Octafish
Octafish's JournalHow Corrupt Is the American Government? See For Yourself...
How Corrupt Is the American Government?
See For Yourself
Posted on January 5, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog
Government corruption has become rampant:
Senior SEC employees spent up to 8 hours a day surfing porn sites instead of cracking down on financial crimes
Nuclear Regulatory Commission workers watch porn instead of cracking down on unsafe conditions at nuclear plants
SNIP...
A high-level Federal Reserve official says quantitative easing is “the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time”
SNIP...
Congress recently told the courts that Congress can’t be investigated for insider trading
SNIP...
The Bush White House worked hard to smear CIA officers, bloggers and anyone else who criticized the Iraq war
CONTINUED...
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/01/corrupt-american-government.html
Actually, I told DUers about the S&L scammers in Feb. 2008 -- before the Bankstershitstorm.
Yeah, see.
Feb. 28, 2008:
Know your BFEE: They Looted Your Nation’s S&Ls for Power and Profit
Then, after the Bankstershitstorm in September 21, 2008, I asked them who stole it to put it back:
Know your BFEE: Phil Gramm, the Meyer Lansky of the War Party, Set-Up the Biggest Bank Heist Ever.
What's weird is how, rather than the jail cell he so richly deserved, Phil Gramm ended up as Vice Chairman of UBS -- the Swiss Bank that received about $59 Billion with a Billion in TARP funds -- from where Gramm hired Bill Clinton, who signed into law the repeal of Glass Steagall. Since then, they've also brought in George W Bush to specialize in Wealth Management:
http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/SenatorPhilGramm.html
So, no. I do not favor run amok capitalism. At all.
It's an important publication.
A real resource. Its founders are committed to excellence. The work, profound.
Look what David Talbot reported at the Passing the Torch conference at Duquesne in 2013:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024105197
As a Democrat, a DUer and as a citizen of the United States, I was proud to attend "Passing the Torch: An International Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy" at Duquesne University.
One of the important speakers there was David Talbot, author of "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years." As the founder of Salon.com, the man of letters also understands new media and its import for democracy and our republic.
David Talbot did not mince words in his presentation at Duquesne. He publicly named former CIA director Allen Dulles not only as participant in the cover-up of events concerning CIA in the assassination of President Kennedy, Talbot said Dulles was the chief architect of the assassination.
Mr. Talbot has worked for more than two years on a book that I believe will shake the nation's financial and political establishment to its core. Here are Mr. Talbot's words, outlining why:
...I think what we're going to show over the next few years is that Allen Welsh Dulles was much more centrally involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, and its cover-up, than Lee Harvey Oswald.
Fifty years later, it's finally time to give the man his rightful place in history. In his day, Allen Dulles was America's most legendary spymaster, the longest-serving director of the CIA. He took great pleasure in regaling the public about his espionage triumphs. But, for obvious reasons, he could never take credit for his biggest and boldest covert operation:
the killing of the President of the United States in broad daylight on the streets of an American city.
I hope that my forthcoming book, which will be titled "The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, JFK and the Epic Battle for America's Soul" will at long last give Mr. Dulles his due. As I say in my title of my remarks this morning, I believe Allen Dulles truly was the "Chairman of the Board of the Kennedy Assassination."
In September 1965, nearly two years after Kennedy was violently removed from office, Allen Dulles went for a stroll near his home in Georgetown with a young magazine editor named William Morris. The old spymaster, long since retired, struck Morris as an amiable, avuncular character until the name Kennedy suddenly came up in the conversation. Suddenly a dark cloud crossed the old man's brow.
"That little Kennedy," he spat out. "He thought he was a god."
Allen Dulles knew who the true overlords of American power were. (They were) men like him and his brother, not Jack and Bobby Kennedy. The Kennedys were mere upstarts in comparison to the Dulles family. The Dulles dynasty boasted diplomats and international bankers and three secretaries of state. The Kennedy clan, by comparison, was distinguished by saloon keepers and ward healers. When paterfamilias Joseph Kennedy was amassing his fortune as a movie mogul and stock gambler, Dulles and his older brother were running Wall Street from their perch at the world's largest law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell and creating a new global financial order.
During the Cold War, President Eisenhower outsourced the country's foreign policy to the Dulles Brothers, with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles serving as the architect of Washington's global crusade against communism, and Allen Dulles carrying out the darker chores of empire.
Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev who kept looking for a way out of the Cold War noose but found himself repeatedly checkmated by the Dulleses remarked at one point, "One shuddered at what great force was in the Dulles Brothers' hands."
The Dulles Brothers stood at the very apex of American power, straddling an elite network that connected Wall Street, Washington, big oil and international finance. John Foster Dulles was the ultimate counselor for that overworld that ruled the country's government and business, and his younger brother Allen was at privileged circles master of intrigue and subversion, its enforcer...
Mr. Talbot had a lot more to say about the Dulles Brothers, especially Allen Dulles as head of CIA. One of the most important things to remember, Dulles, even after he was out of office, continued to command the respect of people like James Jesus Angleton and Richard Helms, people he had promoted to their positions of power, and people who kept their knowledge of CIA assassination programs away from President Kennedy and the various government investigators who would later ask them about them.
Something I'm personally proud to add: Dulles and his brother are two of the main founders of the BFEE, a term Bartcop coined and I borrow to denote the War Party affiliated with the right wing Wall Street crowd that infested Washington for much of the late 19th and 20th century. Allen Dulles was a good friend and business associate of Prescott Sheldon Bush, Sr.
During the Depression, they tried to overthrow FDR. Before and during World War II, they did business with Hitler. After the war, they imported NAZIs to help fight the commies and build up a case for the Military Industrial Complex. They've done a lot since, from Vietnam to Iraq.
Where does Salon.com and DU fit in all of this? They serve to spread the truth about the government and how its secret services operate in service to wealth before service to the People. Which is democratic? Which is fascistic? Secret Government or Democracy?
The Fast Track Kabuki was nice.
All right. "Grand-Guignol."
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2010/04/its_time_to_retire_kabuki.html
Thanks for telling me.
I wish there were a repository or logbook listing all the banned assholes on DU. It'd be easier to know who I could write about. Maybe they could do it on a national level, set up so we could know the biggest asshole. I know you know what I mean, pintobean.
Richard Helms obstructed Justice in 1964...CIA still does...
"CIA Lying Performance” Then and Now: The JFK Assassination Versus The CIA’s Obstruction of Justice in 2015Why CIA’s Richard Helms Lied about Oswald, Part III
By Peter Dale Scott
WhoWhatWhy, Dec. 28, 2015
EXCERPT...
Now let us compare the CIA’s lying performance in 1964 with its lying performance in 2015. In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, members of many U.S. agencies, including also the FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the U.S. Air Force, and the Secret Service, withheld relevant information from those investigating the murder.[1] But to my knowledge there is in 2015 only one U.S. agency that is still actively maintaining the cover-up – and that is the CIA.
I am referring to the CIA’s declassification and release of a previously classified CIA study by CIA historian David Robarge, “DCI John McCone and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”[2] The essay is worth reading, and it contains interesting information on such matters as McCone’s relationship with Robert Kennedy. It is also significantly selective: it does not mention for example that McCone only learned late on the night of November 22 that “the CIA had known beforehand of [the alleged] Oswald’s trip to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City,” nor that as a result McCone “was enraged, ripping into his aides, furious at the way the agency was run.”[3]
Buried within Robarge’s discussion of John McCone and the Commission – a pertinent but hardly central topic – are a more important thesis statement and conclusion about the CIA itself. In the light of what I have just said about Helms, I would charge that both of these statements are false – so false indeed as arguably to constitute, once again, obstruction of justice.
The thesis statement on page 8 is that “Under McCone’s and Helms’s direction, CIA supported the Warren Commission in a way that may best be described as passive, reactive, and selective.” This claims that the CIA’s deception of the Warren Commission was a sin of omission. But no, the CIA was not just passive. Helms perjured himself, just as he lied again in the 1970s.
Worse, the article focuses on the failure of the CIA to tell the Warren Commission about its plots to assassinate Castro, which may very well have been relevant; but in so doing it deflects attention away from the CIA’s suppression of its own LCIMPROVE operation in October involving “Lee Oswald” (or “Lee Henry Oswald”), which unquestionably was of very great relevance.
Worst of all is the article’s conclusion:
Max Holland, one of the most fair-minded scholars of these events, has concluded that “if the word ‘conspiracy’ must be uttered in the same breath as ‘Kennedy assassination,’ the only one that existed was the conspiracy to kill Castro and then keep that effort secret after November 22nd.”
Of the many things wrong with this sentence, the worst service to truth in my mind is the skillful effort to divert attention away from the Angleton operation involving Oswald, and to focus instead on plots to kill Castro. This is an old ploy dating back to 1965, following in the footsteps of old CIA veterans and friends like Brian Latell and Gus Russo. It allows a writer like Philip Shenon to quote from the Robarge study the old red herring question “Did Castro kill the president because the president had tried to kill Castro?”[4]
CONTINUED...
http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/12/28/why-cias-richard-helms-lied-about-oswald-part-3/
''If he was credible he would have influence.'' Like Gov. Donald Siegelman?
Guy's rotting in prison for doing what previous Alabama administrations were free to do. The GOP prosecutors who led his multiple prosecutions shopped for the judge, since dismissed from the federal bench for beating his wife, have been exposed for partisan hacks in ser vice of John Ashocroft and Karl ROve. That is why Legal Schnauzer is prosecuted for "libel."
Glad to see where you stand on it, rjsquirrel. The "wrong side of history," as they say.
Our Solar System Mirrors the Chemical Makeup of the Universe
We really are, elleng. Amazing place, our universe.
Our Solar System Mirrors the Chemical Makeup of the Universe
JAXA, Oct. 23, 2015
“The Suzaku satellite has opened a brand new window on the Universe and shown us that wherever you look, over vast scales, the mix of chemical elements is essentially the same" said Steven Allen, Professor of Physics at Stanford University and co-author of the study. "It's a beautifully simple result, and another step in understanding how the Universe around us came to be.”
All of the chemical elements that are heavier than carbon, the oxygen we breathe, the silicon that makes up the sand on the beach, were produced inside stars through nuclear fusion and released by stellar explosions called supernovae. By measuring the chemical composition of the Universe, scientists are trying to reconstruct the history of how, when, and where each of the chemical elements so necessary for the evolution of life were produced.
SNIP...
JAXA’s Suzaku X-ray satellite dedicated a great amount of observing time, collecting data over many weeks, to address this problem. The first such deep observations, targeting the brightest system, the Perseus Cluster (shown at top of the page), allowed remarkably detailed measurements of the iron abundance in the intra-cluster medium on large scales. However, information about chemical elements predominantly produced by core collapse supernovae was still missing.
For such measurements, observations of a galaxy cluster with a lower average temperature were needed, in order for the emission from lighter elements to be comparatively stronger than in the Perseus Cluster. Suzaku therefore spent about two weeks looking at the Virgo Cluster, the nearest and second brightest cluster in the X-ray sky, which has such a suitably low temperature. With this new data set, Simionescu and her colleagues at JAXA and Stanford University succeeded to detect not only iron but for the first time also magnesium, silicon and sulphur all the way to the edge of this galaxy cluster. Their results are reported in a study published recently in the Astrophysical Journal.
“What we found was that the ratios between the abundances of iron, silicon, sulphur, and magnesium, are constant throughout the entire volume of the Virgo Cluster, and indeed roughly consistent with the composition of our own Sun and most of the stars in our Galaxy”, explains Dr. Norbert Werner from Stanford University, a co-author of the article. Galaxy clusters cover such a large volume that the content of each such object is believed to be representative for the rest of the Universe as well. The new Suzaku finding means that the chemical elements in the cosmos are very well mixed, with a chemical composition that remains the same from scales of the solar radius (hundreds of thousands of kilometers) to the size of a cluster of galaxies (several million light years).
Although there may still be a few special places in the Universe that retain a different chemical make-up, on average, the bulk of the Universe has a very similar composition to our local neighbourhood — the same raw soup of elements that is necessary for life like ours is found, wherever you look.
The Daily Galaxy via JAXA
SOURCE: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2015/10/our-solar-system-mirrors-the-chemical-makeup-of-the-universe.html
We need more guns to protect our ideals.
Pentagon Spent $150 Million on Afghanistan "Villas," Security for Lavish Compounds
Thursday, 03 December 2015 00:00
By Sam Knight, The District Sentinel | Report
The Pentagon spent $150 million in Afghanistan renting "villas" and private security contractors for Department of Defense employees there - officials from a now-defunct economic development arm called the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO).
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said "it is unclear what benefit the US received" from the outlays, and that the expenditures appear to have been made without a prior cost-benefit analysis.
SIGAR John Sopko said that TFBSO could have saved taxpayers "tens of millions of dollars" if it had chosen to house personnel "at DOD facilities in Afghanistan." He made the statements in a Nov. 25 letter to Defense Secretary Ash Carter. The correspondence was published this week by SIGAR.
Included among the lavish services Sopko inquired about were luxury commodities provided by private military contractors.
"Triple Canopy provided TFBSO personnel with queen size beds in certain rooms, a flat screen TV in each room that was 27 inches or larger, a DVD player in each room, a mini refrigerator in each room, and an 'investor villa' that had 'upgraded furniture' and 'western-style hotel accommodations,'" the comptroller noted.
"In terms of food, Triple Canopy was required to provide service that was ';at least 3 stars,' with each meal containing at least two entrée choices and three side order choices, as well as three course meals for 'Special Events," Sopko added.
The first director of TFBSO, Paul Brinkley, may have made the decision to locate staff outside of US military bases, but the former federal employee "has not cooperated with our requests for information," SIGAR noted.
[font color="green"]"Wherever possible, we avoided depending on the military," Brinkley said in the passage a 2014 book highlighted by SIGAR in the Nov. 25 letter. "The goal was to show private companies that they could set up operations in Afghanistan themselves without needing military support."
[/font color]
CONTINUED...
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33887-pentagon-spent-150-million-on-afghanistan-villas-security-for-lavish-compounds
The wealthiest times in human history and kids are living in cars.
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