“What does count as suspicious behaviour, however, is the White House’s response to the public’s legitimate interest in a political appointee’s previous job, which involved significant dealings with Russia in a context of financial risk. The White House has been accused of blocking details about Wilbur Ross’s engagement with the Bank of Cyprus and its Russian investors, thus warranting the question of why. Is this simply a power play, or are they seeking to hiding any other information that might be divulged as a result? The Trump administration’s tactics on this will be interesting to watch.”
Fascinating profile of the delusional, batshit LtGen Michael Flynn. He thinks what he did was “capitalism.” https://t.co/If7vIPWXj8
Capitalism with a crony’s face … layered onto a number of intersecting social, financial, and data networks.
This vile paper-money and funding system; this system of Dutch descent, begotten by Bishop Burnet and born in hell; this system has turned everything into a gamble. There are hundreds of men who live by being the agents to carry on gambling… many of the gamblers live in the country; they write up to their gambling agent, whom they call their stockbroker; he gambles according to their order; and they receive the profit or stand to the loss. Is it possible to conceive a viler calling than that of an agent for the carrying on of gambling! And yet the vagabonds call themselves gentlemen.
William Cobbett, Rural Rides 1830
How often can one think that money laundering has no labor effects because it is the accumulated finance capital surplus being transformed and exploited.
Similarly the machinations of finance capitalism manifest themselves in indulgences like yacht racing, where there is no real relation to the sponsors from vast global neocapitalism selling fossil fuel, upscale automobiles, and computer software.
And yet there are major national elements at work representing North/South and the 1% / 99%. Now one can see how they affect significant geopolitical and demographic change as state capitalism in the post-soviet period has evolved into kleptocratic crony capitalism.
What’s more galling is how US ruling class clowns have paraded exploitation as a mass spectacle complete with security theater, demonizing immigration, the arts, and race/class/gender differences.
Debt peonage arising from the dislocating taxes from land rent and monopoly rents is a key to the current crises of social division.
The International Regulation of Money Laundering Mónica Serrano and Paul Kenny Global Governance Vol. 9, No. 4 (Oct.–Dec. 2003), pp. 433-439
In keeping with his materialist view of history, Marx expected banking to be subordinated to the needs of industrial capitalism. Equity investment – followed by public ownership of the means of production under socialism – seemed likely to replace the interest-extracting “usury capital” inherited from antiquity and feudal times: debts mounting up at compound interest in excess of the means to pay, culminating in crises marked by bank runs and property foreclosures.
But as matters have turned out, the rentier interests mounted a Counter-Enlightenment to undermine the reforms that promised to liberate society from special privilege.
Instead of promoting capital investment in an alliance with industry and government, financial planners have sponsored a travesty of free markets.
Realizing that income not taxed is free to be capitalized, bought and sold on credit, and paid out as interest, bankers have formed an alliance between finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) to free land rent and monopoly rent (as well as debt-leveraged “capital” gains) from taxation.
The result is that today’s economy is burdened with property and financial claims that Marx and other critics deemed “fictitious” – a proliferation of financial overhead in the form of interest and dividends, fees and commissions, exorbitant management salaries, bonuses and stock options, and “capital” gains (mainly debt-leveraged land-price gains). And to cap matters, new financial modes of exploiting labor have been innovated, headed by pension-fund capitalism and privatization of Social Security. As economic planning has passed from government to the financial sector, the alternative to public price regulation and progressive taxation is debt peonage.
Diplomats explain & defend our political system.Can be tough when partisan acrimony so high, but there is still no greater country. #USA ðºð¸
Ms Smith – who was appointed as the head diplomat in Doha by former President Barack Obama three years ago – has since tweeted that “Qatar is a strong partner in combating terrorist financing”, contradicting the US President’s public claims that the country is “a funder of terrorism at a very high level”…
Egypt has long thought Qatar’s support of Islamist groups Muslim Brotherhood was dangerous for their country.
Saudi Arabia also re-ignited tensions over Doha’s alleged support for Iran, which they claim could act to destabilise the region.
Qatar
Trump has stakes in four companies that appear to be tied in business in the desert nation. The country’s state-owned carrier, Qatar Airways, has leased an office in Manhattan’s Trump Tower since 2008. Ivanka Trump told Hotelier Middle East in 2015 that the Trump Hotel Collection was eyeing opportunities in Qatar. Back to map.
Saudi Arabia
Shortly after his presidential campaign got underway, according to his financial disclosures, Trump registered eight companies that could be related to a development project in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second-biggest city. “Saudi Arabia, I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me,” Trump said at a campaign rally. Four of the eight companies have since dissolved. In February 2016, Trump said Saudi Arabia “blew up the World Trade Center.” (Fifteen of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudi citizens.) Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Alsaud reminded Trump on Twitter that he had helped “bail” him out in the past; according to the New York Times, the prince agreed to take majority control of New York’s Plaza Hotel when Trump faced financial upheaval in the 1990s and also bought a Trump yacht when the President-elect’s Atlantic City casinos were struggling. Back to map.
Money has no hygienic meaning even though there is dirty/clean money. Money laundering regulation involves banks in competitive cost-benefit strategies
There are regulatory mechanisms that in their political economy distinguish between criminal organizations, terrorist entities, and “normal” finance with a variety of agencies signaling violations.
More interesting in the case of the Gulf states are claims of terrorism and non-terrorism. The Trump Qatar accusations are actually a diversion from examining money laundering for things other than terrorism and other capital gains.
In the #TrumpRussia context, the intersection of financial laundering and demographic data laundering came together in a variety of media applications including the targeting of audiences as well as critical voting districts.
The prosecution of individuals leveraging influence in the #TrumpRussia can be layered over the overt/covert active measures, and layered over the capitalist social networks that laundered data.
Moments later, a second protester … stood up in the crowd and gestured, screaming: “You are all Goebbels! You are all Nazis like Joseph Goebbels… you are inciting terrorists,” likening the audience to the Nazi propaganda minister who aided Adolf Hitler.
The Public Theater’s latest production of the Shakespearean classic has prompted social media protests and led to the withdrawal of two corporate sponsors — Bank of America and Delta Airlines.
In Trump’s case he had a preexisting relationship with Russians who only coincidentally in the 2007 prosecution of Bayrock, revealed the money laundering that is ubiquitous — in such financial capital transactions.
Finally, the role of legal/illegal banking operations especially in tax havens can be layered onto the 2016 election just as one observes the relation between individuals bridging the GOP and Russian actors.
The strangeness of fictitious capital as fiction have come in its most epiphenomenal realms, like the withdrawal of corporate sponsorship of NYC’s Public Theater because of the purported costume blasphemy of god-emperor Trump in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
Such spectacular noise near the original historical sites of Hoovervilles … the ultimate problem of rentier economies.
Politically exposed and expressed, our reality show Donald …
Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum, so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in your brainpan, feel free to add a comment. __________________________________________________________
Dear @realDonaldTrump: You told Comey “it would be good to find out” if your associates colluded. What if one of them was your son-in-law? https://t.co/Gnd4RO1yMv
After 7 months of investigations & committee hearings about my “collusion with the Russians,” nobody has been able to show any proof. Sad!
â Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2017
If there’s “no proof”, then Agent Orange was the unwitting dupe of Russians among other Americans particularly in the light of his willingness to casually accommodate and even share code-word clearance information with them. Publicly urging them to subvert a political opponent does seem to transcend campaign rhetorical practice. And then there are the purity of lies about Russian private involvements contradicted publicly by his sons, officers of his private corporations.
If there is no proof, then why all the obstructing and firing … thousands of Russian bots in social media, then there’s the actual hacking … they can’t be wrong… and then there’s all those circumstantial events, cooperating entities, and GOP hearsay even, aside from what is now actual evidence believed by Congress from evidence in closed session. And then there’s the ordering the manufacturing of firing reasons, only to simultaneously deny and affirm those same reasons.
The Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency concluded in a report declassified in January that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a campaign not just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system but to affect the outcome.
The agencies said Putin and the Russian government had a clear preference for Trump to win the White House. Putin’s associates hacked information, paid social media “trolls” and backed efforts by Russian government agencies and state-funded media to sway public opinion, the agencies said.
The report stopped short of assessing whether Russia succeeded in swaying the election result…
The Post reported the scope of the probe expanded to include Trump shortly after Comey’s dismissal, citing government officials.
I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt
â Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2017
BTW, Donnie, what is the so-called Fake News when you yourself produce it.
The Fake News Media hates when I use what has turned out to be my very powerful Social Media – over 100 million people! I can go around them
â Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2017
Speaking of fake news media … Lord Dampnut retweeted this …
#Hannity Starts in 30 minutes with @newtgingrich and my monologue on the Deep StateâÂÂs allies in the media
Idiots, when you invoke the myth of a deep state you also contradict yourself because all media news organizations must therefore propagate “fake news” (fallacies abound)
Today is Bloomsday, the day in 1904 that the events in the James Joyce novel Ulysses take place.I confess I have only read pieces of it, because it’s so densely written, and some of it I just don’t get. But it has put me in an Irish mood, and there’s a giant of Irish poetry, one of my all-time favorite poets, whose birthday anniversary was earlier this week, on the 13th of June.
As I from time to time remind you, Dear Readers, this weekly series is an introduction to the poets profiled here, a starting point for you to discover their work in more depth on your own. This has seldom been more true than it is today. The collected works of today’s poet-playwright take up fourteen volumes, so this will be only the barest glimpse.
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) is admired as one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century. He is a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival (also ironically called the Celtic Twilight), and a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre with Lady Augusta Gregory (see Word Cloud: COOLE – link below).
Though he viewed himself as Irish, his family were Anglo-Irish, and he was moved back and forth as a child between living in Ireland and in England, as the demands of his father’s career as an artist dictated. William was enrolled in Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art from 1884 to 1886.
He also rather neatly fits the definition of of that great Scrabble word quixotic: idealistic, romantic, visionary, utopian, extravagant, starry-eyed, and unworldly. ________________________________________________________________
Sailing to Byzantium
I
That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
New GOP talking points have emerged to address news of obstruction in the continuing saga of #TrumpRussia’s sub-drama of executive branch corruption. Like the GOP health plan being drafted in secret, Trump never expected to win, much less have his collusion (or his stooges’ collusion) reach the light of day, or oversight.
Collusion, obstruction of justice, perjury; all interesting legal territory, but the crimes are multiple and it’s always about the material incentives, whether influence, reputation, or money and the latter is what it’s about, root of evil stuff.
A former Bernie volunteer shooting up a Congressional baseball practice won’t divert attention from the WaPo news that #TrumpRussia continues and that there are multiple avenues of investigation in multiple states. The Strategy of Tension continues as multi-dimensional, multi-networked states of occasional targeted elections, more frequent marketing of media products, and the financial capital circulation that makes regime change worthwhile.
ð¨ð¨ð¨ WaPo: Special counsel is investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, officials say https://t.co/ECthxlBL2j
The advantage for capitalism is that the Russians won’t reveal information unless it serves their interests, which are still based on protecting their US collaborators. Because it’s still all about the money. For some the IC might be the real danger, but for now it is performing some maintenance or self-regulation because one player got ‘jacked by a psychopath.
The authors of the 2006 book about psychopathy in the workplace, Snakes in Suits describe a five phase model of how a typical workplace psychopath climbs to and maintains power. In phase three (manipulation) – the psychopath will create a scenario of “psychopathic fiction” where positive information about themselves and negative disinformation about others will be created, where your role as a part of a network of pawns or patrons will be utilised and you will be groomed into accepting the psychopath’s agenda.[34]
A source sent me RNC/Trump talking points for Repubs seeking to discredit tonightâÂÂs WaPo scoop on Mueller investigating Trump obstruction âÂÂ> pic.twitter.com/ctwy2si9A7
![Money_Laundering_Flow_Chart[1]](https://flowersforsocrates.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/money_laundering_flow_chart1.jpg?w=498&h=283)
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Joy of Fishes
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Flowers For Socrates 