DEBUNKED: Donald Trump Will NOT End the Federal Reserve

DEBUNKED: Donald Trump Will NOT End the Federal Reserve

by Sean Jobst
January 25, 2017

An article has recently been making the rounds on social media and on many conservative and pro-Trump websites, purporting to reveal Trump's alleged opposition to the Federal Reserve. Entitled "Trump is meeting with an ex-bank CEO who wants to abolish the Federal Reserve and return to the gold standard", it describes a meeting in late November 2016 between President-elect Donald Trump and John Allison, the former CEO of the bank BB&T and the libertarian think-tank the Cato Institute.

The article itself simply reported the meeting, and cited Allison's own views against the Federal Reserve. But as is now common with any story shared on social media, quickly assumed a life of its own. Even without the original article quoting Trump's views even once, it became the source for an article entitled "Trump: I Will Abolish The Federal Reserve" which was carried on sensationalist "news" site YourNewsWire and such pro-Trump websites as Conservative Daily Post and Maine Republic Email Alert.

That Allison's personal view that the Federal Reserve should be abolished, could then be magically turned into Donald Trump himself saying "I will abolish the Federal Reserve" as a policy statement now, merely from one meeting the two had in late November 2016 when Trump was interviewing possible candidates for Treasury Secretary, is a bizarre leap which highlights the proliferation of fake news and sensationalist headlines on both sides.

Such is an unfortunate symptom of social media, and I personally witnessed these articles posted and re-posted on Facebook, with comments praising the alleged move....Except that such people never bothered to simply click on the original headline and see the date: November 28, 2016. They merely looked at the misleading headline and, whetting their own pro-Trump bias, decided to run away with it as part of their revisionist narrative of Trump as "anti-Establishment" man of the people - boldly standing up against the banking elites.

 

If any of those Trumpists could've contained their misplaced giddiness for a second, they would've realized Trump nominated his campaign finance chairman, Steven Mnuchin, as Treasury Secretary on November 30th. John Allison wasn't even in the top contentions for the position - besides Mnuchin, another leading contender was Carl Icahn. Developing a reputation as a "corporate raider" after his hostile takeover of airline TWA in 1985, through the devious process called asset stripping where he profitted immensely while leaving the company with a higher debt, Icahn has been named among "The world's 50 Richest Jews." Neither Mnuchin nor Icahn share Allison's opposition to the Federal Reserve.

 

Son of a Goldman Sachs partner, Steven Mnuchin himself joined the bank after graduating from Yale University. He then worked for seventeen years at Goldman Sachs. He rose to oversee trading in government securities and mortgage bonds for Goldman Sachs. After leaving the firm in 2002, Mnuchin founded the hedge fund Dune Capital Management. From 2003 to 2004, he worked as chief executive of SFM Capital Management, which is associated with and funded by George Soros.

 

 

Steven Mnuchin
 

Mnuchin was part of the group which purchased IndyMac, a failed California-based mortgage lender, from the government in 2009. Under the renamed moniker OneWest Bank, it was recipient of the government's corporate welfare to the tune of a $814.2 million "bailout." OneWest Bank became notorious for its "harsh, repugnant and repulsive" acts in throwing poor and elderly tenants out of the homes the banks foreclosed after the tenants were unable to meet their predatory rent charges. The group sold OneWest Bank in 2015 for more than double the price they had acquired it for in 2009. For the six years of its operation, it earned an infamous reputation for its horrid practices:

 

"OneWest Bank also disproportionately foreclosed on senior citizens. Using a FOIA request, the California Reinvestment Coalition determined that OneWest's reverse mortgage servicing subsidiary Financial Freedom was responsible for 39 percent of reverse mortgage foreclosures, typically something that goes to senior citizens. But Financial Freedom only serves 17 of the market so OneWest was foreclosing at twice the rate one would expect....Similarly, OneWest Bank foreclosed on more communities of color than white communities. Of the 35,877 foreclosures the bank conducted in California from April 2009 to April 2015, 68 percent occurred in areas where the non-white population was 50 percent or higher." (Gideon Resnick, "Trump's New Money Man Has a 'Repulsive' Record of Throwing Homeowners Out on the Street," The Daily Beast, May 5, 2016)

 

 

 

So there you have it: The new Treasury Secretary under "anti-Establishment" Trump is a former Goldman Sachs banker, one linked to a Soros-funded bank, and one associated with and who profited from a vulturous bank that received government-sanctioned corporate welfare. Mnuchin has never repudiated any of these past activities or his profits, nor has Trump who has likewise named Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn as Director of the United States National Economic Council. Trump's Commerce Secretary is Wilbur Ross, a billionaire who spent twenty-five years running Rothschild Inc.'s bankruptcy practice in the United States.

Linda Sarsour: Opportunist Hiding Behind A Hijab and Palestinian Identity

Linda Sarsour: Opportunist Hiding Behind A Hijab and Palestinian Identity

by Sean Jobst
January 24, 2017

There is an older expose of self-styled Palestinian-American and Muslim "activist" Linda Sarsour, but very pertinent with her recent speech at the "Woman's March" in D.C., where she evoked herself as a Muslim and Palestinian-American, of course in her exaggerated Brooklyn accent; I also share this because I have seen too many people on FB praise her. Here's the bottom line: It's the height of hypocrisy that she would now suddenly evoke that, whereas when Obama was slaughtering Muslims in Libya or with drone bombings in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen, or when he was consistently supporting Israel, and its slaughter of her own Palestinian people like in Gaza, where was her outrage then?! Quite the contrary, she was laughing it up and cozying up with his administration at the White House! She was buddies with the staunchly pro-Zionist NYC Mayor; she attended petty-bourgeois social functions with assorted faithful stewards of AIPAC - those who spin and justify the slaughter of her own Palestinian people!

Linda Sarsour has aligned with the Zionist ruling elite on Syria, championing the cause of the "Free" Syrian Army and other rebel groups in their CIA and Saudi-funded, Israeli-supported "revolution" in Syria. This is because she aligns with the Muslim Brotherhood, along with the ISNA and CAIR. And unlike the kosher cuckservatives with their false narrative about "creeping sharia" but who remain silent about Talmudic Noahide Law or the control of AIPAC over U.S. foreign policy, I see the Muslim Brotherhood as nothing but a manipulated group of self-serving political opportunists who want to cash in on identity politics to propel their own careers.

This is not surprising, since very very few are from a working class background - most of them are from more upper-class urban mercantile classes or other professionals who have little concern for workers except if they can paternalistically guide their cause - just like the anointed identity politicians of other communities, who's job is to herd those communities into a Democratic Party which obviously cares as much about them as the other Party. Just like the Marxist "revolutionaries" of the past, they are mostly the privileged people within their own communities who set themselves up as the "avant garde" to "guide" (read: manipulate) the masses whom they inherently have contempt for. All the while they are themselves being manipulated - often willingly and completely of their own accord - by the bankers and other financial interests who serve dual roles as their shot callers and sugar daddies.

Sarsour supports the Israeli-Saudi-Western elites' Soros-funded, Globalist think-tank-inspired "revolution" in Syria, exactly because assorted Muslim Brotherhood flunkies living in comfortable exile - much like the NYC-born and raised Sarsour, who wants to control the discourse on the Palestinian cause even while selling out her people whenever it suits her - are the ones being groomed for power in a hypothetical post-Assad Syrian rump state, beholden to IMF/World Bank loans (much like Morsi was in Egypt - and no, this is not an endorsement of the dictator Sisi) and implementing the Oded Yinon Plan in a "kumbaya" alliance with Israel. This is not surprising, because they have accommodated themselves to the neo-liberal economic order, with banking-friendly policies and legitimizing usury by using other names for it. Such self-serving individuals have shown, time and time again, their willingness to sell out anyone when it comes to their own opportunism.

Cognitive Dissonance in the Age of Trump and SJW Reactionaries

Cognitive Dissonance in the Age of Trump and SJW Reactionaries

by Sean Jobst
20 January 2017

There is a term that means variously refusing to accept what is true, even when confronted with evidences; coming up with preconceived notions and then twisting arguments to support them; and lying to one self. And this is a fitting word when I try and tune out the noise on both sides as we approach the Trump inauguration. As won't come as a surprise to any of you who've been following my work, I will call out the lies and bullshit on both sides - true to my principles, for I am more concerned with truth and consistency beyond falling for the latest hype or simply obsessing about the bullshit of one side and hence falling into the other side of this dialectic.

Trump will be no better or no worse than others; he is no worse or no better than other politicians, when it comes to his ideas at least. There is one side that makes him almost into devil incarnate, based on misconceptions about him allegedly being a "racist" or "fascist" - these are false (my saying that is NOT an endorsement or support for him by any means), and he is really no different on those issues than the Democratic Party or President Obama, under whom the racial, social and economic status quo has remained, and under whom the police continued to be militarized with all their Israeli advisors, teaching them similar tactics used against the Palestinians.

This is a part of the wholesale government-sanctioned corporate takeover of the economy, its expansion of the surveillance state that has the support of both political parties (including "populist" Trump), and the private bankers collecting on their debt from government at our expense. As I've stressed before concerning the Trump charade, his role as a businessman and not a "career politician" is meaningless given the synthesis of Big Business and the State. It's all one big club, as George Carlin once said - and we ain't invited.

Meanwhile, from the other angle alot of these protests have been engineered by agitator groups through which banksters such as that svengali George Soros has funneled millions - as part of their effort to "create order out of chaos" and to forge what he terms an "open society", with its mix of cultural Marxism and identity politics dividing the masses, while those of his ilk continue to profit at the top like typical kosher corporatist capitalist banksters. They want a populace of docile consumers, who will consume-conform-obey while producing just enough to keep the machine going for them. This is the merger of capitalist economics (opposed to a true free-market) with Marxist social and cultural policies; even the rhetoric about the workers has long been discarded.

And if for a second any of the Trump cultists are deceived that the elite is somehow uniformly "against" Trump, they clearly don't know how it operates, that the elites have been split with Trump but they are still part of the same elite just differing on methods and some issues. Such Trumpists have been too deceived by his phony "opposition" and populist rhetoric - rhetoric he has already repudiated and laughed off (ridiculing the "drain the swamp" as "hokey" talk meant to get people's support; backing off immediately from the "Lock her up!" rhetoric he promoted at his rallies, since he was always a buddy of the Clintons, whom he praised as "terrific people", etc.) - to recognize despite all his populist rhetoric, Trump has always had and continues to have links with even Goldman Sachs and Soros:

For example, his campaign finance chairman and Treasury Secretary nominee, Steven Mnuchin, worked for Goldman Sachs and was chief executive of SFM Capital Management, financed by Soros; or Trump's own investments with Goldman Sachs, how he has nominated Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn as National Economic Council director, and that his Senior Counselor Stephen Bannon got his profits as a Goldman Sachs investment banker - these are the people Trump has chosen to oversee the U.S. economy, so those who still obsess about the Goldman Sachs links of the liberal Democrats but turn a blind eye to those of their beloved orange knight in shining armor, are foolish, useful idiots who are clearly cognitively dissonanced because they are clearly not consistent when it comes to their own favored side.

<http://sjobst.blogspot.com/2016/10/make-oligarchy-great-again-donald.html>
<www.national-anarchist.net/2016/10/make-oligarchy-great-again-donald.html>

At the same time, however, where were all these protestors these last eight years? Why were they not protesting Obama's wars, his drone bombings and interventions which have killed hundreds of thousands of people and devastated entire countries? Why were they not protesting Hillary Clinton's war-mongering policies as Secretary of State? Frankly, if war is not on their radar of moral outrage, then I seriously question their moral compass; if they are more offended by words and rhetoric than the actual death of other human beings. (Before the Trump cultists get carried away though, I remind them that their hero likewise championed the Neocons' war in Iraq and the intervention in Libya, so they have no moral high ground either.)

<http://sjobst.blogspot.com/2016/11/where-were-clinton-rioters-when.html>
<http://nonalignedmedia.com/2016/11/anti-trump-sjw-protestors-silent-clinton-crimescorruption/>

Despite his rhetoric to the contrary (even ole "Dubya" Bush had promised "no nation building" in his 2000 campaign), and given his own record of supporting the elites' wars (Iraq and Libya), expect no real change when it comes to foreign policy under President Trump. On the contrary, on the central issue of Israel he will continue the subservient position of the United States to Netanyahu and the Israel Lobby (AIPAC) - manifested for example in the despicable bipartisan $38 billion aid gift to Israel despite all the poverty and issues here in the United States that need handling.

Actually, he will be even worse than President Obama on that issue because, for all Obama's murderous policies at least he asserted some slight semblance of American sovereignty when it came to Netanyahu - making the deal with Iran (which is truly in U.S. interests, with only the pro-Israel crowd in an uproar because they want to use a country's relationship with Israel as the measuring stick of how the U.S. will act toward that country), and abstaining in the recent U.N. vote about Israeli settlements on the West Bank (a far cry from the standard veto for Israel, putting the U.S. at odds with the rest of the world in the process). In any case, those who think Trump will truly "Make America Great Again," need only look at the big Goldman Sachs bankers he has placed over the economy and how his foreign policy will be guided more by Jason Greenblatt, Jared Kushner and David Friedman than anything truly in the interests of these United States.