establishment – Page 3 – The Burning Platform

Can the GOP Get Together in Cleveland?

After winning only six delegates in Wisconsin, and with Ted Cruz poaching delegates in states he has won, like Louisiana, Donald Trump either wins on the first ballot at Cleveland, or Trump does not win.

Yet, as that huge, roaring reception he received in his first post-Wisconsin appearance in Bethpage, N.Y., testifies, the Donald remains not only the front-runner, but the most exciting figure in the race.

Moreover, after the New York, New England, mid-Atlantic and California primaries, Trump should be within striking distance of the 1,237 delegates needed for the nomination.

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He will then have to persuade uncommitted delegates to back him, and perhaps do a deal with one of the defeated candidates, Marco Rubio or John Kasich, to win the remaining few needed to go over the top.

In 1976, Ronald Reagan, shy of the delegates he needed to defeat President Ford, offered second place on his ticket to Sen. Richard Schweiker, a moderate from Pennsylvania.

This brainstorm of Reagan campaign manager John Sears did not produce the required delegates, and Reagan received an envelope from a conservative Congressman with 30 dimes in it — 30 pieces of silver.

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THE BOOMER RETIREMENT MEME IS A BIG LIE

As the labor participation rate and employment to population ratio linger near three decade lows, the mouthpieces for the establishment continue to perpetuate the Big Lie this is solely due to the retirement of Boomers. It’s their storyline and they’ll stick to it, no matter what the facts show to be the truth. Even CNBC lackeys, government apparatchiks, and Ivy League educated Keynesian economists should be able to admit that people between the ages of 25 and 54 should be working, unless they are home raising children.

In the year 2000, at the height of the first Federal Reserve induced bubble, there were 120 million Americans between the ages of 25 and 54, with 78 million of them employed full-time. That equated to a 65% full-time employment rate. By the height of the second Federal Reserve induced bubble, there were 80 million full-time employed 25 to 54 year olds out of 126 million, a 63.5% employment rate. The full-time employment rate bottomed at 57% in 2010, and still lingers below 62% as we are at the height of a third Federal Reserve induced bubble.

Chart via econimica

Over the last 16 years the percentage of 25 to 54 full-time employed Americans has fallen from 65% to 62%. I guess people are retiring much younger, if you believe the MSM storyline. Over this same time period the total full-time employment to population ratio has fallen from 53% to 48.8%. The overall labor participation rate peaked in 2000 at 67.1% and stayed steady between 66% and 67% for the next eight years. But this disguised the ongoing decline in the participation rate of men.

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Rule 40(b): Republicans Set the Stage to Select the Establishment Candidate

So the GOP establishment creates a rule out of thin air in 2012 to stop the anti-establishment candidate Ron Paul from gaining traction at the convention. Now they scrap the rule in order to stop the anti-establishment candidate Trump from winning at the convention. They don’t give a fuck what the voters have to say. Realize that. You are nothing but a lowly peasant to them. The only way to win is to overthrow the establishment.

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

As expected, the Republican Party will not follow the candidate who the people select in the primaries. Rule 40(b), which requires a presidential candidate to win eight states to qualify for the nomination, has been scrapped for the upcoming convention in Cleveland. Rule 40(b) was a special rule to prevent Ron Paul’s name from being introduced. Under the present circumstances, the very rule used to put Mitt Romney in the candidate slot would prevent anyone but Trump from being the candidate.

Rule 40(b) only applied to the 2012 Republican Convention in Tampa, Florida, that nominated former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. The chairman is trying to pretend that the delegates pick the nominee, but if they can stop Trump on the first ballot then they are free to vote for whoever they want, which nullifies the entire primary process.

The ceiling will start to crumble when the American people see that their votes do not really count. The establishment picks the nominee — not the people. They will try to do their best to pretend this is a democratic process, but if anyone other than Trump becomes the candidate it will prove that the right to vote is meaningless.

Lock Out the Establishment in Cleveland!

Guest Post by Patrick Buchanan

Lock Out the Establishment in Cleveland!

The Wisconsin primary could be an axle-breaking speed bump on Donald Trump’s road to the nomination.

Ted Cruz, now the last hope to derail Trump of a desperate Beltway elite that lately loathed him, has taken the lead in the Badger State.

Millions in attack ads are being dumped on the Donald’s head by super PACs of GOP candidates, past and present. Gov. Scott Walker has endorsed Cruz. Conservative talk radio is piling on Trump.

And the Donald just had the worst two weeks of his campaign.

There was that unseemly exchange with Cruz about their wives. Then came the pulling of the woman reporter’s arm by campaign chief Corey Lewandowski, an atrocity being likened by the media to the burning of Joan of Arc.

Then there was Trump’s suggestion, instantly withdrawn, that if abortion is outlawed, then women who undergo abortions may face some punishment.

This gaffe told us nothing we did not know. New to elective politics, Trump is less familiar with the ideological and issues terrain than those who live there. But the outrage of the elites is all fakery.

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The Battle to Keep the Establishment in Power

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

The last time a Republican presidential convention opened without the nominee having been decided in the primaries was 1976 and the fight was between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. There were efforts by the establishment to stop two people they regarded as outsiders before – Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1976. It is looking much more difficult for Trump to nail down enough delegates to beat the Republicans at their own corrupt rules. We are more likely headed to a rigged convention and this is highly playing into the hands of the precise thing the Republicans better not do. They are sacrificing the nation for personal perks. It is not that Trump is the savior; hardly. But he would be at least a check against these people.

It seems more likely than not that they will rig the game one-way or another to stop Trump and ignore the fact why people are even voting for him because it is really a vote against the establishment. This appears likely to explode in total chaos for 2018 and as we look into the 2017-2020 time period, it appears that they will destroy the public confidence in government on a wholesale basis.

As it now stands, they will most likely hand the nomination to Cruz one way or another. Trump’s only chance would be to run to the Libertarian Party since there would be no time left to get on all the ballots as an independent. Cruz would lose against Hillary and Hillary will destroy the economy with massive tax increases while protecting the banks. It appears we are indeed sowing the seed of our own destruction. The Republicans know Social Security goes negative in 2017 so they want to blame Hillary. Meanwhile, Trump shoots himself in the foot all the time and he has the media in full blown assault against him. This is likely to really undermine the entire confidence in government especially since Cruz came out and said he would not support Trump, only himself.

Conservatives for Big Government

Guest Posts by Martin Armstrong

Glen Beck’s piece in the National Review has really pissed off a lot of people. He has taken the “elite” position and claims that Trump is not a conservative. “Politically orphaned by their party, conservatives were forced to either stay home or hold their noses and vote for a progressive Republican,” Beck wrote. Quite honestly, the entire “conservative” position is a bunch of crap, because they have not done anything that is “conservative.” They support every war and the NSA. They have done nothing to “reduce” government. The “conservatives” are just a part of the “special” elite class that looks down upon the rest of us as the great unwashed. Even John McCain voted to tax the internet.

The “conservatives” have bullshitted themselves into thinking they are somehow doing something other than lining their own pockets and protecting the bankers just like the Clintons. Beck says, “If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, there will once again be no opposition to an ever-expanding government. This is a crisis for conservatism.” It has been the crisis in conservatism that has given rise to Trump.

David Boaz, vice president of the Cato Institute, claims Trump’s idea of the presidency is that he will ride in on a “white horse… fire the stupid people, hire the best people, and fix everything. He doesn’t talk about policy or working with Congress. He’s effectively vowing to be an American Mussolini, concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat. It’s a vision to make the last 16 years of executive abuse of power seem modest.”

Why work with Congress when they do not work? Should they fire people who have been there through Democrat and Republican eras because they are the unelected bureaucrats? The thought of bringing in more outsiders scares them to death. This system is collapsing and they are too busy lining their pockets to give two shits!

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A Long, Hot Summer is Coming

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Whatever happens, it’s going to get ugly.

If Trump is nominated, there will be riots – the Perpetually (and professionally) Aggrieved will take to the streets.

If Trump is denied the nomination, there will be riots – as the people come face to face with the true nature of the system they were taught to respect since childhood.

Not since 1861 has America been so clearly divided. These divisions transcend mere political differences of opinion over this or that policy. There is a fundamental schism. Irreconcilable differences. The two sides detest each other, have almost nothing in common. And so can no longer live together.

Trump has been likened to Hitler – which is unfair. He is no Hitler. He is a crony capitalist and some other things, too. Mussolini, maybe.

But he isn’t Hitler.

However, he is riding a wave – make that a tsunami – similar to the one that led to the chancellorship of the German Reich (as it was styled in those days) falling into the hands of the former gefreiter. The people of Germany had been driven to a state of desperation and frenzy by decades of economic evisceration of their country and thus, of themselves. Their country had been ruled over by a revolving, insular cabal of greedheads and frauds, some nothing more than puppets of financial interests, who milked the cow for their and their masters’ benefit.

Sound familiar?

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CHART OF WHY TRUMP IS WINNING

It really doesn’t get any clearer than the chart below. The average working stiff brings home $100 less per week in real terms than they did in 1972. Meanwhile, the price of everything they need to live their daily lives (rent, home prices, cars, food, energy, medical, tuition, taxes, clothing) has gone up exponentially. The ruling class (bankers, politicians, corporations, oligarchs) have convinced millions to utilize their easy money debt to make up the difference. Replacing earnings with borrowing is good for the establishment and bad for you. It seems millions are starting to awaken from their stupor and are pissed off at the perpetrators of this crime. They are flocking to Trump, not because he’s like them or has a clear plan to help them, because they believe he is the destroyer of their enemy establishment. Whether Trump can reverse the chart below is yet to be seen.

ESTABLISHMENT GREEN LIGHTS ASSASSINATION OF TRUMP

Guest Post by Ol’ Remus

Obama said, during a 2008 Philadelphia fund raiser, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” There was no gasp in disbelief, everyone knew it was a real threat backed by the Big Red Machine and their news-fixing journos. Later he added, “I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face!”

He could safely assume the Republican leadership were mewling wusses, when not outright accomplices, and at the first hint of Bolshevik terror they’d grovel and back peddle and apologize, then go on hostile talk shows to get kicked around as an act of public contrition. They seem to like it.

By way of evidence, here are quotes from some Republican party leaders in outright support of the flash-mobs deployed to shut down Donald Trump’s appearance in Chicago. Via the Daily Mail :

Ted Cruz: “When the candidate urges supporters to engage in physical violence, to punch people in the face, the predictable consequence of that is that is escalates. Today is unlikely to be the last such incidence.”

Marco Rubio: Trump is not entirely to blame for tonight’s events but the Republican front-runner “does bear responsibility for other things that have happened at his events”

John Kasich: “Tonight the seeds of division that Donald Trump has been sowing this whole campaign finally bore fruit, and it was ugly.”

Compare these with Hillary Clinton’s statement , “The ugly, divisive rhetoric we are hearing from Donald Trump and the encouragement of violence and aggression is wrong, and it’s dangerous.” Same words. Same people. Same as always.

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ESTABLISHMENT vs ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT

VOTING TO DESTROY THE ESTABLISHMENT

“The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don’t know what that event will be.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Nassim Taleb is a prickly arrogant SOB who doesn’t give a crap what intellectuals, academics, and other establishment elitists think about him. He has an Ivy league MBA, but despises everything about the curriculum of Ivy League MBA programs. He has a PhD, but scorns academics and their worship of theories and models. He enjoys poking holes in the storylines of the propaganda spewing corporate media. He glories in ridiculing the predictions of captured “experts” mouthing the talking points of whichever corporate interest is paying them blood money.

I read his brilliant Black Swan book back in 2008. It was a difficult read, but there were so many gems of wisdom throughout the book, it was a powerful tome predicting the financial collapse in real time. He wrote it in 2006. He understands the world doesn’t operate the way Ivy League models say it is supposed to operate. The world is propelled by black swans, not a normal distribution of the world. He was right in 2006 and he’s right now. The paragraph below has been making the rounds in the alternate media this past week. The establishment media would never publicize it, as their job is to protect the crumbling social order.

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The Defense Of The Oligarchs: MoveOn.org’s “Simple & Utter Brutishness”

Submitted by Thad Beversdorf via FirstRebuttal.com,

Kids these days… So the Trump rally in Chicago was successfully disrupted by mostly young and socio-economic despondent protestors who have, unknowingly, been turned into pre-programmed anti-Trump warriors by the Oligarchs they claim to hate (yes MoveOn.org is fully funded by the Oligarchs, look it up). The very same mentality that naively fell hook-line-and-sinker into Obama’s message of “Change, Yes We Can”. Now many of these protestors today are simply too young to remember the 2008 Obama campaign for what it really was; the greatest fraud in the history of American politics (and wow is that saying something).

However, this time around there are millions of Americans who do have the benefit of recent history still burned into their hearts. Millions of previously naive, young voters devastated by the deceit of politics, leaving them scorned are now ready to fight the Oligarchs and the bought and paid for Executive and Legislative branches of government. Citizen soldiers are a key component of any revolution.

Remember, Trump supporters are not die hard fans of Trump per se, they are themselves warriors ready take back their nation. And I expect if push comes to shove, which apparently MoveOn.org is dead set on making happen, Trump supporters will respond in kind. And so perhaps the violent revolution begins. The unwavering wave of support against the establishment is not a light hearted movement.

And while a group of young, angry protestors, organized by those who will discard them without so much as a deep breath beforehand, appear steadfast they will soon find out what it means to be on the wrong side of right. While they are rightly ready to fight, they are wrongly allowing themselves to be manipulated in believing their fight is with Trump. For Trump and Sanders are the same movement anthropomorphized in different bodies. And through Trump and Sanders the bloodshed need be directed at the oligarchs.

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The Sea Island Conspiracy

Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan

Over the long weekend before the Mississippi and Michigan primaries, the sky above Sea Island was black with corporate jets.

Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Napster’s Sean Parker, Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, and other members of the super-rich were jetting in to the exclusive Georgia resort, ostensibly to participate in the annual World Forum of the American Enterprise Institute.

Among the advertised topics of discussion: “Millennials: How Much Do They Matter and What Do They Want?”

That was the cover story.

As revealed by the Huffington Post, Sea Island last weekend was host to a secret conclave at the Cloisters where oligarchs colluded with Beltway elites to reverse the democratic decisions of millions of voters and abort the candidacy of Donald Trump.

Among the journalists at Sea Island were Rich Lowry of National Review, which just devoted an entire issue to the topic: “Against Trump,” and Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the Trumphobic New York Times.

Bush guru Karl Rove of FOX News was on hand, as were Speaker Paul Ryan, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham, dispatched by Trump in New Hampshire and a berserker on the subject of the Donald.

So, too, was William Kristol, editor of the rabidly anti-Trump Weekly Standard, who reported back to comrades: “The key task now, to … paraphrase Karl Marx, is less to understand Trump than to stop him.”

Kristol earlier tweeted that the Sea Island conclave is “off the record, so please do consider my tweets from there off the record.”

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An Establishment in Panic

Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan

An Establishment in Panic

Donald Trump “appeals to racism.”

“[F]rom the beginning … his campaign has profited from voter prejudice and hatred” and represents an “authoritarian assault upon democracy.”

If Speaker Paul Ryan wishes to be “on the right side of history … he must condemn Mr. Trump clearly and comprehensively. The same goes for every other Republican leader.”

“Maybe that would split the (Republican) party,” but, “No job is worth the moral stain that would come from embracing (Trump). No party is worth saving at the expense of the country.”
If Republican leaders wish to be regarded as moral, every one of them must renounce Trump, even if it means destroying their party.

Who has laid down this moral mandate? The Holy Father in Rome?

No. The voice posturing as the conscience of America is the Washington Post, which champions abortion on demand and has not, in the memory of this writer, endorsed any Republican for president – though it did endorse Marion Barry three times for mayor of D.C.

Anticipating the Post’s orders, Sen. Marco Rubio has been painting Trump as a “scam artist” and “con artist,” with an “orange” complexion, a “spray tan” and “tiny hands,” who is “unfit to lead the party of Lincoln and Reagan.”

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An Establishment Unhinged

Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan

Calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” Donald Trump this week ignited a firestorm of historic proportions.

As all the old hate words — xenophobe, racist, bigot — have lost their electric charge from overuse, and Trump was being called a fascist demagogue and compared to Hitler and Mussolini.

The establishment seemed to have become unhinged.

Why the hysteria? Comes the reply: Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration tramples all over “American values” and everything we stand for, including the Constitution.

But is this really true?

The Constitution protects freedom of religion for U.S. citizens. But citizens of foreign lands have no constitutional right to migrate. And federal law gives a president broad powers in deciding who comes and who does not, especially in wartime.

In 1924, Congress restricted immigration from Asia, reduced the numbers coming from southern and Central Europe, and produced a 40-year moratorium on most immigration into the United States.

Its authors and President Coolidge wanted ours to remain a nation whose primary religious and ethnic ties were to Europe, not Africa or Asia.

Under FDR, Truman and JFK, this was the law of the land.

Did this represent 40 years of fascism?

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Sanders and Trump at the Iowa State Fair – Loss of Confidence in the ‘Political Establishment’

Guest Post by Jesse

This is a funny election season in the US. Yes it is still early times, and many things may happen between now and next November. But one thing for certain is that the people of the US are rejecting the fake popular reform of corporate brand Obama, and the smarmy deceitfulness and slick branding of mainstream party politics.Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are ‘genuine’ candidates, whether you agree with them or not. People are flocking to their messages because they see them as telling the truth about what they think, and what they will do, without bowing down to special interests for money, or saying whatever people wish to hear to get elected and then do whatever they wish for those who pay them.And make no mistake, the mainstream establishment in the US, in the media and the professional political ranks, hate and fear both of them. The establishment candidates, duly anointed by the moneyed interests, are Hillary and Jeb, with some designated stand-ins should either of them stumble too badly. And the established party machines and their enablers will do everything in their power to make sure that you can only choose one or the other of their approved products next year.

And we are seeing similar phenomenon abroad in the UK with Corbyn and Fararge, and in France with Le Pen.

Obviously I do not know how this will end. I am not necessarily hopeful in the short term. If they were wise, the ‘establishment’ would allow for peaceful evolution, and more forcefully rein in the abuses and plundering being done by themselves and their predatory patrons. And they have shown little wisdom, or self-awareness, existing as they do in hermetically sealed envelopes of money and power.

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