#just sending narrative signals up the rigging (as it were)

[oldshrewsburyian]

My defensive feelings concerning Anne are well roused, now. She’s constantly adapting her conversation to the priorities of others, and being taken where she doesn’t want to go. She bears up well, and is tolerably cheerful -- indeed, we’ve seen an improvement in her spirits since the start of the book -- but she deserves better. Before Lady Russell takes her off to Bath, we get some very interesting conversation about Captain Benwick, both about his literary interests (real) and his romantic interests (supposed.) Sharing in the former, Anne is even ready to declare herself flattered by the supposition of the latter.

Meanwhile, Lady Russell is fascinated by Benwick’s reputations. According to Mary, he is rude and unmannerly and entirely ill-suited for the company of Elliots generally. According to Anne, he is intelligent, thoughtful, and kind; if Lady Russell were to make his acquaintance, “she would soon see no deficiency in his manner.” Lady Russell says herself that she is curious about the person “who can give occasion to such directly opposite notions.” Now, of whom does this remind us? Me, to the tune of Bonny Bobby Shafto: Lady Russell, get a clue / That is what you ought to do / Sailors are good men and true / You can suck a lemon.

[bountyofbeads]

Here's the thing.

Bill Taylor was a *witness* to *something* that made him raise alarms in his texts about a direct quid pro quo involving military aid in exchange for helping Trump rig the election.

We need to know what that is.

It's time Dems try to bring in Ambassador Bill Taylor.

Taylor *twice* texts about a direct quid pro quo between military aid and Ukraine helping Trump rig our election.

There's a *reason* Taylor thought there was a quid pro quo.

Let's hear from him:

Another key angle on the texts, in this piece:

"The texts show that State Department officials, taking direction from the White House, explicitly conditioned a meeting with Trump — which Zelensky badly wanted — on Ukraine helping to rig the next US election on Trump’s behalf."

The Plum Line Opinion

Three awful revelations about Trump in those explosive texts

By Greg Sargent | Published October 4, 2019 10:28 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 4, 2019 12:21 PM ET |

House Democrats have released a batch of texts among State Department officials that tell a big story: President Trump has been leveraging the power of his office to coerce a foreign power into helping him rig the next U.S. election on his own behalf, not just in this or that crazy outburst or tweet, but rather as part of an extensive, long-running plot.

However, there’s even more to this story: The texts clearly contain a trail of clues that, if followed, may lead to a much more direct quid pro quo involving hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money, dangled as a prize to Ukraine in exchange for joining in his effort to corrupt our elections to his own benefit.

Pursuant to that end, Democrats can, and should, solicit the testimony of William B. “Bill” Taylor, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Ukraine. That’s because Taylor alludes twice to a direct quid pro quo, in which hundreds of millions in military aid to Ukraine are directly conditioned on carrying out Trump’s political bidding.

Let’s first state that you don’t need a direct quid pro quo for Trump’s corrupt conduct to be impeachable. We already know from the rough White House transcript of Trump’s call that he pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to “investigate” potential political opponent Joe Biden, based on an entirely fabricated narrative, and to substantiate a fringe conspiracy theory undercutting the fact of Russian interference in our election on his behalf.

What we now know, thanks to the full batch of texts, is much worse. Here are three key revelations:

First, the texts show that State Department officials, taking direction from the White House, explicitly conditioned a meeting with Trump — which Zelensky badly wanted — on Ukraine helping to rig the next U.S. election on Trump’s behalf, by carrying out the investigations Trump wanted.

Just before the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky, former special U.S. envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker texted a Zelensky aide to say that he had “heard from White House” that “assuming” Zelensky were to persuade Trump that he will do the investigations, “we will nail down date for visit to Washington.”

Subsequent to this, on the July 25 call, Trump directly pressed Zelensky to investigate Biden. This text shows that Volker understood directly from the White House that this was the condition that must be met by Zelensky in order to secure that meeting.

Second, and importantly, the texts also show that Ukraine understood that the fate of its country’s relations with the United States rested on whether it carried out Trump’s political marching orders to interfere in a U.S. election and investigate Trump’s political opponent.

During Ukraine’s efforts to get that meeting with Trump, a top aide to Zelensky texted Volker on Aug. 10 that “once we have a date” for the meeting, Ukraine will outline a “vision for the reboot” of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship, “including among other things Burisma and election meddling in investigations.”

That’s striking. It shows that Zelensky’s aide believed that Ukraine’s relations with the United States — something that obviously has great significance for that country — turned on doing the “investigations” Trump wanted, both to smear a political opponent and to discredit our own intelligence services’ conclusion about the Russian attack on our political system.

Third, the texts set up a clear line for further inquiry that will likely produce even more damning revelations. They strongly suggest that Trump made hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine directly contingent on that country doing his political bidding.

On Sept. 1, as Ukraine was still trying to get that meeting with Trump, there was this exchange between Taylor and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union:

Taylor: Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?

Sondland: Call me

Note that Taylor says the security assistance is also conditioned on doing Trump’s bidding. And then, on Sept. 9, Taylor again raises this concern, texting Sondland that he worried that holding up the security assistance was sending a terrible “message” about the steadfastness of U.S. support to Ukraine, and, crucially, to Russia as well. After this, Taylor texted:

As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.

Sondland flatly rejected this categorization, saying there was no quid pro quo on Trump’s part, then signed off.

But the key here is that Taylor had a reason for saying these things. Something he witnessed, heard, or knows made him think there was such a quid pro quo.

“Taylor articulates his overwhelming sense that there is a shakedown and a quid pro quo in the making,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House Oversight Committee, told me. “And he clearly protests to try to stop the sellout of U.S. foreign policy.”

Raskin added that Taylor was basically a direct witness to “the president’s attempt to turn U.S. foreign policy into an instrument of his reelection campaign.”

This would seem to suggest that Democrats can learn a lot more from Tayor, if they can question him directly. “I hope that Congress and the American people get a further chance to hear from Mr. Taylor,” Raskin said.

Again, you don’t need the quid pro quo for all this to be impeachable. But these texts are clearly a signal that there is still a lot more to learn — and that it could be still worse than we know.

“The president’s telephone conversation on July 25 was the culmination of a whole process by which Trump and [Rudy] Giuliani tried to coerce the Ukrainian government to do their political bidding," Raskin told me. “We’ve got the shakedown in plain view. But all of the telltale signs of a quid pro quo are all over this operation."

And to think that the impeachment inquiry is only just beginning.

[samingtonwilson]

Return - Part 9 - Jim Kirk

Part 8

Summary: series following the events of loot– takes place during events of star trek beyond. in this chapter, you’re #TeamScotty.

Warnings: language

A/N: not my favorite part in the least but part 10 is a million times better and this part is necessary to the narrative. also, please continue sending me good energy and luck and juju, angels-- i need it

Seated on the bridge with your legs crossed at the knee, you watched Leonard pace, Spock stand almost impossibly still, and Jim lean against the captain’s chair. You almost snorted at the thought that he was only leant there to prevent Jaylah from sitting— you wouldn’t put it past him to do that.

“We should go,” Jim stated in his Captain-mode voice, one hand toying with the loaded belt of his trousers and the other at his side.

“We should wait until we’re absolutely sure,” Scotty argued, his red operations uniform now covered by a black leather jacket he’d found on board. His voice was more certain, more pressing than you’d ever heard it.

“No, we have to get the crew back now. Chekov has the coordinates that can lead us to Krall’s base, so we go.”

“With respect, sir, how do we know Krall was at the base when she called him?” Scotty’s accent seemed to grow heavier with each word he uttered. “Even if he was, we don’t know that the crew is even with him.”

“Or if they’re even still alive,” Leonard said, earning a scowl from you and Jim to which he responded with a shrug.

Spock crossed the bridge to step beside Chekov, the grey fabric of the clean, bloodless outfit he wore swishing with each step. He began fiddling with the console. “Mr. Chekov, can you reconfigure the search parameters in order to compensate for this formula?”

Chekov looked down at Spock’s work and hummed. “Aye, Commander. But what is this formula?”

“It is Vokaya, Mr. Chekov. A mineral unique to Vulcan which emits low-level radiation.”

“I will have to filter out all other energy emissions,” Chekov replied, busying himself at the adjacent console so the sound of high-pitched beeps filled the air.

Leonard, just as confused as the rest of you, spoke up to ask, “Spock, what the hell would a Vulcan mineral be doing way out here?”

Jim nodded. “Yeah, where are you going with this?”

Spock turned to face all of you. “Lieutenant Uhura wears a Vokaya amulet which I presented to her as a token of my affection and respect.”

“That blue thing?” you said, narrowing your eyes questioningly at Spock as he nodded.

Leonard frowned. “You gave your girlfriend radioactive jewelry?”

“The emission is harmless, Doctor. But its unique signature makes it very easy to identify.”

“You gave your girlfriend a tracking device.”

Spock’s eyes widened in realization, his hands still clasped behind his back. “That was not my intention.”

“You never gave me a tracking device when we were together,” you said to Jim as you swiveled your seat to face him, feeling the rumbles of Leonard’s laughter. “What, did you not feel affection and respect towards me?”

The corners of Jim’s lips twitched upwards. “I did, but probably not enough to merit a gift like that.”

“Well, thank God.”

Spock raised an amused eyebrow, a hint of a smirk playing at his lips— the expression satisfied you greatly.

When another set of beeps echoed through the bridge, you all turned your attention to the screen behind Chekov. Jim pushed off the back of the captain’s chair and walked a few feet closer, as did Leonard.

“Huh,” mused the Russian navigator. “I am detecting a very trace amount of Vokaya.”

Spock nodded once. “Does the location match the coordinates you acquired from Krall’s henchwoman, Mr. Chekov?”

Chekov nodded and turned around. “It is a match, sir.”  

“Its presence suggests that Lieutenant Uhura and thereby the rest of the crew are being held at Krall’s base of operation.”

“Can you beam them out?” Jim asked.

“No, sir,” Chekov answered with a hint of sadness painting his voice. “There is some geological interference that is blocking the transporter signal.”

“Well, I guess we’re gonna have to go in and break ‘em out the old-fashioned way.”

You tilted your head and opened your mouth to speak but were cut off by a saddened yet enraged Jaylah. “You cannot go to this place.” She gripped her elbow with her right hand, her posture shrinking and her voice shaking. “Everyone who goes there, he kills.”

Jim tilted his head and took a few steps in her direction. “You’ve been there? You’ve seen it?”

“Not really focusing on the point here, Captain,” you said in a warning tone, watching Jaylah’s features shift as she glanced at Jim.

“Why didn’t you say something?” he continued, ignoring you.

“Because I know you will ask me to take you there. If your friends are there, they will die. Just like my family. I will not go back to that death place.”

You held your tongue as Scotty said, “Aye, but if you’ve escaped, then you can show us the way in and the way out.”

Her honey eyes were alive with anger as she faced the two men.

“No!” she exclaimed, her voice breaking. “This is not the deal we made, Montgomery Scotty. If you choose to do this, you are on your own.”

When he turned to follow Jaylah as she stormed away, a frustrated Jim stated, “Let her go.”

Scotty, seemingly upset at even the suggestion, waved him off. “She’s lost people, too, Captain.”  

Jim turned to look at Leonard and Spock, who then looked at you. They appeared to be confused.

You raised your eyebrows at them and lifted your hands in surrender. “I’m on Scotty’s side.”

Jim sighed heavily. “Sometimes I feel like you disagree with me for the sake of an argument.”

“I’m not. She’s scared, she thinks she’ll be left alone again,” you explained, shrugging. “She just needs to understand, to be reassured.”

Jim was silent for a beat. “What do I do?”

“I wish I could tell you but I’m just as bad at this as you are.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Leonard muttered with a soft smile as Jim walked towards the doorway. “You two are the same goddamn person.”

“Eh,” you stretched out in a high pitch. “That’s debatable.”

It didn’t take much time to convince Jaylah. After a bit of reassurance that she was a part of the team— an essential, indisposable part of the team— she beckoned you all back to the commissary where there was a wide enough table to crowd around.

Placing random tools and miscellaneous metallic objects to resemble what she recalled of Krall’s base, Jaylah stood with her hands against the table’s edge. “The digging machines uncovered a tunnel that goes into the crater. That’s how I got out.”

Jim rounded the table to pause beside her for a moment. “So that’ll be our way in. An away team will beam to the other side of the tunnel, follow it to Krall’s base, get inside the building, and break out the crew.”

“Uh, Captain,” Chekov began, “we cannot lock onto anyone inside the crater in order to beam them out.”

Scotty, who sat beside Chekov’s standing figure, frowned. “I could rig up pulse beacons as pattern enhancers. That’d get the signal out of the crater.”

“How many people can the Franklin transport at a time?” Jim asked the Scotsman.

He shrugged. “With a wee bit of modification, twenty— max. But I’m not sure how long it would hold out.”

“Bones, Mr. Chekov, Jaylah, you’re with me on the away team,” Jim told you all once he’d straightened his posture in Captain-mode fashion. His chest was puffed out this time, too, and a sense of determination brightened his eyes. “Mr. Scott, modify that transporter and then do everything you can to get this ship operational.”

“You know I’m a security officer, right?” you asked, scowling from your seat. “I’m trained for this stuff.”

“You’re also the one that failed to deliver the artifact to Krall— his entire crew knows that,” Jim replied, shaking his head. “And you’re injured. Stay on board and help Scotty— there’s nothing left to atone for.”

“Captain, —”

“You’ve been hurt by that damn artifact enough,” he interjected, meeting your gaze. “Sit this one out. That’s an order.”

It was Spock’s turn to protest. “Captain, Mr. Chekov’s technical acumen makes him more valuable aboard the Franklin with Mr. Scott. It is thereby logical that I would replace him.”

“Why is that logical, Spock? You just got back on your feet.”

“Lieutenant Uhura is in that facility, Jim.”

Jim was silent for a moment. He stared at Spock, reading the fleeting flecks of desperation in his deep-set eyes.

He then glanced at you. You sat with your hair a mess, the skin around your eyes darkened, and the fingers of your uninjured hand drumming against the table as your wrapped wrist sat on your lap. You were scathed but secure— and Jim knew there was no way he could stop Spock.

His heart was safe, Spock’s hung in the balances.

He nodded, looking at the Vulcan once again. “Understood.”

“But his soldiers are everywhere,” Jaylah pointed out, frowning. “We won’t pass unseen.”

“What we require is a diversion,” Spock mused.

The knowing smile that pulled at Jim’s lips when his eyes met yours made you groan inwardly. “Please don’t say what I think you’re going to say.”

“It’s a good idea!” he argued, grinning.

“It’s really not, Captain. Please don’t be ridiculous,” you were practically whining. “Least of all when I’m not there to see it.”

Leonard cleared his throat to gain your attention. “You two telepaths mind tellin’ us what you’re gabbin’ about?”

“He wants to use the bike. The PX70,” you answered, shaking your head. “He’s had his eye on it since we got on board. It won’t be enough.”

Jim paused in thought until realization brightened his eyes. “Jaylah, do you have any spare deflecting devices and traps like the one Chekov and I were caught in?”

“They were caught in a trap?” Leonard asked you.

You nodded, smiling. “It was incredible.”

Less than a half hour later, you found yourself situated behind Chekov and Scotty. You stared at the transporter pad through the discolored window blankly with your shoulder leant against the adjacent wall, practicing deep breathing and calming thoughts. Fruitlessly, of course.

You heard Jim’s heavy boots clunk behind you and looked over your shoulder, biting the inside of your cheek.

Part of you protested as you called out, “Captain?”

He turned, asking Jaylah to take the bike from him when he noticed the nervousness hunching your shoulders. “Yeah?”

You walked to him, staring directly into the pair of blue eyes that you saw each time your eyelids shut. You sighed. “Be careful.”

He nodded. He was watching you carefully. “I will be.”

“Good. And don’t do anything stupid.”

He lifted his hand, hesitantly placing it below your jaw so it curved around your bruised neck. His thumb ran over your cheek lightly and his pupils dilated with the intention of memorizing each of your features as if you weren’t already burnt into his every thought. “Don’t worry.”

Your smile was sad, small. “S’not really something I can control.”

“You don’t think we’ll be okay this time?”

“I think the optimism was a limited-time characteristic.”

He laughed through his nose, a soft smile over his full lips. “It’ll be okay.”

He leaned forward and placed his forehead against yours. He inhaled deeply as your hands sat against his chest, his heart beating as if it intended to burst from his ribs. “Trust me.”

You nodded. “Go, before I hold you hostage and tie you up in one of these rooms.”

“We never did try that, did we? Tying each other up,” he clarified as he took a step away from you, smiling a little. “We should some time.”

“You’re being quite optimistic, Captain.”

His grin could have stopped your heart. “One of us has to be, Ensign.”

PART 10

tagging (tell me if you’d like to be added or removed):  @outside-the-government@daughterofthebrowncoats @multifandom-slytherin @buckyy3s @cinema212 @caaptain @dani-fae  @wonders-of-the-enterprise @imaginesofdreams @the-witching-hours12-3 @kaitymccoy123 @anyakinamidala @vevsee @afluffykiwi @curiositywillbethedeathofme @arielsimaginess @captain-what-is-going-on@micheladakenzo@avengers-earths-mightiest-heroes @eufeme @buriedinfandomsandfeels@ididntmeantobutiaccidentally @avoidthoseeyes @emmkolenn @heartofdixie14 @thnk-you-fr-th-venom @captainveromendes @wickedsingularity @vadersdaycare @samaxraph99 @hiimangelique @boldlygo-ing

[digitalmark18-blog]

You can't make a reality game show out of social media

New Post has been published on https://britishdigitalmarketingnews.com/you-cant-make-a-reality-game-show-out-of-social-media/

You can't make a reality game show out of social media

Technology’s ubiquity has become a real problem for the entertainment industry because life is easier now. There’s a reason that horror films these days always seem to feature a shot of someone discovering they’re in a signal blackspot. Shows like Sherlock have found novel ways to incorporate technology into their narratives, but clearly, it’s still a bit of a fudge.

It’s even worse in the world of reality TV, which often relies on throwing people into hostile situations and filming the results. Would-be victims can cope with the faux-isolation or trauma much easier if you’re packing the sum total of human knowledge in your back pocket. It explains why so many big reality shows, like Jersey Shore, Big Brother and The Amazing Race ban the use of phones.

But times must change, which brings us to The Circle, a new reality show by Britain’s Channel 4, which incorporates social media as its main concept.(Despite the name and subject matter, there’s no direct relationship between this and Dave Eggers’ dystopian novel of the same name.) The premise is the inverse of Big Brother: Rather than confine a group of people together, they’re kept isolated from one another. They communicate only through The Circle, a “social media” platform created by, and for, the show.

Hashtag banter, then a monkey crying emoji, send.

The Circle isn’t a real social-media platform, and is, in fact, little more than a gimmick to make the text-based interactions more visual. A group of (mostly) twenty-somethings sitting on their couches banging away at their phones might not make for good TV. So they talk at one of four TVs in their apartments / cells, with the words being transcribed in real time by the production team.

It helps highlight the first major problem between The Circle and how social media works out in the real world. After all, I can’t imagine too many people saying out loud, in the real world, “hashtag banter, then a monkey crying emoji, send.” I mean, I’m sure there are some people who do that in casual conversation, but I actively avoid those people.

It’s not just the problem of making online interactions visual but the entire premise of the show that I take issue with. Channel 4 rigged the deck to justify its thesis that the internet, and social media in general, sucks. I don’t disagree, but the channel has decided to focus on the wrong aspects of its failings in an attempt to turn it into a spectacle.

One of the show’s gimmicks is that players are encouraged to lie to and manipulate rivals in the hope of winning the £50,000 ($65,780) prize. Periodically, users are then asked to rate each other by a likeability score out of five, with the most popular deciding who gets “blocked.” And the person who winds up blocked is both ostracized from the community and booted from the competition.

Levels of fraud run from the tame — a single mother not revealing she’s got a child — through to the pretty nasty. Alex, a male 26-year-old social-media manager, is posting as a woman, using photos of his current partner. Which is possible because there’s no human interaction and limited photo sharing, so you can be whoever you want to be.

There are plenty of catfishes (catfishers?) lurking on the internet, and Instagram can, at times, be little more than a database of fakery. But the emphasis on it exaggerates that problem over the more real issues faced on social media. If you were making a list of online hazards, it’s possible that the harassment of women and minorities, groups glorifying self harm and fake news may all come higher up the tally.

Day 1 and Alex’s conscience is already getting the better of him! 😬 #TheCircle pic.twitter.com/weSWGBCJbZ

— The Circle (@C4TheCircle) September 18, 2018

And the show plays the sight of someone being catfished as something little more than a gag for yuk-yuk laughs. Alex (posing as “Lucy”) wins the first popularity contest and is told to invite someone up to a luxury room for a “one-on-one” champagne meeting. None of the participants is too likable, but it makes you feel grubby to watch some lunk getting played before your eyes. It’s the sort of idea cooked up by TV executives after half-watching an episode of Black Mirror at 3am.

The show doesn’t translate to the real experience of online communication, either. A real voice assistant won’t correct your typos and mispronunciations and might have offered some real friction. Not to mention that writing is a fundamentally different cognitive experience to talking. Actually, it might have been more fun to watch them silently typing on their phones, watching how they wrote and then edit what they were going to say. We could have watched their brows furrow as they searched for the perfects words that, they believed, would make them popular.

There’s also the fact that there are three billion people on the internet, and so the notion of being locked in an online space with just eight is a little far fetched. It doesn’t help that the people picked are the usual coterie of folks mugging to the camera in the hope of future fame. Nor that some of the contestants were initially proud of their potential manipulations, like Jennifer the marketing manager who posed as an oncologist and lied about her age. Those lies didn’t work too well, and she was booted out of the show at the conclusion of episode two.

It’s also where I’ll stop watching it, I think.

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/20/the-circle-reality-game-show-social-media/

[tortuga-aak]

'The last president to vilify the FBI was Nixon': Trump's war with the FBI is set to backfire spectacularly

Associated Press/Alex Brandon

President Donald Trump has escalated a burgeoning war with the FBI in the wake of former national security adviser Michael Flynn reaching a plea agreement with the special counsel.

Trump has slammed the FBI, saying they "ruined" Flynn's life.

His battle could backfire, as it did in a tweet this weekend.

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to federal agents about his conversations with the former Russian ambassador. President Donald Trump's initial reaction over the weekend: attacking the FBI as a "rigged" agency that had "ruined" Flynn's life while letting Hillary Clinton off the hook.

"So General Flynn lies to the FBI and his life is destroyed, while Crooked Hillary Clinton, on that now famous FBI holiday 'interrogation' with no swearing in and no recording, lies many times ... and nothing happens to her? Rigged system, or just a double standard?" Trump tweeted on Saturday night.

He continued his attacks on Sunday, characterizing the bureau's investigation of Clinton's private email server as "tainted" because of text messages sent last year by one of the agents in charge of that probe that appeared to show an anti-Trump skew.

The president also laid into former FBI Director James Comey, whom he blamed for leaving the bureau's reputation "in tatters" after a "phony and dishonest Clinton investigation."

Speaking to reporters Monday morning, Trump said again that Flynn had been treated unfairly.

"I feel badly for General Flynn. ... Hillary Clinton lied many times to the FBI and nothing happened to her," Trump said. "She lied many times, nothing happened to her. Flynn lied and they ruined his life. It's very unfair."

Scott Olson, a recently retired FBI agent who spent 20 years at the bureau and specialized in counterintelligence, acknowledged that "Comey did more damage than he realized or intended by how he handled things last year."

But he said he thinks Trump "is actively keeping a narrative alive to counter the news coming out of Mueller’s investigation. And I think he’ll continue to latch onto any and all available targets to support his counter-narrative."

'We have a couple of surprises left'

Trump's suggestion that the FBI has sought to protect Clinton was undermined last November by his own campaign surrogate and close confidante, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

A few days before the 2016 election, Giuliani indicated in an interview with Fox News that someone within or close to the FBI had leaked him information about the email investigation into Clinton because they were "outraged" by the way Comey had handled it. Giuliani also suggested he and the Trump campaign intended to weaponize that information before Election Day.

"We have a couple of surprises left," he said.

In a later interview, three days before Election Day, Giuliani claimed that there was "a revolution going on" inside the FBI that had reached "a boiling point" over Comey's decision to close the Clinton probe without recommending criminal charges.

The reason for the leaks to Giuliani — and to multiple media outlets in the days leading up to the election — was that "the FBI is Trumpland," one FBI agent told The Guardian last November. Some agents, the person added, had openly discussed voting for Trump.

Thomson Reuters

"The reason why they're leaking is they're pro-Trump," another unnamed agent told the publication. Clinton "is the Antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel."

Olson, for his part, argued that "the bureau is neither anti-Trump nor anti-Hillary."

"All political opinions are well represented in the ranks of FBI employees," he said. "And the debates over coffee and lunch are the same as anywhere else."

Former FBI counterintelligence special agent Asha Rangappa, who served under President George W. Bush, largely echoed that assessment.

"There are people across the political spectrum, but by and large I'd say it is a politically conservative organization," she said.

"It's worth noting that the FBI has objectively investigated admins of both parties. Iran-Contra, Whitewater/Lewinsky, Valerie Plame leak, etc. All of the Presidents in these investigations let them take their course," she added. "The last president to vilify the FBI was Nixon."

'Now Mueller knows what the truth is'

That Trump has defended Flynn while vilifying the FBI signals a dual purpose to his attacks, experts say: undermine the bureau, and alert Flynn that he could be rewarded with a pardon if he limits what he tells Mueller, who is probing whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia and if Trump attempted to obstruct justice when he fired Comey.

But taking his feud with the FBI and defense of Flynn into the court of public opinion may backfire for the president. A tweet he sent on Saturday showed why: It seemed to indicate that he knew Flynn had lied to the FBI when he asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn raising more questions about whether he tried to obstruct justice.

The White House scrambled to clean up the mess Trump's tweet had created, claiming hours later that Trump's lawyer John Dowd had crafted the tweet inartfully.

Legal experts were incredulous.

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

"Most lawyers I know are so careful about what they write that they triple-check every letter they send out," said former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti. "We’re supposed to believe Trump’s lawyer wrote a false tweet about the Mueller investigation and sent it out through the President’s account?"

A pardon, moreover, would be essentially useless at this point, said former Department of Justice spokesman Matt Miller — and Flynn is likely aware of that.

"It would've worked before he started cooperating because Mueller could then compel Flynn's testimony and he could just claim not to remember anything," Miller said on Monday. "But now Mueller knows what the truth is."

The truth, according to court documents filed by Mueller's office on Friday, is that Flynn spoke to Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak about US sanctions on Russia during the presidential transition period — but told federal agents that the subject never came up.

Trump's renewed attacks on the FBI and hints of sympathy for his former national security adviser won't change the fact that Flynn, with his son facing criminal exposure and the looming threat of more charges related to his undisclosed lobbying work for Turkey, is now Mueller's star witness — one who, according to his lawyer, "has a story to tell."

NOW WATCH: Everything we know about Trump's unhealthy diet

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[porchenclose10019]

Obama's $400,000 Wall Street Speech Is Completely In Character

The rumors are true: Former President Barack Obama will receive $400,000 to speak at a health care conference organized by the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

It should not be a surprise. This unseemly and unnecessary cash-in fits a pattern of bad behavior involving the financial sector, one that spans Obama’s entire presidency. That governing failure convinced millions of his onetime supporters that the president and his party were not, in fact, playing for their team, and helped pave the way for President Donald Trump. Obama’s Wall Street payday will confirm for many what they have long suspected: that the Democratic Party is managed by out-of-touch elites who do not understand or care about the concerns of ordinary Americans. It’s hard to fault those who come to this conclusion.

Obama refused to prosecute the rampant fraud behind the 2008 Wall Street collapse, despite inking multibillion-dollar settlement after multibillion-dollar settlement with major firms over misconduct ranging from foreclosure fraud to rigging energy markets to tax evasion. In some cases, big banks even pleaded guilty to felonies, but Obama’s Justice Department allowed actual human bankers to ride into the sunset. Early in his presidency, Obama vowed to spend up to $100 billion to help struggling families avert foreclosure. Instead, the administration converted the relief plan into a slush fund for big banks, as top traders at bailed-out firms were allowed to collect six-figure bonuses on the taxpayers’ dime.

Nothing forced Obama to govern this way. Had he truly believed that prosecuting bankers for obvious criminal fraud would cause an economic collapse, Obama would, presumably, have tried to radically reshape the financial sector. He did not. His administration’s finance-friendly policies damaged the economic recovery and generated a new cohort of Trump voters. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times has demonstrated, nearly one-fourth of Obama’s white working-class supporters in 2012 flipped for Trump in 2016. Racism and misogyny were surely part of Trump’s appeal, but not all two-time Obama voters turned to Trump out of bigotry alone.

It’s easier for Democrats to denounce Trump supporters as morally unworthy individuals than to consider whether governing failures in the Obama era contributed to Trump’s popularity. In the final years of his presidency, Obama made clear that he wanted to be remembered as a great Democratic reformer — a leader who expanded access to health care and embodied the humane, egalitarian side of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. But the disconnect between this progressive vision and his Wall Street record is not trivial. The Obama foreclosure plan hurt families. Refusing to punish financial crime has encouraged more of it. Workers are still digging out from the economic wreckage caused by too-big-to-fail banks in 2008, and those banks are bigger today than they were during the meltdown. Wealth accrues to a tiny population of bank executives and shareholders instead of flowing to households. Society is more unequal, and the prospects for progress depend on a financial sector fraught with unnecessary systemic risk.

This risk is not confined to the Trump presidency. Obama once called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time,” but Democratic leaders have been steadfastly aligning their own personal fortunes with the very elites the system is rigged to favor. Throughout her 2016 presidential campaign, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was dogged by the millions of dollars in speaking fees she courted from major financial institutions after leaving the State Department. Her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), mocked a Clinton speech to Goldman Sachs, saying it must have been a “world-shattering” talk “probably written in Shakespearean prose.” She never had a good answer to questions about these talks during debates, and eventually she resorted to invoking the twisted logic of the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision in an effort to deflect accusations of corruption.

Clinton and her husband were worth over $100 million at the time. But a few million dollars between elites is not considered that big a deal in the Washington social scene. The money is an instrument of influence, rather than wealth ― a way of maintaining status, of exercising informal, unofficial, but very real power. It is a relationship incompatible with small-d democratic principles.

Sanders was not able to derail Clinton’s primary campaign with this critique. And die-hard Democrats will doubtless find ways to excuse or overlook Obama’s decision to follow in Clinton’s buckraking footsteps. Professional Democrats have admired Obama for many reasons despite his financial policy failures, and a few hundred grand will not make them reconsider this judgment. But the Goldman Sachs issue was a serious problem for Clinton during the general election, feeding right-wing narratives that she and her husband were fundamentally corrupt (not to be confused with the fairy tales about her killing Vince Foster and four Americans in Benghazi).

Obama isn’t running for office again, but his sellout sends even uglier signals to the electorate. Clinton had very limited policy power over the financial sector during her time at the State Department. Obama, on the other hand, had plenty. Voters could be forgiven for seeing a president cash out to Wall Street at the end of his term and concluding that maybe he wasn’t immune to those considerations when he was making policy in office.

“Regardless of venue or sponsor, President Obama will be true to his values, his vision, and his record,” Obama spokesman Eric Schultz told HuffPost in a written statement. “He recently accepted an invitation to speak at a health care conference in September, because, as a president who successfully passed health insurance reform, it’s an issue of great importance to him. With regard to this or any speech involving Wall Street sponsors, I’d just point out that in 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history ― and still went on to successfully pass and implement the toughest reforms on Wall Street since FDR.”

It is impossible to know what the 2010 Wall Street reform law would have looked like had Obama not received loads of campaign money from the financial sector. Maybe he would have broken up the banks. Maybe he would have reinstated Glass-Steagall. Campaign finance regulations -- which the vast majority of Democratic voters support -- would be unnecessary if political leaders were not influenced by campaign contributions. 

What’s most baffling about Obama’s $400,000 payday is the fact that he doesn’t need the money. He and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, reportedly received $65 million from Penguin Random House for their memoirs. He is an excellent writer who has already written two best-selling books, and he’ll receive a handsome $200,000 pension from the federal government every year for the rest of his life. Several generations of Obamas will be financially secure. His legacy is not nearly as safe.

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from HuffPost and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2pBptF4

[repwincoml4a0a5]

Obama's $400,000 Wall Street Speech Is Completely In Character

The rumors are true: Former President Barack Obama will receive $400,000 to speak at a health care conference organized by the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

It should not be a surprise. This unseemly and unnecessary cash-in fits a pattern of bad behavior involving the financial sector, one that spans Obama’s entire presidency. That governing failure convinced millions of his onetime supporters that the president and his party were not, in fact, playing for their team, and helped pave the way for President Donald Trump. Obama’s Wall Street payday will confirm for many what they have long suspected: that the Democratic Party is managed by out-of-touch elites who do not understand or care about the concerns of ordinary Americans. It’s hard to fault those who come to this conclusion.

Obama refused to prosecute the rampant fraud behind the 2008 Wall Street collapse, despite inking multibillion-dollar settlement after multibillion-dollar settlement with major firms over misconduct ranging from foreclosure fraud to rigging energy markets to tax evasion. In some cases, big banks even pleaded guilty to felonies, but Obama’s Justice Department allowed actual human bankers to ride into the sunset. Early in his presidency, Obama vowed to spend up to $100 billion to help struggling families avert foreclosure. Instead, the administration converted the relief plan into a slush fund for big banks, as top traders at bailed-out firms were allowed to collect six-figure bonuses on the taxpayers’ dime.

Nothing forced Obama to govern this way. Had he truly believed that prosecuting bankers for obvious criminal fraud would cause an economic collapse, Obama would, presumably, have tried to radically reshape the financial sector. He did not. His administration’s finance-friendly policies damaged the economic recovery and generated a new cohort of Trump voters. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times has demonstrated, nearly one-fourth of Obama’s white working-class supporters in 2012 flipped for Trump in 2016. Racism and misogyny were surely part of Trump’s appeal, but not all two-time Obama voters turned to Trump out of bigotry alone.

It’s easier for Democrats to denounce Trump supporters as morally unworthy individuals than to consider whether governing failures in the Obama era contributed to Trump’s popularity. In the final years of his presidency, Obama made clear that he wanted to be remembered as a great Democratic reformer — a leader who expanded access to health care and embodied the humane, egalitarian side of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. But the disconnect between this progressive vision and his Wall Street record is not trivial. The Obama foreclosure plan hurt families. Refusing to punish financial crime has encouraged more of it. Workers are still digging out from the economic wreckage caused by too-big-to-fail banks in 2008, and those banks are bigger today than they were during the meltdown. Wealth accrues to a tiny population of bank executives and shareholders instead of flowing to households. Society is more unequal, and the prospects for progress depend on a financial sector fraught with unnecessary systemic risk.

This risk is not confined to the Trump presidency. Obama once called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time,” but Democratic leaders have been steadfastly aligning their own personal fortunes with the very elites the system is rigged to favor. Throughout her 2016 presidential campaign, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was dogged by the millions of dollars in speaking fees she courted from major financial institutions after leaving the State Department. Her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), mocked a Clinton speech to Goldman Sachs, saying it must have been a “world-shattering” talk “probably written in Shakespearean prose.” She never had a good answer to questions about these talks during debates, and eventually she resorted to invoking the twisted logic of the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision in an effort to deflect accusations of corruption.

Clinton and her husband were worth over $100 million at the time. But a few million dollars between elites is not considered that big a deal in the Washington social scene. The money is an instrument of influence, rather than wealth ― a way of maintaining status, of exercising informal, unofficial, but very real power. It is a relationship incompatible with small-d democratic principles.

Sanders was not able to derail Clinton’s primary campaign with this critique. And die-hard Democrats will doubtless find ways to excuse or overlook Obama’s decision to follow in Clinton’s buckraking footsteps. Professional Democrats have admired Obama for many reasons despite his financial policy failures, and a few hundred grand will not make them reconsider this judgment. But the Goldman Sachs issue was a serious problem for Clinton during the general election, feeding right-wing narratives that she and her husband were fundamentally corrupt (not to be confused with the fairy tales about her killing Vince Foster and four Americans in Benghazi).

Obama isn’t running for office again, but his sellout sends even uglier signals to the electorate. Clinton had very limited policy power over the financial sector during her time at the State Department. Obama, on the other hand, had plenty. Voters could be forgiven for seeing a president cash out to Wall Street at the end of his term and concluding that maybe he wasn’t immune to those considerations when he was making policy in office.

“Regardless of venue or sponsor, President Obama will be true to his values, his vision, and his record,” Obama spokesman Eric Schultz told HuffPost in a written statement. “He recently accepted an invitation to speak at a health care conference in September, because, as a president who successfully passed health insurance reform, it’s an issue of great importance to him. With regard to this or any speech involving Wall Street sponsors, I’d just point out that in 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history ― and still went on to successfully pass and implement the toughest reforms on Wall Street since FDR.”

It is impossible to know what the 2010 Wall Street reform law would have looked like had Obama not received loads of campaign money from the financial sector. Maybe he would have broken up the banks. Maybe he would have reinstated Glass-Steagall. Campaign finance regulations -- which the vast majority of Democratic voters support -- would be unnecessary if political leaders were not influenced by campaign contributions. 

What’s most baffling about Obama’s $400,000 payday is the fact that he doesn’t need the money. He and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, reportedly received $65 million from Penguin Random House for their memoirs. He is an excellent writer who has already written two best-selling books, and he’ll receive a handsome $200,000 pension from the federal government every year for the rest of his life. Several generations of Obamas will be financially secure. His legacy is not nearly as safe.

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from HuffPost and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2pBptF4

[repwincostl4m0a2]

Obama's $400,000 Wall Street Speech Is Completely In Character

The rumors are true: Former President Barack Obama will receive $400,000 to speak at a health care conference organized by the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

It should not be a surprise. This unseemly and unnecessary cash-in fits a pattern of bad behavior involving the financial sector, one that spans Obama’s entire presidency. That governing failure convinced millions of his onetime supporters that the president and his party were not, in fact, playing for their team, and helped pave the way for President Donald Trump. Obama’s Wall Street payday will confirm for many what they have long suspected: that the Democratic Party is managed by out-of-touch elites who do not understand or care about the concerns of ordinary Americans. It’s hard to fault those who come to this conclusion.

Obama refused to prosecute the rampant fraud behind the 2008 Wall Street collapse, despite inking multibillion-dollar settlement after multibillion-dollar settlement with major firms over misconduct ranging from foreclosure fraud to rigging energy markets to tax evasion. In some cases, big banks even pleaded guilty to felonies, but Obama’s Justice Department allowed actual human bankers to ride into the sunset. Early in his presidency, Obama vowed to spend up to $100 billion to help struggling families avert foreclosure. Instead, the administration converted the relief plan into a slush fund for big banks, as top traders at bailed-out firms were allowed to collect six-figure bonuses on the taxpayers’ dime.

Nothing forced Obama to govern this way. Had he truly believed that prosecuting bankers for obvious criminal fraud would cause an economic collapse, Obama would, presumably, have tried to radically reshape the financial sector. He did not. His administration’s finance-friendly policies damaged the economic recovery and generated a new cohort of Trump voters. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times has demonstrated, nearly one-fourth of Obama’s white working-class supporters in 2012 flipped for Trump in 2016. Racism and misogyny were surely part of Trump’s appeal, but not all two-time Obama voters turned to Trump out of bigotry alone.

It’s easier for Democrats to denounce Trump supporters as morally unworthy individuals than to consider whether governing failures in the Obama era contributed to Trump’s popularity. In the final years of his presidency, Obama made clear that he wanted to be remembered as a great Democratic reformer — a leader who expanded access to health care and embodied the humane, egalitarian side of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. But the disconnect between this progressive vision and his Wall Street record is not trivial. The Obama foreclosure plan hurt families. Refusing to punish financial crime has encouraged more of it. Workers are still digging out from the economic wreckage caused by too-big-to-fail banks in 2008, and those banks are bigger today than they were during the meltdown. Wealth accrues to a tiny population of bank executives and shareholders instead of flowing to households. Society is more unequal, and the prospects for progress depend on a financial sector fraught with unnecessary systemic risk.

This risk is not confined to the Trump presidency. Obama once called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time,” but Democratic leaders have been steadfastly aligning their own personal fortunes with the very elites the system is rigged to favor. Throughout her 2016 presidential campaign, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was dogged by the millions of dollars in speaking fees she courted from major financial institutions after leaving the State Department. Her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), mocked a Clinton speech to Goldman Sachs, saying it must have been a “world-shattering” talk “probably written in Shakespearean prose.” She never had a good answer to questions about these talks during debates, and eventually she resorted to invoking the twisted logic of the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision in an effort to deflect accusations of corruption.

Clinton and her husband were worth over $100 million at the time. But a few million dollars between elites is not considered that big a deal in the Washington social scene. The money is an instrument of influence, rather than wealth ― a way of maintaining status, of exercising informal, unofficial, but very real power. It is a relationship incompatible with small-d democratic principles.

Sanders was not able to derail Clinton’s primary campaign with this critique. And die-hard Democrats will doubtless find ways to excuse or overlook Obama’s decision to follow in Clinton’s buckraking footsteps. Professional Democrats have admired Obama for many reasons despite his financial policy failures, and a few hundred grand will not make them reconsider this judgment. But the Goldman Sachs issue was a serious problem for Clinton during the general election, feeding right-wing narratives that she and her husband were fundamentally corrupt (not to be confused with the fairy tales about her killing Vince Foster and four Americans in Benghazi).

Obama isn’t running for office again, but his sellout sends even uglier signals to the electorate. Clinton had very limited policy power over the financial sector during her time at the State Department. Obama, on the other hand, had plenty. Voters could be forgiven for seeing a president cash out to Wall Street at the end of his term and concluding that maybe he wasn’t immune to those considerations when he was making policy in office.

“Regardless of venue or sponsor, President Obama will be true to his values, his vision, and his record,” Obama spokesman Eric Schultz told HuffPost in a written statement. “He recently accepted an invitation to speak at a health care conference in September, because, as a president who successfully passed health insurance reform, it’s an issue of great importance to him. With regard to this or any speech involving Wall Street sponsors, I’d just point out that in 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history ― and still went on to successfully pass and implement the toughest reforms on Wall Street since FDR.”

It is impossible to know what the 2010 Wall Street reform law would have looked like had Obama not received loads of campaign money from the financial sector. Maybe he would have broken up the banks. Maybe he would have reinstated Glass-Steagall. Campaign finance regulations -- which the vast majority of Democratic voters support -- would be unnecessary if political leaders were not influenced by campaign contributions. 

What’s most baffling about Obama’s $400,000 payday is the fact that he doesn’t need the money. He and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, reportedly received $65 million from Penguin Random House for their memoirs. He is an excellent writer who has already written two best-selling books, and he’ll receive a handsome $200,000 pension from the federal government every year for the rest of his life. Several generations of Obamas will be financially secure. His legacy is not nearly as safe.

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from HuffPost and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2pBptF4

[rtawngs20815]

Obama's $400,000 Wall Street Speech Is Completely In Character

The rumors are true: Former President Barack Obama will receive $400,000 to speak at a health care conference organized by the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

It should not be a surprise. This unseemly and unnecessary cash-in fits a pattern of bad behavior involving the financial sector, one that spans Obama’s entire presidency. That governing failure convinced millions of his onetime supporters that the president and his party were not, in fact, playing for their team, and helped pave the way for President Donald Trump. Obama’s Wall Street payday will confirm for many what they have long suspected: that the Democratic Party is managed by out-of-touch elites who do not understand or care about the concerns of ordinary Americans. It’s hard to fault those who come to this conclusion.

Obama refused to prosecute the rampant fraud behind the 2008 Wall Street collapse, despite inking multibillion-dollar settlement after multibillion-dollar settlement with major firms over misconduct ranging from foreclosure fraud to rigging energy markets to tax evasion. In some cases, big banks even pleaded guilty to felonies, but Obama’s Justice Department allowed actual human bankers to ride into the sunset. Early in his presidency, Obama vowed to spend up to $100 billion to help struggling families avert foreclosure. Instead, the administration converted the relief plan into a slush fund for big banks, as top traders at bailed-out firms were allowed to collect six-figure bonuses on the taxpayers’ dime.

Nothing forced Obama to govern this way. Had he truly believed that prosecuting bankers for obvious criminal fraud would cause an economic collapse, Obama would, presumably, have tried to radically reshape the financial sector. He did not. His administration’s finance-friendly policies damaged the economic recovery and generated a new cohort of Trump voters. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times has demonstrated, nearly one-fourth of Obama’s white working-class supporters in 2012 flipped for Trump in 2016. Racism and misogyny were surely part of Trump’s appeal, but not all two-time Obama voters turned to Trump out of bigotry alone.

It’s easier for Democrats to denounce Trump supporters as morally unworthy individuals than to consider whether governing failures in the Obama era contributed to Trump’s popularity. In the final years of his presidency, Obama made clear that he wanted to be remembered as a great Democratic reformer — a leader who expanded access to health care and embodied the humane, egalitarian side of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. But the disconnect between this progressive vision and his Wall Street record is not trivial. The Obama foreclosure plan hurt families. Refusing to punish financial crime has encouraged more of it. Workers are still digging out from the economic wreckage caused by too-big-to-fail banks in 2008, and those banks are bigger today than they were during the meltdown. Wealth accrues to a tiny population of bank executives and shareholders instead of flowing to households. Society is more unequal, and the prospects for progress depend on a financial sector fraught with unnecessary systemic risk.

This risk is not confined to the Trump presidency. Obama once called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time,” but Democratic leaders have been steadfastly aligning their own personal fortunes with the very elites the system is rigged to favor. Throughout her 2016 presidential campaign, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was dogged by the millions of dollars in speaking fees she courted from major financial institutions after leaving the State Department. Her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), mocked a Clinton speech to Goldman Sachs, saying it must have been a “world-shattering” talk “probably written in Shakespearean prose.” She never had a good answer to questions about these talks during debates, and eventually she resorted to invoking the twisted logic of the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision in an effort to deflect accusations of corruption.

Clinton and her husband were worth over $100 million at the time. But a few million dollars between elites is not considered that big a deal in the Washington social scene. The money is an instrument of influence, rather than wealth ― a way of maintaining status, of exercising informal, unofficial, but very real power. It is a relationship incompatible with small-d democratic principles.

Sanders was not able to derail Clinton’s primary campaign with this critique. And die-hard Democrats will doubtless find ways to excuse or overlook Obama’s decision to follow in Clinton’s buckraking footsteps. Professional Democrats have admired Obama for many reasons despite his financial policy failures, and a few hundred grand will not make them reconsider this judgment. But the Goldman Sachs issue was a serious problem for Clinton during the general election, feeding right-wing narratives that she and her husband were fundamentally corrupt (not to be confused with the fairy tales about her killing Vince Foster and four Americans in Benghazi).

Obama isn’t running for office again, but his sellout sends even uglier signals to the electorate. Clinton had very limited policy power over the financial sector during her time at the State Department. Obama, on the other hand, had plenty. Voters could be forgiven for seeing a president cash out to Wall Street at the end of his term and concluding that maybe he wasn’t immune to those considerations when he was making policy in office.

“Regardless of venue or sponsor, President Obama will be true to his values, his vision, and his record,” Obama spokesman Eric Schultz told HuffPost in a written statement. “He recently accepted an invitation to speak at a health care conference in September, because, as a president who successfully passed health insurance reform, it’s an issue of great importance to him. With regard to this or any speech involving Wall Street sponsors, I’d just point out that in 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history ― and still went on to successfully pass and implement the toughest reforms on Wall Street since FDR.”

It is impossible to know what the 2010 Wall Street reform law would have looked like had Obama not received loads of campaign money from the financial sector. Maybe he would have broken up the banks. Maybe he would have reinstated Glass-Steagall. Campaign finance regulations -- which the vast majority of Democratic voters support -- would be unnecessary if political leaders were not influenced by campaign contributions. 

What’s most baffling about Obama’s $400,000 payday is the fact that he doesn’t need the money. He and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, reportedly received $65 million from Penguin Random House for their memoirs. He is an excellent writer who has already written two best-selling books, and he’ll receive a handsome $200,000 pension from the federal government every year for the rest of his life. Several generations of Obamas will be financially secure. His legacy is not nearly as safe.

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from HuffPost and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2pBptF4

[exfrenchdorsl4p0a1]

Obama's $400,000 Wall Street Speech Is Completely In Character

The rumors are true: Former President Barack Obama will receive $400,000 to speak at a health care conference organized by the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

It should not be a surprise. This unseemly and unnecessary cash-in fits a pattern of bad behavior involving the financial sector, one that spans Obama’s entire presidency. That governing failure convinced millions of his onetime supporters that the president and his party were not, in fact, playing for their team, and helped pave the way for President Donald Trump. Obama’s Wall Street payday will confirm for many what they have long suspected: that the Democratic Party is managed by out-of-touch elites who do not understand or care about the concerns of ordinary Americans. It’s hard to fault those who come to this conclusion.

Obama refused to prosecute the rampant fraud behind the 2008 Wall Street collapse, despite inking multibillion-dollar settlement after multibillion-dollar settlement with major firms over misconduct ranging from foreclosure fraud to rigging energy markets to tax evasion. In some cases, big banks even pleaded guilty to felonies, but Obama’s Justice Department allowed actual human bankers to ride into the sunset. Early in his presidency, Obama vowed to spend up to $100 billion to help struggling families avert foreclosure. Instead, the administration converted the relief plan into a slush fund for big banks, as top traders at bailed-out firms were allowed to collect six-figure bonuses on the taxpayers’ dime.

Nothing forced Obama to govern this way. Had he truly believed that prosecuting bankers for obvious criminal fraud would cause an economic collapse, Obama would, presumably, have tried to radically reshape the financial sector. He did not. His administration’s finance-friendly policies damaged the economic recovery and generated a new cohort of Trump voters. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times has demonstrated, nearly one-fourth of Obama’s white working-class supporters in 2012 flipped for Trump in 2016. Racism and misogyny were surely part of Trump’s appeal, but not all two-time Obama voters turned to Trump out of bigotry alone.

It’s easier for Democrats to denounce Trump supporters as morally unworthy individuals than to consider whether governing failures in the Obama era contributed to Trump’s popularity. In the final years of his presidency, Obama made clear that he wanted to be remembered as a great Democratic reformer — a leader who expanded access to health care and embodied the humane, egalitarian side of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. But the disconnect between this progressive vision and his Wall Street record is not trivial. The Obama foreclosure plan hurt families. Refusing to punish financial crime has encouraged more of it. Workers are still digging out from the economic wreckage caused by too-big-to-fail banks in 2008, and those banks are bigger today than they were during the meltdown. Wealth accrues to a tiny population of bank executives and shareholders instead of flowing to households. Society is more unequal, and the prospects for progress depend on a financial sector fraught with unnecessary systemic risk.

This risk is not confined to the Trump presidency. Obama once called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time,” but Democratic leaders have been steadfastly aligning their own personal fortunes with the very elites the system is rigged to favor. Throughout her 2016 presidential campaign, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was dogged by the millions of dollars in speaking fees she courted from major financial institutions after leaving the State Department. Her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), mocked a Clinton speech to Goldman Sachs, saying it must have been a “world-shattering” talk “probably written in Shakespearean prose.” She never had a good answer to questions about these talks during debates, and eventually she resorted to invoking the twisted logic of the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision in an effort to deflect accusations of corruption.

Clinton and her husband were worth over $100 million at the time. But a few million dollars between elites is not considered that big a deal in the Washington social scene. The money is an instrument of influence, rather than wealth ― a way of maintaining status, of exercising informal, unofficial, but very real power. It is a relationship incompatible with small-d democratic principles.

Sanders was not able to derail Clinton’s primary campaign with this critique. And die-hard Democrats will doubtless find ways to excuse or overlook Obama’s decision to follow in Clinton’s buckraking footsteps. Professional Democrats have admired Obama for many reasons despite his financial policy failures, and a few hundred grand will not make them reconsider this judgment. But the Goldman Sachs issue was a serious problem for Clinton during the general election, feeding right-wing narratives that she and her husband were fundamentally corrupt (not to be confused with the fairy tales about her killing Vince Foster and four Americans in Benghazi).

Obama isn’t running for office again, but his sellout sends even uglier signals to the electorate. Clinton had very limited policy power over the financial sector during her time at the State Department. Obama, on the other hand, had plenty. Voters could be forgiven for seeing a president cash out to Wall Street at the end of his term and concluding that maybe he wasn’t immune to those considerations when he was making policy in office.

“Regardless of venue or sponsor, President Obama will be true to his values, his vision, and his record,” Obama spokesman Eric Schultz told HuffPost in a written statement. “He recently accepted an invitation to speak at a health care conference in September, because, as a president who successfully passed health insurance reform, it’s an issue of great importance to him. With regard to this or any speech involving Wall Street sponsors, I’d just point out that in 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history ― and still went on to successfully pass and implement the toughest reforms on Wall Street since FDR.”

It is impossible to know what the 2010 Wall Street reform law would have looked like had Obama not received loads of campaign money from the financial sector. Maybe he would have broken up the banks. Maybe he would have reinstated Glass-Steagall. Campaign finance regulations -- which the vast majority of Democratic voters support -- would be unnecessary if political leaders were not influenced by campaign contributions. 

What’s most baffling about Obama’s $400,000 payday is the fact that he doesn’t need the money. He and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, reportedly received $65 million from Penguin Random House for their memoirs. He is an excellent writer who has already written two best-selling books, and he’ll receive a handsome $200,000 pension from the federal government every year for the rest of his life. Several generations of Obamas will be financially secure. His legacy is not nearly as safe.

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from HuffPost and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2pBptF4

[rtscrndr53704]

Obama's $400,000 Wall Street Speech Is Completely In Character

The rumors are true: Former President Barack Obama will receive $400,000 to speak at a health care conference organized by the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

It should not be a surprise. This unseemly and unnecessary cash-in fits a pattern of bad behavior involving the financial sector, one that spans Obama’s entire presidency. That governing failure convinced millions of his onetime supporters that the president and his party were not, in fact, playing for their team, and helped pave the way for President Donald Trump. Obama’s Wall Street payday will confirm for many what they have long suspected: that the Democratic Party is managed by out-of-touch elites who do not understand or care about the concerns of ordinary Americans. It’s hard to fault those who come to this conclusion.

Obama refused to prosecute the rampant fraud behind the 2008 Wall Street collapse, despite inking multibillion-dollar settlement after multibillion-dollar settlement with major firms over misconduct ranging from foreclosure fraud to rigging energy markets to tax evasion. In some cases, big banks even pleaded guilty to felonies, but Obama’s Justice Department allowed actual human bankers to ride into the sunset. Early in his presidency, Obama vowed to spend up to $100 billion to help struggling families avert foreclosure. Instead, the administration converted the relief plan into a slush fund for big banks, as top traders at bailed-out firms were allowed to collect six-figure bonuses on the taxpayers’ dime.

Nothing forced Obama to govern this way. Had he truly believed that prosecuting bankers for obvious criminal fraud would cause an economic collapse, Obama would, presumably, have tried to radically reshape the financial sector. He did not. His administration’s finance-friendly policies damaged the economic recovery and generated a new cohort of Trump voters. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times has demonstrated, nearly one-fourth of Obama’s white working-class supporters in 2012 flipped for Trump in 2016. Racism and misogyny were surely part of Trump’s appeal, but not all two-time Obama voters turned to Trump out of bigotry alone.

It’s easier for Democrats to denounce Trump supporters as morally unworthy individuals than to consider whether governing failures in the Obama era contributed to Trump’s popularity. In the final years of his presidency, Obama made clear that he wanted to be remembered as a great Democratic reformer — a leader who expanded access to health care and embodied the humane, egalitarian side of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. But the disconnect between this progressive vision and his Wall Street record is not trivial. The Obama foreclosure plan hurt families. Refusing to punish financial crime has encouraged more of it. Workers are still digging out from the economic wreckage caused by too-big-to-fail banks in 2008, and those banks are bigger today than they were during the meltdown. Wealth accrues to a tiny population of bank executives and shareholders instead of flowing to households. Society is more unequal, and the prospects for progress depend on a financial sector fraught with unnecessary systemic risk.

This risk is not confined to the Trump presidency. Obama once called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time,” but Democratic leaders have been steadfastly aligning their own personal fortunes with the very elites the system is rigged to favor. Throughout her 2016 presidential campaign, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was dogged by the millions of dollars in speaking fees she courted from major financial institutions after leaving the State Department. Her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), mocked a Clinton speech to Goldman Sachs, saying it must have been a “world-shattering” talk “probably written in Shakespearean prose.” She never had a good answer to questions about these talks during debates, and eventually she resorted to invoking the twisted logic of the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision in an effort to deflect accusations of corruption.

Clinton and her husband were worth over $100 million at the time. But a few million dollars between elites is not considered that big a deal in the Washington social scene. The money is an instrument of influence, rather than wealth ― a way of maintaining status, of exercising informal, unofficial, but very real power. It is a relationship incompatible with small-d democratic principles.

Sanders was not able to derail Clinton’s primary campaign with this critique. And die-hard Democrats will doubtless find ways to excuse or overlook Obama’s decision to follow in Clinton’s buckraking footsteps. Professional Democrats have admired Obama for many reasons despite his financial policy failures, and a few hundred grand will not make them reconsider this judgment. But the Goldman Sachs issue was a serious problem for Clinton during the general election, feeding right-wing narratives that she and her husband were fundamentally corrupt (not to be confused with the fairy tales about her killing Vince Foster and four Americans in Benghazi).

Obama isn’t running for office again, but his sellout sends even uglier signals to the electorate. Clinton had very limited policy power over the financial sector during her time at the State Department. Obama, on the other hand, had plenty. Voters could be forgiven for seeing a president cash out to Wall Street at the end of his term and concluding that maybe he wasn’t immune to those considerations when he was making policy in office.

“Regardless of venue or sponsor, President Obama will be true to his values, his vision, and his record,” Obama spokesman Eric Schultz told HuffPost in a written statement. “He recently accepted an invitation to speak at a health care conference in September, because, as a president who successfully passed health insurance reform, it’s an issue of great importance to him. With regard to this or any speech involving Wall Street sponsors, I’d just point out that in 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history ― and still went on to successfully pass and implement the toughest reforms on Wall Street since FDR.”

It is impossible to know what the 2010 Wall Street reform law would have looked like had Obama not received loads of campaign money from the financial sector. Maybe he would have broken up the banks. Maybe he would have reinstated Glass-Steagall. Campaign finance regulations -- which the vast majority of Democratic voters support -- would be unnecessary if political leaders were not influenced by campaign contributions. 

What’s most baffling about Obama’s $400,000 payday is the fact that he doesn’t need the money. He and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, reportedly received $65 million from Penguin Random House for their memoirs. He is an excellent writer who has already written two best-selling books, and he’ll receive a handsome $200,000 pension from the federal government every year for the rest of his life. Several generations of Obamas will be financially secure. His legacy is not nearly as safe.

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from HuffPost and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

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[stormdoors78476]

Obama's $400,000 Wall Street Speech Is Completely In Character

The rumors are true: Former President Barack Obama will receive $400,000 to speak at a health care conference organized by the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

It should not be a surprise. This unseemly and unnecessary cash-in fits a pattern of bad behavior involving the financial sector, one that spans Obama’s entire presidency. That governing failure convinced millions of his onetime supporters that the president and his party were not, in fact, playing for their team, and helped pave the way for President Donald Trump. Obama’s Wall Street payday will confirm for many what they have long suspected: that the Democratic Party is managed by out-of-touch elites who do not understand or care about the concerns of ordinary Americans. It’s hard to fault those who come to this conclusion.

Obama refused to prosecute the rampant fraud behind the 2008 Wall Street collapse, despite inking multibillion-dollar settlement after multibillion-dollar settlement with major firms over misconduct ranging from foreclosure fraud to rigging energy markets to tax evasion. In some cases, big banks even pleaded guilty to felonies, but Obama’s Justice Department allowed actual human bankers to ride into the sunset. Early in his presidency, Obama vowed to spend up to $100 billion to help struggling families avert foreclosure. Instead, the administration converted the relief plan into a slush fund for big banks, as top traders at bailed-out firms were allowed to collect six-figure bonuses on the taxpayers’ dime.

Nothing forced Obama to govern this way. Had he truly believed that prosecuting bankers for obvious criminal fraud would cause an economic collapse, Obama would, presumably, have tried to radically reshape the financial sector. He did not. His administration’s finance-friendly policies damaged the economic recovery and generated a new cohort of Trump voters. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times has demonstrated, nearly one-fourth of Obama’s white working-class supporters in 2012 flipped for Trump in 2016. Racism and misogyny were surely part of Trump’s appeal, but not all two-time Obama voters turned to Trump out of bigotry alone.

It’s easier for Democrats to denounce Trump supporters as morally unworthy individuals than to consider whether governing failures in the Obama era contributed to Trump’s popularity. In the final years of his presidency, Obama made clear that he wanted to be remembered as a great Democratic reformer — a leader who expanded access to health care and embodied the humane, egalitarian side of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. But the disconnect between this progressive vision and his Wall Street record is not trivial. The Obama foreclosure plan hurt families. Refusing to punish financial crime has encouraged more of it. Workers are still digging out from the economic wreckage caused by too-big-to-fail banks in 2008, and those banks are bigger today than they were during the meltdown. Wealth accrues to a tiny population of bank executives and shareholders instead of flowing to households. Society is more unequal, and the prospects for progress depend on a financial sector fraught with unnecessary systemic risk.

This risk is not confined to the Trump presidency. Obama once called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time,” but Democratic leaders have been steadfastly aligning their own personal fortunes with the very elites the system is rigged to favor. Throughout her 2016 presidential campaign, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was dogged by the millions of dollars in speaking fees she courted from major financial institutions after leaving the State Department. Her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), mocked a Clinton speech to Goldman Sachs, saying it must have been a “world-shattering” talk “probably written in Shakespearean prose.” She never had a good answer to questions about these talks during debates, and eventually she resorted to invoking the twisted logic of the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision in an effort to deflect accusations of corruption.

Clinton and her husband were worth over $100 million at the time. But a few million dollars between elites is not considered that big a deal in the Washington social scene. The money is an instrument of influence, rather than wealth ― a way of maintaining status, of exercising informal, unofficial, but very real power. It is a relationship incompatible with small-d democratic principles.

Sanders was not able to derail Clinton’s primary campaign with this critique. And die-hard Democrats will doubtless find ways to excuse or overlook Obama’s decision to follow in Clinton’s buckraking footsteps. Professional Democrats have admired Obama for many reasons despite his financial policy failures, and a few hundred grand will not make them reconsider this judgment. But the Goldman Sachs issue was a serious problem for Clinton during the general election, feeding right-wing narratives that she and her husband were fundamentally corrupt (not to be confused with the fairy tales about her killing Vince Foster and four Americans in Benghazi).

Obama isn’t running for office again, but his sellout sends even uglier signals to the electorate. Clinton had very limited policy power over the financial sector during her time at the State Department. Obama, on the other hand, had plenty. Voters could be forgiven for seeing a president cash out to Wall Street at the end of his term and concluding that maybe he wasn’t immune to those considerations when he was making policy in office.

“Regardless of venue or sponsor, President Obama will be true to his values, his vision, and his record,” Obama spokesman Eric Schultz told HuffPost in a written statement. “He recently accepted an invitation to speak at a health care conference in September, because, as a president who successfully passed health insurance reform, it’s an issue of great importance to him. With regard to this or any speech involving Wall Street sponsors, I’d just point out that in 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history ― and still went on to successfully pass and implement the toughest reforms on Wall Street since FDR.”

It is impossible to know what the 2010 Wall Street reform law would have looked like had Obama not received loads of campaign money from the financial sector. Maybe he would have broken up the banks. Maybe he would have reinstated Glass-Steagall. Campaign finance regulations -- which the vast majority of Democratic voters support -- would be unnecessary if political leaders were not influenced by campaign contributions. 

What’s most baffling about Obama’s $400,000 payday is the fact that he doesn’t need the money. He and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, reportedly received $65 million from Penguin Random House for their memoirs. He is an excellent writer who has already written two best-selling books, and he’ll receive a handsome $200,000 pension from the federal government every year for the rest of his life. Several generations of Obamas will be financially secure. His legacy is not nearly as safe.

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from HuffPost and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2pBptF4