Courtesy of Pam Martens
Dow Jones Industrial Average (Bright Green) Versus Wall Street Bank Stocks and Two Large Insurers on October 4, 2018
By Pam Martens
Add the stock market to the growing list of things that are not normal in the U.S. We’ll get to the details of yesterday’s appearance of a rigged market in a moment, but first a small sampling of the other abnormal ways the U.S. is currently functioning.
The U.S. has a President and Commander-in-Chief who is credibly accused by his own lawyer of engaging in political campaign fraud by paying hush money to women whose stories could have impacted the 2016 presidential election. The same President is credibly accused by the New York Times of engaging in tax fraud. That same man is also the subject of a criminal probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. And yet, Donald Trump is allowed to nominate a judge who will sit on the highest court in the land for a lifetime – a man who is, like the President himself, credibly accused of sexual assault by multiple women. That’s not normal in what is supposed to be a thriving democracy. It’s more compatible with a banana republic.
Then there is the FBI. The FBI has 35,000 employees and yet it didn’t spot the Trump family’s tax scams. It took three reporters at the New York Times, doing the work the FBI should have been doing, to report the facts to the American people this week. Even more striking, and compatible with a plutocracy rather than a democracy, the FBI is now taking its orders from Donald Trump and curtailing the scope of its investigation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The taint of Trump has been allowed to spread to the FBI and the U.S. Supreme Court – two critical institutions in which the American people must have confidence but no longer will. None of this is normal.
According to news reports, there is a likelihood that Republicans will vote to seat Kavanaugh on the highest court in the land. Those 51 yes votes would stand in contrast to the 2400 no votes from law professors across the U.S. who have signed a letter to the U.S. Senate indicating that they believe Kavanaugh is unfit to sit on the highest court. It’s not normal in a democracy for 51 politicians to listen to the special interests (like the fossil fuels industry) who want Kavanaugh seated and vote against 2400 of the wisest members of the legal profession on a judicial nominee. It effectively means the U.S. is now a corporatist state where wealthy special interests have supplanted representative government of the people.
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