On Scalia & Trump
In the past week, I’ve put up a couple of O.P.s, that focused on the potential for our federal government to totally disconnect with the Constitution of the United States. Indeed, the citizens of the United States should recognize and reject the tendency of individuals in the government to bend, or go against, the Constitution. We should not allow that document to become a parched piece of ancient history, hidden in the vault of some museum.
Today on both CNN and MSNBC, I’ve watched -- and listened to -- reports that included Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s highly offensive position on black university students. It was as if Scalia took offense to Donald Trump’s setting the bar low, as far as being the worst horse’s ass in America today, and Scalia sought to reclaim that title. However, it is worse than that: this provides evidence of exactly how a majority of the 1% view this nation’s people. Rather than “competition,” this is the coordinated agenda of the worst enemies of America.
In 2004, former Nixon White House theorist Kevin Phillips published, “American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush” (Penguin). On pages 107-108, Phillips addressed some of the connections between Scalia and the Bush family. This included a quote from the 5-justice majority decision on December 11, 2000, that put Bush-Cheney in office: “the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for President of the United States ….”
Scalia takes pride in believing he is the Master of Original Intent. In a sick sort of way, he is: in large part, the original Constitution provided for a republic, to benefit the “enlightened few” -- with that club being restricted to wealthy, educated white men. It wasn’t until the early 1800s, that the nation became a constitutional democracy -- with some structures of a republic firmly in place. A person need study no more than about how common citizens began to vote for Senators, to get a historical grasp of the tensions between groups of wealthy, educated white men. Or, simply consider the Bill of Rights.
Individuals, organizations, states, and even the US government attempted to deny various groups of citizens their constitutional rights, ever since that powerful Bill of Rights was enacted. Even the US Supreme Court has ruled against groups and individual citizens, far too often. On the other hand, the Court has been consistent in upholding the rights of wealthy, educated, “straight” white men over the centuries. In recent times, they’ve even upheld the “rights” of corporations.
Scalia provides a unique window into which we can see the cold, less-than-human heart of the 1%. Few quotes grant us access to their actual beliefs than the following, from Kevin Phillips’ book:
“Part of Scalia’s objection to democracy, amplified a year later, was that it got in the way of a return to an eighteenth-century interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Speaking at the January 2002 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, he opined that as written, the Constitution reflected natural or divinely inspired law that the state was an instrument of God. ‘That consensus has been upset,’ he said, ‘by the emergence of democracy.’ He added that ‘the reactions of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it but resolution to combat it as effectively as possible’.”
It would be easy to think that Scalia merely represents the extreme right-wing of one political party; yet, his position is supposed to be nonpartisan. Rather, he is one of the most powerful people in American society, where he believes his noble obligation is to channel the divinity of the 1%. And that, as the most recent comments on affirmative action confirm, includes a “resolution to combat ….as effectively as possible” efforts by the 99% to be active, equal members of society.
No one argues that “affirmative action” in 2015 is a flawless approach to righting historic wrongs. Yet, no one has proposed a more effective and fair approach, Of all the problems facing public education, affirmative action is hardly among the most pressing. When more young black men are being caught up in the criminal justice system, than being enrolled in college, it should be clear that affirmative action still has a significant role in today’s social reality.
Just as with the “Founding Fathers” -- a relatively small group, which contained diverse thinking -- there is a wide range in the thinking among the “leaders” in our federal government today. And, in many ways, these are important. There are, for example, significant differences between Bernard Sanders and Rafael Edward Cruz, even though both of them are members of the same small, elite political organization. It would be foolish to hold that “they are all the same.”
Yet, at the same time, both Sanders and Cruz are part of the same system, the US Senate -- just as both are running to be president, the highest position within the larger system of the federal government. And, despite the very real differences in character between Sanders and Cruz, that system is primarily geared towards increasing the advantages -- economically, socially, and politically -- of the 1%. And a significant tactic for doing so is to divide the public into smaller groups that compete with one another.
Back in 1970, Vine Deloria, Jr., published “We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (Dell). Deloria predicted that the 1% would attempt to create a modern version of feudalism -- with rule by a corporate elite -- by dividing the public, and pitting groups against each other. He knew that so long as these groups mistakenly saw other groups as their competition, and thus enemy, that the future of America would be a feudal state.
However, if those same groups learned some basic lessons in organization -- the same one that many of the Founding Fathers learned from the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy -- and recognized that the 1% were their competition (and their common enemy), that would promote a higher level of democracy, and social justice. And 45 years later, that remains true. Indeed, it is even more important that we recognize this reality today, than in 1970.
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Apart from the occassional avid reader or cowboy movie fan, too few notice the bad guy when he's bathed, shaved, well dressed, soft spoken and so very polite. From before Ronald Reagan:
Friendly Fascism - The New Face of Power in America
by Bertram Gross
EXCERPT...
Friendly fascism portrays two conflicting trends in the United States and other countries of the so-called "free world."
The first is a slow and powerful drift toward greater concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government partnership. This drift leads down the road toward a new and subtly manipulative form of corporatist serfdom. The phrase "friendly fascism" helps distinguish this possible future from the patently vicious corporatism of classic fascism in the past of Germany, Italy and Japan. It also contrasts with the friendly present of the dependent fascisms propped up by the U.S. government in El Salvador, Haiti, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere.
The other is a slower and less powerful tendency for individuals and groups to seek greater participation in decisions affecting themselves and others. This trend goes beyond mere reaction to authoritarianism. It transcends the activities of progressive groups or movements and their use of formal democratic machinery. It is nourished by establishment promises-too often rendered false-of more human rights, civil rights and civil liberties. It is embodied in larger values of community, sharing, cooperation, service to others and basic morality as contrasted with crass materialism and dog-eat-dog competition. It affects power relations in the household, workplace, community, school, church, synagogue, and even the labyrinths of private and public bureaucracies. It could lead toward a truer democracy-and for this reason is bitterly fought...
These contradictory trends are woven fine into the fabric of highly industrialized capitalism. The unfolding logic of friendly fascist corporatism is rooted in "capitalist society's transnational growth and the groping responses to mounting crises in a dwindling capitalist world". Mind management and sophisticated repression become more attractive to would-be oligarchs when too many people try to convert democratic promises into reality. On the other hand, the alternative logic of true democracy is rooted in "humankind's long history of resistance to unjustified privilege" and in spontaneous or organized "reaction (other than fright or apathy) to concentrated power...and inequality, injustice or coercion".
A few years ago too many people closed their eyes to the indicators of the first tendency.
But events soon began to change perceptions.
CONTINUED...
Bush. Family. Evil. Empire. It's a handy catch phrase to describe the convergence of the super-rich with their toadies in secret government offices. Like the Safari Club.
When Jimmy Carter's CIA director, Adm. Stansfield Turner, tossed out the bad apples, rogues, etc. -- Poppy was ticked. They were his chums. So, the petrodollar-connected friends found a work-around. Voila! The hostages are held past the election and Pruneface and Poppy are back in the White House.
A NEW BIOGRAPHY TRACES THE PATHOLOGY OF ALLEN DULLES AND HIS APPALLING CABAL
by Jon Schwarz
The Intercept, Nov. 2 2015, 1:24 p.m.
EXCERPT...
Because what the Safari Club demonstrates is that Dulles’ entire spooky world is beyond the reach of American democracy. Even the most energetic post-World War II attempt to rein it in was in the end as effective as trying to lasso mist. And today we’ve largely returned to the balance of power Dulles set up in the 1950s. As Jay Rockefeller said in 2007 when he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, “Don’t you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that because I’m chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say ‘I want it, give it to me’? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time.”
In February 2002, Saudi Prince Turki Al Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence from 1977 until September 1, 2001, traveled to Washington, D.C. While there, Turki, who’d graduated from Georgetown University in the same class as Bill Clinton, delivered a speech at his alma mater that included an unexpected history lesson:
In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran … so, the Kingdom, with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the world safe when the United States was not able to do that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don’t know.
Turki was not telling the whole truth. He was right that his Georgetown audience likely had never heard any of this before, but the Safari Club had been known across the Middle East for decades. After the Iranian revolution the new government gave Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, one of the most prominent journalists in the Arab world, permission to examine the Shah’s archives. There Heikal discovered the actual formal, written agreement between the members of the Safari Club, and wrote about it in a 1982 book called Iran: The Untold Story.
And the Safari Club was not simply the creation of the countries Turki mentioned — Americans were involved as well. It’s true the U.S. executive branch was somewhat hamstrung during the period between the post-Watergate investigations of the intelligence world and the end of the Carter administration. But the powerful individual Americans who felt themselves “literally tied up” by Congress — that is, unfairly restrained by the most democratic branch of the U.S. government — certainly did not consider the decisions of Congress to be the final word.
Whatever its funding sources, the evidence suggests the Safari Club was largely the initiative of these powerful Americans. According to Heikal, its real origin was when Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, “talked a number of rich Arab oil countries into bankrolling operations against growing communist influence on their doorstep” in Africa. Alexandre de Marenches, a right-wing aristocrat who headed France’s version of the CIA, eagerly formalized the project and assumed operational leadership. But, Heikal writes, “The United States directed the whole operation,” and “giant U.S. and European corporations with vital interests in Africa” leant a hand. As John K. Cooley, the Christian Science Monitor’s longtime Mideast correspondent, put it, the setup strongly appealed to the U.S. executive branch: “Get others to do what you want done, while avoiding the onus or blame if the operation fails.”
This all seems like something Americans would like to know, especially since de Marenches may have extended his covert operations to the 1980 U.S. presidential election. In 1992, de Marenches’ biographer testified in a congressional investigation that the French spy told him that he had helped arrange an October 1980 meeting in Paris between William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager, and the new Islamic Republic of Iran. The goal of such a meeting, of course, would have been to persuade Iran to keep its American hostages until after the next month’s election, thus denying Carter any last-minute, politically potent triumph.
De Marenches and the Safari Club certainly had a clear motive to oust Carter: They blamed him for allowing one of their charter members, the Shah, to fall from power. But whether de Marenches’ claims were true or not, we do know that history unfolded exactly as he and the Safari Club would have wished. The hostages weren’t released until Reagan was inaugurated, Reagan appointed Casey director of the CIA, and from that point forward America’s intelligence “community” was back in business.
And yet normal citizens would have a hard time just finding out the Safari Club even existed, much less the outlines of its activities. It appears to have been mentioned just once by the New York Times, in a profile of a French spy novelist. It likewise has made only one appearance in the Washington Post, in a 2005 online chat in which a reader asked the Post’s former Middle East bureau chief Thomas Lippman, “Does the Safari Club, formed in the mid-70s, still exist?” Lippman responded: “I never heard of it, so I have no idea.”
CONTINUED...
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/02/the-deepest-state-the-safari-club-allen-dulles-and-the-devils-chessboard/
So, where did the Safari Club get such a mandate? Could it be the same employer that Scalia -- appointed by Poppy Bush -- really works for? Based on the money flowing from the US Taxpayer to War Inc and on to Swiss banks, yeah.
Both of these guys had ancestors and cronies in the slave trade.
Baron de Rothschild and Prescott Bush, share a moment and some information, back in the day.
The people who tried to overthrow FDR in 1933 had kids.
And their offspring* and connected cronies in crime are the ones* screwing America now.
What's different today, is we don't have Smedley Butler or FDR to stop them.
* Of course, it's not just a few rich families's offspring who screw the majority today. They've hired help and built up the giant noise machine to continue their work overthrowing the progress FDR and the New Deal brought America for 80 years.
Why would the nation and world's richest people do that? Progress costs money. And they don't want to pay for it, even when they've gained more wealth than all of history put together. Instead, whey continue to work -- legally, through government and lobbyists -- to amass even more, transferring the wealth of the many to themselves.
And instead of an armed mob led by a war hero on a white horse, as planned in 1933, their weapon since Pruneface made his first payment to the Ayatollah has been "Supply Side Economics." To most Americans, that means Trickle-Down.
Rothschild and Freshfields founders’ had links to slavery, papers reveal
By Carola Hoyos
Financial Times
Two of the biggest names in the City of London had previously undisclosed links to slavery in the British colonies, documents seen by the Financial Times have revealed.
Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the banking family’s 19th-century patriarch, and James William Freshfield, founder of Freshfields, the top City law firm, benefited financially from slavery, records from the National Archives show, even though both have often been portrayed as opponents of slavery.
Far from being a matter of distant history, slavery remains a highly contentious issue in the US, where Rothschild and Freshfields are both active.
Companies alleged to have links to past slave injustices have come under pressure to make restitution.
JPMorgan, the investment bank, set up a $5m scholarship fund for black students studying in Louisiana after apologising in 2005 for the company’s historic links to slavery.
CONTINUED (with registration, etc) ...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7c0f5014-628c-11de-b1c9-00144feabdc0.html
Generation upon generation, knowing only service to power and property.
Kevin (Someone Mention "Southern Strategy"?) Phillips called them a ''multigenerational family of fibbers.''
The Barreling Bushes
Four generations of the dynasty have chased profits through cozy ties with Mideast leaders, spinning webs of conflicts of interest
by Kevin Phillips
Published on Sunday, January 11, 2004 by the Los Angeles Times
EXCERPT...
During these years, Bush's four sons - George W., Jeb, Neil and Marvin - were following in the family footsteps, lining up business deals with Saudi, Kuwaiti and Bahraini moneymen and cozying up to BCCI. The Middle East was becoming a convenient family money spigot.
Eldest son George W. Bush made his first Middle East connection in the late 1970s with James Bath, a Texas businessmen who served as the North American representative for two rich Saudis (and Osama bin Laden relatives) - billionaire Salem bin Laden and banker and BCCI insider Khalid bin Mahfouz. Bath put $50,000 into Bush's 1979 Arbusto oil partnership, probably using Bin Laden-Bin Mahfouz funds.
In the late 1980s, after several failed oil ventures, the future 43rd president let the ailing oil business in which he was a major stockholder and chairman be bought out by another foreign-influenced operation, Harken Energy. The Wall Street Journal commented in 1991, "The mosaic of BCCI connections surrounding Harken Energy may prove nothing more than how ubiquitous the rogue bank's ties were. But the number of BCCI-connected people who had dealings with Harken - all since George W. Bush came on board - likewise raises the question of whether they mask an effort to cozy up to a presidential son."
Other hints of cronyism came in 1990 when inexperienced Harken got a major contract to drill in the Persian Gulf for the government of Bahrain. Time magazine reporters Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, in their book "The Outlaw Bank," concluded "that Mahfouz, or other BCCI players, must have had a hand in steering the oil-drilling contract to the president's son." The web entangling the Bush presidencies was already being spun.
CONTINUED...
http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/kevin_phillips.htm
Of course, outside of DU and Bartcop, no one's heard of the BFEE. While everybody wonders where Saddam's WMDs went off to, Wall Street gets ahead and the Constitution continues to shrink to the point where it's only big enough to cover Scalia's conscience.
PS: Sorry so much recycling, H2O Man. Not that any of it is a masterpiece of storytelling, the facts and reportage are sound. Readers in some future date will be able to access pertinent documents, etc., should the links go bad, and find out how these weasels not only are working to destroy Democracy, they don't care who they kill in the process or to make a buck.
