The so-called "Resistance"

SUBHEAD: What would a real resistance to the complex systemic corruption of America look like? 

By James Kunstler on 29 May 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-so-called-resistance/)


Image above: Left-wing protesters attended an April 29 rally in a "clown bloc," wearing masks to mock their adversaries as Alt-Left  and Alt-Right battle in the streets of Portland. From (http://www.wweek.com/news/2017/05/23/white-supremacists-are-brawling-with-masked-leftists-in-the-portland-streets-homeland-security-is-watching/).

Entropy never sleeps. It works remorselessly to transform things of value into useless, dissipated waste and heat. Complexity stokes it especially as the law of diminishing returns multiplies the wheels of futility spinning down to zero. Hence, the intellectual decay of American life in which spin is everything, anything goes, and nothing matters.

The latest manifestation of this dynamic is the curious movement that styles itself The Resistance, lately adopted by the grotesque handmaiden of the Deep State that the Democratic Party became in the regency of Hillary Clinton.

Its mission is to undo the results of the last national election by claiming that Russia undid it. It pretends to seek the restoration of something — but what? Of dissipated power relations within the Deep State itself?

President Trump is actually taking care of that by turning government management over to his generals and the minions of Goldman Sachs.

The generals are reinvesting in the strategic black hole of our military adventures overseas.

The Goldman Sachs appointees are making Wall Street safe for the continued asset-stripping of the USA. The last time I checked, Hillary’s gang did not oppose either of these endeavors.

The Resistance employs cadres of useful idiots — Black Lives Matter, “undocumented” visitors, “Antifa,” the LGBTQ “community” — to pretend that it stands for social justice, but these are just straw persons fronting a gang devoted only to regaining the levers of “privilege” — which they also pretend to be against.

The Resistance takes its name from the movement in World War Two France that fought the Nazi occupation, thus self-valorizing itself. But the pre-owned styling is just another victory of spin in the public relations nightmare that American political life has become.

It also begs the question: what would a real resistance look like?

First, it would oppose the aforementioned asset-stripping that the US economy has become, the transfer of capital in all its forms — monetary, political, cultural, social — from the dis-employed former middle classes to the tiny, select beneficiaries of financial manipulation.

Note that the things being manipulated — markets, currencies, securities, and interest rates — are increasingly phantom entities that appear to maintain their value only because the high priests of financial authority say that they do.

The shelf-life of that flim-flam approaches its endgame as it self-evidently immiserates the masses and their sheer faith in its recondite promises dwindles away to nothing. A genuine resistance would begin to deconstruct this clerisy and its institutions, namely Too Big To Fail banks and the Federal Reserve.

The best opportunity to accomplish that would have been the early months of Mr. Obama’s turn in the White House, the dark time of the previous financial crash when the damage was fresh and obvious.

But the former president blew that under the influence of high priests Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. And the lower order clerics were allowed run their hoodoo machine flat out in the following eight years.

 Just look at the long chart of the Standard & Poors index. Tragically, this ever-upward arc is now taken to be the normal state of things, and when it fails the implosion will be orders of magnitude more violent than the last time.

One would think that a genuine resistance would also oppose the growing consolidation of power in the now-colossal spying apparatus of the nation — the often averred to “seventeen intel agencies” that show signs of being actively at war against other parts of the government and against citizens themselves.

Hence, the non-stop murmur of allegation about “Russian interference in the election,” going back to the summer of 2016 without either any real evidence, or any clarification of what is actually alleged to have happened.

Another tragic turn is that this fifth column of rogue intel agencies has recruited the major organs of the news to incessantly repeat its allegations until the public accepts the story as established fact rather than just the manufactured story it so far appears to be.

Well, the lives of persons and societies founder on versions of the “reality” they fabricate for their own purposes.

A genuine resistance would show foremost some fidelity to a reality beyond the spin-factories of self-delusion. And it would lead in the hard work of shedding this over-burden of self-multiplying despotisms.

Maybe this Memorial Day is a good moment to question the claims of the so-called resistance, and perhaps patriotically meditate on what the nature of an authentic resistance would be to the ongoing decay of this nation while it is still possible.

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Sound of One Wing Flapping

SUBHEAD: Just when you thought it was safe you find that a calm surface is exactly what Black Swans like to land on.

By James Kunstler on 1 May 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/sound-one-wing-flapping/)


Image above: One from a series of photos of a black swan landing on calm waters. From (http://wampy1.blogspot.com/2011/04/black-swan-landing.html).

And suddenly the storms of early Trumptopia subside, or seem to. The surface of things turns eerily placid as the sweets of May sweep away the toils of an elongated mud season. Somebody stuffed Kim Jong Un back in his bunker with a carton of Kools and the Vin Diesel video library.

France appears resigned to Hollandaise Lite in the refreshing form of boy wonder Macron. It’s been weeks since The New York Times complained about the Russians stealing Hillary’s turn as leader of the free world.

We’re given to understand that Congress managed overnight to cook up a spending bill that will avert a Government shut-down until September. Rest easy America… oh, and buy every dip.

A calm surface is exactly what Black Swans like to land on, though by definition we will not know they’re out there until our reveries are broken by the sound of wings flapping.

Some kind of dirty bird showed up on Canada’s thawing pond last week when that country’s biggest home loan lender suffered a 60 percent pukage of shareholder equity and had to be bailed out — not by the Canadian government directly, but by the Ontario Province’s Health Care Workers Pension Fund, a neat bit of hocus pocus that amounts to a one-year emergency loan at ten percent interest.

If that’s a way for insolvent public employee pension plans to find enough “yield” to meet their obligations, then maybe that could be the magic bullet for the USA’s foundering pension funds.

The next time Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and friends get a case of the Vapors, let them be bailed out by the Detroit School Bus Drivers’ Pension Fund at ten percent interest. That ought to work. And let Calpers take care of Wells Fargo.

The situation across Western Civilization is as follows: virtually every major financial institution has become a check-kiting operation or a Ponzi scheme, and we’ve reached the point where they can only pretend to be rescued.

Bailout or not, the Toronto-based Home Capital Group is still stuck with shit-loads of non-performing sub-prime mortgage loans — its specialty — and Canada’s spectacular real estate bubble has hardly begun to pop. The collateral is starting to turn, like dead meat in the May sunshine, and the odium will waft across the border.

It doesn’t take much to blow things up, as the world discovered in several other historically recent episodes.

The 1998 banking contagion started with the collapse of Thailand’s currency, called the baht. I doubt you could count on one hand the number of people in Wall Street or the Federal Reserve (with its 300-plus PhD economists) who gave a flying fuck about the Thai baht.

Before you knew it, South Korea and Indonesia started whirling around the drain. And then Russia felt the suck.

And then the Nobel Prize winning economists at a Connecticut hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management found out the hard way that their “secret sauce” investment formula which “could not fail in the life of this universe or several like it,” fatally poisoned its balance sheet on a repast of Russian sovereign bonds after only about eighteen months.

And it took all the poobahs of American banking to paper over the firm’s death about five minutes before the global banking system would shut down via the greatest daisy chain of cross-collateralized financial booby-traps ever assembled.

And ten years later, there was the fiasco of 2008, starring Lehman Brothers and a demonic host of grifters trafficking in worthless bonded debt around the sub-prime mortgage racket tied into a toxic web of “derivative financial products” — i.e. bad bets between insolvent counter-parties masquerading as “insurance” against unsound investment. Trillions of bailout monies conjured out of thin air fixed that, oh yes it did!

So enjoy the festivities around the Maypole today, and the suddenly calm waters of global affairs, and keep your ears pricked for the sound of wings flapping.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Land as insurance - The Black Swan 3/7/17

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The Left's Descent to Fascism

SUBHEAD: The only way forward is to jettison both the Left and Right of state-cartel Corporatocracy.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 18 April 2017 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr17/left-fascism4-17.html)


Image above: Book cover illustration for "Liberal Fascism". From (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Liberal-Fascism-History-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0141039507).

The Left is morally and fiscally bankrupt, devoid of coherent solutions, and corrupted by its embrace of the Corporatocracy.

History often surprises us with unexpected ironies. For the past century, the slide to fascism could be found on the Right (conservative, populist, nationalist political parties).

But now it's the Left that's descending into fascism, and few seem to even notice this remarkable development. By Left I mean socialist-leaning, progressive, internationalist/globalist political parties.

What is fascism? There is no one tidy definition, but it has three essential elements:

1. State and corporate elites govern society and the economy as one unified class.
   
2. This status quo (i.e. The Establishment) seeks to impose a conformity of values and opinion that support the dominant narratives of the status quo via the mass (corporate) media and the state-controlled educational system.
   
3. Dissent from any quarter is suppressed via mass-media ridicule, the judicial crushing and silencing of whistleblowers, and all the other powers of the central state: rendition, extra-legal imprisonment, political gulags (in our era, disguised as drug-war gulags), character assassination, murder by drone, impoverishing dissenters via firings and blacklists, and on and on.

The Left is now the political wing of the corporatocracy. As Phillipe Poutou, a Ford factory mechanic from Bordeaux who is the sole working-class candidate in France's presidential election, so deliciously pointed out, the Left and Right status quo candidates are indistinguishable in terms of their self-serving corruption and elitism: NY Times: Mechanic-Candidate Bursts French Political Elite's Bubbl .

Here in the U.S., the self-serving Democratic Party elites operate within the Corporatocracy structure, in which the state protects and funds private-sector cartels; the two intertwined and self-reinforcing elites manifest and enforce state policies.

This state-corporate elite domination is fascism. Some may claim the Left was co-opted by the Corporatocracy structure, others will blame capitalism (never mind the dominant form of capitalism is state-cartel, and it cannot exist without the central state enforcing the privileges of monopoly).

But these are simply excuses for the abject surrender of the Left to self-enrichment and power. Since the Left has always claimed the high moral ground--and continues to do so--see my essay Virtue-Signaling the Decline of the Empire (February 28, 2017)-- the Left must mask its own corruption and role in the Corporatocracy structure.

The Left accomplishes this by imposing a virtue-signaling conformity on corporate media, social media, and the state institutions under its control-- higher education, government agencies, etc.

Dissent is by definition fake news or hate speech--Orwell would be so proud of the Left's deft doublespeak.

The suppression of skeptical inquiry and alternative narratives is fascism. There is no way to sugar-coat this, so let's not even try, shall we?

The principle of substitution reveals the underlying truth. If a Rightist state imposed a virtue-signaling conformity on corporate media, social media, and the state institutions under its control, the Left would be very quick indeed to identify this as fascist.

It's still fascist if the Left does the same thing.

While the Left attempts to deflect a wider understanding of its descent into fascism with obsessive accusations of fake news and incessant demands for virtue-signaling conformity, the developed-world economies are circling the drain.

The Left's obsession with meaningless speech acts is a direct result of its lack of will and intellectual firepower to tackle the erosion of working-class/middle-class income, wealth and political power.

This is the harsh reality: wages are no longer an adequate means of distributing the dwindling surpluses of advanced economies:

The Left's single "solution" to this profound structural trend is for central states to "fight austerity" by borrowing and blowing trillions of dollars, yen, yuan, euros, etc.--with no end in sight.

But as even the most economic illiterate Leftist understands somewhere in their muddled soul, borrowing trillions from future generations is morally and fiscally bankrupt, and the very opposite of a "progressive" policy.

Here's the U.S. central state debt: if the Left claims this trajectory is sustainable, what is this claim based on? It's based on magical thinking.

The magical thinking of the Left is that decades of slowing growth will be reversed and the clock of history magically reset to 1946 if the central state borrows even more trillions from future generations.

But there is abundant evidence that borrowing and squandering immense sums has not boosted growth rates in a sustainable fashion--rather, the staggering debt loads are squeezing current spending and shackling future policy-makers with an ever-grimmer slate of self-reinforcing bad choices.

The Left is morally and fiscally bankrupt, devoid of coherent solutions, and corrupted by its embrace of the Corporatocracy. Its descent to fascism has too much momentum to be stopped.

Isn't it obvious that the only way forward is to jettison both the Left and Right flavors of state-cartel Corporatocracy and pave a third way?

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Under New Management?

SUBHEAD: Is Trump just another variant of the Deep State stranglehold on the Untied States?

By Jeff Thomas on  16 January 2017 for The International Man -
(http://www.internationalman.com/articles/under-new-management)


Image above: Obama meeting in White House with Donald Trump after he won the presidential election. From (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/us/politics/transition-briefing-passing-the-presidency-to-donald-trump.html).

In 2008, the majority of Americans voted for “change,” and in some ways, they got it. They received a heavier dose of collectivism in the form of Obamacare, but in addition, they received an even heavier dose of “more of the same.”

Mister Obama did not put an end to Guantanamo as he promised.  And, although he did remove troops from Iraq (only to send them back a few years later), he expanded America’s military adventures overall, invading numerous sovereign nations.

As for his promise to come down hard on the sworn enemies of democrats—the evil usurpers on Wall Street—he instead dug in deeper. His Treasury secretaries were banking insiders, not the “reformers” that had been anticipated.

Many who had voted for Mister Obama were deeply disappointed. Under him, government had grown, warfare had expanded, the economy worsened and Wall Street became even fatter than before.

In 2016, Americans, in large part, sought the selfsame changes—less central government control, less overseas aggression and a reigning-in of Wall Street and banks.
But to achieve these ends, voters switched sides once again and voted for a Republican, one who boldly committed to “drain the swamp.”

So, what are the odds that they’ll receive those changes? Let’s have a look.

When a new leader is elected, the best first assumption to make is that his campaign promises probably had little or no relationship to his actual intentions.

More likely, his intentions will be to continue to pander to the Deep State and those that helped him to get elected. Therefore, it’s always a good idea, in any country, to pay attention to the new leader’s choice as his posse.

The US president-elect has been active in choosing the gunslingers who will ride with him into Washington and the choices may provide an early warning as to who the new president really intends to be.

So, first off would be his closest advisors—his chief of staff and his chief strategist. Mister Trump’s choices, respectively, are Reince Priebus and Stephen Bannon. Mister Bannon is a Goldman alumnus.

In addition, Gary Cohn, Goldman’s president, has been chosen as director of the National Economic Council. By any measure, the cabinet will be somewhat of an extension of Goldman.

Mister Trump railed against Wall Street during his campaign and vilified his opponent on Twitter, stating, “Hillary will never reform Wall Street. She is owned by Wall Street!” His supporters had every reason to expect that he would prove to be the reformer they hoped for, yet his choices above suggest that that’s not the plan.

This likelihood is further enforced by his choice of Steven Mnuchin, who spent 17 years at Goldman, as Treasury secretary. His choice for commerce secretary is Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor who is also unlikely to emerge as an advocate for reform.

As to whether warfare will be diminished in the coming administration, Mister Trump has stated clearly, in reference to ISIS, that he intends to “bomb the shit out of ’em.” (No uncertainty there.)

His choice for national security advisor is Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, whose primary focus is in ramping up tensions with Iran.

His choice for secretary of defense is Gen. James Mattis, who has declared his desire to invade Iran. In addition, Mike Pompeo, who also favours an invasion of Iran, has been selected as head of the CIA.

These choices are not likely to sit comfortably with Mister Putin, with whom the president-elect suggests he will enjoy a good relationship. Nor will they sit well with the many throughout the world who already feel the US has gone far beyond its limit in seeking to police the world.

Rather than back off from the dreaded Wolfowitz Doctrine, the choices of cabinet members, taken collectively, suggest a continuation of the foreign boondoggles that began in 2001.

The one departure may be in the important position of secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, a lifetime employee of Exxon who has developed good relations with Russia and opposes government regulation of business. He may be the one pick that reflects Mister Trump’s campaign claims.

Still, Mister Tillerson falls right in line with the ever-expanding corporatist relationship extant in the US government.

Finally, those who hope that Trump will reverse the trend of the Deep State’s near-total control over the US will be disappointed not only by the choice of Mike Pompeo for the CIA, but of Trump campaigner and establishment insider Jeff Sessions as attorney general.

None of the above guarantees that the voters who chose Mister Trump will soon be experiencing buyer’s remorse, but the indicators that Americans may find themselves out of the pan and into the fire are significant.

There’s an old saying that “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” and the lineup of new players above suggests that that may well be the case in the next administration.

Meanwhile, not only the US, but the entire world will be holding its collective breath over the coming months. The new president is less likely to spend as much time on the golf course as his predecessor. He’s far more likely to hit the road running.

The question will be in what direction he chooses to run. His choices for cabinet suggest that that direction might have less relationship to his campaign rhetoric and more relationship to the ongoing Deep State program.

To be sure, his clear choice of Washington insiders for so many of his primary cabinet positions informs us that the swamp will not, in fact, be drained. Big Business, the military-industrial complex and Big Banks will dominate the Trump cabinet.

Whatever the world will be treated to under the new American presidency, the words of Neil Innes ring true:

“No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.”

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Degrowth is Punk as Fuck

SUBHEAD: We use "degrowth" because unlike post-growth or re-growth  Goldman Sachs won't be able to co-opt it.

By Vansintjan & Bliss on 9 December 2016 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/12/09/degrowth-punk-fuck)


Image above: Banksy piece in its original place within Detroit’s Packard Plant. Photo by Billy Voo. From (http://beltmag.com/the-fight-over-graffiti-banksy-in-detroit/).

Very serious people often tell us that the word “degrowth” is too negative. People like happy, positive, nice things. Sure, the economy is systematically destroying life on earth. But nobody wants to degrow it.

Instead, these critics prefer words like “post-growth,” “a-growth,” "re-growth", even the mythical “green growth.” They want to create a circular economy, a green economy, a new economy, a prosperity economy, well-being economy, or a steady-state economy.

What do all these terms have in common?

They’re boring.

Here’s what degrowth naysayers don’t seem to get: degrowth is actually punk as fuck. We’re nonconforming, anti-establishment, DIY punks. And we’re not trying to sound nice. Take your positivity and shove it.

The term "sustainable development" shows what happens to concepts that aren't hardcore. It's been integrated into international agreements for over two decades, yet here we are, at the precipice of reaching dozens of tipping points that will send Earth's climate spinning into chaos.

The problem wasn't that not enough people got behind sustainable development, it was that everyone got behind it because it didn't challenge anything at all. In 2014, Goldman Sachs commissioned a report “Attaining Sustainable Development of Oil and Gas in North America” (emphasis ours).

That's why we use degrowth. Goldman Sachs won't be able to co-opt it. Unlike post-growth, re-growth, or a-growth, we think degrowth has something special: that "de-" is a little middle finger at the establishment.

Very serious people shoot back that degrowth, in using the word “growth,” just strengthens the language of the status quo. All it does, according to “framing” enthusiasts, is further reinforce the dominant pro-growth “frame” that supposedly makes degrowth seem scary and bad.

To this, degrowthers respond reasonably: we actually don’t give a flying fuck. We don’t want to be fake-nice about it. We want to name and shame our enemy.

Very serious people claim that degrowth, like some punk culture, is nihilistic, that it doesn’t inspire hope or change. We denounce growth but do not describe alternative values, they say.


Image above: Banksy  trompe-l’oeil painting on a security fence in the West Bank in 2005. Photo courtesy of Banksy. From (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/14/banksy-was-here).

Sure, degrowth is nihilistic, but in the Nietzschean sense: a healthy refusal of the present, one that is necessary to think differently. We reject growth to make space for different concepts and values: international solidarity, the commons, financial reform, basic income, conviviality, care, to name a few.

We've done our research, and we urge for practical policy proposals, long-term utopian visions, and disobedient direct actions—because the very serious politicians aren’t listening yet. If you've come to any of the last five degrowth conferences, you'll know how forward-looking and positive degrowthers can be.

Very serious people think that punks don’t get very far: no one listens to them, no one empathizes with them. Why not focus on the establishment, why not bribe them with words that are easier to swallow?

We beg to differ. Think of the Occupy movement. With little plan beyond stirring shit up, those punks redefined politics and forced politicians to finally pay attention to inequality. Think of the Windows employees who spent their time at the office coding open-source programs, using Microsoft money to pave the way for a new kind of cyberspace: one based on sharing and mutual aid.

It wasn't the soothing March on Washington For Jobs And Freedom that convinced President Kennedy to sign the civil rights act; it was the threat of disaffected black youths rioting in the streets in every major US city.

This fall, we stood with Standing Rock. The Lakota gathered against the DAPL not to be nice, but to register their dissent, to stand in the way of a system that has tried to crush them for centuries. Their dissent delivered a striking victory against the establishment.

We understand, but don’t agree with, those who voted Brexit and Trump as a big “fuck you” to the establishment. They are punks too, and we lament that the Left has been so preoccupied with being nice, professional, and reasonable, encouraging many of these promising punks to vote for a new breed of white supremacists and oligarchs.

We think the suburbanites tinkering in their backyard are punks as well—their DIY creations objections to the industrial economy. We are in solidarity with the foot-draggers, the wildcat strikers who don’t care about their company’s competitiveness. We agree with Paul Lafargue, who scoffed at “the right to work” and demanded “the right to be lazy!”

To us, nurses, teachers, small farmers, and childcare workers are punks too. Capitalist society considers these jobs basically worthless, but people do them anyway, because fuck you, that's what they do.


Image above:  Banksy graffiti art "Kill them with Non-Violence". It's perfect to explode them with flowers and love.  A version of this graffiti was used in the original article in CommonDreams. From (http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/banksy-graffiti-art-lennon-lincoln-gandhi-roosevelt-revolution/1/612185.html).

At home, many of us degrowthers are squatters. Some of us dumpster dive and graffiti over advertising. We cook big meals for each other. We throw big weddings and big funerals. We are weirdos who’ve never quite fit in in board rooms.

Last week, one of our own presented degrowth inside the pearly halls of the UK House of Commons.

Federico Demaria, one of the co-editors of the book Degrowth: A vocabulary for a new era, shared the parliamentary stage with Kate Raworth, who coined the unobjectionable phrase Doughnut Economics, Tim Jackson, who wrote Prosperity without Growth, and two of the authors of the 1972 book Limits to Growth.

Unlike the other panelists, Federico was willing to be radical, willing to think differently. The audience loved it: he wasn't boring. Of course, some of his very serious co-panelists patronized him as a big-dreaming, radical youngster.

The serious people tell us that politicians will never support degrowth. They tell us to stop acting like teenagers, put on suits, and come up with innocuous words that the representatives of every country will applaud in the UN General Assembly.

We know that sort of work is necessary. Sometimes you will find us putting on those awkwardly fitting suits and creeping through the halls of power, our tattoos and piercings and bad haircuts not very well hidden.

But that’s not our audience. Our sympathies lie with the misfits, the outcasts, the mischief-makers, the queers. They are our kind of people. And that’s why people like us: at heart, whoever feels like a political outsider is a bit of a punk.

• Aaron Vansintjan is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London and the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is an editor of the website Uneven Earth and enjoys wild fermentations, decolonization, and long bicycle rides.

• Sam Bliss is a PhD student at the University of Vermont in the Economics for the Anthropocene research initiative. He loves reading, singing, and slow travel and strongly dislikes post-environmentalism.

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Clinton Foundation hedge fund play

SUBHEAD: Chelsea Clinton's husband used Clinton Foundation to raise cash for his hedge fund.

By Tyler Durden on 6 November 2016 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-06/chelsea-clintons-husband-used-clinton-foundation-raise-cash-his-hedge-fund)


Image above: Hedge-fund manager Marc Mezvinsky with his wife, Chelsea Clinton, at a Clinton Global Initiative event in 2014.  From (http://www.wsj.com/articles/hedge-fund-co-founded-by-chelsea-clintons-husband-suffers-losses-tied-to-greece-1423000325).

[IB Publisher's note: And that's why we voted for Jill Stein for President.]
That Teneo's Doug Band was not a fan of Chelsea Clinton, with whom he had a long-running feud as a result of her ongoing accusations that he was taking advantage of Bill Clinton's presence to enrich himself (even though thanks to a leaked memo we now know for a fact just how Teneo was working as a pass through, pay-for-play vehicle to enrich both Clinton and Band), we have known for a while (and reported on again just moments ago, when in one of the latest Podesta emails, he accused her of using Foundation cash to pay for her wedding).

We now learn that Band was also not a fan of Chelsea's husband, Marc Mezvinsky, co-founder of the hedge fund Eaglevale Partners, which had received substantial seed funding from Goldman Sachs, and which suffered massive losses with its wrong-way bet on Greek bonds.

In an email from January 18, 2012, Doug Band tells John Podesta and Cheryl Mills that "Marc mez[vinsky] had an idea to put together a poker night for the foundation to raise money. His raising money for his own fund hasn't been going well and he has cvc [Chelsea Clinton] making some calls for him to get mtgs with some clinton people."

What Band was accusing "Mez" of doing is that since he was unable to raise cash for his hedge fund on his own, he came looking for the help of his wife, Chelsea, who is Vice Chairman of the Foundation bearing her last name.

Band then says that "Marc has invited several potential investors and a few current business ones to the poker night. I assume all are contributing to the foundation, which of course isn't the point. What is the point is that he is doing precisely what he accused me of doing as the entire plan of his has been to use this for his business which he is."

And there you have another Pay-to-Play smoking gun: an extended Clinton family member using Bill's (and Chelsea's) "last name" connections to raise money for his business.

Needless to say, the idea worked: as Fox previously reported, in April 2012, Eaglevale booked $19 million from a dozen investors. California’s public employee pension fund, CalPERS, reportedly invested $13 million. Goldman Sach’s CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, jumped in with his own money, as did Chelsea Clinton’s former boss, Marc Lasry, who specializes in buying distressed debt.

In retrospect it appears that while we have no reason to doubt the sincerity of the relationship between Mezvinsky and Chelsea, the former clearly saw some prominent fringe benefits, namely the ability to fall back on the latter's last name to "raise money" through the Clinton Foundation, after his own fundraising efforts were falling short.

Another fringe benefit was to use Chelsea Clinton as a conduit for confidential information on Greek bailout talks coming directly from the US State Department, whose head - and top US diplomat - at the time was Hillary Clinton. As Fox previously reprorted, In May 2012, Sid Blumenthal, emailed two “confidential” memos about the Greek debt situation to Clinton. Hormats was included in the email loop.

Clinton stepped down as secretary of state in 2013 to run for president. But newly released emails from 2012 show that she and Clinton Foundation consultant, Sidney Blumenthal, shared classified information about how German leadership viewed the prospects for a Greek bailout. Clinton also shared “protected” State Department information about Greek bonds with her husband at the same time that her son-in-law aimed his hedge fund at Greece.

The first memo, Blumenthal told Clinton, is “based on conversations with German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble and those close to him … the information comes from an extremely sensitive source and should be handled with care. This information must not be shared with anyone associated with the German government.”

The second memo was classified and blacked out by State Department censors when Clinton’s emails were released. No doubt, it was informative. In June, Clinton’s deputy, Jake Sullivan emailed her “a depressing snapshot” of reports that Greek banks were failing and that Merkel was against a Greek bailout. The next day, he reported “re: Greece” that Ambassador Dan Smith “just spoke to the Central Bank Governor and assessed that the economic situation was “ok for now” provided that “small depositors put money back into the banks.”

A few days later, Clinton asked Sullivan for a confidential state department report, “Solidarity Bonds Greece Revised.” He sent it to her adding, “If you like, send it on [to] WJC," presumably a reference to William Jefferson Clinton.

Clinton ordered an aide, “Pls print two copies” of the Greek bond report. The report was blacked out as a “protected” document when the emails were made public.

Did Mezvinsky benefit from his family connection?

The emails show that Clinton did at least one official favor for her son-in-law. In August 2012, she forwarded Deputy Secretary Thomas Nides an email from Mezvinsky lobbying on behalf of his former Goldman Sachs colleague, Harry Siklas. Siklas and Goldman Sachs were invested in a deep sea mining venture called Neptune Minerals. Siklas asked Mezvinsky to broker a talk with Clinton about “current legal issues and regulations” on deep sea mining. Clinton ordered Nides to “follow up on this request.”

Nides replied, “I’ll get on it.”

Ironically, despite all the behind the scenes benefits which should have assured the young hedge funder of slam dunk returns, Mezvinsky still failed. As Fox also added, "Marc Mezvinsky had friends in high places when he bet big on a Greek economic recovery, but even the keen interest of his mother-in-law, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, wasn't enough to spare him and his investors from financial tragedy."

In 2012, Mezvinski, the husband of Chelsea Clinton, created a $325 million basket of offshore funds under the Eaglevale Partners banner through a special arrangement with investment bank Goldman Sachs. The funds have lost tens of millions of dollars predicting that bailouts of the Greek banking system would pump up the value of the country’s distressed bonds. One fund, exclusively dedicated to Greek debt, suffered near-total losses.

A quick note here on what Mezvinsky's biggest seed investor: Goldman Sachs. Recall that when Chelsea Clinton's husband sought funding for his new hedge fund, he found financial backing from one of the biggest names on Wall Street: Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein. Blankfein not only personally invested in the fund, but allowed his association with it to be used in the fund’s marketing.

The decision for Blankfein to invest in Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law’s company is just one of many ways Goldman Sachs has used its wealth to forge a tight bond with the Clinton family. The company paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 in personal speaking fees, paid Bill Clinton $1,550,000 in personal speaking fees, and donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation. At a time when Goldman Sachs directly lobbied Hillary Clinton’s State Department, the company routinely partnered with the Clinton Foundation for events, even convening a donor meeting for the foundation at the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Manhattan.

Finally, in May 2016, Mezvinsky shut down Eaglevale's Greek fund after losing 90% of its assets in early 2015. It is unclear if he has since resorted to using the Clinton Foundation to fund more cash.


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