Ominous Election Day Guest Post By Russ Baker: Roger Stone's And Trump's Plan For Chaos

 

Donald Trump’s forces planned to have their supporters block bridges and tunnels into major cities if he lost in 2016. This revelation comes from Trump adviser Roger Stone, and it sounds a lot like what Trump supporters are doing now.

The story was first revealed to me by a retired journalist, who said Stone told him in 2016 that the Trump team was, in Stone’s words, “Planning a nationwide protest blocking bridges and highways into the cities.”

Contacted today, Stone told me he wished to clarify his statement from four years ago: “I only favor non-violent civil disobedience if there is overwhelming evidence that the election had been stolen through ballot fraud.”

Claims of ballot fraud are exactly what Trump has been making this year, and Stone was quick to add: “When it comes to corruption, Joe Biden makes Lyndon Johnson look like Mother Teresa.”

The idea in 2016 was that the resulting commotion-- similar to the “yuppie riot” (also known as the Brooks Brothers riot) that Stone staged in Florida in 2000-- would cause havoc and freeze the orderly conclusion of vote counting. This is a striking revelation given that, in 2016, Trump did not expect to win.

Today, in 2020, Trump’s supporters have already mounted a series of aggressive activities in advance of the election, which is expected to be close.





On Sunday, a caravan of Trump supporters brought traffic to a standstill on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey and on the Governor Mario M. Cuomo (formerly Tappan Zee) Bridge in suburban New York. That was the day after the well-publicized incident in Texas where Trump supporters in trucks surrounded a Biden campaign bus. Meanwhile, hundreds of Trump supporters have been rallying in Beverly Hills for weeks. A week ago there were as many as 3,000 supporters at a protest there. And in New York City, there have been protests with Trump supporters disrupting traffic in Times Square.

Stone, a staunch Trump loyalist and longtime adviser, is well known for his conviction for making false statements and obstructing the federal investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign and its ties to Russia. Trump commuted Stone’s sentence in July just before he was to begin serving a prison term.

Russ Baker Asks The Serious Questions About John Brennan That The Senate Won't

The good news: The House Intelligence Committee-- think Michele Bachmann-- won't be able to make a circus out of Obama's nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA. The bad news: Republicans on the Senate Committee include Saxby Chambliss, Richard Burr, lobbyist Daniel Coats, and two Bachmannoid excuses for senators, Marco Rubio and Tom Coburn. Yeah, so it'll be a circus. A serious look at Brennan's fitness for the office-- he is, after all, Obama's "assassination czar"-- is very much called for. CREDO's political director, Becky Bonds: “It was wrong when the Bush administration did it. And despite the virtual silence on both sides of the aisle when it comes to secret killings and extraordinary rendition, it's still wrong now. What kind of message does it send to the rest of the world if the United States, a leading democracy, confirms ‘assassination czar’ John Brennan to head the CIA?"

The Senate may not be prepared to ask them, but there are serious questions about Brennan's nomination and yesterday investigative reporter and author Russ Baker laid them out at WhoWhatWhy.com/ He starts by acknowledging that it isn't surprising that Brennan, a spy, is "a crafty character" and insists that the confirmation hearings should offer the public and opportunity "to demand answers to a host of questions, not just about Brennan’s values and activities, but about whether the resources of the presidency are routinely used for nakedly political purposes."

As Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, Brennan played a central role in two episodes that provided the President with much needed image-boosts. In one, Navy SEALs bagged the numero uno prize, Osama bin Laden. In the other, Navy SEALs rescued a young American woman from Somali pirates.

...With the bin Laden operation, Brennan has provided a shifting panoply of details concerning what went on that have never been rationalized, and that raise fundamental questions. In that linked article, we reported that

Brennan… was the principal source of incorrect details in the hours and days after the raid. These included the claim that the SEALs encountered substantial armed resistance, not least from bin Laden himself; that it took them an astounding 40 minutes to get to bin Laden, and that the White House got to hear the soldiers’ conversations in real time.

[snip]

Almost all that turns out to be hogwash-- according to the new account produced by The New Yorker three months later. An account that, again, it seems, comes courtesy of Brennan. The minutes did not pass like days. Bin Laden was not armed, and did not take cover behind a woman. And the commandoes most certainly were not on the ground for 40 minutes. Some of them were up the stairs to the higher floors almost in a flash, and it didn’t take long for them to run into and kill bin Laden.

Perhaps the most troubling of many troubling assertions was the final explanation Brennan provided for why Osama bin Laden’s body was hastily dumped in the ocean-- rather than being made available for autopsy and identification procedures, or buried somewhere unknown to the public but where the body could later be exhumed if necessary (a common occurrence when identity issues arise). Here’s what Brennan said: he consulted the Saudis on what to do with the body, and they said sure, good idea to toss the terror leader into the deep.

Brennan, it should be noted, has close ties to the Saudi leadership from his years running the CIA station in Riyadh, 1996 to 1999.  (He then returned to Washington and was CIA deputy executive director at the time of the September 11 attacks.)

There’s a great deal of irony in taking advice from the Saudis on deep-sixing a valuable piece of evidence, given questions about the Saudi leadership’s knowledge of what was afoot with the 9/11 hijackers. For one thing, there’s the well-known rapid departure of Saudi royals from around the United States immediately following the carnage in New York and Washington.

But there’s a meatier, documented Saudi connection. If you’re not familiar with it, be sure to read our multi-part piece here. As we reported, in the weeks prior to the attacks the alleged hijackers were hanging out at the Florida house owned by a top lieutenant in the Saudi hierarchy. Is Brennan not interested in that? Shouldn’t some Senator ask him about it?

And why did the SEALs kill the unarmed bin Laden, when it would have seemed strategically wiser to exert every effort to capture him alive? Imagine what stories this Saudi black sheep could tell! To explain why he was summarily killed, we were first told that he was armed, then we learned he was not, then that his fate was left up to the SEALs themselves.

Brennan-- who ran the National Counterterrorism Center for George W. Bush while Bush was seeking re-election in 2004 and pushing the “terror alerts” button like crazy-- has plenty of questions to answer.

The bare details of the Somali raid, aka Pirates of the Arabian Sea, immediately suggest that something more was going on. What was this American woman doing in such a crazily dangerous place? Charity work, OK, but it is hardly standard procedure for the US military to launch such a risky and expensive operation-- moreover, three months after the abduction occurred-- because one civilian in purportedly declining health has been kidnapped abroad.

Was it simply a coincidence this operation came early in the election year, literally just as Obama was delivering his 2012 State of the Union Address? The media, unsurprisingly, did not ask questions but played up the derring-do of the operation and the decisiveness of the Commander-in-chief. Again, we see Brennan at the helm when an opportunistic military adventure unfolds. Is the timing of this operation a legitimate question for his confirmation hearing?

Even back when Obama was merely a presidential hopeful, Brennan showed up at the nexus of intelligence work and image issues. In March, 2008, around the time that rumors and speculation about Obama’s country of birth began circulating, the State department revealed that the passport records of presidential candidates Obama, McCain and Clinton had been breached. Subsequent reporting by the Washington Times revealed that those accessing the records were actually government contract employees from two private firms. One worked for The Analysis Corporation, a Virginia company run at the time by Brennan-- who was also then an advisor to the Obama campaign.

As happens often in cases of malfeasance, the person working for Brennan’s company was described as a lone wolf, and “disciplined”-- but not fired. Because the matter was laid to rest before the “birther” controversy took wing, no connection between the breach and the issue was made. In retrospect, though, since McCain’s and Clinton’s place of birth were not in doubt, it is reasonable to wonder whether these improper accesses-- which were never explained-- were to find out what government records revealed about Obama, and that the searches on the other candidates were conducted to supply that old staple of the spying game, “cover.”

Flash forward four years. We do not yet understand what role if any Brennan might have played in the still mysterious affair that brought down David Petraeus, the man Brennan replaces at CIA. If you don’t think there are power struggles going on that determine, for example, which adulterous relationships in high places come to light and which don’t-- then you don’t know Washington very well.

Unfortunately, it will take a quantum leap in America’s investigative journalistic energy to generate the kind of heat that might be felt by the Brennans of the world-- or their bosses. But why waste the opportunity to grill one of the key players in our ever-expanding security establishment?

The Senate hearings on Brennan’s nomination at CIA will likely focus only on bite-sized, partisan controversies like the death of America’s ambassador to Libya. We’re not likely to witness Brennan opening up about the highly delicate topics of recent vintage discussed above. But why not at least broaden the inquiry to quiz Brennan on current policy toward murky security matters that are still unresolved decades later? A good place to start: the long-overdue declassification of documents that American citizens need to inform themselves about their own history.

As we previously reported, the CIA has been refusing to release records on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And the new person in charge of declassification at the National Records and Archives Administration is a former CIA counterterrorism officer. In this, the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death, might Brennan be compelled to do the right thing-- and release all of the records in what the government still says was nothing more than the doings of a “lone nut?”

Surely, this is a nonpartisan issue. Who wouldn’t feel comfortable asking their Senator if he or she would push for prompt attention to this shared national concern?

We may not have access to information we need to understand what is being done, right now, in our names. But perhaps we can find out what went on half a century ago. Maybe then we can begin coming to terms with our past as prologue to the strange state of American democracy circa 2013.

Mitt Romney Tries Voodoo Foreign Policy

We've been trying to makes heads or tails out of Romney's incoherent foreign policy statements. He sounds absolutely clueless about one of the most important jobs a president has to do, which is worrying foreign leaders all over the world. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright hit the nail on the head when she termed his speech the other day "full of platitude and free of substance." It's also worrying Republicans, including Republicans on Romney's own team. Our old friend, Russ Baker, covered that exceptionally well this week at WhoWhatWhy. He starts with a good laugh at the NY Times fumbling around the edges of exposing Romney as a silly dilettante in the foreign policy arena, using words to describe a speech devoid of seriousness like "vague" and "yet to fill in many of the details." Baker has a couple of questions though: "Given the common belief that national security/foreign policy is either one of the two most important areas a president must contend with or the most important one, it is reasonable to ask: What the heck is going on? How did we end up with a situation in which one of our two choices in November is a man who seems to know, or care, so little about the world? How is it possible that, with just weeks before the election, there is no dominant person or clique in Romney’s camp to articulate a vision of what the United States can and should do in an incredibly complex and explosive world?" And then he tries answering.

The truth of the matter is that, while the actions of the United States in the world are of utmost importance to all Americans-- and especially to the financial sector, oil/mineral and other natural resource extraction industries, importers/exporters and traders, and the humongous armaments industry-- we always seem to end up with candidates who are not really knowledgeable or strong enough to chart their own course.

...Bewilderingly, the article concludes by implying that what really is needed is a return to power of the same-old-same-old gaggle of seemingly immortal “foreign policy czars”-- presumably people like John McCain and William Kristol-- big backers of proactive wars and invasions ranging from Vietnam to Iraq to Libya:

"Missing from the team are the big names in establishment Republican foreign policy circles. The best known of them, Henry A. Kissinger, has endorsed Mr. Romney, but recently took a shot at his declaration that he would declare China a currency manipulator on the 'first day' of a new administration. Last week, Mr. Kissinger described both presidential candidates’ approach to China as 'extremely deplorable'.”

The unstated point is: American presidential elections are often little more than bad jokes. The two nominees are awfully similar on so many global issues. Worse, there’s a fifty-fifty chance that we will end up with a guy who has no idea what to do with the world-- and who is surrounded by competing cabals of self-important people who must know in their own hearts that they have no idea how to proceed judiciously and wisely. Privately, this whole gang must be terrified to be put in charge of an operation promising to outdo a president who has himself routinely embraced force, even outdoing his predecessor  on the particularly cruel and reckless policy of death by drone.

Obama and Romney will debate foreign policy on October 22. Romney better start boning up now. Because it's not as easy as where he and his shady accountants find tax shelters for his fortune or how much slave labor he can take advantage of in Chinese factories to make money for his wealthy investors.

Whose Water Could The NY Times Possibly Be Carrying In Their Slanted Syria Reporting?

Assad & Brig. Gen. Tlass

I was pondering how to approach the NY Times story from last week about how Assad's regime in Damascus is unstable and that the proof is in the defection of Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass. And then I happened on a post from an old friend, investigative reporter Russ Baker of WhoWhatWhy.com who suggests all the "news" we're getting about Syria is, at the minimum, skewered. The Times:

The defection of a young general close to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has provided the most telling sign yet of eroding support for his government among even the most elite and trusted Sunni Muslims, who serve as a critical pillar of the security forces and civilian administration.

But while the defector, Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, gained world attention when he fled Damascus on Thursday, President Assad’s bigger military challenge is the swelling number of silent objectors-- soldiers of all ranks lacking the means to flee, or the interest, but no longer cooperating with the government. Instead of responding to the call to duty, they are staying home, abandoning their posts as the opposition grows bolder, stronger and more effective, said Syrian military experts and defectors.

Mr. Assad’s loyal inner circle and core support remains the Alawite community, a minority Muslim sect. But Alawites constitute no more than 12 percent of the 23 million population, so the Assad family has for decades relied on the majority Sunnis for their legitimacy and practical support. Sunnis make up the bulk of the nation’s foot soldiers, hold posts throughout the bureaucracy and dominate the elite in the business community.

A few Sunnis have always held high-profile positions in the government and military. General Tlass’s father, Mustafa, like his son a Sunni, was a confidant of the president’s father, Hafez, and served as defense minister for 32 years under both men.

But the uprising fueled almost entirely by the Sunni community-- some 75 percent of the population-- has gradually formed a deepening sectarian rift, chipping away at that crucial support among Sunnis. As the government crackdown intensified, leaving by some estimates as many as 17,000 dead, according to the United Nations, at least one deputy minister and 15 generals, all of them Sunnis, have defected to Turkey, 5 in the past few weeks alone.

The numbers of those who are actively undermining the government by simply refusing to comply, rather than join the opposition, are far larger, however. The Syrian Army of roughly 400,000 troops has been more affected by this type of attrition than by defections, experts said. Of the 80,000 young men expected to show up for their mandatory military service this year-- most of them Sunnis-- experts said that virtually none have responded.

The distrust between the Sunnis and Alawites in the military has grown so deep that at night, when Sunnis are put on guard duty at key installations, there are always Alawite guards assigned to watch the Sunni soldiers, said a colonel who defected to Turkey.

The NY Times would never purposely publish false "news" to push an agenda, would they? Well... you can't help but wonder when you realize that they somehow neglected to mention in their fine reportage that "Tlass did not defect directly from the Assad inner circle. He had already fallen into disfavor early in the uprising and lost his command in May 2011—14 months ago. If you had that additional piece of information, you would interpret the news reports in a totally different way." And Baker adds, "When a piece of evidence that contradicts the overall impression is absent from the reportage, the reportage itself is almost worthless" and then asks who really carried out the Houla massacre?

The media told us that more than 100 people, including women and children, were brutally slaughtered at close range in the village of Houla in late May. The bloodshed, reported around the world, was ascribed to a militia, the Shabiha, which is loyal to Assad. Here’s an example, from the BBC website:

Survivors of the massacre in Syria’s Houla region have told the BBC of their shock and fear as regime forces entered their homes and killed their families….

Most witnesses who spoke to the BBC said they believed that the army and shabiha militiamen were responsible.

“We were in the house, they went in, the shabiha and security, they went in with Kalashnikovs and automatic rifles,” said survivor Rasha Abdul Razaq.

Later, a dribble of accounts cast doubt on this, since the people killed were, by and large, themselves supporters of Assad. But few heard about these. The BBC report did not say who Rasha was, or provide any evidence that she actually was there, or that if she was, she had any basis for saying that the killers were identifiable as to their affiliation. BBC quoted one other source, who did not provide a name.  Despite the thinness of this material, the BBC story was picked up all over the world, and became perhaps the definitive account.

Maybe the Frankfurter Allgemeine-Zeitung has less of an agenda to push than the NY Times and BBC. They reported that Assad opponents admitted that government backers were not responsible for the massacre and that "anti-Assad rebels attacked army roadblocks just outside Houla, which had been intended to protect villages, where the majority are members of Assad’s Alawi sect, from Sunni militias. The soldiers at the roadblocks, overwhelmed, called for backup, which led to a 90-minute battle, in which both sides sustained extensive fatalities" and that "it was in this time frame that the unidentified militias entered Houla." Frankfurter Allgemeine-Zeitung:

“According to eyewitness accounts…those killed were almost exclusively from families belonging to Houla’s Alawi and Shia minorities. Over 90% of Houla’s population are Sunnis. Several dozen members of a family were slaughtered, which had converted from Sunni to Shia Islam. Members of the Shomaliya, an Alawi family, were also killed, as was the family of a Sunni member of the Syrian parliament who is regarded as a collaborator. Immediately following the massacre, the perpetrators are supposed to have filmed their victims and then presented them as Sunni victims in videos posted on the internet.

…"Their findings contradict allegations of the rebels, who had blamed the Shabiha militias which are close to the regime.”

I never believe anything I read about developments in other countries. I learned long ago that's it's always false and always a reflection of someone's agenda, usually the Military Industrial Complex's. The Times is notorious for putting out fake news on behalf of the U.S. government. They've been doing it ever since I could read.

Locking People Up As A Business Model... For Sleazy Corporations And Sleazy Politicians

A few weeks ago we talked about how our friends at Cuéntame were calling out corrupt hypocrite Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her scandalous role in the prison-for-profit system. Cuéntame wants to know why Wasserman Schultz, the head of the DNC is "siding with the Corrections Corporation of America and not her constituents in Southwest Ranches? 99% of her constituents DO NOT want a new for-profit immigrant detention center!" Although CCA "donates" their bribe money primarily to right-wing Republicans like Steve Womack (AR), Kevin McCarthy (CA), John Culberson (TX) and Marsha Blackburn (TN), Wasserman Schultz is one of the few Democrats taking payoffs from them as well.

Yesterday Russ Baker noted at WhoWhatWhy that fewer Americans are committing serious crimes than ever and wondered aloud why more Americans are getting locked up. He suggested we ask our friends at the "very lucrative private prison industry." He's right... them and the corrupt political hacks, like Wasserman Schultz, they buy off. In fact, he hones right in on Wasserman Schultz's pals at Corrections Corporation of America.

America’s system of detaining and monitoring “criminals” impacts more people than ever before. Including those who are either in some form of incarceration or in the parole and probation process, you’re looking at an affected population of….six million. One out of every 100 Americans is behind bars now. And every year, about 13 million Americans spend some time in jail for at least a brief spell.

State legislators faced with dwindling revenues are eager to offload inmates to “cheap” private facilities

The private prison industry grew 350 percent over the past fifteen years.

Two private companies-- Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group-- dominate the private prison industry. The biggest company, Corrections Corporation of America, is offering to buy prisons from states as long as they can promise an adequate supply of prisoners to make the deal worthwhile.

Studies show that private facilities perform badly compared to public ones on almost every metric-- prevention of intra-prison violence, jail conditions, rehabilitation efforts-- except reducing state budgets and adding to the corporate bottom line.

To keep their gravy train rolling, private prison companies need a few things from state and local government:

1) Lots of people arrested and convicted (often of essentially victimless crimes) and given long sentences. This most heavily impacts young black males-- about one in nine of whom is in prison, many for using or selling marijuana, or, to a lesser degree, harder drugs. (Although whites have comparable drug use rates, their prosecution rates are dramatically lower.)

2) Opposition to the decriminalization of drug use, which would cut sharply into prison industry profits. (As a result, it ain’t going to happen.)

3) The continued criminalization and detention of undocumented foreigners.

With serious crime rates dropping, the US has fewer and fewer of the hardest-core (mostly male) criminals who were once prime targets for incarceration. To replace them, the private prison industry needs more young people, more women and (thanks to the immigration snatch game) more children as fodder for detention facilities.

The privatization of prisons is yet another instance of how small-government advocates are driving more and more of our lives into the hands of companies whose only objective is to turn a profit-- without concern for larger social consequences. When public services like incarceration are handled as cheaply as possible, terrifying outcomes can result, including, in this case, unnecessary harm to minor offenders, the hardening of minor offenders into serious criminals, and calls for still more draconian law enforcement and punishment protocols, whose main justification is to keep those for-profit prisons filled.

How bad can it get? A private detention company in Pennsylvania bribed two judges to order youths imprisoned.

Lucky for them there are plenty of inherently corrupt politicians like Wasserman Schultz to push their agenda-- an agenda that includes inhumane and barbaric treatment of those unfortunate enough to fall into their clutches. Is it fair to blame this on politicians like Wasserman Schultz? 100%.

Is Romney Cheating The American People On His Taxes?

I hope you're not too bored with hearing about Romney's tax manipulations and offshore tax-dodging accounts to read a perspective from our favorite investigative journalist, Russ Baker. He makes the point that there are still a lot of questions that haven't been answered-- and a lot that haven't even been asked.

Can we expect to find anything crooked in Romney’s filings?

You kidding? Smart rich people hire smart accountants to keep them out of trouble. It’s not the illegal things they do, it’s how they manage to rig things so that they get away, metaphorically, with murder.

Should Romney’s tax returns be the way to judge him?

To be sure, they do reveal how capital gains tax rates are highly advantageous to the rich and penalize those who work for their living. And that’s an important point. But what we should be interested in with regard to Romney in particular is his values, as shown by the strategies and tactics of his companies.

Are Romney’s recent tax filings the most important ones?

Because Romney left Bain Capital way back in 1999 to embark on a political career, it is the earlier tax filings that would likely reveal the most.

His seasoned political advisers would have been all over him to exhibit exemplary behavior-- since ’99, and probably even earlier, when he may already have been considering politics. Also, as he was not actually working at Bain but just receiving passive income from it in recent years, we shouldn’t expect to see much that is worth assessing.

Thus, his 2010-11 release is definitely not very forthcoming.

Was Romney’s delay tactic part of a “limited hangout”?

One of the oldest tricks in the book is to resist disclosure, let anticipation build a bit, then release something that appears to answer questions, while not revealing anything very interesting. This pretty much ends debate.

Consider how long George W. Bush took to release National Guard service records, and how long Barack Obama took to release his birth records. In the end, these controversies fizzled, and people moved on.

Should Romney’s income from Bain even be treated as a capital gain?

No. He actually worked for that money, as a fund manager, plenty of hours every week. Thus, it should be taxed as normal earned income. But because of a loophole in the law (what a surprise!) engineered by the faithful lawyers, accountants and lobbyists of the one percent, it gets treated as capital gains, and therefore the lowest tax rate applies.

What’s with Romney’s having had money in the Swiss Bank UBS?

This looks pretty bad. (For more on UBS, its pernicious activities and how it gets its claws into politicians of both parties, see this, this and this.) There are very few legitimate, or public-spirited business reasons for having a Swiss bank account.

So why did Romney have that account? Someone should ask him. His trustee said he closed it in early 2010. That’s just a short time after UBS was forced to pay huge fines to the US government to settle a criminal investigation that established the bank had encouraged wealthy Americans to illegally hide their income abroad.

Could Romney have been one of those Americans? Possible, but doubtful, mostly because it would have been really dumb. Most of those caught doing that were largely in the “rich but dumb” category.

Could any of the tax shelter stuff turn out to be odious even if not illegal?

Sure, but you probably wouldn’t know unless you looked at, and compared, a whole bunch of different years’ tax filings. And so far, Romney has not agreed to provide that.

Can we trust Fred Goldberg’s clean bill of health?

When Romney released his tax filings, they came with a letter from former IRS commissioner Fred Goldberg saying he’d checked them out, and they looked…supah!

But who is Fred Goldberg? The same guy who, following an unscheduled visit from Scientology’s top leader, abruptly reversed policy to grant tax exempt status to the hyper-controversial, pyramid-style, service-selling enterprise. Worth taking a second look at this guy and why and how he is helping Mitt out.

Does the way Mitt released his taxes demonstrate good faith?

Definitely not. Though this was by far the biggest news out of his campaign on Tuesday, it was released the same day as the State of the Union address, guaranteeing that it would get second billing. Also, the campaign managed to bury it on their website, so much so that after a few minutes, I had still not found it there, and had to rely on the website of the Washington Post.

What about those domestic workers Mrs. Romney paid?

The filing, by Mrs. Romney (not Mr.), show that she paid around $20,000 in total during 2010 to four domestic workers. Sure would like to know more about that-- and what it tells us about the rich vs. poor. The Romneys have at least three houses, some pretty substantial places. Assuming they only employ regular help at their main Massachusetts house, $20k is still a paltry total. That’s an average of $5,000 a year to four people. Wonder how much work they did. After all, Mrs. Romney is known to struggle with MS, and it’s doubtful Mitt does much sweeping, dusting, cooking, etc.

The Romneys should be queried about why Mrs. Romney takes legal responsibility for reporting payments to the help (beyond unfortunate stereotypes about stay-at-home wives), and why no payments show up for 2011.

In any case, it’s not a very good ratio of income to job creation, for a guy who talks about creating jobs: the year the Romneys paid their staff $20,000, they earned $27 million.

The worst thing of all is that, depending on their total income, those domestic workers may have paid a much higher tax rate for their hard physical labor at Romney’s house than Romney did on the millions in investment income that piled in while he pursued his political dream.

And that just seems really wrong.

Romney's growing reputation as a shady businessman and con artist wasn't helped yesterday when the L.A. Times revealed his long overdue tax release attempts to cover up some of his monkey business with overseas tax shelters. Confronted with the evidence, Romney at first claimed it was a "trivial" discrepancy and "inconsequential." Trivial? Inconsequential? It's almost half a million dollars, and no matter how rich you are, that is neither "trivial" nor "inconsequential."

A review by the Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau found that at least 23 funds and partnerships listed in the couple’s 2010 tax returns did not show up or were not listed in the same fashion on Romney’s most recent financial disclosure, including 11 based in low-tax foreign countries such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg.

...Many of the funds are affiliated with Bain Capital, the Boston-based private equity firm Romney ran for 15 years. Several others are apparently unrelated offshore entities with mysterious names such as Babson 2006-1, which is based in the Cayman Islands, and Barracuda Investments, which has an address in Dublin, Ireland, but appears to be solely owned by Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm based in San Francisco.

Among the assets omitted is a Swiss bank account in Ann Romney's blind trust that campaign officials said held $3 million of the couple's money until it was closed in 2010. The account was listed on a financial disclosure Romney filed in 2007, but it was mistakenly named as an asset held by the couple, not as part of Ann Romney's trust. The campaign said it is filing an amendment to the most recent report to reflect $1,700 worth of interest earned in the Swiss bank account in 2010, as well as another amendment to move the account to the appropriate category in the 2007 report... [T]he discrepancies between Romney’s tax returns and his personal financial statement speak to a broader challenge facing the longtime private equity chieftain: convincing voters that he can relate to their economic distress despite the incredibly complex architecture of his immense fortune.

It looks like President Obama was talking to Mittens in Las Vegas yesterday, don't you think? He even used the "Bill Gates does not envy the rich" line that just eviscerates Romney.

Qaddafi, Libya... Some Other Sides Of The Story

Everybody's happy, happy, happy that the Qaddafi's have been overthrown, right? I mean, once it became public, however that happened, that he was personally behind the Lockerbie bombing-- like someone didn't already know that?-- he had to be deposed. And deposed he was, primarily by the CIA, the U.S. military and the NATO allies. Over the past couple weeks I've been trying to draw comparisons-- imperfect as they are-- between the U.S. overthrowing Qaddafi and the CIA activities that toppled legitimate governments "we" (meaning corporate America) disagreed with in Iran, Guatemala, Chile and Ecuador. I left out how the CIA toppled governments in Australia, Italy, Greece and even England. And now I see there are other people thinking along the same lines... like the fine folks at the Revolutionary Communist Party of the USA. Don't laugh.

Qaddafi's overthrow and the victory of the "rebel" forces is being presented by the U.S. rulers, their European imperialist allies-- including Britain, France, and Italy-- and their media mouthpieces as a big victory for the people, a triumph of "democracy" over tyranny, and a vindication of their "humanitarian" military intervention in Libya.  

As the anti-Qaddafi forces took over Tripoli, President Barack Obama stated, "The people of Libya are showing that the universal pursuit of dignity and freedom is far stronger than the iron fist of a dictator... The future of Libya is now in the hands of the Libyan people."

It is nothing of the sort. The unfolding events in Libya are primarily the result of a U.S.-NATO military, political, and economic assault on Qaddafi’s forces, stretching over months.  

The day the Tripoli fell to the anti-Qaddafi forces, the New York Times reported:

"Through Saturday, NATO and its allies had flown 7,459 strike missions, or sorties, attacking thousands of targets, from individual rocket launchers to major military headquarters. The cumulative effect not only destroyed Libya's military infrastructure but also greatly diminished the ability of Colonel Qaddafi's commanders to control forces, leaving even committed fighting units unable to move, resupply or coordinate operations." ("Sharper Surveillance and NATO Coordination Helped Rebels Race to Capital," August 22)

This assault has had not been about liberating Libya or ensuring self-determination for the nation of Libya. Instead, it has been aimed at strengthening imperialism's grip on Libya... [T]he day after Tripoli fell, the New York Times carried an article headlined, "Scramble Begins for Access to Libya's Oil."

It wasn't that big a war. I saw a CNN news crawl yesterday that said it's estimated that 50,000 Libyans died. And I guess that doesn't count the African workers who are all over the country who seem to be meeting a bad fate at the hands of "our" pals. Even a reporter who is totally buying into the "magnificence" (his word) of the battle to free themselves from the tyrant, observed that the whole enterprise has been marred by racism.

"This is a bad time to be a black man in Libya," reported Alex Thomson on Channel 4 News on Sunday. Elsewhere, Kim Sengupta reported for the Independent on the 30 bodies lying decomposing in Tripoli. The majority of them, allegedly mercenaries for Muammar Gaddafi, were black. They had been killed at a makeshift hospital, some on stretchers, some in an ambulance. "Libyan people don't like people with dark skins," a militiaman explained in reference to the arrests of black men.

The basis of this is rumours, disseminated early in the rebellion, of African mercenaries being unleashed on the opposition. Amnesty International's Donatella Rivera was among researchers who examined this allegation and found no evidence for it. Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch similarly had not "identified one mercenary" among the scores of men being arrested and falsely labelled by journalists as such.

Lurking behind this is racism. Libya is an African nation-- however, the term "Africans" is used in Libya to reference the country's black minority. The Amnesty International researcher Diana Eltahawy says that the rebels taking control of Libya have tapped into "existing xenophobia." The New York Times refers to "racist overtones," but sometimes the racism is explicit. A rebel slogan painted in Misrata during the fighting salutes "the brigade for purging slaves, black skin." A consequence of this racism has been mass arrests of black men, and gruesome killings – just some of the various atrocities that human rights organisations blame rebels for. The racialisation of this conflict does not end with hatred of "Africans." Graffiti by rebels frequently depicted Gaddafi as a demonic Jew.

...The dominance of relatively conservative elites and the absence of countervailing pressures skewed the politics of the rebellion. We hear of "the masses," and "solidarity." But masses can be addressed on many grounds-- some reactionary. There are also many bases for solidarity-- some exclusionary. The scapegoating of black workers makes sense from the perspective of elites. For them, Libya was not a society divided on class lines from which many of them had profited. It was united against a usurper inhabiting an alien compound and surviving through foreign power. Instead, the more success Gaddafi had in stabilising his regime, the more the explanation for this relied on the claim that "Gaddafi is killing us with his Africans."

A further, unavoidable twist is the alliance with Nato. The February revolt involved hundreds of thousands of people across Libya. By early March the movement was in retreat, overseas special forces were entering Libya, and senior figures in the rebellion called for external intervention. Initially isolated, they gained credibility as Gaddafi gained ground. As a result, the initiative passed from a very large popular base to a relatively small number of armed fighters under the direction of the NTC and Nato. It was the rebel army that subsequently took the lead in persecuting black workers.

Under different conditions, perhaps, unity between the oppressed was possible. But this would probably have required a more radical alliance, one as potentially perilous for those now grooming themselves for office as for Gaddafi. As it is, the success of the rebels contains a tragic defeat. The original emancipatory impulse of February 17 lies, for now, among the corpses of "Africans" in Tripoli.

At least they didn't infect them with syphilis. I mean who would ever do something like that? (The Washington Post story gets all the facts out there except that this was done by a gang of Nazis brought here by domestic fascists in the OSS straight from experimenting on Jews and other captives in the concentration camps. They did lots of experiments in the U.S. and for the U.S.) Off topic... let's get back to Libya. Actually we're going to turn to Africa News for a completely different perspective than the one we're hearing from corporate media cheerleaders for the Military Industrial Complex. I'm not claiming it's a more valid perspective; it's just another perspective to the one we all know-- or should know by now-- is completely compromised and devoid of anything beyond slick propaganda.

Libya's destruction, a victory for the west; a defeat for ordinary Libyans. The suffering of Libyans has just begun. For there can never be true liberation when your oppressor is the one who defines what your freedom should be. The ousting of Colonel Gaddafi, Libyan leader for 42 years, by the rebels backed western forces especially NATO is indeed a victory for the west whose fixation on Gaddafi's Libya has become worrisome.

It’s definitely not a victory for ordinary Libyans who would continue to suffer a lot of nervous strain and shock after the destruction. Neither is it a victory for the rebels who have been in excess jubilation since capturing Gaddafi’s official residence. “We are free,” they proclaimed in wild happiness.

But they have forgotten one important thing: that they are now slaves to all the countries that helped them kick out Gaddafi.

Apparently the rebels are not ordinary Libyan but a group of people who want the share of the oil with the help of foreign forces. Gaddafi’s main crime may be the fact that he refused to let the west control Libya’s resources, hence he must be eliminated by all possible means.

In their euphoria and in their haste to get rid of him, they forgot that none of the countries that backed them has the interest of Libyans at heart. Let them for once re-visit Iraq.

...Gaddafi should have known that neither America nor its allies forget and forgive. He should have known that the oil in his background is enough to eliminate him by all means. He should have learnt a lesson from Iraq, a nation destroyed by Obama's predecessor on the pretense that the late Iraqi leader possessed Weapon of Mass Destruction which turned out to be a ruse.

It was simply a ploy by Mr. Bush to invade the oil rich nation. There is always an excuse to invade certain countries especially when the rulers of such countries refused to be a stooge.

Earlier this morning author and investigative journalist Russ Baker was asking for some transparency about U.S. intervention in Libya. He's already written about the growing doubts about Libya's complicity in Lockerbie and looking at the American role in the "liberation" of the country... well, like many of us, he smells a rat.

It’s true that Qaddafi, like many-- perhaps a majority of-- rulers in his region, was a thug and a brute, if at times a comical figure. But one doesn’t need to be an apologist for him-- nor deny the satisfaction of seeing the citizenry joyously celebrating his ouster-- to demand some honesty about the motives behind his removal. Especially when it comes to our own government’s role in funding it, and thus every American’s unwitting participation in that action.

Let’s start with the official justification for NATO’s launch of its bombing campaign-- for without that campaign, it’s highly improbable the rebels could ever have toppled Qaddafi. We were told from the beginning that the major purpose of what was to be very limited bombing-- indeed, its sole purpose-- was to protect those Libyan civilians rebelling against an oppressive regime from massive retaliation by Qaddafi. Perhaps because of NATO’s initial intervention, the feared Qaddafi-sponsored, genocidal bloodletting never did occur. (At least, not beyond the military actions one would expect a government to take when facing a civil war:  after all, remember General Sherman’s “scorched earth” policy in the US Civil War?). However, protecting civilians apparently didn’t generate sufficient public support for intervention, so we started to hear about other purported reasons for it.  Qaddafi was encouraging his soldiers to…commit mass rape! And giving them Viagra! And condoms!

You can’t make this sort of thing up. And yet that’s just what the NATO crew did-- made it up. The media, always glad to have a “sexy” story, especially a sick sexy story, even a sick sexy story with no evidence to back it up, covered this ad nauseum, but never bothered to find out if it was true.

...Qaddafi should never be seen as a victim-- indeed, he has always been sleazy and monstrous in various ways. But the US and its allies appear to have cared little about this, while being deeply  troubled by his role as a fly in the geopolitical ointment. A look at the long and complex historical relationship between Qaddafi and the West begins to explain the true reason he had to go. It also dovetails perfectly with a growing body of indications that Western elites encouraged and even provoked the uprising-- while tapping into deep discontent with the dictator.

Qaddafi has long been a thorn in the side of the West’s oil industry and their national security apparatus. In the early 1970s he worked closely with Occidental Petroleum chairman Armand Hammer in thwarting the ambitions of the oil majors. He was a leader in the boycott of Israel and often cozied up to the Soviet Union.

...What the media has so relentlessly characterized as the “spontaneous uprising” of February 2011 was hardly spontaneous. It began even before the Arab Spring itself commenced in Tunisia during December of last year—and it was orchestrated by the West.

...Khalifa Hifter, a former Libyan army officer, had spent the past two decades living just down the road from CIA headquarters, with no apparent source of income.  In 1996, while a resident of Vienna, Virginia, he organized a Benghazi-based revolt that failed. When the current uprising was sputtering in March, CIA sent Hifter in to take command.

When the rebels were being routed, the United Nations Security Council approved a no-fly order for Qaddafi. The NATO bombing began almost immediately, under the “humanitarian” label.
Before long, other European countries had covert elements in Libya. The British paper, The Guardian, has just reported the role of British special forces in coordinating the rebels on the ground. This was denied by the UK government . But then another British paper, The Telegraph, cited UK defense sources saying special forces had been in Libya already for weeks, i.e., since early August.)

Hopefully they won't attack Algeria next-- for it's oil... I mean for giving the Qaddafi family shelter. Interesting video below, although the filmmakers seem a little hung up with the Rothschilds.

Making War In Libya... For Goldman Sachs And J.P. Morgan?

An overwhelming majority of Americans don't like our involvement in the bombing campaign against Libya but whether you think that what looks like the congressional wrist slap goes far enough, the resolution Webb and Corker are proposing on that war, it certainly guarantees that there will be a debate on U.S. policies there and-- at least in theory-- if Obama can't make an argument on the merits (and so far he hasn't been able to), then Congress will be bound to restrain the executive branch over reach. That would be a first in many decades. This is the press release that went out with S.J.Res, 18 this week:

Senators Jim Webb (D-VA) and Bob Corker (R-TN) today introduced a joint resolution requiring the Administration to provide a detailed justification of U.S. operations in Libya and prohibiting the deployment of U.S. troops on the ground there. It further calls on the President to request authorization for the continuation of U.S. involvement in NATO activities and states that Congress should fully debate such a request expediently. Nearly 90 days after the initiation of force in Libya, such debate has not occurred.

The bipartisan resolution states, “The President has failed to provide Congress with a compelling rationale based upon United States national security interests for current United States military activities regarding Libya.” It calls for an unclassified report to provide essential information to Congress and the American public to evaluate U.S. involvement in Libya and appropriately debate it.

“When we examine the conditions under which the President ordered our military into action in Libya, we are faced with the prospect of a very troubling historical precedent that has the potential to haunt us for decades,” said Senator Webb. “The issue for us to consider is whether a President-- any President-- can unilaterally begin, and continue, a military campaign for reasons that he alone defines as meeting the demanding standards worthy of risking American lives and expending billions of dollars of our taxpayers’ money. It is important for Congress to step in and clearly define the boundaries of our involvement.”

“It has now been more than 80 days since the United States first launched military action in Libya in what was supposed to be only a very limited operation, but neither the Congress nor the American people have any clearer view of the administration’s stated mission or end game for our military involvement in Libya. Having been denied answers, repeatedly, to these fundamental questions or even a comprehensive debate to consider the merits of U.S. involvement in such an engagement, it’s long past time to set a final deadline to get the information every man and woman who puts on a uniform and every taxpayer who funds the operation deserves,” Senator Corker said.

The joint resolution, which would have the force of law, requires the Administration to publicly answer a detailed series of questions about the Libya operation within 14 days of enactment. Parts of the resolution mirror bills passed in the House of Representatives.

Someplace Webb and Corker don't have the imaginations or the will to go is to ask what the hell we're doing bombing the hell out of this small country in the first place. Why Libya instead of, say, Syria or Bahrain, each of which is doing far worse to its citizens, the ostensible "reason" we're involved with this massive attack on Libya? In a pair of powerful investigative articles that would do far more credit to the Senate than the toothless joint resolution, journalist Russ Baker posits that evidence makes it clear that Qaddafi has been set up and that the U.S. in part of a plan to create an “Arab Spring” for the Good Old Boys-- CIA, banks, oil companies. Hopefully, you've been following Matt Taibbi's exciting reporting on the relationship between Qaddafi and the bandits at Goldman Sachs.

Libya was eager to join the big leagues of finance, and its investors were “awed” by an Arabic-speaking Goldman executive who urged them into an options deal that bet on the fortunes of companies including Citigroup Inc. C +0.23% , Allianz DE:ALV -1.33% and Italy’s UniCredit IT:UCG +2.08%.

The LIA, Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, was charmed by the demonstration and decided to go all-in with a $1.5 billion bet. Goldman very quickly lost them 98 percent of that money.

I never knew it was even possible to lose 98 percent of an investment that quickly. If you sent a blind, three-legged donkey into Caesar’s palace with $1.5 billion in chips, it could probably stay solvent longer than this options package Goldman sold to Qaddafi.

How could the Libyans be enticed to take such a crappy deal? See if this sounds familiar: according to the Wall Street Journal, the Libyan fund manager felt that Goldman had "misrepresented" the fantastic investment opportunity Goldman sold to them, and also made trades "without proper authorization."

...Having managed to get their bankers out of Libya with their heads still attached to their shoulders, Goldman decided to make up for losing $1.5 billion of Qaddafi’s money by offering the international pariah a $3.7 billion equity stake that would have made him one of the largest single owners of the bank.

In con-man parlance, this is called the reload. You beat someone in a Ponzi scheme for his life’s savings, and when he shows up at your door with an axe, you get him to mortgage his house to buy a stake in the Brooklyn Bridge. After blowing $1.5 billion of Libya’s money almost instantaneously, Goldman’s solution to the problem was to immediately get Qaddafi reaching back into his pocket for a cash sum over twice the size of the original losses. It’s really hard not to admire the sheer balls of the whole deal.

Baker starts by asking if there is any actual evidence that the claims by Qaddafi’s defecting Justice Minister, Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al Jeleil, that Qaddafi was the culprit behind the bombing of Pan Am 103 are true. "This story," he points out, "made it into major news media throughout the world, without anyone stopping to raise questions about the propaganda benefit of the statement, or of the timing." And though no one has seen any of the promised "evidence," the original headlines did the trick-- anyone watching television or reading stories then would have been led to believe that Qaddafi was behind the Lockerbie tragedy. That's when Obama called on Qaddafi to step down and started down the road to the "humanitarian" attacks on Tripoli.

By December 2010, when a Tunisian man set himself on fire, the Arab Spring revolt was under way—in Egypt, Bahrain, and elsewhere. Pretty quickly, it was clear to everyone that the Western powers were in danger of losing crucial oil suppliers—and vital military bases.
It certainly was convenient that, right about that time, Libya showed signs of moving in the opposite direction-- into the US camp. Read our piece here about the CIA ties to the Libyan uprising.

Then consider the timing of February’s ramped-up claim by the defecting Libyan official, that Qaddafi himself had ordered the Lockerbie bombing.

If that wasn’t enough in the propaganda department to get the global public worked up, next came the Libya rape story. The average person doesn’t have the time or appetite to follow the kinds of complex corporate maneuverings that fascinate us here, but they do understandably get upset about bombs on civilian aircraft and rape.

...We noted the timing of the story, the alacrity with which the Western press grabbed it and spread it, and the simple fact that there’s no evidence tying Qaddafi in any way to any such act. Even the woman herself doesn’t claim that.  Yet it infuriated untold millions and postings all over the Web show that it moved a lot of public opinion into the column supporting military action to remove the Libyan leader.

That the corporate media cannot see what is going on here, or refuses to see, tells us how far we have not come since the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

Still, we can hear the other shoe dropping if we listen carefully enough. For example, the website Politico ran a little item the other day on a powwow between Hillary Clinton and corporate executives over business opportunities in Iraq.

FIRST LOOK: WALL STREET IN IRAQ? – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Deputy Secretary Tom Nides (formerly chief administrative officer at Morgan Stanley) will host a group of corporate executives at State this morning as part of the Iraq Business Roundtable. Corporate executives from approximately 30 major U.S. companies-- including financial firms Citigroup, JPMorganChase and Goldman Sachs-- will join U.S. and Iraqi officials to discuss economic opportunities in the new Iraq. Full list of corporate participants.

Give it a couple of years, and they’ll be having the same party celebrating a more sympathetic regime in Libya.

How Long Will Big Oil And Their Paid Political Shills Keep America In the Dark About A Viable Energy Future?

Since they pay so little in taxes and get billions in taxpayer subsidies, oil and gas companies have unlimited resources at their disposal to run annoying, misleading ads on TV brainwashing dull couch potatoes about their awesomeness. I immediately change the channel when any of them come on. The video above is a very different kind of clip-- and not one you're likely to see on American television.

The clip is about a town in gloomy Cornwall (southwestern England), Wadebridge, that will have a third of its energy needs met through solar, wind and other renewables in 4 years. Why there and not here? Here where we have all the sun and wind anyone could ever hope for. Well, remember those Oil and gas companies with all the money I mentioned above? They buy politicians to carry out their oily agenda the way you buy a paperback to read on a train or plane. Last week the League of Conservation Voters sent an alert out to their members that, as they phrased it so elegantly, "48 U.S. senators just voted to hand billions to greedy and destructive oil companies." That was Tuesday night and that was enough to block a bi-partisan majority from moving legislation forward meant to end $21 billion in tax subsidies for Big Oil over the next ten years. All the Republicans but Collins and Snowe voted the way the Oil companies pay them to vote. And all the Democrats-- except Oil whores Mary Landrieu, Mark Begich and Ben Nelson, who crossed the aisle to vote with the GOP-- voted to end the wasteful, budget-busting subsidies.

"These politicians," promises the League, "are hoping Americans won’t notice they are doing the bidding of the same oil companies who are raking in record profits by destroying our environment. They’re wrong."

Friday, Rinaldo Brutoco and Madeleine Austin, World Business Academy put the Senate's disgraceful shillery for Big Oil into context at Truthout.

The Congressional votes create a strong contrast between the US and other countries, including Germany, China, the Scandinavian countries, and most recently, Japan, who are leading the way to a new planetary fuel system that will replace oil and nuclear energy with renewable energy. In response to its nuclear disaster, Japan has renounced its plans to build new nuclear plants and announced it will redo its energy system "from scratch." Germany is using the Fukushima disaster as an opportunity to curtail nuclear power and boost its strong clean technology export sector. Other countries have curtailed or suspended their nuclear plans. But the United States, once a leader in science and technology that beat other countries to the moon, remains controlled by money politics, Big Oil, and climate deniers.

The oil industry is the most profitable industry in the world. US oil companies earn about $3 billion in profits every week, yet get $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies every year. In the first quarter of 2011, Big Oil's profits were up 38% from the first quarter of 2010.

The industry's outsize profits didn't stop it from squealing like a stuck pig over proposals to trim $2 billion from its annual subsidies and use the revenue to reduce the deficit by about $21 billion over 10 years.

The oil companies tried to characterize the end of their subsidies as a "tax hike," despite growing and widespread recognition across the political spectrum that tax breaks are just another form of government spending, one of several ways to provide direct support for an industry. Before becoming Speaker, John Boehner (R-Ohio) admitted that "tax deductions, credits, and special carve-outs . . . what Washington sometimes calls tax cuts are really just poorly disguised spending programs …."

As a recent Washington Post editorial about such "tax expenditures" pointed out, "an astonishing amount of "spending"-- more than $1 trillion annually-- is accomplished through the tax code, by way of tax credits or deductions. But there is little conceptual difference between billions spent to directly subsidize particular programs and billions spent indirectly in tax preferences. Either way, it's money the government does not have, and that adds to the deficit."

The Senators who opposed ending the oil subsidies received 5 times more in campaign cash from the oil industry during their time in Congress than the Senators who favored ending the subsidies (on average, $370,664 versus $72,145), according to an Oil Change International and Public Campaign Action Fund analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

Who’s benefiting from the US oil industry's taxpayer subsidies? Certainly the oil companies' CEOs. Last year the CEO of Occidental Petroleum, the 4th largest US oil and gas company based on market capitalization, was near the top of a list of the median pay for top executives at 200 major companies. Occidental's CEO took home $76.1 million, up 142% from the year before, despite a majority "no" vote by shareholders on his pay package.

Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson earned $21.7 million in 2009-- 12 times more than the $1.8 million earned last year by the CEO of the Norwegian energy company Statoil, which is 2/3 owned by the Norwegian government. Tillerson’s pay was "more than double the combined $8.3 million that Statoil paid its nine top executives in 2010." [The comparisons are based on the most recent pay figures available.]

The average American pays a higher income tax rate than ExxonMobil, which is the most profitable Fortune 500 company for the 8th year in a row.

This week Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) gave the Republican weekly radio address. CNN reported that she called for changes to the country's energy policies that exactly reflect the demands of Big Oil. In fact, she sounded exactly like one of the paid ads they run-- which in effect, she was. Not that you'd know that from CNN or any other media coverage.

"We have vast resources under our land and we need to safely explore and develop them to have a stable energy supply for our consumers and our economy,” she said. ... [I]n her address, Hutchison chastised the Obama administration for “seeking to impose more regulations and taxes on oil and gas companies.”

“This is placing our own valuable resources out of reach and stifling job creation-- their proposals will actually increase pain at the pump,” Hutchison said.

The Texas Republican also singled out the six-month offshore drilling moratorium imposed by the Obama administration following the April 20 explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, lamenting that the drilling freeze continues to negatively affect the energy production industry.

“While companies were forced to stop operations, they had to continue paying to lease lands they were prohibited from using. Leaseholders sat idle for a year, losing valuable exploration time through no fault of their own,” Hutchison said.

Obviously Hutchison didn't mention that she's received $2,141,025 in legalistic direct bribes from Big Oil-- more than any other sitting senator except John McCain, who pulled ahead of her only because of his presidential run that Big Oil was so aggressively behind. I can understand why Hutchison would want to mislead her listeners by not mentioning it. But what about CNN? Wouldn't you think that just maybe they would find it relevant to their reporting? Or are they worried all those annoying, misleading ads will be pulled?

This morning Russ Baker published a piece at WhoWhatWhy explaining the background-- sickeningly-- of why the Senate couldn’t even pass a measure that timidly taxes Big Oil.

As I discovered in researching the background of the rise of the Bush family for my book Family of Secrets, so much of the unknown origins of political intrigue—from the strenuous lobbying effort to get the freshman Congressman George H.W. Bush appointed to the House Ways and Means Committee as a freshman, to John F. Kennedy’s political problems, to even Watergate-- could be ascribed in part to the oil industry’s urgency for protecting tax breaks. Sometimes, the tax breaks have been the most important part of the industry’s profits. The most recent, defeated bill, sought to get rid of a number of loopholes and advantages.

One of the key provisions in the bill concerned the oil depletion allowance. The allowance permits firms to recover their “capital investment-- the costs of discovering, purchasing, and developing the well-- over the period the well produces income.” The senate bill did not propose getting rid of this highly attractive allowance, only modifying it so that the five biggest companies could not use a formula called “percentage depletion,” in which “total deductions could (and often do) exceed the taxpayer’s capital investment.”

So-- get this: all the Senate Dems were doing in the area of the depletion allowance was trying to keep just the five biggest companies from deducting more than their actual capital investment. They weren’t trying to get rid of this long-controversial depletion allowance, and weren’t trying to prevent any other oil companies from deducting more than they spent. Amazing! And this tepid measure still didn’t pass. (Of course, there were other provisions, including trying to block oil companies from sneakily reclassifying royalties paid abroad as “taxes” so they could deduct them domestically-- a tax connivance on par with the depletion allowance in its one-sided benefit for the industry and harm to the greater good.)

And the sickening part I promised? Flip over to Russ' blog to read the sordid history of Big Oil in contemporary American politics... if you have the guts to hear the truth.

An Important Question-- Maybe An Existential Question-- For America: Can Issa Be Trusted?

I thought I'd follow up on yesterday's tweet (above) with a more detailed explanation. As we pointed out, it's worth being very suspicious about who exactly Rep. Darrell Issa is and how he-- a low grade car thief, gun-totin' thug and arsonist-for-profit-- wound up as the richest man in Congress. Right-wingers have been warning that Issa is a kind of Manchurian candidate for Arab terrorism. That may be a stretch... but that he's a danger to American democracy isn't, not by a long shot. This weekend Eric Lipton in the NY Times pointed to a development that shows why giving actual power to a deranged, irresponsible sociopath like Issa-- whether he's a conscious agent for our destruction or not-- is antithetical to a thriving democracy. Issa just took over the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and he's demanding "the names of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, business executives, journalists and others who have requested copies of federal government documents in recent years."

[H]is extraordinary request worries some civil libertarians. It “just seems sort of creepy that one person in the government could track who is looking into what and what kinds of questions they are asking,” said David Cuillier, a University of Arizona journalism professor and chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee at the Society of Professional Journalists. “It is an easy way to target people who he might think are up to no good.”

One of America's most intrepid and well-respected investigative reporters, Russ Baker, asks if Issa's mug is the new face of Big Brother. He calls Issa's demand "an ominous development that is likely to pass almost unnoticed" and warns that "it’s hard to accept that at face value, without at least considering the corporate interests that backed the GOP takeover in November, and Issa’s ascension to this powerful position."

The very short Times article doesn’t get into the extent to which Issa and his allies are indebted to corporations that have a strong interest in finding out about inquiries that could affect their interests. Like reporters nosing around into the military-industrial complex, or trying to find out about stalled prosecutions of egregious polluters.

If, indeed, Issa is just super concerned about openness in government, that’s fine. But it’s not clear that a member of Congress-- and a highly politicized, partisan one at that-- ought to be the one to receive such sensitive information.

Can Issa be trusted? Well, consider this New York Magazine summary of a New Yorker dig into Issa:

The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza has taken a long look into the often shady past of California congressman Darrell Issa, the House Oversight Committee chairman who intends to unleash a flurry of investigations on the Obama administration. Issa has, “among other things, been indicted for stealing a car, arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, and accused by former associates of burning down a building.” “Everyone has a past,” Issa tells Lizza. This is true. But not everyone has fired an employee by “plac[ing] a box on the table, and open[ing] it to reveal a gun.”

Is Baker being paranoid to think Issa could possibly put the interests of GOP corporate donors ahead of a value like, say, democracy? Absolutely not and the best source of all is... Darrell Issa himself. Last year, asked what he’d do if GOP took the House, he told 400 applauding party members and Republican donors during a dinner at the chocolate-themed Hershey Lodge, "That will make all the difference in the world. I won't use it to have corporate America live in fear that we're going to subpoena everything. I will use it to get the very information that today the White House is either shredding or not producing." And I'd guess Paul Krugman doesn't trust Issa much either. He ran this tangentially-related post this morning in the NY Times: Inquiry And Intimidation. I think he's talking about Issa here; the McCarthy line is a dead giveaway.

I haven’t seen this reported elsewhere-- but Republicans in Congress are planning to investigate the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, looking for evidence of corruption and wrongdoing.

It’s absurd, of course: a tiny commission with a small budget didn’t offer much scope for corruption.

But what this is really about is intimidation-- in much the same way that investigations of climate scientists are about intimidation.

What the GOP wants is to make people afraid even to do research that produces conclusions they don’t like. And they don’t stop at trying to undermine the research-- they go after the researchers personally. The goal is to create an environment in which analysts and academics are afraid to look into things like financial-industry malfeasance or climate change, for fear that some subcommittee will either dig up or invent dirt about their private lives.

McCarthy had nothing on these guys.

"Nous Ne Sommes Plus Vos Macaques!"-- Anti-Racist Words That Moved The U.S. Power Structure To Murder A Nation's Founding Father

All little boys grow up under the impression that their country is the best in the whole wide world-- except in the U.S. where we grow up not even knowing that there is a whole wide world out there aside from the land of the free and the home of the brave. So when did I start recognizing that my own country was every bit as bad-- if not worse-- than every other political cesspool through time and space? My atheist dad helped by explaining how religion was an effective system that kept working people from killing the rich crooks who oppressed them. And my socialist grandfather helped by explaining why the U.S. was taking the wrong side in Cuba right around the time I was crossing over into teenagedom. But the ultimate moment of realization came for me just about 50 years ago on the nose.

I wasn't even 12 when I first heard of Patrice Lumumba, then in the midst of agitating for independence for the Congo from the brutal and inhuman captivity of the Belgian royal family. On June 23, 1960 Lumumba was elected Prime Minister on the newly independent country but on Independence Day celebrations (June 30) the Belgian fascists tried one last humiliation by leaving the new Prime Minister off the program. Instead, King Baudouin tried to talk about how wonderful his country's savage and violent regime in the Congo had been. Lumumba took the stage and gave a more reality-based speech that horrified Western conservatives, as reality-based speeches often do:

For this independence of the Congo, even as it is celebrated today with Belgium, a friendly country with whom we deal as equal to equal, no Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that it was by fighting that it has been won, a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic fight, a fight in which we were spared neither privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and our blood. We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force... We are no longer your monkeys!

The Belgians helped provoke a secessionist movement-- and civil war-- in Katanga, the mineral rich province they intended to hold onto for as long as they could. On September 15 the CIA backed a coup d’état by Joseph Mobutu, who promptly arrested Lumumba. Mobutu turned him over to the Katanga right-wing rebels where he was murdered by a firing squad commanded by Belgian army officers. Belgians later tried to destroy the evidence of the murder in sulfuric acid but some kept teeth and bullets from the body as souvenirs.

A few weeks ago, we looked at how the Nazi-oriented Dulles Brothers and their Republican Party allies illegally smuggled thousands of Eastern European Nazi war criminals into the U.S. for political purposes. But that isn't all the Dulles Brothers were up to after World War II.

Declassified U.S. cables from the year preceding the assassination bristle with paranoia about a Lumumba-led Soviet Communist takeover. The CIA was hatching plots against Cuban leader Fidel Castro and was accused of fomenting coups and planning assassinations worldwide. And Lumumba clearly scared the daylights out of the Eisenhower administration. "In high quarters here, it is the clear-cut conclusion that if [Lumumba] continues to hold high office, the inevitable result will [have] disastrous consequences... for the interests of the free world generally," CIA Director Allen Dulles wrote. "Consequently, we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective."

Even out of office, Lumumba remained under the microscope of Western spy services. His ties to Moscow frightened Washington. His fierce anti-colonialism unnerved Brussels. Belgium finally got its chance at Lumumba after Congolese authorities arrested him in December 1960. Belgian officials engineered his transfer to the breakaway province of Katanga, which was under Belgian control. De Witte reveals a telegram from Belgium's African-affairs minister, Harold d'Aspremont Lynden, essentially ordering that Lumumba be sent to Katanga. Anyone who knew the place knew that was a death sentence.

Firing squad. When Lumumba arrived in Katanga, on January 17, accompanied by several Belgians, he was bleeding from a severe beating. Later that evening, Lumumba was killed by a firing squad commanded by a Belgian officer. A week earlier, he had written to his wife, "I prefer to die with my head unbowed, my faith unshakable, and with profound trust in the destiny of my country." Lumumba was 35.

The next step was to destroy the evidence. Four days later, Belgian Police Commissioner Gerard Soete and his brother cut up the body with a hacksaw and dissolved it in sulfuric acid. In an interview on Belgian television last year, Soete displayed a bullet and two teeth he claimed to have saved from Lumumba's body.

What remains unclear is the extent, if any, of Washington's involvement in the final plot. A Belgian official who helped engineer Lumumba's transfer to Katanga told de Witte that he kept CIA station chief Lawrence Devlin fully informed of the plan. "The Americans were informed of the transfer because they actively discussed this thing for weeks," says de Witte. But Devlin, now retired, denies any previous knowledge of the transfer.

Either way, Lumumba's death served its purpose: It bolstered the shaky regime of a formerly obscure colonel named Joseph Mobutu. During his three-decade rule, Mobutu would run his country, bursting with natural resources, into the depths of poverty. It took a civil war to oust him, and Congo has seen little peace since. Today, at least five countries are fighting in Congo and Lumumba's son, an opposition leader, spent several weeks in a Kinshasa jail cell on politically motivated charges.

At the time Lumumba was a hero to progressive young Americans and the CIA's involvement in his deposition and murder was a wake-up call for many, myself included.

Last week my friend Melody reminded me that January 17 was the 50th anniversary of the cold-blooded murder of Patrice Lumumba by the CIA and their Belgian and Katangan stooges. Allen Dulles claims Eisenhower ordered him to have Lumumba killed. Melody wrote that "the events really were important in shaping the fate of the Congo, and Africa in general [and are] a reminder that the US has had it's hand in all sorts of dirty deeds. Although the U.S. media has always chosen to ignore what the CIA did in the Congo and the anniversary was resolutely ignored in this country (NY Times excepted this time), she suggested that DWT readers take a look at the story last week in the Guardian:

Between 1961 and 1973, six African independence leaders were assassinated by their ex-colonial rulers, including Patrice Lumumba of Congo, who was killed 50 years ago today.

Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of newly independent Congo, was the second of five leaders of independence movements in African countries to be assassinated in the 1960s by their former colonial masters, or their agents.

A sixth, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, was ousted in a western-backed coup in 1966, and a seventh, Amilcar Cabral, leader of the west African liberation movement against Portugal of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde or PAIGC) in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, was assassinated in 1973.

Lumumba's death in 1961 followed on from that of the opposition leader of Cameroon, Felix Moumie, poisoned in 1960. Sylvanus Olympio, leader of Togo was killed in 1963. Mehdi Ben Barka, leader of the Moroccan opposition movement was kidnapped in France in 1965 and his body never found. Eduardo Mondlane, leader of Mozambique's Frelimo, fighting for independence from the Portuguese, died from a parcel bomb in 1969.

The loss 50 years ago of this group of leaders, who all knew each other, and had a common political project based on national dignity, crippled each of their countries, and the African continent. The effects are still evident today.

Ben Barka and Cabral were revolutionary theoreticians-- as significant as Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara. Their influence reverberated far beyond their own continent. At the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, organised by Ben Barka before his death, Cuban leader Fidel Castro's closing speech referred to "one of the most lucid and brilliant leaders in Africa, Comrade Amílcar Cabral, who instilled in us tremendous confidence in the future and the success of his struggle for liberation."

The Third World Movement, challenging the economic and political world dominance of the colonial powers, the US, and the neocolonial leaders favoured by the west, would have two short decades of ambition and optimism despite the long shadow of its great leaders' deaths.

Today, it is impossible to touch down at the (far from modernised) airport of Lubumbashi in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo-- in 1961 known as Elizabethville, in Congo (then renamed Zaire)-- without a shiver of recollection of the haunting photograph taken of Lumumba there shortly before his assassination, and after beatings, torture and a long, long flight in custody across the vast country which had so loved him. This particular failure of the United Nations to protect one man and his two colleagues was every bit as significant as that in Srebrenica in 1995, when 8,000 men and boys were killed.

Lumumba's own words, written to his wife just four months after the exhilaration of independence day in the capital Kinshasa are a reminder of who he was and why he meant so much to so many people then, and still does today.

"Dead, living, free, or in prison on the orders of the colonialists, it is not I who counts. It is the Congo, it is our people for whom independence has been transformed into a cage where we are regarded from the outside… History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets… a history of glory and dignity."

Lumumba would not have been surprised that his successor, Joseph Mobuto was the US strategic ally in Africa for 30 years. Congo was too rich, too big, and too important for the west to lose control as they would have had Lumumba lived.

How ironic that Mobuto was succeeded by Laurent Desire Kabila, whose 10th anniversary of assassination, by his own guards, falls just one day before Lumumba's?

UPDATE: Russ Baker Wants To Make Sure We're Aware Of The Bush Connection

Baker points out that the CIA was a sponsor of Mobutu's and that George H.W. Bush later welcomed the savage kleptocrat and tyrant to America as "one of our most valued friends." Three days after Lumumba was murdered, JFK was sworn in as President of the United States and Baker's nook, Family of Secrets makes a hard to deny case for the involvement of the CIA, Dulles and... George H.W. Bush. From Baker's WhoWhatWhy:

In my book, Family of Secrets, I cite evidence that the elder Bush was deeply involved in C.I.A covert operations during the time in which both assassinations took place. I document his close ties to mining interests comparable to the ones Lumumba himself had angered-- by declaring, as Hochschild recounts, that it was not enough for the Congolese to gain political independence from colonial rule, but that “Africans had to also benefit from the great wealth in their soil.”

More troubling are the many inconsistencies and gaps that I discovered in accounts by Bush and others concerning his activities on and around the day of the assassination, all of which are extensively documented and footnoted. These include:

•    Bush’s noted inability to recall where he was on November 22, 1963;

•    his longtime friendship with George de Mohrenschildt, a mentor and confidant to Lee Harvey Oswald;

•    a declassified FBI memo identifying Bush as a C.I.A officer working with Cuban exiles at the time of the assassination;

•    FBI records documenting a call Bush himself placed to the Bureau on Nov. 22 from a location near Dallas, offering to identify a possible triggerman in the assassination-- a man Bush knew far better than he revealed at the time, and who he knew could not have been the triggerman

•     Barbara Bush’s revelation in her 1994 book, Barbara Bush: A Memoir, that the Bushes were having lunch the week of November 22 with Alfred Ulmer, an old friend who, research shows, was one of the C.I.A.’s experts in deposing leaders.

•    Bush’s close relationship with the military intelligence official whose unit and unit members played an astonishing array of roles on November 22, from forcing their way into the lead car of Kennedy’s motorcade to providing the interpreter who framed Marina Oswald’s statements in a way that implicated her husband.