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Octafish

Octafish's Journal
Octafish's Journal
May 5, 2013

Which is why the First Amendment is so important and modern gatekeepers so repugnant.

Obama Confidant's Spine-Chilling Proposal

Everybody knows Rush Limbaugh. Who ever heard of Phil Zelikow?

Undemocratic in the extreme.
May 5, 2013

We've got Democratic senators who have liberal records, except when it comes to defense spending.

Which helps explain the creepy way the wars just keep on keeping on and on, even when the enemy we created this giant national security complex to defend us from is no more.

May 5, 2013

No. The point is George Herbert Walker Bush was in Dallas the day JFK was assassinated.

He told the FBI he was there, yet Poppy Bush has never had to answer publicly a single question about that memo. Poppy has never been asked about it in public by a member of the news media. One I know who tried to ask him via official channels, Russ Baker, got labeled "conspiracy theorist," affecting the coverage his resulting work received. Similar treatment by the mainstream media is afforded many authors who go against the Warren Commission.

George H W Bush did answer, through a spokesman, questions raised by the second memo to "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" when an article by Joseph McBride about it was published in The Nation just before the 1988 campaign. The agency, at the time, broke protocol and publicly fingered another George Bush who had worked at CIA on loan from another government agency. Reached at his home by reporters knocking on his door, that George Bush said he had never been briefed about the assassination on the feelings of the pro- and anti-Castro Cuban communities in Miami.

Here's another point I like to make: Based on these FBI memos and Bush's behavior at the funeral of Gerald Ford, where in his eulogy he brought up a "deluded gunman" and chuckled, I'd like to see him answer questions about what he knows about the assassination of President Kennedy, while he's still alert and able. At the minimum, he's a material witness.

May 5, 2013

Why should I care? I didn't bring it up. Yet, you continue blowing it out of proportion.

Why you insist on making it into the point of discussion when I didn't bring it up is your M.O.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=219508&mesg_id=219638

You must be hoping to compel me to anger. Like I care what you think.

May 5, 2013

Note how despots and their countries are just loved by the BFEE?



In Vietnam, Diem.

In the Philippines, Marcos.

In Nicaragua, Somoza.

In Iran, the Shah.

In Iraq, Saddam.

In Panama, Noriega.

In Chile, Pinochet.

In Egypt, Mubarak.

"Money trumps peace." -- George W Bush, selected pretzeldent.
May 4, 2013

The Privilege of the Pritzkers



An Interview with Tim Anderson on Obama's Commerce Nominee, Penny Pritzker, the Sub-Prime Queen

The Privilege of the Pritzkers

by DENNIS BERNSTEIN
CounterPunch, May 3-5, 2013

EXCERPT...

TA: $38 billion. One publication listed eight casinos, another listed 13, with each license worth a half a million dollars. There is another $5-7 billion in casinos. When you own 13 casinos for 5-7 billion, you are a player in the casino business. That’s just the hotels and casinos. There are many other companies they own such as the second largest chewing tobacco company, which they sold for 3.5 billion dollars. They actually owned the second and third largest chewing tobacco company, but have since off-loaded those for billions of dollars. Many of their assets are not what society considers clean assets, but hey don’t care. As far as money goes, they want it. When it comes to casinos or chewing tobacco companies, they don’t care. Their wealth is almost incalculable, because according to Forbes magazine, they are the only family in America to have off shore tax-free trusts because they were grandfathered in. Their off shore trust can ship money back to their family tax-free. It was grandfathered in because their grandfather got it through Congress – he was smart to see the future and got it done. Congress closed the loophole and grandfathered him in. Forbesmagazine wrote about the Pritzker’s off shore trust, they emphasized that there are over 1000 separate trusts. Many families have two or three different savings accounts to keep track of what money belongs to who, but when you have over 1000 different trusts to handle the family estate it’s very hard to comprehend how much wealth there is and how many businesses they control. A few years ago, Penny sold TransUnion, the largest credit reporting agency in America, but there’s a question about whether she sold it to herself by selling it to various hedge funds which her family has a large interest in. Until she sold it, you could say that Penny Pritzker had more files on every citizen in America than the CIA and FBI combined, because everybody has a credit score and credit report. Penny Pritzker had the credit scores and report on every single citizen in America.

SNIP...

TA: She had TransUnion while she had Superior Bank, so she controlled the credit scores of everybody who was getting a subprime loan. You pay a higher interest on your subprime loan based on your credit score. Whether or not it was ever brokered between the credit bureau and the bank, we don’t know, but we know the same people control both entities.

SNIP...

TA: Superior Bank was acquired back in 1989 as part of the original savings and loan giveaway by M, D and E Wall. As I wrote a in a paper for an economic conference in Denver, Superior Bank was sold to the Pritzkers for 42.5 million dollars. They changed the name from Lion Savings and Loan to Superior Bank after they acquired it. Lion Savings and Loan was sold to the Pritzkers just to put up money for the capital. But as government reports show, they only put up a million dollars cash and pledged their assets as the difference, the capital. That’s not supposed to be done, but they are privileged people so they get privileged deals. After they acquired this for $1 million they also got $640 million in tax credits.

SNIP...

TA: The tax credits were designed so they could use it in any entity they wanted. They didn’t have to use it on what they bought. It could be sold on the open market for value, the credits could be used to file back taxes or warehouse them for future taxes. So for a million dollars, they got 640 million dollars for agreeing to take over Superior Bank, which they then looted for years then gave it back to the government with an enormous loss to the uninsured depositors and the whole subprime industry.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/03/the-privilege-of-the-pritzkers/

PS: I don't have anything against rich people, per se. I'd just like to see the offices and powers of the government go toward helping somebody other than the rich. For a change.
May 4, 2013

Democracy and the Pathology of Wealth -- Michael Parenti



"Most of the world is capitalist. And most of the world is poor."

May 3, 2013

Many organizations and individuals have gone out of their way to cover up child abuse.

From the Roman Catholic Church to the United States Government to Penn State University to Jerry Sandusky's charity to BBC London and Margaret Thatcher's friends and who knows who, what and where else.

Remember Mark Foley, Republican-FL, who was in charge of protecting 'Missing and Exploited Children'?



That guy resigned and no charges were filed against Foley, who as a Republican congressman sent sexually suggestive Instant Messages to an underage male page.

In his official capacity, Foley established for himself a leadership role in protecting "Missing and Exploited Children" on Capitol Hill.

Did Foley ever work with the Second Mile organization that super conservative 'ball coach Jerry Sandusky founded and used to find victims?

If so, the connection may lead to unmasking some of the sickest of the sick. Foley was nationwide. It seems Sandusky was protected by officials at Penn State.

Most shocking is how I've failed to find in all this is anyone with real authority working to protect children, except the gay Republican out of Arizona who tried to warn his colleagues about Foley in 2000.

Let's hop over the Pond and we see that the problems are "Over There," too. And the story is seldom, if ever, mentioned in the US news media.



Jimmy Savile's extraordinary access to Margaret Thatcher detailed in secret files

Guardian, Dec. 28, 2012

Jimmy Savile gleefully informed the prime minister about "my girl patients" after meeting her at a Downing Street fund-raising ceremony where he sought advice on charities' tax deductions.

A letter preserved in Downing Street's records sheds fresh light on the extraordinary access the now disgraced BBC television presenter enjoyed at the height of his popularity.

In the letter sent to Margaret Thatcher during her first year in office, Savile displayed all his brazen charms. The note, featuring a prominent colour photo of himself, declared: "Dear Prime Minister, I waited a week before writing to thank you for my lunch invitation because I had such a superb time I didn't want to be too effusive.

"My girl patients pretended to be madly jealous and wanted to know what you wore and what you ate. All the paralysed lads called me 'Sir James' all week. They all love you. Me too!! Jimmy Savile OBE xxx."

CONTINUED...

http://m.guardiannews.com/uk/2012/dec/28/jimmy-savile-access-margaret-thatcher



Of course, by labelling all this "conspiracy theory" it serves to end discussion in the minds of many. Which, as you know, Rainforestgoddess, serves to imperil innocent lives.
May 3, 2013

How people who hate Conpiracy Theories operate...

About three years after the death of President John F. Kennedy, it became a matter of official CIA policy to denigrate anyone who disagreed with the Warren Commission conclusion of Oswald as the lone gunman. So, the agency ordered its "media assets" to label anyone who disagreed with the Big Lie as a "conspiracy nut." Ever hear Corporate McPravda say anything nice about Jim Garrison or Oliver Stone?

Here's background:



How the CIA Killed History

by Ace R. Hayes
(May/June 1997 issue)
From the Portland Free Press

Editor's note: Three decades ago (4 January 1967), the CIA produced adocument (#1035-960), "Countering Criticism of the Warren Report." This document was partly declassified under an FOIA, September 1976. It is the blueprint for employing "CIA media assets" to smear critics of the Warren Commission. The justification for this perversion of truth, justice and democracy was clearly stated: "Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society."

CONTINUED…

http://www.redshift.com/~damason/lhreport/flash//ciakillhistory.html

Read this CIA document 1035-960 here:

http://www.discip.crdp.ac-caen.fr/anglais/documents/america2/CIA%20Document%20_1035-960.htm


Countering Criticism of the Warren Report

http://www.jfklancer.com/CIA.html



The term “conspiracy nut” soon evolved into “conspiracy theorist” as code for “psychotic,” “paranoid” or “kook.” Consider how quickly that label, once pinned on a person, prevents any further consideration of the person’s rhetoric, writings or discoveries.

So people who wonder why the “government” doesn’t give two figs for finding out who killed President Kennedy, a Liberal Democrat, who worked every day of his time as President to keep the peace, make life better for ALL Americans, and make the world a better place (which is a lot more than most presidents since have done or even tried) are called “nuts.”

That's what Allen Dulles, J Edgar Hoover, and their stooges and sub-stooges in Congress and the White House worked to do. And to think so many today continue their work, spreading lies. The hell with such people.

Here’s a bit of real work by David Talbot. The editor of Slate.com, Talbot’s a more accomplished journalist, writer, researcher and an all-around better source than Kos ever will be, IMFO.



The Mother of All Cover-Ups

Forty years after the Warren Report, the official verdict on the Kennedy assassination, we now know the country's high and mighty were secretly among its biggest critics

by David Talbot
This article first appeared in the September 15, 2004 issue of Salon.com

EXCERPT…

There is one sanctuary where the Warren Report is still stubbornly upheld and where its manifold critics can expect their own rough treatment: in the towers of the media elite. Fresh from assaulting Oliver Stone, not only for his film but his very character (a media shark-attack in which, I must confess, I too once engaged), the national press rushed to embrace Gerald Posner's bold 1993 defense of the Warren Report, "Case Closed," making it a bestseller. ("The most convincing explanation of the assassination," historian Robert Dallek called it in the Boston Globe.) And the 40th anniversary of JFK's murder last November sparked a new cannonade of anti-conspiracy sound and fury, with ABC's Peter Jennings making yet another network news attempt to silence the report's critics. Most of the press lords and pundits in the 1960s who allowed themselves to be convinced that the Warren Report was the correct version of what happened in Dallas -- whether because they genuinely believed it or because they thought it was for the good of the country -- are now dead or retired. But after buying the official version for so long, it seems the elite media institutions have too much invested in the Warren Report to change their minds now, even if they're under new editorial leadership.

One of the great ironies of history is that while the media elite was busily trying to shore up public confidence in the Warren Report, the political elite was privately confiding among themselves that the report was a travesty, a fairy tale for mass consumption. Presidents, White House aides, intelligence officials, senators, congressmen, even foreign leaders -- they all muttered darkly among themselves that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, a plot that a number of them suspected had roots in the U.S. government itself. (In truth, some high media dignitaries have also quietly shared their doubts about the official version. In 1993, CBS anchorman Dan Rather, who did much along with his network to enforce the party line on Dallas, confessed to Robert Tannenbaum, the former deputy chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, "We really blew it on the Kennedy assassination.&quot

Thanks to tapes of White House conversations that have been released to the public in recent years, we now know that the man who appointed the Warren Commission -- President Lyndon Johnson -- did not believe its conclusions. On September 18, 1964, the last day the panel met, commission member Sen. Richard Russell phoned Johnson, his old political protege, to tell him he did not believe the single bullet theory, the key to the commission's finding that Oswald acted alone. "I don't either," Johnson told him. Johnson's theories about what really happened in Dallas shifted over the years. Soon after the assassination, Johnson was led to believe by the CIA that Kennedy might have been the victim of a Soviet conspiracy. Later his suspicions focused on Castro; during his long-running feud with Robert Kennedy, LBJ leaked a story to Washington columnist Drew Pearson suggesting the Kennedy brothers themselves were responsible JFK's death by triggering a violent reaction from the Cuban leader with their "goddamed Murder Inc." plots to kill him. In 1967, according to a report in the Washington Post, Johnson's suspicious gaze came to rest on the CIA. The newspaper quoted White House aide Marvin Watson as saying that Johnson was "now convinced" Kennedy was the victim of a plot and "that the CIA had something to do with this plot." Max Holland, who has just published a study of LBJ's views on Dallas, "The Kennedy Assassination Tapes," intriguingly concludes that Johnson remained haunted by the murder throughout his tenure in the White House. "It is virtually an article of faith among historians that the war in Vietnam was the overwhelming reason the president left office in 1969, a worn, bitter, and disillusioned man," writes Holland. "Yet the assassination-related tapes paint a more nuanced portrait, one in which Johnson's view of the assassination weighed as heavily on him as did the war."

Critics of the Warren Report's lone-assassin conclusion were often stumped by defenders of the report with the question, "If there was a conspiracy, why didn't President Kennedy's own brother -- the attorney general of the United States, Robert Kennedy -- do anything about it?" It's true that, at least until shortly before his assassination death in June 1968, Bobby Kennedy publicly supported the Warren Report. On March 25, during a presidential campaign rally at San Fernando Valley State College in California, Kennedy was dramatically confronted by a woman heckler, who called out, "We want to know who killed President Kennedy!" Kennedy responded by saying, "I stand by the Warren Commission Report." But at a later campaign appearance, days before his assassination, Bobby Kennedy said the opposite, according to his former press spokesman Frank Mankiewicz. When asked if he would reopen the investigation into his brother's death, he uttered a simple, one-word answer: "Yes." Mankiewicz recalls today, "I remember that I was stunned by the answer. It was either like he was suddenly blurting out the truth, or it was a way to shut down the questioning -- you know, 'Yes, now let's move on.'"

His public statements on the Warren Report were obviously freighted with political and emotional -- and perhaps even security -- concerns for Bobby Kennedy. But we have no doubt what his private opinion of the report was -- as his biographer Evan Thomas wrote, Kennedy "regarded the Warren Commission as a public relations exercise to reassure the public." According to a variety of reports, Kennedy immediately suspected a plot as soon as he heard his brother had been shot in Dallas. And as he made calls and inquiries in the hours and days after the assassination, he came to an ominous conclusion: JFK was the victim of a domestic political conspiracy. In a remarkable passage in "One Hell of a Gamble," a widely praised 1997 history of the Cuban missile crisis based on declassified Soviet and U.S. government documents, historians Alexksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali wrote that on November 29, one week after the assassination, Bobby Kennedy dispatched a close family friend named William Walton to Moscow with a remarkable message for Georgi Bolshakov, the KGB agent he had come to trust during the nerve-wracking back-channel discussions sparked by the missile crisis. According to the historians, Walton told Bolshakov that Bobby and Jacqueline Kennedy believed "there was a large political conspiracy behind Oswald's rifle" and "that Dallas was the ideal location for such a crime." The Kennedys also sought to reassure the Soviets that despite Oswald's apparent connections to the communist world, they believed President Kennedy had been killed by American enemies. This is a stunning account -- with the fallen president's brother and widow communicating their chilling suspicions to the preeminent world rival of the U.S. -- and it has not received nearly the public attention it deserves.

CONTINUED…

http://home.earthlink.net/~jkelin1/talbot.html



Why is it that some people make the “koo-koo” signal circling their forefinger around their temple and rolling their eyes whenever the subject is something that may be outside their understanding?

People who advance or doubt “conspiracy theories” when they are disagreeing with the “official story” are not nuts. They are not even “theorists.” They are Truth Seekers.

May 3, 2013

You know who REALLY hates 'Conspiracy Theories'?

The Bush family, where it's a generational thing:

''Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories.'' -- George Walker Bush, a GOP-appointed pretzeldent of the United States.



"We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty. To inflamOoe ethnic hatred is to advance the cause of terror." -- Commander-n-Thief George Walker Bush speaks to United Nations, November 10, 2001

Poppy didn't care much for "Conspiracy Theorists" either, mentioning them at the funeral of unelected president and former Warren Commissioner Gerald R. Ford.
P
After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And the conspiracy theorists can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Jerry Ford put his name on it and Jerry Ford’s word was always good.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x3029417


Seldom remembered and never mentioned in the media or academia are the NAZI connections to the Warren Commission:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5572427

When so many find the Truth to be unbelievable shows what kind of remarkably times these are.

How many understood his telling laugh?



http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021010833#post24

Poppy revealed himself to be very, very forgiving about one subject:

''Let’s forgive the NAZI war criminals.''

Poppy Bush wants us to move on with der business. He is quoted as stating the above in The New York Times of April 14, 1990.

Anyway, it's almost odd how few are left these days to remember his father, before-he-became-Sen. Prescott Sheldon Bush and his own role in trading with the enemy during World War II:



How utterly coincidental that the Bill of Rights is a thing of the past and the Have-Mores have almost all of it, I'm sure not.

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