Four Points make me FOR Bernie

[Octafish]

1. The economic policies of the United States should serve the needs of ALL Americans, not just work to shovel money into the pockets of the well-to-do.

2. The domestic policies of the United States should uphold the law and respect the rights of ALL Americans, not just the well-to-do and their lawyers.

3. The foreign policies of the United States should treat ALL people of the world like human beings deserve: with respect, not just the well-to-do.

4. Washington should respond to the needs and interests of ALL citizens of the United States, not just the corporations and their well-to-do owners.

Go ahead and laugh. It wasn't long ago that the Democratic Party stood for those four points.



They made us stand apart from the warmongers, greedheads and racists working for Reagan and, for the most part, all who've followed.

[brooklynite]

1. I'm sure Bernie Sanders will be able to bring these issues up when he's back in the Senate.

[Octafish]

4. I hope Hillary does if she's the nominee.

Her record on those four points isn't as good as Bernie Sanders'. Take foreign policy.

[YouDig]

2. Hillary agrees with all those.

[Octafish]

5. Not when it comes to NSA domestic spying.

Hillary's Evasive Views on the NSA

On the eve of her presumptive bid for the White House, the former senator is willfully obscuring the positions she would take as president.

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF
The Atlantic, FEB 25, 2015

Hillary Clinton is almost certain to launch a bid for the presidency. But at least for now, she's determined to keep the public guessing about her stance on NSA spying. As Edward Snowden's revelations forced the issue to the fore of national debate, she kept mum, even as other prospective candidates staked out positions.

On Tuesday, the technology journalist Kara Swisher raised the subject of surveillance while questioning the former Secretary of State. "Would you throttle back the NSA in the ways that President Obama has promised but that haven't come to pass?" she asked. Clinton's successfully evasive answer unfolded as follows:

Clinton: Well, I think the NSA needs to be more transparent about what it is doing, sharing with the American people, which it wasn't. And I think a lot of the reaction about the NSA, people felt betrayed. They felt, wait, you didn't tell us you were doing this. And all of a sudden now, we're reading about it on the front page...

So when you say, "Would you throttle it back?" Well, the NSA has to act lawfully. And we as a country have to decide what the rules are. And then we have to make it absolutely clear that we're going to hold them accountable. What we had because of post-9/11 legislation was a lot more flexibility than I think people really understood, and was not explained to them. I voted against the FISA Amendments in 2008 because I didn't think they went far enough to kind of hold us accountable in the Congress for what was going on.

Swisher: By flexibility you mean too much spying power, really.

Clinton: Well yeah but how much is too much? And how much is not enough? That's the hard part. I think if Americans felt like, number one, you're not going after my personal information, the content of my personal information. But I do want you to get the bad guys, because I don't want them to use social media, to use communications devices invented right here to plot against us. So let's draw the line. And I think it's hard if everybody's in their corner. So I resist saying it has to be this or that. I want us to come to a better balance.
This will not do. The answer elides the fact that Clinton has not been a passive actor in surveillance policy. "What the rules are" is something that she was responsible for helping to decide. She served in the United States Senate from 2001 to 2009. She cast votes that enabled the very NSA spying that many now regard as a betrayal. And she knew all about what the NSA wasn't telling the public. To say now that the NSA should've been more transparent raises this question: Why wasn't Clinton among the Democrats working for more transparency?

Clinton may resist "saying" that surveillance policy "has to be this or that," but it must be something specific. "Let's draw the line" and "I want us to come to a better balance" are shameless weasel phrases when you're vying to call the shots. What is being balanced in her view? What should the NSA have revealed earlier? How much transparency should it provide going forward? What does the law require of the NSA? Since 9/11, when has the NSA transgressed against the law as Clinton sees it? Those questions hint at the many ways that her position is evasive. So long as no one else contests her party's nomination, she can get away with it.

SOURCE:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/hillary-clintons-evasive-position-on-nsa-spying/386024/

[YouDig]

6. That article has nothing to do with your OP.

[Octafish]

9. Here's help.

2. The domestic policies of the United States should uphold the law and respect the rights of ALL Americans, not just the well-to-do and their lawyers.

[YouDig]

10. That article still has nothing to do with your OP. What does the NSA have to do with

the well-to-do? Nothing.

[Octafish]

13. Yes it does, esp. considering how much NSA work is done by private contractors.

Secret government means secret policies and secret beneficiaries.

Behind the Curtain: Booz Allen Hamilton and its Owner, The Carlyle Group

Written by Bob Adelmann
The New American; June 13, 2013

According to writers Thomas Heath and Marjorie Censer at the Washington Post, The Carlyle Group and its errant child, Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), have a public relations problem, thanks to NSA leaker and former BAH employee Edward Snowden. By the time top management at BAH learned that one of their top level agents had gone rogue, and terminated his employment, it was too late.

For years Carlyle had, according to the Post, “nurtured a reputation as a financially sophisticated asset manager that buys and sells everything from railroads to oil refineries”; but now the light from the Snowden revelations has revealed nothing more than two companies, parent and child, “bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits.”

And have they ever. When The Carlyle Group bought BAH back in 2008, it was totally dependent upon government contracts in the fields of information technology (IT) and systems engineering for its bread and butter. But there wasn't much butter: After two years the company’s gross revenues were $5.1 billion but net profits were a minuscule $25 million, close to a rounding error on the company’s financial statement. In 2012, however, BAH grossed $5.8 billion and showed earnings of $219 million, nearly a nine-fold increase in net revenues and a nice gain in value for Carlyle.

Unwittingly, the Post authors exposed the real reason for the jump in profitability: close ties and interconnected relationships between top people at Carlyle and BAH, and the agencies with which they are working. The authors quoted George Price, an equity analyst at BB&T Capital: " got a great brand, they've focused over time on hiring top people, including bringing on people who have a lot of senior government experience." (Emphasis added.)

For instance, James Clapper had a stint at BAH before becoming the current Director of National Intelligence; George Little consulted with BAH before taking a position at the Central Intelligence Agency; John McConnell, now vice chairman at BAH, was director of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the ‘90s before moving up to director of national intelligence in 2007; Todd Park began his career with BAH and now serves as the country's chief technology officer; James Woolsey, currently a senior vice president at BAH, served in the past as director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and so on.

BAH has had more than a little problem with self-dealing and conflicts of interest over the years. For instance in 2006 the European Commission asked the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Privacy International (PI) to investigate BAH’s involvement with President George Bush’s SWIFT surveillance program, which was viewed by that administration as “just another tool” in its so-called “War on Terror.” The only problem is that it was illegal, as it violated U.S., Belgian, and European privacy laws. BAH was right in the middle of it. According to the ACLU/PI report,

Though Booz Allen’s role is to verify that the access to the SWIFT data is not abused, its relationship with the U.S. Government calls its objectivity significantly into question. (Emphasis added.)

Among Booz Allen’s senior consulting staff are several former members of the intelligence community, including a former Director of the CIA and a former director of the NSA.

As noted by Barry Steinhardt, an ACLU director, “It’s bad enough that the administration is trying to hold out a private company as a substitute for genuine checks and balances on its surveillance activities. But of all companies to perform audits on a secret surveillance program, it would be difficult to find one less objective and more intertwined with the U.S. government security establishment.” (Emphasis added.)

CONTINUED w Links n Privatized INTEL...

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15696-behind-the-curtain-booz-allen-hamilton-and-its-owner-the-carlyle-group

Ever hear of the Carlyle Group, YouDig? Look 'em up.

[brentspeak]

29. Octafish...

You're responding to an entity whose only job here is to prevent any civil, rational discourse on these boards. He/she/it/they are not here for well-intentioned reasons.

I, however, and I'm sure plenty of other otherwise silent members, appreciate your efforts.

[2cannan]

32. Truer words were never spoken (about the entity and praising Octafish's efforts)! nt

[Melissa G]

36. Swoon.. Ah, Octafish!

I so enjoy the talented manner you school those who merely wish to impede good discourse. Always a pleasure to watch your entertaining style!

[Octafish]

11. Here's detail on how NSA spying helps the well-to-do.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité and ideas like justice, commonwealth and democracy may be missing from humanity's thoughts in the very near future if we don't wake the heck up now.



Like the fellah who just wants a bath and a shave in "High Plains Drifter."

Surveillance and Scandal

Time-Tested Weapons for U.S. Global Power

By Alfred McCoy
Tomgram, Jan. 19, 2014

For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.

For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington’s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.

What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies.

[font color="green"]Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA’s global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.[/font color]

A Cost-Savings Bonanza With a Downside

Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army’s shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI’s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probes into the Internet’s fiber optic cables.

This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began. Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries, as in the Cold War era, but on a truly global scale.

CONTINUED...

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175795/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy,_it's_about_blackmail,_not_national_security/

Why does this matter, when my house is about to get foreclosed because my job got offshored? It's tied in, when Wall Street and War Inc. are where the really Big Bucks go to get made. For We the People are the ones who ALWAYS get "the haircut."



Sometimes a fortune rests on a mere scrap of information, like in a "Fistful of Dollars."

CIA moonlights in corporate world

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.

In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.

The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.

SNIP...

But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.

The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.

CONTINUED...

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eIFPhHBh

Then there's the signature tradition of playing both sides off the middle, like selling rifles to both the Allies and the Central Powers during World War I, or the bounty hunters in "For a Few Dollars More" getting one inside to work out.



Banks is where the money is.

Stratfor: executive boasted of 'trusted former CIA cronies'

By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent
9:08PM GMT 28 Feb 2012
The Telegraph

A senior executive with the private intelligence firm Stratfor boasted to colleagues about his "trusted former CIA cronies" and promised to "see what I can uncover" about a classified FBI investigation, according to emails released by the WikiLeaks.

Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at the Texas firm, also informed members of staff that he had a copy of the confidential indictment on Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

The second batch of five million internal Stratfor emails obtained by the Anonymous computer hacking group revealed that the company has high level sources within the United States and other governments, runs a network of paid informants that includes embassy staff and journalists and planned a hedge fund, Stratcap, based on its secret intelligence.

SNIP...

Mr Assange labelled the company as a "private intelligence Enron", in reference to the energy giant that collapsed after a false accounting scandal.

CONTINUED...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9111784/Stratfor-executive-boasted-of-trusted-former-CIA-cronies.html

Then, there's Booz Allen, NSA's go-to private spyhaus, vacuums and filters the right stuff for Carlyle Group, a buy-partisan business which always seems to know where and what to bomb and make a buck, but the lines between sides turned out be fuzzy and amorphous nebula-like -- like in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."

The Knights of the Revolving Door

When War is Swell: the Carlyle Group and the Middle East at War

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition September 6-8, 2013

Paris.

A couple of weeks ago, in a dress rehearsal for her next presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of humanitarian interventionism, made a pit-stop at the Carlyle Group to brief former luminaries of the imperial war rooms about her shoot-first-don’t-ask-questions foreign policy.

For those of you who have put the playbill of the Bush administration into a time capsule and buried it beneath the compost bin, the Carlyle Group is essentially a hedge fund for war-making and high tech espionage. They are the people who brought you the Iraq war and all those intrusive niceties of Homeland Security. Call them the Knights of the Revolving Door, many of Carlyle’s executives and investors having spent decades in the Pentagon, the CIA or the State Department, before cashing in for more lucrative careers as war profiteers. They are now licking their chops at the prospect for an all-out war against Syria, no doubt hoping that the conflagration will soon spread to Lebanon, Jordan and, the big prize, Iran.

For a refresher course on the sprawling tentacles of the Carlyle Group, here’s an essay that first appeared in CounterPunch’s print edition in 2004. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening years, except these feted souls have gotten much, much richer. – JSC

Across all fronts, Bush’s war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 1000, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Ba’athists for decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.

Still not all of the president’s men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtel’s triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.

Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son’s war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They’ve remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don’t need to hire lobbyists..

Bush Sr. serves as a kind of global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president doesn’t negotiate arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of high level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive business and political ties. According to an account in the Washington Post, Bush Sr. earns around $500,000 for each speech he makes on Carlyle’s behalf.

One of the Saudi investors lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group, the construction conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced Shafiq Bin Laden, Osama’s half brother, to sink $2 million of BinLaden Group money into Carlyle’s accounts. In a pr move, the Carlyle group cut its ties to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/06/when-war-is-swell-the-carlyle-group-and-the-middle-east-at-war/

The reality is that underneath what shows for public navigators is one enormous iceberg made from blood-red ice, invisible to the proles and serfs who are doing their best to keep afloat in a frozen sea of austerity, endless war and debt servitude in what are, by far, the wealthiest times in human history. The fact the greedheads would rather make a World War instead of building a better world for all shows who Terror most benefits.

[YouDig]

12. I'm about conspiracy theoried out.

[Octafish]

14. Profound for you.

Show the first conspiracy theory you find. Otherwise, don't be asinine.

[bobthedrummer]

15. You've only been here for about 60 days, I dig that.

[Octafish]

18. Stratfor via WikiLeaks saw problems from the beginning for Clinton Foundation...

If the for-profit spies noticed what was in the hopper, it's a good bet somebody else noticed the shake down.

2010-2011: Stratfor privately says the Clinton Foundation could be a "shakedown operation" for the Clintons. In 2012, WikiLeaks publishes over five million e-mails from the US-based private intelligence company Stratfor. Stratfor provides confidential intelligence to major corporations and branches of the US government. At some unknown point in either 2010 or 2011, Bart Mongoven, vice president for Stratfor’s public policy intelligence group, writes in an email to Rodger Baker, Stratfor's vice president of geopolitical analysis: &quot Bill) Clinton's biggest project on climate change comes through the Clinton Global Initiative, which has climate among its top priorities. The CGI acts as a funnel for money from wealthy individuals and corporations toward programs and policies that Clinton supports (or that support his or his wife's political objectives). CGI has raised more than $100 million for climate change organizations... CGI and the Clinton Foundation are suspected of being shakedown operations for the Clintons, and especially for Hillary Clinton from 2001 to 2008. If a corporation wanted to be on the Clintons' good side, it had to show up at CGI or give money to the Foundation. The money from CGI or the foundation would go to non-profits that promoted issues of importance to Hillary Clinton's political calculus. In other words, if she needed something to be an important national issue, he would pressure a corporation or billionaire to fund activists who would promote the issue that she needed. CGI has been a good way to read the tea leaves on Hillary Clinton, and it may still be. Either way, the future priorities of CGI are important to understand. Other, less cynical people, say that the CGI and the Clinton Foundation are simple, well-meaning organizations dedicated to funding good works and making the world a better place. (I'll let you come to your own conclusions.)" (WikiLeaks, 10/19/2012)

Source: The Clinton Email Scandal Timeline ©2016 #ClintonEmailTimeline

http://www.thompsontimeline.com/The_Clinton_Foundation_Timeline_-_Part_2#entry000010stratfor

Know your BFEE: WikiLeaks Stratfor Dump Exposes Continued Secret Government Warmongering

[senz]

27. I like your taste in westerns, Octafish.

[Octafish]

33. Thanks, senz! Sergio Leone and Jethro Tull all day long.

Those examples above show who's getting the haircut. Because their crowd controls government and own the mass media, few get to see the stories line up to create the big picture.

In all seriousness, westerns are a bridge to another universe. They give me a chance to think about life without the fears of sudden death which surround us today. Even a tinhorn like me can solve their problems when there are two sides to stand on.

I also use westerns to talk with senior citizens. They almost always smile or laugh upon hearing the name "Randolph Scott!" They may not have thought of him in a loooong time, but they invariably enjoyed (or in the cases of one young girl now near the end of life's course, "endured&quot his pictures. Same goes for bringing up Alan Ladd in "Shane" and Joel McCea in "The Lone Hand."

I like to write SF and dig all genres of film, but westerns are about my faves. In Detroit, COMCAST offers the Starz Encore Western Network...



"It's like a book," Half-Soldier told Angel Eyes. "Now, what's the name of that town? Someplace fairly near?"

What are your taste in westerns, senz? What pictures do you like?

[senz]

42. Interesting, Octafish.

The breadth of your knowledge and interests is slightly mind boggling. I'm seriously glad we progressives and Bernie supporters have someone like you on our side.

My take on westerns is different from yours. I grew up at a time when cowboys were hero figures for kids, representations of inner strength, nobility and freedom as well as attunement to the rugged natural environment of the southwest which I periodically experienced in summertime. All my siblings were boys, which may have helped me internalize the cowboy ethos both as male qualities to admire (plus, they're pretty hot) and personal qualities to aspire to. So, westerns feel natural to me. However, I've never been interested in actors and other celebrities, so the name "Randolph Scott" is simply a name I've heard. In my teens I began to comprehend stylistic differences between writers and then, thanks to a boyfriend who avidly read every copy of Cahiers du Cinéma and took me to scores of movies, I began to understand film as art and directors as auteurs. And then, again due to his enthusiasms, I finally conceptualized westerns as a serious genre. My knowledge is not extensive and deep, nor organized, and I can't even remember all the westerns I've seen and enjoyed. Directors that pop up are John Ford, Sergio Leone, Howard Hawks, Clint Eastwood, Sam Peckinpah. Some films that come to mind are The Searchers, Shane, Stagecoach, The Ox-bow Incident, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, High Plains Drifter, Rio Bravo, Unforgiven, Ride the High Country, and of course, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. At the present moment, I'm remembering Leone and Eastwood films, as well as Altman's very special McCabe and Mrs. Miller, as aesthetically and/or emotionally resonant, and Shane is pretty well internalized for me as classic good vs. evil (hmm, maybe some similarities to the situation here at DU). I wish all this were better organized in my mind; maybe when this harrowing election is over, it will be a nice project to escape into.

I wonder if your perspective as a SF writer gives you a more global understanding of the current state of the country and the world? I've only come to what little I know through flashes of comprehension beginning in the 1990s and probably not complete. I have a bad habit of averting my eyes and mind from evil (for some of us, growing up takes decades.)

Sorry it took so long to answer your question. I shift gears rather slowly.

[immoderate]

3. Uh-huh. The USA is a Reaganomic Republic.

We nearly had the chance to break their string.

--imm

[Octafish]

7. Trickle Down Voodoo has WASTED 7/8 of all the wealth in history on the rich.

My source: David Stockman, GOP wunderkid who implemented Trickle Down as OMB Director.

He added up all the GDP and estimated the riches from the middle ages and ancient times.

His real point is that most all of what's been created since 1981 has ended up in the pockets of the greedhead plutocrats' pockets.



In 1985, the top five percent of the households – the wealthiest five percent – had net worth of $8 trillion – which is a lot. Today, after serial bubble after serial bubble, the top five per cent have net worth of $40 trillion. The top five per cent have gained more wealth than the whole human race had created prior to 1980.” -- David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's budget director

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7009217n&tag=related;photovideo

"In 1985, the top five percent of the households, wealthiest five percent, had net worth of $8 trillion, which is a lot. Today, after serial bubble after serial bubble, the top five percent have net worth of $40 trillion," he explained. "The top five percent have gained more wealth than the whole human race had created prior to 1980." -- David Stockman

SOURCE: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/28/60minutes/main6999906_page4.shtml

And to think there are kids in America who every night would go to bed hungry if they had one.

[laserhaas]

25. The rat exercising the trap

Is.priceless

[bobthedrummer]

8. K&R

It's Al From's Democratic Party..the rest of us just live here (madfloridian DU September 22, 2015)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027191121

[Octafish]

16. The Good Shepherd

It's a fictionalized history of the CIA. Matt Damon's character, Edward Wilson - a confabulation or analgam of James Jesus Angleton and Ted Shackley's careers as snipped from the public record, pays a visit to Joseph Palmi, a Mafia liaison to the Castro Assassination program, played by Joe Pesci.

Before talking business, the small talk...

Joseph Palmi: "We Italians, we've got our families and the Church. What do your people have, Mr. Wilson?"

Edward Wilson: "We've got the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting."

And that little scene spelled out precisely the primal importance on Al From and the related "money trumps peace" crowd place on private property and, thus, its bearing on our current, austere, situation. They don't give humanity and all the death and collateral damage they cause a passing thought. And the rich getting richer, from their POV, isn't a problem.

[senz]

30. Why doesn't that important OP have a "permalink?" I thought all comments did.

Maybe I'm overlooking something?

[Xyzse]

17. Interesting article.

I will have to research that.

[Octafish]

19. Glen Ford is a real journalist.

On Detroit:

“What is emerging in the second decade of the 21st century is a new version of American Apartheid, in which the inhabitants of largely Black urban centers are denied a meaningful vote or the legal capacity to safeguard their collective and individual property from the grasping hands of the rich.”

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/detroit-nexus-new-american-apartheid

One can hear him explain in his own voice at the link.

[Demsrule86]

22. I don't want to hear his voice unless it says...I concede. nt.

[Octafish]

31. Your attitude explains your level of awareness.

Keep it up and one day, maybe soon, you'll know you really are something.

[Demsrule86]

37. It is customary for the loser of any election or primary to concede.

This is part of our peaceful electoral process. Bernie has really behaved badly by not doing so. I believe that.

[eastwestdem]

20. I'm for my nextdoor neighbor, Stan...but he's not on the general election ballot either. nt

[Octafish]

23. Is Stan a Democrat? Here's some of what one Democrat managed to do in only 1,037 days in office.

Look at some of what JFK accomplished in less than three years in office:

Kept peace when almost all counseled war.

Put Main Street ahead of Wall Street.

Respect for Africans and respect for Asians -- not their former colonial masters -- in matters of war and peace, trade and policy.

Integrated White House Secret Service detail and ordered Justice Department to go after the Mafia.

Launched Project Apollo and got humanity to the moon.

If Stan can get even half of that accomplished, he'd be better than what we've had for a long time.

[Demsrule86]

38. Have you ever heard about a little altercation called the bay of pigs?

By all accounts, we came within hours of a nuclear war. I always thought that Johnson got way more done than Kennedy would have in the end.

[Octafish]

39. JFK stood up to the warmongers. Every time.

Case in point:

At a meeting in July 1961 they counseled JFK to attack in the Fall of 1963, when the USA would enjoy optimum strategic and tactical superiority. It's something important that's been missed by journalists and historians due to all copies but one getting burned...

Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?

Recently declassified information shows that the military presented President Kennedy with a plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.

James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell
The American Prospect | September 21, 1994

During the early 1960s the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) introduced the world to the possibility of instant total war. Thirty years later, no nation has yet fired any nuclear missile at a real target. Orthodox history holds that a succession of defensive nuclear doctrines and strategies -- from "massive retaliation" to "mutual assured destruction" -- worked, almost seamlessly, to deter Soviet aggression against the United States and to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.

The possibility of U.S. aggression in nuclear conflict is seldom considered. And why should it be? Virtually nothing in the public record suggests that high U.S. authorities ever contemplated a first strike against the Soviet Union, except in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, or that they doubted the deterrent power of Soviet nuclear forces. The main documented exception was the Air Force Chief of Staff in the early 1960s, Curtis LeMay, a seemingly idiosyncratic case.

But beginning in 1957 the U.S. military did prepare plans for a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R., based on our growing lead in land-based missiles. And top military and intelligence leaders presented an assessment of those plans to President John F. Kennedy in July of 1961. At that time, some high Air Force and CIA leaders apparently believed that a window of outright ballistic missile superiority, perhaps sufficient for a successful first strike, would be open in late 1963.

The document reproduced opposite is published here for the first time. It describes a meeting of the National Security Council on July 20, 1961. At that meeting, the document shows, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, and others presented plans for a surprise attack. They answered some questions from Kennedy about timing and effects, and promised further information. The meeting recessed under a presidential injunction of secrecy that has not been broken until now.

CONTINUED...

http://prospect.org/article/did-us-military-plan-nuclear-first-strike-1963

''And we call ourselves the human race.'' - President John F. Kennedy, after walking out of that briefing.

More important information "Left Out" of the official narrative.

And some more on the history of that time:

LEMNITZER and DULLES knew Bay of Pigs Operation was COMPROMISED, yet gave it their blessings...

CIA Successfuly Conceals Bay of Pigs History

‘Wasn’t that, like, the Bay of Pigs thing?’

Please don't rewrite history, Demsrule86. Learn it.

[Demsrule86]

21. for who? Oh yeah Bernie ...well he lost. So who cares?

I would say better luck next time...but I would not want Bernie to be in the White House unless a DEMOCRAT PRESIDENT invited him.

[Octafish]

24. Who's the real loser, Demsrule86?

[laserhaas]

26. The corporate Red states

For white America

Who dont need {bl}U

[Octafish]

34. Agents for Bush

"The best way to predict the future is to make it happen." -- U.S. Army saying.

1980 campaign:

Agents for Bush

by Bob Callahan*
Covert Action Information Bulletin, Number 33 (Winter 1990)

EXCERPT...

Bush and Terrorism

The Bush presidential campaign not only set the tone for the role and structure of the intelligence apparatus in the new Reagan administration, it also took up a new foreign policy theme which would reap huge political dividends in the years to come. This new theme was terrorism/counterterrorism.

In July 1979 George Bush and Ray Cline attended a conference in Jerusalem where this theme was given its first significant political discussion before leaders of Israel, Great Britain and the United States.

It would take an enormously important event to keep a major American presidential candidate away from campaigning on the Fourth of July weekend. For George Bush, the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism was such an event. The Jerusalem Conference was hosted by the Israeli government and, not surprisingly, most of Israel’s top intelligence officers and leading political (figures) were in attendance. (6)

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin rose to the podium on July 2, 1979 to provide the conference with its opening address. By the summer of 1979, even Menachem Begin was willing to join in the bashing of his old Camp David friend, Jimmy Carter – a practice which had become almost endemic by the fall of 1979.

The Israelis were angry with Carter because his administration had recently released its Annual Report on Human Rights wherein the Israeli Government was taken to task for abusing the rights of the Palestinian people on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel’s new anti-Carter tone was mile, however, compared to the rhetoric of the two separate U.S. delegations which attended the conference. The first delegation was led by the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington. It included the noted black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin; Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute; and Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter of Commentary Magazine. The members of this delegation were registered Democrats, yet all became very active in neo-conservative politics during the Reagan years.

The Republican delegation was led by George Bush. It included Ray Cline and two important members of Bush’s Team B form his CIA days – Major General George Keegan, a Bush supporter who had served as intelligence chief for the United States Air Force; and Harvard professor Richard Pipes. (7)

Looking for a mobilizing issue to counter the Carter-era themes of détente and human rights, the Bush people began to explore the political benefits of embracing the terrorism/anti-terrorism theme.

As Jonathan Marshall of the Oakland Tribune explains: “At the conference, Ray Cline developed the theme that terror was not a random response of frustrated minorities, but rather a preferred instrument of East bloc policy adopted after 1969 when the KGB persuaded the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to accept the PLO as a major political instrument in the Mideast and to subsidize its terrorist policies by freely giving money, training, arms and coordinated communications.(8)

In Ray Cline’s imagination, terrorism had now hardened into a system – an international trouble making system. Richard Pipes elaborated on the Cline hypothesis. “The roots of Soviet terrorism, indeed of modern terrorism,” Pipes states, “date back to 1879….It marks the beginning of that organization which is the source of all modern terrorist groups, whether they be named the Tupamaros, the Baader-Meinhoff group, the Weathermen, Red Brigade or PLO. I refer to the establishment in 1879 of a Congress in the small Russian town of Lipesk, of an organization known as Narodnaya Volya, or the People’s Will.”(9)

According to Philip Paull, who wrote his master’s thesis on the subject of the Jerusalem Conference, “If Pipes was to be believed, the Russians not only support international terrorism, they invented it!”(10)

The Bush/Cline/Pipes definition of terrorism was of course both expeditious and powerfully political. “Left out of their equation,” Jonathan Marshall comments, “was any mention of terrorist acts by CIA-trained Cuban exiles, Israeli ties to Red Brigades, or the function of death squads from Argentina to Guatemala. Soviet sponsorship, real or imagined, had become the defining characteristic of terrorism, not simply an explanation for its prevalence. Moreover, there was no inclination whatsoever to include, under the rubric of terror, bombings of civilians, or any other acts carried out by government forces rather than small individual units.” (11)

Within days after the conference the new propaganda war began in earnest. On July 11, 1979, the International Herald Tribune featured a lead editorial entitled "The Issue is Terrorism," which quoted directly from conference speeches. The same day Congressman Jack Kemp placed selected quotes from the conference in the Congressional Record. In his syndicated column of July 28, 1979, former CIA employee William F. Buckley blasted two of his favorite targets in one single mixed metaphor: “No venture is too small to escape patronage by the Soviet Union,” Buckley stated, “which scatters funds about for terrorists like HEW in search of welfare clients.” Then in August, George Will, who also attended the conference, wrote about it in the Washington Post.

Before the year was out Commentary, National Review, and eventually New Republic writers would all church out yard after yard of copy on this theme. Soon after, Claire Sterling, who had also attended the conference, would create the first "bible" of this new perspective with the publication of her highly controversial book, The Terror Network.(12)

With the help of George Bush and Ray Cline, the Jerusalem Conference had managed to start a propaganda firestorm.

In the following decade, the theme of terrorism/counter-terrorism would grow increasingly important to George Bush. He would become the ranking authority on this subject in the Reagan White House. Indeed, it would be Bush’s own Task Force – the Vice President’s Task Force on Combatting Terroris, -- which would eventually provide Oliver North back channel authorization through which he would bypass certain dissenting administration officials in his ongoing management of the Reagan/Bush Secret War against Nicaragua.(13)

CONTINUED...

PDF: https://archive.org/details/GeorgeBushTheCompanysMan-CovertActionInformationBulletinNo.33

And that is how Poppy got his neat job.

[laserhaas]

35. WOW...I've read 'Crossing the Rubicon' 4 times

Nothing surprises me...any more

Except for the fact of how easy the populace

Can be played to tune

[felix_numinous]

28. Concise and well put

I agree, human rights, inalienable rights is where I draw the line-- they should not be politicized, they were meant to be permanent. THIS is what made America great!

The fact that human rights have been deemed a 'left' issue, and attacked as some kind of cartoon fairy tale only children believe, is evidence these people have truly jumped the proverbial shark into deep dark waters of insanity. You can't have it both ways, ridiculing human rights and then being outraged when the results of this policy come home to roost.

[Uncle Joe]

40. That's an excellent list, I couldn't agree more.

Thanks for the thread, Octafish.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

41. Not long ago = still does today. N.T.

[bobthedrummer]

43. A Dr. Strangelove for the 21st Century (Steve Breyman May 9, 2014) kick

Anne-Marie Slaughter "first woman Director of Policy Planning at the State Department (2009-2011)"
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/09/a-dr-strangelove-for-the-21st-century

The ship of fools continues it's drift.