Voting With Our Feet

By Chris Hedges
Global Research, March 22, 2016
truthdig 20 March 2016

EXCERPT...

In his book “The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology,” Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany and later a scholar of fascism, examined the roots of fascist ideology. He singled out as fundamental to the rise of fascism the collapse of liberalism as a political force and a government crippled by infighting and paralysis. He wrote of the nascent German fascists:

They attacked liberalism because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it: the bourgeois life, Manchesterism (laissez-faire capitalism), materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sensed in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.

SNIP...

We need to once again make the power elites afraid.

Ask yourself, what would Ida B. Wells, Mother Jones, Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, Emma Goldman or “Big Bill” Haywood do? What would Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker or Fred Hampton do?

“They were madmen (and madwomen),” Pierre-Auguste Renoir said of the radicals who rose up and led the Paris Commune, “but they had in them that little flame which never dies.”

SOURCE: http://www.globalresearch.ca/voting-with-our-feet/5515658

For over four decades, Gaddafi promoted economic democracy and used the nationalized oil wealth to sustain progressive social welfare programs for all Libyans. Under Gaddafi’s rule, Libyans enjoyed not only free health-care and free education, but also free electricity and interest-free loans. Now thanks to NATO’s intervention the health-care sector is on the verge of collapse as thousands of Filipino health workers flee the country, institutions of higher education across the East of the country are shut down, and black outs are a common occurrence in once thriving Tripoli.

-- http://www.globalresearch.ca/libya-from-africas-wealthiest-democracy-under-gaddafi-to-us-nato-sponsored-terrorist-haven/5482974

[font size="5"]Just our Bill[/font size]

By Dennis Roddy
Saturday, December 02, 2000

Lito Pena is sure of his memory. Thirty-six years ago he, then a Democratic Party poll watcher, got into a shoving match with a Republican who had spent the opening hours of the 1964 election doing his damnedest to keep people from voting in south Phoenix.

"He was holding up minority voters because he knew they were going to vote Democratic," said Pena.

The guy called himself Bill. He knew the law and applied it with the precision of a swordsman. He sat at the table at the Bethune School, a polling place brimming with black citizens, and quizzed voters ad nauseam about where they were from, how long they'd lived there -- every question in the book. A passage of the Constitution was read and people who spoke broken English were ordered to interpret it to prove they had the language skills to vote.

By the time Pena arrived at Bethune, he said, the line to vote was four abreast and a block long. People were giving up and going home.

SNIP…

Party leaders told him not to get physical, but this was the second straight election in which Republicans had sent out people to intellectually rough up the voters. The project even had a name: Operation Eagle Eye.

CONTINUED…

http://old.post-gazette.com/columnists/20001202roddy.asp

FLINT CRISIS:

Panel issues emails showing EPA reluctance to confront state

Tiffany Stecker, E&E reporter
E&E Daily: Wednesday, March 16, 2016

EXCERPT...

"I'll bet that the State will take this personally since they are responsible for the City of Flint's actions; which isn't a bad thing, but they may get VERY defensive," wrote Jennifer Crooks, Michigan program manager in Region 5's groundwater and drinking water division, in a July 9 email. "We need to move forward and work with the State as our partner ... I don't see the benefit in rubbing their nose in the fact that we're right, and they're wrong."

SNIP...

"I'm not so sure Flint is the community we want to go out on a limb for. At least without a better understanding of where all that money went," wrote Debbie Baltazar, chief of state and tribal programs for Region 5, in a Sept. 24, 2015, email.

Gerald Ford: Warren Commission skeptics "no problem"

by a gnostic
Fri Aug 08, 2008 at 02:06:56 PM PDT

The Washington Post reports that, per newly declassified documents, Gerald Ford was secretly forwarding information to the FBI about the Warren Commission inquiry into John F. Kennedy's assassination and that Ford, then a congressman, told the FBI that skeptical members of the Warren Commission posed "no problem" to ____ (fill in the blank), that three members "failed to understand" the bullet trajectory, and that two members were skeptical that the shots came from the Texas Book Repository.

-------------------------------------

a gnostic's diary :: ::

Ford Told FBI of Skeptics on Warren Commission

A December 1963 memo recounts that Ford, then a Republican congressman from Michigan, told FBI Assistant Director Cartha D. "Deke" DeLoach that two members of the seven-person commission remained unconvinced that Kennedy had been shot from the sixth-floor window of the Texas Book Depository. In addition, three commission members "failed to understand" the trajectory of the slugs, Ford said.

Ford told DeLoach that commission discussions would continue and reassured him that those minority points of view on the commission "of course would represent no problem," one internal FBI memo shows. The memo does not name the members involved and does not elaborate on what Ford meant by "no problem."

-------------------------------------------------

SOURCE w details: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/08/08/564843/-Gerald-Ford-Warren-Commission-skeptics-no-problem


My bold.

No problem to whom?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Ford told FBI about panel’s doubts on JFK murder

Former President Ford confided to FBI about panel's doubts over JFK assassination

MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN
AP News/Washington Post, Aug 09, 2008 09:19 EST

Former President Ford secretly advised the FBI that two of his fellow members on the Warren Commission doubted the FBI's conclusion that John F. Kennedy was shot from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository in Dallas, according to newly released records from Ford's FBI files.

SNIP...

A newly released memorandum provides more details about Ford's role as the FBI's informant. DeLoach wrote on Dec. 17, 1963, to outline what Ford told him in the congressman's office about the commission meeting the day before.

"Two members of the commission brought up the fact that they still were not convinced that the President had been shot from the sixth floor window of the Texas Book Depository," DeLoach wrote. "These members failed to understand the trajectory of the slugs that killed the President. He stated he felt this point would be discussed further but, of course, would represent no problem."

There was no explanation of what Ford meant by "no problem."

Warren Commission records released in 1997 revealed that in the final report Ford changed the staff's original description of one of Kennedy's wounds. Ford said then he only made the description more precise. Skeptics said Ford's wording falsely made the wound seem higher on the body to make the panel's conclusion that one bullet hit both Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally more plausible.

CONTINUED...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/09/AR2008080900742_pf.html

Gerald Ford's Terrible Fiction

Moving the Back Wound and the Single Bullet Theory

Read Gerald Ford's correction to the Warren Commission Report Draft:

page 1 page 2

The initial draft of the report stated:
"A bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the shoulder to the right of the spine."

Ford wanted it to read:
"A bullet had entered the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine."

Autopsy Face Sheet
Drawing showing area of back wound

JFK assassination eye-witnesses, including the observations of at least one Secret Service man in Dealey Plaza and several FBI agents present at the Bethesda autopsy, placed the president's back wound exactly where the mute testimony of the president's jacket and shirt showed where the wound was: six inches below the collar line.

CONTINUED w DOCUMENTS, EVIDENCE, LINKS...

http://jfklancer.com/Ford-Rankin.html

Soviets Knew Date of Cuba Attack

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 29, 2000; A04

Shortly after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, a top CIA
official told an investigative commission that the Soviet Union had
somehow learned the exact date of the amphibious landing in advance,
according to a newly declassified version of the commission's final report.

Moreover, the CIA apparently had known of the leak to the Soviets--and
went ahead with the invasion anyway.

In an effort to oust Fidel Castro, the CIA organized and trained a force of
about 1,400 Cuban exiles and launched the invasion on April 17, 1961.
Castro's soldiers easily repelled the landing force in less than 72 hours,
killing 200 rebels and capturing 1,197 others in what became one of the
worst foreign policy blunders of the Cold War.

The investigative commission, chaired by Gen. Maxwell Taylor, was
established almost immediately and held a series of secret hearings at the
Pentagon before sending a sharply critical report to President Kennedy in
June 1961.

CONTINUED…

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/bay-of-pigs/soviets.htm