Among the Podesta emails, there are some rather refreshing ones, like this one from Brent J. Budowsky to Podesta:

"Considering that a) Hillary's campaign has become close to 100% negative with attacks on Bernie, b) she is running to serve Obama's third term, c) her latest move is to escalate her use of Wall Street money and Super PAC's to pursue her negative attacks against Bernie, d) a growing number of her black surrogates have moved beyond supporting her record to openly lying about Bernie's record, and e) before this latest move her favorable ratings were dangerously low and her distrust numbers were dangerously high, (...)"

Sex trumps Clinton wall street leak emails--
Clinton wins this round.

Awesome comment. I wish I could upvote it twice. I threw up a little in my mouth watching the grandstanding going on here and how apparently most Sifters are eating it up.

Fraud? Cross-selling is perfectly legal and in fact practiced regularly in many industries besides banking (like when Best Buy tries to get you to purchase a protection plan for any electronics you buy at their store). If she has an issue with it, as a legislator she is free to bring a bill to the floor to do something about it. The problem is, she didn't give a shit about cross-selling until she realized she was going to have an opportunity to stump for future votes in these hearings and she apparently doesn't give a shit about it now because despite those strong-worded pleas for action she's done nothing personally to make anything she said happen.

Stumpf should give up his money? He isn't the one who opened fake Wells Fargo accounts nor is there any evidence he directed his employees to do so. And as he tried to explain before she cut him off to grandstand some more, those fake accounts only represent 1% of the total cross-selling that happened, which means the stock price was not unduly inflated--people were in fact opening of their own volition more accounts with Wells Fargo than any other bank and Wall Street loved them for it.

The real issue here is that there were not adequate controls in place to prevent the fake accounts from being created in the first place (or detected quickly after being created). And for that Stumpf probably does have some small amount of responsibility, although it sounds to me more like whoever was in charge of compliance is the person who likely should be the one left holding the bag.

But let's not let reality get in the way of a politician's dreams of future offices.

I think it is stupid to whine about the email leaks "unfairly" damaging Hillary's campaign.

The DNC could have easily avoided the fallout / resignations / etc. by simply not doing shady, underhanded shit. When you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar, don't bitch about who snitched on you -- a better response would be to learn that you can't get caught if you don't do anything wrong.


Sorta reminds me of earlier in the campaign when Hillary complained that it was unfair for people to want to see her transcripts of paid speeches given to Wall Street banks. She said that other candidates weren't expected to do that, so it was an unfair double standard. Bernie Sanders response was great -- he said he'd be 100% willing to hand over any of his transcripts, except for one minor problem: he never made any paid speeches to Wall Street banks.


With regards to Wikileaks, I have zero problems with how they handled things and don't care at all who their source was -- Russia, some other very biased source with a clear agenda to damage Hillary, whatever. The only thing that matters is, are the emails true / legit? I haven't heard anyone suggest that they aren't; just bitching about it being "unfair" that all the dirt is on Hillary and the DNC.

Wikileaks relies on sources. You know, leakers. I'm confident that if they had dirt on Trump or any other candidate, they'd put it out there. But Wikileaks can't make candidates or parties do questionable shit, and even when candidates or parties do do questionable shit, they still need someone to catch them and then leak the information to Wikileaks.

Sometimes, if they don't have any dirt on somebody, it might be because there isn't any dirt to be had... Just like Sanders' transcripts of Wall Street speeches.

This is really important. *promote
MM lays out how REAL a President Trump is, based on some of Hillary's fatal flaws, like the TPP support and the loss of the Rust Belt support.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/michael-moores-5-reasons-why-trump-will-win

Yet she still continues to make poor choices, like double-down on Wall Street/Banking support with Caine, and a big wet sloppy kiss to Wasserman-Schultz after evidence surfaces of their conspiracy. This is the behavior of the Entitled, not the Deserved.

i am just going to add to the opinions and perspectives that @MilkmanDan ,@ChaosEngine ,@dannym3141 and especially @newtboy who i agree with so clearly that i swear we are related.

since many dynamics have already been covered, i.e:police culture,racism,incompetence etc etc.

i shall offer a historical perspective in the ways of the power dynamic.

while this is a power vs powerlessness dynamic dealing with agents of the state,it helps to understand just how we got to this point,and it is NOT the first time we have been here.

see:labor movement of the 30's and the labor strikes,and the response from not only the business community but our own government.

see: the civil rights movement and segregation,and how demagouges used political power to divide by way of racism,and then used police to intimidate,beat and imprison.

there are many MANY examples here in america where the police have been used to suppress and oppress a people or community for less than altruistic reasons,and most certainly not aligning with the ideology we were taught in school the function of police.nevermind the syrupy sweet,idealized picture shoved down our throats since an early age.

so we see on our facebooks,our twitters and/or whatever social media you prefer,that black lives matter...and the counter point,that NO..ALL lives matter.

now this would make sense in a world that never took history into account,or a growing cultural norm of violence and oppression that had been slowly seeping into poor communities (mainly black and latino).

oh wait..
that's right.
social media pundits NEVER fucking consider any of those factors,because just like bill o'reilly,those are pesky nuances and context conflict with their own narrow narrative.

but let us consider them and how they may possibly be a major driving factor in americas current climate.

let us take ferguson as an example,that is a good place to start.
and let us go back to 2008,where we can see the boiling begin to take place in this extremely impoverished community which was already struggling.

the population is a black majority,poor to working poor.home ownership is low,food stamp recipients are high and the future is pretty bleak.

in 2008 ferguson received approximately 18% of it's total fiscal revenue from misdemeanor infractions i.e:traffic,parking,moving violations.small time stuff.basic fines for small infractions.in 2008 that number jumped to 66%.

why?
what happened?
what changed?

well the comptroller of ferguson (and greater st louis),along with HUNDREDS of other smaller municipalities across the country,had bought the rotten fish that wall street was selling in the form of bullshit derivatives.

now wall street and the big banks got their tax payer bailout,but towns like ferguson did not.they lost millions,sometimes billions.this meant pensions were either reduced or outright denied,because there was NO money!

but a town still has to pay police.
fire fighters and school teachers,
clerks and judges,
keep the roads paved and the street lights working.

so what is a local government to do?
can't tax the working class who own homes.you already jacked their property tax to the roof.
can't tax the local business,you already squeeze them as well.
how about those non-property owning people in ferguson?
they need to pay up as well,and let's use the police force to relinquish them of the paltry money they don't have.

to the tune of 66% of all of fergusons revenue.
that is insanity.

so what if you live in ferguson?
chances are you are black,and either poor or working poor.

you make,if you are lucky,20 grand a year and by one man's testimony he paid over 2,000 in traffic tickets in one year.the majority of americans dont see those kind of numbers their entire lifetime.

and what if you began to realize that it was not just you.that almost every person you know or talked to had similar stories.

would you begin to feel a tad bit targeted?

what if the city of ferguson started to become very creative with not only their rules but how they enforced those rules?

what if every year the fines went up?
not remained the same,but actually UP? every year.

what if,as a community people began to actually fear the police? to experience anxiety just by the sight of a patrol car,even though they were not engaging in anything illegal? and who knows...maybe there is some new ordinance on the books that you are unaware of?

would you become paranoid and suspicious of law enforcement?

and then..what if....you started losing friends to cops.people you grew up with being shot in the street,and every time the mayor comes out and calls it a "justifiable killing".

would that make you feel any better?
any less paranoid or anxious?

there was ONE police shooting in ten years and then..as if by magic ..(which is how the media seems to always portray this..shocking news..at 11)..you lose 5 friends in a year.all to cops..all "justifiable".

would you begin to think there was a conspiracy?
targeting you and your neighbors?

i BET you would.
i know i would.

now lets look at the cops.

they are just a tool.
an instrument for the state to uphold the law and write citations for infractions.they dont MAKE the laws,nor the infractions,not even the fines.

they just do what they are told.

and they are told to go into these poor and working poor neighborhoods and write tickets,a LOT of tickets.

do you really think they are unaware of the growing hostility towards them? the looks of disgust,fear and apprehension?

but...this is their job,and they do what they are told.

they see.
they know.
they are aware of the growing hatred towards them,and this makes them anxious..and defensive..and in some horrible,tragic cases...trigger happy.

a natural and normal response to heightened stimuli in the face of great uncertainty.

so they react impulsively and out of fear in a way that ten years ago would have been unheard of.

they think themselves good cops.
they do a good job.
they do what they are told.
and the people hate them for it.
so they respond instinctively and with poor judgement.

we..as citizens,respond with disgust and indignation when a cop abuses his/her authority.we see this as a major moral breach in the citizen/cop relationship,because we feel as agents of the law they should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us...and rightly so,but when you put a human being in a tense and dangerous situation,not of their making,they will fail at some point to react correctly and with sound judgement.

they SHOULD be held accountable,but so should the city council members and the mayor and all the local representatives who created this toxic climate in the first place.

the lesson to be learned here is that nothing is a binary situation when people are concerned.

so when black lives matter protestors address people to make them aware of the situation,this is what they are talking about.the police killing are only a last stage manifestation of a situation that began in 2008 on wall street.

and we need to be aware,because right now it is the predominantly black communities,but soon coming to a neighborhood near YOU.

the poor and working poor have become expendable.no longer relevant to the system.which is why police shootings are being handled the way they are.our value is ever increasingly being judged on how well we can feed the system.

until this disparity is addressed there will continue to be police shootings.people will die and there will be no indictments.

because police do what they are told.

it is up to us to make policy makers accountable for their actions,and in doing so address a toxic climate that both the poor,working poor and cops alike have to swim in.

stop forcing cops to write tickets to fund a city that lost it's savings due to fuckhead bankers.

this blood..all of it..is on those bankers hands.

Ugh. I want to disagree so much, but in light of the email scandals, breech of trust, bribery, wall street speeches, corporatist super pac, vote suppression, and election fraud, I don't have much to go on.

And on the note of vote suppression and election fraud: there is mounting evidence that those are the two qualities that most enabled Hillary to snare her victory for the 'democratic' nomination.

A lot of her issues come from her time in Arkansas, her legal cases, and her underhanded wall street support in the 90's. She has been lucky so far to not be caught red handed on anything, but she is definitely on par with a Nixon or Rumsfeld. Obama isn't corrupt in my opinion.

She didn't run this time because she was smart. She saw the writing on the wall that the Democratic Elite wasn't going to risk another upstart challenging 'the Clinton'.

We should be amazed and astounded that Sanders has been able to do as well as he has, given that it was a guaranteed that Hils was going to be the nominee before the primaries even started.

I think that she is now just hoping to be Clinton's pick for VP, since she would bring at least a small amount of anti-establishment credence to the main campaign without being the full on, in the face, challenge that a Sanders VP selection would be. Clinton doesn't want to spend 4 years defending her loving support of big business and wall street from her VP as well as the liberals in her party.

You can blame whomever you like. I will never vote for Hillary, which means I will be voting Libertarian this year. If that means Trump wins, then so be it. An inexperienced president is MUCH less of a threat than a corrupt one.

The worst harm Trump could do would be picking crappy SCOTUS judges, realistically an inexperienced President doesn't have that much power over anything else if Congress is against him/her. Look at Obama, other than the few years he had a Democratic led Congress, he has mostly been limited to presidential decrees that really don't do much.

Now a corrupt president that is motivated and knows how to work the system, that is an entirely different animal. I have no issues in saying that Hillary is the most corrupt person I have seen in the running for President since Nixon, and we all know how well that turned out. She is by far worse than Trump, who is just an idiot. Her husband was just as bad, his support of the deregulation policies of the late 1990s in regards to Wall Street directly led to the 2008 Depression.

I doubt he'll be remembered as anything other than a massive disappointment

Edit: Re-reading that, it came across harsher than I had intended. I think Obama was a good guy with mostly good intentions (still not keen on his policy of murdering brown people in other countries without due process).

But his healthcare was half-assed, he did nothing about gun control, and he STILL hasn't closed Guantanamo. Meanwhile, privacy rights have further eroded under his watch, and whatever legislation he apparently put in place around Wall Street is clearly not working. I'm not sure he's even looked at campaign finance reform.

Granted, a lot of that is down to an increasingly intractable (read: borderline retarded) republican congress, but the fact remains, he didn't achieve nearly as much as was hoped for.

I expect the same answer about raising the minimum wage if she's elected...
"I'll push to raise it when everybody does it." Or when it's time to fight for health care "I'll do it when everybody does it".

Those are not the words of a LEADER, Hillary, those are the words of a FOLLOWER. If you're waiting for your opponents to do the right thing before you do, you are much WORSE than they are, not somehow better.

There's clearly something to hide, or she would not be taking the huge hits in the polls over this issue, she would just release the transcripts, but that would end her campaign so she has to make up excuses and use the Republican's behavior as her standard.

I liked Bernie's reply....'I've released every transcript of every paid speech I've ever given to wall street bankers...it was easy....there's never been one.'

Is it weird that I find her more attractive in this role than wolf of wall street?

Better to blow up few abortion clinics than to murder 50 Million babies.. But hey who's counting. Hitler would be proud.


Bernie stands for unrealistic ideas. Nothing more.

Income inequality-- If you feel bad about that Take every dollar you make over the 15$/hr living wage and give it to someone.-- You can't -- You won't. You , like me are selfish pricks like everyone else. But you wont mind if it is done by force on you employer.

Free tuition? Bull -- nothing is free in life. If you pay for it It will have more value to you.

Getting big $ out of politics-- Agree but will never happen.. Sounds nice though.

Creating decent jobs. 8 Years of Democrat control and zero happened. You think a socialist can make a difference. .What is a decent job? I never had one. One you like or one that pays you more that you are worth? I think the unicorn would be discovered first.

A Living wage 15$/hr -- I feel that he is cheating people should be 35$/hr What is the right number-- Its what the market will bear.


Climate change this is BS but I'll go along-- Tax people and companies, which pass to consumers -- We are poor enough under the Obama economy ... Trying to get blood from a rock.


Humane Immigration-- Bernie is a son of an immigrant who came here legally. IF you want these illegals taking you son and daughters and your job buy all means vote for Bernie If your that stupid I suppose the illegal is smarter than you.


Family values. The best family value is for the family to stay together where there is 1 provider and the other provided love, support, encouragement anytime of day , not just after 7pm when both parents come home.. Progressive democrat policies has its price and destroyed the family unit. Bernie just wants more PTO.

Reforming wall street--Obama was the biggest giver of money to wall street in history---Under he and the democrats they created Quantitative easing -- This dumped trillions directly into big banks and wall street.. ..

Bernie stands for unrealistic ideas. Nothing more.