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It's News To M_A "Weekend Edition" - 7/18/09

M_A — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:40:13 GMT

Stories of note from the WakeTheFuckUp news desk....

Here's a glimpse of some of the features below the fold:

President Barack Obama addresses the 2009 NAACP Convention

Howard Dean on Health Care Reform

Boing Boing: The Making of a Media Empire

Working With Walter Cronkite

Neil Armstrong, 60 Minutes Interview (from 2007)

Blair Doroshwalther's 'The Fire This Time'

The Grapevine (fox) 7/17/09

It's past time to wake the fuck up!

M_A

Dems Take Card Check Voting Out of Employee Free Choice Act

fairleft — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:55:59 GMT

That was the critical feature of the bill. Here's the NY Times report, apologias for corporate Democrats and corporate power editorializing largely eliminated except for an example in the first sentence:

Democrats Drop Key Part of Bill to Assist Unions
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: July 16, 2009
A half-dozen senators friendly to labor [Arlen Specter is friendly to labor??!] have decided to drop a central provision of a bill that would have made it easier to organize workers.
The so-called card-check provision . . . would have required employers to recognize a union as soon as a majority of workers signed cards saying they wanted a union. Currently, employers can insist on a secret-ballot election, a higher hurdle for unions.
The abandonment of card check was another example of the power of [corporate] Democrats to constrain their party's [less Republican] legislative efforts. . . .
Labor unions have pushed aggressively to enact the bill - formally, the Employee Free Choice Act. They view it as essential to reverse labor's long decline. Just 7.6 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions, one-fifth the rate of a half-century ago. . . .
Union leaders argue that under current law, unionization elections are often unfair because, they say, employers have a huge opportunity to intimidate and pressure workers during the lengthy campaigns that precede the unionization vote.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07...
On this latest preemptive surrender, Bill Press (on his sort of Air American radio show) was whining this morning about the scaredy-cat Dems, "What's wrong with the Democrats?" and so on. Surely he doesn't believe that bullshit, he knows what's wrong, and it's not whimpiness. "The Democrats," as a caller soon said, "are the new Republicans, and the Republicans are just crazy."

Comments from over at HuffPost:

Spineless, unprincipled, greedy, useless, sell-outs. Card-check was crucial. I think ever one of these "public servants" should be sentenced to 6 mos. working for Wal-Mart or Lenscrafters or any other union-busting outfit.
They got theirs, what do they care?

Its been a very long time since the Democrats represented the working class. Now it is clear they never will. Its been a very long time since I voted for a Democrat. Now its clear I never will. Us union guys used to be the heart of the party. Now the party spits on us and takes bribes from the Chamber.

The workers were never going to "lose the right" to a secret vote there was going to be a choice. What this means is that companies will continue to intimidate workers and keep unions out of shops that obviously need to be unionized. The rich continue to live off of the flesh of the low wage, no benefit, worker.

So wait a minute here..... The PURPOSE of the Employee Free Choice Act was to make it easier for employees to organize a union at their workplace that doesn't already have a union....... So they removed the ONE portion of the bill which would have made it easier?????? Doesn't that make it the EmployER Free Choice Act now?????

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

It's News To M_A - 7/17/09

M_A — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:16:31 GMT

Stories of note from the WakeTheFuckUp news desk....

Here's a glimpse of some of the headlines featured below the fold:

Oil and Natives Don't Mix

Bernanke's Bad Teachers

WHAT IS IT WITH THOSE C STREET GUYS?

The Dreaded S Word

Bush's Hit Teams

Is Pakistan "on the brink"?

Liberty and Safety

Oil and Natives Don't Mix
by Greg Palast

There's an easy way to find oil. Go to some remote and gorgeous natural sanctuary, say Alaska or the Amazon, find some Indians, then drill down under them.

If the indigenous folk complain, well, just shoo-them away. Shoo-ing methods include: bulldozers, bullets, crooked politicians and fake land sales.

But be aware. Lately the Natives are shoo-ing back. Last week, indigenous Peruvians seized an oil pumping station, grabbed the nine policemen guarding it and, say reports, executed them. This followed the government's murder of more than a dozen rainforest residents who had protested the seizure of their property for oil drilling.

Again and again I see it in my line of work of investigating fraud. Here are a few pit-stops on the oily trail of tears:

In the 1980s, Charles Koch was found to have pilfered about $3 worth of crude from Stanlee Ann Mattingly's oil tank in Oklahoma. Here's the weird part. Koch was (and remains) the 14th richest man on the planet, worth about $14 billion. Stanlee Ann was a dirt-poor Osage Indian.

Stanlee Ann wasn't Koch's only victim. According to secret tape recordings of a former top executive of his company, Koch Industries, the billionaire demanded that oil tanker drivers secretly siphon a few bucks worth of oil from every tank attached to a stripper well on the Osage Reservation where Koch had a contract to retrieve crude.

Koch, according to the tape, would, "giggle" with joy over the records of the theft. Koch's own younger brother Bill ratted him out, complaining that, in effect, brothers Charles and David cheated him out of his fair share of the looting which totaled over three-quarters of a billion dollars from the Native lands.

The FBI filmed the siphoning with hidden cameras, but criminal charges were quashed after quiet objections from Republican senators.

Then there are the Chugach Natives of Alaska. The Port of Valdez, Alaska, is arguably one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on Earth, the only earthquake-safe ice-free port in Alaska that could load oil from the giant North Slope field. In 1969, Exxon and British Petroleum companies took the land from the Chugach paid them one dollar. I kid you not.

Wally Hickel, the former Governor of Alaska, dismissed my suggestion that the Chugach deserved a bit more respect (and cash) for their property. "Land ownership comes in two ways, Mr. Palast." explained the governor and pipeline magnate, "Purchase or conquest. The fact that your granddaddy chased a caribou across the land doesn't make it yours." The Chugach had lived there for 3,000 years.

No oil company would dream of digging on the Bush family properties in Midland, Texas, without paying a royalty. Or drilling near Malibu without the latest in environmental protections. But when Natives are on top of Exxon's or BP's glory hole, suddenly, the great defenders of private property rights turn quite Bolshevik: lands can be seized for The Public's Need for Oil.

Some Natives are "re-located" through legal flim-flam, some at gunpoint. The less lucky are left to wallow, literally, in the gunk left by the drilling process.

Take a look at the photo with this article at gregpalast.com, taken in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. It's from an investigation that I conducted for BBC TV, now in the film Palast Investigates (gregpalast.com/PalastInvestigates/). I'm holding up a stinking, black glop of crude oil residue pulled from an abandoned Chevron-Texaco waste pit. A pipe runs from the toxic pit right into the water supply of Cofan Indians.

Chief Emergildo Criollo told me how oil company executives helicoptered into his remote village and, speaking in Spanish - which the Cofan didn't understand - "purchased" drilling rights with trinkets and cheese. The Natives had never seen cheese. ("The cheese smelled funny, so we threw it in the jungle.")

After drilling began, Criollo's son went swimming in his usual watering hole, came up vomiting blood, and died.

I asked Chevron about the wave of poisonings and deaths. According to an independent report, 1,401 deaths, mostly of children, mostly from cancers, can be traced to Chevron's toxic dumping.

Chevron's lawyer told me, "And it's the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States? ... They have to prove that it is our crude," which, he noted with glee, "is absolutely impossible."

Big Oil treats indigenous blood like a cheap gasoline additive. That's why the Peruvians are up in arms. The Cofan of Ecuador, unlike their brothers in Peru, have taken no hostages. Rather, they have heavily armed themselves with lawyers.

But Chevron and its Big Oil brethren remain dismissive of the law. In June, Shell Oil, tried to get rid of a nasty PR problem in Nigeria by paying $15 million to the Ogoni people and the family of Ken Saro-Wiwa for the oil giant's alleged role in the killing of Wiwa and his associates, activists who had defended these Nigeria Delta people against drilling contamination. Shell pocketed $31 billion last year in profits and hopes the payoff will clear the way for a drilling partnership with Nigeria's government.

Congratulations, Shell. $15 million: For a license to kill and drill, that's a quite a bargain.

Bernanke's Bad Teachers
by Gerald Friedman

Addressing a conference honoring Milton Friedman on his 90th birthday in 2002, the future chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke, praised Friedman's 1963 book, written with Anna J. Schwartz, The Monetary History of the United States. Before Friedman and Schwartz, most economists saw the Great Depression of the 1930s as proof that capitalist economies do not tend towards full-employment equilibrium. But Friedman and Schwartz restored the prior orthodoxy by blaming the Great Depression on bad monetary policy by the Federal Reserve while exonerating American capitalism. The Great Depression was "the product of the nation's monetary mechanism gone wrong."

It is significant that Friedman and Schwartz never use the phrase "the Great Depression"; instead, they speak of "the Great Contraction" of the 1930s, addressing the reduction in the money supply while treating the fall in employment and output as a secondary matter, the consequence of bad government policy that caused "the Great Contraction." By flattering the prejudices of economists who want to believe in the natural stability of free markets, Friedman and Schwartz's story has become the accepted explanation of America's worst economic disaster.

Bernanke, for one, confesses that he was inspired by their work; "hooked" in graduate school, "I have been a student of monetary economics and economic history ever since." Pushing on an open door, Friedman and Schwartz persuaded most orthodox economists, and that part of the political elite that listens to economists, that the economic collapse that began in 1929 was an accident that would have been avoided by reliance on free markets and competent Federal Reserve monetary policy.

Bernanke closed his 2002 remarks with a promise. "Let me end my talk," he said, "by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."

Bernanke had five years to ponder this promise before he faced a worthy challenge; and then he acted with the vigor of a Friedman/Schwartz acolyte. When this decade's housing bubble began to deflate in early 2007, major financial firms like New Century Finan-cial and Bear Stearns reported major losses, and confidence in the U.S. financial system began to collapse as swiftly as in 1929-33. In early August, the rising tide reached tsunami dimensions when the International Monetary Fund warned of a trillion dollars in bank losses from bad mortgages. This was Bernanke's moment. Channeling Friedman and Schwartz, careful to avoid the mistakes of 1929-33, the Federal Reserve moved quickly in early August 2007 to provide liquidity to financial markets. It acted again on August 17 by cutting mortgage rates. More cuts came on September 18, on October 31, and on December 11. Then, on December 12, the Fed announced the creation of a new facility formed with the Europeans (Term Auction Facility, or TAF) to provide $24 billion in additional liquidity to financial markets. After still more interest rate cuts in January 2008, a new special lending facility, with $100 billion, was established on March 2, along with another $75 billion for the TAF. Then, on March 11, another new facility was created, the Term Securities Lending Facility, with $200 billion. And all this was long before the bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, or the federal government's trillion-dollar Toxic Assets Relief Program (TARP).

If insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then the Federal Reserve went insane after the summer of 2007. Never before has it acted this aggressively in trying to get ahead of a financial market meltdown. Under Bernanke, the Fed has increased the money supply by over 16% in less than two years, nearly mirroring the 18% drop in the money supply in the same period after the stock market collapse of 1929. Had he lived, Milton Friedman would have been proud.

The one thing that has not changed between the crisis of 1929+ and the crisis of 2007+ has been the behavior of the real economy. Bernanke has avoided his predecessors' monetary policy mistakes, but he has not prevented a sharp economic downturn. Since 2007, the economy has lost nearly 6 million jobs, including over half a million in the last month. At 8.9%, the April 2009 unemployment rate unnervingly equals the 1930 figure. We have a long way to go before we hit Great Depression level unemployment; but we are only in the second year of this collapse. And monetary policy is not helping.

Here, then, we see the legacy of Friedman and Schwartz. Confident that capitalist free markets naturally move towards a full-employment equilibrium, Bernanke and his allies saw the need for only one type of government action: providing liquidity to the banks in order to strengthen confidence in the financial markets. Guided by Friedman and Schwartz, Bernanke has provided nearly unlimited aid to the Wall Street bankers and financiers responsible for our current economic collapse. And he has starved the real economy-businesses, workers, and homeowners-to avoid interfering in free markets.

Bernanke has conducted an economic policy as cruel as it has been ineffective. But the blame here goes beyond Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz. It lies squarely on the economics profession.

WHAT IS IT WITH THOSE C STREET GUYS?
by Steve Benen

It seemed odd when Mississippi's Chip Pickering decided not to run for the Senate a few years ago, after Trent Lott's departure. This Roll Call report suggests there was an explanation we weren't aware of.

The wife of former Rep. Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) has filed a complaint in a Mississippi circuit court alleging that Pickering had an extramarital affair while serving in Congress and that his decision not to seek retiring Sen. Trent Lott's (R) seat followed an ultimatum from his mistress.

Leisha Pickering filed an alienation of affection complaint July 14 that alleges her estranged husband conducted an affair with Elizabeth Creekmore-Byrd of Jackson, Miss., while living in the C Street complex in Washington, D.C.

Chip Pickering filed for divorce from Leisha in 2008, but the divorce is not yet final. The couple has five children.

Leisha Pickering alleged in the court document that the Mississippi Republican's decision to leave the House at the end of the 110th Congress came after Creekmore-Byrd told him "as long as he remained in public life that she and he could not have a private life together."

The complaint also asserts that Creekmore-Byrd's ultimatum led to Pickering's decision to not seek the Senate seat vacated by Lott.

Yes, it looks like we have yet another conservative Republican who preached "family values," but couldn't quite meet the personal standards he said others should follow.

But what's especially interesting about Pickering in particular is the fact that he lived in suddenly-infamous C Street house, home to "The Family." It's the same house where other scandal plagued far-right politicians John Ensign and Mark Sanford lived.

Josh Marshall joked, "I don't know about their politics. But these dudes know how to party."

The Dreaded S Word
by Charles Marowitz

If the culprits who committed acts of torture and violations of both the Geneva Convention and the Constitution are to be rooted out through congressional investigations so that justice can be served, why shouldn't the Wall Street traders and those responsible for the criminal actions on the stock market be forced into the open as well? When there has been wrongdoing in the military and we agitate for full disclosure to indict the wrongdoers, why should we not just as fiercely investigate the bankers, brokers, and traders whose collective greed and underhanded actions caused the miseries of the present Great Recession? In both cases, we will never feel morally cleansed unless wrongdoing is thoroughly exposed and wrongdoers publicly prosecuted.

In our present state, we are suffering the consequences of crimes in which virtually no effort is being made to rout out the criminal instigators. Is this because top-flight, well-heeled, Wall Street movers-and-shakers are in some way immune from prosecution? In some way, not to be classed as criminals because they are involved in activities where the criminality is rooted into the established system and therefore cannot be assailed as criminal acts?

The assumption appears to be that the "system" went wrong, not the people who were consciously working it to their own advantage. But all efforts to fix the system without indicting the people who consciously manipulated it for their own ends creates a kind of tacit tolerance of larceny and blurs the lines that separate criminality from "normal business practices." Are we not reaching that point where we have to admit there has been a systemic failure that has produced a slew of wrongdoers, and that systemic failure is embedded in the matrix of capitalism?

It is curious the way the term "socialism" has generated the worst kind of opprobrium in the present turmoil. It is alleged that the worst thing that Americans can do in the present circumstances is resort to socialist practices like the government bailing out the banks, acquiring a large controlling interest in failed corporations and stopping the divine flux of an unregulated Free Market. And yet, virtually every meaningful intervention being made in this crisis smacks of the kind of governmental control that we historically associate with socialism.

The hysterical response to this trend is understandable. If "socialism" can be applied in order to "bail out" organizations that have been brought down by heinous acts of capitalism, doesn't that suggest that there might be virtues in the tolerated system towards which the government is inclining? It is too horrific a word -- socialism -- not to scare away all those people who have benefited from the criminality of capitalism; but if its precepts are consciously applied, does that not suggest that there may be a practical alternative to the failed system that takes for granted "booms and busts" and has now experienced the most lethal "boom" and the most harrowing "bust" in recent history?

Are we not reaching the point at which a new system has to be considered, rather than the footling patchwork being applied to rescue one that consistently fails? No, we mustn't call it socialism or too many people will have instantaneous heart attacks and the Republic will wither in violence and mass bloodletting. So let us call it "revised democratic procedures" or "governmental assistance measures," but let us at the same time acknowledge that many of those salvationary features stem from an alternative notion of government that may just provide the key to genuine rescue for a mess, which, if one takes the broad view, has been with us since the nation was first created. If we instinctively incline towards a therapy that is actually helping the patient, does that not suggest we have to discard failed procedures such as "bleeding" or praying for supernatural assistance from mythical powers above?

This is a period in which the evils of capitalism are too large to be ignored -- or justified in accordance with convenient clichés about The American Dream and the virtues of democratic rule. The disturbing facts are we have been hammered by the freedoms that we have been led to believe are our saving graces. Almost every day we are obliged to rationalize the frauds, deceptions, and flagrant corruption of people who have pledged their allegiance to the tenets of what we call the American Way of Life. It has brought us misery, poverty, massive unemployment, and the realization that the shibboleths of democracy are rooted in fraud; that we are at the mercy of suave manipulators who engineer deceptions to rob us of our savings and uproot us from our homes. In any small-scale Latin American country this would cause riots and national chaos. Here it merely adds misery to apathy. If our legislators were as clever as our computer technicians, we would have found a way out of this morass but as it is, we mope, struggle, and pray for deliverance from politicians who, despite their partisan differences, belong to the same mindset and jointly place obstacles against measures that might relieve the pain.

If a flawed, fallacious, and sometimes fatal American-styled democracy is not the answer, we should be searching for other remedies. But we have to begin by acknowledging our shortcomings and then, painful as it is, rethink our ideology.

Bush's Hit Teams
by Robert Parry

Despite the new controversy over whether a global CIA "hit team" ever went operational, there has been public evidence for years that the Bush administration approved "rules of engagement" that permitted executions and targeted killings of suspected insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In effect, President George W. Bush transformed elite units of the U.S. military - including Special Forces and highly trained sniper teams - into "death squads" with a license to kill unarmed targets on suspicion that they might be a threat to American occupying forces.

In the recent public debate over whether Bush also authorized the CIA to assemble teams of assassins to roam the world hunting al-Qaeda suspects, the U.S. news media has cited the distinction between such face-to-face executions and the CIA's use of remote-controlled Predator drones firing missiles to kill groups of suspected insurgents in or near the war zones.

However, the evidence is that the Bush administration also permitted U.S. military units to engage in close-quarter executions when encountering alleged insurgents, even if they were unarmed and presented no immediate threat to American or allied troops.

This reality surfaced in 2007 with the attempted prosecutions of several U.S. soldiers whose defense attorneys cited "rules of engagement" that permitted killing suspected insurgents.

One case involved Army sniper Jorge G. Sandoval Jr., who was acquitted by a U.S. military court in Baghdad on Sept. 28, 2007, in the murders of two unarmed Iraqi men - one on April 27, 2007, and the other on May 11, 2007 - because the jury accepted defense arguments that the killings were within the approved rules. (Sandoval was convicted of lesser charges relating to planting evidence on a victim to obscure the facts of the homicide.)

The Sandoval case also revealed a classified program in which the Pentagon's Asymmetric Warfare Group encouraged U.S. military snipers in Iraq to drop "bait" - such as electrical cords and ammunition - and then shoot Iraqis who picked up the items, according to evidence in the Sandoval case. [Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2007]

Another case of authorized murder of an insurgent suspect surfaced at a military court hearing at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in mid-September 2007. Two U.S. Special Forces soldiers took part in the execution of an Afghani who was suspected of leading an insurgent group.

Though the Afghani, identified as Nawab Buntangyar, responded to questions and offered no resistance when encountered on Oct. 13, 2006, he was shot dead by Master Sgt. Troy Anderson on orders from his superior officer, Capt. Dave Staffel.

According to evidence at the Fort Bragg proceedings, an earlier Army investigation had cleared the two soldiers because they had been operating under "rules of engagement" that empowered them to kill individuals who had been designated "enemy combatants," even if the targets were unarmed and presented no visible threat.

The troubling picture was that the U.S. chain of command, presumably up to President Bush, authorized loose "rules of engagement" that allowed targeted killings - as well as other objectionable tactics including arbitrary arrests and indefinite detentions, "enhanced interrogations" otherwise known as torture, kidnappings in third countries with "extraordinary renditions" to countries that torture, secret CIA prisons, and "reeducation camps" for younger detainees.

Typical of Washington politics, however, the loudest arguments have been over whether the Bush administration adequately notified Congress of covert aspects of these operations, including the reported CIA-assassination plan which allegedly was ordered kept hidden from the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Some Republicans have said Democrats proved that they don't have the toughness to defend U.S. national security by raising questions about the hit team, while pro-Democratic pundits note that the Bush administration apparently demonstrated its incompetence by failing to get the assassination program off the ground. In other words, the debate is centered on peripheral issues, not on the substance of extrajudicial murders.

Similarly, Attorney General Eric Holder is said to be leaning toward appointing a special prosecutor to investigate some CIA personnel for torturing detainees, but only if they went beyond the parameters of torture that had been spelled out by Bush administration lawyers. In other words, senior government officials who sanctioned limited waterboarding and other torture techniques would not be held to account, only overzealous interrogators who went even further.

Is Pakistan "on the brink"?
by SNEHAL SHINGAVI

UNDER INTENSE pressure from the U.S., the Pakistani military has engaged in a major offensive in the Swat Valley of the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP). While the stated objective is to root out the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TeT), the Pakistani variant of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the bombings and gunfights have killed thousands and produced a massive outpouring of refugees from the NWFP into other parts of Pakistan. The indiscriminate violence is also paving the way for the Taliban and other Islamist outfits to grow.

In fact, the reason that the state deals with Islamist organizations through military means is because it is unwilling to address the underlying reasons that political Islam has grown in the NWFP-massive inequality and corruption, the genuine grievances of the Pashtun minority, and the collaboration of the Pakistani state with the American imperial project.

Soon after bombings of TeT installations began on May 8, major cities in Pakistan were flooded with refugees. The country's internal refugee population was already quite large, estimated at about a million before April 2009, since the NWFP is not new to militancy or to Pakistani military operations. The UN now estimates that the refugee crisis is larger than the one in Darfur, Sudan, as three million internally displaced Pakistanis crowd into under-resourced camps. The economy of Swat has been devastated and entire villages have been depopulated.

As it became harder to ignore the refugee crisis produced by military operations, international aid agencies began requesting serious aid for relief efforts. On May 20, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even pleaded with Americans to send aid to Swat through a text message program organized by the United Nations. Her interest in Swati refugees would be admirable if it weren't dripping with hypocrisy. Of the $1.9 billion in American aid that has been pledged for "humanitarian relief" to Pakistan, $900 million will be spent on building the American embassy in Islamabad.

What's more, it was the current American administration that pressured the Pakistani government to take "decisive" action to "eliminate and expel" the Pakistani TeT. American drones bear responsibility for some of the refugee crisis as it is. More than 700 people have been killed since 2006, with 164 killed in 14 attacks since the beginning of the Obama administration. But things will only get worse. As American impatience to pacify Afghanistan builds, more and more people in the border region will feel the pain of the pincer action of Americans in the west and Pakistani military from the east, not to mention the violence against non-Pashtun minorities by members of the Taliban.

The Pakistani ruling class is not innocent either. It has a long-established pattern of hitching its wagon to the United States. It is the worst kind of irony, perhaps, that the Taliban grew into a significant force in the 1990s with the help of the Pakistani Interservice Intelligence agency (ISI) as part of a project that began in the 1980s to develop a proxy army to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Benazir Bhutto's government was the first to normalize relations between Pakistan and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in the late 1990s, a decision that proved very costly for her.

Today, two decades after the Soviets left, the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan are now awash with guns, training camps, and militant organizations. The current crisis in Pakistan is the making of the cynical policies of its ruling clique, who have used militant Islam to attack their secular opponents in places like the NWFP and Balochistan, where nationalist parties have attempted to organize secessionist movements.

Some speculate that the army may have intentionally allowed the TeT to grow to levels that would necessitate a heavy intervention. It was only a short while ago when the armed forces were forced out of politics and back into the barracks; the growth of the Taliban allows the Pakistani military to pose itself as the nation's savior.

Liberty and Safety
by Andrew P. Napolitano

For a professor of law at one of the country's best law schools who was once the go-to guy in the Justice Department whenever the Bush White House needed legal cover for its truly lawless ventures outside the Constitution, John Yoo has revealed a breathtaking ignorance of American values, history, and jurisprudence.

In his startling mea culpa, published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Professor Yoo confessed to advising President Bush that he possessed powers from some source other than the Constitution, that in the name of public safety he could cut down all laws written for the express purpose of restraining the President, and that Americans would expect no less than this so long as they were actually kept safe as a result of it.

He advanced the argument that since the President's first job is to keep us safe, he could disregard the 1978 FISA law as "obsolete" since it was written in an era when modern day non-state terrorism was not contemplated. By this unprecedented and perverse logic, one wonders if the President was told if he could disregard as obsolete any law that was inconvenient to his purposes; even the Supreme Law of the Land itself, which the Constitution declares itself to be.

The whole purpose of FISA was to abolish the Nixonian notion that "If the President does it, it's not illegal." While FISA's statutory reduction of the constitutionally-mandated standard for obtaining a judicial search warrant - from probable cause of crime to probable cause of foreign status - is itself of dubious constitutionality, nevertheless, it is and was at the time Professor Yoo was telling President Bush to disregard it, the "exclusive" lawful means for agents of the President to wiretap foreign persons present in the U.S. Moreover, the FISA court has become the President's rubber stamp by granting well over 99% of requested warrants.

It is not painless for one who loathes this law to defend it; but it was among the laws that the President and the Professor swore to uphold, it does force the executive branch to identify and specify who and what it wishes to pursue, and it presents at least a minimum of checking and balancing by forcing the President to go before a super-secret court (without an adversary present) and seek permission to violate the Fourth Amendment-guaranteed rights of the President's targets.

The time-is-of-the essence argument is nonsense. I once issued a search warrant in my gym shorts from my living room at 3 am, and I know of a former FISA court judge who did the same from his cell phone while riding a motorcycle. While neither of these situations is optimal, there are at least written records of what was done to whom and why; and that was a goal of the law which President Bush was told was obsolete.

The Framers never contemplated FISA, and I cannot conceive of Jefferson, Madison, or even Hamilton condoning it. But one thing we know the Framers would never condone is a government that refused to reside within the Constitution; "chained down" by it as Jefferson once said.

The Founders, unlike John Yoo and George Bush, feared a king who enforced only the laws he found convenient to his present needs, who dispatched his agents with their own self-generated search warrants to knock on any door and seize any thing they or the king wanted, and who claimed to be doing all this for safety's sake.

Cutting down the laws to get at the Devil is dangerous business. As Robert Bolt argued in A Man for All Seasons, the land is planted thick with laws. If you cut them down to get to the Devil, who could stand the wind that then would blow?

When President Lincoln and the Radical Republicans tried civilians in military tribunals in the North, hundreds of miles from battle, and in the South after the Civil War had ended, a unanimous Supreme Court stopped them. It declared that "The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances."

President Bush argued frequently and forcefully that his first job was to keep us safe. He was wrong. The Constitution tells us that his sole job was to enforce the Constitution; and that means keeping us free. Free from tyrants who sought and claimed power from thin air; free from prince-like federal agents who could behave without constitutional or legal restraint; free to live with a government that obeyed its own laws. Any president who keeps us safe but unfree is rejecting his oath to the American people.

And finally...

It's past time to wake the fuck up!

M_A

Wild Wild Left Radio # 27 Portends of Doom & Decline

Diane G — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:55:18 GMT

Join Gottlieb, Ed Encho and I tonight at 6pm EDT on Wild Wild Left Radio, via BlogtalkRadio, for an interesting hour of Political Reporting and Commentary.

We will be covering the fiasco of the Sotomayer hearings, with an honorable asshat mention of Sessions.

We will comment on the Health Care bill, and the obvious win of Insurance over People.

Of course, the CIA and Cheney: Will the fallout ever be more than just a cover-up with pardons? Unlikely.

As the moneyed wins... Goldman Sachs record profits angers far too few.

Then on to the biggest portend of DOOM: Israel is preparing to attack Iran.

Call in and add your two cents!

The call in number is 646-929-1264

The live chat link will go live around 5:15.
CHAT LINK:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/F...

Cheney's Inferno

Jeff Huber — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:57:50 GMT

I tend to regard Dick Cheney the way most of us probably think of our ex-spouses. The ex-spouses are going to hell and revenge is already ours, so why waste our breath on them? It's likewise with Cheney. He's out of power, his next political post will be as number two man to Satan; is he worth wasting a thousand word essay on anymore? Then something happens to remind me that there's a big difference between Dick Cheney and ex-spouses. Ex-spouses may have been bona fide bums and broom jockeys, but none of them was the first arch villain of the 21st century.
Were any of us actually shocked by the recent revelation that the dark lord ordered the CIA to withhold information about a secret program from Congress for eight years? Given the galactic scale of his malevolence in the Office of the Vice President, ordering the CIA to lie to Congress amounts to a parking violation. Even before young Mr. Bush was elected, Cheney was a proponent of extra-constitutional presidential powers. Most of us are familiar with the unprecedented extent to which Bush exceeded his Article II authorities. Even more horrifying, though, is the way Cheney expanded the powers of his office.

The Constitution gives the vice president one power only: Article I states that "The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided." Cheney made himself a vice-commander in chief.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Cheney, hunkered down in a bunker beneath the White House, called his old pal, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, at the Pentagon. Cheney told Rumsfeld that, ""Pursuant to the president's instructions," he had ordered fighter pilots to shoot down the airliners involved in the attacks. What's wrong with this scenario is that the vice president is not in the military chain of command. As delineated in the Goldwater-Nichols act of 1986, legal command authority passes directly from the president to the secretary of defense to the four-star unified commanders (Central Command, Southern Command, European Command, etc.)

Young Mr. Bush was alive and conscious throughout that crisis-well, as conscious as he ever was. He had no business passing orders through Cheney and Cheney had no business ordering anybody to fire on anything. It's possible that the military commanders he spoke to knew this, and didn't pass the orders along to the pilots in the air. Bush should have gone directly through Rumsfeld who, as it played out, was only informed of Cheney's illegal orders after the fact.

We know that Cheney cooked the intelligence on Iraq through Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans. Journalist and former CIA officer Philip Giraldi asserts that Cheney was behind the forgery of the Nigergate "Habbush letter" document. Cheney later authorized Scooter Libby to leak classified information to discredit Joe Wilson when he correctly claimed the Bush administration's claims that Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy yellowcake from Niger was a hoax. Cheney also played a key role in revealing Valerie Plame's undercover role in the CIA. Cheney's secret White House Information Group, which included Condi Rice, Karl Rove, the nightmarish Mary Matalin and other right wing luminaries, sold the war to the American public through false propaganda echoed by access poisoned journalists like Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller of the New York Times.

Cheney used the Iranian Directorate to cook intelligence on Iran much as the Office of Special Plans manufactured WMD evidence on Iraq. The Iranian Directorate was located in the same office as the OSP, and included OSP veterans Abram Shulsky, John Trigilio, Ladan Archin and Reuel Marc Gerecht.

Cheney authorized illegal torture. He met secretly with big oil executives to formulate an energy policy that favored his pals at Exxon and Shell and the other major energy companies.

Cheney has a Siamese relationship with Israel's hard-right Likudniks. Sidney Blumenthal of Salon.com reported in August 2006 that Cheney and his henchmen were sharing National Security Association intelligence with Israel as part of an attempt to escalate the Iraq war into open hostilities with Iran and Syria. Many are convinced, as am I, that Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon was agreed upon at a meeting between Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu at an American Enterprise Institute conference in Colorado.

Cheney subverted the operations of the entire executive branch by inserting neocon ideologues in key positions. Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and Stephen Cambone strangled dissent in the Defense Department. Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley ensured that his boss Condoleezza Rice was nothing more to Bush than a workout partner and an office wife. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton undermined Colin Powell's efforts at statesmanship. In the second Bush term, when Rice moved to the top State billet, Cheney arranged to have Bolton made U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., ensuring continuation of the administration's "make them an offer they can't accept" diplomacy, of which the Iran policy was a perfect example. Insisting that Iran give up it's U.N. treaty guaranteed "inherent right" to develop nuclear energy as a precondition to direct talks ensured that direct talks would never take place.

Senator Pat Leahy (D-Vermont), speaking of the revelation that Cheney directed the CIA to withhold information from Congress, said that nobody in America, including Cheney, is "above the law." Where has Leahy been for the last eight years and change? Everybody in the Bush administration except Scooter Libby was above the law.

President Obama has so far been reluctant to investigate the wrong doing of the Bush administration. That's a mistake. If we let that administration's major decision makers walk, we leave the door open for the next generation of tyrants to give us a repeat performance.

So far, the only people who have paid for the Bush administration's sins are the likes of a mentally challenged Army private and a Cheney crony whose sentence was commuted by Bush. It's a dead cert that Cheney will spend the next life roasting in a room at the Robert McNamara Suite of the LBJ Hilton in Hell, but we need to apply some justice on this side of eternity.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Sometimes, All You Can Say Is "Fucking A!"

woody — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:55:01 GMT

This would be high in the category of "things you just don't see every day, and can be glad of it." It is the last thing its mortal enemies would likely EVER see...Can't you just hear George C. Scott describing it in loving detail?

Blog-pal, theMom, had this up.

It made me gasp. Real time. Apparently, the FAA made a special grant of permission to let the Navy F/A-18F "SuperHornet" make a low-level pylon pass to open the Detroit River Air Races last week.

I was in the USAF for four years, and though it wasn't my field, I hung around the zoomies and the flight-line as much as I could. The noise that one of these things makes, at the range where the perspective/dof of the foto makes sense, could have knocked the guy right off his porch, going the other way.

PS: I'm back...Blissed

oh my FUCKING god. Seriously. oh my fucking GOD! (UPDATED)

Diane G — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:39:41 GMT

Updated w/ Max Keiser striking again.

It's News To M_A - 7/16/09

M_A — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:41:13 GMT

Stories of note from the WakeTheFuckUp news desk....

Here's a glimpse of some of the headlines featured below the fold:

Klobuchar's Contribution: Talking Law With Sotomayor

High Sierras

The Banks' Massive Theft

Granny Get Your Gun

The Shipping Point

The U.S. is Compromising Democracy in Honduras

Will Iraq Be a Global Gas Pump?

Klobuchar's Contribution: Talking Law With Sotomayor
by John Nichols

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar brought something rare and valuable to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor: a savvy questioning style that invited the nominee to offer extended and revealing answers regarding her views on the law.

That's what should happen at judicial confirmation hearings. But it rarely does -- and it might not have at Judge Sotomayor's session, had it not been for Klobuchar.

The senior senator from Minnesota got the judge talking, at length, about the extent to which the legal system can address broader societal ills, about the burden of sentencing guidelines that limit the options of judges, about the stark questions that arise when a prosecutor realizes a defendant is innocent and even about Perry Mason -- don't laugh, he popularized the law as a profession to which working-class kids from the Bronx and Plymouth, Minnesota, might aspire.

"I was influenced so greatly by a television show in igniting the passion that I had as being a prosecutor, and it was 'Perry Mason'," Judge Sotomayor acknowledged in response to a question from Klobuchar, adding a human note to the routine give-and-take of the past several days.

The nominee was not just throwing off a pop-culture reference.

Judge Sotomayor, a former Manhattan prosecutor, was making a serious point about the law:

For the young people behind all of you, they may not even know who Perry Mason was, but Perry Mason was one of the first lawyers portrayed on television. And his storyline is that, in all of the cases he tried -- except one -- he -- he proved his client innocent and got the actual murderer to confess.

In one of the episodes, at the end of the episode, Perry Mason and the character who played the prosecutor in the case were meeting up after the case. And Perry said to the prosecutor, "It must cause you some pain having expended all that effort in your case to have the charges dismissed." And the prosecutor looked up and, "No, my job as a prosecutor is to do justice, and justice is served when a guilty man is convicted and when an innocent man is not." And I thought to myself, that's quite amazing to be able to serve that role, to be given a job, as I was by (New York County District Attorney Robert) Morgenthau, a job I'm eternally grateful to him for, in which I could do what justice required in an individual case.

Thus began an extended rumination on the purposes of prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges by a Supreme Court nominee whose work on the bench will involve defining the roles of these key players in our legal system.

Judge Sotomayor spoke freely and extensively in her exchanges with Klobuchar, and the senator encouraged her to do so by actually listening as the nominee spoke.

For the most part, the exchanges between Judiciary Committee members and Judge Sotomayor this week have been political exercises. Democrats tossed softballs to the nominee of a Democratic president. Republicans threw hardballs. The nominee hit most of them in routine fashion -- no strikes but not many home runs.

High Sierras
by Josh Harkinson

EARLY ONE MORNING in August 2005, a small team of game wardens and deputies climbed through coyote brush and manzanita in the Sierra Azul Open Space Preserve outside San Jose, California, searching for an illegal pot farm. As they crested a ridge, they discovered densely planted rows of cannabis stalks. Suddenly, a high-powered rifle cracked and an officer fell to the ground, shot through both legs. Seconds later, another deputy shot and killed a man wielding a sawed-off shotgun. "It was literally like a jungle firefight," recalls warden John Nores, who fired at the other shooter before he escaped into the woods. Left behind in a meadow just minutes from the heart of Silicon Valley were 22,000 marijuana plants worth some $88 million.

Over the past decade, marijuana patches known as "grows" or "gardens" have sprung up on public lands across the West, including a third of California's national parks and nearly 40 percent of all national forests. Where hippies once grew just enough weed to peace out, traffickers now cultivate more than 100,000 plants at a time on 30-acre terraces irrigated by plastic pipe, laced with illegal pesticides, and guarded by men with MAC-10s and Uzis. Grows have turned up everywhere from the deepest backcountry to the edges of suburban subdivisions. Farming pot on public land can be more profitable than smuggling it across the increasingly militarized border. The 3.1 million pot plants seized in national forests in the year prior to last September had an estimated street value of $12.4 billion.

Rangers and game wardens say pot growers are a major threat to California's 23,500 square miles of wilderness (which doesn't include state or regional lands). "These guys literally create cities within your national forests," says Laura Mark, a special agent with the US Forest Service. Growers clear land year-round, plant crops in the spring, and haul out the harvest in the fall, often leaving behind mounds of trash and dead animals, denuded hillsides, and streams full of sediment and human waste. Last year, the community of Snow Creek, California, traced feces in its water treatment plant to a grow in the nearby San Bernardino National Forest. Restoring the 10,000 acres of national forest fouled by pot farms could cost more than $30 million.

Pot farmers who till public lands avoid the risk of forfeiting their property if they're busted, but they must also ward off competitors. "They are going to point guns at you first and ask questions later," says Troy Bolen, the Bureau of Land Management's head of law enforcement in California. In the past decade, growers have killed two people who have stumbled upon their fields, held nature lovers at gunpoint, and had numerous shoot-outs with cops. Last year, in California's national forests the state's anti-grow task force killed one grower and arrested 177, 80 percent of whom were Mexican citizens.

Officials believe that Mexican drug cartels control the grows, but proving that is tough. Last year, Nores caught a pot grower who revealed almost everything about his operation but said he didn't know whom he worked for. "They're kind of set up like terrorist cells," he observes. After the bloody 2005 ambush, he says, his team now treats raids like potential battles, bringing along medics and keeping air support on standby-just in case.

The Banks' Massive Theft
by Dennis Kucinich

Congress was taken for a ride, and the American people's wealth went with it.

So now you have a system of checks and balances. The Treasury writes all the checks, and Congress doesn't know what the balance is.

Trillions of dollars are being taken both from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, which is printing money, which you, the American taxpayer, have to back up.

We need to begin to have a serious discussion of monetary reform because what's been allowed to happen is that banks have been permitted to create money out of nothing, and they have not held sufficient reserves against their investments that could go sour. This caused the collapse of a financial system that's being shored up with U.S. tax dollars and with trillions of dollars printed by the Fed as backup.

This is a moment in American history that should not escape us. This is a massive theft that goes far beyond anything that's ever occurred in the history of this country. What's happening is they're using government to accelerate the wealth upward and they're using the Treasury to grab the resources of the public and to enable the banks to get extraordinary amounts of resources and they're still not loaning money to let people save their homes.

We desperately need monetary reform.

Granny Get Your Gun
by Nathan Comp

Crime is generally a young person's game, but that hasn't stopped an ever-growing number of older Americans from breaking the law. Following a decline through most of the '90s, over the past 10 years arrest rates for those over 50 have shot up 85 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Experts predict that these numbers will continue to climb well into the next decade, as 35 million baby boomers expand America's graying population from 16 to nearly 25 percent.

Is America on the precipice of a geriatric crime wave?

"The numbers are definitely going to keep going up, no doubt about it," says Ronald Akers, a criminology professor at the University of Florida. "People are healthier and living longer, which may make crime an attractive option for some older people."

Geriatric crime isn't a new phenomenon, nor is it unique to America. Several countries, including the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and South Korea, have reported substantial increases in the number of elderly arrests, blaming the rises on rapidly growing-and marginalized-elderly populations. But none have seen problems on the scale of Japan, which saw arrest rates of residents over 70 triple from 9,478 to 28,892 between 2000 and 2006.

Most elderly, in America and abroad, are arrested for petty crimes such as shoplifting and drunk driving. But murder among the over-50 crowd climbed more than 15 percent in the last decade. (Music producer Phil Spector was 64 when he killed Lana Clarkson in 2003.) Drug arrests among the elderly tripled during this same period. In April, two sisters, ages 65 and 70, were busted in Stroudsburg, Penn., for selling heroin.

Akers speculates that many elderly arrestees are career criminals who maintain the stamina and strength that crime typically requires. "Late-onset criminality is very rare, and typically financial in nature," he says.

Author and geriatric expert Michael Brogden says late-onset criminality can flourish under some conditions, namely boredom. "With more able-bodied persons no longer gainfully employed, older people may be less inhibited in erring into crime," Brogden wrote in his book, Crime, Abuse and the Elderly. "Older people, freed from past conventions, are now able to indulge as novitiates in crime."

The Shipping Point
by Harold Meyerson

On May 14, Wal-Mart released its first-quarter financials for 2009 and announced that despite the recession -- or, perhaps, because of it -- business was booming. Shoppers in search of cheaper products had been flocking to its stores: A full 17 percent of its customers during the quarter were first-timers. The company had been able to exploit the downturn by reducing its legendarily bare-bones distribution expenses by an additional 5 percent. In keeping with its practice of compelling its manufacturers, shippers, truckers, and warehouses to continually cut costs, Wal-Mart had been able to "sweat the assets" in its distribution network more than usual, said Eduardo Castro-Wright, head of the company's U.S. division.

On the very day that Wal-Mart released its quarterly statement, however, some of those assets announced that they'd be sweated no more. At 2:30 that afternoon, some 200 local warehouse workers, abetted by half a dozen priests and ministers and a number of union activists, paraded up San Bernardino Avenue to the main trucking gate at a Wal-Mart distribution center in Fontana, California -- an obscure Los Angeles exurb that is the epicenter of warehousing not just for Wal-Mart but for the entire U.S.?Asian trade sector. Moments before the demonstrators arrived, Wal-Mart security guards scrambled down the long driveway and rolled the main gate shut, lest the protestors come inside. A Wal-Mart truck, halfway down the driveway on its way to the street, slowed, then stopped.

For the next two hours, the priests prayed, the activists spoke, the workers shouted their demands -- and the distribution center ceased its distributing. Then the county sheriffs carted away the four workers and three priests who had sat down in the driveway, and the demonstrators boarded their buses and left. The unthinkable had happened: Wal-Mart's supply chain had been broken, if only for an afternoon.

The demonstration was an opening shot in a union drive to organize warehouse workers. Devised and run by the Change to Win Federation and backed financially by the Teamsters, it may be one of the more quixotic American organizing campaigns in decades, but it is surely one of the most important. Strategically, the warehouses in the Fontana area present a tempting target to the unions that seek to organize Wal-Mart, its nonunion peers, and the myriad transport and warehouse companies that ship their goods. But the obstacles are considerable, as employers can stall elections and intimidate workers. Their ability to do so will diminish if Congress enacts the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) later this year, but even if EFCA passes, organizers will still face a mountainous challenge. A majority of the workers aren't employed by the warehouses but by some of the 270 temp agencies in the vicinity -- a conundrum that virtually compels Change to Win to organize the entire warehouse community.

Forty-three percent of all the seaborne imports into the United States come through the adjacent ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, roughly 70 miles from Fontana by freeway. Two decades ago, when Asian imports began to dominate American stores, major retailers required warehouses where they could sort and route the products that came into Los Angeles and Long Beach before shipping them to their stores. The retailers needed a minimum of 60 acres per warehouse, but Los Angeles County was too built up to provide that kind of land. Instead, they found what they needed -- room enough for hundreds of warehouses, adjacent to major freeways running in every direction -- around Fontana, an old steel town whose mill had long since closed, situated about two-thirds of the way from Los Angeles to San Bernardino.

The neat, newly built structures, some of them comprising more than a million square feet, now line the boulevards in Fontana and nearby Ontario. The buildings, though huge, are unobtrusive and opaque, devoid of windows and signage. The only way to distinguish among them is by the lines of trucks being loaded onto their docks: Here's a Target warehouse, next door a Home Depot, then a Wal-Mart.

Like the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors, to which few Angelenos travel, the Fontana warehouse district, which employs roughly 100,000 workers, is one of the key crossroads of the new global capitalist order, where Asian production meets American consumption. Yet it has stolen quietly into the landscape. But for the trucks pulling on and off the freeways (and belching the smoke that makes Fontana the planet's fourth-highest center of diesel particulate pollutants), the warehouses -- individually, in aggregate, and as an industry -- are easy to miss.

The U.S. is Compromising Democracy in Honduras
by Shamus Cooke

Can a solution to the crisis in Honduras - itself the result of a military coup - be "mediated," where on one side sit coup leaders and on the other a democratically elected but ousted President? Does any "middle ground" exist? Of course not. If President Zelaya unconditionally returns to finish his term in office, democracy will be restored; anything short of that will have democracy "compromised" into its opposite.

Obama is the behind-the-scenes organizer of this negotiated farce, even though he has no legal or moral right to undermine the democratic process in Honduras. His Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, brought the parties together and chose an "objective" mediator, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias - someone who has obviously aligned himself with the United States.

And while Arias is the "official" mediator, Obama will be the one calling the shots, using U.S. economic and military clout to bully the opposing sides into an "acceptable deal."

For example, when some members of the coup leadership were still using obstinate language against a deal with ousted President Zelaya, the U.S. finally announced it would withhold $16.5 million in military assistance to the country.

If this announcement were made the day the coup took place - as it was legally required to under U.S. law - the coup would have been crushed. Now, the money is simply being used to cajole the coup plotters into a more pliable position at the bargaining table; a place at which they obstinately refused to sit previously. It was also announced that $165 million in aide to Honduras could be in jeopardy. That is, if the coup leaders don't do exactly as the U.S. demands.

And this highlights a stark fact that many Obama supporters are refusing to see: the origins of the coup, and indeed its resolution, lie squarely on the shoulders of the U.S. When a country [the U.S.] trains and funds another nation's military [Honduras], while also purchasing the vast majority of that country's exports, and supplying it with enormous financial aid, there is little ground for "equal footing."

In fact, all of Obama's rhetoric about leaving South America to the South Americans is a conscious ploy at public relations. In reality, the economic and military screws continue to be tightened, and U.S. foreign policy continues as it always has.

After the coup first happened, the entire world reacted with horror, condemnation, and sanctions of various kinds, while everyone understood that only one country had the economic and military influence to actually reverse it...instantly.

Obama purposely dragged his feet. He cleverly tagged the U.S. name on U.N and O.A.S resolutions, while doing absolutely nothing in the realm of guns, trade, or aid - the places where actual power is wielded.

The New York Times correctly noted that "the mixed messages have emboldened Honduras's de facto government..." (July 7, 2009).

Also emboldening the coup leaders is Obama's virtual silence around the fact that Honduras has been transformed into a democracy-free zone, where anti-coup media has been silenced, a military curfew enforced, basic rights suspended, and unarmed protesters killed.

Will Iraq Be a Global Gas Pump?
by Michael T. Klare

Has it all come to this? The wars and invasions, the death and destruction, the exile and torture, the resistance and collapse? In a world of shrinking energy reserves, is Iraq finally fated to become what it was going to be anyway, even before the chaos and catastrophe set in: a giant gas pump for an energy-starved planet? Will it all end not with a bang, but with a gusher? The latest oil news out of that country offers at least a hint of Iraq's fate.

For modern Iraq, oil has always been at the heart of everything. Its very existence as a unified state is largely the product of oil.

In 1920, under the aegis of the League of Nations, Britain cobbled together the Kingdom of Iraq from the Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul in order to better exploit the holdings of the Turkish Petroleum Company, forerunner of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). Later, Iraqi nationalists and the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein nationalized the IPC, provoking unrelenting British and American hostility. Hussein rewarded his Sunni allies in the Baath Party by giving them lucrative positions in the state company, part of a process that produced a dangerous rift with the country's Shiite majority. And these are but a few of the ways in which modern Iraqi history has been governed by oil.

Iraq is, of course, one of the world's great hydrocarbon preserves. According to oil giant BP, it harbors proven oil reserves of 115 billion barrels -- more than any country except Saudi Arabia (with 264 billion barrels) and Iran (with 138 billion). Many analysts, however, believe that Iraq has been inadequately explored, and that the utilization of modern search technologies will yield additional reserves in the range of 45 to 100 billion barrels. If all its reserves, known and suspected, were developed to their full potential, Iraq could add as much as six to eight million barrels per day to international output, postponing the inevitable arrival of peak oil and a contraction in global energy supplies.

Iraq's great hydrocarbon promise has been continually thwarted by war, foreign intervention, sanctions, internal disorder, corruption, and plain old ineptitude. Saddam Hussein did succeed for a time in elevating oil output, in the process raising national income and creating a well-educated middle class. However, his ill-conceived invasions of Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 led to devastating attacks on Iraqi oil facilities, as well as trade embargoes and crippling debt, erasing much of his country's previous economic gains. The trade sanctions imposed by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the wake of the First Gulf War only further eroded the country's oil-production capacity.

When President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, his overarching goals all revolved around the geopolitics of oil. He and his top officials were intent on replacing Saddam Hussein's regime with one that would prove friendly to American oil interests. They also imagined that, greeted as liberators by a grateful population, they would preside over a radical upgrading of Iraq's petroleum capacity, thereby ensuring adequate supplies for American consumers at an affordable price. Finally, by building and manning a constellation of major military bases in a grateful Iraq, they saw themselves ensuring continued American dominance over the oil-soaked Persian Gulf region, and so the energy heartland of the planet.

And finally...

It's past time to wake the fuck up!

M_A

Righteous Murder

Diane G — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:44:24 GMT

I was lying in bed in the wee hours, trying to still my mind, or trick it into contemplating some blissful fantasy to lull myself back to sleep.

But no.

It kept coming back at me, flipping between the style of a debate or like the lyrics of a Henley song, with far more questions than answers.

As both the Health Care debate and the Sotomayer confirmation degrades back into the abortion question, I have to wonder if the zealots ever took a course in Ethics. I think I did, in High School. I'm fairly sure. In a Catholic High School, no less, in that tiny post-hippy, post ruler-smacking and pre-born again window, where they thought being hip and relevant might boost their sagging popularity. They welcomed critical thinking at that age level, even in a Catholic system. But still, short a course, who has not mentally weighed the murk of right, wrong, the greater good in any decision?

Sure, sure I can speak in black and white absolutes with the best of them, depending on my mood, my audience, my opposition and the subject matter. Truth be told? All is grey.

The core question to these subjects haunting me today really comes down to the one thing that is never discussed when abortion is the tool to make reactionaries react.

Do individuals have the right to conscientiously object to any aspect of where their tax dollars are spent? The flip? Does the Federal Government have a right to spend our tax dollars as they see fit, as elected representatives with no public input or recourse?

The path to get to that question is much more convoluted. It wanders through societal limits, personal self determination, collective punishment, vengeance, and self defense.

There are no easy answers, but I wish we could have a societal debate, as reasoned people, thinking men.

If the objection is "I don't want my tax dollars spent on abortions," then have I a right to object to mine being spent in the collective retribution that is war? "Vengeance is MINE," sayeth the Lord and all. I can even frame it their way.

I don't want my tax dollars spent on AIG and G/S bonuses for that matter.

Wherein did the students of Christianity decide that war is Righteous Murder, and extend that from "self-defense" (an arguably just cause for killing) to preemptive killing ala the Bush Doctrine?

Where did righteous killing start, and don't they see the broken hearts, of those left with battered bones, love ones left so all alone? Where the children pay the dues, fathers sins and tainted news, kill a man or kill them all once the seeds are sown. (ok, yeah, the lyric part was bound to slip into this, forgive me)

Do we punish a farmer for some distant neighbor's actions, is that just? Shall his wife and children be left destitute and future-less because his religion, or political views don't match ours? Sins of the fathers?

Can an "enemy" ever be defined further than a person trying to actively kill you in the immediate? What of tribes and clans, and invasions? Does violence ever not beget violence? Is group killing less heinous than choking someone with your bare hands? What of war against those committing atrocities, like in Darfur, Hitler's Germany or Israel's Gaza?

How about the fact there is a Corporate Cabal running this country that sees us less than fodder for their amassing of wealth slowly killing us, but killing us all the same? Is there justification for the actions of a "V"?? You make think yes at first blush, as often do I, but remember well there are those who see us as the ruination of this country, those who would love to kill you, Obama, or Kucinich, or anyone perceived as Liberal, and have no problem with Malia and Sasha or our kids paying the price.

When do we quit using the clubs?

They justify killing abortion doctors, a reprehensible act. I do understand their angst. I have known women who used abortion as birth control, although to most it is a tortured decision. Why should that child not have a chance, even a chance of living a life with a couple who wants them? That child, too, is paying for the sins of its parents. It is a hard ethical choice. Having even pondered that choice, how can yet more killing, a Doctor, thus the Doctor's family becoming the default victims, even be an option? Death is only the beginning of lingering punishment for those left behind. Still.

To the abortion issue itself. Should that ethical question be only the business of the people making it? Does society have a right to decide and impose its will (mostly religious-based, not ethically based) on an individual woman? The added layer of grey that even the zealots can see is rape or incest, or the life of the mother. So they see sacrificing the life of the child for the mother sometimes. Again, a case of righteous murder for those who consider it as murder in the first place. Arbitrary justification.

So, who decides our fate? Can we make our own moral/ethical choice? Can they? Does it stop outside our bodies or in a court room? Ultimately if the argument is Religious, the Separation of Church and State covers it, PERIOD.

If the debate is to be based on Ethics, Morality or Religion, it has to be proven to me that no Murder is Righteous, thus negating my responsibility for paying for drone bombings in Afghanistan. It cannot be framed that some Murder is Righteous, and others are not, because that has been proven subjective beyond any reasonable doubt to me. Again, I have seen opponents of abortion support Capital Punishment, knowing well the margin of error has been proven by DNA testing to be wildly wrong in the past.

If the debate is to be framed on tax dollar usage, then the People must have the ability to have oversight on all governmental spending, and the capacity to vote on such.

But that raises the ugly possibility that majority rule may degrade to the prejudices of the unwashed masses. Where does individual protections begin and the peoples will meet?

Slow murder (polluting) fast murder, retributive murder, young murder, old murder, where does the insanity end?

I warned you this would be more questions than answers.

And that it was discordant and jumbled. I should have slept in longer.

The abortion debate would not be a bad debate, were it ever done in an intelligent way. It could lead to a more open, reasoned way of doing governance, one in which the absolute hypocrisy of the War society is shown, and one in which Separation of Church and State is revered, and one in which society realizes that individuals do have the right to decide for themselves what to do with their bodies.

That debate will never happen.

Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government (Pt. 4b)

Ed Encho — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:12:15 GMT

V: Family Of Secrets

..the Bush Family is so heavily connected and is so interwoven with this systemic fraud, they're concerned about a cascade effect within the public. They don't mind if one incident comes out that they can point to it as an isolated incident. What they're concerned about is the public beginning to understand the level of corruption that exists within all agencies of government and the intricate connection the Bush family has had to this fraud over the decades.

-Al Martin (author of The Conspirators: Secrets of an IranContra Insider)
The involvement of a member of the Bush family, cousin John P. Ellis with Samuel Israel of Bayou Investments and the $250 billion treasury note referenced earlier is a continuation of the amazing and ongoing presence of the Bush dynasty in post WW II America politics. The Bushes are generational scoundrels and have served the most powerful interests of the American oligarchy since the early days of the Twentieth Century. There have been a few excellent books written about the family and of note are Webster Griffin Tarpley's early and rather lurid tome that is entitled George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Kevin Phillips' American Dynasty and an extremely interesting recent book that has been completely ignored by the corporatist media (other than a few hit pieces) Family Of Secrets by Russ Baker. The latter is particularly interesting in that it looks at the Bush family in the larger context of the ruling oligarchy and the system that serves it and has additional history on George H.W. Bush as a lifelong intelligence figure. I also not that Baker in interviews (see Family of Secrets site for links) has made the case that people like Bush family hatchetmen must be looked at in the larger context as being agents or operatives for the preservation of the larger oligarchical system albeit on a lower rung than the Bushes.

The Bush family runs like a poisonous serpent through the recent American history Their deep seated ties to the ruling oligarchy, the Ivy League Eastern Establishment and later the southern fried fascism of big oil, big religion and the sunbelt weapons colossus goes back for several generations. A good resource on the rise of the Bushes would be the aforementioned Kevin Phillips book which lays out the early history of these scoundrels. Further embellishment on the ill gotten gains, murky business dealings and political deviltry of the family can be found in the other two books. The early history of the Bushes is that of patriarchs Samuel P. Bush and the relation to gig oil, steel and munitions during the early period of the American Empire. Sam Bush was a big kahuna for a company called Buckeye Steel Castings, run by members of the Rockefeller family when they were tall in the saddle as some of the nation's foremost Robber Barons. He would eventually rise to a position of prominence with the War Industries Board as director of the Small Arms, Ammunition and Ordnance Division prior to the U.S. entry into World War I. General Smedley D. Butler was absolutely correct when he famously proclaimed in his seminal tract that War Is A Racket (a statement bordering on heresy in the current militarist America) and it would prove to be a very lucrative one indeed for the Bush Family.

Another early member of the House of Bush was George Herbert Walker 'Bert' Bush, a high rolling banking establishment type whose ties to the upper crust of the financial oligarchy, such as the railroad and financial elite Harriman family (Brown Brothers Harriman) would allow for the early fortification of power for the later generations. Bert was a man who was able to parlay his connections and expertise in doing business with Russia and Germany post WW I and he would do much to ensure that Prescott, his son in law would get a primo position on Wall Street, with the lucrative business of the foreign clients who would later go on to infamy after they were armed by the money mongers whose only loyalty was to mammon, not country. It was under the stewardship of Prescott that the Bush family would take a darker turn. As a famous alumnus of the Yale secretive society Skull and Bones Dubya's grandpa gained notoriety for being one of the Bonesmen who raided the grave of Indian warrior Geronimo and took his skull as a trophy.

It was the Skull and Bones pedigree that punched Prescott Bush's ticket into the upper echelon of the American fascist club and while I am not going to into these secret societies here, many of which are mischaracterized as being satanic or occult oriented rather than what they truly are which is a bunch of rich pricks determined to keep the game rigged. Skull and Bones is well known for the influential and interconnected members who engage in bizarre initiation rituals and swear allegiance to each other as they work together to ensure that the status quo remains intact. It should be mentioned that both candidates in the 2004 Presidential election, George W. Bush and John Kerry (who ran the Kerry Commission that later would investigate - or as cynics would portend 'cover up' allegations of CIA involvement in drug trafficking associated with Iran-Contra) were from Skull and Bones. A look at the roster of alumni from this secret group alone shows the influence of a very small and selective oligarchy in America.

Prescott Bush followed the trajectory of his faulty moral compass (and the call of the fascist elements of his era) to work with Wall Steet interests in helping to build the Nazi war machine, reputedly as a money launderer for Hitler's murderous regime through the Union Banking Corporation which served German magnate Fritz Thyssen the German industrialist known as "Hitler's Angel" who was indispensable in providing the financial backing and carried clout that would create what was then the strongest military machine in the world as well as the most bellicose. While the Bush-Nazi links received no attention domestically in our neutered, corporatist media here is an article from The Guardian, How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power and here is a link to another piece by journalist John Buchanan that is entitled Bush Nazi Link Confirmed that was published in the New Hampshire Gazette. The Nazi skeleton is but one of a great number in the Bush family closets and potentially the most damning of all. The Union Banking Corporation would be shut down by FDR in 1942 under the Trading With the Enemy Act, just another reason for the American fascists to burn for revenge against Roosevelt and fuel the fire for their relentless crusade against New Deal policies that continues to this day.

Prescott Bush went on to be an extremely influential figure in U.S. politics in the post-war era, his son George H.W. Bush would cut his teeth in intelligence, dirty dealing and black ops as a matter of family heritage, the father would pass down the business to his spawn in the truly American fashion. Phillips pegs it dead on here in describing the Bush Crime Family as:

A great family (great as in power, not morality) that has bulit a base over the course of the Twentieth Century in the back corridors of the new military-industrial complex and in close association with the growing intelligence and national security establishment.

The father of the 41st President and the grandfather of the most overtly fascist and recently departed leader in U.S. history, George W. Bush burrowed deeply into the establishment. He became a Senator in 1952 and as legend has it helped to groom Richard M. Nixon for his rise as a tool of the establishment.

Prescott Bush and Dick Nixon

Nixon's political career was formed by his run for a California Congressional seat where he was backed by big money power (post-WW II fascist elements)against incumbent Jerry Voorhis, a backer of the New Deal and a man who had run afoul of the oligarchy for his opposition to Standard Oil and a secret government drilling contract in the Elk Hills reserve that he had exposed before Congress. Voorhis was a marked man and was challenging Wall Street power at every opportunity, railing agains the "cancerous superstructure of monopolies and cartels". It was Nixon who would perform the political hit on Voorhis, subjecting him to a withering onlsaught of red baiting propaganda, the sort that would become religion in the U.S. as the war against the unions and the middle class began in earnest. Nixon would later go on to play a big part in the poisonous culture wars that have so ill-served this country and which we can now see the wreckage of in our thoroughly corrupted, diseased political system and the new feudalism as exemplified by the massive redistribution of wealth to reinflate speculative capitalism and the big Wall Street banks.

Russ Baker does some very interesting analysis in his Family Of Secrets, especially in regard to George H.W. Bush (aka Poppy) who appears to have been a member of intelligence dating back to at least the 1950's instead of when he was formally put in charge of the CIA in 1976. There is the very interesting story that Poppy is 'unable' to remember exactly where he was on the day of the JFK assassination (interestingly Nixon was in Dallas that day too) which in and of itself is odd, Baker makes the following statement in an interview:

I am very careful not to speculate. What I do is begin with the curious fact that G.H.W. Bush has said he could not remember where he was on November 22, 1963. That makes him just about the only adult alive at the time who has that memory defect.

Which in and of itself proves nothing but it is very unusual that Mr. Bush would not remember where he was, even more so when considering the existence of a memo from then FBI head J. Edgar Hoover on the Kennedy assassination dated 11/29/63 that specifically mentions a "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency". Bush and the CIA denied that they were the same person (another George Bush briefly worked for the CIA at the time, perhaps brought in as a cover) but there is the matter of Bush's company the Zapata Corp. that has been linked to the CIA as a front, according to Baker the CIA helped Bush to establish this company. Note that during the Bay of Pigs, the code name for the invasion was Operation Zapata. During this particular period Bush would become familiar with some of the aforementioned anti-Cuban operatives such as Ted Shackley, E. Howard Hunt, Felix Rodriguez and an interesting figure by the name of Barry Seal. Seal, like many others would eventually turn up again in the milieu of drug dealers, gun runners and black operations that swirled around Iran-Contra when Bush was in the White House as Reagan's V.P.

George H.W. Bush's connections to many of the most shadowy figures and operations of the past half century as well as the criminal nature of his entire family make a strong argument that the ongoing destabilization of the United States by fascists has been aided greatly by the Bushes. I don't have the time to go into every aspect (I'll save it for the future) but the evolution of the Bush family from well connected servants of the early robber barons, to the arms trade, the Nazis and the smuggled out war criminals who would greatly aid and assimilate themselves into the intelligence services and the war against communism on through the JFK assassination, Vietnam, Iran Contra and ultimately the ruinous eight year reign of the Bush-Cheney regime have been instrumental in the fascist takeover of America.

An eerie and interesting footnote is the association of Bush's son Neil to the brother of John W. Hinkley Jr., the disturbed young man who attempted to kill President Reagan. Neil Bush and Scott Hinkley had dinner plans the night after the botched assassination, interesting bit of happenstance or perhaps a postponement of a celebration? Assassination researcher John Judge made the following comment on this in the linked interview:

They knew each other socially quite well. The press said that they were to have dinner -- Scott Hinkley and Neil Bush were to have dinner on March 31 1981. But they cancelled the dinner after the news of the shooting. The press said that that was ironic. It gives a new meaning to the word `irony'. Because if Robert Oswald, Lee Harvey's older brother and Lynda Bird Johnson were going to have dinner the night of the JFK assassination, somebody would figure out it meant something.

One can never be too suspicious of such sort of things when they involve members of the Bush family. Hinckley the shooter had ties to World Vision, a right-wing organization that allegedly acted as a CIA front run by John W. Hinkley Sr. that worked in Central America. Rumors of mind control (manchurian candidates?) have surfaced in regard to World Vision but whatever activities surround it are like most of our history, concealed behind the veil of secrecy. Some credence can however be given to the CIA's long history of mind control experiments (MKULTRA), the secret wars waged against leftist governments in the Southern Cone and the really creepy story that Mark David Chapman, the killer of the hated by the establishment John Lennon also had ties to World Vision.

I would strongly encourage everybody who has taken the time to read this to do your own research on the connections between the Bush family and the downward trajectory of this once great country into the fascist gangster state that it has become today and despite the disgraced rule of George W. Bush he was after all able to successfully eviscerate the Constitution during his time in office as well as to put into place the most formidable high-tech police state in the history of mankind. The economy has been destroyed, the privatization projects of the fascists are now a reality and with more states in financial distress along the lines of California there will soon be national fire sales of roads, infrastructure and landmarks to the descendants of the early Robber Barons whose power has been consolidated by insiders such as the Bush family beyond their wildest of dreams. The only things that the United States of America is now capable of producing is death, destruction, financial scams, for profit prisons, paranoia and a massive Big Brother style surveillance and repression apparatus that is the envy of all dictators.

And the Bush family isn't finished yet, Jeb is coming soon. You can count on it.

Obama and Potemkin America 2009

Conclusion: The Octopus Ascendant

While it initially began with clandestine operations and murky, beneath the surface alliances The Octopus has become the underlying but inextricable operating system for the American capitalist empire as it exists today. It is the very kernal of all that we known and now has gone legit or perhaps more appropriately the system has descended to the level of corruption once the domain of rogue forces within. It has been a long and slow process, layered over the decades as the last vestiges of a free system where liberty is paramount has been leeched out leaving in its place a land that is America in name only, except that shingle has been replaced with one that says Homeland, a fitting legacy for the fascists who used the aftermath of WW II to mount their takeover. Now The Octopus is comprised of much more and it's gone corporate, ponder how the following tentacles have become interconnected and now dominate our ever declining way of life:

1: Energy and Resources (Soon to include privatized food and water...got money? I sure hope so if you plan on any sort of a continued existence)

2: Banking and Finance (The recent financial crisis has allowed the most powerful of institutions to essentially take over the government so that tax dollars will be directed to shore up their bogus markets and Ponzi schemes)

3: Transportation and Infrastructure (Our airports have already been transformed into Soviet bloc style checkpoints, it's all a matter of conditioning and time until all freedom of movement has been restricted entirely, the tracking chips are already being successfully sold as prevention against child abduction.)

4: Drugs (Pharmaceuticals are giving narcotics a run for their money and there will be no serious efforts at meaningful reform)

5: Munitons, Military Spending (Oceania always has and always will be at war)

6: Geopolitics (The coups, destabilizations, puppet dictatorships, torture and ethnic cleansings will go on, it's all business as usual - for an intersting perspective see Tom Hayden's piece from The Nation entitled Understanding the Long War)

7: Media (Would anything be possible without the wonderful complicity of the media. The CIA had it right with Operation Mockingbird, it would only be further refined over time with the rise of the right-wing, corporatist think tanks, the ginned up attack on the 'liberal' media and the rise of cable television, the corporatization and consolidation have built a propaganda machine that not even Goebbels cound have envisioned. The mass hypnosis that has narcotized an entire population through television has been an astounding boon for the fascists.)

8: Intelligence (The 'terrorist' attacks of 9/11 have legitimized the ubiquitous surveillance of the American people helped along by the technology of PROMIS and Main Core, our new forms of social control are already being beta tested by American corporations in China. See Naomi Klein's piece on China's All-Seeing Eye from Rolling Stone Magazine).

And it's all tied up in the big, shiny, star-spangled package of EMPIRE.

The Obama administration has been a major disappointment in reigning in any of the power of the fascist state established by his predecessors, I seriously am beginning to think that he doesn't care, nor do any of the Democrats who triumphantly retook the White House and the Congress - they are the insiders now and they control the cash spigots, and most importantly they have favors to pay back. Americans were promised change, here are a few of the changes that we have received to this point: a continuation of domestic spying, a bailout of the fraudulent financial system of Wall Street speculation, the Federal Reserve creating trillions of dollars out of nothing, apologies for torture (whoops - enhanced interrogation techniques - my bad), the failure to prosecute war criminals, a continuation of anti-labor practices, more secrecy (the suppression of the additonal Abu Ghraib photos), plans to censor the internet, the diabolical conflation of dissenters and extremists (terrorists) by the anti-American Department of Homeland Security and coming soon, the bait and switch of a public health care option that would only allow the filthy scoundrels in the insurance industry and the Wall Street profiteers to further enrich themselves while beggaring the population. And of course there are the wars, dealing in the death and devastation it is far too lucrative of a business to ever abandon and the swords that should long ago have been beaten back into plowshares are being honed to razor sharpness and pointed at the necks of all Americans who chose awareness and enlightenment over denial and acquiescence.

Face it, the same people who once glorified Mussolini on the cover of Fortune Magazine for his wondrous corporatist state have won and we are their subjects, their slaves, their chattel and if you don't like it you can go and live in a for profit prison or simply disappear without any possiblity of a trial for the rest of your life. As American capitalism and its excesses gradually mutated from the original petri dish of the post World War II era world, the corruption, the greed and the pathological need for the necessary control for it to exist on a grand scale has metastasized to the point where it has consumed all, instead of The Octopus a more fitting metaphor for all that has taken place is the 1950's science fiction movie The Blob.

What happens now is no longer a matter of simply exposing the elements that set into motion the chain of events that are now reaching critical mass but in waging total war against the entire system itself through acts of civil disobedience and refusal to comply, I would caution those who are instigating for a full blown revolution, the rulers have bigger guns and more money than God, you are but ants to them and you will be squashed if you use violence to rebel. That is the only way that there will be a chance for survival now that the state has been weaponized against the people, equipped with a monstrous high technological surveillance system that morphed out of the theft of the PROMIS software and the police state infrastructure that grew out of the Reagan era programs such as Garden Plot, Cable Splicer and REX 84. The plans for the camps are ready if not the camps themselves...it has become fashionable to demonize those who now speak of them albeit ironic that the loudest of them never uttered a peep when George W. Bush was in charge of generating the pick-up lists.

But for the most part America sleeps. The coronation of Barack Obama, a product, a brand name and a triumph of modern public relations and marketing has provided the soothing balm for the raw sores on backs courtesy of the Bush administration. For a television addicted nation of sheep content to live on the world's largest lemming farm he is their perfect leader, a reality television show president, crooning sweet words while his actions belie the rhetoric. The vast majority of the fools will still be watching American Idol when the jackboots kick in their doors.

PRIOR INSTALLMENTS

Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government - Part One

Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government - Part Two

Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government - Part Three

It's News To M_A - 7/15/09

M_A — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:57:26 GMT

Stories of note from the WakeTheFuckUp news desk....

Here's a glimpse of some of the headlines featured below the fold:

House Democrats Unveil Landmark Health Care Legislation

The Economy Is Even Worse Than You Think

Washington and the Coup D'etat in Honduras

Behind Detainee Release, a U.S.-Iraqi Conflict on Iran

Overload

Worse Than Foreign Assassinations?

Iraq: From breadbasket to dust bowl

House Democrats Unveil Landmark Health Care Legislation
by Carolyn Lochhead

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top Democrats opened an all-fronts charge today to pass a $1.5 trillion, 10-year health care overhaul by August, unveiling legislation that would tax the wealthy to pay for universal coverage, create a public insurance plan and require individuals to carry insurance and businesses to offer it.

The bill would also begin wide-ranging experiments to change the way doctors and hospitals are paid in an effort to slow decades of relentless cost increases.

The legislation arrived after a strong shove from President Obama at a White House meeting Monday, when he ordered Democratic House and Senate leaders to begin moving bills that have languished for months as opponents have gathered force and polls show public skepticism on the rise.

Pelosi, D-Calif., and three key committee chairmen she has dubbed "three tenors" - Democratic California Reps. George Miller and Henry Waxman, and Rep Charles Rangel, D-N.Y. - vowed to make history by achieving universal coverage, a dream of Democrats since President Harry Truman.

"Inaction is not an option," Pelosi said. The Democrats described a crisis among individuals, businesses and governments at all levels facing cost increases that are driving all them toward financial ruin.

"You will never again be one treatment away from bankruptcy," Miller promised.

The bill would levy a surtax starting at 1 percent on individuals earning more than $280,000, rising to 5.4 percent for those earning $1 million a year. Businesses would have to pay a tax of 8 percent of their payroll if they do not offer coverage, with an exemption for businesses with payrolls less than $250,000.

Business groups immediately slammed the idea, saying it would impose an enormous tax on small businesses and kill jobs.

"If there's one sure way to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, this is it," said U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Tom Donohue.

Obama and Democrats see health care reform as central to their election victory last year and are determined to succeed for fear they will not have another chance.

The Economy Is Even Worse Than You Think
by Mortimer Zuckerman

The recent unemployment numbers have undermined confidence that we might be nearing the bottom of the recession. What we can see on the surface is disconcerting enough, but the inside numbers are just as bad.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics preliminary estimate for job losses for June is 467,000, which means 7.2 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession. The cumulative job losses over the last six months have been greater than for any other half year period since World War II, including the military demobilization after the war. The job losses are also now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous expansion.

Here are 10 reasons we are in even more trouble than the 9.5% unemployment rate indicates:

- June's total assumed 185,000 people at work who probably were not. The government could not identify them; it made an assumption about trends. But many of the mythical jobs are in industries that have absolutely no job creation, e.g., finance. When the official numbers are adjusted over the next several months, June will look worse.

- More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people don't count on the unemployment roll.

- No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the last 12 months but were not counted. Why? Because they hadn't searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.

- The number of workers taking part-time jobs due to the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about nine million, or 5.8% of the work force. Add those whose hours have been cut to those who cannot find a full-time job and the total unemployed rises to 16.5%, putting the number of involuntarily idle in the range of 25 million.

- The average work week for rank-and-file employees in the private sector, roughly 80% of the work force, slipped to 33 hours. That's 48 minutes a week less than before the recession began, the lowest level since the government began tracking such data 45 years ago. Full-time workers are being downgraded to part time as businesses slash labor costs to remain above water, and factories are operating at only 65% of capacity. If Americans were still clocking those extra 48 minutes a week now, the same aggregate amount of work would get done with 3.3 million fewer employees, which means that if it were not for the shorter work week the jobless rate would be 11.7%, not 9.5% (which far exceeds the 8% rate projected by the Obama administration).

- The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks, the longest since government began tracking this data in 1948. The number of long-term unemployed (i.e., for 27 weeks or more) has now jumped to 4.4 million, an all-time high.

- The average worker saw no wage gains in June, with average compensation running flat at $18.53 an hour.

- The goods producing sector is losing the most jobs -- 223,000 in the last report alone.

- The prospects for job creation are equally distressing. The likelihood is that when economic activity picks up, employers will first choose to increase hours for existing workers and bring part-time workers back to full time. Many unemployed workers looking for jobs once the recovery begins will discover that jobs as good as the ones they lost are almost impossible to find because many layoffs have been permanent. Instead of shrinking operations, companies have shut down whole business units or made sweeping structural changes in the way they conduct business. General Motors and Chrysler, closed hundreds of dealerships and reduced brands. Citigroup and Bank of America cut tens of thousands of positions and exited many parts of the world of finance.

Job losses may last well into 2010 to hit an unemployment peak close to 11%. That unemployment rate may be sustained for an extended period.

Can we find comfort in the fact that employment has long been considered a lagging indicator? It is conventionally seen as having limited predictive power since employment reflects decisions taken earlier in the business cycle. But today is different. Unemployment has doubled to 9.5% from 4.8% in only 16 months, a rate so fast it may influence future economic behavior and outlook.

How could this happen when Washington has thrown trillions of dollars into the pot, including the famous $787 billion in stimulus spending that was supposed to yield $1.50 in growth for every dollar spent? For a start, too much of the money went to transfer payments such as Medicaid, jobless benefits and the like that do nothing for jobs and growth. The spending that creates new jobs is new spending, particularly on infrastructure. It amounts to less than 10% of the stimulus package today.

About 40% of U.S. workers believe the recession will continue for another full year, and their pessimism is justified. As paychecks shrink and disappear, consumers are more hesitant to spend and won't lead the economy out of the doldrums quickly enough.

It may have made him unpopular in parts of the Obama administration, but Vice President Joe Biden was right when he said a week ago that the administration misread how bad the economy was and how effective the stimulus would be. It was supposed to be about jobs but it wasn't. The Recovery Act was a single piece of legislation but it included thousands of funding schemes for tens of thousands of projects, and those programs are stuck in the bureaucracy as the government releases the funds with typical inefficiency.

Another $150 billion, which was allocated to state coffers to continue programs like Medicaid, did not add new jobs; hundreds of billions were set aside for tax cuts and for new benefits for the poor and the unemployed, and they did not add new jobs. Now state budgets are drowning in red ink as jobless claims and Medicaid bills climb.

Washington and the Coup D'etat in Honduras
by Eva Gollinger

The State Department had previous knowledge of the coup. The State Department and US Congress financed and advised the Honduran actors and organizations which participated in the coup. The Pentagon trained, financed, and armed the Honduran army which perpetrated the coup and which continues to repress the honduran people. The US military presence in Honduras, which occupies the military base at Soto Cano (Palmerola), authorized the coup with its tactical complicity and refusal to withdraw military support to the honduran forces. The US ambassador to the United States in Tegucigalpa, Hugo Llorens, coordinated the expulsion of president Manuel Zelaya, together with the Subsecretary of State Thomas Shannon and John Negroponte, who actually works as a consultant to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

From the first day of the coup, the government in Washington has spoken of the "two parties" involved and the need for "dialogue" to restore the constitutional order, legitimating in this way the coupsters.

The State Department has refused to certify legally the events in Honduras as a "coup", it has not suspended nor frozen financial support or trade with the country, nor has it taken steps to pressure effectively the de facto regime.

Washington manipulated the Organization of American States to increase the time devoted to debate what needed to be done and in this manner did not support the immediate return of president Zelaya to power, as part of a strategy to legitimate the de facto government and wear down the honduran people, who continue to resist the coup.

Secretary of State Clinton and her spokespersons stopped speaking of the return of president Zelaya to power and later designated Costa Rican president Arias as a mediator, and have now referred to the dictator who assumed power illegitimately during the coup, Roberto Micheletti, as an "interim president".

The strategy of "negotiating" with the coupsters was imposed by Obama's government as a way of discrediting president Zelaya--holding him responsible for provoking the coup--and legitimating the coupsters.

United States congressional representatives--democrats and republicans--organized a visit by representatives of the coupsters to Washington, and received them with distinction at a variety of institutions in the US capital.

In spite of the fact that republican senator John McCain coordinated the visit of the coupsters to Washington through a lobbying organization called the Cormac Group, actually Bill Clinton's lawyer and close friend of Hillary, Lanny Davis, was contracted as a "lobbyist" to gain public acceptance of Washington for the de facto government in Honduras.

Otto Reich and venezuelan Robert Carmona-Borjas, former lawyer to dictator Pedro Carmona during the coup in Venezuela in April 2002, helped from Washington to set the stage for the coup against president Zelaya in Honduras.

The planning team for the coup in Honduras designated by Washington also included a group of US ambassadors recently named to central american countries, experts in the destabilization of the cuban revolution, and also Adolfo Frank, formerly in charge of USAID for Cuba.

No one can doubt the involvement of Washington in the coup in Honduras against president Zelaya that began this past june 28. Many analysts, leaders, as well as presidents, have denounced it. Nonetheless, the majority concur that the administration of Barack Obama had no role in the honduran coup, holding responsible in its place remnants of the government of George W. Bush and the hawks who continue to walk the hallways of the White House. The evidence demonstrates that yes, it is certain that the hawks and the usual suspects of coups and sabotage in Latin America have participated this time, and there also exists ample proof of the role of Obama's government as well.

Behind Detainee Release, a U.S.-Iraqi Conflict on Iran
by Gareth Porter

The release Friday of five Iranians held by the U.S. military in Iraq for two and a half years highlights the long-simmering conflict between the U.S. and Iraqi views of Iranian policy in Iraq and of the role of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) there.

For the Barack Obama administration, as for the George W. Bush administration before it, the Iranian detainees had become symbols of what Washington steadfastly insisted was an Iranian effort to use the IRGC to destabilise the Iraqi regime.

But high-ranking Shi'a and Kurdish officials of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had never shared the U.S. view of the IRGC or of the Iranian role. They have acted on the premise that Iran is interested in ensuring that a friendly Shiite regime would remain in power.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly expressed concern that the five Iranian detainees being released were "associated with" the Quds Force of the Iranian and could endanger U.S. troops in Iraq.

The idea that the Quds Force was fighting a "proxy war" against U.S. and Iraqi troops was the justification for the George W. Bush administration's decision in late 2006 to target any Iranian found in Iraq who could plausibly be linked to the IRGC.

Three of the five Iranian detainees, who had been grabbed in a January 2007 raid, were working in an Iranian liaison office that had been operating in the Kurdistan capital of Erbil. The U.S. military, hinting that it actually had little information about the Iranians seized, said they were "suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraqi and coalition forces".

Kurdish Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari tried to get the U.S. officials to understand that the Iranians seized in Erbil were not part of a "clandestine network" but were working on visas and other paperwork for travel by Iraqis to Iran. Zebari explained that they were working for the IRGC because that institution has the responsibility for controlling Iran's borders.

After Mahmoud Farhadi was kidnapped by the U.S. military from a hotel in the Kurdish city of Suleimaniya in September 2007, a U.S. military spokesman made the spectacular claim that Farhadi was an IRGC commander responsible for all Iranian operations inside Iraq.

Kurdish officials acknowledged Farhadi's IRGC affiliation, but the Kurdish president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, publicly confirmed that Farhadi was a civilian official of the neighbouring Iranian province of Kermanshah on a "commercial mission with the knowledge of the federal government in Baghdad and the government of Kurdistan".

Although Farhadi had indeed been a military commander at one time, the Kurds pointed out that he was now carrying out only civilian functions.

Overload
by Nebojsa Malic

At a meeting in March 2009, Secretary Clinton presented her Russian counterpart with a red button that was supposed to read "Reset" in Russian. Instead, it read "Overload." It seemed like an innocent mistake, a syllable lost in translation. But was it, really?

That may well be the question on many Russians' minds this week, in the aftermath of Barack Obama's visit to Moscow, but also in the wake of news that the new Bulgarian government reneged on its energy agreements with Moscow and signed on to the alternate gas pipeline, designed to bypass Russia.

Though the speech Obama gave at the New Economic School in Moscow on July 7 was well written and well delivered, it is hard to see how the reaction to it could have been anything but incredulity. Having endured seven decades of violent hypocrisy, Russians can smell it a mile away - and Obama's speech reeked of it.

Take this, for example: "In 2009, a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonizing other countries. The days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chess board are over."

Isn't it Obama's own country that routinely dominates and demonizes entire nations, and invents Hitlers du jour to justify its overseas military adventures? And isn't the most notable theorist of the "grand chessboard" Obama's old professor from Columbia, Zbigniew Brzezinski, an unrepentant Russophobe?

It gets better. Surely Obama was aware that the U.S. pioneered the method of regime-change now known as the "color revolution" and used it first in Serbia (2000), then in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004). His Russian audience certainly was. Yet he looked them in the eye and said, "America will not seek to impose any system of government on any other country, nor would we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country."

Finally, even though it was Washington that interfered in Georgia and Ukraine to install friendly regimes; even though it was the U.S. that pushed the hardest for the "independence" of the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo; and it was the U.S. that attacked Serbia in 1999 and Iraq in 2003, in clear violation of international law, Obama had the sheer gall to say:

"State sovereignty must be a cornerstone of international order. Just as all states should have the right to choose their leaders, states must have the right to borders that are secure, and to their own foreign policies. That is true for Russia, just as it is true for the United States. Any system that cedes those rights will lead to anarchy. That is why this principle must apply to all nations - including Georgia and Ukraine. America will never impose a security arrangement on another country."

So who put Yushchenko and Saakashvili in power? Who created the "independent state of Kosovo"? Who invaded and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan? Who has bases in over 150 countries around the planet? The Martians, maybe?

Worse Than Foreign Assassinations?
by Digby

Pretty much every news outlet has confirmed that the secret CIA program held from Congress by Dick Cheney concerned targeted assassinations of Al Qaeda members abroad, basically the "executive assassination ring" discussed by Sy Hersh earlier this year.

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.

Former counter-terrorism officials who retain close links to the intelligence community say that the hidden operation involved plans by the CIA and the military to launch operations, similar to those by Israel's Mossad intelligence service, to hunt down and kill al-Qaida activists abroad without informing the governments concerned, even though some were regarded as friendly if unreliable.

The CIA apparently did not put the plan in to operation but the US military did, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the programme.

I'd like to know more about that Kenya incident. Put it this way, when 15 year-old kids who committed no crime other than being valuable to an Afghan warlord seeking a bounty ended up at Guantanamo, I can only imagine what the fever dreams of Dick Cheney led to out in the world.

But something's not right here. Targeted assassinations of heads of state are illegal, President Ford signed that in 1975. But Peter Bergen explains that we have had assassination policies on Al Qaeda since before 9-11 and after.

Peter Bergen, a senior security analyst at the New America Foundation, said that the secret operation must have gone further than that to have created such a backlash in Congress: "If it's an assassination programme of al-Qaida leaders that is hardly surprising. Clinton had an assassination programme against bin Laden. There have been 27 drone missile strikes against al-Qaida alone this year."

It could be the case that Congress is merely upset about not being properly informed, also a crime under the National Security Act of 1947, and not the contents of the program. But two things stick out. It's completely unclear why this action, out of all the others, would be hid by the Bush Administration from Congress. Most terror policies were justified under the concept that we were at war with Al Qaeda, and the executive has broad discretion to carry out the policies he sees fit to protect the nation. I don't agree with the expansiveness of that view, but this kind of assassination ring would fall squarely inside that construct, no? Why would the Bush White House not be afraid to argue that we can torture suspects in the war on terror but terrified to explain that we can take out Al Qaeda safe houses with targeted strikes, the way that the Clinton Administration clearly did in the past? Why would it be so radioactive that Leon Panetta couldn't hear about it for six months after being made CIA Director?

The second thing that bothers me about this is the lightning quickness with which the program has been explained to the press, mostly through unnamed sources. You'd almost think that some members of the Bush Administration wanted to convince the public that their secret program only dealt with killing bad guys. And when I say some members, I mean Dick Cheney.

Iraq: From breadbasket to dust bowl
by Tom Peter

When Iraqi farmer Amir Yass Kadyar returned to his fields this time last year, after 12 months languishing in Baquba as a refugee, the land was barren.

Agricultural problems had been building in the years before he left, but with his fields lying derelict the challenges compounded. Now Kadyar says he can't compete with cheap, imported produce, so he has stopped growing food altogether.

"The government doesn't support the farmers," Kadyar said, explaining that without government subsidies it is impossible for local farmers to compete with foreign producers that charge as little as half Iraqi market price for their fruits and vegetables.

Known for centuries as the breadbasket of the Middle East, Iraq has become a net importer of food for the first time in recent history, mainly due to decades of war, sanctions and ineffective government policy.

Agriculture experts say that with time and sufficient resources, Iraq's farms can overcome substantial technical problems. But creating an effective government policy for the nation's agricultural industry may prove a bigger hurdle.

"There are policy issues that need to be resolved, and then there are structural issues that need to be resolved," said Russell Williams, senior agricultural adviser for the U.S. State Department's provisional reconstruction team in Diyala Province. "There's nothing here that can't be resolved, but it's time and money. At the current pace it's going to take a while."

If Iraq does not move to repair its farming sector, it could face a food supply emergency. A USAID study predicts that Iraq will face a major food crisis within a generation unless the government undertakes a significant reallocation of oil revenue to fund imports and food production. Additionally, Iraq's rapidly growing population and expanding middle class will also place significant strain on the nation's food supply.

Despite being situated in the heart of an area known from antiquity as the fertile crescent, Iraq has been in an agricultural demise for the last several decades.

Though the decline in the sector began under ineffective socialist farming practices implemented by Saddam Hussein, the real problems came shortly after the first Gulf War. The oil for food program flooded Iraq with free food in the form of rations, forcing many Iraqi farmers out of work.

Coalition forces, after their invasion of 2003, established the Coalition Provisional Authority to temporarily assist in governing the country. Seeking to end decades of close government oversight, the authority drastically reduced funding to most government ministries, including the Ministry of Agriculture. Subsequently, Iraqi farmers lost government support and many were unable to make a profit farming.

And finally...

It's past time to wake the fuck up!

M_A

Wednesday Open - Snorting in Derision

Diane G — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:11:36 GMT

Yesterday I was Holding my Breath, but today it is blasting back out in utter exasperation.

Will somebody please stop the performance art? Will somebody step up and stop the Kubuki Theater already?

"Listen up Douchebags. Sotomayer's nomination is a done deal. All this smoke blowing is nothing but an attempt to prove to your base what racist, sexist bastards you can be.
Really? Scroll back to when Alito was nominated, and he said the EXACT same things she is saying and you supported him. Seriously, roll the tape and move on. "Experiences from my background."
Besides, nothing has been said new in ANY of these hearings in years. There are only coached non-answers.
It is nothing but a play that is too proud of being a play, so proud in fact that every fucking scripted word by the minor players is over-emoted to the point of parody. It is painful to watch, a caricature of itself. I'd much rather read the book, or at least in this case her decisions.
The woman has more bench experience than any of the presently seated Justices.
Get over it. Its done. Move on, and can I hear a dot com amen?"

::Derisive Snort::

Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government (Pt. 4a)

Ed Encho — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:32:11 GMT

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

- President John F. Kennedy

Secrecy is the slayer of liberty, it is the essence of which dictatorships are made, of which free societies are suffocated by and of which people are subjugated by. When that secrecy becomes institutionalized in the most powerful corridors of government then it is only a matter of time until that government becomes a weapon of the powerful to be used against the people. Today, in mid-2009 we here in the United States of America (or at least those of us who are awake) are bearing witness to the last vestiges of a once vibrant democracy slowly strangled to death by a deeply embedded culture of secrecy. There has been a hijacking of the intentions of the founders who envisioned a free people by a corrupt and immoral oligarchy and those who serve it. It is backed by the rise of a high-tech police state built on on our backs and enforced by Big Brother style surveillance, incessant propaganda and the vicious undercurrent of social manipulation in order to sow the seeds of hatred necessary for divisiveness and ignorance that are protection for the gangster state.
Our last great leader, President John F. Kennedy once warned of the danger of secrecy in a 1961 speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association:

The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.

Contrast those words with the acts of the government today, and of the government and of its agents (both official and clandestine) since Kennedy's public brutal murder in Dealey Plaza which served as a crystal clear message to all that if he could be executed publicly in such a manner that nobody was safe. In the subsequent administrations following that of JFK's, the power of the state was slowly, incrementally increased so as to not alarm a somnolent citizenry. The rise of the authoritarian fascists who now are at the very pinnacle of their meticulously planned police state did not occur either quickly or without warning, it has been a well thought out, intricately constructed plan that has succeeded largely due to the immersion of official business in a cloud of secrecy.

The early days were largely the work of a small cabal, a few rogue networks run by the real owners of America to implement a system that would serve their interests alone and to brutally put down challenges. They would count on the ability of the media and the lies to anesthetize the public at large, amuse them, distract them with emotional appeals, ball games, contests and triviality to provide distractions and to remove the necessary civic involvement for democracy to exist. Today, as we stumble about in a fog amidst the wreckage of the Bush years, the trap is almost closed, facilitated by that holiest of holies that is 9/11, jusfification for everything.

Our newly minted Emperor Barack Obama has continued the repressive policies of the post 9/11 fascist state. Our bondage is now sold to us by a charismatic pitchman with the gleaming smile instead of a sneer, the iron fist is covered by a velvet glove. Obama is the bookend to JFK, the flipside of the coin, most of the dirty work has already been done and he will close the deal now that the hostile takeover has been completed. He will now carry out the policies of war, oppression, debt slavery and be a guardian of the oligarchy. Change has indeed come to America, we are now a lawless, modern feudal state ruled by corporations, banks, arms manufacturers, extortionists, gangsters and corrupted politicians who are protected by paramiltary police forces and a media that no longer even pretends to tell the truth.

This is the story of the Octopus...

I: Cabazon

I am going to begin this installment where I left off with part three , the story of the strange dealings and murders at the Cabazon Indian Reservation in the California desert. Emmy award winning investigative reporter Nathan Baca of KESQ, a Palm Springs television station has just come out with his latest installment in the excellent series The Octopus Murders. The series developed out of a Riverside County Sheriff's Department cold case squad investigation into the 1981 execution style murders of three people in a Rancho Mirage home and the swirling dark dealings that have been associated with those murders. Cabazon Indian tribe Vice Chairman Fred Alvarez had grown suspicious of shadowy government operatives and arms dealers using the reservation as a testing and development ground from which to profit through the supply of weapons to third world regimes, the type of countries in which the U.S. funded vicious thugs, death squads, assassinations, black ops and in which the American intelligence services such as the CIA played a hand in training the torturers and killers. The recent Honduran coup and the revelations that some of the leaders received training at Fort Benning's notoriously vile School of the Americas puts this sort of destabilization (which was especially in vogue during the era of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush) back into the headlines albeit several layers below the ongoing Michael Jackson saturation coverage.

Fred Alvarez was going to blow the whistle on how Cabazon sovereign land was being used for nefarious purposes by national security state operatives and the contracting outfits (CIA fronts?) Wackenhut Corporation and Meridian Arms Company. When interests of this nature are threatened there is a long history of the 'meddlers' ending up dead (typically suicides, accidents or 'heart attacks') but the chances of Alvarez blowing up this particular operation which would prove to be huge and multi-faceted, a veritable nexus of clandestine activity during the Reagan years had to be halted with extreme prejudice. So on July 1, 1981 Alvarez along with two friends who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time were professionally executed. The names of the other victims were Patty Castro and Ralph Boger, just collateral damage to the ice cold killers, professionals when it came to protecting the interests of those they were hired by. But sometimes things like this come back to haunt, Mr. Boger's daughter, Rachel Begley has tirelessly investigated the murder of her father (her website is Desertfae and she also maintains The Octopus Wiki) and the cold case investigation had worked it's way through the system to the California Department of Justice - where it is now effectively stalled. These murders are the key to a dangerous Pandora's box that if opened would implicate numerous top political figures, expose the way that the deep state really operates and offer a true glimpse behind the star spangled façade of false morality that America exists behind. It would also show that the PROMIS software, the legendary, highly advanced program that has been integral in the formation of the police state infrastructure was modified for espionage and profit on Cabazon Indian land. To say that this is the story of the century is not mere hyperbole, the trail of dead bodies over the years can attest to that and it is time that it be told.

Joseph Daniel Casolaro 1947-1991
II: Danny Casolaro and the Octopus

How much violence was there in Nazi Germany...before the old Germany, the center of theatre, opera, philosophy, poetry, psychology and medicine was destroyed? How many incidents took place that were not coincidental before it was called Fascism? What were the transitions? How many people? Was it when the first tailor disappeared? Or librarian? Or professor? Or when the first press was closed or the first song eliminated? Or when the first political science teacher was killed coming home on his bike? How many incidents happened that were perfectly normal until people woke up and said, 'Hey, we're in a police state!'

-Mae Brussell

According to the book The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro by Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith casolaro had identified a core group of individuals operating within the national security apparatus and their influence in post WW II political history:

Danny Casolaro believed the Octopus responsible for criminal conspiracies, which, linked, formed a virtual history of intelligence double dealing from 1950 to the present. These events, in Casolaro's view, included the ousters of US President Richard Nixon, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, the Shah of Iran, and the murders of Chilean President Allende, and of course, of President John F. Kennedy. Casolaro saw the Octopus' tentacles entwined throughout the creation of the Golden Triangle and the Latin American drug trade, the Cuban Bay of Pigs debacle, the October Surprise, the BCCI banking scandal, and, almost as an afterthought, the theft of PROMIS software.
Casolaro found a "Secret Team", a high cabal of players operating a clandestine, parallel government, identified previously by other writers [Col. L. Fletcher Prouty]. The cabal had operated beyond the control or scrutiny of elected government, financed by drug-running from Southeast Asia and the Americas.
Other researchers tended to see the Octopus as a fog of political crimes ascribed to the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies, institutions or even the modern terrorist state and its citizenry. Casolaro's Octopus, however, was no grand, unified mega-conspiracy theory. Casolaro believed the crimes could best be identified by linking them to a small network of named individuals that made up his Octopus. He outlined their hierarchy and provided specific detail about their behind-the-scenes role in contemporary political history.
Casolaro named people both familiar and unfamiliar to other researchers. He deemed the "first level" operatives to be Richard Helms, George Pender, John Philip Nichols and Ray Cline. The second level included Robert Chasen, E. Howard Hunt, Edwin Wilson, Thomas Clines and Ted Shackley. Working backward from the PROMIS theft, Casolaro saw them in a new relationship, a nearly organic entity that impacted both past and then current events.

When it comes to the mysterious deaths related to this story, free lance investigative journalist Danny Casolaro, who was 'suicided' in a Martinsburg, West Virginia hotel room in August 1991 is the most notable for he was getting close to the truth. His body was found by a maid in the bathtub in a grisly blood-spattered bathroom, his wrists had been deeply slashed numerous times. In what is a discernable pattern, many of those who threaten the hidden power are found in hotel rooms, allegedly the victims of suicides even though as in Casolaro's case the victim did not appear to friends, family and associates as being despondent or otherwise suicidal. In his case it was quite the opposite, Casolaro had been devoted to an investigation into a covert network of spooks, criminals and government officials that he had called 'The Octopus.' He had been working on a book and according to sources, had gone to West Virginia in pursuit of a final piece of evidence that would break the case. His files, which he carried everywhere, were missing when his body was discovered. Adding to the suspicious circumstances, the room where he was found was professionally cleaned preventing further investigation and the body was illegally embalmed before the family could claim his remains.

Casolaro had been putting together connections involving some of the most critical and dangerous elements of the deep state and he was threatening powerful interests. He had traced an 'dirty old boy' network of the OSS/CIA that had gotten together for profit in the aftermath of WW II. That critical period for the U.S. presented an unprecedented opportunity for some to profit from the military industrial complex (which has never been dismantled despite the ominous warnings from President Eisenhower in his farewell address) and the wave of anti-communist paranoia that would be used in order to justify the most extreme and immoral conduct by elements connected to the U.S. Government.

It is well documented that the CIA assimilated former Nazi war criminals into the ranks ostensibly to be used in the fight against the red menace but many of the scientists ended up participating in the darkest forms of research involving mind control techniques and the evolution of the American space/defense sector where they worked on weaponry. Rescued Nazis were also sent to South America where they would assist in supporting right-wing regimes to against the rise of popular movements that could threaten western business interests. In addition to the merger with some of the most foul remnants of Hitler's Reich such as the Gehlen Org, the bogeyman of an international communist conspiracy also gave rise to networks of money laundering, drug trafficking and arms dealings that would make the business of the warfare state into a very lucrative trade. Corrupt insiders were able to play both ends against the middle and had no qualms about cutting deals with some of the most unsavory and violent types.

But I am getting ahead of myself so I digress...

Danny Casolaro had been able to find a common denominator, a thread that ran through some of the most prevalent schemes and scandals of the time. Iran-Contra, Reagan's secret wars in Latin America, BCCI, The October Surprise, the INSLAW case and PROMIS and was set to visit Indio California and the Cabazon reservation. He was onto something and it was big enough to put the fear into some very serious people. Not only was he investigating ties between global arms dealers and government operatives tied to Iran-Contra (one of the greatest scandals of the 20th century in both audacity and magnitude one which is still not completely understood) but the very ascension of Reagan to the presidency (along with the true power that was George H.W. Bush) which was facilitated when a deal was cut to prolong the Iran hostage crisis until after Jimmy Carter was defeated. This is high treason of course, something that the Bushes and their ilk are intimately familiar with but the manipulation of the 1980 election could be viewed as a bloodless coup in that it brought the shadow government into the White House itself. Now another person of interest involved in the Iran hostages deal includes a figure named Earl Brian, an intimate of Reagan who was in on the Paris sessions to delay hostage release for political benefit. For a payment he was allegedly allowed to profit from the sale of the stolen version of INSLAW's PROMIS software.

Brian's Hadron Inc, in which he was allied with longtime Reagan crony Edwin Meese would be instrumental in the misappropriation, modification and subsequent sale of PROMIS to foreign governments. The entire sordid business of what was done is a proverbial snakepit without a bottom and it taps into many elements of the vast criminality that had infected the system. There is a very good reason for the trail of dead bodies (including Casolaro), wrecked careers, ginned up charges leading to imprisonment and disinformation that has orbited the PROMIS scandal.

The foreign governments included Israel which now has a massive intelligence and telecommunications infrastructure in place in the United States and it's all legitimate. I am not going to get into this right now but for the sake of reference please see the following pieces by Gordon Thomas on PROMIS and the Mossad, Christopher Ketcham (whose article The Last Roundup was instumental in breaking the news on the Main Core database) on the ongoing programs of Israeli espionage - Trojan Horse and Breaking the Taboo on Israel's Spying Efforts in the United States) as well as the following from James Bamford (author of The Shadow Factory) - a Democracy Now interview and the Haaretz article on Bamford Is Israel's booming high-tech industry a branch of the Mossad?. It is no secret that Israel plays a major part in the PROMIS saga and that will be covered in the next part of this series in more depth.

Again, PROMIS plays an integral part in the subversion of the system itself in order to allow the relatively few with juice who are connected to profit obscenely due to its at the time highly advanced technological capabilities to implement it as a tool of control in order to engage in monitoring and spying on potential threats. In part one of this series I mentioned that according to a Wired Magazine piece entitled The INSLAW Octopus that none other than rogue Colonel Oliver North was using the PROMIS software to support his extra constitutional programs like REX 84:

Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States as part of a domestic emergency preparedness program, commissioned under Reagan's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to sources and published reports. Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crude. This operation was so sensitive that when Rep. Jack Brooks asked North about it during the Iran-Contra hearings, the hearing was immediately suspended pending an executive (secret) conference. When the hearings were reconvened, the issue of North's FEMA dealings was dropped.

Casolaro had been concentrating on the INSLAW case around the time of his demise. He had been receiving information from insiders within the intelligence community that would bring to light the use of PROMIS by the government. One source was a civilian employee of the NSA named Alan Standorf whose body was found in the back seat of his car in an airport parking lot, it was set up to look like he was the victim of a robbery. Sources say that he may have been providing Casolaro with proof that the NSA was using PROMIS but as with so many others who crossed paths with The Octopus he became collateral damage.

As to who it was who 'suicided' Danny Casolaro and most importantly why, there may never be an answer. Casolaro had his fingers in too many pies and the nexus of evil that he was untangling was just too huge for the investigation to have ended any way but badly for him.

III: Common Threads

When researching the shadow government or Deep State it is amazing how so many of the same names keep popping up. One of those names belongs to Robert Booth Nichols, a longtime player who was recently back in the news. Mr. Nichols, who died under strange circumstances back in February was involved with the current financial crisis through Sam Israel, one of the thousands of Bernie Madoffs that have been using intricately structured financial instruments, shady hedge funds and offshore banking to destabilize America from within as though it were just another banana republic. The opaque, above the law, rigged games that have brought the country to the brink of ruination for the benefit of a corrupt oligarchy have working blueprints in CIA/shadow government fronts of the past such as BCCI and the Nugan Hand Bank and there is no reliable way of knowing just how much of the finance, insurance and real estate (F.I.R.E.) economy is derived from such shady organizations.

I would strongly suspect that the amount of money laundering, involvement with organized crime, narcotics and weapons dealing that is being currently conducted is stunning. Only the recent high profile cases like that of Alan Stanford who has been tied to such dirty activities as well as Madoff and Israel get the attention but they are the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Without digressing too much I just want to point out that much of the post WW II intelligence apparatus including the cowboys who were at the heart of the original Octopus were directly tied to the Eastern establishment, Skull and Bones types from which the OSS/CIA was comprised of. This being said, it is only natural that such grand scale financial chicanery and speculation has come to dominate both the U.S. economy as well as the government itself which is so thoroughly intertwined with the pirates that the schemes of the Wall Street high rollers are preserved at the expense of the millions of lesser beings whose lives are being destroyed by the ongoing greed and the subsidizing of such by a system gone cancerous.

Now back to Robert Booth Nichols who prior to his death was involved in a complex financial scheme with Samuel Israel and Bayou Investments involving a fee of $10 million to be paid to Nichols for services rendered for assistance in the locating of a mysterious $250 billion U.S. treasury note that is secured by 2,500 metric tons of gold that sits in the Atlanta Federal Reserve. Israel, who after being convicted for large scale financial fraud faked his own suicide, allegedly jumping off of a bridge and leaving on the hood of his SUV traced in dust the words "Suicide is Painless" never was able to obtain the T-Note (which was sitting in a London Safe Deposit Company and has been seized) subsequently sued Nichols for get this, cheating him. Now here is the kicker, according to papers filed by Nichols the transaction was conducted under the premise of "matters of national interest" and according to a Bloomberg story (Bayou's Israel Was Cheated in Scam Investigator Says) was vouched for by a member of the Bush family, John P. Ellis whose previous claim to fame was calling the rigged 2000 election for George W. Bush while working for FOX News. When doing an objective review of the myriad scandals and dirty deeds in America over the past 50 or so years it is astounding just how many times that a member of the Bush crime family is involved but more on them later.

Now what is of greater interest pertaining to Nichols is that he was deeply involved in the Cabazon Reservation activities as well as tied in to Danny Casolaro's doomed investigation of The Octopus. Nichols had contributed much to Casolaro and he had previously worked as a partner of political prisoner Michael Riconosciuto on projects on weapons development at the Cabazon Indian Reservation and the ongoing activities there through the company Meridian Arms.

Riconosciuto was the technical wizard who performed the alteration of the PROMIS software on the reservation to include the "back door" feature that would go on to figure so prominently in the espionage activities that it was later used for - political and financial. With the activities at the reservation including weapons development, training of paramilitaries and money laundering it was a veritable spook nest and the use of sovereign Indian lands for unauthorized purposes is something that needs to be seriously investigated. Author Joel Bainerman, in his book The Crimes of a President referred to the reservation as a "CIA cutout", with the revelations in Baca's KESQ series that three other local Indian tribes were also being investigated in the Alvarez murders and the weapons testing activities at the Cabazon reservation the question is to what extent has this sort of piggybacking of black ops on sovereign land existed throughout the and for how long.

With Nichols being a connected guy he would be a hugely important source for Casolaro, or was he a disinformation agent? According to sources, Nichols and Casolaro spoke often and at length in the month before Casolaro's demise. Nichols, it must be noted also allegedly had organized crime ties to the Gambino crime family as well as to the Japanese Yakuza. It has already been established that the CIA and Shadow Government had regularly worked with organized crime figures (see Operation Underworld) including those who had been burned by Castro's takeover of Cuba. Again, the war against communism, Cuba in this case provided blanket justification for lawlessness, nefarious alliances and the deviation from accepted American ideals.With Nazi war criminals already on board with the CIA, ties with The Syndicate were consistent with the pattern. In this context, the question must be asked regarding Robert Booth Nichols and whether he was sanctioned as a contact with the organized crime elements on behalf of the establishment. It should be recognized that the mob played a part in forging the political careers of many an influential U.S. figures, Ronald Reagan and Richard M. Nixon to name a few. and, it would be naïve to not believe that many of our elected representatives are not just as much in the pockets of organized crime as they are with other interests that threaten the system as a whole. (I would recommend this piece as food for thought as it references a current influential politican who has been a party to much of the overt criminality of the past several years, primarily as an accomplice).

The presence of Robert Booth Nichols in the milieu surrounding Casolaro's research as well as with Bayou Investments and the $250 billion treasury note is just another example of the interconnectivity between the underworld and the overworld. The financial aspects of this cannot be downplayed in the wake of the global meltdown that is largely due to the shadow banking system comprised of offshore banks largely exempt from U.S. laws, money laundering, pools of black money, narcotics/weapons dealing profits and speculative finance that have been a permanent fixture of the oligarchy's financial matrix. Any legitimate investigation of power in the U.S. must include an analysis of intricate financial institutions, layered in Enron style subversion and patterned after CIA/Wall Street front companies expressly created for the purpose of funding off the books operations.

IV: Tentacles of the Octopus

"We will know that we have succeeded when everything the public believes is false."

- William J. Casey

It must be understood that there has always been a powerful segment of this country that has been enamored with fascism as the perfect sort of government that would support the long-term evolution of capitalism itself. Fortune Magazine once featured a fawning cover story extolling the virtues of Benito Mussolini's corporatist/fascist state in pre-WW II Italy and even Hitler had ardent admirers in America. It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that the precursors to today's Wall Street ruling elite were perfectly willing to do business with the Nazi regime as long as it was in their short term financial interests to do so. Let me be emphatic that this is NOT an attack on capitalism itself but rather on those who are able to use the system to advance their interests and agendas and to destroy any and all impediments and obstacles. I would like to opine that the system is fatally flawed and like communism, contains the seeds of its own demise, what is going on right now is a testament to that.

In order for the bastardized form of capitalism that exists today (largely through the machinations of those that I am addressing in this section) to continue to evolve it mush become much more authoritarian in nature, the early forms of fascism are too ostentatious for the more sophisticated era in which we now live so we need to look more to China as the current role model. For profit prisons, all encompassing surveillance, a militarized police state, compromised courts and above all the possibility of disappearance into a gulag system with no trial and the nearly codified indefinite detention along with torture must be a tool for which to exercise control over the dissenters and the rabble.

The conditions for the creation of the Octopus, or as Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty would refer to it, a Secret Team were set into motion with Harry S. Truman's much maligned creation of the National Security State with the signing into law of the National Security Act of 1947. This set into up the post WW II world and allowed for the use of the intelligence services to be used to perpetuate their wartime stance into a permanent fixture of U.S. policy. The act also created the CIA although its original mandate would be expanded to include the anti-democratic functions that it has since become known for. In creating the CIA, the successor of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) there would be no end to the warfare state, only a redirection into clandestine and covert activities that would include destabilization of governments deemed 'unfriendly' to U.S. interests, propaganda, sabotage, training and support of paramilitary forces and above all snooping.

Being that the OSS largely grew out of the Eastern Establishment and the Skull and Bones types (from which it drew recruits) it would naturally serve the interests of Wall Street finance oligarchs, corporations, industrialists, oil barons and other moguls.It would also due to the very nature of secrecy under which it existed be a fertile ground for rogue elements, private CIA's within the CIA so to speak.

I do want to state that the CIA is far from the only U.S. intelligence agency, there are many and too often they are lumped in with the CIA as it is the most prominent. There are at least sixteen separate intelligence agencies and those are only the ones that we know about and there is often collaboration with foreign intelligence to circumvent laws and ensure plausible deniability. The CIA though is unique in that it was created to serve as an enforcement arm for the Wall Street elite and the money power, its primary obligation is not to the United States itself but that element that exists in the shadows. I recommend reading: How the CIA Created a Ruling, Corporate Overclass in America for some very good examples.

The Wall Street cultivated OSSwas established in 1942 by the hated Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man whom the financial elite once tried to overthrow(see the Business Plot) to consolidate intelligence during the war. William 'Wild Bill' Donovan, a powerful member of the Eastern Establishment and a Wall Street lawyer would head it up. Other OSS luminaries with elite pedigrees would include Allen Dulles (of firm Sullivan and Cromwell, another Wall Street business that didn't shy away from doing business with the Nazis) who would go on to play an integral role in the CIA as it developed. Dulles would be a key force in Operation Paperclip, the assimilation of Third Reich refugee war criminals into the CIA and sciences where their Nazi experience could be drawn upon to serve what would one day become The Homeland. Dulles, who would later become head of the CIA was unceremoniously forced out after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion by John F. Kennedy who was sufficiently aware of the dirty deeds of America's unofficial terrorist organization would threaten to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds". The accompanying blowback took care of Kennedy and in what should go down as one of the greatest conflicts of interest in American history Allan Dulles would go on to become a member of the Warren Commission 'investigating' the assassination and coming up with the crazed lone gunman conclusion.

It also should be recognized that the fight against Fidel Castro for his takeover and subsequent nationalization of Cuba's resources as well as property 'owned' by U.S. interests including that of organized crime figures who operated casinos out of Havana represented opportunity. With the common interests of both the mob and U.S. oligarchs threatened it would provide a good excuse for the for the CIA and mob to join forces against Castro. The precedent for alliances with organized crime had already been set during the war and the CIA would welcome with open arms such notorious mobsters as Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, Charles 'Lucky' Luciano and Meyer Lansky brokered by veteran operative Robert Maheu who would later go on to work for Howard Hughes in Las Vegas. The joint venture against Castro would allow the mob to get the proverbial camel's nose under the tent with certain elements of the government and very likely would lead back to domestic black operations associated with the JFK assassination.

Now let me make it clear that I personally have an attitude of ambivalence towards mob and organized crime in general, it's just another line of work as far as I am concerned. So with that out of the way what I do have a problem with are government bureaucrats, U.S. military and intelligence and elected officials crossing the line into where they become gangsters themselves by working with organized crime. This is a very important aspect in what has gone seriously wrong in America post WW II in that the lines were not only blurred but the shadow government and the mob (as well as international organized crime syndicates) actively joined forces, knowingly and willingly for an agenda that ran counter to long term American interests and the CIA was responsible for allowing this to happen.

But I digress....

The OSS was also a breeding ground for virulent right-wingers, military men and dyed in the wool fascists with axes to grind against the communist devils. One of these men was General Edward Lansdale, a serious reactionary who was involved in anti-Castro plotting and allegedly, according to some, notably L. Fletcher Prouty was in Dallas on the day of the Kennedy assassination (as were others including Richard M. Nixon and George H.W. Bush but more on that in the next section) where he was allegedly seen in the vicinity of the 'three tramps'. Other prominent spooks from the OSS would include future CIA chiefs William Colby (also of the Phoenix Program) and William Casey whose tenure under Reagan would occur during the Iran-Contra period and intersect with the PROMIS software ordeal.

General Lansdale, as legend has it, was involved with gold taken from vanquished WW II enemies (see Yamashita's Gold) and using it to provide funding for black operations. The illegal narcotics trade would also prove to be a useful source in providing operational money for secret wars and off the books operations. Lansdale's work against the Castro regime would bring him into contact with Theodore Shackley aka The Blond Ghost out of the Miami JMWAVE headquarters [note that George Bush's Zapata Corporation also allegedly had ties to this operation, likely a CIA front]. Ted Shackley would go on to turn up in an astounding number of scandals and shadow government operations over the years. Shackley was identified by Danny Casolaro as a part of the dirty old boy network that would become The Octopus so keep that in mind. When the work against Cuba was no longer a top priority with the Vietnam War ratcheting up, Shackley was sent to Southeast Asia where he was involved along with other anti-Castro operatives namely Felix Rodriguez, Thomas Clines and Edwin Wilson (among others) in CIA operations such as the Phoenix Program (note also that the aforementioned Earl Brian who was a benefactor of the illegal sales of PROMIS was associated with this fearsome assassination and torture venture as well), the Secret Team was now up and running in another war zone where their skills could be fully utilized.

I also want to note that regarding the anti-Castro operation from which so many of these rogue operators sprang also produced the infamous E. Howard Hunt, a veteran spook who at least according to a deathbed 'confession' recording had inside knowledge of the Kennedy assassination (this from a Rolling Stone article The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt). Interestingly enough, Hunt would go on to be one of the Watergate burglars who Nixon feared was going to spill his guts about that "Bay of Pigs thing". Hunt's wife Dorothy would be killed in a suspicious plane crash which is described in Carl Oglesby's book The Yankee and Cowboy War in chapter seven which is transcribed here. Hunt, like Shackley was suspected by Casolaro to be a member of The Octopus.

Once in Vietnam, the Shackley operation would draw in the next generation of shadow government figures including Richard Secord, Richard Armitage and Oliver North who would all turn up later during the ongoing operations of "The Enterprise" during Iran-Contra. North and Secord specifically would play key roles, augmented by key neocons within the bureaucracy such as Elliott Abrams, John Negroponte, Michael Ledeen, John Poindexter and most importantly Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush. The Vietnam group that had coalesced around Shackley would also be involved in the Nugan Hand Bank, a conduit for dirty money (drugs, guns) that would be redirected to fund the secret off the books spook wars under the ideological cover of the battle against communist influence. The Nugan Hand Bank operated until 1980 when Frank Nugan, an Australian lawyer with more shady connections than the proverbial switchboard and under investigation for stock fraud was found dead in his Mercedes-Benz, the victim of what appeared to be a self inflicted gunshot wound, his wallet contained the business card of William Colby in his wallet. The other half of Nugan Hand was former Green Beret Michael Jon Hand whose special operations experience allegedly included a good amount of work in the Golden Triangle with the heroin trade. Hand disappeared and was never seen again after Nugan's death.

The Nugan Hand bank with its extremely high rates of return, tax-free accounts and promises of anonymity was a model that would eventually be replicated and in today's convoluted morass of offshore banking and fraudulent high finance there are likely thousands of smaller operations, of note is the recent scandal involving high rolling Texan investment guru Alan Stanford and his suspected involvement in money laundering for Mexican drug cartels. The system has become thoroughly polluted, corrupted and rigged in order to benefit the Wall Street oligarchy that was so instrumental in originally setting up the CIA. With the blueprint for such grand scale financial chicanery that was originally a big part of black ops monetary alchemy available and the entire system eventually honeycombed with the sort of illicit, amoral types that were all too willing to grab onto the teats of the anti-communist cash cow. With the Vietnam experience an ugly and tragic blight on the American consciousness, Nixon run out of Washington in disgrace and the ruling establishment hydra reconfiguring itself out of the ashes there would be a haven for The Octopus and its operatives within the shining palace of American renewal that would be erected as a temple for the soon to be annoited savior and heroic all-American warrior king Ronald Reagan.

And the Bush Family...(to be continued)

PRIOR INSTALLMENTS

Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government - Part One

Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government - Part Two

Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government - Part Three

Move Over Dasani - There's A New Dog In Town

asqv — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:10:56 GMT

Andrew Liveris, Dow's Chairman and CEO: "lack of clean water is the single largest cause of disease in the world and more than 4,500 children die each day because of it."
"Dow is committed to creating safer, more sustainable water supplies for communities around the world."

The unique qualities of our water come from 25 years of slow-leaching toxins at the site of the world's largest industrial accident.
To this day, Dow Chemical - who bought Union Carbide - has refused to clean up and whole new generations are being poisoned.

On the night of Dec. 2nd and 3rd, 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, began leaking 27 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate. None of the six safety systems designed to contain such a leak were operational, allowing the gas to spread throughout the city of Bhopal.[1] Half a million people were exposed to the gas and 20,000 have died to date as a result of their exposure. More than 120,000 people still suffer from ailments caused by the accident and the subsequent pollution at the plant site.
These ailments include blindness, extreme difficulty in breathing, and gynecological disorders. The site has never been properly cleaned up and it continues to poison the residents of Bhopal. In 1999, local groundwater and wellwater testing near the site of the accident revealed mercury at levels between 20,000 and 6 million times those expected. Cancer and brain-damage- and birth-defect-causing chemicals were found in the water; trichloroethene, a chemical that has been shown to impair fetal development, was found at levels 50 times higher than EPA safety limits.[2]Testing published in a 2002 report revealed poisons such as 1,3,5 trichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead and mercury in the breast milk of nursing women.[3] In 2001, Michigan-based chemical corporation Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide, thereby acquiring its assets and liabilities. However Dow Chemical has steadfastly refused to clean up the site, provide safe drinking water, compensate the victims, or disclose the composition of the gas leak, information that doctors could use to properly treat the victims.

Check out http://bhopalwater.com/

I did a little checking and it's interesting to note that Dow Water Solutions, a division of this corporate matrix,

is a performance-based business unit comprised of leading world-class brands and enabling component technologies designed to advance the science of water purification around the world, including seawater desalination, contaminant removal and water reuse.

from the source

Kind of begs the question why can't they apply some of this leading technology to clean up the contamination, doesn't it?

Gaza conflict sparks billboard battle in Texas

shergald — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:33:31 GMT

A Pray for Gaza billboard on northbound Hwy 59 before the Westlayan exit near the the Israel Consulate.
A battle for the hearts and minds of Houston residents is presently being waged between proPalestinian organizations, and those who consider themselves proIsrael in the Houston area. They represent different sides regarding the siege of Gaza, one working to end it, the other preferring its continuation. Its continuation obviously maintains the inhumane conditions that have inspired world wide condemnation and efforts to end it.

The Houston Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine heads the proPalestinian effort, and describes itself as a diverse group of community members organized on democratic principles to promote justice, peace, human rights, liberation and self-determination of the Palestinian people through a range of inter-group initiatives focusing on communication, outreach, education and activism in the greater Houston area. They support justice and human rights, ending direct aid to Israel, and pressing for Israel to abide by international law and end its illegal occupation of Palestine.

SAVE GAZA FROM HAMAS. Teach PEACE, not HATE

The opposition to ending the siege is the proIsrael organization, StandWithUs, who have sponsored billboards like the above one in opposition to the proPalestinian groups. StandWithUs says that it is an Israel advocacy group whose focus is on public outreach and education, from a grass-roots perspective.

Strangely, it was hard to find local Houston news reports of the battle. But the Israeli newspaper Haaretz covered the story.

Texans have had occasion this week to witness the eruption of a billboard war waged between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel grassroots organizations vying to tell Houston commuters their side of the story.
...two pro-Israel groups put up two giant roadside billboards bearing the message: "Save Gaza from Hamas. Teach peace, not hate." The signs - featuring a picture of two boys, an Arab and an Israeli, sitting arm-in-arm and smiling - was put up in response to an earlier roadside campaign by a pro-Palestinian group under the banner "Pray for Gaza," featuring crying Arab children.
The 10 pro-Palestinian signs were put up throughout the city after January's Operation Cast Lead by an organization called the "Houston Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine." The billboards pointed onlookers to a Web site (www.pray4gaza.org) praising the intifada and quoting critics of Israel, such as Jimmy Carter and Richard Falk. According to the site's "Facts" section, in carrying out Operation Cast Lead - launched in response to Palestinian rocket fire - Israel "broke first" the cease-fire it had with Hamas. The site's "History" section says Zionists began as "an extremist minority" of Jews, and accuses them of "sabotaging efforts to place Jewish refugees in Western countries" during the Holocaust.
"We believe in confronting big lies about Israel head-on, and they don't come much bigger than on a billboard," said U.K.-born Michael Dickson from Jerusalem, head of the organization's Israel branch. "Pray4Gaza, via their campaign and their Web site, deliberately twist facts and distort history to demonize Israel. People should pray for Gaza; pray for it to be free from Hamas' tyranny."

In the meantime, in Albuquerque, NM the ad below was taken down after only three weeks of display. But that's another story.

In other news from the Houston area, again not from local newspapers, it was reported and pictured below that a Houston activist delivered aid to Gaza.

Sahar Abusada (holding flowers) returns to Houston after delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Palestinian-American activist Sahar Abusada returned home and was greeted by a welcoming crowd at the airport in Houston Feb. 28. Abusada had raised money in Houston to buy 140 large tents and 280 blankets for families in Gaza who are homeless due to the recent Israeli bombing.
When Abusada came through customs she was greeted with cheers and bouquets of flowers given to her by family and fellow activists.

They called it a war, but for those who followed the Gaza conflict over several weeks, it was a massacre of defenseless civilians, who are now being subjected to the inhumane conditions brought on by a siege. It is justified by "Hamas" laden propaganda. So which side is getting the right message out?