FoxNews: Wall Street for Hillary?:Clinton has $48.5M in hedge fund backing, compared to Trump’s $19K
* In the mid-1990s, I freaked out the senior management of my bank by showing them several pages of FEC records showing their contributions to various (sometimes surprising) candidates. They knew this stuff was public record, but up until then they had not grasped just how easy it was to get this data. I guess the banking world has gotten over their discomfort with being affiliated with the Clintons since then.
* Capitalist propaganda portrays capitalism’s tendency to push disparate peoples together while weakening the hold of their traditional beliefs systems as an advantage, not a defect. Refer to Voltaire’s famous observation from the early 18th Century:
“Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son’s foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn’t understand mumbled over the child, others go to their church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.”
* It was always in Wall Street’s best interest to buy out the dems, not the Republicans. The Republicans are already pro-Wall Street as a matter of ideology. No need to buy them out.
* Thanks for the pro-tip, Captain Obvious. No, in seriousness this is good point, but one I’ve been pondering for a couple years now and think deserves deeper analysis.
This is similar to Jewish/Israeli positioning with regard to the two major parties, which I started thinking about when I read a clunker of a NYT op-ed by a former Mossad honcho on how wonderful! Democrats are on Israel, complete with effusive praise for Jimmy Carter. I mean, sure, Carter was OK 30 years ago, but you can’t mean the same Kreepy Khristian who now runs around saying Zionism is Apartheid, can you? But surely Mr. Mossad big-wig is smart enough to know this, and so what he was doing was not trying to “win” any sort of argument (for there can be no “victory” in a two-party democracy) but simply, like any competent lobbyist, hedge his bets by flattering the more anti-Israel political party so that Israel would never lose an effective avenue of access no matter who the current occupant of the White House happened to be. A “vibrant” candidate like Hillary (corrupt and venal enough to be easily controlled, personally philo-Semitic, and holding the whip-hand in the political party to which the bulk of BDS-types ultimately conclave, with enough diversity Pokemon points for supposedly being a womyn to shut-up any upstart cishet Palestinian man) is ideal from the Israeli stand-point, and I honestly think they’d have a much warmer relationship with her than a President Trump, for fear that too-close an association with him would make Israel irredeemably toxic to progressives. I somehow suspect that if a modern von Neumann worked out the numbers on it, the current status quo of a rabidly pro-Israel, neocon Republican party getting only 30% of the Jewish vote but sizeable donations, while a much more ambivalent at the grass-roots level Democratic party getting 70% is somehow a global maximum from a game theoretic standpoint.
