Revolutions through out history, while not all the same in nature or cause, do have a common thread that runs through every revolution, the disenchantment of the masses. This isn't to say that just because we don't agree with the prevailing Zeitgeist, we should over turn the apple cart so to speak. I firmly believe that we have to expose the prevailing Zeitgeist for the fraud that it truly is, through a sustained information campaign, ie a propaganda war if you will.

(apologies, but my would be comment, exploded into this...)

Let me be perfectly clear, it will require a revolution to over turn the prevailing Zeitgeist, that is the current Neoliberal economic and political order that has been built up over several past generations, if we want to save humanity, period.

The target of our ire should be a sustained campaign targeted to exposing the 1% that pull the strings of our political leaders, especially those in the financial sectors that are at the heart and soul of this Neoliberal monster that is crushing any hope of real change, not to mention literally destroying our planet.

No one, except the dangerously delusional, will want violent revolution, so our first step in this Peaceful Revolutionary Process is to under mind everything that the Neoliberal order stands for (ideological), and expose it for the fraud that it truly is, not to mention the pernicious purveyors of it's continued existence, like the faux economist, Paul Krugman.

Let me give you an example.

People like Paul Krugman that sit on the side lines and offer mild criticisms and minor tweaks to an economic order that is literally killing us, need to be exposed for the shills for the TBTF banks that they truly are.

Stop and think for a moment, how long ago was he and others like him, disparaging Senator Sanders economic plan that included tackling Climate Change with a WWII like mobilization effort?

Just consider this..(from a diary I wrote at TOS)

That idiot (Paul Krugman) has proven he has no clue about the underlining issues that brought on the financial crisis. The other day in his hit piece against Senator Sanders, he writes:

The easy slogan here is “Break up the big banks.” It’s obvious why this slogan is appealing from a political point of view: Wall Street supplies an excellent cast of villains. But were big banks really at the heart of the financial crisis, and would breaking them up protect us from future crises?

Many analysts concluded years ago that the answers to both questions were no. Predatory lending was largely carried out by smaller, non-Wall Street institutions like Countrywide Financial; the crisis itself was centered not on big banks but on “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers that weren’t necessarily that big. And the financial reform that President Obama signed in 2010 made a real effort to address these problems. It could and should be made stronger, but pounding the table about big banks misses the point.

First of all, Lehman Brothers was one of the many banks providing the cash to fund the securitization of mortgage backed securities, which Country Wide was one of the biggest with over 74 billion, which Lehman and other banks happily bought up and re-packaged into a variety of financial vehicles, CDO’s Credit SWAPS etc...Derivatives.

Lehman Brothers was the largest purveyor of liar’s loan backed securities in the WORLD! Got that, the biggest, but not according the this faux economist, Krugman.

According to the Center for Public Integrity:

Between 2000 and 2007, backers of subprime mortgage-backed securities — primarily Wall Street and European investment banks — underwrote $2.1 trillion worth of business, according to data from trade publication Inside Mortgage Finance. The top underwriters in the peak years of 2005 and 2006 were Lehman Brothers at $106 billion; RBS Greenwich Capital Investments Corp., at $99 billion; and Countrywide Securities Corp., a subsidiary of the lender, at $74.5 billion. Also among the top underwriters: Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Goldman Sachs.
(emphasis mine)

Krugman didn’t get it right about the financial crisis, and as Mrs. Clinton might say, “not by a long shot”.

Also consider an this excerpt from one of the many, of Professor Black's critiques of Mr. Krugman's "economics". From New Economic Perspectives:

The Clinton administration had already shown its intense hostility to financial regulation at the SEC, working with Republicans to block key reform efforts by SEC Chair Arthur Levitt. Beginning in 1998 and continuing in spring 1999 the administration successfully blocked the efforts of Brooksley Born to protect the global economy from coming problems involving financial derivatives – and later in 1999 passed an act that forbade any future regulator from providing such protection.

The Clinton administration was working with the most conservative Republicans in Congress to effectively repeal the Glass-Steagall Act. In 1999, Citigroup and Travelers Insurance agreed to the largest merger in financial history – in open defiance of the Glass-Steagall Act in order to successfully extort Congress to repeal the Act. Robert Rubin, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, the government leader in destroying Glass-Steagall, announced that he was stepping down as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. He promptly joined Citigroup. By 1999, even before the effective statutory repeal of Glass-Steagall, the banks that were first to take advantage of Greenspan’s evisceration of Glass-Steagall and began to trade securities were already suffering severe losses.

“Liberal” economists were the critical supporters of the Clinton administration’s destruction of effective financial regulation. Part of this effort was deregulation, but desupervision was its even more destructive handmaiden. I have taken key excerpts from one of these economists to illustrate how far right wing they were.

Consider Professor Black's testimony before the House Financial Services Committee:
[video:https://youtu.be/J8CqaHTygSc align:center]

It's fraud, pure and simple!

Consider this as well...

Our democratic president is pushing “free” trades deals that completely eviscerate national sovereignty, upend our constitution and destroys the entire the fundamental principles of the Rule of Law and Equal Justice Under Law. Under these disastrous trade deals corporate lawyers determine out comes, not the people or a court of law. The only thing free in these “free” trade deals, is the freedom of multinational corporations to exploit and pollute the planet for their personal profits, funded by Wall Street.

Accepting legal bribes is justified by exclaiming “everyone does it” or by engaging in fear mongering about the “republicans”. If we don't accept these legal bribes from Wall Street, we'll be defeated. The “party” cares more about winning, then anything else.

Stop and think for a moment. White collar prosecutions are down over 36% since the Clinton administration. According to FrontLine, in 2013 Eric Holder, Obama's top cop said:

“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult to prosecute them,” Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “When we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps world economy, that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large. It has an inhibiting impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate. That is something that you all need to consider.”

It was the Clinton administration's assistant attorney general, Eric Holder, who in a memo in 1999 made the case for this trend to start, that is advocating for DPA (deferred Prosecution Agreements) and listed out a number of factors prosecutors should consider before indicting a corporation for white collar crimes. While I won't go into a detailed point by point analysis of this absurd document, I will focus on the very 1st considering Mr. Holder makes.

From Mr. Holder's Memo: Bringing Criminal Charges
Against Corporations

General Principle:

Generally, prosecutors should apply the same factors in determining whether to charge a corporation as they do with respect to individuals. See U.S.A.M. § 9-27.220, et seq. Thus, the prosecutor should weigh all of the factors normally considered in the sound exercise of prosecutorial judgment: the sufficiency of the evidence, the likelihood of success at trial, the probable deterrent, rehabilitative, and other consequences of conviction, and the adequacy of non-criminal approaches. See id.

However, due to the nature of the corporate "person," some additional factors are present. In conducting an investigation, determining whether to bring charges, and negotiating plea agreements, prosecutors should consider the following factors in reaching a decision as to the proper treatment of a corporate target:

1. The nature and seriousness of the offense, including the risk of harm to the public, and applicable policies and priorities, if any, governing the prosecution of corporations for particular categories of crime (see section III,infra);

Let's start with just the first part of this consideration in bringing criminal charges against a corporation. “The nature and seriousness of the offense”.

The offense is “felony financial control fraud”. How serious is it? It destroyed 11 trillion in wealth, destroyed 10 million jobs, threw millions into foreclosures, forced millions into extreme poverty, made millions homeless and threatened the entire planet with financial and political chaos, whose costs and impacts are incalculable.

Let consider the the second part “including the risk of harm to the public”.

What is the risk to the public? What risk is there to the public by removing the criminals and placing a federal regulator to supervise the institution until it was A) able to correct the systemic culture of corruption or B) manage the liquidation the corporation in a orderly and timely manner. Just like happened during the Savings and Loan financial crisis, where there were over 30,000 criminal referrals and over 1000 felony convictions, yet was only 1/7th the size of the 2007-08 financial crisis.

11 trillion in wealth gone. 10 million jobs gone. Millions unemployed.

Gee, what harm to the public would come from prosecuting these criminals?

Where was the DOJ in protecting the public against these criminals in the first damn place? Asleep at the wheel no doubt, which, if one actually takes the time to read the Financial Crisis Investigative Committee report, regulatory over sight was NIL, largely as a direct result of this 1999 memo, as well as the Federal Reserve unwillingness to use it's unique authority empowered by law in 1994, but chose not too!

From the FCIC Report:

From 1978 to 2007, the amount of debt held by the financial sector soared from 3 trillion to 36 trillion, more than doubling as a share of gross domestic product. The very nature of many Wall Street firms changed—from relatively staid private partnerships to publicly traded corporations taking greater and more diverse kinds of risks. By 2005, the 10 largest U.S. commercial banks held 55% of the industry’s assets, more than double the level held in 1990. On the eve of the crisis in 2006, financial sector profits constituted 27% of all corporate profits in the United States, up from 15% in 1980. Understanding this transformation has been critical to the Commission’s analysis.

Now to our major findings and conclusions, which are based on the facts contained in this report: they are offered with the hope that lessons may be learned to help avoid future catastrophe.

• We conclude this financial crisis was avoidable.
The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire. The captains of finance and the public stewards of our financial system ignored warnings and failed to question, understand, and manage evolving risks within a system essential to the well-being of the American public. Theirs was a big miss, not a stumble. While the business cycle cannot be repealed, a crisis of this magnitude need not have occurred. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in the stars, but in us.

Snip

Despite the expressed view of many on Wall Street and in Washington that the crisis could not have been foreseen or avoided, there were warning signs. The tragedy was that they were ignored or discounted. There was an explosion in risky subprime lending and securitization, an unsustainable rise in housing prices, widespread reports of egregious and predatory lending practices, dramatic increases in household mortgage debt, and exponential growth in financial firms’ trading activities, unregulated derivatives, and short-term “repo” lending markets, among many other red flags. Yet there was pervasive permissiveness; little meaningful action was taken to quell the threats in a timely manner.

The prime example is the Federal Reserve’s pivotal failure to stem the flow of toxic mortgages, which it could have done by setting prudent mortgage-lending standards. The Federal Reserve was the one entity empowered to do so and it did not. The record of our examination is replete with evidence of other failures: financial institutions made, bought, and sold mortgage securities they never examined, did not care
to examine, or knew to be defective; firms depended on tens of billions of dollars of borrowing that had to be renewed each and every night, secured by subprime mortgage securities; and major firms and investors blindly relied on credit rating agencies as their arbiters of risk. What else could one expect on a highway where there were neither speed limits nor neatly painted lines?

We know that professional real estate appraisers were being extorted to artificially inflate appraisals since as early as 2000. We also know that by 2004 the FBI was warning of systemic mortgage lending fraud. There were many people warning about the possible catastrophe, but since they were not considered “main stream” enough, were derided as crack pot's hell bent on spreading doom and gloom, by political hacks like Paul Krugman, who later admitted, “everyone got it wrong”.

It's people like Krugman that we need to stop listening too. This guy is so completely wrapped up in his ego inflating Noble Prize, he no longer has the ability to think, speak or act rationally. Everyone else is also mesmerized by his noble, they themselves can no longer think, speak or act rationally. If Paul Krugman said it, it must there fore be true. (Screw Krugman!)

In a column by Krugman in 2002, he was echoing for a housing bubble!

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
(emphasis mine)

Think about that last sentence..."Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble".

This, from a Nobel Economist? Is he insane? Create one bubble to replace another, which is exactly what the FED did, replaced one bubble with another, and look how well that turned out.

Paul Krugman does nothing but preach a economic myth like it's some kind of religion. He is so full of himself, he has said he is always right.

What did he get a Noble Prize for ?
From the Noble Prize Organization:

"for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity"

International Trade and Economic Geography

Patterns of trade and location have always been key issues in the economic debate. What are the effects of free trade and globalization? What are the driving forces behind worldwide urbanization? Paul Krugman has formulated a new theory to answer these questions. He has thereby integrated the previously disparate research fields of international trade and economic geography.

Nut Shell = Globalization

While everyone likes to think our president has fundamentally changed the culture of corruption and fraud on Wall Street, the reality is that nothing has really changed. Dodd Frank has more holes in it than a screen door, left
wide open.

Deferred prosecution agreement don't do a thing.

How many times have Wall Street been convicted of crimes (felonies) since the financial crisis, and even after Dodd Frank passed? Just a hint from Wall Street On Parade: (3-14-2014)

During the period in which JPMorgan has been the trusted custodian of a major part of the assets of the U.S. central bank, it has been repeatedly charged with serial crimes. In January of this year, JPMorgan paid $2.6 billion and made history in being the first Wall Street mega bank to be charged with two felony counts and receive a deferred prosecution agreement. The crime was aiding and abetting the Madoff fraud – the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of modern finance. In September of last year, JPMorgan settled its London Whale scandal for $920 million in penalties. That case involved its use of depositors’ savings to gamble in exotic derivatives in London, lose at least $6.2 billion of those deposits, and initially misstate the amount of losses to its regulators.

Who was it that called up congressmen and senators to personally lobby for the CitiGroup amendment that was tacked on at the last minute, to a must pass spending bill? Our buddy at J.P Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. But the president didn't oppose the amendment, just that he has some reservations about it.

From the NewYorker:

Josh Earnest, Obama’s press secretary, said that the President had some reservations about the spending bill, but added that passing it would remove the threat of another government shutdown and provide “the kind of certainty that’s important to our economy.” It was left to Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and other congressional liberals to try to rally opposition. “It’s more billions of dollars in subsidies for Wall Street. It’s morally reprehensible,” Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat, told reporters. “They’re saying government bailouts are back.”

What “certainty” is there in our economy? Do you have any idea of the derivatives exposure the TBTF bank have on their balance sheets? It makes 2007-08 look like kindergarten.

From Wall Street on Parade:

A rational observer of Wall Street’s serial hubris might have expected some key segments of this letter to make it into the business press. A mere eight years ago the United States experienced a complete meltdown of its financial system, leading to the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. President Obama and regulators have been assuring us over these intervening eight years that things are under control as a result of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. But according to the letter the Fed and FDIC issued on April 12 to JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank with over $2 trillion in assets and $51 trillion in notional amounts of derivatives, things are decidedly not under control.

At the top of page 11, the Federal regulators reveal that they have “identified a deficiency” in JPMorgan’s wind-down plan which if not properly addressed could “pose serious adverse effects to the financial stability of the United States.” Why didn’t JPMorgan’s Board of Directors or its legions of lawyers catch this?

Snip

According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC) derivatives report as of December 31, 2015, JPMorgan Chase is only centrally clearing 37 percent of its derivatives while a whopping 63 percent of its derivatives remain in over-the-counter contracts between itself and unnamed counterparties. The Dodd-Frank reform legislation had promised the public that derivatives would all become exchange traded or centrally cleared. Indeed, on March 7 President Obama falsely stated at a press conference that when it comes to derivatives “you have clearinghouses that account for the vast majority of trades taking place.”

But the OCC has now released four separate reports for each quarter of 2015 showing just the opposite of what the President told the press and the public on March 7. In its most recent report the OCC, the regulator of national banks, states that “In the fourth quarter of 2015, 36.9 percent of the derivatives market was centrally cleared.”

Equally disturbing, the most dangerous area of derivatives, the credit derivatives that blew up AIG and necessitated a $185 billion taxpayer bailout, remain predominately over the counter. According to the latest OCC report, only 16.8 percent of credit derivatives are being centrally cleared. At JPMorgan Chase, more than 80 percent of its credit derivatives are still over-the-counter.

As Senator Warren was quoted in the Washingtonpost about the proposed Citi Group Amendment:

Mr. President, in recent years, many Wall Street institutions have exerted extraordinary influence in Washington’s corridors of power, but Citigroup has risen above the others. It's grip over economic policy making in the executive branch is unprecedented. Consider a few examples:

Three of the last four Treasury Secretaries under Democratic presidents have had close Citigroup ties. The fourth was offered the CEO position at Citigroup, but turned it down.

The Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve system is a Citigroup alum.

The Undersecretary for International Affairs at Treasury is a Citigroup alum.

The U.S. Trade Representative and the person nominated to be his deputy – who is currently an assistant secretary at Treasury – are Citigroup alums.

A recent chairman of the National Economic Council at the White House was a Citigroup alum.

Another recent Chairman of the Office of Management and Budget went to Citigroup immediately after leaving the White House.

Another recent Chairman of the Office of Management of Budget and Management is also a Citi alum -- but I’m double counting here because now he’s the Secretary of the Treasury.

That’s a lot of powerful people, all from one bank. But they aren’t Citigroup’s only source of power. Over the years, the company has spent millions of dollars on lobbying Congress and funding the political campaigns of its friends in the House and the Senate.

Snip
and most importantly....

Fact two: During Dodd-Frank, there was an amendment introduced by my colleague Senator Brown and Senator Kaufman that would have broken up Citigroup and the nation’s other largest banks. That amendment had bipartisan support, and it might have passed, but it ran into powerful opposition from an alliance between Wall Streeters on Wall Street and Wall Streeters who held powerful government jobs. They teamed up and blocked the move to break up the banks—and now Citi is bigger than ever.

The role that senior officials working in the Treasury department played in killing the amendment was not subtle: A senior Treasury official acknowledged it at the time in a background interview with New York Magazine. The official from Treasury said, and I’m quoting here, “If we’d been for it, it probably would have happened. But we weren’t, so it didn’t.” That’s power.

Who has help fund one of our presidential candidates political careers? Citi Group, as well as a host of Wall Street bankers (employees)!

From a another article at Wall Street on Parade (April of 2016)

Following JPMorgan’s 2012 foray into using its depositors’ money to make wild gambles with derivatives in London (the London Whale saga), the U.S. taxpayer via the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations spent significant sums investigating how the bank came to lose at least $6.2 billion of depositors’ money on its own wild speculations. At the conclusion of the investigation, which produced a 307-page report, Senator John McCain had this to say at the March 15, 2013 Senate hearing:

“This investigation into the so-called ‘Whale Trades’ at JPMorgan has revealed startling failures at an institution that touts itself as an expert in risk management and prides itself on its ‘fortress balance sheet.’ The investigation has also shed light on the complex and volatile world of synthetic credit derivatives. In a matter of months, JPMorgan was able to vastly increase its exposure to risk while dodging oversight by federal regulators. The trades ultimately cost the bank billions of dollars and its shareholders value.

“These losses came to light not because of admirable risk management strategies at JPMorgan or because of effective oversight by diligent regulators. Instead, these losses came to light because they were so damaging that they shook the market, and so damning that they caught the attention of the press. Following the revelation that these huge trades were coming from JPMorgan’s London Office, the bank’s losses continued to grow. By the end of the year, the total losses stood at a staggering $6.2 billion dollars.”

What is most striking, is that our leading democratic presidential candidate doesn't think anything else needs to be done to reign in Wall Street criminal behavior.

Hillary Clinton, vying for the Democratic nod for President while taking millions of dollars in campaign funds from the felonious Wall Street banks, thinks Dodd-Frank reform is working just fine and simply needs some tinkering around the edges. No amount of facts to the contrary or serial charges of new crimes emanating from Wall Street will alter her view. She also refuses to support the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, which would separate banks holding insured deposits from their gambling casino cousins – legislation which protected the U.S. banking system and made it the envy of the world for 66 years until it was repealed under the Bill Clinton administration in 1999.

Hillary is also clinging desperately to the nutty proposition that the big banks didn’t cause the 2008 Wall Street crash, buttressed by the increasingly desperate sounding New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who some suspect may be auditioning for a role in Hillary’s cabinet were she to become the next President.

Wall Street has become an indispensable to the democratic party, like heroine is to a drug addict. The problem is our party doesn't have the courage 1) to admit they have a problem and 2) to ween themselves off this drug 3) to fulfill their constitutional duty to “protect the American people”, from terrorists, that is “financial terrorists”, Wall Street.

My reply is simple, as Harry Truman once said, “If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”.

How many of you really, truly believe that an incremental approach to climate change as Mrs. Clinton advocates, is going to do any good? How many believe that “mitigation” and technology will say the day for humanity?

Here is a simple answer you need to understand, if any of you believe either of these “idea's", well no offense, then you're not ready for real change, and need more “conditioning”, that is a heavy does of reality and the truth, which is this --> humanity will not survive climate change, unless we change the current Zeitgeist!

We are already experiencing climate events that are costing lives all across this planet and the amount of fossil fuels, just those currently in place, are enough to warm our planet well beyond the 2 C agreed to in the Paris Agreement, which will wreak untold havoc on this planet and most especially humanity.

You must understand this - This means WAR
From Bill McKibben at the NewRepublic:

For years, our leaders chose to ignore the warnings of our best scientists and top military strategists. Global warming, they told us, was beginning a stealth campaign that would lay waste to vast stretches of the planet, uprooting and killing millions of innocent civilians. But instead of paying heed and taking obvious precautions, we chose to strengthen the enemy with our endless combustion; a billion explosions of a billion pistons inside a billion cylinders have fueled a global threat as lethal as the mushroom-shaped nuclear explosions we long feared. Carbon and methane now represent the deadliest enemy of all time, the first force fully capable of harrying, scattering, and impoverishing our entire civilization.

Re-acting, that is, doing the same thing over and over, to daily headlines is a waste of time, unless you have a specific goal in mind to expose the fraud that it is.

The Revolution is gathering steam and will become a storm that this country has never seen. Whether it stays a peaceful “political” revolution or becomes a violent one, will largely depend on the “democratic values” of our government, which as we see, has gone AWOL. The constitution no longer exists, nor does the rule of law or Equal Justice Under Law. History has shown over and over again, when human suffering reaches entropy, revolutions follow.

We are not fighting to win the presidency, we are fighting to take back our country from the corporations who are destroying our planet, our country and our democracy. And reality boils down to this, if you are not a part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

American (the world for that matter) are in a serious crisis, our government and it's co-conspirators (Wall Street) are destroying this country, democracy and most importantly, humanity's chance for survival beyond the next 2-3 generations from today.

The president, members of congress, members of the Senate, and our federal regulators, (not to mention the top military) have all failed, and are continuing that failure in their fundamental duty to protect the American people.

Our own president has prosecuted more whistle blowers than all preceding presidents in our country’s history. CIA and military personnel that committed torture, well they are still walking around this planet. George Bush, who should be tried as a war criminal, not to mention crimes against humanity, still walking around on this planet, free.

Human survival on this planet, that is what is at stake. Don't be a member of the herd of well meaning idiots, they are the ones that usually man the concentration camps, and lead death squads that have been so prevalent through out history, including our own.

This simple truth is this, if you're not outraged and ready to kick some metaphorical ass, you're not fully awake yet and thus, an "Agent Smith" (as Krugman is) waiting to spring to life to shoot down any criticisms of the prevailing Zeitgeist.

Well expletive PAUL KRUGMAN his ilk, he's a shill for the 1% who are destroying any chance for humanity's survival. It's that simple.

This is how we wage this Revolution!
[video:https://youtu.be/FdMHfZJ4j5w align:center]

RR

Here's a little music to get you in the mood!
[video:https://youtu.be/exlGc8eFXI0 align:center]