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One conspiracy theory we always knew was true

Monday, June 10, 2013

We are all familiar with the term “October Surprise”. It refers to an action taken shortly before an election, usually by the party in power, designed to affect the election’s outcome. The term was first used, I think history would show, in 1980, when Republicans loudly proclaimed their certainty that Jimmy Carter would somehow, likely in some sort of unholy deal with Iran, get the hostages out of Iran at a time designed to guarantee himself re-election. All the while, many of us have always believed, the Republicans were conspiring with the Iranians to make sure that such a thing would definitely not happen until Reagan was safely elected. There was evidence in support of the theory, though never a smoking enough gun to make a dent on public opinion. Most people never bothered to wonder why Carter was able to finally succeed in freeing the hostages on the date most favorable for Reagan: Inauguration Day, which guaranteed that Reagan would not have the issue to dog him, and would not have ownership of whatever agreement was made to free them. Who knows, Jimmy might have known he was being played, but what could he do?

Later, when Ronnie was caught sending money to Iran, inquiring minds wanted to know: were those persistent rumours about a campaign season deal true? Congress duly investigated, but as was their wont, Democrats preferred a believe-no-evil approach was called for. A critical question was whether Bill Casey, the by then deceased former head of the CIA, had or had not gone to Madrid to make the deal to guarantee the hostages would remain hostages for the duration. The Congressional committee decided he did not, and absolved the Reaganauts of any wrongdoing.

But…, as Robert Parry of Consortium News reports:

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who oversaw two congressional investigations into Ronald Reagan’s secret dealings with Iran, says a key piece of evidence was withheld that could have altered his conclusion clearing Reagan’s 1980 campaign of allegations that it sabotaged President Jimmy Carter’s hostage negotiations with Iran.

In a phone interview on Thursday, the Indiana Democrat responded to a document that I had e-mailed him revealing that in 1991 a deputy White House counsel working for then-President George H.W. Bush was notified by the State Department that Reagan’s campaign director William Casey had taken a trip to Madrid in relation to the so-called October Surprise issue.

Casey’s alleged trip to Madrid in 1980 was at the center of Hamilton’s investigation in 1991-92 into whether Reagan’s campaign went behind Carter’s back to frustrate his attempts to free 52 American hostages before the 1980 election, popularly known as the “October Surprise.” Hamilton’s task force dismissed the allegations after concluding that Casey had not traveled to Madrid.

“We found no evidence to confirm Casey’s trip to Madrid,” Hamilton told me. “We couldn’t show that. … The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he did make the trip. Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.”

Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force’s investigation. “If the White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us,” Hamilton said, adding that “you have to rely on people” in authority to comply with information requests.

The document revealing White House knowledge of Casey’s Madrid trip was among records released to me by the archivists at the George H.W. Bush library in College Station, Texas. The U.S. Embassy’s confirmation of Casey’s trip was passed along by State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson to Associate White House Counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. in early November 1991, just as the October Surprise inquiry was taking shape.

(via Consortiumnews)

I’m not generally a conspiracy theorist, but this one fit together all too neatly, and it was precisely the sort of thing one would expect from a party that has always, since the days of Nixon, believed in winning at any cost. I’ve always believed that it happened, and I think it paved the way for the later secret deal in which the U.S. secretly sold arms to a state that was, officially, an implacable enemy of ours.

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Mea culpa

Sunday, June 9, 2013

A day or two ago I penned a short post about a study that showed that inequality in the United States was a result of deliberate governmental policy. The point I tried to make, in a more or less humous vein, is that it doesn’t take a study to make that finding; the facts are staring us right in the face.

To my shock and surprise the post post garnered a comment from the study’s author, David Cay Johnston, which I reproduce here:

JCW, the cynical commentary you offer is not useful.

But for a lot of hard work by a relative handful of people digging through and analyzing the official data you would not be so well informed.

This study is not redundant, it is groundbreaking because it establishes facts that show the prevailing argument about what drives inequality is wrong.

After many years of digging out facts that were not known and getting them into the public record I am happy that you grasp the issues so well.

But a very large number of our fellow Americans, including many of the most politically and economically powerful citizens.

Also see my new piece on these issues, which just went up at National Memo and my earlier column for Tax Analysts on relative income growth of the vast majority and the oligarchs – an inch to 5 miles.

He’s mostly right, of course. (Looks like he forgot to finish the fourth sentence, but it’s easy to see where he was going). We do need these things rigourously proven, though sometimes you have to wonder if that does any good, since the ruling elites and media movers and shakers have an amazing facility for ignoring the facts. Still, I stand by the gist of my observation. It was pretty easy to see, for anyone who understood math, that each and every Republican tax cut was a transparent attempt to shift money from the masses to the elite. That was a matter of simple arithmetic. That left two possibilities. First, that the shift was the whole point. Second, that the politicians involved had no idea what they were doing. The latter seems unlikely to the nth degree, so that leaves us with the former. The same pattern repeats itself over and over, including many bills passed with substantial Democratic support. Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act is a case in point, though the motivations there could be more successfully obscured than in the “tax cut” bills.

In any event, I want to apologize for seeming to dismiss the hard work that went into the study. Sometimes it is necessary to prove the obvious.

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Maher de-canonizes Reagan

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Amen

Hat tip Why Evolution is True

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Friday Night Music

Friday, June 7, 2013

So, no rock legends died this week, but chance has come to my rescue. I’ve got my iPod connected to my car stereo system, and my choice of music is pretty much dictated by randomly spinning the selection wheel on the stereo. It’s an uncertain process, since I also have to keep an eye on the road, and the ultimate selection, while not exactly totally random, is close enough. Anyway, a couple of days who should appear on the little LED screen but the Allman Brothers, who I promptly chose and realized straightaway that I’ve never put them up, or at least I can’t remember having done so, which is the same thing.

This is an instrumental, Jessica. Great guitar work, of course.

I actually thought about putting up something on Esther Williams, who died yesterday. I decided against it, but I do recommend perusing some of the stuff on youtube. She was actually a little before my time, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of her water routines before. She had a lot of guts. I was a swimmer myself, though not very good (terrible, actually), but you couldn’t get me or most of the swimmers I knew to do a swan dive off a high diving board. Even the diver on my college team, who was an excellent diver on the one meter, was a little gun shy on the high board. According to the Times obit, she literally broke her back diving off a 50 foot platform because the idiots making the movie she was in put a metal crown on her head that caused it to snap back when she hit the water. Oh, what the heck, this is as far from the Allman Brothers as you can get, but check this out.

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The least surprising news of the year

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Why am I not surprised that the NSA is monitoring our phone calls?

Why am I not surprised that this intrusion into our private lives is the one issue in which the cherished goal of “bi-partisanship” has been reached, for Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike seem to think it’s great.

The real question is: why does anyone find this surprising?

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Fresh from the Department of Redundancy Department

Thursday, June 6, 2013

David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times reporter on economic issues, analyzes a recent study of wealth among five nations among those with the richest economies and concludes: “In short, what the paper shows is this: Inequality is a product of government policy.”

(via Widening Economic Inequality in United States Is a Deliberate Result of Government Policy, New Study Finds)

And yes, this post’s title is apt, or apt enough, for “redundancy” besides meaning the “state of being redundant”, also means, “Something redundant or excessive; a superfluity”, and surely the study is superfluous, or it is if all it shows is that inequality is a product of government policy.

As Hamlet’s buddy Horatio, might have said: “There needs no study, come from a think tank, my lord, to tell us this.”

But of course, I jest. We don’t really need a study, but in today’s world, the nose on your face, may it be ever so plain, doesn’t really exist unless it is confirmed by a study.

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A Tale of our Times

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

This post is only tangentially related to politics, though the story is emblematic of our culture. I found out about it because my wife and I subscribe to the Boston Globe, for it’s a local Boston story. We were particularly interested because our son currently has a fellowship at the Academy of Arts and Sciences, where the story takes place.

If, like us before he got the fellowship, you have never heard of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, let me enlighten you. It is, as the Globe reports, a prestigious institution, founded by John Adams, John Hancock and their ilk while the American Revolution raged around them. They felt Boston deserved an institution that could compete head to head with Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia based American Philosophical Society. But this story is not about our patriotic forbears, for it is very much a modern fable.

The Globe ran a story yesterday revealing that the president of this institution, one Leslie Cohen Berlowitz has, not to put too fine a point on it, lied about her academic credentials. That Ph.D from NYU that appears on her resume? NYU has no record of it. In fact, the good “Doctor”’s only claim to the title is an honorary degree, and calling yourself a Doc on the strength of a free degree is a giant academic no-no.

But the real story here is twofold. First, there’s the backstory, and dare we assume that word of Ms. Berlowitz’s mendacity may have come to the Globe from her staff:

She was almost fired in 1997, a year after she became chief executive of the academy, because of her heavy-handed management style, according to a former member of the governance board who asked not to be named.

Gail Loffredo lasted just 14 days as Berlowitz’s executive assistant in 2012. She said Berlowitz fired her last year after her teenage daughter found a lump in her chest and Loffredo told Berlowitz she needed to take her daughter to the doctor the following week. Loffredo later learned that Berlowitz had gone through as many as five other assistants in as many months.

“She is horrible,” Loffredo said, adding that she regularly witnessed Berlowitz scolding employees in her office in front of colleagues.

Ben Didsbury, a former membership coordinator charged with compiling contact information for academy fellows, recalled being ordered to apologize in front of other staffers after Berlowitz mistakenly called a person’s fax number rather the voice line and thought Didsbury had reversed the numbers.

“There was fear permeating through the whole place,” said Didsbury, who now works as a freelance audio engineer in Cambridge.

Workers were even afraid to speak much of the time, making the office seem eerily quiet. Didsbury recalls one time when an office assistant asked him if he needed any more staples, and Berlowitz stormed into his office yelling: “You do not talk to each other!”

(via The Boston Globe)

Did I mention that this lady is paid over $600,000.00 (more than most college presidents) to run an institution with a budget of a little more than $8 million? Or that she is chauffeured around by her long suffering employees, travels frequently on the Academy’s dime, and while doing so eats at only the finest restaurants?

But I haven’t gotten to the second fold (the story is twofold, remember?). When the Globe confronted her, she, of course refused to speak. She had a flack do it for her. Unfortunately, the response was, shall we say, not terribly convincing:

“Neither the academy nor President Berlowitz is going to respond to subjective, interpretive, and gossipy allegations from former employees and unnamed sources,” Howell said in the statement. “Nor are they going to respond to personal questions that are irrelevant, do not belong in the public domain and, frankly, smack of sexism.”

Well that didn’t really quite cut it, for obvious reasons. In fact, my wife and I were speculating about whether press flack Howell was purposely subverting his boss, but given her style she surely reviewed every word before it was released. So, yesterday, they tried again. Bear in mind that the Globe’s original article concentrated more on her penchant for “kissing up and kicking down” (a great phrase, that) than on her fraud. So, give a guess how she chose to explain the fraud:

A spokesman for Berlowitz, who has often clashed with employees in her 17-year tenure, blamed her staff for incorrect information in a statement Tuesday, even though Berlowitz signed some of the submissions and is known for being a micromanager who insists on seeing every document that leaves the academy.

“President Berlowitz, who reviewed only the substantive content of the applications, was unaware of the mistakes,” academy spokesman Ray Howell said in the statement. “President Berlowitz takes full responsibility for the error, and the academy is working to correct the information with relevant funding agencies.”

(via The Boston Globe)

Blame the staff, of course. It’s clear from the articles that there is no way in the world the woman wasn’t aware of the fraud.

This truly is a story of our time. Arrogance, greed, fraud, and contempt for the ordinary American worker, all mixed up and baked to perfection. She missed her calling. She belongs on Wall Street.

Postscript: While my son does have a fellowship at the Academy, he doesn’t, so far as I know, work directly for this woman and never mentioned her before we read the article. He is not “staff” and is not among her victims.

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21st Century Potemkin Village

Monday, June 3, 2013

A wise man once said: “Some things in life are bad. They can really make you mad. Other things just make you swear and curse.” This one is probably of the swear and curse variety. Seems that the upcoming G-8 summit is being held in a little Northern Ireland town that has been particularly hard hit by the depression. Not to worry, our lords and masters will not be having their noses rubbed in their dirty doings:

What they’ve done is they have filled the shop front window with a picture of what was the business before it went bankrupt or closed. In other words, grocery shops, butcher shops, pharmacies, you name it, they have placed large photographs in the windows that if you were driving past and glanced out the window, it would look as if this was a thriving business. It’s an attempt really by the local authority to make the place look as positive as possible for the visiting G8 leaders and their entourages, and it’s really tried to put a mask on a recession that has really hit this part of Ireland really very badly indeed.

(via Northern Ireland Town Fakes Prosperity for G8 Summit | @pritheworld)

But it’s not really the local authorities. The Austerity King is to blame:

This is one big initiative really stemming from the Foreign Office in London. This is David Cameron’s gig. It’s his invitation, it’s his decision to host the G8 in County Fermanagh, which is, don’t forget, part of the United Kingdom. It’s also on the island of Ireland, it’s in Northern Ireland, but he will be the hosting head of government and it’s his say so. Much of the money that has been spent in and around the host town of Enniskillen, about more than £300,000 worth, that’s getting on from half a million dollars, the bulk of the cash and certainly the driving force behind the plans to tidy up the place, that’s all coming from London.

Well, I suppose there’s a bright side. Little Enniskillen is the beneficiary of the only stimulus spending in which Cameron is prepared to engage. Devoutly must we hope, fervently must we pray, that Cameron’s Potemkin village will make a laughingstock out of its creator.

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Cheers for Chris Murphy

Saturday, June 1, 2013

My wife has often remarked that while Elizabeth Warren is getting some mostly deserved attention for her progressive views, our own Chris Murphy is every bit her equal, something he’s recently proven by “no” vote on a proposed resolution to authorized President Obama to arm the Syrian rebels. From Chris’s email about the subject:

Last week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 15-3 in favor of giving President Obama the power to arm the Syrian rebels fighting against President Bashar al-Assad in their nation’s civil war. I was one of the three votes in opposition, joined by Senators Tom Udall and Rand Paul.

It was not an easy vote for me. I visited with Syrian refugees during my trip to the Middle East earlier this month. I met families who lost fathers, and daughters burned by government bombs.

I believe that Syria represents a grave human rights crisis, and I wholeheartedly support increasing humanitarian aid to the war-torn nation. But as of today, I draw a different conclusion when it comes to U.S. military intervention.

The fact is, we have failed over and over again in our attempts to pull the strings of Middle Eastern politics. At some point, we need to learn the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Right now, I do not believe it is our national interest to send weapons into a conflict that could simply lead to more, rather than less, people being killed.

I don’t know if Obama asked for this power, but it’s passing strange that the same Republicans that insist he is a dictator striving to take away our precious right to kill each other are perfectly willing to give him carte blanche to get us into yet another war.

There is, as Chris observes, a pattern to these things. We interfere, and when all is said and done, the situation we leave behind is worse than the one we found when we moved in. It’s almost a given that nothing that replaces the current Syrian dictator will be an improvement, from our perspective, over what’s there now. It’s not like the rebels are going to implement a liberal democracy or anything. We’ll simply get another theocratic Middle Eastern regime. More power to them if they can get rid of their dictator, but our interests are best served by taking a hands off approach.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, May 31, 2013

This one is apropos of nothing. Sometimes I get desperate. I came across Kinky as I scrolled through my iTunes library, and I thought, why not?

 

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