American Politics

[TheHowieLama 13,174]

7 hours ago, Anubis said:

And Howie is almost certainly behind it all.

 

 

First rule of the Seditious Conspirators Club is you don't talk about the Seditious Conspirators Club.

[Red Phoenix 1,967]

 

[Rico1304 8,965]

 

[Em City 1,815]

21 minutes ago, Rico1304 said:

 

 

Yeah, but Sleepy Joe Biden lol

[Em City 1,815]

https://mobile.twitter.com/GaviBegtrup/status/1543002460285026305?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^tweet

 

An "opportunity". That's what they're saying to children who have obviously been raped by a family member and are been forced to carry the baby to term. Children forced to have children.

 

Sick.  

 

 

[Kepler-186 562]

First episode all about legalisation of abortion in the States and Roe V Wade. 

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0011cpq?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

I didn’t watch all the Handsmaid’s Tale but I liked some of the flashbacks they did early on with the “terror”

attack on the Capitol or Senate subsequently forcing through extreme legislation and the main character’s debit card stopping working as she was a woman, and the new law meant that men controlled the accounts of any partners. 

 

[Section_31 25,785]

Someone was telling me recently that the reason the republicans are so arsed about abortion is because whites are more likely to have them than Latinos (because they're Catholic) and they're worried about Latinos becoming the dominant ethnic group. Dunno if that's bollocks or not, sounds possible though given the general mentalism.

[Rico1304 8,965]

Always read the paperwork. 
 

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/07/minnesota-legalized-edibles-after-a-republican-didnt-read-the-bill/

[Mudface 5,407]

38 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

Someone was telling me recently that the reason the republicans are so arsed about abortion is because whites are more likely to have them than Latinos (because they're Catholic) and they're worried about Latinos becoming the dominant ethnic group. Dunno if that's bollocks or not, sounds possible though given the general mentalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement

 

Fucking weird cunts.

[Red Phoenix 1,967]

Dems at it again blocking Greens. So much for democracy :

 

 

[skend04 2,590]

8 hours ago, Section_31 said:

Someone was telling me recently that the reason the republicans are so arsed about abortion is because whites are more likely to have them than Latinos (because they're Catholic) and they're worried about Latinos becoming the dominant ethnic group. Dunno if that's bollocks or not, sounds possible though given the general mentalism.

Yeah, it's part of that Great Replacement conspiracy theory that Trump and his supporters kept espousing. 

[Rico1304 8,965]

3 hours ago, skend04 said:

Yeah, it's part of that Great Replacement conspiracy theory that Trump and his supporters kept espousing. 

The judgment actually says they need to keep the ‘supply’ of babies flowing.  Chilling. 

[Red Phoenix 1,967]

From Jacobin in April :

 

Quote

The Kids Are Alright. BlackRock’s President Isn’t.

By Ryan Zickgraf

BlackRock president Rob Kapito has a lot of nerve calling young Americans entitled brats. In reality, millennials and Zoomers are struggling to find a foothold in a harsh economic climate that BlackRock executives themselves helped create.

The latest salvo in the generation wars comes from Rob Kapito, the sixty-five-year-old president of BlackRock.

Young people today are “entitled” and strangers to sacrifice, Kapito said on Tuesday. “For the first time, this generation is going to go into a store and not be able to get what they want.”

Hey kids, quit your whining about skyrocketing inequality and inflation, shortages of goods and services, and the rising threat of climate change and World War III. Instead, listen to the hard-earned wisdom of a cartoon villain speaking at a fossil fuel industry convention — one whose activities helped lead to the 2008 financial crash.

Smoking the BlackRock

It’s one thing for your cantankerous grandfather to go Grandpa Simpson and bellyache about the bratty privilege of millennials and Gen Z.

But for a BlackRock executive to rant about the entitlement of kids these days? That’s rich — extremely rich considering that it comes from a man who makes $25 million a year. And speaking of entitlement, Kapito’s fortune is built entirely on other people’s money.

Kapito landed a job at investment banking firm First Boston in 1979 after graduating from Penn’s Wharton School a few years after Donald Trump.  There, he met Larry Fink, and together they helped pioneer the mortgage-backed securities market. Fink and Kapito convinced Freddie Mac to let First Boston take mortgages, pool them, slice them, and sell them as securities to offload $1 billion in mortgages.

In 1988, the pair founded BlackRock under the umbrella Blackstone Group but later broke up with the private equity firm and struck out on their own. Together, they gobbled up billions of dollars in new business through ruthless acquisitions that one former executive called “an extraordinary exercise in the Machiavellian method” and by churning out new financial products.

BlackRock did for investing what Henry Ford did for the car, says the Financial Times. Sure, but imagine if Ford built a car that drove off a cliff en masse. That’s a crude way to describe the way that the mortgage-backed security market bubble burst, helping trigger the credit crisis in 2007 and rocking the entire global financial system, leading to the Great Recession.

BlackRock took a big hit, but avoided the fate of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers by divesting itself from some of the multitrillion-dollar mortgage securities markets before the roof caved in. Soon, everyone from foreign central banks to Wall Street rival companies to the state of Florida were begging for help in dealing with $1 trillion in securities that nearly drowned the entire financial system.

Tens of millions of Americans suffered enormously from the financial crisis. But arguably the sharpest blow was reserved for millennials, who entered the workforce at a time of economic contraction and high unemployment and have become saddled with debt as they try to put together a semblance of an adult-seeming life.

The Thanos of Finance

Can This Man Save Wall Street?” asked CNN about Fink, BlackRock’s CEO. Sure. After all, who better to defuse a bomb than the one who originally planted it?

Over the past decade and a half, BlackRock has amassed unimaginable money and power. The company’s $10 trillion of assets are worth more than the GDP of all countries on the planet except the United States and China. And there’s a growing pipeline of personnel between its headquarters and the White House — a “shadow government” as the Intercept has called it.

Donald Trump had Fink on speed dial in early 2020 to get advice on dealing with markets and then — voilà! — the US Federal Reserve hired BlackRock to purchase, get this, commercial mortgage-backed securities. It was the worst kind of nostalgia for the aughts.

“I didn’t know Larry Fink had been made God,” billionaire investor Sam Zell told CNBC in 2018. “I just wonder whether America is really ready for Vanguard and BlackRock to control the New York Stock Exchange, because that’s what’s happening,” he added.

Kapito has a lower profile than his partner Fink, but maybe being God’s right-hand man long enough has gone to his head. Otherwise, it’s hard to imagine how he got the nerve to badmouth the younger generation suffering from bleak material conditions that BlackRock had some hand in creating.

Yet somehow financially precarious and debt-burdened young people are the entitled ones? Ok, boomer.

 

https://jacobin.com/2022/04/rob-kapito-millennials-gen-z-blackrock-2008-crisis

 

[Numero Veinticinco 8,413]

14 minutes ago, Numero Veinticinco said:

Are you sure, or do you just think you know what they want?

@Red Phoenix

[Red Phoenix 1,967]

8 minutes ago, Numero Veinticinco said:

@Red Phoenix

 

I think it looks fairly obvious what they want the more you learn about them. Do you think they're good for America?

[SasaS 3,234]

It's refreshing. It used to be all Goldman Sachs this and Glodman Sachs that, but that is obviously so 2012.

[Numero Veinticinco 8,413]

43 minutes ago, Red Phoenix said:

 

I think it looks fairly obvious what they want the more you learn about them. Do you think they're good for America?

Yes, it is obvious. They are, after all, an asset manager so they want they assets they manage to grow. There have been loads of conspiracy type accounts on social media pushing the BlackRock angle. They've been going since the 80s. You mentioned them once before this year (a passing mention to do with yougov). Is it possible the sites you read are conspiring to make a story. 

 

Do I think they're good for America. Well, I guess it depends on how you look at it. They're very good at making money.

[Skidfingers McGonical 3,522]

16 hours ago, Mudface said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement

 

Fucking weird cunts.

I’ve seen the book “The Birth Dearth” by Ben Wittenberg being thrown about recently. People saying that it’s used politically by both Rep. & Dem parties to control. 
 

From the quick scan I have had through it on a PDF, it’s some take. 
 

Here’s a review of it at the time. 
 

 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-08-02-bk-722-story.html

[Red Phoenix 1,967]

1 hour ago, Numero Veinticinco said:

Is it possible the sites you read are conspiring to make a story. 

 

Do I think they're good for America. Well, I guess it depends on how you look at it. They're very good at making money.

 

I don't think there's any need to conspire to make a story when it comes to BlackRock. When you look at their history, lobbying, ties with government and the amount of cash they have I'd say they qualify as one of the best current definitions of crony capitalism.

[Numero Veinticinco 8,413]

26 minutes ago, Red Phoenix said:

 

I don't think there's any need to conspire to make a story when it comes to BlackRock. When you look at their history, lobbying, ties with government and the amount of cash they have I'd say they qualify as one of the best current definitions of crony capitalism.

How come you didn't care about this before this year? 

[TheHowieLama 13,174]

1 minute ago, Numero Veinticinco said:

How come you didn't care about this before this year? 

He had Canada to worry about.

[Red Phoenix 1,967]

49 minutes ago, Numero Veinticinco said:

How come you didn't care about this before this year? 

 

I did, I've just never really posted about them. And even if I didn't know of them before this year it doesn't change anything about them does it?

 

But yeah, this is an article I'm sure I remember from 2016 for instance. It might have been around then that I became more aware of them : Larry Fink and His BlackRock Team Poised to Take Over Hillary Clinton’s Treasury Department

 

 

[Red Phoenix 1,967]

4 minutes ago, Red Phoenix said:

I did, I've just never really posted about them.

 

To be clear : I find this odd too. It could be that if the search function worked well enough there'd be a link or two back in the 2016 election thread. I might not have linked anything though because of all of the other crazy shit going on during that election.

[SasaS 3,234]

Do you see them as more, or less dangerous Goldman Sachs were (are)?

[Numero Veinticinco 8,413]

13 minutes ago, Red Phoenix said:

 

I did, I've just never really posted about them. And even if I didn't know of them before this year it doesn't change anything about them does it?

 

But yeah, this is an article I'm sure I remember from 2016 for instance. It might have been around then that I became more aware of them : Larry Fink and His BlackRock Team Poised to Take Over Hillary Clinton’s Treasury Department

 

 

Ah, back in your Trump supporting days. But why it matters to me is the trend. You see it all the time. It has become fashionable to talk about BlackRock this year. As if they're somehow ruling the world and everything is because of them. Like so much that comes from these crackpost conspiracy theorists, it's all twisted and misjudged nonsense.

 

Shame Clinton never got in over Trump though, right?