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Thursday, February 6, 2020

The Myth Of Incompetence - DNC Scandals Are A Feature, Not A Bug

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

The Iowa caucus scandal has continued to get more egregious by the hour, with new revelations routinely pouring in about extremely suspicious manipulations taking place which all just so happen to disadvantage the campaign of Bernie Sanders in the first Democratic electoral contest of 2020. By the time you read this article, there will likely have been more.

Following the failure of an extremely shady app developed by vocally anti-Sanders establishment insiders which reportedly was literally altering vote count numbers after they were entered, Black Hawk County supervisor Chris Schwartz shared the election results in his county on Facebook so the public could have some idea of what’s going on as the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) slowly trickles out the results of the caucuses.

Sanders supporters quickly highlighted the fact that the IDP’s reported numbers for Black Hawk County were wildly different from those reported by Schwartz, with votes taken from Sanders and given to minor fringe candidates Deval Patrick and Tom Steyer. The IDP then announced that it would be making “a minor correction to the last batch of results”, which just so happened to be in Black Hawk County and just so happened to give Sanders back some votes (but still remains different from that reported by Schwartz).

It’s probable that this only happened as a result of one Black Hawk County supervisor taking to social media to report the vote tallies for this one particular county. What about all the Iowa locations where this did not happen and local Democratic Party officials didn’t report their numbers on social media? Does anyone actually believe that the one instance where the IDP got caught is the one instance in which such vote tampering occurred?

That would be a very silly belief to hold, in my opinion. It would be like a store clerk discovering that a can of beans is completely rotten, then going ahead and putting the rest of the pallet on the shelf under the assumption that the other cans are fine.

Another of the countless revelations hemorrhaging from this fustercluck is a report from CNN and The New York Post that the DNC, not the IDP, is “running the show” in managing the Iowa caucus scandal. This means that this Democratic presidential primary scandal is being managed by the same committee which orchestrated the last Democratic presidential primary scandal, and that the campaign being victimized by this scandal, that of Bernie Sanders, is the same in both cases.

This would be the same DNC whose chairperson, Tom Perez, recently stacked its nominating committee with dozens of odious alt-centrist establishment insiders who are ideologically opposed to Sanders in every meaningful way.

“Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez has nominated dozens of lobbyists, corporate consultants, think tank board members, and former officials linked to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton to serve on the Democratic National Convention (DNC) nominating committee this July,” Kevin Gosztola reported for Grayzone last month. “Many of Perez’s nominees are vocal opponents of Senator Bernie Sanders and spoke out against his campaign when he challenged Hillary Clinton for the nomination in 2016.”

As these scandalous revelations continue to emerge I don’t see anyone online expressing surprise that the Democratic establishment is once again stacking the deck against Sanders, but I do see some people expressing surprise that they are being so brazen about it. Which is perfectly understandable; if this party wants to screw over progressive voters, you’d expect that they’d at least try to hide it a little bit so they don’t alienate their progressive base before November.

The flaw in this expectation is its premise that Democratic Party elites care if their party wins in November. They do not.

Put yourself in the shoes of one of the leading movers and shakers within the Democratic Party for a minute. Pretend you’re getting a nice paycheck, pretend you’re getting great healthcare benefits, pretend you get plenty of prestige and exclusive access and invitations to classy parties. And pretend you’re the type of person who’s willing to manipulate and deceive and kiss up and kick down and do whatever it takes to get to the top of such a structure.

Now ask yourself, if you were such a person in such a situation, would you care if voters pick Donald Trump or Pete Buttigeig in November? Would it affect your cushy lifestyle in any way whatsoever? Would you lose your job, your prestige or your influence? No party elites lost those things in 2016. Why would you expect this time to be any different?

But you might be at risk of losing your cushy lifestyle if a forcefully anti-elitist progressive movement gets off the ground and takes control of your party. So you’d stand everything to gain by doing everything you can to prevent that from happening, and, because you don’t care if Trump gets re-elected, you’d stand absolutely nothing to lose.

These people do not care if Trump gets re-elected, because they lose nothing if he does. The only people who stand anything to lose are the ordinary citizens who are suffering under a corrupt status quo of soul-crushing neoliberalism and increasing authoritarianism, many of whom currently support Sanders. Democratic Party elites are perfectly happy to keep shrieking about Russia for another four years while making sure that the status quo which rewards their manipulative behavior remains intact, and ensuring that they never wind up like those poor suckers out there who are suffering from poverty and lack of healthcare.

And everything I just said is equally true of the media class who are currently working in conjunction with the DNC’s shenanigans to spin Pete Buttigeig as the clear winner of the party’s first presidential electoral contest. They enjoy all the same perks, and move in many of the same circles, as Democratic Party elites, and it’s all conditioned on their protection of the status quo.

I keep seeing the word “incompetence” thrown around. “Gosh these Democratic Party leaders are so incompetent!”, they say. “How can anyone be so bad at their job?”

Well, they are not bad at their job. They are very, very good at their job. It’s just that their job isn’t what most people assume it is.

Their job is not to win elections and garner public support, their job is to ensure the perpetuation of the status quo which rewards them so handsomely for their malignant behavior. Toward this end they are not incompetent at all. They know exactly what they’re doing, and they’re doing it well.

They are extremely competent. Depraved, certainly. Sociopathic, possibly. But not incompetent.

They’re happy to make their nefariousness look like incompetence though, whenever they can get away with it. Any manipulator worth their salt always will be. If they can make their planned, deliberate acts of sabotage look like innocent little oopsies, they’ll gladly do so. But you learn in life that whenever you see someone making a lot of “mistakes” which just so happen to benefit them every time, you’re dealing with manipulation, not incompetence.

What do the bad guys say in the movies when they order someone’s murder? They say “Make it look like an accident.” If it’s an accident you’ve got no trouble. You won’t be seen for what you are.

But of course it’s no accident, and anyone with clear eyes and good intentions sees this. If you see someone working hard to make you believe that it’s incompetence, you are dealing with someone who is invested in maintaining the status quo in some way. You are being manipulated.

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly the way it’s intended to work. It ain’t a bug, it’s a feature. And that feature will remain in operation until the entire sick system is torn down and replaced with something healthy.

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Just A Little Sloppy Record-Keeping? The Pentagon's $35 Trillion 'Accounting Black Hole'

From Zero Hedge:

Over the past two weeks of coronavirus headlines and heightened global anxiety, along with impeachment coverage and after over the Super Bowl weekend Americans huddled in living rooms in blissful oblivion, a story which in more normal times would be front and center has gone largely unnoticed. To be sure, the Pentagon couldn't be happier that this bombshell has taken a back burner in global headlines:

The Pentagon made $35 trillion in accounting adjustments last year alone — a total that’s larger than the entire U.S. economy and underscores the Defense Department’s continuing difficulty in balancing its books.

The latest estimate is up from $30.7 trillion in 2018 and $29 trillion in 2017, the first year adjustments were tracked in a concerted way, according to Pentagon figures and a lawmaker who’s pursued the accounting morass.

It sounds more appropriately news out of The Onion or Babylon Bee given this is *Trillions* and not just billions — though that itself would have been remarkable enough. Naturally, the first and only question we should start with is: how is this even possible?

After all, $35 trillion is about one-and-a-half times the size of the entire US economy. Not to mention that the figure easily dwarfs the GDP of the entire combined nations of the European continent. Consider too that the current actual US budge for defense-related funding is $738 billion.

“Within that $30 trillion is a lot of double, triple, and quadruple counting of the same money as it got moved between accounts,” Todd Harrison, a Pentagon budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Bloomberg in a recent report.

But are we really to believe that mere “combined errors, shorthand, and sloppy record-keeping by DoD accountants” — as another analyst was quoted as saying — can explain a $35 Trillion accounting black hole?

According to the DoD, there's nothing to see here...

The Defense Department acknowledged that it failed its first-ever audit in 2018 and then again last year, when it reviewed $2.7 trillion in assets and $2.6 trillion in liabilities. While auditors found no evidence of fraud in the review of finances that Congress required, they flagged a laundry list of problems, including accounting adjustments.

With tax season now fast approaching, it's not too comforting to know the Pentagon enjoys over half of all discretionary domestic spending for its global war machine in maintenance of ~~our humble Republic~~ Empire .

Bloomberg attempted to get a handle on it further in explaining, "The military services make adjustments, some automatic and some manual, on a monthly and quarterly basis, and those actions are consolidated by the Pentagon’s primary finance and accounting service and submitted to the Treasury."

"There were 546,433 adjustments in fiscal 2017 and 562,568 in 2018, according to figures provided by Representative Jackie Speier, who asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate," the report added. Spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s inspector general, Dwrena Allen, downplayed what to most Americans will sound like the makings of an explosive scandal. “In layman’s terms, this means that the DoD made adjustments to accounting records without having documentation to support the need or amount for the adjustment,” she said.

And for further perspective on the DoD's "defense" of the beggars belief figure:

"It means money that DoD moved from one part of the budget to another," Clark explained to Task & Purpose. "So, like in your household budget: It would be like moving money from checking, to savings, to your 401K, to your credit card, and then back."

However, $35 trillion is close to 50-times the size of the Pentagon's 2019 budget, so that means every dollar the Defense Department received from Congress was moved up to 50 times before it was actually spent, Clark said.

"Trillions" explained away by a little benign neglect of simple documentation?

Of course, in the real world outside the halls of government and of largely unchecked power, a mere single trillion would be enough send people to jail. Here we're talking $30+ trillion and it appears this gaping accounting black hole bigger that most of the world's past and future economies will itself be memory holed and explained away as being but the minor errors of some DoD pencil-pushers, apparently.

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Wednesday, February 5, 2020

US Launches Criminal Probe Into JPMorgan For Gold Price Manipulation

From Zero Hedge:

There was a time when the merest mention of gold manipulation in "reputable" media was enough to have one branded a perpetual conspiracy theorist with a tinfoil farm out back... and immediately banned from social media.

That was roughly coincident with a time when Libor, FX, mortgage, and bond market manipulation was also considered unthinkable, when High Frequency Traders were believed to "provide liquidity", or when the stock market was said to not be manipulated by the Fed, and when the ever-confused media, always eager to take "complicated" financial concepts at the face value set by a self-serving establishment, never dared to question anything.

That has now changed...

In November 2018, a former JPMorgan precious-metals trader admitted he engaged in a six-year spoofing scheme that defrauded investors in gold, silver, platinum, and palladium futures contracts.

John Edmonds, 36, of Brooklyn, New York, pleaded guilty under seal on Oct. 9 in the District of Connecticut to commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, commodities price manipulation, and spoofing. As Justice notes in a statement:

“From approximately 2009 through 2015 John Edmonds engaged in a sophisticated scheme to manipulate the market for precious metals futures contracts for his own gain by placing orders that were never intended to be executed,” said Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski.

“The Criminal Division is committed to prosecuting those who undermine the investing public’s trust in the integrity of our commodities markets through spoofing or any other illegal conduct.”

That was followed, a year later, by the DOJ charging the entire precious-metals trading desk at JPMorgan of being deeply involved in what prosecutors described as a "massive, multiyear scheme to manipulate the market for precious metals futures contracts and defraud market participants."

The DoJ charged Michael Nowak, a JPMorgan veteran and former head of its precious metals trading desk and Gregg Smith, another trader on JPM's metals desk, in the probe. (Blythe Masters was somehow omitted).

“Based on the fact that it was conduct that was widespread on the desk, it was engaged in in thousands of episodes over an eight-year period -- that it is precisely the kind of conduct that the RICO statute is meant to punish,” Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski told reporters.

Here's where it gets extra interesting: according to Bloomberg, the unusually aggressive language language embraced by prosecutors reminds legal experts of indictments utilizing the RICO Act - a law allowing prosecutors to take down 'criminal enterprises' like the mafia by charging all members of the organization for any crimes committed by an individual on behalf of the organization.

Prosecutors charged the head of JP Morgan’s global metals trading operation and two other traders with "conspiracy to conduct the affairs of an enterprise involved in interstate or foreign commerce through a pattern of racketeering activity" - language that is typically used to describe a RICO charge.

And now, 5 months later, Bloomberg reports that things have escalated even further.

According to two people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports that U.S. authorities that accused six JPMorgan Chase & Co. employees of rigging precious-metals futures are building a criminal case against the bank itself.

So more than 11 years after the farce began, this previously unreported investigation of the global bank’s parent company - part of a wide-ranging federal clampdown on market manipulation - raises the prospect of criminal charges and significant fines against America’s largest bank.

Additionally, Bloomberg notes that, according to a third person familiar with the matter, authorities are conducting a similar racketeering investigation of a second financial firm involving spoofing.

And all of this is occurring as more and more investors realize the value of gold as a hedge against the idiocy of politicians and policy-makers... in other words, just as manipulating precious-metals prices lower would be at its most use to the banking elites.

Conspiracy theory becomes conspiracy fact... and we wonder whether any of this would be public had Twitter's newly-minted "censor anything we don't like" policies been in place?

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