Fargo loan between 2005 and 2008 are vacant, 71 percent of them in predominantly black neighborhoods. Baltimore still had the ninth-largest number of foreclosures in the country last year at 5,200.
The foreclosure crisis devastated black wealth across the country. Today, black families in the area have much less money than white ones. While white income fell 6.5 percent between 1999 and 2013, from $72,860 to $68,112, black income started lower — at $62,639 — and fell faster, 7.2 percent. Income is also lower in Baltimore — about $39,000 — than in the surrounding county, which makes about $62,400 on average. The city also grapples with an incredibly high poverty rate — 24 percent of households live below the official poverty line.
TUESDAY, APR 28, 2015 10:00 AM CEST
Robert Reich: Americans are utterly powerless
The former secretary of labor examines how we let our biggest corporations get away with whatever they please
Robert Reich
This originally appeared on Robert Reich's blog.
A security guard recently told me he didn’t know how much he’d be earning from week to week because his firm kept changing his schedule and his pay. “They just don’t care,” he said.
A traveler I met in the Dallas Fort-Worth Airport last week said she’d been there eight hours but the airline responsible for her trip wouldn’t help her find another flight leaving that evening. “They don’t give a hoot,” she said.
Someone I met in North Carolina a few weeks ago told me he had stopped voting because elected officials don’t respond to what average people like him think or want. “They don’t listen,” he said.
What connects these dots? As I travel around America, I’m struck by how utterly powerless most people feel.
The companies we work for, the businesses we buy from, and the political system we participate in all seem to have grown less accountable. I hear it over and over: They don’t care; our voices don’t count.
A large part of the reason is we have fewer choices than we used to have. In almost every area of our lives, it’s now take it or leave it.
Companies are treating workers as disposable cogs because most working people have no choice. They need work and must take what they can get.
Although jobs are coming back from the depths of the Great Recession, the portion of the labor force actually working remains lower than it’s been in over thirty years – before vast numbers of middle-class wives and mothers entered paid work.
Which is why corporations can get away with firing workers without warning, replacing full-time jobs with part-time and contract work, and cutting wages. Most working people have no alternative.
Consumers, meanwhile, are feeling mistreated and taken for granted because they, too, have less choice.
U.S. airlines, for example, have consolidated into a handful of giant carriers that divide up routes and collude on fares. In 2005 the U.S. had nine major airlines. Now we have just four.
It’s much the same across the economy. Eighty percent of Americans are served by just one Internet Service Provider – usually Comcast, AT&T, or Time-Warner.
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