# Mail bombs sent to CNN / Dems



## Bentaycanada (Oct 25, 2018)

What does everyone think of this?

The list is pretty insane, including:


Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Former President Barack Obama

Former Vice-President Joe Biden

Former CIA Director John Brennan, care of CNN

Former Attorney General Eric Holder

California Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters

Actor Robert De Niro, via his restaurant
The Left are saying that Trump shares the blame for this with his "the press are the enemy of the people" comments at rallies. The Right appear to be saying that the President has no blame for this, and that the Left need to look internal.

There are even false flag conspiracies that appeared almost instantly, and have even been pushed by Limbaugh on his radio show.

What are peoples feelings on this?
Do left-wing media hold as much blame for the rhetoric as Trump or even his base / media alias?


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## Randy (Oct 25, 2018)

The mistake the Left have been making is trying to fight this as a matter of 'who hit who first' because the fact is, I have my beliefs on this but regardless of what they are, Conservatives have been effective at 'whataboutizing' this issue with the stories about Rep. Scalise or the ricin that was sent out lately.

Never going to win a fight like this that way.

Likewise, the overarching narrative on this has become "Dems plant false flag bomb scare" on conservative outlets and "Republicans accuse Dems of planting false flag bomb scare" on the left. Both play into the narrative conservatives want leading to the midterm and likely give the bomber exactly what they want. It should be covered as an active criminal and likely domestic terror investigation, no more and no less.


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## MaxOfMetal (Oct 25, 2018)

Randy said:


> The mistake the Left have been making is trying to fight this as a matter of 'who hit who first' because the fact is, I have my beliefs on this but regardless of what they are, Conservatives have been effective at 'whataboutizing' this issue with the stories about Rep. Scalise or the ricin that was sent out lately.
> 
> Never going to win a fight like this that way.
> 
> Likewise, the overarching narrative on this has become "Dems plant false flag bomb scare" on conservative outlets and "Republicans accuse Dems of planting false flag bomb scare" on the left. Both play into the narrative conservatives want leading to the midterm and likely give the bomber exactly what they want. It should be covered as an active criminal and likely domestic terror investigation, no more and no less.



This.


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## Bentaycanada (Oct 25, 2018)

Ok, so they shouldn't be making it about who hit first. But it cannot be ignored that the President has openly attacked several of the targets dozens of times, in Tweets and most importantly at live rallies. Not to mention Fox News, which literally claims ignorance on this.

According to CNN (who I personally dislike as much as Fox) these are some numbers on Trump / Fox News tweets / attacks. I think these numbers are worth looking at and considering regardless of how you feel about them:

* CNN in tweets - 63 times
* The press as "the enemy of the people" in speeches / tweets - 55 times
* "fake news" - 700 times
* Attacks on Clinton - 109 times
* Obama tweets - 137 times
* Maxine Waters in speeches, press statements and tweets - 73 times (since March)
* Hannity mentioned Clinton - 360 times
* Tucker Carlson mentioned Clinton - 290 times
* Eric Holder mentioned by Hannity and Carlson - 74 times

Trump has only been in office 677 days, and I think these numbers are staggering.

Now, my question is, has the other side been this consistent in their attacks on Trump?
Also, I don't think saying that the press, be it CNN or NY Time or whoever writing negative pieces on the President counts. He's the President and should be open to scrutiny from anyone.
So on that note, was Obama this bad about Fox or Bush?


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## narad (Oct 25, 2018)

Bentaycanada said:


> So on that note, was Obama this bad about Fox or Bush?



He wasn't even this bad about Fox when they were suggesting he was not even born in American. Obama just smoothly mocked how dumb it all was at the correspondence dinner.

btw, the Rory Scovel standup on this topic is hilarious.


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## KnightBrolaire (Oct 25, 2018)

i'm not one for conspiracy theories but some of the photos i've seen of the bombs look fake af. they basically look like pipe bombs with digital timers attached to them, which makes no sense given that mail travel can vary greatly and most of these would have been opened by aides/secretaries. the unabomber would boobytrap his packages so they exploded upon opening, which is more what i would expect if people were actively trying to blow up politicians.
the idea that multiple bombs slipped through mail screening, but didn't detonate at any point, makes me question whether they were actual bombs and not just a fearmongering prank.
i'll have to talk to my eod buddies and see what they think of the bombs.


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## Randy (Oct 25, 2018)

KnightBrolaire said:


> i'm not one for conspiracy theories but some of the photos i've seen of the bombs look fake af. they basically look like pipe bombs with digital timers attached to them, which makes no sense given that mail travel can vary greatly and most of these would have been opened by aides/secretaries. the unabomber would boobytrap his packages so they exploded upon opening, which is more what i would expect if people were actively trying to blow up politicians.
> the idea that multiple bombs slipped through mail screening, but didn't detonate at any point, makes me question whether they were actual bombs and not just a fearmongering prank.
> i'll have to talk to my eod buddies and see what they think of the bombs.



If fear is the goal, the bombs working didn't matter. Either way, you can skew the intention of this to suit either narrative.

I don't think there's anything especially unfair or biased about taking this at face value until the investigation concludes. It's hard not to take the jumping to conspiracy as bias dictating conclusions rather than the other way around, considering how quick those conclusions seem to have been reached and on so little information either way.


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## narad (Oct 25, 2018)

Btw I had a particularly good default rendering of one of the news pages as I was reading up on this topic:


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## Ordacleaphobia (Oct 25, 2018)

Randy said:


> The mistake the Left have been making is trying to fight this as a matter of 'who hit who first' because the fact is, I have my beliefs on this but regardless of what they are, Conservatives have been effective at 'whataboutizing' this issue with the stories about Rep. Scalise or the ricin that was sent out lately.
> 
> Never going to win a fight like this that way.
> 
> Likewise, the overarching narrative on this has become "Dems plant false flag bomb scare" on conservative outlets and "Republicans accuse Dems of planting false flag bomb scare" on the left. Both play into the narrative conservatives want leading to the midterm and likely give the bomber exactly what they want.* It should be covered as an active criminal and likely domestic terror investigation, no more and no less*.



Absolutely. The fact that people will always politicize stuff like this will never not be obnoxious as hell.



Bentaycanada said:


> Ok, so they shouldn't be making it about who hit first. But it cannot be ignored that the President has openly attacked several of the targets dozens of times, in Tweets and most importantly at live rallies. Not to mention Fox News, which literally claims ignorance on this.
> 
> According to CNN (who I personally dislike as much as Fox) these are some numbers on Trump / Fox News tweets / attacks. I think these numbers are worth looking at and considering regardless of how you feel about them:
> 
> ...



Yes, it can totally be ignored. Are you serious? Is the implication seriously that the right trash talking the left is encouraging a _*bombing*_? 
Trump is an asshole. That's his schtick. Politicians and news outlets fling mud, that's what they do. It just so happens the cheetopope is way less subtle about it. How can you watch this stuff and not just roll your eyes?

It's the same as the other terror attacks mentioned above, probably just some dude that's just absolutely _batshit_ insane who happened to be very "into" right wing politics and decided the only way to get what he wanted was to become a literal terrorist. Crazy.


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## Bentaycanada (Oct 26, 2018)

Ordacleaphobia said:


> Yes, it can totally be ignored. Are you serious? Is the implication seriously that the right trash talking the left is encouraging a _*bombing*_?
> Trump is an asshole. That's his schtick. Politicians and news outlets fling mud, that's what they do. It just so happens the cheetopope is way less subtle about it. How can you watch this stuff and not just roll your eyes?
> 
> It's the same as the other terror attacks mentioned above, probably just some dude that's just absolutely _batshit_ insane who happened to be very "into" right wing politics and decided the only way to get what he wanted was to become a literal terrorist. Crazy.



Yes it can be ignored, and largely that is the case. I never said he encouraged anything.
But we're not talking about just trash talking here. Calling the free press the enemy of the people is language heard from China or Syria. This resonates with crazy people very differently than your average flinging mud.

Look at the guy that harassed the family of the Sandy Hook child or that guy with the Pizzagate attack. Is Alex Jones responsible? No. But then does Alex Jones hold some place in the events that led these people to commit these twisted acts? Possibly, not definitely, but it warrants discussion.

Nowhere have I said the Trump is responsible, as I don't think he is. But are we then denying that the language used, and actions taken, do not in some manner deserve criticism when the very people he regularly attacks are then in turn attacked by a terrorist? Or at the very least discussion?

In the very same discussion, we can also ask, did some of these targeted individuals say or act in a manner that helped them become targets for these attacks? Like Clinton with the deplorable speech, or Walters openly saying people should harass Republicans?


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## KnightBrolaire (Oct 26, 2018)

Randy said:


> If fear is the goal, the bombs working didn't matter. Either way, you can skew the intention of this to suit either narrative.
> 
> I don't think there's anything especially unfair or biased about taking this at face value until the investigation concludes. It's hard not to take the jumping to conspiracy as bias dictating conclusions rather than the other way around, considering how quick those conclusions seem to have been reached and on so little information either way.



"Officials declined to say whether the devices were intended to detonate or were meant to scare people, but they repeatedly urged the public to view them as if they could pose a threat.
'We are treating them as live devices,” said O’Neill, urging people not to touch packages they deem suspicious. “This is something that should be taken seriously.”

"The devices — clearly aiming to shake up the political landscape just two weeks before the midterm elections — were so poorly constructed that at least one source involved in the investigation told The Miami Herald that they could not detonate. Whether they were intentionally designed that way was not known." 
.....“The way they were constructed they were not going to go off,” one law enforcement official told the Herald. “You could not compare them to the Boston Marathon bomber.”
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article220621360.html

Law enforcement officials said the devices, containing timers and batteries, were not rigged like a booby-trapped package bomb that would explode upon opening. But the officials were still uncertain whether the devices were poorly designed or never intended to cause physical harm. A search of a postal database suggested at least some of packages may have been mailed from Florida, one official said.-https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/10/25/political-strain-grows-pipe-bombs-target-democrats-cnn/JkeRPRieuWRPt7YM4hPQLP/story.html

Officials described the devices as PVC pipes stuffed with what appeared to be fireworks powder and glass. Electrical wires leading out of the pipe attached to an electric timer taped to the side, according to law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation. Most of the devices appeared to have been sent through the mail system.
-from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...uilding/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.88d37eb1b8e6

NYPD police commissioner James P. O’Neill characterized the devices as suspected explosives, but declined to go into detail as to their characteristics or whether any were found to be functional. All have been sent to an FBI facility in Quantico, Va., for examination. from: https://variety.com/2018/politics/news/fbi-cnn-bomb-scare-bill-de-blasio-1202994464/

"There have been no injuries. None of the devices detonated, and there have been no reports of injuries." ... "Law enforcement officials have not said whether the devices are indeed real bombs." - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/nyregion/new-york-today-mail-bombs.html

"No injuries from the explosives have been reported so far, but several have been "proactively detonated" by bomb squads, proving that they were intended to harm, and not merely to frighten, their recipients." -https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/25/robert-de-niros-nyc-restaurant-reportedly-receives-suspected-mail-bomb-similar-to-those-sent-to-top-democrats-and-cnn.html
TLDR: basically there's mixed reports about whether the pipe bombs were actually functional. It's pretty bizarre, you'd think the cops would want to stress the fact that the were not live bombs if they actually didn't function.


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## Ordacleaphobia (Oct 26, 2018)

Bentaycanada said:


> Yes it can be ignored, and largely that is the case. I never said he encouraged anything.
> But we're not talking about just trash talking here. Calling the free press the enemy of the people is language heard from China or Syria. This resonates with crazy people very differently than your average flinging mud.
> 
> Look at the guy that harassed the family of the Sandy Hook child or that guy with the Pizzagate attack. Is Alex Jones responsible? No. But then does Alex Jones hold some place in the events that led these people to commit these twisted acts? Possibly, not definitely, but it *warrants discussion.*
> ...



I'm not sure it does. I'm not trying to get too far into this because we seem to disagree on this type of language policing on a fundamental level, but I think this type of thing is a bit of a reach.
Sure, I see your argument- but I think if you take a step back and look at what you're saying on a macro scale, it doesn't really hold water. You can draw connections to everything.

I'll certainly concur that that type of language could potentially communicate a different message to deranged people like this compared to the normal type of political shade. But lets not pretend this is comparable to what you'd see from an oppressive government.
And I know you didn't say Trump is responsible and I apologize if it came off like I was trying to put words in your mouth; but what I was getting was it sounds like you're *implying* that Trump and republican media are [unknowingly?] *egging something like this on*, to the point where we should gossip about it. Which to me personally, sounds ridiculous.



KnightBrolaire said:


> it sounds like it was probably nothing



Kinda figures the type of person to do something like this wasn't smart enough to get it done.


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## Bentaycanada (Oct 26, 2018)

Ordacleaphobia said:


> I'm not sure it does. I'm not trying to get too far into this because we seem to disagree on this type of language policing on a fundamental level, but I think this type of thing is a bit of a reach.
> Sure, I see your argument- but I think if you take a step back and look at what you're saying on a macro scale, it doesn't really hold water. You can draw connections to everything.
> 
> I'll certainly concur that that type of language could potentially communicate a different message to deranged people like this compared to the normal type of political shade. But lets not pretend this is comparable to what you'd see from an oppressive government.
> And I know you didn't say Trump is responsible and I apologize if it came off like I was trying to put words in your mouth; but what I was getting was it sounds like you're *implying* that Trump and republican media are [unknowingly?] *egging something like this on*, to the point where we should gossip about it. Which to me personally, sounds ridiculous.



No one is language policing, this is not a matter of free speech. I haven't said that Trump can't say the things he's said, nor have I said that he shouldn't. I think he should be able to say whatever he wants, and in turn he can be criticized for it. Same goes for Fox, CNN or anyone else.

I never implied anything, all I did was ask questions as this is an interesting topic.


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## narad (Oct 26, 2018)

Ordacleaphobia said:


> And I know you didn't say Trump is responsible and I apologize if it came off like I was trying to put words in your mouth; but what I was getting was it sounds like you're *implying* that Trump and republican media are [unknowingly?] *egging something like this on*, to the point where we should gossip about it. Which to me personally, sounds ridiculous.



If you call someone that punches a journalist "my kind of guy" you are condoning violence against the media. It's obviously not the same as condoning the threat of serious injury or murder, but when you're a head of state, a public figure, and a representative of the people, you have to think about how people might interpret your comments. And that's not even a particularly spicy comment by Trump's standards. It's not surprising that someone could act in this way and genuinely believe that he's helping the president.


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## USMarine75 (Oct 26, 2018)

Particularly relevant here... an excerpt from "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by Loewen:

At home, [President Woodrow] Wilson's racial policies disgraced the office he held. His Republican predecessors had routinely appointed blacks to important offices, including those of port collector for New Orleans and the District of Columbia and register of the treasury. Presidents sometimes appointed African Americans as postmasters, particularly in southern towns with large black populations. African Americans took part in the Republican Party's national conventions and enjoyed some access to the White House. Woodrow Wilson, for whom many African Americans voted in 1912, changed all that. A southerner, Wilson had been president of Princeton, the only major northern university that refused to admit blacks. He was an outspoken white supremacist—his wife was even worse—and told "darky" stories in cabinet meetings. His administration submitted a legislative program intended to curtail the civil rights of African Americans, but Congress would not pass it. Unfazed, Wilson used his power as chief executive to segregate the federal government. He appointed southern whites to offices traditionally reserved for blacks. Wilson personally vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The one occasion on which Wilson met with African American leaders in the White House ended in a fiasco as the president virtually threw the visitors out of his office. Wilson's legacy was extensive: he effectively closed the Democratic Party to African Americans for another two decades, and parts of the federal government remained segregated into the 1950s and beyond." In 1916 the Colored Advisory Committee of the Republican National Committee issued a statement on Wilson that, though partisan, was accurate: "No sooner had the Democratic Administration come into power than Mr. Wilson and his advisors entered upon a policy to eliminate all colored citizens from representation in the Federal Government."

Omitting or absolving [President Woodrow] Wilson's racism goes beyond concealing a character blemish. It is overtly racist. No black person could ever consider Woodrow Wilson a hero. Textbooks that present him as a hero are written from a white perspective. The coverup denies all students the chance to learn something important about the interrelationship between the leader and the led. White Americans engaged in a new burst of racial violence during and immediately after Wilson's presidency. The tone set by the administration was one cause. Another was the release of America's first epic motion picture.21 The filmmaker David W. Griffith quoted Wilson's two-volume history of the United States, now notorious for its racist view of Reconstruction, in his infamous masterpiece The Clansman, a paean to the Ku Klux Klan for its role in putting down "black-dominated" Republican state governments during Reconstruction. Griffith based the movie on a book by Wilson's former classmate, Thomas Dixon, whose obsession with race was "unrivaled until Mein Kampf." At a private White House showing, Wilson saw the movie, now retitled Birth of a Nation, and returned Griffith's compliment: "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so true." Griffith would go on to use this quotation in successfully defending his film against NAACP charges that it was racially inflammatory.22 This landmark of American cinema was not only the best technical production of its time but also probably the most racist major movie of all time. Dixon intended "to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat! . . . And make no mistake about it—we are doing just that."2 ' Dixon did not overstate by much. Spurred by Birth of a Nation, William Simmons of Georgia reestablished the Ku Klux Klan. The racism seeping down from the White House encouraged this Klan, distinguishing it from its Reconstruction predecessor, which President Grant had succeeded in virtually eliminating in one state (South Carolina) and discouraging nationally for a time. The new KKK quickly became a national phenomenon. It grew to dominate the Democratic Party in many southern states, as well as in Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon. During Wilson's second term, a wave of antiblack race riots swept the country. Whites lynched blacks as far north as Duluth.24 If Americans had learned from the Wilson era the connection between racist presidential leadership and like-minded public response, they might not have put up with a reprise on a far smaller scale during the Reagan-Bush years." To accomplish such education, however, textbooks would have to make plain the relationship between cause and effect, between hero and followers. Instead, they reflexively ascribe noble intentions to the hero and invoke "the people" to excuse questionable actions and policies. According to Triumph of the American Nation: "As President, Wilson seemed to agree with most white Americans that segregation was in the best interests of black as well as white Americans." Wilson was not only antiblack; he was also far and away our most nativist president, repeatedly questioning the loyalty of those he called "hyphenated Americans," "Any man who carries a hyphen about with him," said Wilson, "carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready."26 The American people responded to Wilson's lead with a wave of repression of white ethnic groups; again, most textbooks blame the people, not Wilson. The American Tradition admits that "President Wilson set up" the Creel Committee on Public Information, which saturated the United States with propaganda linking Germans to barbarism. But Tradition hastens to shield Wilson from the ensuing domestic fallout: "Although President Wilson had been careful in his war message to state that most Americans of German descent were 'true and loyal citizens,' the anti-German propaganda often caused them suffering." Wilson displayed little regard for the rights of anyone whose opinions differed from his own.

tl;dr The connection between leaders and the led - the people often take their social and moral cues from their leaders (be it politicians, or today from social media "stars"). Or more apropos, a cycle between popularism, leaders, and the led. LGBTQ rights become a majority held view, leaders like Biden and then Obama become "enlightened", and then this becomes a socially acceptable norm for many. Trump is a nationalist, xenophobe, and what many consider to be a racist -> white nationalists come out from the dark.


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## Edika (Oct 26, 2018)

^I was going to make the same argument. Public figures that hold power and have hundreds or millions of devoted followers have to be really careful at what they're communicating. A small percentage of unstable followers will interpret this as a green light to take action to their own hands and recent history has proven that the individuals closer to the extreme right curve of the Gauss distribution are more prone to take violent action, especially when they feel validated and recognized by your "supreme" leader.

It's like when Brexit was voted in the UK. From the moment it was voted reports of racial based attacks and threats increased dramatically as all those covert racists felt validated that they can throw out all the "foreign scum" stealing their "jobs". Not that they weren't racists before the event and some of them didn't engage in violence but the sudden surge of "nationalistic" pride went over their head. A labor MP was shot dead by one of those loony's too. Did the heads of the Brexit campaign bare no fault for repeating the same lies over and over and over until you could see the barely literate spewing them over like good little parrots in every chance they had?


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## Kaura (Oct 26, 2018)

Call me a nut but I don't think the false flag conspiracy theory is too off the charts crazy. I mean, what a coincidence that none of the bombs went off and most of the people lke Clintons and Soros weren't even home when the bombs were found. Although, I must say that I haven't spend too much time researching this whole escapade so I don't claim the be an expert on this case.


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## MaxOfMetal (Oct 26, 2018)

Kaura said:


> Call me a nut but I don't think the false flag conspiracy theory is too off the charts crazy. I mean, what a coincidence that none of the bombs went off and most of the people lke Clintons and Soros weren't even home when the bombs were found. Although, I must say that I haven't spend too much time researching this whole escapade so I don't claim the be an expert on this case.



These folks are former/current high level politicians, world famous actors, millionaires and billionaires. Do you think these folks actually open their own mail? Have a single residence? 

At worst, this was going to get a low level aid or security employee killed.


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## vilk (Oct 26, 2018)

I fire a gun at someone but miss, does it mean I was just trying to scare them?


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## ihunda (Oct 26, 2018)

I kept reading the title as nailbombs sent to CNN / Dems...


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## MaxOfMetal (Oct 26, 2018)

vilk said:


> I fire a gun at someone but miss, does it mean I was just trying to scare them?



Is it an air gun? 

I wasn't saying that the perpetrator(s) didn't mean to not do harm to the intended victims, I just don't think that since they didn't hurt anyone that it means it was some flase flag operation.


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## Ordacleaphobia (Oct 26, 2018)

I give up. I just eagerly await the day where everyone stops blaming everything on the president. 



vilk said:


> I fire a gun at someone but miss, does it mean I was just trying to scare them?



In my opinion, this guy was clearly trying to kill people. He just wasn't very good at it.


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## USMarine75 (Oct 26, 2018)

Ordacleaphobia said:


> I give up. I just eagerly await the day where everyone stops blaming everything on the president.



No worries you must have missed this, so I'll post it again for you. You're welcome! 

_Particularly_ relevant here... an excerpt from "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by Loewen:

At home, [President Woodrow] Wilson's racial policies disgraced the office he held. His Republican predecessors had routinely appointed blacks to important offices, including those of port collector for New Orleans and the District of Columbia and register of the treasury. Presidents sometimes appointed African Americans as postmasters, particularly in southern towns with large black populations. African Americans took part in the Republican Party's national conventions and enjoyed some access to the White House. Woodrow Wilson, for whom many African Americans voted in 1912, changed all that. A southerner, Wilson had been president of Princeton, the only major northern university that refused to admit blacks. He was an outspoken white supremacist—his wife was even worse—and told "darky" stories in cabinet meetings. His administration submitted a legislative program intended to curtail the civil rights of African Americans, but Congress would not pass it. Unfazed, Wilson used his power as chief executive to segregate the federal government. He appointed southern whites to offices traditionally reserved for blacks. Wilson personally vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The one occasion on which Wilson met with African American leaders in the White House ended in a fiasco as the president virtually threw the visitors out of his office. Wilson's legacy was extensive: he effectively closed the Democratic Party to African Americans for another two decades, and parts of the federal government remained segregated into the 1950s and beyond." In 1916 the Colored Advisory Committee of the Republican National Committee issued a statement on Wilson that, though partisan, was accurate: "No sooner had the Democratic Administration come into power than Mr. Wilson and his advisors entered upon a policy to eliminate all colored citizens from representation in the Federal Government."

Omitting or absolving [President Woodrow] Wilson's racism goes beyond concealing a character blemish. It is overtly racist. No black person could ever consider Woodrow Wilson a hero. Textbooks that present him as a hero are written from a white perspective. The coverup denies all students the chance to learn something important about the interrelationship between the leader and the led. White Americans engaged in a new burst of racial violence during and immediately after Wilson's presidency. The tone set by the administration was one cause. Another was the release of America's first epic motion picture.21 The filmmaker David W. Griffith quoted Wilson's two-volume history of the United States, now notorious for its racist view of Reconstruction, in his infamous masterpiece The Clansman, a paean to the Ku Klux Klan for its role in putting down "black-dominated" Republican state governments during Reconstruction. Griffith based the movie on a book by Wilson's former classmate, Thomas Dixon, whose obsession with race was "unrivaled until Mein Kampf." At a private White House showing, Wilson saw the movie, now retitled Birth of a Nation, and returned Griffith's compliment: "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so true." Griffith would go on to use this quotation in successfully defending his film against NAACP charges that it was racially inflammatory.22 This landmark of American cinema was not only the best technical production of its time but also probably the most racist major movie of all time. Dixon intended "to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat! . . . And make no mistake about it—we are doing just that."2 ' Dixon did not overstate by much. Spurred by Birth of a Nation, William Simmons of Georgia reestablished the Ku Klux Klan. The racism seeping down from the White House encouraged this Klan, distinguishing it from its Reconstruction predecessor, which President Grant had succeeded in virtually eliminating in one state (South Carolina) and discouraging nationally for a time. The new KKK quickly became a national phenomenon. It grew to dominate the Democratic Party in many southern states, as well as in Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon. During Wilson's second term, a wave of antiblack race riots swept the country. Whites lynched blacks as far north as Duluth.24 If Americans had learned from the Wilson era the connection between racist presidential leadership and like-minded public response, they might not have put up with a reprise on a far smaller scale during the Reagan-Bush years." To accomplish such education, however, textbooks would have to make plain the relationship between cause and effect, between hero and followers. Instead, they reflexively ascribe noble intentions to the hero and invoke "the people" to excuse questionable actions and policies. According to Triumph of the American Nation: "As President, Wilson seemed to agree with most white Americans that segregation was in the best interests of black as well as white Americans." Wilson was not only antiblack; he was also far and away our most nativist president, repeatedly questioning the loyalty of those he called "hyphenated Americans," "Any man who carries a hyphen about with him," said Wilson, "carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready."26 The American people responded to Wilson's lead with a wave of repression of white ethnic groups; again, most textbooks blame the people, not Wilson. The American Tradition admits that "President Wilson set up" the Creel Committee on Public Information, which saturated the United States with propaganda linking Germans to barbarism. But Tradition hastens to shield Wilson from the ensuing domestic fallout: "Although President Wilson had been careful in his war message to state that most Americans of German descent were 'true and loyal citizens,' the anti-German propaganda often caused them suffering." Wilson displayed little regard for the rights of anyone whose opinions differed from his own.

*tl;dr The connection between leaders and the led - the people often take their social and moral cues from their leaders (be it politicians, or today from social media "stars"). Or more apropos, a cycle between popularism, leaders, and the led. LGBTQ rights become a majority held view, leaders like Biden and then Obama become "enlightened", and then this becomes a socially acceptable norm for many. Trump is a nationalist, xenophobe, and what many consider to be a racist -> white nationalists come out from the dark.*


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## KnightBrolaire (Oct 26, 2018)

https://americanmilitarynews.com/20...pidoZM5tNesZFhpDcJJHUoFkdIs5vILoBgSirEuEdNvuU
2 more suspicious packages have been found and were sent to Dem Sen. Cory Booker and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper

Talked to my eod buddies and they're very suspect of the whole thing. One of them laughed about the use of the digital timer saying it made no sense, and that pvc doesn't work well for a small scale explosive. The whole point is to cause pressure build up and the violent release of said pressure (like the pressure cooker bombs in the boston marathon) and the pvc just doesn't make that good of a pressure vessel. The propellant used (likely just black powder) is viable, but the trigger system doesn't make any sense since a tripwire or cellphone are more commonly used if remote detonation was the actual goal. Setting off the black powder requires a heating filament/ignition source (like 2 wires with steel wool or a magnesium strip placed between them) or a spark generated from the current having to cross a gap, which as far as my buddies could tell from the pics/xrays available to the public, these bombs lacked.
EDIT: the bombs did have a battery/wires to generate an ignition spark according to ABC: https://abcnews.go.com/US/explosive-device-maxine-waters-la-similar-obama-clinton/story?id=58737042

I'm sure we'll have more in depth analysis of the explosives whenever the FBI decides to share their findings. This whole situation is just bizarre, either we have the world's most inept bomber or maybe the conspiracy theorists are right about this one


----------



## TedEH (Oct 26, 2018)

I only sort of skimmed the thread, but if baffles me that when someone sends out a bunch of bombs, we're wasting a bunch of time blaming everyone except the actual bomber.
"This is the lefts fault!" "This is the rights fault!" "This is the medias fault!" "Thanks Obama!" No, it's the bombers fault. Politics are dumb.


----------



## thraxil (Oct 26, 2018)

KnightBrolaire said:


> I'm sure we'll have more in depth analysis of the explosives whenever the FBI decides to share their findings. This whole situation is just bizarre, either we have the world's most inept bomber or maybe the conspiracy theorists are right about this one



Well, apparently an arrest has been made. And, not to get too far ahead of things, it does appear to be a "Florida man", so I would say sheer incompetence is not out of the question...


----------



## vilk (Oct 26, 2018)

TedEH said:


> I only sort of skimmed the thread, but if baffles me that when someone sends out a bunch of bombs, we're wasting a bunch of time blaming everyone except the actual bomber.
> "This is the lefts fault!" "This is the rights fault!" "This is the medias fault!" "Thanks Obama!" No, it's the bombers fault. Politics are dumb.


Maybe you shouldn't have skimmed past USMarine75's posts...


----------



## Ordacleaphobia (Oct 26, 2018)

vilk said:


> Maybe you shouldn't have skimmed past USMarine75's posts...



....the one blaming the president?


----------



## vilk (Oct 26, 2018)

Ordacleaphobia said:


> ....the one blaming the president?


The one detailing American History that was intentionally left out of the textbooks they gave me in public schools in Indiana.


----------



## Randy (Oct 26, 2018)

KnightBrolaire said:


> or maybe the conspiracy theorists are right about this one



I said it earlier. Fake bombs still doesn't jump straight to it being a pro-Democratic plot. Saying it's anything more than 50/50 at that point is nothing but biased bullshit.


----------



## MaxOfMetal (Oct 26, 2018)

Here's the dude's van:






I don't know guys, I think he might be a Trump supporter.

Link: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...dressed-sen-cory-booker-found-florida-n924776

This is the dude's Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/hardrock2016


----------



## USMarine75 (Oct 26, 2018)

Ordacleaphobia said:


> ....the one blaming the president?



That's what you took from that? Talk about missing the point...

https://www.khanacademy.org/partner...phi-fundamentals/v/intro-to-critical-thinking


----------



## Randy (Oct 26, 2018)

MaxOfMetal said:


> Here's the dude's van



Didn't need to make it past these words.


----------



## KnightBrolaire (Oct 26, 2018)

Randy said:


> I said it earlier. Fake bombs still doesn't jump straight to it being a pro-Democratic plot. Saying it's anything more than 50/50 at that point is nothing but biased bullshit.


 i never said it was a pro-dem plot, all i said was that it was possible that this was either a hoax or we were witnessing the world's most inept bomber, and currently it looks to be the latter since they've arrested a suspect. There was no reason to take that tiny part of my earlier post out of context, it's not like I've been running around screaming FALSE FLAG HURR DURR or anything.


----------



## Bentaycanada (Oct 26, 2018)

MaxOfMetal said:


> Here's the dude's van:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



That van is amazing! How did it take this long to even find it?! The conspiracy nuts are going to explode with this one!


----------



## PunkBillCarson (Oct 26, 2018)

Randy said:


> Didn't need to make it past these words.



What if he'd said that it was down by the river?


----------



## Randy (Oct 26, 2018)

Bentaycanada said:


> The conspiracy nuts are going to explode with this one!



I'll bet that before sundown (EST) there'll already be some kind of web that connects the guy to pro-Democratic politics. Book it.



PunkBillCarson said:


> What if he'd said that it was down by the river?



Not to speak ill of the dead but that generation of SNL turned out especially conservative, so I wouldn't be surprised if Chris Farley ended up being a Trumper if he lived this long


----------



## KnightBrolaire (Oct 26, 2018)

MaxOfMetal said:


> Here's the dude's van:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


jesus christ his twitter is horrifying, it looks like a bot was running it with all the copy paste spam.


----------



## narad (Oct 26, 2018)

MaxOfMetal said:


> Here's the dude's van:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Hell, I think he might have even been an SSO regular. Haven't seen that guy around for a month or so...


----------



## Ordacleaphobia (Oct 26, 2018)

USMarine75 said:


> That's what you took from that? Talk about missing the point...
> 
> https://www.khanacademy.org/partner...phi-fundamentals/v/intro-to-critical-thinking





USMarine75 said:


> *tl;dr The connection between leaders and the led - the people often take their social and moral cues from their leaders (be it politicians, or today from social media "stars"). Or more apropos, a cycle between popularism, leaders, and the led. LGBTQ rights become a majority held view, leaders like Biden and then Obama become "enlightened", and then this becomes a socially acceptable norm for many. Trump is a nationalist, xenophobe, and what many consider to be a racist -> white nationalists come out from the dark.*



This clearly communicates to me that since the president broadcasts a heavily anti-democrat, anti-media message that it triggers a domino effect leading to a percentage of the people accepting these types of views as normal and acceptable, and those that already hold these views are now emboldened by this. 

As a result, the crazier, fringey-er members of this idealogy are particularly dangerous because they interpret this as being totally cool; making it not that far of a stretch for one of these lunatics to start sending out bombs.
If I got something different from what you were trying to communicate, please clarify where my assessment is incorrect.

FWIW, I appreciated the excerpt- I never knew any of that about Wilson. 

Looking forward to the next condescending post.


----------



## USMarine75 (Oct 26, 2018)

Ordacleaphobia said:


> This clearly communicates to me that since the president broadcasts a heavily anti-democrat, anti-media message that it triggers a domino effect leading to a percentage of the people accepting these types of views as normal and acceptable, and those that already hold these views are now emboldened by this.
> 
> As a result, the crazier, fringey-er members of this idealogy are particularly dangerous because they interpret this as being totally cool; making it not that far of a stretch for one of these lunatics to start sending out bombs.
> If I got something different from what you were trying to communicate, please clarify where my assessment is incorrect.
> ...



Nope, sounds like you're picking up what I'm putting down.

Wow, you must have watched that Khan Academy video on 64x. 

FWIW the book is "Lies My Teacher Told Me" which won all kinds of awards. One of the many themes is that history textbooks (and the media) pretty much rate everyone as a 0 or 1, either Hitler or Jesus, whereas people are various shades of grey with complicated layers (The story of Hellen Keller is one of the best examples in the book).

http://www.ier.edu.vn/upload/produc...a-day-hoc-lich-su-tai-hoa-ky-149754535413.pdf


----------



## Ordacleaphobia (Oct 26, 2018)

USMarine75 said:


> Nope, sounds like you're picking up what I'm putting down.
> 
> Wow, you must have watched that Khan Academy video on 64x.
> 
> ...



So how is that not indirectly pointing at the president though? 
You posted like I was way off base with that comment, but it seems like a pretty clear takeaway.

Not giving you a hard time, I just want to make sure I'm not mis-characterizing you.


----------



## USMarine75 (Oct 26, 2018)

Ordacleaphobia said:


> So how is that not indirectly pointing at the president though?
> You posted like I was way off base with that comment, but it seems like a pretty clear takeaway.
> 
> Not giving you a hard time, I just want to make sure I'm not mis-characterizing you.



Apologies but it came across like you were saying this regarding Trump...







Hey, unemployment is at a low, the economy might be going really well at least for some people, and there's possibly peace on the Korean peninsula. But he who shall not be named is by all accounts a deplorable human being of low IQ and even lower morals. He's at best a useful idiot and (far more likely) at worst a racist, nationalist, populist, xenophobic, fucking idiot. Like that book says, people are shades of gray... but he's closer to an orange Hitler than Jesus on that sliding gray scale.

But the point I was making is that there is a demonstrated strong correlation between a leader and how various elements of those being lead respond. The video below is more about compliance with authority and lack of critical reasoning and thinking... but it shows how even good people will take (false) direction from authority figures.


----------



## Randy (Oct 26, 2018)

Randy said:


> I'll bet that before sundown (EST) there'll already be some kind of web that connects the guy to pro-Democratic politics. Book it.



Anecdotal but the first person to walk into my office today said "Did you hear they arrested the bomber? I heard he's registered Green Party'?"

Swoosh!


----------



## broj15 (Oct 26, 2018)

Haven't been keeping up in this as much as I probably should, but to me this seems like either a far right domestic terrorist nutcase (because I can see "Billy Bob" not having the for thought to realize these people don't open thier own mail), or it was a stunt orchestrated by a "foreign party" knowing such a high profile occurrence would see media attention for the sole purpose of "social terrorism" or to further manipulate public opinion and polarize the American political climate. But at the same time I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a false flag carried out by the US government in order to further pit us against each other with a hot button story. Who's to say those packages even had real bombs in them.

I'll be interested to see who goes down as the scape goat for this one.


Edit: I'd never (openly) claim false flag in a school shooting situation or in the case of last Vegas, but in circumstances like this where no one actually does I can't help but feel like this could be a rise put on by someone pulling some strings.


----------



## USMarine75 (Oct 26, 2018)

broj15 said:


> But at the same time I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a false flag carried out by the US government in order to further pit us against each other with a hot button story.



Fuck off with that stupidity. 

And yeah, well worth a ban if it comes my way.


----------



## Ordacleaphobia (Oct 26, 2018)

USMarine75 said:


> Apologies but it came across like you were doing the "leave brittany alone" thing



I mean I _guess _you wouldn't have been wrong, in a way.
I just disagree that his portion of the blame for this event is significant enough. Not saying I know for sure either, because you've got a point. I just think there's more to it and find it irritating when people reflexively point the finger at the guy for everything.


----------



## USMarine75 (Oct 26, 2018)

Ordacleaphobia said:


> I mean I _guess _you wouldn't have been wrong, in a way.
> I just disagree that his portion of the blame for this event is significant enough. Not saying I know for sure either, because you've got a point. I just think there's more to it and find it irritating when people reflexively point the finger at the guy for everything.



I hear ya. And it's refreshing that you're willing to listen to both sides, do some research, and pause and think for yourself! 

But maybe here's a diff and better way for me to describe my point:

You get 100 people in a room and poll them and ask if they consider themselves racist. 90-95 are going to say no to some varying degree. A lot of that is self-reporting bias. They either don't want to admit it, or fear social repercussions. Let's face it, more than 5% of the population harbors racist, nationalist, and xenophobic thoughts.

Now, you have a bunch of moderates speak and you might get one sort of reaction. But you put a racist, xenophobic, illiberal nationalist on the stage and he's going to get a different reaction from the crowd. Sure, maybe ~30% are enraged by his overtness and storm out. Another ~30% don't know what to think. But the remaining ~30% are empowered and brought to a frenzy. Hey, this guy is saying what we're thinking but have been afraid to say! Whip them up good enough and they're ready to take to the streets. And that middle 30%? Well they could sway either way. Put them in the room and they either go along to get along or maybe even start to sway towards that opinion. Then you have the emotionally disturbed persons... the Adam Lanzas and Dylan Roofs of this world. Or that Killary Clinton child slavery pizza joint wannabe shooter guy. They are easily prodded towards violence. Simply saying things like, well there were good and bad people on both sides of this, tweeting falsehoods and inciting propaganda, repeating debunked myths, etc... is enough for them.

As the head of state, you don't espouse hatred, threaten locking up your political rivals and suspending the rights of the media, make the media the enemy, summarily cancel previous accords and treaties, surround yourself with sycophants and traitors, etc. And you don't equivocate on violence and extremism, you condemn it unilaterally... unless you're _that_ guy.


----------



## broj15 (Oct 26, 2018)

USMarine75 said:


> Fuck off with that stupidity.
> 
> And yeah, well worth a ban if it comes my way.


>USMarine75

With a user name like that I'm not surprised by this response. Enjoy being indoctrinated.


----------



## KnightBrolaire (Oct 26, 2018)

so... back on topic, the suspect has a history of making terroristic threats and could get up to 58 yrs in prison. 2 more devices have been intercepted.

"Court records show Sayoc, an amateur bodybuilder with social media accounts that praise Trump, has a history of arrests for theft, illegal steroids possession and a 2002 charge of making a bomb threat. His 2002 arrest affidavit states that he threatened Florida Power & Light Co., claiming he would blow up their headquarters and "it would be worse than September 11th."
"Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a 2:30 p.m. press conference from Washington, D.C., that Sayoc, from Aventura, Florida, faces five federal charges and up to 58 years in prison. He confirmed the five charges are: interstate transportation of an explosive, illegal mailing of explosives, threats against former presidents and certain other persons, threatening interstate communications and assaulting federal officers. Even though Sayoc was detained in Florida, he will be prosecuted in New York City."

"The devices are thought to have been fashioned from crude, bomb-making designs widely available on the Internet. Authorities haven’t said whether the devices were built to explode and kill or simply sow fear. A 13th device was discovered Friday in Sacramento, California, addressed to Democratic Senator Kamala Harris. Law enforcement officials told Fox News that a 14th suspicious package has been intercepted in Burlingame, California, addressed to Tom Steyer. Steyer is a California billionaire who has been calling for the impeachment of President Trump. According to the charge sheet, some of the mailings included photographs of the targets marked with a red "X".
-https://www.foxnews.com/us/suspect-arrested-in-florida-in-connection-with-suspicious-packages-sent-to-democrats


----------



## Drew (Oct 26, 2018)

KnightBrolaire said:


> i'm not one for conspiracy theories but some of the photos i've seen of the bombs look fake af. they basically look like pipe bombs with digital timers attached to them, which makes no sense given that mail travel can vary greatly and most of these would have been opened by aides/secretaries. the unabomber would boobytrap his packages so they exploded upon opening, which is more what i would expect if people were actively trying to blow up politicians.
> the idea that multiple bombs slipped through mail screening, but didn't detonate at any point, makes me question whether they were actual bombs and not just a fearmongering prank.
> i'll have to talk to my eod buddies and see what they think of the bombs.


"I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but... Let me tell you about my conspiracy theory!" 



Ordacleaphobia said:


> I give up. I just eagerly await the day where everyone stops blaming everything on the president.


Maybe we could get there if he could stop calling the press "the enemy of the people"? At the end of the day, words matter, when you're in a position of power.


----------



## Drew (Oct 26, 2018)

broj15 said:


> >USMarine75
> 
> With a user name like that I'm not surprised by this response. Enjoy being indoctrinated.


...says the guy saying this looks like a false flag operation, and how he wouldn't _openly_ call Sandy Hook or Vegas false flag operations? With all due respect, I'm not sure I agree that USMarine75 is the one we have to worry about getting indoctrinated.


----------



## vilk (Oct 26, 2018)

Mocking combat veterans is actually par for the course when it comes to Trumpos


----------



## USMarine75 (Oct 26, 2018)

broj15 said:


> >USMarine75
> 
> With a user name like that I'm not surprised by this response. Enjoy being indoctrinated.



Derp. Glad I took a bullet so assholes like you can make their nonsensical asshole statements. Thanks for demonstrating the power of internet anonymity, toughguyism, and sheer stupidity all rolled in one. Now run off and find a veteran's funeral to protest after you're done handing out homemade copies of Loose Change.


----------



## Randy (Oct 26, 2018)

Randy said:


> Anecdotal but the first person to walk into my office today said "Did you hear they arrested the bomber? I heard he's registered Green Party'?"
> 
> Swoosh!


----------



## Bentaycanada (Oct 26, 2018)

Randy said:


> View attachment 64757



I don't think his so-called political affiliation is that important. His intended targets were clear.
I know plenty of Dems, like far-left Dems that jumped ship to Trump in 2016. I wouldn't call them Republicans by any means. Heck, Trump isn't even a Republican, not even close. That's what I spent most of the 2016 election saying, and I think it's still true today.

In the wake of the political horse-shoe that the 2016 election was you had a ton of far-left Bernie fans that went to Trump instead of Hillary for that exact reason. He wasn't really that far off, where-as Hillary was just status-quo. Though I still argue she'd have been more Neo-Con in office, like she was in Obama's admin.


----------



## USMarine75 (Oct 26, 2018)

Bentaycanada said:


> I don't think his so-called political affiliation is that important. His intended targets were clear.
> I know plenty of Dems, like far-left Dems that jumped ship to Trump in 2016. I wouldn't call them Republicans by any means. Heck, Trump isn't even a Republican, not even close. That's what I spent most of the 2016 election saying, and I think it's still true today.
> 
> In the wake of the political horse-shoe that the 2016 election was you had a ton of far-left Bernie fans that went to Trump instead of Hillary for that exact reason. He wasn't really that far off, where-as Hillary was just status-quo. Though I still argue she'd have been more Neo-Con in office, like she was in Obama's admin.



"Trump registered as a Republican in Manhattan in 1987 and since that time has changed his party affiliation five times. In 1999, Trump changed his party affiliation to the Independence Party of New York. In August 2001, Trump changed his party affiliation to Democratic. In September 2009, Trump changed his party affiliation back to the Republican Party. In December 2011, Trump changed to "no party affiliation" (independent). In April 2012, Trump again returned to the Republican Party."

Guy used to publicly praise Hillary, donated to her campaigns, then comes across his info wars false flag loving base and flips accordingly.


----------



## Randy (Oct 26, 2018)

Well, anyway, my point is how entirely futile it is to try and use the politics of this to shame anyone from that ideological hemisphere to accept blame or even accept the guy as one of their own. 

The guy sends bombs or "bombs" to anyone whose ever said one unpleasant thing about Donald Trump and he drives around in van with basically 'A Beautiful Mind' for people with a cheetoh fetish Mod Podged all over it, and copy paste of every sick pro-Republican, anti-Democratic talking point all over social media but nope nope nope, definitely Democratic false flag.

Stop encouraging these people.


----------



## USMarine75 (Oct 26, 2018)

Randy said:


> Well, anyway, my point is how entirely futile it is to try and use the politics of this to shame anyone from that ideological hemisphere to accept blame or even accept the guy as one of their own.
> 
> The guy sends bombs or "bombs" to anyone whose ever said one unpleasant thing about Donald Trump and he drives around in van with basically 'A Beautiful Mind' for people with a cheetoh fetish Mod Podged all over it, and copy paste of every sick pro-Republican, anti-Democratic talking point all over social media but nope nope nope, definitely Democratic false flag.
> 
> Stop encouraging these people.


----------



## vilk (Oct 27, 2018)

So some Nazi shot up a synagogue in PA this morning. You wanna bet he makes "6 gorillian" jokes?


----------



## Cabinet (Oct 28, 2018)

I'm under the impression that Nazi groups in the US were allowed to organize because of our red scares over the past few decades.


----------



## MaxOfMetal (Oct 28, 2018)

Cabinet said:


> I'm under the impression that Nazi groups in the US were allowed to organize because of our red scares over the past few decades.



Nah, America has just never really liked black, brown and non-Christian folks all that much. 

Many of the hate groups to use WWII Nazi imagery have ties to good old American racism like the KKK. 

We also have some of the most laxed freedom of speech and expression laws, which I think is a net positive, but this is a side effect.


----------



## USMarine75 (Oct 28, 2018)

Cabinet said:


> I'm under the impression that Nazi groups in the US were allowed to organize because of our red scares over the past few decades.



Politically in the 30's, the US was by default pro-Nazi since the Nazis were the enemy of the Communists (and Anarchists). The German American Bund was the US Nazi party, run by a German-American Nazi named Kuhn.

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/542499/marshall-curry-nazi-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/
^ archival video

https://www.politico.com/magazine/s...rican-bund-rally-madison-square-garden-215522
^story

There are still many active pro-Nazi groups in the US today, like the ANP (founded in 1959).

https://www.splcenter.org/
^ SPLC is an organization that tracks active extremist and hate groups in the US.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers-willing-business-partners/303146/
^Many US companies still did business with the Nazi regime, even after it was forbidden by the Trading with the Enemy Act. Brown Brothers Harriman (one of the largest investment banks of its day, and UBC a subsidiary) was a bank with ties to Prescott Bush, the CT Senator, and George Bush's father and G W Bush's grandfather. He was also married to the daughter of George Herbert Walker, who connected him with the right people and with the Nazi party for banking purposes.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryford-antisemitism/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm?noredirect=on
^ Ford and GM were also linked to the Nazi party.


----------



## Randy (Oct 28, 2018)

USMarine75 said:


> https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryford-antisemitism/
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm?noredirect=on
> ^ Ford and GM were also linked to the Nazi party.


----------



## USMarine75 (Oct 28, 2018)

Randy said:


>




I was literally thinking about this when I was posting haha.


----------



## USMarine75 (Oct 28, 2018)

Randy said:


> Anecdotal but the first person to walk into my office today said "Did you hear they arrested the bomber? I heard he's registered Green Party'?"
> 
> Swoosh!









Appropriate Halloween humor for some people on here...


----------



## Cabinet (Oct 28, 2018)

MaxOfMetal said:


> Nah, America has just never really liked black, brown and non-Christian folks all that much.
> 
> Many of the hate groups to use WWII Nazi imagery have ties to good old American racism like the KKK.
> 
> We also have some of the most laxed freedom of speech and expression laws, which I think is a net positive, but this is a side effect.


I agree, to an extent; however, I think the media has played a large responsibility in the polarity between political parties and our politicians tend to do the same. I remember watching a political debate recorded a few decades ago (Maybe it was during Reagan's campaign?) and the approach to complicated issues highlighted unity of the American people which is not something I see a lot of today. Though we aren't completely under the control of televisions and reporters, it has an effect especially given that less educated people, and people that financially struggle, tend to care less about political ideology.
Look at India in the 1950s, with what was arguably a stable Democracy at the time and part of the reason was that half the country was illiterate. Political unrest in India today is partly fueled by the rising importance and accessibility of higher education (a good thing, in my opinion).


----------



## MaxOfMetal (Oct 28, 2018)

Cabinet said:


> I agree, to an extent; however, I think the media has played a large responsibility in the polarity between political parties and our politicians tend to do the same. I remember watching a political debate recorded a few decades ago (Maybe it was during Reagan's campaign?) and the approach to complicated issues highlighted unity of the American people which is not something I see a lot of today. Though we aren't completely under the control of televisions and reporters, it has an effect especially given that less educated people, and people that financially struggle, tend to care less about political ideology.
> Look at India in the 1950s, with what was arguably a stable Democracy at the time and part of the reason was that half the country was illiterate. Political unrest in India today is partly fueled by the rising importance and accessibility of higher education (a good thing, in my opinion).



I'll never fault the media for being right. (Whoops, typed that differently and left "wrong" instead of "right".)

But, while the media is bright, shiny and in broad daylight, the real cause for such divide is the darker part of politics that is very rarely thought of by your average citizens: lobbying and gray (and black) money from the super rich, large corporations, religious special interest groups, and foreign countries.

Senator Chuck D. Republican doesn't care about abortion or healtcare he cares about the big check in the mail. Of course you have your Steve Kings, who are actual monsters and your Bernie Sanders that are true believers, but I'd reckon most politicians are in it for self enrichment, and they're willing to do anything to get it, even if it means tearing the country apart and actually killing people.


----------



## Cabinet (Oct 28, 2018)

MaxOfMetal said:


> I'll never fault the media for being wrong.
> 
> But, while the media is bright, shiny and in broad daylight, the real cause for such divide is the darker part of politics that is very rarely thought of by your average citizens: lobbying and gray (and black) money from the super rich, large corporations, religious special interest groups, and foreign countries.
> 
> Senator Chuck D. Republican doesn't care about abortion or healtcare he cares about the big check in the mail. Of course you have your Steve Kings, who are actual monsters and your Bernie Sanders that are true believers, but I'd reckon most politicians are in it for self enrichment, and they're willing to do anything to get it, even if it means tearing the country apart and actually killing people.


Completely agree. Especially in foreign policy, US interests have never been rooted in morality, but we try to see it as such. This is why we never see reports of the military build up in east Asia. There is no philosophical enemy. No fascist dictator to overthrow. No unstoppable Communist force. Just business.


----------



## MaxOfMetal (Oct 28, 2018)

Cabinet said:


> Completely agree. Especially in foreign policy, US interests have never been rooted in morality, but we try to see it as such. This is why we never see reports of the military build up in east Asia. There is no philosophical enemy. No fascist dictator to overthrow. No unstoppable Communist force. Just business.



Money, revenge and a burning hatred of brown people. In that order. 

It's the American way.


----------



## Cabinet (Oct 28, 2018)

MaxOfMetal said:


> Money, revenge and a burning hatred of brown people. In that order.
> 
> It's the American way.


Eh. Vietnam has been quietly requesting US naval presence in the area, and Singapore has built harbors specific to American warship dimensions. China doesn't want us there, but most of the smaller nations there do.


----------



## MaxOfMetal (Oct 28, 2018)

Cabinet said:


> Eh. Vietnam has been quietly requesting US naval presence in the area, and Singapore has built harbors specific to American warship dimensions. China doesn't want us there, but most of the smaller nations there do.



_America: The Lesser of Two Evils_


----------



## USMarine75 (Oct 28, 2018)

MaxOfMetal said:


> Senator Chuck D. Republican doesn't care about abortion or healtcare he cares about the big check in the mail.






The senator has no comment at this time regarding these allegations.


----------



## AngstRiddenDreams (Oct 28, 2018)

MaxOfMetal said:


> I'll never fault the media for being right. (Whoops, typed that differently and left "wrong" instead of "right".)
> 
> But, while the media is bright, shiny and in broad daylight, the real cause for such divide is the darker part of politics that is very rarely thought of by your average citizens: lobbying and gray (and black) money from the super rich, large corporations, religious special interest groups, and foreign countries.
> 
> Senator Chuck D. Republican doesn't care about abortion or healtcare he cares about the big check in the mail. Of course you have your Steve Kings, who are actual monsters and your Bernie Sanders that are true believers, *but I'd reckon most politicians are in it for self enrichment, and they're willing to do anything to get it, even if it means tearing the country apart and actually killing people.*



*cough* _guillotine _*cough*


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## KnightBrolaire (Oct 28, 2018)

AngstRiddenDreams said:


> *cough* _guillotine _*cough*


fun fact: france used the guillotine as a form of execution up until the late 1970s.


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## USMarine75 (Oct 29, 2018)

KnightBrolaire said:


> fun fact: france used the guillotine as a form of execution up until the late 1970s.



fun fact: manatees use farts as ballast to control their swimming.


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## AngstRiddenDreams (Oct 29, 2018)

USMarine75 said:


> fun fact: manatees use farts as ballast to control their swimming.


That actually is a fun fact.


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## Jacksonluvr636 (Oct 30, 2018)

USMarine75 said:


> Particularly relevant here... an excerpt from "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by Loewen:
> 
> At home, [President Woodrow] Wilson's racial policies disgraced the office he held. His Republican predecessors had routinely appointed blacks to important offices, including those of port collector for New Orleans and the District of Columbia and register of the treasury. Presidents sometimes appointed African Americans as postmasters, particularly in southern towns with large black populations. African Americans took part in the Republican Party's national conventions and enjoyed some access to the White House. Woodrow Wilson, for whom many African Americans voted in 1912, changed all that. A southerner, Wilson had been president of Princeton, the only major northern university that refused to admit blacks. He was an outspoken white supremacist—his wife was even worse—and told "darky" stories in cabinet meetings. His administration submitted a legislative program intended to curtail the civil rights of African Americans, but Congress would not pass it. Unfazed, Wilson used his power as chief executive to segregate the federal government. He appointed southern whites to offices traditionally reserved for blacks. Wilson personally vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The one occasion on which Wilson met with African American leaders in the White House ended in a fiasco as the president virtually threw the visitors out of his office. Wilson's legacy was extensive: he effectively closed the Democratic Party to African Americans for another two decades, and parts of the federal government remained segregated into the 1950s and beyond." In 1916 the Colored Advisory Committee of the Republican National Committee issued a statement on Wilson that, though partisan, was accurate: "No sooner had the Democratic Administration come into power than Mr. Wilson and his advisors entered upon a policy to eliminate all colored citizens from representation in the Federal Government."
> 
> ...



Agree overall, people are sheep. I just think they are idiots to blindly follow.

Between the Federal Reserve Act and this info above is another reason why I think Wilson is officially the worst President the US has ever seen.


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## Drew (Oct 31, 2018)

Jacksonluvr636 said:


> Between the Federal Reserve Act...


Oh, jeez. No. Just, no. You don't know enough about monetary policy to hold that opinion, or you wouldn't hold that opinion, and I REALLY don't want to get into this argument again with someone else who doesn't know what they're talking about.


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## Jacksonluvr636 (Oct 31, 2018)

Drew said:


> Oh, jeez. No. Just, no. You don't know enough about monetary policy to hold that opinion, or you wouldn't hold that opinion, and I REALLY don't want to get into this argument again with someone else who doesn't know what they're talking about.



This guy. Mr know it all? I have read every section so what more could you possibly know? You are kind of putting yourself into an argument by your post but don't want to get into one? Your logic makes a lot of sense. I can't imagine all of the amazing things you would have to say.


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## Drew (Oct 31, 2018)

Jacksonluvr636 said:


> This guy. Mr know it all? I have read every section so what more could you possibly know? You are kind of putting yourself into an argument by your post but don't want to get into one? Your logic makes a lot of sense. I can't imagine all of the amazing things you would have to say.


It's just this is what I do for a living, man.  

But, please, by all means, explain to me why the Federal Reserve was such a mistake.


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## jaxadam (Oct 31, 2018)

Jacksonluvr636 said:


> This guy. Mr know it all? I have read every section so what more could you possibly know? You are kind of putting yourself into an argument by your post but don't want to get into one? Your logic makes a lot of sense. I can't imagine all of the amazing things you would have to say.



*brb, going to read Wikipedia about it. will return in a few as a foremost expert*


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## Drew (Oct 31, 2018)

jaxadam said:


> *brb, going to read Wikipedia about it. will return in a few as a foremost expert*


 

I'm just hoping this guy comes back with something _new_, that I haven't heard a few dozen times by now.


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## MFB (Oct 31, 2018)

Drew said:


> I'm just hoping this guy comes back with something _new_, that I haven't heard a few dozen times by now.



Maybe his wife is a CPA as well, so ya know, by association he might as well be!


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## jaxadam (Oct 31, 2018)

Drew said:


> I'm just hoping this guy comes back with something _new_, that I haven't heard a few dozen times by now.



I mean, I've become a penny stock billionaire just by reading Investopedia on the shitter every now and then.


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## Randy (Oct 31, 2018)

MFB said:


> Maybe his wife is a CPA as well, so ya know, by association he might as well be!



I heard he stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night


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## MFB (Oct 31, 2018)

Randy said:


> I heard he stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night



Quite fitting giving their slogan is "Bada-book, bada-boom" wouldn't you say?


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## Jacksonluvr636 (Oct 31, 2018)

I love how guy comes in, claiming that he knows everything and everyone else is wrong yet I'm the one supposed to come back with information lol.

SS.org'D.


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## tedtan (Oct 31, 2018)

Jacksonluvr636 said:


> I love how guy comes in, claiming that he knows everything and everyone else is wrong yet I'm the one supposed to come back with information lol.
> 
> SS.org'D.



You made the claim, the onus is on you to support it.


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## jaxadam (Oct 31, 2018)

Jacksonluvr636 said:


> I love how guy comes in, claiming that he knows everything and everyone else is wrong yet I'm the one supposed to come back with information lol.
> 
> SS.org'D.


----------



## jaxadam (Oct 31, 2018)




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## Jacksonluvr636 (Oct 31, 2018)

tedtan said:


> You made the claim, the onus is on you to support it.


What claim is that exactly? I said Wilson was one of the worst presidents because of allowing the Federal Reserve Act to happen. That is an opinion if I am not mistaken.

Then Drew comes knowing everything about it and how everyone else is wrong because "that is what he does for a living" lol Give me a break. That is the claim. Talk about a fucking Ego lol.

But it is cool, Cheer him on. I am ok with the mob mentality over here and still login. See signature. It is comical to me.

So IMO it seems you may have gotten things a little twisted about the claims. Anyway I really don't care what you guys think because I have read up on this quite a bit as this is something I have thought the same way on for years. Ever since 2009, interesting enough the FED couldn't stop the financial collapse or the great depression or inflation after their wars. In fact, it was their interference on banking to begin with that created any type of panic or reasoning for the FED. Other countries didn't have that problem I dont think?

We are definitely a first world country but I do not think other places that do not have the FED are too far behind or maybe even riding our tail with much less debt? IDK a lot of those later things are just thoughts.

It is pretty simple yet funny how some of you don't see it. Government puts hands into pot, things get messy, government claims there is a problem and takes complete control. It is kind of a rinse repeat kind of thing.

So it seems to me, that the one who actually made the claim should be posting his data of how everyone he has talked to about this is wrong? Since you know it is his job and apparently the FED wasn't a mistake.?? Just saying


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## Ordacleaphobia (Oct 31, 2018)

USMarine75 said:


> The senator has no comment at this time regarding these allegations.



HAH.
I was wondering why that name sounded so familiar.


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## jaxadam (Oct 31, 2018)

Jacksonluvr636 said:


> What claim is that exactly? I said Trump was one of the worst presidents because of allowing women the right to vote



At this point I'd like to analyze your username. At first glance we have an amalgamation of letters and numbers. Let's look a little deeper. In the beginning, we have a capitalized J followed by some more letters. This is pretty standard fare when starting a word. We see a sensical combination "Jackson" emerge, which we can assume is a portmanteau of Jacks and On, which is most likely a play-on of Jacks Off. Following this, we have the misspelling of Louvre which we can assume is just an avant-garde attempt at giving the finger to fancy French art museums. Finally following all of this french jerkoffery we are given some numbers. Number combinations after a grouping of letters typically resemble some form of birthday, so we can assume you were either born on June 36th or in 636 AD.


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## Drew (Nov 1, 2018)

Jacksonluvr636 said:


> What claim is that exactly? I said Wilson was one of the worst presidents because of allowing the Federal Reserve Act to happen. That is an opinion if I am not mistaken.


Ok, WHY do you think the Federal Reserve Act was such a terrible mistake? I can't very well refute your claim if you don't bother to explain your reasons for holding that opinion, now can I?


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## Xaios (Nov 1, 2018)

jaxadam said:


> Number combinations after a grouping of letters typically resemble some form of birthday, so we can assume you were either born on June 36th or in 636 AD.


That DOB could also be June 63rd OR Hectamarch 6th.

As an aside, there was a mailbomb in Canada fairly recently that became big news, one that actually went off. About a day after the news story broke, they figured out where it was sent from. I got a bit of a shock when they arrested the guy who sent it and it turned out he lived in the same town as me. I use the past participle intentionally in this instance as, after a couple court hearings, he died in prison awaiting trial, only a few days after the incident and under somewhat mysterious circumstances.


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## tedtan (Nov 1, 2018)

Jacksonluvr636 said:


> What claim is that exactly? I said Wilson was one of the worst presidents because of allowing the Federal Reserve Act to happen. That is an opinion if I am not mistaken.
> 
> Then Drew comes knowing everything about it and how everyone else is wrong because "that is what he does for a living" lol Give me a break. That is the claim. Talk about a fucking Ego lol.
> 
> But it is cool, Cheer him on. I am ok with the mob mentality over here and still login. See signature. It is comical to me.



I wasn't acting as part of a mob, I was merely responding to your comment:



Jacksonluvr636 said:


> I love how guy comes in, claiming that he knows everything and everyone else is wrong yet I'm the one supposed to come back with information lol.
> 
> SS.org'D.



You first stated that you believed that Wilson is the worst president in US history due in part to his having signed the Federal Reserve Act into law. Drew then disagreed. Granted, both are opinions, but you need to support yours and Drew needs to support his in order for for others to evaluate your position. And since you made the initial claim, you should provide your supporting evidence first.

And if you don't intend for others to evaluate your position, why post it in the first place?




Jacksonluvr636 said:


> It is pretty simple yet funny how some of you don't see it. Government puts hands into pot, things get messy, government claims there is a problem and takes complete control. It is kind of a rinse repeat kind of thing.



The economy is just a bit more complicated than this, but I agree that the government hasn't always made the right call (though it sometimes does).


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## Ordacleaphobia (Nov 1, 2018)

tedtan said:


> You first stated that you believed that Wilson is the worst president in US history due in part to his having signed the Federal Reserve Act into law. Drew then disagreed. Granted, both are opinions, but you need to support yours and Drew needs to support his in order for for others to evaluate your position. And since you made the initial claim, you should provide your supporting evidence first.



This is pretty much true. Yeah, Drew kind of swooped in with an unusually provocative "I'm so much smarter than you" kind of tone, but nothing he's said yet is logically false.
The onus is kind of on you [Jack] if you want to prove him wrong, or avoid the argument with an "agree to disagree" style post.


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## BlackSG91 (Nov 1, 2018)

;>)/


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## Drew (Nov 1, 2018)

Ordacleaphobia said:


> This is pretty much true. Yeah, Drew kind of swooped in with an unusually provocative "I'm so much smarter than you" kind of tone, but nothing he's said yet is logically false.
> The onus is kind of on you [Jack] if you want to prove him wrong, or avoid the argument with an "agree to disagree" style post.


To be fair, I'll apologize for that - I've seen a LOT of attacks on the Fed delivered from a place of total ignorance, so for me "The Fed was such a mistake" is roughly akin to "why do you play seven strings? They're only good for low tuned riffing, you shouldn't play 7 unless you've mastered six," or some of the other usual bullshit delivered at seven string players that, thankfully, seems to be going away. Anyway, my reaction was admittedly painting with a pretty broad brush, and to be fair you actually may have done some pretty serious study of monetary policy at some point in your life. This would make you the exception, not the norm... But it's wrong of me to not give you the benefit of the doubt until you've had the opportunity to explain yourself, so for that I do apologize for my tone.


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## USMarine75 (Nov 2, 2018)

Drew said:


> To be fair, I'll apologize for that - I've seen a LOT of attacks on the Fed delivered from a place of total ignorance, so for me "The Fed was such a mistake" is roughly akin to "why do you play seven strings? They're only good for low tuned riffing, you shouldn't play 7 unless you've mastered six," or some of the other usual bullshit delivered at seven string players that, thankfully, seems to be going away. Anyway, my reaction was admittedly painting with a pretty broad brush, and to be fair you actually may have done some pretty serious study of monetary policy at some point in your life. This would make you the exception, not the norm... But it's wrong of me to not give you the benefit of the doubt until you've had the opportunity to explain yourself, so for that I do apologize for my tone.



https://www.healthfreedom.info/Federal_Reserve_Fraud.htm


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## Drew (Nov 2, 2018)

USMarine75 said:


> https://www.healthfreedom.info/Federal_Reserve_Fraud.htm


I'll cut you.


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## Jacksonluvr636 (Nov 2, 2018)

Drew said:


> To be fair, I'll apologize for that - I've seen a LOT of attacks on the Fed delivered from a place of total ignorance, so for me "The Fed was such a mistake" is roughly akin to "why do you play seven strings? They're only good for low tuned riffing, you shouldn't play 7 unless you've mastered six," or some of the other usual bullshit delivered at seven string players that, thankfully, seems to be going away. Anyway, my reaction was admittedly painting with a pretty broad brush, and to be fair you actually may have done some pretty serious study of monetary policy at some point in your life. This would make you the exception, not the norm... But it's wrong of me to not give you the benefit of the doubt until you've had the opportunity to explain yourself, so for that I do apologize for my tone.


Ok fair enough, and I am not looking to argue. I can get trigger for sure 

But I did post some info previously the other day. From things I have read which I do believe to be factual. I am curious of what you think on those points. Maybe there is a reply here I will see after I keep reading comments.


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## Drew (Nov 2, 2018)

Jacksonluvr636 said:


> Ok fair enough, and I am not looking to argue. I can get trigger for sure
> 
> But I did post some info previously the other day. From things I have read which I do believe to be factual. I am curious of what you think on those points. Maybe there is a reply here I will see after I keep reading comments.


About the Fed? If so, I completely missed it, and if it's in this thread I can't find it.


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## Jacksonluvr636 (Nov 2, 2018)

Drew said:


> About the Fed? If so, I completely missed it, and if it's in this thread I can't find it.



My previous post that may have been missed. This was absolutely rushed as I browse while at work so I can't exactly write a professional essay:

"The FED couldn't stop the financial collapse or the great depression or inflation after their wars. In fact, it was their interference on banking to begin with that created any type of panic or reasoning for the FED. *Edit: To my knowledge Financial Panics were the sole reason the FED was created yet the Government's restrictions on Notes and Branching could be argued to be the actual reason for these panics to have even exited. So I look at this as a complete setup from day one by Uncle Same to be in complete control and be allowed to manipulate money to pad their own pockets further. /edit*

Other countries didn't have these problem I dont think?

We are definitely a first world country but I do not think other places that do not have the FED are too far behind or maybe even riding our tail with much less debt? IDK a lot of those later things are just thoughts.

Government puts hands into pot, things get messy, government claims there is a problem and takes complete control. It is kind of a rinse repeat kind of thing."


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## USMarine75 (Nov 2, 2018)

I've read several sources (including a GAO report) that say the US alone lost about $13T during the 2008 crisis and that eventually all of the collateral damage will end up costing round $22T. That's not something the Fed could have stopped once it was set in motion.

The Great Depression was a collapse of the "new" world economy that had become newly investment bank oriented. What largely started from the forced depression of the German economy (I think was top 3 previously) after WWI had a worldwide effect that, combined with this new investment economy that was careening precariously out of control, plowed quickly into what became the Great Depression. Again, how was the Fed supposed to stop a worldwide collapse?

Here's a good article about what was learned years later about the Feds actions in 2008:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/the-real-cost-of-the-2008-financial-crisis


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## tedtan (Nov 2, 2018)

In terms of preventing a depression or recession, I'd say think of it as the shock absorbers on your car. They'll smooth out the ride when you're going over small bumps or holes, but they won't do much if you hit a large pothole. And both the Great Depression and the 2008 depression were more like giant sinkholes that opened up and swallowed the entire car. I other words, they were orders of magnitude greater than what a single country's central banking system could prevent.

I know that's a bad analogy, but hopefully it gets the point across.


----------



## Drew (Nov 2, 2018)

Jacksonluvr636 said:


> My previous post that may have been missed. This was absolutely rushed as I browse while at work so I can't exactly write a professional essay:
> 
> "The FED couldn't stop the financial collapse or the great depression or inflation after their wars. In fact, it was their interference on banking to begin with that created any type of panic or reasoning for the FED. *Edit: To my knowledge Financial Panics were the sole reason the FED was created yet the Government's restrictions on Notes and Branching could be argued to be the actual reason for these panics to have even exited. So I look at this as a complete setup from day one by Uncle Same to be in complete control and be allowed to manipulate money to pad their own pockets further. /edit*
> 
> ...


So, this is by necessity going to have to be a pretty quick gloss since that's a LOT to cover.

So, there may be one or two small exceptions out there I'm not aware of, but generally speaking every government in the world has a central bank, so no, the Federal Reserve isn't a uniquely American invention the rest of the world does without, or even all that unusual. In Europe, you actually generally see two levels of central banking - national banks (Bank of Italy, Bundesbank in Germany, Banque du France, etc), and then the European Central Bank, ECB, setting monetary policy for the entire EU, headed by Mario Draghi. While the Bundesbank has a fair amount of clout given Germany's history of fiscal prudence and their economic clout within the EU, the ECB is the closest European analogue to the Fed, and nearest in power - in terms of impact on the global economy, Chairman Powell and ECB head Draghi are loosely peers.

Also, I think you're confusing the Federal Reserve and the Treasury in a few points -- the Treasury (headed at present by Steven Mnuchin) is responsible for issuing and paying debt (in the form of Treasury bills), while the Federal Reserve is responsible for overseeing monetary policy and pursuing a dual mandate of full employment and stable prices). The Fed can set short term interest rates (the Fed Open Markets Committee sets the Fed Funds Rate, the overnight rate banks can borrow at, as well as the interest rate paid to banks on reserves at deposit at the bank, and by setting those rates has a lot of ability to control short-term interest rates in this country) and has the authority to engage directly in open market transactions, although it usually does not - the Fed's quantitative easing policies after the great recession, buying Treasury bonds and mortgages in the open market to increase the monetary supply and decrease the Treasury supply in the market to drive down interest rates and in doing so attempt to spur investment, is a notable exception). But, if you want to talk about the national debt, that's the Treasury, indirectly, and really it's Congress not balancing a budget and then asking the Treasury to cover the deficit by selling treasury bills. The Federal Reserve isn't really involved in that.

As far as the Great Recession, the most recent collapse... You can nit-pick over who's ultimately responsible on each step of the way, but the generally-accepted chain of events was after the Dot-Com crash in the late 90s, investors decided to get out of the stock market and instead pour money into "safe" assets like real estate. Real estate demand increased (pushing up asset prices), affordability became harder, and since it was a rising market and a "safe" asset class, mortgage originators began relaxing lending standards to compete for customers. This was pretty low-risk for them because the loans would then be sold, bought by Wall Street banks, and then repackaged into Collateralized Debt Obligations supported by pools of mortgages. They would then generally sell off the top traunches with top payment priority (which despite all the backlash actually generally performed in line with their high credit ratings), and then keep the lower-rated, higher yielding stuff on book, collecting the interest. This all worked well and good until lenders began to default (there's a number of reasons for this, but a common one was loans with an ultra-low interest rate "teaser" period that after a year or two would reset to a much higher market rate), which set off a chain reaction of falling housing prices (if two or three houses in a neighborhood go into forclosure, that tends to pull house prices down around them) driving _other_ lenders underwater on their loands, encouraging further defaults, and as lower-traunche CDOs started to deteriorate, bank balance sheets began to get slammed, leading eventually to such high-profile failures as Lehman Brothers, at which point counterparty risk from over-the-counter derivative contracts suddenly became a MAJOR source of risk for "main street" banks like Bank of America with huge retail books of business (ironically enough, Wells Fargo has a long history of exceptionally conservative risk control, and they were almost completely unscathed during this period - I think they might have posted a modest quarterly loss for a single period, but didn't post a single annual loss. Their current scandals, which are stupid more than they are intentionally criminal, are that much more idiotic for it).

Anyway, it'll be a LONG time yet before we can fairly write the post-mortem on the Great Recession... but so far their response has, I'd say, been pretty decent. There was a lot of concern about runaway inflation when the Fed started QE (I'm in the camp that QE may actually have been disinflationary, in that the Fed's ability to set interest rate policy through direct action is modest compared to their ability to influence market expectation, and the fact they believed they could _get away with_ engaging in several trillion dollars worth of bond purchases as a form of stimulus, and in doing so expand the monetary supply, implied they really weren't worried about inflation at all), but inflation has been remarkably low over the last 10 years, and only in recent months have we seen the Fed's preferred measure, core PCE, hit their informal 2% target (and, I'd be very surprised if in the November release core PCE didn't drop back below 2% - a stable annual number has masked the fact that the month-over-month numbers have shown a deceleration since late spring). They cut short term rates down to the effective lower bound of 0% (and instead moved to a range rather than a specific target, 0-0.25%) rapidly, engaged in "extraordinary measures" like QE to attempt to spur investment and risk-taking, and then held rates at or near zero for an extraordinarily long time while pundits fretted about inflation, all the while, sure enough, runaway inflation failed to materialize. They're now in the process of unwinding their balance sheet they built up during QE, and while there will likely be the occasional misstep (the sharp spike in rates at the start of October has been attributed to a number of things, but Powell's comment that policy "was a long way from neutral" (and thus further rate hikes are likely - again, given that to me evidence points to a _slowdown_ in inflation, I think it's going to be tough to hike rates more than 1-2 more times in the next 12-18 months) as well as the Fed's accelleration of their allowing their balance sheet to run off without reinvesting from $40b/month to $50b/month are likely both factors), generally speaking I'm of the mindset that without the Fed's rapid action and willingness to use extraodrinary measures to push down interest rates, and the Treasury's TARP program, the recession would have been deeper and likely would have lasted a lot longer than it did, and the subsequent recovery (which can fairly be critiqued as being more pronounced for asset owners than it has been for workers - Fed policy can only go so far, and monetary policy is only one factor that determines how corporations act) would have been slower.

Idunno. Your critiques above are kind of broad and general, so I'm not sure if I'm really speaking to _exactly_ what you have in mind... But, central banking is a fairly universal part of a modern national economy, and the Fed's mandate isn't related to national debt or even administering national debt, but overseeing the economy and promoting price stability and full employment. And I don't really see how that lends itself to allowing the government to "pad it's own pocket," exactly.


----------



## USMarine75 (Nov 2, 2018)

Drew said:


> So, this is by necessity going to have to be a pretty quick gloss since that's a LOT to cover.
> 
> So, there may be one or two small exceptions out there I'm not aware of, but generally speaking every government in the world has a central bank, so no, the Federal Reserve isn't a uniquely American invention the rest of the world does without, or even all that unusual. In Europe, you actually generally see two levels of central banking - national banks (Bank of Italy, Bundesbank in Germany, Banque du France, etc), and then the European Central Bank, ECB, setting monetary policy for the entire EU, headed by Mario Draghi. While the Bundesbank has a fair amount of clout given Germany's history of fiscal prudence and their economic clout within the EU, the ECB is the closest European analogue to the Fed, and nearest in power - in terms of impact on the global economy, Chairman Powell and ECB head Draghi are loosely peers.
> 
> ...



And one of the biggest underlying causes...
"The banks that had been bailed out by Bush and Obama had engaged in behavior that was beyond insane. In 2004 the five biggest investment banks in the country (at the time, Merrill Lynch, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns) had gone to then-SEC chairman William Donaldson and personally lobbied to remove restrictions on borrowing so that they could bet even more of whatever other people's money they happened to be holding on bullshit investments like mortgage-backed securities. They were making so much straight cash betting on the burgeoning housing bubble that it was no longer enough to be able to bet twelve dollars for every dollar they actually had, the maximum that was then allowed under a thing called the net capital rule. So people like Hank Paulson (at the time, head of Goldman Sachs) got Donaldson to nix the rule, which allowed every single one of those banks to jack up their debt-to-equity ratio above 20:1. In the case of Merrill Lynch, it got as high as 40:1. This was gambling, pure and simple, and it got rewarded with the most gargantuan bailout in history. It was irresponsibility on a scale far beyond anything any individual homeowner could even conceive of."

tl;dr if you're mad at the fed, there's a long line in front of them, about 535 congressman deep, you should be mad at first.






^I highly recommend this book if you (Jacksonluvr636) want to read something that's not a textbook, but is pretty comprehensive, and by a great writer.


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## Jacksonluvr636 (Nov 2, 2018)

Drew said:


> Idunno. Your critiques above are kind of broad and general, so I'm not sure if I'm really speaking to _exactly_ what you have in mind... But, central banking is a fairly universal part of a modern national economy, and the Fed's mandate isn't related to national debt or even administering national debt, but overseeing the economy and promoting price stability and full employment. And I don't really see how that lends itself to allowing the government to "pad it's own pocket," exactly.



Well you covered a lot and most of it. A bit deep into the Mortgage side of things but I am just generally saying, or trying to say...While I agree with pretty much all of your points. They are kind of hard to deny. I still feel that you are speaking on current times. We have this system now weather we like it or not but what I was saying is before this was our system things seemed to be doing fine until the government's regulations got out of hand. That is when things started getting bad and the reason there was ever a need to have a system like this in the first place. Obviously we will never know what it would be like today without it. 

My comment regarding other countries I don't think I worded right. It was also referring to the early 1900's. From what I have read, and idk if these are hard facts. Places like Canada were not having financial scares and did not have a need for a "FED' type of thing. The governments were involved but much less and they were doing fine.

Once our gov got too involved things went to shit, there was panic and the FED was their answer. Due to their actions.

Padding their pockets comment idk. I do not have spreadsheets of this but I know the FED banks are tax exempt. Why is that? Why do they not have to pay anything? I may be mixing treasury and the fed but in whole, our government does not generate any income whatsoever. They only make profit from others and with things like Tax Free banking and Multi TRILLION dollar corporations out there, in general I feel the system is flawed and completely in their favor.


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## Drew (Nov 2, 2018)

Jacksonluvr636 said:


> We have this system now weather we like it or not but what I was saying is before this was our system things seemed to be doing fine until the government's regulations got out of hand.
> 
> Once our gov got too involved things went to shit, there was panic and the FED was their answer. Due to their actions.


Ok, could you maybe elaborate on this or provide some background? That's awfully vague.



> Padding their pockets comment idk. I do not have spreadsheets of this but I know the FED banks are tax exempt. Why is that? Why do they not have to pay anything? I may be mixing treasury and the fed but in whole, our government does not generate any income whatsoever. They only make profit from others and with things like Tax Free banking and Multi TRILLION dollar corporations out there, in general I feel the system is flawed and completely in their favor.


Well, yeah. The Fed is a government institution. So is the Treasury. Neither is really trying to make an operating profit, so much as they are to accomplish specific government aims... But, for example, when the Treasury wound down their TARP asset-buying program they had actually turned a profit on the intervention, and that profit was paid back into the US government's operating budget. So, they're tax exempt... but, considering taxes go to the US's operating budget, what's the difference between a tax-exempt Fed and Treasury that returns any "profit" realized on open market transactions back to the government, and one that pays a 100% tax rate, far higher than you or me or large corporations? Because I certainly can't see one.


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## USMarine75 (Nov 2, 2018)

Jacksonluvr636 said:


> Well you covered a lot and most of it. A bit deep into the Mortgage side of things but I am just generally saying, or trying to say...While I agree with pretty much all of your points. They are kind of hard to deny. I still feel that you are speaking on current times. We have this system now weather we like it or not but what I was saying is before this was our system things seemed to be doing fine until the government's regulations got out of hand. That is when things started getting bad and the reason there was ever a need to have a system like this in the first place. Obviously we will never know what it would be like today without it.
> 
> My comment regarding other countries I don't think I worded right. It was also referring to the early 1900's. From what I have read, and idk if these are hard facts. Places like Canada were not having financial scares and did not have a need for a "FED' type of thing. The governments were involved but much less and they were doing fine.
> 
> ...



No... man... just... no. I mean I hear ya... but... no.

"Regulations out of hand"? Literally read my quote above. Literally the repealing of regulations allowed the financial collapse to happen. Deregulating essential commodities (which is a joke, because e.g. OPEC colludes in regulating oil on behalf of the sellers = why oil could hit $150/barrel) doesn't benefit buyers, only the company's executives and shareholders. The reason why you pay ridiculous costs for medicine isn't Obama, it's that exorbitant amount of money that goes into insurance companies which should be regulated, but aren't... again... thanks to your congressman, who repealed the regulations and sent it down to the state level, where... many states dont even have mechanisms to regulate. Deregulation was pushed for by Ken Ley... you know, the guy that used deregulation to create Enron.

Show me where any over-regulation by the federal or state government was bad? Obamacare was a sabotaged 'attempt' at regulating the high cost of medical devices, pharma, and health insurance. Obama F'd us! Right? No. Those businesses lobbied hard, paid for repealing of regulations, and fought against universal health care which would have leveled off their profiteering from the sick ($50 for gauze? Really?). But instead, those companies won, and convinced 40% of the country that wellness is a privilege and not a right, in the supposed best country in the world. They literally convinced people to vote against their own interests (I want insurance companies to make a huge profit and I want my medical bills high, but luckily not as high as 'Obummer' would make it in the fantasy world they portrayed of death panels and other BS). And the POS that was the actual ACA was a gutted piece of garbage thanks to congress, that was a handout to pharma and insurance companies... exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to be. So no this was truly regulation, this was a gutted regulation that has since been sabotaged instead of fixed... fixing entailing reinstating those provisions to cut your costs, which would be regulating pharma and insurance companies.

/rant lol... but it just drives me crazy how many people vote against their own self interests, because they read or buy into BS business-funded propaganda.

Read about the Panic of 1907 and how JP Morgan had to stave off a Great Depression using his own money... hence the desire to create an institution that could provide the same service, governed by federal supervision.

Oh well, either way, read that book. At least you'll like the chapter called "The Biggest Asshole in the Universe" about Alan Greenspan, the former Fed Chairman lol. The writer really hates him!


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## Mathemagician (Nov 2, 2018)

Do people still knock independent central bank policy?

....

The EU has the ECB.

The UK has the BOE.

Japan has the BOJ.

Every single developed economy has a central bank.

China has the PBOC.

And post-recession every single world economy is tragically trailing ours. Aside from China’s. And that’s almost entirely because they only have one party anyways, and the entire world is bankrolling their exploding middle class by moving manufacturing there.

The US central bank’s sole job is to independently of political whims and whimsy, steer the country towards stable interest rates that promote economic growth via steady interest rates (and by extension prices) and high employment.

I will never understand how people regardless of political bent can stand there and say “the party in office should have control over interest rates.”

No amount of shit presidential advisors whose positions are temporary and at the mercy of the president’s mood are better equipped to handle economic rate decisions better than the reserve banks. It literally operates like a private enterprise and one has to be promoted to move up not simply voted by a plebeian voter base or appointed by a politician who studied English or Law. The ones who claim to want less regulation should love that. 

No elected official should be able to influence monetary policy.

Fiscal policy is already set by the government and that has always been shown to be lobby-able by special interest groups.


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## Drew (Nov 2, 2018)

Yeah, hence my continual bewilderment with people having problems with the Federal Reserve. Hell, Trump is TRYING to pressure the Fed on interest rate policy* and thank god isn't successful.

On the bright side, no one has said a thing about "globalists" or the Illuminati in this thread, which is a small blessing. 



*Which, as an aside, is a really weird thing to be doing - about the only thing I think Trump has gotten RIGHT is his Fed appointments; I liked Yellen and was hoping he'd keep her on, but Powell is a moderate dove in the same mold as Yellen, and with the exception of Goodfriend, whose nomination is DOA in Congress, the others he's appointed have been qualified, experienced, centrists likely to stay the course on a slow, gradual increase in short term rates. Seeing as the only direct way Trump can shape Fed policy is by Fed board nominations, it's kind of dumbfounding to me that he's appointing these really qualified moderates highly likely to keep current policy in place, and then fuming about Powell "going crazy" and threatening to fire him (which he doesn't have the authority to do) if he keeps raising rates.


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## Cabinet (Nov 2, 2018)

Drew said:


> Yeah, hence my continual bewilderment with people having problems with the Federal Reserve. Hell, Trump is TRYING to pressure the Fed on interest rate policy* and thank god isn't successful.
> 
> On the bright side, no one has said a thing about "globalists" or the Illuminati in this thread, which is a small blessing.
> 
> ...


Those who favor the US in isolation do not have a serious opinion on foreign policy. Our geographic location gives us natural security and our military force accounts for security for the entire Western hemisphere and more. The United States is destined to be globally involved in power politics and that will never change. The anti globalist will have to reconcile with that one way or another.


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## USMarine75 (Nov 2, 2018)

Drew said:


> Yeah, hence my continual bewilderment with people having problems with the Federal Reserve. Hell, Trump is TRYING to pressure the Fed on interest rate policy* and thank god isn't successful.
> 
> On the bright side, no one has said a thing about "globalists" or the Illuminati in this thread, which is a small blessing.



Please don't talk about us while we are busy plotting and eating delicious homemade cookies in my mom's basement.


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## Drew (Nov 5, 2018)

USMarine75 said:


> Please don't talk about us while we are busy plotting and eating delicious homemade cookies in my mom's basement.


Delicious cookies, you say? I won't, if you share!


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## vilk (Nov 8, 2018)

Trumpo incel shot up a bar in CA last night.

The Right announced a plan to slow down the weekly mass shootings:


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## Drew (Nov 8, 2018)

USMarine75 said:


> And one of the biggest underlying causes...
> "The banks that had been bailed out by Bush and Obama had engaged in behavior that was beyond insane. In 2004 the five biggest investment banks in the country (at the time, Merrill Lynch, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns) had gone to then-SEC chairman William Donaldson and personally lobbied to remove restrictions on borrowing so that they could bet even more of whatever other people's money they happened to be holding on bullshit investments like mortgage-backed securities. They were making so much straight cash betting on the burgeoning housing bubble that it was no longer enough to be able to bet twelve dollars for every dollar they actually had, the maximum that was then allowed under a thing called the net capital rule. So people like Hank Paulson (at the time, head of Goldman Sachs) got Donaldson to nix the rule, which allowed every single one of those banks to jack up their debt-to-equity ratio above 20:1. In the case of Merrill Lynch, it got as high as 40:1. This was gambling, pure and simple, and it got rewarded with the most gargantuan bailout in history. It was irresponsibility on a scale far beyond anything any individual homeowner could even conceive of."
> 
> tl;dr if you're mad at the fed, there's a long line in front of them, about 535 congressman deep, you should be mad at first.
> ...


Missed this earlier - Matt Taibbi is an idiot who favors sensationalism over solid research. He's not wrong that Wall Street banks lobbied the SEC to allow them to increase leverage before the Great Recession, but describing that as "betting even more of other people's money on bullshit investments like mortgage-backed-securities" is kinda disengenuous, and considering MBS as an asset class covers a HUGE range of assets including uber-high-quality assets like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds, well, he's playing fast and furious here.

Try as he might, the dude's no Hunter S. Thompson.


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## Randy (Nov 8, 2018)

I'd stop short of saying he's an idiot necessarily. I think his compass points the right way and he processes events coherently in a way that allows him to put them into words better than most, but it doesn't come as much of a surprise if Taibbi would be the type to go into a discussion like Wall Street/SEC/MBS with his mind already made up, and only court whatever facts back up his conclusion, without a broader context.


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## Drew (Nov 8, 2018)

Randy said:


> I'd stop short of saying he's an idiot necessarily. I think his compass points the right way and he processes events coherently in a way that allows him to put them into words better than most, but it doesn't come as much of a surprise if Taibbi would be the type to go into a discussion like Wall Street/SEC/MBS with his mind already made up, and only court whatever facts back up his conclusion, without a broader context.


Fair point - I'm definitely engaging in the same sort of hyperbole I'm accusing him of here (ironically, lol).

But, he has a clear agenda and strong biases, and sometimes those two combine to mask some of the things he doesn't realize he doesn't know. I think one of the more grevious examples was the hit piece he did on the swap markets where he, knowingly or unknowingly, _drastically _overestimated the size of the market at larger than the whole global economy by 1) looking at the two notional exposures of a given swap contract between two counterparties (for example, one party will agree to pay the other a fixed interest rate on a notional balance of $20mm and in return receive a floating rate payment from the other party) as _seperate_ amounts (in the example below, he would calculate the total value as $40mm, not $20, even though there was only one $20mm contract), 2) ignore the fact that swaps often get netted out or used to hedge _other _liabilities (so if the first counterparty in the example above had $20mm in floating-rate debt outstanding, what the swap contract was actually doing wasn't speculating on the level of interest rates, but was converting a floating rate liability into a fixed rate one), and most egregiously, 3) ignoring the fact that in a swap, the notional balance never actually changes hands but is the hypothetical basis for determining the interest payments, so in the example above, if the first counterparty was paying a fixed rate of 2.5%, then in reality the actual payments they were making would be $500k a year, not $20 million... except, 4) payments are netted, so in actuality only one party makes a payment to the other based on the difference in rates (so, if last yeare the floating rate was 2.25% and this year it rose to 2.75%, then last year counterparty 2 would pay the other 0.25% x $20mm = $50k, and this year counterparty 1 would pay the other $50k. So, he's estimating the size of the swaps market, in this hypothetical example, as $40mm, whereas the actual cash payments moved would be a minescule fraction of that.... _and even then,_ more often than not they were being used to hedge other cashflows. He either had no idea what he was talking about, or did but just didn't care because a hundreds-of-trillions-dollar swap market sounded really scary and like gamblers run amuck. 

Here, there's a couple things he was missing - aside from the MBS thing, the biggest is probably banks weren't increasing their leverage from 12:1 to 20-40:1 to go out and buy speculative CMOs, they were increasing them to allow them to loan out far more money than they had previously, and in doing so leverage their net interest margin (difference between the interest they pay out on customer deposits, to interest they earn on their loan book) through the roof. I actually don't have hard numbers on the percent of firm assets that Merrill Lynch was using for proprietary trading, but I suspect it was quite small compared to their "conventional" retail banking, investment advisory, and investment banking assets, it's just with the amount of leverage they'd taken on even a small part of their business could cauuse crippling losses to the parent if it got hit hard enough. 

...but, of course, if you write it like the banks doubled leverage to invest other people's money in collateralized mortgage obligations, it sounds WAY more like gambling than if you tell it more honestly and say that the banks just stretched their balance sheet to such a degree that even modest unexpected losses (relative to total assets) would become completely crippling compared to firm equity (the net of assets and liabilities).


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## zappatton2 (Nov 8, 2018)

vilk said:


> Trumpo incel shot up a bar in CA last night.


Has a motive been established? I hadn't seen anything written on it. Still a tragedy regardless, though if political in motive, eerily on-topic. Everybody's worried about caravans of vulnerable, desperate people, but these shootings are getting a tad endemic.


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## Drew (Nov 8, 2018)

zappatton2 said:


> Has a motive been established? I hadn't seen anything written on it. Still a tragedy regardless, though if political in motive, eerily on-topic. Everybody's worried about caravans of vulnerable, desperate people, but these shootings are getting a tad endemic.


Nothing yet, Ex-Marine, served in Afghanistan, possibly PTSD related, he'd been acting odd earlier in the year but cleared by a police mental health group after they interviewed him. Nothing about political or personal views, only identifying features during the shooting were that he was dressed entirely in dark/black clothing, and (not surprisingly, now that we know he was a former Marine) he was very proficient with handling and reloading his handgun.


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## MFB (Nov 8, 2018)

I'm going to run for office on the platform of profiling former vets by how high they hold their rifles at rest, and I'm also putting a ban on HD Vision SpecOps Tactical sunglasses! How many more people could've been saved if this Marine couldn't see so well in the low-lighting atmosphere the bar was trying to create? I ASK YOU?!


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