http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/02/mk-ultra-cias-mind-control-program.html
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
MK-ULTRA: The CIA's Mind Control Program
Stephen Lendman
MK-ULTRA was the code name for a secret CIA mind control program, begun in 1953, under Director Allen Dulles. Its purpose was multifold, including to perfect a truth drug for interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War. It followed earlier WW II hypnosis, primitive drugs research, and the US Navy's Project Chatter, explained by its Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request as follows:
It began "in the fall of 1947 focusing on the identification and testing of drugs (LSD and others) in interrogations and the recruitment of agents. The research included laboratory experiments on both animal and human subjects. The program ended shortly after the Korean War in 1953."
It was run under the direction of Dr. Charles Savage of the Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, MD from 1947 - 1953, after which CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence continued it under the name Project Bluebird, its first mind control program to:
-- learn how to condition subjects to withstand information from being extracted from them by known means;
-- develop interrogation methods to exert control;
-- develop memory enhancement techniques; and
-- establish ways to prevent hostile control of Agency personnel.
In 1951, it was renamed Project Artichoke, then MK-ULTRA under Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms in 1953. It aimed to control human behavior through psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs, electroshock, radiation, graphology, paramilitary techniques, and psychological/sociological/anthropological methods, among others - a vast open-field of mind experimentation trying anything that might work, legal or otherwise on willing and unwitting subjects.
Ongoing at different times were 149 sub-projects in 80 US and Canadian universities, medical centers and three prisons, involving 185 researchers, 15 foundations and numerous drug companies. Everything was top secret, and most records later destroyed, yet FOIA suits salvaged thousands of pages with documented evidence of the horrific experiments and their effects on human subjects.
Most were unwitting guinea pigs, and those consenting were misinformed of the dangers. James Stanley was a career soldier when given LSD in 1958 along with 1,000 other military "volunteers." They suffered hallucinations, memory loss, incoherence, and severe personality changes. Stanley exhibited uncontrollable violence. It destroyed his family, impeded his working ability, and he never knew why until the Army asked him to participate in a follow-up study.
He sued for damages under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), his case reaching the Supreme Court in United States v. Stanley. Argued and decided in 1987, the Court dismissed his claim (5 - 4), ruling his injuries occurred during military service. Justices Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan and Sandra Day O'Conner wrote dissenting opinions, saying the Nuremberg Code applies to soldiers as well as civilians. In 1996, Stanley got $400,000 in compensation, but no apology from the government.
Perhaps MK-ULTRA's most publicized victim was Frank Olsen, a biochemist working for the Army Chemical Corps' Special Operations Division at Ft. Detrick, MD. On November 18, 1953, he was administered LSD. Immediately, he became agitated and severely paranoid. Nine days later, he reportedly committed suicide by jumping 13 stories to his death through a New York hotel's closed window. His family members didn't know he was drugged until MK-ULTRA was exposed in 1975.
President Gerald Ford apologized, granted a $750,000 settlement, but Olson's son discovered documents suggesting his father was killed. In 1994, he exhumed the body, had it forensically evaluated, and the conclusion was homicide based on a previously undetected skull fracture suggesting a blow on the head and other disturbing evidence.
Stanley Glickman was another MK-ULTRA tragedy, an unwitting victim of hallucinogenic drugs and electroshock treatment. He became traumatized, couldn't work, barely ate, suffered a psychological breakdown and never fully recovered. After learning about the CIA's LSD experiments, he sued in 1983. The trial was delayed 16 years, he died, but his sister Gloria Kronisch pursued the case.
MK-ULTRA chief Stanley Gottleib was at issue, hired to run its Technical Service Staff (TSS) to develop poisons to assassinate political opponents, truth serum drugs for interrogating spies, and mind control techniques to create robot assassins or unwitting double agents. He used Nazi scientists and their state of the art methods, perfected on concentration camp victims. Some were known as programmers, skilled professionals in the art of breaking down and controlling the human mind.
Joseph Mengele did similar work, experimenting extensively with children and adults using mescaline, electroshock therapy, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, torture, rape, starvation, and trauma bonding. He was so successful with the latter technique that survivors expressed strong affection for him.
The CIA and US military copied the Nazi methodology through numerous programs, including MK-ULTRA, MK being an abbreviation for words "mind control" in German. According to obtained documents, it works best when severe trauma (such as rape) occurs by age three, the result often causing the personality to split or dissociate (called dissociative identity disorder or DID) to repress painful memories.
Therapists can cause multiple personality disorder (MPD) by mind manipulation, but early in life trauma makes victims especially vulnerable. Gottlieb focused on LSD for mind control and exotic poisons and drugs for political assassinations.
Under Operation Paperclip, 9,000 Nazi scientists and technicians were recruited to help undermine the Soviet Union.
In 1952, Gottlieb met Glickman in a Paris cafe, bought him a drink and laced it with LSD. After finally being held to account, he became ill. The trial was postponed, and on the eve of its resumption he died unexpectedly. At the time, New York Times and Los Angeles Times obituaries reported that his family refused to disclose the cause. The online WorldNet Daily explained it was after a "month-long bout with pneumonia," saying that after being admitted to the University of Virginia Medical Center, he lapsed into a coma, never recovered, but foul play couldn't be determined.
At trial against his estate, the judge died of a heart attack while exercising. The question again arose. Was it natural or was he killed, especially since his replacement was prejudicial to the plaintiff having thrown out his case two years earlier. Perhaps so after the jury ruled against Glickman's family, denying them justice.
On December 22, 1974, Seymour Hersh exposed MK-ULTRA in a New York Times article. Headlined, "Huge CIA Operation Reported in US Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years," it documented illegal activities, including secret experiments on US citizens during the 1960s and earlier. Church Committee Congressional investigations followed, headed by Senator Frank Church, on abusive intelligence practices, replaced by the Pike Committee five months later. The Rockefeller Commission, under vice president Nelson Rockefeller, also examined the domestic activities of the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence agencies.
By summer 1975, it was learned that CIA and Department of Defense had conducted illegal experiments on willing and unwitting subjects as part of an exhaustive program to influence human behavior through psychoactive drugs (including LSD and mescaline) and other chemical, biological, psychological, and other methods.
Origins of CIA Mind Manipulation Practices
CIA became interested in Montreal Dr. Ewen Cameron's work at McGill University's Allan Memorial Institute. With full knowledge of the Canadian government, he was funded to perform bizarre experiments on his psychiatric patients, including keeping them asleep and isolated for weeks, then administering large doses of electroshock and experimental drug cocktails, LSD and PCP angel dust among them.
Though clearly unethical, Cameron believed by blasting the human brain with an array of shocks, he could unmake impaired minds, rebuilding them with new personalities cleansed of their previous state. It was voodoo science and failed, but CIA gained a wealth of knowledge it's used to this day.
In 1951, the Agency engaged McGill's director of psychology, Dr. Donald Hebb, and others to conduct sensory-deprivation experiments on volunteer students. They showed intense isolation disrupts clear thinking enough to make subjects receptive to suggestion. They were also formidable interrogation techniques amounting to torture when forcibly administered.
These early experiments laid the foundation for CIA's two-stage torture process - sensory deprivation followed by overload. University of Wisconsin historian Alfred McCoy documented them in his book, "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror," calling them "the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries."
CIA developed and codified them in manuals, used extensively in Southeast Asia, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and at secret black sites globally. McCoy referred to an offshore information extraction mini-gulag during the Cold War and War on Terror. Out of sight, nothing is banned, including physical harshness and psychologically crippling mind control methods that turn human beings into mush.
MK-ULTRA was one of them, even though Gerald Ford's 1976 Executive Order (EO 11905) "establish(ed) policies to improve the quality of intelligence needed for national security (and) establish(ed) effective oversight to assure compliance with law in the management and direction of intelligence agencies and departments of the national government."
The EO prohibited "experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with their informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject," according to guidelines issued by the National Commission. Subsequent Carter and Reagan directives banned all human experimentation. Nonetheless, they continue, in violation of the Nuremberg Code that prohibits:
-- medical experiments without the voluntary consent of human subjects - "without coercion, fraud, deceit, and the full disclosure of known risks;"
-- those "where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur;" and
-- only ones expected "to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study...."
Conducting human mind control experiments are clearly illegal and unethical. They're more sophisticated than ever today, and claims that MK-ULTRA experiments were halted in the 1970s were false. Renamed they continue and much more.
America's Long History of Human Experimentation
Prior examples include:
-- In 1931, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads infected human subjects with cancer cells under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations; Rhoads later conducted radiation exposure experiments on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients;
-- In 1932, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study began on 200 black men; they're weren't told of their illness, were denied treatment, and were used as human guinea pigs to follow their disease symptoms and progression; they all subsequently died;
-- in 1940, 400 Chicago prisoners were infected with malaria to study the effects of new and experimental drugs;
-- from 1942 - 1945, the US Navy used human subjects (locked in chambers) to test gas masks and clothing;
-- since the 1940s, human radiation experiments were conducted to test its effects and determine how much can kill; unwitting subjects were used in prisons, hospitals, orphanages, and mental institutions, including men, women, children, and the unborn of all races, mostly people from lower socio-economic brackets; in addition, more than 200,000 US soldiers were exposed to above ground nuclear tests; many later became ill and died;
-- in 1945, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) implemented "Program F," the most exhaustive American study of fluoride's health effects - a key component in atomic bomb production and one of the most toxic chemicals known; it causes marked adverse central nervous system effects; in the interest of national security, the information was suppressed;
-- in 1945, VA hospital patients became guinea pigs for medical experiments;
-- in 1947, the AEC's Colonel EE Kirkpatrich issued secret document #07075001, stating that the agency will begin administering intravenous doses of radioactive substances to human subjects;
-- in 1949, the US Army released biological agents in US cities to study the effects of a real germ warfare attack; tests continued secretly through at least the 1960s in San Francisco, New York, Washington, DC, Panama City and Key West, FL, Minnesota, other midwest locations, along the Pennsylvania turnpike and elsewhere;
-- in 1950, the Defense Department (DOD) began open-air testing of nuclear weapons in desert areas, then monitored downwind residents for medical problems and mortality rates;
-- in 1951, African-Americans were exposed to potentially fatal stimulants as part of a race-specific fungal weapons test in Virginia;
-- in 1953, DOD released zinc cadmium sulfide gas over Winnipeg, Canada, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, the Monocacy River Valley, MD, and Leesburg, VA - to determine how efficiently chemical agents can be dispersed;
-- in 1953, joint Army-Navy-CIA experiments were conducted in New York and San Francisco, exposing tens of thousands of people to the airborne agents Serratia marcescens and Bacillus glogigii;
-- in 1955, the CIA released bacteria from the Army's Tampa, FL biological warfare arsenal to test its ability to infect human populations;
-- in 1956, the US military released mosquitoes infected with Yellow Fever over Savannah, GA and Avon Park, FL to test the health effects on humans;
-- in 1965, Homesburg State Prison, Philadelphia prisoners were subjected to dioxin, the highly toxic Agent Orange agent, to study their carcinogenic effects;
-- in 1966, the New York subway system was used for a germ warfare experiment;
-- in 1969, an apparent nerve agent killed thousands of sheep in Utah;
-- in 1970, the Military Review reported that "ethnic weapons" development was intensified to be able to target specific ethnic groups thought susceptible to genetic differences and DNA variations;
-- in 1976, Americans were warned about an earlier Swine Flu scare, urging everyone to be vaccinated; millions complied, many of whom were harmed; 500 Guillan-Barre Syndrome (GBS - the deadly nerve disorder) resulted; people died from respiratory failure after severe paralysis, and experts said the vaccine increased the GBS risk level eight-fold;
-- in 1985 and 1986, open-air biological agents testing was done in populated areas;
-- in 1990, over 1,500 six-month old Los Angeles black and hispanic babies were given an experimental measles vaccine, never informing parents of the potential harm
-- in 1990 and 1991 before deploying to the Persian Gulf, all US troops were inoculated with experimental anthrax and botulinum toxoid vaccines, even though concerns were raised about their adverse long-term effects; over 12,000 died and over 30% became ill from non-combat-related factors in what subsequently was called Gulf War Syndrome, the result of exposure to a variety of toxins;
-- in 1994, Senator Jay Rockefeller issued a report revealing that for the past 50 or more years, DOD used hundreds of thousands of US military personnel, exposing them to dangerous substances experimentally; materials included mustard and nerve gas, ionizing radiation, psychochemicals, hallucinogens, and other drugs;
-- in 1995, Dr. Garth Nicolson discovered that toxic agents used during the Gulf War were pre-tested on Texas Department of Corrections prisoners;
-- in 1996, DOD admitted that Gulf War troops were exposed to chemical agents; and
-- in 2009, experimental vaccines were again used to inoculate people globally in response to another hyped Swine Flu scare; scattered reports of illnesses and deaths followed.
MK-ULTRA Victim Maryam Ruhullah
This writer will interview Ruhullah and Dr. James Randall Noblitt, a licensed psychologist, on The Progressive Radio News Hour (on The Progressive Radio Network), February 18 at 10AM US Central time to discuss MK-ULTRA, Ruhullah's experience and Noblitt's work with survivors of extreme abuse and individuals afflicted with identity dissociation. Noblitt is a Professor at the California School of Professional Psychology and Chair of the International Society of Trauma and Dissociation Ritual Abuse/Mind Control Interest Group.
The program will be archived for later listening.
As an MK-ULTRA victim, Ruhullah's memory was impaired and somewhat still is because of what she experienced. She explained it as follows.
In the early 1970s, she lived in Boston, MA, was married with a six-year old son, and as a lawyer worked for a prestigious firm, its name she can't remember. "One day, two federal agents came to (her) home unannounced," asking her to be a federal witness against an alleged organized crime figure. For her safety, they explained, she'd be placed in protective custody for a period not exceeding six months. She was asked to leave her family and job immediately, and say nothing to her husband and employer.
She "was forced to leave (her) home with the agents that day." She got no choice, and "was treated more like a prisoner than a witness." She couldn't use the phone or communicate with anyone, was transfered frequently, and held in "very low budget places," during which time her life "became a succession of abuses and exploitations."
"To this day," she says, she doesn't know precisely "when or why the government decided to use" her for MK-ULTRA experimentation, "but one day (she) was a mother, wife, and attorney, then, (later) had no memory of (her) past."
Having partly recovered it, she recalls "being given non-medically necessary electro-shock treatments. This was done to create amnesia (to block her) core personality and replac(e) it with" only need-to-know information.
She remembers "that the shock treatment given (her) was so severe and often that one day something happened and" she wasn't returned to her room. She now speaks of "an unbelievable long list of horrid exploitations and inhumane abuses" done to her.
In the late 1980s, fragments of her memory returned. She sought information on her case through an FOIA request, but was told no records were found. From 1992 - 1996, no one helped her until a member of B'nai Brith, Stephanie Suleiman, offered to do so but needed a few weeks to complete other work.
When Ruhullah recontacted her, she learned that "this thirty-two year old mother of two died of a heart attack," very suspicious given her age.
Ruhullah also explains that federal agents stopped communicating with her. Her experiences were "totally removed from the public record," and she went from "being a missing person to becoming a person erased." She's now divorced and unable to contact her children and former friends. "The US government does not want (her) story told."
She adds that the "only way (she) can measure (her) length of time held (is) by her son's age. (He) was six when (agents) entered (her) home, and he is (now) in his late thirties." She considers herself to have been continuously separated from her children, grandchildren, family, friends, assets, memories, and educated skills.
She calls each day "an experience of being held against (her) will while living in a vat of bureaucratic arrogance which refuses to acknowledge what was done (made worse by stopping (her) from getting (her) life back." Each day she's "being more injured and having more of (her) life robbed from" her.
She says she "was not released from custody." After being used for medical experiments, she was "given an implanted false identity, then left penniless and without proof of (her) true identity or lineage." She still considers herself a prisoner, a body with no persona, with little knowledge of her former self, stripped of everything important in her life.
MK-ULTRA and Ruhullah's story will be featured on the Progressive Radio News Hour on February 18 at 10AM US Central time on The Progressive Radio Network. Listen live or later through archives.
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to the Lendman News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday - Friday and The Progressive Radio News Hour Thursdays and weekends for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Can figure skating go butch?
Monday, Feb 15, 2010 11:01 EST
Can figure skating go butch?
Ex-champ Elvis Stojko leads a push to move skating away from "feminine skaters" with "soft" hands
By Thomas Rogers
Men's figure skating has never been the manliest of sports. Routines are punctuated by dramatic hand motions, the costumes often look like they've escaped from a very gay zoo, and currently, its best-known figure is a man who wears a giant fur hat and hangs out with Lady Gaga.
But some members of the skating community believe the sport's effeminate image is increasingly a problem. Last year, Skate Canada told athletes and officials to talk up the sport's toughness in order to attract more of a "hockey crowd," and three-time world champion Elvis Stojko, the first man to land a quadruple-triple combination jump in competition (in 1997) and a skater known for his butch style, has spoken out on the issue. The sport really needs to start emphasizing "masculinity, strength and power," Stojko has argued, if it wants to be taken more seriously. His remarks infuriated some gay groups, who perceived them as a slap in the face to the sport's traditional fans.
Stojko (who is doing Olympic analysis for Yahoo) spoke to Salon over the phone from Mexico, where he now lives, about "Blades of Glory," why the gay community needs to get over itself, and if it's really possible to get NASCAR fans to watch men's figure skating. The Olympic men's competition begins Tuesday.
There’s been a lot of discussion about masculinity and figure skating recently. Do you think the discussion has been productive?
It basically started about one year ago, when Skate Canada said that they weren't getting enough young boys enrolling in skating. People tiptoe around the topic, and I was like, "You know, I'm just going to say it: Effeminate men's skating is not my style of skating. In men’s skating I like to see power and strength."
Why do you think it's become so difficult to recruit young male skaters?
Some guys get into the sport because it's difficult — the spins, the speed — and they like to showcase that within the music. When you're not appreciated for that, it takes its toll. And then when people call them effeminate, they get pissed. People call them gay, and some people don’t like to be called that.
It's not the skaters' fault. It's the way the system has been rewarding them. You have to have a program that’s dynamic. If it's the same from beginning to end, and it's soft and doesn’t have dynamic strength and power and quickness, the routines become very much the same, and it becomes very boring.
Skating can’t just be one thing. It's got to have something for everybody. There have been so many different personalities, from the Kurt Brownings to Rudy Galindo, who was completely the opposite. There was a very classical style to Todd Eldridge. Now it's starting to become very much the same.
Hasn't the new judging system, which was instituted after the 2002 Olympic figure skating scandal, helped?
Sort of. Some people say it leans toward the technical only because they break it down in a very technical way. The system itself I’m not a huge fan of. The quad jumps don't get enough credit. You can't carry speed through a footwork section, because you’re trying to do so many combinations of things. It limits the skater.
They implemented this five years ago, and now they're seeing a drop in young male skaters. It also alienates the audience, because people got used to the 6.0 score. Now it's just a number. For a lot of people it’s like trying to decipher a code.
Do you really think, though, that figure skating can attract the NASCAR fan?
If you want to open up figure skating to another audience, you need to create something that's going to allow everyone to watch. If you have a male masculine person watching it, they need something to relate to. Other guys relate to Johnny Weir’s thing. You need to have guys doing jumps, so a person who also watches NASCAR can identify with it and say, "Hey that's awesome — how many rotations is that?" or "How fast did he spin?" instead of, "How pretty was that guy?"
I think the reason some people get offended is because calling a man "effeminate" is usually code for "gay."
People in the gay community have to realize they’ve got to take themselves out of it. It's not against anybody. I've been getting heat for this, but there are people behind me saying that they appreciate it. It's about what people can identify with when they're watching the sport. It doesn’t have anything to do with gayness. Effeminate men can identify with effeminate skating. Masculine men can't identify with that. When I watch it, I can't identify because I don't move like that. My consciousness doesn't feel like that.
What is feminine and what is masculine skating?
It's the way you carry yourself. There’s a certain strength to it when a masculine skater steps onto the ice and attacks a program. With the feminine skaters, the use of the hands becomes very soft, down to the fingertips. There's a lot of little details, but essentially you can pick up on it in the first few movements.
It has a lot to do with choreography. A lot of the choreographers out there, the male ones, are very effeminate. The skater ends up picking up that style. As a male skater I don't want to be considered a beautiful skater. I want to be a strong skater.
American Evan Lysacek is being promoted as a more macho skater. Do you think he is an heir to your kind of masculine skating?
I don't think so. I think he is more masculine than Weir, but there is a power and rawness and organic-ness to his skating that's missing. At the beginning of his career, it was there. If you try to refine something too much, you lose its organic essence, and you refine and refine, and it becomes boring. It becomes something that's more of the choreographer’s point of view rather than the skater's point of view. Obviously his skating looks stronger than Johnny Weir's, but he’s missing the aggressive punch of someone like Brian Joubert.
I take my hat off to him, because it's hard for a tall skater to be as consistent as he is. His impact is his size and the use of his arms, but there's a lot of flailing going on. Sometimes it becomes nondescript. Evan's skating is stronger than Johnny’s, but in my opinion it's not strong enough.
What do you think of Johnny Weir?
Johnny is one of these skaters who is obviously unique. He has his own sense of style, and doesn’t care what anybody thinks, and he's not always trying to impress. He's like, "I don’t care if you like it or not, just watch me." He’s not my style of skating, but he’s a talented skater — otherwise he wouldn’t have been on the podium at world’s. Everyone is putting focus on Johnny, of course, because he stands out.
Weir has a film out, and now a TV show. In a sense he’s as much a media personality as a skater. What do you make of that?
I think it is going in that direction. Going your own direction and being outlandish with a lot of things can create media attention, and the media latches on to something that steps out of the norm. It is definitely new to have a skater have his own show.
Do you think it's unfair that you didn't get that kind of attention when you were skating?
God, no. When I was competing, at the height of my career, we didn't have YouTube. I carved out my own niche. To say it's unfair, that's kind of small. The thing that impresses me about Weir is that he doesn't care what people think. I'm the same way in that direction. I say what I feel. You can take it or leave it. With Johnny, he's doing the same thing in this other direction. I can appreciate his whole motto, that he just doesn't care.
"Blades of Glory" painted the sport as a hyper-effeminate joke. Do you think the film’s mocking take is the result of the sport’s feminization?
Absolutely. There's truth behind it, but they take it to a whole other level. Some people got offended by it. Men's skating is a very small world, and there are diehard fans that watch it. They get very, very touchy. As a skater you're used to it. As a kid, you've got to make sure something like that doesn't get into your consciousness. I thought it was hysterical, because that is what the rest of the world sees skating. If the sport of skating wants to be taken seriously, it needs to change.
There’s been a persistent inaccurate rumor that you’ve gotten into a fight with Eric Lindros. Why does that rumor have such a long shelf life?
It's funny because that rumor was 15 years ago and continues to go on. There was one story that he was picking up these girls, and I stepped in. Or he was being rude to people, but it all ended up with me beating the crap out of him.
Did you ever get teased for being a figure skater?
I was picked on in school. People called me twinkle toes. It got annoying because that's not me. Later on in life, you're just like, "I know who I am, and I don't care what people think."
I've been called everything under the sun. Everything from being told that I'm only a jumper, there's no artistic bone in my body, that I'm hideously ugly, that I look like a hockey puck. It got to the point where they said I'd gotten too masculine, and I was like, "What? I'm a guy!"
The Mysterious Death of Bush's Cyber-Guru
http://www.maxim.com/humor/stupid-fun/86265/mysterious-death-bushs-cyber-guru.html
The Mysterious Death of Bush's Cyber-Guru
Wednesday 02/10/2010
Simon Worrall
Shortly before six o’clock on the evening of December 19, 2008, a man standing outside his home in Lake Township, Ohio heard the whine of an engine in the sky above him.
Moments later two red lights broke through the low clouds, heading almost directly toward the ground. It was a light aircraft, and for a second, as it descended below the tree line, the man thought it would climb back up. Instead, there was a terrible thud, and the sky turned orange. When the fire crews arrived, they found the burning wreckage of a Piper Saratoga strewn across a vacant lot. The plane had narrowly missed a house, but the explosion was so intense that the home’s plastic siding was on fire. So was the grass. The pilot had been thrown from the plane and died instantly. Body parts and pieces of twisted metal were scattered everywhere. A prayer book lay open on the ground, its pages on fire.
The crash would have remained a private tragedy confined to the pages of the local press and the hearts of the pilot’s widow and four children, but within days the blogosphere was abuzz with rumors and conspiracy theories: The plane, it was said, had been sabotaged and the pilot murdered to cover up the GOP’s alleged theft of the Ohio vote in the 2004 presidential election. At the center of this plot was the Saratoga’s pilot, a prodigiously gifted IT expert named Michael Connell, whose altar boy charm and technical brilliance had made him the computer whiz of choice for the Republican Party. Left-wing Web sites openly referred to Connell as “Bush’s vote rigger” and claimed that his fingerprints were on all the most controversial elections in recent history. There were dark whispers of electronic pulses or sniper fire being used to bring down the plane—a black ops attack designed to keep him from testifying against his former cronies. Right-wing bloggers and talk show hosts derided such claims as the twisted delusions of liberal nut jobs and tinfoil hatters. The mainstream press sat on its hands.
But while the rumors, innuendos, and allegations continue to swirl through the ether, evidence has recently emerged that suggests the Ohio vote may have been hacked, and that Connell was involved.
Born in 1963 in Peoria, Illinois into a large Irish-American family, Michael Connell was a lifelong Republican and a devout Roman Catholic who went to Mass every day and wore a wristband saying what would jesus do? What Connell did was realize the potential of the Internet to shape politics. While still in his 20s, he worked as finance director for Republican Congressman Jim Leach, and as director of voter programs for Senator Dan Coats of Indiana. In 1988 Connell developed a voter contact database for George H.W. Bush, thus inaugurating a long association with the Bush family: Connell worked on Jeb’s gubernatorial campaign in Florida in 1998; two years later he was the chief architect of George W. Bush’s Web site as Dubya launched his bid for the White House.
But it was while serving as tech guru to Karl Rove that Connell developed his deepest and perhaps most problematic professional relationship. Recruited in the late ’80s, Connell became Rove’s most trusted cyberlieutenant: a Web wizard who could turn portals into power and who would gain access to the very heights of American politics by the time he reached 30 years old. Connell’s two Ohio-based companies, New Media Communications and GovTech, became virtual research and development labs for the Republican Party, building and managing Web sites and e-mail accounts for both Presidents Bush and a long list of leading Republicans. GovTech also designed and managed numerous Congressional IT systems, including those for the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, putting Connell “behind the fire wall” of some of the most sensitive government Web sites from the safety of the Bush White House.
“Mike was known as the GOP’s Mister Fix-It,” says Stephen Spoonamore, an IT security expert and friend of Connell’s. “He built really intelligent tools that allowed people who wanted to win elections do a better job organizing their data.” But aside from his more legitimate business, Connell was no stranger to the darker side of American politics. He was forced to resign from Senator Coats’ campaign for his involvement in ethical violations. Connell’s was also the hand behind the Web site for the notorious Swift Boat Veterans’ for Truth smear campaign against John Kerry and GWB43.com, the secret e-mail account used by Rove and dozens of other White House staffers.
Just six weeks before his death, Connell had given a deposition in an Ohio lawsuit that accused Rove, Bush, and Co. of something far more serious than merely scrubbing e-mails: the theft of the 2004 Ohio vote. “This is the biggest scandal in our history,” says Mark Crispin Miller, a professor at New York University who has written extensively about electronic voter fraud. “Watergate grew out of a paranoid attempt to disable the opposition. But Ohio was exponentially different. We’re talking about a systematic, centralized attempt to rig the voting system.”
“We decided to try to bring a racketeering claim against Rove under Ohio law,” says Cliff Arnebeck, the attorney who brought the suit, a broad-shouldered man with a Senatorial air dressed in a blue blazer. “We detected a pattern of criminal activity, and we identified Connell as a key witness, as the implementer for Rove.”
By any calculation, the Ohio 2004 election was a black day for American democracy. Lou Harris, known as the “father of modern political polling,” and a man not given to hyperbole, called it “as dirty an election as America has ever seen.” All the exit polls suggested Ohio would go to Kerry. But when the vote was counted George Bush had won by 132,685 votes, adding Ohio’s crucial 20 Electoral College votes to his tally. And putting him, not Kerry, into the White House. It has since been alleged that at several points on election night, the Ohio secretary of state’s official Web site, which was responsible for reporting the results, was being hosted by a server in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Ohio’s secretary of state in 2004 was a fiercely partisan Christian named Ken Blackwell. Blackwell had hired a company called GDC Limited to run the IT systems, which had subcontracted the job to Michael Connell’s company, GovTech. Connell had in turn sub-contracted SMARTech, an IT firm based in Chattanooga, to act, it was claimed, as a backup server.
“By looking at the URLs on the Web site, we discovered that there were three points on election night when SMARTech’s computers took over from the secretary of state,” says Arnebeck. “It is during that period that we believe votes were manipulated.”
In computer jargon it is known as a man-in-the-middle attack.
“At the time I didn’t know who SMARTech were,” says IT expert Stephen Spoonamore, opening a file on his computer showing the Internet architecture map of the 2004 Ohio election. He points to a red box in the bottom right-hand corner showing SMARTech’s server.
“Then I found out: They host Rove’s e-mails. They host the RNC’s Web site. They host George Bush’s Web site.” His voice rises in disbelief.
“I go, ‘Holy shit, this is a man-in-the-middle attack! These guys have programmed the state’s computers to talk to a company with ties to the Republican Party.’ It’s brilliant.”
With his wiry hair and designer glasses, Spoonamore looks like a character in a Tim Burton movie. A lifelong Republican, he is also one of the world’s acknowledged experts on cybersecurity, with a résumé that includes work for the U.S. armed forces and the FBI. In his spare time he has devoted thousands of hours to investigating cyberfraud in American elections. “I know I sound crazy when I talk about this stuff. No one wants to believe it. They say, ‘No one would steal an election.’ And I go, ‘Yeah, they would. And that’s exactly what they did.’”
Spoonamore believes that while Michael Connell may have facilitated electoral fraud, he was really just a tool of more powerful forces. “Mike has been called the Forrest Gump of GOP IT operations,” he says. “And I think there’s a truth to that. I think he was a good guy surrounded by wolves. He was always going to be the fall guy.”
The two men had gotten to know each other at Spoonamore’s Washington, D.C. offices in late 2005. “The two of us hit it off,” recalls Spoonamore. “We were the same age, the same generation. We had a lot of friends in common.” At the end of the meeting, Connell broached a delicate topic. “Mike asked me, ‘How easy is it to destroy all records of e-mail?’” recalls Spoonamore. “He sort of gestured toward the White House and said, ‘Because I have clients down the street who are working on that problem.’ And I stepped back and said, ‘If you are talking about White House e-mail destruction, I want nothing to do with it.’”
A year later, at an IT conference in London, Spoonamore confronted the pro-life Connell about the Ohio election: “He said, ‘I’m afraid that in my zeal to save the babies, the system I built may have been abused.’”
Three days later, in the back of a cab heading toward the airport, Spoonamore asked Connell if he would be willing to talk to a Congressional judiciary committee about what he knew. “I actually took Mike’s hand and said, ‘If I can arrange for a private meeting for you to sit down with the committee and explain what you think may have happened in 2004 and how your systems may have been abused, will you do it?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’”
Connell never did talk to the judiciary committee. But in the months leading up to his death he was under intense pressure. In an attempt to extricate himself from the world of politics, he had sold two of his businesses, including GovTech. Throughout the fall his plane was being tracked by Arnebeck and his associates so they could serve him with a subpoena. Connell sought refuge from the maelstrom in his deep Catholic faith. He took to wearing a scapular, two squares of cloth with religious images favored by devout Catholics, under his shirt. He went to Mass twice a day and became more directly involved with the pro-life movement, spending weekends standing outside abortion clinics. He traveled to Burma and Thailand to work with religious dissidents and started a Catholic charity in El Salvador.
Finally, on October 8, 2008, Connell was served with his subpoena at College Park Airfield outside Washington, D.C. Seven weeks later his Piper Saratoga would fall from the sky.
On December 18, Connell flew to D.C. to meet with the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s organization, about starting a new branch and rebuilding their Web site. He stayed the night at a hotel, got up early to attend Mass and then a breakfast meeting. At about 11 a.m., Connell went to College Park Airfield to prepare to fly home to Akron. His firm, New Media Communication, was holding its Christmas party that evening, and he didn’t want to miss it. An experienced pilot with more than 500 hours of flight time under his belt, Connell waited for the weather to clear. Shortly after 3:30 p.m., he called his wife, Heather, in Ohio to say he had his “window.” He took off at 3:51 p.m.
At first everything went fine. On his approach to Akron-Canton Regional Airport, he asked the tower if there were any reports of icing and was told there were not. It was certainly dark and cold, with cloud cover at 1,000 feet, but the plane had a sophisticated autopilot system that would normally bring it onto the runway, like a homing pigeon. But at 3,200 feet, as Connell began his descent, air traffic control radioed to say he was off course by several miles. Connell radioed that he would correct his position. Something seemed to be wrong with the lateral controls.
The audiotapes of Connell’s last communications with the tower suggest a rising sense of panic and confusion. Realizing that he is still off course, he asks to do a 360-degree turn “to reestablish ourselves.” It’s an unusual maneuver at this late stage of the approach, and the flight controller denies the request. Instead, he advises Connell to “climb and maintain 3,000 feet.” Seconds later there is a loud rushing sound as the cockpit bursts open and the engine goes haywire. Connell screams, “Nine nine November declaring an emergency!” Out of respect for his religious beliefs—and his children—the tower reported that his last words were, “Oh, God!” In fact, he cries out, “Oh, fuck!” Then the tape goes dead.
Capt. Lorin Geisner of the Greentown Fire Department was the first person to arrive at the scene. “We received a 911 call, so we contacted the tower and asked what size plane it was and how many souls were on board,” he recalls. “But we were informed that the tower was in lockdown and that no information was available.”
According to sources, there were other anomalies. Normally, a night crash scene would be roped off and investigated in daylight. In this case representatives of the NTSB and FAA used light towers to photograph and document the scene. Connell’s plane was hastily removed to a secure hangar under cover of darkness. By 6 a.m. the investigators had vanished, leaving behind them a trail of debris, and one very angry widow.
“How is this OK?” asks Heather Connell, pulling a chunk of metal from a cardboard box she had brought in from the garage. She is kneeling on the floor of her husband’s basement office, a tidy space decorated with sleek black office furniture. A photo of a 25-year-old Connell with George H.W. Bush sits on the bookshelf next to an action figure of Dubya decked out in fighter pilot garb. A cascade of frizzy blonde hair tumbles forward over Heather’s face. Her eyes are red from crying. “They think this is part of the foot pedal.”
When I ask how she met her husband, she starts to hum the ’80s hit “Don’t You Want Me.” “She was working as waitress in a cocktail bar...” Then her voice falters. “That much is true. We met in Indiana. He was working for Senator Coats, and I was going to college and working at a sports bar. He was with a bunch of interns who came in. I carded every one of them and was in the process of kicking him out of the bar.” She gives a throaty chuckle. “He was used to people fawning over him, and I think he liked me because I was mean.”
“I didn’t go to the crash site on the night he died,” she says, picking another piece of debris from the box. As her husband began his final descent, Heather and the rest of the staff gathered at a restaurant for the company’s annual Christmas party. “I got a message that his plane had landed,” she recalls, choking back tears. “So I kept calling and calling.” She winces at the memory. “This is making me sick again.” Leaning back in her chair, she takes a drag of a cigarette. “They told me the plane had crashed and that he was dead, but I didn’t ?want to believe it. I thought maybe he was on the way to the hospital, so I didn’t go to the crash site until December 26.” Her left nostril spasms. “I have pieces of my husband’s brain!” she cries. “I picked them up with my hands six days after the crash. Chunks of his skin and internal organs. How is that a proper investigation? How is that acceptable? How dare they leave pieces of my husband lying there!”
She pulls out another storage box filled with personal items from the crash site: $50 in cash; a charred prayer book with a note inside it reading, “I love you”; a Mickey Mouse dollar bill. Something important is missing, though. “Why do I have his earpiece?” she asks, pulling out the Jawbone headset of a BlackBerry. “This was in his backpack. And the backpack was zipped. So where’s his phone?”
“He always clips them next to each other,” interjects her 15-year-old daughter, Lauren. It’s an important detail because it suggests that the BlackBerry may have been intentionally removed from the backpack. On it were hundreds, if not thousands, of sensitive files and e-mails relating to Karl Rove and the Bush administration.
“I want to know where my husband’s phone is,” Connell says angrily. “It’s my responsibility as a mother and a spouse to find out what happened. And I will not accept ‘Cause of crash unknown.’ I will not.”
Though she is furious at the NTSB, she has no time for the conspiracy theories. While she admits that Connell was disillusioned with politics, she bridles at any suggestion that he could have been involved with vote rigging. “With Mike there was religion, family, and a love for democracy,” she says firmly. “He would never interfere with the democratic process. That’s just ridiculous.”
Connell’s younger sister isn’t so sure. “I knew he worked for the Bushes,” says Shannon Connell. The two siblings had diametrically opposed views — Shannon Connell is a pro-Obama liberal — but they never allowed this to come between them. “We stayed close despite the political differences. He was my brother.”
She doesn’t know whether Connell helped steal elections. If he did, she says, it was because of his passionate anti-abortion views. “I think he was convinced he was doing good — to save the babies,” she says. “That’s the only thing my sisters and I can come up with.
“Mike had been deposed, but he hadn’t been called as a witness yet,” she says of the possibility that her brother was murdered. “He was incredibly loyal to the people he worked for, but he would never have lied under oath. For want of a better expression, I think they played him. His death would have been a really nice Christmas present for Rove and Cheney.
“I am beyond looking for justice,” she says, resigned. “I just want the truth to be known. But I am not counting on it.” She may be right.
After more than nine months, the factual report into Connell’s crash had still not been made public. According to an NTSB spokesperson, it was “still being reviewed.” That’s scant comfort to Connell’s family, who just want some sense of closure, whatever the outcome.
Still, “In my mind and my heart,” says Shannon Connell, “I am convinced he was murdered.”
We may never know the truth about Connell’s last flight, but contracts between Connell’s company, GovTech, and Ken Blackwell’s administration establish a credible scenario for electoral fraud and place Connell at the scene of the alleged crime.
Among other things, the contracts contradict Connell’s sworn testimony that SMARTech, in Chattanooga, merely acted as a backup site for election data.
The contracts, signed in March 2004, show that SMARTech was specifically tasked with creating a “mirror site” to manage election night results.“What this means is that Connell’s company was on both sides of the mirror,” explains Stephen Spoonamore. “And that the votes of the people of Ohio were in the control of a fiercely partisan IT company (SMARTech) and operating out of another state.”
Clouding matters further is the persistent specter of paranoid conspiracy that has enveloped the case from the beginning. In September 2009, an anonymous letter was sent to the FBI in Ohio and five other addressees, including Heather Connell. “Enclosed is a document that is not meant to exist,” begins the anonymous writer. Included is what purports to be an “after action report” by a black ops agent. All names have been redacted, but the report provides a detailed time log of actions taken to install an AMD (microprocessor) in the engine of Connell’s plane at College Park Airfield in D.C. the night before he made his fatal last flight. Connell himself is not mentioned by name. Just the registration number of his plane, NP299N, which the agent confirms he had been sent to “neutralize.” The letter accompanying the report is headed MICHAEL CONNELL, HOMICIDE. It ends with the words: “Connell was not NST (national security threat).”
While skeptics may be tempted to dismiss these documents as the ingenious work of a hoaxer intent on pouring gasoline on the bonfire of conspiracy theories already surrounding Connell, a number of experts from the intelligence community who have seen the document believe it to be genuine.
In early November, the NTSB finally released its factual report into Connell’s crash. The report concludes that tests carried out on the plane’s engine, flight control, and autopilot systems revealed “no anomalies that would have precluded normal operation.”
A spokeswoman for the NTSB confirmed that the organization had received a copy of the anonymous letter, but would not say whether its claims were being looked into. “We’re investigating the accident,” she says, “not any possible criminal activity.” She adds that the NTSB forwarded the letter to the FBI in Cleveland. When asked to confirm this, Scott Wilson at the FBI’s Cleveland bureau, says, “The only thing I can say is...I can’t say anything.”
Ultimately, only a full criminal investigation can determine the truth about Ohio ’04 and the death of Michael Connell. Robert Kennedy Jr., who sought Connell’s cooperation during an investigation into the election, believes the current administration should pursue the matter. “I think this is more serious than Watergate,” he says. “Watergate was essentially about winning the battle for public opinion. That’s why the break-in took place—to gather strategic information about Democratic strategy and dirt. But the electoral process remained intact. The Ohio vote undermines the very foundation stone of American democracy. There should be an official investigation. Otherwise this becomes a blueprint for how to steal an election from here to eternity.”
That may not be enough for Connell’s widow. When I first spoke to her on the phone, Heather Connell was adamant that her husband’s plane crash had been an accident, God’s will. But she is no longer so sure. “This is a messed-up case of whether Karl Rove threatened my husband or not,” she says. I ask her directly if she now believes her husband could have been murdered. She takes a deep drag of her cigarette and, choking back tears, says: “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
The Mysterious Death of Bush's Cyber-Guru
Wednesday 02/10/2010
Simon Worrall
Shortly before six o’clock on the evening of December 19, 2008, a man standing outside his home in Lake Township, Ohio heard the whine of an engine in the sky above him.
Moments later two red lights broke through the low clouds, heading almost directly toward the ground. It was a light aircraft, and for a second, as it descended below the tree line, the man thought it would climb back up. Instead, there was a terrible thud, and the sky turned orange. When the fire crews arrived, they found the burning wreckage of a Piper Saratoga strewn across a vacant lot. The plane had narrowly missed a house, but the explosion was so intense that the home’s plastic siding was on fire. So was the grass. The pilot had been thrown from the plane and died instantly. Body parts and pieces of twisted metal were scattered everywhere. A prayer book lay open on the ground, its pages on fire.
The crash would have remained a private tragedy confined to the pages of the local press and the hearts of the pilot’s widow and four children, but within days the blogosphere was abuzz with rumors and conspiracy theories: The plane, it was said, had been sabotaged and the pilot murdered to cover up the GOP’s alleged theft of the Ohio vote in the 2004 presidential election. At the center of this plot was the Saratoga’s pilot, a prodigiously gifted IT expert named Michael Connell, whose altar boy charm and technical brilliance had made him the computer whiz of choice for the Republican Party. Left-wing Web sites openly referred to Connell as “Bush’s vote rigger” and claimed that his fingerprints were on all the most controversial elections in recent history. There were dark whispers of electronic pulses or sniper fire being used to bring down the plane—a black ops attack designed to keep him from testifying against his former cronies. Right-wing bloggers and talk show hosts derided such claims as the twisted delusions of liberal nut jobs and tinfoil hatters. The mainstream press sat on its hands.
But while the rumors, innuendos, and allegations continue to swirl through the ether, evidence has recently emerged that suggests the Ohio vote may have been hacked, and that Connell was involved.
Born in 1963 in Peoria, Illinois into a large Irish-American family, Michael Connell was a lifelong Republican and a devout Roman Catholic who went to Mass every day and wore a wristband saying what would jesus do? What Connell did was realize the potential of the Internet to shape politics. While still in his 20s, he worked as finance director for Republican Congressman Jim Leach, and as director of voter programs for Senator Dan Coats of Indiana. In 1988 Connell developed a voter contact database for George H.W. Bush, thus inaugurating a long association with the Bush family: Connell worked on Jeb’s gubernatorial campaign in Florida in 1998; two years later he was the chief architect of George W. Bush’s Web site as Dubya launched his bid for the White House.
But it was while serving as tech guru to Karl Rove that Connell developed his deepest and perhaps most problematic professional relationship. Recruited in the late ’80s, Connell became Rove’s most trusted cyberlieutenant: a Web wizard who could turn portals into power and who would gain access to the very heights of American politics by the time he reached 30 years old. Connell’s two Ohio-based companies, New Media Communications and GovTech, became virtual research and development labs for the Republican Party, building and managing Web sites and e-mail accounts for both Presidents Bush and a long list of leading Republicans. GovTech also designed and managed numerous Congressional IT systems, including those for the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, putting Connell “behind the fire wall” of some of the most sensitive government Web sites from the safety of the Bush White House.
“Mike was known as the GOP’s Mister Fix-It,” says Stephen Spoonamore, an IT security expert and friend of Connell’s. “He built really intelligent tools that allowed people who wanted to win elections do a better job organizing their data.” But aside from his more legitimate business, Connell was no stranger to the darker side of American politics. He was forced to resign from Senator Coats’ campaign for his involvement in ethical violations. Connell’s was also the hand behind the Web site for the notorious Swift Boat Veterans’ for Truth smear campaign against John Kerry and GWB43.com, the secret e-mail account used by Rove and dozens of other White House staffers.
Just six weeks before his death, Connell had given a deposition in an Ohio lawsuit that accused Rove, Bush, and Co. of something far more serious than merely scrubbing e-mails: the theft of the 2004 Ohio vote. “This is the biggest scandal in our history,” says Mark Crispin Miller, a professor at New York University who has written extensively about electronic voter fraud. “Watergate grew out of a paranoid attempt to disable the opposition. But Ohio was exponentially different. We’re talking about a systematic, centralized attempt to rig the voting system.”
“We decided to try to bring a racketeering claim against Rove under Ohio law,” says Cliff Arnebeck, the attorney who brought the suit, a broad-shouldered man with a Senatorial air dressed in a blue blazer. “We detected a pattern of criminal activity, and we identified Connell as a key witness, as the implementer for Rove.”
By any calculation, the Ohio 2004 election was a black day for American democracy. Lou Harris, known as the “father of modern political polling,” and a man not given to hyperbole, called it “as dirty an election as America has ever seen.” All the exit polls suggested Ohio would go to Kerry. But when the vote was counted George Bush had won by 132,685 votes, adding Ohio’s crucial 20 Electoral College votes to his tally. And putting him, not Kerry, into the White House. It has since been alleged that at several points on election night, the Ohio secretary of state’s official Web site, which was responsible for reporting the results, was being hosted by a server in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Ohio’s secretary of state in 2004 was a fiercely partisan Christian named Ken Blackwell. Blackwell had hired a company called GDC Limited to run the IT systems, which had subcontracted the job to Michael Connell’s company, GovTech. Connell had in turn sub-contracted SMARTech, an IT firm based in Chattanooga, to act, it was claimed, as a backup server.
“By looking at the URLs on the Web site, we discovered that there were three points on election night when SMARTech’s computers took over from the secretary of state,” says Arnebeck. “It is during that period that we believe votes were manipulated.”
In computer jargon it is known as a man-in-the-middle attack.
“At the time I didn’t know who SMARTech were,” says IT expert Stephen Spoonamore, opening a file on his computer showing the Internet architecture map of the 2004 Ohio election. He points to a red box in the bottom right-hand corner showing SMARTech’s server.
“Then I found out: They host Rove’s e-mails. They host the RNC’s Web site. They host George Bush’s Web site.” His voice rises in disbelief.
“I go, ‘Holy shit, this is a man-in-the-middle attack! These guys have programmed the state’s computers to talk to a company with ties to the Republican Party.’ It’s brilliant.”
With his wiry hair and designer glasses, Spoonamore looks like a character in a Tim Burton movie. A lifelong Republican, he is also one of the world’s acknowledged experts on cybersecurity, with a résumé that includes work for the U.S. armed forces and the FBI. In his spare time he has devoted thousands of hours to investigating cyberfraud in American elections. “I know I sound crazy when I talk about this stuff. No one wants to believe it. They say, ‘No one would steal an election.’ And I go, ‘Yeah, they would. And that’s exactly what they did.’”
Spoonamore believes that while Michael Connell may have facilitated electoral fraud, he was really just a tool of more powerful forces. “Mike has been called the Forrest Gump of GOP IT operations,” he says. “And I think there’s a truth to that. I think he was a good guy surrounded by wolves. He was always going to be the fall guy.”
The two men had gotten to know each other at Spoonamore’s Washington, D.C. offices in late 2005. “The two of us hit it off,” recalls Spoonamore. “We were the same age, the same generation. We had a lot of friends in common.” At the end of the meeting, Connell broached a delicate topic. “Mike asked me, ‘How easy is it to destroy all records of e-mail?’” recalls Spoonamore. “He sort of gestured toward the White House and said, ‘Because I have clients down the street who are working on that problem.’ And I stepped back and said, ‘If you are talking about White House e-mail destruction, I want nothing to do with it.’”
A year later, at an IT conference in London, Spoonamore confronted the pro-life Connell about the Ohio election: “He said, ‘I’m afraid that in my zeal to save the babies, the system I built may have been abused.’”
Three days later, in the back of a cab heading toward the airport, Spoonamore asked Connell if he would be willing to talk to a Congressional judiciary committee about what he knew. “I actually took Mike’s hand and said, ‘If I can arrange for a private meeting for you to sit down with the committee and explain what you think may have happened in 2004 and how your systems may have been abused, will you do it?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’”
Connell never did talk to the judiciary committee. But in the months leading up to his death he was under intense pressure. In an attempt to extricate himself from the world of politics, he had sold two of his businesses, including GovTech. Throughout the fall his plane was being tracked by Arnebeck and his associates so they could serve him with a subpoena. Connell sought refuge from the maelstrom in his deep Catholic faith. He took to wearing a scapular, two squares of cloth with religious images favored by devout Catholics, under his shirt. He went to Mass twice a day and became more directly involved with the pro-life movement, spending weekends standing outside abortion clinics. He traveled to Burma and Thailand to work with religious dissidents and started a Catholic charity in El Salvador.
Finally, on October 8, 2008, Connell was served with his subpoena at College Park Airfield outside Washington, D.C. Seven weeks later his Piper Saratoga would fall from the sky.
On December 18, Connell flew to D.C. to meet with the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s organization, about starting a new branch and rebuilding their Web site. He stayed the night at a hotel, got up early to attend Mass and then a breakfast meeting. At about 11 a.m., Connell went to College Park Airfield to prepare to fly home to Akron. His firm, New Media Communication, was holding its Christmas party that evening, and he didn’t want to miss it. An experienced pilot with more than 500 hours of flight time under his belt, Connell waited for the weather to clear. Shortly after 3:30 p.m., he called his wife, Heather, in Ohio to say he had his “window.” He took off at 3:51 p.m.
At first everything went fine. On his approach to Akron-Canton Regional Airport, he asked the tower if there were any reports of icing and was told there were not. It was certainly dark and cold, with cloud cover at 1,000 feet, but the plane had a sophisticated autopilot system that would normally bring it onto the runway, like a homing pigeon. But at 3,200 feet, as Connell began his descent, air traffic control radioed to say he was off course by several miles. Connell radioed that he would correct his position. Something seemed to be wrong with the lateral controls.
The audiotapes of Connell’s last communications with the tower suggest a rising sense of panic and confusion. Realizing that he is still off course, he asks to do a 360-degree turn “to reestablish ourselves.” It’s an unusual maneuver at this late stage of the approach, and the flight controller denies the request. Instead, he advises Connell to “climb and maintain 3,000 feet.” Seconds later there is a loud rushing sound as the cockpit bursts open and the engine goes haywire. Connell screams, “Nine nine November declaring an emergency!” Out of respect for his religious beliefs—and his children—the tower reported that his last words were, “Oh, God!” In fact, he cries out, “Oh, fuck!” Then the tape goes dead.
Capt. Lorin Geisner of the Greentown Fire Department was the first person to arrive at the scene. “We received a 911 call, so we contacted the tower and asked what size plane it was and how many souls were on board,” he recalls. “But we were informed that the tower was in lockdown and that no information was available.”
According to sources, there were other anomalies. Normally, a night crash scene would be roped off and investigated in daylight. In this case representatives of the NTSB and FAA used light towers to photograph and document the scene. Connell’s plane was hastily removed to a secure hangar under cover of darkness. By 6 a.m. the investigators had vanished, leaving behind them a trail of debris, and one very angry widow.
“How is this OK?” asks Heather Connell, pulling a chunk of metal from a cardboard box she had brought in from the garage. She is kneeling on the floor of her husband’s basement office, a tidy space decorated with sleek black office furniture. A photo of a 25-year-old Connell with George H.W. Bush sits on the bookshelf next to an action figure of Dubya decked out in fighter pilot garb. A cascade of frizzy blonde hair tumbles forward over Heather’s face. Her eyes are red from crying. “They think this is part of the foot pedal.”
When I ask how she met her husband, she starts to hum the ’80s hit “Don’t You Want Me.” “She was working as waitress in a cocktail bar...” Then her voice falters. “That much is true. We met in Indiana. He was working for Senator Coats, and I was going to college and working at a sports bar. He was with a bunch of interns who came in. I carded every one of them and was in the process of kicking him out of the bar.” She gives a throaty chuckle. “He was used to people fawning over him, and I think he liked me because I was mean.”
“I didn’t go to the crash site on the night he died,” she says, picking another piece of debris from the box. As her husband began his final descent, Heather and the rest of the staff gathered at a restaurant for the company’s annual Christmas party. “I got a message that his plane had landed,” she recalls, choking back tears. “So I kept calling and calling.” She winces at the memory. “This is making me sick again.” Leaning back in her chair, she takes a drag of a cigarette. “They told me the plane had crashed and that he was dead, but I didn’t ?want to believe it. I thought maybe he was on the way to the hospital, so I didn’t go to the crash site until December 26.” Her left nostril spasms. “I have pieces of my husband’s brain!” she cries. “I picked them up with my hands six days after the crash. Chunks of his skin and internal organs. How is that a proper investigation? How is that acceptable? How dare they leave pieces of my husband lying there!”
She pulls out another storage box filled with personal items from the crash site: $50 in cash; a charred prayer book with a note inside it reading, “I love you”; a Mickey Mouse dollar bill. Something important is missing, though. “Why do I have his earpiece?” she asks, pulling out the Jawbone headset of a BlackBerry. “This was in his backpack. And the backpack was zipped. So where’s his phone?”
“He always clips them next to each other,” interjects her 15-year-old daughter, Lauren. It’s an important detail because it suggests that the BlackBerry may have been intentionally removed from the backpack. On it were hundreds, if not thousands, of sensitive files and e-mails relating to Karl Rove and the Bush administration.
“I want to know where my husband’s phone is,” Connell says angrily. “It’s my responsibility as a mother and a spouse to find out what happened. And I will not accept ‘Cause of crash unknown.’ I will not.”
Though she is furious at the NTSB, she has no time for the conspiracy theories. While she admits that Connell was disillusioned with politics, she bridles at any suggestion that he could have been involved with vote rigging. “With Mike there was religion, family, and a love for democracy,” she says firmly. “He would never interfere with the democratic process. That’s just ridiculous.”
Connell’s younger sister isn’t so sure. “I knew he worked for the Bushes,” says Shannon Connell. The two siblings had diametrically opposed views — Shannon Connell is a pro-Obama liberal — but they never allowed this to come between them. “We stayed close despite the political differences. He was my brother.”
She doesn’t know whether Connell helped steal elections. If he did, she says, it was because of his passionate anti-abortion views. “I think he was convinced he was doing good — to save the babies,” she says. “That’s the only thing my sisters and I can come up with.
“Mike had been deposed, but he hadn’t been called as a witness yet,” she says of the possibility that her brother was murdered. “He was incredibly loyal to the people he worked for, but he would never have lied under oath. For want of a better expression, I think they played him. His death would have been a really nice Christmas present for Rove and Cheney.
“I am beyond looking for justice,” she says, resigned. “I just want the truth to be known. But I am not counting on it.” She may be right.
After more than nine months, the factual report into Connell’s crash had still not been made public. According to an NTSB spokesperson, it was “still being reviewed.” That’s scant comfort to Connell’s family, who just want some sense of closure, whatever the outcome.
Still, “In my mind and my heart,” says Shannon Connell, “I am convinced he was murdered.”
We may never know the truth about Connell’s last flight, but contracts between Connell’s company, GovTech, and Ken Blackwell’s administration establish a credible scenario for electoral fraud and place Connell at the scene of the alleged crime.
Among other things, the contracts contradict Connell’s sworn testimony that SMARTech, in Chattanooga, merely acted as a backup site for election data.
The contracts, signed in March 2004, show that SMARTech was specifically tasked with creating a “mirror site” to manage election night results.“What this means is that Connell’s company was on both sides of the mirror,” explains Stephen Spoonamore. “And that the votes of the people of Ohio were in the control of a fiercely partisan IT company (SMARTech) and operating out of another state.”
Clouding matters further is the persistent specter of paranoid conspiracy that has enveloped the case from the beginning. In September 2009, an anonymous letter was sent to the FBI in Ohio and five other addressees, including Heather Connell. “Enclosed is a document that is not meant to exist,” begins the anonymous writer. Included is what purports to be an “after action report” by a black ops agent. All names have been redacted, but the report provides a detailed time log of actions taken to install an AMD (microprocessor) in the engine of Connell’s plane at College Park Airfield in D.C. the night before he made his fatal last flight. Connell himself is not mentioned by name. Just the registration number of his plane, NP299N, which the agent confirms he had been sent to “neutralize.” The letter accompanying the report is headed MICHAEL CONNELL, HOMICIDE. It ends with the words: “Connell was not NST (national security threat).”
While skeptics may be tempted to dismiss these documents as the ingenious work of a hoaxer intent on pouring gasoline on the bonfire of conspiracy theories already surrounding Connell, a number of experts from the intelligence community who have seen the document believe it to be genuine.
In early November, the NTSB finally released its factual report into Connell’s crash. The report concludes that tests carried out on the plane’s engine, flight control, and autopilot systems revealed “no anomalies that would have precluded normal operation.”
A spokeswoman for the NTSB confirmed that the organization had received a copy of the anonymous letter, but would not say whether its claims were being looked into. “We’re investigating the accident,” she says, “not any possible criminal activity.” She adds that the NTSB forwarded the letter to the FBI in Cleveland. When asked to confirm this, Scott Wilson at the FBI’s Cleveland bureau, says, “The only thing I can say is...I can’t say anything.”
Ultimately, only a full criminal investigation can determine the truth about Ohio ’04 and the death of Michael Connell. Robert Kennedy Jr., who sought Connell’s cooperation during an investigation into the election, believes the current administration should pursue the matter. “I think this is more serious than Watergate,” he says. “Watergate was essentially about winning the battle for public opinion. That’s why the break-in took place—to gather strategic information about Democratic strategy and dirt. But the electoral process remained intact. The Ohio vote undermines the very foundation stone of American democracy. There should be an official investigation. Otherwise this becomes a blueprint for how to steal an election from here to eternity.”
That may not be enough for Connell’s widow. When I first spoke to her on the phone, Heather Connell was adamant that her husband’s plane crash had been an accident, God’s will. But she is no longer so sure. “This is a messed-up case of whether Karl Rove threatened my husband or not,” she says. I ask her directly if she now believes her husband could have been murdered. She takes a deep drag of her cigarette and, choking back tears, says: “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Mardi Gras and the Illuminati
Mardi Gras and the Illuminati
Is no vestige of American culture safe from the sinister tentacles of the illuminati? Our LDD operative, Jack Heart, has put together an amazing… almost unbelievable report from inside the world’s oldest conspiracy. The following piece of investigative journalism uncovers the occult origins of Mardi Gras, America’s most spectacular party staged in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The history of Mardi Gras began long before Europeans set foot in the New World. In mid February the ancient Romans celebrated the Lupercalia, a circus like festival not entirely unlike the Mardi Gras we are familiar with today. When Rome embraced Christianity, the early Church fathers decided it was better to incorporate certain aspects of pagan rituals into the new faith rather than attempt to abolish them altogether. Carnival became a period of abandon and merriment that preceded the penance of Lent, thus giving a Christian interpretation to the ancient custom.
During the late 1700's, pre-Lenten masked balls and festivals were common in New Orleans while it was under French rule. In 1704, Mobile established a secret society (Masque de la Mobile) ... similar to those who form our current Mardi Gras Krewes. It lasted until 1709. In 1710, the "Boeuf Graf Society" was formed and paraded from 1711 through 1861. The procession was held with a huge bull's head pushed alone on wheels by 16 men. This occurred on Fat Tuesday.
When New Orleans came under Spanish rule the custom of masked balls and festivals was banned. In 1803 New Orleans came under the U.S. flag. The prohibition against masked festivals continued until 1823 when the Creole populace convinced the governor to permit masked balls. In 1827 street masking was again legalized.
During the early 1800's public celebrations of Mardi Gras centered around maskers on foot, in carriages and on horseback. The first documented parade occurred in 1837. Unfortunately, Mardi Gras gained a negative reputation because of violent behavior attributed to maskers during the 1840's and 50's. The situation became so bad that the press began calling for an end to the celebration.
In 1857 six New Orleaneans saved Mardi Gras by forming the Comus organization. These six men were former members of the Cowbellians, an organization which had put on New Year's Eve parades in Mobile since 1831. The Comus organization added beauty to Mardi Gras and demonstrated that it could be a safe and festive event. Comus was the first organization to use the term krewe to describe itself. Comus also started the customs of having a secret Carnival society, having a parade with a unifying theme with floats, and of having a ball after the parade. Comus was also the first organization to name itself after a mythological character (son and the cup-bearer of Dionysus).
The three secret founders of the Mystick Krewe of Comus were Albert Pike, Judah Benjamin and John Slidell. Judah Benjamin was an agent of the House of Rothschild living in New Orleans in 1857. The House of Rothschild was fearful that the new United States Republic would begin printing its own money and have a central bank not tied into the House of Rothschild. This would weaken the House of Rothschild’s control over the monetary currencies of the world. They had already established a secret bloodline elitist society, incorporating thirteen of the world’s most wealthy families, to eventually establish a New World Order with control over the world’s economy.
In 1832, William Russell, whose family fortunes were made smuggling opium to China through Turkey, founded a chapter of the House of Rothschild’s Illuminati—Knights of Templar at Yale University and called it Skull and Bones. Code numbers are important as a form of identification and communication to the upper echelon within this secret elitist society. Three is a key number. The number 33 is a passage into one of the highest stages of membership within this secret elitist group. The number 13 is a form of identification among these elitists. The official inscription of the Order of Skull and Bones within the building at Yale University called The Tomb is 322. Some people interpret this as the year of its founding, 1832, and that Skull and Bones is one of the 3 chapters of this Brotherhood of Death. The first chapter was founded in Germany. The second Chapter is at Yale University. The third chapter was to eventually be founded, when the time was right, at Tulane University School of Medicine located in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The headquarters for the Mystick Krewe of Comus became the Picwick Club. Here before the days of computers, telephones, etc, a place of secret communication was established for those in the higher levels of the Illuminati’s New World Order. The ordinary members of the Mystick Krewe of Comus had no knowledge of what Albert Pike, John Slidell, and Judah Benjamin were up to. The three secret elitist could also establish their code numbers. The number thirteen was used as the number of the invited guest to establish the original number of founders. The kings identity of the Mystic Krewe of Comus was kept secret.
The Skull and Bones Society was established in secret at Tulane University in New Orleans in October 1907. Dr. Isadore Dyer was one of the founding members. Dr. Isadore Dyer was a graduate of Yale University and was a member of the Berzellus secret society at Yale. This Brezellus secret society is a sister Yale member of Chapter 322-Skull and Bones-the Brotherhood of Death.
U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had reached level code 33. Franklin Delano Roosevelt participated and conspired with 33rd level J. Edgar Hoover to perform and complete the ritual “killing of the king-Kingfish-U.S. Senator Huey P. Long. Both Franklin D. Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover by their participation and completion of the killing of the kingfish U.S. Senator Huey P. Long were made secretly Kings of the Mystick Krewe of Comus. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was King of Comus in 1937. J. Edgar Hoover became a secret King of the Mystick Krewe of Comus later. When J. Edgar Hoover came down to New Orleans to act out his reign as King of Comus, he was involved in a sexual revelry of homosexuality and cross-dressing with various elitist bloodline members of the Mystick Krewe of Comus.
U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt conspired with Skull and Bones Henry L. Stimson, who was appointed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his Secretary of War, and with other 33rd level Winston Churchill to have the Japanese bomb Peal Harbor. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was necessary to destroy the isolationist movement in the U.S., and to force the U.S. into military involvement in the Wars of Europe.
The House of Rothschild-Skull and Bones-Illuminati’s plan was to force the U.S. into the European military theatre. Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Skull and Bones Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had broken the Japanese code and had pre-knowledge of the Pearl Harbor bombing plan of the Japanese.
Agents of Skull and Bones with blessing and involvement of J. Edgar Hoover FBI Director and 33rd level executioner-cover up specialist for the elitist bloodline of the House of Rothschild murdered Freemason Charles Lindberg’s son. This killing of freemason Charles Lindberg’s son was to set an example that the isolationist stand against the U.S. becoming involved with the wars of Europe was not the position or the will of the Illuminati.
Mardi Gras Krewes today are developed from private social clubs that have restrictive membership policies. Since all of these parade organizations are completely funded by its members, there is no legal way to track their activities. We are only left to guess at what these nefarious organizations are up to… or who is really pulling the strings…
Meanwhile… the vast majority of the American public goes about their business without giving much thought to the “Secret Chiefs” or their agenda of world domination. But this situation of obliviousness on the part of the average citizen may not be as hopeless as it first appears. There is something hopeful in the resiliency of the American Spirit in it’s defiance of controll from above. This “thumbing of the nose” at authority is demonstrated quite nicley at Mardi Gras itself. The tumultuous reveling prior to lent is a magnificent example of “stickin’ it to the man” through obstinance. The classic tune that typifies Mardi Gras, Iko-Iko says it best…
If you don’t like what the big chief say, sing “Jac-o-mo fina na (loose translation –let the goodtimes roll)!!!
Posted by Sensei
Heresy, Mardi Gras, Mysticism, Secret Societies
Humor: Kids Are Quick
TEACHER: Maria, go to the map and find North America.
MARIA: Here it is.
TEACHER: Correct. Now class, who discovered America?
CLASS: Maria.
____________________________________
TEACHER: John, why are you doing your math multiplication on the floor?
JOHN: You told me to do it without using tables.
__________________________________________
TEACHER: Glenn, how do you spell 'crocodile?'
GLENN: K-R-O-K-O-D-I-A-L
TEACHER: No, that's wrong.
GLENN: Maybe it is wrong, but you asked me how I spell it.
____________________________________________
TEACHER: Donald, what is the chemical formula for water?
DONALD: H I J K L M N O.
TEACHER: What are you talking about?
DONALD: Yesterday you said it's H to O.
__________________________________
TEACHER: Winnie, name one important thing we have today that we didn't have ten years ago.
WINNIE: Me!
__________________________________________
TEACHER: Glen, why do you always get so dirty?
GLEN: Well, I'm a lot closer to the ground than you are.
_______________________________________
TEACHER: Millie, give me a sentence starting with 'I. '
MILLIE: I is..
TEACHER: No, Millie..... Always say, 'I am.'
MILLIE: All right...'I am the ninth letter of the alphabet.'
________________________________
TEACHER: George Washington not only chopped down his father's cherry tree, but also admitted it. Now, Louie, do you know why his father didn't punish him?
LOUIS: Because George still had the axe in his hand..
______________________________________
TEACHER: Now, Simon, tell me frankly, do you say prayers before eating?
SIMON: No sir, I don't have to, my Mom is a good cook.
______________________________
TEACHER: Clyde, your composition on 'My Dog' is exactly the same as your brother's. Did you copy his?
CLYDE : No, sir. It's the same dog.
___________________________________
TEACHER: Harold, what do you call a person who keeps on talking when people are no longer interested?
HAROLD: A teacher.
MARIA: Here it is.
TEACHER: Correct. Now class, who discovered America?
CLASS: Maria.
____________________________________
TEACHER: John, why are you doing your math multiplication on the floor?
JOHN: You told me to do it without using tables.
__________________________________________
TEACHER: Glenn, how do you spell 'crocodile?'
GLENN: K-R-O-K-O-D-I-A-L
TEACHER: No, that's wrong.
GLENN: Maybe it is wrong, but you asked me how I spell it.
____________________________________________
TEACHER: Donald, what is the chemical formula for water?
DONALD: H I J K L M N O.
TEACHER: What are you talking about?
DONALD: Yesterday you said it's H to O.
__________________________________
TEACHER: Winnie, name one important thing we have today that we didn't have ten years ago.
WINNIE: Me!
__________________________________________
TEACHER: Glen, why do you always get so dirty?
GLEN: Well, I'm a lot closer to the ground than you are.
_______________________________________
TEACHER: Millie, give me a sentence starting with 'I. '
MILLIE: I is..
TEACHER: No, Millie..... Always say, 'I am.'
MILLIE: All right...'I am the ninth letter of the alphabet.'
________________________________
TEACHER: George Washington not only chopped down his father's cherry tree, but also admitted it. Now, Louie, do you know why his father didn't punish him?
LOUIS: Because George still had the axe in his hand..
______________________________________
TEACHER: Now, Simon, tell me frankly, do you say prayers before eating?
SIMON: No sir, I don't have to, my Mom is a good cook.
______________________________
TEACHER: Clyde, your composition on 'My Dog' is exactly the same as your brother's. Did you copy his?
CLYDE : No, sir. It's the same dog.
___________________________________
TEACHER: Harold, what do you call a person who keeps on talking when people are no longer interested?
HAROLD: A teacher.
Kool Sites
Thanks to Rense.com and others for the following...
From DeesIllustration.com
David Dees. Professional freelance illustrator for oveer 20 years.
*
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/
Baseball Prospectus
Thanks for making BP2010 the 22nd-best selling book on Amazon.com.
The 15th edition of the bestselling baseball annual is Now Shipping!
Purchase your copy today for only $13.47...
*
http://www.thompsoncigar.com/
Cigars - Shop Quality Cigars at Thompson Cigar
Shop the biggest selection of premium cigars, national brands, exclusive brands, cigar samplers and more. Best selections at the lowest prices.
From DeesIllustration.com
David Dees. Professional freelance illustrator for oveer 20 years.
*
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/
Baseball Prospectus
Thanks for making BP2010 the 22nd-best selling book on Amazon.com.
The 15th edition of the bestselling baseball annual is Now Shipping!
Purchase your copy today for only $13.47...
*
http://www.thompsoncigar.com/
Cigars - Shop Quality Cigars at Thompson Cigar
Shop the biggest selection of premium cigars, national brands, exclusive brands, cigar samplers and more. Best selections at the lowest prices.
Why We Need Health Care Reform So Desperately
http://robertreich.org/post/380756144/the-national-anthem-and-why-we-need-health-care
The National Anthem -- And Why We Need Health Care Reform So Desperately
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
My health insurer here in California is Anthem Blue Cross. When I first opted for it, it was just called Blue Cross. Then, a year or so back, I was notified that an entity called “Anthem” would now be running my insurance policy. I didn’t think much about it at the time. I’ve had the usual problems most people have with their health insurers – confusing bills, co-payments and deductibles that never seem to add up, a bureaucracy that gives every impression of being more interested in fighting me than helping me — but nothing more.
Now, Anthem Blue Cross is going a step further. It’s raising rates for individual policyholders by as much as 39 percent. That’s fifteen times faster than inflation. So far, my group policy hasn’t been affected but I’m expecting the worst.
Anthem says it has no choice. It says the recession has forced many policyholders to drop coverage because they can’t afford it. So Anthem has to spread its costs over a much smaller pool, which ratchets up the cost of each. In addition, says Anthem, too many of those remaining policyholders have greater medical needs than the average. So Anthem is just doing what it has to do to survive.
This argument sounds logical until you look more closely. First, Anthem and its corporate parent, WellPoint, are enormously profitable. WellPoint’s profits rose to $2.7 billion last quarter. Even if you subtract one-time-only financial maneuvers, WellPoint is still fat and happy, which makes Anthem fat and happy. Everyone is fat and happy except Anthem’s policy holders, who are being skewered.
Anthem’s argument is even more questionable when you consider that Anthem has been among the most aggressive opponents of the health-care bills passed by the House and Senate. If Anthem were sincere about why it’s raising its rates, it would be embracing the legislation. The Senate and House bills would add tens of millions of Americans to insurance pools – thereby spreading the costs over more people and avoiding the very problem Anthem says is now forcing it to raise its rates so much.
Even more troubling is the fact that Anthem obviously believes it can raise its rates by as much as 39 percent without losing every one of its remaining customers with average or even somewhat above-average medical needs. The only way it could possibly raise its rates so high and expect to keep its customers would be if Anthem’s customers have no other choice. In other words, Anthem’s strategy makes sense only if Anthem faces little or no competition from other health insurers.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the case. Insurers, remember, are exempt from the federal antitrust laws. And WellPoint, Anthem’s parent, is the largest insurer in America.
Anthem is a microcosm of what ails our private for-profit health insurance system – the most expensive in the world, whose costs are rising faster than anywhere in the world; a system rapidly becoming unaffordable to more and more Americans, in which insurers are rapidly consolidating into behemoths that have almost no competitors. And a system in which the biggest health insurers are lobbying like mad against reform because they like things just the way they are. They can squeeze the public and the public has no alternative but to pay up.
All this makes Anthem one of he best arguments for reform — which is probably why the President mentioned Anthem today when he emerged from what was billed as a “bipartisan” meeting to talk about health care and jobs.
Obama says he’s open to any new ideas from Republicans for how to control health care costs and expand coverage. The problem is Republicans don’t want to play this game. They don’t care about controlling costs or expanding coverage. They care only about taking back the House and/or the Senate next November. And they believe a means toward attaining this goal is to prevent Obama from achieving a victory on health care. The sooner the President accepts that undeniable fact — and gets the House to pass the Senate’s bill, and then uses the reconciliation process (that requires only 51 votes in the Senate) to deal with any remaining irreconcilable differences between the House and Senate — the better.
In the meantime, next chance I get I’m switching to another insurer — if that makes any difference at all in what I pay or the service I get, which seems increasingly doubtful. I’m also joining any Tea Party of mad-as-hellers fed up with how Big Insurance, Big Pharma, Wall Street, and much of the rest of corporate America have taken over our democracy.
The National Anthem -- And Why We Need Health Care Reform So Desperately
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
My health insurer here in California is Anthem Blue Cross. When I first opted for it, it was just called Blue Cross. Then, a year or so back, I was notified that an entity called “Anthem” would now be running my insurance policy. I didn’t think much about it at the time. I’ve had the usual problems most people have with their health insurers – confusing bills, co-payments and deductibles that never seem to add up, a bureaucracy that gives every impression of being more interested in fighting me than helping me — but nothing more.
Now, Anthem Blue Cross is going a step further. It’s raising rates for individual policyholders by as much as 39 percent. That’s fifteen times faster than inflation. So far, my group policy hasn’t been affected but I’m expecting the worst.
Anthem says it has no choice. It says the recession has forced many policyholders to drop coverage because they can’t afford it. So Anthem has to spread its costs over a much smaller pool, which ratchets up the cost of each. In addition, says Anthem, too many of those remaining policyholders have greater medical needs than the average. So Anthem is just doing what it has to do to survive.
This argument sounds logical until you look more closely. First, Anthem and its corporate parent, WellPoint, are enormously profitable. WellPoint’s profits rose to $2.7 billion last quarter. Even if you subtract one-time-only financial maneuvers, WellPoint is still fat and happy, which makes Anthem fat and happy. Everyone is fat and happy except Anthem’s policy holders, who are being skewered.
Anthem’s argument is even more questionable when you consider that Anthem has been among the most aggressive opponents of the health-care bills passed by the House and Senate. If Anthem were sincere about why it’s raising its rates, it would be embracing the legislation. The Senate and House bills would add tens of millions of Americans to insurance pools – thereby spreading the costs over more people and avoiding the very problem Anthem says is now forcing it to raise its rates so much.
Even more troubling is the fact that Anthem obviously believes it can raise its rates by as much as 39 percent without losing every one of its remaining customers with average or even somewhat above-average medical needs. The only way it could possibly raise its rates so high and expect to keep its customers would be if Anthem’s customers have no other choice. In other words, Anthem’s strategy makes sense only if Anthem faces little or no competition from other health insurers.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the case. Insurers, remember, are exempt from the federal antitrust laws. And WellPoint, Anthem’s parent, is the largest insurer in America.
Anthem is a microcosm of what ails our private for-profit health insurance system – the most expensive in the world, whose costs are rising faster than anywhere in the world; a system rapidly becoming unaffordable to more and more Americans, in which insurers are rapidly consolidating into behemoths that have almost no competitors. And a system in which the biggest health insurers are lobbying like mad against reform because they like things just the way they are. They can squeeze the public and the public has no alternative but to pay up.
All this makes Anthem one of he best arguments for reform — which is probably why the President mentioned Anthem today when he emerged from what was billed as a “bipartisan” meeting to talk about health care and jobs.
Obama says he’s open to any new ideas from Republicans for how to control health care costs and expand coverage. The problem is Republicans don’t want to play this game. They don’t care about controlling costs or expanding coverage. They care only about taking back the House and/or the Senate next November. And they believe a means toward attaining this goal is to prevent Obama from achieving a victory on health care. The sooner the President accepts that undeniable fact — and gets the House to pass the Senate’s bill, and then uses the reconciliation process (that requires only 51 votes in the Senate) to deal with any remaining irreconcilable differences between the House and Senate — the better.
In the meantime, next chance I get I’m switching to another insurer — if that makes any difference at all in what I pay or the service I get, which seems increasingly doubtful. I’m also joining any Tea Party of mad-as-hellers fed up with how Big Insurance, Big Pharma, Wall Street, and much of the rest of corporate America have taken over our democracy.
John Mayer Jokes...
The FBI is investigating John Mayer's penis for its alleged involvement in a 1996 lynching of two African-American teenagers just outside Macon, Georgia. Witnesses have long insisted that the penis was attached to someone described as a "douche bag."
When asked if he likes Jewish girls, John Mayer replied: "My dick is like a Nazi SS officer who runs a concentration camp and loves gassing to death members of the vermin race."
When asked if he likes Asian girls, John Mayer replied: "My fucking cock dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and doesn't feel sorry about it one bit..."
When asked if he likes Jewish girls, John Mayer replied: "My dick is like a Nazi SS officer who runs a concentration camp and loves gassing to death members of the vermin race."
When asked if he likes Asian girls, John Mayer replied: "My fucking cock dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and doesn't feel sorry about it one bit..."
Not his father's son
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/02/15/evan_bayh_quits/index.html
Monday, Feb 15, 2010
Not his father's son
Good riddance to Evan Bayh, who set out to be every Republican's favorite Democrat -- and mostly succeeded
Steve Kornacki
Evan Bayh learned early that liberalism and ambition don't always mix in a red state like Indiana.
It was 30 years ago that Bayh, then a 24-year-old law school student, helped run the re-election campaign of his father, Senator Birch Bayh. An unrepentant liberal with national aspirations (he'd run for president in 1976), the elder Bayh was targeted by a then-emerging network of "New Right" activists and fundraisers, who pilloried him as a big spender and slammed his support for abortion rights, gay rights and school busing.
As expedient as it might have been, Birch Bayh refused to back down from his principles in that campaign, an honorable stand that hastened his demise. On Election Day, he was defeated -- handily. By Dan Quayle. At 52, his political career was over.
His son, it seems, was taking notes.
Evan Bayh inherited all of his father's drive for national office but none of his progressive backbone. From his father's defeat, he seemed to draw a lesson: You can dream big dreams if you're a Democrat from Indiana -- you just can't be proud to be a Democrat. And that has been the defining principle (to the extent there's been one) in Evan Bayh's quarter-century political career, which began with a successful 1986 campaign for secretary of state in Indiana and which now may be ending, with his stunning decision to exit the Senate after two terms.
To his home state's largest newspaper, Bayh painted himself as an innocent bystander in a Capitol overrun by partisan bickering -- a "centrist" surrounded by the extremists of the left and the right. (In Bayh's telling, the left is always equally, if not more, culpable for the country's problem's as the right.)
“Just last week, a major piece of legislation to create jobs -- the public’s top priority -- fell apart amid complaints from both the left and right," he told the Indianapolis Star. "All of this and much more has led me to believe that there are better ways to serve my fellow citizens, my beloved state and our nation than continued service in Congress.”
Funny that he mentioned jobs. After all, it was Bayh and fellow moderate Senate Democrats who insisted last year that President Obama's first major initiative as president -- the stimulus bill -- be pared by about $100 billion, depriving the economy of hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Not that it mattered much to Bayh, who showed far more concern last year in the GOP's new pet issue: government spending and the federal deficit.
This has always been Bayh's way -- to position himself as every Republican's favorite Democrat. It's how he stepped out of his father's shadow back in 1986. It's how he won election as Indiana's governor in 1988 (even as the Bush-Quayle ticket was carrying the state in a romp) and re-election in 1992. And it's how he became the next it-boy of the Democratic Leadership Council in the mid-'90s, back when that designation was actually helpful in Democratic politics. With Bill Clinton's blessing, Bayh keynoted the 1996 Democratic convention in Chicago and a promotion to the Senate followed two years later.
From there, the question was when -- and not if -- he'd make his move into national politics. The moment nearly arrived in the summer of 2000, when Al Gore mulled whether to tap Bayh, John Kerry, John Edwards or Joe Lieberman as his running-mate. Lieberman got the nod, but it was only the first of three times that Bayh would make a VP short-list.
He looked briefly at running for president himself in 2004, but backed out early -- before Iraq began spiraling out of control, when George W. Bush still seemed a safe bet for a second term. He looked harder at 2008, travelling to New Hampshire and bragging to the locals about his high vote totals in red state Indiana. The message was classic Bayh: Elect me not for what I believe in, but because of who I know how to appeal to. But when Barack Obama unexpectedly emerged as a candidate in the fall of 2006, Bayh realized there wasn't any room left and backed out, endorsing Hillary Clinton in a calculated effort to curry favor as a potential running-mate. (As it was, he still managed to make Obama's short list.)
In this career narrative, a different motive for Bayh's Senate exit can be seen. He never set out to be a Senate lifer. He ran for the office because it was the next logical step on his rise to the White House, and when he got it, he made damn sure not to expose himself to the same right-wing taunts that toppled his dad. His goal wasn't to make a mark in the Senate; it was to hold onto the seat long enough to make the next logical move, to a national ticket.
But now, at the age of 54, Bayh's national window is closing. Three presidential cycles have come and gone since 1998 and he's still in the Senate. Youth was always part of his selling point, but in 2016 -- the next time the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nomination are likely to be open -- he'll be 60. He can hear the footsteps behind him. It raised the question: What's the point of staying in the Senate?
Then there's the climate of 2010. Sure, Bayh was running well ahead of Dan Coats, his probable GOP opponent. But just a few weeks ago, a poll showed him in a dead heat with Mike Pence, who then opted not to run. That had to be jarring for Bayh, who won by 32 points in 2004. He watched a national GOP tide take out his father in 1980. For all of his bows to the right, how sure was he that he's be any safer himself in 2010?
Birch Bayh's Senate career was a remarkable one. He knocked out the loathsome Homer Capehart in 1962 and beat back two strong GOP challengers, William Ruckelshaus in 1968 and Richard Lugar in 1974 -- all well pursuing a defiantly progressive agenda. In perhaps his proudest moment, he turned on the Vietnam war early -- at great political risk -- and helped push through the 26th Amendment, lowering the voting age to 18, so that those fighting in Vietnam could vote on the leaders who'd decided to send them there.
And his son? Well, when George W. Bush launched his "war on terror" and turned his focus to Iraq, no Democrat cheered louder than Evan Bayh. And even when the tragic folly of that war and of the broader neoconservative agenda became apparent, he learned nothing. A confrontation with Iran? Sign Senator Bayh up.
24 years ago, Evan Bayh set out to prove voters that he wasn't like his father. As his Senate career ends, we can safely say: Mission accomplished.
Monday, Feb 15, 2010
Not his father's son
Good riddance to Evan Bayh, who set out to be every Republican's favorite Democrat -- and mostly succeeded
Steve Kornacki
Evan Bayh learned early that liberalism and ambition don't always mix in a red state like Indiana.
It was 30 years ago that Bayh, then a 24-year-old law school student, helped run the re-election campaign of his father, Senator Birch Bayh. An unrepentant liberal with national aspirations (he'd run for president in 1976), the elder Bayh was targeted by a then-emerging network of "New Right" activists and fundraisers, who pilloried him as a big spender and slammed his support for abortion rights, gay rights and school busing.
As expedient as it might have been, Birch Bayh refused to back down from his principles in that campaign, an honorable stand that hastened his demise. On Election Day, he was defeated -- handily. By Dan Quayle. At 52, his political career was over.
His son, it seems, was taking notes.
Evan Bayh inherited all of his father's drive for national office but none of his progressive backbone. From his father's defeat, he seemed to draw a lesson: You can dream big dreams if you're a Democrat from Indiana -- you just can't be proud to be a Democrat. And that has been the defining principle (to the extent there's been one) in Evan Bayh's quarter-century political career, which began with a successful 1986 campaign for secretary of state in Indiana and which now may be ending, with his stunning decision to exit the Senate after two terms.
To his home state's largest newspaper, Bayh painted himself as an innocent bystander in a Capitol overrun by partisan bickering -- a "centrist" surrounded by the extremists of the left and the right. (In Bayh's telling, the left is always equally, if not more, culpable for the country's problem's as the right.)
“Just last week, a major piece of legislation to create jobs -- the public’s top priority -- fell apart amid complaints from both the left and right," he told the Indianapolis Star. "All of this and much more has led me to believe that there are better ways to serve my fellow citizens, my beloved state and our nation than continued service in Congress.”
Funny that he mentioned jobs. After all, it was Bayh and fellow moderate Senate Democrats who insisted last year that President Obama's first major initiative as president -- the stimulus bill -- be pared by about $100 billion, depriving the economy of hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Not that it mattered much to Bayh, who showed far more concern last year in the GOP's new pet issue: government spending and the federal deficit.
This has always been Bayh's way -- to position himself as every Republican's favorite Democrat. It's how he stepped out of his father's shadow back in 1986. It's how he won election as Indiana's governor in 1988 (even as the Bush-Quayle ticket was carrying the state in a romp) and re-election in 1992. And it's how he became the next it-boy of the Democratic Leadership Council in the mid-'90s, back when that designation was actually helpful in Democratic politics. With Bill Clinton's blessing, Bayh keynoted the 1996 Democratic convention in Chicago and a promotion to the Senate followed two years later.
From there, the question was when -- and not if -- he'd make his move into national politics. The moment nearly arrived in the summer of 2000, when Al Gore mulled whether to tap Bayh, John Kerry, John Edwards or Joe Lieberman as his running-mate. Lieberman got the nod, but it was only the first of three times that Bayh would make a VP short-list.
He looked briefly at running for president himself in 2004, but backed out early -- before Iraq began spiraling out of control, when George W. Bush still seemed a safe bet for a second term. He looked harder at 2008, travelling to New Hampshire and bragging to the locals about his high vote totals in red state Indiana. The message was classic Bayh: Elect me not for what I believe in, but because of who I know how to appeal to. But when Barack Obama unexpectedly emerged as a candidate in the fall of 2006, Bayh realized there wasn't any room left and backed out, endorsing Hillary Clinton in a calculated effort to curry favor as a potential running-mate. (As it was, he still managed to make Obama's short list.)
In this career narrative, a different motive for Bayh's Senate exit can be seen. He never set out to be a Senate lifer. He ran for the office because it was the next logical step on his rise to the White House, and when he got it, he made damn sure not to expose himself to the same right-wing taunts that toppled his dad. His goal wasn't to make a mark in the Senate; it was to hold onto the seat long enough to make the next logical move, to a national ticket.
But now, at the age of 54, Bayh's national window is closing. Three presidential cycles have come and gone since 1998 and he's still in the Senate. Youth was always part of his selling point, but in 2016 -- the next time the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nomination are likely to be open -- he'll be 60. He can hear the footsteps behind him. It raised the question: What's the point of staying in the Senate?
Then there's the climate of 2010. Sure, Bayh was running well ahead of Dan Coats, his probable GOP opponent. But just a few weeks ago, a poll showed him in a dead heat with Mike Pence, who then opted not to run. That had to be jarring for Bayh, who won by 32 points in 2004. He watched a national GOP tide take out his father in 1980. For all of his bows to the right, how sure was he that he's be any safer himself in 2010?
Birch Bayh's Senate career was a remarkable one. He knocked out the loathsome Homer Capehart in 1962 and beat back two strong GOP challengers, William Ruckelshaus in 1968 and Richard Lugar in 1974 -- all well pursuing a defiantly progressive agenda. In perhaps his proudest moment, he turned on the Vietnam war early -- at great political risk -- and helped push through the 26th Amendment, lowering the voting age to 18, so that those fighting in Vietnam could vote on the leaders who'd decided to send them there.
And his son? Well, when George W. Bush launched his "war on terror" and turned his focus to Iraq, no Democrat cheered louder than Evan Bayh. And even when the tragic folly of that war and of the broader neoconservative agenda became apparent, he learned nothing. A confrontation with Iran? Sign Senator Bayh up.
24 years ago, Evan Bayh set out to prove voters that he wasn't like his father. As his Senate career ends, we can safely say: Mission accomplished.
Monday, February 22, 2010
The “Tea Party” movement in the US
http://wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/teap-f09.shtml
The “Tea Party” movement in the US: A right-wing media creation
By David Walsh
9 February 2010
The “Tea Party” movement, which held a convention last weekend in Nashville, Tennessee, is largely a media concoction, aimed at shifting official American political life even further to the right.
The convention gathered “nearly 600 conservative activists,” according to ABC News, a weak showing considering the US media has been playing up this “grassroots movement” for the past 12 months.
The press coverage of the Tea Party movement begins from a thoroughly false premise, that wide layers of the American population oppose the Obama administration from the right, outraged over “socialism” and “big government” and the sinister possibility of “universal health care.”
The Tea Party business took shape in a typically sordid and fraudulent manner. One year ago, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli let loose with a rant from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade—cheered on by traders—against the Obama administration’s meager mortgage reform, denouncing attempts “to subsidize the losers’ mortgages … How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”
Far from a spontaneous outburst, Santelli’s appeal for a “tea party” protest was a stage-managed event, prepared well in advance and backed by wealthy, extreme right-wing forces. In any case, how could such a reactionary and selfish attack on the millions in danger of losing their homes provide the basis for a “populist” revolt in any meaningful sense of the word? The various rallies organized by the Tea Party network have been attended by a combination of ultra-right activists and highly confused, primarily middle class layers. Again, the gatherings have attracted forces largely through absurdly out-of-proportion media coverage.
This continues. Last weekend’s convention, addressed by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, received front-page treatment in the leading US newspapers. The New York Times referred to the movement’s efforts to harness “the grass-roots anger that burst onto the streets a year ago.” The Washington Post noted the number of convention delegates, but assured its readers that “there are millions of Americans just like them.” This is a movement, declared the Post, “that is unmistakably people-powered.”
There are people and there are people. The “people” who organized and spoke at the Tea Party convention happen to be well-heeled scoundrels and demagogues. The speakers included Tom Tancredo, the former Colorado Republican congressman, a fundamentalist Christian and anti-immigrant fanatic; Steve Milloy, the “junk science” commentator for FoxNews.com, i.e., an opponent of any effort to reverse the damage inflicted on the environment by “free enterprise”; Judge Roy Moore, the Alabama Supreme Court justice who refused to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments despite a federal judge’s orders in 2003 and currently a Republican candidate for Alabama governor; Fox News commentator Angela McGlowan, author of BAMBOOZLED: How Americans Are Being Exploited by the Lies of the Liberal Agenda; etc., etc.
A leader of the Memphis Tea Party, Mark Skoda, who presided over a final press conference, is a former UPS and FedEx executive and host of a radio program, “For God and Country,” on a Memphis radio station.
The audience, “overwhelmingly white and middle-aged,” according to the Post, was regaled with attacks on the Obama administration, including one effort to correlate the current administration and “Marxist Dictators of Latin America,” the defense of “Judeo-Christian values,” and appeals for fiscal responsibility, less government, lower taxes, states’ rights and “strong national security.”
In her remarks to the meeting, Palin—reportedly paid $100,000 for her appearance—offered a simple-minded defense of American militarism and attacks on democratic rights. She denounced law enforcement officials for supposedly granting “our constitutional rights” to terrorism suspects and the Obama administration for “reaching out to hostile regimes, writing personal letters to dangerous dictators, and apologizing for America!” In her appearances at the convention, she made clear her desire to be a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.
As a political figure, Palin is also largely a media and right-wing concoction. Among her earliest sponsors and advisors were longtime Democratic Party fundraiser and Washington DC lawyer, John Coale, and his wife, Greta Van Susteren, the Fox News commentator. Coale, a Scientologist like his spouse, raised large amounts of money for Sen. John Kerry in 2004 and for Hillary Clinton in 2008. When the latter lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, Coale switched his allegiance to Sen. John McCain and became especially involved in efforts to make Palin into a national figure. This is the incestuous character of American politics.
The Tea Party movement has been organized by a section of the Republican Party, including Dick Armey, the former Texas congressman, House Majority leader and “flat tax” advocate, along with right-wing media types such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has endorsed the movement, and Texas Governor Rick Perry attended a rally in Austin, Texas. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has strenuously advertised and promoted the Tea Party events.
The reactionary policies advocated by this movement are not popular with the American people, and if the Tea Party forces were presented before the public in an accurate light, they would not garner significant support. This is not, however, a reason for complacency. The growth of extreme right-wing elements is a real danger.
But contrary to the claims of the Nation and the left-liberal milieu, the risk does not emerge from some mass base for fascistic politics in America. It comes primarily from the continued subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party, and by that means, to the ruling elite. This blocks the development of a progressive alternative and provides the Republican right with opportunities to make gains by demagogically exploiting the political impasse. It is political roadblock that must be addressed.
The “Tea Party” movement in the US: A right-wing media creation
By David Walsh
9 February 2010
The “Tea Party” movement, which held a convention last weekend in Nashville, Tennessee, is largely a media concoction, aimed at shifting official American political life even further to the right.
The convention gathered “nearly 600 conservative activists,” according to ABC News, a weak showing considering the US media has been playing up this “grassroots movement” for the past 12 months.
The press coverage of the Tea Party movement begins from a thoroughly false premise, that wide layers of the American population oppose the Obama administration from the right, outraged over “socialism” and “big government” and the sinister possibility of “universal health care.”
The Tea Party business took shape in a typically sordid and fraudulent manner. One year ago, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli let loose with a rant from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade—cheered on by traders—against the Obama administration’s meager mortgage reform, denouncing attempts “to subsidize the losers’ mortgages … How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”
Far from a spontaneous outburst, Santelli’s appeal for a “tea party” protest was a stage-managed event, prepared well in advance and backed by wealthy, extreme right-wing forces. In any case, how could such a reactionary and selfish attack on the millions in danger of losing their homes provide the basis for a “populist” revolt in any meaningful sense of the word? The various rallies organized by the Tea Party network have been attended by a combination of ultra-right activists and highly confused, primarily middle class layers. Again, the gatherings have attracted forces largely through absurdly out-of-proportion media coverage.
This continues. Last weekend’s convention, addressed by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, received front-page treatment in the leading US newspapers. The New York Times referred to the movement’s efforts to harness “the grass-roots anger that burst onto the streets a year ago.” The Washington Post noted the number of convention delegates, but assured its readers that “there are millions of Americans just like them.” This is a movement, declared the Post, “that is unmistakably people-powered.”
There are people and there are people. The “people” who organized and spoke at the Tea Party convention happen to be well-heeled scoundrels and demagogues. The speakers included Tom Tancredo, the former Colorado Republican congressman, a fundamentalist Christian and anti-immigrant fanatic; Steve Milloy, the “junk science” commentator for FoxNews.com, i.e., an opponent of any effort to reverse the damage inflicted on the environment by “free enterprise”; Judge Roy Moore, the Alabama Supreme Court justice who refused to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments despite a federal judge’s orders in 2003 and currently a Republican candidate for Alabama governor; Fox News commentator Angela McGlowan, author of BAMBOOZLED: How Americans Are Being Exploited by the Lies of the Liberal Agenda; etc., etc.
A leader of the Memphis Tea Party, Mark Skoda, who presided over a final press conference, is a former UPS and FedEx executive and host of a radio program, “For God and Country,” on a Memphis radio station.
The audience, “overwhelmingly white and middle-aged,” according to the Post, was regaled with attacks on the Obama administration, including one effort to correlate the current administration and “Marxist Dictators of Latin America,” the defense of “Judeo-Christian values,” and appeals for fiscal responsibility, less government, lower taxes, states’ rights and “strong national security.”
In her remarks to the meeting, Palin—reportedly paid $100,000 for her appearance—offered a simple-minded defense of American militarism and attacks on democratic rights. She denounced law enforcement officials for supposedly granting “our constitutional rights” to terrorism suspects and the Obama administration for “reaching out to hostile regimes, writing personal letters to dangerous dictators, and apologizing for America!” In her appearances at the convention, she made clear her desire to be a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.
As a political figure, Palin is also largely a media and right-wing concoction. Among her earliest sponsors and advisors were longtime Democratic Party fundraiser and Washington DC lawyer, John Coale, and his wife, Greta Van Susteren, the Fox News commentator. Coale, a Scientologist like his spouse, raised large amounts of money for Sen. John Kerry in 2004 and for Hillary Clinton in 2008. When the latter lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, Coale switched his allegiance to Sen. John McCain and became especially involved in efforts to make Palin into a national figure. This is the incestuous character of American politics.
The Tea Party movement has been organized by a section of the Republican Party, including Dick Armey, the former Texas congressman, House Majority leader and “flat tax” advocate, along with right-wing media types such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has endorsed the movement, and Texas Governor Rick Perry attended a rally in Austin, Texas. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has strenuously advertised and promoted the Tea Party events.
The reactionary policies advocated by this movement are not popular with the American people, and if the Tea Party forces were presented before the public in an accurate light, they would not garner significant support. This is not, however, a reason for complacency. The growth of extreme right-wing elements is a real danger.
But contrary to the claims of the Nation and the left-liberal milieu, the risk does not emerge from some mass base for fascistic politics in America. It comes primarily from the continued subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party, and by that means, to the ruling elite. This blocks the development of a progressive alternative and provides the Republican right with opportunities to make gains by demagogically exploiting the political impasse. It is political roadblock that must be addressed.
The March of the Know Nothings
by Joel Peskoff
It started with a summer health care town hall meeting when a senior citizen angrily stood up and shouted, “keep your government hands off my Medicare,” not appreciating the irony that Medicare is a run by the government. What’s fascinating is that factless ranting has morphed into a full blown movement.
Members can be seen on the news raving that President Obama is both a Socialist and a fascist, not knowing that the two are opposing ideologies. I’m sure none of the Tea Partiers heard of, let alone read, Keynes’ “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.” Blissfully ignorant of established economics, they call for repeating the policies of Hoover’s Depression enabling Administration – namely, balancing the budget during a deep recession. While running big deficits in the face of the worst economic dive in 80 years is actually the right thing to do, don’t tell them that, they don’t want to know.
The support columns of the Tea Party movement are unfocused anger. They’re angry that bankers got a better deal than they did (me too); they’re angry that there is high unemployment; they’re angry that the government spends a lot of money; and, who knows why they’re angry that someone actually wants to tackle health care costs which are bankrupting the nation. Of course, their solution is misguided. The Tea Partiers gravitate to the right-wing who, given the chance, would privatize their Social Security, eliminate their Medicare, eviscerate social programs that benefit them, eliminate bank regulation that protect their savings and export their jobs to foreign countries.
The movement’s discourse is appealing name-calling delivered by demagogues. Steven Millroy, who runs JunkScience.com, said at the Tea Party convention, “President Obama is not a U.S. socialist. He's an international socialist. He envisions one world government. That's what his whole plan is.” Oh really, Steve? How did you arrive at that, because Obama likes Star Trek?
Former Republican Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo suggests that the country would be better off if we required “civics literacy tests” before people can vote. I wonder how that would have sat with Tancredo’s Italian-immigrant grandparents? As a boy, I lived in a mixed neighborhood inhabited by many Italian immigrant citizens who could barely speak English. My grandmother’s native language was Yiddish and could not read English. Yet, nobody thought they weren’t good enough to let vote.
Fortunately, we’ve been there and we’ve learned how to deal with the irrational and ignorant that advocate disastrous public policy. During the 1930s, many on the right denounced Franklin Roosevelt as a “Socialist” even though his family was wealthy blue-bloods. The same right-wing argued that America should not aid the British as they combated Nazi Germany. The right-wing was on the wrong side of history then, as it is now. Could we imagine for a second what the world would be like today if America had let Britain fall to the Nazis and allowed the Great Depression to continue unrestrained by the New Deal?
Revisionists claim that the New Deal didn’t work but that’s why they’re revisionists. The fact is that from 1929 to 1933, when Roosevelt took office, GDP had halved and private unemployment soared to 25%. Upon enacting the New Deal, unemployment dropped by half but since workers employed by the WPA, CCC and other government programs were not considered employed, using 1930s measures, the official figures are understated.
FDR recognized that there would always be 20-25% of the people who would never stop criticizing him. He dealt with them by ignoring and ridiculing their views, not allowing their viral views to infect his policies. In 1937, FDR did heed to critics and cut back the New Deal stimulus and it drove the country into recession.
President Obama is attacked by Republicans for everything, from hiring “czars” and trying terrorists in civilian courts, just as the previous president did. His wife is also attacked. This is not new. Roosevelt and his family were the brunt of relentless and continuous attacks by Republican leaders and their puppets in the media, who were just as much the soulless pricks as they are today.
One attack claimed that Roosevelt ordered a Navy destroyer to transport his dog, Fala. Roosevelt counterattacked with biting humor:
“These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him--at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars--his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself--such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog."--Sept. 23, 1944
My advice to clear-headed policymakers: ignore and ridicule the Tea Party crowd. You can’t argue with the irrational or the uninformed. You can’t reason with people who seriously think that the President of the United States wants to destroy America. Just because they are serious doesn’t mean you need to take them seriously. Their views should be mocked so that everyone else can see how out of the mainstream they are, and how rational you are.
Likewise, you can’t negotiate with a political party that wants you to accomplish nothing. Any concession will be greedily taken without reciprocation on their part. The only way to deal with that crowd is the steamroller approach.
It started with a summer health care town hall meeting when a senior citizen angrily stood up and shouted, “keep your government hands off my Medicare,” not appreciating the irony that Medicare is a run by the government. What’s fascinating is that factless ranting has morphed into a full blown movement.
Members can be seen on the news raving that President Obama is both a Socialist and a fascist, not knowing that the two are opposing ideologies. I’m sure none of the Tea Partiers heard of, let alone read, Keynes’ “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.” Blissfully ignorant of established economics, they call for repeating the policies of Hoover’s Depression enabling Administration – namely, balancing the budget during a deep recession. While running big deficits in the face of the worst economic dive in 80 years is actually the right thing to do, don’t tell them that, they don’t want to know.
The support columns of the Tea Party movement are unfocused anger. They’re angry that bankers got a better deal than they did (me too); they’re angry that there is high unemployment; they’re angry that the government spends a lot of money; and, who knows why they’re angry that someone actually wants to tackle health care costs which are bankrupting the nation. Of course, their solution is misguided. The Tea Partiers gravitate to the right-wing who, given the chance, would privatize their Social Security, eliminate their Medicare, eviscerate social programs that benefit them, eliminate bank regulation that protect their savings and export their jobs to foreign countries.
The movement’s discourse is appealing name-calling delivered by demagogues. Steven Millroy, who runs JunkScience.com, said at the Tea Party convention, “President Obama is not a U.S. socialist. He's an international socialist. He envisions one world government. That's what his whole plan is.” Oh really, Steve? How did you arrive at that, because Obama likes Star Trek?
Former Republican Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo suggests that the country would be better off if we required “civics literacy tests” before people can vote. I wonder how that would have sat with Tancredo’s Italian-immigrant grandparents? As a boy, I lived in a mixed neighborhood inhabited by many Italian immigrant citizens who could barely speak English. My grandmother’s native language was Yiddish and could not read English. Yet, nobody thought they weren’t good enough to let vote.
Fortunately, we’ve been there and we’ve learned how to deal with the irrational and ignorant that advocate disastrous public policy. During the 1930s, many on the right denounced Franklin Roosevelt as a “Socialist” even though his family was wealthy blue-bloods. The same right-wing argued that America should not aid the British as they combated Nazi Germany. The right-wing was on the wrong side of history then, as it is now. Could we imagine for a second what the world would be like today if America had let Britain fall to the Nazis and allowed the Great Depression to continue unrestrained by the New Deal?
Revisionists claim that the New Deal didn’t work but that’s why they’re revisionists. The fact is that from 1929 to 1933, when Roosevelt took office, GDP had halved and private unemployment soared to 25%. Upon enacting the New Deal, unemployment dropped by half but since workers employed by the WPA, CCC and other government programs were not considered employed, using 1930s measures, the official figures are understated.
FDR recognized that there would always be 20-25% of the people who would never stop criticizing him. He dealt with them by ignoring and ridiculing their views, not allowing their viral views to infect his policies. In 1937, FDR did heed to critics and cut back the New Deal stimulus and it drove the country into recession.
President Obama is attacked by Republicans for everything, from hiring “czars” and trying terrorists in civilian courts, just as the previous president did. His wife is also attacked. This is not new. Roosevelt and his family were the brunt of relentless and continuous attacks by Republican leaders and their puppets in the media, who were just as much the soulless pricks as they are today.
One attack claimed that Roosevelt ordered a Navy destroyer to transport his dog, Fala. Roosevelt counterattacked with biting humor:
“These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him--at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars--his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself--such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog."--Sept. 23, 1944
My advice to clear-headed policymakers: ignore and ridicule the Tea Party crowd. You can’t argue with the irrational or the uninformed. You can’t reason with people who seriously think that the President of the United States wants to destroy America. Just because they are serious doesn’t mean you need to take them seriously. Their views should be mocked so that everyone else can see how out of the mainstream they are, and how rational you are.
Likewise, you can’t negotiate with a political party that wants you to accomplish nothing. Any concession will be greedily taken without reciprocation on their part. The only way to deal with that crowd is the steamroller approach.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
