Και επι του θεματος, μην ξεχνιομαστε με το καρτουν και τους αμπαλους που εθελοτυφλουν για το ποιος ειναι επειδη βρηκαν φασισταριο να υποστηριξουν. Ουτε να ξεχναμε ενα μικρο ποσοστο των ψεμματων του καρτουν που αραδιασα παραπανω και πηγε ασχολιαστο.
Ας δουμε τωρα μερικες αποδειξεις για τα ψεμματα της αντισυστημικοτητας και ανεξαρτησιας απο τραπεζιτες, Wall Street, funds, πολυεθνικες, συμφεροντα που πουλαει το καρτουν:
[size=20pt]1. Steven Mnuchin[/size]
Let’s start with Steven Mnuchin, now national finance chairman, chief fundraiser for a man who used to claim his campaign was totally self-financed and that he would not need money from outsiders.
Mnuchin is a banker and chief executive of the Dune Capital Management hedge fund – remember, Trump has lashed out at hedge funds, calling them “guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”
He’s also a former Goldman Sachs employee and Trump has gone after Goldman, too, including Hillary Clinton’s association with it.
Among his other accomplishments, The Wall Street Journal reported, with its characteristic wonder at such financial legerdemain, “Mr. Mnuchin turned one of the biggest bank failures ever, IndyMac Bank, into a very lucrative investment for himself and a consortium that included some of the billboard names on Wall Street, including [George] Soros, hedge-fund manager John Paulson, and J. Christopher Flowers.
“IndyMac Bank, based in Pasadena, Calif., collapsed in the summer of 2008 as customers grew concerned about its souring mortgages and withdrew deposits. It was the third-largest bank failure in U.S. history at the time. The group bought IndyMac from the government for about $1.5 billion in early 2009 and eventually sold it to a larger bank for a more than $3 billion gain.”
But at The Nation magazine, Peter Dreier says there’s more to the story: “The FDIC was so desperate to unload IndyMac that Mnuchin and his colleagues were able to obtain, as part of the purchase deal, a so-called ‘shared loss’ agreement from the FDIC which reimbursed these billionaires for much of their costs for foreclosing on people unlucky enough to have mortgages from IndyMac.
“Within a year, the group that the Los Angeles Times called a ‘billionaires’ club of private financiers’ had paid themselves dividends of $1.57 billion. In other words, the FDIC took much of the risk by subsidizing the bank’s troubled assets, while Mnuchin and his colleagues pocketed the profits.”
Dreier notes, “Both Trump and Mnuchin have run businesses accused of widespread racial discrimination, and they both represent the excessive wealth and greed of the billionaire developer and banker class.”
[size=20pt]2. Paul Manafort[/size]
But Mnuchin’s deeds pale compared to Trump’s new campaign chairman and chief strategist Paul Manafort, a longtime veteran of Republican politics, and a poobah of the lobbying industry that has helped make Washington the swell, dysfunctional place it is. Roger Stone was one of his partners in the lobby biz (and it was Roy Cohn who introduced Manafort to Trump, too).
So was the late, infamous Lee Atwater, the brutal, take-no-prisoners GOP strategist who gave the world the Willie Horton ads attacking Michael Dukakis and slickly dragged the smear and whispering campaign to new lows. (He repented on his deathbed.)
Their company, as described by Franklin Foer at Slate, was “a new style of firm, what K Street would come to call a double-breasted operation. One wing of the shop managed campaigns, electing a generation of Republicans, from Phil Gramm to Arlen Spector. The other wing lobbied the officials they helped to victory on behalf of its corporate clients. Over the course of their early years, they amassed a raft of blue-chip benefactors, including Salomon Brothers and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.” And Donald Trump.
Manafort and his cronies got into trouble during the Reagan years, when, as Foer explains, the firm “hired alumni of the Department of Housing and Urban Development then used those connections to win $43 million in ‘moderate rehabilitation funds’ for a renovation project in Upper Deerfield, New Jersey. Local officials had no interest in the grants, as they considered the shamble of cinder blocks long past the point of repair. The money flowed from HUD regardless, and developers paid Manafort’s firm a $326,000 fee for its handiwork. He later bought a 20 percent share in the project. Two years later, rents doubled without any sign of improvement.
“Conditions remained, in [Washington Post columnist] Mary McGrory’s words, ‘strictly Third World.’ It was such an outrageous scam that congressmen flocked to make a spectacle of it. Manafort calmly took his flaying. ‘You might call it influence-peddling. I call it lobbying,’ he explained in one hearing. ‘That’s a definitional debate.’” You know, potato, potahto…
The scandal barely left a scratch and Manafort’s ambition soon stretched far beyond America’s shores. Steven Rosenfeld at AlterNet notes a new report from the American Bridge 21st Century PAC, funded by Democratic donors and founded by David Brock of Media Matters. It states that Manafort “was responsible for representing some of the world’s most unsavory clients on behalf of what the press called the ‘Torturers’ Lobby.’”
Among those he billed were Lebanese-born arms dealer Abdul Rahman El-Assir, Zaire’s dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, Nigeria’s Sani Abacha, Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi, Somalia’s Said Barre, and Angolan guerilla leader Jonas Savimbi.
“Savimbi and his UNITA army engaged in a decades-long civil war that terrorized and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians,” the American Bridge report states, “with UNITA engaging in bodily mutilations, sexual slavery, child kidnapping, and witch burning. Savimbi funded his role in the gruesome civil war with proceeds of smuggled diamonds, aid from apartheid South Africa, and aid from the United States.”
Especially cozy was Manafort’s relationship with former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukoyvch. “Some in the West felt Yanukovych could be an ally,” The Washington Post reported, “but ultimately he pursued ties to Russia and fled Ukraine amid violent clashes.”
Manafort was a political and media adviser to Yanukoyvch (as was Bernie Sanders consultant Tad Devine) and set about gilding the image of a man another consultant described as “a kleptocratic goon, a pig who wouldn’t take lipstick.” According to Franklin Foer in Slate, Manafort had the Ukrainian leader rail against NATO to gain political advantage, and when told by US Ambassador William Taylor that what he was doing flew in the face of official American policy “bluntly announced that he wouldn’t ask Yanukoyvch to dial back the rhetoric. It polled too well.”
τα λινκς των πηγων τα βρισκετε στο πρωτοτυπο: