The REAL ASSHOLES are the traitors who lied America into war and still walk free.
The REAL ASSHOLES are the banksters who looted the banks and got bailed out plus paid bonuses for their trouble.
The REAL ASSHOLES are the spies who use their powers to get tabs on every American and make big bucks for their connected cronies at the same time.
The REAL ASSHOLES are the propagandists who run Corporate McPravda to feed America useless drivel while diverting attention from the critical issues.
The REAL ASSHOLES are the rainmakers on Wall Street who run through the revolving door to become watchdogs in Washington and back, all the while sending American jobs overseas and profits back to their patrons, the 1-percent of 1-percent.
Those are the REAL ASSHOLES, not the reporters who told us about them.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Yes.
He agreed 100% with Hillary and the Democratic Party leadership.
Are you going to attack them/her too?
It's not just busting unions and busting the Democrats -- at least the ones interested in justice. The Big Money Boys want to bust Democracy itself.
Here's the plan they spelled out, by a lawyer for Big Tobacco soon-to-turn Supreme Court justice:
The Lewis Powell Memo - Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy
Greenpeace has the full text of the Lewis Powell Memo available for review, as well as analyses of how Lewis Powell's suggestions have impacted the realms of politics, judicial law, communications and education.
Blogpost by Charlie Cray - August 23, 2011 at 11:20
Greenpeace.org
Forty years ago today, on August 23, 1971, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., an attorney from Richmond, Virginia, drafted a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that describes a strategy for the corporate takeover of the dominant public institutions of American society.
Powell and his friend Eugene Sydnor, then-chairman of the Chamber’s education committee, believed the Chamber had to transform itself from a passive business group into a powerful political force capable of taking on what Powell described as a major ongoing “attack on the American free enterprise system.”
An astute observer of the business community and broader social trends, Powell was a former president of the American Bar Association and a board member of tobacco giant Philip Morris and other companies. In his memo, he detailed a series of possible “avenues of action” that the Chamber and the broader business community should take in response to fierce criticism in the media, campus-based protests, and new consumer and environmental laws.
SNIP...
The overall tone of Powell’s memo reflected a widespread sense of crisis among elites in the business and political communities. “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack,” he suggested, adding that the attacks were not coming just from a few “extremists of the left,” but also – and most alarmingly -- from “perfectly respectable elements of society,” including leading intellectuals, the media, and politicians.
To meet the challenge, business leaders would have to first recognize the severity of the crisis, and begin marshalling their resources to influence prominent institutions of public opinion and political power -- especially the universities, the media and the courts. The memo emphasized the importance of education, values, and movement-building. Corporations had to reshape the political debate, organize speakers’ bureaus and keep television programs under “constant surveillance.” Most importantly, business needed to recognize that political power must be “assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination – without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.”
CONTINUED...
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/news-and-blogs/campaign-blog/the-lewis-powell-memo-corporate-blueprint-to-/blog/36466/
In the process, their greed and lies work to destroy the planet, let alone peace and prosperity. Also helps explain the, uh, uncertainty on the part of so many these days as to what's true and what matters.
that's their intent. For some of us it became clear over a decade ago... but we were just lowly CT enthusiasts then.
And I say that as I sit here losing money I could be making waiting for clearance to work at a mediocre level (pay-wise) job but it seems that my student loan problem will keep me from ever having a ob that will afford me the luxury of paying it back. Which is how it became a problem in the first place... timing (9/11) happened 30 days after the hood was wrapped around my neck, been financially f*cked ever since, no matter how hard I try to climb out of the hole for which I can no longer see the rim. Catch22 clearly designed for those of us who sought to be a part of our democracy in the middle class. Now it looks like poverty will be my life-long legacy.
We are being oppressed, held down with a boot on our necks, until we either suffocate or just give it up and blow our own brains out, and if that doesn't work there's pollution for those who prefer a slow, painful demise (won't go quietly).
Apparently that is the choice we are offered.
The true story of our "Secretary of Commerce" or "Miss TPP"....another good read...(as you already know) 's 
That's much easier. Tomorrow it will be "Hate Snowden, hate Snowden." Never any hate toward the oligarch-overlords. I think they believe Blaise Pascal's Wager applies to politics.
Everyone who passed High School English understands his tweet.
I agree 100% with Greenwald's Tweet.
I can understand if some, blinded by their ODS, misread his Tweet,
and Knee Jerked into a condemnation,
but their mistake has been exposed.
There is no need to cling to an exposed mistake,
but some feel the need to now willfully cling to this distortion in order to justify their daily Two Minutes of Hate.
Because he didn't point out concern for the schoolgirls first, it's given his detractors an excuse to pile on.
DETAILS:
http://wonkette.com/548653/youll-never-believe-which-inhuman-monster-doesnt-care-to-find-nigerian-schoolgirls-its-glenn-greenwald#cLPrj69kA2UOBBS6.99
Going from his record as a journalist, I thought it didn't need mentioning that Greenwald is concerned about the schoolgirls.
Thanks for kicking Octa's thread!
Thanks for reminding me, Octafish!
I also remember around that time that the German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff echoed that sentiment when he was being interviewed about his movie version of The Handmaid's Tale. When asked what fascism would be like if it came to America, he said something like, "I think it would seem very friendly, because it would be run by advertisers."
Although both Gross and Schlöndorff were wise men, I fear they may have been naive. We may devolve into the less friendly variety a little faster than anyone expected.
Just ask Scott Olsen. Or Chelsea Manning. Or Cecily McMillan. Or even a bunch of peaceful kids at U.C. Davis.
Bam! Thanks Octa that was perfect.
You've got me on why anybody would take anything the asshole has to say into account about anything, but some folks around here like the asshole so he gets thread space.
I saw the OP as a pathetic attempt to take the spotlight off the asshole who tweets.
Rank "the Asshole Greenwald" amidst the assholes in the OP in terms of the damage done to democracy. Personally, I think the assholery of Greenwald is less important than every single one. Actually, almost too small to mention.
So which ones do you think is he worse than?
Your answer will be illuminating!
Remember Richard (PNAC/Another Pearl Harbor) Perle? Just after September 11 and the Washington-Wall Street axis of war profiteering was heating up, Perle hit up Adnan (Iran-Contra/BCCI) Khashoggi for $100 million to make his new "Trireme Partnerships" take off.
Khashoggi's money would help launch the Carlyle Group-like investment group Perle founded. The petromoney was not for arms, directly. It was for investing in companies that were going to be making a killing off of homeland security related areas.
Interesting selling point: Perle already had secured financing from in from Boeing and some other bigwigs like Henry Kissinger.
One of the most important articles The New Yorker ever published:
Lunch with the Chairman
by Seymour M. Hersh
17 March 2003
At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.
Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.
The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.
Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.
CONTINUED...
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/17/030317fa_fact
A bit on the new TRIREME business...
At Hollinger, Big Perks in A Small World
By Steven Pearlstein
Wednesday, November 19, 2003; Page E01
It's amazing the coincidences you find digging into Hollinger International, the publishing empire that includes Chicago's Sun-Times and London's Daily Telegraph and is quickly slipping from Conrad Black's control.
Let's start with the board of directors, which includes Barbara Amiel, Conrad's wife, whose right-wing rants have managed to find an outlet in Hollinger publications.
And there's Washington superhawk Richard Perle, who heads Hollinger Digital, the company's venture capital arm. Seems that Hollinger Digital put $2.5 million in a company called Trireme Partners, which aims to cash in on the big military and homeland security buildup. As luck would have it, Trireme's managing partner is none other than . . . Richard Perle.
Perle, of course, has been pushing hard for just such a military buildup from his other perch at the Pentagon's secretive and influential Defense Policy Board, where there are a number of other Friends of Hollinger.
CONTINUED (archived nowadays)...
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-309818.html
Thanks for noticing, malaise. The to-bomb list grows longer and the system stronger every damn day.
PS: It's why I keep bringing up Dallas. Those who remember the JFK Administration know it wasn't always this way.
instead.
War is big business. It's an insider's game. It's why we have so much secret government.
The last remaining enormous wads of cash in the Treasury are to be had for purchasing today's modern military industrial intel complex.
There's more than a trillion to be grabbed -- just for the Lockheed-Martin F-35.
Now keeping tabs on us -- people interested in using some of the nation's treasure for more peaceful purposes -- are for-hire spies. How do I know this? Julian Assange and Anonymous:
WikiLeaks' Stratfor Dump Lifts Lid on Intelligence-Industrial Complex
WikiLeaks' latest release, of hacked emails from Stratfor, shines light on the murky world of private intelligence-gathering
by Pratap Chatterjee
Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2012 by The Guardian/UK
What price bad intelligence? Some 5m internal emails from Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based company that brands itself as a "global intelligence" provider, were recently obtained by Anonymous, the hacker collective, and are being released in batches by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website, starting Monday.
The most striking revelation from the latest disclosure is not simply the military-industrial complex that conspires to spy on citizens, activists and trouble-causers, but the extremely low quality of the information available to the highest bidder. Clients of the company include Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, as well as US government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Marines.
SNIP...
Assange notes that Stratfor is also seeking to profit directly from this information by partnering in an apparent hedge-fund venture with Shea Morenz, a former Goldman Sachs managing director. He points to an August 2011 document, marked "DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS", from Stratfor CEO George Friedman, which says:
"What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor's intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like."
CONTINUED...
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/28-10?print
If it weren't for Anonymous and WikiLeaks, we probably wouldn't know about any of that.
It's no joke. It's no unimportant story. It's no boring history. Run by insiders, the secret government is key to making the system run on behalf of the few -- the 1-percent of 1-percent. Central to that is intelligence -- economically, politically and military useful information.
Which brings up the nation's purported free press, the only business mentioned by name in the entire United States Constitution, and how the organizations therein have miserably failed to feature prominently the sundry and myriad ways the insiders on Wall Street and their toadies in Washington do the work for Them.
The problem is systemic. The corruption is systemic.
Because it involves oversight of secret organizations -- the Pentagon, Homeland Security, CIA, etc -- Congress and the Administration often have no clue, let alone oversight, to what is happening because the corruption is marked "Top Secret."
Secret government also means We the People can't do our job as citizens, which is to hold them accountable and find the ones responsible in order to vote the crooks out and, it is hoped, the honest ones in.
With no citizen oversight, anything goes. And it doesn't stop.
Remember this fine fellow, US Navy fighter ace Randy "Duke" Cunningham?
Later a member of the United States Congress, he used his position to feather his nest, Big Time.
In his political career, Cunningham was a member of the Appropriations and Intelligence committees, and chaired the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Human Intelligence Analysis and Counterintelligence during the 109th Congress. He was considered a leading Republican expert on national security issues.
Currently, he's in USP Tuscon or another fine facility where he gets three squares, medical and dental.
He's due for release in a year or so. He'll be able to pick up his pension.
"The Duke Cunningham Act, also known as the Federal Pension Forfeiture Act, was introduced by U.S. Senator John F. Kerry in 2006. The bill would have denied pension benefits to any members of Congress convicted of bribery, conspiracy or perjury. The bill died in committee. (Source: The Press Enterprise)
Duke wasn't alone. He really was just one snake in a long line of snakes. Remember Dusty Foggo, Number 3 at CIA and close associate of CIA Director and former Congressman Porter Goss? Swells sitting atop the peak of political and military secrecy and power.
Unfortunately, when it comes to modern governance, no oversight means means the insiders are getting away with murder, and warmongering and treason and all the power that they bring. Appointed pretzeldent George W Bush on Valentine's Day 2007 put it in words: "Money trumps peace."
Secret government warmongering and war profiteering are systemic. Secret government is rotten to the core. What's more, in a democracy that once really was land of the free and home of the brave, secret government poses the greatest threat to true national security.
Thank you for grokking the situation, Dustlawyer. The "American way of life" is fast disappearing as the nation's only profitable lines of business are resource extraction, finance, and war. It is serious and those who work and serve to draw attention away from it are major parts of the problem.
?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1309492241606
Either that or he doesn't actually want to be associated with it.
Interesting.
Response to Octafish (Original post)
Some folks had their you-know-whats handed to them upthread.
It's the same 40-47 posters that spam this board with their never ending bullshit. Same names, same meme. Consistently. I keep pretty much a mental ignore list. When I see the names there is no surprise as to what they are going to support or not support. So more often then not I skip their posts.
Unfortunately they are very very prolific posters. And it makes the place seem much worse then it actually is.
Look at the recs on this thread and then compare to some screed that has no substance, or maybe a few
.
They will quickly step up and say "What do recs mean?" Huh? Huh?
I don't think admin added the function because it didn't "mean anything".
but some will make excuses!
Response to Octafish (Original post)
What a smart guy said:
The Bush Family: A Continuing Criminal Enterprise?
Gary W. Potter, PhD.
Professor, Criminal Justice
Eastern Kentucky University
The S&Ls, the Mob and the Bushs
During the 1980's hundred of Savings and Loan Banks failed. Those bank failures cost U.S. taxpayers over $500 billion to cover federally insured losses, and much more to investigate the bank failures (Pizzo, Fricker, and Muolo, 1989; Brewton, 1992; Johnston, 1990). More than 75% of the Savings and Loan insolvencies where directly linked to serious and often criminal misconduct by senior financial insiders (Pizzo, Fricker and Muolo, 1989: 305). In fact, less than 10 percent of bank failures are related to economic conditions, the rest are caused by mismanagement or criminal conduct (Pizzo, Fricker and Muolo, 1989: 305).
A good example of the Savings and Loan failures can be found in the activities of Mario Renda, a Savings and Loan insider who often worked in close collaboration with organized crime (Pizzo, Fricker and Muolo, 1989: 123-126;302). Renda served as a middle man in arranging about $5 billion a year in deposits into 130 Savings and Loans, all of which failed (Kwitny, 1992: 27). Many of these deposits were made contingent on an agreement that the Savings and Loan involved would lend money to borrowers recommended by Renda, many of whom were organized crime figures or people entirely unknown to the banking institution involved (Kwitny, 1992: 27).
SNIP...
Prescott Bush: The Yakuza’s Frontman
Finally, and perhaps most seriously, the Bush family pioneered the practice which has now become commonplace of collaboration between corporate and organized criminals. Prescott Bush, uncle of the current President and brother of the former President, played a key role in helping the Japanese Yakuza extend their financial and real estate holdings to the United States. In 1989, Prescott Bush made arrangements for a front company for Japanese organized crime groups to buy into two U.S. corporations and to make a sizeable real investment in the U.S. (Helm, 1991a: 1; Isikoff, 1992: A1). West Tsusho, a Japanese corporation, was identified by Japanese police officials as a front company for one of that country’s largest organized crime syndicates. Prescott Bush was paid a fee of $500,000 for his help in negotiating West Tsusho’s purchase of controlling interest in Assets Management, a U.S. corporation (Helm, 1991a: 1; Isikoff, 1992: A1). Bush also assisted the Japanese mob in investing in Quantam Access, a U.S. software company, which was ultimately taken over by the Japanese (Helm, 1991b: 10; Isikoff, 1992: A1). Both companies ultimately went into bankruptcy (Isikoff, 1992: A1; Moses, 1992).
George Bush Sr.: Shutting Down the Organize Crime Strike Forces
Despite assessments from senior law enforcement officers and experts on organized crime that efforts to control organized crime would be crippled, in December 1989, the administration of George Bush, Sr. abolished all 14 regional organized crime strike forces (McAlister, 1989: A 21; Struck out, 1990). The organized crime strike had been created as independent entities so they would not be subject to political influences or bureaucratic wrangling within federal law enforcement. In the two decades of their operation the strike forces had secured convictions of major organized crime figures in several U.S. cities (Struck out, 1990). It is at the very least curious to note that the federal strike force in Miami had been responsible for indicting Miguel Recarey, the man for whom Jeb Bush had intervened with regulators. Organized crime strike forces had similarly indicted Mario Renda, the organized crime liaison to the S& L’s, as well as several other key figures in the Savings and Loan Fiasco (Pizzo, Fricker, and Mulolo, 1989: 112, 120-123, 303, 337).
CONTINUED...
http://critcrim.org/critpapers/potter.htm
That's the way a professor of criminal justice puts it. Bartcop, to get a better handle on War Inc's first family, called them the "BFEE" for short.
For one of the best threads laying so much of it out we should review this from 2008…
Go here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x4055207
I'd add the Kochs and the Waltons to that list.