The pot calls the kettle black and then makes some tea.

Donald Trump spent the past two years attacking rival Hillary Clinton as crooked, corrupt, and weak.

But some of those attacks seem to have already slipped into the history books.

From installing Wall Street executives in his Cabinet to avoiding news conferences, the president-elect is adopting some of the same behavior for which he criticized Clinton during their fiery presidential campaign...

GOLDMAN SACHS

Then: "I know the guys at Goldman Sachs," Trump said at a South Carolina rally in February, when he was locked in a fierce primary battle with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. "They have total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton."

Now: A number of former employees of the Wall Street bank will pay a key role in crafting Trump's economic policy. He's tapped Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn to lead the White House National Economic Council. Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary nominee, spent 17 years working at Goldman Sachs and Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist and senior counselor, started his career as an investment banker at the firm.

Trump is following in a long political tradition, though one he derided on the campaign trail: If Cohn accepts the nomination, he'll be the third Goldman executive to run the NEC.

BIG DONORS

Then: "Crooked Hillary. Look, can you imagine another four years of the Clintons? Seriously. It's time to move on. And she's totally controlled by Wall Street and all these people that gave her millions," Trump said at a May rally in Lynden, Washington.

Now: Trump has stocked his Cabinet with six top donors — far more than any recent White House. "I want people that made a fortune. Because now they're negotiating with you, OK?" Trump said, in a December 9 speech in Des Moines.

The biggest giver? Linda McMahon, incoming small business administrator, gave $7.5 million to a super PAC backing Trump, more than a third of the money collected by the political action committee.

NEWS CONFERENCES

Then: "She doesn't do news conferences, because she can't," Trump said at an August rally in Ashburn, Virginia. "She's so dishonest she doesn't want people peppering her with questions."

Now: Trump opened his last news conference on July 27, saying: "You know, I put myself through your news conferences often, not that it's fun."

He hasn't held one since.

Trump skipped the news conference a president-elect typically gives after winning the White House. Instead, he released a YouTube video of under three minutes. He also recently abruptly canceled plans to hold his first post-election news conference, opting instead to describe his plans for managing his businesses in tweets. "I will hold a press conference in the near future to discuss the business, Cabinet picks and all other topics of interest. Busy times!" he tweeted in mid-December.

FAMILY TIES:

Then: "It is impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins. It is now abundantly clear that the Clintons set up a business to profit from public office. They sold access and specific actions by and really for I guess the making of large amounts of money," Trump said at an August rally in Austin.

Now: While Trump has promised to separate himself from his businesses, there is plenty of overlap between his enterprises and his immediate family. His companies will be run by his sons, Donald Jr and Eric. And his daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have joined Trump at a number of meetings with world leaders of countries where the family has financial interests.

In a financial disclosure he was required to file during the campaign, Trump listed stakes in about 500 companies in at least 25 countries.

Ivanka, in particular, has been caught making early efforts to leverage her father's new position into profits. After an interview with the family appeared on "60 Minutes," her jewelry company, Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, blasted out an email promoting the $10,800 gold bangle bracelet that she had worn during the appearance. The company later said they were "proactively discussing new policies and procedures."

Ivanka is also auctioning off a private coffee meeting with her to benefit her brother's foundation. The meeting is valued at $50,000, with the current top bid coming in at $25,000.

"United States Secret Service will be Present for the Duration of the Experience," warns the auction site.

After 6 bankruptcies, Trump was somehow still able to get new capital investments. James Henry, who recently published an article in the magazine, The American Interest, titled "The Curious World of Donald Trump's Private Russian Connections."

This information comes not from some fringe lunatic.

James S. Henry is a leading economist, attorney and investigative journalist who has written extensively about global issues. James served as Chief Economist at the international consultancy firm McKinsey & Co. As an investigative journalist his work has appeared in numerous publications like Forbes, The Nation and The New York Times. He was the lead researcher of the recently released report titled 'The Price of Offshore Revisited.'

Click here for the Washington Post story.

Trump Vineyard Estates LLC filed a request Dec. 2 with the Labor Department for six H2 visas, which permit U.S. employers to hire foreigners for seasonal jobs such as pruning grapevines, which is what the request said. The request was posted online by the Labor Department on Wednesday and first reported by BuzzFeed News.

The workers are needed to prune the vines on the estate, the Labor application said, and they would be paid $10.72 per hour for a 40-hour, six-day week. The jobs are anticipated to last from January to June....

The Trump vineyard applied for 19 temporary visas for foreign workers in 2014, 2015 and this year, before the most recent request, according to federal records. In addition, he has sought to hire 513 foreign workers since 2013 for some of his other businesses, including for his Palm Beach home, Mar-a-Lago Club.

Do you see the irony here? The same candidate who protested about immigrants taking jobs, is asking for permission to hire (and has previously hired) immigrant labor instead of hiring American workers. Obviously, it was all bullshit. The chutzpah of these people is simply amazing.

Planned Obsolescence is inefficient and destructive. What appears good to the individual firm in the short term, might actually be destructive in the aggregate. Interesting video.

The favorite game of this industry is to build [it] and then blow [it] up and rebuild it again.... Increased necessity produces increased inefficiency.... It's a value system disorder.

Supporting dictators who enable cheap extraction of resources is unfortunately the history of the Western world, and perhaps humanity in general.

Click here for a Rachel Maddow expose on how Rex Tillerson changed the Chad oil market to help a dictator and destabilize the region, against the interests of the United States. Or watch the video below. Your choice.

From crooksandliars.com

Joseph Stiglitz knows a few things about economics. He was the chief economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000. He was the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors to President Bill Clinton from 1995 to 1997. He is currently an Economics professor at Columbia University.

He also writes for an outlet called Project Syndicate, an online warehouse of various columnists and opinion writers that can get picked up an published by newspapers. The website is practically an independent periodical, except the individuals who write are mostly reputable and knowledgable. Any potential spin is at least intelligent, and not based on blatant abuse of facts or outright lies, which has somehow become tolerable in the mainstream press.

His latest article was published in the U.K. Guardian today.

During the campaign, Trump promised to get tough on executives who outsource American jobs. He is now holding up the news that the home heating and air-conditioning manufacturer Carrier will keep around 800 jobs in my home state of Indiana as proof that his approach works. Yet the deal will cost taxpayers $7m, and still allow Carrier to outsource 1,300 jobs to Mexico. This is not a sound industrial or economic policy, and it will do nothing to help raise wages or create good jobs across the country. It is an open invitation for a shakedown of the government by corporate executives seeking handouts.

Similarly, the increase in infrastructure spending is likely to be accomplished through tax credits, which will help hedge funds, but not America’s balance sheet: such programmes’ long track record shows that they deliver little value for money. The cost to the public will be especially high in an era when the government can borrow at near-zero interest rates. If these private-public partnerships are like those elsewhere, the government will assume the risks, and the hedge funds will assume the profits.

The debate just eight years ago about “shovel-ready” infrastructure seems to be a distant memory. If Trump chooses shovel-ready projects, the long-term impact on productivity will be minimal; if he chooses real infrastructure, the short-term impact on economic growth will be minimal. And back-loaded stimulus has its own problems, unless it is managed extremely carefully.

If Trump’s pick for US treasury secretary, the Goldman Sachs and hedge fund veteran Steven Mnuchin, is like others from his industry, the expertise he will bring to the job will be in tax avoidance, not constructing a well-designed tax system .... [T]ax reform was inevitable, and was likely to be undertaken by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and his staff – giving the rich the less progressive, more capital-friendly tax system that Republicans have long sought. With the abolition of the estate tax, the Republicans would finally realise their long-held ambition of creating a dynastic plutocracy – a far cry from the “equality of opportunity” maxim the party once trumpeted.

Rex Tillerson sat on the board of a Russian oil company based out of the Bahamas. Click here for the story in the Guardian, a UK newspaper.

Tillerson – the chief executive of ExxonMobil – became a director of the oil company’s Russian subsidiary, Exxon Neftegas, in 1998. His name – RW Tillerson – appears next to other officers who are based at Houston, Texas; Moscow; and Sakhalin, in Russia’s far east.

This is a great video lecture from Richard D. Wolff, a very intelligent, infamous professor of economics at University of Massachusetts from 1973 to 2008. He is called a "socialist" economist, but I think he is more of a historian than anything else. He just happens to be anti-militarist, and so I think that's why he gets this label -- because he thinks the economy should not be run dominated by military spending. Regardless of your perspective, his intelligence transcends ideological bounds because he truly understands economics and history.

Click here for the Greg Palast report on how Rethuglicans sabotage democracy with a straight face.

How come Obama said nothing about this during his big Friday speech? Not one word from our black president. Not one single word.

Who do you really work for Mr. Barack Obama?

Jill Stein has done the nation a tremendous public service. Why the fuck is Hilary and Obama absent on this issue? Because they are complicit in the corporate fascist takeover. That's why.

How else can you explain saying nothing about the theft of votes by massive obstruction and removal from the voter rolls? Robert Kennedy spent 90% of his time as Attorney General during his brother's presidency taking Jim Crow to court and viciously standing up for voting rights in our country. What the fuck has Obama done but try to focus the country on Russian hacking, saying absolutely nothing about what really happened?

Seven million and more voters got their names removed from the voter rolls and had to vote on provisional ballots that never got counted. The media wants you to believe that Democrats did not show up this election cycle. The media wants you to believe that working class democrats voted with Trump in this election cycle. Bullshit. They just got taken off from the registration rolls and didn't have their votes counted. It wasn't Russian hacking schemes. It was treasonous Rethuglican operations.

Click here