Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Donald Trump Tax Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for Nearly Two Decades, The Times Found
NYTimes | David Barstow | 10/01/16

Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show. The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump's 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period. ... Read more
Donald Trump Tax Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for Nearly Two Decades (10/01/16) []

Julian Assange Disappoints, Fails To Reveal Material Information At Wikileaks Press Conference
ZeroHedge | author | 10/04/16

In what was a disappointment for anyone hoping for "devastating" disclosures, Julian Assange today held off releasing information about the US elections or Hillary Clinton, despite widespread expectation that he was poised to make a major release. The WikiLeaks founder said the organization would publish around one million documents related to the U.S. election and three governments, but denied the release was aimed at damaging Hillary Clinton.

While Assange said the documents would be released before the end of the year, starting with an initial batch in the coming week, this came as a surprise to many following an unprecedented build up within the media that Wikileaks would release dramatic disclosures on its 10th anniversary. ... Read more
Assange speaks at WikiLeaks' 10th anniversary in Berlin (10/04/16) [1:55:35]

*Oil, Power and Money: "Assad Must Go"
GlobalResearch.ca | Mike Whitney | 10/01/16

Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria. -- Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Why the Arabs don't want us in Syria, Politico

The conflict in Syria is not a war in the conventional sense of the word. It is a regime change operation, just like Libya and Iraq were regime change operations. The main driver of the conflict is the country that's toppled more than 50 sovereign governments since the end of World War 2. (See: Bill Blum here.) We're talking about the United States of course. ... Read more
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*Why the Arabs don't want us in Syria
Politico | Robert F. Kennedy, Jr | 09/16/16

In part because my father was murdered by an Arab, I've made an effort to understand the impact of U.S. policy in the Mideast and particularly the factors that sometimes motivate bloodthirsty responses from the Islamic world against our country. As we focus on the rise of the Islamic State and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology. Instead we should examine the more complex rationales of history and oil -- and how they often point the finger of blame back at our own shores.

America's unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria -- little-known to the American people yet well-known to Syrians -- sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIL. ... Read more

Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin... And How to Bring It Back by David A. Stockman

In TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin... And How to Bring It Back, David Stockman brings us an insider-turned-iconoclast's report on how 30 years of financial and political misrule by the Washington/Wall Street elites have brought the U.S. to the brink of ruin.

He shows that the Fed's destructive ZIRP and QE policies have buried Flyover America in debt while clobbering it with shrinking real wages and vanishing job opportunities. At the same time, the bicoastal elites have prospered mightily from the massive inflation of financial assets in the Wall Street casino and the debt-fueled expansion of Imperial Washington's domestic rackets and global interventions.

Stockman argues that Donald Trump's improbable candidacy happened because Flyover America has had enough of a rigged system that benefits the few but has failed to delivery economic recovery and real prosperity at home and a safer and more stable world abroad.

Stockman's book is no testimonial on behalf of Trump's candidacy, and contends that much of what he advocates is wrong-headed or downright reprehensible. But it does salute him as the rallying force for Main Street political insurrection because the existing regime of Bubble Finance on Wall Street and statist aggrandizement in Washington threatens incalculable harm.

Stockman also argues that there remains a way forward. He suggests the "political outlaw" who considers himself to be the world's greatest dealmaker would need to "make ten great deals" to bring American back from the brink. These include a Peace Deal, a Jobs Deal, a Sound Money Deal, a Super Glass-Steagall Deal, A Liberty Deal and five more.