Friday, November 04, 2011

The world of Barney Frank: "blowing away" taxpayers' money on Wall Street....


The world of Barney Frank: "blowing away" taxpayers' money on Wall Street....


November , 2011 -- Barney Frank operates a gay intimidation and Wall Street lobbying operation...

White House finds it difficult to tamp down Obama's "preferences."
December , 2011 -- Obama's best friends in Washington....


WMR was preparing to go to press with a story about President Obama's closest friends and advisers in Washington when Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) announced that he was foregoing another re-election bid and was leaving the Congress. On November 28, the White House announced "This country has never had a Congressman like Barney Frank, and the House of Representatives will not be the same without him."

While it's not easy to read the minds of the White House spinmeisters, the announcement is odd. But perhaps not so odd when considering the story we were about to run. WMR has learned from members of Washington's wealthy and very pro-Obama gay community, centered in Georgetown and in the DuPont Circle area, that Obama's closest friends and advisers are almost exclusively gay males and that the president prefers their company and advice over heterosexual politicos and Democratic Party stalwarts.

While Frank was unusual in the general history of the House, he certainly was not the only gay male member of Congress -- Gerry Studds, Larry Craig, Bob Bauman, and Mark Foley are testament to that fact. But to suggest or infer that Frank is in the same league as Sam Rayburn, Nicholas Longworth, Joseph Cannon, Joseph Martin, or Carl Albert is a very big stretch of the imagination.

Obama was attending Harvard Law School when the Massachusetts congressman was in the news for hiring his lover, Stephen Gobie, as his staff driver, and who was later discovered to be running a call boy service from Frank's Capitol Hill townhouse. However, if Frank's hero status among Washington's gay community is all that one cares about in writing his congressional career epilogue, it can be understood why Obama, who seeks the counsel and friendship of Washington's gay Democrats, would be so inclined to heap praise upon Frank.

There is also a political consequence attached to Obama's sexual predilections. Top Obama advisers, including re-election campaign chief David Axelrod, have made the decision that they do not want to run against any Republican who has a whiff of sex scandals in their background -- and that includes Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry. The Obama advisers know that if sex becomes an issue in the general election, their candidate will face some tough questioning if the campaign heads into the gutter. Therefore, the favorite GOP candidates for Obama's team are the two ostensibly squeaky-clean Mormons, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman. Neither Romney nor Huntsman, who served as Obama's ambassador to Beijing, are expected by the Obama team to take the low road in the sexual dirt department, especially considering Romney's tepid pro-civil union stance as governor of Massachusetts.

Today, November 30, President Obama is in mid-town Manhattan to attend a small and intimate fundraiser to celebrate the passage of New York's gay marriage law. Small may be the crowd but not the ticket prices, which range from $10,000 to $35,800 per head....


Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) has, according to well-placed congressional sources, used his office to hire openly gay staffers with the ultimate intent of later forcing them into senior staff positions for incoming Democratic freshmen members of Congress. The operation, which has resulted in a steady increase in the number of gay and intimately-connected staffers in the House of Representatives, resembles the 2006 GOP House scandal, in which page sex scandal investigation target Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) was linked to a number of gay male staffers in his own office and those of ex-Representative Tom Reynolds (R-NY)and ex-House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Frank is not stranger to impropriety in his gay relationships. In the mid-1980s, Frank was reprimanded by his House colleagues for fixing the Congressional parking tickets for and not telling the truth about a gay escort named Paul Gobie. Gobie was also using Frank's Capitol Hill residence to operate a gay escort service. Efforts to censure and expel Frank from the House were led by Rep. Larry Craig (R-ID), who, in 2007 as a U.S. Senator, would be arrested by a Minneapolis airport police officer for trying to solicit gay sex in a men's restroom.

WMR has also discovered evidence that Frank hired a male staffer having an arrest record for molesting two underage teen males in New York state. It is believed that Frank maintained a relationship with the staffer until an incoming freshman Democratic House member was forced to hire the Frank staffer as his own chief-of-staff. Soon, the new member's chief-of-staff began dealing with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Frank's staff to ensure the new member, who did not support President Obama's health care initiative, would be engulfed in a carefully contrived and engineered scandal and be forced from office.

Frank, the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, has also been embroiled in a conflict-of-interest in having one of his ex-gay staffers become a top lobbyist for Wall Street. Frank's committee has oversight over Wall Street and Frank was involved in approving government bailout funds for Goldman Sachs and other "too-big-to-fail" Wall Street firms.

November , 2011 -- "Which office do I go to ... to get my reputation back?"


"Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?" Those were the words of former Reagan Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan after he was acquitted on fraud charges on May 25, 1987.

Those same words and their attribution to Donovan appear on a t-shirt given to former Democratic U.S. Representative Eric Massa by a legal team representing the office of U.S. House Employment Counsel after their determination that Massa, a retired U.S. Navy Commander, did not sexually harass male members of his staff. Massa experienced a stormy resignation from Congress and a hasty departure from Washington after unsubstantiated rumors surfaced that he had engaged in inappropriate sexual contact with his male staffers. The rumors, as shall be described, emanated from a closely-connected group of gay congressional staffers on the Hill, many of whom once worked for openly gay Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank, the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, the chief overseer over Wall Street firms.

As the carefully-engineered "scandal" began to spell the end of Massa's term as a House member, Massa recalled how then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel confronted him, naked, in the shower of the House gym, after Massa's first eight weeks in office. Emanuel berated Massa for not supporting President Obama's health care bill, poking Massa in the chest with his finger. It turns out that Emanuel, a former House member, spent every morning hanging around the House gym's showers. Massa, just hours away from resigning his seat, told a radio interviewer that Emanuel was "the son of the devil's spawn," adding, "he is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive . . . ladies and gentlemen, you live today in a world that is so innocent as to not understand what's going on in Washington, D.C."

At the time, Massa believed that it was his opposition to "Obamacare" that made him a target of Emanuel. However, WMR has learned that the effort to scandalize Massa had even deeper roots, roots that made the first-term congressman a problem for the power structure embedded in Washington, Wall Street, and Jerusalem.

Massa was a one-time aide to NATO military commander General Wesley Clark but had to retire from the Navy medical reasons having been diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Massa fully recovered from the cancer and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House against GOP incumbent Randy Kuhl in 2006. In 2008, in a re-match in a Democratic year, Massa narrowly defeated Kuhl in the traditionally conservative Republican district, long dominated by its chief employer, Corning Glass, and its owners, the Houghton family. In fact, Kuhl's predecessor was Amo Houghton, scion of the Corning owners, but a dying breed in the GOP -- a social liberal and fiscal conservative. It was by adopting such a political brand that helped Massa best Kuhl for the normally Republican seat in 2008. It also helped that Clark and former president Bill Clinton campaigned for Massa. Not forthcoming with campaign help was Emanuel and his Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee money. Emanuel never supported Massa's bid for the House.

However, Massa's success resulted in a number of hidden agendas confronting him from the outset. Massa opposed natural gas "fracking" in his state of New York, not popular with the powerful oil and gas lobby; raised the red flags of treasonous behavior with top Pentagon brass as it became known that General David Petraeus, the commander of CENTCOM and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was meeting with top GOP officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, to plot out a run for the White House in 2012 against Petraeus's own Commander-in-Chief; and opposed the Wall Street bailouts and pocket-lining inherent with Obama's stimulus package and health care program.

But as much as his opposition to Obama, the gas industry, and the machinations of Petraeus may have placed him in jeopardy, it was Massa's meeting with one of his constituents, in the far northern reaches of his 29th District, in Rochester, that spelled his doom, as many similar stances in the past have resulted in a trail of destroyed political careers, from Secretary of Defense James Forrestal to Senators Charles Percy and J. William Fulbright, and Representatives Paul Findlay, Pete McCloskey, James Traficant, and Cynthia McKinney.

In a carefully unpublicized meeting, Massa met with John Hrankowski, a survivor of the unprovoked and wilfull 1967 Israeli attack on the National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence collection ship, the USS Liberty and the chief promoter of the USS Liberty Memorial in Rochester, a landmark that was vigorously opposed by Jewish groups and the Israeli Lobby. Hrankowski died in March but the memorial in honor of the 34 US Navy and NSA personnel killed by Israeli aircraft strafing and torpedo boats, as well as the rest of the crew, lives on, despite the concerted efforts by many American Jews and the Israel Lobby to obliterate the memory of the ship from history.

Already considered by the House leadership, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, whose sister was once the executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as not in lockstep with the Obama and Emanuel agenda, Massa was targeted in a campaign by a powerful group that is only whispered about on Capitol Hill -- the "Lavender Mafia," a group of openly and closeted gay staffers with close links, including past employment, with the office of Barney Frank.

Upon winning his seat in 2008, Massa was forced by the House Democratic leadership to accept as his chief-of-staff a gay Frank staffer, Joe Racalto, a one-time intern and driver for Frank who was brought into Frank's office by Robert Raben, a former Frank counsel and now the head of the Raben Group, which counts some of Wall Street's top firms as clients, firms over which Frank has oversight authority.

After Massa met with Hrankowski, a person described as Massa's "AIPAC overseer," approached him and asked why he had met with the former Liberty crewman. There was an obvious leak in Massa's office. Soon, Racalto began conspiring with Frank's chief of staff to undermine Massa with a contrived sex scandal. Massa's "salty" Navy language around his office began to be twisted into "sexual harassment" issues, including later charges by Racalto that he had been harassed by Massa.

In a Closing Argument made by House Office of Compliance attorneys Gloria Lett, Victoria Botvin, and Randall Robertson, it is stated: "Racalto never once alleged that he had been sexually harassed by Massa, and never once reported or complained about anyone that he had been sexually harassed . . . In short, this sexual harassment action is just one more of Racalto's strategic attempts to unjustly enrich himself through a calculated and manipulative series of lies." Helping Racalto in his "legal defense fund" is none other than Raben, the Wall Street lobbyist.

WMR has also learned from 29th District sources that Racalto maintained a relationship with Massa's announced GOP challenger, Tom Reed, at the same time that Racalto served as Massa's chief of staff. Reed, who was the mayor of Corning and is married with children, had been implicated in an attempt to conduct a sexual foursome after meeting two of Massa's female staffers in a Corning bar. Whether Racalto used this information to cut a side deal for future favors from Reed is not known but it is clear that a relationship developed between Massa's chief of staff and his Republican challenger.

There is little doubt that Massa faced two formidable but hidden oppoents: Rahm Emanuel, who never supported Massa's bid for the House, and Karl Rove, the GOP's rottweiler on keeping Democrats out of safe GOP districts. But could Emanuel and Rove have worked together, through people like Frank, Reed, Racalto, and others, to topple Massa? Such a scenario is likely considering that Rove's 2012 candidate, Mitt Romney, is benefiting from the sex scandal meltdown of pizza magnate Herman Cain. There are reports that some of the sexual dirt on Cain originated with Rahm Emanuel, now the mayor of Chicago, placing Rove and Emanuel in the same sty of political mud.

However, blackmailable information is the stock-in-trade for the "Lavender Mafia." New York Democratic Representative Bernard Higgins, who is married and represents the Buffalo area 27th District, has not been thrown out of Congress, even though congressional sources report that Higgins shares a bed in a Washington apartment with a male staffer.

In a series of e-mails obtained by WMR, it is clear that Massa was the subject of unsubstantiated rumor mongering and that rumors served as the basis for The Washington Post's exaggerated reporting on Massa's "alleged" conduct beyond the use of "salty language." In one e-mail, dated March 9, 2010, from the Post's Carol Leonnig to Racalto, she states "we will be reporting that allegations [emphasis added] involving Cong. Massa involved far more than 'salty language," based on numerous allegations of a pattern of physical sexual harassment of male staffers in his office and groping." However, there was never any formal complaints about such behavior from Massa's staffers, including his own chief of staff who only filed charges after Massa's resignation, charges that were rejected by the House Office of Compliance's counsels.

As far as "salty language," Massa's language was no more "salty" than that used by fellow Navy veteran Senator John McCain, whose foul mouth in the Congress is legendary, and the equally "salty" Baltimore longshoreman's language from Senator Barbara Mikulski.

In an e-mail, dated March 4, 2010, from Scott Brown, a reporter for WGRZ-TV in Buffalo, to Racalto, it is stated that Hoyer's office was informed about Massa's alleged activities on February 8 and that Massa's staff, again according to Hoyer's office, had notified the Ethics Committee within 48 hours. Brown said that before Politico reported on the Ethics Committee probe, Massa said he was unaware of it. Racalto was allowing the manufactured scandal to grow legs of its own. In another March 4, 2010, e-mail, Raymond Hernandez of The New York Times, wrote Racalto: "In the email you sent last night, you said that there has been no formal complaint filed with the Ethics Committee. That is at odds with the statement released by Majority Leady [sic] Steny Hoyer. Could you explain this inconsistency? In addition, you said that Mr. Massa had not been contacted by the committee. But it is my understanding that representatives of the committee visited his office yesterday. Has the congressman or any person on his staff been contacted by the committee?"

Racalto's response to Hernandez: "Congressman Massa has not been contacted by the Committee on Official Standards and Conduct. It is obvious that Congressman cannot comment on a matter about which he has been given no information and I am unable to comment because there is no formal complaint to comment on."

Then, Racalto, adds in a statement worthy of the Kremlin during the Cold War, "Congressman Massa is retiring for health reasons."

On February 26 and 27, Racalto was in e-mail communication with Frank's chief of staff Maria Giesta. It was clear that Racalto and Giesta were conspiring to bring the unsubstantiated allegations against Massa to a head and the role of Frank's office in undermining Massa cannot be emphasized more. After all, the only thing that Frank is more committed to than gay rights is support for Israel and Frank had the means, via his Lavender Mafia, and the desire to see Massa dumped from the House.
Click here for an unusual e-mail exchange between Giestra and Racalto.

Maria E. Giesta,
Chief of Staff and Staff Director
Congressman Barney Frank

to Racalto:
By the way honey do you have some extra Viagra

Racalto to Giesta: Sorry, fell asleep - yes I do.

Giesta to Racalto: I hope you're OK
I need one of you spare it [
another e-mail from Giestra requests a Dr. Patel's phone number.]

Racalto to Giesta: At airport - have a mtg with lawyers at 11

Giesta to Racalto: Where are you going?

Racalto to Giesta: I'm meeting with attorneys in nyc - I want to make sure we are all set legally (if this investigation goes formal)

Then, on March 7, Giesta tips her hand on Frank's role in Massa's "scandal" in an e-mail to Racalto:

Giesta to Racalto: Make sure you get your severence [sic] before going postal on Massa. [Congressional sources have told WMR that in mid-March 2010, Racalto promised to all Massa staffers who levelled sexual harassment charges against Massa that they would receive $300,000 each.] [Racalto also falsely represented to Massa's campaign committee that he was due $40,000 as a "campaign management fee," which Massa denies was authorized. The media spin was that the $40,000 was some sort of "hush money."]

On February 26, there was the following from Giesta to Racalto: Hi. I can definitely loan you some money - no problem.

On February 22, Racalto was, according to his House e-mail, negotiating a $50 - 60,000 job with AIDS Community Resources.

On February 26, in a harbinger of what would befall Massa, Giesta sent another e-mail to Racalto:

Well it looks like Patterson [sic] is not going to run for Governor - good news!!

[The reference is to New York Democratic Governor David Paterson, who succeeded Governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned after another contrived sex "scandal."]

Massa is now unemployed in Corning and wonders if he can hold on to his house. He muses while raking leaves on his lawn how much more of a difference he could make if he were able to speak during House "special orders" on the problems of Wall Street and the outrageous behavior of Washington politics that puts special interests first and citizens at the bottom of the priority list. However, in a city of deception and perfidy, there is no office where Massa can go to get his reputation back.

Meanwhile, for Frank, his staffers, and the congressional "Lavender Mafia," the Viagra, crystal meth, and booze continue to make for a gay old time....
Ellen Brown's Web of Debt is essential reading (and she actually made all this financial stuff really interesting)

http://www.webofdebt.com/

I also consider these documentaries to be required viewing for all Americans who want to understand what's going on and get this country back:


Money as Debt


The Money Masters - How International Bankers Gained Control of America



"The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole...Their secret is that they have annexed from governments, monarchies, and republics the power to create the world's money..." THE MONEY MASTERS is a 3 1/2 hour non-fiction, historical documentary that traces the origins of the political power structure that rules our nation and the world today. The modern political power structure has its roots in the hidden manipulation and accumulation of gold and other forms of money. The development of fractional reserve banking practices in the 17th century brought to a cunning sophistication the secret techniques initially used by goldsmiths fraudulently to accumulate wealth. With the formation of the privately-owned Bank of England in 1694, the yoke of economic slavery to a privately-owned "central" bank was first forced upon the backs of an entire nation, not removed but only made heavier with the passing of the three centuries to our day. Nation after nation, including America, has fallen prey to this cabal of international central bankers"


The Secret of Oz - Winner, Best Docu of 2010



This version finally cuts several bogus quotes which have festered in the monetary reform literature for decades.
The world economy is doomed to spiral downwards until we do 2 things: outlaw government borrowing; 2. outlaw fractional reserve lending. Banks should only be allowed to lend out money they actually have and nations do not have to run up a "National Debt". Remember: It's not what backs the money, it's who controls its quantity....




“I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government,” Jewish columnist Joel Stein wrote in the Los Angeles Times in December 2008. “I just care that we get to keep running them.”
Mr Stein’s reckless candor in admitting that the Jews ran America was to cost him his job at the LA Times.
If Americans have lost their country to organized Jewry, they lost it slowly and imperceptibly. Indeed, most Americans remain unaware that their country no longer belongs to them. They fervently believe they still live in a democracy. This was a takeover not without precedent, however. It had happened to Germany. It had happened to Russia. It has now happened to America.


Uh-oh, looks like Iceland hasn't escaped the clutches of the global banksters:

Keiser Report – Make Love, Not Debt


We discuss the new world order in which we’re all Greeks because we didn’t see the signs in 1969 – “Make Love, Not Debt.” In the second half of the show, Max Keiser interviews Birgitta Jonsdottir, about the true state of transparency, banking and economy in the latest IMF poster child, Iceland.

with this comment: f**king IMF tentacles everywhere....


Wednesday, November 02, 2011

SADDAM HUSSAIN: As Deluded as Possible...as usual...


SADDAM HUSSAIN: As Deluded as Possible...as usual...
Hossein Alaei, veteran Sepah commander and an expert in strategic affairs, takes a look at the recently declassified documents on Saddam Hussein’s view of the Iran-Iraq war.






Last Tuesday, the US National Defense University released twenty pieces of confidential documents from Saddam Hussein’s archive, seized by the US Army following Baghdad’s occupation in 2003. What is eye-catching in these documents is Saddam Hussein’s misperception of events: especially his underestimation of Iranian military power before he waged a catastrophic war against his eastern neighbor. According to the documents, less than one week before the war, Saddam predicted that Iraqi forces massing at the borders would intimidate and shatter the morale of the Iranian army; he did not anticipate the Iranian Air Force’s ferocious response to the invasion and its precise bombardment of key structures, such as the Osirak nuclear plant south of Baghdad, which he believed to have been Tel Aviv’s job.

Saddam Hussein suffered an inflexible interpretation of the Iranian army’s power, as it was difficult for him to think outside the Cold War framework: for him, all countries were either allies of the US or the Soviet Union. With his bipolar mentality, Saddam pictured Iran as utterly dependent on US military support (equipment, training etc.), just as he himself relied upon the Soviet Union’s military aid. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, not only did Iran cut off all its military transactions with the US, but also seized the US embassy in Tehran, which eventually led to severance of diplomatic ties between the countries. Saddam Hussein believed that-- defanged after the Revolution-- the Iranian military forces could not withstand an Iraqi blitz. At that time, Iran found it extremely difficult to purchase military equipment (even spare parts) and weapons. Even Washington thought before the war that the Iranian jet fighters would stop functioning in the short run, as Iran presumably lacked the know-how to repair and maintain its US-manufactured F14s. With such analyses, common among the decision-makers, Saddam was encouraged to think of the Iranian military as feeble and dared to attack his neighbor to the east.

Many high-ranking commanders of the Army –the Shah’s pride and honor- had fled Iran at that time, and others who had decided to stay retired or faced a purge by the government. A broken-down military with a severely damaged hierarchy could not employ its military units to fight in a war.

The attempted Nojeh Coup-- staged by elements inside the Iranian military and what eventually forced a second wave of purges among its top brass-- also emboldened Iraq to wage the war, intended to satisfy its territorial, diplomatic and military ambitions. The Iraqi dictator’s sweet dreams were disrupted the day after he began the war by attacking Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport, when a 140-jet fighter fleet took off from Iranian Air Force military bases and targeted critical Iraqi infrastructures, including its precious nuclear plant, Osirak. In less than a week, Saddam Hussein was convinced that the war would not proceed according to his desires, and hence hastily offered a ceasefire to stop the war unfolding in a way that could undermine his position.





Tuesday, November 01, 2011

CIA counter-attacking on exposure of Obama and family as CIA operatives...




The CIA's "Kincaid Kops"....


October , 2011 -- CIA counter-attacking on exposure of Obama and family as CIA operatives...


A Republican Party insider has tipped off WMR on a covert domestic "dirty tricks" operation by the CIA, working with a group of right-wing Republican pseudo-journalists, to tarnish WMR and, in fact, anyone who has appeared on the Russian news network, RT, as agents of the Russian government....

The dirty tricks operation is intended to allegedly expose "links" between this editor and the Russian government to financially and professionally harm WMR. The project by the CIA, using right-wing operatives like Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media (AIM) and
a group called America's Survival, funded through a myriad of right-wing non-profits, is to paint this editor as concocting the Obama's family's ties to the CIA to divert attention away from the meme that Obama and his family were Communists who took their orders from the Soviet KGB. The CIA, using ciphers like Kincaid, want to make it appear that Obama's and his family's "leftist views" mean that they could have never worked for the CIA in any manner. It should be noted that the Manhattan firm that Obama went to work at after graduating Columbia University in 1983, Business International Corporation, was a well-known CIA operation that sought to co-opt the left, from the Students for Democratic Society (SDS) to the Castro government of Cuba and the Kremlin leadership, itself....

Kincaid is said to be using an approach similar to that of GOP operative James O'Keefe of Project Veritas. Kincaid and his team are traveling around with video cameras and ambushing those on their target list. Having already confronted radio and TV commentator Thom Hartmann, whose program is aired by RT, the team is, according to our GOP insider, waiting to confront me with the question, "Are you an agent of the Russian government?" Hartmann has been asked the same question. The video tactic is similar to that used by O'Keefe and his colleagues against the housing rights group ACORN and in an attempt to infiltrate the office of Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) in New Orleans.

Kincaid and his group are also trying to show links between financier George Soros, the Russian government, and RT. In fact, on October 27, Kincaid's group sponsored a news conference at the National Press Club on the "Soros Files." The amateurish nature of this CIA-funded psychological warfare operation was evident when I, after having attended a press conference by ousted State Department officer Peter Van Buren, poked my head into Kincaid's "Soros Files" conference. No one, with or without a camera in hand, seemed to recognize me. The CIA appears to be as idiotic as the amateurs they hire to do their dirty work....

Kincaid claims to have a major scoop in uncovering this editor's "Communist" background (all obtained by Google searches) and his relationship with RT. It may come as news to Mr. Kincaid and his merry band of confabulators but a check of RT's recent newscasts will show that I no longer appear as often as I once did. Although I was RT's first regularly appearing American commentator, appearing live at 12 noon Moscow time, and at the ungodly hour of 4 am Washington time, my normal appearances on the network now range from once to twice a month, and they are usually on RT Arabic. After moving to their new studios in Washington, DC, I appeared on RT's regular afternoon news feed from Washington three times a week, or when there was a breaking news story, such as the arrest of alleged Russian spies in the United States and a deadly nightclub fire in Russia.

Although these facts will mean nothing to Kincaid and his knaves, there is one interesting aspect to Kincaid's screed that deserves a closer look. Although the right-wing wants everyone to wrongly believe that Soros, who is actually connected tightly to the CIA, is a secret Communist, he is, in fact, a front man for the Rothschild family. Soros is also a one-time collaborator, along with his father, of the German Gestapo in Hungary, an odd place for a Communist. However, Kincaid may have stumbled across something of merit in his scrutiny of Soros. Kincaid has accused RT of having links to Soros. Considering RT's newest lineup of Barack Obama cheerleaders like Hartmann and others, for example, Council on Foreign Relations operatives in New York City, who regularly appear on the network, there may be some truth to the allegations that Soros has somehow "bought in" to the network. RT is run by the RIA Novosti government-owned news agency in Moscow and it and Al Jazeera have gained the awkward admiration of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but only because they had been beating the United States and Hillary's Wall Street friends in the propaganda war. The change at Al Jazeera into an almost BBC-like compliant network has been stark.

Moscow and Russia are crawling with Soros operatives who are intent on blocking another presidential term for Vladimir Putin. Soros's NGO empire is the nexus of the CIA's media and education operations in eastern Europe and the former USSR, mostly through his de facto control of Radio Free Europe/Liberty/CIA... and Radio Free Asia. The possibility that journalist/operatives for Soros have wormed their way into RT cannot be discounted out-of-hand.

However, Kincaid can't have his story both ways. Either Soros is a Communist who is working with RT and a secretly Communist Russian government to bring about a Communist coup in the United States or he is a major CIA operative who is intent on expanding his huge media empire to completely swallow up RT, Al Jazeera, and anyone else who hosts criticism of Barack Obama and dares to reveal Family Obama's links to the CIA. The record speaks for itself. George Soros is the latter....

As for Kincaid and his camera crew, I am armed with a small can of shaving cream, which will be used with great delight on their camera lenses.....





Billions down a CIA, State Department and Pentagon rat hole.....


Billions down a CIA, State Department and Pentagon rat hole.....


October , 2011 -- State Dept. employee punished for writing the truth about fraud, waste, and abuse...


The U.S. Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimates that up to $60 billion was wasted in fraud, waste, and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the Commission has decided the American taxpayers cannot see the details of this fraud against them for twenty years, since the Commission has decided to seal its records until 2031. The reason they gave is the possibility of embarrassment.

Embarrassing State Department and other U.S. officials over the fraud and waste in Iraq was obviously the reason why the State Department has revoked the security clearance and suspended employment of twenty-three year veteran Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren. Van Buren was subject to intense retaliation by the State Department over the publication of his book, "We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People."

Van Buren, who was previously assigned to diplomatic outposts in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom, before being assigned to Iraq, witnessed first-hand the squandering of billions of dollars in U.S. cash in Iraq. In one case, the State Department decided to build a chicken processing plant in central Iraq. Local contractors were paid off in cash and a facility was built, but with no chickens. It turns out that while the local sheikhs were not interested in a chicken plant because their local way of preparing chicken dinner, grabbing a chicken from the yard and cutting its head off, was sufficient. However, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, decided that the chicken plant was essential because he bragged to a number of young female bloggers about the success of the chicken plant. It turns out that Odierno was more than happy to discuss his activities in Iraq with a number of young female bloggers.

When one of Odierno's female blogger friends decided to visit Iraq, Van Buren and his team were forced to buy up all the chickens they could find in the local area to feed Odierno and his female friend a locally-prepared elegant "chicken dinner from the plant." Odierno was promoted to Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army by President Obama.

The chicken plant was not the only waste of money. The State Department sank cash into beekeeping and pastry classes for Iraqi widows whose husbands were killed during the U.S. invasion and occupation. There was no accountability for the cash spent on such projects.

The State Department's $1 billion Baghdad embassy, the largest embassy in the world, was constructed by a dubious Kuwaiti engineering firm, with little or no accountability over the funds spent.

The State Department unsuccessfully sought to have Van Buren's book redacted after publication, a ploy successfully used by the Pentagon on Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer's book on U.S. military special operations, "Dark Heart." The appearance of Van Buren's book cost him his security clearance. However, after Van Buren posted on
his website a video of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chortling over the execution of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi -- she exclaimed "We came, we saw, he died" -- Van Buren was told he could not return to the State Department premises and he was to remain at home to await further instructions. In an October 27 news conference at the National Press Club, Van Buren described Mrs. Clinton's statement as "obscene" and "undiplomatic."

Van Buren described a draconian working environment at the State Department where employees are forbidden from accessing leaked State Department cables from WikiLeaks at work or even at home. Ironically, Van Buren said he and Private Bradley Manning, who remains jailed without charges for allegedly leaking the over quarter million State Department cables, were stationed together at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq. Van Buren said he doesn't recall meeting Manning while at the base but they may have very well crossed paths. Curiously, Van Buren said none of the State Department Diplomatic Security agents who grilled him were interested in whether he and Manning ever met in Iraq.

Taking pride in the fact that during his State Department career he was able to help U.S. citizens in distress in foreign countries, Van Buren cited the fact that now the United States kills its citizens in foreign countries by using drones.

Van Buren also fears the same reconstruction contract fraud that was rampant in Iraq will be repeated in Libya. U.S. reconstruction projects are carried out through large amounts of cash and, according to Van Buren, the system shouts out for fraud. He said there was no accountability for funds spent in Iraq and he understands from colleagues that the situation in Afghanistan is much worse. Van Buren described Bechtel and KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root) getting billions to build sewer systems and hospitals in Iraq that were never built. Van Buren is confident there will be a repeat in Libya. Looking down the road, Van Buren also sees Iraq reconstruction fraud situations occurring in Yemen and Somalia.

Van Buren has only been contacted by the staff at the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Representative Ron Paul. No other members of Congress apparently care that tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars have been wasted in Iraq, are being wasted in Afghanistan, and will be wasted in Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, and Yemen...





Monday, October 31, 2011

Judges Are for Sale -- and Special Interests Are Buying loads of them all across USA....


Judges Are for Sale -- and Special Interests Are Buying loads of them all across USA....

By ADAM COHEN

The Occupy Wall Street movement is shining a spotlight on how much influence big-money interests have with the White House and Congress. But people are not talking about how big money is also increasingly getting its way with the courts, which is too bad. It's a scandal that needs more attention. A blistering new report details how big business and corporate lobbyists are pouring money into state judicial elections across the country and packing the courts with judges who put special interests ahead of the public interest.

A case in point: West Virginia. In 2007, the West Virginia Supreme Court, on a 3-2 vote, threw out a $50 million damage award against the owner of a coal company. Funny thing: the man who would have had to pay the $50 million had spent $3 million to help elect the justice who cast the deciding vote. The West Virginia ruling was so outrageous that in 2009 the United States Supreme Court overturned it. But that was unusual. In most cases, judges are free to decide cases involving individuals and groups that have paid big money to get them elected. (MORE: Justice on Display: Should Judges Deliberate in Public?)

So who is paying? The new study — by New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice, the National Institute on Money in State Politics, and the Justice at Stake Campaign, a non-partisan reform group — found that a small group of super spenders plays the biggest role, using their money to buy the kind of judges they want hearing their cases. These super spenders are the usual suspects: mainly big business, corporate lobbyists, and trial lawyers. Also high on the list: a disturbing category called "unknown." In many states, disclosure laws are so weak that special interests can buy judicial elections without the public even finding out.

There is also a lot of one-issue money sloshing around. In 2010, three Iowa Supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of gay marriage were voted out of office — after a bitterly fought campaign dominated by money from out-of-state groups like the National Organization for Marriage and the American Family Association. Much of the special interest money is used for attack ads, which leverage hot-button issues to demonize judicial candidates. Has a sitting judge ever reversed a criminal conviction because the law was not followed? Then they must be soft on crime — and not care about victims.

Why does all this matter? Because as money floods into judicial elections, we are getting courts that are filled with judges whose first loyalty is not to justice — or to the general public — but to insurance companies, big business and other special interests. It's not hard to guess what insurance companies want their judges to do. They want them to rule against people who have been injured — even when they deserve compensation, and they want damage awards to be slashed. Big business wants weak enforcement of laws against discrimination and pollution. On the other side of the political spectrum, trial lawyers want verdicts for plaintiffs — and large damage awards.

The report's authors have some suggestions for minimizing the impact of payola. They want to see more public financing of judicial campaigns, although it is unclear how much the current United States Supreme Court will allow. (The conservative majority has been recklessly striking down campaign finance rules in recent years.) Many reformers think that the answer lies in ending the direct election of judges, and switching to a system (which some states already have) of appointing judges. That takes away the problem of elections, but special interests can shift their strategy to lobbying governors to appoint sympathetic judges. (MORE: John Paul Stevens Publishes Supreme Court Memoir)

Clearly, this is not a problem with easy solutions. But there need to be solutions. The American ideal of justice requires neutral judges, whose only commitment is to the law. Judicial elections that are dominated by special interest money make a mockery of that ideal.

Cohen, the author of Nothing to Fear, teaches at Yale Law School ...