September 28, 2020

From BBC4, How the Black Vote was Suppressed in 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=617&v=KIf5ELaOjOk&feature=emb_title

This is all over Twitter, an explanation of how the GOP, Facebook, and Cambridge Analytica combined to suppress and even collapse the black vote in the USA in 2016.

Complaining about Sarandon or Sanders or the Greens is a fool's game. This is how they made the difference in battleground states.

Targeted, slick propaganda works. Facebook is the main portal for it. You know what to do.

September 21, 2020

HSBC's share price has fallen to its lowest level since 1995 amid allegations of money laundering.

On Monday in Hong Kong, the shares fell more than 5.3% to close at HK$29.30. In London they fell by a similar amount.

Leaked documents from the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), involving about $2tn of transactions have revealed how some of the world's biggest banks have allowed criminals to move dirty money around the world.

Shares in rival banks named in the papers have also been hit. At lunchtime, Standard Chartered and Barclays were down by 5% and 6% respectively, while Germany's Deutsche Bank was down 8%.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54230733

25 years of stock gains wiped out in a day is an incredibly big deal. HSBC and Deutsche Bank were two of the biggest players in a series of scams resulting in massive money laundering by rogue states, dictators, drug cartels, human trafficking, and other criminal enterprises worldwide. US banks are awash in drug money, that story broke before the 2008 crash.

The only place the scandal was reported last night was NBC, which reported on money laundering by N. Korea through US banks.

This is a huge and developing story.

https://www.occrp.org/en/the-fincen-files/

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/fincen-files (They brpke the story first in the US)

https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/about-the-fincen-files-investigation/

September 16, 2020

The 'free market' manifesto that broke America and led to Trumpism

On Sept. 13, 1970, the New York Times published the "essay heard round the world." In his manifesto, economist Milton Friedman argued that corporations have one - and only one - obligation: maximizing profits for shareholders.

Five decades after the "Friedman Doctrine" emerged, the American middle class is in tatters. Long before the coronavirus, millions of Americans were poor, sick and angry; perfect prey for Donald Trump's resentful demagoguery and racial scapegoating.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-free-market-manifesto-that-broke-america-and-led-to-trumpism/ar-BB196Z5S?li=BBnb7Kz

Very readable article on how we got here and why wand whodunit, starting with that fraud Friedman. I'm just glad somebody besides me and a few people buried in left wing niche journals are writing about this. It was a long con and the biggest heist in history.

September 15, 2020

The price of inequality? Lost annual income of $42,000 for typical worker, study finds

Income inequality has given the rich a greater share of the economic spoils than middle- and low-income earners. That's resulted in a very real impact on the incomes of middle- and low-income households, with the typical full-time American worker now earning $42,000 less than they would have if inequality hadn't surged over the last four decades.

That's according to a new analysis from researchers at Rand, the global policy think tank. Its researchers wanted to look at the dollars-and-cents impact on U.S. households from yawning income inequality, which has lifted the fortunes of the rich to that of Gilded Age levels.

Prior to the mid-1970s, Americans' incomes, no matter their level, generally rose in step with overall economic growth. But that changed in the late 1970s, with the rich capturing the lion's share of economic growth, while middle-class and lower-income workers eked out gains far below par

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/income-inqequality-42k-lost-anually/

I doubt this will be reported by network news and certainly not reportecd well.

What could you have done with that $807.69 a week?

September 3, 2020

Remembering David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs

September 1, 2020

Russia Just Declassified Footage of The Most Powerful Nuclear Bomb Blast in History

https://www.sciencealert.com/russia-declassifies-footage-of-the-most-powerful-nuclear-bomb-in-history

The video is longish and has subtitles and looks remarkably like what was being produced in the US in the Cold War to drum up public support for our bomb testing.

One thing the article failed to mention is that the power of this thing was dialed back from 100 megatons to 50 megatons, and at that they almost lost the planed that dropped the thing.

This is an interesting look at just how nuts the Cold War was, a fascinating piece of history.

As far as I know, the old Soviets didn't make many of these things. They were too big and heavy, delivery was problematic. Also, several smaller bombs in a cluster were even more devastating than one of these monsters. The largest device the US detonated was a quarter the size of the Tsar Bomba.