Octafish
Octafish's JournalThat's why we're still here...
... Otherwise, the darkness will win. The stakes are major. Going by the history, we're on the glide path to the day when we won't be able to get anything other than the official story.
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/10/main-obama-adviser-blocking-prosecution.html?m=1
As Orwell saw, it was a boot.
Photo ID: Wen Jiabao and Henry Paulson
Two regular, fun loving guys.
Wen's thing is geological structures, useful trade for those in the mineral extraction industries.
http://www.chinavitae.com/biography/Wen_Jiabao/bio
Henry's a BFEE banker royal:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7490955
Talk about trillion dollar smiles...
Know your BFEE: Chinese and American Ruling Elites In Bed Together for Fun and Profit
Ever wonder what happened to our standard of living? You, know, the Middle Class?
Well, it's been off-shored -- both in terms of money to Switzerland and manufacturing jobs to China.
Of course, I mean, don't worry! -- at a profit.
Guess who made a killing? If you said, "The ruling elite" you'd be correct.
What may be surprising to some is how the "ruling elite" crosses political, ideological, and philosophical lines when it comes to money. Case in point: China.
Currently, the people of China are largely unaware at how their ruling Communist elite got rich while the people slaved their asses off.
Here in the good old U.S. of A., the people are largely unaware that their ruling Capitalist elite got rich setting the policies that offshored their money and jobs.
Oh, well. Live and learn.
Thank you, MinM! Dr. Dodge put it into words.
"We have the international institutions and diplomatic skills, models and best practices today to resolve conflict without war. What is needed is the collective will and leadership to take this stand. The future of the planet depends on it. The choice is ours."
Regarding that time: Going by what we've learned about Operation NORTHWOODS (PDF) and the various suggested first strike plans put before Kennedy by CIA Director Dulles and JCS Chairman Lemnitzer, as well as the first strike suggested by Sen. George Smathers, doesn't it seem like a big coincidence that the evidentiary trail of crumbs connected Oswald to was Cuba?
Jack Kennedy called Mrs. King. (Richard Nixon did not.)
JFK helped him change his mind. Just prior to the 1960, then-Sen. John F. Kennedy risked alienating the conservative Southern Democrats by talking to Coretta Scott King while Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rotted in a "backwoods Georgia jail." The photo below was taken when Dr. King visited President Kennedy at the White House.
Robert Kennedy-His Life by Evan Thomas
EXCERPT…
(Robert) Kennedy seemed to fret about what to do as John Seigenthaler drove him to the airport early that afternoon. He was flying to New York for a campaign event. Maybe, he told Seigenthaler, he should take the heat off his brother and act as a "lightning rod" by calling the judge himself. Seigenthaler, whose phone had been ringing all morning with calls of angry southern politicians protesting JFK's call to Mrs. King, urged Bobby to stay out of it. Bobby wearily agreed.
The next day, a press aide told Seigenthaler that the wires were reporting that the judge had released King -- at the intervention of Robert Kennedy.
Can't be true, Seigenthaler said; Kennedy had assured him he wouldn't call the judge. But it was true. Seigenthaler called Kennedy, who sheepishly disclosed the call. He said that, on the plane to New York, he had got to thinking about the whole matter. It was "disgraceful...It just burned me up," Kennedy said. "It grilled me. The more I thought about the injustice of it, the more I thought what a son of a bitch the judge was." So Kennedy called the judge and gave him a lecture on the constitutional right to make bail, and the judge agreed to release King. Later, speaking with Wofford, Kennedy said he told the judge, "If he was a decent American, he would let King out by sundown. I called him because it made me so damn angry to think of that bastard sentencing a citizen to four months hard labor for a minor traffic offense."
The impact of JFK's call to Mrs. King and RFK's intervention with the judge was immense. Daddy King, Martin Luther King's father, an extremely influential Baptist preacher, openly shifted his endorsement from Nixon to Kennedy. The Kennedy campaign brilliantly exploited the symbolism of phone calls with a samizdat campaign in the black community. Careful not to tout the Kennedy-King connection in the popular mainstream press, lest southern voters take umbrage, the Kennedy campaign published hundreds of thousands of leaflets and handbills that were distributed at black churches and bars. On one side, a flyer read: "Jack Kennedy called Mrs. King" On the other side it said: "Richard Nixon did not." Many political analysts believe that this PR offensive decided the election. In a half-dozen states in the East and Midwest carried by Kennedy by very narrow margins on election day, black turnout made the difference. Richard Nixon's chauffeur understood. "Mr. Vice-President," he told his boss after the election, "you know I had been talking to my friends. They had been all for you. But when Mr. Robert Kennedy called the judge to get Dr. King out of jail -- well, they just all turned to him."
CONTINUED…
Excerpted from "Robert Kennedy: His Life” by Evan Thomas, pages 101-102.
You are welcome, Uncle Joe! Didya see this about Sanford Weill?
A guy who got bounced* from his column at the LA Times reports:
For He’s a Jolly Good Scoundrel
By Robert Scheer
Posted on Apr 18, 2012
How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of U.S. homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
So much for the academy’s proclaimed “230-plus year history of recognizing some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, and civic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders.” George Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Albert Einstein must be rolling in their graves at the news that Weill, “philanthropist and retired Citigroup Chairman,” has joined their ranks.
Weill is the Wall Street hustler who led the successful lobbying to reverse the Glass-Steagall law, which long had been a barrier between investment and commercial banks. That 1999 reversal permitted the merger of Travelers and Citibank, thereby creating Citigroup as the largest of the “too big to fail” banks eventually bailed out by taxpayers. Weill was instrumental in getting then-President Bill Clinton to sign off on the Republican-sponsored legislation that upended the sensible restraints on finance capital that had worked splendidly since the Great Depression.
Those restrictions were initially flouted when Weill, then CEO of Travelers, which contained a major investment banking division, decided to merge the company with Citibank, a commercial bank headed by John S. Reed. The merger had actually been arranged before the enabling legislation became law, and it was granted a temporary waiver by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve. The night before the announcement of the merger, as Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley writes in her book “Tearing Down the Walls: How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top of the Financial World ... and Then Nearly Lost It All,” a buoyant Weill suggested to Reed, “We should call Clinton.” On a Sunday night Weill had no trouble getting through to the president and informed him of the merger, which violated existing law. After hanging up, Weill boasted to Reed, “We just made the president of the United States an insider.”
CONTINUED...
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/for_hes_a_jolly_good_swindler_20120418/
Just-us.
* and replaced by Jonah Goldberg, of all people.
A billion dollars is a lot of money to most people.
Not to the Bank of America. To wit:
Bank of America’s latest bailout bigger than ever
Loren Steffy
Houston Chronicle Blog Tuesday, October 18, 2011
What, you thought the big banks were done leaning on taxpayers? Sure, Bank of America may have repaid the $45 billion it borrowed under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, but it’s a long way from standing on its own.
Last month, the bank’s Merrill Lynch unit was hit by a credit downgrade. Moody’s Investors Service cut its rating to Baa1, three notches above junk status. Apparently, this concerned the counterparties for Merrill’s derivatives, who worried their collateral could be compromised if Merrill’s credit rating fell more. So, Bank of America shifted a portion — or perhaps all — of its $53 trillion in derivatives holdings to its retail bank.
That way, the derivatives can be backstopped by the bank’s $1 trillion in deposits — deposits that are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The FDIC, of course, has objected to the move because it would be on the hook if something went wrong. The Federal Reserve, which is concerned with bank soundness rather than depositor exposure, supports the move.
CONTINUED...
http://blog.chron.com/lorensteffy/2011/10/bank-of-americas-latest-bailout-bigger-than-ever/
So, yeah. A billion dollar fine makes a great headline. It certainly sounds enormous. However, when compared to a trillion dollar taxpayer-funded insurance scam, not so much.
The Dark Age of Money: Milton Friedman and the Rise of Monetary Fascism
America, we have a problem, a financial problem that gets ZERO coverage in Corporate McPravda:
Milton Friedman and the Rise of Monetary Fascism
The Dark Age of Money
by JAMES C. KENNEDY
CounterPunch Oct. 24, 2012
EXCERPT...
Monetary Fascism was created and propagated through the Chicago School of Economics. Milton Friedman’s collective works constitute the foundation of Monetary Fascism. Knowing that the term ’Fascism’ was universally unpopular; Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics masquerade these works as ‘Capitalism’ and ’Free Market’ economics.
SNIP...
The fundamental difference between Adam Smith’s free market capitalism and Friedman’s ‘free market capitalism’ is that Friedman’s is a hyper extractive model, the kind that creates and maintains Third-World-Countries and Banana-Republics, without geo-political borders.
If you say that this is nothing new, you miss the point. Friedman does not differentiate between some third world country and his own. The ultimate difference is that Friedman has created a model that sanctions and promotes the exploitation of his own country, in fact every country, for the benefit of the investor, money the uber-wealthy. He dressed up this noxious ideology as ‘free market capitalism’ and then convinced most of the world to embrace it as their economic salvation.
SNIP...
[font color="green"]Monetary Fascism, as conceived by Friedman, uses the powers of the state to put the interest of money and the financial class above and beyond all other forms of industry (and other stake holders) and the state itself.[/font color]
SNIP...
Money has become the state and the traditional state is forced to serve money’s interests. Everywhere the Financial Class is openly lording over sovereign nations. Ireland, Greece and Spain are subject to ultimatums and remember Hank Paulson’s $700 billion extortion from the U.S. Congress. The $700 billion was just the wedge. Thanks to unlimited access to the Discount Window, Quantitative Easing and other taxpayer funded debt-swap bailouts the total transfers to the financial industry exceeded $16 trillion as of July 2010 according to a Federal Reserve Audit. All of this was dumped on the taxpayer and it is still growing.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/24/the-dark-age-of-money/
We need to get back to the day when people were more important than profits; when peace trumped money. I'm so old, I remember when that was what being a Democrat stood for.
5 out of 9 agree with OP.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2414083
Remember Michael Connell.
The Suspicious, Disturbing Death of Election Rigger Michael Connellby By Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
December 20, 2008
EXCERPT...
Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell hired Connell in 2004 to create a real-time computer data compilation for counting Ohio’s votes. Under Connell's supervision, Ohio’s presidential vote count was transmitted to private, partisan computer servers owned by SmartTech housed in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Connell’s company, New Media Communications worked closely with SmartTech in building Republican and right-wing websites that were hosted on SmartTech servers. Among Connell’s clients were the Republican National Committee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gwb43.com, that housed at one point Karl Rove's missing emails. Rove's email files have since mysteriously disappeared despite repeated court-sanctioned attempts to review them.
In 2001, Michael Connell’s GovTech Solutions, LLC was selected to reorganize the Capitol Hill IT network, the only private-sector company to gain permission from HIR to place its server behind the firewall, he bragged.
At 12:20 am on the night of the 2004 election exit polls and initial vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner of Ohio's presidential campaign. The Buckeye State's 20 electoral votes would have given Kerry the presidency.
But from then until around 2am, the flow of information mysteriously ceased. After that, the vote count shifted dramatically to George W. Bush, ultimately giving him a second term. In the end there was a 6.7 percent diversion---in Bush's favor---between highly professional, nationally funded exit polls and the final official vote count as tabulated by Blackwell and Connell.
Until his death Connell remained the IT supervisor for six Congressional committees. But on the day before the 2008 election, Connell was deposed by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count, and his continued involvement in IT operations for the GOP, including his access to Rove's e-mail files and the circumstances behind their disappearance.
CONTINUED...
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2008/3320
PS: How quickly the pages turn. Thanks for standing up to Them, femrap.
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