808 Trump wave will become a Tsunami. Rigged Convention will lead to Revolt

Trump wave will become a Tsunami. Rigged Convention will lead to Revolt

Newsletter published on 15 March 2016

(1) Downward mobility behind Trump vote. The voters aren’t crazy; the
GOP elite are crazy
(2) Republican voters show contempt when GOP elite tells them to reject
Trump
(3) GOP hawks consider voting for Hillary
(4) NYT editorial calls Trump "a shady, bombastic liar", intolerant and
divisive
(5) Democrat Superdelegates overrule Colorado voters
(6) Wall St condemns Trump plan to tax Hedge Fund speculators
(7) GOP chiefs will steal the Nomination from Trump, by rigging the
Convention - Bloomberg
(8) Trump wave will become a Tsunami. Rigged Convention will lead to Revolt

(1) Downward mobility behind Trump vote. The voters aren’t crazy; the
GOP elite are crazy

http://atimes.com/2016/03/trump-triumphed-due-to-downward-mobility/

  Trump triumphed due to downward mobility

By David P. Goldman on March 1, 2016

It’s still a horse race, but only just: Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday
victories in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas and
Massachusetts outweigh the Ted Cruz victory in his home state of Texas
and neighboring Oklahoma. The Republican Establishment will not close
ranks around Cruz as the last candidate capable of beating Trump. Marco
Rubio’s consolation price was the Minnesota caucuses with 37% of the vote,

For the past six months my Republican friends and I have watched Donald
Trump’s ascendancy and asked ourselves whether the voters had gone
crazy. The voters aren’t crazy. We in the Republican elite were crazy:
we thought we could allow the American economy to remain a rigged game
indefinitely. The voters think otherwise. That’s why Trump is winning.
That’s also why Bernie Sanders, the least likely presidential candidate
in living memory, gave Hillary Clinton a run for her money. If you don’t
give people capitalism, the late Jude Wanniski used to say, they’ll take
socialism.

Americans are  shrewd. You can’t spit on them and tell them it’s
raining. They know the game is rigged against them. They know it’s
rigged the same way that they know a lottery is rigged: There aren’t any
winners. They know that they are downwardly mobile because they aren’t
upwardly mobile. Americans don’t mind playing against bad odds–they play
the lottery all the time–but they think that they are playing against
zero odds. Ordinary Americans had an outside chance to get rich until
2008. Now they have no chance at all.

Upward mobility is America’s gauge of well-being. It’s not the decline
of median family income that gets under Americans’ skin, but the
perception that the elites have pulled the ladder up behind them. During
the quarter-century after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, it was only a
slight exaggeration to say that someone in every family got rich. They
bought a cable television franchise, started a website, got some stock
in a high-flying tech company, flipped real estate, or ran a small
business that became a big business. Inequality didn’t bother Americans
as long as they had a chance at a winning ticket–not necessarily a fair
chance, but at least the kind of chance that paid off occasionally for
ordinary people. As long they could see that people like them were
becoming rich, they kept playing the game.

Poor people buy overpriced lottery tickets and rich people buy
overpriced insurance for the same reason: the poor overpay for the
chance to become rich, and the rich overpay to make sure they won’t
become poor. As the distinguished Canadian economists Reuven and
Gabriele Brenner argue, social mobility is the secret of economic
behavior. People don’t count the pennies in their pay packet: the poor
look for a path to middle class security, and the affluent insure
themselves against the slippery slope back to poverty.

You can’t get rich any more in America. The dot.com bubble was a
delusion, to be sure, but so many people made big money that even Mike
Doonesbury briefly became a dot.com millionaire in the eponymous
cartoon. Flipping houses with next-to-nothing down during the subprime
bubble years of the George W. Bush administration enriched millions of
households. Bubbles they were, but they were democratic bubbles. The
markets provided leverage for the masses. The stock market bought
companies run by 20-year olds in cutoff jeans and flip-flops, and the
mortgage market financed housewives as if they were real-estate
magnates. Capital, also known as other people’s money, is what makes
capitalism capitalism. Nobody gets rich on IRA payroll deductions. The
housewife flipping condos in Florida, to be sure, abused other people’s
money as surely as the subprime structurers. That’s not what matters. It
was an equal-opportunity scam.

In 2008, the door shut on middle-class aspirations with a giant crash.

More businesses closed than opened during the post-2008 "recovery" than
opened, as I noted in a February 29 essay.

And businesses with fewer than 50 employees accounted for only 1 in 6
jobs created since 2005. In the three decades preceding the 2008 crash,
by contrast, In other words, startups created 2.9 million jobs a year
while established firms lost 1.5 million jobs a year.

Asset prices recovered, but there was no way that ordinary folk could
get in on the gravy train. Private equity firms raised billions to buy
foreclosed homes and rent them to people who used to own their own homes
at much higher total cost. The national homeownership rate has fallen
from 69% to 64% since the crisis, and rents are rising at 4% a year,
much faster than incomes.

Americans tolerate a wealthy elite if and only if they can get in on the
action, too. The cartelized, corrupted, closed wealth-creating mechanism
of the past eight years shuts them out. The Republican base is out for
blood. They want revenge on the elites that have shut them out of wealth
creation. Pace Peggy Noonan, it has nothing to do with "protected" vs.
"unprotected." It’s about wannabe’s vs. be’s. And pace Bret Stephens, it
has nothing to do with what Stephens calls "a new political wave
sweeping the globe—leaders coming to power through democratic means
while avowing illiberal ends" including Hungary’s Viktor Orban and
Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Americans have different demands than
Turks and Magyars.

I’ve made no secret of my preference for Ted Cruz, and still hope that
he can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. He fielded an intelligent
and disciplined campaign strategy which hasn’t worked out. Cruz counted
on evangelical Protestants to buoy him South Carolina, but most
evangelicals voted for Trump instead. The evangelicals always have had a
split personality, balancing a passion for social conservatism with the
boosterism of the prosperity gospel. Evidently the evangelicals aren’t
voting on conservative principles, as Cruz exhorted them to do.

Trump leapfrogged Cruz on immigration and security, offering
sound-bites–build a wall on the Mexican border and stop Muslims from
entering the country–that drowned out Cruz’ more nuanced positions. Cruz
took stands against the Republican Establishment; Trump gave them a
nonstop insult-comedy routine.

Downward mobility is the decisive issue in the 2016 elections. Unless
Trump’s rivals can capture the imagination of the electorate with a
vision of renewed upward mobility, Trump will take the nomination. A
Clinton-Trump general election would be the dirtiest, nastiest,
sleaziest and most divisive since the Civil War. In that case, God help
the United States of America.

(2) Republican voters show contempt when GOP elite tells them to reject
Trump

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/05/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-party.html

Rank and File Republicans Tell Party Elites: We’re Sticking With Donald
Trump

 From Michigan to Louisiana to California on Friday, rank-and-file
Republicans expressed mystification, dismissal and contempt regarding
the instructions that their party’s most high-profile leaders were
urgently handing down to them: Reject and defeat Donald J. Trump.

Their angry reactions, in the 24 hours since Mitt Romney and John McCain
urged millions of voters to cooperate in a grand strategy to undermine
Mr. Trump’s candidacy, have captured the seemingly inexorable force of a
movement that still puzzles the Republican elite and now threatens to
unravel the party they hold dear.

In interviews, even lifelong Republicans who cast a ballot for Mr.
Romney four years ago rebelled against his message and plan. "I
personally am disgusted by it — I think it’s disgraceful," said Lola
Butler, 71, a retiree from Mandeville, La., who voted for Mr. Romney in
2012. "You’re telling me who to vote for and who not to vote for? Please."

"There’s nothing short of Trump shooting my daughter in the street and
my grandchildren — there is nothing and nobody that’s going to dissuade
me from voting for Trump," Ms. Butler said.

A fellow Louisiana Republican, Mindy Nettles, 33, accused the party of
"using Romney as a puppet" to protect itself from Mr. Trump because its
leaders could not control him. "He has a mind of his own," she said. "He
can think."

The furious campaign now underway to stop Mr. Trump and the equally
forceful rebellion against it captured the essence of the party’s
breakdown over the past several weeks: Its most prominent guardians,
misunderstanding their own voters, antagonize them as they try to reason
with them, driving them even more energetically to Mr. Trump’s side.

As Mr. Romney amplified his pleas on Friday, Mr. Trump snubbed a major
meeting of Republican activists and leaders after rumblings that
protesters were prepared to demonstrate against him there, in the latest
sign of Mr. Trump’s break from the apparatus of the party whose
nomination he is marching toward.Continue reading the main story

As polls showed Mr. Trump likely to capture the Louisiana primary on
Saturday, the biggest prize among states holding contests this weekend,
the party establishment in Washington seemed seized by anxiety and
despair. At the Conservative Political Action Conference, a long-running
gathering of traditional conservatives, attendees feared that they were
witnessing an event that has not occurred in more than a century: the
breaking apart of a major American political party.

They spoke ruefully of "fidelity" lost and "values" forgone. They
conceded a strange new feeling of powerlessness in the face of Mr.
Trump’s ascendance. And they mourned for a 162-year-old party that is
starting to seem unrecognizable to them.

Robert Walker, a former Pennsylvania congressman, lamented that the
nomination of Mr. Trump, with his profane style and ideological
flexibility, "would rebrand the party in ways that would take us a long
time to recover from."

Rick Santorum, a former Republican presidential candidate, warned of the
"Republican Party potentially being torn up," and Senator Ben Sasse of
Nebraska groused about what would "actually make America great again."
(It was not Mr. Trump.)

(3) GOP hawks consider voting for Hillary

From: John Cameron <blackheathbooks@internode.on.net> Subject: U.S
PRESIDENCY. Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2016 13:05:47 +1100

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/trump-clinton-neoconservatives-220151

GOP hawks declare war on Trump

Prominent Republican hawks are debating whether to hold their noses and
vote for Clinton instead.

By Michael Crowley

03/02/16 05:55 PM EST

Updated 03/03/16 03:10 PM EST

Donald Trump calls the Iraq War a lie-fueled fiasco, admires Vladimir
Putin and says he would be a "neutral" arbiter between Israel and the
Palestinians. When it comes to America’s global role he asks, "Why are
we always at the forefront of everything?"

Even more than his economic positions, Trump's foreign policy views
challenge GOP orthodoxy in fundamental ways. But while parts of the
party establishment are resigning themselves or even backing Trump's
runaway train, one group is bitterly digging in against him: the hawkish
foreign policy elites, including many of those known as neoconservatives.

In interviews with POLITICO, leading GOP foreign-policy hands — many of
whom promoted the Iraq War, detest Putin and consider Israel's security
non-negotiable — said Trump would be a disaster for U.S. foreign policy
and vowed never to support him. So deep is their revulsion that several
even say they could vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump in November.

"Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin," said Eliot Cohen, a
former top State Department official under George W. Bush and a
strategic theorist who argues for a muscular U.S. role abroad. Trump's
election would be "an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy,"
Cohen said, adding that "he has already damaged it considerably."

Cohen, an Iraq war backer who is often called a neoconservative but said
he does not identify himself that way, said he would "strongly prefer a
third party candidate" to Trump, but added: "Probably if absolutely no
alternative: Hillary."

In a March 1 interview with Vox, Max Boot, a military historian at the
Council on Foreign Relations who backed the Iraq War and often advocates
a hawkish foreign policy, said that he, too, would vote for Clinton over
Trump. "I'm literally losing sleep over Donald Trump," he said. "She
would be vastly preferable to Trump."

Cohen helped to organize an open letter signed by several dozen GOP
foreign policy insiders — many of whom are not considered neocons — that
was published Wednesday night by War on the Rocks, a defense and foreign
policy website . "[W]e are unable to support a Party ticket with Mr.
Trump at its head," the letter declared. It cited everything from
Trump’s "admiration for foreign dictators" to his "inexcusable" support
for "the expansive use of torture."

The letter was signed by dozens of Republican foreign policy experts,
including Boot; Peter Feaver, a former senior national security aide in
George W. Bush's White House; Robert Zoellick, a former deputy to
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; and Dov Zakheim, a former Bush
Pentagon official; and Kori Schake, a fellow at Stanford University's
Hoover Institution and a former Bush State Department official.

Several other neocons said they find themselves in an impossible
position, constitutionally incapable of voting for Clinton but repelled
by a Republican whose foreign policy views they consider somewhere
between nonexistent and dangerous — and disconnected from their views
about American power and values abroad.

"1972 was the first time I was old enough to vote for president, and I
did not vote. Couldn't vote for McGovern for foreign policy reasons, nor
for Nixon because of Watergate," said Elliott Abrams, a former national
security council aide to George W. Bush who specializes in democracy and
the Middle East. "I may be in the same boat in 2016, unable to vote for
Trump or Clinton."

Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, something of a dean of Washington
neoconservatives, said he would seek out a third option before choosing
between Trump and Clinton.

"If it's Trump-Clinton, I'd work with others to recruit a strong
conservative third party candidate, and do my best to help him win
(which by the way would be more possible than people think, especially
when people — finally — realize Trump shouldn't be president and Hillary
is indicted)," Kristol wrote in an email.

Kristol and Abrams have advised Florida senator Marco Rubio, the
preferred choice of several neoconservatives, who admire his call for
"moral clarity" in foreign policy and strong emphasis on human rights
and democracy.

Alarm brewing for months in GOP foreign policy circles burst into public
view last week, when Robert Kagan, a key backer of the Iraq War and
American global might, wrote in the Washington Post that a Trump
nomination would force him to cross party lines.

"The only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton," Kagan warned.
"The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be."

In an interview, Kagan said his opposition to Trump "has nothing to do
with foreign policy."

From: "Come Carpentier comecarpentier@gmail.com [shamireaders]"  Date:
Sun, 13 Mar 2016 16:23:22 +0530

Has the worm turned in the US? Obama seems to have turned against the
traditional conservative Sunni US allies and the Israelis who share
essential interests with the Gulf monarchies. Unsurprisingly, the Saudis
and Israelis are livid. Interestingly Trump may be closer to Obama in
his foreign policy views than Hillary Clinton who harks back to G W Bush
and Cheney

(4) NYT editorial calls Trump "a shady, bombastic liar", intolerant and
divisive

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/opinion/the-party-of-trump-and-the-path-forward-for-democrats.html

The Party of Trump, and the Path Forward for Democrats

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

MARCH 1, 2016

The strength of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the Super Tuesday
primary contests, evident before the first votes were cast, brings the
2016 presidential race to a point of reckoning. Not enough delegates
were at stake to give either candidate a mathematical lock on a
nomination, but voters can see the shape of the choice facing them in
the general election.

The Republicans seem to be reeling, unable or unwilling to comprehend
that a shady, bombastic liar is hardening the image of their party as a
symbol of intolerance and division.

Last summer, as Mr. Trump began to rise in the polls, party leaders took
umbrage at the idea that they’d have to do something to keep the
nomination from the likes of him. They stood aside and said, let voters
decide. Now voters are deciding. They are leaning, in unbelievable
numbers, toward a man whose quest for the presidency revolves around
targeting religious and racial minorities and people with disabilities,
who flirts with white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, who ridicules
and slanders those who disagree with him.

His opponents, meanwhile, have rushed to adopt his anger-filled message.
It’s small wonder that Republican leaders don’t seem to know quite what
to say.

"If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there can
be no evasion and no games," House Speaker Paul Ryan said on Tuesday,
after months of such games. He sounded naïvely unaware of the darker
elements within the Republican Party, present for decades, and now
holding sway: "This party does not prey on people’s prejudices. We
appeal to their highest ideals. This is the party of Lincoln."

The Republican Party is taking a big step toward becoming the party of
Trump. Those who could challenge Mr. Trump — Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio —
are not only to the right of Mr. Trump on many issues, but are embracing
the same game of exclusion, bigotry and character assassination. That
Mr. Rubio would make double entendres about the size of Mr. Trump’s
hands and talk about Mr. Trump wetting his pants shows how much his
influence has permeated this race and how willingly his rivals are
copying his tactics.

(5) Democrat Superdelegates overrule Colorado voters

http://mycatbirdseat.com/2016/03/colorado-delegates-split-evenly-after-bernie-sanders-defeats-hillary-clinton/

Colorado delegates split evenly after Bernie Sanders defeats Hillary Clinton

Along with Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Vermont, Sanders won Colorado on
Super Tuesday.

By My Catbird Seat

Mar 7, 2016

Winning a Super Tuesday state by 19 points seems like it would matter,
but Sen. Bernie Sanders’ victory in Colorado didn’t earn him more
delegates than Hillary Clinton. In fact, she may end up with an even
greater amount, despite a big loss at the polls.

Of the 78 delegates up for grabs in Colorado, Sanders won 38. And so did
Clinton. How can that be? It’s not that 59 to 40 percent is counted as a
tie in The Centennial State, but rather, has something to do with
something called a superdelegate.

Only 66 of the 78 state delegates in Colorado are actually delegates in
the most specific sense. The other 12 are superdelegates, elected
Democratic Party officials who are not bound by a state’s poll or
election results. So, after the 66 was divvied up proportionally
according to the state party’s caucus rules, 38 to Sanders and 28 to
Clinton, the superdelegates were free to choose which candidate to support.

Ten of Colorado’s superdelegates chose Clinton, while two remain
uncommitted, hence the 38 to 38 current share of the state’s delegates
between the two presidential candidates.

That is bad news for the Sanders supporters in Colorado who helped the
democratic socialist win in nearly 80 percent of the state’s 64 counties
and turn out more Democratic voters than even those who voted in the
2008 primary that featured the rising political rock star of the day,
then-Senator Barack Obama.

Things could still possibly get worse for those "feeling the Bern" in
Colorado. Distribution of the state’s 66 delegates could still change,
because as they’re selected at party meetings in the run-up to the state
party convention in April, the delegates at county conventions are
unbound, according to the Denver Post. Only at the state party
convention will the delegate count be finalized.

The 12 superdelegates are under pressure to move to Sanders out of
respect for the caucus voting results from Super Tuesday, but there’s no
sign of them doing so.

"I appreciate the intense attraction that Senator Sanders has for many,
but my support for Secretary Clinton has never wavered," Colorado Gov.
John Hickenlooper, who is also a superdelegate, told the Denver Post on
Wednesday through a spokesperson. [...]

(6) Wall St condemns Trump plan to tax Hedge Fund speculators

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-markets-idUSMTZSAPEC31DOUFF1

Wall Street's big short: President Donald J. Trump

NEW YORK | By Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss and David Randall

Add the juggernaut that is Donald J. Trump to the list of what-ifs that
is worrying Wall Street.

A growing realization that the unpredictable New York real estate
developer is in a position to win the Republican nomination and then
battle Hillary Clinton for the White House in November's election has
caused some investors to sell U.S. stocks. They fear having such a
wild-card president could trigger trade wars, hurt the economy and add a
lot of market volatility.

"As the market rarely feasts on lack of predictability - Trump
represents a nightmare for investors this year," said hedge fund manager
Douglas Kass of Seabreeze Partners Management Inc, who said last week
that he was adding to his existing short bet on the U.S. stock market in
part because of Trump's increasingly strong position in the race.

Trump's statements on business and Wall Street don't neatly fit into one
ideological worldview, but if anything, they are seen as isolationist in
a globally connected world. He can also suddenly pick on businesses over
various issues, such as his call for a boycott of Apple Inc’s (AAPL.O)
products after the tech giant refused to help the FBI unlock the iPhone
used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.

     "The election this year is the height of uncertainty," said Phil
Orlando, a senior portfolio manager and chief equity strategist at
Federated Investors in New York, which manages $351 billion. He said
political concerns - personified by Trump's emergence as a frontrunner -
are one of the main reasons why he began reducing equity exposure in
mid-January.

There are, of course, plenty of other factors having an impact on U.S.
financial markets. U.S. stocks rallied on Tuesday after strong U.S.
factory and construction data suggested the economy was regaining
momentum. That was even as investors contemplated expectations that
Trump would do very well in 11 states holding Republican primary or
caucus elections on this Super Tuesday.

LITTLE POLICY SUBSTANCE

     Trump’s rhetoric mixes populist criticism of immigration policy,
Wall Street behavior, and other countries' trade policies, while also
citing support for business-friendly efforts such as lower taxation. The
lack of detail from Trump about his policies and how he would implement
them is a particular worry for investors.

     "Trump has been light on policy substance so it’s very difficult
for the markets to handicap," said Dave Lafferty, chief market
strategist at Natixis Global Asset Management, which manages $870.3
billion in assets. He expects market volatility to rise if Trump extends
his lead in Tuesday’s elections.

     Some investors are particularly concerned about Trump's nationalist
rhetoric, saying it is potentially destructive to a global economy that
is already struggling. If it reduces trade flows then it could also
hamper U.S. and global growth and hurt U.S. company profits.

The real estate investor proposes labeling China a currency manipulator
and ending what he calls China's illegal export subsidies and theft of
U.S. intellectual property. He also wants to penalize companies who move
jobs from the U.S. to Mexico by hitting them with high tariffs if they
want to export back to the U.S., as well as build a wall at the Mexican
border to prevent the flow of illegal immigrants.

"In areas of trade policy and foreign affairs lies the greatest
uncertainty," Kass said. "Trump is not likely to be market-friendly in
any of these policy areas."

In response, Trump’s spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in an email to Reuters
that the same crowd criticizing the Republican Party's top candidate had
been responsible for causing the last worldwide recession and economic
meltdown in 2007-2008.

     "They have zero credibility," said Hicks. "Mr. Trump will restore
confidence to the global markets by ending runaway spending and
borrowing, restoring trade balance and fairness, and bringing wealth to
America's middle class."

CARRIED INTEREST

Investors had, for some time, been concerned about the strength of
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' insurgent campaign for the Democratic
nomination against former Secretary of State Clinton, given he declares
himself to be a democratic socialist and has said Wall Street's business
model is fraudulent. With recent losses to Clinton in Democratic
contests in South Carolina and Nevada, he is now seen as less likely to
win the nomination.

Trump's plans include ideas that traditionally come from Republican
candidates, such as lowering the corporate tax rate, simplifying the tax
code, and as his web site puts it, cutting the deficit through
"eliminating waste, fraud and abuse" and "growing the economy to
increase tax revenues."

     "I think markets will like Trump on the taxes issue since he favors
lower rates and a permanent change in repatriation rules," said David
Kotok, chairman and chief investment officer at Cumberland Advisors in
Sarasota, Florida, which manages $2 billion in assets.

Still, financial advisers say that Trump's plans to do away with the
so-called carried interest tax loophole - which gives hedge fund and
private equity managers preferential tax treatment on much of their
income - would prompt more selling if he begins to climb in national
polls against Clinton.

     Jeffrey Gundlach, the co-founder and CEO of bond investing and
trading powerhouse DoubleLine Capital, said that Trump has a history of
being "comfortable with a lot of debt and leverage," and that won't
impede him from spending heavily. He said he believes Trump’s pledge to
spend heavily on the military makes defense stocks a good investment play.

     Others see such spendthrift tendencies more darkly.

     David Ader, chief government bond strategist at CRT Capital Group
in Stamford, Connecticut, said Trump's history raises questions about
his ability to run an organization as unwieldy and complex as the
government. The businessman has in the past filed for Chapter 11
bankruptcy protection for the Trump Taj Mahal casino and Trump Plaza Hotel.

Ader says the uncertainty would cause investors to flock to safe-haven
U.S. Treasuries should Trump take office.

"It's one thing to run casinos that have gone bankrupt, it's another to
run a country and its foreign policy," he said.

     Whether he would enjoy the support of the Senate and House of
Representatives is a critical question, and will determine how many of
his policy pronouncements can be turned into legislation. Congress could
act as a brake if Trump gets the presidency and behaves as wildly as
Trump the candidate. He clearly does not have the full support of a
number of key Republican senators and would be unlikely to get much
Democratic support for many measures.

     Todd Morgan, senior managing partner at wealth management firm Bel
Air Investments Advisors in Los Angeles, said that the increasing
likelihood that Trump will be the Republican nominee is one reason why
he has raised cash in some client portfolios over the past four months.
He would likely sell more if it looks like Trump will win the general
election, he said.

     "It's like a scale and you keep dropping more weights on the
balance everyday, and the political uncertainty is becoming a bigger and
bigger weight," he said.

     For more on the 2016 presidential race, see the Reuters blog,
"Tales from the Trail" (here).

(Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss and David Randall, with
additional reporting by Jennifer Ablan.; Editing by David Gaffen, Linda
Stern and Martin Howell)

This article was funded in part by SAP. It was independently created by
the Reuters editorial staff. SAP had no editorial involvement in its
creation or production.

(7) GOP chiefs will steal the Nomination from Trump, by rigging the
Convention - Bloomberg

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-14/heres-how-establishment-will-steal-gop-nomination-trump

Here's How The Establishment Will Steal The GOP Nomination From Trump

Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/14/2016 14:01 -0400

The political establishment in America is terrified.

Donald Trump gets closer to securing the GOP nomination with each
passing month and his rivals on both sides of the aisle are in disbelief.

Worse - or "better" if you enjoy entertainment - Trump has seemingly
given up any attempt to be anything other than... well... than Donald
Trump. He recently offered to pay the legal fees of a supporter who
punched a protester, shouted almost maniacally about "Bernie guys" at a
recent rally, and frankly seems to have gone punchdrunk with his
newfound political clout.

That’s not necessarily a criticism. Heaven knows it’s funny and
obviously there’s something highly satisfying about watching the
establishment squirm.

All the same, no one - not even Trump’s staunchest supporters - really
know what to expect from a Trump presidency. And virtually no Washington
veterans want to find out. In fact, as we reported last week, a group of
GOP and tech execs recently made stopping Trump the topic of the
American Enterprise Institute's annual World Forum, a secretive affair
held on Sea Island, Georgia.

And although everyone now jokes about just how unstoppable the Trump
"juggernaut" has become, the establishment isn’t called "the
establishment," for nothing. Trump may have proven remarkably adept at
whipping certain sectors of the electorate into a veritable frenzy, but
he himself will tell you that he’s no politician. In fact, he prides
himself on being "outside the political fold," so to speak.

He may know quite a few tricks in the boardroom, but he doesn’t know all
of the tricks of the political trade, and as Bloomberg outlines below,
he could still have the nomination "stolen" from him, if the party pulls
out all of the stops.

Below, find excerpts from "How To Steal A Nomination From Donald Trump".

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2016-03-14/how-to-steal-a-nomination-from-donald-trump

The Fix Is In

How to Steal a Nomination From Donald Trump

Mar 14, 2016 7:00 PM DDUT

[...] All three of Trump’s Republican opponents are now convinced (even
if some are loath to concede it publicly) that the current front-runner
is the only candidate in the field who still has the chance to win the
1,237 delegates that would ensure his nomination in Cleveland. But if
Trump is unable in the remaining primaries and caucuses to line up the
necessary delegates, the convention will be deadlocked on its first
ballot and then have to vote again—and possibly again and again—until a
majority emerges.

That could offer mainstream conservatives and party regulars the opening
they would need to take the nomination from a candidate who almost
certainly will have accumulated more delegates and possibly millions
more popular votes than his rivals. Of the other candidates, only Ted
Cruz is focused on trying to finish ahead of Trump in the delegate
count, even if neither gets the majority; Marco Rubio and John Kasich
are resigned to the reality that they will be playing from behind.

[...] Though the real action will take place on the convention floor in
June, the machinations to take the nomination from Trump are already
fully in progress. If the primary season thus far can be understood as a
triumph for the candidate who defies the norms of politics, the shadow
campaign now underway will reflect the primacy of rules, including some
that can be wantonly rewritten to serve the interests of those in
charge. While there’s not a single Republican establishment with the
power to dictate outcomes, there are many interlocking ones dispersed
among the states. The key to winning at a contested convention is to get
them working in concert, and the age-old practices of favor-trading and
influence-peddling will become the new norms. Here’s what non-Trump
forces are doing—and will find themselves soon scheming to do—to pull
off one of the biggest, perfectly legal, heists in American memory.

MARCH

The Hunt for Double Agents

[...] In many states, primaries and caucuses are just the most public
face-off in a multi-step process to select the individual delegates who
will choose the party’s nominee. Only a small share of the 2,472 total
convention delegates are free to pick the candidate of their choice,
regardless of the election’s outcome, on the first ballot, while about
three-quarters of them are gradually freed to do so on subsequent votes.
That means there is a small pool of so-called unbound delegates who are
pure free agents, but a much larger number who can be recruited
throughout the spring as double agents—delegates who arrive in Cleveland
pledged to Trump, all the while working in cahoots with one of his
opponents and confessing their true allegiances once it is safe to do so.

APRIL

[...] Party bosses stand ready to gut some of Trump’s greatest
primary-season successes. He won every one of South Carolina’s 50
delegates, by finishing first statewide and in each congressional
district, but Trump is powerless to fill that slate with his own people.
  "Whoever is chosen for national delegate will have allegiance to the
party establishment, and the party establishment is never going to be
fond of Donald Trump," says a South Carolina Republican insider.

MAY

The Art of the Deal

[...] There is nothing in the RNC’s rules that prohibits delegates from
cutting a deal for their votes, and lawyers say it is unlikely that
federal anti-corruption laws would apply to convention horse-trading.
(It is not clear that even explicitly selling one’s vote for cash would
be illegal.)

[...] Every delegate and alternate is already paying for individual
travel costs to get to Cleveland. Most state parties tell delegates to
expect to spend $3,000 out of pocket on airfare, hotel and meals, and
for some it could prove an unexpected hardship. (Delegates are assigned
hotels by state; some could end up paying for the La Quinta Inn, others
stuck with a bill from the Ritz-Carlton.) As blogger Chris Ladd has
noted, Trump’s slate in Illinois contains "a food service manager from a
juvenile detention center, a daycare worker from a Christian School, an
unemployed paralegal, a grocery store warehouse manager, one brave
advocate for urban chicken farming, a dog breeder, and a guy who runs a
bait shop." Could some of them be tempted to flip their votes if a
generous campaign, super-PAC, or individual donor picked up the costs of
their week in Cleveland?

JUNE

The Disqualifying Round

[...] If the primary calendar ends without any candidate emerging as its
presumptive nominee, all those responsibilities will remain with RNC
Chairman Reince Priebus. Thus far, Priebus has been docile toward Trump,
who early on made being treated equitably by the national party a
precondition for promising not to run as an independent in the general
election. But if Trump doesn’t finish with a clear majority of
delegates, Priebus will face immense pressure from party officials and
donors to undermine him. ==

*  *  *

And there’s much, more in the full article at Bloomberg including how
the party could take the nomination at the convention in a series of
procedural maneuvers.

But perhaps Ted Cruz put it best when he said the following in Maine:
"If the Washington deal-makers try to steal the nomination from the
people, I think it would be a disaster. It would cause a revolt."

It sure would. And make no mistake, Trump would be more than happy to
lead it.

(8) Trump wave will become a Tsunami. Rigged Convention will lead to Revolt

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-13/much-more-just-trump

Much More Than Just Trump

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/13/2016 19:00 -0500

Authored by StraightLineLogic's Robert Gore via The Burning Platform blog,

[...] Elite sons and daughters have not been in the ranks of front line
military that have fought the elite’s disastrous wars. The top and
bottom of the service economy swell—lobbyists, political operatives,
debt merchants, Internet wizards, lawyers, bureaucrats, waiters,
bartenders, nurses, orderlies, sales clerks—while what used to be the
heart of the economy—manufacturing—shrinks. The bailouts from the last
financial crisis went to Wall Street, not the homeowners with underwater
mortgages facing foreclosure. Whose pockets were picked to fund those
bailouts? And whose pockets were picked to pay the higher insurance
premiums necessary to fund the Obamacare disaster?

It doesn’t take an Ivy League degree to know that the national debt, $19
trillion and counting, is a big, scary number, and that the unfunded
Social Security and medical care liabilities coming due are even bigger,
scarier numbers. It does, apparently, take an Ivy League degree to
believe that more debt is the answer to our economic problems, or that
microscopic or negative interest rates will do anything but fund
carry-trade speculators and screw those trying to fund their own
postponed retirements, or that the limping economy since the financial
crisis has "recovered." Idiotic blather fills the elite, mainstream
media, while much truth is suppressed and debate stifled in the name of
political correctness.

Not much has changed since Vietnam. The decent besieged are taking fire
from all sides, valiantly fighting their way through it, while preening,
posturing, spoiled idiots congratulate themselves for running a once
great country into the ground. It is a mark of the decent besieged’s
decency that they are turning to the ballot box, the politically correct
way to change a democratic government. The idiot class should be
grateful for their forbearance. Instead, it resorts to means fair and
foul to subvert them and maintain its power. Whether Trump does or does
not make it all the way to the White House, the wave he’s riding will
only grow stronger, tsunami-strength when the economy collapses and the
world descends into war. If the idiot class and its rabble subvert him,
a quote from John F. Kennedy, recently featured on SLL, will surely come
back to haunt them.

     Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent
revolution inevitable.