Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #953 Saint Bernard: Rebel Without A Clue

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This broad­cast was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: Against the back­ground of Trumpian polit­i­cal volatil­i­ty made man­i­fest in Syr­ia, we look at St. Bernard [Sanders] and the impli­ca­tions of actions he has tak­en.

This pro­gram is pre­sent­ed in the con­text of the “shock to the sys­tem” that Steve Ban­non and oth­er Trump advis­ers see as nec­es­sary and immi­nent.

After detail­ing more about the Hun­gar­i­an fas­cist man­i­fes­ta­tions of Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s point man for counter-jihadism,  the pro­gram turns to the pos­si­ble use of the Sanders cam­paign as a vehi­cle for the GOP to infil­trate and/or maneu­ver jihadist ele­ments into promi­nence in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.

In numer­ous pro­grams, we have not­ed the sup­pres­sion of Oper­a­tion Green Quest, which tar­get­ed indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions linked to the Al-Taqwa/­Mus­lim Broth­er­hood milieu on the one hand, and to the Karl Rove/Grover Norquist-gen­er­at­ed Islam­ic Free Mar­ket Insti­tute on the oth­er. Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and Gra­ham E. Fuller, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood’s and jihadis’ most sig­nif­i­cant backer in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, fac­tor into this analy­sis:

Rove financed Sanders cam­paign through the Amer­i­can Cross­roads super-PAC. ” . . . Amer­i­can Crossroads—founded by for­mer Bush advis­er Karl Rove—and sev­er­al oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive-backed super PACs have spent the last month inten­tion­al­ly fuel­ing the Bern, but their zeal has more to do with an effort to weak­en Hillary Clin­ton, whom they still see as the like­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee and hard­er to defeat in the gen­er­al elec­tion. . . . Cross­roads is one of sev­er­al groups that has released ads that have been aimed at brand­ing Sanders as the only true pro­gres­sive in the race—a strat­e­gy the Ver­mont senator’s cam­paign also embraces. . . .”

  1. Gra­ham E. Fuller says that he was ” . . . . gal­va­nized at watch­ing the spec­ta­cle of Bernie Sanders pro­claim­ing issues in his cam­paign that had been vir­tu­al­ly off lim­its for polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion for decades: gap between rich and poor, rapa­cious inter­na­tion­al trade deals, a fair wage, free uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion, the call for US bal­ance (gasp!) in han­dling the Arab-Israeli, issue, etc. The great thing about Bernie — even if he prob­a­bly won’t get nom­i­nat­ed — is that he has pushed hawk­ish, friend-of-Wall-Street Hillary to the left. . . .”
  2. Fuller’s actu­al views are the oppo­site of Sanders pol­i­cy points: “. . . Fuller comes from that fac­tion of CIA Cold War­riors who believed (and still appar­ently believe) that fun­da­men­tal­ist Islam, even in its rad­i­cal jiha­di form, does not pose a threat to the West, for the sim­ple rea­son that fun­da­men­tal­ist Islam is con­ser­v­a­tive, against social jus­tice, against social­ism and redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth, and in favor of hier­ar­chi­cal socio-eco­nom­ic struc­tures. Social­ism is the com­mon ene­my to both cap­i­tal­ist Amer­ica and to Wah­habi Islam, accord­ing to Fuller. . . ‘There is no main­stream Islam­ic organization...with rad­i­cal social views,’ he wrote. Clas­si­cal Islam­ic the­ory envis­ages the role of the state as lim­ited to facil­i­tat­ing the well-being of mar­kets and mer­chants rather than con­trol­ling them. Islamists have always pow­er­fully object­ed to social­ism and communism....Islam has nev­er had prob­lems with the idea that wealth is uneven­ly dis­trib­uted.’ . . . .”
  3. Faisal Gill, a for­mer oper­a­tions direc­tor for Norquist’s Islam­ic Free Mar­ket Insti­tute and offi­cial with George W. Bush’s Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty is now the head of Ver­mon­t’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, a post he has used to join Bernie Sanders and Tul­si Gab­bard to pro­mote Kei­th Elli­son as head of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee. Elli­son is now the deputy chair of the DNC, the post for­mer­ly held by Gab­bard. ” . . . . Yet some offi­cials remain con­cerned that Gill appar­ent­ly enjoys the polit­i­cal pro­tec­tion of Norquist, the archi­tect of the 1994 Repub­li­can elec­tion sweep that brought Geor­gia Repub­li­can Newt Gin­grich to pow­er as House speak­er. Norquist speaks of ‘crush­ing’ his polit­i­cal oppo­nents and dis­miss­es those who don’t agree with his anti-tax, anti-gov­ern­ment agen­da as ‘Bol­she­viks.’ His pow­er derives from a for­mi­da­ble coali­tion of evan­gel­i­cal, busi­ness and oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive groups that he con­trols to push favored GOP issues, as well as from his close rela­tion­ship with White House polit­i­cal chief Karl Rove. . . .”

The pro­gram also notes a num­ber of oth­er things about the Sanders cam­paign:

  1. He was pro­mot­ing open pri­maries for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, which would enable Karl Rove and the Repub­li­cans to choose the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee.
  2. Sanders was a Pres­i­den­tial elec­tor for the Social­ist Work­ers Party, embrac­ing a stance which would have made him ter­mi­nal­ly vul­ner­a­ble had he got­ten the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tion. ” . . . . In 1980, Sanders served as an elec­tor for the Social­ist Work­ers Par­ty, which was found­ed on the prin­ci­ples of Leon Trot­sky. Accord­ing to the New York Times, that par­ty called for abol­ish­ing the mil­i­tary bud­get. It also called for “sol­i­dar­i­ty” with the rev­o­lu­tion­ary regimes in Iran, Nicaragua, Grena­da, and Cuba; this was in the mid­dle of the Iran­ian hostage cri­sis. . . .”
  3. The SWP was a vehi­cle for infil­tra­tion and the acqui­si­tion of a “left cov­er” by Nazis and spooks, includ­ing Lee Har­vey Oswald.
  4. The Third Reich saw Leon Trot­sky’s method­ol­o­gy as wor­thy of emu­la­tion. (The SWP is a Trot­skyite polit­i­cal par­ty.) ” . . . . ‘You should read his books,’ he [Hitler] barked. ‘We can learn a lot from him.’ . . .”
  5. To what extent have the GOP and the over­lap­ping Under­ground Reich focused on Sanders (with­out his knowl­edge) as a vehi­cle for infil­trat­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty? In FTR #‘s 941, 942 and 945, we not­ed the numer­ous fas­cist con­nec­tions of Tul­si Gab­bard, one of the dri­ving forces behind Sanders’ ascent. To what extent has the Trot­skyite tem­plate served as a vehi­cle for Gab­bard, and, per­haps, Elli­son to infil­trate the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty?

1a. Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka, Trump’s nation­al secu­ri­ty advi­sor for counter-jihadism, spoke pos­i­tive­ly on TV back in 2007 about the move by the far-right Job­bik par­ty to start its own “Hun­gar­i­an Guard” para­mil­i­tary mili­tia based on the WWII “Arrow Cross” Hun­gar­i­an Nazis.

“EXCLUSIVE: Con­tro­ver­sial Trump Aide Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka Backed Vio­lent Anti-Semit­ic Mili­tia” by Lili Bay­er; For­ward; 4/3/2017.

As a Hun­gar­i­an polit­i­cal leader in 2007, Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka, Pres­i­dent Trump’s chief counter-ter­ror­ism advis­er, pub­licly sup­port­ed a vio­lent racist and anti-Semit­ic para­mil­i­tary mili­tia that was lat­er banned as a threat to minori­ties by mul­ti­ple court rul­ings.

In a video obtained by the For­ward of an August 2007 tele­vi­sion appear­ance by Gor­ka, the future White House senior aide explic­it­ly affirms his party’s and his sup­port for the black-vest­ed Hun­gar­i­an Guard (Mag­yar Gár­da) — a group lat­er con­demned by the Euro­pean Court of Human Rights for attempt­ing to pro­mote an “essen­tial­ly racist” legal order.

Asked direct­ly on the TV inter­view pro­gram if he sup­ports the move by Job­bik, a far-right anti-Semit­ic par­ty, to estab­lish the mili­tia, Gor­ka, appear­ing as a leader of his own new­ly formed par­ty, replies imme­di­ate­ly, “That is so.” The Guard, Gor­ka explains, is a response to “a big soci­etal need.”

Hungary’s offi­cial mil­i­tary, he stressed, “is sick, and total­ly reflects the state of Hun­gar­i­an soci­ety…. This coun­try can­not defend itself.”

As he speaks dur­ing the pro­gram, a ban­ner head­line read­ing “UDK Sup­ports The Hun­gar­i­an Guard” runs across the screen. The Hun­gar­i­an acronym is a ref­er­ence to Gorka’s own, par­ty, known in Eng­lish as the New Demo­c­ra­t­ic Coali­tion.

Both the inter­view­er and Gor­ka refer to the move to estab­lish the para­mil­i­tary out­fit as “the Fidesz-Job­bik ini­tia­tive,” reflect­ing Gorka’s con­tention that Fidesz, a larg­er right-wing par­ty, was qui­et­ly back­ing Job­bik in its effort.

Gorka’s affir­ma­tion of sup­port for the far-right mili­tia echoed state­ments his par­ty post­ed on its web­site that same month, back­ing the Guard’s estab­lish­ment and refer­ring to it as “the Fidesz-Job­bik ini­tia­tive,” an appar­ent attempt by Gor­ka and his par­ty to some­what dis­tance them­selves from the con­tro­ver­sial mili­tia at the same time. In one such state­ment, a par­ty fac­tion indi­cat­ed its aware­ness of the Guard lead­ers’ extrem­ism, declar­ing blunt­ly, “We sup­port the estab­lish­ment of the Hun­gar­i­an Guard despite the per­son­al­i­ties involved.”Anoth­er August state­ment spoke more gener­i­cal­ly of “a need for guards” in dis­cussing the new militia’s estab­lish­ment.

The fol­low­ing month, anoth­er par­ty state­ment attacked crit­ics of the Guard, alleg­ing that they opposed the mili­tia to please U.S. Rep. Tom Lan­tos, a Hun­gar­i­an-born Holo­caust sur­vivor who had pro­posed leg­is­la­tion to bar Guard mem­bers from enter­ing the Unit­ed States. Lan­tos, a Cal­i­for­nia Demo­c­rat, cit­ed the Guard’s affin­i­ty for “the fas­cist Arrow Cross regime” that ruled Hun­gary at the end of World War II, when it par­tic­i­pat­ed in the depor­ta­tion of Hun­gar­i­an Jews into Nazi hands and killed thou­sands more.

On the TV pre­sen­ta­tion, when his inter­view­er notes the ways in which the Guard “echoes Octo­ber 1944, or some­time around then” through its uni­forms, arms train­ing and street march­es, Gor­ka strong­ly defends his party’s sup­port for the Guard, though not with­out some ambiva­lence.

“I’m not say­ing it’s a good solu­tion, but nei­ther shoot­ing train­ing nor using the Arpad flag [is] uncon­sti­tu­tion­al,” he replied. The Arpad red-and-white flag, a nation­al­ist sym­bol embla­zoned on the Guard’s uni­form, was also used by the Arrow Cross dur­ing World War II.

As for the Guard’s black vests, which the inter­view­er cit­ed as rem­i­nis­cent of the Arrow Cross’s black shirts, Gor­ka said: “When the police shows up to deal with bank rob­bers in black uni­forms, who talks about a fas­cist police in Hun­gary? Nobody! Now, it is pos­si­ble that when they put togeth­er all these things, the effect in the end will be very bad, but it’s not my prob­lem. It would be Fidesz and Jobbik’s prob­lem.”

Dur­ing the 11-minute inter­view, which aired on Hungary’s Echo TV, Gor­ka dis­missed con­cerns expressed by the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, and in par­tic­u­lar fears that the Guard pro­voked among Hun­gar­i­an Holo­caust sur­vivors. As is often the case in Hun­gary, the inter­view­er refers to Holo­caust sur­vivors oblique­ly, as “peo­ple who expe­ri­enced 1944” — when hun­dreds of thou­sands of Hun­gar­i­an Jews were deport­ed to Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camps — or as those who expe­ri­enced “the Arrow Cross regime.”

Many such peo­ple, the inter­view­er not­ed, “are say­ing now is the time to leave Hun­gary. So in effect [the estab­lish­ment of the Hun­gar­i­an Guard] is facil­i­tat­ing the flar­ing-up of anti-Semi­tism?”

“This is a tool,” Gor­ka replied. “This type of accu­sa­tion is the very use­ful tool of a cer­tain polit­i­cal class.”

The Guard was well known for its mem­bers’ anti-Semi­tism. Mem­bers often attend­ed memo­r­i­al cer­e­monies for World War II-era Hun­gar­i­an fas­cists. In a 2008 speech, István Dósa, who served in the Guard as a high-rank­ing cap­tain, referred to Jews as “Zion­ist rats” and as “locusts” while also dis­cussing “Zion­ist-Bol­she­vik geno­cide” and call­ing Hun­gar­i­an Jews “nation-destroy­ers.”

In his cur­rent posi­tion as deputy assis­tant to the pres­i­dent, Gor­ka, who immi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States and became an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen in 2012, serves as Trump’s chief con­sul­tant on counter-ter­ror­ism issues, and in par­tic­u­lar on fight­ing jihadists. He has char­ac­ter­ized the Unit­ed States in this effort as a coun­try “at war” and, in a recent inter­view, reaf­firmed Trump’s call dur­ing his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign for sur­veil­lance of Amer­i­can Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ties. Nei­ther Gor­ka nor the White House respond­ed to emailed requests from the For­ward for a response to the infor­ma­tion the video reveals about Gorka’s sup­port for the Guard.

Crit­ics have ques­tioned Gorka’s exper­tise in the field of ter­ror­ism, which was the sub­ject of his doc­tor­al the­sis at Budapest’s Corv­i­nus Uni­ver­si­ty, where he received his doc­tor­ate. Some have cit­ed seri­ous flaws in his the­sis and not­ed his fail­ure to pub­lish any schol­ar­ship on the issue in peer-reviewed jour­nals. But his August 2007 TV inter­view also rais­es ques­tions about his under­stand­ing, at least at that point in time, of basic secu­ri­ty struc­tures and legal real­i­ties in key coun­tries that are fight­ing ter­ror­ism.

Asked dur­ing the inter­view if it was “nor­mal” for a polit­i­cal par­ty in “devel­oped democ­ra­cies” to estab­lish “in real­i­ty, a para­mil­i­tary group,” Gor­ka respond­ed: “Well it depends on which coun­try. If we look at the Swiss or Israeli exam­ple, then it’s com­plete­ly nat­ur­al…. Even in Amer­i­ca, where the largest and wealth­i­est mil­i­tary exists, there are such pro­grams where peo­ple can access weapons almost for free if they attend an orga­nized shoot­ing train­ing and always belong to an orga­ni­za­tion.”

Gor­ka dis­miss­es the interviewer’s objec­tion that the units in these coun­tries — mil­i­tary reserve units in Israel and Switzer­land, or, in the Unit­ed States, Nation­al Guard forces — “are in effect under the military’s con­trol.”

“It is clear after the dis­tur­bances in Hun­gary last year [that] a need has arisen” to which Job­bik is respond­ing, Gor­ka says.

Job­bik, which announced its estab­lish­ment of the Hun­gar­i­an Guard in June 2007, has a long record of anti-Semit­ic and anti-Roma posi­tions and state­ments. One of the Guard’s found­ing mem­bers was Gábor Vona, Jobbik’s leader. The organization’s declared aim was to defend “eth­nic Hun­gar­i­ans,” since, its founders argued, Hun­gary lacked oth­er means of “phys­i­cal, men­tal or spir­i­tu­al self-defense.”

The Guard was for­mal­ly banned in 2009, with the country’s high­est court rul­ing that its anti-Roma march­es vio­lat­ed the rights of the Hun­gar­i­an Roma com­mu­ni­ty. In 2013, two of its mem­bers were found guilty in a string of racial­ly moti­vat­ed mur­ders of Hun­gar­i­an Roma, includ­ing the killing of a 5‑year-old, com­mit­ted in 2008 and 2009.

In 2013, the Euro­pean Court of Human Rights ruled that Hungary’s unusu­al blan­ket ban on the group was legal. “The movement’s activ­i­ties and man­i­fes­ta­tions were based on the racial con­flict between Hun­gar­i­an major­i­ty and Roma minor­i­ty,” the court ruled.

Gorka’s inter­view was aired about three weeks before the Guard’s first offi­cial swear­ing-in cer­e­mo­ny. But at the time, many observers and Jew­ish groups were already protest­ing against the Guard and call­ing for a ban.

In an August 2007 open let­ter, World Jew­ish Con­gress Pres­i­dent Ronald S. Laud­er and Euro­pean Jew­ish Con­gress Pres­i­dent Moshe Kan­tor warned then-Hun­gar­i­an Prime Min­is­ter Fer­enc Gyurcsány that the “impend­ing cre­ation of an armed guard, under the false guise of ‘sport­ing and shoot­ing clubs,’ with uni­forms resem­bling those worn by fas­cists in World War II” was a dan­ger to democ­ra­cy and should be stopped.

Gorka’s par­ty, which he had launched only recent­ly, was com­pet­ing intense­ly with Job­bik and Vik­tor Orbán’s Fidesz par­ty at the time. While con­firm­ing his sup­port for the Guard, its uni­forms and its para­mil­i­tary nature, when asked whether the Guard would, indeed, resolve the prob­lems he out­lined in Hungary’s mil­i­tary and soci­ety, Gor­ka remarked: “Ah, it’s not that sure. With some kind of pre­sentable orga­ni­za­tion, or sev­er­al orga­ni­za­tions, it could be pos­si­ble.”

Fol­low­ing the inter­view, the New Demo­c­ra­t­ic Coali­tion post­ed a link on its own par­ty web­site, under the head­ing “UDK Sup­ports The Hun­gar­i­an Guard: Sebestyen [Sebas­t­ian] Gor­ka on EchoTV.” But near­ly two weeks lat­er, the par­ty com­plained in a post on its web­site that his com­ments had been “mis­in­ter­pret­ed.”

Dur­ing the TV exchange, Gorka’s inter­view­er allud­ed to a pop­u­lar con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry in Hun­gary regard­ing Israeli secu­ri­ty com­pa­nies main­tain­ing an armed pres­ence on Hun­gar­i­an ter­ri­to­ry to back the gov­ern­ment. “As you all men­tion in the analy­sis you wrote as well, Israeli-owned secu­ri­ty com­pa­nies which also do gov­ern­ment tasks have to be liq­ui­dat­ed,” the inter­view­er told Gor­ka.

The coalition’s leader did not con­tra­dict his interviewer’s account.

The tele­vised inter­view was not the only time Gor­ka defend­ed the Guard. A month lat­er, in an inter­view with a Hun­gar­i­an online por­tal, Gor­ka said that when it comes to the Guard, “it’s not worth talk­ing about ban­ning or a nation­al secu­ri­ty risk.”

Gor­ka left Hun­gary short­ly there­after, as his efforts to build a career in pol­i­tics there failed. In 2008, after a report sur­faced in a Ger­man-lan­guage pub­li­ca­tion about his sup­port for para­mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tions, he wrote a let­ter deny­ing that he had ever sup­port­ed the Guard.

There is no evi­dence that Gor­ka him­self has ever engaged in overt­ly anti-Semit­ic acts or par­tic­i­pat­ed in any of the Guard’s activ­i­ties. But Gor­ka and some of his polit­i­cal sup­port­ers have argued that he has fought anti-Semi­tism through­out his career. The new­ly avail­able video footage sig­nals that Gor­ka not only failed to fight anti-Semi­tism, but also sup­port­ed an open­ly intol­er­ant para­mil­i­tary group and pub­licly reject­ed the Jew­ish community’s con­cerns about their own safe­ty and the safe­ty of oth­er minori­ties due to the group’s found­ing. . . .

 

. . . . Gorka’s par­ty, which he had launched only recent­ly, was com­pet­ing intense­ly with Job­bik and Vik­tor Orbán’s Fidesz par­ty at the time. While con­firm­ing his sup­port for the Guard, its uni­forms and its para­mil­i­tary nature, when asked whether the Guard would, indeed, resolve the prob­lems he out­lined in Hungary’s mil­i­tary and soci­ety, Gor­ka remarked: “Ah, it’s not that sure. With some kind of pre­sentable orga­ni­za­tion, or sev­er­al orga­ni­za­tions, it could be pos­si­ble.”

Fol­low­ing the inter­view, the New Demo­c­ra­t­ic Coali­tion post­ed a link on its own par­ty web­site, under the head­ing “UDK Sup­ports The Hun­gar­i­an Guard: Sebestyen [Sebas­t­ian] Gor­ka on EchoTV.” But near­ly two weeks lat­er, the par­ty com­plained in a post on its web­site that his com­ments had been “mis­in­ter­pret­ed.”

Dur­ing the TV exchange, Gorka’s inter­view­er allud­ed to a pop­u­lar con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry in Hun­gary regard­ing Israeli secu­ri­ty com­pa­nies main­tain­ing an armed pres­ence on Hun­gar­i­an ter­ri­to­ry to back the gov­ern­ment. “As you all men­tion in the analy­sis you wrote as well, Israeli-owned secu­ri­ty com­pa­nies which also do gov­ern­ment tasks have to be liq­ui­dat­ed,” the inter­view­er told Gor­ka.

The coalition’s leader did not con­tra­dict his interviewer’s account.

The tele­vised inter­view was not the only time Gor­ka defend­ed the Guard. A month lat­er, in an inter­view with a Hun­gar­i­an online por­tal, Gor­ka said that when it comes to the Guard, “it’s not worth talk­ing about ban­ning or a nation­al secu­ri­ty risk.”

Gor­ka left Hun­gary short­ly there­after, as his efforts to build a career in pol­i­tics there failed. In 2008, after a report sur­faced in a Ger­man-lan­guage pub­li­ca­tion about his sup­port for para­mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tions, he wrote a let­ter deny­ing that he had ever sup­port­ed the Guard.

1b. Sanders was a Pres­i­den­tial elec­tor for the Trot­skyite Social­ist Work­ers Par­ty in 1980. In addi­tion to being an indi­ca­tion of Sanders being polit­i­cal­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly imma­ture, we won­der if sin­is­ter ele­ments may have focused on him, tab­bing him for even­tu­al manip­u­la­tion. (We do not feel that Sanders him­self is will­ful­ly sinister–we feel he is imma­ture, unin­tel­li­gent and vul­ner­a­ble to manip­u­la­tion.)

“Bernie Sanders’ Rad­i­cal Past” by Michelle Gold­berg; Slate; 2/24/2016.

. . . . There’s more. In 1980, Sanders served as an elec­tor for the Social­ist Work­ers Par­ty, which was found­ed on the prin­ci­ples of Leon Trot­sky. Accord­ing to the New York Times, that par­ty called for abol­ish­ing the mil­i­tary bud­get. It also called for “sol­i­dar­i­ty” with the rev­o­lu­tion­ary regimes in Iran, Nicaragua, Grena­da, and Cuba; this was in the mid­dle of the Iran­ian hostage cri­sis. . . .

1c. The SWP was used as a vehi­cle for giv­ing a left cov­er to spooks and Nazis, includ­ing Lee Har­vey Oswald.

The Mil­i­tant;” Wikipedia.com

. . . . Cur­rent pub­li­ca­tion[edit]

The Social­ist Work­ers Par­ty was found­ed on Decem­ber 31, 1937, by Trot­sky­ists fol­low­ing the expul­sion of the “Social­ist Appeal fac­tion” from the Social­ist Par­ty of Amer­i­ca. The SWP’s news­pa­per con­tin­ued to be known as Social­ist Appeal until 1941 when it was renamed The Mil­i­tant. This pub­li­ca­tion has con­tin­ued with­out inter­rup­tion into the decade of the 2010s.

In the sum­mer of 2005, The Mil­i­tant became a bilin­gual news­pa­per, pub­lished in both Eng­lish and Span­ish (El Mil­i­tante), and with lead arti­cles and edi­to­ri­als appear­ing in both lan­guages. A French edi­tion was inau­gu­rat­ed in 2012 named Le Mil­i­tant.

The Mil­i­tant is not offi­cial­ly owned or con­trolled by the SWP. To pro­tect the par­ty and the paper, The Mil­i­tant is owned by a pri­vate group[cita­tion need­ed], although the endorse­ment the paper gives to the SWP is clear.

Con­tro­ver­sy[edit]

The Mil­i­tant became noto­ri­ous after a pho­to sur­faced show­ing Lee Har­vey Oswald, the sniper who assas­si­nat­ed pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy, hold­ing a copy of the pub­li­ca­tion along with a rifle. . . .

2. Many key Nazis saw the Trot­skyite polit­i­cal par­a­digm as a tem­plate for their own oper­a­tions. We won­der if Sanders is being manip­u­lat­ed by ele­ments look­ing to under­mine the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.

The Nazis Go Under­ground by Curt Riess; Dou­ble­day, Doran and Co., Inc. [HC]; Copy­right 1944 by Curt Riess; p. 11.

. . . . Strange­ly enough, among the under­ground move­ments for which the Nazis, or at least a few of them, have always had a par­tic­u­lar inter­est was the Com­mu­nist under­ground of the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and the Trot­sky under­ground in the late nine­teen twen­ties and ear­ly thir­ties. On one occa­sion, dur­ing the late twen­ties, Hitler him­self asked a few of his lieu­tenants what they thought of Leon Trot­sky. Since Trot­sky was a Com­mu­nist and a Jew on top of that, these lieu­tenants pre­tend­ed to feel dis­gust and hor­ror at the mere men­tion of his name. The Führer, how­ev­er, did not agree with them. “You should read his books, “ he barked. “We can learn a lot from him. “

At least one of the Nazis besides Hitler did read Trotsky’s books and became very famil­iar with his ideas and meth­ods of orga­ni­za­tion. That man, of course, was Himm­ler. He also knew many things about Trotsky’s meth­ods, because Rudolf Hess and sev­er­al oth­er men of the Hess orga­ni­za­tion were at dif­fer­ent times in close touch with the Russ­ian Com­mu­nist leader. The devel­op­ment of the Trot­sky move­ment may have giv­en Himm­ler more than one idea for the under­ground move­ment he is now work­ing out. Trot­sky was deprived of any direct pow­er after his exclu­sion from the Russ­ian Gov­ern­ment. But even then he still retained con­sid­er­able indi­rect pow­er, because he did not lose con­tact with his adher­ents, many of whom kept their key posi­tions with­in the appa­ra­tus of the state. If, as fre­quent­ly hap­pened, one of these men was found out to be a con­spir­a­tor against the Sovi­et Russ­ian Gov­ern­ment, all he had to do was to say that he had been wrong, to repent, and in most cas­es he would be rein­stalled and could con­tin­ue exer­cis­ing his sub­ver­sive influ­ence. It was thus that Trot­sky, or, rather, Trotsky’s move­ment, con­tin­ued to hold a great num­ber of posi­tions par­ty, with­in the army, with­in the secret police, and, above all, with­in the diplo­mat­ic ser­vice. It was at least the­o­ret­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble that the day would come when all these men would take over their depart­ments in which they were work­ing. And thus, indeed, an under­ground move­ment could have tak­en over the whole gov­ern­ment and the run­ning of the coun­try with­out any great dif­fi­cul­ty. . . .

3a.  None oth­er than Gra­ham E. Fuller, the “ex” CIA offi­cer who is (arguably) the biggest advo­cate for the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty describes him­self as being “gal­va­nized” by Sanders. The val­ues espoused by Sanders are the oppo­site of those advo­cat­ed by Fuller. WHY is Fuller so sup­port­ive of Sanders?

  • None oth­er than Gra­ham E. Fuller, who was CIA sta­tion chief in Kab­ul, helped start the first Afghan war, was some­thing of a God­fa­ther for al-Qae­da and fig­ures in the inves­ti­ga­tion into the Boston Marathon bomb­ing, is pulling for “Boinie,” as well as tout­ing Don­ald Trump as a desir­able can­di­date. “. . . . Like many oth­ers, I have been gal­va­nized at watch­ing the spec­ta­cle of Bernie Sanders pro­claim­ing issues in his cam­paign that had been vir­tu­al­ly off lim­its for polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion for decades: gap between rich and poor, rapa­cious inter­na­tion­al trade deals, a fair wage, free uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion, the call for US bal­ance (gasp!) in han­dling the Arab-Israeli, issue, etc. The great thing about Bernie — even if he prob­a­bly won’t get nom­i­nat­ed — is that he has pushed hawk­ish, friend-of-Wall-Street Hillary to the left. She has as much acknowl­edged that. That will be Bernie’s great­est lega­cy. I would have hoped that the issues Sanders has raised can nev­er be shoved back into the polit­i­cal tooth­paste tube again. . . . .”
  • Might ele­ments of the CIA be pulling for “Boinie?” Com­pare Gra­ham E. Fuller “feel­ing the Bern” with his advo­ca­cy for the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood: “. . . Fuller comes from that fac­tion of CIA Cold War­riors who believed (and still appar­ently believe) that fun­da­men­tal­ist Islam, even in its rad­i­cal jiha­di form, does not pose a threat to the West, for the sim­ple rea­son that fun­da­men­tal­ist Islam is con­ser­v­a­tive, against social jus­tice, against social­ism and redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth, and in favor of hier­ar­chi­cal socio-eco­nom­ic struc­tures. Social­ism is the com­mon ene­my to both cap­i­tal­ist Amer­ica and to Wah­habi Islam, accord­ing to Fuller. . . ‘There is no main­stream Islam­ic organization...with rad­i­cal social views,’ he wrote. Clas­si­cal Islam­ic the­ory envis­ages the role of the state as lim­ited to facil­i­tat­ing the well-being of mar­kets and mer­chants rather than con­trol­ling them. Islamists have always pow­er­fully object­ed to social­ism and communism....Islam has nev­er had prob­lems with the idea that wealth is uneven­ly dis­trib­uted.’ . . . .”

3b. To give us some depth on Fuller’s views and how frankly fishy his sup­port for Sanders is, we review the Broth­er­hood’s advo­ca­cy of cor­po­rate eco­nom­ics.

Ibn Khal­dun is high­ly regard­ed by the Broth­er­hood and that atti­tude has led the cor­po­rate busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty to sup­port the Broth­er­hood. Note that no less an author­i­ty than the World Bank views Ibn Khaldun—revered by the Brotherhood—as “the first advo­cate of pri­va­ti­za­tion”!

“Islam in Office” by Stephen Glain; Newsweek; 7/3–10/2006.

. . . . The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood hails 14th cen­tu­ry philoso­pher Ibn Khal­dun as its eco­nom­ic guide. Antic­i­pat­ing sup­ply-side eco­nom­ics, Khal­dun argued that cut­ting tax­es rais­es pro­duc­tion and tax rev­enues, and that state con­trol should be lim­it­ed to pro­vid­ing water, fire and free graz­ing land, the util­i­ties of the ancient world. The World Bank has called Ibn Khal­dun the first advo­cate of pri­va­ti­za­tion. [Empha­sis added.] His found­ing influ­ence is a sign of mod­er­a­tion. If Islamists in pow­er ever do clash with the West, it won’t be over com­merce.

3c. We note that Karl Rove was help­ing to finance the cam­paign of Bernie Sanders.

. . . . Amer­i­can Crossroads—founded by for­mer Bush advis­er Karl Rove—and sev­er­al oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive-backed super PACs have spent the last month inten­tion­al­ly fuel­ing the Bern, but their zeal has more to do with an effort to weak­en Hillary Clin­ton, whom they still see as the like­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee and hard­er to defeat in the gen­er­al elec­tion.

In the wake of Clinton’s close Neva­da win, Cross­roads claimed cred­it for dri­ving her num­bers down in favor of Sanders.

“Amer­i­can Cross­roads and Bernie Sanders helped Neva­da cau­cus-goers see right through Hillary Clinton’s man­u­fac­tured zeal on immi­gra­tion reform after spew­ing vir­u­lent Trump-like rhetoric—and that one-two punch shaved Clinton’s 50-point lead a year ago to a slim, sin­gle dig­it win,” Steven Law, Cross­roads CEO and pres­i­dent, said in a state­ment.

Cross­roads is one of sev­er­al groups that has released ads that have been aimed at brand­ing Sanders as the only true pro­gres­sive in the race—a strat­e­gy the Ver­mont senator’s cam­paign also embraces.

“If it helps push the nee­dle so that she los­es a state, and she comes out a weak­ened can­di­date, then fan­tas­tic,” said Ian Pri­or, com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor for Cross­roads.

On Mon­day, Future 45, a super PAC report­ed­ly backed by hedge fund bil­lion­aire Paul Singer, launched the lat­est in its own series of ads that seem to defend Sanders. . . .

. . . . Still, the Clin­ton cam­paign has cried foul, not­ing that Sanders’s sup­port­ers have been echo­ing Repub­li­can attacks on Clin­ton and that he cer­tain­ly has not been reject­ing the ads. . . .

5a. Sanders was an advo­cate of mak­ing all Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­maries “open”–permitting Repub­li­cans to help choose the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date.

“Mak­ing Democ­rats’ Pri­maries More Open Could Be Hard­er Than You Think” by Scott Detrow; Nation­al Pub­lic Radio; 5/21/2016.

As the Democ­rats’ pri­ma­ry process begins to wind down, the big ques­tion on a lot of peo­ple’s mind is, what does Bernie Sanders want?

The Ver­mont sen­a­tor now has a lot of clout with­in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, and is in the posi­tion to demand some changes.

One thing Sanders has voiced con­cerns about is how Democ­rats vote for pres­i­dent: He’s made it clear he does­n’t like closed pri­maries, where only Democ­rats can vote.

Nei­ther do Sanders sup­port­ers. When Sanders men­tioned dur­ing a pri­ma­ry night ral­ly this week that Ken­tucky is “a closed pri­ma­ry, some­thing I am not all that enthu­si­as­tic about, where inde­pen­dents are not allowed to vote,” the Cal­i­for­nia crowd roared to life with boos.

So, per­haps Sanders will make a push the par­ty to embrace open pri­maries at the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion this sum­mer.

There are elec­toral stakes here. All year, Sanders has done bet­ter in con­tests where inde­pen­dents, or even reg­is­tered Repub­li­cans, were allowed to par­tic­i­pate.

Of course, has also done well in cau­cus­es, which are very closed and very lim­it­ed, com­pared to statewide pri­maries. . . .

5b. More about Sanders’ advo­ca­cy of open pri­maries for the DNC:

“Open Pri­maries Are a Ter­ri­ble Idea, Espe­cial­ly Know­ing the GOP is Mov­ing Toward Closed Pri­maries” by Bob Cesca; The Dai­ly Ban­ter; 5/25/2016.

Basic log­ic dic­tates that mem­bers of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty should be exclu­sive­ly tasked with choos­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty nom­i­nee for pres­i­dent...

. . . .Mean­while, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty is under pres­sure from Bernie Sanders sup­port­ers to elim­i­nate closed pri­maries, thus allow­ing any reg­is­tered vot­er to chime in, regard­less of par­ty affil­i­a­tion. The idea is that too many inde­pen­dent vot­ers who want­ed to sup­port Bernie Sanders were unable to do so in 29 states because they weren’t reg­is­tered Democ­rats. But, see, you can’t have your Bernie cake and eat it, too. You can’t shun the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty then expect to have a voice in who the Democ­rats nom­i­nate. It’s up to the Dems to decide, not inde­pen­dent vot­ers who refuse to join a par­ty, or Repub­li­cans, for that mat­ter, who have a vest­ed inter­est in see­ing Democ­rats defeat­ed.

Frankly, there should­n’t be any open pri­maries in the first place. Basic log­ic dic­tates that mem­bers of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty should be exclu­sive­ly tasked with choos­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty nom­i­nee for pres­i­dent, as well as con­gres­sion­al offices and so forth.

Sec­ond, it’s a huge mis­take for the Democ­rats to uni­lat­er­al­ly make a change like this since it’d leave the process com­plete­ly and lop­sid­ed­ly vul­ner­a­ble to Repub­li­can tam­per­ing, not unlike Rush Lim­baugh­’s “Oper­a­tion Chaos” in 2008 where­by Repub­li­cans, freed up after John McCain secured his nom­i­na­tion, were urged to cross over and vote for Hillary Clin­ton in order to stir up the con­tentious­ness of that race. Open pri­maries allowed it to hap­pen.

Nev­er­the­less, no one was dis­en­fran­chised by the exis­tence of 29 closed pri­ma­ry states. (Vot­er ID and local incom­pe­tence, on the oth­er hand, dis­en­fran­chised many.) Inde­pen­dents who man­aged to over­come an unfor­giv­ably glitchy reg­is­tra­tion process were allowed to vote in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­maries, even in the closed states, by plan­ning ahead and reg­is­ter­ing as Democ­rats. Fur­ther­more, there’s always the oppor­tu­ni­ty to help decide the nom­i­nee from one of the third par­ties. Weird­ly, how­ev­er, it always seems like the third par­ties nom­i­nate the same peo­ple over and over (Gary John­son and Jill Stein, for instance). It appears as if the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, and even the GOP, has a much more stren­u­ous­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic (small “d”) process than the Lib­er­tar­i­an or Green par­ties, each of which mag­i­cal­ly nom­i­nate the same two can­di­dates every year with very lit­tle input from vot­ers. Fun­ny how that works.

Any­way.

And final­ly, elim­i­nat­ing closed Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­maries is most­ly about Bernie Sanders fail­ing to win the nom­i­na­tion, and not out of an ide­al­is­tic demo­c­ra­t­ic need for inclu­sive­ness. This appears to be a post-mortem reac­tion after fail­ing to secure the nom­i­na­tion, hav­ing real­ized too late that closed pri­maries would hurt Bernie’s chances. Con­verse­ly, Bernie sup­port­ers would like­ly sup­port closed pri­maries if such a rule had helped, rather than hurt Bernie’s del­e­gate count. Clear­ly, there’s a bit of sour grapes here, and no deci­sions about elim­i­nat­ing closed pri­maries should be made while ten­sions are still high and feel­ings are still crushed. The con­se­quences would only serve to harm Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates and Demo­c­ra­t­ic whip counts, espe­cial­ly if the GOP choos­es to go with closed pri­maries across-the-board.

So, hope­ful­ly this par­tic­u­lar move­ment will die a quick death before any dam­age is done.

6a. In FTR #941, we high­light­ed the push by Bernie Sanders and his promi­nent backer Tul­si Gab­bard to have Kei­th Elli­son, an African-Amer­i­can Mus­lim to be head of the DNC. He was not elect­ed head of the DNC, but is now deputy chair of the DNC, the posi­tion for­mer­ly held by Gab­bard.

We fleshed out Gab­bard’s inco­her­ent pol­i­tics and fas­cist links in FTR #‘s 942 and 945 as well.

Elli­son is net­worked with the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, and the Nation of Islam as well.

With Elli­son now hold­ing down the #2 posi­tion in the DNC, the Democ­rats may be poised to be cast as “the Ter­ror­ist Par­ty” in the event of a future inci­dent or inci­dents.

“The Elli­son Decep­tion” by Jared Israel [edit­ed by Saman­tha Criscione]; The Emper­or’s New Clothes; 1/30/2017.

 . . . . If you are like most peo­ple, you prob­a­bly don’t know much about Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, but after you read what I have post­ed below, you will see that describ­ing it as “rad­i­cal black Mus­lims” triv­i­al­izes the hor­ror of an appa­ra­tus of fas­cists – pho­to­graph­ic neg­a­tive images of David Duke and com­pa­ny – thus sup­port­ing the impres­sion, which David Corn and oth­ers wish to con­vey, that the Elli­son con­tro­ver­sy is noth­ing more than the polit­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed harass­ment of a pro­gres­sive politi­cian, exploit­ing some minor indis­cre­tions, long, long ago. . . .

. . . . As Pio­neer Press, the sec­ond high­est cir­cu­la­tion news­pa­per in the Min­neapo­lis-St. Paul area, report­ed in a June 21, 1998 arti­cle on Ellison’s cam­paign for the office of State rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Elli­son had been the Min­neso­ta ‘coor­di­na­tor’ [7] of the so-called Mil­lion Man March.  Giv­en that Farrakhan’s march was a Nation of Islam project, it fol­lows that the Min­neso­ta coor­di­na­tor was either a mem­ber of the Nation of Islam or so close to the NOI as to be indis­tin­guish­able from a mem­ber.  Indeed, the June 21, 1998 arti­cle states that at that time – that is, three years after Farrakhan’s march – Elli­son was a mem­ber of the Nation of Islam:“Ellison has been active in the com­mu­ni­ty, but not with­in the estab­lished DFL par­ty [the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty in Min­neso­ta]. A mem­ber of the Nation of Islam, Elli­son was the coor­di­na­tor of the Min­neso­ta par­tic­i­pants in the Mil­lion Man March and the sub­se­quent com­mu­ni­ty group that formed.” [See foot­note 7]

In the next arti­cle in this series, I will present hard evi­dence that Elli­son was already a mem­ber in 1995, when he was orga­niz­ing for Farrakhan’s march.

(Dur­ing the cur­rent debate over Ellison’s Nation of Islam ties, nobody else has men­tioned the June 21, 1998 Pio­neer Press arti­cle, let alone post­ed it on the Inter­net.  You can read it in Appen­dix I, where we have copied it for Fair Use – very fair, since it con­tains infor­ma­tion vital for assess­ing a key politi­cian.  Let’s get this infor­ma­tion out to as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble!) . . . .

6b. We note that anoth­er of Kei­th Ellison’s sup­port­ers to head the DNC was Faisal Gill, a Grover Norquist pro­tege whom we cov­ered in FTR #467. Gill was the for­mer oper­a­tions direc­tor of Norquist’s Islam­ic Free Mar­ket Insti­tute.

“Ver­mont Elects First Mus­lim Par­ty Chair, Sends ‘Strong Mes­sage’ to Trump” by Alex Seitz-Wald; NBC News ; 3/6/2017.

“To have a Mus­lim and immi­grant to be the state par­ty chair sends a real­ly strong mes­sage to Trump and his type of pol­i­tics that this is not where the coun­try is at,” he told NBC News.

The White House released a new exec­u­tive order Mon­day restrict­ing trav­el from six Mus­lim-major­i­ty coun­tries after a fed­er­al court halt­ed an ear­li­er ver­sion. Trump says the move is nec­es­sary for secu­ri­ty, but Gill and oth­er crit­ics say it’s mere­ly an attempt to legal­ly dis­crim­i­nate against Mus­lims.

Gill is an out­sider in ultra-white, ultra-lib­er­al Ver­mont in more ways than one. In a state that is near­ly 95 per­cent white, a Pak­istani-born for­mer Repub­li­can from Vir­ginia stands out.

“Us and Wyoming keep going back and forth for least diverse,” Gill quipped.

After emi­grat­ing to the U.S. and going to law school, Gill served five years in the Navy’s JAG corps before enter­ing Repub­li­can pol­i­tics in Vir­ginia. That led to a post in the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty under George W. Bush. . . .

6c. In FTR #467, we dis­cussed a Fifth Col­umn that Mr. Emory believes facil­i­tat­ed the 9/11 attacks. One of the prin­ci­pal ele­ments in the devel­op­ment of this Fifth Col­umn is GOP king­mak­er Grover Norquist’s active recruit­ment of Islamists to the Repub­li­can cause. Many of Norquist’s Islamist recruits had ter­ror­ist ties. Among the Norquist recruits is Faisal Gill, whose sen­si­tive posi­tion with the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty places him in pos­ses­sion of top-secret infor­ma­tion about the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of America’s sea­ports, avi­a­tion facil­i­ties and nuclear pow­er plants. Gill, in turn, is linked to Abdu­rah­man Alam­ou­di, part of the Al Taqwa milieu impli­cat­ed in the financ­ing of Al Qae­da. Gill’s appoint­ment is all the more alarm­ing in light of his appar­ent lack of intel­li­gence qual­i­fi­ca­tions.

Now, Gill is in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty and was tout­ing Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and Nation of Islam fel­low trav­el­er Kei­th Elli­son to head the DNC.

Recap­ping a por­tion of FTR #467, the pro­gram high­lights the appoint­ment of Faisal Gill—a Norquist protégé—to a sen­si­tive intel­li­gence posi­tion with the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty. Note that Gill, in turn, is close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Abdu­rah­man Alam­ou­di, an inti­mate of the Al Taqwa milieu.

It is fright­en­ing to note the infor­ma­tion to which Gill’s appoint­ment has giv­en him access.

Doc­u­ments seized from Sami Al-Ari­an indi­cate that the Fifth Col­umn about which Mr. Emory has hypoth­e­sized in con­nec­tion with 9/11 was indeed con­tem­plat­ed by peo­ple tar­get­ed by the Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids of 3/20/2002. (Alam­ou­di and Al-Ari­an are part of the milieu tar­get­ed in those raids. For more about Al-Ari­an, see—among oth­er pro­grams—FTR #s 462, 464, 538.)

As is the case with Elli­son, can the Democ­rats now be cast as “the Ter­ror­ist Par­ty”? Will Faisal Gill be in a posi­tion to com­mu­ni­cate use­ful intel­li­gence for a future ter­ror­ist inci­dent?

“How Secure is the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty?” by Mary Jaco­by; Salon.com; 6/22/2004. 

The pol­i­cy direc­tor for the Depart­ment of Home­land Security’s intel­li­gence divi­sion was briefly removed from his job in March when the Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion dis­cov­ered he had failed to dis­close his asso­ci­a­tion with Abdu­rah­man Alam­ou­di, a jailed Amer­i­can Mus­lim leader. Alam­ou­di was indict­ed last year on ter­ror­ism-relat­ed mon­ey-laun­der­ing charges and now claims to have been part of a plot to assas­si­nate Sau­di Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdul­lah.

After a flur­ry of inter­a­gency meet­ings, how­ev­er, Home­land Secu­ri­ty decid­ed to leave the pol­i­cy direc­tor, Faisal Gill, in place, accord­ing to two gov­ern­ment offi­cials with knowl­edge of the Alam­ou­di inves­ti­ga­tion. A White House polit­i­cal appointee with close ties to Repub­li­can pow­er bro­ker Grover Norquist and no appar­ent back­ground in intel­li­gence, Gill has access to top-secret infor­ma­tion on the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of America’s sea­ports, avi­a­tion facil­i­ties and nuclear pow­er plants to ter­ror­ist attacks. 

The FBI raised con­cerns with Home­land Secu­ri­ty offi­cials in March after dis­cov­er­ing that Gill had failed to list on secu­ri­ty clear­ance doc­u­ments his work in 2001 with the Amer­i­can Mus­lim coun­cil, the offi­cials said. The advo­ca­cy group, which was con­trolled by Alam­ou­di, has been under scruti­ny in an inves­ti­ga­tion of ter­ror­ism financ­ing. The lead agent in that inves­ti­ga­tion works for an arm of Home­land Secu­ri­ty. Gill’s omis­sion of the infor­ma­tion on his ‘Stan­dard Form 86’ nation­al secu­ri­ty ques­tion­naire is a poten­tial felony vio­la­tion. There is no evi­dence, how­ev­er, that Gill has tak­en any action to com­pro­mise nation­al secu­ri­ty.”

A Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty spokes­woman would not com­ment on Gill or when he was hired, except to say that a ‘thor­ough inves­ti­ga­tion’ by the department’s Office of Secu­ri­ty found no basis to deny the 32-year-old lawyer a secu­ri­ty clear­ance. Among gill’s polit­i­cal patrons is Grover Norquist, head of Amer­i­cans for Tax Reform and a key ally of the White House. Gill list­ed Norquist as a ref­er­ence on employ­ment doc­u­ments, the gov­ern­ment offi­cials said. Gill also worked in 2001 for a Mus­lim polit­i­cal out­reach orga­ni­za­tion that Norquist co-found­ed with a for­mer top aide to Alam­ou­di. [That is the Islam­ic Institute—D.E.] Norquist did not respond to phone calls, a fax and an e‑mail seek­ing com­ment. . . .

. . . . Mark Zaid, a lawyer in pri­vate prac­tice in Wash­ing­ton who spe­cial­izes in secu­ri­ty clear­ance cas­es, said it would be unusu­al for an agency to over­look omis­sions on a secu­ri­ty clear­ance appli­ca­tion. ‘Most agen­cies get real­ly upset and sus­pi­cious and act antag­o­nis­ti­cal­ly toward appli­cants if they find they with­held infor­ma­tion,’ he said, adding that a minor vio­la­tion might be for­giv­en. But he said if the issue con­cerned fail­ing to list employ­ment at ‘a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion or one that’s being inves­ti­gat­ed, all sorts of red flags would go up.’ Gill’s place­ment in the sen­si­tive intel­li­gence job has alarmed gov­ern­ment offi­cials because it fits the oper­at­ing the­o­ry of pros­e­cu­tors and inves­ti­ga­tors that Alam­ou­di was part of a long-term scheme by Islam­ic extrem­ists to place friend­ly, if per­haps unwit­ting, asso­ciates in key U.S. gov­ern­ment posi­tions.

A doc­u­ment seized in a 1995 raid of a close Alam­ou­di friend and polit­i­cal ally, for­mer Uni­ver­si­ty of South Flori­da pro­fes­sor Sami Al-Ari­an, out­lined a plan to ‘infil­trate the sen­si­tive intel­li­gence agen­cies or the embassies in order to col­lect infor­ma­tion and build close rela­tion­ships with the peo­ple in charge of these estab­lish­ments.’ The unsigned doc­u­ment, which author­i­ties believe was authored by Al-Ari­an in part because it was found among his papers, added: ‘We are in the cen­ter which leads the con­spir­a­cy against our Islam­ic world . . . Our pres­ence in North Amer­i­ca gives us a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to mon­i­tor, explore and fol­low up.’ It instruct­ed mem­bers of the ‘cen­ter,’ thought to refer to an Islam­ic think tank that Al-Ari­an found­ed, to ‘col­lect infor­ma­tion from those rel­a­tives and friends who work in sen­si­tive posi­tions in gov­ern­ment.’

Al-Ari­an is in a Flori­da prison await­ing tri­al next year on charges he was the North Amer­i­can leader of the Pales­tin­ian Islam­ic Jihad, a group that has tar­get­ed Israel with sui­cide bomb­ings. He denies all the charges. But inves­ti­ga­tors believe Al-Ari­an and Alam­ou­di were part of a broad­er polit­i­cal Islam­ic move­ment in the Unit­ed States that con­nects sym­pa­thiz­ers of Hamas, Islam­ic Jihad and al-Qai­da.

‘This move­ment, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, is the umbrel­la under which ter­ror groups have forged ‘a sig­nif­i­cant degree of coop­er­a­tion and coor­di­na­tion with­in our bor­ders,’ for­mer White House coun­tert­er­ror­ism chief Richard Clarke told the Sen­ate Bank­ing Com­mit­tee last year. ‘The com­mon link here is the extrem­ist Mus­lim Brotherhood—all of these orga­ni­za­tions are descen­dants of the mem­ber­ship and ide­ol­o­gy of the Mus­lim Broth­ers.’ Alam­ou­di, for exam­ple, has spo­ken open­ly of his admi­ra­tion for the anti-Israeli Hamas, which evolved from a branch of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. Al-Arian’s cir­cle of asso­ciates, mean­while, over­laps with mem­bers of the Brook­lyn, N.Y., pre­cur­sor to al-Qai­da that was respon­si­ble for the 1993 World Trade Cen­ter bomb­ing.

The ties among Alam­ou­di, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and Gill help explain why offi­cials are con­cerned about whether Gill was ade­quate­ly vet­ted. These rela­tion­ships are dif­fi­cult to under­stand with­out immer­sion in the indict­ments, court tran­scripts and case exhibits; the con­cerned offi­cials said they fear that busy polit­i­cal oper­a­tives in the admin­is­tra­tion sim­ply do not grasp the nation­al-secu­ri­ty issues at stake. ‘There’s an over­all denial in the admin­is­tra­tion that the agen­da being pushed by Norquist might be a prob­lem,’ one offi­cial said. ‘It’s so absurd that a Grover Norquist per­son could even be close to some­thing like this. That’s real­ly what’s so insid­i­ous.’ . . . .

. . . . In 1999 a group of reform­ers oust­ed Alam­ou­di as AMC exec­u­tive direc­tor amid ques­tions about the group’s opaque finances and mys­te­ri­ous Mid­dle East­ern fund­ing sources. Alam­ou­di took a posi­tion at the affil­i­at­ed Amer­i­can Mus­lim Foun­da­tion but remained in con­trol of the AMC through friend­ly board mem­bers, the reform­ers said. ‘I had con­cerns about the reluc­tance to reveal infor­ma­tion about the finances. They said they’re not doing well, that they need­ed more mon­ey, but I looked at their office [in Wash­ing­ton], and it was very big,’ said one of the would-be reform­ers, Ikram Khan, a sur­geon in Las Vegas. Khan said he resigned from the AMC board when his friend, Nazir Kha­ja, a Pak­istani-Amer­i­can physi­cian from Cal­i­for­nia who was try­ing to open the group’s books, told him that Alam­ou­di was not coop­er­at­ing. ‘I said, ‘if this is the case, I can­not con­tin­ue to serve in the group,’ and I sent in my res­ig­na­tion let­ter,’ Khan said. . . .

. . . . U.S. Jus­tice Depart­ment is exam­in­ing whether Alam­ou­di was con­spir­ing with a Lon­don group the Sau­di gov­ern­ment says is linked to Osama bin Laden. Who is Abdu­rah­man Alam­ou­di? We real­ly don’t know,’ one of the con­cerned gov­ern­ment offi­cials said.’ So how can we say there is not a prob­lem with his for­mer aide? He [Gill] has access to infor­ma­tion about all our vulnerabilities—aviation, ports. He knows what is pro­tect­ed and what is not.’

Yet some offi­cials remain con­cerned that Gill appar­ent­ly enjoys the polit­i­cal pro­tec­tion of Norquist, the archi­tect of the 1994 Repub­li­can elec­tion sweep that brought Geor­gia Repub­li­can Newt Gin­grich to pow­er as House speak­er. Norquist speaks of ‘crush­ing’ his polit­i­cal oppo­nents and dis­miss­es those who don’t agree with his anti-tax, anti-gov­ern­ment agen­da as ‘Bol­she­viks.’ His pow­er derives from a for­mi­da­ble coali­tion of evan­gel­i­cal, busi­ness and oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive groups that he con­trols to push favored GOP issues, as well as from his close rela­tion­ship with White House polit­i­cal chief Karl Rove.

In 1998, Norquist and a for­mer deputy to Alam­ou­di at the AMC co-found­ed the non­prof­it Islam­ic Insti­tute as part of a dri­ve to win Mus­lim vot­ers for Bush in 2000. Alam­ou­di donat­ed $35,000 to the insti­tute, records show. Soon, the Islam­ic Insti­tute, the AMC and Al-Ari­an were all work­ing togeth­er on a top pri­or­i­ty for Amer­i­can Mus­lims: an end to the use of clas­si­fied intel­li­gence to jail nonci­t­i­zens as nation­al-secu­ri­ty threats. Al-Arian’s broth­er-in-law had been jailed on the basis of such secret evi­dence link­ing him to Pales­tin­ian Islam­ic Jihad, and Al-Ari­an lob­bied heav­i­ly on Capi­tol Hill to end the prac­tice. In Octo­ber 2000, through the efforts of Norquist and Rove, Bush came out against secret evi­dence in a debate with Al Gore, and the AMC endorsed Bush for pres­i­dent. Al-Ari­an would lat­er claim that the Mus­lim votes he round­ed up for Bush in Flori­da helped decide the elec­tion.

Gill was in the mid­dle of these advo­ca­cy efforts. As direc­tor of gov­ern­ment affairs at Norquist’s Islam­ic Insti­tute, Gill lob­bied against the use of secret evi­dence, accord­ing to a May 2001 release on the institute’s Web site. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gill was quot­ed in news arti­cles as a spokesman for the AMC. A Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle from May 2001, mean­while, iden­ti­fied Gill as a spokesman for the ‘fledg­ling’ Tax­pay­ers Alliance of Prince William Coun­ty, Va., which is affil­i­at­ed with Norquist’s Amer­i­cans for Tax Reform. Accord­ing to the Post arti­cle, Norquist was slat­ed to appear with Gill at an anti-tax ral­ly. . . .

7. The pro­gram con­cludes with an excerpt from Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Show M11: Uncle Sam and the Swasti­ka.

At the same that St. Bernard was a Pres­i­den­tial elec­tor for the Social­ist Work­ers Par­ty, Mr. Emory was doing this:

Discussion

22 comments for “FTR #953 Saint Bernard: Rebel Without A Clue”

  1. Two points of inter­est:

    First, much was made of Sanders’ pho­tos show­ing him par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Civ­il Rights move­ment, includ­ing this pho­to:  http://imgur.com/gallery/pHnRuDB. If the pho­to is authen­tic, would the FBI have tak­en an inter­est in iden­ti­fy­ing and inves­ti­gat­ing the appar­ent “domes­tic threats” they viewed peo­ple like Sanders as?  Did Sanders have a 1960s FBI file?  Even the Rev­erend William Sloan Cof­fin, as it turns out, was an infor­mant for the FBI.

    Sec­ond, not much notice has been giv­en to the on-the-job media train­ing giv­en to Trump and Bernie (but not Hillary).

    Trump was giv­en an NBC show that effec­tive­ly gave him “tele­vi­sion train­ing” and media prac­tice.  Bernie Sanders has been a week­ly radio guest (and more recent­ly, video guest) on the syn­di­cat­ed Thom Hart­mann radio show and tele­vi­sion show “The Big Pic­ture” every Fri­day for over 15 years.

    Hart­mann is a “bedrock FDR Demo­c­rat” whose bona fides are dif­fi­cult to ques­tion.  And yet...

    Hart­mann co-wrote a JFK assas­si­na­tion book that eras­es the CIA as a sus­pect, pins the blame on the mafia & RFK him­self.  The title “Ulti­mate Sac­ri­fice” refers to RFK’s alleged “sac­ri­fi­cial silence” due to a “cov­er-up” of a “Kennedy anti-Cas­tro coup plot.”  This the­o­ry is light­weight rub­bish, of course, as it fails to take into account dozens of exam­ples of plot holes in that the­o­ry.

    Hart­mann is flu­ent in Ger­man and trav­els to Ger­many every year by his own account.  Some of his oth­er inter­ests include chil­dren & hyp­no­sis & NLP.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Hartmann#Other_areas_of_notability

    “Trained in the 1970s in Neu­ro-Lin­guis­tic Pro­gram­ming by Richard Ban­dler (Hart­mann is licensed by Ban­dler’s Soci­ety of NLP as both an NLP Prac­ti­tion­er and an NLP Train­er)”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Hartmann#Business_career

    “Hart­mann moved to New Hamp­shire to start The New Eng­land Salem Chil­dren’s Village,[20] which still oper­ates in Rum­ney, New Hamp­shire. He was its Exec­u­tive Direc­tor for five years, and on the board of direc­tors for more than 25 years. NESC­T’s child-care mod­el was based on that of the Ger­man Salem Inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion, and through his affil­i­a­tion with that group he helped start inter­na­tion­al relief pro­grams in Ugan­da, Colom­bia, Rus­sia, Israel, India, Aus­tralia, and sev­er­al oth­er coun­tries between 1979 and today.[citation need­ed]

    “...Hart­mann found­ed Inter­na­tion­al Whole­sale Trav­el and its retail sub­sidiary Spray­ber­ry Trav­el in Atlanta in 1983, a busi­ness which in the inter­ven­ing years has gen­er­at­ed over a quar­ter of a bil­lion dol­lars in revenue.[21][22] Accord­ing to their web­site, Spray­ber­ry Trav­el was laud­ed by the Wall Street Jour­nal in 1984 for being one of the ear­ly adopters of fre­quent trav­el pro­grams anal­o­gous to the recent­ly ini­ti­at­ed fre­quent fly­er pro­grams of the air­line industry.[23] He sold his share in the busi­ness in 1986 and retired with his fam­i­ly to Ger­many to work with the inter­na­tion­al relief orga­ni­za­tion Salem International.[24] In the late 1970s, he had been a train­er in adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing for The Amer­i­can Mar­ket­ing Cen­ters (now defunct), and in 1987 after return­ing from Ger­many found­ed the Atlanta adver­tis­ing agency Chan­dler, Mac­Don­ald, Stout, Schnei­der­man & Poe, Inc., which did busi­ness as The Newslet­ter Factory.[25] He sold his inter­est in that com­pa­ny in 1996 and retired to Ver­mont.”

    Writ­ten by Hart­mann him­self on his web­site is a denial of being in the CIA.  No BND denial, though.

    https://www.thomhartmann.com/thom-hartmann-biography

    “An invet­er­ate trav­el­er and some­times a risk-tak­er, Hart­mann has often found him­self in the world’s hot spots on behalf of the Ger­man-based Salem inter­na­tion­al relief orga­ni­za­tion or as a writer, a sit­u­a­tion which caus­es his friends to some­times won­der aloud if he works for the CIA (he does not and nev­er has). He was, for exam­ple, in The Philip­pines when Fer­di­nand Mar­cos fled the coun­try; in Egypt the week Anwar Sadat was shot; in Ugan­da dur­ing the war of lib­er­a­tion by Tan­za­nia; in Hun­gary when the first East Ger­man refugees arrived; in Ger­many when the wall came down; in Bei­jing dur­ing the first stu­dent demon­stra­tions; in Thai­land when the mil­i­tary coup of 1991 occurred; in Bar­ba­dos dur­ing the 2004 anti-gov­ern­ment strikes and shut­downs; in Bogo­ta and Medellin, Colom­bia, dur­ing the spate of killings of pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates; in Israel, in the West Bank town of Nablus, the week the Intifa­da start­ed there; on the Czech bor­der the week Cher­nobyl melt­ed down; in Kenya dur­ing the first big wave of crack­downs on dis­si­dents; and in Venezuela dur­ing the 1991 coup attempt...”

    That Hart­mann gave Sanders invalu­able hun­dreds of hours of media expe­ri­ence is not in ques­tion. Whether Hart­man­n’s back­ground is murky or whether he was a long game play­er is up to you. Would be pos­si­bly note­wor­thy to look into who pur­chased his “tea com­pa­ny”.

    Posted by Port of Denver | April 16, 2017, 7:52 pm
  2. @Port of Den­ver–

    Wow! Ban­dler’s NLP was uti­lized by the CIA and is a form of neu­rolin­guis­tic mind con­trol. It would not sur­prise me if Ban­dler was clan­des­tine­ly fund­ed by the Agency of some sim­i­lar orga­ni­za­tion.

    Hart­man­n’s pres­ence in key areas at the time he was there is more than a lit­tle inter­est­ing.

    Do note that an under­cov­er oper­a­tive would not admit that he was such.

    He or she would work to blend in with the milieu tar­get­ed for infil­tra­tion.

    The car­di­nal rule for a good dou­ble agent: “Make your­self indis­putable to the effort.”

    Hart­mann has admit­ted that he worked for a PR firm that has done work for the CIA.

    Good show!

    Best,

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Emory | April 17, 2017, 8:59 pm
  3. @Port of Den­ver: As some­one who has lis­tened to Thom Hart­man’s show for years and hours of his “Brunch with Bernie” show seg­ments, I can def­i­nite­ly attest to the val­ue of those appear­ances in rais­es Bernie’s nation­al pro­file. Show­ing up for an ‘any­thing goes’ Q&A hour week after week for years real­ly did make a big dif­fer­ence both in terms of Bernie’s nation­al pro­file. But I think it’s impor­tant to point out that Thom was any­thing but a “Bernie or Bust”-er through­out the pri­ma­ry and gen­er­al cam­paign. Quite the oppo­site. And after Hillary won the pri­ma­ry, the call-in seg­ments of Thom’s show often devolved into him fight­ing wave after wave of “Bernie or Busters” callers (it’s a talk radio show, so those kinds of calls were inevitable, and many were trolls). So while Thom cer­tain­ly played a big role in the rise of Bernie sim­ply by giv­ing him a reg­u­lar plat­form for years (a plat­form that end­ed when Bernie entered the 2016 race), he was also one of the lead­ing anti-Bernie-or-bust voic­es with a nation­al radio show dur­ing the race.

    And regard­ing spec­u­la­tion that he could be CIA, if so that would be quite a twist since he has a night­ly show on RT and has been the one of the least-focused lib­er­al talk radio per­son­al­i­ties on the Trump/Russia sto­ry. The book, “The Prophet’s Way: A Guide to Liv­ing in the Now”, where he dis­cuss­es his men­tor, Got­tfried Muller, is avail­able on Google books, so that would be one place to look for more info about his back­ground. If he’s some sort of under­cov­er oper­a­tive, he’s not just deep under­cov­er but seem­ing­ly point­less­ly under­cov­er too because after years of lis­ten­ing to him I can’t recall any­thing that struck me as indica­tive of some­one try­ing to screw over the Left. Quite the oppo­site. Con­sis­tent­ly.

    All that said, it’s def­i­nite­ly use­ful to note the role “Brunch with Bernie” played in giv­ing him the kind of nation­al fan base on the Left that may have made it seem like he came out of nowhere after start­ing his 2016 cam­paign. If any­thing, that should be one of the most valu­able lessons the Democ­rats can take from the Bernie phe­nom­e­na: reg­u­lar question/answer time in a pub­lic set­ting like a radio show is an invalu­able polit­i­cal tool. An invalu­able tool that’s almost nev­er been turned into a reg­u­lar thing by any politi­cian in either par­ty. And yet here we are with Bernie being the pop­u­lar elect­ed offi­cial in the US after a cam­paign where he basi­cal­ly cam­paigned on the same themes he was pro­mot­ing dur­ing “Brunch with Bernie” all those years. At least “Brunch with Bernie” has been replaced with “Brunch with Marc Pocan” so there’s still at one elect­ed offi­cial reg­u­lar­ly doing a question/answer seg­ment but it’s unfor­tu­nate that more Democ­rats haven’t found a sim­i­lar reg­u­lar Q&A radio spot.

    At the same time, you exact­ly can’t blame Demo­c­ra­t­ic politi­cians for not doing more radio Q&A shows sim­ply because of the rel­a­tive dearth of lib­er­al polit­i­cal talk shows on the air. Not just shows with a nation­al pro­file like Hart­man­n’s show which is the most pop­u­lar lib­er­al talk radio show in the US but still only has a small frac­tion of the audi­ence of, say, Sean Han­ni­ty’s far-right radio show, but also at the local lev­el. Sure, much of the lack of left-wing talk radio is due to the choic­es of right-wing radio sta­tion own­ers and/or a lack of inter­est in such for­mats by lib­er­al audi­ences, but regard­less of the rea­sons, the Bernie phe­nom­e­na has under­scored the untapped poten­tial for using that for­mat to pro­mote pro­gres­sive ideas in that talk radio back-and-forth debate envi­ron­ment. Con­sid­er­ing the pro­found, and pro­found­ly neg­a­tive, impact right-wing talk radio has had on the Amer­i­can psy­che and how much influ­ence right-wing talk radio hosts have on the pub­lic mind it’s pret­ty clear that the polit­i­cal talk radio medi­um can have a huge impact on a pop­u­lace and the Left has large­ly aban­doned that space. With the excep­tion of a few nation­al shows like Hart­man­n’s.

    Some­thing that would be nice to see from all this is a push to inter­twine the issues of pub­lic financ­ing of cam­paigns with a par­al­lel push to see reg­u­lar Q&A ses­sions from elect­ed offi­cials. Like, every week. Tie the two ideas togeth­er and make it clear to the pub­lic that less time spent fundrais­ing means a lot more time avail­able for direct inter­ac­tions with the pub­lic. Because at this point mem­bers of Con­gress spend more time on the phone fundrais­ing than just about any­thing else. 3–4 hours a day. All time that could have been much bet­ter spent on Q&A ses­sions and town halls. Or any­thing else, real­ly, con­sid­er­ing polit­i­cal fundrais­ing is basi­cal­ly legal bribery. Plus, the more time the pub­lic spends lis­ten­ing to Q&A ses­sions or attend­ing town halls, the less need there is for polit­i­cal ads in gen­er­al. So maybe that could be one of the lessons the Democ­rats can take from the role the Thom Hart­mann Show played with the rise of Bernie: “Brunch with [insert elect­ed offi­cial’s name here]” isn’t just a catchy radio seg­ment. It could be an impor­tant “pub­lic lob­by­ing” com­po­nent of a mod­el for replac­ing the cur­rent night­mare sys­tem of lob­by­ing we have today with pub­lic financ­ing of cam­paigns and LOTS of Q&A ses­sions. And if a big cor­po­ra­tion wants to lob­by your elect­ed offi­cial they can call up dur­ing the Q&A ses­sion or town hall. Would­n’t that be fun.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 18, 2017, 2:50 pm
  4. I feel that Sanders was a rodent cop­u­la­tor who par­tic­i­pat­ed will­ing­ly in an orches­trat­ed cam­paign to destroy Hillary Clin­ton and Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, not because of his vaunt­ed “prin­ci­ples” but because he’s lazy and arro­gant and knows he can make a for­tune by brand­ing him­self as the “lib­er­al” who slimes Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty. Though he’s lazy he’s shrewd. He knew exact­ly what he was doing, why he was doing it, and who the play­ers were. He’s every bit as vile as Trump and Rethugli­cans.

    I’m intrigued by your notion about Rus­sians being part of smoke and mir­rors effort to con­ceal who and what were behind hack­ing of DNC. The whole Russ­ian thing nev­er felt right to me. I feel there were oth­er pow­ers behind it but am not real­ly sure who they are. It appears you are unrav­el­ing those threads. I’ve spent 50 years ques­tion­ing the JFK assas­si­na­tion so I’m wary of the obvi­ous.

    Posted by Kathleen O'Neill | April 18, 2017, 5:31 pm
  5. @Pterrafractyl and Kath­leen O’Neill–

    Hart­mann cer­tain­ly was not part of the Bernie or Bust phe­nom­e­non, but I’ve regard­ed him as an intel­li­gence agent or asset from my first aware­ness of him–his bs book on the JFK assas­si­na­tion.

    That book–claiming the Mafia did it (in short)–was CIA mod­i­fied lim­it­ed hang­out cir­ca F*ING 1980, and it was pub­lished in 2005!

    He’s a very bright guy and if he REALLY want­ed to write a book about the JFK hit there was a world of good info to choose from at that point.

    I did­n’t know about his inter­ests in hyp­no­sis and NLP at that point.

    The NLP con­nec­tion smacks of intel­li­gence ties.

    His appear­ances in world hot spots at key times is very inter­est­ing as well.

    I don’t think Sanders was delib­er­ate­ly try­ing to screw Hillary, but he is PROFOUNDLY imma­ture and the ego­cen­tric­i­ty and self-right­eous­ness that go with that lev­el of imma­tu­ri­ty are all cun­ning ele­ments would need to manip­u­late him.

    Plus, he’s not very bright. Sor­ry, Pter­ra, but he’s no more than an aver­age intel­lect with below aver­age polit­i­cal skills.

    The old­er I get, the more the fable of “The Emper­or’s New Clothes” becomes rel­e­vant.

    Sanders is the naked emper­or of the left and, although I don’t think he is delib­er­ate­ly sin­is­ter, that is not real­ly very impor­tant.

    He is devoid of real polit­i­cal skills and absolute­ly infat­u­at­ed with him­self. Plus, he’s stu­pid.

    The dif­fer­ence between an auto­mo­bile mur­der­er who sits at an inter­sec­tion wait­ing for the intend­ed vic­tim, then guns the car and kills the tar­get­ed indi­vid­ual and a drunk who runs a red light and kills some­one is the rel­e­vant com­par­i­son here, in my opin­ion.

    I strong­ly sus­pect the Salem Inter­na­tion­al link is an intel cov­er.

    The “Rus­sia did it” expla­na­tion for the high-pro­file hacks is ludi­crous.

    NO intel­li­gence ser­vice would behave like that, unless it were a rival intel­li­gence ser­vice try­ing to tar­get and frame a rival.

    Best,

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Emory | April 18, 2017, 8:56 pm
  6. I agree with every­thing you said about Sanders except that he’s not sin­is­ter. I think he’s very tox­ic and malev­o­lent. The fact that the Mainslime Media find him the only “Lib­er­al” they wor­ship should raise red flag (no pun intended).I have to ask myself why has­n’t he been scru­ti­nized to the lev­el that Clin­ton or Oba­ma have been? I think if more gen­uine peo­ple (not the racist cultists or the paid bots”) knew about him they would become dis­en­chant­ed.

    Inter­est­ing his­to­ry about Tom Hart­mann. I know noth­ing about him and I don’t lis­ten to him. I haven’t missed any­thing.

    Posted by Kathleen O'Neill | April 19, 2017, 3:39 pm
  7. Since there’s clear­ly going to be inter­est in inquir­ing whether or not Thom Hart­mann is some sort of intel­li­gence agent or some­thing along those lines, let’s play the “Is Thom Hart­mann a secret agent?” game. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing game because, on the one hand, there’s basi­cal­ly noth­ing in Thom’s behav­ior and body of works that points towards secret nefar­i­ous­ness, oth­er than per­haps his co-author­ing of a book that min­i­mizes the CIA’s role in the JFK assas­si­na­tion. But that’s most­ly it. On the oth­er hand, if you look at Thom’s per­son­al biog­ra­phy, wow is it spooky. And it’s that con­tra­dic­tion that makes this such a fun game: the more you look at his back­ground the more eye­brow­ing-rais­ing “hmmm...” fun-facts you come across. And yet, despite all the eye­brow-rais­ing fun-facts you come across, there isn’t real­ly any­thing that the guy has actu­al­ly done that seems like the kind of thing a secret spy/disinfo would do. He’s like an inter­na­tion­al man of mys­tery, where the biggest mys­tery is why he’s so mys­te­ri­ous because he most­ly just does help­ful things.

    Ok, so let’s get start­ed. And we’re going to be cit­ing his wikipedia page pret­ty exten­sive­ly here so note that since Wiki pages can change:
    1. He was part of Stu­dents for a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Soci­ety dur­ing the Viet­nam war, some­thing he men­tions pret­ty often dur­ing his radio show along with the fact that he knew some of the peo­ple who joined the Weath­er Under­ground. Typ­i­cal­ly, when he does men­tion this in the show it involves a dis­cus­sion about how one par­tic­u­lar per­son in their group who kept advo­cat­ing that they engage in vio­lent protests lat­er turned out to be an under­cov­er police offi­cer as part of a larg­er dis­cus­sion about why vio­lent protests are stu­pid.

    Spook­i­ness rat­ing: Not too spooky giv­en the con­text of the times, but cer­tain­ly notable.

    2. Around the same time he was involved with SDS he got into Chris­t­ian mys­ti­cism and even­tu­al­ly became an ordained Min­is­ters with Cop­tic Fel­low­ship Inter­na­tion­al in 1971 (when he was around 20 yrs old). He came under the teach­ings of Mas­ter Stan­ly, who died in 1972 (as described in “A Prophet’s Way”).

    Spook­i­ness rat­ing: It is quite a twist to go from the SDS to being a Cop­tic Min­is­ter by the time you’re 20. Then again, if you’re a hip­py who was into Chris­t­ian Mys­ti­cism, get­ting involved with Cop­tic Chris­tians does sort of make sense.

    3. While in his 20’s he co-found­ed The Wood­ley Her­ber Com­pa­ny, a com­pa­ny that sold herbal prod­ucts and oper­at­ed until 1978. It was dur­ing this time that he got degrees in her­bol­o­gy and home­o­path­ic med­i­cine. It was also dur­ing this time that he moved to New Eng­land to start The New Eng­land Salem Chil­dren’s Vil­lage, a com­mu­ni­ty for abused chil­dren based on the Salem Inter­na­tion­al mod­el.

    Spook­i­ness rat­ing: Unless The Wood­ley Her­ber Com­pa­ny was a front from some­thing naughty it’s hard to see what’s spooky about that part. And while start­ing a com­mu­ni­ty for abused chil­dren is indeed the kind of thing that would be seen as very spooky in oth­er con­texts (i.e., they’re secret­ly mind con­trol­ling the kids!), let’s not for­get that there’s no short­age of abused chil­dren who needs places to heal and start­ing a char­i­ty to help kids in needs is sort of the default thing some­one is going to do if they want to leave a pos­i­tive mark on the world. Plus, Thom was already a Cop­tic min­is­ter.

    4. Ger­many-based Salem Inter­na­tion­al was start­ed by Got­tried Muller, a man who Thom describes as his per­son­al men­tor. He wrote a whole book about it and describes his inter­ac­tions with Muller in detail. It turns out Thom was orig­i­nal­ly put in touch with Muller via a friend from the Cop­tic church who was already work­ing with Muller. It went some­thing like this (from “A Prophet’s Way”, p 44):
    In 1978, on a day when Thom was pray­ing about what to do next in his life, his friend, Don, appar­ent­ly had a vision of Thom right at that time, called him up, and asked him to come to Stadt­steinach, Ger­many to meet Muller. It sounds like Don was so tak­en aback by how saint­ly Muller was that he felt com­pelled to invite Thom to Ger­many to meet him. And the rest of his­to­ry.

    Spook­i­ness fac­tor: Well, if you read The Prophet’s Way it’s a pret­ty odd back­sto­ry for get­ting to know Muller. His friend Don appar­ent­ly had a hal­lu­ci­na­tion while a chil­dren’s orches­tra that Muller’s group oper­at­ed was per­form­ing in Boston. He saw the face of Jesus hov­er­ing over the kids and then Muller gave a great speech that made such an impres­sion on Don that he decid­ed to trav­el to Stadt­steinach to join Muller’s group. And then called Thom and brought him there. Yeah, it’s a lit­tle spooky.

    5. This prob­a­bly won’t be too sur­pris­ing giv­en his age, but Got­tr­fied Muller was...*drum roll*...a for­mer sol­dier in Hitler’s army. They cov­er this on Muller’s bio page on Salem Inter­na­tion­al’s web page. It was appar­ent­ly his expe­ri­ences in WWII that made him ded­i­cate the rest of his life to God’s works, which even­tu­al­ly includ­ed “heal­ing with the Jews”. Specif­i­cal­ly, heal­ing with Abram Pol­jack, one of the founders of Mes­sian­ic Judaism (the “Jews for Jesus” move­ment).

    Spook­i­ness fac­tor: Ok, yeah, that’s pret­ty damn spooky. If you’re look­ing for a fac­tion of Judaism that’s going to be over­run with fas­cists you could do worse than Mes­sian­ic Judaism. It’s also worth not­ing that he’s recount­ed on his show how he’s met old Nazis in Ger­many beer halls. So, you know, you do have to won­der if any of them for Muller’s old friends.

    6. In the 80’s Thom and his wife start­ed a trav­el agency, Inter­na­tion­al Whole­sale Trav­el and its retail sub­sidiary Spray­ber­ry Trav­el in Atlanta in 1983. It did quite well and the Hart­man­n’s sold his shares in 1986, mak­ing the Hart­man­n’s enough mon­ey that Thom could retire and move to Ger­many to work with Salem Inter­na­tion­al.

    Spook­i­ness fac­tor: Well, start­ing a busi­ness that’s big enough to allow you to retire in a few years is pret­ty damn impres­sive. And a trav­el agency would have poten­tial val­ue if he was work­ing for some intel­li­gence agency or some­thing like that (mov­ing peo­ple around the world effi­ca­cious­ly around is a must). But at the same time, it’s not like this was the first com­pa­ny the Hart­man­n’s start­ed and peo­ple cre­ate busi­ness­es that do well rapid­ly all the time. As Thom’s said on his show many times, one of his approach­es to busi­ness is look­ing for a need that the mar­ket isn’t cur­rent­ly serv­ing and that’s a pret­ty good approach to start­ing a suc­cess­ful busi­ness that can find its groove rapid­ly.

    7. In 1987 Thom returned from Ger­many to Atlanta to found the mar­ket­ing agency Chan­dler, Mac­Don­ald, Stout, Schnei­der­man & Poe, Inc. He sold his shares in 1996 and re-retired to Ver­mont.

    Spook­i­ness fac­tor: It all depends. Who were the clients for this firm? If they were spooky clients than, yeah, that’s pret­ty spooky. Oth­er­wise, well...it’s not like the guy does­n’t have a demon­stra­ble tal­ent for mar­ket­ing so this seems like a nat­ur­al fit for his skill. That it was suc­cess­ful should­n’t sur­prise us.

    8. In 1996, Thom actu­al­ly went to the Geor­gia Police Acad­e­my. Yep. And while that sounds real­ly odd at this point in his biog­ra­phy, there is a rea­son­able-ish expla­na­tion: The Olympics were com­ing to Atlanta in 1996, and as part of a pro­gram to beef up secu­ri­ty the Atlanta police had a pro­gram where cit­i­zens could go through an “exec­u­tive pro­tec­tion” police train­ing course to pro­vide VIP secu­ri­ty for the event. That year, Thom was work­ing on a pri­vate detec­tive nov­el and shad­ow­ing an Atlanta pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor, DeWitt Wan­na­mak­er, who had worked in a vari­ety of law enforce­ment jobs and Wan­na­mak­er got him into the course. He’s men­tioned this expe­ri­ence on his show a num­ber of times.

    Spook­i­ness fac­tor: Ok, it’s odd. At the same time, he had just re-retired that year and had been liv­ing in Atlanta before mov­ing to Ver­mont so it’s not all that odd. But quite a twist for an ex-SDS mem­ber.

    9. Thom is high­ly trained in neu­ro-lin­guis­tic pro­gram­ming (NLP), which was co-devel­oped by Richard Ban­dler. And Ban­dler wrote the for­ward to Thom’s book about how to use NLP to help kids with ADD.

    Spook­i­ness fac­tor: Yeah, hav­ing Richard Ban­dler write the for­ward to your book spooky. At the same time, it’s not at all unimag­in­able that some­thing like NLP could be use­ful for kids with severe ADD and Ban­dler’s endorse­ment is quite sig­nif­i­cant for a book like this. It’s also worth not­ing that Hart­mann has writ­ten about how he sus­pects GOP spin-miesters like Frank Luntz are uti­liz­ing NLP on the GOP mass­es and he advo­cates that the Left stop uni­lat­er­al­ly not using these kinds of tools. So, in that sense, it’s not like we can hold Thom’s NLP inter­est against him. If it works, it’s a tool that can be used for good or ill, and in the cas­es where we see Thom advo­cat­ing the use of NLP it’s for good rea­sons. Which is a hel­lu­va lot bet­ter than an NLP-do-bad­der like Luntz.

    10. Thom him­self recounts all the times he’s been trav­el­ing around the world in a locale where some­thing big, polit­i­cal­ly, was about to hap­pen. And while this has prompt­ed Thom’s friends to ask if he’s CIA, he assures them he’s not. And he does this on his bio page.

    Spook­i­ness fac­tor: Ok, if you need to assure peo­ple you’re not CIA in spite of all the CIA-ish stuff in your back­ground, that’s pret­ty spooky.

    11. The JFK book.

    Spook­i­ness fac­tor: Pret­ty spooky!

    So that’s a sum­ma­ry of Thom’s spooky back­ground. Spooky in both the ‘intel­li­gence’ sense and the “friend hal­lu­ci­nat­ing Thom’s face and then invit­ing him to trav­el to Ger­many” spooky sense. And when you look at all that is it sure­ly tempt­ing to con­clude that Hart­mann is some sort of left-wing spook/agent. Because wow.

    But here’s the thing about Hartmann...he’s spooky on paper. But if you actu­al­ly lis­ten to his show or fol­low his dai­ly polit­i­cal dis­cours­es it’s pret­ty damn hard to see what on earth spy agency he’s work­ing for because unless there’s a very lib­er­al, pro­gres­sive, and over­all well-inten­tioned spy agency out there oper­at­ing in the world it’s not at all obvi­ous who he’d be work­ing for. Is there’s a super secret Cen­tral Nice­ness Agency (beware the CNA) that hired him years ago? The Under­ground Help­ful Peo­ple? Because unless there’s a ton of secret shady right-wing crap that Hart­man­n’s done that just has­n’t been revealed, it’s hard to see what kind of ‘spooky’ dam­age he’s doing. Except, of course, for the JFK book. But that’s still a rel­a­tive­ly small thing in terms of the guy’s life’s work. All in all, if Thom’s is actu­al­ly a secret spy he’s got to be one of the best one’s ever. And one of the worst ever. Worst in ways that make him the best.

    So if you have a chance to catch one of his shows, they’re worth a lis­ten. And yes, you’ll be NLPed, but hope­ful­ly in a good way.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 25, 2017, 8:43 pm
  8. @Pterrafractyl–

    Excel­lent and insight­ful com­ment.

    I do note your rel­a­tive youth­ful­ness, not some­thing for which you are to be fault­ed.

    Many, many painful years on the front lines of the polit­i­cal wars have giv­en some insight into the ways of intel­li­gence.

    For now, I will just pass along some infor­ma­tion from cor­re­spon­dents about some of Hart­man­n’s activ­i­ties and milieu:

    “Ger­man-based Salem Inter­na­tion­al? Well, that is worth look­ing at. Don’t have time to do a ton of research on this, but I found the founder of Salem to be DAMN inter­est­ing... Keep in mind, Bernie’s appoint­ments of the “Elders of the Pro­to­cols of Bernie” to the Dem con­ven­tion plat­form com­mit­tee were very telling. This fits in with that vein, in my opin­ion. Gotf­fried Mueller is the founder of this org.

    One HELL of a bio. Even the pre-war part reeks of intel­li­gence work. Keep in mind that folks like Har­rer were doing their “trav­els and research” around this time.

    Note also that Hart­mann is a BIG Dalai Lama guy... the DL even invit­ed him to spend a week with him in Dhar­masala back in ’99!

    http://www.dalailamafilm.com/cast-thom-hartmann/thom-hartmann-biography-air-america-radio.html

    Got­tfried Mueller’s itin­er­ary? Egypt, Pales­tine, Iraq, and Kurd lands. And then when the war starts? He winds up work­ing with Kurds to help Ger­many secure oil fields! Gee, his “inno­cent wan­der­lust of the mys­te­ri­ous East” sure came in handy just a few years lat­er. After the war? Siemens. “Nice work if you can get it and you can get it if you try!” Then he “becomes dis­il­lu­sioned with cap­i­tal­ism” and wants to pro­mote “heal­ing with the Jews”. So who does he hook up with? Mes­sian­ic Jews! Basi­cal­ly, Jews who con­vert to Chris­tian­i­ty and try to con­vince oth­er Jews of Christ’s divin­i­ty. Jews for Jesus, for exam­ple. Groups like this are often con­sid­ered anti-semit­ic and I have seen them hook up with fas­cist ele­ments before.

    http://www.saleminternational.org/media/downloads/gottfried-mueller-vita.pdf

    1935/36
    First jour­ney to the Ori­ent
    With a bike, a friend and 60 Ger­man marks he trav­eled to the Ori­ent by land and by sea, vis­it­ing Cairo and the Pyra­mids, JeruSALEM, Beth­le­hem, Bag­dad and ven­tur­ing into the hith­er­to seclud­ed empire of the Kurds. His first book ‘Break­ing into Seclud­ed Kur­dis­tan’, the trav­el­ogue of this first jour­ney to the Ori­ent, was pub­lished in 1937 by Philadel­phia Reut­lin­gen.

    1937/38
    After return­ing from the Ori­ent, Got­tfried Müller had to do his mil­i­tary ser­vice.

    He was sta­tioned in Ulm where, among oth­er things, he was trained to ride hors­es and dri­ve a coach. Even­tu­al­ly, his ser­vice end­ed and he left in the rank of Reserve Sec­ond Lieu­tenant.

    1939/40
    Dur­ing this time, he was a sales­man in Vien­na and a horse­man in the tra­di­tion­al cav­al­ry reg­i­ment “Hoch- und Deutschmeis­ter”. In the mean­time,
    World War II broke out. He was draft­ed to serve in France. In 1940 his broth­er Christoph was killed in Rus­sia by an explod­ing grenade.

    1940 – 1942

    Sta­tioned in Reichenbach/ Vogt­land, he worked as an instruc­tor for war­fare in Rus­sia, and lat­er for the Stal­in­grad cam­paign. In between times, he was trained by the Ger­man Air Force.

    1942 – 1948
    ‘Oper­a­tion Mam­mut’

    Sec­ond jour­ney to the ori­ent Seite: 2 / 4
    Dur­ing the war, he attempt­ed to con­quer oil fields for the Ger­man army with the help of the Kurds. His secret mis­sion was betrayed. He and his Kurd friend Ramzie were tak­en pris­on­er by British and Iraqi forces – he was tor­tured and sen­tenced to death, but even­tu­al­ly escaped.

    He described these events in his book ‘In the Burn­ing Ori­ent’ which was first pub­lished in 1959 – today the book is in its 3rd edi­tion. The book was lat­er trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish, Ara­bic, Turk­ish and Kur­dish. He spent one year in the death cell where he he con­tem­plat­ed life and death.

    This was his inspi­ra­tion to lat­er found SALEM.

    1948 – 1950
    After the war was over, he was trans­ferred to the British intern­ment camp Ham­burg-Neuengamme in 1947 and lat­er to Camp Augs­burg.

    He was released in 1948 and in the same year mar­ries his first wife Susanne Fir­gau who raised their son Amadé dur­ing the war. They then had a sec­ond
    son, named Alexan­der. Dur­ing these years, he lived with his fam­i­ly in an attic flat in Back­nang study­ing eco­nom­ics and work­ing as an insur­ance agent.

    1951 – 1954
    Dur­ing this time, he worked for Siemens sell­ing vac­u­um clean­ers and togeth­er with his fam­i­ly he moved to Stuttgart. But he was not sat­is­fied with his reg­u­lar life and the rel­a­tive pros­per­i­ty it gave him. Often pic­tures of his impris­on­ment and escape, the death cell and his res­cue, came to mind. Since being impris­oned he had vowed to be a veg­e­tar­i­an and non-smok­er. [Like Hitler–D.E.] More­over, he had then made God the promise: ‘If I get out of here, I want to serve You and help the poor’. [Yeah, right!–D.E.]

    1955 –1957
    He became more dis­tanced from the idea of mak­ing mon­ey. He con­tact­ed Abram Pol­jak, a Mes­sian­ic Jew. The rec­on­cil­i­a­tion between Chris­tians and Jews meant a lot to him. Dur­ing these years, he orga­nized a num­ber of lec­tures with Abram Pol­jak in Ger­many, Switzer­land, Eng­land, Swe­den, Den­mark and Fin­land.

    At this time, he gave every­thing he pos­sessed to two old and dis­abled Jew­ish women who were in need. His mar­riage had begun to suf­fer from his con­tin­ued social com­mit­ment and both he and his wife sep­a­rat­ed, even­tu­al­ly divorc­ing in the 1960s.”

    I’ll post more from this cor­re­spon­dent lat­er.

    The Bat­tle of Stal­in­grad, one of Mueller’s resume points, is a damn poor antecedent to spir­i­tu­al redemp­tion­ism!

    Best,

    Dave Emory

    Posted by Dave Emory | April 25, 2017, 9:44 pm
  9. @Pterrafractyl–

    More about the Salem milieu from this same cor­re­spon­dent:

    ” . . . .When I look at that Salem group, I see Ger­man corporatism/charity/intel oper­a­tions in the back­ground.

    1. Salem has NOT cut ties to it’s Nazi past or Muller. While Muller is long dead, his fam­i­ly is still in total con­trol of the char­i­ty. I find that odd... Also, I don’t know if this is com­mon or not in Ger­many, but Salem is struc­tured as a GMBH or an LLC.

    http://www.saleminternational.org/index.php?seite=the-organisation

    The share­hold­ers‘ meet­ing is the high­est super­vi­so­ry and con­trol­ling body. It decides all fun­da­men­tal and guid­ing objec­tives and actions that are not assigned to the man­age­ment or the super­vi­so­ry board.

    Mem­bers:
    Samuel Müller, man­ag­ing share­hold­er
    Ursu­la Müller, share­hold­er
    Nathan Müller, share­hold­er

    2. I was being VERY polite ear­li­er when I described “Mes­sian­ic Jews” as being some­times tied to fas­cism. They are TOTALLY fas­cist, their entire pur­pose is Jew­ish era­sure through con­ver­sion. Hart­mann is open­ly linked with an org found­ed by a for­mer Ger­man sol­dier (not sure of his par­ty mem­ber­ship, but his CV sure seems to indi­cate a Nazi) who worked with Mes­sian­ic Jews. That is inher­ent­ly trou­bling.

    3. One of their Super­vi­so­ry Board mem­bers is Suzanne Kraus, who is man­ag­er of the CSU par­ty in the Bavar­i­an dis­trict of Kalm­bach.

    http://www.saleminternational.org/index.php?seite=the-organisation

    4. One of their top char­i­ty “part­ners” is called the Help and Hope foun­da­tion, which was found­ed by a guy named Jost-Ste­fan Heinig ( usu­al­ly referred to as Ste­fan Heinig), who is a titan of Ger­man indus­try. He runs Kik (more about them in a sec­ond), which is major­i­ty owned by the Ten­gel­mann group, a huge con­glom­er­ate. (note: there is an Ernst Ten­gel­mann who was head of Hoechst and most DEFINITELY a Nazi, but I have not con­firmed he is relat­ed.)

    https://www.helpandhope-stiftung.com/en/the-foundation/

    The Nazis’ pow­er base among the fad­ing small mer­chant class, among oth­ers, led to offi­cial mea­sures against nation­al­ly oper­at­ing gro­cery and depart­ment store chains. Among these mea­sures was a stiff rev­enue tax. Ten­gel­mann, asso­ci­at­ing with oth­er firms, was able to gain an exemp­tion from the rev­enue tax, at least for non-Jew­ish com­pa­nies. But Ten­gel­man­n’s expan­sion efforts were nonethe­less thwart­ed by pro­tec­tion­ist poli­cies that barred the open­ing of new branch­es or fac­to­ries. The out­break of the Sec­ond World War placed Ten­gel­man­n’s oper­a­tions under the ulti­mate con­trol of the Nazi gov­ern­ment.

    The end of the war had left not only the Reich in ruins, but much of Ten­gel­mann as well. Its urban-based stores and fac­to­ries had not been spared the bomb­ing of the coun­try by the Allied forces, while many of its unde­stroyed fac­to­ries now were locat­ed in Sovi­et-con­trolled East Ger­many. More­over, the short­age of goods fol­low­ing the war would make it dif­fi­cult for the com­pa­ny to resume its oper­a­tions; on top of this, com­pa­ny chief Karl Schmitz-Scholl had been placed in jail. Nonethe­less, Ten­gel­mann was able to resume oper­a­tions in 1945, under direc­tion of Schmitz-Schol­l’s sis­ter Elis­a­beth Haub. The com­pa­ny reopened shop using mobile trail­ers. Prod­uct assort­ment was lim­it­ed, but the com­pa­ny devel­oped sev­er­al pow­dered prod­ucts meant as pro­tein sup­ple­ments. Ten­gel­mann was once again back on its feet in the 1950s. The com­pa­ny par­tic­i­pat­ed ful­ly in the Ger­man eco­nom­ic recon­struc­tion that would spark an eco­nom­ic boom that would last into the 1980s.

    NOTE: here is a wikipedia sum­ma­ry (all wiki-caveats apply of course) of how Kik does busi­ness. All the cit­ed arti­cles are in Ger­man so it may take some trans­la­tion work to get the full sto­ry. The one about the swasti­ka-shaped cloth­ing racks is not online at all, unfor­tu­nate­ly. The Bangladesh sto­ry sad­ly illus­trates how Heinig likes to bring “Help and Hope” to the peo­ple of the Third World...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiK#cite_note-14

    Build­ing col­lapse at Savar
    Main arti­cle: 2013 Savar build­ing col­lapse

    On 24 April 2013, the eight-sto­ry Rana Plaza com­mer­cial build­ing col­lapsed in Savar, a sub-dis­trict near Dha­ka, the cap­i­tal of Bangladesh. At least 1,127 peo­ple died and over 2,438 were injured.[8] The fac­to­ry housed a num­ber of sep­a­rate gar­ment fac­to­ries employ­ing around 5,000 people,[9] and man­u­fac­tured appar­el for brands includ­ing the Benet­ton Group, Joe Fresh,[10] The Chil­dren’s Place, Pri­mark, Mon­soon, and DressBarn.[11][12] Of the 29 brands iden­ti­fied as hav­ing sourced prod­ucts from the Rana Plaza fac­to­ries, only 9 attend­ed meet­ings held in Novem­ber 2013 to agree a pro­pos­al on com­pen­sa­tion to the vic­tims. Sev­er­al com­pa­nies refused to sign includ­ing Wal­mart, Car­refour, Bon­marché, Man­go, Auchan and KiK. The agree­ment was signed by Pri­mark, Loblaws, Bon­marché and El Corte Inglés.[13]

    In 2009, a man from the Ger­man state Schleswig-Hol­stein pressed charges against KiK under Strafge­set­zbuch § 86a, which out­laws the “use of sym­bols of uncon­sti­tu­tion­al organ­i­sa­tions”, for the chain using swasti­ka-styled cloth­ing racks in their shops.[14]

    KiK have been crit­i­cised by the Clean Clothes Cam­paign for their bad prac­tis­es in coun­tries such as Bangladesh, where fac­to­ry work­ers, often children,[15] are paid as lit­tle as €18–24 per month.[16]

    While run­ning almost 50,000 secret cred­it rat­ings of staff,[17] over­time is often not paid,[18] despite accu­sa­tions and law­suits of KiK pay­ing below min­i­mum wage to their staff in Germany.[19]

    NOTE: A few years ago, Heinig part­nered with Karl-Erivan Haub (Ger­man fam­i­ly from Pacif­ic North­west, one of the rich­est in the world... nev­er heard of them before yes­ter­day!) to buy the Ger­man ver­sion of Wool­worths.

    http://tengelmann.de/en/press/press-archive/news-detail/datum/2010/08/26/unternehmensgruppe-tengelmann-zieht-positive-bilanz.html

    Mül­heim an der Ruhr, August 26, 2010 – In the 143rd year of its exis­tence the Ten­gel­mann Group round­ed off its 2009 finan­cial year with sales total­ing EUR 11.34 bil­lion, rep­re­sent­ing an increase of 2.6 per­cent over the year before. The Group oper­at­ed 4,519 branch­es and employed 84,516 staff. “The Ten­gel­mann Group was not affect­ed by the glob­al eco­nom­ic cri­sis. We have record­ed a growth in sales and prof­its and have high equi­ty and fur­ther increased liq­uid funds,” explained Karl-Erivan W. Haub, man­ag­ing and per­son­al­ly liable part­ner of the Ten­gel­mann Group, at today’s press con­fer­ence at the head­quar­ters in Mül­heim an der Ruhr. “We are focus­ing on sound com­mer­cial virtues and organ­ic growth gen­er­at­ed by our own resources, but we are also tak­ing advan­tage of spe­cif­ic acqui­si­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties. As a result, our fam­i­ly busi­ness is inde­pen­dent of the finan­cial mar­ket and is devel­op­ing in a sus­tain­able man­ner.”

    The Ten­gel­mann Group is rep­re­sent­ed in 16 Euro­pean coun­tries with its Kaiser’s Ten­gel­mann, KiK, OBI and Ten­gel­mann E‑Commerce divi­sions as well as many small­er com­pa­nies. In 2009, the Ger­man sub­sidiaries devel­oped bet­ter than the for­eign sub­sidiaries, which suf­fered more from the glob­al eco­nom­ic cri­sis. How­ev­er, times of cri­sis also offer unique oppor­tu­ni­ties: “For the first time we have made notable invest­ments in acqui­si­tions, main­ly in mar­ket-lead­ing Inter­net enter­pris­es but also in sta­tion­ary retail by acquir­ing stakes in Wool­worth,” said Mr. Haub.

    NOTE: The Haub fam­i­ly (prob­a­bly worth a few hours research them­selves) is quite proud of their Ger­man his­to­ry and Chris­t­ian, Karl-Erivan’s broth­er, has been a Grand Mar­shal of the Steuben parade! This “Great Atlantic and Pacif­ic Tea Com­pa­ny” sounds very inter­est­ing.

    http://gacgny.org/news19.html

    Chris­t­ian W. E. Haub is Exec­u­tive Chair­man of the Board of Direc­tors of The Great Atlantic & Pacif­ic Tea Com­pa­ny, Inc. (A&P), a Mont­vale, NJ-based oper­a­tor of more than 436 super­mar­kets in 8 states and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia. Mr. Haub joined the Com­pa­ny in 1991. In Decem­ber 1993, he was elect­ed Pres­i­dent and Chief Oper­at­ing Offi­cer. In May 1998, Mr. Haub was elect­ed Pres­i­dent & Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer. He was elect­ed Chair­man of the Board in April 2001, and assumed that office on May 1. He became Exec­u­tive Chair­man of the Board of Direc­tors in August 2005.

    Mr. Haub is a Part­ner and Co-Chief Exec­u­tive of The Ten­gel­mann Group, Mül­heim, Ger­many, one of the world’s largest food retail­ing com­pa­nies and the major­i­ty share­hold­er of The Great Atlantic & Pacif­ic Tea Co., Inc. Born in Taco­ma, Wash­ing­ton in 1964, Mr. Haub is a grad­u­ate of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Eco­nom­ics, Vien­na, Aus­tria, and a Ger­man-Amer­i­can in every aspect. . . .:

    Best,

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Emory | April 25, 2017, 10:01 pm
  10. More about Thom Hart­mann and Ger­many from a schol­ar­ly cor­re­spon­dent:

    ” . . . . Man, does he ever love Ger­many! Note: I agree with him on many of the pro­gres­sive things he likes about Ger­many. But I real­ly can’t find any­thing neg­a­tive from him about Merkel.

    But check out these posts from him about the Father­land...

    http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/the-end-of-poverty/why-are-bmw-and-mercedes-so-rich

    https://www.democraticunderground.com/101717715

    NOTE: This econ prof from Bayreuth is on the Salem board as well. He inter­views him here...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRlBgqKvDjk

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT5DPNZ4CPk

    Oh, and here are his com­ments on the death of Got­tfried Mueller back in ’09.

    https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=146537756020&id=113201214447

    “Herr Müller died on Sat­ur­day. Those of you who have read “The Prophet’s Way” will know about him. Thom will fly to Ger­many after today’s show, funer­al Wednes­day. Peter B guest hosts tomor­row and Carl and Chris­tine on Wednes­day. Show live from Ger­many Thurs­day and Fri­day.”

    Posted by Dave Emory | April 27, 2017, 5:30 pm
  11. @Dave: While it’s unde­ni­able that Thom brings up Ger­many a lot and often makes com­par­isons between the US and Ger­many that puts Ger­many in a favor­able light, it’s impor­tant to note that it’s vir­tu­al­ly always com­par­isons where Ger­many real­ly is doing bet­ter than the US, like union­iza­tion rates in the labor force, uni­ver­sal health care, and big nation­al invest­ments in solar pow­er. Those are the main areas where he he touts Ger­many’s accom­plish­ments, at least that I’ve ever heard him bring up. But anoth­er impor­tant thing to note is that he fre­quent­ly crit­i­cizes Europe, and Ger­many specif­i­cal­ly, over the insane aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies that are destroy­ing Europe. Here’s an exam­ple from back in 2011 when the euro­zone cri­sis was real­ly heat­ing up where Thom brings up the notion that aus­ter­i­ty was basi­cal­ly a back-door way means of Ger­many win­ning WWII. Sure, he does­n’t bring up this top­ic as much as I would pre­fer since it’s one of the biggest sto­ries of our time, but he def­i­nite­ly brings it up much more than basi­cal­ly any oth­er polit­i­cal talk radio host I’ve heard.

    And, yeah, you’re not going to find him say­ing many neg­a­tive things about Merkel, but then again, almost no one on the Left in the US crit­i­cizes her. The per­son who is lead­ing the way on lead­ing Europe into per­ma­nent far-right eco­nom­ic straight­jack­et is rou­tine­ly fet­ed by US pro­gres­sives as some sort of great glob­al leader. It’s bizarre, but it is what it is.

    Over­all, if Thom’s a secret far-right agent or some­thing like that he’s done a pret­ty good job main­tain­ing his cov­er.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 28, 2017, 10:42 am
  12. @Pterrafractyl–

    Some quick points to pon­der:

    1.–The car­di­nal rule for a good dou­ble agent: Make your­self indis­pens­able to the effort.

    2.–Note the FFT post at the cur­rent top of the page: https://spitfirelist.com/news/nazis-in-new-orleans‑2/

    Using Anti-Com­mu­nism to enslave Amer­i­ca was the focal point of the “gar­gan­tu­an” plot not­ed by Army intel offi­cer Glenn Pinch­back.

    If you are going to use anti-Com­mu­nism to enslave Amer­i­ca, you have to have at least the per­ceived threat of com­mu­nism. In that regard, I note the Eston­ian Nazi back­ground of Kalle Lassen, whose “Adbusters” kicked off Occu­py Wall Street, and Sanders’ links to the far right/Karl Rove, etc.

    I believe that the per­ceived threat of “Bol­she­viks” gen­er­at­ed by Lassen’s Occu­py move­ment and Bernie’s so-called “rev­o­lu­tion” helped gen­er­ate the “agree­ment” among the mem­bers of the fra­ter­ni­ty dis­cussed in the con­clu­sion of “Uncle Sam and the Swasti­ka.”

    In con­clu­sion, note that Hart­mann used NONE of the info I have pre­sent­ed over the decades, from open sources, in his b.s. cov­er-up book about the JFK assas­si­na­tion.

    Also: NEVER for­get that, when lis­ten­ing to him, you are prob­a­bly being sub­ject­ed to NLP, a form of psy­cho-lin­guis­tic mind con­trol.

    Best,

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Emory | April 28, 2017, 4:09 pm
  13. More about St. Bernard–

    One of the most wretched things he did was to get an awful crea­ture named Cor­nel West onto the Demo­c­ra­t­ic plat­form com­mit­tee, where CW prompt­ly called for peo­ple to vote for Jill Stein and the Green Par­ty!

    Great stuff!

    A lis­ten­er con­tributed what fol­lows, which I present unedit­ed.

    West is now call­ing for the dis­man­tling of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.

    Per­son­nal­ly, I would like to see the dis­man­tling of Cor­nel West.

    His sen­ti­ments on CW encom­pass my own:

    ” What a fuck­ing piece of shit he is... I will admit some amuse­ment on how close he comes to an out­right par­o­dy of ‘angry black mil­i­tant’ from the 60s. Reminds me of Chris Rock­’s ‘Nat X’ rou­tines... except that Nat X is fun­ny.

    Nat X

    https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/cast/chris-rock-14736/character/nat-x-66231

    Cor­nel’s call to destroy the par­ty he was on the con­ven­tion com­mit­tee of less than a year ago is below. Nice idea, Bernie, you crap­head. Note: I did­n’t ful­ly grasp the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of Boin’s ties to the SWP until fair­ly recent­ly. Knew of the Oswald thing from your work, but there is a LOT more. Stay tuned...

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/24/democrats-delivered-one-thing-100-days-disappointment

    Even as we forge a unit­ed front against Trump’s neo­fas­cist efforts, we must admit the Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty has failed us and we have to move on. Where? To what? When broth­er Nick Brana, a for­mer Bernie cam­paign staffer, told me about the emerg­ing pro­gres­sive pop­ulist or social demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty – the People’s par­ty – that builds on the ruins of a dying Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty and cre­ates new con­stituen­cies in this moment of tran­si­tion and liq­ui­da­tion, I said count me in.

    And if a class-con­scious mul­ti-racial par­ty attuned to anti-sex­ist, anti-homo­pho­bic and anti-mil­i­taris­tic issues and ground­ed in eco­log­i­cal com­mit­ments can recon­fig­ure our cit­i­zen­ship, maybe our decay­ing democ­ra­cy has a chance. And if broth­er Bernie Sanders decides to join us – with many oth­ers, includ­ing sis­ter Jill Stein and activists from Black Lives Mat­ter and brown immi­grant groups and Stand­ing Rock free­dom fight­ers and betrayed work­ing peo­ple – we may build some­thing for the near future after Trump implodes.”

    Posted by Dave Emory | May 2, 2017, 9:40 pm
  14. Slan­ders’ Field Man­ag­er in New Hamp­shire, Hugo Pal­ma, gave an inter­view to James O’Keefe and pre­tend­ed he did­n’t know who he was. Pal­ma told O’Keefe that the Democ­rats were reg­is­ter­ing fake vot­ers and using false address­es, all to help the Reicht make the DNC look untrust­wor­thy. At first, I thought Slan­ders was­n’t aware his cam­paign had been infil­trat­ed but became very doubt­ful when his cam­paign was caught steal­ing mail­ing lists from the DNC data­base. I think those mail­ing lists went straight into the hands of Eddie the Friend­ly Spook in Moscow who is dis­pens­ing RT’s social media News­feed. Stein and Slan­ders were paid to facil­i­tate, they knew.

    Posted by May Frock | June 5, 2017, 1:34 am
  15. @ May Frock–

    Please let us know what the source is for your alle­ga­tion that Hugo Pal­ma gave the inter­view to James O’Keefe.

    Best,

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Emory | June 5, 2017, 3:40 pm
  16. From a reg­u­lar, trust­ed con­trib­u­tor.

    “Men­tioned before that Jane Sanders was head­ing for rough waters over this col­lege up in Ver­mont... looks like it is actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing! And they hired Scoot­er Lib­by’s attor­ney. I don’t judge them for hir­ing a good lawyer, nor do I think Scoot­er Lib­by deserved to be the scape­goat for the Iraq War. But I do think it inter­est­ing and indica­tive of the kind of cir­cles that Sanders moves in. This is not the first time we have seen this “social­ist” close to GOP cir­cles. The lawyer is also known for defend­ing the Big Four account­ing firms.

    http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/24/bernie-sanders-and-his-wife-reportedly-lawyer-up-amid-fbi-probe.html

    This week, Politi­co Mag­a­zine said the cou­ple have obtained legal coun­sel amidst a Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion (FBI) inves­ti­ga­tion into whether Jane Sanders fraud­u­lent­ly obtained a bank loan for the now defunct Burling­ton Col­lege in Ver­mont. Addi­tion­al­ly, inves­ti­ga­tors are prob­ing whether the Ver­mont sen­a­tor’s office pres­sured the bank to approve the loan, Politi­co Mag­a­zine added.

    While the Sanders’ have large­ly tried to down­play the inves­ti­ga­tion, the pair has now lawyered up, Politi­co report­ed, retain­ing well-con­nect­ed Burling­ton attor­ney, Rich Cas­sidy. Also part of the legal team is Lar­ry Rob­bins, a not­ed Wash­ing­ton-based defense attor­ney who rep­re­sent­ed I. Lewis “Scoot­er” Lib­by, the pub­li­ca­tion stat­ed.”

    Posted by Dave Emory | June 26, 2017, 4:03 pm
  17. Anoth­er salient con­tri­bu­tion from the same, above, lis­ten­er:

    I built a flow chart about a decade ago about Alfa Bank and its net­work­ing, as Alfa is back in the news. Just caught sometht­ing while look­ing them over: the law firm that Bernie and wife just hired in the col­lege scan­dal? Same law firm that John P. Schmitz and Richard Ben-Veniste (Bar­ry Seal lawyer, 911 Com­mis­sion mem­ber) worked for!

    May­er Brown.”

    Enjoy!

    Dave Emory

    Posted by Dave Emory | June 27, 2017, 5:23 pm
  18. A [char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly] inci­sive and impor­tant piece of analy­sis was sent to me by an asso­ciate.

    It con­cerns Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion and the Mahar­ishi milieu and their links to the Bernie Sanders milieu.

    ““A lit­tle dad­dy with a beard telling sto­ries of heav­en as if he knew. You could nev­er pin him down, but he often spread rumors through his right hand man who used to be with the CIA and told about the planes he saved.”
    ‑John Lennon, “The Mahar­ishi Song” (ear­ly ver­sion of Sexy Sadie, which was about the Mahar­ishi)

    “Mahar­ishi teach­es: Invin­ci­bil­i­ty can be obtained on many lev­els, indi­vid­ual, orga­ni­za­tion­al and governmental.The cur­rent thrust of the move­ment is to cre­ate a 7,000 sid­hi-fly­ers group in one coun­try, there by cre­at­ing an invin­ci­ble nation.Maharishi teach­es orga­ni­za­tions can also gain invin­ci­bil­i­ty. He claims that by hav­ing a spe­cif­ic per­cent­age of the employ­ees prac­tic­ing his $3,500 sid­his pro­gram an indi­vid­ual can also become invin­ci­ble.
    One of the qual­i­ties of enlight­en­ment is invin­ci­bil­i­ty. Mahesh explains that when an indi­vid­ual, orga­ni­za­tion or gov­ern­ment is invin­ci­ble, it is impos­si­ble for an ene­my to even think a neg­a­tive thought about the invin­ci­ble. In con­sid­er­ing Mahar­ishi’s claims in light of the fol­low­ing affi­davit ofGem­ma Cowhig, I ask:
    Has Mahesh attained enlight­en­ment?
    If he is enlight­ened, is he invin­ci­ble?
    If he is invin­ci­ble, why does he have a fear of the CIA?
    Why would the move­ment have a fear of a CIA infil­tra­tion?”

    Patrick Ryan, MIU Class ’80, August, 1994~ http://www.minet.org/news94sm.dtp.0.html

    “In recent years, the Mahar­ishi’s think­ing and poli­cies have become increas­ing­ly para­noid. He rails about the Move­ment being in dan­ger from Rak­shasas (demons) — who can only enter build­ings from south-fac­ing entrances, while gods pro­tect and enter build­ings from east-fac­ing entrances. He has claimed at var­i­ous times that the TM Move­ment has been infil­trat­ed by agents of the CIA, Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion, and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies.”

    http://tmfree.blogspot.com/2008/01/why-i-believe-transcendental-meditation.html

    NOTE: I gen­er­al­ly like TMfree (ex-TM mem­bers), but I think I’m with the Mahar­ishi on that one! I think his org has been infil­trat­ed for 50 years, whether he liked it or not.

    It wasn’t just the Trump fam­i­ly that got close with TM dur­ing the 2016 elec­tion, Bernie also tried to milk that cow. Dave, you will love this… noth­ing bet­ter than Bernie back­ers drool­ing with New Age clichés. Uggh… Also, keep in mind that, back in 2016, I for­ward­ed a piece by a blind Hillary cam­paign work­er who switched from the Bernie camp, when she saw from the inside that his med­ical pol­i­cy was large­ly based on New Age think­ing, lead­ing her to sus­pect that there would be “more yoga and well­ness... few­er wheel­chairs” in the lives of the Amer­i­can dis­abled. I did­n’t pay much atten­tion to Bernie and the New Age at the time, how­ev­er.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-transcendental-meditationists-who-turned-an-iowa-farm-town-into-a-bernie-base/2016/01/29/b4de383c-c5e1-11e5-8965–0607e0e265ce_story.html

    FAIRFIELD, Iowa — Every morn­ing and every evening, and some­times in between, this rur­al com­mu­ni­ty appears to under­go a mas­sive out­break of nar­colep­sy. Gath­er­ing in giant domes or sit­ting in the pri­va­cy of their own homes, hun­dreds of men and women will take the time to close their eyes, bow their heads and sit motion­less for 20 min­utes.

    With the cau­cus­es just days away, this unlike­ly mec­ca for prac­ti­tion­ers of Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion is get­ting a jolt of activ­i­ty. There have been vis­its from Hillary Clin­ton, as well as HUD Sec­re­tary Julián Cas­tro, her who-knows-maybe poten­tial run­ning mate. Ted Cruz drew a big crowd to the small con­ven­tion cen­ter here on a Tues­day night.

    But it was Bernie Sanders whose vis­it Thurs­day got the most buzz about town — and it’s he who might ben­e­fit most from the Mahar­ishi effect.
    “He rep­re­sents a high­er lev­el of cog­ni­tive devel­op­ment,” said Sam Far­ling, a vol­un­teer orga­niz­er here for Sanders. “Hillary Clin­ton may have the almost mil­i­taris­tic lev­el of orga­niz­ing — but we have the pas­sion.”

    Far­ling, a Viet­nam vet­er­an orig­i­nal­ly from Ohio, migrat­ed here decades ago for the same rea­son as many Fair­field res­i­dents: the Mahar­ishi Mahesh Yogi.
    The glo­ri­ous­ly beard­ed guru, who died in 2008 at age 90 , launched the Bea­t­les and Mia Far­row on spir­i­tu­al quests and made the ancient Indi­an tra­di­tion of med­i­ta­tion hip. He also helped trans­form a sleepy farm town into the enlight­en­ment cap­i­tal of south­east­ern Iowa: When a group of his acolytes out­grew their digs in Cal­i­for­nia in the ear­ly 1970s, they came here, snap­ping up a new­ly defunct lib­er­al arts col­lege at a bar­gain price.

    Now the Mahar­ishi Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­age­ment dom­i­nates the town with its 1,000 stu­dents, two 25,000-square-foot med­i­ta­tion domes (“over one mil­lion hours of tran­scend­ing has occurred here”) — and a boun­ti­ful crop of Bernie 2016 stick­ers in the park­ing lot.

    “I think in gen­er­al it’s a weird school, so peo­ple here tend to be more open-mind­ed to new and dif­fer­ent things,” said stu­dent Ken­nidy Stood. “Bernie rep­re­sents a cer­tain ide­al, and peo­ple aren’t as afraid here to go for that.”

    As a “con­scious­ness-based learn­ing” insti­tu­tion, Mahar­ishi requires stu­dents to prac­tice TM; they are encour­aged to get brain scans as they start at the uni­ver­si­ty and right before they leave, to see how med­i­ta­tion has affect­ed them. While many oth­er spir­i­tu­al fads of the ’70s have petered out or been deemed too cultish, TM has held steady, even gain­ing in pop­u­lar­i­ty as the ancient art of yoga has also entered the main­stream.
    “It’s unlike­ly the Army and Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health would fund a cult,” said Maharishi’s exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent, Craig Pear­son, not­ing var­i­ous grants the school has received.

    NOTE: I would hearti­ly dis­agree with that notion!

    The school’s sen­si­bil­i­ties have tak­en hold in Fair­field, as a num­ber of TM prac­ti­tion­ers (who call each oth­er “Ru,” short for “guru”) have put down roots. Even the may­or, Ed Mal­loy (“I’m cau­cus­ing for Hillary, and my wife is cau­cus­ing for Bernie”), is a Long Island trans­plant who came here for the med­i­ta­tion.
    Many homes face east, their roofs topped with gold­en Hershey’s Kiss-shaped orna­ments; the town boasts a hip cof­fee shop, an upcy­cled goods cen­ter, veg­e­tar­i­an joints and six Indi­an restau­rants.
    But still, this is small-town Iowa, home to farm­ers and foundry work­ers and the Iowa Cat­tle Association’s best burg­er of 2015. And for all his old-hip­pie cre­den­tials, not every­one here is in the tank for Sanders.
    “A lot of our com­mu­ni­ty is real­ly hard-wired to look at the most ide­al­is­tic ver­sion of every­thing,” said Hol­ly Moore, a 1979 Mahar­ishi grad­u­ate who is vol­un­teer­ing for Clin­ton. “But I’m so prag­mat­ic. I don’t think life is all about sit­ting some­where with my eyes closed, and not all about a lev­el of activ­i­ty. It’s a com­bi­na­tion of the two.”
    There are even TMers who vote Repub­li­can.

    “It’s real­ly about being against the estab­lish­ment,” said Doug Stew­art, a Cruz sup­port­er. It’s more typ­i­cal for a GOP TMer to lean lib­er­tar­i­an, though. This is, after all, the only coun­ty in Iowa that Ron Paul won in 2008.
    “If I don’t vote for Rand Paul, I might vote for Bernie,” said David Bal­lou, who is help­ing run one of the cau­cus loca­tions in town.
    Jeff Ship­ley, the 27-year-old chair­man of the coun­ty GOP, says he’s not your typ­i­cal Repub­li­can — he’s as keen on legal­iza­tion and the anti­war move­ment as he is on fis­cal con­ser­vatism — and even he can almost feel the Bern.
    “The point of the med­i­ta­tion is to cre­ate world peace,” said Ship­ley, who is him­self not a med­i­ta­tor. “You had thou­sands of peo­ple come here with the idea of cre­at­ing a bet­ter world, and they like Bernie for that. If I was a Demo­c­rat, I’d sup­port him with­out a doubt.”

    Two hours before the Ver­mont sen­a­tor showed up, the line to the con­ven­tion cen­ter had begun to snake through town. “It’s like Hillary 2.0,” said a local pho­tog­ra­ph­er shoot­ing the scene.

    “I had to move a den­tist appoint­ment up to ear­ly this after­noon to make this,” said David Good­man, a Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion­ist. “The Novo­cain is just wear­ing off.”

    The actress Gaby Hoff­mann (“Trans­par­ent”) stood in the back wear­ing a shirt with a sten­ciled ren­der­ing of Sanders’s face, hav­ing come to Iowa for 24 hours to sup­port a can­di­date she has nev­er met. (“But he shops at the same health-food store as my best friend’s mom.”) Susan Saran­don opened the show for him.
    “I came from New York,” the Oscar win­ner said to know­ing applause. “For me, the one thing that is impor­tant is con­sis­ten­cy and moral courage.”

    NOTE: Saran­don spread Tim­o­thy Leary’s ash­es at Burn­ing Man a few years back…

    When Sanders took the stage, his voice hoarse from repeat­ing his mantra about income inequal­i­ty at stops across the state, the crowd broke their rever­ie and screamed approval for their hon­orary Ru.

    There’s an open ques­tion about whether Sanders is going to be able to turn this enthu­si­asm into actu­al cau­cus-goers. It’s Clin­ton who has a down­town phone-bank oper­a­tion here and a field orga­niz­er as well as a klatch of vol­un­teers.
    But Fair­field res­i­dents are high­ly trained at keep­ing cool. If the can­di­date they adore can’t pull it off, they’ll find peace some­how.
    “Peo­ple who med­i­tate get in the har­mo­ny with the deep­est flow of life,” Far­ling said, “and we already know that over­all every­thing is going to turn out won­der­ful.”

    NOTE: Yeah, the 2016 elec­tion turned out just fuck­ing fan­tas­tic, right?! Next up, let’s do away with the myth of TM being “just for lib­er­als”. Here is a puff piece from the right-wingers at News­max.

    http://www.newsmax.com/Health/Headline/president-should-meditate-stress/2016/06/07/id/732778/

    …Our next pres­i­dent, whether it be Don­ald Trump, Hilary Clin­ton, or Bernie Sanders, should med­i­tate every day, says Dar­rin Zeer, who is known as Amer­i­ca’s Relax­ation Expert. “The pres­i­den­cy is the tough­est job on earth and the most impor­tant.” he tells News­max Health.

    “We want our pres­i­dent to make the right deci­sions for glob­al safe­ty and secu­ri­ty,” Zeer says, and med­i­ta­tion can help the pres­i­dent man­age stress and con­cen­trate bet­ter.

    Med­i­ta­tion does­n’t have to be com­pli­cat­ed, says Zeer, or take up much of the pres­i­den­t’s lim­it­ed time. “Keep it sim­ple,” he says. “Just sit and close your eyes for three to five min­utes and focus on your breath­ing.”

    Med­i­ta­tion could have spe­cif­ic ben­e­fits for each pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, accord­ing to Zeer. “Trump could prob­a­bly use some help with stress man­age­ment, while Hilary might find that med­i­ta­tion cre­ates accep­tance of painful events in her past. Stud­ies have found that med­i­ta­tion slows the aging process, and that might be par­tic­u­lar­ly help­ful for Sanders.”

    Med­i­ta­tion is a form of “mind­ful­ness,” which focus­es atten­tion on both inter­nal and exter­nal expe­ri­ences that are occur­ring in the present moment.

    It’s not just the pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates that could ben­e­fit from med­i­ta­tion. Recent stud­ies have shown that med­i­ta­tion pro­vides a wide range of health ben­e­fits for vir­tu­al­ly every­one:

    Pro­tects against heart dis­ease. A study pub­lished in Cir­cu­la­tion: Car­dio­vas­cu­lar Qual­i­ty and Out­comes fol­lowed 201 African-Amer­i­can men and women diag­nosed with heart dis­ease. They were divid­ed into two groups: One group prac­ticed med­i­ta­tion while the sec­ond group par­tic­i­pat­ed in an edu­ca­tion­al class about heart-friend­ly exer­cise and diet.

    After five years, the med­i­ta­tion group expe­ri­enced a 48 per­cent reduc­tion in the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death from any cause. “Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion may reduce heart dis­ease risks for both healthy peo­ple and those with diag­nosed heart con­di­tions,” said lead researcher Robert Schnei­der.

    NOTE: Let’s take a quick look at some oth­er views of Dr. Scheider’s work as opposed to the uncrit­i­cal treat­ment by News­max. The thing to always watch for is those who con­flate ALL med­i­ta­tion with TM. TM has been attempt­ing to cre­ate sci­en­tif­ic sup­port for itself for decades. This can be skipped by any­body with a good grasp of why TM doesn’t add up sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, but worth cit­ing as some read­ers or lis­ten­ers may not under­stand the flaws. There is more detail in the arti­cle, I tried to keep it short.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/larryhusten/2012/11/25/yet-another-look-at-the-transcendental-meditation-paper/#34230d6265ac

    …I’m grate­ful for Kaul’s high­ly tech­ni­cal analy­sis of the sta­tis­ti­cal issues raised by Schnei­der, but I don’t think this case real­ly requires a ter­ri­bly high lev­el of tech­ni­cal exper­tise. Com­mon sense actu­al­ly works pret­ty well in this case. A tri­al with bare­ly 200 patients can not be expect­ed to pro­vide broad answers about the health ben­e­fits of a nov­el inter­ven­tion. As Kaul and oth­ers have stat­ed on many oth­er occa­sions, “extra­or­di­nary claims require extra­or­di­nary evi­dence,” and it is quite clear that the evi­dence in this tri­al is not extra­or­di­nary, at least in any pos­i­tive sense.

    Ques­tions About Tri­al Reli­a­bil­i­ty And Data– In his response Schnei­der tries to skate away from the inevitable ques­tions raised about this paper when Archives of Inter­nal Med­i­cine chose to with­draw the paper only 12 min­utes before its sched­uled pub­li­ca­tion time. Schnei­der can pre­tend that this inci­dent nev­er occurred, but out­sider read­ers can not help but won­der what sparked this extra­or­di­nary inci­dent, and will not be sat­is­fied until the details are ful­ly explained.

    There are addi­tion­al red flags about the tri­al. Schnei­der told Web­MD that since the Archives inci­dent “the data was re-ana­lyzed. Also, new data was added and the study under­went an inde­pen­dent review.” Said Schnei­der:

    “This is the new and improved ver­sion.”

    This is an extra­or­di­nary claim, because a clin­i­cal tri­al can­not be “new and improved” unless there were seri­ous flaws with the ear­li­er ver­sion. What exact­ly does it mean to say that a paper pub­lished in 2012 about a tri­al com­plet­ed in 2007 is “new and improved”? (Accord­ing to ClinicalTrials.Gov the study was com­plet­ed in July 2007, while June 2007 was the “final data col­lec­tion date” for the pri­ma­ry end­point.)

    The 5‑year delay between the 2007 com­ple­tion date and the pub­li­ca­tion of the data is high­ly sus­pi­cious. What exact­ly caused this delay? The paper hints at one pos­si­ble source of delay: as Kaul notes below, the inves­ti­ga­tors refer to the pri­ma­ry end­point as a “DSMB-approved end­point.” This sug­gests that the pri­ma­ry end­point was changed at some point in the tri­al. As Kaul points out, it is not the job of the DSMB to either choose or approve pri­ma­ry end­points. Since the tri­al was not reg­is­tered until 2011 with ClinicalTrials.Gov it is impos­si­ble to sort this issue out unless the inves­ti­ga­tors choose to release the ini­tial tri­al pro­to­col and sta­tis­ti­cal plan.

    Schnei­der’s response also fails to explain why there is a dif­fer­ence in the num­ber of pri­ma­ry end­point events between the Archives paper and the Cir­cu­la­tion: Car­dio­vas­cu­lar Qual­i­ty & Out­comes paper, since the col­lec­tion date for the pri­ma­ry out­come mea­sure is list­ed as June 2007 on ClinicalTrials.Gov. I see no rea­son why the rea­son for this dis­crep­an­cy should­n’t be explained. Although the dif­fer­ence is only 1 event, it inevitably rais­es ques­tions about the reli­a­bil­i­ty of the data.

    Tri­al Inter­pre­ta­tion– Final­ly, I am deeply con­cerned about the way this tri­al will be used, or mis­used, to “sell” the brand of Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion in the broad­est pos­si­ble pop­u­la­tion, ie, every­one. Though the study was lim­it­ed to African-Amer­i­can with heart dis­ease, here’s what Schnei­der told the Dai­ly Mail:

    ‘Tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion may reduce heart dis­ease risks for both healthy peo­ple and those with diag­nosed heart con­di­tions. The research on tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion and car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease is estab­lished well enough that doc­tors may safe­ly and rou­tine­ly pre­scribe stress reduc­tion for their patients with this easy to imple­ment, stan­dard­ised and prac­ti­cal pro­gramme.’

    Med­i­ta­tion may of course be ben­e­fi­cial, but it will nev­er be a cure for heart dis­ease, and it won’t replace oth­er treat­ments. But here’s what Schnei­der told Web­MD:
    “What this is say­ing is that mind-body inter­ven­tions can have an effect as big as con­ven­tion­al med­ica­tions, such as statins,” says Schnei­der.

    It should­n’t be nec­es­sary to say, but the evi­dence base for statins is sev­er­al orders of mag­ni­tude greater than the evi­dence base for med­i­ta­tion. Fur­ther, there have been no stud­ies com­par­ing med­i­ta­tion to statins. Any claim that med­i­ta­tion is equiv­a­lent to statins is pre­pos­ter­ous.
    To be clear, I have noth­ing against med­i­ta­tion. Gener­ic med­i­ta­tion is cheap, safe, and even pos­si­bly effec­tive. Brand­ed Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion, on the oth­er hand, is a cult, and it is out to get your mon­ey. An ini­tial TM pro­gram costs $1500, and increas­es the deep­er you get pulled into the cult.

    Here’s what Schnei­der told Health­day:
    “One of the rea­sons we did the study is because insur­ance and Medicare calls for cit­ing evi­dence for what’s to be reim­bursed,” Schnei­der said. “This study will lead toward reim­burse­ment. That’s the whole idea.”
    Here’s the real source of my dis­com­fort with this tri­al. For true believ­ers like Schnei­der, fight­ing heart dis­ease is impor­tant only inso­far as it can be employed to fur­ther the inter­ests of TM. Sci­en­tif­ic stan­dards and med­ical progress are unim­por­tant in the larg­er scheme of pro­mot­ing TM.

    NOTE: Sure­ly the Chris­t­ian hip­pie-haters at Fox News will take on this demon­ic spir­i­tu­al­ism! They found Tom McKin­ley Ball… of the David Lynch Foun­da­tion… to help clear this all up. Did my best to delete some of the New Age spew to make this more read­able.

    http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/02/19/can-meditation-save-us.html

    …Eco­nom­ic uncer­tain­ty, polit­i­cal divisiveness—it seems that our nation and many of us indi­vid­u­al­ly are now under more stress than we’re designed to handle.It’s no sur­prise that increas­ing num­bers of peo­ple are turn­ing to med­i­ta­tion for refuge. And why shouldn’t we? It’s just the nat­ur­al use of our own minds.
    …“If Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion were a new drug, con­fer­ring this many ben­e­fits, it would be the biggest, mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar block­buster drug on the market.”—former senior NIH researcher Nor­man Rosen­thal, M.D.
    In the 1970s, Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion (“TM”) became a wide­spread cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non. Now there’s a ris­ing new wave of inter­est in TM, but for dif­fer­ent rea­sons: because there’s so much sci­en­tif­ic research ver­i­fy­ing its effects.
    Doc­tors and ther­a­pists are rec­om­mend­ing it in grow­ing num­bers. Busi­ness own­ers offer it as a human resource for employees—such as Oprah Win­frey and her com­pa­ny, Har­po Pro­duc­tions.

    Prison sys­tems in the U.S. and abroad are imple­ment­ing pro­grams for inmates. Hun­dreds of schools around the world are offer­ing TM-Qui­et Time pro­grams for stu­dents. But most­ly, peo­ple are learn­ing it because they notice pos­i­tive change in some­one they know who’s learned.
    ….Here’s the beau­ty of Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion: it’s a stress-reduc­ing prac­tice that tran­scends per­son­al opin­ion, likes and dis­likes, beliefs and ide­olo­gies. It works on the basis of some­thing deep­er and more universal—the mind’s nat­ur­al ten­den­cy.
    Tom McKin­ley Ball is a writer for the David Lynch Foun­da­tion. He attend­ed a Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion teacher train­ing course in 1975–76, where he stud­ied with Mahar­ishi Mahesh Yogi, and has taught med­i­ta­tion for 38 years.

    NOTE: As men­tioned above, I don’t think it is at all crazy to think that the mil­i­tary would help out a cult and vice ver­sa. I think it is fair­ly stan­dard prac­tice. And the suc­cess of TM, which is utter­ly pro­tect­ed by the con­trolled media, and revered by the President’s chil­dren, bears this out. If any­body has any con­fu­sion over whether there are ties between TM and the mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex, I think this arti­cle should dis­miss some of that con­fu­sion.

    https://www.army.mil/article/139778

    Tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion: A path to heal­ing
    By U.S. Army
    Decem­ber 11, 2014
    FORT GORDON, Ga. — Staff Sgt. Todd Knauber used to believe it would sound ridicu­lous to rec­om­mend some­thing like tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion class­es to fel­low com­bat vet­er­ans but the results have changed his views.

    Knauber states that, “it is our great­est weapon in help­ing to com­bat the scars of con­flict. This pro­gram pro­vides [vet­er­ans] the grounds to reestab­lish hope; and begin to tru­ly heal.”

    Knauber served nine months as a U.S. Army tur­ret gun­ner in the far west region of
    Afghanistan dur­ing Oper­a­tion Endur­ing Free­dom before he was injured.

    “Togeth­er we have seen both the best and worst human­i­ty has had to offer and we have learned to endure the scars we have been left with.”

    He was told that the longer you are out of the fight, the bet­ter things are sup­posed to get but he found his real­i­ty was much dif­fer­ent.

    “Every day that hill gets a lit­tle steep­er. The life back there ver­sus the life here seem worlds apart; one feels like the sole place I belong, or where any­thing makes some mod­icum of sense. Some days it’s hard to stay out of that dark place.”

    With­out a depend­able sup­port sys­tem at home, he was hav­ing trou­ble doing his job and main­tain­ing any kind of rela­tion­ship with his friends and loved ones.

    “I got to a tip­ping point. Things were bad, but then I was giv­en the great­est gift I have ever received from a stranger.”

    Knauber was offered an oppor­tu­ni­ty to par­tic­i­pate in tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion as part of his treat­ment at Eisen­how­er Army Med­ical Cen­ter.

    Tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion was some­thing he had nev­er heard of but it offered him the pos­si­bil­i­ty of deal­ing with the med­ica­tions, the night­mares, and the phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al pain.

    “It was not a branch for me to grab hold of but rather a tap­root under my feet. A sta­ble plat­form which gives me a moments respite so I can put my pain into per­spec­tive enough that I can reat­tempt the climb.”

    Since he began med­i­tat­ing, there has been a change in his life. He med­i­tates twice a day for 20 min­utes and over the course of four months, he has been able to entire­ly dis­con­tin­ue two med­ica­tions, Pra­zosin and Trazadone, and has reduced his Zoloft by half.

    In addi­tion to the calm he says he expe­ri­ences through tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion, Knauber says it has made it eas­i­er to man­age his phys­i­cal pain from his injuries.

    “I typ­i­cal­ly have a reg­i­men of sev­er­al pain med­ica­tions to man­age my phys­i­cal injuries. Rather than tak­ing a hand­ful of pills sev­en days a week, I can man­age my pain reg­u­lar­ly with a few tablets, two to three times a week.”

    Oth­ers have even told him that he looks like an entire­ly dif­fer­ent per­son after start­ing to med­i­tate.

    “I am vibrant, I smile, and I look much more ground­ed. The truth is you can’t prac­tice tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion with­out it pos­i­tive­ly affect­ing you.”

    Doc­tors promised him through med­ica­tion and hard work he could poten­tial­ly heal over the course of years, but since tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion he has moved much clos­er to achiev­ing his recov­ery in months.

    “At times the trou­bling thoughts and night­mares come back, but as a whole, the progress is palat­able.”

    “I feel more in con­trol of my life now, and I’m becom­ing hope­ful about rebuild­ing and get­ting bet­ter.”

    NOTE: OK, back to the Bernie crowd. Here’s where this gets REAL inter­est­ing and rel­e­vant in a spit­fire con­text. One of Bernie’s sup­port­ers was New Age guru, Mar­i­anne Williamson. No sur­prise there, but what I found inter­est­ing was that Williamson ran for Con­gress a few years back, and we see in her endorse­ment list some note­wor­thy names.

    http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/marianne-williamson-hollywoods-favorite-new-792820

    Mar­i­anne Williamson, Hol­ly­wood’s Favorite New Age Guru, Backs Bernie Sanders for Pres­i­dent
    1:11 PM PDT 5/1/2015 by Tina Daunt
    …For­mer con­gres­sion­al can­di­date, social activist and spir­i­tu­al advis­er Mar­i­anne Williamson, who enjoys a wide fol­low­ing in Hol­ly­wood, is urg­ing her sup­port­ers to back Ver­mont Sen. Bernie Sanders in his quest to wrest the Democ­rats’ pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion away from fron­trun­ner Hillary Clin­ton.
    …Williamson was one of 16 can­di­dates seek­ing to fill Demo­c­rat Hen­ry Waxman’s 33rd Dis­trict House seat on the West­side. Her cam­paign promised to “heal” Wash­ing­ton. She fin­ished fourth in the race.
    …In an email cir­cu­lat­ed Fri­day, Williamson described Sanders’ address as “stun­ning” and said that when asked how many in the audi­ence would sup­port him for pres­i­dent, the “entire room rose to their feet.”
    “Let’s work togeth­er to turn this rip­ple of hope into a mas­sive wave of pos­i­tiv­i­ty and pow­er,” Williamson wrote to her sup­port­ers. “Win­ning the White House might indeed take a mir­a­cle, but many of us believe in those.” (Williamson’s best known book is the best-sell­ing Course in Mir­a­cles.)

    NOTE: Yes, “Course in Mir­a­cles”. Remem­ber that name for lat­er…

    http://marianne.com/365-days-of-a-course-in-miracles/

    Com­mit to the Work­book of A Course in Mir­a­cles. Begin any time.
    $25 for the year.
    Every morn­ing you will receive a dai­ly les­son, read by Mar­i­anne, by email. These dai­ly audios can be streamed on demand, or down­loaded to your com­put­er and saved, so you can build the entire library and return to them again and again.
    A Course in Mir­a­cles says, “An idea grows stronger when it is shared.” Join this pow­er­ful col­lec­tive as we jour­ney through the 365 lessons of the Course Work­book togeth­er, and watch the many mir­a­cles unfold.

    NOTE: I first noticed A Course in Mir­a­cles when look­ing at Von Braun’s Insti­tute of Noet­ic Sci­ences. Some of those on the IONS board were very involved with the A Course in Mir­a­cles agen­da. One of them was William Whit­son. Whit­son has QUITE the resume. Also, to clear up any con­fu­sion, Williamson did not write the orig­i­nal Course in Mir­a­cles, though she does seem to imply that. She just wrote a work­book to help explain the orig­i­nal work, which by all accounts is a con­fus­ing and unread­able mess.

    http://williamwhitson.com/about.html

    William Whit­son gained a Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence degree from the Unit­ed States Mil­i­tary Acad­e­my in 1948. He then pur­sued a twen­ty-two year mil­i­tary career in a vari­ety of assign­ments includ­ing a topo­graph­ic sur­vey of the Philip­pines; General’s Aide at the Unit­ed Nations; com­ple­tion of a Ph.D. in inter­na­tion­al rela­tions and eco­nom­ics at the Fletch­er School of Law and Diplo­ma­cy; instruc­tor at West Point in the eco­nom­ics of nation­al secu­ri­ty and inter­na­tion­al rela­tions; ranger and para­chute train­ing; advi­sor to the Dean of the Kore­an Mil­i­tary Acad­e­my; com­pa­ny com­mand and bat­tle group oper­a­tions offi­cer with the 82nd air­borne divi­sion; Chi­nese lan­guage train­ing; polit­i­cal ana­lyst with the Amer­i­can Embassy in the Repub­lic of Chi­na (Tai­wan); polit­i­cal ana­lyst with the Amer­i­can Con­sulate in Hong Kong; and the Office of the Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Defense, Sys­tems Analy­sis.

    After his retire­ment from the Army in 1970, for the next decade he engaged in research in Chi­na stud­ies and strate­gic pol­i­cy plan­ning at the RAND Cor­po­ra­tion, the Stan­ford Research Insti­tute and BDM Cor­po­ra­tion. Dur­ing the 1970’s he lec­tured at the Air and Army Com­mand and Gen­er­al Staff Col­leges, the Air War Col­lege, the Army War Col­lege, the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency, Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, the For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute, the Har­vard Busi­ness School, the Indus­tri­al Col­lege of the Armed Forces, the Nation­al War Col­lege and the Unit­ed States Air Force and Mil­i­tary Acad­e­mies.

    In addi­tion to numer­ous arti­cles and papers for the RAND Cor­po­ra­tion, he edit­ed The Mil­i­tary and Polit­i­cal Pow­er in Chi­na in the 1970’s (1972); Doing Busi­ness With Chi­na (1972); and For­eign Pol­i­cy and U.S. Nation­al secu­ri­ty: Major Post Elec­tion Issues (1973) and wrote The Chi­nese High Com­mand: A His­to­ry of Mil­i­tary Pol­i­tics (1956–71) (1973). In 1975, he joined the Library of Con­gress as Chief of the For­eign Affairs and Nation­al Defense Divi­sion of the Con­gres­sion­al Research Ser­vice.

    In 1980, he resigned from the Library of Con­gress to orga­nize and chair the Emer­gency Earth­quake Task­force for Cal­i­for­nia. There­after, he served as Pres­i­dent of CIM Asso­ciates, a ser­vice cor­po­ra­tion to busi­ness and gov­ern­ment. He is a past mem­ber of the Board of the Insti­tute of Noet­ic Sci­ences and the Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute for Inte­gral Stud­ies.

    Since 1980 he has also served the Foun­da­tion for Inner Peace as a mem­ber of the Board of Direc­tors, man­ag­ing the trans­la­tion pro­gram to yield twen­ty trans­la­tions of A Course in Mir­a­cles. The fun­da­men­tal ideas of the Course have inspired all major themes and plot twists in his nov­els about David Harrison’s inner devel­op­ment. Indeed, David’s pas­sion for flight is a metaphor for his yearn­ing for inner flight.

    NOTE: Let’s take a quick look at the roots of A Course in Mir­a­cles.

    http://acim-archives.org/bios/Myths.html

    In the sum­mer of 1965 psy­chol­o­gists Drs. William Thet­ford and Helen Schuc­man, tenured mem­bers of the teach­ing staff at Colum­bia Col­lege of Physi­cians and Sur­geons, began to scribe A Course in Mir­a­cles.
    Myths and Mis­in­for­ma­tion is the sto­ry of the process by which Dr. Thet­ford arrived at that junc­ture. It begins with his ear­ly inter­est in psy­chol­o­gy and his acqui­si­tion of a Ph.D. in that field from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go.
    Next it describes his pro­fes­sion­al career, includ­ing his job as a senior psy­chol­o­gist with the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency from 1950 to 1953 and his work with Dr. John Git­tinger at CIA to devel­op the Per­son­al­i­ty Assess­ment Sys­tem (PAS).

    Thet­ford so respect­ed the intel­lec­tu­al and behav­ioral fore­cast­ing poten­tial of the PAS that, from 1953 to 1965, he received Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty grants to help refine the PAS and use it to explore the broad field of per­son­al­i­ty devel­op­ment.
    Despite his intel­lec­tu­al fas­ci­na­tion with the PAS, by 1965 Dr. Thet­ford was acute­ly aware of inher­ent lim­i­ta­tions of psy­chol­o­gy to explain human behav­ior. In that aware­ness Bill one day exclaimed to Helen, “There must be a bet­ter way.” When the scrib­ing of A Course in Mir­a­cles began in that year, he and Helen Schuc­man shift­ed their inter­est and ener­gies from the analy­sis of ego devel­op­ment (PAS) to search for the nature of this oth­er way.

    NOTE: If you can’t trust a New Age reli­gion direct­ly birthed from a CIA psy­chol­o­gist, what can you trust? Next up, we find this weird ass let­ter from Williamson to Hillary, attack­ing her from the “New Age” left. I find it inter­est­ing that Williamson was appar­ent­ly invit­ed to the White House by Hillary back when she tried to reach out to that crowd in the 90s. Even if she is part of an op (like­ly), I won­der if Williamson also has a per­son­al grudge against Clin­ton as Hillary fig­ured out her advice was kooky. It reads like that, and the arti­cle fol­low­ing this one seems to sup­port that. Who the fuck starts off a polit­i­cal let­ter with “Hi Hillary. You know me.”? Sounds as much like a creepy stalk­er as a cult leader… which I guess is part of the cult leader job descrip­tion.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marianne-williamson/an-open-letter-to-hillary_b_5606437.html

    …Hi, Hillary. You know me. I mean, we’re not friends, exact­ly, but we’re acquain­tances. You were won­der­ful to me back in 1994 when you invit­ed me to the White House. It’s a mem­o­ry I will trea­sure always, and you gave it to me. I thank you.
    Now, about your pres­i­den­tial run — if indeed you make it. I’m writ­ing you this let­ter because I think the top­ic might fig­ure into your deci­sion-mak­ing, or maybe not.

    I admit that in 2008 I went with Oba­ma, feel­ing at the time that he was car­ry­ing the real spir­it of things, yada, yada, yada. Yeah, well. Any­way.

    That was then and this is now.

    I want a woman pres­i­dent — real­ly, I do. A lot of us do. And yes, you’re so qual­i­fied, and yes, we’ve known you for­ev­er, and yes, you’d know what to do from Day 1. We all get that.

    But none of that is enough to get my vote, or the vote of a lot of peo­ple I know. We only want to vote for you if you run like hell away from that cor­po­rate box you’ve land­ed in. I’m telling you, Hillary. The Amer­i­can peo­ple have become hip to what’s hap­pen­ing. We know now that Wall Street runs the coun­try, and we don’t like it. And for many of us, we don’t want to vote for you if Wall Street runs you too.

    There are the seeds of polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion in the air — a rebel­lious­ness, a ram­bunc­tious­ness — that Amer­i­ca has been sore­ly miss­ing. It’s faint, at least on the left, but it is there. As a mat­ter of fact, as trag­ic as it is for a life­long Demo­c­rat to have to admit this, the one place where we have been see­ing it man­i­fest recent­ly is on the polit­i­cal right. The Tea Par­ty, sans a code­pen­dent rela­tion­ship with the Repub­li­can Par­ty, is caus­ing a real prob­lem for estab­lish­ment Repub­li­cans. And once pro­gres­sives break free of their code­pen­dent rela­tion­ship with the cor­po­rate Democ­rats, you’re going to have a real prob­lem on your hands too.

    That’s why I’m writ­ing. I have a feel­ing you’re get­ting most of your advice from peo­ple who think that every­thing I’m say­ing here is non­sense. So I’ll say it as loud­ly as I can.

    STOP NOW. Stop cozy­ing up to the banks, to the chem­i­cal com­pa­nies, to the mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex, to the par­ty machine, and to all the var­i­ous financiers who make up the plu­toc­ra­cy now ruin­ing this coun­try. Yeah, I know a lot of them are nice peo­ple and that’s cool. But they should not be able to turn the elect­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Amer­i­can peo­ple into mere incon­ve­niences they can buy off elec­tion after elec­tion. And if we have a sense that you’d be just anoth­er pup­pet of the elite, then I don’t believe that you will win. We were fooled once, but I don’t think we’re going to be fooled again.

    In the final analy­sis, we real­ly do love democ­ra­cy — and watch­ing it dis­man­tled as it’s being dis­man­tled, and cor­rupt­ed like it’s being cor­rupt­ed, has tak­en a lot of us from denial to real depres­sion to a col­lec­tive “Hell, no!” that will have elec­toral con­se­quences in 2016.

    Years ago, George Lakoff com­pared Repub­li­cans to a crit­i­cal father and Democ­rats to a nur­tur­ing moth­er. I point­ed out a bit lat­er that the crit­i­cal father had become an abu­sive one — but that as any­one with any psy­chother­a­peu­tic under­stand­ing knows, the child will ulti­mate­ly put a lot of his or her blame on the moth­er who stood by and allowed the abuse to hap­pen! That’s the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty machine today, Hillary. Please don’t be one of them.

    I know you know exact­ly what I’m say­ing, because I remem­ber you — a lot of us remem­ber you — when you were rag­ing against the Estab­lish­ment machine on top of which you’re now so sweet­ly perched. That machine is not our sal­va­tion; it’s our prob­lem. Cor­po­rate Democ­rats might have gained some pow­er for the par­ty, but at the cost of its soul.

    I’d love to clam­or for you, to work for you, to cheer you on. I don’t want to sit on the side­lines long­ing for Eliz­a­beth or Bernie. I want to hear what’s true from you. I want you to rail against the chem­i­cal com­pa­nies and their GMO’s — not sup­port them. I want you to decry the mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex — not assure them you’re their girl. I want you to sup­port rein­stat­ing Glass-Stea­gall — not just wink at Wall Street while sip­ping its cham­pagne. In short, I want you to name the real prob­lems so we can trust you’d pro­vide some real solu­tions.

    But maybe that’s just me want­i­ng you to change, to be some­one dif­fer­ent than who you are. If that’s true, please for­give my pre­sump­tion and ignore this let­ter. But if any­thing I’m say­ing rings any kind of true at all, then I hope you’ll start say­ing so.

    And quick­ly please, Hillary. Peo­ple are start­ing to despair.

    NOTE: Yuk. In this arti­cle, long­time Wash­ing­ton reporters Jack Ger­mond and Jules Wit­cov­er debunk the notion (start­ed by Bob Wood­ward, nat­u­ral­ly) that Hillary’s out­reach to the guru set was some­how equal to the lev­el of New Age input that Nan­cy Rea­gan received. Spoil­er alert: it wasn’t. Clinton’s con­nec­tion to Hous­ton (and Williamson by exten­sion) was minor by com­par­i­son.

    http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1996–06-26/news/1996178079_1_jean-houston-hillary-clinton-clinton-relationship

    Hillary’s guru: an indi­ca­tor of the qual­i­ty of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal debate
    June 26, 1996|
    By JACK W. GERMOND & JULES WITCOVER

    WASHINGTON — The pres­i­den­t’s wife has become a sub­ject of ridicule because of her rela­tion­ship with a woman named Jean Hous­ton, depict­ed in Bob Wood­ward’s new book on the elec­tion cam­paign, ”The Choice.” It prob­a­bly says a great deal more about the mind­less qual­i­ty of polit­i­cal debate in this coun­try today than it does about Hillary Clin­ton.
    On the face of it, there was noth­ing sin­is­ter about a White House ses­sion described by Mr. Wood­ward in which Ms. Hous­ton, a moti­va­tion­al expert, urged Mrs. Clin­ton to con­duct imag­i­nary con­ver­sa­tions with Eleanor Roo­sevelt and Mahat­ma Gand­hi as a way of think­ing through her own views on the issues with which she was deal­ing. Sim­i­lar tech­niques are employed in cor­po­ra­tion brain­storm­ing ses­sions con­duct­ed by peo­ple like Ms. Hous­ton. But most Amer­i­cans have nev­er even heard of such pro­ce­dures, let alone tak­en part in them.

    So a huge audi­ence of peo­ple is will­ing to accept the tabloid cat­e­go­riza­tion of Ms. Hous­ton as ”Hillary’s guru” and quick to laugh at the First Lady for tak­ing part in a seance in the White House solar­i­um. More to the point, it was easy to draw a facile anal­o­gy between Mrs. Clin­ton’s rela­tion­ship with Jean Hous­ton and Nan­cy Rea­gan’s reliance on an astrologer a decade ago.

    In fact, there is no valid com­par­i­son. Accord­ing to a book by Don­ald Regan, Mr. Rea­gan’s for­mer chief of staff, the advice Nan­cy Rea­gan received from that astrologer had a direct and some­times deter­mi­na­tive influ­ence on the pres­i­den­t’s sched­ule. If the stars were not in the prop­er align­ment, the sched­ule would be changed. There is no evi­dence that any­thing between Hillary Clin­ton and Jean Hous­ton was ever trans­lat­ed into advice from the First Lady to her hus­band. Mrs. Clin­ton says she was seek­ing help in for­mu­lat­ing her ideas for her book, ”It Takes a Vil­lage.”

    Even if that expla­na­tion sounds like a con­ve­nient ratio­nale, there hard­ly could be any­thing very sin­is­ter in a ses­sion in the solar­i­um that also includ­ed mem­bers of the First Lady’s staff and oth­er out­side advis­ers.

    NOTE: Sav­ing the best for last, here are “33 celebri­ty endorse­ments” of the Mar­i­anne Williamson cam­paign. Some VERY intrigu­ing names on this list… I gen­er­al­ly hate the term “alt-left”, as it has been used to lump ALL dis­sent on Rus­sia under one loony­bin umbrel­la. But in this case, I think we do see an “alt-left”… which basi­cal­ly serves the same pur­pose as the so-called “alt-right”. And the “alt-left” and the CIA/New Age ele­ment seem to be the same damn peo­ple!

    http://www.presspassla.com/33-celebrity-endorsements-make-marianne-williamson-contender-33rd-district/

    NOTE: Jesse Ven­tu­ra, part of 2000 Reform Par­ty fias­co, fan of Trump and Bernie, fore­run­ner of Trump in many ways. Long­time Trump friend and ally.

    ...20) Jesse Ven­tu­ra (For­mer Pro Wrestler)

    This for­mer pro wrestler and renais­sance man says, “Mar­i­anne is the type of leader we need in Wash­ing­ton today. I com­mend her for run­ning and sup­port her 100 per­cent.” See his inter­view with Mar­i­anne.

    NOTE: Kind of weird to see sup­posed devout Mus­lim Kei­th Elli­son back­ing a New Age leader? He basi­cal­ly com­pares her to MLK. Vom­it…

    ...21) Kei­th Elli­son (U.S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive for Minnesota’s 5th Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict)
    Ellison’s impres­sive polit­i­cal resume lends even more heft to this incred­i­ble endorse­ment: “I proud­ly endorse Mar­i­anne Williamson. She is a pro­gres­sive leader who offers to inject a spir­it of love, gen­eros­i­ty and inclu­sion into pol­i­tics as usu­al. We sure need it. Not only does she chal­lenge con­ven­tion­al pol­i­tics, but she also chal­lenges spir­i­tu­al activists because she invites them to bring mind­ful­ness and love into the pro­fane world of pol­i­tics where knot­ty prob­lems like cam­paign finance, stag­nant wages, and cli­mate change need solv­ing. Of course, the spir­i­tu­al activists, like Mar­tin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and Bish­op Desmond Tutu, have always incor­po­rat­ed the sacred into their activism, and achieved results. So in a way, her can­di­da­cy is remind­ing us of how true and mean­ing­ful change real­ly hap­pens.”

    NOTE: Yes, John Gray is a huge fan…

    ...23) John Gray (Author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus)

    “Mar­i­anne Williamson is a tru­ly inspi­ra­tional leader of our time. I find her stand on “Con­scious Pol­i­tics” pro­found and sup­port her U.S. con­gres­sion­al can­di­da­cy in Cal­i­for­nia.” See more.

    NOTE: Had this next guy tagged for years as a spook. Black New Age leader with dreads, good-look­ing, hangs with Ramtha (who hates blacks usu­al­ly!), IONS, all the usu­al sus­pects.

    ...29)Dr. Michael Beck­with (Author & Spir­i­tu­al Leader)

    Best known for his sub­stan­tial appear­ance in pop­u­lar doc­u­men­tary, The Secret, Dr. Beck­with sup­ports Mar­i­anne by host­ing her at his wild­ly suc­cess­ful New Thought church in Cul­ver City, as well as singing her prais­es at ral­lies, like this one here.

    NOTE: New Age big­wig of the “Chick­en Soup for the Soul” empire of self-help books, Jack Can­field. Push­es the same “Secret Law of Attrac­tion” crap as Ramtha, Williamson, Beck­with, IONS.. well, all of them! In oth­er words, if a mine col­laps­es on your head because Trump got rid of safe­ty reg­u­la­tions, it was your “stinkin’ thinkin’” that made it hap­pen to you! If you had only been a lit­tle more pos­i­tive, things might have worked out.

    ...30) Jack Can­field (Moti­va­tion­al Speak­er)
    Birds of a feath­er flock togeth­er, don’t they? Jack, like Mar­i­anne, is known for inspir­ing the lives of mil­lions. Check him out here.

    NOTE: Kucinich… no sur­prise here. Got his polit­i­cal start by pulling sup­port from right-wing Slav­ic Repub­li­cans in Cleve­land by going after blacks. Once tried to intro­duce a bill, writ­ten by anti-semit­ic UFO buff Alfred Lang­mont-Webre, that includ­ed bans on “chem­trails” and weapons made by aliens.
    ...32) Den­nis Kucinich (For­mer Ohio U.S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive)
    Check out this polit­i­cal heavy-hitter’s endorse­ment.

    NOTE: Alan Grayson is the cra­zi­est Dem in Con­gress, after Kucinich left, basi­cal­ly the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Trump.
    ...33) Alan Grayson (U.S .Rep for Florida’s 9th Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict)
    “Mar­i­anne Williamson has taught us that ‘play­ing small doesn’t serve the world.’ Every Mem­ber of Con­gress needs to hear those words. We all need to ‘play big,’ and cre­ate a world where each one of us is free to – in Mar­i­anne Williamson’s words – ‘let our own light shine.’ In a nation where Mar­i­anne Williamson helps to make the laws, our dif­fer­ences will no longer divide us; they will be cul­ti­vat­ed and nur­tured and cher­ished, so that every one of us can be all that he or she can be.”

    Wow!

    Sure makes you want to vote for Bernie, dun­nit?

    Best,

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Emory | July 28, 2017, 12:12 pm
  19. Would love to hear more about St Bernard and look for­ward to your upcom­ing Update! Love you!

    Posted by May Frock | March 22, 2018, 10:39 am
  20. For clar­i­fi­ca­tion, Kuchich’s 2001 bill, HR 2977 , attempt­ed to ban space based weapons sys­tems — such as those that could be used against pop­u­la­tions or per­sons. There is no men­tion of “aliens,” although it does men­tion chem­trails.
    https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/2977/text

    Posted by John | March 22, 2018, 6:36 pm
  21. @JOHN–

    A fur­ther clar­i­fi­ca­tion on your com­ment, from the same trust­ed asso­ciate:
    “A com­menter claimed that Kucinich’s bill was not about UFOs. This is part­ly true and part­ly false. The ORIGINAL bill, draft­ed by UFO and all-around New Age weirdo Alfred Lang­mont Webre, indeed includ­ed a ban on ET/alien weapons. The final form that Kucinich intro­duced did not include that request. Webre worked on this with Car­ol Rosin, who claimed that she was told by Von Braun in the 70s “Car­ol, you will be the one to stop the weaponiza­tion of space”. Not buy­ing that necess­ri­ly, but the fact she would brag about his advice speaks vol­umes about who these peo­ple are. It’s the whole SRI/Esalen/IONS crowd.

    Webre him­self is a Yale/Fullbright guy, who has worked with SRI, Ford Foun­da­tion, etc.

    Here is the orig­i­nal text:

    (i) elec­tron­ic, psy­chotron­ic, or infor­ma­tion weapons;
    (ii) chem­trails;
    (iii) high alti­tude ultra low fre­quen­cy weapons sys­tems;
    (iv) plas­ma, elec­tro­mag­net­ic, son­ic, or ultra­son­ic weapons;
    (v) laser weapons sys­tems;
    (vi) strate­gic, the­ater, tac­ti­cal, or extrater­res­tri­al weapons; and
    (vii) chem­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal, envi­ron­men­tal, cli­mate, or tec­ton­ic weapons.

    This is Rosin/Webre’s ICIS group that push­es this stuff. Edgar Mitchell was on their board, as is Daniel Shee­han... of course. Group may not exist in same form, this is cached from inter­net.

    ICIS — Board of Direc­tors & Advi­sors

    ICIS — Board of Direc­tors & Advi­sors”

    Hope this helps,

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Emory | March 26, 2018, 5:48 pm
  22. When you look at the effect of Bernie Sanders impact on the Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty, he has caused them to less effec­tive, despite gain­ing enthu­si­asm for the lib­er­al wing. He hurt Hillary Clinton’s elec­tion effort against Don­ald Trump by hav­ing a part­ing of the ways with him and not full heart­ed­ly endors­ing him like most oppo­nents would he pre­vi­ous­ly was an Inde­pen­dent. Now the divi­sive ele­ments of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty sup­port him such as Alexan­dria Oca­sio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashi­da Tlaib. He was a kind of stal­wart of the Nation­al Rifle, and until he ran for Pres­i­dent assert­ed that immi­grants steal our jobs and dis­liked John Kennedy.

    This arti­cle involv­ing an inter­view with for­mer Mary­land Gov­er­nor Mar­tin O’Malley express­es his con­cerns.

    Inter­view ‘How do you fall for Bernie Sanders scam?’ Mar­tin O’Malley on the Democ­rats and Iowa
    Mar­tin Pen­gel­ly @MartinPengelly Sun 2 Feb 2020 02.00 EST

    Four years ago, in Iowa, Mar­tin O’Malley with­drew from the race for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion.

    To some, he’d seemed made for the job. Born in 1963, to work­ing-class Democ­rats in the Wash­ing­ton sub­urbs, he was schooled in the Kennedy way. He vol­un­teered for Gary Hart, the Col­orado sen­a­tor who was the par­ty fron­trun­ner for 1988 until scan­dal brought him down. Enter­ing elect­ed pol­i­tics him­self, O’Malley was the may­or of Bal­ti­more from 1999 to 2007 and the gov­er­nor of Mary­land from 2008 to 2015. He aimed at the White House as a hap­py war­rior, a gui­tar-play­ing politi­co with a record of pro­gres­sive pol­i­cy achieve­ment.

    But in the pri­ma­ry, he says, he found him­self caught “between a rock”, mean­ing Hillary Clin­ton, “and an angry place”, mean­ing Bernie Sanders. There wasn’t room to breathe and his cam­paign went nowhere: the mid­dle can­di­date in an elec­tion that end­ed up with Amer­i­ca deeply divid­ed.

    A few days before Iowa votes again, O’Malley walks a few blocks from his Wash­ing­ton office. The room is qui­et, the table dis­creet. The nation­al stage is not. Over at the Capi­tol, in the impeach­ment tri­al, Don­ald Trump is on his way to acquit­tal. In Iowa and New Hamp­shire, Sanders is surg­ing again. Some fear that in answer to Trump’s march to the right, Democ­rats are slid­ing too far left. O’Malley is among them.

    “Bernie’s still being giv­en a bit of a free pass by the nation­al media,” he says. “I do not believe that he would be a strong can­di­date for our par­ty in the fall. And, except for three months out of every four years, he’s not even of our par­ty.”

    Sanders sits in the Sen­ate as an inde­pen­dent, a demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist, the “d” very much low­er-case. He may be 78 but he’s pop­u­lar with the young. Since leav­ing office, O’Malley has taught at Johns Hop­kins, George­town, Boston Col­lege and Carnegie Mel­lon.

    “I would fre­quent­ly tell my stu­dents, ‘Look, I know in my own gen­er­a­tion we fell for the Niger­ian prince scam, but how do you all fall for the Bernie Sanders scam?’ I don’t get that.

    “Here’s a guy who has been a kind of stal­wart of the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion, a man who said immi­grants steal our jobs right up until he ran for pres­i­dent, a guy who said the sound of John Kennedy’s voice made him nau­seous.”

    In con­ver­sa­tion, O’Malley can seem to slip behind an invis­i­ble podi­um, rap­ping out his points with dra­mat­ic cadences, frowns and smiles. If there is an air of the stump speech, he’s giv­en thou­sands. He did so again in 2017 and 2018, tour­ing the coun­try, sup­port­ing Democ­rats in midterm elec­tions which swung hard the party’s way.

    Of course, much of the ener­gy that deliv­ered such vic­to­ries was deter­mined­ly pro­gres­sive, akin to or direct­ly sup­port­ive of Sanders and his trans­for­ma­tive effect on the lib­er­al cause. But O’Malley is as much a pil­lar of the par­ty as Sanders is not.

    “I respect the fact that he’s been say­ing the same things, most­ly, since 1952, albeit dial­ing down his hatred for John Kennedy and his dis­dain for immi­grants, but I just don’t get the appeal.

    “He’s a man who nev­er has accom­plished any­thing in pub­lic office, who has I believe demon­strat­ed his inabil­i­ty to forge a gov­ern­ing con­sen­sus, let alone hold a gov­ern­ing con­sen­sus. And I think he’d be an awful choice as our party’s nom­i­nee.”

    He smiles. “Do you want me to speak more frankly?”

    O’Malley has irons in many fires, teach­ing, con­sult­ing, cam­paign­ing. He’s writ­ten a book, Smarter Gov­ern­ment: How to Gov­ern for Results in the Infor­ma­tion Age.

    It’s a text­book, built on a use of data in gov­ern­ment well known among pol­i­cy geeks. But O’Malley’s lyri­cal side is nev­er far from the sur­face and the book is shot through with sto­ries from his time as may­or and gov­er­nor.

    Some such sto­ries, he says, fea­ture in anoth­er man­u­script, writ­ten with the guid­ance of the late Richard Ben Cramer, the author of What It Takes, “the defin­i­tive book about the 1988 pres­i­den­tial race” in which Hart flew so high then fell. Its title is Bal­ti­more: A Mem­oir and a piece of it is out there on the web. Some want O’Malley to rewrite it, he says, to tie his own sto­ry more close­ly to the idea he was the mod­el for the may­or of Charm City played by Aidan Gillen in The Wire, David Simon’s ground­break­ing HBO series. He’s not keen. “Every­one gets one Wire ques­tion,” he says, laugh­ing a lit­tle rue­ful­ly. As the only per­son in Amer­i­ca who hasn’t seen The Wire I don’t have one, so he describes instead an invi­ta­tion over to Ire­land to sit with Gillen at a cel­e­bra­tion of the life and music of Shane McGowan. O’Malley still plays in his own epony­mous band.

    He says he wrote his text­book “because democracy’s in a cri­sis and the cri­sis is democ­ra­cy itself. Whether gov­ern­ments of and by the peo­ple can still deliv­er the things that make a repub­lic worth hav­ing, in essence lives with greater safe­ty, secu­ri­ty and oppor­tu­ni­ty for our­selves and our kids. That’s the ques­tion on the table.

    “And set against the declin­ing trust that Amer­i­cans express in their nation­al gov­ern­ment is a qui­eter sto­ry that’s ris­ing across the coun­try, from cities that are well-gov­erned. And that’s a sto­ry of ris­ing trust, of smarter gov­ern­ment, of tak­ing advan­tage of the tools that no pri­or gen­er­a­tion has had, to mod­el, mea­sure and map chang­ing human dynam­ics in ways that allow us to make bet­ter and more time­ly deci­sions.

    “Whether those bet­ter results are improv­ing stu­dent achieve­ment or reduc­ing vio­lent crime or turn­ing around a 300-year decline in the health of the waters of the Chesa­peake Bay, I con­sid­er myself to have been very for­tu­nate and blessed to have served at a time when this new way of gov­ern­ing was just emerg­ing.”

    Such focus seems time­ly: with the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment in Trump’s scle­rot­ic grip, cities in par­tic­u­lar have begun to take a lead. On cli­mate change, for exam­ple, some US may­ors have react­ed to Trump’s with­draw­al from the Paris deal by say­ing they will sim­ply pur­sue its aims them­selves.

    That showed one way Trump­ism might be chal­lenged, away from the polls and the cor­ri­dors of pow­er. It is also chal­lenged on the streets of the cities them­selves.

    On the night before Thanks­giv­ing, O’Malley went as he does every year to the Dublin­er, a Capi­tol Hill pub, with oth­er grad­u­ates of Gon­za­ga, a Wash­ing­ton Jesuit high school. Then anoth­er mem­ber of an 80s class walked in: Ken Cuc­cinel­li, for­mer­ly attor­ney gen­er­al of Vir­ginia, now the act­ing direc­tor of US Cit­i­zen­ship and Immi­gra­tion Ser­vices for the hard­line pres­i­dent.

    The Gon­za­ga gath­er­ing, O’Malley says, is a friend­ly one, a chance for the old boys “to ask, ‘Hey, how are you doing? How’s your wife? How’s your kids? What are you up to?’ “And into the bar walked Don­ald Trump’s child-tak­er in chief.”That is a ref­er­ence to the Trump administration’s fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion poli­cies at the south­ern bor­der, of which O’Malley has been a vocal oppo­nent. Cuc­cinel­li was soon walk­ing back out of the Dublin­er, dri­ven back on to Mass­a­chu­setts Avenue by a blast of Bal­ti­more­an anger.

    “We rec­og­nized each oth­er from the Sun­day shows and hav­ing served togeth­er. We shook hands … but it was not a moment for me to sim­ply say, ‘Hey, how’s work?’ I know how work is with him.

    “Work with him is real­ly bad for a lot of human beings because he shoves those cages on the south-west bor­der full with as many brown-skinned, Span­ish-speak­ing, most­ly Catholic peo­ple as he pos­si­bly can.

    “I told him he was a cow­ard and he put the lit­tle kids in cages. And when he tried to get a drink at the bar, oth­er peo­ple start­ed telling him the same thing. So after the patrons drove him from the place, some­one at the bar decid­ed to tweet it out and then it went kind of viral.”

    The Wash­ing­ton Post picked up the sto­ry and for a while it fuelled debate around such pub­lic con­fronta­tions: do oppo­nents of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion owe it a debt of civil­i­ty?

    “Each of us has to make our own deci­sion in these unprece­dent­ed times,” O’Malley says, “about whether we want to be silent in the face of suf­fer­ing being inflict­ed on oth­er peo­ple at the hands of our gov­ern­ment, or whether we stand up to it.

    “And some of us will stand up to it by run­ning as can­di­dates, oth­ers will stand up to it as elect­ed offi­cials, oth­ers will stand up to it as lawyers, oth­ers will stand up to it in social set­tings. And for me at that moment in time, I couldn’t look myself in the mir­ror in the morn­ing if I missed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to let him know that he wasn’t wel­come. And so I did.

    “The day we become pas­sive in the face of that sort of immoral­i­ty, injus­tice, that sort of sys­temic child abuse exer­cise by our own gov­ern­ment, that’s the day we lose our repub­lic.”

    Cuc­cinel­li, need­less to say, saw the evening dif­fer­ent­ly. But viral fame recedes quick­ly and O’Malley is back in milder climes, pub­lish­ing op-eds in the Post, con­cerned with the push against Trump at the polls.

    After 2016, he con­sid­ered run­ning for chair of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee but stepped back when he sensed a “a proxy echo of the Sanders-Clin­ton clash and there wasn’t oxy­gen there”. Tom Perez, once the Mary­land sec­re­tary of labor, end­ed up in the role but O’Malley sup­port­ed a young may­or from the Repub­li­can heart­lands: Pete Buttigieg, now a chal­lenger in the pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry.

    For Buttigieg, O’Malley says, “that race real­ly wasn’t about DNC. That race was about putting on the sneak­ers and get­ting around the track”. The younger man, he says, has gone on to beat all expec­ta­tions.

    But in an echo of the frus­tra­tions of 2016, O’Malley crit­i­cis­es the way the DNC has run the pri­ma­ry, par­tic­u­lar­ly the way debate qual­i­fi­ca­tions based on polling data and donor num­bers – changed this week – have kept the likes of the for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor Deval Patrick (“a friend” to whom O’Malley has donat­ed) and the Mon­tana gov­er­nor Steve Bul­lock firm­ly out of the spot­light.

    O’Malley isn’t ready to endorse again – he first backed Beto O’Rourke – but he express­es a wish to “hear more from” Michael Bloomberg, the bil­lion­aire for­mer New York may­or whose self-fund­ed cam­paign has kept him off the debate stage too. He thinks that wish is shared by oth­ers.

    “I would think Bloomberg’s open­ing,” he says, “is if there’s a mud­dled fin­ish [in Iowa and New Hamp­shire] or an une­lec­table left­ist. That’s Bloomberg time. In 2016, there were some peo­ple who said to me, ‘Well, if you could only have hung in until we got total­ly sick of Bernie.’ And I said, ‘Well, I couldn’t. I had no mon­ey.’ I was out there rat­tling the tin cup, from coun­ty square to coun­ty square.”

    Either way, he hopes the par­ty will decide wise­ly.
    “I do believe,” he says, “that in 2016, a year of anger, rage and ret­ri­bu­tion, a cry for new lead­er­ship got squeezed between a rock and the angry place. But I think peo­ple are look­ing for that lead­er­ship now.

    “Each of the many can­di­dates who stepped for­ward this year has caught the atten­tion of the vot­ers for a week or two as being great vehi­cles for peo­ple to demon­strate that they real­ly dis­like Don­ald Trump. That they were 180 degrees dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed to Don­ald Trump. And being opposed to Don­ald Trump, giv­ing him the prover­bial fin­ger … is being opposed to a white, racist misog­y­nist.

    “All of that’s part of the process. But at the end of the day, we have to nom­i­nate some­one who can defeat him and who can bring our coun­try togeth­er and gov­ern.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/01/bernie-sanders-iowa-democrats-martin-omalley?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

    Posted by Mary Benton | February 4, 2020, 6:44 pm

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