Sunday, July 20, 2014

JFK Haters (Killers?) Buy Access To JFK Library

In a stunning development that was glossed over and/or largely ignored by the mainstream media, the Carlyle Group, an evil multinational corporation that has profited immensely from human suffering across the globe, is financing a facelift of the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. This raises the question, what is the Carlyle Group and what interest could it possibly have in JFK’s historical artifacts.

The Carlye Group is an investment firm with holdings in defense, technology, hedge funds, real estate, telecommunications, transportation, and the aerospace industry. It is estimated that their assets approach $200 billion. Their board members and advisors were and are political, corporate and military titans who have profited handsomely from their associations with Carlyle. It is one of the largest defense contractors in America, and it made hundreds of millions of dollars off the Iraq War.

Perhaps the first notorious mention of Carlyle occurred in Michael Moore’s incendiary Fahrenheit 9/11, wherein the director alleged that the bin Laden and Bush families were both connected to the Group. Following the attacks on September 11, the bin Laden family’s investments in the Carlyle Group became an embarrassment, and the family was forced to liquidate its assets with the firm. Moore exposed Carlyle's connections with George H. W. Bush and his Secretary of State James A. Baker III, both of whom served as advisers to the firm. You’ll recall that after 9/11 the bin Ladens were spirited out of America with the help of the George W. Bush administration. Subsequently none of the Bushies were made to publicly account for this by anyone in the mainstream media. The movie quotes author Dan Briody who claimed that the Carlyle Group profited from September 11 because it owned United Defense, a military contractor.

Moreover, the attacks occurred at the very moment when Carlyle was holding its annual investor conference, attended by none other than Osama bin Laden’s brother.

What does this all mean and what does it have to do with JFK? For the answer to that you’ll have to do a lot of independent reading on your own. There is not enough room here to delineate all the nefarious connections to November 22, 1963. When I told a friend about Carlyle’s funding of the JFK Library he snarked, “The murderers want access to the incriminating evidence. Maybe they want to start another fire.” The fire he refers to is the mysterious blaze that occurred in the JFK Library on the same day of the Boston Marathon bombing. There are some who see a connection between the two, but there is no proof of this. And while it seems highly suspicious to those of us who understand the genesis and far-flung implications of JFK’s murder, further investigation is needed.

Back to Carlyle. The only public excoriation of the company happened a few years back when ABC News reported this: “The Carlyle Group, a giant Wall Street firm best known for its ties to former President George H.W. Bush and other prominent public officials, made more than $13 million in payments to an indicted political fixer who arranged for the firm to receive business from a New York pension fund, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo said today. Carlyle is a politically connected powerhouse whose board of advisors has been graced by the names of numerous political luminaries from both the Democratic and Republican Parties including former President Bush, his Secretary of State James Baker III, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, Britain's former Prime Minister John Major, ex-Time magazine media glitterati Norman Pearlstein and former Clinton White House Chief of Staff, Mack McLarty. The firm is currently headed by the highly regarded ex-IBM CEO Lou Gerstner.”

And recently Russ Baker, a genuine investigative reporter (probably the last of a dying breed in America), wrote this on his website, WhoWhatWhy.com, under the headline “Carlyle Group’s latest acquisition: The JFK Library”:

“Some things you truly cannot make up. Like this: the museum and archives celebrating and exploring the life (if not really wanting to investigate the death) of John F. Kennedy is getting a facelift—courtesy of….the Carlyle Group. This development was noted, without much fanfare, in a variety of major media. If there was a smidgen of irony, I missed it. Yet, consider this: The ultimate globe-girdling corporation is playing a major role in preserving the memory of a president who at the time of his death was engaged in what may be described as mortal combat with outfits not unlike Carlyle—if smaller and less global. (I write about this in my book Family of Secrets but you can learn a lot more about JFK versus the corporations in Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency.) Kennedy was locked in grim battle with oil and steel and banking interests, hated by mining giants and soda pop companies, resisting pressures from the burgeoning defense industry, and on and on. The list of the offending and the aggrieved was endless. Executives were taking out ads to excoriate him, and even showing up at the White House to practically spit in his face. ‘Those robbing bastards,’ JFK told Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, when Heller mentioned the oil and gas industry. ‘I’m going to murder them.’”—as cited in Family of Secrets, from audiotape held by John F. Kennedy Library and Museum - See more at: http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/06/29/carlyle-groups-latest-acquisition-the-jfk-library/#sthash.mN9khqOV.dpuf

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Saturday, July 12, 2014

Scalia The Tyrant

Historically the Supreme Court has been an august body of legal paragons adjudicating the uniquely American doctrines of fairness, equality, and protection under the law. I am referring, of course, to giants like Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan, William O. Douglas, Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens. Even Reagan appointee Sandra Day O’Connor had a common sense judicial mien. I disagreed with most of her rulings, but she was not unreasonably partisan, crass and smug—qualities which have infected the current Supreme Court.

Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in particular, have turned the Court into a right-wing forum for altering the letter and intent of the Founding Fathers’ blueprint. But more galling is their attitude. They are deplorably arrogant and pompous. Even their dissents are full of vitriol and lacking in solid legal foundation. They are law unto themselves. They have become self-anointed despots, disdainful of all the ways in which the Constitution provides protections for the greater good.

Thomas, the surly Uncle Tom with smarmy sexual habits, is a follower. It is Scalia who is the bully; Thomas is just his manservant. Thusly, I was amused to see Scalia viciously attacked in a recent edition of OpEd News. I quote here from the article written by Jim Hightower:

“So many absurdities abound in our lives that there's a whole body of philosophical thought called ‘absurdism,’ as well as an entire catalogue of plays called the ‘theater of the absurd.’ And then there's Antonin Scalia.

“This sour, scowling, and snarky Supreme Court Justice personifies the dictionary definition of absurd: ‘Utterly or obviously senseless, illogical, or untrue; contrary to all reason or common sense; laughably foolish or false.’

“A right-wing dogmatist and extreme judicial activist who's full of himself, Scalia has been the court's chief monkey-wrencher for corporate interests, constantly messing with the Constitution to enthrone plutocratic money over our people's democratic politics. By black-robed fiat, he and his four fellow corporatists on the bench have managed to twist language and pervert nature itself by declaring that corporations are ‘people’ and money is ‘speech.’ Thus, in their now infamous Citizens United edict of 2010, the five decreed that these huge, lifeless, paper constructs -- without brains, hearts, souls, or tongues--must be free to ‘speak’ in our elections by spending unlimited (and undisclosed) amounts of their shareholders' money to determine who wins public office.

“Two years later, questioned in a CNN interview about the logic of this finding, Scalia leapt from the merely preposterous to the phantasmagoric, insisting that the founders themselves would've approved extending the human right of political speech to these imaginary corporate persons. Doing so, proclaimed the legal contortionist, increases the level of democratic participation, so it's inherently good: ‘I think Thomas Jefferson would have said, 'The more speech, the better.'

“Good grief! What we have here is one of the most powerful officials in America, one of nine supreme arbiters of what the wording of the Constitution means, who's either (1) sublimely ignorant about the core democratic beliefs of a key author of our nation's founding documents; (2) an ideological delusionalist; or (3) a shameless liar.

“Start with the fact that the word "corporation" appears nowhere in the Constitution. That is not by accident. Jefferson (along with Madison and other founders) abhorred any participation in the people's business by these predatory corporate beasts. Unlike Scalia, Jefferson had no trouble distinguishing between an actual human being and a piece of paper, which is what a corporation is. He saw them as plutocratic vultures poised to overpower our fledgling democratic experiment, supplanting it with a corporate aristocracy that would plunder and impoverish the people. He would have just as soon ripped out every red hair on his head than extend political speech to the vast piles of wealth stored in corporate treasuries.”

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Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Koch Family Exposed As John Birchers And JFK Haters

If you watched, as I did, the glut of JFK assassination documentaries this past November, you must have wondered why none of them built the case for a conspiracy, despite a mountain of evidence indicating that JFK was murdered by a secret cabal of intelligence/military operatives, facilitated by LBJ and his billionaire oilmen supporters. PBS, an otherwise credible source of investigative journalism, was out in front of this pack of broadcast liars, with such blatant historical frauds as "Cold Case JFK" and "Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?" Why was the truth squashed? For the answer, all you have to do is follow the money. Who paid for these disinformation pieces? David Koch, that's who. That's right, PBS sold its journalistic integrity down the river for a few shekels from one of the most vitriolic and extreme right-wing billionaires in America.

If you don't know David Koch, let me give you some background. He is one of the richest men in America. He and his brother are right-wing fanatics committed to abolishing Social Security, taxation of the wealthy, Medicare, minimum wages, and voting rights for minorities. He has spent millions trying to prove that Obama is a socialist Muslim who was born in Kenya. He is a lying, tax-dodging, Kennedy-hating, fascist Oligarch. He can buy anything he wants, and the truth is for sale. And the family's extremist politics did not start with the brothers. Their father, Fred Koch, an oil billionaire and member of the John Birch Society, paid for hateful posters which were passed out in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The posters had front and side views of JFK beneath the headline "Wanted For Treason." So maybe there's good reason not to trust the Oswald-did-it-alone documentary paid for by the Kochs. You think?

The Koch family history is not tied to just the John Birch Society; there is evidence that the German Kochs were Nazis. There are some who believe that Ilse Koch, the notorious "Bitch of Buchenwald" was related to the American Kochs. She was the wife of Karl-Otto Koch, commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp. After World War II, Ilse was tried for war crimes and imprisoned by a U.S. tribunal. Information connecting Ilse and Koch Industries is hard to find but is a string of fragments, pieces of information that connects the American and German Kochs and this connection gives us a clear image of the sentiment behind the Tea Party and conservative American politics since the 1950s. Where is the connection between the German Kochs and Fred Koch? Besides evidence the American Kochs were related to Ilse’s family, Erich Koch (an important Nazi official in charge of Prussia) induced Fred Koch to sell his oil in Nazi Germany when Fred was banned from doing business in the US. After the fall of Nazi Germany, Erich Koch and Fred expanded their oil empire to the Soviet Union. A few years later the Soviets took Fred Koch’s oil and prosecuted Erich for war crimes – Fred Koch returned to the US, became anti-communist, and was allowed to do business in the States again.

The links between the American and Nazi Kochs are tenuous, but they certainly shared the same political ideologies. What we know for certain about the Kochs in America comes from this article in the summer 2014 issue of "The Progressive":

"In 1961, at the age of twenty-six, Charles Koch moved home to Wichita, Kansas, to work for Rock Island Oil and Refining Company, which was led by his father, Fred Koch, who was on the national council of the John Birch Society. Charles subsequently opened a John Birch Society bookstore in Wichita with a friend of his father, Bob Love, the owner of the Love Box Company in Wichita, according to Dan Schulman’s Sons of Wichita. The John Birch Society’s 'American Opinion Bookstores' were stocked with material opposing the civil rights movement Birchers had put up billboards in Kansas and elsewhere calling for the impeachment of Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who had ordered the desegregation of the public schools in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. There’s no indication that Fred or Charles objected to the Birch campaign to impeach Warren. There are indications they paid for ads in Dallas in 1963 with President John F. Kennedy’s head depicted like two mug shot photos, with the word 'Treason' below, shortly before the assassination of the President ... Or when [Birchers] opposed the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, based on the Bircher claim that the movement was created as a forty-year front for the communists. Or when [they] supported billboards calling Martin Luther King a communist."

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Monday, July 7, 2014

"The Sixties" Makes Ludicrous Presumptions About JFK Assassination

Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman are on a fierce mission to rewrite America's past and turn the CIA's lies into our official history. Hanks and Goetzman are the producers of the abomination called "The Sixties" which is airing on CNN, and, for reasons that are unfathomable to me, they want to turn JFK's assassination into an accidental meeting of killer and president, devoid of any deep political implications and neutered of any CIA, military or secret cabal involvement. [They also produced "Parkland," notable for its historical omissions and inaccuracies.] Hanks is a multimillionaire without a care in the world, and I suppose he feels guilty having gamed a corrupt and top-heavy system. He wants, in his own feeble way, to assure us, or himself, that America is not elitist and evil...and that Kennedy's assassination did not facilitate illegitimate and pseudo-oligarchies in the half-century since. Whatever Hanks' motives, "The Sixties" episode dealing with JFK's assassination is a twisted fairy tale, full of misinformation and outlandish prevarications.

The purported assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, is depicted as a miserable misanthrope, unconnected to any intelligence or military agencies, who just happened to get a job in a building overlooking the President's parade route. The fact is, Oswald was a CIA operative whose personal acquaintances and circumstances virtually screamed undercover agent. His best friend in Dallas was George DeMohrenschildt, CIA asset and oil geologist, who was connected to the richest oilmen in Texas and his old pal George W. Bush, head of the CIA in 1976-77 when DeMohrenschildt was murdered. Oswald's landlady in Irving, Texas (where he spent weekends with his wife and children), was Ruth Paine, whose family was associated with the CIA for decades. Paine's mother-in-law was best friends with Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles's mistress. Who was Allen Dulles? Oh, just the head of the CIA under Kennedy, and the de facto head of the Warren Commission which covered up the assassination. Dulles was fired by Kennedy in 1961, and he despised JFK ever after.

Moreover, Oswald was identified as a CIA agent by his contemporaries in the Agency. Husband and wife CIA assets Jim and Elsie Wilcott exposed Oswald as a CIA double agent. In his book, "JFK And The Unspeakable," James Douglass writes, "In his own HSCA testimony Wilcott said Oswald served as a double agent in the Soviet Union and afterwards came under suspicion by the Agency...Wilcott himself had issued an advance on funds for the CIA's Oswald project under a cryptonym...Wilcott had to confront his own complicity in the CIA's Oswald counterintelligence project that was the background to the president's assassination."

Another CIA employee who spoke the truth about Oswald was Ann Egerter, assistant to CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton. Douglass writes that, "Egerter indicated by her testimony that Oswald was a particular kind of CIA asset, an Agency employee who was suspected of being a security risk. That would have been the reason for opening a 201 file on him specifically in Angleton's Special Investigations Group of Counterintelligence. Egerter said SIG was known in the Agency as the office that spied on spies...[identified as] CIA employees."

Not surprisingly, Douglass did not appear on "The Sixties" as one of the expert JFK historians. However, Warren Commission apologists and Oswald framers Vincent Bugliosi and Max Holland did. It all makes for a pleasant fairy tale, by which Hanks hopes that America will fall asleep and/or chalk up JFK's life and death as a meaningless fable. Maybe Tom should rename it for better ratings--"Asleep in Dallas," or "Forrest Stumped," or "Past Away," or some other Hanks nonsense that makes him obscenely rich and pacifies all our worries.

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Sunday, July 6, 2014

Christianity Has Nothing To Do With America...According To The Founding Fathers

Nothing is more nauseating than listening to some right-winger bloviate about the Founding Fathers' intentions when they established the precepts by which America should conduct itself. Idiots like Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Bill O'Reilly are constantly harping on America's traditional core values, rooted in the Christian beliefs of men like Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton. They were Christians, argue conservatives, and as such they implicitly included Christian values in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

I got so sick of the carping that I finally looked up what the Founding Fathers had to say on the matter, and what I found is, as usual, O'Reilly, Beck and Coulter, et al, are lying. They have twisted the truth to suit their own warped agendas. Here's what the Founding Fathers really had to say:

Thomas Jefferson: “Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.”

James Madison: “The civil government … functions with complete success … by the total separation of the Church from the State.”

George Washington: “If I could conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded, that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.” (Note to right wingers: What Washington meant here is persecution BY religious zealots, not OF religious zealots.)

John Adams: “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

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Thursday, July 3, 2014

Hobby Lobby Profits From Products Related To Contraception And Abortion

Yes, you read that headline correctly. This is not a sick, ironic joke. Hobby Lobby's right-wing, Christian nutjob owners--the Greens--made a small fortune from investing in the very things they publicly denounce. They went all they way to the Supreme Court to avoid providing adequate contraceptive coverage for their employees, yet privately they profit from contraceptive investments. It confirms what I've always believed: the right wing is oblivious to its own hypocrisy. They have no real values except those of self-interest and profit. All the Jesus talk and the Bible thumping is nothing but self-preservation. Caring for others, which is what the Bible really teaches, has nothing to do with a right-winger's faith. They see God as the ultimate CEO, whom they must please in order to move into the big mansion in the sky. Caring for the well-being of others and living moral, selfless existences have nothing to do with their religious aspirations.

I quote from Rick Ungar's article in Forbes on-line (of all publications!): “In what just may be the most stunning example of hypocrisy in my lifetime, Mother Jones has uncovered numerous investments on the part of Hobby Lobby’s retirement fund in a wide variety of companies producing abortion and contraception related products. Hobby Lobby is currently seeking relief from certain contraception benefit requirements of Obamacare in a United States Supreme Court case that promises to be a landmark decision on the rights of corporations and the extension of personal religious protections to corporate entities. In the case of the Hobby Lobby corporation, the company is closely held by the Green family who purport to have strong religious objections to certain types of contraceptive devices and are suing to protect those religious rights. Remarkably, the contraceptive devices and products that so offend the religious beliefs of this family are manufactured by the very companies in which Hobby Lobby holds a substantial stake via their employee 401(k) plan. As I suspect many readers will find this as hard to believe and digest as I, the data can be confirmed by reviewing the company’s 2012 Annual Report of Employee Benefit Plan as filed with the Department of Labor.”



The Greens represent all that is obscene and despicable about America. Corrupt and soulless rich white people, full of phony piety which shelters a covert hatred (simmering just below the scrubbed veneer) of all diversity and broad tolerance, they want it all for themselves. "Greed is good" is their guiding principle; American capitalism is their real religion. They buy politicians who appoint corporate-friendly judges. This is the American way. The Greens--white-bread, superficial, hypocritical, and callous--are as American as a rotten apple pie.

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