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Octafish

Octafish's Journal
Octafish's Journal
April 14, 2012

They're the best of the best. Mostly.

Sometimes, things happen. Like that time in Dallas, when the guys who were supposed to be guarding President and Mrs. Kennedy went out for a good time.

That wasn't the worst thing someone in the Secret Service did that weekend.



Not this guy, though. Henry J. Rybka tried to do his job. And he registered dismay when ordered off the bumper at Love Field.

April 10, 2012

Guy who helped Hitler fight commies helped USA fight commies.

From OP's article:

When the team arrived, its members were transferred to their hospital, which was close to the Ho Chi Minh trail, the supply route used by the communist forces. "It was then when we realized what we had gotten ourselves into: there was a constant coming and going of helicopters and a terrible smell of napalm everywhere," says Gutiérrez de Terán.

Doing Mammon's work, fighting communists in secret. Today, seeing how there really are no more communists left, we see the 1-percent of 1-percent employ similar tactics against Liberals. Soon, there'll only be the rich and their willing toadies.

Thank you for a fascinating article on the disastrous wars in Vietnam, xchrom.

April 9, 2012

You know, I gave him the benefit of the doubt in 2008...

...when, as a candidate, he left the campaign trail to fly back to Washington to vote for Bush's bank bailout. I thought, "Gee. Maybe there's more to the situation than what it seems."

No, Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy reminds us, it's the same old same old:

"A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot. But a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook!" -- Bertolt Brecht


The thing is, there was a lot more to the story at the time.

And that's why we need to draw this to the attention of all Democrats and DUers -- and to the attention of all Americans who give a damn. We the People -- the 99-percent plus the 1-percent -- are running out of time. Every day wasted, makes it that much more difficult to fix our nation's problems, most of which can be fixed through progressive taxation and economic justice, once main planks of the Democratic platform.
April 9, 2012

That's what Secret Government is for.

To keep such things secret...and to find out such secrets.

Know your BFEE: Spawn of Wall Street and the Third Reich

Regarding superpowers and democracy. Oh yeah. Invisibility would go a long way to restoring it. Didn't it used to be called "Transparency"?

April 9, 2012

The ROBS Act



Truth in advertising, courtesy of Mr. Jim Hightower, Democrat of Texas:



The ROBS Act

Wednesday, 04 April 2012 13:13
By Jim Hightower, Truthout | Op-Ed

EXCERPT...

Clucking with sympathy, Congress' tea party Republicans have rushed to the side of these poor, rich financiers, pledging to unshackle them from "burdensome" regulations. Serving Wall Street is not all that popular these days with voters, however, so the Repubs and their Democratic allies have committed their own fraud in order to pass this bill, deceptively titled it the "JOBS Act" (even though it doesn't actually create any jobs).

Then they pushed it in the name of small businesses (even though they quietly defined "small" as a billion dollars a year in sales). In fact, the accent on the JOBS acronym should be on "B.S." Will it surprise you to learn that the word "jobs" isn't even included in the title? Instead, JOBS stands for "Jump-start Our Business Start-ups."

Alarmingly, the so-called "onerous" regulations that Congress eliminated primarily are the extremely useful financial disclosure rules passed a decade ago to prevent another Enron scandal.

The GOP House even tried to free financial hucksters from having to tell potential investors the names of the executives running the company and — get this — from providing such essential investor information as a description of what the company does and accurate accounting of its financial condition!

CONTINUED...

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/8312-the-robs-act



Anyone remember the Savings and Loan bailouts?

It was the largest financial fraud in history, until the Great Wall Street Bailout of '08?

How about the next one? Anyone give a damn?
April 7, 2012

'Merchant of Death' Viktor Bout Sentenced to 25 Years; Trial Ignored His Ties to U.S. & Dick Cheney

Like for Manny Noriega, and Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi, time ran out for Viktor Bout.



Weird how that always is.



"Merchant of Death" Viktor Bout Sentenced to 25 Years; Trial Ignored His Ties to U.S., Dick Cheney

DemocracyNow!
April 6, 2012

EXCERPT...

(Democracy Now! interviewed) a former U.N. arms trafficking investigator who tracked Bout for more than a decade, Kathi Lynn Austin, executive director of the Conflict Awareness Project, a group dedicated to tracking global weapons traffickers and exposing the illicit world of war profiteering.

SNIP...

AMY GOODMAN: What was Viktor Bout’s relationship with the U.S. government and with U.S. companies?

KATHI LYNN AUSTIN: Well, Viktor Bout has served many governments in the past in their national security operations. So even when I was bringing forward compelling evidence—I collected forensic evidence, I collected documentary evidence in the field. And even as I was bringing forward that information, I was testifying before the U.S. Congress, I was talking to U.S. State Department intelligence officials—this is from the mid-1990s—still there was no action taken against Viktor Bout. And that was because the U.S. government saw that his services were very valuable for national security operations.

The most recent case where American officials and American private security firms were colluding with Viktor Bout was during the Iraq war. And that is one of the startling reveals during the trial and the sentencing. Viktor Bout wrote to the judge, basically saying, "Look, I’ve also worked for the U.S. companies. I’ve flown 140 flights. They’ve paid me $6 million." That’s probably, by the way, just the tip of the iceberg. "And so, why would you be convicting me, when, in fact, at the time that I was providing these services for the U.S. government, it was in violation of a U.S. law, an executive order signed by President Bush at the time, and it was in violation of U.N. sanctions?"

SNIP...

KATHI LYNN AUSTIN: Well, we know President Bush in 2004 signed an executive order making it illegal for any U.S. entity to do business with Viktor Bout. We had a number of private security firms. We had Brown & Root, we had Halliburton, that were linked to former Vice President Cheney, who were involved at the time with Viktor Bout. Even as we investigators confronted the U.S. government about these illicit activities, these private security firms continued to use Viktor Bout in violation of U.S law, in violation of U.N. sanctions, even American agencies. On one hand, you had the Department of Justice issuing a list of all companies and entities that the U.S. government and U.S. private firms were prohibited from doing business with. Viktor Bout’s companies were on that list. So you had the Department of Justice, on one hand, and yet you had the Department of Defense that continued to see—to seek out Viktor Bout’s services.

CONTINUED...

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/6/merchant_of_death_viktor_bout_sentenced



BFEE Doesn't like competition. Not one bit. Ask Mr. Sarkis Soghanalian, if we could.
April 5, 2012

Like a NAZI?



Know your BFEE.

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