A stunning 2011 Government Accountability Office report examined $16 trillion of bailout facilities extended by the Fed in the wake of the crisis and exposed numerous examples of blatant conflicts of interest. Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of General Electric served as a director on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the same time the Fed provided $16 billion in financing to General Electric. JP Morgan Chase chief executive, Jamie Dimon, meanwhile, was also a member of the board of the New York Fed during the period that saw $391 billion in Fed emergency lending directed to his own bank. In all, Federal Reserve board members were tied to $4 trillion in loans to their own banks. These funds were not simply used to keep these banks afloat, but actually to return these Fed-connected banks to a period of record profits in the same period that the average worker saw their real wages actually decrease and the economy on main street slow to a standstill.
If there’s any ray of hope here, it’s that (as I discussed with James Evan Pilato on a recent edition of New World Next Week), Dimon recently said he wouldn’t want to become Treasury Secretary due to “Democrat-Republican bullshit.” As Pearse Redmond points out, the Trump team may be floating Dimon’s name right now to make it seem not so bad when they “only” appoint Goldman/Soros insider Mnuchin to the position,
John Bolton – John Bolton is a career Republican insider who served roles in both Bush White Houses, including most recently as UN Ambassador in 2005-2006. He’s also the worst kind of crazed, bloodthirsty neocon who has literally never heard of a foreign invasion he didn’t lust after. Don’t take my word for it, listen to him explain Trump’s foreign policy imperatives…for as many seconds as you can stomach it. And yes, he’s commenting on Trump’s foreign policy because he has been advising the Trump campaign and has been name-dropped for months as a possible Secretary of State in the Trump cabinet. So are all of those who voted Trump over Hillary because they didn’t like her warmongering suitably upset now? Well if not there’s always his picks for Secretary of Defense, like:
Stephen Hadley – Hadley is the man who, acting as Bush Jr.’s Deputy National Security Advisor, served as the conduit for the ridiculously fake yellowcake uranium forgeries that were used to help drum up the war in Iraq. He was also the guy who kept the bogus yellowcake story in Bush’s October 2002 speech in Cincinnati laying out the case for the illegal bloody war of aggression in Iraq. A share of the million dead Iraqi’s blood is on his hands. And he’s in the running to be Trump’s Secretary of Defense.
Reince Priebus – Nothing says “anti-establishment party outsider” like the current chairman of the Republican National Committee, right? Well, guess what: Reince Priebus is under consideration for Trump’s chief of staff. You know, the highest ranking employee of the White House? Priebus is apparently competing against the likes of Stephen Bannon (Trump campaign C.E.O. and former head of Breitbart News) and Jared Kushner‘s (The Donald’s own son-in-law who the Times of Israel takes great pains to point out is an Orthodox Jew, as is Ivanka Trump). Regardless of who gets the spot, the very fact that Priebus is in the running shows that Trump’s feud with the Republican Party was about as real as Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant at Wrestlemania.
Rudy Giuliani – Rudy Giuliani is an unconvicted 9/11 criminal who illegally cleared the 9/11 crime scene, and who failed to pass on the prior warning that he received about the towers’ destruction. He is also hated by the New York Fire Department for having kicked the firemen off the pile as soon as the gold was discovered. As Associate Attorney General in 1981 he was involved in the PROMIS software octopus. He oversaw New York’s unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policing policy. He is a ghoul in every sense. So naturally the only question is which spot will he fill in the Trump cabinet: Attorney General, DHS chief, cybersecurity czar, or something else entirely?
Getting nauseated yet? You should be, but if not there are many many many more contemptible establishment insiders who are being vetted for potential cabinet positions at this very moment. But don’t worry, this is why I saved the good news for last.
But first, the not-so-bad news: None of these positions have been filled yet. We don’t know who is going to actually make it into the Trump cabinet at this point. Who knows, maybe it will be a bunch of swell, upstanding Beltway outsiders, non-banksters and populists who are committed to the principles of human freedom. Trump and Change 2016!
OK, alright. That’s wishful thinking. But here’s the really good news:
