Exposing Lies About the FED, the CIA, the Murder of JFK

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

New allegations about CIA involvment in the murder of JFK put a glaring spotlight on the current bankster crisis. Those who pull off crimes are, naturally, most motivated to lie about them! The CIA, therefore, looks very guilty of two murders that ripped America apart: the murders of JFK and RFK.

As news broke this week that CIA lies about the JFK murder had been exposed, I recalled that among the motives for JFK's murder was his threat to abolish the FED, the very source of the government's 'funny money' and most certainly, the root cause of the current banking collapse. JFK had threatened to strip the power of the FED, smash the CIA into 'a thousand pieces' and abolish the oil industry's sacred cow: the Oil Depletion Allowance. No President since has dared piss off so many powerful and ruthless people.

JFK tried to strip the Federal Reserve Bank of its power to loan money to the government at interest

The move would have bypassed the Fed by restoring to the government the power and authority to issue currency. Executive Order 11110 gave the US government the ability to create its own money --backed by silver! It just might have put the FED out of business.

Some background and basic economics: to pay it's bills, the US government borrows money from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The Federal Reserve Notes are not backed up by anything. 'Silver certificates' issued under the authority of JFKs order would have been backed up by government owned silver. The government would no longer borrow from the FED to pay its obligations. It would have done so with 'silver certificates' issued by the government itself.
Like any commodity, Federal Reserve notes are subject to the laws of supply and demand. The demand for Federal Reserve notes might have collapsed altogether and the FED itself might have been forced out of business.

Executive Order 11110 could have prevented the national debt from reaching its current level. It would have would have made it possible for the government to repay its debt without having to borrow worthless 'notes' from the Fed and having to repay them later at interest.
Executive Order 11110 was never repealed. One wonders why no other President ever bothered to utilize it. Could it have had anything to do with the fact that JFKs order made him very, very unpopular throughout the banking establishment? JFK was brutally murdered in Dallas just five months after issuing the order. No more silver certificates were issued. The FED's gravy train was still intact.

FED owners do not have ready access to $trillions$ needed to float the U.S. debt and deficit. They don't need it! The FED 'creates' money with a bookkeeping entry, writing out a check to the US government in exchange for US bonds. Cashing the check is easy; the US Government banks at the Federal Reserve.

It's a scam in which no "real" money, no hard currency is exchanged. Government agents are never seen walking out of the FED offices --under armed guard --carrying bullion, coins, or, indeed, anything of real value. The Fed makes an 'entry' in the books! The government makes an entry in its books!

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
--Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson, I believe, had foreseen what has happened in fact. That is the context in which the latest news should be considered.

The October 17 Times story was another such example. It revealed, perhaps for the first time in any major US newspaper, that the CIA has been deceiving the public about its own relationship to the JFK assassination.

On the Kennedy assassination, the deceptions began in 1964 with the Warren Commission. The CIA hid its schemes to kill Fidel Castro and its ties to the anti-Castro Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil, or Cuban Student Directorate, which received $50,000 a month in CIA support during 1963. In August 1963, Oswald visited a New Orleans shop owned by a directorate official, feigning sympathy with the group’s goal of ousting Mr. Castro. A few days later, directorate members found Oswald handing out pro-Castro pamphlets and got into a brawl with him. Later that month, he debated the anti-Castro Cubans on a local radio station.

That the October 17 story was published at all is astonishing. According to Lexis Nexis, there have only been two earlier references to the CIA Joannides documents controversy in any major US newspaper: a brief squib in the New York Daily News in 2003 announcing the launching of the case, and a letter to the New York Times in 2007 (of which the lead author was Jeff Morley) complaining about the Times’ rave review of a book claiming that Oswald was a lone assassin.

--The JFK Assassination: New York Times Acknowledges CIA Deceptions

Just last year, the BBC reported that it was the CIA that was behind the murder of RFK, JFK's younger brother.

The new video and photographic evidence -- the result of a three year long investigation --"puts three senior CIA operatives" at the scene of the murder.

Three of these men have been positively identified as senior officers who worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA's Miami base for its Secret War on Castro.

David Morales was Chief of Operations and once told friends: "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard."

Gordon Campbell was Chief of Maritime Operations and George Joannides was Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations. Joannides was called out of retirement in 1978 to act as the CIA liaison to the Congressional investigation into the JFK assassination. Now, we see him at the Ambassador Hotel the night a second Kennedy is assassinated.

[See also: CIA Involvement in the assassination Of Robert Kennedy]
--CIA role in Kennedy killing

--Evidence That the CIA Murdered RFK

As with the 1963 murder of JFK in Dallas, lingering questions dog the official theories. Powder burns indicated that three shots had been fired from very close range from 0 to 1-1/2 inches though no witness could place Sirhan closer than three feet. Sirhan's gun held only eight bullets but a total of ten were recovered. Three were found in Kennedy. Two were lodged in a pantry door frame. One was found in an airspace. Presumably four more were found elsewhere. Significantly, four bullets 'touched' Kennedy to include the three that were recovered --lodged --in his back. At no time was Sirhan ever behind RFK.

Inexcusably, the door frames were burned, the Los Angeles Police Dept. claimed no bullets were found lodged in the "bullet holes", and two expended bullets (inexplicably dug out of wood) were soon found in the front seat of Sirhan's car. The LAPD then destroyed their records of the tests that had been done on the "bullet holes" in the doorframe. 

--Facts about the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination

Like the fatal flaws in the official conspiracy theory of 911, the holes in the government's JFK story are fatal.

• No competent or sane sniper/hit man would choose to shoot anyone from the TSBD. The 'view to a kill' was obscured by branches and leaves as photos taken that day prove! It was and remains the worst of several possible locations!
• Zapruder frame 313 proves conclusively that the fatal shot came from the front, the so-called Grassy Knoll
• No sniper in his right mind would choose a kill spot providing no possibility of egress or escape! Oswald would have had to have ditched his rifle and run down some six flights! No 'hit man' would have tried it! It's stupid! The place would have been 'sealed'!
• I have visited Dealy Plaza! The picket fence afforded cover, egress and a clear unobstructed shot of the 'target' from a distance about one third that of a site in TSBD.
• From TSBD, the motorcade is moving laterally and then away; from the picket fence, the target's lateral motion relative to the 'shooter' is minimal. A non-expert could have made the shot but, in fact, it was an expert who did!

I interviewed a witness to the JFK murder many years after the fact. Rosemary Willis was but a child on that fateful day and her story has been ignored by the mainstream media. When we met, she produced several boxes of color slides that had been taken by her father that fateful day in Dealy Plaza.

Referred to in the literature of the assassination as the "little girl in the red dress", she is seen in the Zapruder film running along the south side of Elm Street. Her father, Phillip Willis, taking 35mm color slides, can also be seen in the Zapruder film, looking forward at his daughter, perhaps calling to her. She stops suddenly just as the Presidential limousine is partially blocked by a sign between the motorcade and Abraham Zapruder's camera.

The FBI seized the Willis photos but returned them years later. I looked at them on a light table with a loupe. I immediately recognized Dealy Plaza, the limousine, the motorcade, the Texas School Book Depository, the Pergola, the Grassy Knoll, the Triple Underpass, place names now burned into the consciousness of a scarred nation.

One Phillip Willis took a series of 12 photos of Dealy Plaza, where Kennedy was shot, in the minutes before and after the assassination. Mr. Willis' photos and testimony before the Commission appear in the report.
He was not questioned about the eighth photo, a shot of the Book Depository entrance shortly after the shooting. As Willis later pointed out, one of the men in the photo "looks so much like (Jack Ruby), it's pitiful". FBI agents questioning Willis agreed with him that the man bore a powerful resemblance to Ruby. When Willis mentioned this to the Commission, no interest was shown. When the photo was published in the Warren Report, a considerable part of the face of the Ruby look-alike had been cropped away.

--JFK Conspiracy Theories

At last, Rosemary (if I may be so familiar) pointed out some especially interesting slides. One of them was a shot of the Pergola, above the grassy knoll, taken from her father's position on the south side of Elm Street. Through the columns, all was clear. Then Rosemary produced an old copy of Look Magazine and turned to a double page spread. Reproduced over facing pages was her father's photograph of the limousine with the Pergola behind it.

"Do you notice anything unusual?" she asked.

I had noticed something, something which I now believe was the result of FBI complicity in the cover-up of a murder! In the magazine spread, a train locomotive could plainly be seen between the columns. Indeed, there are railroad tracks in that area to this day as Google earth reveals. Those tracks were there in 1963 as well --as photos of the time reveal. It was in that rail yard that three "tramps" had been arrested prior to the Kennedy assassination. [See: JFK Conspirator Wanted Every Kennedy Dead ]

But why was there a locomotive in the published picture but no locomotive in the "slide"? Rosemary explained that after Look Magazine published her father's pictures, FBI agents took all her father's slides. As I recall, the slides were kept for several years. When they were returned at last, every slide that had depicted the train had been doctored. The train was gone. Only the FBI could have 'removed' the depicted train --but why?

It was clear to me that the answer to that question might very well have solved the JFK murder case! The removal of the train was intended to protect the guilty and it was equally clear that by removing the evidence, the FBI was overtly obstructing justice, protecting the identity/identities of murderers and traitors! The murder of JFK was not just a murder. It was an act of high treason!

Why would the FBI find it necessary to remove a train? What did the FBI find threatening about a train? I've speculated that the train was the egress, the perfect getaway for the assassins who fired the fatal shot from the grassy knoll just as Mark Lane had theorized years ago. That raises the question: why would the FBI protect an assassin's get-away? Unless the FBI was a part of the plot, lately called a coup d'etat, it would not.

However speculative my thoughts, it is fair to say that when you have uncovered the FBI's motive for removing the seemingly innocent picture of a train, you will have gone a long way toward explaining why the Warren Commission insisted upon the theory that the fatal shot came from the rear when any examination of the Zapruder film will reveal otherwise. Those who cover up are guilty! Count on it!

Addendum

Here's more about Rosemary Willis from Wikipedia:

Rosemary Willis (born 1953) was a close witness during the assassination of President Kennedy.

Clearly seen in the Zapruder film at the start of the assassination wearing a white, hooded coat and a red skirt, located to the limousine's left, she runs southwestward and parallel with the limousine. She races for a short while when the limousine was to her direct right.

At Zapruder film frame 190 (hereafter "Z-190"), she is seen slowing, then she stops running. Simultaneous with her slowing/stopping, she slightly turns her head to look upward toward the southwest corner of the Texas School Book Depository.

Immediately after the sitting upright President Kennedy is first hidden at Z-207 by the "Stemmons Freeway" traffic sign in the Zapruder film, Rosemary suddenly, and beginning at Z-214, snaps her head very rapidly 90 to 100 degrees westward --completely away from the depository southwest corner-- within only 0.16 second to then face Abraham Zapruder and the grassy knoll by Z-217.

Precisely 0.60 second after starting her extremely quick westward headsnap towards Mr. Zapruder and the grassy knoll, President Kennedy's head then emerges back into the Zapruder film view at Z-225 still sitting upright with his face and arms already displaying a physical reaction to having already been impacted by a bullet.

Importantly, in 1978 Rosemary was interviewed by investigators from the House Select Committee on Assassinations and stated that she heard at least 4 shots during the assassination. She also stated to the HSCA that while she was still facing the grassy knoll picket fence, she was attracted to view the quick movement of a person who quickly dropped down behind a "wall" out of her view. Rosemary was also documented in the HSCA report that her father, military veteran Phillip Willis, became upset when the Dallas policemen, sheriffs, and detectives --who first quickly ran onto the grassy knoll where he thought the shots came from-- then the authorities ran away from the grassy knoll.

Rosemary's sister, Linda, stated to assassination researcher and author Richard Trask (“Pictures of the Pain” 1994) that after the assassination she and Rosemary also saw someone find a piece of the president's head that had landed in the grass located at least twenty-two feet to the left of the president.

After the assassination Willis, along with her sister, father (Phillip), and mother (Marilyn) were present at the Kodak photographic laboratory getting her father’s assassination related photo slides developed when the Zapruder film was also developed and first shown to approximately nineteen persons.

Rosemary Willis was never called to testify to the Warren Commission.
--Wikipedia, Rosemary Willis

Excellent JFK Documentary

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Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part II, A Climate of Fear is Maintained

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Fascist dictatorships assume and keep power by maintaining or encouraging a climate of fear, an atmosphere of near panic but short of closing down the government entirely, just short of bringing the engines of industry to a grinding halt. Thus, every budding fascist, totalitarian state walks a tight rope stretched between Democracy left behind and the absolute, Hegelian state ahead. On either side of the rope are the consequences that accrue to failed coups d'etat! It is the people's responsibility to ensure that 'state absolutists' like Bush fail and fail utterly! The 'absolute state' which assumes supremacy over people, over the sovereignty of one's person, is an artificial and illogical construct subscribed to by the likes of Bush, the Skull and Bones, and Adolf Hitler.

Never innovative, the Bush administration follows the old Nazi play book. Because Americans were in a state of shock and fear already, it was easy for Bush to maintain the climate of fear essential to effect a dictatorship. In the wake of 911, Bush exploited a climate of fear, appointing Tom Ridge to preside over the administration's new propaganda arm: a Department of Homeland Security, 'homeland' being Herr Bush's unimaginative re-write for 'fatherland'.

"If we simply go to red ... it basically shuts down the country," (Tom Ridge) [meaning that civilian government bodies would be closed down and taken over by an Emergency Administration.]

"What a lot of Americans suspected all along turns out to be true. The color-coded alert system for terrorist attacks was a fraud." (www.North.Jersey.com

The Bush use of 'color codes' was obvious and heavy-handed. The 'alerts' become increasingly counter-productive, as Americans eventually recovered. A history of the use of color codes to maintain an atmosphere of panic can be found at: Fabricating Intelligence for Political Gain.

The Department of Homeland Security was a Frankenstein from its horrific beginnings. Like the famous monster, it was cobbled of bits and pieces, a hodgepodge of unmanageable scope owing in part to its dubious and unspoken mission: maintain the state of fear and panic upon which Bush's incipient dictatorship absolutely depends.

The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), commonly known in the United States as "Homeland Security", is a Cabinet department of the federal government of the United States with the responsibility of protecting the territory of the United States from terrorist attacks and responding to natural disasters.

Whereas the Department of Defense is charged with military actions abroad, the Department of Homeland Security works in the civilian sphere to protect the United States within, at, and outside its borders. Its goal is to prepare for, prevent, and respond to domestic emergencies, particularly terrorism. On March 1, 2003, the DHS absorbed the now defunct United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, and assumed its duties. In doing so, it divided the enforcement and services functions into two separate and new agencies -- US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

With over 200,000 employees, DHS is the third largest cabinet department in the US federal government, after the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs. Homeland security policy is coordinated at the White House by the Homeland Security Council. Other agencies with significant homeland security responsibilities include the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Energy.

--Department of Homeland Security, Wikipedia

From the 'monster' department's own website is found the following mission statement:

A six-point agenda for the Department of Homeland Security was developed and announced in July 2005, by Secretary Chertoff to ensure that the Department's policies, operations, and structures are aligned in the best way to address the potential threats – both present and future – that face our nation. The six-point agenda is structured to guide the department in the near term and result in changes that will:

1. Increase overall preparedness, particularly for catastrophic events
2. Create better transportation security systems to move people and cargo more securely and efficiently
3. Strengthen border security and interior enforcement and reform immigration processes;
4. Enhance information sharing with our partners
5. Improve DHS financial management, human resource development, procurement and information technology
6. Realign the DHS organization to maximize mission performance.

The higher the Threat Condition, the greater the risk of a terrorist attack. Risk includes both the probability of an attack occurring and its potential gravity. Threat Conditions shall be assigned by the Attorney General in consultation with the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security. Except in exigent circumstances, the Attorney General shall seek the views of the appropriate Homeland Security Principals or their subordinates, and other parties as appropriate, on the Threat Condition to be assigned. Threat Conditions may be assigned for the entire Nation, or they may be set for a particular geographic area or industrial sector. Assigned Threat Conditions shall be reviewed at regular intervals to determine whether adjustments are warranted.

--Department of Homeland Security

The system of color codes was always absurd, even assuming 911 had not been an inside job. No hard evidence was ever put forward at any time in support of 'alleged threats'. Nor was a method put into place to measure or monitor the effectiveness of such a system, immeasurable in any case. It was and remains a boondoggle, a complete waste of tax payer money, premised upon an attack --911 --about which it is increasingly apparent that it was an inside job. The DHS, itself, is therefore a taxpayer funded propaganda apparatus with which an illegitimate Bush administration maintains the desired level of fear and terror. Is this how you wish your tax dollars wasted?

DHS is not, itself, a terrorist organization. That designation is better applied to the Bush administration and the CIA, a fascist organization responsible for deaths of some 12 to 20 million people world wide since its creation. [See: CIA Holocaust Claims Twenty Million Victims]

The color codes, in fact, get ahead of the story. The color codes, it was hoped, would train us like Pavlov's dogs to fear and quake at the mere TV image of 'Code Red'. We were expected to associate a color --red --with the lies Bush had hoped we would believe: 1) Saddam had WMD, possibly a nuke 2) Muslim terrorists were planning another attack; 3) that they just hated freedom! Past that point, the lies spun out of control. Condo Rice raised the specter of a mushroom cloud. Saddam, we were led to believe, was conspiring with Bin Laden to wage war on Americans. It was and remains bullshit! Saddam never had WMD and Bin Laden, said by Benazir Bhutto to have been murdered years ago, was, in fact, a Bush family friend and business partner. It is no coincidence that terrorism is always worse under GOP regimes.

How convenient for Bush to be able to summon up the specter of 911 with but one word, one color: red! Bush's job seemed easy. After all, it was believed, Americans are conditioned from birth to give greater weight to right wing theories of all sorts.

It's not only the phantom, external threats Bush summons up to terrorize us. It is the administration, itself, arrogating unto itself unprecedented and unjustified powers to intrude into your private lives, spy on you, and crush your opinions should you disagree with its lies.

Imagine a world of streets lined with video cameras that alert authorities to any suspicious activity. A world where police officers can read the minds of potential criminals and arrest them before they commit any crimes. A world in which a suspect who lies under questioning gets nabbed immediately because his brain has given him away.

---The Government Is Trying to Wrap Its Mind Around Yours, Nita Farahany, Washington Post

One is right to be afraid. The real terrorists have taken over the White House which now threatens not only the world but the American people themselves. A nightmare has come true: psychopaths now control the world's largest nuclear arsenal, the largest military apparatus that the world has ever seen. Be afraid. Be very afraid!

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Evidence That the CIA Murdered RFK

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

A new BBC documentary supports the conclusion that the CIA planned and executed the assassination of Robert Kennedy. The new video and photographic evidence -- the result of a three year long investigation --"puts three senior CIA operatives" at the scene of the murder.

Three of these men have been positively identified as senior officers who worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA's Miami base for its Secret War on Castro.

David Morales was Chief of Operations and once told friends: "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard."

Gordon Campbell was Chief of Maritime Operations and George Joannides was Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations.

Joannides was called out of retirement in 1978 to act as the CIA liaison to the Congressional investigation into the JFK assassination. Now, we see him at the Ambassador Hotel the night a second Kennedy is assassinated.

--CIA role in Kennedy killing

As with the 1963 murder of JFK in Dallas, lingering questions dog the official theories. Powder burns indicated that three shots had been fired from very close range from 0 to 1-1/2 inches though no witness could place Sirhan closer than three feet. Sirhan's gun held only eight bullets but a total of ten were recovered. Three were found in Kennedy. Two were lodged in a pantry door frame. One was found in an airspace. Presumably four more were found elsewhere. Significantly, four bullets 'touched' Kennedy to include the three that were recovered --lodged --in his back. At no time was Sirhan ever behind RFK.

Inexcusably, the door frames were burned, the Los Angeles Police Dept. claimed no bullets were found lodged in the "bullet holes", and two expended bullets (inexplicably dug out of wood) were soon found in the front seat of Sirhan's car. The LAPD then destroyed their records of the tests that had been done on the "bullet holes" in the doorframe.

--Facts about the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination

Found on the Ron Paul forum:

When the hypnotized patsy, Sirhan Sirhan, opened fire on Robert Kennedy from the front, a CIA agent fired the kill shot at close range into the back of Kennedy's head.

The same agent who coordinated the operation and was at the scene, was later brought out of retirement to "handle" the congressional investigation into the assassination.

All 3 members of the assassination team are now dead, but many of those connected to them still hold high offices in government.

The BBC report by Shane O'Sullivane reveals that CIA operatives and four unidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles the night of June 5, 1968, moments before and after the murder. It was broadcast on BBC Newsnight.

The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles.

Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary on an anti-War ticket and was set to challenge Nixon for the White House when he was shot in a kitchen pantry.

A 24-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, was arrested as the lone assassin and notebooks at his house seemed to incriminate him.

However, even under hypnosis, he has never been able to remember the shooting and defence psychiatrists concluded he was in a trance at the time.

Witnesses placed Sirhan's gun several feet in front of Kennedy but the autopsy showed the fatal shot came from one inch behind.

--CIA role in Kennedy killing

It is not surprising that the CIA would be implicated in the murder of RFK. It is tragic that the same scrutiny was not forthcoming sooner --when it might have done some good. It is tragic that the murder of JFK was not likewise scrutinized. It is tragic that the investigation of this murder was left in the hands of an incompetent Los Angeles Police Department about which there is no adjective to describe the utter incompetence given this case. Earlier there was no adjective to describe the criminal neglect given the murder of JFK in Dallas!

The world's number one terrorist organization, the CIA has committed heinous acts of terrorism abroad, murdering critics of US foreign and domestic policies and has done it on behalf of an increasingly tiny, privileged American elite. This tiny elite of some one percent owns more than the combined wealth of 95% of the entire population. [See: the L-Curve] On behalf of this tiny, privileged base, the CIA has placed itself above law and supervision. The CIA's war on the world has claimed an estimated 12 million to 20 million victims, far more than the best estimates attributed to Adolph Hitler's 'Holocaust' of World War II.

The RFK assassination was, like the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other prominent figures, a political murder committed by operatives and agents of the US government (including, but limited to, the CIA and FBI), in conjunction with local police (operating as CIA cutouts), and intelligence-connected organized crime figures and mercenaries.

There is overwhelming evidence that the RFK murder was a CIA operation involving the Los Angeles Police Department.

More proof continues to emerge, including this fresh piece of evidence uncovered by BBC investigator Shane O’Sullivan. Conducting research for his own film on the RFK assassination, O’Sullivan has identified and corroborated the presence and identities of three former CIA operatives at the crime scene:

Michael Ruppert, former Los Angeles Police detective, author, journalist and editor of From The Wilderness, conducted his own investigation of the RFK assassination, tapping into inside contacts deep within the LAPD. His investigation definitively proves that the assassination was a CIA operation, and names some of the perpetrators:

--Commentary, Online Journal

There's more

Forty years after Democratic rising star Robert F. Kennedy was killed at a Los Angeles hotel during his presidential run, new evidence suggests the man serving a life sentence for his murder did not fire the shots that killed the charismatic senator.

Forensic scientists met at a conference in Connecticut this week to discuss their independent findings that cast serious doubt on the Kennedy assassination. Sirhan Sirhan is serving a life sentence in Kennedy's death, but the conference presenters argue he could not have fired the fatal shot that killed Kennedy.

One investigator, Dr. Robert Joling, has studied the Kennedy assassination for nearly four decades. He determined the fatal shot came from behind Kennedy, while Sirhan was four to six feet in front of the senator and never got close enough to shoot him from behind, an NBC affiliate reports.

Analysis by another forensics engineer, Philip Van Praag, of a Canadian journalists tape recording, known as the Pruszynski recording, determined that 13 shots were fired while Kennedy was killed, although Sirhan's gun only held eight bullets, according to the NBC reporter. This suggests that a second shooter was involved in the assassination.

Van Praag's analysis led him to conclude that a second gun that was fired matched a type owned by one of the security guards in Kennedy's entourage.

"When that security guard was asked about owning that gun at first he admitted, 'Yes I owned that kind of gun but I got rid of it two months before the assassination.'" correspondent Amy Parmenter said on MSNBC Wednesday. "It turns out upon further investigation, in fact, he did not get rid of that gun until five months after the shooting. Of course, you can see going with this. ... That security guard, was in fact behind Senator Kennedy when the fatal shot was fired."

--New evidence suggests second shooter killed RFK, David Edwards and Nick Juliano

Given the rash of recent outrages by taser happy thug cops and given the incompetent handling of 911 where there is probable cause to arrest the arch criminals Bush and Cheney, one is hard pressed to find an institution of government that is legitimate or competent! I have proposed abolishing the CIA, indeed, smashing it into "a thousand pieces"! Abolish the CIA before the CIA abolish what little remains of America. Alas, America, you will fall of your own corruption and rot. No nation that condones the slaughter of its brightest and best will long survive! The enemy is not in Iraq, nor anywhere in the world but those of our own creation. The enemy is within. The enemy is among the traitors that make up the CIA.

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Reasons to Believe: Why Americans Have Swallowed an Official Conspiracy Theory More Full of Holes Than Swiss Cheese

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

Bill Maher drank the Kool-aid --to be expected from a jester for whom there are limits to his license to offend the court. The rest of us, it is hoped, can still think for ourselves but haven't!

There are several reasons Americans simply refuse to believe anything other than Bushco's official conspiracy theory of 911.

1. The official lie relieves Americans of all responsibility for the attacks. In other words, we don't have to feel guilty about being a greedy, militaristic empire. We don't have to feel guilty about the fact that the CIA --in our name --routinely commits heinous crimes against innocent people everyday. We don't have to feel guilty about having threatened the world with nuclear annihilation for a period of some fifty years.
2. For similar reasons, Americans find it impossible to believe that their own government could be involved in anything so heinous. The very idea strikes at an individual's self-esteem. Only the irredeemably evil enjoy thinking of themselves in those terms. Normal folk like to think themselves good even when they are not. These folk prefer to believe that the US is always morally beyond reproach though it most certainly is not and perhaps never was. Get reall!
3. Many Americans, perhaps most, are typically incurious. There is not a lot to be said about or for these folk. They are most at ease with themselves when plonked down on the sofa swilling beer, stuffing pretzels and pork rinds, watching the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders or Fox swill ie, Bill O'Really?
4. The 911 Truth Movement is an easy target of demagoguery. Popular Science got away with every version of the classic strawman fallacy because the 911 Truth Movement is, in fact, not centralized or top down. Some alternative theories are, indeed, pure bunkum but no more so than Bush's "official conspiracy theory". The movement, meanwhile, makes an easy target of demogogues, GOP liars, and Fox blow hards like balding Billo.

It doesn't matter that there is absolutely no admissible evidence in support of Bush's ongoing, ever revised lie. The official conspiracy theorists will delude themselves, believing that the official narrative is not a "conspiracy theory" when, in fact, it is the least believable of all conspiracy theories, shot through with demonstrable lies, falsehoods and fallacy.

Bush's official conspiracy fails the litmus test of any good theory. That is, it fails to "explain" a given set of observable facts.

• Bush's official conspiracy theory does not explain how arab hijackers got on board airplanes without showing up on flight manifests. There were, in fact, no arabs on Flight 93. That fact alone shoots down Bush's silly theory.
• Bush's official theory does not explain the collapse of the twin towers of WTC. No version of the official narrative has explained the towers' fall as they were observed to have fallen, stright down into the footprint. The "official" narrative has been changed several times under criticism by the 911 truth movement. The first 'official' version, aired in a PBS documentary, used the term "pancaking". Even Bush defenders have abandoned that cover story, flawed by its own animation which conveniently but falsely omitted the existence of a heavily reinforced core which would have remained standing had the outer floors simply pancaked. Newer versions of the animation now show a core though it is still unaffected by the pancaking around it. The unexplained fact is simply this: the core did not remain standing. Just one of many facts not explained by the official theory. The 'officialists' can't even revise correctly. They cannot have it both ways.
• The official line does not explain a "punch out hole" in the Pentagon's inner ring, a hole considerably smaller than the fuselage of a 757. Only in Alice in Wonderland does something so large disappear into holes so small --a diameter about the height of human being. Perhaps it was a portal and the 757 got sucked into a black hole. Perhaps it popped into a parallel universe. Perhaps it got whisked away by Dr. Who!
• The official conspiracy theory espoused by GWB does not explain nor does the 911 Commission report address the collapse of Building 7 which was not hit by any aircraft. The building's owner --Larry Silverstein --is on record stating unambiguously that Building 7 was "pulled" (controlled demolition) down that day. It is a fact that a controlled demolition of that magnitude requires weeks, perhaps months of engineering and/or architectural studies, careful placement of explosives, a regimen of safeguards. Someone, therefore, had planned to pull down Building 7. It is interesting that the BBC reported Building 7 collapsed when, in fact, it remained standing behind the reporter as she reported live from the scene.

Interesting thing about theories, they are not a Chinese menu from which you choose one from column "A", one from column "B". A theory is a package. If the theory fails to explain any part of a related set of facts it must be discarded. That's how science works. As Johnny Cochran said of a glove, we say of theories: if it does not fit, you must acquit!

Now --superstition and propaganda will never live up to that high standard and neither does Bush's official conspiracy theory. As propaganda, the official conspiracy theory more nearly resembles superstition. People will believe superstition and myths because much claptrap makes one feel good about him/herself.

The administration of Ronald Reagan sold his absurd tax cuts benefiting only a tiny upper class because he promised wealth would trickle back down to them. People believed it. They wanted to believe it. They chose to believe it. It made them feel better about themselves and about the world despite the cold, hard fact that Reagan's economic policy would make only the rich even richer and the poorer even poorer.

That is, in fact, what happened; I have the facts from the US Census Bureau to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. I most certainly do not believe it because it makes me feel better about being me. It doesn't. The truth is often almost too much to bear but it is still the truth and wishful thinking never changed a thing. I believe the cold, hard facts from the CB. The picture painted by those numbers is a demonstrable, statistical truth for which there is no spin, no refutation, no escape into GOP fantasy-land.

Yet --people would simply not believe any thing "bad" about Uncle Ronnie. At the GOP National Convention in Houston (1993) a Republican, interviewed for national broadcast, said: "He (Reagan) made us feel good about ourselves". Masturbation makes one feel good but the effect is temporary. Nevertheless, it has more to recommend it than indulging GOP ideology --the bad effects of which last for a long, long time

Before Michael Shermer succumbed to the many fallacies put forward by Bush theorists, he listed 25 fallacies that lead us to believe weird things:

(1) Theory influences observation. Heisenberg wrote, "What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Our perception of reality is influenced by the theories framing our examination of it.

(2) The observer changes the observed. The act of studying an event can change it, an effect particularly profound in the social sciences, which is why psychologists use blind and double-blind controls.

(3) Equipment constructs results. How we make and understand measurements is highly influenced by the equipment we use.

(4) Anecdotes do not make science. Stories recounted in support of a claim are not scientific without corroborative evidence from other sources or physical proof of some sort

(5) Scientific language does not make a science. Dressing up a belief in jargon, often with no precise or operational definitions, means nothing without evidence, experimental testing, and corroboration.

(6) Bold statements do not make claims true. The more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinarily well-tested must be the evidence.

(7) Heresy does not equal correctness. Being laughed at by the mainstream does not mean one is right. The scientific community cannot be expected to test every fantastic claim that comes along, especially when so many are logically inconsistent. If you want to do science, you have to learn to play the game of science. This involves exchanging data and ideas with colleagues informally, and formally presenting results in conference papers, peer-reviewed journals, books, and the like.

(8.) Burden of proof. It is the person who makes the extraordinary claim who has the burden of proving the validity of the evidence.

(9) Rumors do not equal reality. Repeated tales are not of necessity true.

(10) Unexplained is not inexplicable. Many people think that if they themselves cannot explain something that it must be inexplicable and therefore a true mystery of the paranormal.

(11) Failures are rationalized. In science, the value of negative findings is high, and honest scientists will readily admit their mistakes. Pseudoscientists ignore or rationalize failures.

(12) After-the-fact reasoning. Also known as "post hoc, ergo propter hoc," literally "after this, therefore because of this." At its basest level, this is a form of superstition. As Hume taught us, the fact that two events follow each other in sequence does not mean they are connected causally. Correlation does not mean causation.

(13) Coincidence. In the paranormal world, coincidences are often seen as deeply significant. As the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present.

(14) Representiveness. As Aristotle said, "The sum of the coincidences equals certainty." We forget most of the insignificant coincidences and remember the meaningful ones. We must always remember the larger context in which a seemingly unusual event occurs, and we must always analyze unusual events for their representiveness of their class of phenomena.

(15) Emotive words and false analogies. Emotive words are used to provoke emotion and sometimes to obscure rationality. Likewise, metaphors and analogies can cloud thinking with emotion and steer us onto a side path. Like anecdotes, analogies and metaphors do not constitute proof. They are merely tools of rhetoric.

(16) Ad ignoratum. This is an appeal to ignorance or lack of knowledge, where someone claims that if you cannot disprove a claim it must be true. In science, belief should come from positive evidence, not a lack of evidence for or against a claim.

(17) Ad hominem and tu quoque. Literally "to the man" and "you also," these fallacies redirect the focus from thinking about the idea to thinking about the person holding the idea. The goal of an ad hominem attack is to discredit the claimant in hopes that it will discredit the claim. Similarly for tu quoque. As a defense, the critic is accused of making the same mistakes attributed to the criticized, and nothing is proved one way or the other.

(18.) Hasty generalization. In logic, the hasty generalization is a form of improper induction. In life it is called prejudice. In either case, conclusions are drawn before the facts warrant it.

(19) Overreliance on authorities. We tend to rely heavily on authorities in our culture, especially if the authority is considered to be highly intelligent. Authorities, by virtue of their expertise in a field, may have a better chance of being right in that field, but correctness is certainly not guaranteed, and their expertise does not necessarily qualify them to draw conclusions in other areas.

(20) Either-or. Also known as the fallacy of negation or the false dilemma, this is the tendency to dichotomize the world so that if you discredit one position, the observed is forced to accept the other. A new theory needs evidence in favor of it, not just against the opposition.

(21) Circular reasoning. Also known as fallacy of redundancy, begging the question, or tautology, this occurs when the conclusion or claim is merely a restatement of one of the premises.

(22) Reductio ad absurdum and the slippery slope. Reductio ad absurdum is the refutation of an argument by carrying the argument to its logical end and so reducing it to an absurd conclusion. Surely, if an argument's consequences are absurd, it must be false. This is not necessarily so, though sometimes pushing an argument to its limits is a useful exercise in critical thinking; often this is a way to discover whether a claim has validity, especially when an experiment testing the actual reduction can be run. Similarly, the slippery slope fallacy involves constructing a scenario in which one thing leads ultimately to an end so extreme that the first step should never be taken.

(23) Effort inadequacies and the need for certainty, control, and simplicity. Most of us, most of the time, want certainty, want to control our environment, and want nice, neat, simple explanations. Scientific and critical thinking does not come naturally. it takes training, experience, and effort. We must always work to suppress our need to be absolutely certain and in total control ands our tendency to seek the simple and effortless solution to a problem.

(24) Problem-solving inadequacies. All critical and scientific thinking is, in a fashion, problem solving. There are numerous psychological disruptions that cause inadequacies in problem solving. We must all make the effort to overcome them.

(25) Ideological immunity, or the Planck Problem. In day-to-day life, as in science, we all resist fundamental paradigm change. Social scientist Jay Stuart Snelson calls this resistance an ideological immune system: "educated, intelligent, and successful adults rarely change their most fundamental presuppositions." As individuals accumulate more knowledge, theories become more well-founded, and confidence in ideologies is strengthened. The consequence of this, however, is that we build up an "immunity" against new ideas that do not corroborate previous ones. Historians of science call this the Planck Problem, after physicist Max Planck, who made this observation on what must happen for innovation to occur in science: "An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning."

Bushco most certainly does not rise to those standards at any time about anything. But let's take one principle as an example

Burden of proof. It is the person who makes the extraordinary claim who has the burden of proving the validity of the evidence.

--Michael Shermer

I part company with Shermer with respect to the burden of proof. His summary of it is imprecise. Better is: "Those who assert must prove". However "burden of proof" is defined, Bush was never held to the very lowest standards. Colin Powell lied to the United Nations about non-existent WMD and got away with it! It apparently never occurred to anyone to challenge the official orthodoxy. Why was not the phony evidence challenged, consisting as it did of a student paper and out-of-date satellite photos? Why was he not held to this standard when he asserted --free of challenged --that it was al Qaeda that planned and executed the events of 911.

To this day there is absolutely no evidence in support of Bush's official conspiracy theory. There are no reasons to believe. There is only manipulated irrationality and raw emotions to support them.

In the meantime, Bill Maher joins Bushco in labeling critics kooks or, to use Maher's terminology: nut jobs! I have a message for Maher: people who have a case, make it. Those who don't call other people names, just as Bushco labeled its critics unpatriotic or, worse, treasonous.

As we have said, many people believe whatever makes them feel good about themselves. I would like to believe that if you played Bush's 2003 State of the Union address backward, you hear him confess to lying about everything, including 911. But, unlike Bush partisans and Reagan regulars, I don't have to indulge absurd fantasies in order to feel good about myself.

There is enough evidence in the public record to bring capital charges against George W. Bush right now. This evidence and probable cause meets the high standard required of a court at law. No mumbo jumbo, no supply-side hokum, no GOP sloganeering or meaningless platitudes required.

Top Ten Conspiracy Theories Courtesy of Indymedia New York
Mike Ward of PopMatters lists the most outrageous top ten officially spun conspiracy theories of the year - Scoop Editor's Note: If you feel like a laugh then read this!
He forgot to mention the most outlandish conspiracy of them all (and the most widely accepted): 19 hijackers from a third world terrorist group armed with boxcutters forced 3 planes into 3 of the the nation's most important and symbolic structures with no assistance from US government/intelligence insiders. ...

People tend to believe whatever makes them feel good about themselves. I wonder how good Maher manages to feel about himself after selling out to superstition and corporate financed ideology --however well-financed and packaged! I am not curious enough to sell out to the establish just to find how how it makes me feel. I will settle for Maher's report and I suspect that he is, rather, the authority on that subject right now.

Does it matter what is believed? Indeed, those who don't believe in the existence of cliffs may one day walk off one. Unless the U.S. awakens to George W. Bush, it will have soon walked off a cliff.

He left out Trickle Down Economics and other GOP Mumbo Jumbo.

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Life Under 'Big Bro'

In March 2006, my article Bush's New PR Offensive: Old Lies Die Hard! was visited by Bush's State Department. [ISP 169.252.4.# (U.S. Department of State) ] I say "Bush's State Department" rather than the "US Department of State" because the letters "US" imply, indirectly the people's ownership of the apparatus of government. Under Bush that is no longer true. And under either Colin Powell or Condo Rice the "State Department" no longer belongs to the people of "...these United States". Now --I am quite sure that other bloggers are visited routinely by Big Brother and there is no reason to suppose that my anti-Bush stance has not been visited on numerous other occasions via proxy servers. I have stopped counting the really suspicious visits, from obvious proxy servers. The really malevolent spying --that done by CIA or NSA --I will most certainly never know about.

Little has changed since I wrote this almost two years ago. Therefore, since Bush is still in office, still flouting the rule of law, still subverting American values, still a threat to world peace with the world's largest stockpile of WMD at his disposal, sill a terrorist in fact, still a war criminal, still a liar, still a failed and sorry excuse for a "President", and for having made my opinion known by at least one "state" visitor, here is the offending article in its entirety.

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Bush has thrown down the gauntlet yet again! And congress continues to let him get away with it. Once again, the "rule of law" takes a beating. Bush repeats a fairy tale about Iraq and cites it as justification for thumbing his nose at the Constitution, circular, delusional thinking.

The reality in Iraq is a stark contrast to Bush's PR version. Numerous writers in Iraq describe a "...a country convulsed by fear" where sectarian killings are commonplace; the scale of violence is largely unseen. In a nation —still largely without lights or running water —civilians flee old neighborhoods desperately seeking safer ground —IF it can be found. Death squads roam the streets. Bush never talks about this.

And even as Bush has created chaos and civil war in Iraq, he cites Iraq as justification for his crackdown on civil liberties and the rule of law at home. That, in and of itself, should be grounds enough for impeachment and removal from office immediately.

Socrates said that the good was good not because the gods approved it but that the gods approved because it was good. Bush and his party have reversed the logic of Socrates. The GOP reverses thought processes, thinking backward to make legal crimes already committed, rationalizing bad decisions after the harm has already been done. Fast forward to G. W. Bush, who, like Richard Nixon before him, has said that if the President does it it's legal. If Socrates were alive, he would say that both Nixon and Bush had it backward. Socrates is right; the GOP is dead wrong.

Backward thinking is not uncommon in the ranks of the GOP but it seems to have reached epidemic levels with the ascension of George W. Bush. Before the Supreme Court handed down Bush v Gore, the most infamous 5 to 4 decision in its history, Antonin Scalia had already given the game away. Continuing the recount, he said, would be harmful to Bush.

On still another occasion, Scalia said:

Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires.

—Antonin Scalia, US Supreme Court Justice

Scalia assumes that Bush had already more votes than Gore but, of course, we know now that such was not the case. Scalia's conclusive was, therefore, entirely partisan. His mind had been made up going in. Had the court simply ordered that the recount continue, as it should have, Gore would surely have won the White House. Take Scalia to his logical conclusion and the actual counting of votes need never be done again. Counting votes is sure to be harmful to someone. Last time I checked, the candidate getting the fewer number of votes was supposed to lose.

Ironically, it was Scalia who had said that it was not the court's job to hand down decisions applicable only in single cases; it was, rather, the job of the court to make precedent, establish case law. But, guiltily, the Bush v Gore court added a hasty, guilty proviso limiting Bush v Gore to one case and one case only. This would seem to be, in itself, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment cited so fallaciously and disingenuously by the five vote ideological majority.

And lately Bush crows about "Inherent" powers" and "implicit" authorization! It makes one long for the good old days when President Bush pledged his allegiance to a philosophy of "strict" construction. I've never seen anything in the Constitution about "inherent" or "implicit" powers and, if the GOP had not been disingenuous about "strict constructionism", they would have to admit that they haven't either.

President Truman claimed to have "implicit" or "inherent powers" to seize U.S. steel mills during the Korean War. But, in a landmark decision, Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer, the Supreme Court rejected Truman's argument, ruling that his seizure was unconstitutional.

When the United States signs agreements like the Geneva Conventions, they become the law of the land. Congress is therefore allowing Bush to circumvent the law with his unilateral re-invention of both law and language. Bush has invented new descriptions of "enemies", and he has arrogated unto himself the power to define what he unilaterally chooses to call "enemy combatants". He assumes the power to hold this "class" of his invention incommunicado indefinitely —even if they are American citizens. Though the Supreme Court has said that this is outside the law, Bush would have you believe that he is above the law. If Bush is correct, SCOTUS is moot. Have the justices on the court been given two weeks notice and pension?

If Bush is allowed to interpret the laws, then the independent judiciary is no longer required. Bush has denied authorizing the torture of captives, but when Congress proposed to outlaw the practice, he threatened to veto their efforts. That would seem to be, in itself, evidence that he had ordered torture knowing that it was a violation of the law. Then Bush compounded his crime; when a ban was passed with a veto-proof majority, Bush signed the measure but added a memo that said, in effect, that if he felt the need, he would not obey it, "it" being the law.

It is not Bush's job to decide which laws he will enforce and which laws he will not. I don't give a damn about how Bush "feels" about the law. If he wants to talk about his feelings, let him join a support group! "His "memo" is a challenge to the separation of powers and more evidence that the quote attributed to Bush is accurate.

The Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper!

—George W. Bush, as quoted in Capitol Hill Blue

On yet another related issue, Bush has acted in a manner consistent with the quote that is attributed to him. For example, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act states —without ambiguity —that domestic phone surveillance could not be conducted without a warrant. A special court [FISA] was set up by Congress so that Presidents could obtain court approvals in a timely manner. Bush, however, chose to ignore and violate the law setting up the FISA court.

It was not only Democrats who were alarmed:

We have not just allegations, but proud admissions by the Republican Administration of George W. Bush that it has been conducting surreptitious electronic surveillance of American citizens, without court approval, in obvious contravention of an explicit federal law to the contrary.

—Bob Barr

Meanwhile, Bush continues to thumb his nose at Congress, wiretapping, bugging and spying on American citizens and boasting about it —though he is violating the law daily! NOTHING said by Bush has in any way refuted the law or rescinded it.

Where is the Congress when the President of the United States thumbs his nose at the rule of law, the Constitution, and the separation of powers? Everything done by Bush over the last several months has supported the charge that Bush exploits terrorism in order to maintain the U.S. presence in Iraq —in itself an ongoing war crime. [See:325 000 names on terror list ]

Bush's subversion of our laws erodes Democracy and the rule of law. Our Chief Executive has become an outlaw, and, in the process, we have ceased to be a Democratic Republic.

Gore Vidal on the Origins of the Cold War

Additional resources

• NY Times: ‘The Big Con’, America Has Been Hijacked by Right Wing Extremists
• The CIA's Pain Project
• Charges Sought Against Rumsfeld Over Prison Abuse
• Committee Against Toture
• Human Rights Committee
• Can Radical Capitalism Survive the Disasters It Creates?

Discoveries

• Goodbye Joe, Adieu... R.I.P.
• Operation Gladio - Behind False Flag Terrorism & 9/11

The Cowboy's Shared News Items

The Existentialist Cowboy

Imperialism
Conservative Lies
War Crimes
Indict Bush
Why Conservatives Hate America
GOP Crime Syndicate
Iraq

Spread the word:

Billionaires For Bush Reveal How Bush Paid Off His Base and Stuck You with the Tab

If you think the astounding rise of income inequities and the rise of the GOP are just coincidental, please email me. I would like to speak with you about the many advantages and pleasures you might derive as the new, proud owner of the Brooklyn Bridge. The GOP sold Ronald Reagan's tax cut of 1982 like George W. Bush sold his war on Iraq. The benefits of both have accrued only to this nation's power elite and, in both cases, everyone else is stuck with the tab. It will be left to sons, daughters, grand-children and great grand children to retire the debt Bush has run up murdering civilians in Iraq. Yet, odds are, many of those same sons, daughters and their offspring will start life pulling up the rear having been denied pole position at the outset.

Bush stuck you in yet another way. His "elite" base got the tax cut that you didn't. Those who did not get a tax cut are considered "poor" but are getting poorer as we live and breath. His "base" was rich at the time Bush cut their taxes. They've gotten richer as a result. Where will Bush's base hide, I wonder, when the bill he has run up in Iraq comes due? They are not worried. Bush has been bought and paid for.

We have grown up with "official myths", Horatio Alger stories of rags-to-riches, stories about how down-and-out boys might achieve an American dream of wealth and success through mere hard work and fair dealing. The US, myths say, is not an aristocracy; it is a "meritocracy". On the other side of the coin is an implicit message that if the deserving poor eventually get rich, those that are not rich deserve to be poor.

The GOP are well-advised not to waste my time and their time denying it. Their progenitur is Scrooge.

"Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons...then let them die and decrease the surplus population."

—Scrooge, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Still, the GOP is indicted best in their own words. Pat Buchanan is the class example.

One by one, the prophets of doom appeared at the podium. The Reagan decade, they moaned, was a terrible time in America; and the only way to prevent even worse times, they said, is to entrust our nation's fate and future to the party that gave us McGovern, Mondale, Carter and Michael Dukakis.

--Patrick J. Buchanan, 1992 Republican National Convention Speech, Houston, Texas

Buchanan targeted Democrats already tarred with the label "liberal", a GOP code word for anyone opposing GOP robber-baron economics. Any Democrat would have made a better President than any Republican chosen at random. At least one on Buchanan's hit list did. Jimmy Carter, now demonized with a GOP made-up, code word --stagflation. There is, in fact, no real word for an economic condition that only Republicans seemed to have complained about. Certainly, when another Democrat interrupts the GOP diet of government gravy and Pentagon pork, he/she will be accused of stagflation --or whatever word GOP consultants and focus groups can make-up or otherwise "pass".

The critics Buchanan so vociferously publicized were right about Reagan's disastrous presidency. Much of the rest of Buchanan's speech credits Reagan with any number of things which Reagan had nothing whatsoever to do with or things which occurred despite Reagan's worst efforts.

It was under our party that the Berlin Wall came down...

Thus it is implied that Ronald Reagan, who paid tribute to Nazi SS dead at Bitburg, had something to do with bringing down the Berlin Wall. Reagan is more accurately remembered for having "blinked" when Gorbachev put total nuclear disarmament on the table for negotiation at Rekjavik.

Buchanan's next absurdity must be read while remembering Bush v Gore:

We stand with President Bush in favor of federal judges who interpret the law as written, and against Supreme Court justices who think they have a mandate to rewrite our Constitution.

To be fair, Buchanan could not have known in 1992 that in a mere eight years a "conservative" majority on the high court would prove him wrong yet again. For all the right wing bluster about "strict constructionist" interpretations of the US Constitution, it will be forever recalled that it was the Republican majority on the Supreme Court that rewrote the Constitution in order to put into office an imperial "President" who would finish off the venerable document for good!

Wealth "trickling up" is a world wide phenomenon but the effects are stunning. In the year 2000, almost twenty years after the infamous Ronald Reagan tax cut benefiting only the richest Americans, a tiny elite, the richest 1% of adults, owned 40% of the world’s total assets. In 2000, the richest 10% of adults owned 85% of total assets. The bottom half of the world adult population owned a mere 1% of global wealth.

[See: World Institute for Development Economics Research, The World Distribution of Household Wealth, 2006]. It's gotten much worse since then.

It is well known that wealth is shared out unfairly. "People on the whole have normally distributed attributes, talents and motivations, yet we finish up with wealth distributions that are much more unequal than that," says Robin Marris, emeritus professor of economics at Birkbeck, University of London.

In 1897, a Paris-born engineer named Vilfredo Pareto showed that the distribution of wealth in Europe followed a simple power-law pattern, which essentially meant that the extremely rich hogged most of a nation's wealth (New Scientist, 19 August 2000, p22). Economists later realised that this law applied to just the very rich, and not necessarily to how wealth was distributed among the rest.

Now it seems that while the rich have Pareto's law to thank, the vast majority of people are governed by a completely different law. Physicist Victor Yakovenko of the University of Maryland in College Park and his colleagues analysed income data from the US Internal Revenue Service from 1983 to 2001. They found that while the income distribution among the super-wealthy- about 3 per cent of the population- does follow Pareto's law, incomes for the remaining 97 per cent fitted a different curve- one that also describes the spread of energies of atoms in a gas.

In the gas model, people exchange money in random interactions, much as atoms exchange energy when they collide. While economists' models traditionally regard humans as rational beings who always make intelligent decisions, econophysicists argue that in large systems the behaviour of each individual is influenced by so many factors that the net result is random, so it makes sense to treat people like atoms in a gas. The analogy also holds because money is like energy, in that it has to be conserved. "It's like a fluid that flows in interactions, it's not created or destroyed, only redistributed," says Yakovenko.

--New Scientist, There's one rule for the rich

Some essential background:

• In 1979, the top 1 per cent of the US population earned, on average, 33.1 times as much as the lowest 20 per cent. In 2000, the multiplier had grown to 88.5. Certainly, since Ronald Reagan's tax cut of 1982, US "inequality" grew steadily but for a brief respite in Clinton's second term. Bush's final record will be even worse.
  
• Surveys have also identified a small, but fast-growing global group of 70,000 super rich individuals with more than $30 million in financial assets. This group is growing even faster than "paupers" in the $1 million-plus bracket." [See: World's richest worth $29 trillion in 2003; Survey: Wealthy now back at level before dot-com bust. MSNBC.com, June 15, 2004 ]
• The top fifth of households saw their income rise 43 percent between 1977 and 1999, while the bottom fifth saw their income fall 9 percent.
  
• The top fifth now makes more than the rest of the nation combined
  
• Table 2: Share of Total Available Household Net Worth, 2001*
  
  

  Wealth Group	Share of Net Worth
  99-100th percentile	32.7%
  95-99th percentile	25.0%
  90-95th percentile	12.1%
  50th-90th percentile	27.1%
  0-50th percentile	2.8%
  Total	100.0%

  [See: Kennickell, 2003. See data from the Federal Reserve Board for details.

The "center" itself would not be so bad were not the centers so far to the "right", in other words, skewed. Imagine a line with a tiny, ruling oligarchy on the right end and a perfectly egalitarian democracy i.e, a group sharing both power and wealth in perfect equity on the left end. The bulging bell curve in the middle of this line is not --in America --the middle at all, but far to the right. In America, the center is not in the center and may never have been.

While a tiny few, like Bill Gates, may indulge acts of philanthropy from time to time, the over all trends have not changed. A more egalitarian society is the preferred remedy to injustice --not isolated acts of charity, however kind. Moreover, with very, very few exceptions, those growing rich at the expense of others are unlikely to become more liberal as they gain riches. With few notable and statistically insignificant exceptions, the nouveau riche will continue to "...dance with the party that brung 'em." Reagan-heads called it the "Reagan Revolution" for good reason. Conditioned to think of "revolution" in terms of the French or Russian revolutions, Americans might not have grasped the significant harm "Reaganomics" have done America. It was for real.

How many people actually rule America by virtue of their great wealth, their ability to finance political campaigns, their ability to open doors with a phone call? The size of this group is variously estimated, but the fact is no one really knows. Surveys don't ask that question and political consultants like Karl Rove or Paul Caprio will most certainly not tell you. It is possible, however, to estimate the size of a group that literally owns some 99 percent of all "wealth" in the US. As this group grows both smaller and richer, the GOP declines in terms of total votes that can be counted on. This is why the GOP must, of necessity, communicate to its core base via "code words". The GOP, in other words, cannot afford to be honest even with its rank and file. It has cut a Faustian bargain with a tiny elite, Bush's base.

This tiny elite, Bush's base, must work behind the scenes. Robber barons have the money and the power to interfere with the electoral process in numerous ways. The most glaring development is the rise of super-conservative "networks" like Fox and talk shows like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. These programs are the Right Wing's propaganda machine, "faux news" programs that make no effort to tell the truth. Gullible people who have nothing in common with Rupert Murdoch will nevertheless fall for the Fox line. In more egalitarian days, opposing voices could demand and get "equal time". The Fairness Doctrine was deliberately targeted by un-American, "monied" interests for whom the open exchange of ideas is a threat.

Even Roman Emperors gave the vox populi lip service with a healthy soupcon of bread and circuses. The most successful oligarchs --real and faux --are those who succeed in tricking the "folk" into thinking them "...of the people". A regular contributor to this blog wrote recently:

Howard Dean, along with the other main stream Dem orgs. and the progressive Dem.orgs had better figure out a way to co-exist and share resources, they are going to need, if they are to over come this corrupt bunch they are about to take the field with.

Certainly, as more voters grow dis-enchanted with George W. Bush and the GOP in general, Democratic prospects will improve. But there is a downside to the political reality that even as they grow smaller in number, the GOP's natural base grows very, very rich.

Sadly, our electoral system seems designed to weed out dissent deviating past a certain "norm", a norm acceded to by a tiny, exceedingly rich, ruling cabal, a "norm" established by the Democratic and Republican wings of a single party.

An update.

Americans Now Resemble Pre-War Nazi Germans

You see them at the supermarket aggressively pushing their shopping carts around, and you get this feeling that if you do not move fast enough they might just run into you. You detect an undercurrent of suppressed rage, hostility, and detachment as if they are on some other planet.

You feel the same thing when you are driving down the road, and you see them driving with one hand on the wheel, the other hand holding up a cell phone to their ear, wheeling their SUVs around just as aggressively and at the same time detached, like those people in the supermarket pushing their shopping carts around.

No-one smiles any more. No-one wants to talk about things that matter. If you want to discuss anything other than sports, sex, or Dancing with the Stars, no-one seems interested.

What is happening? Is it something in the water, or is Invasion of the Body Snatchers actually happening for real?

I do not remember people being like this. They are hostile, impatient, full of suppressed anger, abrupt, suspicious, and some even threatening.

Not so many years ago, you couldn't walk down the street without running into your friends and neighbors wanting to talk about anything and everything, and have a good laugh. People, I remember, used to communicate -- now they just glare at you, or completely ignore you.

No-one wants to complain about anything. No-one seems to be bothered by high taxes or inflation. They just look at you and roll their eyes like you are crazy if you dare to express your dissatisfaction with the status quo. And God forbid, do not mention the wars, that topic really gets people uncomfortable. It is as if you are asking some personal question. ...

Just how much debt will Bush leave to your children to pay back --unless, your children somehow become billionaires?

As percentage of GDP, "deficit is twice as large as it's ever been"

Billionaires for Bush

Bush Restricting Travel Rights Of More Than 100,000 Americans

Monday, September 3rd, 2007 by RLR
From True Blue Liberal
By Sherwood Ross

Citizens who have done no more than criticize the president are being banned from airline flights, harassed at airports’, strip searched, roughed up and even imprisoned, feminist author and political activist Naomi Wolf reports in her new book, “The End of America.”(Chelsea Green Publishing)

“Making it more difficult for people out of favor with the state to travel back and forth across borders is a classic part of the fascist playbook,” Wolf says. She noticed starting in 2002 that “almost every time I sought to board a domestic airline flight, I was called aside by the Transportation Security Administration(TSA) and given a more thorough search.”During one preboarding search, a TSA agent told her “You’re on the list” and Wolf learned it is not a list of suspected terrorists but of journalists, academics, activists, and politicians “who have criticized the White House.”Some of this hassling has made headlines, such as when Senator Edward Kennedy was detained five times in East Coast airports in March, 2004, suggesting no person, however prominent, is safe from Bush nastiness. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia has also been mistreated. And it can be nasty. Robert Johnson, an American citizen, described the “humiliation factor” he endured:“I had to take off my pants. I had to take off my sneakers, then I had to take off my socks. I was treated like a criminal,” Wolf quotes him as saying. And it gets worse than that. Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s foreign minister, said he was detained at Kennedy airport by officers who “threatened and shoved” him. And that was mild. Maher Arar, a Canadian software consultant was detained at Kennedy and “rendered” to Syria where he was imprisoned for more than a year by goons that beat him with a heavy metal cable. Read the rest of this entry »

From an Amazon reader review of John Perkins' "The Secret History of the American Empire.

In his first book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins lifted the veil on a world rarely seen by most people. He took us on a tour of the costs and consequences of American corporate hegemony, dispelling myths of the `free market', and forcing us to peer deep into our own souls. As Perkins states in his earlier works, "The world is as you dream it," so the question is, what will you dream?

Picking up where he left off, Perkins continues down the path of redemption. Once serving the masters of modern slavery, Perkins now works tirelessly to free those who have been oppressed by the corpratocracy. His thesis? Our planet cannot survive ruthless consumerism at the expense of the world and its people. When all the trees are gone, and all the oil is tapped, what will be left? Does your shirt still feel nice when you understand the suffering involved in its production?

The world John Perkins envisions is one in which personal participation is crucial, and power does not rest in the hands of the few. We have everything we need to create a sustainable global society. We have the resources, the technology, and viable social models. What we need now is a vision, and the inspiration to create such a world. In 329 pages, Perkins provides us with the inspiration to fearlessly question ourselves, and the power structures that exist around us.

Traveling through countries like Indonesia, Brazil, Bolivia, Iraq, and Iran, Perkins paints a picture so vivid its life-altering. This is an amazing follow-up to Confessions, and I strongly recommend this book to anyone who still believes the `free market' benefits all, or anyone who is still waving a flag. This story is brutal, harsh, and real. But the good news is: life can change. We can change. Deep down we all share common values. We all want to live peacefully, we all want to prosper, and we all want to feel love.

If you wish to understand the world for how it really exists, and you seek the tools to help create positive changes, then you have to read this book.

As John says, "Today is the day for us to begin to truly change the world."

Additional resources

• The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller, Jr. University of North Carolina at Wilmington
• We're Right, They're Wrong
• Wealth Inequality ChartsPublish Post
• War Profiteering and the Concentration of Income and Wealth in America
  

Discoveries

• Carl Jung - Matter of Heart

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