January 2010 archive

HAPPY NEW YEARS FOR AMERICAS WEST COAST

HAPPY NEW YEARS FOR AMERICAS MOUNTAIN WEST

HAPPY NEW YEARS FOR AMERICAS MIDWEST

HAPPY NEW YEARS FOR AMERICAS EAST COAST

Happy New Year, everyone!  I hope that your 2009 was a bit happier than mine, but on reflection, mine was not that horrible.  Here is to hoping that your 2010 will be happy, prosperous, and interesting.

I have some reflections about the year, mainly just stream of consciousness stuff, and then will make an argument as to why 2009 is not the end of a decade, nor that 2010 is the beginning of a new one.  Here we go!

NOTE: I will publish this diary later at DKos. But, I don’t want to ruin my evening by all the flak I will catch there. I feel that sharing this with Docudharma, as my first essay here, will not ruin anything. Feel free to comment. Peace. And Happy New Year.

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Among other presidents, Barack Obama (BHO) has been compared to Jack Kennedy. But, given Obama’s behavior over the last year, and especially over the last month, its more likely that the correct comparison is to Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO), rather than to John Kennedy.

“I’m just a patsy.” – Lee Harvery Oswald

The correctness of this comparison struck me as I read the extensive description of Oswald’s actions and their context in JFK and the Unspeakable.

To me, Obama seems to be, like Oswald, a patriotic patsy, obediently and unquestioningly following the orders of and playing the roles assigned by his Beltway handlers, only, in the end, to be left holding the bag for the murder of the American middle class.

If this intro hasn’t popped an aneurysm, come below the fold for the complete analogy.

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DISCLAIMER:

This diary, like everything I write, uses a historical ANALOGY. This diary is NOT about the Kennedy assassination; I’m not here to discuss the minutiae of Dallas. But, it does use the widely-held historical belief that Oswald was a patsy.

Almost 50 years on, we are finally getting access to the records about the JFK assassination. New material from American, post-Soviet Russian, and Cuban sources has blown away what little credibility the Warren Commission report had left.

The latest Gallup poll in 2003 showed that an incredible 75 percent of the American people reject the findings of the Warren Commission and believe there was a conspiracy in the assassination. Only 19 percent believe that Oswald acted alone.

– Vincent Buglosi, The Assassination of JFK

So, if you want to read this essay and you are part of the NINETEEN PERCENT who still think Oswald was a brilliant planner, a fabulous marksman, and a lone nut, just pretend that Oswald the Patsy is some character in a movie fiction, like “The Manchurian Candidate”.

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1. What were JFK’s politics?

JFK lived at the height of the Cold War, when generals were pushing for nuclear first strikes and invasions of Cuba, when the CIA was overthrowing governments with proxy armies, agents provocateur, and false-flag operations. But JFK tried to take things in a different direction:

…every move Kennedy made was anti-war.  This, Douglass argues, was because JFK, a war hero, had been deeply affected by the horror of war and was severely shaken by how close the world had come to destruction during the Cuban missile crisis. Throughout his life he had been touched by death and had come to appreciate the fragility of life.  Once in the Presidency, Kennedy underwent a deep metanoia, a spiritual transformation, from Cold Warrior to peace maker.  He came to see the generals who advised him as devoid of the tragic sense of life and as hell-bent on war.  And he was well aware that his growing resistance to war had put him on a dangerous collision course with those generals and the CIA.  On numerous occasions he spoke of the possibility of a military coup d’etat against him.

– Edward Curtin, a review of JFK and the Unspeakable

JFK also went to the mat with the steel industry over price hikes, earning the undying emnity of the business class with his widely reported quote:

“My father always told me that all businessmen were sons-of-bitches, but I never believed it until now.”

– JFK during the steel crsis, quoted in NYT, April 23, 1962.

The bottom line, according to James Douglass,  was that JFK was anti-war and pro-labor – and it cost him his life. The assassination did not come out of nowhere; it was the effect and Kennedy’s political actions were the cause.

2. How did the public receive JFK’s politics?

Short answer: like rain in the desert.

Long answer: individual citizens on all sides wanted peaceful coexistence. They wanted to live and let live, rather than be blown to kingdom come for the sake of an ideology. But military men, and the industries that served them – on both sides of the Cold War – pushed for nuclear confrontation and total, Constitution-shredding war. Plans like the infamous and un-Constitutional Operation Northwoods were seriously proposed by the rabid rightwing in the military.

3. Where is this analogy going? What does it have to do with today?

Just as in the Cold War, the people of the U.S. want peace. They want an end to the fruitless and contrived “War on Terror”; and, like JFK, they believe there are less war-like policy alternatives to ever-increasing military budgets and ever-decreasing civil liberties. Americans also want an end to the ruinous class war from above that has all but bankrupted the middle class. More personally, the want the same healthcare that the rest of the first world enjoys.

Obama received a large majority of votes, vs the GOP ticket, because he was perceived to be the “peace” candidate, the middle-class candidate, the “sensible” candidate, the candidate who would deliver what the public wanted. And, even though his proponents will deny it, he was PERCEIVED to be the “progressive” candidate, the “Camelot”-redux candidate.

In my analogy, the American people play the role of JFK. In the face of all out war by the Military-Media-Industrial-Insurance Corporate Complex (MICsquared), the people want to put an end to these wars that are draining the blood out of our middle class nation.

So here is the analogy. After the last month of war escalation, DOJ cave-ins, HCR stabs-in-the-back, (fill in your worst outrages here), the kindest take I can muster for Obama is that he MUST be a patsy. No one could be this obtuse if he were not being coached to play a role. And, I’m not the first person to come to this conclusion.

Obama and Democrats seem to think they’re securing the long-term support of the corporate establishment, they think they’re consolidating their power, but they’re walking right into a trap.  They’re being set up to fail, they’re being set up to take the blame when everything implodes.  

Darkness at Noon

4. So, who’s doing the coaching?

One doesn’t have to look very far to find quite a lot of coaches. As doesn’t need repeating, the Obama Administration is crawling with Goldman Sachs alumni. And, there is the on-going GOP control of the Defense Department via Defense Secretary Gates, and the appointment of Cheney’s assassin master McCrystal. Most recently, there is the open ideological warfare against progressives led by Rahm Emmanuel.

No matter whom the American public elects, it finds the same bunch of warmongers and Wall St. pirates still in charge. But, this should be no surprise, and all this was in place 50 years ago:

While the president struggled to push his newly found politics of peace past the anti-communist priorities of the CIA, that creature from the depths of the Cold War kept sprouting new arms to stop him. As in Vietnam, the CIA agents operating in other branches of the government…How had the CIA’s covert arms been grafted onto these other parts of the government…

Air Force headquarters…set up a Pentagon office to proovide military support for the clandestine operations of the CIA…CIA Director Allen Dulles was its actual creator…Dulles got (Colonel Fletcher Prouty) to create a network of subordinate… offices in the armed services, then throughout the entire US government. Each office that Prouty set up was put under a “cleared” CIA employee. That person took orders directly from the CIA but functioned under the cover of his particular office and branch of government…

The consequence…was that the CIA had placed a secret team of its own employees throgh the entire US government. It was accountable to no one except the CIA, headed by Allen Dulles…

– JFK and the Unspeakable,  pp 196-7

What are Max Baucus, Joe Lieberman, and the rest of the Blue Dogs but a team that is accountable only to its corporate masters? Even as they block the American public’s expressed wishes (70%+ poll numbers for the public option; majorities for not escalating in Afghanistan), MICsquared and Wall St. (i.e., corporatists) are busy setting up the final assassination of that pesky, meddlesome public that wants neither permanent war, nor war on their civil liberties, their infrastructure, their livelihoods, and their savings.

And, in the best traditions of plausible deniability, they have been planning to blame the whole mess on the Democratic Party.

Just as JFK knew the MIC was plotting against him, the American public today knows that corporations are plotting against them.

“In the 1980s, corporatism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s, it triumphed over democracy.”

– David Korten

5. Moving the Patsy into Position

In attempts to excuse Obama’s actions, many have talked about “the situation he has inherited”. But, I am more interested in the economic bureaucracy he has inherited. The hermetic seal of the Goldman Sachs bubble reminds me of handlers that surrounded and facilitated the manufacturing of the legend – (There are cases where a person may attempt to infiltrate a target organization, with a well-prepared synthetic identity for them, called a legend in tradecraft.) – of LHO.

…the CIA took its own secret steps…toward setting up Lee Harvey Oswald as an identifiable Soviet-and-Cuban-directed assassin of the president. “Sheepdipping”, the process whereby sheep are plunged into a liquid to destroy parasites, had been applied in its intelligence sense to Oswald in New Orleans. There Oswald’s potentially incriminating associations in Fort Worth and Dallas…with the White Russian community were expunged in the pool of Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba dramatics.

– JFK and the Unspeakable, p74

We were distracted from Obama’s corporate roots by progressive-sounding campaign speeches that, a year later, have turned out to be worthless. Once again, progressives have been right all along, but no one has listened. Its Iraq and WMDs all over again.

Continuing with the analogy, about putting patsies in place, its time to compare BHO’s route to the WH with LHO’s route to Dallas. Its easiest to begin when BHO first stuck out from the ordinary.

In 2006 – two years before the Presidential election, when everyone thought the nomination was Hillary’s  (HRC) to lose – a whole lot of big money backed this long-shot candidate BHO, and kept backing him for a whole year before the grassroots money came in big. People like Zbigniew Brezizinski (can you say uber-Cold Warrior?) signed on to advise him.

Now think back to 2004, when Howard Dean generated $50 M on his own hook: the Powers That Be (PTB) ordered up a media assassination. Does anyone have the slightest doubt that the PTB gave BHO the money because they KNEW he was no progressive, no liberal, but rather the bluest of Blue Dog Democrats? Because they knew he would be completely in their pocket. As he has proven to be. (Remember how we were told that Joe Lieberman being his “mentor” really meant nothing? Gee, then why does  BHO roll over for Traitor Joe, time after time?)

Looking backwards in time from 2006, his major “accomplishment” was giving a good speech at the 2004 convention that was supposedly about giving publicity to John Kerry. Wasn’t it just amazing how the in-the-bag-for-Bush corporate media gave him all that airplay for that speech?

His other major accomplishment was “winning” his Senate seat in 2004, after the convention. Wasn’t it amazing how his opponent, Jack Ryan (is Tom Clancy writing BHO’s legend?) was sunk by a seamy revelation from his hot, TV star wife in a juicy divorce proceeding – so far into the campaign (late June) that BHO wound up running against that hopeless fruitcake, Alan Keyes. A ham sandwich with a “D” behind its name could have won that race. Just FYI, Jack Ryan became a centi-millionaire by “working” for Goldman Sachs. They really do have both sides bought and paid for.

Before that Senate campaign, Obama was a complete nobody on the national stage. His political biography during the Presidential race was the equivalent of a Potemkin village or a stage set. The question is not whether he has a “legend”. The question is: who paid for it and why?

6. Paymasters and 11-dimensional chess

Given the total lack of mainstream investigative journalism and the high death rate among whistelblowers these days, questions of motivation (the “why”) are little more than a matter of speculation. Until there is hard evidence about motivation (the why), it is only fit for conspiracy theorists to discuss. But the fact remains that Wall St. and the MICsquared have paid, and continue to pay for BHO to spin out this patsy scenario.

Once one thinks about the manipulation, all the talk about multi-dimensional chess takes on a new meaning. IMHO, the 11-D chess isn’t being played by Obama; its being played by the people who are maneuvering Obama into his role as patsy. The author of “Darkness at Noon” puts it similarly:

Obama isn’t playing 12 dimensional chess, he’s playing Russian Roulette with a bullet in every chamber.  

One would have to be either delusional or an obedient patsy to think that this disaster of Health Care “Reform” would not be extremely harmful to the Democratic Party across the board. With the awareness rising on the ACTUAL tax on the middle class that will be imposed to pay for this, the Dems are being made to look exactly like the GOP caricature of them. As the author of that piece asks:

How can a tax (“mandate”) on the middle class BY & FOR CORPORATIONS be called “reform” by Democrats?

7. Collateral Damage – the Democratic Party

The answer is that it can’t. The “mandate” is setting up the Democratic Party and progressives as co-conspirators in the murder of the middle class, just as Russia and Cuba were set up by Oswald’s coat-trailing at the Russian and Cuban embassies. (More detail on that can be found in the Appendix.)

In the case of JFK, the framed “co-conspirators” were nuclear armed and willing to fight back; and LBJ had some measure of humanity.

One must give the CIA (and the assassination sponsors that were even further in the shadows) their due for having devised and executed a brilliant setup. They had played out a scenario to Kennedy’s death in Dallas that pressured other government authorities to choose among three major options: a war of vengeance against Cuba and the Soviet Union based on the CIA’s false Mexico City documentation of a Communist assassination plot; a domestic political war based on the documents truly seen, but a war the CIA would fight with every covert weapon at its command; or a complete cover-up of any conspiracy evidence and a sitent coup d’etat that would reverse Kennedy’s efforts to end the Cold War. Lyndon Johnson, for his part, took little time to choose the only option he felt would leave him with a country to govern.

– JFK and the Unspeakable, p 81.

But when the economic shit really hits the fan, sometime in the next year or so, the PTB will be free of that pesky middle class. (Take your pick on the method: dollar collapse, oil price spike, another stock market bubble popping, commercial real estate bubble popping, alternative currency pushes the dollar aside, massive inflation from all the debt…) And, unlike LBJ, there will be absolutely no reason for the PTB not to “go nuclear” on the Democratic Party for the second and FINAL economic meltdown that occurred on “their watch”. Of course, no one will be left standing to fight a “domestic poltical war” with the MICsquared/Wall St. alliance. And, just like the last time, the coverup will stick.

That’s my analogy, and I’m sticking to it.

Barack Hussein Obama, meet Lee Harvey Oswald. You are about to become infamous – unless you wake up and smell the coffee.

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Appendix: Using LHO to implicate Russia and Cuba

As LHO was being set up as an individual scapegoat, so too was the Soviet Union, together with its less powerful ally, Cuba, being portrayed as the evil empire behind the president’s murder…On November 18, the Soviet Embassy in Washington rec eived a crudely typed, badly spelled letter dated nine days earlier and signed by “Lee H. Oswald:” of Dallas. The timing of the letter’s arrival was no accident. Its contents made it a Cold War propaganda bomb whose trigger would be President Kennedy’s assassination. Read in the context of Dallas four days later, the text of the letter seemed to implicate the Soviet Union in conspiring with Oswald to murder the U.S president.

– JFK and the Unspeakable,   p 227

…Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin sent a…telegram…to Moscow. Ira subject was the suspicious Oswald letter received by the Soviet Embassy four days before the assasination. Dobrynin cabled:

“This letter was clearly a provocation: it gives the impression we had close ties with Oswald  and were using him for some purpose of our own…The suspicion that the letter is a forgery is heighted by the fact that it was typed…One gets the definite impression that the letter was concocted by those who, judging from everything, are involved in the President’s assassination.

– JFK and the Unspeakable, p 230