Tag Archives: propaganda

Joshua Holland on the myths behind Romney’s “47%”

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Joshua Holland at Alternet has a thoughtful piece on the intellectual fudging behind  Romney’s  “47%” who allegedly don’t pay taxes, don’t have skin in the game, and feel both entitled and victimized.

This notion of a non-paying half of the population omits a fact that the right usually understands – that these sorts of figures are not set in stone.

47% is a figure that represents mobile segments of the population.

That is, the people who are in the non-paying 47% in one year are in the paying 53%  in the next.

For instance, included in the non-payers are students, who eventually do pay taxes.

Furthermore, there are plenty of wealthy households that don’t pay taxes.

In fact, if Romney wants to find entitled people who cry victim at the drop of a hat, feel the government owes them bail-outs, contribute nothing and steal whatever isn’t actually nailed down, maybe he should check out some of his colleagues in the financial industry.

Joshua Holland writes:

“More than a fifth of households that pay no federal income taxes are elderly. This is a group that should feel entitled. They paid into Social Security and Medicare during their working years, and are now in retirement. Many are struggling to get by .

There are a good number of rich people among the 47 percent of households that pay no federal income taxes. According to the Tax Policy Center, 18,000 households with incomes over $500,000 – and 4,000 households bringing in over $1 million – paid no federal income taxes in 2011.

Because there is no discrete group of Americans who routinely pay no income taxes year in and year out, it’s impossible to say for sure what their partisan loyalties might be, but it’s highly likely that a majority of them are Republicans. Around four out of 10 of those households are divided between demographics that lean towards the Dems – students, the poor – and those that lean toward the Republicans – the elderly, disabled veterans. But a majority of that group – six in 10 – are just lower income working families whose incomes fell below a certain threshhold in a given year. And this is where they live:

Click to enlarge.

The Romney campaign is reportedly going to run with this narrative in the coming weeks. The problem is that it only resonates with a minority of hard-right voters who aren’t up for grabs anyway. Most Americans understand that half the country isn’t indolent and doesn’t see themselves of victims of anything but the depression in which we find ourselves today. And that’s why, according to a Gallup poll released on Wednesday , only 20 percent of registered voters say that Romney’s sneering remarks make them more likely to vote for him, while 36 percent say they’re turned of by them.”

The delusional nature of Romney’s math is matched by the delusional nature of his philosophy.

He was born with no silver spoon, he claims, except the silver spoon of being born in America.

Well, being born in America is surely an enormous advantage.

But consider what Mr. Romney does NOT consider a silver spoon:

“Romney was the son of a governor and an auto executive who gave him a wealth of connections, a private education, college tuition, a stock portfolio that he lived on while in graduate school, help buying a first house.”

Apparently, Romney thinks that had he been born Hispanic, his life would have been much easier.

Oh boo-hoo.

Last I looked, the financial industry, not noticeably underpaid, was filled with while males who are NOT Hispanic.

And their high incomes seem to have reflected no great competence on their part.

Indeed, the high incomes seem to have gone hand-in-hand  with extraordinary levels of incompetence and criminality.

Anti-Islamic movie made by convicted Californian fraudster

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Update: The Daily Bell is running with this story today, a little late in the day.

( We wrote about Gladio in 2005…..)

Meanwhile, it was  the mainstream media that actually did the best job of putting together the story yesterday.

The alternatives mostly swallowed the “Israeli Jews did it” red herring.

Fortunately, I took my own advice and waited for more reports…

In other words, it’s not a psyop by “Jews”….it might not even be a psyop by “Muslim Brothers” made to look like a psyop by “Jews”.

It could be a psyop by the “Jews” or the “Christians” made to look like a psyop by “Muslim Brothers” made to look like a psyop by “Jews.”

Or even deeper.

I’ve figured out a bit more than this, but I won’t be putting that research on the net. ….

ORIGINAL POST

The hunt for the man behind the offensive anti-Muslim film gets weirder by the hour.

Jeffrey Goldberg at “The Atlantic Wire” writes:

“I asked him who he thought Sam Bacile was. He said that there are about 15 people associated with the making of the film, “Nobody is anything but an active American citizen. They’re from Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, they’re some that are from Egypt. Some are Copts but the vast majority are Evangelical.”

What are we to make of Steve Klein’s assertions? I’m taking everything about this strange and horrible episode with a grain of salt, though I will say that I haven’t seen any proof yet that Sam Bacile is an actual Israeli Jew, or that the name is anything other than a pseudonym. More to come, undoubtedly.”

Just yesterday I posted a piece advising people to take everything in the major media as a psyop.

It turned out to be good advice.

The first reports (see this Guardian piece) said that the  horrible and tragic murder of the American ambassador in Libya, Christopher Stevens, had been triggered by a video made by an Israeli Jew.

Other reports claimed that Bacile was a Coptic Christian Israeli, not a Jew.

But the latest reports tell a different story.

It seems that all the 15 people involved in the making of the inflammatory anti-Islamic movie (“The Innocence of Muslims”) were American citizens and most were Evangelical Christians. Some were Coptics.

It seems that the $5 million that allegedly went into the making of the film produced an amateurish work of questionable values shown for a day at L.A.’s Vine theater.

It seems that Hollywood is a bit puzzled about who Sam Bacile is. He isn’t a known name.

One of the consultants on the film, Steve Klein, turns out to be  a counter-terrorism expert in California, who belongs to an ultra-conservative Christian group. He published a strongly anti-Islamic tract last year.

The Guardian:

Bacile has virtually no footprint in the Hollywood community. The writer-director-producer has no agent listed on the IMDBPro website and no credits on any film or TV production.

Steve Klein, a “consultant” on the film, describes himself as a Vietnam veteran, counter-terrorism expert and board member of an ultra-conservative group, Courageous Christians United. In 2010, he self-published a book, Is Islam compatible with the Constitution?, which assails Islam’s treatment of women.

Bacile was also linked to Morris Sadik, an Egyptian Coptic Christian based in California who runs a small virulently Islamophobic group called the National American Coptic Assembly. He promoted a clip of the film last week.”

Daily Kos has lots more about consultant Steve Klein and his extremist belief that California is dotted with Muslim Brotherhood cells (or Al Qaeda cells, in another version of the story) waiting to explode; who led a hunter-killer team as a Marine in Vietnam, has minuteman ties, and engages in armed confrontations near abortion clinics and Mormon churches.

Another weird twist is that the film was apparently altered unknown to the original actors and writers to convey insults to Islam:

In an even stranger twist, NPR’s Sarah Abdurrahman noticed that every specific reference to Muhammad or Islam in the movie’s trailer appears to be dubbed over what the actors actually said. Without the lines that insult Islam, the trailer “reads like some cheesy Arabian Nights story,” Abdurrahman writes. In a statement given to CNN, the cast and crew of the film said they were “grossly misled” about the movie’s purpose and said they feel “taken advantage of.” One of the film’s actors told Gawker that the cast was told they were acting in a movie called “Dessert Warriors,” and had no idea it would be altered to have an anti-Islam message. She said the film’s director, whom she now plans to sue, said he was Egyptian.

In the latest news, reported at NPR, it turns out that Bacile has been convicted for financial fraud.

“Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, told The Associated Press in an interview outside Los Angeles that he was manager for the company that produced “Innocence of Muslims,” which mocked Muslims and the prophet Mohammed and was implicated in inflaming mobs that attacked U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya. He provided the first details about a shadowy production group behind the film.

Nakoula denied he directed the film and said he knew the self-described filmmaker, Sam Bacile. But the cellphone number that AP contacted Tuesday to reach the filmmaker who identified himself as Sam Bacile traced to the same address near Los Angeles where AP found Nakoula. Federal court papers said Nakoula’s aliases included Nicola Bacily, Erwin Salameh and others.

Nakoula told the AP that he was a Coptic Christian and said the film’s director supported the concerns of Christian Copts about their treatment by Muslims.

Nakoula denied he had posed as Bacile. During a conversation outside his home, he offered his driver’s license to show his identity but kept his thumb over his middle name, Basseley. Records checks by the AP subsequently found it and other connections to the Bacile persona.”

Nakoula isn’t some petty wrong-doer either:

“Nakoula, who talked guardedly about his role, pleaded no contest in 2010 to federal bank fraud charges in California and was ordered to pay more than $790,000 in restitution. He was also sentenced to 21 months in federal prison and ordered not to use computers or the Internet for five years without approval from his probation officer.”

And this:

“Nobody is anything but an active American citizen,” Klein told the Atlantic. “They’re from Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, there are some that are from Egypt. Some are Copts but the vast majority are evangelical.”

Klein told the AP that he vowed to help make the movie but warned the filmmaker that “you’re going to be the next Theo van Gogh.” Van Gogh was a Dutch filmmaker killed by a Muslim extremist in 2004 after making a film that was perceived as insulting to Islam.

Question: If you make a film with the foreknowledge that it might result in someone being killed, is that an act of incitation?

The NPR piece (above) also tells us that after first considering the killing of the American ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, as an act of mob violence,  US authorities are now looking into whether it was a terrorist attack intended to coincide with 9-11.

I would advise them first to check if this was a staged US-Israeli false-flag intended to justify war and end foreign aid to Muslim countries ( an issue coming up next week).

Note: I think the government should not be aiding any country,  Arab or anything else.

Check out my previous posts on false-flags:

The involvement of the CIA in the Mumbai bombing;

Mossad links to the killing of Bassam Trache, a Syrian doctor in Hungary;

CIA/Mossad involvement in plans to Balkanize India.

Suspected Israeli targeting of Kochi naval base in India

US/Isreli involvement in Stuxnet virus attack on Iran

Mossad killing of a Hamas operative in Dubai using forged passports from other countries

The killing of the Polish prime minister and his entourage

Martha Nussbaum defends burqa against French neocons (Updated)

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Update (Sept 10)

Another thought occurs to me.  What level of brainwashing does it take to lecture the Islamic world for its “medieval” and “degrading” attitude toward women,  when the most popular book in the west today  is”Fifty Shades of Grey”). No individualists have said a word negative about this book, which describes how wonderful it is to be tied up and have steel balls pushed up your vagina by a controlling man who feeds you, dresses you, and employs you, while whipping you on your genitals and beating you until you cry.

Or, to take another case, what level of self-delusion does it take  to lecture extremely poor people in Asia, recovering from multiple centuries of enslavement and starvation, under a succession of empires, about physical dirt, while refusing to acknowledge a different kind of filth, which is perhaps more deadly. I am talking about the saturation of popular culture with perversions as disordered as cannibalism, sadism, coprophagia and necrophilia?

(Search the “Go Ask Alice” website at Columbia University, where these things are treated almost neutrally).

ORIGINAL POST

Martha Nussbaum brilliantly demolishes a series of justifications for banning the burqa, a costume not too different from the garb of nuns during the period of history that gave France some of its great cultural treasures.

I confess that I used to support a ban on burqas, from the point of view of security and civility, with the idea that it would enable natives to see Muslim immigrants as more human and akin to them.

But Nussbaum’s comprehensive essay has made me rethink that position.

Having grown up in a town in India where 30% of the population is Muslim and where most of the Muslims on the street wear Burqa all the time, in temperatures over 45 degrees celsius, I can tell you that the women I saw wearing them seemed quite happy with their choice.

Covering up the limbs and face preserves the skin from coarsening and burning, so it actually makes sense in very hot countries, especially for women.

No Florida “alligator” skin and rooster necks.  No discoloration spots and skin cancer.

It also makes sense to cover up in very crowded countries, where women are forced to rub up against strange men because of the crowds.

Covering up protects women against molestation. It carves out a sphere of dignity for a woman and protects her from violations of her personal space and modesty.

It prevents a women becoming a piece of meat on the market, which is often what happens in the West.

I felt noticeably more comfortable in the Muslim countries in which I’ve traveled alone, than anywhere in the West or in India.

The West can be terrifying for a single foreign women.  That has been my experience.  There is verbal intimidation, sexual assault, and vulgarity directed toward vulnerable women, especially divorced women, who are seen as fair targets for workplace slander and harassment.

In India, since the liberalization of the economy, the situation has also become difficult for women on the street. I know many foreign women, very good travelers, understanding of Indian culture,  who tell me they have been repeatedly pestered and molested since the l990s. American women have told me they’ve been assaulted in such porn-friendly cities as Buenos Aires.

[I should clarify: This may have less to do with porn as it has to do with the fact that they’re foreigners and blondes, at that. Blondes, I’ve observed, tend to have a harder time in Latin countries.  The woman who told me this said she’d been quite safe traveling alone in Thailand.]

Muslim countries I’ve visited were easily the most “women-friendly” for a single woman,

Nussbaum’s arguments about these matters, and many others, make a convincing case why the burqa ban is fundamentally anti-liberal and discriminatory.

First is the argument from security: it holds that security requires people to show their face when appearing in public places. A second, closely related, argument, which I shall treat together with it, says that the kind of transparency and reciprocity proper to relations between citizens is impeded by covering part of the face.

What is wrong with both of these arguments is that they are applied inconsistently. It gets very cold where I live in Chicago. Along the streets we walk, hats pulled down over ears and brows, scarves wound tightly around noses and mouths. No problem of either transparency or security is thought to exist, nor are we forbidden to enter public buildings so insulated.

Moreover, many beloved and trusted professionals cover their faces all year round: surgeons, dentists, skiers and skaters. The latter typically wear a full – face covering with slits only for the eyes, similar to a niqab. Some are even more covered than the typical burqa wearer. In general, then, what inspires fear and mistrust in Europe, and, to some extent, in the United States, is not covering per se, but Muslim covering.

So, what to do about the threat that all bulky and non-revealing clothing creates? Airline security does a lot, with metal detectors, body imaging, pat-downs, and so on (one very nice system is at work in India, where all passengers get a full manual pat-down, but in a curtained booth by a member of the same sex who is clearly trained to be courteous and respectful). Sport stadiums search all bags (though more to check for beer than for explosives, thus protecting the interests of in-stadium vendors). Retailers or other organizations who feel that bulky clothing is a threat (whether of shoplifting or terrorism or both) could institute a non-discriminatory rule banning; They could even have a body scanner at the door, but they don’t, presumably preferring customer friendliness to the extra margin of safety…….

…A third argument, very prominent today, is that the burqa is a symbol of male domination that symbolizes the objectification of women: it encourages people to think of and treat a woman as a mere object. A Catalonian legislator recently called the burqa a “degrading prison.” President Sarkozy said the same thing.

[Lila: Please note that certain libertarian outfits that would never speak out against the objectification of women in the dangerous practices of the global porn trade nonetheless come out with the same memes that neoconservatives used to justify the invasion of Iraq – the liberation of women – a meme thoroughly discredited and debunked by third-world and post-colonial critics and even by some more thoughtful liberal feminists like Nussbaum.

It hardly needs to be said that the people who make this argument typically don’t know much about Islam and would have a hard time saying what symbolizes what in that religion. But the more glaring flaw in the argument is that society is suffused with symbols of male supremacy that treat women as objects.

Sex magazines, pornography, nude photos, tight jeans, transparent or revealing clothing – all of these products, arguably, treat women as objects, as do so many aspects of our media culture. Women are encouraged to market themselves for male objectification in this way, and it has long been observed that this is a way of robbing women of both agency and individuality, reducing them to objects or commodities.

And what about the “degrading prison” of plastic surgery? Every time I undress in the locker room of my gym, I see women bearing the scars of liposuction, tummy tucks, breast implants. Isn’t much of this done in order to conform to a male norm of female beauty that casts women as sex objects?

……Respect is for the person, and is fully compatible with intensely disliking many things that many people do. So in a society dedicated to equal liberty people remain perfectly free to think and to say that the burqa is an objectionable garment because of the way in which it symbolizes the objectification of women…….

Myself, I think that a burqa is not a symbol of hatred, and thus not something that it would be reasonable to find deeply hateful. It is more like the boys and their tzizit, something I may feel out of tune with, but which it is probably nosy to denounce unless a friend has asked my opinion. Still, if someone else wants to say that it is deeply objectionable, and that she does not respect it, that does not in any way disagree with the principles I am defending here.

What respect for persons requires is that people have equal space to exercise their conscientious commitments, not that others like or even respect what they do in that space. Furthermore, equal respect for persons is compatible with limiting religious freedom in the case of a “compelling state interest………Which brings me to my next point.

Argument 4: Coercion

A fourth argument holds that women wear the burqa only because they are coerced. This is a rather implausible argument to make across the board, and it is typically made by people who have no idea what the circumstances of this or that individual woman are.

We should reply that of course all forms of violence and physical coercion in the home are illegal already, and laws against domestic violence and abuse should be enforced much more zealously than they are. Do the arguers really believe that domestic violence is a peculiarly Muslim problem? If they do, they are dead wrong.

According to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, intimate partner violence made up 20% of all nonfatal violent crime experienced by women in 2001. The National Violence Against Women Survey reports that 52% of surveyed women said they were physically assaulted as a child by an adult caretaker and/or as an adult by any type of perpetrator.

There is no evidence that Muslim families have a disproportionate amount of such violence. Indeed, given the strong association between domestic violence and the abuse of alcohol, it seems at least plausible that observant Muslim families will turn out to have less of it…….

College fraternities are very strongly associated with violence against women, and some universities have made all or some fraternities move off campus as a result. But private institutions are entitled to make such regulations about what can occur on their premises; public universities are entitled to limit the types of activities that will get public money, particularly when they involve illegality (underage drinking). But a total governmental ban on the male drinking club (or on other places where men get drunk, such as soccer matches) would certainly be a bizarre restriction of associational liberty.

One thing that we have long known to be strongly associated with coercion and violence against women is alcohol. The Amendment to the United States Constitution banning alcohol was motivated by exactly this concern. It was on dubious footing in terms of liberty: why should law-abiding people suffer for the crimes of abusers? But what was more obvious was that Prohibition was a total disaster politically and practically. It increased crime and it did not stop violence against women……..

So, where should government and law step in? Certainly it should step in where physical and/or sexual abuse is going on, which is very often. Where religious mandates are concerned, intervention would be justified, similarly, where the behaviour either constitutes a gross risk to bodily health and safety (as with Jehovah’s Witness children being forbidden to have a life-saving blood transfusion), or impairs some major functioning.

Thus, I think that female genital mutilation practiced on minors should be illegal if it is a form that impairs sexual pleasure or other bodily functions. Male circumcision seems to me all right, however, because there is no evidence that it interferes with adult sexual functioning; indeed it is now known to reduce susceptibility to HIV/AIDS.

[Lila: Here, I think Nussbaum is mistaken. There is plenty of evidence that removal of the foreskin does affect male pleasure.  And there may be many other side-effects that haven’t been fully studied yet.]

….The burqa (for minors) is not in the same class as genital mutilation, since it is not irreversible and does not engender health or impair other bodily functions – not nearly so much as high-heeled shoes. If it is imposed by physical or sexual violence, that violence ought to be legally punished.

[Lila: Brilliant. There are far more crippling and unhygienic forms of clothing popular in the West, from thongs (which are gross and unhygienic!) to nylon stockings (itchy, and they constrict the blood vessels), crotchless panties (unhygienic and infectious), flimsy bras (lead to sagging breasts), baggy pants (can trip you up); tight skirts (prevent normal movements), low-cut blouses (ruin delicate breast and neck skin), deodorant (stops perspiration and lets toxicity build up in the body), shampoo (makes your hair thin and go grey prematurely).]

…. If people think that women only wear the burqa because of coercive pressure, let them create ample opportunities for them, and then see what they actually do.………

Argument 5: Health Risk

Finally, one frequently hears the argument that the burqa is per se unhealthy, because it is hot and uncomfortable. I have heard this argument often in Europe, particularly in Spain. This is perhaps the silliest of the arguments.

Clothing that covers the body can be comfortable or uncomfortable, depending on the fabric. In India I typically wear a full salwaar kameez of cotton, because it is superbly comfortable, and full covering keeps dust off one’s limbs and at least diminishes the risk of skin cancer. It is surely far from clear that the amount of skin displayed in typical Spanish female dress would meet with a dermatologist’s approval.

But more pointedly, would the arguer really seek to ban all uncomfortable and possibly unhealthy female clothing? Wouldn’t we have to begin with high heels, delicious as they are? But no, high heels are associated with majority norms (and are a major Spanish export), so they draw no ire.t harmful chemicals, and that other gross health risks are avoided. But on the whole women in particular area allowed and even encouraged to wear clothing that could plausibly be argued to create health risks, whether through tendon shortening or through exposure to the sun….

….The burqa is not even in the category of the corset. As many readers pointed out, it is sensible dress in a hot climate where skin easily becomes worn by sun and dust. What does seem to pose a risk to health is wearing synthetic fabrics in a hot climate, but nobody is talking about that.

The Burqa and the Limits of Laicite

All five arguments are discriminatory. We don’t even need to reach the delicate issue of religiously grounded accommodation to see that they are utterly unacceptable in a society committed to equal liberty. Equal respect for conscience requires us to reject them.

Let us now consider more closely the special case of France. Unlike other European nations, France is consistent – up to a point. Given its history of anticlericalism and the strong commitment to laicite, religion is not to set its mark upon the public realm, and the public realm is permitted to disfavour religion by contrast to non-religion. This commitment leads to restrictions on a wide range of religious manifestations, all in the name of a total separation of church and state. But if one looks closely, the restrictions are unequal and discriminatory. The school dress code forbids the Muslim headscarf and the Jewish yarmulke, along with “large” Christian crosses.

But this is a totally unequal burden, because the first two items of clothing are religiously obligatory for observant members of those religions, and the third is not: Christians are under no religious obligation to wear any cross, much less a “large” one. So there is discrimination inherent in the French system…….

Let’s now consider the language of the law banning the burqa. It prohibits “wearing attire designed to hide the face” (porter une tenue detinee a dissimuler son visage) – and then there is a long list of exceptions:

“The prohibition described in Article 1 does not apply if the attire is prescribed or authorized by legislative or regulatory dispensation, if it is justified for reasons of health or professional motives, or if it is adopted in the context of athletic practices, festivals, or artistic or traditional performances.”…….

Does the application of the ban to all religions mean that the ban, unlike the school dress code, is truly neutral? Well of course, although the word burqa does not occur in the legislation, we understand perfectly well that this is what it is all about. And the fact that they are so generous with other cultural and professional exemptions shows that they are not terribly worried about the practice as such – only when it is a religious manifestation. But still, isn’t that a consistent and, up to a point, neutral application of the polity of laicite?

The difficulty we have here is that no other religion has a custom of precisely that sort. So what the law has done is to single out something that is of central importance to one religion and to apply a very heavy burden to it, without similarly burdening the central and cherished practices of other religions. Indeed, it seems clear that one would not be fined for making the sign of the cross over oneself in a public place, for singing a religious hymn as one walked down the street, or for wearing any type of religious apparel other than the burqa: cassocks, nuns’ habits, Hasidic dress, the saffron garb of the Hindu priest – all of these remain unburdened. So it is neutral in one sense, but not at all neutral in another.

At this point, defenders of the ban will typically allude to one of the other arguments, saying that the burqa, unlike these other forms of clothing, is a security risk, an impediment to normal relations among citizens, and so on. But the fact that the government does not credit these rationales is clear from the fact that they permit so many exceptions to the ban. Even a public masquerade, at which hundreds of people cover their faces, received explicit defence in the statute.

So it’s clear that the government does not think that security provides a compelling interest in favour of the restriction: it’s trumped routinely by very weak and even frivolous interests.

So I conclude that the French ban is not truly neutral, any more than the school dress code. Besides the obvious objection that French secularism does not allow sufficiently ample freedom for religious observance, we may add the objection of bias.

***

Philosophical principles shape constitutional traditions and the shape of political cultures. I have tried to articulate some important principles behind traditions of religious liberty and equality in both the United States and Europe.

Today, a climate of fear and suspicion, directed primarily against Muslims, threatens to derail these admirable commitments. But if we articulate them clearly and see the reasons for them, this may help us oppose these ominous developments.

Excerpted from The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age by Martha C. Nussbaum, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright 2012 by Martha C. Nussbaum. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics in the Philosophy Department, Law School and Divinity School at the University of Chicago. You can listen to her in conversation with Andrew West on Radio National’s Religion and Ethics Report.”

Assange & Anonymous: Sock-Puppet Rebels..

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Willy Loman has an impassioned plea to forget the “dissent-chiefs” and official revolutionaries on the left (Greenwald, Ellsberg, Hedges, Cole, Chomsky, Goodman, Assange, Anonymous etc.) and on the right (Ron Paul, Alex Jones, Doug Casey, etc.).

Take what’s good in them, but go beyond.

They are reliable on past conspiracies.  Don’t believe them on present ones, unless confirmed by your own analysis. (Hint: If they support Assange and Anonymous, or keep pointing to the approved activists, think twice).

Light your own fire. Think your own thoughts.

And, follow the facts, not the leader.

Willy Loman::

“The rolling psyop known as Julian Assange is not done with us just yet.

After serving as the CIA’s front-man for the distribution of phony intel for a couple years (and getting paid well for it) and then living like a king in an English mansion under “house arrest” for 500 days (while the patsy Bradley Manning is in lock down 24/7), now Julian is getting his very own interview based TV show…….

..Julian Assange lives with a globalist billionaire in the heart of the new imperialist England and he’s going to tell us 99%ers what we should be doing and which “politicians, revolutionaries, intellectuals, artists and visionaries” we should trust and follow.

Anyone else see an inherent problem with that?

With yet another economic collapse just off the horizon and the Occupy Spring taking shape and the entire European continent rioting, you don’t think steering the boiling over dissident movement would be something that the CIA, NSA, and the State Department would be interested in, do you?

If a psyop gets any more obvious than Julian Assange, I haven’t seen it……..

Unfortunately as you know there will be those on the dissident left and right who buy into this shit, believe it or not. Let’s see how our old friend Glenn Greenwald writes about it.

“A WikiLeaks press release states, “‘The World Tomorrow’ is a collection of twelve interviews featuring an eclectic range of guests, who are stamping their mark on the future: politicians, revolutionaries, intellectuals, artists and visionaries. The world’s last five years have been marked by an unrelenting series of economic crises and political upheavals. But they have also given rise to the eruption of revolutionary ferment in the Middle East and to the emergence of new protest movements in the Euro-American world. In Julian’s words, the aim of the show is ‘to capture and present some of this revolutionary spirit to a global audience.’””  RT

[Lila: This is exactly what this Peter Dale Scott article at Lew Rockwell is about. It too lists the activists you should pay attention to.  That’s just what prizes are intended to do – focus your eyes on what the globalists want you to focus on. That is how revolution has been co-opted from the start of scientific state propaganda.]

“Does anyone remember how much we trusted al Jazeera English after their great coverage of the Egyptian protests? Anyone getting the feeling that Russia Today is headed down the same path AJ took right after they earned our trust?

The RT article announcing this weekly psyop is hinting that the proven NSA asset “Anonymous” may be one of his first interviews.

The guest list has not been revealed, but it has been hinted that the first guest will be someone controversial. A tweet from the WikiLeaks account asks provocatively, “Any bets on who The World Tomorrow’s first mystery guest(s) are?” It then adds the hashtag “#ExpectAssange” — a play on the Anonymous slogan, “Expect us.” RT

“For those of you who don’t understand how these games are played, I’ll give you an example. If a law enforcement agency wants to get a new man on the inside of an organization, say a mob organization, what they do is they have someone who is already on the inside vouch for him. Someone with “street cred” so to speak. This is the same thing they do when trying to influence movements of different types.

Take for instance the Truth Movement (or what’s left of it). You have a fake “truther” named Jon Gold. His idea of the “truth” of 9/11 is whatever George Bush and Dick Cheney told us… plus.. “foreknowledge”… well, foreknowledge minus insider trading which he doesn’t think took place. Well, you have that guy (which no real Truth advocate believes for a second) write a book and then you get Sibel Edmunds of Boiling Frogs to stand beside him claiming he is the real deal. Then Gold promotes Sibel’s LIHOPy book and BINGO… you have the APPEARANCE of a consensus in the hijacked movement.

See how that works? One fake vouches for another fake. Jon and Sibel = Julian and “Anonymous”

[Lila: To give Sibel Edmonds credit, she is a lot more credible to me than the others. She is after all a brave person and a whistle-blower who has called out a lot of the lazy activism of another very well-heeled, “comfortable” group, Antiwar. Edmonds seems to be reliable until she gets to 9/11 and she falls silent about Hank Greenberg, as do most Republican activists. But other than that, I don’t feel she belongs in this group. I feel she’s been forced to join them.]

In the world of organized crime, this kind of game can be a bit dangerous. In the world of crime fighting this can be very very dangerous. But in the world of dissident movements, what’s the risk? Remember that guy who was busted infiltrating that movement down in New Orleans? What happened to him? Nothing. He went on after he was exposed to start some new assignment and that was the end of it. What happened to Nurse Nariah (whatever her name was) or that guy who pretended to be the “Gay Girl from Damascus” or “Syrian Danny” once they were all exposed?

This is how they work.

Right now we are on the edge of a massive popular uprising and it just so happens that their two most successful psyops are about to go on one of the most respected news outlets left to us to tell us what to do.

Get it?

Assange himself says in the trailer for the show, “Today we’re on a quest for revolutionary ideas that can change the world tomorrow.” RT

oooooo…. Julian himself tells us what to do…. oh I can’t wait… and “Anonymous” will be there too? And it’s on RT? Well hell, that must be legit.

If you notice though, at the end of the RT article, they seem to be presenting a little disclaimer. Turns out RT didn’t produce this CIA/State Department psyop… some “independent” company out of London produced it. I wonder if it is owned by the same globalist billionaire who is letting Julian live in his mansion while under “house arrest”

“A press release for the show, however, emphasizes that it was put together by an independent UK producer and that RT is merely serving as the initial broadcaster. Negotiations are presently underway with other possible licensees, who might broadcast longer versions of the same interviews.” RT

Seems like RT is already making sure they can distance themselves from this psyop even before it launches it’s first installment……

John Young of Cryptome said years ago that he knew Assange and Wikileaks was a CIA honeypot from the start and he was correct.

Now they are trying to cash in on his “street cred”, street cred that was given (“given”.. not earned) him by the likes of Amy Goodman, Glenn Greenwald, and Daniel Ellsberg.If you still that that is a group of true dissidents, I can’t help you.

[Lila: So what does that make Peter Dale Scott who points to the dissent-chiefs?]

All I can say about this State Department infomercial is: Don’t believe it folks and don’t watch it.

Let them know via their own ratings tools that we can’t be fooled by their Disneyesque smoke and mirrors.

The PR and influence peddling institutions think they’re the real power behind this country and time and time again they’re proven wrong but they just keep plugging away telling themselves they are smarter than all of us. They’re not.

If you don’t take the hint from me, take a cue from the RT article… there’s a REASON they posted the disclaimer in their press announcement and the article about the show. RT is trying to tell you something. The reason is… it’s BULLSHIT.

Don’t watch the show. Tell others its bullshit. Make sure Julian and his NSA handlers get the rotten tomatoes ratings they deserve.

No more Syrian Danny no more Gay Girl no more Julian of the Mansion. We’ve outgrown it. We’re tired of the bullshit. That’s it.

This is going to be our revolution and NOTHING they do is going to hijack it.

Whomever he puts on that fraud of a show of his is suspect. Whoever is on that show of his is just as much of a fraud as he is.

We saw through Invisible Children and Kony 2012 in record time (less than a day I believe) and we will see.. through.. this.. too.

No prepackaged heroes, no ready-made leaders. It’s ham-handed and obvious and we are too tired and angry to fall for this shit.”

Assange Circus: Smoke-Screen To Hide Real Whistle-Blower

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At Veterans Today, a fascinating take on what’s real behind the Assange circus at the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK:

“Have you ever asked yourself why the founder of WikiLeaks always reaches the front pages of our daily and international newspapers and yet this unknown entity (Andrea Davison) has little or no coverage!!

You may be surprised to learn that in the real sense what Ms Davison knows far outweighs the out of date garbage that comes from Julian Assange!!

Ms Davison had an incredible amount of very secretive documents in her possession that had the potential to put many ex and current Prime Ministers in prison for life and in some case many other very senior MP’s and members of the House of Lords so I again keep asking the same question why is the world’s media ignoring Ms Davison?

I would now like to continue in exposing exactly what this woman knew as proof that our government and the opposition certainly are making sure that the media does not get hold of this story.

Here is more information that Ms Davison herself produced and published in her own words with the title:

MI5 DESTROY THE BLAIR BROWN IRAQ DEFENCE ARE THEY NOW WAR CRIMINALS – Jul 20, 2010:

Former head of MI5 in her evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry showed Tony Blair’s evidence that “Toppling Saddan Hussein helped make Britain safe from terrorists” was false.

In her testimony she said, what every intelligence service in the world knew, that Iraqwas no threat and did not have the capability to use WMD’s. Whilst she did not say that Saddam had mobile biological weapons units in the southern marshes it was revealed in a memo to John Gieve, Permanent Secretary to the Home Office, in March 2002, that Saddam was not likely to use chemical or biological weapons unless “he felt the survival of his regime was in doubt”.

Britain and the USA supplied Iraqwith a military industrial base which included the facility to produce chemical and biological weapons and deliver them. Britain supplied large amounts of VX gas and the tech transfer which resulted in a bio engineered flu virus transposed with a biotoxin. Following Desert Storm much was transported to Sudan, Iran and Libya.

The intelligence reports from around the world did not suit Tony Blair’s agenda and he made war on Iraq causing the radicalization of British Muslims and thereby increasing the threat of home grown terrorism Just as the intelligence reports he chose to ignore warned. Some of those reports were written by former arms investigator and intelligence agent Andrea Davison.

Manningham-Buller also said Iraq had posed little threat before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, and insisted there was no evidence of a link between former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. “There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection and that was the judgment, I might say, of the CIA,” she told the inquiry. “It was not a judgment that found favour with some parts of the American machine.”

Former head of M15 Eliza Manningham-Buller revealed that there was such a surge of warnings of home-grown terrorist threats after the invasion of Iraq that MI5 asked for – and got – a 100 per cent increase in its budget. Baroness Manningham-Buller, who was director general of MI5 in 2002-07, told the Chilcot panel that MI5 started receiving a “substantially” higher volume of reports that young British Muslims being drawn to al-Qa’ida.

As reported she told the inquiry: “Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam.” She added: “Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi Jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before.”

Her words are in stark contrast to the claim that Mr Blair made in front of the same inquiry on the 29 January this year “If I am asked whether I believe we are safer, more secure, that Iraq is better, that our own security is better, with Saddam and his two sons out of office and out of power, I believe indeed we are. “It was better to deal with this threat, to remove him from office, and I do genuinely believe that the world is safer as a result.”

Sir Menzies Campbell, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, added: “I should be astonished if Mr Blair were to return to give further evidence, but questions will remain as to what it was which prompted him to disregard the reservations of officials and their advice. If only Britain had been as well served by its politicians as it was by Eliza Manningham-Buller then we would never have got ourselves into the illegal mess of Iraq.”

Only 16 days before Blair gave evidence to the Inquiry documents were seized by Derby Police from Andrea Davison proving that the Government knew there were no WMD’s in Iraq at the time of the second Iraq War, along with Intelligence reports which would have ended Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s carefully laid tissue of lies

Ken Livingstone, who was Mayor of London at the time of the 7 July bombings, said: “Eliza Manningham-Buller’s evidence is a damning indictment of a foreign policy that not only significantly enhanced the risk of terrorist attacks in London but gave al-Qa’ida the opening to operate in Iraq too.”

Evidence showed that a year before British troops went into Iraq, Elize sent the Home Office a memo which – though phrased in official language – demolished the idea that Saddam Hussein’s regime represented a credible terrorist threat to theUK. The memo went on: “We assess that Iraqi capability to mount attacks in the UKis currently limited.”

Lady Manningham-Buller also hinted at disagreement between Blair’s office and MI5 over the dossier that the Prime Minister presented to Parliament in September 2002, to prepare public opinion for the likelihood of war.

“We were asked to put in some low-grade, small intelligence to it and we refused because we didn’t think it was reliable,” she said.

Andrea Davison has repeatedly asked the Home Office for the Return of her documents and Intelligence reports from the Derby Police in order to present them to the Iraq enquiry without success. Why the new Government want to keep them hidden is a mystery yet to be revealed.
They both ended up seeking political asylum in this building – The Ecuador Embassy in London

As I told you all in my last article Ms Andrea Davison has far more to offer than the CIA conman Julian Assange so why isn’t the world media interested in this scoop and more to the point just what does this women know that the British Government does not want you to know?

To prove that the information I printed is authentic I will now show you some very sensitive letters letter that Ms Davison herself released into the public domain before she was gagged and forced to take down her webpage…….you will see extremely confidential letters that proves beyond a shadow of doubt that all that she did was known to Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the current PM David Cameron who between them not only carried out breaches under the Nuclear Explosions Act but she herself and her journalistic puppet, Pete Sawyer, could both have breached the Official Secrets Act!!

This story is truly a major scoop but the current Zionist controlled world media refuses to print it and those in high places continue to evade prison!!

Here are a sequence of letters that show communications between Ms. Davison and the Prime Minister and other very senior MP’s and member of the House of Lords which clearly reveal that the current Chilcot Inquiry will be a total cover-up and the star witness – Ms Davison was never called to give her evidence…….not to mention the fact that three nuclear weapons went missing and were allowed to be sold on the black market………many of the above received back handers from that fraudulent deal including our current PM who received £17.8 million for his party and another £1 million went to Tony Blair….not forgetting many other of the political elite who also got a slice of the cake!!

I will also mention other names such as Sir Ken Warren and Peter Lilley MP who employed Ms Davison and Dr. David Kelly who suffered the ultimate sacrifice in being assassinated simply because he knew too much!!!

Here are the letters in sequence of date order…….note the items seized during the police raid as highlighted in the letter to Gordon Brown the PM at the time and also note the reference made to the DTI which obviously implicates Sir Ken Warren and Peter Lilley to name but a few of those involved:

One can clearly see political interference into the case being mounted by the Derbyshire Police which they ignored and continued to put Ms Davison on trial to which she was found guilty of 27 charges…….

However, she did not attend the Mold Crown Court and so the police issued a bench warrant for her arrest…….she eventually turned up in the Ecuador Embassy in London and is currently seeking political asylum with Julian Assange as her roommate!!

The question remains will the Police or government ask the embassy to release her so that she can continue to give her vital evidence at the yet to be revealed Chilcot Inquiry……….obviously not as that would be the downfall of not only ex Prime Ministers but also the current PM and possible many members of the Government.

One should also mention in closing the fact that Ms Davison and her journalistic friend, Pete Sawyer could possibly also be charged under the official secrets act for holding and sharing official secrets and then in their publication on Ms Davison’s own blog and also in articles published by Mr. Sawyer himself that could be considered as highly sensitive!!

Mr. Sawyer had the audacity to tell Gordon and I that the reason he was attending the Royal Courts of Justice was to make sure we never printed such articles as this one……..Sorry Mr Sayer you failed on that point……also this so called journalist had the audacity to wait outside the court and take photographs of Gordon and I…………this gave me no option but to also film him which upset him deeply and he responded by almost poking his telephoto lens up my nostril……all to no avail!!!

Stayed tuned for more juicy government cover-ups and if you want to learn more you can go to the US Republic Broadcasting Network and listen to Paul Drockton and I in our own show……you can find this also on the link on this page……happy listening!!”

Peter Eyre – Middle East Consultant – 30/7/2012

Comment:

Paul-Lehrman Connection Meaningless, Says Daily Bell (Corrections Added)

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Update: Subsequent to my posting this, the Agora disinfo agent/troll/paid basher Ryals reposts Amberger’s comments to him (rather than Amberger’s blog posts about Agora), simultaneously discrediting and neutralizing Amberger by an unsubstantiated smear (Nazi Stasi), just as he posts any substantial criticism of Agora, ALWAYS with slurs about the critics and always with OLD NEWS about Agora, usually attributing criminal behavior to the critics, for which he gives not a shred of proof.

His response fails to mention the people who really are responsible for Agora’s marketing and selling today – Myles Norin (CEO), Matthew Turner (counsel), Addison Wiggin (chief of Agora Financial, its flagship subsidiary, and also heavily involved in Oxford Group, Michael Masterson (Mark Ford), Byron King, Alexander Greene, Mike Ward, Julia Guth, and many others, whose border-line promotions were all deconstructed by Christoph Amberger. Instead, Ryals tries to discredit Amberger’s whistle-blowing. No question Ryals has some kind of tie to Agora.

To make things clearer, Agora is not solely Bonner’s company but owned by several people, some of whom no doubt have axes to grind with others. Bonner himself might have enemies within the company, for partisan, financial or personal reasons.

Notice how Ryals only focuses on the Republicans in the group, like Bonner, presumably Casey, and Robert Bauman, who specializes in the admirable field of asset protection. Now, unlike the state-worshipping fraud Ryals,  I would love to believe Bob Bauman is a really good asset protector (aka money-launderer), but, alas, if he is not what he seems (and I haven’t seen anything concrete to suggest that), he is much more likely to be an IRS/DOJ honey-pot, if I know how these things work.

That’s what I believe large parts of the  asset-protection racket really is about, when it’s not about espionage and government-related money-laundering.

That might include the over-hyped Simon Black, who also seems to be a part of the LRC-Agora crew and constantly tells people that Singapore is a great place for financial security, when anyone who even researches the matter in a skimpy way will figure out that Singapore is crawling with Mossad and CIA.

NWO resistance indeed.

Anyone boosting simplistic asset protection, or simplistic encryption like Tor (heavens!) is simply pushing people into US govt supervised encryption. But, then, maybe that’s the idea.

ORIGINAL POST

The Daily Bell argues that the Ron Paul-Lewis Lehrman connection is meaningless (links to follow):

“Worse, in our humble opinion, whenever such issues arise these days, the dissemblers come out in force to attack the world’s only apparently honest politician, US Congressman Ron Paul, for working with Lewis Lehrman.

It is true that when Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman served (with many others) on a US Gold Commission during the Reagan years they wrote a minority report recommending a return to some sort of gold standard.

But Ron Paul certainly didn’t seek Lehrman out to write the report. He wrote it with Lehrman because Lehrman was on the committee. Ron Paul, of course, went on to call for a regime of competing currencies, which is something we’re partial to.”

Comment:

This would be a whole lot more credible if  The Daily Bell itself didn’t call out people on just as tenuous evidence, in much more black and white terms than I have ever done.

It also doesn’t help that the Bell dismisses critics of Paul as dissemblers.

Why?

What’s wrong with criticizing a politician who’s set up as the sole spokesman for libertarian issues?

Why would anti-state capitalists focus on a politician as their spokesman, in the first place?

What sense does that make?

Especially, when just a few days ago, the Bell raised no objection at all, when, in an interview on their site, Gerald Celente claimed Paul was “not a fighter” and had failed because he was not a fighter.

If that is the opinion of Paul’s friends, isn’t it natural that people on the paper-money team or outside the binary altogether (like me) would reach even more devastating conclusions?

I don’t believe most Paul critics are dissembling. I think they are genuinely disappointed and suspicious. I am too.

Three. The Bell loses credibility when it claims Paul is the “only honest politician in the world.”

That’s pure hyperbole.

I’m sure the Daily Bell doesn’t know “all the politicians in the world.” And Paul isn’t perfectly clean. There was rampant nepotism during his campaign. There was the alleged double-billing. There were other mis-steps.

They might all be minor. And the Lehrman connection might be innocuous too, but it’s not the only troubling thing that comes to mind.

Which brings me to my fourth point.

Paul has a long-standing relationship via Murray Rothbard with Agora Inc. and its founder, James Dale Davidson, about which I blogged in July (the first person to pull that little nugget up, I do believe….although, as soon as I say that, I’m sure a dozen quicky sites will pop up with the same information on them).

This is a very troubling connection, in my opinion.

The Agora Inc. network has  ties to Rockefeller-related groups, like the Peterson Institute. I blogged about that in 2009, January.

Now, I myself have once cited research produced by the Peterson.

[It’s in my piece on Krugman, at LRC, and the researcher was Anders Aslund, who was one of the advocates of privatization in the Soviet Union. Aslund was wrong about that,  although not the only one wrong, and certainly not the main one.]

But I post research from all over the place, and that is not an endorsement of the authors’ other works or of the websites carrying the research.

Agora’s ties to the Peterson Institute, however, are a bit more relevant and important than my posting or quoting someone once, casually.

The I.O.U.S.A film (a spin-off from Agora’ “Empire of Debt,” Wiley, 2005) was promoted nationally by the Peterson Institute. Some of the positions Agora supports are consonant with Pete Peterson’s interests, although I do believe most people at Agora are anti-state libertarians, whereas Peterson is no more than a  crony capitalist.

This is what I wrote in my 2009 blog post  about the Peterson connection:

“Assembling this bipartisan group of prominent enablers/theorists of empire over the last twenty years lets IOUSA claim it goes beyond partisanship. In reality it does no such thing. Omitting a context for its arguments, the film actually lends itself to being interpreted in ways quite contradictory to the tenor of the original work. At times it even subverts the book thoroughly.

IOUSA lends itself to a very anti-libertarian, statist moralizing of the debt issue: thus, spendthrift population needs to be forced to save by government. Now that really alarms me. Watch out – forced savings accounts ahead!”

Agora also promotes things like “peak oil,” which I don’t find persuasive, being a long-time believer in the abiotic origin of oil.

These positions are  accompanied by promotions throughout its marketing network from which it stands to gain financially, either directly or indirectly.

That surely calls into question the credibility of the positions of anyone deeply connected to them.

Is Paul connected to them in a serious way?

{Added, August 25: Obviously, Agora has also supported anti-war positions that have not won it popularity, so I should give them credit for that and I do.

But I also recognize that the “anti-war” position has a place in the permissible range of public opinion, as long as on crucial issues and events  antiwar advocates develop laryngitis. This strategy, devised by the intelligence services, ensures that there is “cognitive diversity” among critics of war and the police state that gives the appearance of a “liberal” political culture, while actually permitting them little impact.  It siphons off the energy, time, money, and ambition of perhaps 95% of activists and effectively marginalizes the rest. Zahir Ebrahim has written extensively about this at his depressing but honest website, Project HumanBeingsFirst.]

Besides the tie-in to the establishment via Peterson/Rockefeller and besides the commercial imperative which undermines the sincerity of its positions, there are also Rothschild connections to Agora.

First, Rothschild interests are now directly connected to Rockefeller interests, by a recent merger (which I’ve blogged a couple of times).

Second, there are also direct connections between the Rothschilds and Agora.

I wasn’t sure about some of those, a couple of years ago.

In fact, I thought the allegation that Agora was a Rothschild front was only innuendo concocted at Executive Intelligence Review by ex-Larouchite, Bill Engdahl, who often doesn’t cite his sources and has once picked up leads from me without acknowledgement, likely because I come from the right

That’s why, even though I was disillusioned with Ron Paul by then, I didn’t place much stock in the Engdahl charge, especially when it was picked up on Jennifer Lake’s blog (see this blog post of March 10 2010) and then embellished with a lot of strange errors.  I felt the whole thing had to be some kind of disinformation. I certainly didn’t make any connection to Paul.  I thought it was a ploy to muddy more concrete legal issues. One can’t be prosecuted for being a Rothschild front, after all, but one can discredit one’s detractors by posing as one, since the whole Rothschild conspiracy is beyond the pale for mainstream analysts and writers. In fact, Lake’s silly comments, which I was forced to address because they libeled me, actually damaged the very thing she –  with typical arrogance – thought she was assisting – the public interest. In short, she forced me to state things that tipped off the very people she claimed I was covering for.

That’s why I even thought Agora itself was encouraging the story, a view shared by at least one other credible journalist. For the same reason, I suspect that Tony Ryals, the cyberbully behind all the negative postings about me, isn’t half as insane as he pretends to be. In fact, I think he has indirect ties to Agora himself, since he never mentions the people there who have actual legal responsibility there, like CEO Myles Norin, or their attorney, Matt Turner, or Agora Financial chief, Addison Wiggin, or some of their star traders, like Alan Knuckman.

[Sept 6 – this morning, I checked to find that Ryals’ posts referencing these comments of mine and thus referencing these individuals had been deleted or “disappeared.” Of course, just to make me a liar,  they might pop back. But it’s interesting that it’s impossible to stop Ryals’s libels, when it’s someone like me (or others, who aren’t in charge at Agora or whose crimes, if they committed any, are beyond the statute of limitations, but it’s easy enough to get him to remove comments about the people still there.]

Funnier still, Ryals never mentions a former senior employee, Christoph Amberger, whose blog about the company’s shenanigans (cons would be a better word from what I read) was shut down in 2011. Reportedly, this was after he was paid to keep his silence, that is, hold to a non-disclosure agreement under threat of litigation. All traces of his blog about the company’s marketing deceptions (GreenLaserReviews) were wiped off the net in a matter of days.

Instead of mentioning all this, Ryals, who even corresponded with Amberger (who smacked him down for the troll he is) waffles on about Davidson, who is safely beyond reach of prosecution, and, in any case, seems to have more than paid for any sins by his investigations into the Clinton mafia and his insights into the manipulation of the stock markets; Bonner, who probably has no legal liability, as he’s not an officer of the company, and is too wealthy, too cautious, too smart, and too well-connected to get into trouble anyway; and Stansberry, who is already damaged goods and unlikely to get hurt any worse by innuendo.

But leaving aside intriguing theories about the cyber-underworld in which Ryals and his rants reside, I’m still not sure what the Rothschild connections to Agora really amount to.  The best I can say is I’m much more willing to believe some people there profit from them.

Why did it take me so long to get to that point?

Because it’s only recently (over the last year) that I’ve had the time to dig around and find any kind of credible accounting of how the Rothschild family might be the financial juggernaut they are said to be on conspiracy sites.

[I got there by adding material posted at Project Humanbeingsfirst  to my own research into BCCI (via Engdahl, Skolnik, DeepBlackLies, Yamaguchi.com, Forbes.com, LBMA website and other material.]

Now that I’ve come to think the whole “Rothschild” conspiracy  is something more than fiction, I’ve also begun to look at Ron Paul with a more critical eye.

So that’s where I come from on that.

Now, for my own credibility on the subject, given that I too have a connection to Agora.

This is what I have to say.

Except for the attacks following my pieces on Assange (by an attention-seeking Assange groupie, Tom Usher at RealLiberalChristian) and a legal threat at DailyBell by another fanboy and blatant troll, calling himself Al Kyder, and a couple of other things), one hundred percent of  the negative posts about me on the net stem from this one supposedly crazy person, who seems to have an indirect connection to Agora.

And all the rest of the monitoring/hacking I’ve experienced stem from my fall-out with Agora too.

What was the monitoring/hacking about? Simple.

In 2008, I gave whatever information I had  about certain sensitive issues to responsible journalists and investigators.

There you have it. That’s why their campaign against me didn’t end with the resolution of my IP issues with the company.  In fact,  it’s the reason why the IP issue keeps festering.

Who likes to be joined at the hip to someone who’s outed them? Who likes to know that someone knows what they are capable of?

That is why they are so bent on isolating me, stirring up third parties against me, and minimizing my influence in every way possible.

Since then, I’ve been warned by good people to “leave it alone” or possibly become even more of a target.  And that’s what I’ve tried to do, but it’s not because I’m interested in covering up anything for anyone.

It’s because I see no reason to second-guess the integrity, good faith, and sound judgment of what I’ve been told but take it as solid advice from people who know better than me. And  it’s because I believe more evil than good will come from ignoring that advice.

Especially as there’s another layer of complexity to this story.

Agora Inc. was also the last business association of former CIA director, William Colby, who  seemingly committed suicide some twenty years ago.

I say seemingly, because the suicide theory has been peddled only recently, and only by one of Colby’s sons. No one else believes it and there’s not much evidence for it.

Thus far, the official story has been  that it was an accident.

That sounds just as unlikely to me, as I blogged earlier.

Note: Ryals not only filched the Davidson-Chomsky-Rothbard connection from my blog (posted on July 20), as well as the information about Rees-Mogg’s and Colby’s Le Cercle and Pilgrim connections (which I got by discovering and researching the ISGP.EU site in detail),** he failed to link the post and then tried to pretend that I was covering up something about the Colby killing, when I’d  blogged about it as a murder, long ago, in 2010, and before that, in 2009. In fact, I’d been researching Mockingbird, MKUltra, mind-control, and sex-trauma as early as 2004, for my first book, where I have a couple of chapters on the material.

In 2005 I wrote a piece about former CIA director Stansfield Turner and Operation Gladio. It was around then that I also first heard about about Colby.

The fact that I ended up in the company where Colby once worked is one of those strange coincidences that “intention” pulls out of the universe.

And, far from covering up any of this, I’ve blogged repeatedly about it.

For instance, here’s my comment on an interview of Rees-Mogg there:

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 06/05/10 11:59 AM

Sorry. Colby was Cercle and apparently also Opus Dei …

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 06/05/10 11:55 AM

Rees-Mogg is reportedly a member of Le Cercle and the Pilgrim’s Society, as well as the exclusive Roxburghe club – supposedly a very influential part of the Anglo-American establishment. He was backed by speculator and corporate raider, James Goldsmith, relative and close associate of the Rothschilds.

Allegations are made on the left that Rees-Mogg is closely associated with Richard Mellon Scaife. Rees-Mogg is also closely tied to James Davidson, Bill Bonner, and Agora, through the Strategic Investment newsletter and other publications.

Through SI, he’s also linked to William Colby, ex CIA chief, also a Pilgrim Society member, if I’m not mistaken.

By link, I just mean there exists a relationship. It’s by no means clear how that actually plays out, if at all.

Colby was murdered (?) early 1990s. My best guess is it was related to the opening of CIA files with the Church Committee (much earlier)….and inter departmental fighting that resulted; there’s also a connection to a White House- related paedophilia scandal in Nebraska that got hushed up in a hurry. Some have linked that scandal to CIA mind-control operations but I haven’t seen anything conclusive about it. “

It always seemed plausible to me that Colby’s death was a political assassination, given his involvement in Operation Phoenix and Project Mockingbird, his testimony at the Church Committee hearings, his interest in the Nebraska pedophile ring, and his work for the intelligence-affiliated Nugan Hand bank (which had ties to BCCI).

I learned about Le Cercle and the Pilgrim’s Circle from ISGP.eu, and passed that onto the Bell, as well.

I posted the link to ISGP.eu at the Bell below a July 8, 2010 article

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 07/09/10 12:28 PM

Sorry. Two careless mistakes.

@John Treichler (not Treicher, as posted before).

The site is the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics (ISGP.eu not ISGPU, as I wrote in a hurry). Written from a very left-wing perspective. Meticulously compiled.

[Note: ISGP eu was up when I posted the link, but googling for it today, I find that the domain is for sale and I find a post at Cryptogon, dating back to January of the same year (2010), saying that the site had disappeared, but that the writer at Cryptogon had saved the information from the google cache in the form of a zip file. However the link he had posted didn’t open to the ISGP.eu file at all. He claimed he had given it to Wikileaks for safe-keeping. I later found it at wikispooks.]

So, that’s my explanation of why the Bell’s dismissal of the Lehrman link isn’t quite enough; why there are other reasons to worry about Paul, such as his connections to Agora; why I was slow to start looking at Paul critically; what Agora’s ties to the Rothschilds might be; and what my connection to the whole business amounts to.

There’s one other thing. The Bell is also a part of the same Agora network to which Paul seems to have ties.

You won’t hear that from them, though.  It’s one of those little omissions that are troubling,  like the repositioning and revisionism that goes on on the site, at times.

For instance, in the same piece on the Lehrman tie, Wile writes that he knew Assange was disinformation right away.

Not so. He got that from me (see these comments below a piece at Infowars.com

as well as these comments below another piece there.

I was perhaps the only rightist anti-neocon to criticize Assange.

Other debunkers were Wayne Madsen (the first on the case) and Bill Engdahl, both on the left.

Neither of those two, by the way, assembled nearly as comprehensive a critique of Wikileaks as I did.

And I know that research had an impact, because  the Guardian ran a piece derived from it shortly after (picking up on the John Shipton lead) and an Australian academic wrote a paper repositioning the cypherpunk association (deconstructed in my pieces) into a narrative more favorable to their man.

Wile relied on that research, as well as material on Gordon Duff’s site, in changing his opinion. Then he exaggerated and ended up with a kind of parody of my criticism of Assange.

This he tends to do, which allows an opening to people like Fed regulator, William Black, whom Wile once made the mistake of criticizing. Black reacted with a petty and surprisingly  personal attack, but, when you distort people’s positions, you have to expect vehement reactions.

Wile’s subtle perception management has even caught the attention of many contributors to the Bell, including pro-Paulian goldbugs like Bionic Mosquito and Leonardo Pisano, as well as paper-money anti-Paulians like FauxCapitalist and Memehunter.

Why does he do it? Most likely as a way for the site to stay viable on the net, while conspiracy mongering, or perhaps, as a way to manage the reactions of readers and associates. Nothing wrong with that, but, still, it’s unsettling and tends to make people suspicious.

It’s why I stopped posting on their forum, despite my gratitude to them. for providing a useful and unusual venue for discussions.

I also do respect Wile’s courage in tackling material people usually avoid for fear of losing their credibility.

So the Bell does get a lot of props from me for bravery and unique content, yes, but I also see them as compromised by their financial ties. The same goes for some other libertarian sites I still read.

Other pluses: Wile is almost always polite and he is not as Eurocentric in his thinking as some others.

I should add that I’m not one of those who think he’s running a limited hang-out himself.  Or, at least, he is doing it less than most.

Some final thoughts:

First, about Colby and Agora.

Colby had so many enemies that it would be hard to narrow down who murdered him, if he was murdered, without a lot more evidence being uncovered. But no one in officialdom or intelligence is likely to want to do that. And only a fool or a martyr would venture into that territory alone.

About the Agora connection (and, through them, to Paul):

Colby’s name appeared on Agora’s long-running Strategic Investments newsletter, with which the Rothschild-related Rees Mogg is/was affiliated, along with long-time anti-tax advocate, electronic counterfeiting (anti-Naked Short Selling) critic, and Forbes/Scaife protege, James Dale Davidson.

Davidson, Rothbard, and Chomsky all worked together in the 1970s, in antiwar activism, which by itself means little or nothing. Many ideological foes make common cause on single issues.

But, it was not “by itself,” as the evidence shows.

At least one of Paul’s writers (the guy who wrote the race realist pamphlets) is directly tied to Agora.

Paul himself has been incessantly promoted by Agora, until very recently, when affiliates and associates began promoting a few anti-Paul libertarians, like Wendy McElroy, N. Stephen Kinsella, and even Stephan Molyneux, who appeared briefly on the Doug Casey website, and then was pushed out.

It was also from Agora Inc. that I first heard of Ron Paul.

Casey, like Jeff Berwick and what looks like a majority of the hard-money community, is himself closely tied to the Agora network by business affiliation.

So also, as I said earlier,  the Daily Bell, with its multiple banking and gold community associations.

These ties may or may not mean anything nefarious, but they would certainly limit what the Bell, or any other libertarian writer in this circle, would be willing or able to say publicly.

Which means I really can’t trust someone in that circle to be too forthcoming about Paul, since they all share business networks.

That is simply common-sense.

Even I have had a hard time writing about Agora’s network, even though all I did was write and do some research there, and the only person I really worked with was Bill Bonner.

To put it as simply as possible for all the trolls who still can’t read my actual words, let alone between my words:

It is difficult to write critically about people with whom you have had personal and professional relationships; who have accessed your personal and business records (illegally).

It is even more difficult when their employees work and live close to where you work and live and they are native-born, while you are an immigrant.

It becomes impossible when the political and economic context is a multi-front global military and economic war, in which your motherland is also involved, and not always as an ally; when the legal and media environment of your adopted country is totalitarian; when your family lives abroad and you are self-employed and modestly well-off, while they have tens of millions of dollars behind them, are connected to intelligence and financial elites, have thousands, if not millions, of subscribers and friends to whom they can outsource their efforts, and when they are marketing, financial, and political players on a global scale.

If that is true of me, how much more is it true of the hard-money community, which is completely encompassed by the Agora network?

I don’t expect any of them to pipe up with anything but support for Ron Paul. They will alienate their business associates, otherwise.

I hope that explains why I don’t think the Bell’s dismissal of the Lehrman tie is sufficient by itself.

I say this as someone who took a long time to open their eyes about Paul.

Which person likes to think they’ve been had? Or, that establishment critics mightn’t be entirely off-base in their criticism of Paul?

As far back as 2008, I heard some mutterings from loyal fans of Paul but said nothing, hoping it was all minor or a mistake.

I even took the part of the LRC crowd against the WSJ in a lengthy blog post.

[As far as that WSJ incident goes, I still stand by the piece ]

In 2010 I spoke up about my dissatisfaction with Paul’s positions at the Daily Bell forum.

I didn’t want to, because I knew Paul supporters would get annoyed by it, but credibility is very important to anyone writing about politics. It should be more important than pleasing the team.

Then, a few people who’ve wanted to discredit me for supporting libertarian positions(albeit nuanced and rather more conservative ones than that of the anarcho-caps), or for criticizing Assange (albeit in a most circumspect and balanced way than his other detractors), or for deconstructing Ron Paul and his libertarian promoters (albeit factually and with respect), have tried to claim that I’m covering up for this or that person.

The truth is exactly the opposite. I’ve been libeled, monitored, and undermined covertly, almost continuously since 2007.  I’ve also been plagiarized repeatedly and marginalized.

I don’t really believe the government was behind any of that, except maybe at a very low level, in so far as some petty operatives might have been employed by my enemies to do the dirty work.

So, there is no cover up on my part. Or paranoia.  What I say is not a lie. It’s not propaganda. It’s not a smear or anything but the most truth it is possible, helpful, and advisable for anyone in my position to speak.

For the umpteenth time, I’m not RAW, nor CIA, nor Jihadi, nor Hindu fascist. I’m just a writer, with a lot of interests, an eclectic background, and too much curiosity and impetuosity for her own good.

It was a meaningful synchronicity that I got involved in the whole business. I don’t say that to promote myself,  create a mystery, or confuse the situation. I say it because that is really how it happened.

There are mysteries of “intention,” “attraction,” and the cycles of time.  And they have nothing to do with “dissembling”, “disinformation,” or “RAW”.

The innuendos by Jennifer Lake, Tony Ryals, and Tom Usher are simply smears, even if they are understandable smears.

There really are more things in earth and heaven, Horatio…

[Added: August 5, 2017, I deleted the link on this page to http://occultview.com/category/astrology because my security software sent me a malware alert for it. You can google the site directly.]

Ron Paul and Herman Cain Only Non-Deadbeats

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LRC blog comments on a Politico piece about presidential dead-beats (“Presidential also-rans stiff small businesses, ” David Leventhall and Robin Bravender, Politico, July 29, 2011):


Bachmann, other candidates stiff small businesses
Posted by Lew Rockwell on July 29, 2012 09:05 AM

Politico goes down the list of shame, but for some reason neglects to mention the one non-deadbeat, Ron Paul.

Comment:

Ron Paul wasn’t mentioned, true. But why did Lew Rockwell emphasize Bachmann? The Politico piece emphasized her too and buried the Democrat names at the back.

It also buried Herman Cain’s notable difference from the crowd. He paid his vendors personally and ended up being owed by his own campaign, as well as Gingrich’s.

Even Bachmann was actually less in debt to vendors than the other candidates (under a million compared to multiple millions for the others, all of whom are richer than she was).

So why would a former paleo-libertarian pick on Bachmann?

Pandering to the left?

Murray Rothbard: Hooray For Che!

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File under ideological insanity – Rothbard gives props to the people’s poseur, Che Guevara, whom even the anarchist left today has rejected:

“What made Che such an heroic figure for our time is that he, more than any man of our epoch or even of our century, was the living embodiment of the principle of Revolution. More than any man since the lovable but entirely ineffectual nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, Che earned the title of “professional revolutionary.” And furthermore, to paraphrase Christopher Jencks in a recent perceptive, if wrongheaded, article in the New Republic, we all knew that his enemy was our enemy–that great Colossus that oppresses and threatens all the peoples of the world, U. S. imperialism.

Trained as a physician in Argentina, witnessing CIA-fomented counter-revolution by the thug Castillo Armas in Guatemala, Guevara dedicated the rest of his life to the Revolution. He found a promising field first in Cuba, where, as everyone knows, Che was second only to Fidel Castro in waging and then winning the revolution there.”

and this:

But in his mighty heart Che could not refrain from leaping a whole raft of stages, from plunging romantically but recklessly into the premature adventure of armed struggle in Latin America. And so, with tragic irony, Che Guevara, in his daring and courage, was betrayed by the very Bolivian peasantry whom he was trying to liberate, and who barely understood the meaning
of the conflict. Che died from violating his own principles of revolutionary war.

And this, enthusiastically quoting from Fidel Castro’s praise of Che:

“Newspapers of all tendencies have univermlly recognized Che’s virtues… . He is an almost unique example of how a man could win the recognition and respect of his enemies, of the very enemies he faced with his arms in his hands, of those who have been ideological enemies and have nevertheless expressed feelings of admiration and of respect toward Che.”

Murray Rothbard, “Ernesto Che Geuvara: RIP,” Mises.org http://mises.org/journals/lar/pdfs/3_3/3_3_1.pdf

See also this article from a strict anarcho-capitalist position about Rothbard’s misrepresentation of his views to placate or mislead followers: The 10 Points Of The Libertarian Party Abolitionist Caucus.pdf.

Note – My main objection to an-cap positions is that they are easily manipulated by the state (national and transnational) for its own ends. An an-cap world is possible, but only spottily.

Now, in contrast to Rothbard’s glowing portrait, here is a more candid assessment of Che’s actual record from the anarchistlibrary.org (Che Guevara: why anarchists should view him critically):

Organise, Issue 47, Winter 1997/1998
flag.blackened.net

QUOTE: “After all, the Che cult is still used to obscure the real nature of Castro’s Cuba, one of the final bastions of Stalinism.”

QUOTE: “He demanded the death penalty for “informers, insubordinates, malingerers and deserters.” He himself personally carried out executions. Indeed the first execution carried out against an informer by the Castroists was undertaken by Che. He wrote: “I ended the problem giving him a shot with a.32 pistol in the right side of the brain.” On another occasion he planned on shooting a group of guerrillas who had gone on hunger strike because of bad food. Fidel intervened to stop him. Another guerrilla who dared to question Che was ordered into battle without a weapon!”

QUOTE: “With the Castroite victory in 1959, Che, along with his Stalinist buddy Raul Castro, was put in charge of building up state control. He purged the army, carried out re-education classes within it, and was supreme prosecutor in the executions of Batista supporters, 550 being shot in the first few months. He was seen as extremely ruthless by those who saw him at work. These killings against supporters of the old regime, some of whom had been implicated in torture and murder, was extended in 1960 to those in the working class movement who criticised the Castro regime. The anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists had their press closed down and many militants were thrown in prison. Che was directly implicated in this.”

QUOTE: “Photo opportunities with the peasantry and proletariat, good looks and a dramatic death in no way exonerate him from his historical role in the suppression of the popular classes, state terror and capitalism, and changing Cuba from the semi-colony of one great power the US, to another, the USSR.”

QUOTE: “I’d like to confess, papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing” “Hate will be an element of the battle, a merciless hate for the enemy, that will inspire the guerrilla-soldier to superhuman efforts of strength and changes him into an effective, violent, selected, in cold blood killing machine”

The Truth About Dragan Mihailovich and Serbia’s Chetniks

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Statement by Richard L. Felman, USAF, in front of the Serb National Federation, on July 7, 1987 and entered into the Congressional Record on Draga Mihailovic and the Serb Chetniks on November 19, 1987

President Stone, Reverend Clergy, Distinguished quests, members of the SNF, and fellow Chetniks:

Moja braco i sestre, (“my brothers and sisters” in Serbian language)

May I first express my deep appreciation to President Stone and all members of the Serb National Federation for inviting me to your 3 Day Serbian Day Weekend. I know it is a most important event and I am delighted you have asked me to share it with you.

Chetnik leader
General Draža Mihajlovi?

Before getting into my speech I would like to acknowledge how appreciated it is that today (July 17th) is the very day in 1946 that General Mihailovich lost his life to a Communist Firing Squad. I say it is appropriate because were it not for Draza Mihailovich and the Grace of God, I would not be shading here before you today. I have said it before and will say it again: I owe my very life to General Mihailovich, the Chetniks and the Serbian people and because of this whenever I get together with the Serbian people it is like a family reunion and fill me with much emotion. If I may state it as simply as possible: “OO MOM SERTZU YA SAM SERBEEN.” (This is the pronunciation script of “U mom srcu ja sam Srbin” – in Serbian or “In my heart I am a Serb” – in English.)

My feelings, however, go far deeper then just gratitude for saving my life. I say that because when I was shot down in Yugoslavia, I had the opportunity to know first hand what truly remarkable people the Serbians are … and the bond of brotherhood that we formed during the war continues to this day. In every Serb I met I always found a sense of honor and sense of freedom that is second to none … and in this day and age I feel privileged to know people who still maintain these values and have such a strong commitment to their God, their family and their heritage.

I was in England a while ago to celebrate the European Chetnik Congress and Karageorgevich Day. Needless to say the Serbian Hospitality and food were out of this world. But the outstanding part of my visit was meeting with the Serbian Youth and seeing how intense they were about carrying on their priceless heritage… Their parents told them about the American Airmen that Mihailovich had rescued but I was the first one they met and their questions were endless. I spent a great deal of time with them and came away inspired by their enthusiasm.

I am reminded of them as I see the young people in the audience today. If I may I would like to say to them: “Thank God you were blessed with such a proud heritage. I saw with my own eyes the blood shed by your parents and grandparents just so it could be passed on to you .. Be proud of this priceless treasure you have and preserve it the rest of your days… So many of today’s youth are troubled and searching for answers in many strange ways. You have all the answers you need right here in your own church and your own heritage.”

So much for the Sunday Sermon, and now I would like to tell you of my first introduction to the Serbian people an how I won my Ravna Gora Badge as an honorary Chetnik. The one good thing the Germans did during WWII was shoot me down, giving me a chance to meet the Serbian people. During World War II, I was returning from an air raid on the Ploesti oil fields in Roumania when my B-24 Bomber was attacked by German ME-109s over Yugoslavia. We managed to shoot down two of them before my pane caught fire and we were forced to bail out from 20,000 feet.

As soon as I landed I was immediately surrounded by about 20 Chetniks all shouting “Amerikanski”… Before I knew it they each took turns hugging and kissing me (only the men mind you, not the women). As my leg was bleeding, they carried me to a nearby kucha (house in Serbian) for treatment. They had no medical supplies, but they did have a bottle of slivovitza [Serbian plum brandy] and used it to clean my wound… Once that was done, we all sat around and drank what was left in the bottle.

Shortly after that, an elderly man about ninety motioned for me to follow him. I had no idea what he wanted but limped after him until we came to a small wooden chapel. He then got down on his knees, clasped his hand in prayer and motioned for me to kneel down beside him. It was a most unforgettable sight! Here we were: strangers from 2 different countries, we spoke two different languages and practiced two different religions. But in those few moments we were united as brothers kneeling to give thanks for my rescue to the one God we all worship: It was one of the most moving experiences of my life.

It would be impossible for me to relate all the many wonderful things the Chetniks and the Serbian people did for me and my fellow American fliers. As our numbers increased, each man would tell of his own personal experiences. They told how the people went hungry in order to give them what little food they had. How many of them slept on the floor so that the Airmen could have the comfort of their beds. How they risked their lives to protect us from the German patrols. Not once did I hear anything but the highest praise from the 500 Americans rescued by General Mihailovich………

….Before getting into the concluding part of my speech, I would like to make brief mention of a matter of a personal nature which is added reason for my admiration of the Serbian people.

Besides being one of the American Airmen rescued, by the Serbian people, I am also a Jew! It is a matter of historical fact that Serbia was one of the very few countries where anti-Semitism was not permitted.

In the old kingdom of Serbia, and later in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Jews were, by law, equal members of the community and enjoyed all the rights and privileges of other citizens. This is so very remarkable when you consider the persecution of the Jewish people throughout history.

The historical goodwill between the Serbs and the Jews does not seem strange when you consider the many parallels in our history. We both suffered cruel persecution, both have been driven from our homeland and today we are both dispersed throughout the world.

One other amazing similarity is that both our peoples fought battles to the death for their belief in the freedom and dignity of man. The Jews at Masada and the Serbs in Kosovo.

In keeping with this same love of freedom, many Serbs risked their lives during World War II to save countless Jews from Nazi death camps. This is something we can never forget and for which I and The Jewish People will always be grateful……

Permit me to read what President Truman had to say in awarding him the highest combat award our nation can bestow on a foreign national:

“LEGION OF MERIT – CHIEF COMMANDER: General Dragoljub Mihailovich distinguished himself in an outstanding manner as Commander-in-Chief of the Yugoslavian Army Forces and later as Minister of War by Organizing and leading important resistance forces against the enemy which occupied Yugoslavia, from December 1941 to December 1944. Through the undaunted efforts of his troops, many United States airmen were rescued and returned safely to friendly control. General Mihailovich and his forces, although lacking adequate supplies, and fighting under extreme hardships, contributed materially to the Allied cause, and were instrumental in obtaining a final Allied victory. March 29, 1948. Harry S. Truman.”

We now know that from this day forward there is a symbol on American soil that established a permanent bond between Gen. Mihailovich, President Truman and 500 grateful Americans… and it is here for all the world to see!

Since the end of WWII we have made great strides in trying to repay our debt of honor to the man who saved our lives. Permit me to read just a partial list of those who have joined us in support of General Mihailovic:
Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan;
The United States Senate;
hundreds of United States Congressmen;
the Secretary of the Air Force, Thomas Reed;
The Department of Interior;
The National Capital Memorial Advisory Committee;
the United States Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Laurence Silberman;
the Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Clement Zablocki;
a United States Commission of Inquiry;
the Arizona State Senate;
the governors of Alaska, Kansas, Kentucky, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and Texas;
the mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley;
Bishops Firmilian, Iriney and Manning;
John Wayne;
The American Legion;
Polish War Veterans;
George Meany and the AFL-CIO;
the Teamsters Union;
The Heritage Foundations;
The Coalition for America;
The New Your Times;
Washington Post and Washington Times,
Toronto Sun, Christian Science Monitor, etc., etc…

And this is only a partial list. Incredible as it may sound, the only ones in the entire world who have not supported and continue to oppose us are the Communist Government of Yugoslavia and our own State Department….

..  What is even more bizarre is that our own State Department chose to take sides against us (its own combat veterans) and side with a Communist government that openly supports and justifies international terrorism.[LR: Tito’s government]

Bob Stone was there in the hearing room and I’m sure he can tell you more about the most incredible alliance of opponents American ever had to face in their own country. Had this been a court of law, the opposition would have been thrown out as completely irrelevant – but this was the political arena where truth takes a back seat to what is politically expedient.

If even the slightest semblance of doubt existed as to what the truth was, it was exploded beyond all recognition when the Encyclopedia Britannica published its revised account of Gen. Mihailovich and the CIA released (under the Freedom of Information Act) the previously unpublished top secret intelligence file on the activities of all parties in Yugoslavia during WWII. Here was the on-the-scene American intelligence reports to the President of the United States exposing all the propaganda lies that have stood in our way since 1944. If ever there was a smoking gun, this was it. And those who still insist on the propaganda fairy tale about Mihailovich’s collaboration, I suggest they join hands with those who believe in the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny and the flat earth theory.

Now that we have the top secret CIA Intelligence File an the same opposition continues to stand in our way, the American Airmen are publicly offering to pay the sum of $100,000 to the United States Government if the State Department or any of Mihailovich’s political opponents can prove in an American court of law the treacherous lies they continue to make against him in opposing our petition before Congress.

What’s more, if they have any respect for the service to the United States of America, the American Veteran represents, I suggests they should speak up now or forever hold their peace. We do not have another 40 years. You can bet your life we are justifiably outraged and fighting mad. Quite frankly, even if our offer were for ten times that amount, we have no fear it will ever be accepted. Under the close scrutiny of an American Court, the facts contained in the CIA file would prove to be an embarrassment and even humiliation to all those parties who continue to oppose us…..”

Richard L. Felman is president of the National Committee of American Airmen Rescued by General Mihailovich).

Reagan Revisionism From The Left

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The Daily Bell has a good piece by Paul Craig Roberts about the continual historical revisionism that blames everything on Reagan.

Salient points excerpted:

1. Reagan most certainly is not to blame for the financial crisis or for the neoconservative wars for American hegemony.

The Reagan administration’s interventions in Grenada and Nicaragua were not, as is sometimes claimed, precursors to Clinton’s war on Serbia and the Bush and Obama wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, with more waiting in the wings. Reagan saw his interventions in the context of the Monroe Doctrine, not as an opening bid for world hegemony.

The purpose of Reagan’s interventions was to convince the Soviets that there would be no more territorial gains for communism. The interventions were part of Reagan’s strategy of bringing the Soviets to the table to negotiate the end of the cold war.

2. When Reagan understood what the Israelis had lured him into in Lebanon, he pulled out. Reagan opposed war as an instrument of American hegemony. It is the neoconservatives who use war to achieve hegemony. Reagan was not a neoconservative.

3. The first business of the new Reagan administration was to complete the Carter administration’s plan to save autoworker jobs by imposing quotas on imports of Japanese cars. Reagan did this even though it demoralized his conservative free trade supporters. Reagan got no thanks from the left who denounced him instead for bailing out his Republican buddies in the auto business.

4. I still hear from readers hostile to Reagan that Reagan’s firing of the illegally striking air traffic controllers is proof that he was a “union buster.” One sometimes feels sorry for people who have so little grasp of politics. For a new president to let himself be rolled up by a poorly-advised, illegally-striking public sector union would have rendered Reagan impotent and without the power to achieve his ambitious agenda of changing the economic and foreign policies of the US. Even Reagan’s court historians do not realize Reagan’s extraordinary achievements in economic and foreign policy.

5. It wasn’t Reagan’s agenda that was anti-left; it was the rhetoric Reagan used in order to keep the conservative base in line. Conservatives did not understand supply-side economics any better than did the economics profession and Wall Street. Conservatives wanted a balanced budget, which is their solution to every economic problem. Reagan was talking about a 30% reduction in marginal tax rates (the rate of tax applied to increases in income) and about faster depreciation schedules for capital investments.

What this meant to conservatives was more budget deficits. Wall Street never lobbied me to repeal Glass-Steagall, but Wall Street did lobby me to water down the Reagan tax rate reductions.

[LR: exactly. The financial world is left-oriented because they benefit most from finagling money/banking and not from tax reductions aimed at the manufacturing and non-financial business sector]

5. On the cold war front, conservatives were very suspicious of negotiating with the Soviets. Some conservatives put out the story that Gorbachev was the anti-christ, that he would take Reagan to the cleaners and we would all end up living under the red flag of communism.

[LR: Well, they got that half right]

6. Reagan did not cut back government or abolish the welfare state.

7.  If all the uninformed people who ranted about “Reagan deficits” and “tax cuts for the rich” had bothered to educate themselves about the policy that they so desperately wanted to demonize, a wider understanding of the Reagan era might have created an audience among Washington policymakers for writings by myself and others who stressed, to no effect, the adverse impact of jobs offshoring on the economy. Instead, this cancer, masquerading as the benefits of free trade, has gone untreated for 20 years.

8. The Presidents Working Group on Financial Markets, created in the last year of the Reagan administration, was labeled the “plunge protection team” by the Washington Post. The Working Group consists of the Treasury Secretary, Federal Reserve Chairman, and the financial regulators….. If speculators were indeed gaming the market at the expense of pension funds, IRAs, and long term investors, the government might have felt obliged to come up with new regulations or to use moral suasion or even direct intervention in order to protect legitimate investors from the greed of speculators. If speculators short the market and the Federal Reserve buys long, the shorts don’t pan out for the speculators.

How the Working Group has evolved since 1988 I do not know.

However, it is absurd to blame Reagan for the Federal Reserve’s different use or misuse of the Working Group twenty-four years later, if that is indeed what is occurring.