Diary (October 28, 2020)
Online diary of Karl Jones for Wednesday October 28, 2020.
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Diary
Terminate With Extreme Pride and Prejudice
Terminate With Extreme Pride and Prejudice
Tacoverse
The Tacoverse is a transdimensional corporation which functions as a pocket universe constructed entirely from tacos.
Donald Trump and Deutsche Bank
How this plodding, conservative bank from a country famous for diligence and thrift turned into the most infamous casino on Wall Street is the subject of David Enrich's excellent, deeply reported book Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction.
It started by recruiting Edson Mitchell, an American executive from Merrill, who believed Deutsche Bank's "stubborn Germanness was the main impediment to unleashing its full animal spirits." Mitchell set about building a global markets operation, not at the bank's Frankfurt headquarters but in London, where he could function more independently. He hired a staff of "bloodthirsty piranhas" from Wall Street who knew how to push boundaries, as Enrich's tale tells.
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Among them was Bill Broeksmit, a risk management genius who subsequently killed himself as regulators were moving in on the bank and whose death is the mystery Enrich uses to frame the story.
Mitchell died early in a plane crash, but the machinery he built kept chugging along. Enrich tells the story of its rise and fall in the careful style of a good newspaper reporter (he is an editor at The New York Times) but allows the complicated material to unfold like a good novel.
With the piranhas in charge, Deutsche Bank eventually became the biggest bank in the world, with 90,000 employees and some $2 trillion in assets — almost the size of the German economy, Enrich notes. Despite that, it was a clumsily managed place.
But the private banking division, which catered to the rich and famous, arranged the loan anyway — and then, when Trump stopped making payments, arranged another one.
- 'Dark Towers' Chases Scandal-Ridden Deutsche Bank's Mysterious Ties To Donald Trump @ NPR (18 February 2020)
Many of these militia groups have ties to the police. At the center of the right-wing network in the border states is Joe Arpaio, the fascist sheriff who set up a self-proclaimed “concentration camp” for immigrants along the border and was pardoned by Donald Trump in 2017 after being convicted of contempt of court for refusing to stop his department from racially profiling Latinos. Trump has called Arpaio a “patriot.” Arpaio has spoken at numerous campaign rallies for Trump and has been busy building support for Trump’s presidency across the region.
Arpaio has close ties to various right-wing groups, including the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers. The land in Wisconsin where the Wolverine Watchmen trained for their plot to kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was owned by a member of both the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers, while conspiracy leader Adam Fox was reportedly a leader of Michigan’s Three Percenters.
The Oath Keepers are closely connected to the fascist Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), which was founded by Arpaio and former Graham County, Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack (nonfiction), who is also a founding board member of the Oath Keepers (nonfiction).
In 2006 Mack ran for US Senate as a libertarian. In 2012 and 2018, Mack ran in and lost Republican primaries for congress in Texas and Arizona, respectively.
Mack is also a longtime member and leader in the National Rifle Association, and has been featured multiple times on Alex Jones (nonfiction)’ show Prison Planet. He also was a speaker at the far-right Red Pill Expo. Oath Keepers’ founder Stewart Rhodes was one of the speakers at the 2019 CSPOA conference.
The CSPOA signed a joint letter to sheriffs around the country as part of the Liberty Group Coalition, which is comprised of the Gun Owners of America, Oath Keepers, the John Birch Society, Tenth Amendment Center and other organizations. The letter was prompted by a proposed gun control bill by the Democrats, and was a page-long tirade centered around the Second Amendment being taken away by Americans’ “succumbing” to the temptation to “fundamentally change America into another socialistic regime.”