As a young man I read Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Convenent series. Convenant, a leprosy victim, experiences brief, periodic meetings with a character he refers to as the harbinger. These events always presage his transition from an ill, socially isolated man in the mundane world into a healthy anti-hero catapulted into The Land, a place of magic and mystery.
I've seen these creatures in my own life; the shapes of men, silent and strange. The harbinger, he's an outsider's outsider, alone on the path, even when in a crowd.
I encountered another one today and the experience has left me a bit shaken.
The plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty used to say, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
Now it says, "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here."
We got the Bush Regime, arguably the most incompetent, corrupt and outright-treasonous Administration in American history. A regime so reckless, savage and gleefully bestial that it made the career-Nixon-hating Hunter Thompson actually pine for the good old days of Tricky Dick: "I miss Nixon. Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a flaming liberal."
And, like Nixon, it is more than likely that not a single one of the smirking traitors who nearly wrecked this country will ever spend a day in jail. Instead they remain lodged in our flesh like so many ricin pellets, oozing their poison into our national bloodstream, waddle from one fawning audience to another, worming their way into major media outlets, or dispatching their degenerate children and underlings out into the world the keep their poison pumping.
They soiled our good name, bankrupted the country, shredded the Constitution and kicked the crutches out from under the global economy on their way out the door, and while it is sometimes hard to focus on them through the flames of the world they set on fire, we must.
America could have had justice.
But America didn't get justice.
America got Hopey McChange, who said he wants to look forward, not backward. Who said there must be no "retribution", no "vengeance", no "payback", who said the era of "divisive partisanship" must end.
Four score and twenty betrayals ago, when Barack Obama was posturing as a transformational leader, when he was promising government of the people, by the people, and for the people, he spoke of the core values progressives have always believed in as the solution to America's problems . . .
That spirit of looking out for one another, that core value that says I am my brothers keeper, I am my sister's keeper, that spirit is most evident during times of great hardship, but that spirit can't just be restricted to moments of great catastrophe. Because as I stand here and look out at the thousands of folks who have gathered here today, I know that there's some folks who are going through their own quiet storms.
Hurricane Ike had just hit the gulf coast of Texas, Wall Street was about to implode, the foundations of the economy were crumbling, Americans everywhere were losing their jobs, their homes, their last remnants of trust in the government . . .
All across America there are quiet storms taking place. There are lives of quiet desperation. People who need just a little bit of help. Now, Americans are a self-reliant people, we're an independent people. We don't like asking somebody else to do what we can do ourselves, but you know what we understand is that every once in awhile, somebody's going to get knocked down.
Every once in awhile . . .
Yes, and every once in awhile, the sun comes up. Then, every once in awhile, it goes down again.
Low income Americans get knocked down every day, middle class Americans get knocked down every day, seniors on fixed incomes get knocked down every day. Republicans knocked them down for 30 years, and now Barack Obama and that gang of corporate enforcers that used to be the Democratic Party are doing it. A punch in the face is a punch in the face. Analyze that, Beltway Republicrats. When Americans are flat on their back all the time, they don't give a damn whether the fist that knocked them down was a Republican fist or a Democratic fist. A corporate fist is a corporate fist. Whistle past that graveyard, Obamabots. Have an "ideologue" diary contest, fill that wreck list of yours with "ideologue" ravings and let's all see who can clap the loudest.
Congressman Dennis Kucinich will introduce a new resolution on Thursday, March 4, 2010, that will force the U.S. Congress (against their will) until debating the merits of continuing to fund the fraud and folly of the Afghnistan foreign occupation.
It is expected that the resolution will be taken up for consideration on the following Wednesday, March 10, 2010, and that the debate will be subject to a rule providing for three hours of debate.
Dennis Kucinich urges that we all sign the petition in favor of this resolution, and getting out of Afghanistan on his web site: http://kucinich.us/
WASHINGTON - February 26 - Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement about the ongoing war in Afghanistan:
"The Washington Post reports that nearly one billion dollars per year in cash, suspected to include U.S. aid, opium receipts or both, is moving from Afghanistan to Dubai, where friends and family of Afghanistan's President Karzai have multimillion dollar villas.
"Dubai real estate deals and a number of crooked enterprises connected to the Karzai family have created crony capitalism in a country awash with U.S. cash and U.S. blood.
"Nearly 1000 U.S. soldiers have died. And for what? Hundreds of billions spent. And for what? To make Afghanistan safe for crooks, drug dealers and crony capitalism?
"Next Thursday, I will bring a privileged resolution to this House so that Congress can claim our constitutional right to end this war and to bring our troops home. Please support the resolution."
Yeah, I'm back with yet more bad news about the 'Nuclear Renaissance' that's trying without much panache to corner the market on 'green' energy subsidies during this extended worldwide recession/depression. So that renewables will end up with table scraps, as usual.
I'm not going to pull any punches here. I detest the two party system. I believe that it undermines representative government. It makes our government more responsive to corporations than to citizens. It decreases the chances of progress and it results in many good ideas being shut out of the national political debate.
This piece was written as part of GreenChange Blog Action Day. Learn more here.
It is a truism that leaders are few and followers are numerous. This is itself an inequality that we don't often contemplate, nor feel any compulsion to amend by direct action. No flurry of blog postings or activist group with a message statement to convey has ever proposed that we ought to consider revising this important discrepancy. This may be because the gap itself is likely a construct of biology, for whatever reason. One wishes perhaps the numbers would be a bit more balanced, certainly not flip-flopped, since if most of us were leaders, we'd never get anything accomplished. In that regard, herding cats might be putting it lightly. Still, as it stands, for whatever reason, those who lead hold minority status and as such they often easily manage to attract followers to their causes and private bandwagon. It is another paradox of human behavior that while most minorities find reduced numbers much to their detriment, those who lead find the fact that they are relatively few in number much to their benefit.
We always seem to return to the example of the Great Man or Great Woman, the almost superhuman being who through his or her personal skill fixes all outstanding problems and provides mass unity. We should really know better than to expect that one single person could save us from ourselves, but to some extent, it isn't surprising why can so easily opt for this belief. Two thousand plus years of a Christ-centered framework leads us to expect that a Messiah will rescue us, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not. This is true whether we're Christian, Jewish, or not a person of faith at all. I myself recognize that I'm still waiting for Jesus to return, and would gladly fall at his feet to offer my assistance if I knew for certain he had returned. If the Second Coming arrived, some would doubt to the very end, some would desire proof, and some would resist altogether purely for their own reasons. Many, however, would breathe a sigh of relief, and quickly fall in line behind him.
Recent developments with political leaders have showed what happens when power corrupts, temptation leads to bad decisions, or disappointment sets in when high hopes are not realized. There is certainly enough fault to spread around if we seek to assign blame. However, that is not exactly my intent with this post. Nor am I seeking to absolve those who let their own shortcomings destroy the good will and good stead they formerly held. With power, charisma, and charm comes temptation of all kinds--monetary gain and sexual gratification only but two of them. I seek to bring light, in part, to the fact that those in leadership roles who court the adoration of the crowds, instantly reap all the benefits and all of the drawbacks in the process. If I, for example, stand up before an attentive audience and impress them with the cogency of my arguments, the eloquence of my rhetoric, or otherwise strike a nerve, I can expect to receive compliments, flirtatious glances or conversation, and an instant kind of immediate attention and personal favor with those who until a moment before were complete strangers. Everyone wants to be my friend, at least for that moment.
A close associate is fond of advancing a particular theory concerning this phenomenon. His example concerns the immediacy of live music, but it works well in this context, too. As he puts it, the reason we find it so easy to be attracted to to musicians, in particular, is that we see our own best qualities reflected in whomever is singing or playing. A powerful emotional intimacy is present in that moment that perhaps speaks more to us and our condition than to those on stage. This concept may wash over political leaders as well, particularly when on the stump, particularly when their personal charisma renders them something close to celebrity. They inspire so much in us: adoration, trust, envy, hope, desire, and so on. That we would entrust them so willingly with all of these in the blink of an eye makes me wonder how anyone who stands out in front can survive for long, with or without the benefit of handlers. It takes a tremendously strong person to not succumb to distraction, properly handle the stress, stay on message, and not get waylaid by a thousand wild goose chases. It is precisely our demands upon which they must conform and though they never are allowed to forget, this doesn't mean that they're always in the easiest position to respond. We expect much in return for our trust and our affections and the conditions of the transaction are both numerous and exacting.
So long as we expect perfection from our leaders, we can never see them for their gloriously flawed humanity and never forgive them for their frailties. We sometimes treat these figures as though they were our lover, one which always must say the right thing at the right time and halfway read our minds. Assuming they were the keeper of our heart, we would then need to concede that we would need to love them not just for their best qualities, but also for their worst. We can easily be dismayed, demoralized, and distressed at the behavior and conduct of those we idolize, certainly, but forgiveness is a concept ultimately foreign to us far too often. If it arrives, it arrives late, if ever at all, and it is yielded grudgingly. How often have I "forgiven" someone by mentioning, "Well, I'll forgive you this once, but you better not do it again, or I'll never speak to you again".
This ought not excuse mediocrity, philandering, or a distressing turn towards hypocrisy, but it might better explain a bit better some of the hypocrisies buried within our minds. We often say we'd never want to be a celebrity, a politician, or anyone with the same degree of constant media exposure and with it a fishbowl work environment, but many of us would also jump at the chance if it were available to us someday. I'm not so much advancing a notion that we ought to Leave People in the Public Eye Alone™ but that we need to look within ourselves and examine why we thrust so much of our entire selves, dreams, and aspirations towards whomever might have ability, courage, or God-given talents of oratory and authenticity. They certainly use our faith in them for their own benefit, as is part of the beast, and hopefully never forget the potency of the dreams of thousands upon thousands. If this truly were a relationship rather than a social contract, there would be disturbingly equal proportions of sadism and masochism present.
As it stands now, this compact is a curious kind of two-step, whereby we give all of ourselves to whomever represents us formally, with the requisite number of strings attached that we put in place in an effort that ensure that our personal wish list is followed without in order and without flaw. As for those who would lead or stand out from the pack, raising the bar high, be it in music, entertainment, or politics sets a huge precedent in place and some can rise to the challenge by hitting another home run out of the park, though many fall short. It would seem, then, that the responsibility to keep things in proper proportion is everyone's. We may not be able to close the gap regarding the number of those who lead versus those who follow, but we can make strides toward adopting a much more feasible strategy, one that would lead to fewer headaches and fewer feelings of betrayal. To me, forgiveness could be a solution. And by this I don't mean forgiveness for selfish reasons like the ability to successfully cross off another item on a voluminous to-do list, but forgiveness out of a realization that doing so would encourage true healing. True healing leads to group health. If Jesus does return someday, he would expect nothing less.
Last week we heard Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and University of California at Berkeley Professor, and author of Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), talk with Paul Jay of The Real News in the first and second parts of a multipart series about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war in Afghanistan.
Scott also talked about an "iceberg" analogy of US politics in which which "the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what's going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all"
Here in part 3 of the series Scott again talks with Jay, this time about something much more sinister that permeates American political reality penetrating and corrupting much deeper than the normal military-industrial complex we've read about in the past - about the fact that the way to succeed in Washington has become to support the next use of the war machine to attack its next chosen target - about privatized intelligence services creating for profit wars, representing a private business that has become a form of permanent government - and concludes that the only way he can see out of the mire is that "We have to pull back from the two-party system and start a new kind of politics. We have to essentially build a new kind of civil society in America. And this is not easy, and I'm not confident that it will happen. The most likely thing to happen is that America will just go into decline from overextension the way that Britain went into decline from overextension before it".
To give you an example of how powerful they are, when it was clear that the intelligence about Iraq [had] been skewed and we went in because of weapons of mass destruction that weren't there. And they commissioned (Science Applications International Corporation) SAIC to investigate what went wrong. And SAIC came up with a report that didn't mention that some of the key people who had been saying that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction had been saying that it would be necessary to deal with him militarily were people who were in fact working for SAIC. So when you give a private corporation the job of seeing whether we should go to war against a country, and then you give that same private corporation the job of finding out why false information was given, you can see that there has been a very, very deep corruption of the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence in Washington and SAIC.
JAY: Who are some of the individuals you referring to?
SCOTT: If you don't mind, I'm going to read from an article by Donald Barlett that you already quoted from. This was David Kay, who was on the committee, and this is what he said in 1998 to the Senate Armed Services Committee, that Saddam Hussein, quote, "remains in power with weapons of mass destruction," and that, quote, "military action is needed." Wayne Downing, a retired general and proselytized for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis, quote, "are ready to take the war ... overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us." Both of these men, David Kay and Wayne Downing, worked for SAIC. And so a decent analysis of what went wrong would have pointed to the fact that we were relying on people who had, really, a profit motive. I'm not saying that they did all of this thinking only of profit; I'm saying that they were totally part of this dominance mindset that I'm talking about, and they know that the way to succeed in Washington is to support the next target, the policy for the next use of the war machine.
JAY: Now, Robert Gates, Obama's secretary of defense, used to be part of SAIC as well. Is that true?
SCOTT: Was on the board of directors of SAIC, yes. And, you know, for that matter, Mike McConnell was with Booz Allen Hamilton.
JAY: So, given the Obama administration, again, promises of a new mindset, has the role of SAIC and these kinds of companies changed in any way?
SCOTT: No. See, this is why I talk about deep politics.
If Dr. King hadn't been assassinated for speaking truth to power, if he was here today, if he was at the Lincoln Memorial again, looking out at that corporate capital of deceit and corruption, what would he say, what would he ask us to do?
He'd ask us to overcome our fear, he'd call for mass protests and civil disobedience, he'd explain why it's necessary, just as he did in 1968 . . .
If you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you would die for it, then you are not fit to live. You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day some great crisis arises and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause, but you refuse to take a stand because you are afraid.
You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. Or you're afraid that you will lose your job, or that you will be criticized, or that you will lose your popularity. So you refuse to take a stand. Well you may go on and live until you're 90, but you are just as dead at 38 as you will be at 90. And when you take your last breath, it will only be the belated announcement of the earlier death of your spirit.
You died when you refused to stand up for right.
You died when you refused to stand up for truth.
You died when you refused to stand up for justice.
Can you understand that, "leaders" of the Netroots? Can you understand that, Markos Moulitsas? Can you understand that, Obamacrats? Tap your TR trigger fingers on the lid of that coffin you call a blog if you do. Can you understand that, MoveOn.org? Can you understand that, Josh Marshall? John Amato? Digby? Jane Hamsher? If you do, explain it to TBogg, that Mighty Slayer of "Purists." How about you, Madame Proprietor of the Huff and Puff Post? Can you understand that? Can any of you understand that???
None of you have called for mass protests or civil disobedience. In the streets of Washington D.C. or anywhere else. You refuse to because you're afraid. Well go ahead, keep on blogging until you're 90, it won't matter, you're just as dead right now as you will be then.
You died when you refused to stand up for right.
You died when you refused to stand up for truth.
You died when you refused to stand up for justice.
Welcome to Netroots Nation . . .
Enjoy your stay.
I have some news for those nonstop typers. Typing isn't standing up for right, truth, justice, or anything else. It's just typing.
The truth is that the most important line in the decision was not the one overruling Austin. It was this one: "ingratiation and access . . . are not corruption." For many years, the Court had gradually expanded the corruption rationale to extend beyond quid pro quo corruption (donor dollars for legislative votes). It had licensed Congress to regulate even when the threat was simply that large donors had better access to politicians or that politicians had become "too compliant with the[ir] wishes." Indeed, at times the Court went so far as to say that even the mere appearance of "undue influence" or the public's "cynical assumption that large donors call the tune" was enough to justify regulation. "Ingratiation and access," in other words, were corruption as far as the Court was concerned. Justice Kennedy didn't say that the Court was overruling these cases. But that's just what it did.
This is the Democrats' story. It's a story of consequences, it's a story of tragedy, it's a story ripped from the pages of history and stained with the blood of the innocent.
There are no characters in it and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.
No We Can't has been a recurring theme of this story. When Obama got elected, No We Won't replaced it. We haven't seen any change, change has been consumed in a firestorm of corruption.
It's one of the most disturbing videos I've ever seen. A member of the ruling family of the UAE tortured a man he didn't much care for, beating him with a board bristling with nails, driving a car over him, and all kinds of nasty, nasty business, displaying a sadism rarely seen in public. A top-ranking police chief was right there the whole time, letting it happen, in fact enabling it, as they drove out in the desert to do this.
I'm pretty sure I wrote about it here when it went public. Oh yeah, here it is: Obama wants to give nukes to the crooks in the UAE. Sorta flew under the radar, didn't it? How many people know anything about our nuclear deal with the UAE? Yeah, nukes for a psychotic ruling family of a country that can't even keep its books straight. Nice.
The videotape of the torture slowed the deal down, but apparently it went through, because, well, corruption wins every time, right? Gotta go where the money is was, and the money ain't here any more.
Anyway, here's a new article on the outcome of this crime:
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) -- A United Arab Emirates sheikh was acquitted Sunday of charges connected to the videotaped beating and torture of an Afghan grain dealer.
Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the emirates' ruling family, was charged with rape, endangering life and causing bodily harm in connection with the nearly three-hour long tape shot in 2004 in the desert outside Abu Dhabi, one of the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf region.
However, the court acquitted Issa on Sunday, ruling he had diminished responsibility for his actions because of the effects of medication his defense attorney claimed he was given. Issa had a "lack of criminal responsibility," the court found, defense attorney Habib al-Mulla told CNN.
"The judiciary system acquitted Issa based on the evidence presented by the defense that the sheikh was under the influence of drugs given to him," al-Mulla said. "That deprived him from his poise and caused him to carry out acts that were out of consciousness and that were photographed with the intention for later extortion."
The tape surfaced last year as a piece of evidence in a federal civil suit filed in Houston, Texas, against the sheikh by his former business partner, Bassam Nabulsi. It caused outrage among human rights groups and in the United States, where senior U.S. officials familiar with the case said the tape delayed the ratification of a civil nuclear deal between the UAE and the United States.
On the tape, Issa is seen along with a private security officer stuffing sand in the man's mouth. As the grain dealer pleads and whimpers, he is beaten with a nailed board, burned in the genitals with a cigarette lighter, shocked with a cattle prod and led to believe he would be shot. Salt is poured into his wounds.
In the end, the victim can muster up only weak moans as an SUV is repeatedly driven over him.
So he gets off with the "twinkie defense".
I'm sure the videotape cowed anyone who might be considering convicting this guy that it would probably be a pretty bad idea. I mean, I'm amazed it went this far. What a joke. "Yeah, let's waste everybody's time and money to put on a little pony show demonstrating that we have this thing called "justice" in the UAE. I mean, for everybody BUT the ruling family."
Sure. Like I said, it's good to be King.
And these are our "friends". We do nuclear deals with these guys. We move American businesses to this country (like Halliburton! as American as baseball!) If the United States was on Facebook, the UAE and this monster would have been one of the first to get "friended". So would the guys who torture people for us in Uzbekistan. BFF's!
And on the 18th, Goldman Sachs is handing out 20 BILLION dollars in bonuses (we used to call it "embezzlement") to its partners in crime. And nothing will be done. There won't even be a protest, apparently, because everybody will have their eyes diverted to, if not Harry Reid's "scandal", something new.
I wish I was King.
If I was King, there would be serious hell to pay. For some people. Those who skate. Those who torture. Those who murder, and those who steal retirement funds. They would skate no more.
And if anyone thinks "oh, this stuff only happens in other countries," I'll remind you that Dick Cheney shot a man in the face. And the man later apologized to Dick Cheney. Just in case you'd forgotten.
I have always hated Darrell Issa. I live in California and Darrell Issa is largely the reason that we now have Arnold "will my term ever end?" Schwarzenegger in the governor's hot tub. He's also, quite simply, a scumbag.
But remiscent of the Bush years, when I found myself agreeing more with Pat "I'm also a scumbag" Buchanan, than I did with most "mainstream" Democrats like, well, almost all of them, I now want to pat Scumbag Issa on the back.
The controversy surrounding Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's role in the 2008 Wall Street bailouts was ramped up Thursday with the revelation of emails that show the New York Federal Reserve -- then run by Geithner -- pressured insurance giant AIG to withhold information about payments the company made to its creditors.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) obtained emails between AIG employees showing that the company had planned to disclose in its filings to the SEC that it had paid 100 cents on the dollar to creditors like Goldman Sachs and other banks, but "the New York Fed crossed out the reference," Bloomberg News reports.
AIG has received $183 billion in taxpayer relief. The news that the New York Fed attempted to keep from the public how that money was spent will likely increase political opposition to Geithner's appointment as Treasury Secretary.
Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer's payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.
AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on the swaps, which were contracts tied to subprime home loans, threatened to swamp the insurer weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid for $62.1 billion of the swaps, prompting lawmakers to call the AIG rescue a "backdoor bailout" of financial firms.
"It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information," said Issa, a California Republican. Taxpayers "deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation's securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information."
Will this become a mainstream story? Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? After all, it paints a "Democrat" in a negative light, and it's being pushed by a Republican.
But we're talking about Banksters here, and they don't play by the rules. They run the place.
I guess now that it's the dead of winter, the time when people can really get sick, the "Swine Flu" panic is a thing of the past.
We have many more things to panic about now, right? I mean, we've got the official CNN 24/7 "terrorgasm", we've got coffers to bill at Big Corporations who can Supply Things To Us That Will Keep Us Safe.
And considering that there was a case of a suicide bomber somewhere (Afghanistan?) hiding the bomb up his rectum, Colbert's suggestion that all Muslim men have a colonoscopy before boarding an aircraft doesn't seem like something that would be far-fetched in today's world.
But that's not what this is about. This is about --- gosh, I almost forgot it myself, how distracting today's panics are! -- "Swine Flu", you know that thing that was supposed to kill all of us, that thing we were all geared up to be SCARED SCARED SCARED about -- and more importantly that thing that was designed to open all our wallets.
You'll never see this on our 24-hour news terror programs, but for some reason the European Parliament has decided to investigate this scam:
The Council of Europe member states will launch an inquiry in January 2010 on the influence of the pharmaceutical companies on the global swine flu campaign, focusing especially on extent of the pharma's industry's influence on WHO. The Health Committee of the EU Parliament has unanimously passed a resolution calling for the inquiry. The step is a long-overdue move to public transparency of a "Golden Triangle" of drug corruption between WHO, the pharma industry and academic scientists that has permanently damaged the lives of millions and even caused death.
The parliament motion was introduced by Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, former SPD Member of the German Bundestag and now chairman of the Health Committee of PACE (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe). Wodarg is a medical doctor and epidemiologist, a specialist in lung disease and environmental medicine, who considers the current "pandemic" Swine Flu campaign of the WHO to be "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the Century."[1]
The text of the resolution just passed by a sufficient number in the Council of Europe Parliament says among other things, "In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines. The "bird-flu"-campaign (2005/06) combined with the "swine-flu"-campaign seem to have caused a great deal of damage not only to some vaccinated patients and to public health-budgets, but to the credibility and accountability of important international health-agencies."[2]
The Parliamentary inquiry will look into the issue of „falsified pandemic" that was declared by WHO in June 2009 on the advice of its group of academic experts, SAGE, many of whose members have been documented to have intense financial ties to the same pharmaceutical giants such as GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, Novartis, who benefit from the production of drugs and untested H1N1 vaccines. They will investigate the influence of the pharma industry in creation of a worldwide campaign against the so-called H5N1 "Avian Flu" and H1N1 Swine Flu. The inquiry will be given "urgent" priority in the general assembly of the parliament.
In his official statement to the Committee, Wodarg criticized the influence of the pharma industry on scientists and officials of WHO, stating that it has led to the situation where "unnecessarily millions of healthy people are exposed to the risk of poorly tested vaccines," and that, for a flu strain that is "vastly less harmful" than all previous flu epidemics.
There you have it, in plain English.
What everybody knew, who was paying attention. Of course NOW they decide to do this, NOW, after the pharmaceutical companies have sold all the vaccines they could, I mean, if you haven't gotten a vaccine by now, you're probably not gonna get one, right?
This reeks of the "I am shocked, shocked, that gambling is going on here" line from Casablanca (and forgive me if i'm not quoting it correctly).
I mean, the EU sure wouldn't want to actually infringe on a corporation's god-given natural rights to scam the public into making money? But to keep a little legitimacy in the public eye, they'll sure pretend to investigate it afterwards, probably to slap a few fines on the perps so they can share the wealth, you know?
I was saying it back when they fear was being ramped up to fever pitch (excuse the pun) over this bogus flu. That the WHO must have been corrupted. Because it was, well, just obvious as fuck (pardon the language)..
The world is completely corrupt. You can't believe anything any more.
But the public keeps getting punked. It seems every year the public is ever-more-easy to punk.
When Obama needed the votes of progressives to get elected, his message was Change We Can Believe In. But now that he no longer needs us, now that he has power, he has a very different message for progressives . . .
That blunt message is echoing from one end of the Beltway to the other, from the White House to Capitol Hill, it's echoing from K Street to Wall Street and across the corporate media airwaves. Corporate power must not be challenged. Don't even think about it. Byron Dorgan got the message. Chris Dodd got the message. Robert Wexler got the message. We all got the message.
2 AM and she calls me 'cause I'm still awake,
Can you help me unravel my latest mistake?
I don't have to tell you what her latest mistake was, I don't have to tell you when she made that mistake, I don't have to tell you because she wasn't the only one who made that mistake. 100 million other Americans made the same mistake on November 4, 2008, they believed the lies, they voted for liars and frauds and career criminals up and down the ballot.
So here we are.
"Pragmatic" progressives tell us we can't jump the track, the corporate media tells us we're just cars on a cable, the "Christians" tell us life's like an hourglass, glued to the table, so go to church unless you want to be damned to Hell for eternity like the Muslims and the Jews and the heathens in Africa and Asia. Well we've seen this movie before, we know who the killers are, we know who the victims are, we know who the warmongers are, we know who the hypocrites are, we know how it ends, we know how it always ends, but no one can find the rewind button, no one can ever find the rewind button.
A quantity of explosive, found in a flat on Dorset Street in Dublin this morning, was brought into the country following a failed security operation in Slovakia.
The explosive was one of eight pieces of contraband planted by the authorities in the luggage of unsuspecting passengers at Bratislava Airport in Slovakia last weekend as part of a test of security procedures.
Seven were detected by airport security, but the eighth - 90g of research development explosive or RDX - was put in the luggage of a Slovakian electrician who lives and works in Dublin.
On this day where we seek to remember the legacy of the nine years that came before the one very shortly to conclude, I recall the beginning of another decade ninety years in the past. The Presidential election of 1920 returned Republicans to control of the Executive Branch, and epitomized the weariness the American people had with foreign wars and towering idealism. When, a year or so before, Woodrow Wilson proposed the League of Nations to a skeptical American public, itself an altruistic enterprise promising world peace, the proposal was transformed by smears and lies to imply that somehow the United States would sacrifice its autonomy and be governed by foreign powers. By the time a new decade rolled around, isolationism was the word of the hour and with it came a reliance on business and a pursuit of big money. So it was that the Republican nomination for President of the United States was sold to the highest bidder, and with it came the office itself.
Lanton McCarthy's fascinating recent book, The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country deflates the notion that the past promised some degree of ethical conduct in its elected representatives and stewards of the people's trust. It would be difficult to imagine a festering cesspool of corruption, dirty deals, and hushed up scandals in more copious quantity than in the form of the gang of thieves who effectively ran the country for three years. Those who believe that the past promises some kind of respite from the sordid, the unethical, and the immoral would do well to think again. One wonders as well if the passage of time will slaughter other sacred cows and lay bear the reality of the situation in question.
A few years back, during the waning years of George W. Bush's second term, many made a comparison of the gross incompetence present in that Administration to the Harding years, which though it had some parallels, was not a wholly satisfying one. For starters, had there been no Woodrow Wilson and World War I, there would have been no established precedent to reverse, and with it no Warren G. Harding. George W. Bush won in part by tapping into a public desire to return some degree of morality to the Oval Office after the embarrassment of the Clinton Impeachment. Harding won by promising a return to good times and unregulated business wheeling and dealing. Indeed, his very election owed itself to a multitude of deep pockets who provided their support with some serious strings attached, namely high ranking cabinet positions and control of then untapped oil reserves in the Southwest and West in return for high dollar contributions and the votes of the very convention delegates by which Harding was chosen as leader of the GOP. Those who screamed "Drill, Baby, Drill!" in 2008 were merely echoing their predecessors of nearly a century before.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I was prompted to study the Teapot Dome Scandal and the Harding White House due to the fact that I am related to one of the active participants. My late Grandmother, as is true with so many, desperately wanted to prove a direct connection to someone either rich or powerful on a grand scale. This is why she took an active interest in genealogy, and in so doing unearthed the name of a close relative. The relative in question was named Jess Smith, who took the role of yes man, bribe collector, unofficial attorney general, and kick back accountant for Harding's Ohio Gang. The structure of the Harding Administration resembled an organized crime syndicate more than a government entity, and had Grandmother known this, I doubt she would have taken pride at having de facto mob ties.
Nor would she have found much to crow about had she discovered this,
According to some accounts, Smith's primary role was to quiet women, including Carrie Fulton Phillips, who claimed that Harding had affairs with them. Smith and Daugherty were members of the Ohio Gang, and they actually were both from Ohio. While Daugherty served as attorney general, Smith held no formal position in the federal government. He simply served as an unofficial assistant to Daugherty. Smith lived with Daugherty at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC, and it was rumored, at the time, that the two men were engaged in a homosexual relationship. Smith was single, while Daugherty was married.
As rumors spread about corrupt officials in Harding's administration, eventually Attorney General Daugherty launched various investigations. Critics, especially in the United States Congress, claimed that Daugherty did not vigorously pursue the investigations. Eventually, it was suggested that Daugherty was also working with bootleggers. Bootlegging was a direct violation of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This amendment established Prohibition in the United States. Smith also was supposedly involved in Daugherty's illegal activities. Rather than face legal charges and a possible prison sentence, Smith committed suicide.
Smith's actions, along with those of several other of Harding's cabinet officials, caused a great deal of distrust of government officials among the American people and also solidified Harding's reputation as a poor president.
Harding's incautious and highly impulsive womanizing make both Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy seem tame by comparison. What complicated matters further is that Harding was a bit of a bizarre romantic, who was not inclined merely to keep to one night stands. Instead he heavily courted each of the numerous women with whom he had affairs and in so doing wrote scores of love letters to each of his paramours, providing undeniable documented proof and paper trails a mile long. The RNC, by way of slight-of-hand and creative accounting managed to find untraceable ways to pay off most of these women in exchange for their silence, though two or three did come forward, sometimes goaded on by jealous husbands or boyfriends, threatening to tell all if they were not handsomely compensated for it. This proved to be an additional headache for Harding's handlers, as they had their hands full putting out fires all over the place. The vast scope of Harding's adulterous dalliances make Tiger Woods look like a mere novice by comparison and the David Letterman matter a relatively modest affair.
This was, of course, purely the tip of the iceberg. Harding's own failings were bad enough. It would be difficult to imagine a more disturbing group of unapologetic slimeballs setting up shop in Washington, DC. Their own marital infidelity often rivaled Harding's, and they quite eagerly engaged in money laundering, bootlegging, obstruction of justice, solicitation of prostitution, covering up the death of at least one accidental homicide, and other crimes. Smith ran a love nest for Harding and his inner circle on H Street that was mere blocks from the White House and could be accessed by way of an underground tunnel. He made sure it was well-stocked with alcohol recently confiscated from rum runners and bootleggers, scantily clad chorus girls shipped down from New York City, and any number of Harding cronies who were always in the mood to play a few hands of a never-ending poker game. It was a $50,000 a year enterprise and came complete with a full time cook and full time butler. Harding's wife was well-aware of her husband's behavior, but refused to besmirch the reputation of the office by allowing such conduct in the White House, necessitating the procurement of the secret residence. This didn't, however, prevent Harding from sneaking his favorite mistress into the official home of the President and having sex on the floor of the Oval Office, to boot, confirming at two the number of Chief Executives who have engaged in sexual conduct in that room. I would not be surprised if the exact count was much higher than that.
Much of this, of course, never became public knowledge until decades after the fact. Harding died unexpectedly, towards the end of what would be his only term in office, at which point the entire organization began to unravel. Criminal investigations followed, at which point the rats began to scurry from the ship, and a shocked public recognized just how indebted its federal government had been to the whims of big business, particularly the oil industry. The American oil powers had recognized just how lucrative exporting crude could be and how it could be profitably marketed and sold to a Europe that was still rebuilding from World War I. It is for that reason that they wanted complete control over land that was under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Government, in particular designated to the Department of the Navy. Granted, this land had been wrested from Native Americans a few decades before, but these men were not particularly sympathetic to the plight of indigenous peoples or to the conservation movement, which is the immediate precursor to the environmentalism of today. That has not changed much in nearly a century.
A wealthy Oklahoma oilman named Jake Hamon contributed over a million dollars to Harding's campaign immediately prior to the convention, buying off enough delegates in the process to win him the right to name the position he wanted within the presumptive Cabinet. Hamon coveted the Secretary of the Interior slot, since it promised full control of government-owned oilfields, of which Teapot Dome was one. Once formerly installed, Hamon reckoned he'd rake in enough revenue to make him the richest man in the country, if not the world, by directing the oil profits into his own pocket, rather than that of the government coffers where it rightly belonged. He would have been richer than Rockefeller and openly bragged about it to anyone who would listen.
His plans were rather abruptly short-circuited, however, when his much younger and long-term mistress shot him, whereupon he died from his wounds five days later. It seems that Mrs. Harding would not stand for Hamon to bring his mistress to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue--only his neglected wife and their children. Hamon was then forced to inform the other woman, Clara Hamon (no relation, despite the same last name) that she could not come with him. The mistress, however, had other ideas. After mortally wounding Jake, she found a letter in his papers addressed to him from Harding, specifically spelling out the precise quid pro quo of the cabinet position. The letter was signed in the President-Elect's own hand, and Clara knew that as long as the letter was in her possession, she held a powerful trump card that would prevent her from being convicted for murder and put to death.
This kind of brazen, Wild West kind of attitude is what eventually led to the complete dissolution of the Ohio Gang. The Bush Administration, by contrast, kept a code of silence and with it a very secretive attitude that deliberately locked out all but those with the President's primary ear. It was no less incompetent and no less arrogant, but it was ultimately undone not by a kind of unrestrained permissiveness but rather by its dogged determination to stifle dissent and label those who disagreed with its narrow interpretation of pressing concerns and ideological stances as anti-American and borderline traitorous. The lessons, then, to be learned from Harding and the beginning of another decade are not so much in our rear-view mirror, but in the future that lies before us.
Another erudite, well-polished, academic Democratic President has promised major reforms based on idealistic notions of unity and cooperation. This same President won the Nobel Peace Prize based not so much on actual achievement as by the expansive goals he has set forth, goals that may or may not find enactment on a broad scale. Now, as then, he is far more popular in the rest of the world than he is at home. Now, as then, he was elected on the premise to, if not keep us out of war altogether, certainly minimize our commitment to it. Later both men reversed course and Obama has since taken full ownership of a foreign entanglement. Assuming he wins a second full term, the question on the glossy cover of soberly contemplative print magazines (assuming they exist then) will be, "Life after Obama?"
Indeed, it might not be such a bad thing for us to contemplate what the Democratic party, the American people, and the demands facing us will be when this soon-to-arrive decade is well over half-finished. All we need do is look back ninety years to see what happens when a supposed return to normalcy produces little more than an Restoration of the Good Old Boy network. One would hope that our role as bloggers and citizen journalist would continue to be that of the gatekeepers, since investigative journalism seems to have been utterly abandoned by the mainstream outlets. Removing coats of whitewash and pursuing subjects too sensitive to find voice otherwise is how I envision my role. Though some criticize the blogs for being too reactive, too amateurish, and too beholden to echo chamber, there are many worthy and substantial voices out there and these we must continue to lift up and to dig to discover. Everyone must take a role if we are to ensure that someone is watching the store, because history provides a multitude of tragic examples which reveal what happens when it is not being closely monitored. Though my own brush with the past is not an especially inspiring one, I can redeem the sins and the mistakes of prior generations by vowing to never forget and in so doing never neglect a greater purpose beyond myself and my own blood.
Reform Immigration -
March on Washington
Last week we heard Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and University of California at Berkeley Professor, and author of Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), talk with Paul Jay of The Real News in the 
