November 8, 2010Editor’s Note: NBC has decided to reinstate Keith Olbermann, the host of MSNBC’s top-rated news program, “Countdown,” after suspending him last week for making donations to three Democratic candidates.MSNBC President Phil Griffin said the network considered Olbermann’s suspension, which will end Tuesday, as sufficient punishment for his violating an NBC News policy that prohibits political donations without prior approval from the chief of the news division.Danny Schechter comments on the controversy in this guest essay:Alex Gibney's new film “CLIENT # 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer" shows how the former Governor's indictments and criticisms of many Wall Street firm's led to counterattacks and pushback from powerful people.
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It shows how he became targeted, and it exposes the role of the FBI, the Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney, rich players on Wall Street, corrupt politicians in Albany, a professional former Nixon-boosting political provocateur/hit-man and Rupert Murdoch's New York Post. They all went after him with a vengeance.He was, in fact, outed by the dirty tricksters.In the end, though, Spitzer blamed himself for his own arrogance and hubris. He says he brought himself down.There is no doubt that Keith Olbermann had many pols and powercrats gunning for him for his outspoken commentaries and political impact. He is a partisan, yes, but also a commentator who takes whacks at his own party.He pointed to the deep biases and superficiality in TV News. But then, he violated a firm rule governing TV journalists barring political donations to people they are covering. He apparently flouted his own contract although I am sure there is ambiguity thereIn doing so, Keith put himself at risk and opened the door to being suspended.A few years ago, I wrote a magazine profile on Olbermann (who NBC blocked me from speaking to.) It does show his history of confronting broadcasters and bosses.I admire his work, even as I find it sometimes pedantic and predictable, He knew, or should have known, that he would be outed for a blatant transgression, and that does not excuse the others who do it, including his company and competitors.(I do not make partisan political donations for this very reason, as well as my disgust for most politicians, but I also do not disguise my viewpoints with the blather of phony "objectivity.")Yes, I would like to see him back on the air.Is there hypocrisy here? Of course! That goes without saying.TV is a minefield, and to survive, you need an internal radar and realization that perception often trumps reality. You need relationships with colleagues and managers too, or you can isolate yourself. Who had his back? Did he believe his own hype?My profile of Olbermann in 2007 follows:The most upsetting thing about watching “Good Night, and Good Luck” — George Clooney’s cinematic tribute to media legend Edward R. Murrow — was realizing there aren’t any journalists of his stature in the hyper-commercialized, dumbed-down “wasteland” of contemporary network TV news.An intrepid war correspondent and broadcaster, Murrow dared expose tyrannical Sen. Joseph McCarthy on CBS in the 1950s. Who among today’s blow-dried anchors and reporters would have had the cajones to take on blustering blowhard McCarthy?In the wake of Clooney’s 2005 biopic, one candidate has emerged from the media pack to reinvigorate the Fourth Estate. “Keith Olbermann is, quite simply, the Edward R. Murrow of our time,” asserts liberal radio host Stephanie Miller, whose program has been heard on Sirius Satellite Radio and other broadcast outlets.The sportscaster-turned-political analyst anchors MSNBC’s evening newscast, “Countdown With Keith Olbermann.”If you haven’t been paying attention to his rising influence and popularity, you may be alone — Countdown’s viewership rose 21% in a year, and the perpetually third-place cable-news network edged out its CNN competitor during Olbermann’s time slot. Countdown is MSNBC’s highest-rated program.Olbermann has always stood out, and not just because he stands 6-3 and wears size 13 shoes. Born in New York City in 1959, he was a gifted child who, at age 14, wrote the bookThe Major League Coaches: 1921-1973 (published by Card Memorabilia Associates). He was also a play-by-play announcer for his high school’s hockey team on WHTR. Chris Berman, now an ESPN mainstay, was the station’s sports director.Keith entered Cornell University at age 16, and while an undergraduate, covered sports for WVBR, a student-run radio station. Graduating at 20, Olbermann paid his dues on local news at Boston and Los Angeles TV stations before landing a berth at ESPN.He won awards for a witty and distinctive reportorial style that was also criticized for having “too much backbone.” It was literally true because the oversized Olbermann has six lumbar vertebrae, while the rest of us have only five. He refers to himself as a “spinal mutant,” quipping, “I do have too much backbone.”Olbermann has had to overcome some physical problems, including celiac disease, which requires a gluten-free diet. In 1980 he hit his head on a New York City subway door and lost depth perception.Olbermann also has had some problems containing his emotions. When Keith left ESPN in June 1997, colleague Mike Soltys said, “He didn’t burn bridges here. He napalmed them.” One issue was an appearance on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” that ESPN did not authorize.On Nov. 17, 2002, Olbermann published what he called a “mea culpa” on Salon.com, in which he mused about his motivations, emotional vulnerability and willingness to talk about doubts and concerns most public figures avoid.“It feels as if I’ve been coming out of a huge fog bank,” Olbermann wrote, acknowledging there had been problems and screwups on his show. “On top of everything else about it that can destabilize the soul, television is fraught with a million commonplace things that can go wrong.“I have lived much of my life assuming much of the responsibility around me and developing a dread of being blamed for things going wrong,” Keith candidly confessed. “Moreover, deep down inside I’ve always believed that everybody around me was qualified and competent, and I wasn’t, and that someday I’d be found out.“If you think that way, when somebody messes up, you can’t imagine that it just ‘happened.’ Since they’re so much better than you are, how could they not complete a task successfully? They have to be not trying hard enough — and when they don’t try and the show goes to hell, who gets blamed? You do.”Olbermann’s backbone surfaced again when MSNBC hired him to cover politics. He quickly discovered he couldn’t stand cable’s marathon-like obsession with repetitive Monica Lewinsky news-a-thons.On Jan. 21, 1998, MSNBC reoriented Olbermann’s program, “The Big Show,” to focus on “what we euphemistically call ‘The Clinton-Lewinsky investigations,’” Keith said.The story began to get to him. He later explained why at the Cornell University commencement address that June:“Virtually every night, for an hour, sometimes two, I have presided over discussions about this stuff, so intricate, so repetitive, that it has assumed the characteristics of the medieval religious scholars arguing for months and even years over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.“Then my network starts covering this story 28 hours out of every 24.”He confessed it led him to “having dry heaves in the bathroom” and “days…when my line of work makes me ashamed, makes me depressed, makes me want to cry.” Later that spring, “I awakened from my stupor and told my employers that I simply could not continue doing this.” He then urged the graduates to do the right thing.After 17 months at MSNBC, Olbermann returned to sports, this time at Fox, for another short stint as anchor. He went freelance, turning up on CNN, then radio, also writing for Salon.com, until bouncing back to MSNBC.Olbermann really took off after he debuted his current MSNBC show, “Countdown,” on March 31, 2003. The program originates at MSNBC’s Secaucus, New Jersey, headquarters.One of its most-talked-about segments, called “Oddball,” features wacky footage from around the world illustrating Keith’s eclectic interests and idiosyncratic passions.(An oddball fact about Caucasian Keith is that he’s related by marriage to boxer Mike Tyson. The niece of Tyson’s adoptive father, longtime trainer Gus D’Amato, married Olbermann’s father’s brother, making Keith — who is single and childless — a Tyson cousin. How appropriate — considering his initials are K.O.)Playgirl magazine voted Olbermann its number one sexiest male newscaster in 2004. GQ recently branded him a “renegade” and named him one of the publication’s “Men of the Year.” Keith has also won an Edward R. Murrow Award for reporting, which may explain why he signs off “Countdown” with Murrow’s signature farewell, “Good night, and good luck.”The CBS broadcaster, renowned for speaking truth to power, is Olbermann’s role model.The MSNBC anchorman took on his Fox competition directly and personally by skewering its “reportage,” repeatedly labeling Fox bullyboy Bill O’Reilly “The Worst Person in the World.”Olbermann wore an O’Reilly mask to a meeting of TV critics, giving them the Nazi “Sieg Heil” salute. The demagogic O’Reilly blasted back, cutting off callers to his radio program for using the K or O words. He even sicced Fox security on one caller who managed to bleat out the offending name.After Olbermann started detailing the charges lodged by a former producer in a sexual harassment suit against The O’Reilly Factor’s führer, the New York Post — which, like Fox, is owned by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp — reported on accusations posted to a gossip Web site that Olbermann was a lousy lover.The feud soon deteriorated into a very personal tit-for-tat.Olbermann moved from taking on people like O’Reilly to frontally challenging the Bush regime, and then Dubya himself. For the first time, left-leaning and Democratic viewers had a voice that resonated with them in a medium dominated by right-wing pundits and opinion makers.His “special comments” segment, centering on pressing issues, spontaneously began after Hurricane Katrina so that Olbermann could express his outrage at the federal government’s disastrous bungling.The special comments — the best soliloquies since Hamlet — are spread virally on sites like YouTube and Google and linked throughout the blogosphere. Keith used his own “Bloggerman” blog to make sure his words could be read as well as heard.Suddenly, Olbermann’s ratings rocketed, as did his status as a fearless and articulate force in media. When Keith teamed up with Hardball’s Chris Matthews to cover the 2006 midterm elections, MSNBC doubled the size of the audience that had watched it during 2002’s midterms.Overall, MSNBC’s viewership rose from 15% of the cable news audience in 2002 to 25% in 2006. Meanwhile, the ratings of MSNBC’s competitors have declined.TV critics such as the Washington Post’s/CNN’s Howard Kurtz credit Olbermann with helping to swing the 2006 election to the Democrats. “Keith is a powerhouse — a pundit/journalist with brains and guts, and a fundamental sense of decency,” adds Mark Crispin Miller, an NYU media professor and author. “I think it’s telling that his background is not news but sports, because the U.S. news establishment would never have produced avoice so brave and honest.” What audiences seem to like most is that Keith does not genuflect or pull punches vis-à-vis the powers-that-be. He goes right for the jugular; no other contemporary newsman would chastise the commander in chief with impertinent words like:“The President of the United States owes this country an apology. It will not be offered, of course. He does not realize its necessity. There are now none around him who would tell him or could. There needs to be an apology from the President. … And more than one.”Olbermann went further in responding to Donald Rumsfeld, when he compared his critics to appeasers of Nazis. Keith denounced the then-Defense Secretary for “demonizing disagreement,” and compared Rumsfeld to Murrow’s old archenemy, Red-baiter Joseph McCarthy.The anchorman concluded with a clear reference to Rummy & Company: “This country faces a new type of fascism. Indeed!”Olbermann’s outspoken rants — which are punched up with humor, historic quotes and an undeniable sincerity — differentiate him from his colleagues and even fictional newsy characters, notably the deranged ex-anchor Howard Beale from the 1976 movie “Network.” Thirty years after its release, the satire trashing television feels more and more like a documentary.And yet Olbermann is up against the same industry forces that brought Beale down and pushed Murrow out — an anxious, profit-driven executive bureaucracy terrified of rocking the boat.Olbermann has already been warned not to have too many “liberal” guests, a rationale used to end Phil Donahue’s program, MSNBC’s highest-rated show in 2003.On Al Franken’s Air America radio show, Olbermann defiantly revealed, “I got called into a vice-president’s office…and [was] told, ‘Hey, we don’t mind you interviewing these guys, but should you really have put liberals on on consecutive nights?’”Jeff Cohen, a former Donahue producer, finds this alarming. The author of the insider book Cable News Confidentialdiscloses: “What Olbermann has done in the recent era was specifically banned by NBC management when I was at MSNBC with Phil Donahue four years ago.”Cohen, who co-founded the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and who also worked at Fox and CNN, adds:“Setting oneself apart from what the others are selling can bring customers. Olbermann is a beneficiary of the shifting political environment that resulted from Bush disasters and years of brave activism and advocacy by progressives in Congress, civil liberties lawyers, MoveOn[.org] and thousands of hard-core activists who turned the tide — not to mention [Comedy Central’s Jon] Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert.”Can Bloggermann survive at General Electric-owned MSNBC if he is identified as a voice of the Left? It’s not a topic he was allowed to speak to this reporter about. MSNBC press liaison Jeremy Gaines finally responded to three e-mails requesting an Olbermann interview with a terse “The answer is ‘No.’”I spoke informally to a former MSNBC president who thinks the anchorman’s days are numbered in the cautiously conservative NBC environment.But an NBC News V.P., who spoke off the record and is personally bullish on Olbermann, told me it has taken years for the newscaster to establish himself and that the network wants him to stay. Keith’s contract was due to expire in March 2007.I asked the veep about the attitude of NBC President Bob Wright, who reportedly kowtows to GE, a defense contractor credited with building Ronald Reagan’s career.“Bob Wright is content agnostic, but financially religious” was the response, suggesting that as long as Countdown’s numbers are good, and the revenues are up, there will be no pressure on Olbermann to follow the party line.FAIR’s Peter Hart contends that Olbermann is helping MSNBC, which has generally trailed Fox and CNN in the ratings.“Those of us on the outside have been saying for years that the best way for the cable news channels to compete with Fox would be to counterprogram by featuring hosts and guests who represent the Left/progressive end of the political spectrum, since those voices are nearly silent on national television.”The media observer adds: “Olbermann represents a tentative step in that direction, and folks are watching. It’s also worth noting that they’re not watching a typical cable-news shoutfest — Olbermann is delivering passionate, articulate critiques of the powerful. The conventional wisdom…would have probably told you that was a horrible idea, but viewers seem to disagree,” Hart points out.According to Dan Abrams, who runs (RAN) MSNBC, “[Olbermann’s] program could become a model for the newscast of the future. It’s a mix of straight news…with lighter fare and occasionally with some opinion.”Although it was hard to find outspoken critics outside the Fox orbit and its echo chamber, Olbermann has attracted enemies and at least one death threat.On Fox’s media observer program “News Watch,” Christian conservative columnist Cal Thomas bestowed the “Turkey Award” on Keith for claiming 65-year-old Thomas dyed his jet-black hair.On a more serious note, in October 2006, Olbermann received a letter at his New York home with an unidentified white powder in it. He immediately called police and was told not to go public, as this could tip off the sender.But when Murdoch’s New York Post published an account of the incident, the journalist went ballistic, in part because he insisted the newspaper’s story was wrong. Keith claims he did not ask for a medical checkup, as reported in the Post, and then spoke about what happened on the air:“My first inclination was to wait until the start of the next workday to notify authorities. But the remote possibility that any delay might have endangered others led me to reverse my decision. … The officer in charge of the 18 or so police officers who responded asked that I follow their protocol: a decontamination shower at the scene, the bagging and sealing of the clothes I was wearing at the time of the incident, and my transportation to an emergency room. I mean, not to overdo this, but they had to melt my keys and my wallet.”Californian Chad Castagana was arrested in November 2006 by the FBI and charged with mailing threatening letters, along with white powder, to Olbermann, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, David Letterman, Jon Stewart and other high-profile figures. The 39-year-old suspect is a conservative blogger.Being a target of right-wing wrath hasn’t deterred Olbermann from confronting the status quo and speaking up for others threatened by reactionary wingnuts.After talk radio’s Stephanie Miller received a letter that threatened her and antiwar mom Cindy Sheehan, Keith gallantly rose to their defense in a riveting rant championing the right to dissent. This earned him a tongue-in-cheek marriage proposal from the single and attractive radio hostess.“The fact that I routinely refer to Keith as my future husband has more to do with my delusional nature than anything to do with his personal taste, which, I’m sure, is much more evolved,” jokes Miller, whose father, William Miller, was Barry Goldwater’s GOP running mate in 1964’s Presidential race.In any case, Olbermann faces a daunting minefield at MSNBC, a part of the larger big media battleground where backstabbing, oversized egos and bottom-line pressures clash every day with journalistic values.Keith Olbermann’s role model, Edward R. Murrow, was an early victim of these pressures, despite his renown and success. Can the gutsy TV host known as “Bloggerman” survive and prosper? Stay tuned, and as Murrow would say, “Good night, and good luck.” News Dissector/filmmaker/troublemaker DannySchechter is the blogger-in-chief of MediaChannel.org, the world’s largest online media issues network. A former CNN and ABC News producer with a short stint at CNBC, Schechter has directed many independent documentaries, including “WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception” and a new film, “In Debt We Trust: America Before the Bubble Bursts,” dealing with the credit trap that has already ensnared six out of ten Americans. (See Globalvision.org to order and for more info.) Besides penning eight books — including When News Lies: Media Complicity and the Iraq War (SelectBooks) and The Death of Media and The Fight for Democracy(Melville House Publishing) — Schechter writes regularly for leading Web sites and media outlets worldwide. He has been profiled in HUSTLER, but insists he is not one. Like Olbermann, Schechter graduated from Cornell University. His latest film is Plunderthecrimeofourtime. (Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com
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10 DVDs Glenn Beck doesn’t want you to see
Watch The Trailer | Get The Box SetDear Dave and Sharon,
Since 2004, we’ve been fighting for a more just America with such films as Outfoxed and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price as well as short videos like McCain’s Mansions (where we ignited a national media storm after we asked how many houses he owns).
Have you seen them all? Do you know a passionate activist that would love our work? We have our first five years of videos compiled into one big box set including the ones mentioned above PLUS Iraq for Sale, Rethink Afghanistan and hundreds of shorts. This is the perfect gift for a like-minded friend or family member this holiday season!
Click here to get the entire 10 DVD set!
We even have a limited edition version of the box set with original cover art designed and signed by Shepard Fairey—the artist whose iconic “Hope” image defined the Obama campaign! There are only 30 limited edition box sets left out of the 125 that were created and each one is numbered for authenticity.
Want to know the best part? By buying this box set, you’re helping Brave New Films in continuing to expose injustice – and keeping our work available for free online. Will you help us keep up the good fight?
Don’t miss your chance to join an incredible community of engaged activists who are really making a difference. Now is the time to do something! Get your Brave New Films Activist Collection today!
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Billionaire Launches Campaign to Slash Social Security
http://labornotes.org/blogs/2010/11/billionaire-launches-campaign-slash-social-security
By: Ethan Allen and...
Tags:
ECONOMY
Wonder if the American people will go to the streets like the Greeks,French or the Brits? Naw! No huevos!
Nov 11 08:19 An Open Letter To The SS Cat Food Commission
http://dailybail.com/home/open-letter-to-alan-simpson-erskine-bowles-chairmen-of-the-u.html
By: Pitchfork
Tags:
ECONOMY
Here's the final paragraph"In this environment, selling 'cuts to social security' is not going to work, and considering the role you both played in creating the irresponsible federal spending machine that now controls Washington and has bankrupted future unborn generations, fuck you for even bringing it up."
Nov 11 08:42 THE LOOTING OF SOCIAL SECURITY TO BALANCE THE FEDERAL BUDGET
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ARTICLE2/budget.php
Tags:
ECONOMY
TAXES
HOLLINGS: Well, the truth is...ah, shoot, well, we all know there's Washington's math problem. Alan Sloan in this past week's Newsweek says he spends 150%. What we've been doing, Mr. Chairman, in all reality, is taken a hundred billion out of the Social Security Trust Fund, transferring it over to the spending column, and spending it. Our friends to the left here are getting their tax cuts, we getting our spending increases, and hollering surplus, surplus, and balanced budget, and balanced budget plans when we continue to spend a hundred billion more than we take in.
Webmaster's Commentary:
Today's news reports efforts by the government and the very rich to drastically cut social security benefits. Although the media may react in shock as if this is a new and unexpected development, the fact is that WRH reported this trend back in 1998 when it became obvious that the Clinton administration was looting the cash set-aside for the baby boomer retirements to manufacture its phony budget surplus. Of course, the Clinton administration called these cash transfers "loans", but clearly if the government was borrowing from the people during what were hailed as economic boom times, there was never going to be a situation in which the government could redeem those "loans", and here we are with the US Government telling the American workers that after a life time of paying social security taxes, the benefits "must" be cut, because after all we had to buy Israel a whole lot of F-35s and those wars killing the people Israel does not like cost a lot of cash, and of course, it's taking trillions of dollars to keep the government's pals on Wall Street out of jail!
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Chemtrails: Powerful Evidence as the Controversy Continues
The controversy around chemtrails continues. Some claim chemtrails are nothing more than normal jet contrails which take longer than normal to dissipate, while the amount of evidence suggesting otherwise continues to grow. The increasing amount of good evidence suggests that chemtrails are real, and that they are being secretly propagated, possibly even by multiple groups with differing agendas. Take a look, for instance, at the over 100 patents which have been issued related to chemtrails and weather manipulation at this link. You can explore any of these intriguing patents by typing the patent number in at this link.The militaries and intelligence agencies of many countries have been conducting secret tests on their soldiers, and even their citizens for many decades. Often adamant denials are issued in response to any inquiries on these tests. But then, sometimes only decades later, the truth is revealed in public testimony, as happened in the 1975 Senate Church Committee hearings on theCIA's secret experiments. Excerpts from a Wall Street Journal article below show that "open-air tests of biological agents were conducted 239 times" by the US military. Yet all of this was kept secret from the public for decades, including the resulting casualties.Declassified government documents have shown that as early as 1950, the San Francisco bay area was secretly sprayed by the US military with what was thought to be a harmless microbe as a test of aerosol dispersion. According to a 2004 San Francisco Chronicle article on this topic, "army tests showed that the bacterial cloud had exposed hundreds of thousands of people in a broad swath of Bay Area communities." At least one person died and 11 were hospitalized as a direct result of this test. Summaries of this and other revealing media articles on chemtrails are included below this message.And now, a number of revealing media articles (see excerpts below) and a very good 90-minute documentary focused specifically on chemtrails have presented enough solid evidence to deserve a recommendation. The documentary, titled "What in the World are They Spraying" is available at the link below:http://www.personalgrowthcourses.net/video/chemtrails_documentary_videosNote that though this chemtrail documentary starts out with some very good, reliable information, the quality and reliability gradually declines in later sections. That said, the first part is well worth watching and includes numerous media news reports on the question of chemtrails.As shown in this revealing documentary and in the media reports below, toxic amounts of barium, aluminum, and other elements have unexpectedly shown up in numerous soil and water samples around the US, where there is no known explanation other than chemtrails. This has been confirmed by many scientists and other respected individuals. So why has the media given so little coverage to this important health concern? Please see the "What you can do" box at the end of this message to help inform others on the vital topic of chemtrails and join in making a difference in our world.With best wishes,
Fred Burks for PEERS and the WantToKnow.info Team
Former language interpreter for Presidents Bush and Clinton
Chemtrails: Is U.S. Gov't. Secretly Testing Americans 'Again'?
November 9, 2007, KSLA-TV (CBS affiliate in Shreveport, LA)
http://www.ksla.com/Global/story.asp?S=7339345&nav=0RY5Could a strange substance found by an Ark-La-Tex man be part of secret government testing program? That's the question at the heart of a phenomenon called "Chemtrails." "It seemed like some mornings it was just criss-crossing the whole sky. It was just like a giant checkerboard," described Bill Nichols. He snapped several photos of the strange clouds from his home in Stamps, in southwest Arkansas. Nichols said these unusual clouds begin as normal contrails from a jet engine. But unlike normal contrails, these do not fade away. Soon after a recent episode he saw particles in the air. "We'd see it drop to the ground in a haze," added Nichols. He then noticed the material collecting on the ground. "This is water and stuff that I collected in bowls," said Nichols as he handed us a mason jar ... after driving down from Arkansas. KSLA News 12 had the sample tested at a lab. The results: A high level of barium, 6.8 parts per million, (ppm). That's more than three times the toxic level set by the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. We discovered during our investigation that barium is a hallmark of other chemtrail testing. This phenomenon even attracted the attention of a Los Angeles network affiliate, which aired a report entitled, "Toxic Sky?" There's already no shortage of unclassified weather modification programs by the government. But those who fear chemtrails could be secret biological and chemical testing on the public point to the 1977 U.S. Senate hearings which confirmed 239 populated areas had been contaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969. Later, the 1994 Rockefeller Report concluded hundreds of thousands of military personnel were also subjected to secret biological experiments over the last 60-years.Note: This is one of the few media reports to break a veritable wall of silence in the major media on the disturbing chemtrail phenomenon. To watch this revealing newscast on YouTube, click here.
Years Ago, The Military Sprayed Germs on U.S. Cities
October 22, 2001, Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1003703226697496080.htmlMuch of what the Pentagon knows about the effects of bacterial attacks on cities came from ... secret tests conducted on San Francisco and other American cities from the 1940s through the 1960s, experts say. In the 1950s, Army researchers dispersed Serratia on Panama City, Fla., and Key West, Fla., with no known illnesses resulting. They also released fluorescent compounds over Minnesota and other Midwestern states to see how far they would spread in the atmosphere. The particles of zinc-cadmium-sulfide -- now a known cancer-causing agent -- were detected more than 1,000 miles away in New York state, the Army told the Senate hearings. In New York, military researchers in 1966 spread Bacillus subtilis variant Niger, also believed to be harmless, in the subway system by dropping lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto tracks in stations in midtown Manhattan. The bacteria were carried for miles throughout the subway system. The Army kept the biological-warfare tests secret until word of them was leaked to the press in the 1970s. Between 1949 and 1969 ... open-air tests of biological agents were conducted 239 times, according to the Army's testimony in 1977 before the Senate's subcommittee on health. In 80 of those experiments, the Army said it used live bacteria that its researchers at the time thought were harmless. Several medical experts have since claimed that an untold number of people may have gotten sick as a result of the germ tests. These researchers say even benign agents can mutate into unpredictable pathogens once exposed to the elements.Note: To read this article on the WSJ website requires a paid subscription. You can read it free atthis link. Considering that the army kept all of these tests secret for decades, do you think it is possible that they are keeping information on chemtrails secret from the public.
Special Report: 'Toxic Sky?" Home Page
May 24, 2006, NBC4, Los Angeles
http://www.nbc4.tv/news/9155725/detail.htmlIt's a quiet mountain community, but some residents claim something's happening in the sky that's making them sick. Mystery clouds and unusual contrails ... Is it a weather experiment on a massive scale? In a Channel 4 News investigation, Paul Moyer looks into why some say the government is manipulating the weather. Watch: Video Report.
References: U.S. Senate Committee testimony on Weather Modification, Owning the Weather in 2025 (U.S. Air force), California Skywatch (Rosalind Peterson), Alpenhorn News Stories.@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@Glenn Beck's Anti-Semitic Attacksby Michelle Goldberghttp://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-10/glenn-becks-anti-semitic-attack-on-george-soros/?om_rid=M4-rCO&om_mid=_BM3FTTB8Vqgx81
Fred Burks for PEERS and the WantToKnow.info Team
Former language interpreter for Presidents Bush and Clinton
Chemtrails: Is U.S. Gov't. Secretly Testing Americans 'Again'?
November 9, 2007, KSLA-TV (CBS affiliate in Shreveport, LA)
http://www.ksla.com/Global/story.asp?S=7339345&nav=0RY5Could a strange substance found by an Ark-La-Tex man be part of secret government testing program? That's the question at the heart of a phenomenon called "Chemtrails." "It seemed like some mornings it was just criss-crossing the whole sky. It was just like a giant checkerboard," described Bill Nichols. He snapped several photos of the strange clouds from his home in Stamps, in southwest Arkansas. Nichols said these unusual clouds begin as normal contrails from a jet engine. But unlike normal contrails, these do not fade away. Soon after a recent episode he saw particles in the air. "We'd see it drop to the ground in a haze," added Nichols. He then noticed the material collecting on the ground. "This is water and stuff that I collected in bowls," said Nichols as he handed us a mason jar ... after driving down from Arkansas. KSLA News 12 had the sample tested at a lab. The results: A high level of barium, 6.8 parts per million, (ppm). That's more than three times the toxic level set by the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. We discovered during our investigation that barium is a hallmark of other chemtrail testing. This phenomenon even attracted the attention of a Los Angeles network affiliate, which aired a report entitled, "Toxic Sky?" There's already no shortage of unclassified weather modification programs by the government. But those who fear chemtrails could be secret biological and chemical testing on the public point to the 1977 U.S. Senate hearings which confirmed 239 populated areas had been contaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969. Later, the 1994 Rockefeller Report concluded hundreds of thousands of military personnel were also subjected to secret biological experiments over the last 60-years.Note: This is one of the few media reports to break a veritable wall of silence in the major media on the disturbing chemtrail phenomenon. To watch this revealing newscast on YouTube, click here.
Years Ago, The Military Sprayed Germs on U.S. Cities
October 22, 2001, Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1003703226697496080.htmlMuch of what the Pentagon knows about the effects of bacterial attacks on cities came from ... secret tests conducted on San Francisco and other American cities from the 1940s through the 1960s, experts say. In the 1950s, Army researchers dispersed Serratia on Panama City, Fla., and Key West, Fla., with no known illnesses resulting. They also released fluorescent compounds over Minnesota and other Midwestern states to see how far they would spread in the atmosphere. The particles of zinc-cadmium-sulfide -- now a known cancer-causing agent -- were detected more than 1,000 miles away in New York state, the Army told the Senate hearings. In New York, military researchers in 1966 spread Bacillus subtilis variant Niger, also believed to be harmless, in the subway system by dropping lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto tracks in stations in midtown Manhattan. The bacteria were carried for miles throughout the subway system. The Army kept the biological-warfare tests secret until word of them was leaked to the press in the 1970s. Between 1949 and 1969 ... open-air tests of biological agents were conducted 239 times, according to the Army's testimony in 1977 before the Senate's subcommittee on health. In 80 of those experiments, the Army said it used live bacteria that its researchers at the time thought were harmless. Several medical experts have since claimed that an untold number of people may have gotten sick as a result of the germ tests. These researchers say even benign agents can mutate into unpredictable pathogens once exposed to the elements.Note: To read this article on the WSJ website requires a paid subscription. You can read it free atthis link. Considering that the army kept all of these tests secret for decades, do you think it is possible that they are keeping information on chemtrails secret from the public.
Special Report: 'Toxic Sky?" Home Page
May 24, 2006, NBC4, Los Angeles
http://www.nbc4.tv/news/9155725/detail.htmlIt's a quiet mountain community, but some residents claim something's happening in the sky that's making them sick. Mystery clouds and unusual contrails ... Is it a weather experiment on a massive scale? In a Channel 4 News investigation, Paul Moyer looks into why some say the government is manipulating the weather. Watch: Video Report.
References: U.S. Senate Committee testimony on Weather Modification, Owning the Weather in 2025 (U.S. Air force), California Skywatch (Rosalind Peterson), Alpenhorn News Stories.@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@Glenn Beck's Anti-Semitic Attacksby Michelle Goldberghttp://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-10/glenn-becks-anti-semitic-attack-on-george-soros/?om_rid=M4-rCO&om_mid=_BM3FTTB8Vqgx81
The Fox host’s stunning two-day tirade against George Soros is a new low on American television. Michelle Goldberg on the roots of his hatred—and the Anti-Defamation League’s response.Anti-Semitism, like all ideologies, tells a story about the world. It’s a story about almost occult Jewish power, about cabals that manipulate world events for their own gain. In classic anti-Semitic narratives, Jews control both the elites and the masses; they’re responsible for the communist revolution and the speculative excesses of capitalism. Their goal is to undermine society so that they can take over. Through the lens of anti-Semitism, social division, runaway inflation, and moral breakdown all make sense because they all have the same cause. Nazi propaganda called Jewsdrahtzieher—wire-pullers. They constitute a power above and beyond ordinary government authority. “There is a super-government which is allied to no government, which is free from them all, and yet which has its hand in them all,” Henry Ford wrote in The International Jew.
If you know this history, you’ll understand why Glenn Beck’s two-part “exposé” on George Soros, whom Beck calls “The Puppet Master,” was so shocking, even by Beck’s degraded standards. The program, which aired Tuesday and Wednesday, was a symphony of anti-Semitic dog-whistles. Nothing like it has ever been on American television before.“There is a crisis collapsing our economy—George Soros,” Beck said on Tuesday’s show. “When the administration and progressives look for a savior to step in and save the day—George Soros… He’s pulled no punches about the end game. It’s one world government, the end of America's status as the prevailing world power—but why?” Because, Beck suggests, Soros wants to rule us all like a God: “Soros has admitted in the past he doesn't believe in God, but that's perhaps because he thinks he is.”http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201011090040Soros, a billionaire financier and patron of liberal causes, has long been an object of hatred on the right. But Beck went beyond demonizing him; he cast him as the protagonist in an updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He described Soros as the most powerful man on earth, the creator of a “shadow government” that manipulates regimes and currencies for its own enrichment. Obama is his “puppet,” Beck says. Soros has even “infiltrated the churches.” He foments social unrest and economic distress so he can bring down governments, all for his own financial gain. “Four times before,” Beck warned. “We’ll be number five.”Beck went beyond demonizing Soros; he cast him as the protagonist in an updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion.It’s true, of course, that Soros has had a hand in bringing down governments—communist, authoritarian governments. Beck seems to be assuming a colossal level of ignorance on the part of his viewers when he informs them, “Along with currencies, Soros also collapses regimes. With his Open Society Fund… Soros has helped fund the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia. He also helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia. So what is his target now? Us. America.”Beck’s implication is that there was something sinister in Soros’ support for anti-communist civil society organizations in the former Soviet Union. Further, he sees such support as evidence that Soros will engineer a communist coup here in the United States. This kind of thinking only makes sense within the conspiratorial mind-set of classic anti-Semitism, in which Jews threaten all governments equally. And as a wealthy Jew with a distinct Eastern European accent, Soros is a perfect target for such theories.To inoculate himself against charges of anti-Semitism, Beck hurled them at Soros, pointing out that he’s an atheist and a critic of Israel. He accused Soros of helping Nazis steal Jewish property as a teenager and of feeling no remorse about it. In fact, when Soros was 14 in Nazi-occupied Hungary, his father bribed an agriculture official to pretend that the boy was his Christian godson. Soros once had to accompany his protector to inventory a confiscated Jewish estate. Asked by 60 Minutes if he felt guilty about it, he said no, because he wasn’t at fault. The slander that he was a Nazi collaborator has proliferated on the right ever since.It’s entirely possible that Beck has waded into anti-Semitic waters inadvertently, that he picked up toxic ideas from his right-wing demimonde without realizing their anti-Jewish provenance. Early on Wednesday’s show, Beck cited the “Prime Minister of Malaysia” on Soros’ villainy. As Media Matters pointed out, he was almost certainly talking about former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Maybe he doesn’t know that Mohamad also said, “We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally Soros is a Jew.”“There’s a difference between first-degree murder and vehicular homicide, which is intentionality,” says J.J. Goldberg, a columnist and former editor in chief of The Forward, America’s leading Jewish newspaper. Goldberg wasn’t convinced that Beck meant to attack Jews. Nevertheless, he described the show as “as close as I’ve heard on mainstream television to fascism.”On Thursday morning, the Anti-Defamation League, which exists to combat anti-Semitism, finally condemned Beck. Earlier, I’d criticized the group for its silence, a change that Todd Gutnick, the ADL’s director of media relations, fiercely disputed. “Sometimes the ADL likes to consider what it’s going to say before it says it,” he said. “In this case we wanted to see the totality of what he was doing on the air before speaking out.”
In a statement, Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s national director and a Holocaust survivor himself, expressed outrage over Beck’s charges about Soros’ behavior as a boy in Nazi-occupied Hungary, which Beck made on television on Tuesday and again on the radio Wednesday. “Glenn Beck’s description of George Soros’ actions during the Holocaust is completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top,” said Foxman. “For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say—inaccurately—that there’s a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros, that’s horrific… To hold a young boy responsible for what was going on around him during the Holocaust as part of a larger effort to denigrate the man is repugnant.”Michelle Goldberg is a journalist based in New York. She is the award-winning author of The New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World. Her third book, about the world-traveling adventuress, actress, and yoga evangelist Indra Devi, will be published by Knopf in 2012.@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@GORDON DUFF: THE PLOT TO DESTROY THE UNITED STATES
If you know this history, you’ll understand why Glenn Beck’s two-part “exposé” on George Soros, whom Beck calls “The Puppet Master,” was so shocking, even by Beck’s degraded standards. The program, which aired Tuesday and Wednesday, was a symphony of anti-Semitic dog-whistles. Nothing like it has ever been on American television before.“There is a crisis collapsing our economy—George Soros,” Beck said on Tuesday’s show. “When the administration and progressives look for a savior to step in and save the day—George Soros… He’s pulled no punches about the end game. It’s one world government, the end of America's status as the prevailing world power—but why?” Because, Beck suggests, Soros wants to rule us all like a God: “Soros has admitted in the past he doesn't believe in God, but that's perhaps because he thinks he is.”http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201011090040Soros, a billionaire financier and patron of liberal causes, has long been an object of hatred on the right. But Beck went beyond demonizing him; he cast him as the protagonist in an updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He described Soros as the most powerful man on earth, the creator of a “shadow government” that manipulates regimes and currencies for its own enrichment. Obama is his “puppet,” Beck says. Soros has even “infiltrated the churches.” He foments social unrest and economic distress so he can bring down governments, all for his own financial gain. “Four times before,” Beck warned. “We’ll be number five.”Beck went beyond demonizing Soros; he cast him as the protagonist in an updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion.It’s true, of course, that Soros has had a hand in bringing down governments—communist, authoritarian governments. Beck seems to be assuming a colossal level of ignorance on the part of his viewers when he informs them, “Along with currencies, Soros also collapses regimes. With his Open Society Fund… Soros has helped fund the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia. He also helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia. So what is his target now? Us. America.”Beck’s implication is that there was something sinister in Soros’ support for anti-communist civil society organizations in the former Soviet Union. Further, he sees such support as evidence that Soros will engineer a communist coup here in the United States. This kind of thinking only makes sense within the conspiratorial mind-set of classic anti-Semitism, in which Jews threaten all governments equally. And as a wealthy Jew with a distinct Eastern European accent, Soros is a perfect target for such theories.To inoculate himself against charges of anti-Semitism, Beck hurled them at Soros, pointing out that he’s an atheist and a critic of Israel. He accused Soros of helping Nazis steal Jewish property as a teenager and of feeling no remorse about it. In fact, when Soros was 14 in Nazi-occupied Hungary, his father bribed an agriculture official to pretend that the boy was his Christian godson. Soros once had to accompany his protector to inventory a confiscated Jewish estate. Asked by 60 Minutes if he felt guilty about it, he said no, because he wasn’t at fault. The slander that he was a Nazi collaborator has proliferated on the right ever since.It’s entirely possible that Beck has waded into anti-Semitic waters inadvertently, that he picked up toxic ideas from his right-wing demimonde without realizing their anti-Jewish provenance. Early on Wednesday’s show, Beck cited the “Prime Minister of Malaysia” on Soros’ villainy. As Media Matters pointed out, he was almost certainly talking about former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Maybe he doesn’t know that Mohamad also said, “We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally Soros is a Jew.”“There’s a difference between first-degree murder and vehicular homicide, which is intentionality,” says J.J. Goldberg, a columnist and former editor in chief of The Forward, America’s leading Jewish newspaper. Goldberg wasn’t convinced that Beck meant to attack Jews. Nevertheless, he described the show as “as close as I’ve heard on mainstream television to fascism.”On Thursday morning, the Anti-Defamation League, which exists to combat anti-Semitism, finally condemned Beck. Earlier, I’d criticized the group for its silence, a change that Todd Gutnick, the ADL’s director of media relations, fiercely disputed. “Sometimes the ADL likes to consider what it’s going to say before it says it,” he said. “In this case we wanted to see the totality of what he was doing on the air before speaking out.” In a statement, Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s national director and a Holocaust survivor himself, expressed outrage over Beck’s charges about Soros’ behavior as a boy in Nazi-occupied Hungary, which Beck made on television on Tuesday and again on the radio Wednesday. “Glenn Beck’s description of George Soros’ actions during the Holocaust is completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top,” said Foxman. “For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say—inaccurately—that there’s a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros, that’s horrific… To hold a young boy responsible for what was going on around him during the Holocaust as part of a larger effort to denigrate the man is repugnant.”Michelle Goldberg is a journalist based in New York. She is the award-winning author of The New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World. Her third book, about the world-traveling adventuress, actress, and yoga evangelist Indra Devi, will be published by Knopf in 2012.@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@GORDON DUFF: THE PLOT TO DESTROY THE UNITED STATES
With Clif High's WebBots warning time running out, don't be surprised if it just takes a bit longer for world jewry to pull off its next big treasonous attack to sucker the American goyim into doing their bidding.
There are so many accepted journalists who write endless dribble about current events - paid by the inch - but Gordon Duff isn't one of them. Most are either too young to remember much or too dumb to dig deep enough to get to source.
This collective consciousness (or un-consciousness) has always been around. Often future events pop up in TV programing and have to be quickly hidden. A good example of this was the premier program of "The Lone Gunmen," the spin-off from the X-Files. It showed a plane plowing into the World Trade towers in early 2000, months before 9/11. That was their one and only show, "The Lone Gunmen" was quickly canceled. More recently was a great show called "Jericho" that took place in western Kansas, following nuke explosions in Denver and 22 other American cities, bringing the country down to a state of primitive isolation. After 22 chapters in their first season and but seven in the next year, the program was mysteriously canceled. It was very well done and very well received, but was getting a bit too close for the comfort of our ruling elite?? I remember the head of Homeland Security was involved in the takeover of the country, and some of those involved were close to exposing the whole matter as coming right out of Washington. Was the program tapping into events scheduled for 2010??? I'm sure TV has a big part in the WebBots situation. Anyway, I'm still sitting on the edge of my chair. Something big is in the works.
--
Best regards,.
Bob Taft
The Taft Ranch
Upton, Wyoming
(307) 465-2447
"We hang the petty thieves and appoint
the great ones to public office." Aesop
http://www.freedomclubusa.com/the_tun
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=74897
There are so many accepted journalists who write endless dribble about current events - paid by the inch - but Gordon Duff isn't one of them. Most are either too young to remember much or too dumb to dig deep enough to get to source.
This collective consciousness (or un-consciousness) has always been around. Often future events pop up in TV programing and have to be quickly hidden. A good example of this was the premier program of "The Lone Gunmen," the spin-off from the X-Files. It showed a plane plowing into the World Trade towers in early 2000, months before 9/11. That was their one and only show, "The Lone Gunmen" was quickly canceled. More recently was a great show called "Jericho" that took place in western Kansas, following nuke explosions in Denver and 22 other American cities, bringing the country down to a state of primitive isolation. After 22 chapters in their first season and but seven in the next year, the program was mysteriously canceled. It was very well done and very well received, but was getting a bit too close for the comfort of our ruling elite?? I remember the head of Homeland Security was involved in the takeover of the country, and some of those involved were close to exposing the whole matter as coming right out of Washington. Was the program tapping into events scheduled for 2010??? I'm sure TV has a big part in the WebBots situation. Anyway, I'm still sitting on the edge of my chair. Something big is in the works.
--
Best regards,.
Bob Taft
The Taft Ranch
Upton, Wyoming
(307) 465-2447
"We hang the petty thieves and appoint
the great ones to public office." Aesop
http://www.freedomclubusa.com/the_tun
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=74897
GORDON DUFF: IN MOTION: THE PLOT TO DESTROY THE UNITED STATES
"The threat, the target, was always the United States. We were the danger----a free people."
November 11, 2010 posted by Gordon Duff · 74 Comments
CAMOUFLAGED TANKS AS SEEN BY MILITARY SATELLITE
SEE IT COMING AND STOP IT, EVEN IF IT COSTS YOU EVERYTHING
By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor
“The 2010 election had one purpose, war with Iran, even if the risk is world conflict and the real loser, no matter what happens on the battlefield is the United States.”
Plans are in motion for a “false flag” attack on America. Iran will be blamed, everyone knows that and Iran will be totally innocent. This is the last thing Iran would ever want. The most likely scenario is a nuclear attack. Two bombs are missing, bombs built by Israel in South Africa and lost long ago. These were supposedly Saddam’s bombs. Now we are told Iran has them. Israel has had them all along and the fear, they may be inside the United States already.
The Israeli game with these weapons is one of the worst kept secrets in the world and has already cost the deaths of many. It will take nothing short of the detonation of one of this Hiroshima sized Israeli nukes to push America into Israel’s war with Iran, much as hunting for these nukes which Israel informed President Bush were in Iraq, led “the decider” to making one of the many blunders of his career. Our next 9/11 will be nuclear.
The purpose will be to push America into a 20 year war that will destroy Iran and Pakistan, take oil to over $300 per barrel and collapse the dollar and Euro. Iran isn’t Iraq of 2003, toothless and starving. This will be America’s last military adventure, and the end of America’s place in the world as we know it. We know the details of the proposed military campaign and the military and political leaders who support it are the worst imaginable incompetents and traitors.
Invading Iran is an impossible task for America. Other than there be no reason whatsoever to engage in such folly, something that, of recent years, seems to concern fewer and fewer Americans. Turn on the TV, if the “rodeo clown” says “wipe ‘em out” then we do it.
Invading Iran is an impossibility for America. Going to the moon was easier. No matter how senseless, how impossible, the decision has been made, more in Tel Aviv than Washington, for sure, but one that will be obeyed.
There are only two scenarios that can fulfill the nightmare Israel and her shiny new congress have in store with us. One is a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran and the other full scale total war with up to 500,000 Americans being drafted into the military.
FAILURE OF THE “VOLUNTEER ARMY”…..AS ISRAEL SEES IT
Forcing America to return to a draft and begin a major war, one America can never really win as with Iraq and Afghanistan and, let us not forget Vietnam, is something absolutely vital to hang around the neck of a Democrat,
RACE HATRED, AMERICAN KRYPTONITE
especially one of African American ancestry. Anyone who doesn’t think the real heart of American politics has always been racism is a liar. Family values means “white” family values. African Americans know shame at the relief they have felt seeing Muslims targeted for persecution. Every political position in today’s America is derived from institutionalized racism, be it immigration, health care or “constitution.”
When a return to the “constitution” is brought up, by people who wouldn’t know the document from a Croatian take-out menu, the reality is always race, fear, hate and envy, the glue that holds American society prisoner. Decades ago, and even more recently during our last presidential election, African Americans were represented as animals, “goyim” to the Jews. Now we play “Kill the camel jockey.” Is this why the Christianized army we sent to Afghanistan murders innocent civilians for sport?
An America in total economic collapse will require another “decider” and more “Patriot Acts,” even more totalitarian and vicious than the last, that and an end to the even farcical elections that are now inundated with drug money and cash from US based foreign corporations.
This is the plan and a criminal gang in America, some in government and the military but more behind the scenes, “banksters” and media moguls, many with ties to Israel, are working feverishly to bring it about. However clever the planners may think they are, their mechanations can be tracked through the media, the army of “Wolf Blitzers” that “work” the American people with the subtlety of carny shills.
WHY DO THEY HATE US SO MUCH?
Why would anyone want to destroy America, kill millions, leave the nation that has been there to save the world over and over a virtual wasteland? If you think America’s castrated government or the military, now relegated to acting as virtual mercenaries for drug lords, oil cartels and bizarre Zionist plots, have the will or ability to stop what has already begun, you have not been paying attention for some time. While the “circus of deception” went on, the utterly phony “war on terror,” imaginary enemies, the 9/11 disaster, orchestrated by Israel and its puppets,
Israel has decided that America is going to war with Iran. The new congress, the one Israel openly boasts is under their total control, will make it happen, it was why they were put there. The upcoming war will leave the United States crippled, castrated, a “third world” nuclear power like the old Soviet Union. The plot isn’t against Iran and Pakistan, that’s just an excuse. The real enemy is what is left of a free and democratic America.
The real goal is to end America’s leadership role in the world.
Israel has plans for Russia, China and India, especially India, to rule the world with them pulling the strings. America had been their “milk cow” for some time, now that cow is going to slaughter.
SCRATCH ONE SUPERTANKER OR DESTROYER
HOW IT BEGINS
This is how it is going to play out. The news media has gotten their orders, Wikileaks is part of it. From now on, key members of congress will, on cue, begin harping about the threat of Iran. Governments in the Middle East that are under the total control of Israel and the American military will aid in every way possible. Thus far, of all the Islamic nations in the world, only Syria and Afghanistan are not taking orders from Tel Aviv.
The next step will be to replace key military staff as was done prior to 9/11, with “Israel friendly” third stringers, “dominionists” and “Israeli firsters” who place “end times” religious mythology over the welfare, safety and sovereignty of the United States. This group has been infiltrating the American military for years and has gained control of every service but the Marine Corps, starting with the United States Air Force.
The military pundits, with their laundered payoffs and free trips to Israel and the dozens of propaganda websites have already begun. If you have a computer, you can check this easily. Simply go into your email, it will be filled with warnings of Iran and nuclear terrorism. An Israeli teenager paid dearly to bring you that message, spending a difficult night in a hotel with one of our political or military “pro-Zionists.”
Our newly elected “Tea Party’ gang will be visiting Israel soon, watch and see, there is a “Monica Lewinsky” in their future. This is how it works, how it has worked for a long time and why we have sunk so low.
Anyone who talks about “liberal” media is part of it. A cursory check of who owns the media, “liberal” or any other media is easy. Israel owns our media, all of it. The stories will start with tales of Iran controlling the Shiite government of Iraq. Then you will hear of them controlling Karzai’s government in Afghanistan.
STEP ONE
Then the stories will start, Iran has to be tied to terrorist attacks on American troops. Watch for this. Americans will start dying and Iran will be blamed. Wikileaks started this with their fanciful stories about Iranians training Iraq in making explosives. A few years ago, we invaded Iraq because we believed they were building nuclear weapons, or so we were misinformed, now they can’t build pipe bombs without Iranian help? Wikileaks is a clear demonstration at how childish, how outlandish the lies are going to be. Wikileaks is prestaging terror attacks on Americans as much as if they made the bombs themselves, no question about that.
Every media outlet that, under specific directions, carries the “party line” on Wikileaks and the rest of it, no matter how absurd, carries these fabrications without question or embarrassment, should be considered a terrorist organization and their employees enemy combatants.
It will be Israel doing the killing just as with 9/11 and the USS Liberty and, frankly, so many other times Americans have died, like the Marines killed in Beirut, an attack Israel admitted knowing of in advance. More and more, we are finding everything was “known” in advance, “known” because those who knew planned it.
Getting the scene set, all the assets in place, buying or blackmailing congress, keeping the president surrounded by Israeli advisors as he is today, silencing voices of reason in the military, all this is going on right now.
Years have been spent branding Iran and Pakistan as dangerous, the press continually ignoring reports that Iran has no nuclear program or endlessly repeating outrageous rumors that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are almost in the hands approaching “Taliban” forces. With Karzai’s government Afghanistan openly negotiating with the Taliban after American forces, 9 years of fighting, have only managed to secure 3% of the country, building a case for war tied to Iranian “interference” in that conflict is going to be unmarketable.
This leaves Pakistan. Drone attacks in Pakistan have brought about considerable destabilization and an increase in terrorism in Pakistan. They have, as seemingly planned, worked to harm American interests in the region while attempting to bring about the dissolution of Pakistan. Continual reports of American contractors in Pakistan, working for the CIA and State Department, aiding terrorists, go unreported in the American media. Even when caught with weapons and explosives inside Pakistan, such reports are suppressed.
Increasingly, evidence is showing that the Mumbai attack, the massive terror assault on India blamed on Pakistan, was orchestrated by one of these American groups.
THE MONEY ISN’T THERE, AND WE KNOW IT
However, considering the financial collapse engineered though Bush era deregulation frauds combined with unstable tax policies and massive increase in government spending, combined with cost of two failed wars, America’s options are limited. There is simply no revenue to pay the current military without rollbacks or sustain moderate capabilities and readiness. America is too broke, not just to fight a new war but to continue the two that are going or even maintain a fully peacetime force at near current levels.
In fact, our military expenditures need to be cut by 30% or more, as studies being reviewed by the Department of Defense and congress are showing. We have the choice of cutting back now or dealing with consequences later, including, not only cuts in military and veterans health care but substantial cuts in pensions and disability compensation as well.
Another war, and there is no question that another war is planned, will push American debt to $20 trillion or more, half being military expenditures, always a combination of pork, payoffs and “misplaced” weaponry and the rest looted from the economy by the planned massive manipulation of oil prices made possible by the shutoff of world petroleum supplies.
HOW IRAN CONTROLS THE WORLD'S OIL SUPPLY, 8000 MISSILES
“IRAN WILL SHUT DOWN HORMUZ AND WORLD OIL IN ONE HOUR”
In March, 2010, a Chinese built missile factory opened in Iran. The plant builds a variety of missiles, primarily anti-ship, with ranges from 100 to 300 miles or more. These are advanced weapons that can be launched from hardened facilities along Iran’s rugged coastline, from aircraft, both fixed and rotary, from patrol boats, from nearly anything. One of these missiles can sink a frigate, perhaps even a destroyer. Several can disable an aircraft carrier. Approaching Iran from sea is impossible.
Iran controls Hormuz, not just with missiles but patrol boats as well, and not just from their own shore but from the islands in the gulf, some of which were seized 30 years ago and are still held.
The government of the United Arab Emirates has discussed, from time to time, a canal bypassing the strait, through to Oman and into the Persian Gulf. However, the cost would be outrageous as a ridge of hills would have to be crossed, something difficult to manage with a lock system capable of handing the largest ships in the world, oil supertankers.
The missiles, the torpedo boats and the almost impossible network of islands and swamps along the coast would make suppressing Iran’s capabilities impossible. The strait would close, oil would stop, Iraq, Iran certainly, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In days, currencies would collapse, stock markets shut down, gas lines would form and gas rationing would be required around the world. All western economies would disappear overnight.
Iranian Facilities at Hormuz
WHY PAKISTAN HAS TO FALL
There is simply no way into Iran by land. We can barely keep American troops in Afghanistan supplied with many routes being hundreds of miles long, narrow roads from the Port of Karachi in Pakistan. Recently we found how easily this supply line could be cut off. Agreements with Iran, not to mention religious affiliations between Shiites in Iraq, the majority there and the Shiite based government in Iran, make an approach through Iraq impossible.
We could also consider that our existing forces in Iraq and the entire Persian Gulf could be cut off by Iran with no resupply by sea possible for, not only Iraq but Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Iraq. These nations and the US forces there would be immediately isolated. The only way in to Iran, restricted because of the topography, is through the province of Baluchistan, a remote area of Pakistan that borders Iran.
NEW YORK TO DENVER, ALL MOUNTAINS, NO ROADS
BALOCHISTAN
This isolated region has become the staging area for attacks against Iran, supposedly by Jundallah “rebels” but actually orchestrated by the Mossad and CIA. There are two independence movements wanting to break Baluchistan from Pakistan. One of the leaders I met in Islamabad while he was recovering from gunshot wounds. The other lives in Israel, surprise-surprise.
Because of the topography of Iran, the only way to approach Tehran is over more than a thousand miles of valleys. They can only be approached through Pakistan and there is only one port that serves that region. The only way to resupply other than through this small Chinese built port, Gwadar, is to truck into Kandahar, hundreds of miles, then back down into Pakistan, following the 500,000 man army into Iran in something closely akin to Napoleon’s ill fated invasion of Russia, but even worse if that is possible.
Tiny port, dirt roads, narrow gauge rail only
The military analogies are inescapable, Dien Bien Phu and Stalingrad are two that come to mind. Though the government of Pakistan lacks strong civilian leadership and is largely dependent on US aid, the use of Pakistan’s territory for another aggressive war in the Middle East that will perceived by almost all the world’s population, not just Muslims, as a sign of Israel’s control of the United States and its ability to get America to commit any crime, will not be acceptable to the people of Pakistan. It is also highly unlikely that even Karzai’s government in Afghanistan would abide such an action.
Thus, America could become beset, not just from Pakistan but by its own allies in Afghanistan and, quite possibly, the newly trained and surprisingly effective army in Iraq as well.
America would become a rogue state, even if purporting to respond to a devastating terrorist attack. In the aftermath of 9/11, America lacks any credibility. The second a disaster strikes inside America, the world will immediately assume the worst, Israel has deemed such an act necessary to push America to war. No rational person could assume otherwise.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
In order to stabilize the situation with our allies, those likely to become enemies, it will likely necessitate the decapitation of several regimes, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan initially. Others will quickly fall into line though some will be directly under the control of Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in particular. They will become indefensible except through massive airlift, resources that will be needed elsewhere. Half the troops needed to secure America’s lines of supply left military service after multiple deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq for nearly a decade. Many are sick, some are homeless and hundreds of thousands are simply “fed up.”
This leaves the new citizen army, the one America had to turn to because of a “9/11 – Pearl Harbor” disaster fewer and fewer believe the cover story on as days go by. Even in America, despite what Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu thinks, you can only fool people so many times. The most glaring example of the lack of foresight some of our “War College” grads have can be seen in the Gwadar Port facilities, the only place American can use for supplies for the most difficult invasion in history, with, perhaps, the exception of Okinawa.
TWO CRANES, TWO CRANES, TWO CRANES...COUNT THEM AGAIN, IT WILL STILL ONLY BE TWO CRANES
ECONOMIC BELT TIGHTENING AT HOME
The 2010 election paid for a war, there is no question of that. Many of the puppets in America’s government had to be replaced as there was fear some of them might object to something as obscene as what is in the planning. Lies, fear mongering and childish rhetoric had never reached the levels seen in 2010. Never had a nation, since Germany in 1932, gone over to the “darkside” as clearly as America has done, a rejection of decency and common sense.
When the bill becomes due, and it most certainly will, that “smaller government” so many thought they would get will most certainly come true. What won’t happen is a return to constitutional rule, that will be gone forever. Habeas Corpus won’t be missed so much in a country where those without the cash to buy their way out of military service, yes, that great American tradition, will be one step ahead of the press gangs working to keep the military training camps filled to capacity. America may, quite likely, have bitten off a bit too much, a world war, and this time, no allies, none, not a chance.
LESS GOVERNMENT, THE DREAM OF AMERICA’S “RIGHT”
SOCIAL SECURITY: Plans for less government have always been around, we have seen attempts to put these plans in place many times, starting with attempts to have Social Security declared unconstitutional back in the 1930s. This will be first to go, Social Security. Getting rid of Social Security has long been a dream of the GOP, either through outlawing it as “Socialism,” or “borrowing” the trust fund to cover war expenses or, more recently “privatization.” Now, none of those will be needed. The money will simply disappear overnight, not to pay war expenses, not hardly. It will be split up and stashed in Swiss bank accounts the same place the “bail out” money went, the same place every 401k in America went, the same place the assets of our largest banks went.
MEDICARE/MEDIAID: They will be the next to go. States will be asked to pay fund this themselves. There won’t be any more questions about illegal aliens using our medical care, there won’t be any, not for them, not for the poor or not for the senior citizens who paid into medicare all their lives. Just because it was paid for doesn’t mean the government can’t simply break its promise, there are loyalties more powerful and more important that our government has than to the people. 9/11 proved that to any rational person.
TAX INCREASES: The time for borrowing, counterfeit money, the “Federal Reserve System” and selling T -Bills will be over. China and Iran are close. China will be finished with us, India too and no more Arab money. The dollar, the instrument we use to buy oil, fertilizer, metals and so many other things, will be worthless. We are going to have to invent a new form of monopoly money or go on the barter system. The dollar, as a world currency, will disappear.
SCHOOLS SHUT DOWN: One good thing, schools will shut down. Thus, America’s inferior education system will no longer do the damage it once did. Along with that, mothers will be home to take care of children, a “blast from the past.” The downside, of course, the mothers will have lost their jobs, the homes will be unheated, some with no electricity, more with no water, all eventually repossessed and, unless the government starts giving out food as it had in the past, we will see starvation. The money that financed Food Stamps will be long gone.
MILITARY AND VETERANS PENSIONS HALVED: Long seen as “freeloaders,” veterans and military retirees will be cut off. Pensions once seen as a “promise” have long been referred to as “entitlements.” Any entitlement can be “unentitled” and these will.
MILITARY PAY CUT: Troops in Vietnam were paid $30 dollars a week. We are going to see that again.
THIS IS THE INEXORABLE FUTURE, BOUGHT AND PAID FOR
The draft, worthless money, gas lines, martial law, metal detectors in supermarkets, cameras everywhere, everything filmed, recorded, everyone every day, biometrics, face recognition, these things will be part of our lives from now on. These are the plans and putting this machinery in place, much of it “designed” in Israel, is what Americans voted for, this and the invasion of Iran, part of a war where only Americans will fight and die.
No one cares about Iran. No knowledgeable person ever thought they had nuclear weapons or wanted them. It was never about them. They were never a target, they were never a threat. The threat, the target, was always the United States. We were the danger, a free people.
Free people can’t be trusted, can’t be managed.
The plans are in place to bring that to an end. How many Americans will continue to be a part of it?
Comment: The two cities that will most likely be hit with a low yield (20KT) atomic weapon are New Orleans and the shipping channel/tank farm area coming into the city of Houston. This would devastate not only imports of food stuffs, but it would instantly cripple much of the refining capacity of the USA. THis would also cut off a large portion of imported crude oil. And, if the weapon went off in New Orleans near the bridge, the collapsed bridge could totally block the Mississippi river and halt all maritime traffic on the river. Both of these attacks could easily be accomplished by hiding the weapon in one of the many container ships that enter these ports every day. These actions, combined with the closing of the Straits of Hormuz, would collapse the economy of the USA literally overnight. For those mentally challenged individuals who still insist that Israel is "the friend" of the USA, and that this report is some sort of paranoid pipe dream, Israelis were caught RED HANDED trying to blow up the George Washington bridge on September 11th, 2001. If you doubt that , then write to this email address and I will send you the full report which appeared that very night on the CBS evening news. This story quickly disappeared down the rabbit hole never to be seen again.
The two nukes mentioned by Mr. Duff are two of five built by Israel for South Africa. One was detonated over the South Indian Ocean in 1979. One was dismantled. And one was set off in North Korea in 2006. This is important because every nuclear weapon has a unique signature. If the remaining two are detonated on U.S. soil the trail will lead back to North Korea. Just speculation, but I would not be surprised to hear the controlled prostitute media claim that North Korea sold the two black market nukes to Iran. Another false flag attack.....
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Reinventing A War Criminal: Defending The Bush Legacy
By Stephen Lendman
13 November, 2010
Countercurrents.org
Countercurrents.org
The Bush legacy is based on lies, deceit, crimes of war and against humanity, and complicity in criminal fraud, a disgusting record deserving denunciation and prison, not shameless feting.
Yet his new book, "Decision Points," attempts the impossible, a brazen scheme to reinvent a war criminal, one of history's greatest, his legacy marked by:
-- neocon hellishness;
-- duplicity and public betrayal;
-- a disdain for human rights and civil liberties;
-- lawlessness;
-- racist hatemongering;
-- usurping unconstitutional "Unitary Executive" authority, what Chalmers Johnson called "a ball-faced assertion of presidential supremacy....dressed up in legalistic mumbo jumbo;"
-- imperial wars called liberating ones;
-- mass murder;
-- extrajudicially establishing coup d'etat "continuity of government" authority to abolish constitutional freedoms unilaterally;
-- color revolutions against democracy;
-- reveling in being a "wartime president;"
-- making torture official US policy;
-- establishing a global torture prison gulag;
-- abolishing the 1807 Insurrection Act and 1878 Posse Comitatus protections against using US military forces for domestic law enforcement, except as constitutionally authorized or in cases of internal insurrection;
-- militarizing state and local law enforcement agencies, establishing a martial law apparatus throughout all levels of government without congressional approval;
-- supporting the worst of Israeli crimes;
-- deposing Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide, its first democratic leader since liberation from France in 1803, turning slaves into citizens;
-- staging a failed coup to depose Venezuela's Hugo Chavez;
-- failing to establish a militarized North American Union (NAU) merger of Canada and Mexico with America, headquartered in Washington;
-- transferring unprecedented wealth to the rich, exceeded only by his successor;
-- unabashedly favoring business over beneficial social change;
-- designating everything for privatization, including public education as another commodity;
-- waging war on working Americans;
-- unprecedented levels of secrecy;
-- endangering public welfare and safety by regulatory shredding;
-- creating the grimmest economic conditions since the 1930s;
-- destroying civil liberties;
-- silencing dissent;
-- criminalizing First Amendment activities advocating for environmental and animal rights;
-- institutionalizing illegal spying and police state repression;
-- turning elections into shams;
-- hiring journalist as paid propagandists;
-- failing to privatize Social Security and end Medicare;
-- opposing Net Neutrality;
-- waging war on Muslims, Latinos, and other political targets; persecuting them; denying them due process and judicial fairness; incarcerating and/or deporting them;
-- fostering social decay; and
-- much more, a legacy from hell, a disgusting betrayal of every norm of civilized decency, engendering global contempt and outrage.
Yet there he was discussing his record publicly on the hustings, promoting his new book, 477 pages of ghostwritten rubbish - fiction, not fact.
The writer: Christopher Michel, aged 28, a fellow Yale graduate, working with Bush preparing it since January 2009. The Daily Beast's Bryan Curtis said, in 2003, he was an unpaid intern, then rose to become deputy assistant to the president and deputy speechwriting director. Both positions involved close regular contact, including traveling the world on Air Force One.
Treating his former boss reverentially, he said Bush was fully in charge, "writ(ing) a first draft of a lot of things, (then) email(ing it) to" him. "My role (was) to help put together different scenes. (He wrote) the scenes, and (I) stitch(ed) things together." Or so he claimed, wanting Bush to get full credit, a man who couldn't complete a full sentence, got through Yale and Harvard Business School on his pedigree, not intellect, and likely didn't write his own term papers, let alone a book.
Curtis concluded saying "the best way to read the Bush memoir is as the elusive piece de resistance of the most loyal Bush scrivener. In (a) 2009 email to friends, Michel wrote, 'I owe more than I can repay to the 43rd president of the United States, a man of courage who will fare well in history.' " Perhaps what's taught in Texas schools or featured in "managed news." Never by legitimate chroniclers, exposing one of history's greatest war criminals, a mass murderer, a contemptible human being, so far unaccountable.
Feting a World Class Rogue
Bombastically back on the world stage, Bush began a whirlwind tour on prime time NBC TV, promoting his book, defending his illegal wars, rationalizing his abandonment of New Orleans post-Katrina, and more, trying to reinvent himself.
Soft media hosts, including Matt Lauer, Oprah Winfrey, Rush Limbaugh and three Fox News regulars (Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Greta Van Susteren in that order) provided venues. Print interviews will follow, one announced with AARP The Magazine. More interviews as well on CBS Sunday Morning, prime time CNN, The Tonight Show, and other programs, part of the carefully planned scheme to rewrite history, reinvent the man, and sell books, corporate media hosts always cooperative.
New York Times writer Brian Stelter called it part of a well-orchestrated campaign, NBC getting first crack having outbid other network proposals. One reason perhaps is because Bush's daughter, Jena, is a part-time Today show correspondent.
In his November 7 article titled, "With Book, Bush Is Back in Spotlight," Stelter said:
Late last month, NBC taped the interview "over the course of two days in Texas," calling it "a major coup." But anyone expecting "to see a televised confrontation over issues like the Iraq war may come away disappointed. The tone of the prime-time special (and other scheduled interviews) is conversational, not prosecutorial, and for that reason, 'Lauer/Bush' is not likely to join 'Frost/Nixon' in the public imagination."
Former Bush press secretary Dana Perino said tone was an important consideration for the tour, a combination image-building/book-selling effort, already a non-fiction best seller.
Without trying to embarrass or pressure Bush, Lauer asked, "Let's talk about waterboarding." He flatly denied it was torture because he legal staff said so. In fact, they followed orders, devising legal opinions to justify lawlessness, what they clearly understood.
Yet with no substantiating evidence, Bush claimed it "saved lives" by providing advance warning. In fact, experts know that that torture is both ineffective and counterproductive, accomplishing nothing but vengeance.
One of many torture techniques used, waterboarding inflicts severe pain from 40-second applications in two hour sessions, multiple ones daily, forcing water in detainees' mouths and noses for 12 minutes, repeated daily, sometimes for weeks.
Merriam Webster online calls it "an interrogation technique in which water is forced into a detainee's mouth and nose so as to induce the sensation of drowning."
Wikipedia calls it:
"a form of torture that consists of immobilizing the subject on his/her back with the head inclined downwards; water is then poured over the face into breathing passages, thus triggering (a sensation) of drowning. In contrast to submerging the head face-forward in water, waterboarding precipitates an almost immediate gag reflex (causing) extreme pain, dry drowning, damage to (the) lungs (and) brain....from oxygen deprivation (as well as) other physical injuries including broken bones due to struggling against restraints, lasting psychological damage or, if uninterrupted, death."
By any standard, it's barbaric torture, omitted from media interviews. They focused mainly on Bush's book, reinvented history, airbrushed truth, the same "managed news" featured daily in corporate media reports, censoring or sanitizing hard topics too sensitive to discuss.
Instead, soft-ball hosts doted on Bush calling the world "better off without Saddam Hussein in power, as are 25 million (Iraqis) who now have a chance to live in freedom." The millions dead, suffering, and immiserated perhaps feel otherwise. Their country (like Afghanistan) is occupied, destroyed, corrupted, tryannized, and contaminated, the undiscussed Bush legacy Obama continues seamlessly, his memoirs ahead in a future volume, no less disgusting than "Decision Points."
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached atlendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site atsjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
Firefly (Lilia Adecer Cajilog)
Tawo Seed Carrier
POB 1456
South Pasadena, CA 91031
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In case you have forgotten New Mexico is aptly called the 'land of enchantment'
LOCATION
Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States
Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States
CREATED BY
Criminal Conversations
Criminal Conversations
CATEGORY Film
.
.Criminal Conversations
LOCATION
Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States
Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States
CREATED BY
Criminal Conversations
Criminal Conversations
CATEGORY Film
A man meets his ex-wife again while his current spouse is dying and his ex-wife's current husband is suing her for divorce and trying to prove adultery.
THE MOVIE
CRIMINAL CONVERSATIONS is a romantic dramedy that unfolds amid somewhat unusual circumstances. A man meets up again with his ex-wife while his current wife is dying and his ex-wife’s current husband is suing her for divorce and trying to prove she is guilty of adultery. The tale unfolds on a small college campus in Santa Fe where Ted, whose dying wife has encouraged him to prepare for a new life without her, signs up for an acting course and discovers that his professor is his ex-wife, Alexandra.
Will Ted and Alexandra rekindle the love they shared long ago? Will Alexandra's soon-to-be ex, Frank, get the goods on her and Ted and claim adultery? Will Ted "fit in" with the much younger students in his class and fulfill his youthful dream of an acting career?
CRIMINAL CONVERSATIONS incorporates several key factors, including keeping the budget as low as possible while operating within union rules and regulations, putting as much money on the screen as possible, keeping the “above the line” costs lower than on most films, and attracting a name cast. The budget for CRIMINAL CONVERSATIONS is $50,000 for a 14-day shoot in Santa Fe, New Mexico..
CRIMINAL CONVERSATIONS has been written and specifically structured for low-budget production. The story focuses on a handful of characters and uses a limited number of locations that are readily accessible. The movie can be produced with minimal crew and no special effects. It is intended to be shot on HDV using mostly ambient lighting.
And how did we get a famous actor like WES STUDI to star in our very-low-budget film? Well, it helps that he's a long-time friend of the director, Jules Rubin. And he lives here, (Sta. Fe, NM) and Wes has long been defying the mindset of casting Native Americans only in Native roles. Here he plays a romantic lead in a "straight" role and even gets to spout Shakespeare. Thank you, we'll take the credit for this career breakthrough.
Then, to add to the intrigue....Wes is playing opposite his lovely wife Maura Dhu Studi We also have Anthony Arkin and we're keeping tabs on a number of other fine actors. We'll be casting some college students, as well.
.
COPYRIGHT 2010 SAGECREEK PRODUCTIONS, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. WGA Registration #: 1424548
THE IMPACT
You may have noticed more films with, shall we say, "mature" actors. As I write this, REDS with Helen Mirren is getting big box office, and MORNING GLORY with Diane Keaton and Harrison Ford is opening soon. Merle Streep can still pull 'em in, and Sly Stallone pulled off a coup getting Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis back together. A couple years ago, an episode of BOSTON LEGAL starred our beloved and spunky Betty White, who sued the television company because they didn't provide the over-50 crowd with shows they could watch and app
CRIMINAL CONVERSATIONS is a romantic dramedy that unfolds amid somewhat unusual circumstances. A man meets up again with his ex-wife while his current wife is dying and his ex-wife’s current husband is suing her for divorce and trying to prove she is guilty of adultery. The tale unfolds on a small college campus in Santa Fe where Ted, whose dying wife has encouraged him to prepare for a new life without her, signs up for an acting course and discovers that his professor is his ex-wife, Alexandra.
Will Ted and Alexandra rekindle the love they shared long ago? Will Alexandra's soon-to-be ex, Frank, get the goods on her and Ted and claim adultery? Will Ted "fit in" with the much younger students in his class and fulfill his youthful dream of an acting career?
THE PRODUCTION STRATEGY
CRIMINAL CONVERSATIONS incorporates several key factors, including keeping the budget as low as possible while operating within union rules and regulations, putting as much money on the screen as possible, keeping the “above the line” costs lower than on most films, and attracting a name cast. The budget for CRIMINAL CONVERSATIONS is $50,000 for a 14-day shoot in Santa Fe, New Mexico..
CRIMINAL CONVERSATIONS has been written and specifically structured for low-budget production. The story focuses on a handful of characters and uses a limited number of locations that are readily accessible. The movie can be produced with minimal crew and no special effects. It is intended to be shot on HDV using mostly ambient lighting.
And how did we get a famous actor like WES STUDI to star in our very-low-budget film? Well, it helps that he's a long-time friend of the director, Jules Rubin. And he lives here, (Sta. Fe, NM) and Wes has long been defying the mindset of casting Native Americans only in Native roles. Here he plays a romantic lead in a "straight" role and even gets to spout Shakespeare. Thank you, we'll take the credit for this career breakthrough.
Then, to add to the intrigue....Wes is playing opposite his lovely wife Maura Dhu Studi We also have Anthony Arkin and we're keeping tabs on a number of other fine actors. We'll be casting some college students, as well.
.
COPYRIGHT 2010 SAGECREEK PRODUCTIONS, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. WGA Registration #: 1424548
THE IMPACT
You may have noticed more films with, shall we say, "mature" actors. As I write this, REDS with Helen Mirren is getting big box office, and MORNING GLORY with Diane Keaton and Harrison Ford is opening soon. Merle Streep can still pull 'em in, and Sly Stallone pulled off a coup getting Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis back together. A couple years ago, an episode of BOSTON LEGAL starred our beloved and spunky Betty White, who sued the television company because they didn't provide the over-50 crowd with shows they could watch and app
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The Secret Big-Money Takeover of America
by Robert Reich
Not only is income and wealth in America more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years, but those hands are buying our democracy as never before – and they’re doing it behind closed doors.
Hundreds of millions of secret dollars are pouring into congressional and state races in this election cycle. TheKoch brothers (whose personal fortunes grew by $5 billion last year) appear to be behind some of it, Karl Rove has rounded up other multi-millionaires to fund right-wing candidates, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is funneling corporate dollars from around the world into congressional races, and Rupert Murdoch is evidently spending heavily.
No one knows for sure where this flood of money is coming from because it’s all secret.
But you can safely assume its purpose is not to help America’s stranded middle class, working class, and poor. It’s to pad the nests of the rich, stop all reform, and deregulate big corporations and Wall Street – already more powerful than since the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators.
Credit the Supreme Court’s grotesque decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, which opened the floodgates. (Even though 8 of 9 members of the Court also held disclosure laws constitutional, the decision invited the creation of shadowy “nonprofits” that don’t have to reveal anything.)
According to FEC data, only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.
Last week, when the Senate considered a bill to force such disclosure, every single Republican voted against it – thereby revealing the GOP’s true colors, and presumed benefactors. (To understand how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)
Maybe the Disclose Bill can get passed in lame-duck session. Maybe the IRS will make sure Karl Rove’s and other supposed nonprofits aren’t sham political units. Maybe pigs will learn to fly.
In the meantime we face an election that marks an even sharper turn toward plutocratic capitalism than before – a government by and for the rich and big corporations — and away from democratic capitalism.
As income and wealth has moved to the top, so has political power. That’s why, for example, it’s been impossible to close the absurd tax loophole that allows hedge-fund and private-equity managers to treat much of their income as capital gains, subject to a 15 percent tax (even though they’re earning tens or hundreds of millions a year, and the top 15 hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion last year). Why it proved impossible to fund expanded health care by limiting the tax deductions of the very rich. Why it’s so difficult even to extend George Bush’s tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent of Americans without also extending them for the top 2 percent – even though the top won’t spend the money and create jobs, but will blow a $36 billion hole in the federal budget next year.
The good news is average Americans are beginning to understand that when the rich secretly flood our democracy with money, the rest of us drown.
Wall Street executives and top CEOs get bailed out while under-water homeowners and jobless workers sink.
A Quinnipiac poll earlier this year found overwhelming support for a millionaire tax.
But what the public wants means nothing if our democracy is secretly corrupted by big money.
Right now we’re headed for a perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top, a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy, and a public in the aftershock of the Great Recession becoming increasingly angry and cynical about government. The three are obviously related.
We must act. We need a movement to take back our democracy. (If tea partiers were true to their principles, they’d join it.) As Martin Luther King once said, the greatest tragedy is “not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”
What can you do?
1. Read Justice Steven’s dissent in the Citizens United case, so you’re fully informed about the majority’s pernicious illogic.
2. Use every opportunity to speak out against this decision, and embarrass and condemn the right-wing Justices who supported it.
3. In this and subsequent elections, back candidates for congress and president who vow to put Justices on the Court who will reverse it.
4. Demand that the IRS enforce the law and pull the plug on Karl Rove and other sham nonprofits.
5. If you have a Republican senator, insist that he or she support the Disclose Act. If they won’t, campaign against them.
6. Support public financing of elections.
7. Join an organization like Common Cause, that’s committed to doing all this and getting big money out of politics. (Personal note: I’m so outraged at what’s happening that I just became chairman of Common Cause.)
8. Send this post to your friends (including any tea partiers you may know).
© 2010 Robert Reich
Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written twelve books, includingThe Work of Nations [1], Locked in the Cabinet [2], and his most recent book, Supercapitalism [3]. His "Marketplace" commentaries can be found onpublicradio.com [4] and iTunes [4].
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/10/08-1
Firefly (Lilia Adecer Cajilog)
Tawo Seed Carrier
POB 1456
South Pasadena, CA 91031
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Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says
November 14, 2010, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14nazis.htmlA secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II. The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades. It describes the government’s ... pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz. The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis. The report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations. The Justice Department has resisted making the report public since 2006. Under the threat of a lawsuit, it turned over a heavily redacted version last month to a private research group, theNational Security Archive, but even then many ... portions were omitted. A complete version was obtained by The New York Times.Note: To read the complete Justice Department report obtained by The New York Times, click here. For a brief comparison with the heavily redacted version previously available, click here. For a more detailed analysis by the the National Security Archive, click here.@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@It’s Official: Rich Declare War on the Middle Class
by Robert Freeman
For the past thirty years the rich have been waging war on the middle class. It’s been astonishingly effective, partly because it has been undeclared. But even that pretense is now being abandoned. The President’s National Deficit Commission has effectively declared that the rich will now go after what is left of working and middle class wealth and will take whatever steps are necessary to seize it. If allowed to succeed, their plan will reduce Americans to a state of serfdom.
Ronald Reagan began the war on the middle class with his “supply-side” economics. Its very purpose, according to David Stockman, Reagan’s Budget Director, was to transfer wealth and income upwards. It cut the marginal tax rate on the highest income earners from 75% to 35% while dramatically expanding spending for war. The results were two-fold: massive federal debt and an astonishing rise in the share of income and wealth going to those who were already the wealthiest people in the world.
The national debt quadrupled between 1980 and 1992. George W. Bush would repeat Reagan’s policies and double it again between 2000 and 2008. Meanwhile, the share of national income going to the top 1% more than doubled, from 9% to 24%. The share going to the top one-tenth of 1% of income earners more than tripled. We now have the most unequal distribution of income in the developing world and the inequality is growing rapidly.
Shifts of this magnitude over such short periods of time have never been seen in American history. With the rich getting much, much richer, its means that everybody else is getting poorer. And in fact, real wages for median workers are lower today than they were in 1973. Indeed, while the inflation-adjusted income of the bottom fifth of workers fell by $6,900 between 1979 and 2007, the top 1% saw its annual income increase by $741,000!
To try to keep up with living standards Americans resorted to debt. They increased their personal debt-to-income ratio from 62% in 1980 to 130% in 2008. When housing prices fell 35% nationwide in the recent collapse it left Americans with a smaller share of equity in their homes, 48%, than at any time since the Great Depression. The share they have lost has been taken by the banks.
In other words, all of the income and wealth gains for middle Americans from the “golden years” between 1945 and 1975 have now been wiped out. Or more accurately, have now been transferred to the very rich. The top 1% holds 34% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 50% holds just 2.5%. The bottom 40% owns absolutely nothing.
These effects and numbers can be numbing, even dizzying. But it’s important to understand that they have not been the result of random events or impersonal market forces. Rather, they have followed as the intended consequences of the relentless application of a wide array of government and industry policies.
The massive run-up in debt is one such policy. The wealthy are net lenders. This means that massive public and private debt transfers interest income to them from the rest of the economy. Another method for effecting massive wealth transfer: Beginning in 1981 the Reagan administration effectively stopped enforcing anti-trust laws, allowing monopolies to gouge everyone who had to buy their products.
The government actually provided tax subsidies so that corporations could eliminate jobs in the industrial heartland and ship them to Mexico and later, China, India, and other low-wage countries, reducing wages and pitting American workers against each other for those jobs remaining.
The bank deregulation that began in the early 1980s reached its apex with the repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act in the late nineties. This set up the “casino capitalism” of the next decade that would spawn massive criminality and mortgage fraud by the nation’s leading banks—none of which has been prosecuted. The result was the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression.
But even as more than five million homeowners have lost their homes, the wealthy had their losses covered by the Bush and later Obama administrations. Bloomberg news estimates that the transfer to the banks through the financial bailout comes to some $13 trillion dollars.
We could go on and on and on with the roster of ways the wealthy have used the government to transfer national wealth to themselves. Environmental and health laws that are not enforced. Deals with the pharmaceutical industry so they don’t have to compete with foreign manufacturers. Health care “reform” that forces tens of millions of Americans to buy questionable insurance products, even as insurers continue to kick legitimate claimants off their rolls. Give-aways of the telecommunication spectrum worth hundreds of billions of dollars to media monopolies that ladle out state propaganda as if were news and never, ever challenge official narratives.
In these and a thousand other ways, the rich have conspired with the government they largely control to shift more and still more of the nation’s wealth away from the working and middle classes, to themselves. It amounts to the most insidious class warfare and the most rapacious looting of public and private resources in the history of the world.
The result is vast impoverishment, demoralization, and the destruction of the American middle class. One out of eight Americans are on food stamps. One out of five people are in official poverty. One out of four children are raised in poverty. Twenty five million people cannot find enough work, while their skills atrophy and their families and communities are destroyed. These are not figures describing a banana republic, a disaster-stricken region, or a third world country. They describe the United States of America after three decades of plunder by the rich. And now they want to go in for the kill.
Not satisfied with the staggering wealth they have already siphoned away, the ultra-rich are now using Barack Obama’s National Deficit Commission to propose even more brazen plunder. And the looting is no longer taking place behind closed doors or under the cover of arcane public policies.
The commission proposes to cut the federal government’s budget deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade. But 75% of the “savings” will come from gutting programs that help stabilize the middle class and their communities. None of it comes from policies that would harm the rich.
For example, the commission proposes cutting the tax deduction for mortgage payments. Not only will this render housing much less affordable for millions of prospective home buyers, it will reduce housing prices, perhaps substantially, for without the tax writeoff, buyers will be able to afford much less house. This will decimate the sole source of wealth of tens of millions of Americans.
It is housing wealth that undergirds retirement security for the middle class. Or, at least it did until one out of four homeowners went underwater on their mortgage in the recent bank-triggered collapse. Then, even as the Commission plans to decimate home prices and owner equity, it proposes cutting back benefits to Social Security recipients.
It would lower Social Security cost-of living adjustments while raising the minimum retirement age. And this is being proposed at the very moment that the bank-owned Federal Reserve Board is beginning to print hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks from what’s left of their toxic assets still held from the housing crash.
The ensuing inflation is going to destroy the value of retirement incomes at exactly the moment that 77 million baby boomers head off into retirement. It was exactly this process of money printing and bankrupting of retirees that destroyed the German middle class in the early 1920s, giving rise to Adolph Hitler.
The Commission’s proposals would increase co-pays and deductibles for Medicare, making it unaffordable to millions. It proposes taxing as income the health insurance benefits millions receive from their employers. The Child Tax Credit would be eliminated as would 10% of all federal government jobs. This, at a time when more than 20% of the workforce is already underemployed and there are five workers trying for every available job.
We should be crystal clear: these policies amount to a mortal assault on what remains of middle class solvency and the democracy that a vibrant middle class makes possible.
But even as it girds up for this assault, the Commission barely touches the ultra-rich on whose boards they serve and who have gained so much over the past 30 years. And it cannot go without being said that it was these same professional predators who actually wrecked the economy, pitching it into its greatest collapse since the Great Depression.
The Commission’s proposals would actually lower the maximum tax on the highest income earners, from 35% to 24%. The nominal tax rate on corporate income would fall as well, from 35% to 26%. There is nothing proposed to raise taxes after so many decades of steadily amassed wealth. No financial transactions tax (as the IMF recommends) to stanch the kind of tsunami of speculative buying and selling that brought down the economy. Such a tax would raise over $700 billion over the next decade.
Of course, there will be no claw-backs of the trillions of dollars transferred to the rich under the phony duress of “saving the system” during the height of the financial crisis. No proposal that the cap on earnings subject to Social Security withholding should be removed. That proviso alone would raise more than half a trillion dollars over the next decade.
In fact, it is in comparison with other give-aways to the rich that the take-aways from the middle class by the Commission can be seen as so one sided and venal. Remember, they propose to save $4 trillion over 10 years.
But the war in Iraq, which we now know was entirely premised on lies, will cost more than $5 trillion, according to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz. It has proven a huge boon to the rich weapons makers, bankers, logistics companies and oil companies that Bush used to coddle as his “base.”
As mentioned above, Bloomberg news estimates that the financial bailout cost some $13 trillion, all of it going to the very richest people on the planet. There is not a syllable in the Commission’s report proposing getting any of that back to help reduce the deficit.
Or consider the notorious Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 where fully 40% went to the top 1% of income earners. Obama once promised to overturn them but, as is his typically cowardly pattern, is now folding. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated that they will cost the government more than $18 trillion over their lifetime—four times what the Deficit Commission claims it will achieve in savings. But God forbid we should ask for even a penny of that back to help battle the deficit.
In other words, there are many, many substantial and just ways that the savings the Commission proposes to create could be secured via small contributions from those who have gamed the system and gained the most over the past three decades. But that is not the Commission’s plan. And it is in that omission that its true intent is revealed.
There is no more time for stealth, no more need for subtlety. Western capitalist economies are declining at a pace that is frightening their elite stewards and compelling such desperate, slovenly measures as the wholesale printing of money to postpone the inevitable. While Obama sings lullabies of “hope” and “change” to tranquillize the suckers out front, the rich are backing the truck up to the vault in the back, no longer even deigning to disguise the heist. And of course, why should they? They have the additional diversion of the moronic Tea Party vigilantes (“Keep the government out of my Medicare”), ever ready to cut other people’s throats to cure their own nosebleeds.
The Commission’s proposal is the most naked, undisguised declaration of class warfare possible. Its agenda is not to reduce the deficit but rather to reduce what is left of the American middle class and American workers, to a condition of servitude, of feudal peonage. Their poverty will make them docile and subservient. This will make possible the final looting of America by those whose sociopathic greed has brought it so low already. The battle over this proposal is the last bulwark against the devastation and final destruction of America. It must be fought and won or our freedom and security ceded forever. There is no other choice.
Robert Freeman writes on economics, history, and education. His earlier pieces, "If You Want More Debt, Vote Republican," and "Obama Was Used, and is Now Used Up," were also published on Common Dreams.
Class Warfare
http://www.hermes-press.com/class_warfare.htm@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@A Tsunami of MoneyBerry Craig: It was a tsunami of money triggered by the Supreme Court ruling that corporations could spend unlimited sums to elect or oppose candidates for public office.
November 14, 2010, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14nazis.htmlA secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II. The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades. It describes the government’s ... pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz. The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis. The report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations. The Justice Department has resisted making the report public since 2006. Under the threat of a lawsuit, it turned over a heavily redacted version last month to a private research group, theNational Security Archive, but even then many ... portions were omitted. A complete version was obtained by The New York Times.Note: To read the complete Justice Department report obtained by The New York Times, click here. For a brief comparison with the heavily redacted version previously available, click here. For a more detailed analysis by the the National Security Archive, click here.@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@It’s Official: Rich Declare War on the Middle Class
by Robert Freeman
For the past thirty years the rich have been waging war on the middle class. It’s been astonishingly effective, partly because it has been undeclared. But even that pretense is now being abandoned. The President’s National Deficit Commission has effectively declared that the rich will now go after what is left of working and middle class wealth and will take whatever steps are necessary to seize it. If allowed to succeed, their plan will reduce Americans to a state of serfdom.
Ronald Reagan began the war on the middle class with his “supply-side” economics. Its very purpose, according to David Stockman, Reagan’s Budget Director, was to transfer wealth and income upwards. It cut the marginal tax rate on the highest income earners from 75% to 35% while dramatically expanding spending for war. The results were two-fold: massive federal debt and an astonishing rise in the share of income and wealth going to those who were already the wealthiest people in the world.
The national debt quadrupled between 1980 and 1992. George W. Bush would repeat Reagan’s policies and double it again between 2000 and 2008. Meanwhile, the share of national income going to the top 1% more than doubled, from 9% to 24%. The share going to the top one-tenth of 1% of income earners more than tripled. We now have the most unequal distribution of income in the developing world and the inequality is growing rapidly.
Shifts of this magnitude over such short periods of time have never been seen in American history. With the rich getting much, much richer, its means that everybody else is getting poorer. And in fact, real wages for median workers are lower today than they were in 1973. Indeed, while the inflation-adjusted income of the bottom fifth of workers fell by $6,900 between 1979 and 2007, the top 1% saw its annual income increase by $741,000!
To try to keep up with living standards Americans resorted to debt. They increased their personal debt-to-income ratio from 62% in 1980 to 130% in 2008. When housing prices fell 35% nationwide in the recent collapse it left Americans with a smaller share of equity in their homes, 48%, than at any time since the Great Depression. The share they have lost has been taken by the banks.
In other words, all of the income and wealth gains for middle Americans from the “golden years” between 1945 and 1975 have now been wiped out. Or more accurately, have now been transferred to the very rich. The top 1% holds 34% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 50% holds just 2.5%. The bottom 40% owns absolutely nothing.
These effects and numbers can be numbing, even dizzying. But it’s important to understand that they have not been the result of random events or impersonal market forces. Rather, they have followed as the intended consequences of the relentless application of a wide array of government and industry policies.
The massive run-up in debt is one such policy. The wealthy are net lenders. This means that massive public and private debt transfers interest income to them from the rest of the economy. Another method for effecting massive wealth transfer: Beginning in 1981 the Reagan administration effectively stopped enforcing anti-trust laws, allowing monopolies to gouge everyone who had to buy their products.
The government actually provided tax subsidies so that corporations could eliminate jobs in the industrial heartland and ship them to Mexico and later, China, India, and other low-wage countries, reducing wages and pitting American workers against each other for those jobs remaining.
The bank deregulation that began in the early 1980s reached its apex with the repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act in the late nineties. This set up the “casino capitalism” of the next decade that would spawn massive criminality and mortgage fraud by the nation’s leading banks—none of which has been prosecuted. The result was the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression.
But even as more than five million homeowners have lost their homes, the wealthy had their losses covered by the Bush and later Obama administrations. Bloomberg news estimates that the transfer to the banks through the financial bailout comes to some $13 trillion dollars.
We could go on and on and on with the roster of ways the wealthy have used the government to transfer national wealth to themselves. Environmental and health laws that are not enforced. Deals with the pharmaceutical industry so they don’t have to compete with foreign manufacturers. Health care “reform” that forces tens of millions of Americans to buy questionable insurance products, even as insurers continue to kick legitimate claimants off their rolls. Give-aways of the telecommunication spectrum worth hundreds of billions of dollars to media monopolies that ladle out state propaganda as if were news and never, ever challenge official narratives.
In these and a thousand other ways, the rich have conspired with the government they largely control to shift more and still more of the nation’s wealth away from the working and middle classes, to themselves. It amounts to the most insidious class warfare and the most rapacious looting of public and private resources in the history of the world.
The result is vast impoverishment, demoralization, and the destruction of the American middle class. One out of eight Americans are on food stamps. One out of five people are in official poverty. One out of four children are raised in poverty. Twenty five million people cannot find enough work, while their skills atrophy and their families and communities are destroyed. These are not figures describing a banana republic, a disaster-stricken region, or a third world country. They describe the United States of America after three decades of plunder by the rich. And now they want to go in for the kill.
Not satisfied with the staggering wealth they have already siphoned away, the ultra-rich are now using Barack Obama’s National Deficit Commission to propose even more brazen plunder. And the looting is no longer taking place behind closed doors or under the cover of arcane public policies.
The commission proposes to cut the federal government’s budget deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade. But 75% of the “savings” will come from gutting programs that help stabilize the middle class and their communities. None of it comes from policies that would harm the rich.
For example, the commission proposes cutting the tax deduction for mortgage payments. Not only will this render housing much less affordable for millions of prospective home buyers, it will reduce housing prices, perhaps substantially, for without the tax writeoff, buyers will be able to afford much less house. This will decimate the sole source of wealth of tens of millions of Americans.
It is housing wealth that undergirds retirement security for the middle class. Or, at least it did until one out of four homeowners went underwater on their mortgage in the recent bank-triggered collapse. Then, even as the Commission plans to decimate home prices and owner equity, it proposes cutting back benefits to Social Security recipients.
It would lower Social Security cost-of living adjustments while raising the minimum retirement age. And this is being proposed at the very moment that the bank-owned Federal Reserve Board is beginning to print hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks from what’s left of their toxic assets still held from the housing crash.
The ensuing inflation is going to destroy the value of retirement incomes at exactly the moment that 77 million baby boomers head off into retirement. It was exactly this process of money printing and bankrupting of retirees that destroyed the German middle class in the early 1920s, giving rise to Adolph Hitler.
The Commission’s proposals would increase co-pays and deductibles for Medicare, making it unaffordable to millions. It proposes taxing as income the health insurance benefits millions receive from their employers. The Child Tax Credit would be eliminated as would 10% of all federal government jobs. This, at a time when more than 20% of the workforce is already underemployed and there are five workers trying for every available job.
We should be crystal clear: these policies amount to a mortal assault on what remains of middle class solvency and the democracy that a vibrant middle class makes possible.
But even as it girds up for this assault, the Commission barely touches the ultra-rich on whose boards they serve and who have gained so much over the past 30 years. And it cannot go without being said that it was these same professional predators who actually wrecked the economy, pitching it into its greatest collapse since the Great Depression.
The Commission’s proposals would actually lower the maximum tax on the highest income earners, from 35% to 24%. The nominal tax rate on corporate income would fall as well, from 35% to 26%. There is nothing proposed to raise taxes after so many decades of steadily amassed wealth. No financial transactions tax (as the IMF recommends) to stanch the kind of tsunami of speculative buying and selling that brought down the economy. Such a tax would raise over $700 billion over the next decade.
Of course, there will be no claw-backs of the trillions of dollars transferred to the rich under the phony duress of “saving the system” during the height of the financial crisis. No proposal that the cap on earnings subject to Social Security withholding should be removed. That proviso alone would raise more than half a trillion dollars over the next decade.
In fact, it is in comparison with other give-aways to the rich that the take-aways from the middle class by the Commission can be seen as so one sided and venal. Remember, they propose to save $4 trillion over 10 years.
But the war in Iraq, which we now know was entirely premised on lies, will cost more than $5 trillion, according to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz. It has proven a huge boon to the rich weapons makers, bankers, logistics companies and oil companies that Bush used to coddle as his “base.”
As mentioned above, Bloomberg news estimates that the financial bailout cost some $13 trillion, all of it going to the very richest people on the planet. There is not a syllable in the Commission’s report proposing getting any of that back to help reduce the deficit.
Or consider the notorious Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 where fully 40% went to the top 1% of income earners. Obama once promised to overturn them but, as is his typically cowardly pattern, is now folding. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated that they will cost the government more than $18 trillion over their lifetime—four times what the Deficit Commission claims it will achieve in savings. But God forbid we should ask for even a penny of that back to help battle the deficit.
In other words, there are many, many substantial and just ways that the savings the Commission proposes to create could be secured via small contributions from those who have gamed the system and gained the most over the past three decades. But that is not the Commission’s plan. And it is in that omission that its true intent is revealed.
There is no more time for stealth, no more need for subtlety. Western capitalist economies are declining at a pace that is frightening their elite stewards and compelling such desperate, slovenly measures as the wholesale printing of money to postpone the inevitable. While Obama sings lullabies of “hope” and “change” to tranquillize the suckers out front, the rich are backing the truck up to the vault in the back, no longer even deigning to disguise the heist. And of course, why should they? They have the additional diversion of the moronic Tea Party vigilantes (“Keep the government out of my Medicare”), ever ready to cut other people’s throats to cure their own nosebleeds.
The Commission’s proposal is the most naked, undisguised declaration of class warfare possible. Its agenda is not to reduce the deficit but rather to reduce what is left of the American middle class and American workers, to a condition of servitude, of feudal peonage. Their poverty will make them docile and subservient. This will make possible the final looting of America by those whose sociopathic greed has brought it so low already. The battle over this proposal is the last bulwark against the devastation and final destruction of America. It must be fought and won or our freedom and security ceded forever. There is no other choice.
Robert Freeman writes on economics, history, and education. His earlier pieces, "If You Want More Debt, Vote Republican," and "Obama Was Used, and is Now Used Up," were also published on Common Dreams.
Class Warfare
http://www.hermes-press.com/class_warfare.htm@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@A Tsunami of MoneyBerry Craig: It was a tsunami of money triggered by the Supreme Court ruling that corporations could spend unlimited sums to elect or oppose candidates for public office.
http://www.laprogressive.com/election-reform-campaigns/tsunami-money/
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Yet Another Neo-Nazi March In Support Of SB-1070Andrea Nill: This weekend’s march is yet another example of the increasing participation of white supremacist groups in the SB-1070 immigration debate.
http://www.laprogressive.com/immigration-reform/neonazi-march/
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More Torture, PleaseSteve Hendricks: I derive immense comfort, for example, from the similarity between the pro-torture 70 percent and the 68 percent of Americans who believe “angels and demons are active in the world.” Surely many of my pro-torture countrymen just need a little more education about torture. Well, a lot more
http://www.laprogressive.com/law-and-the-justice-system/torture/
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Meet Sandy Weill.
He engineered a merger of the Travelers insurance company, which he headed and which included investment banking in its portfolio, with the commercial banking entity of what was then Citicorp. That merger would have been judged illegal because of the Glass-Steagall legislative barrier to merging investment and commercial banking that President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law to prevent another Great Depression, but Weill got the law changed to accommodate his plans.
Bill Clinton changed the Glass-Steagall law.
The Man Who Shattered Our Economy
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_man_who_shattered_our_economy_20101117/
Posted on Nov 17, 2010
By Robert Scheer
Rejoice, the housing market is back. Sandy Weill just picked up a humdinger of a wine vineyard estate in Sonoma, Calif., for a record $31 million, so the foreclosure crisis—which the former CEO of Citigroup did so much to create when he successfully lobbied then-President Bill Clinton to sign off on radical deregulation of the banking industry—must be over.
After all, Weill wasn’t desperate for shelter, already being in possession of a 14-acre estate in über-exclusive Greenwich, Conn., and a 120-acre spread in New York state’s Adirondacks. Let’s also not forget the penthouse that he bought for $42.4 million in New York City in 2007 as the banking collapse he helped engineer was fast developing. Not too shabby for a guy who ran Citigroup into the ground by trafficking in what proved to be toxic mortgage-based securities.
Thanks to legislation that Weill got President Clinton to sign off on, Citigroup was allowed to become too big to fail, and when fail it did, the taxpayers had to bail the humungous bank out—to the tune of $50 billion in a direct subsidy and $306 billion more for the housing mortgage-backed securities Citigroup was holding.
The Treasury still owns a good chunk of Citigroup common stock, now trading at a paltry four dollars and change per share.
However, like all of the other top dogs involved in this scandal, Weill has emerged from a housing crisis that has impoverished tens of millions of Americans with his own personal fortune intact. Indeed, as evidenced by his vineyard purchase, he has quite a bit of money to throw around.
Although the value of most housing in Sonoma County, in the heart of the wine country, is down 30 to 50 percent, Weill was willing to pay close to the asking price for his new property. And why not? As the San Francisco Chronicle website quoted one Coldwell Banker real estate agent as saying, the sale “is not an indicator of an emerging real estate recovery, but rather the ability of the world’s wealthiest individuals to buy what they desire.”
Some guys have all the luck, particularly when they supply the dice. There would be no housing crisis were it not for radical financial deregulation legislation that Weill and other Wall Street hotshots got Clinton to approve. First Weill engineered a merger of the Travelers insurance company, which he headed and which included investment banking in its portfolio, with the commercial banking entity of what was then Citicorp. That merger would have been judged illegal because of the Glass-Steagall legislative barrier to merging investment and commercial banking that President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law to prevent another Great Depression, but Weill got the law changed to accommodate his plans.
Boy, was Weill ever persuasive, not only enlisting the bipartisan support of Washington politicians but the enthusiastic backing of the establishment media. As The New York Times editorialized back in April of 1998 in praising the merger: “In one stroke Mr. Reed [John Reed of Citigroup] and Mr. Weill will have temporarily demolished the increasingly unnecessary walls built during the Depression to separate commercial banks from investment banks and insurance companies.”
A Times news story that same day also read like a Wall Street lobbyist’s press release: “In a single day, with a bold merger, pending legislation in Congress to sweep away Depression-era restrictions on the financial industry has been given a sudden, and unexpected, new chance of passage. … Indeed, within 24 hours of the deal’s announcement, lobbyists for insurers, banks and Wall Street firms were huddling with Congressional banking committee staff members to fine-tune a measure that would update the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial banking from Wall Street and insurance. …” Notice the Times’ use of “update” to mask what was a clear reversal of the law.
It helped that former Goldman Sachs honcho Robert Rubin was Clinton’s treasury secretary, and after the bill was passed, Weill rewarded Rubin with a $15-million-a-year job at the new Citigroup, which was now legal, thanks to the legislation Rubin had helped pass.
When Clinton signed the bill reversing Glass-Steagall and making the Citigroup merger legal, he gushed: “Today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority.” Clinton then handed Weill a pen he used in signing the bill, and that pen ended up framed on the wall at the CEO’s office near a plaque that paid tribute to Weill as “The Man Who Shattered Glass-Steagall.” And shattered our economy as well. His are the grapes of wrath.
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