I’m in for Randi Rhodes all this week, and have some great interviews lined up. And, of course, I left lots of time for your phone calls to 866-87-RANDI (866-877-2634).
I truly believe laughter is necessary for our collective sanity, so we’ll have a bit of humor in the first hour with my friend John Fugelsang. For listeners lucky enough to be in the NYC area, John is joining the cast of Laughing Liberally NYC, off Broadway, this week.
Every Monday morning on my regular show, Crooks and Liars’ Nicole Belle joins me to recap the Sunday talking head shows in a segment we call “Fools on the Hill.” Today she’ll join me on Randi’s show. This is what Nicole brings us today:
I refer often to our DC-based journalists as living “inside the Beltway Bubble.” That bubble insulates and isolates them from the concerns of the rest of America and create a reality that bears little resemblance to what you and I understand reality to be.
For example, on the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, Brit Hume moans that if the health care law had incorporated some Republican ideas, they’d actually vote for it. Huh? The Affordable Care Act *was* a Republican program. That’s why they call it RomneyCare in Massachusetts. The final program is essentially the same as the Republican response to the Clintons’ attempt to get Universal Health Care in 1992/3. I also find the claim that the Republicans would vote for anything absolutely laughable.
And then there’s Tweety, who is always good for some Bubble cluelessness. He asks his panel whether Haley Barbour can overcome his racist past with the voters. His panel overwhelmingly thinks he can, which is both sad and telling, since it will be precisely their enabling that will allow Barbour to do so. Take careful note of future coverage of Barbour by Howard Fineman, now Political Editor of HuffPo, based on his boisterous defense here.
Newt Gingrich’s sense of reality is something rather magnificent to behold. He has held as many positions on Libya as he has had wives and frankly, listening to him now, the only thing I’m really sure is that whatever the President chooses, Newt is going to say the opposite is the right move.
Speaking of Libya, Ted Koppel (who was the subject of a rather shallow (but too lengthy for radio) interview with Howie Kurtz, another person interminably caught within the Bubble) asked the question for which I’ve yet to get a satisfactory answer : Why Libya, why now? It’s especially harder to justify it when you’ve got Secretary of Defense Robert Gates acknowledges that Libya is not a vital interest for the US.
And if we have time, for a little comedic relief on a Monday, my favorite moment bar none on Sunday was listening to Chris Wallace whine and whine that Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates declined to appear on Fox News Sunday, despite appearances on three other Sunday shows. The punch line? Immediately following Wallace’s complaint, he went to John McCain and BFF Joe Lieberman for their 72,309th appearance on a Sunday show.
In the third hour, I’ll be joined by Chris Larson, the Wisconsin state senate minority leader who led his colleagues to Illinois to try to keep their legislature from having a quorum in order to prevent a vote on the union buster bill.
Sorry, forgot that link to Glenn Greenwald’s brilliant talk:
http://podcast.lannan.org/2011/03/13/glenn-greenwald-presentation-8-march-2011-video/
And again, to any others like denverdancer — catch a clue for once in your life, Obama ain’t NO liberal, dude, otherwise he WOULD NOT have a 100% neocon administration.
Geez, how much more simpler and obvious can it be!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Re: Libya-BP Connection & Greenwalk link
First, I am sorry, but that Flugalsang is a complete lunatic and whackadoodle — anyone who would support the reelection of Obama’s 100% neocon administration is insane — and no democrat! (Admittedly, the last real dem in the White House was John F. Kennedy!)
The primary reason for the Libyan intervention — and you are correct — is the oil: BP is the primary corporate beneficiary and oil revenues have been falling there since that wonderful rebellion began.
It is important to understand that BP, and ExxonMobil, are the two successor companies to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and it’s no coincidence that BP occupies the original Standard Oil building in Ohio.
Starting around the ’30s, the Rockefeller family began sheltering their fortune, and hiding corporate ownership, in a network of foundations and trusts; those foundations now number over 35 and fuction as tax-free holding companies.
The Rockefeller family has substantial holdings in BP, ExxonMobil, JPMorgan Chase (the Rockefeller-Morgan bank), Citigroup, Morgan Stanley (the Morgan-Rockefeller bank) , Baxter International (pharmaceuticals), and a number of pharmaceutical, precious metals and mining companies, etc., etc., far more than their reputed several billion net worth, and at least three times the official richest person in America.
With regard to the structure of American foundations, it is crucial to realize that it was the Rockefellers who designated Peter G. Peterson to head the commission back in the ’70s to “reform” foundations (essentially, to make them even more efficient as tax-free holding companies). Peterson also served on a number of other important commissions — including Clinton’s commission to “end welfare as we know it.”
David Rockefeller would later involved in Peter G. Peterson’s appoints to head the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Federal Reserve Bank (the control element in the Federal Reserve System), as well as bankrolling Peterson’s Blackstone Group, for many years the number one private equity firm (i.e., private bank and LBO outfit) in existence.
The consistent and constant perfidy of the Rockefeller family, led today by David Rockefeller, cannot be understated; whether anti-union mass murder earlier in the 20th century, to the collusion of Rockefeller’s Chase Bank in France during World War II — when the replaced the French bank manager with a Swiss neutral to stay in business, and promptly handing over all the depositors’ account records; specifically the Jewish-French depostor records to the Nazis, and their support of German (and American) eugenics programs (along with Carnegie and Harriman).
One evily beyond evil they supported was Josef Mengele, who was allowed to get away by Rockefeller’s boy, McCloy.
Mengele would later surface, first in Argentina, then in Chile, where he had a medical clinic of some sort and where he was supposed to have died. Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about Mengele’s clinic, but it is interesting to note that David Rockefeller vacations every year in Chile!
It is also worth noting the following: that Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle have long functioned as David Rockefeller’s assistants; that Rockefeller-mentored Peter G. Peterson has long mentored Timothy Geithner, Obama’s secretary of the treasury and it was Rockefeller’s bank which profited mightily back when Jimmy Carter sanctioned Iran’s money on account back in the late ’70s, and it was Rockefeller’s bank, JPMorgan Chase, which oversaw the oil account for the Iraqi reconstruction funds when $8.7 billion went missing (Timothy Geithner’s best-friend-forever, Daniel Zelikow, just happened to be JPMorgan’s managing director in charge of that contract).
I’ll leave it here, but could easily continue for another hundred pages of nefarious connections and thievery!
Lastly, have you seen Glenn Greenwald’s recent talk in Santa Fe? It is truly brilliant and worth a viewing.
Take care,
(Sidebar: And denverdancer’s comments were so abjectly clueless, I sincerely hope they aren’t really an American citizen as I constantly see and hear perpetually ignorant American consumers who don’t know the first thing about the existing reality today, i.e., the unemployment stats are so completely fudged it doesn’t matter what actions anyone takes; the US Chamber of Commerce is so entrenched, as are individual city CoCs around the country, which labor industriously to offshore as many American jobs as remains, and sadly, I’ll bet denverdancer isn’t even aware of the perpetual member on the United Nations of the International Chamber of Commerce — truly, most American consumers today — not citizens, as they don’t qualify — still are clueless about the causes of the economic meltdown, and why they continue on, dangerously unabated.
At least in the aftermath of the Great Crash of 1929, many Americans both knew the actual causes as well as who the real enemy was, something I’ve yet to note in America!)
James, Seattle
Liberals often get frustrated with Obama–he does not stand up for the liberal or more radical solution. So, the frequent response is a bit of anger. Actually, I think the better reaction is to get busy. Obama needs a mobilized, organized movement on the left. He cannot, in the current media environment, very well take positions that do not get much play in the media given its rightward tilt. So, the left needs to take creative community action. Everywhere. A few ideas:
1. Everyone not working full time should register with his or her local unemployment office as a worker looking for full time work. Result: this would spike the unemployment
data and give people concrete action to take. The right is now saying that those receiving unemployment are indolent and not aggressive. More lies. The fact is, my view, the number is those wanting full time work is way north of the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates.
2. Picket local offices of the Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber as a national organization is hostile to workers, to the unemployed and most particularly to health care reform. Result: A focus on the Chamber will back pressure local businesses to retard the right-wind tilt of the Chamber. Local busiensses do NOT want to be seen as the enemy.
3. Afghanistan and Pakistan: We cannot in good conscience abandon women to Islamic fundamentalists. The veil is a good starting point. Women veil themselves form many reasons, not the least of which is that some men, usually the fundamentalist and uneducated men on the streets, molest women by bumping into them, groping them, soliciting them or berating them. The was highlighted even during the revolution in Cairo. Of course, in the most backward or right-wing nations, they are at risk physically. Men need to speak up against the mistreatment of women everywhere. They need to call out the aggressive sexual behavior of men against women. The puritanical approach will never work in the long run. Even Laura Bush went to Afghanistan and called for the fair treatment of women and for their educaiton. Supporting women moves the discussion away from whether we should be in Iraq or Afghanistan and toward the problem of the Middle East in general: it is a locale of an exhuberant male testosterone created by cultural traditions and tribal customs. It really has nothing to do with Islam at all. Taking on the women’s issues will lead to taking on the route of the problem in the Middle East: it is unrelivably tribal. There can be no effective central authority until the tribes are broken. It is not different from the history of England. Here we might find arguments, but that is my view on the region.
This list is short–many more good ideas are in circulation and need acting on. We need to get organized and get moving. Politicians cannot appear to take positions much ahead of the populations that they serve–left or right. We need to point in the direction that the President needs to take. So. . . .don’t get angry; don’t get even; get ahead of the issue, whatever it is. Ma obilizing movement to run a candidate in primaries against Obama is much less effective than forcing his hand, the hand of every politician, with an aroused citizenry left of the positions that he is currently forced to adopt. Maybe the best would be a mass march on Washington or everybody that wants work. It would be hard to argue with millions of people on the lawn in front of Congress who say that what they want is that they want to work, but there are no jobs.