Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Lloyd Blankfein Stumps For Bernie Sanders

In a canny burst of reverse psychology, the Wall Street banking mogul who helped crash the entire global financial system in 2008 today refreshingly declared that a President Bernie Sanders "would ruin our economy."

Since 94% of all the American household wealth "lost" in the crash is now in the hands of the oligarchy, it is safe to assume that what former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein really fears is that a Sanders presidency would put a damper on his winner-take-all economy - or what Citigroup had secretly dubbed the "plutonomy."

Blankfein tweeted;
If Dems go on to nominate Sanders, the Russians will have to reconsider who to work for to best screw up the US. Sanders is just as polarizing as Trump AND he’ll ruin our economy and doesn’t care about our military. If I’m Russian, I go with Sanders this time around.
Whether he knows it or not, Blankfein just bleated out a campaign commercial for Bernie. He implicitly signaled his fealty to Donald Trump, who also regularly and falsely claims that the phony opposition party doesn't care about "our military," But Blankfein is obviously referring to Bernie's own refusal to vote for the latest obscene $750 billion Pentagon budget, the successful bipartisan passage of which is bloating Goldman Sachs's own war-connected profits to the monstrous proportions to which it has become accustomed.

Blankfein's peevish McCarthyite tweet actually seems tailor-made to spur even more record, small-dollar donations to Bernie, who won the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday despite the best efforts of the corporate media to fool the country into thinking that second runner-up Amy Klobuchar was the break-out heroine of the night. The core media narrative is that since Bernie did not win by the same astronomically huge 40-point margin by which he trounced Hillary Clinton in 2016, it not only doesn't count, it is testament to the "chaos and divisiveness"  that Sanders brings to the Democratic Party establishment. As if that were a bad thing!

As far as the reviled "razor-thin" margin by which Sanders beat Pete Buttigieg in New Hampshire  is concerned, we should be honest and admit that Bernie is indeed having a tough time luring in old white conservative people too set in their ways and too attached to Medicare For Only Themselves to abandon the rejuvenating young fogey soul-brother they've found in Mayor Pete.

None of the coverage denigrating Bernie's victory that I watched last night mentioned tthat more young people voted for him than voted than for all the other primary candidates combined. He got more than half the entire youth vote of 18 to 29 year olds, while the 38-year-old Buttigieg received only 22 percent of this demographic.

Bernie's slim margin of victory is based simply upon the much higher number of older voters turning out on primary day. As Vox reports,
One caveat: Older people are simply a bigger part of the electorate. In New Hampshire’s Democratic primary, people 45 and older made up 63 percent of voters, according to the exit polls. People aged 18 to 29 made up just 14 percent.
Historically, this has also been true nationally:Young voters are less likely to turn out. In 2016, less than half of voters aged 18 to 29 went to the polls, while a majority in all other age groups voted, according to the US Census Bureau.
And since older people are more apt than younger people to read the New York Times, and the Washington Post and stay riveted to CNN and MSNBC  they thus might be more prone to internalize the mainstream "narrative," and make the manufactured - and rankly xenophobic -  paranoia of Blankfein and others their very own.

Maybe Prince Harry, who reportedly is making a "billion dollar handshake" with Goldman Sachs, can help. He and wife Meghan already appeared at the JP Morgan Chase Investment Summit in Miami over the weekend to share their mental health expertise with some of the same billionaires and pathocrats who plundered the economy in 2008 and who are now so very, very nervous that their turbo-charged free rides and their mammoth runaway government welfare benefits and their padded portfolios might be in store for the Bernie Brake Pad Special. They're certainly in dire need of a muffler job. And the way their entitled complaining keeps backfiring on them, they might even be headed for the junkyard reserved for totaled luxury limos.

Blankfein and his fellow paranoid plutes should just relax and stay hunkered down in their eight car garages and stop with the class war antics and refrain from raising Bernie's profile so much with their negative attention. Because Sanders is not threatening a communist revolution or an overthrow of capitalism, or a 90 percent wealth tax, or total world peace, or anything remotely close. He is no more radical than FDR, whose ultimate aim was to save predatory capitalism from itself.

14 comments:

  1. And a lot of thanks FDR gets from those capitalists! How much did Bernie have to pay Blankfein for the endorsement? Because it's exactly the sort of endorsement that will put him over the top.

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  2. The Blankfein? How many divisions does he have?

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  3. Uncle Joe, Uncle Sam has some 800 military bases surrounding the earth, while all other countries combined have fewer than 40.

    “Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.”
    ~ Joseph Conrad

    "When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain."
    ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

    "Who controls the food supply controls the people;
    who controls energy controls whole continents;
    who controls money controls the world."
    ~ Henry Kissinger

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  4. It does look like the vote totals are being hacked. Pete and/or Amy only seem to pull ahead well beyond what exit polls predict in districts that can't be checked with paper ballots. When the paper backups are in place Bernie wins and Pete and Amy fade exactly as the exit polls predict. So before we critique Bernie for not getting votes, I would like to see what the totals look like when they are honest instead of brazenly cooked.

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  5. Lloyd Bankfraud needn't worry his bald little head over Bernie becoming President and crashing the plutonomy. He's merely playing his part in the most brazen, systematic, oligarchic takeover of electoral politics in US history.

    Here's the playbook. It's a MUST READ thread.

    https://twitter.com/blakezeff/status/1227976156936171520

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  6. Erik Roth -- At the end of twenty years of wars under Napoleon, France had no national debt. It had paid its way, not just by taxation but by just taking things.

    Napoleon's quote about bankers should be seen in that light, that he did wars of national mobilization for a generation without recourse to bankers.

    Meanwhile, Britain was totally "broke." But what it owed was repayment to its privileged wealthy elite of the money it had not taxed from them, but had borrowed from them. The last of those "gilts" (bonds) was paid off only recently. Britain's poorer working class taxpayers paid off the rich for the Napoleonic Wars for near 200 years.

    That is what the winners looked like, and why Napoleon said this about banks.

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  7. Mark,

    My quoting Napoleon should not be considered in any way as favorable toward him, any more than should my quoting that other abominable war criminal, Kissinger. The point I intended was that bankers, or rather banksters, and the tyrannical rule by financiers running the world is ruining the world.
    For good reason, scripture says that the love of money is the root of all evil.

    “History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything.”
    ~ Jeffrey D. Sachs

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  8. EXCLUSIVE: BLOOMBERG CONSIDERS HILLARY RUNNING MATE

    Drudge Report

    Yup, then when Bloomberg wins, he'll resign and hand it over to Hillary. After all, he doesn't need the work.

    This is Hillary's dream come true and our worst nightmare.

    Are you ready to rumble?

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  9. Money, money, money wherever it comes from, makes the wars go 'round.

    In days of old, military types were expected to have the right stuff and the fund-raising expertise for leading not just an army into battle but eventually, as a logical next step, the whole damn country, especially if it had ideas about ballooning itself into an empire. You know, Alexander, Cesar, Napoleon, Grant, de Gaulle, Eisenhower. The list of American generals-become-president would be longer if only one or two four-stars could win a war since Ike checked out.

    This morning, the NY Times signalled a change. In the third headline with tease of the digital edition we're told, in a most subtle way, the job of president is best learned as a mayor.

    THE LONG RUN
    What Being a Mayor Taught Pete Buttigieg
    By TRIP GABRIEL
    Some Democratic rivals question whether Mr. Buttigieg has the experience to be president. Some key episodes in South Bend show how he struggled, learned and grew as a leader.

    Giant city or middling city, it doesn't matter. Even in flyover country a mayor's job is an all-around struggle. First, the mayor is commander-in-chief of the local army, the militarized police force, and he remains vigilant on the fronts of infrastructure, finance, business, welfare, security––what more do you want?

    A glib tongue is another asset, whether elegant (Obama) or profane (Trump). 'Mayor' on your resume tells the world you have the multifaceted right stuff to be manager of the biggest business on earth.

    Please forget about the four-term mayor of Burlington, VT, Bernie Sanders; as often as he pops up he keeps getting shoved down the memory hole. Why? Divisive notions about the inequities of inequality.

    The takeaway message from the propaganda ministry this morning is "Let's not hear any more talk about Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg being unprepared." To reassure everyone he will serve a brief apprenticeship as an understudy. The three-time mayor of the Big Apple, Michael Bloomberg, will be The One who taps Mayor Buttigieg to be his vice-president. The ultimate test that Buttigieg has finally arrived will be when your word processor stops redlining his name as a misspelling of something else.

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  10. Karen, I used to read your blog regularly but stopped because I was just too exhausted with 'the news' and was starting to feel that my own mental health was at stake and I just had to stop. Periodically I check-in to see where you are going. Thank you for your dedication and perseverance in reporting about the clusterfuck our country has become.

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  11. Karen,
    I always look for you in NYT commemts.
    I’m writing to you for the first time in many years because i’m confused about what’s going on in nyt comments.
    i have noticed recently that comments in response to bloomberg articles do not have names i recognize from being a longtime comments-reading fanatic.
    Instead of the ordinary ratio in top reader rated comments bloomberg-punching skeptics and critics, there are only new unrecognizable names ALL praising Bloomberg.
    This. Is.... Weird.
    Last night I read all the way through the first fifty reader rated comments in response to both Dowd and Douthat, and saw only one recognizable name.
    Has anyone else noticed this?

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  12. Dear Puzzled.

    The following is pure speculation.

    Bloomberg is inundating the media with ads, thus raising the price for everybody else and squeezing them out.

    The Times just announced that now that it has a record 5 million paid subscribers, it is raising its monthly subscription price from $15 to $17. Concurrently, Bloomberg announced he is paying $150 to people to write comments supporting him on social media. The Times comment sections have coincidentally become indundated with pro-Bloomberg blurbs, despite continuing revelations of racism, sexism and other reactionary right wing words and deeds.

    Progressive commenters, who used to dominate the Times comment threads, have all but disappeared, thanks to a mysterious algorithm which delays or even outright bans their submissions.

    Sock puppetry from political campaigns has long contaminated reader comment sections. During the 2016 campaign there was an influx of new "verified" commenters who would regularly pounce on all Times posts critical of Hillary Clinton but who would rarely write stand-alone comments of their own. These people mysteriously disappeared when Trump was elected. Did their paychecks from David Brock's Rapid Response Unit suddenly cease?

    With Bloomberg's unlimited ad budget, that he would take over newspaper comment sections is no surprise at all. Just another way for mainstream media to lose what little credibility they still have left.

    One bright point: the liberal class is revealing itself in all its previously carefully hidden hypocrisy by embracing Bloomberg and taking his bribes.

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  13. "‘We’d be f—ed’: Texas Dems sweat a Bernie Sanders ticket.
    Veteran operatives fear it undermines an opportunity to flip the state House."
    https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/15/texas-dems-sweat-bernie-sanders-ticket-110524

    No, Texas (and national) Dems, f-ck you for your fear-mongering and slander of Bernie Sanders. Bernie isn't perfect, but he's far and away the best candidate in the field, head and shoulders above the neoliberal tripe you want to foist on the voters.

    The Democratic party apparatus still shows no sign of understanding why the institutions of this country have failed, why voters' have rejected the party's so-called "centrist" candidates past and present, and why Trump won in 2016. The party has f-cked itself, and as with f-cking oneself in real life, it has taken a fair bit of unnatural contortion in order to do so. But it must be pleasurable, for the party seems intent on doing it again.

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  14. Karen,
    Thanks for your response.
    I think you’re absolutely right.
    I wish I could find some comfort in that.
    Where I work, all the clientele has been openly fretting whether to support buttigieg or bloomberg.
    All the servers (young, more multiracial group) are already supporting Sanders.
    This came to a head recently with one client openly gushing to a friend that “three new significant black people had come out for Bloomberg!” Actual quote. Not addressing the congresspersons by title, just “significant black people.”
    It was the groan heard round the wine cave.
    Pretty sure the manager lets us upcharge for that? Haven’t heard otherwise so...

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