Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: On Scalia & Trump [View all]Octafish
(55,745 posts)5. Friendly Fascism: A Division of the BFEE
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 weve 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, Dont you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that because Im 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, whod 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 dont 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 Shahs 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. Its 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 Frances 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 Monitors 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 Reagans 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 months 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 werent released until Reagan was inaugurated, Reagan appointed Casey director of the CIA, and from that point forward Americas 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 Posts 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 familys 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 companys 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.
Edit history
Please sign in to view edit histories.
10 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
RecommendedHighlight replies with 5 or more recommendations
last sentence...second to the last paragraph..."completion". Did you mean "competition"?
antigop
Dec 2015
#1
So true. Now we see the mission behind his strict constructionist method.
Baitball Blogger
Dec 2015
#7