Conservative New Media

A pair of articles at Breitbart News looks at the Buzzfeed criticism of 'conservative media' losing the election of 2012: one by Joel B. Pollack and the other by Alexander Marlow.

This is fascinating because the purpose of the Conservative New Media outlets isn't about elections or parties, as such, but about a conservative viewpoint and analysis of events (news and non-news events).  As such these New Media outlets must look to offer viewpoints based upon a conservative understanding of society, culture, economics, freedom and liberty: these are not things amenable to a 'party line' in conservative parlance because they are based on the activities of individuals and what the freedom of the individual actually is.  Parties, elections and the rest of the apparatus of the State is an understood as an organ of society and it is not the brain, eyes, ears nor any of these higher senses or reasoning facilities but the process part of the body meant to contain harm from the body and ensure the body has regularity in its processes.  Instead of the head end of the body, government is at the other end and serves a valuable function but does not deal in a societal 'good' (that is guiding society) but does good only when it acts in accordance with the body, itself.

What conservative media does is to examine how all the rest of the body operates and see what the function and use of government is with respect to that society.  As peoples are different they have different Nations, different sensibilities and different cultures and, therefore, different governments.  Likewise in a federal system of governments within a Nation, conservatism addresses all the levels of government beyond that of the Nation's State or National government.  To that end conservative media isn't about personalities, hair color or a winning smile as those are things that can be done by individuals and are not reflective of their ideas and viewpoints; they are ephemeral parts of being a politician, not a part of policy making nor how policy is crafted into governing legislation or execution of same.  It is very hard to catch a photographer, say, trying to put a halo around the head of a politician: a politician is a human being, not some anointed instrument of the Divine.

From this circumstance the Conservative New Media approaches news (as such) from the vector of 'what are the facts?' and then 'what do they mean?', with an examination of spin to see how far the spin is from the facts and the direct implication of same as seen by those doing the presentation of the facts.  This is in contrast to the Old Media that attempts to present a story, first, which has facts attached to it, and then uses the story to generate a narrative and postulate what will happen next based on a given storyline.  Thus the criticism of sites like Buzzfeed, Politico and Huffington Post is that they are light on facts and high on story and storylines, even when there is little evidence that the facts fit on a storyline that is given.  Conservatives accept more facts as they come in and can re-analyze them in light of prior facts and then draw conclusions from the array of facts, even ones that may be contradictory with each other: facts are facts and must hit into a coherent framework.  Older Media and those sites stuck in narrative making lurch from storyline to storyline trying to find a storyline to fit a given viewpoint, and may not report on, dismiss, discount or wholly forget to look at new factual information that contradicts the storyline.

An example of the latter is the entire 'The Iraq War was about WMDs!' save that the Congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force had a number of distinct reasons for restarting the conflict, of which only a few dealt with Saddam Hussein's lack of compliance with the cease-fire agreements after Desert Storm.  By trying to create a storyline or narrative, facts are discounted, dismissed or even laughed at, yet the facts of the Authorization are the facts, and no matter how much any individual tries to say the war was 'sold' on WMDs, Congress obviously was sold on a much broader array of materials.  Even with that, when the next piece is 'And we didn't find ANY WMDs!' and then pointing out that the Poles did, indeed, find WMDs and that storehouses of precursor chemicals and facilities to process them, both violations of the cease fire agreement, those are also discounted, ignored, downplayed or laughed at.  They may have set the bar unreasonably high at tens of thousands of shells with active factories, yet the cease fire demanded NO facilities for processing and, indeed, no PLANS to process them, which was an entire dismantling and reduction of ALL WMD capacity.  Yet the Old Media and its apparatchiks push a storyline, even when there are facts to show it to be wholly and completely false in detail and whole cloth.

By trying to attach itself to a particular viewpoint that serves a political end, the Old Media and those following its narrative style online, practice a form of corrupt journalism that serves ends they do not openly state.  When supporting storylines of a candidate looking to 'heal racial divisions' when that candidate openly courts racial groups to try and put animosity between groups based on race, that is deceitful not just to the reader but to the individual writing the material.  It demonstrates a lack of honesty, a lack of capacity to actually read material, and a lack of morals and ethics to do such reporting which states one thing while reporting another.  Yet when in the case of the Breitbart reporters looking to properly put information about a candidate before voters, information that is factual and not based on race or class, but just what a candidate has said and done, this is said to be racist or a 'smear'.  One cannot 'smear' anyone with their own words in proper context of where they were and who they were talking to: that is factual reporting of information that allows analysis of it.  The facts, themselves, should be neutral.  The analysis of them is done knowing the bias imparted by the author in an open and honest manner, not by trying to gloss over words by trying to portray a narrative or storyline.

It is the unwillingness of Old Media reporters and their storyline adhering counterparts online to actually present the facts without preface save for setting who, what, where, when and how that is disturbing.  How can the public properly assess a candidate without a good and thorough grounding in the background of the individual involved?  What they have done or not done, what they have backed or not backed, and the candidate's viewpoints in their own words to different audiences allows for an overview of the individual and their character to be done.  By pushing a predetermined narrative or storyline about a candidate, the Old Media and their online doppelgangers do a grave disservice to their media consumers and leave citizens unequipped with the necessary background to make decisions on how the process function of the body to protect it from harm can be best served.

One other thing about the Conservative New Media is that it is not monolithic nor trying to create a monolithic party nor State.  Our charge that we agree to as citizens is to form a more perfect Union, which means allowing for our differences and ensuring that they do not become a cause for friction or social disturbance.  There is no attempt to try and push a large scale agenda down on conservatives as a whole, but to respect differences and work where there is general agreement and to not interfere save by participation in an honest way when there is disagreement.  This is not done to drive legislation or to force activities upon people: it is done to see if there is any reason to have any legislation AT ALL in certain areas as the principles require respect for each other in our differences, not a forced similarity upon all people.  From that there are social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, military conservatives, cultural conservatives, religious conservatives, and human rights conservatives which includes the positive human right to keep and bear arms to protect our property. 

As all of these venues are in play for any given event or happening, this requires that reporting be with an understood set of references and that there be respect in disagreement of analysis, not a cause to vilify or castigate, but to discuss and understand amongst people.  In this the Conservative New Media is at a stark contrast to the Old Media and their cohort members online: one seeks to unify by common agreement upon what needs to be done, the other seeks to enforce a monolithic agreement upon individuals and mold society to its own ends.  Frank and open discussion amongst conservatives is one that does not boil down to name calling, but often finds citation of first principles so that one must become familiar with Kirk, Smith, de Vattel, Grotius, Pufendorf, Seneca, Plato and a host of others just to be able to understand what the basis for a difference in viewpoint is.  To find commonality amongst such original arguments on man and society is seen as a duty of each individual.  The Old Media wants individuals to just be a collection of items, a checklist of race, color, religion, etc. so that group can be set upon group, class upon class, in an attempt to create a uniform society and control it via media output used to purely political ends.

Conservative New Media puts the process and an understanding of it as a priority as a good process will generally yield good ends.

Old Media and their counter-parts online put the ends as a priority and then use any means to get to it.

And that is why Buzzfeed, Politico, et. al. do not comprehend the Conservative New Media: the means are an end in and of themselves and that fits to no storyline and does not fit into pushing an agenda forward, thus they cannot understand how anyone can think like this.  For all the alleged intelligence of those with such an ends-oriented system, they truly aren't all that smart or capable of accepting true differences in the way people are in this life... diversity only in external things, never in the soul and the mind.

Same planet, different worlds

Reading a recent column by David Ignatius at RealClearPolitics I am struck by something that has begun to change in America due to the Tea Party movement.  It is a strong, very strong, sense that those who once had a great capability to describe the world as it was have not adapted to the world as it is.

The last time I had a similar feeling was at the end of the 1980's and heading into the 1990's.  The collapse of the Soviet Bloc (in general Eastern European Communist regimes) and the final fall of the USSR itself, by dissolving out of existence, then left an entire class of the pundit class at sea.  They were the ones who could only see the USSR lasting at least to 2030 if not longer, and saw no structural problems within the Soviet system or amongst its outlying satellite states.  This was the grim and gruesome crowd that knew we would 'always have the USSR to kick around'.  Mind you, the ever ready CIA agreed with that position, too.

Then came Solidarity and Gorbie and soon the entire edifice was crumbling.  Poland 10 years, Hungary 10 months, Czechoslovakia 10 weeks, Romania 10 days and East Germany 10 hours.  One decade a mighty USSR that is everlasting and a decade later 'where the hell did it get to?'  It was the seemingly impossible snowballing to take out all previous assumptions and constructions with it and those who were hardest hit were minorities... just kidding!  No the hardest hit were the Kremlinologists who had their 'sources' to 'know' what was 'going on' in the Kremlin.  Or at least that small bar off the square near the hotel where the double-agents hung out.  Their credibility went from supremo-maximo, must consult before any decision so as to not get global thermonuclear war over a minor trade dispute, to 'what a bunch of morons'!

You know, the over-educated elite punditry?  Those were the morons.

Really, morons need lessons.

Fast-forward to a massive lending crisis involving a few institutions (Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Citibank) and a huge government over-response (throw tons of cash at everyone, force secret deals, keep the system going!!!) that has made things worse by stifling the market and upsetting the normal rule of law and the course of bankruptcies.  Pulled into that were two automakers that deserved to be taken down a few million notches: GM and Chrysler.  Actually GM is a lending institution (GMAC) that makes cars as a side-show, and the government wanted to get its fingers into GMAC as did the head of GM.  Gotta love that 'government getting into bed with industry' sort of deal that made Mussolini a household name back in the late 1920's early 1930's.

The reaction to all of this has been the sudden appearance of the Tea Party movement, foreshadowed by the Porkbusters movement during the later Bush years.  From 'trimming the pork' and 'finding the waste' to 'Taxed Enough Already' in only a couple of years, going from a concerted group of the interested to involving their friends, relatives and neighbors in a few massive federal bailouts.  Change is in the air and it isn't of the 'hope & change' variety, either.  Thus reading David Ignatius has that ever so eerie feeling of Kremlinologists spouting off about the durability of the USSR, and 'certain ways things will always be done' and, generally, missing the fact that the Eastern Bloc was crumbling wasn't really happening at all, just some 'minor adjustments' to the USSR.  The world could use some minor adjustments like that in Old Europe, which David Ignatius points out. 

What he misses, though, is the entire tone of what needs to be done. Consider these two opening paragraphs and I will highlight the things that really get to me:

WASHINGTON -- At the risk of taking contrarianism to extremes, let me offer this suggestion: The global economy needs a "tea party" movement in Europe to lobby for fiscal conservatism there.

Many "mainstream" analysts deride the tea party agitators as a right-wing fringe group, and in many respects, that label is deserved. I wouldn't want them running the Treasury Department or the Federal Reserve.

The last part, first: I don't want eggheads like Little Timmy "The Smartest Guy In The Room Who Can't Figure Out TurboTax" Geithner running the Treasury.  From that experience of the tax code did Lil Timmy figure out the tax code was too damned complex for an egghead like himself?  Nope.  BTW he was in charge of the NY Fed and a major source of our financial problems and regulatory enforcement and pushing for different regulations.  So I would, actually, like someone who has been on the pointy end of the financial system and who can learn their lessons to be the head of the Treasury... and I don't see why we need the Federal Reserve as it is very convenient to politicians and turns out to be quite costly to the people as it makes the exact same mistakes of the 1920's all over again in the 1990's to 2008 era.  Save that we have Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie and a much more massive government presence in markets than it ever had in the 1920's.

But its that first part that really lets me know that a pundit is about to find out that although he is on the same planet as I am, we are living in different worlds.  The code words 'fiscal conservatism' have a definite meaning in DC:  conservatives who want to restrain the growth of government.  They want to manage government growth.  The underlying concept is that they want more government not less of it.  This is conservatism of a Progressive venue in that it never, not once, asks: 'Are all these things government does justified and supportable under the US Constitution?'

These are the folks derided by the Left when they want to 'restrain growth' as the Left claims those are 'cutting government'?  But that is not the case as the responsibilities and costs of what has been done before continue onwards.  What the Left complains about is that government is not growing fast enough for their liking.  This is what happens when Progressives remain unchallenged for decades: they so twist the meaning of words and concepts that black becomes white and they get killed at the next Zebra crossing (as per Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).  Thus not growing is shrinking, growing slowly is stifling and only when there is robust government growth do they complain about the slow rate of government growth.  By casting no growth as 'cuts' the Left 'wins' the important kudos of 'providing more of taxpayers money to non-taxpayers as such swell Congresscritters' Award.

Now the commentariate, the modern day Kremlinologists of the two party system who have 'fiscal conservatives' pegged as slow-growth Republicans are seeing their ideas being left way out on muddy expanses and wondering 'what the hell is that wall of water across the entire horizon?'  That, as was found out in 2004, is a tsunami.  If my feeling on this is right (and I've only had it one other time beyond the USSR era when Bill Gates famously said that '640K was enough for anyone') then that old idea of 'fiscal conservatism' for Europe (i.e. slow growth conservatism) is about to find that the only place that might make sense is inside Europe.  As Mr. Ignatius points out, Europe can no more get a Tea Party together than it can figure out that all these unassimilated Muslims really aren't Europeans.

This concept of 'fiscal conservatives' is cemented in the next paragraph:

But these conservative populists do perform the useful function of focusing American political attention on the need for fiscal responsibility. They make a good point, for example, in arguing that we shouldn't add a major new entitlement program for health care until we've figured out how to pay for the entitlement programs we've already got.

Hell even the NYT/CBS group that had a poll last week understands that a majority of Americans would take a cut in services to reduce spending.  That goes beyond the WaPo/ABC poll and Rasmussen Reports poll where 63% want smaller government.  This is slowly becoming something that isn't about health care but about the current entitlement system which is broken beyond political repair.  This is not old-time Republican 'fiscal conservatism' that is brewing in America, but something that hasn't been around since the 1830's - a disgust for powerful government.  The Tea Partiers are representative of those Americans who not only want 'fiscal conservatism' but to start addressing the entitlement programs we have, and not figure out how to pay for them... just reduce or eliminate them.  Smaller government and fewer services doesn't mean paying for what we have, but reducing the outlays, powers and taxing power of the government simultaneously.

Like I said, I'm getting that Kremlinologist/Bill Gates feeling going on here and it won't be pretty for the indentured servitude party pundits who can't imagine what liberty and freedom are like because they have read their own material for too long.  That feeling of life-time service to a way of thought comes through clearly in the last paragraph:

I wouldn't really wish the tea party movement on anyone, but the Europeans could use some of its passion about fiscal responsibility. And while we're thinking contrarian thoughts, how about a "conspicuous consumer" movement in high-saving Asia to push for greater domestic spending there?

No, he really can't understand the Tea Party movement as his fellow Americans take up the banner of liberty and freedom which clearly states: Don't Tread On Me.

And while we are on authoritarian ideals, why don't we just wish governments would tell people what to do, tax the hell out of them to do it, restrain their liberty and freedom and make them servants to government because government 'knows best'.

So while I'm thinking contrarian thoughts, wouldn't it be great if the punditcrats got out of their cubicles, their cushy brie and chardonnay get togethers, their damned echo chambers and actually went out into neighborhoods and just talked with folks instead of talking at them?  Luckily we have the internet for that.

Yet another thing Bill Gates didn't expect to catch on...

The essence of Liberty

Watching the move of messages at Twitterfall is captivating, as is getting the latest uploaded videos, still images and testimony from various sources in Iran. There are attempts to block communications both in-country, by the regime, and via those who are supporters of the regime outside of Iran, and the messages could not be more startling to hear how the varied views of a Free People give so many viewpoints, while those supporting the regime become sock puppets for it with messages that do not diverge from the 'party line' and being unwilling to engage in civil conversation of any sort. Thus you can easily weed out those messages from your viewing just by mentally ignoring them. It is a trick we all have in our mental toolbox, but very few people realize just how fast they do process information before they mentally acknowledge it.

Still, there are some disturbing trends amongst those in the West that can only be described as pacifists or appeasers, who trot out nostrums from decades past and attempt to apply them to the situation in Iran.

EQUIVALENCY

First is the attempt to link up the current ongoings in Iran to the US 2000 election. Yes we all remember how the polls closed early, how multiple cities had more people voting than were registered, that George W. Bush beat Al Gore by some 99.98% to 0.02%, right? And how 2004 would see the repeat of that in spades?

Oh, that's right, that didn't happen, did it?

The only problems I remember from 2000 was that Florida did a mandatory vote recount in a very, very close election and that all after-action reports by all news groups verified that, indeed, George W. Bush carried the State by a slim margin. That news agencies got that WRONG and that first counts were inaccurate does not mean you take to the street. Nor does it mean changing how you count votes in the middle of a recount.

Losing a close election is NOT the same as having it stolen by a regime that has to HAND COUNT paper ballots, does so in an impossibly short period of time, then has 100%+ turnout in some cities. There is NO equivalent between Iran 2009 and USA 2000.

Nor was the close election of 2004 in doubt by any but conspiracy theorists who, because they see a conspiracy behind everything, put forward there was one for that election. Mind you those same folks will also attribute the entire United States, modern Europe, the state of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, indeed the entire WORLD as run by conspiracy. Anyone pushing this meme needs to be tossed into the 'crank file' of conspiracy theorists.

Those seeking to do so with 2000 need their morals and ethics examined: don't degrade those standing up to HAVE a say in government, even through a corrupt regime, by making their stance in any way, shape or form equal to a civil election with a close outcome.

I do have extreme problems with the Progressive attitudes of Liberals and Conservatives seeking to vest more power in government as that is an infringement on the Liberty and Freedom of the people when government takes more power to itself and pushes aside the people. I will not start any fight with my government, but will give civil voice to my understandings of the world, human nature and how ill-run our governments are. Any action to coerce individuals and establish government as the ONLY power and limit the VOICE of the people in it, I will take as an attack on myself.

That is why I give my love, support and understanding to the people of Iran: they are in the position of fight for Freedom or becoming slaves to government.

Do note that this Presidential Administration with more unelected 'Czars' than all of Russia ever had, that seeks to fire those who keep government accountable so as to reward supporters of the President, that attempting to push 'reform' out the door to take over companies that NEED to fail and not BECOME arms of government, that attempting to stifle the Liberty of the people to choose what health care, if any, they should get and seek help from their fellow citizens by charity for those who cannot get it, all of these things are NOT encouraging Liberty and Freedom in America. I did not like NAFTA, I do not like NCLB, I do not like the Federal Reserve, or Fannie Mae, or Freddie Mac, or Social Security which is going insolvent at a rate far faster than any predicted though anyone could see looking at actuarial tables, or Medicare, or Medicaid....these are all distractions from government, give too much power and say from government in our lives, and need to be chopped off with a chainsaw. We do need government, but only to curb the abuses of individuals and protect society: that is the punishing tools we hand to government.

You want government to do more?

Look at the regime in Iran: it has been doing MORE for decades. The USSR provided all those wonderful things to people like healthcare and assured retirement, if you could live long enough to reach retirement as the health care by government sucked like an Electrolux. Multiple European Nations now have 'competition' where you STILL pay for government health care and STILL have to pay if you want to get decent private care... that is not competition, but paying TWICE to purchase ONCE.

When I see the Free People of Iran standing up to have their voices heard in government, they are supporting the essential Liberty for running a representative democracy.

You do not see me trying to make equivalent their fundamental stand on Liberty and Freedom to be in any way equivalent to how I observe the problems of government. I do not have such hubris, such narcissism to project myself onto an entire Nation. I can discriminate between my civil disagreements with a civil government, that I feel does NOT represent my views and NOT turn it into a partisan cause for projecting those feelings everywhere on planet Earth. I have a fundamental and basic understanding that we have Nations to HAVE separate cultures and that all Nations are equal under the Law of Nations, and that all people have the right to form society, create government and expect government to protect it and the basis of society... not to dictate to society what it shall be.

We should be so lucky as to get a 60% turnout at the polls... and we are close enough to the 50% turnover going downwards that the pure position of the legitimacy of government now falls into question in America, and that has been becoming apparent over decades, not due to one party or another but BOTH. I don't particularly like that, either, but that is far better, to have non-representative, corrupt and generally unsupported elections than to have coerced elections with high turnouts that seek to validate a given regime that then feels free to make up the numbers as it goes along.

BAD PEACE IS BETTER THAN A GOOD WAR

Really?

Supporting tyrants and dictators to intimidate, threaten and attack Nations means you should not once, nor ever, respond?

This sentiment was given to us by Neville Chamberlain and has been haunting the Left for decades. Allowing Czechoslovakia to be divided then allowed the complete take-over of the country and its $10 billion gold reserves to flush into the Nazi regime and give it a last buying spree before 1939, which witnessed a sudden dip in the value of gold as so much came into the market. The idea that a 'bad peace' that sees large Nations coercing small ones to be dismembered by tyrants and despots that then leads to a horrific war would be better than an armed stand-off to support the sovereignty of an Ally so as to deprive a tyrannical regime of the necessary funds to reinforce its military might get you a war, yes. But a far better one than you wind up with, otherwise. And if the Allies had stood up to the Nazi regime when it walked into the Ruhr valley to wrest it from Allied control, then it wouldn't even have gotten THAT far.

That means you MUST protect peace, create peace and realize that if you ally yourself to a Nation you are required to risk much for her safety, also.

Vietnam? The backlash of the US leaving was millions dead in Vietnam and Laos and tens of millions of dead due to Pol Pot's genocide in his own country which only happened once the US was no longer a factor. That was not a well supported war at home, but the 'bad peace' cost tens of millions dead in reprisals and genocide, which I don't even count as a 'bad peace' but a horrific war staged by governments upon their own people. Much thanks, but the 'bad peace' made the war seem trivial in comparison.

War is, indeed, a horror and there must be support to have the capability to wage it so as to establish a just peace. World War I went horrifically wrong and then got the very worst peace imaginable. It was so bad, so unsupported that it got another World War. WWII saw the Marshal Plan and the reconstruction of Japan as good and decent aims, beyond just confronting the USSR, there was deep good in giving civil government breathing space after long-term ventures into tyranny. That BUILT a peace which has lasted to this day. That peace was not accomplished without a horrific war before it and the unwillingness of America to let Europe 'go its own way' and, instead, seek to establish civil society as a control for government. The trend to vest more control over society in government is now making those civil governments fragile, just as it does our own: and the only quest of government is more power to government and that must be confronted at all costs.

I would much prefer to have a scaling back of government via civil means.

The revolt of Iranians point out that there is an end to that when government sees fit to stifle society and its individuals in the name of government power.

Wars, then, are necessary to establish civil power and create better government as governments can and do go corrupt, to the point of feeling that government is ALL THE POWER in a Nation. Yet all that power rests in the people of the Nation, with government being a fraction of it. Far safer to have the power in the hands of individuals with mild restrictions upon those who seek to rape, murder, kill, extort, and otherwise coerce their way into power, than to let such people get INTO power and use those methods upon the Nation.

Thus the moderate position is to see that government is a necessary evil that, at best, can administer justice equally and without favor, and be highly restricted to doing a few things necessary to defend a Nation and its society. Stepping from that is immoderate as it vests power and influence into government, thus attracting those seeking power over their fellow man for reasons not of the public good.

For those who seek peace at any price, I do understand this to be true:

3. Right of making war.⁽¹³⁶⁾

In treating of the right to security (Book II. Chap. IV.), we have shown that nature gives men a right to employ force, when it is necessary for their defence, and for the preservation of their rights. This principle is generally acknowledged: reason demonstrates it; and nature herself has engraved it on the heart of man. Some fanatics indeed, taking in a literal sense the moderation recommended in the gospel, have adopted the strange fancy of suffering themselves to be massacred or plundered, rather than oppose force to violence. But we need not fear that this error will make any great progress. The generality of mankind will, of themselves, guard against its contagion — happy, if they as well knew how to keep within the just bounds which nature has set to a right that is granted only through necessity! To mark those just bounds, — and, by the rules of justice, equity, and humanity, to moderate the exercise of that harsh, though too often necessary right — is the intention of this third book.

Law of Nations, Book III by Emmerich de Vattel

Bad peace at all costs is fanaticism.

It is this understanding that I hold:

Peace, above all things, is to be desired, but blood must sometimes be spilled to obtain it on equable and lasting terms. -Andrew Jackson

As it goes for States so is it held for people, and the recourse of civil discussion ends when fundamental liberty is abridged. I would prefer that governments not abridge fundamental liberty and seek to enslave their people. But once done, the right of the people to resist and give their lives to the cause of Liberty is one that makes them Free. Our Freedom is purchased with the blood of our forebearers. Do not quail and cower behind fanaticism when you see others stand up to pay that price as it is the only cost allowed for the purchase of any Liberty. To do otherwise is to enslave yourself to fear of yourself and seek slavery for yourself.

I love and honor those that stand up to support Liberty as that is the only way to get Freedom.

Even when lost, the fight against being enslaved and your children enslaved is worth the cost.

If you are not prepared to pay it, then you willingly measure yourself for the fetters to enslave you. Followers of Ghandi paid in their lives. Those rebelling in Tehran do not have the means to defend themselves. I would not dare dishonor that courage by wanting 'peace' that is 'bad' as that is encouraging tyranny. I would prefer that they were armed, as Ghandi depended on the civility of the British, while those fanatics in power in Tehran have NONE.

In case you hadn't noticed the difference.

These two memes need to be addressed as the first pre-supposes illegitimate routes to power and then legitimize them by constant repeating of them, and the second to have people submit to any odious regime rather than fight.

Together they are fatal to society and require that assertion of human liberty to keep government small so that it will not grow large and repressive.

Otherwise the final assertion is through blood.

And if you don't like seeing blood spilled overseas in the fight for essential Liberty, then do ask yourself if, and when, you will EVER support the fight for it. Otherwise measure yourself for fetters as 'Live Free or Die' is not what you support, and slavery for yourself to your pacifism are the chains you wish for everyone.

Excuse me if I disagree.

I do so in a civil manner.

I will start no fights.

Best if you keep the chain measuring to yourself.

So there is no connection between....

One of the purely insane, and that is in the 'dear god they have their fingers in their ears and are singing la-la-la, I don't want to hear this' , from the Left and particularly President Elect Obama backers  is not wanting to hear about their own candidate's past connections with, well, anyone.  Apparently he is now on the path to a purely virgin birth that happened to take place in Hawaii but was conceived with Space Aliens and/or Bigfoot.  Really, Sasquatch seem to have better taste than intermingle with us, and I really don't see Obama in the Fox Mulder.  After that having a political career where he would, contrary to all other evidence of being a Machine Politician, actually have money magically appear before him and be able to bi-locate for 20 years while at Rev. Wright's sermons.

Sorry, he appears to be a normal smokin Joe who, apparently smokes and is part of the 'in crowd' in Chitown politics.

Luckily he isn't named 'Joe'.

The honest Joes, like Joe the Plumber, get a bad rap from politicians.

Depressing beyond all account is that I can stick to my past articles in the archive and pull up the necessary connection almost immediately.

Let's take Eric Holder, nominee for Attorney General and man implicated in saving the hide of Marc Rich, beyond being a flat out liar about the Justice Department's views on what was going on with Elian Gonzalez.  Say, remember that?  Lovely pontificating on the part of the Justice Department about how they wouldn't do anything and then the midnight raid?  Gotta love that, no?  I remember how so many 'activists' were up in arms about that... but I digress.

So lets hit Marc Rich.

They guy was a fugitive from justice, for various forms of illegal trading and such inside the US, and he went overseas to start up a firm doing financial deals in 'hot spots' around the world, which would end up backing all sorts of people.  He first shows up in my archives in a look at Monzer al-Kassar and the report on corrupt banking in the US done as part of the BCCI investigation by Congress in 1992.  He appears in the Executive Summary at point 16:

16. INVESTIGATIONS OF BCCI TO DATE REMAIN INCOMPLETE, AND MANY LEADS CANNOT BE FOLLOWED UP, AS THE RESULT OF DOCUMENTS BEING WITHHELD FROM US INVESTIGATORS BY THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT, AND DOCUMENTS AND WITNESSES BEING WITHHELD FROM US INVESTIGATORS BY THE GOVERNMENT OF ABU DHABI.

Many of the specific criminal transactions engaged in by BCCI's customers remain hidden from investigation as the result of bank secrecy laws in many jurisdictions, British national security laws, and the holding of key witnesses and documents by the Government of Abu Dhabi. Documents pertaining to BCCI's use to finance terrorism, to assist the builders of a Pakistani nuclear bomb, to finance Iranian arms deals, and related matters have been sealed in the United Kingdom by British intelligence and remain unavailable to U.S. investigators. Many other basic matters pertaining to BCCI's criminality, including any list that may exist of BCCI's political payoffs and bribes, remain sequestered in Abu Dhabi and unavailable to U.S. investigators.

Many investigative leads remain to be explored, but cannot be answered with devoting substantial additional sources that to date no agency of government has been in a position to provide.

Unanswered questions include, but are not limited to, the relationship between BCCI and the Banco Nazionale del Lavoro; the alleged relationship between the late CIA director William Casey and BCCI; the extent of BCCI's involvement in Pakistan's nuclear program; BCCI's manipulation of commodities and securities markets in Europe and Canada; BCCI's activities in India, including its relationship with the business empire of the Hinduja family; BCCI's relationships with convicted Iraqi arms dealer Sarkis Sarkenalian, Syrian drug trafficker, terrorist, and arms trafficker Monzer Al-Kassar, and other major arms dealers; the use of BCCI by central figures in the alleged "October Surprise," BCCI's activities with the Central Bank of Syria and with the Foreign Trade Mission of the Soviet Union in London; its involvement with foreign intelligence agencies; the financial dealingst of BCCI directors with Charles Keating and several Keating affiliates and front-companies, including the possibility that BCCI related entities may have laundered funds for Keating to move them outside the United States; BCCI's financing of commodities and other business dealings of international criminal financier Marc Rich; the nature, extent and meaning of the ownership of other major U.S. financial institutions by Middle Eastern political figures; the nature, extent, and meaning of real estate and financial investments in the United States by major shareholders of BCCI; the sale of BCCI affiliate Banque de Commerce et Placement in Geneva, to the Cukorova Group of Turkey, which owned an entity involved in the BNL Iraqi arms sales, among others.

The withholding of documents and witnesses from U.S. investigators by the Government of Abu Dhabi threatens vital U.S. foreign policy, anti-narcotics and money laundering, and law enforcement interests, and should not be tolerated.

Of course this will bring up bad nightmares for the Left and Right, but to hell with the party favorites - if you don't like the dirty dealing by one party, then your own gets its fair share when doing the same.  Mind you by then he was already dealing with the Mullahcracy in Iran and helping their oil deals along.

Next up, Marc Rich shows up in my first article on the Red Mafia... you do know he was involved with the Red Mafia before President Clinton pardoned him, right?  This is the article where I make the surprising 'one person away' connection between Hillary Clinton and Randy "Duke" Cunningham, and it is tenuous, of course, but just how many folks donating to politicians will have BOTH in their list of who they contribute to?  I point to an article in Pravda, but leave out this little excerpt from it:

When this money returned to Moscow it had to be used and directed for the national good. The KGB and its allies, under Silayev and Kryuchkov, set up a system in which loyal and trusted members of the Komsomol system and friendly businessmen could form their own banks – Russian banks. Men like Khodorkovsky, Aven, Fridman and others were chosen and set up in the money business. They used the banks to channel the returning Mafia money into long-term businesses. With few exceptions, those chosen for this were all Jews. When Western pioneers like Marc Rich, David Reuben, Gerry Lennard or Jerry Cligman agreed to work within this system by creating the ‘tolling business, they were given a kick start of roubles to help pay for the initial costs of the tolling system, They, too, were mainly Jews, albeit foreign Jews.

Marc Rich working with the Red Mafia, nice, no?  Some of the connections in the network of individuals would be gone into via my article looking at connections between then Sen. Obama and other folks in his inner circle of friends.  Here, as I am citing an article that is not for direct quotation and I am honoring that, which was looking into political corruption and banking, will be my own words summarizing that article starting with following up Nadhmi Auchi's investment in the TotalFinaElf scandal:

He would go on to be convicted of the charges under TotalFinaElf and get 15 months suspended sentence for it. At the 10th International Anti-Corruption Conference Jean-Francois Medard presented a paper on the relationship between Elf, Angola and individuals at the head of the banking concerns involved, like Nadhmi Auchi (and for a not officially published work you can't quote from, it is excellent). The resultant method used to ensure that funds, arms, oil and company assets would not be easily traced is what is termed 'a nebula of networks' and I commonly refer to as person-to-person trust-based networks. As many have heard about jobs 'it is not what you know, but who you know' the exact, same thing goes on for illegal transactions of arms, equipment and money laundering. It is a question of who you know and who they trust who can help lead to getting whatever needs to be done, accomplished. This includes not only the direct p2p network, but also trusted organizations and the individuals in them, so that things like Masonic Lodges (quite the societal networking group for European business and mafioso) in which the establishment, itself, represents a node on the p2p network.

It is this network that would include individuals like Pierre Falcone, Etienne Leandri, Charles Pasqua, Marc Rich, Bill & Hillary Clinton, Nadhmi Auchi and organizations like Elf, the corrupt Menatep Bank of Russia (used by the Abromovich organization) and the Bank of New York system compromised by the Berlin couple and Semion Mogilevich. By exchanging Angolan debt and cash from other parts of the system, the entire affair was able to arrange for arms to be shipped illegal to Jonas Savimbi in Angola. That entire deal, involving so many multiple level 'cut-outs' in the banking structure (between BNP and the corrupt BoNY system), off-shore banks and money transfers (mostly to paper front companies) plus the high level of individuals and organizations ensured that no one would be able to properly figure the whole thing out. Just to be sure, President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich due to his high level of involvement in that and with the Russian Mafia.

Yes, the individuals mentioned in the article and their connections link up to all of these... mostly they are directly cited.

Now, far be it from me to point out that by now we have Marc Rich involved with BCCI, Red Mafia, and as part of the larger network that then is put together because of the last one and corrupt individuals in multiple banking institutions in the US, Europe, Russia and the Middle East.  That network can also take the 'one-hop' method and use Rich's connections in the Red Mafia to tie him right next to Monzer al-Kassar.  Small world, that one of black financing, guns, drugs, and death dealing. 

Another look into the Red Mafia ties of Marc Rich is done by the Dirty Money Digest in 2007, and I cite that in my article looking at Currency and Corruption:

Galmond had ridden the laundering roundabout with his IPOC fund for a number of years, no doubt earning considerable fees in the process, before his scheme hit an obstacle. This was the Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman who decided to challenge his claim to ownership of a stake in a mobile phone company.

Fridman is the majority owner of a company called Alfa Group, which is today known as Altimo. Alfa owns stakes in VimpelCom, in a mobile phone operator in Ukraine and in Russia’s fixed line operator, Golden Telecom. Fridman made one early fortune by selling an interest in his oil business (originally acquired from US commodities trader, Marc Rich) to BP Amoco for $6.75 billion. He is no stranger to controversy. His company faces a lawsuit from the Canadian energy company called Norex, which alleges that Alfa issued invoices for fabricated services that were performed by offshore shell companies. Alfa has also been accused of bribing Ukrainian officials and is black-listed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Alfa Group is assisted by two controversial characters. The first is Pyotr Aven who has allegedly been engaged in various misdeeds, including drug trafficking. The other is Hans Bodmer who allegedly worked with Fridman and Aven to send instructions to IPOC to wire money through banks in New York. Bodmer recently pled guilty to the criminal conspiracy to launder money and conspiracy to violate the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection with a scheme to bribe foreign leaders.

Fridman is ably abetted by Leonid Rozhetskin a former investment banker who managed the New York listing of mobile phone network operator VimpelCom, part of the Alfa stable of telecoms interests. Rozhetskin is also a colourful character. He is an American-educated lawyer, who appeared on the cover of the Russian edition of Forbes, under the headline ‘The Most Dangerous shark in our waters.’

Rozhetskin’s activities threw a spoke into Galmond’s wheel. According to a suit brought by IPOC vs Leonid Rozhetskin, Mikhail Fridman, Pyotr Aven, Alfa Group Consortium, Alfa Capital Markets Inc, Alfa Telecom (n/k/a Altimo) and Hans Bodmer in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, June 8 2006, Rozhetskin’s company LV Finance was touting around an option to buy a stake in a nascent Russian telecoms company called Sonic Duo. The funds were to be used as seed capital, and Galmond made an initial payment to LV of $15m in early 2001. He put further money into the business over the course of the year, bringing his investment to $40m. The result was the creation of a company called MegaFon which was formed by bringing together IPOC and a communications company called TeliaSonera, a merger of Finnish and Swedish interests.

What, you didn't know that the Red Mafia had organizations that got into mobile phones, owning banks and doing corrupt dealing on a global basis?

Guess what?

Neither did Eric Holder.

At his post in the Justice Department, he would remain clueless about the Red Mafia, even when one of the toughest Moscow Bosses, by the name of Yponchik, came to the US to murder some folks while being based in the Russian emigre community in Brooklyn.  Eric Holder, apparently, couldn't be too interested in the fraud and dirty dealings surrounding that entire escapade and would only have that driven home when the Berlin couple in the Bank of New York would be working illegal trades that would mask the movement of billions of dollars in the most complex network of transactions ever seen in the financial community.  As one FBI Agent in the late 1990's said, 'this is bigger than BCCI'.

Still is, actually, as no one has tried to puzzle out how one man can direct two hundred people to run 300 front companies, institutions and such in Nations with lax banking oversight.

Now we go to add in the next scandal under Eric Holder's time in the Justice Dept. involving Marc Rich *before* the pardon.  This I go into exquisite detail in A taste of Oil For Food and its chefs.  In that I find the treasure trove of information on Mr. Rich from various sources including Kenneth R. Timmerman book The French Betrayal of America, published 2004 and here I quote from the book:

Marc Rich resurfaced in October in Paul Volcker's investigation of the U.N. Oil-for-Food Program. The report said Rich & Co. covertly financed at least $932,630 in oil purchases from Saddam Hussein by using a front company, Masefield, of Zugin, Switzerland.

Reading the Volcker report leads to the conclusion that big payments were made to the son of a French member of parliament and an Indian Cabinet member, who created "shell companies" to enrich Saddam.

Now, if you remember correctly the main banks doing this were BNP and Paribas bank, under Nadhmi Auchi and Paul Desmarais, respectively, and they would merge into BNP-Paribas, with Auchi shifting his shares to his General Mediterranean Holdings and having the Desmarais and Frère families under their Pargesa Holding company pick up a controlling share (via their previous stake in Paribas).  Together this all winds up with Marc Rich working oil deals for Saddam in the old oil fields in which the Desmarais family has a stake to undermine US domestic oil companies by driving the price of oil low enough to force many of those domestic companies to either close up or sell of their exploration wings so as to survive.  That was testimony before the Senate in 1999 on the impact of OFF and Saddam's dirty oil deals on the domestic industry, BTW.

Over at Kommersant they put together a lovely timeline of the Red Mafia stand-up and look at Marc Rich's involvement in 1991:

The Swiss company Marc Rich organized tolling at the Krasnoyarsk Aluminum Smelter (KrAZ). Oleg Deripaska, Mikhail Chornoi, and Yury Shlyafshtein would later be credited with inventing tolling, but in fact it was Marc Rich that brought it to Russia. The company left Russia within a year due to internal conflicts, making way for the AIOC company.

Then in 1994:

In June, Marc Rich & Co. AG, which had left the Russian aluminum business, changed owners and changed its name to Glencore International AG. Glencore gradually started returning to the Russian nonferrous metal market.

And in 1996:

Krazpa Metals NV, which was 50% owned by Glencore, was presented in London on March 28 as KrAZ's marketing partner. Krazpa replaced AIOC, whose joint venture with KrAZ and Sibalko had collapsed at the end of the previous year after Feliks Lvov's murder. TWG, Renova, RIAL, Trastkonsalt, and Glencore formed a "big five" of traders in the aluminum business.

Is this bringing back fond memories of the 1990's for you, yet?

No?

Ok, how about Angolagate?  Remember that during the 1990's?  You know, Fench government trading in Angolan debt for arms... that has to be the neatest thing, turning debt into something you normally pay for!  To get a taste of that I excerpted from an article by Francois Misser at African Business MAY 2001 at Findarticles:

Over the past few months, the French media has been smacking its lips over juicy revelations from what has been dubbed The Angolagate scandal - a series of complicated oil for arms deals. It is easy to understand the media interest. The cast of characters being sucked into the scandal is impressive enough - former US President Bill Clinton, his wife Hillary - now a New York senator, Mark Rich - on the wanted list in America before being pardoned by Bill Clinton, Francois Mitterrand's son, Jean-- Christophe -currently out bail, Angolan President Dos Santos, and the principal actor, the flamboyant Pierre Falcone currently serving a prison sentence in France.

[..]

The major headache for Luanda was that the Bicesse Peace Accord included a United Nations ban on arms sales to both sides. It was lifted in October 1992 by Russia, the United Kingdom and partially by United States - but France continued to prohibit the sale of arms to both sides in the civil war.

Enter the French-Brazilian entrepreneur extraordinary - Pierre Falcone and his partner, the Israeli-Russian businessman Arkadi Gaydamak. They came to make an offer which they knew Luanda could not refuse.

Between 1993 and 1997 they arranged the supply of Russian made weapons (including combat helicopters) by the Slovak ZTS-- Osos company in an arms for oil deal worth an estimated $600m.

[..]

Angola was not ZTS-Osos' only African client. Cameroonian officials confirmed French media reports in early 2001 that it had also imported weapons from the Slovak company in 1994, during a border conflict with Nigeria. But the same Cameroonian sources claim there was nothing illegal about the deal, also mediated by Pierre Falcone.

In Angola's case, the situation was different. Falcone is a French citizen and his oil-- backed operations aimed at facilitating the purchase of weapons for Angola were made with the financial support of the French bank, Paribas. For both these reasons, he should have asked for the French Defence and Foreign Affairs Ministries for permission before going ahead with the deals. That he did not is why the French ordered his arrest last December and held him at the La Sante prison in Paris

The French judiciary has other charges against the French-Brazilian jet-setter.

He was also involved at the time with the French government's security equipment export company Sofremi, which was under the Former Minister of Interior, Charles Pasqua.

[..]

Angolagate has also spreads its tentacles across the Atlantic. In a report titled Crude Awakening, the British NGO Global Witness had asserted that "the financing of a $50m contract for the supply of East European weapons from the Czech Osos Praha Company and the Slovak joint stock company ZTS was arranged in 1993 by the Russian-- Israeli businessman Arkadi Gaydamak and by his French-Brazilian partner Pierre Falcone, run through the Swiss oil-trading company Glencore founded by Marc Rich". That was a year before Rich sold his shares in Glencore. At the time, neither Glencore nor Marc Rich denied the Global Witness report.

Gaydamak is currently on the run - the French having issued an international arrest warrant for him.

So far, neither Glencore or Marc Rich have been accused of violating Swiss or French laws, but the conclusion one may draw from the Global Witness report is that Marc Rich might have contributed to the Angolan government's war effort. Should the US Justice Department find a connection between his ex-wife, singer Denise Rich, and her donation to Hillary Clinton's New York senate campaign being linked to Bill Clinton's decision to pardon Marc Rich over a purported $48m tax fraud, that would be more than embarrassing for the former First Lady.

The question is whether or not the former US President, who justified his decision to pardon Rich for his `positive role' in the Middle East peace process, can seriously ignore Marc Rich's role in Angolagate. After all, Bill Clinton, if he wanted to, could have easily accessed all intelligence reports about such an important and controversial player on the world's oil scene.

Even assuming that Clinton did not know, it will be even harder to convince those black voters who supported Mrs Clinton in New York that she and her husband were ignorant of Marc Rich's role as a top sanctions busters during the South Africa apartheid era. According to a book, Apartheid's Oil Secrets Revealed, from the Dutch-based anti-apartheid group Shipping Research Bureau, which monitored violations of the 1979 UN oil embargo, the Swiss-based trader chartered 149 out of the total 865 tankers spotted by the SRB calling at South African ports between 1979 and1993.

Since oil was at the time the only strategic product which South Africa lacked, Rich can be considered as having been instrumental in supporting the apartheid state's war machine - unleashed against those who opposed this system both inside the country and in the frontline states. The SRB book provides evidence that Rich, who is Jewish and holds an Israeli passport, managed to sell crude from the Arab states of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Oman, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Brunei to South Africa, which had developed close military cooperation with Israel.

Rich also supplied crude from Nigeria, Gabon and the former Soviet Union, who were scrupulously supporting all antiapartheid resolutions at the UN. Rich, whose operations are afforded an entire chapter of the book, was from the mid 1980s South Africa's main coal trader, finding alternative markets to those of France and Denmark in Spain, China, Chile, Portugal and Turkey.

Mrs Falcones' Donations

The US Democratic party do not have a monopoly on receiving funding from dubious characters connected with Angola's oil barons or the former apartheid regime. The Republicans came close to becoming a recipient when, last January, the Arizona Republic daily revealed that a Utah-based health company, Essante Corp, controlled by Falcone's wife Sonia Montero, a former Bolivian beauty queen, contributed $100,000 in campaign money to a Republican Party committee just days after President Bush's election victory. However, the money was returned by Republican officials who became concerned after reporters from Newsweek asked them what they knew of Falcone's arms-dealing background.

Bush and the Republicans just managed to escape a scandal, but have failed to explain just why Mrs Falcone was quite so generous towards them. In fact, prior to this particular donation, US Federal Election Commission records show that Sonia had already contributed a modest $2,000 to the Arizona Republican Party and contributed the same amount to the Democratic National Committee in May 1999.

Ah, Bill and Hill and arms to Jonas Savimbi helped by Marc Rich... makes you pine for the good old days, doesn't it?  Rich trading in Apartheid Oil and getting a wink and a nod from the Clintons as it goes to help the French... such sweet people, no wonder he was pardoned for his humanitarian efforts to support the Apartheid regime.  As Mr. Misser points out, it would be hard for Bill Clinton to NOT know what was going on with Marc Rich, even if Eric Holder was a complete dimwit and unable to read reports from his NY Bureau and others, plus contacts in INTERPOL.

And why he originally fled?  In Businessweek in 2005 we get this:

Traders soon learned the art of the Rich deal: Do whatever it takes. After Rich and Green left Phibro in 1973 to form their own company, they bought a house in the South of France and "stocked it with hookers from Paris and flew in oil guys who spent a week at their expense," says a former U.S. oil executive who knows Rich. "They got the oil contracts they wanted." A former Rich partner corroborates this. Green, who retired in 1992 after heart surgery, could not be reached for comment.

Rich is notorious for trading with Iran during the hostage crisis, South Africa during apartheid, and Cuba and Libya during U.S. trade embargoes. In 1983 he fled to Switzerland after being indicted by the Justice Dept. for racketeering, trading with the enemy (Iran), dodging a $48 million corporate tax bill, and other violations that could have resulted in 300 years of jail time. Rich's companies pleaded guilty to some charges and paid about $200 million in fines, penalties, and taxes, but the case remained open until the pardon. "Rich's philosophy is that no law applies to him," says Morris "Sandy" Weinberg Jr., the former U.S. prosecutor who pursued and indicted Rich in 1983.

You know, maybe those Leftist are right and it IS all about oil... and the Democrats who look the other way while all these dealings go on.  But the big one comes further in the article, with this and the great connector of dots:

THE SADDAM CONNECTION
Some of the most compelling details to emerge from Oil-for-Food probes revolve around Rich himself. BusinessWeek has pieced together information suggesting that, despite his denials, Rich did buy Iraqi crude from several questionable companies during the program. His name appears in shipping records compiled by MEES. These show he bought from four separate companies, starting in February, 2001: Onako Oil Co., a subsidiary of Alfa Group, one of Russia's largest conglomerates; an Egyptian company called International Company for Petroleum & Industrial Services (or INCOME, for short); and a Swiss company, Zerich, with ties to some extremist groups. The fourth, EOTC, remains a mystery. Hesham Sheta, vice-chairman of INCOME's parent company in Cairo, Egypt, International Group for Investments, confirmed that "Marc Rich has been INCOME's 'agent' [oil trader] since 1990" and that Rich bought Iraqi crude from INCOME in 2001. Zerich has since been liquidated. Alfa denies paying surcharges.

Rich tells a different story. In March he acknowledged his company was on the U.N.'s list of "approved" crude buyers but insisted in written answers to House International Relations Committee questions that "nothing ever came of it." A committee spokesman remarked at the time: "We believe [Rich] knows more than he wishes to acknowledge." Marc Rich + Co.'s Frutig reiterated an earlier press statement: "Marc Rich Holdings reject all the allegations relating to its involvement in the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program in Iraq."

Even with the new information, it may be difficult for the authorities to prove that Rich did anything illegal. At the time, Saddam offered oil at cut-rate prices to his supporters, who would then sell it for a huge profit on the market. For two years leading up to September, 2002, the dictator demanded surcharges of up to 50 cents a barrel that he deposited in secret bank accounts, according to the CIA, the Volcker committee, and Senate documents.

[..]

Some Rich Boys were heavy hitters in Oil-for-Food. In February, 2001, for example, the U.N. Security Council reported that Glencore bought 1 million barrels of Iraqi crude destined for the U.S. The oil was diverted to Croatia, where it was sold for a $3 million premium, that went into a secret bank account. Glencore was caught by U.N. overseers, and later agreed to refund the money to the U.N. A Glencore spokeswoman says the oil was shipped to Croatia for storage and later shipment to the U.S. A CIA report alleges that Glencore paid more than $3.2 million in surcharges to Iraq, something it denies.

The numerous investigations into the U.N. program paint a complex picture of how Rich Boys allegedly work. In September, 2001, U.S. and U.N. authorities were tipped off by a Greek shipping captain, who feared his tanker chartered by Trafigura was involved in sanctions busting. Trafigura, run by former Rich traders Claude Dauphin and Eric de Turckheim, bought Iraqi oil from a Bermuda company called Ibex Energy, according to a U.N. report. Ibex was owned by another former Rich trader, Jean-Paul Cayré. SOCO's Patrick Maugein, once a top Rich trader, was close to former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. The CIA alleges Maugein received oil allocations that he sold through Trafigura. Maugein denies paying illegal surcharges. Maugein says he knows one of Trafigura's founders. Investigators allege he had a contract with or a stake in Trafigura, something both the company and Maugein deny. Maugein and Trafigura also deny having commercial ties to Ibex.

Well of COURSE he is approved for OFF because two of the cronies of the regime, Auchi and Desmarais are backing the banks that Saddam APPROVED to work the money deals.  And considering that Paul Volcker worked for Desmarais before the OFF scandal, back in the 1970's, I have some problems taking that investigation all too seriously as to its veracity and looking into details.  Even with what they *did* find, its damning.

Oh, yeah, Paul Volcker is on the Obama fast-track for some lovely position for the future Administration, no?

What a cozy circle of friends!

Eric Holder, Marc Rich, Nadhmi Auchi, Paul Volcker... too bad we can't get any direct backing of Obama from Desmarais or we would have a closed loop on the deal.  As it is the corruption is already just neck deep by the time we get this far.

 

Now we switch to someone I haven't taken much of a look at so far, and hope that others carry this ball as there is a lot of ball to carry, here.  This is, of course, Governor Rod Blagojevich's scandal of trying to sell Obama's Senate Seat, which looks like influence peddling, corruption and Pay-For-Plutocrats.  For this I will got to my article on Sen. Obama, It isn't what you know but who you know, and John Batchelor on 03 MAR 2008 looking at the deal between Rezko, Auchi and Aiman Alsammarae who would wind up being convicted in Iraq of various forms of embezzlement on a power plant deal that Auchi was funding, and then Alsammarae was busted out of Iraqi prison and fled back to Chicago.  This would cover the time in Sen. Obama's career when he 'flipped' from being anti-Iraq War to for it, before flipping back again when Alsammarae fled the scene:

In addition, in April 2005, one month before Mr. Alsammarae left his post, his Ministry of Electricity signed a contract for $50 million with Companion Security to provide training to Iraqis to guard electrical plants by flying them to Illinois for classes.

Companion Security was headed by a former Chicago policeman with a troubled history, Daniel T. Frawley, in partnership with Mr. Rezko and in association with Daniel Mahru, the lawyer for the original contract and Mr. Rezko's former business partner. In April 2006, Mr. Frawley entered negotiations with Governor Rod Blagojevich's staff to lease a military facility in Illinois to be a training camp. In August 2006, Mr. Frawley started negotiations with Mr. Obama's U.S. Senate staff to complete the contract.

The discussions with Mr. Obama's staff continued over many months, including e-mails and conferences with an Obama staffer, Seamus Ahern. Questions raised by this contact go to the issue of whether or not Mr. Obama ever favored Mr. Rezko's commercial ties. Mr. Obama has said often that he performed no favors for Mr. Rezko.

The timeline of Companion discussions in 2006 is important to note: April 2006 Frawley speaks to governor's office; August 2006 Frawley speaks to senator's office; October 2006 indictment of Rezko revealed; October 2006 Rezko arrested upon return from Syria; October 2006 Alsammarae convicted in Baghdad and makes his first escape attempt; December 2006 Alsammarae escapes form Baghdad.

Did Mr. Obama's staff and Governor Blagojevich's staff not know how these events related to their discussions with Mr. Frawley? Importantly both Governor Blagojevich's office and Mr. Obama's office later explained they did not know of the link between Mr. Frawley and Mr. Rezko. Senate staffs are expected to perform due diligence on inquiries, such as is this matter about campaign contributions or unsavory activity. What was the nature of Mr Obama's staff's inquiry into the Ilinois resident Mr. Frawley's ability to secure a contract with the CPA's Ministry of Electricity in Bagdad from April, 2005?

What a list of names I had to go through for THAT article!  Still, following along in the original by Mr. Batchelor, we get to this lovely bit:

Oddly, after Mr. Alsammarae left his ministry post in 2005, he was reported that summer to be forming a Sunni political organization with participation by insurgents, some of whom threatened in public declarations to murder him. An intelligence analyst with knowledge of Syria commented that this episode may illustrate Mr. Alsammarae's then-strong, active links to the Baathist elite in exile in Syria, who have been a major source of money and operations to the Iraqi insurgency these last years; and that Mr. Alsammarae's freelancing rankled the so-called foreign elements in the insurgency.

The strangest of all events was not Mr. Alsammarae's arrest for theft in August 2006, nor his conviction in a Baghdad court in October 2006, but rather the two jailbreaks in October and December 2006. In the first instance, private armed men he may have hired took him from his jail cell in the Green Zone soon after his conviction in court. A report indicates that he was stopped at the Bagdad Airport carrying a Chinese passport. American officials later returned Mr. Alsammarae to Iraqi custody. At least one American with the International Police Liaison Officer program lost his job because of this first jailbreak.

This is about the time that Mr. Alsammarae's family in the United States sought help; there is a report that Mr. Alsammarae's daughter appealed directly to the office of U.S. Senator Barack Obama.

Are you getting the idea that Sen. Obama isn't being totally above-board with his dealings here?  That the work between Ahern, Frawley, Rezko, Obama and Blagojevich are not being transparent in the use of public funds?  And just how could neither Blago or Obama know what their staffers were doing in their names, or own up to the works being DONE in their names?

Look, for those on the Left, if you hated President Reagan's entourage doing 'plausible deniability', as I did on the good old premise of the 'Buck Stops Here', then trying to cover up the exact, same thing with Barack Obama makes YOU out to be no better than the people you criticized.  That is not 'hope & change' but acting in the exact, same, dirty manner and then trying to excuse it because your motives are so much more lofty than those you criticized.  You are saying that the ENDS justify the MEANS and the MEANS STINK.

The Chicago Business News would put out an article in 2005 which I cite in my article Obama and Iraq, looking at the Blago-Rezko connection:

Rezmar Corp., a real estate development company controlled by Tony Rezko, a controversial confidant of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, entered into a joint venture with a British firm in a $150-million deal to build a power plant in Iraq.

The contract, signed with Iraq’s ministry of electricity, calls for the soon-to-be named joint venture to supply power to Iraq for 10 years, according to a spokesman for Chicago-based Rezmar.

The Rezmar joint venture will be based in Jordan. Construction is slated to begin this fall.

[..]

The project will be managed by one of Gov. Blagojevich's previous top administration officials, Michael Rumman, former director of the Illinois Department of Central Management Services, the state's internal operations real estate agency. Mr. Rumman, the former president of Peoples Energy Services, has been hired as a consultant.

He announced his resignation in April after a draft audit of CMS found problems at the agency.

Mr. Rumman, who speaks Arabic, says the project is slated to be built in northern Iraq.

This cements the earlier citation of Mr. Batchelor and further puts down the markers that this was a known project that needed work between Obama and Blagojevich.  Further along in the article:

Messrs. Rezko and Auchi were introduced several years ago by a mutual acquaintance in London. They teamed up recently on a $150 million contract to build a power plant in Iraq.

Mr. Rezko, a close confidante and fundraiser for Gov. Rod Blagojevich, arranged for Mr. Auchi to meet the Governor and State Senate President Emil Jones on a visit to the U.S. last year.

A spokeswoman for General Mediterranean said Mr. Auchi was unavailable for comment. Joseph Ryan, a local attorney representing the company, would only discuss the Riverside Park project.

[..]

The odds that Mr. Rezko’s partnership would be able to pull off the project fell this year, when city officials determined that he set up a minority front to obtain a concession for two Panda Express restaurants at O’Hare International Airport. The Daley Administration would have had difficulty explaining $140 million in tax increment financing (TIF)—the most ever requested by a developer in Chicago—to someone who skirted city rules, especially with corruption allegations sweeping through City Hall.

Real estate experts also questioned whether Mr. Rezko and his partner, Daniel Mahru, had the experience to pull of such a massive project. The developers paid about $70 million for the site in 2002.

From here I trip backwards in time in my article to look at how Blagojevich and Obama got their starts in Illinois politics, and cite James L. Merriner of Chicagomag in a 2007 article, and do note that Daniel Mahru has some real problems with Rezko here, but his other views are worth noting:

Daniel Mahru was Rezko's partner in Rezmar for 16 years until the two men had, according to Mahru, "a difference of opinion" in 2005. He says they developed more than $600 million in properties, not counting a billion-dollar deal for 62 acres in the South Loop that has been stalled for years. By Mahru's account, Rezko initially showed little interest in the trappings of power. "Back in the eighties, Tony had an opportunity to go to the White House with Muhammad Ali," Mahru says. (The occasion was a dinner during the December 1987 summit of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader; Ali had been invited as a guest.) "I commented to Tony, ‘Wow, that is something I would love to do, see history in the making!' He said, ‘Dan, that doesn't make me any money. I'm not interested.'

"That changed. I think everything went to his head. After the late nineties he was more interested in being around powerful people. He went to a Christmas party at the Bush White House." Rezko cochaired a major fundraiser for President Bush's campaign in 2003.

Rezko declined to comment about Mahru, likening their breakup to a divorce. "You would hear my story; you would hear his story. I wish him no harm."

If hanging around the likes of Blagojevich and Obama went to Rezko's head, as Mahru suggests, one reason might be that Rezko had befriended them before they became famous, forming bonds of loyalty from the start. The BGA's Stewart says, "I would give the guy credit for being shrewd. He would identify young up-and-comers early. Fine, Obama, he's the editor of the Harvard Law Review, but in Chicago politics, big deal, so what. But [Rezko] approached Obama. Rod Blagojevich, he's an unimportant state legislator. What distinguishes Rezko—he didn't just give money to established figures."

Rezko read a newspaper article about Obama's Law Review election and had a colleague get in touch; in 1990 Rezko offered Obama a job at Rezmar before he had graduated from Harvard Law School. Obama declined, joining a Chicago law firm instead. There he did what he has described as a minimal amount of legal work for Rezmar. Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell, author of the recently published Obama: From Promise to Power, says, "Rezko threw an early fundraiser for Obama at his North Shore house, and that fundraiser was instrumental in providing Obama with seed money" for his U.S. Senate race in 2004.

In our conversation, Rezko was reluctant to discuss his association with Obama, except to stress that he has had no formal role in Obama's campaigns. He would not comment on Obama's real-estate deals.

Rezko met Blagojevich in 1995, when the future governor was a state representative from the Northwest Side. Rezko helped to finance Blagojevich's runs for office, in 1996 for Congress and in 2002 for governor. The Chicago Sun-Times has reported that Rezko and his family, businesses, and business associates have contributed more than $675,000 to 15 prominent Illinois politicians since 1989. That sum includes $117,652 for Blagojevich.

Rezko approaches Obama in 1990, and backs Blagojevich in 1995.  These are not short-term dealings, and Rezko would shift Resmar's work to the law offices that Obama worked in so that Obama would have some standing as a young lawyer fresh out of Harvard.

Little known about Rezko is that he served on the Muhammad Ali Foundation under Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, with the Foundation then being sued by Muhammad Ali for unauthorized use of his name in 1999 (Source: FrontPageMag article by Andrew Walden, 11 MAR 2008).  Now if a man is involved in using a famous boxer's good name for ill ends, is it any wonder how he would approach things going on in Iraq, as seen further along in John Batchelor's article:

A mysterious fugitive from Iraqi justice named Aiham Alsammarae, who is also a Chicago resident, is the focus of a politically fraught episode in the association between accused political fixer Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who goes on federal trial today in Chicago for graft, and Senator Barack Obama, the most spectacular Illinois presidential candidate in half a century.

"We want him back to serve his sentence of fourteen years," said an Iraqi government official in Baghdad last week. "He stole $650 million from the people of Iraq, and from the people of the United States, and he was tried and convicted in an Iraqi court in October 2006 for his crimes. We have a four-inch-thick file of his crimes. He plundered the Ministry of Electricity. Dates, bank accounts, dummy companies, a lot of them in the States. We want him, and we want the money back."

When asked why an American citizen with a dual Iraqi citizenship, who had served as the Iraqi Minister of Electricity from 2003 to 2005, after being convicted in an Iraqi court was living openly in Chicago in 2008 rather than in Abu Ghraib, the official said, "That's what we want to know. Armed men broke him out of jail in the Green Zone. He escaped without his U.S. passport to Amman, Jordan, where he hid in the U.S. Embassy, and then to Turkey, where he called us up and bragged he had pizza and a cold beer in his hotel room. We've asked the FBI to help us. They sent us to Interpol. We filed a report. And nothing. It's been a year. We want him back."

Yes, you are reading that correctly: the US under President Bush is harboring a fugitive from justice in Iraq that has been working with Barack Obama, Tony Rezko, Nadhmi Auchi and Rod Blagojevich.

To anyone who wanders by wondering why I'm hitting President Bush:  I am non-partisan, I support my nation not any damned political party.

And both parties stink to high heaven at this point.

Mr. Batchelor has a very strong stomach to look at this next part of the Alsammarae-Auchi-Rezko-Blagojevich-Obama connection group:

Two months later it was reported in Chicago that as early as 2004, while Mr. Alsammarae was a minister with authority to approve contracts, he had joined with Mr. Rezko and the London-based General Mediterranean Holdings, headed by the billionaire British investor Nadhmi Auchi, in a contract to construct a 250-megawatt plant in the Kurdistani city of Chamchamal.

A member of the development team at Mr. Rezko's Chicago-based company Rezmar said in 2005 that Mr. Rezko possessed a "formidable overseas network of business relationships" that permitted Rezmar to join together up to 30 companies in order to begin the plant's construction as early as January 2006.

In addition, in April 2005, one month before Mr. Alsammarae left his post, his Ministry of Electricity signed a contract for $50 million with Companion Security to provide training to Iraqis to guard electrical plants by flying them to Illinois for classes.

Companion Security was headed by a former Chicago policeman with a troubled history, Daniel T. Frawley, in partnership with Mr. Rezko and in association with Daniel Mahru, the lawyer for the original contract and Mr. Rezko's former business partner. In April 2006, Mr. Frawley entered negotiations with Governor Rod Blagojevich's staff to lease a military facility in Illinois to be a training camp. In August 2006, Mr. Frawley started negotiations with Mr. Obama's U.S. Senate staff to complete the contract.

The discussions with Mr. Obama's staff continued over many months, including e-mails and conferences with an Obama staffer, Seamus Ahern. Questions raised by this contact go to the issue of whether or not Mr. Obama ever favored Mr. Rezko's commercial ties. Mr. Obama has said often that he performed no favors for Mr. Rezko.

The timeline of Companion discussions in 2006 is important to note: April 2006 Frawley speaks to governor's office; August 2006 Frawley speaks to senator's office; October 2006 indictment of Rezko revealed; October 2006 Rezko arrested upon return from Syria; October 2006 Alsammarae convicted in Baghdad and makes his first escape attempt; December 2006 Alsammarae escapes form Baghdad.

[..]

Oddly, after Mr. Alsammarae left his ministry post in 2005, he was reported that summer to be forming a Sunni political organization with participation by insurgents, some of whom threatened in public declarations to murder him. An intelligence analyst with knowledge of Syria commented that this episode may illustrate Mr. Alsammarae's then-strong, active links to the Baathist elite in exile in Syria, who have been a major source of money and operations to the Iraqi insurgency these last years; and that Mr. Alsammarae's freelancing rankled the so-called foreign elements in the insurgency.

The strangest of all events was not Mr. Alsammarae's arrest for theft in August 2006, nor his conviction in a Baghdad court in October 2006, but rather the two jailbreaks in October and December 2006. In the first instance, private armed men he may have hired took him from his jail cell in the Green Zone soon after his conviction in court. A report indicates that he was stopped at the Bagdad Airport carrying a Chinese passport. American officials later returned Mr. Alsammarae to Iraqi custody. At least one American with the International Police Liaison Officer program lost his job because of this first jailbreak.

This is about the time that Mr. Alsammarae's family in the United States sought help; there is a report that Mr. Alsammarae's daughter appealed directly to the office of U.S. Senator Barack Obama.

So let me get this straight: Alsammarae is tapped for the CPA, leaves that, heads up contracts which he embezzles money from with the help of Auchi and Rezko, seeks help from Blagojevich and Obama for other work which includes security training for un-named Iraqis when he is forming a political opposition group supporting the Sunni Insurgency in Iraq?  Gotta love Chicago politics, no?  He continues on with this:

The second man with much to lose regarding what Mr. Alsammarae knows is the mysterious and genuinely powerful Nahdmi Auchi of London, a British citizen who, born in Iraq in 1937, has been for decades closely linked with the Baathists. In 2005, Mr. Auchi was reported to have involved his company in the Chamchamal electrical generating plant deal that was used as a major ploy for the plundering of the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity. As recently as this month, Mr. Auchi's representative denied that Mr. Auchi's company, General Mediterranean Holding, invested in the Rezko-Alsammarae deal for Chamchamal in 2004-2005, a denial that does not explain the well-sourced 2005 published reports of the linkage.

Iraqi government officials in Baghdad speak bluntly of Mr. Auchi as a "Saddam guy," and as a member of the Baathist gang who have beggared Iraq for 50 years, a gang that now, exiled to Damascus, Syria, and headed by men wanted for war crimes in Iraq, aims to continue plundering Iraq by using their stolen fortune to corrupt other regions and perhaps some day to return to Baghdad.

A stunning 2004 Pentagon report obtained by Bill Gertz of the Washington Times has identified Mr. Auchi not only as a man who, before the fall of Saddam, had managed to "arrange for significant theft from the U.N. Oil-for-Food Program. . . .", who not only had, before the fall of Saddam, sought to "bribe foreign governments and individuals before Operation Iraqi Freedom to turn opinion against the American-led mission to remove Saddam Hussein," but also since the fall of Saddam had engaged in a "conspiracy" over cell phone contracts under the CPA by "unlawful activities working closely with Iraqi intelligence operatives."

What is most striking about this Pentagon report is that it is from the year 2004, when Mr. Auchi traveled by private aircraft to Midway Airport in Chicago and then to a fete at the Four Season Hotel, where he met with his business partner in Chicago real estate, Mr. Rezko, as well as with Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Also present that night, according to a fresh report by James Bone and Dominic Kennedy of the London Times, was State Senator Barack Obama, who had recently won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat that next fall. Bone and Kennedy report that Mr. Auchi and Mr. Obama shook hands. Mr. Obama's aide does not now recall the handshake but does agree that Mr. Obama was present in the hotel that evening.

It may be significant that in a snapshot from the April hotel meeting that shows Governor Blagojevich making remarks to a dinner table beside a smiling Mr. Auchi, there is a third well-dressed man in the photograph, mustachioed, jovial, receding hairline, who greatly resembles other photographs from November 2004 of Iraqi CPA Minister of Electricity Aiham Alsammarae.

Mr. Alsammarae may or may not have been in the room that night. Pictures are useful indicators but his presence is not confirmed. However, he is certainly now accused and convicted of having been in a conspiracy in Iraq with two other men in that room: Tony Rezko, who is regarded by some intelligence analysts as a money-handler for unsavory agents in his native Damascus, and Nadhmi Auchi, who is regarded by Pentagon analysts as a money-handler for Baathist-linked agents in the Middle East.

Here we have Governor Blagojevich meeting with Auchi during that same trip he met with Sen. Barack Obama, Blagojevich is at the same table with Auchi and Alsammarae?  And both these guys fingered as pro-Baathist later in the insurgency phase in Iraq?  Why yes they could!

That slips us back to my Oil For Food article and John Fund's article on 03 MAR 2008, looking at Chicago Mores at the WSJ which starts out with Obama and Rezko's land deal but then comes to the Blagojevich part as the connections unfold:

Mr. Auchi was also a top official in the Iraqi oil ministry in the 1970s. He has for years vigorously denied charges he had dealings with Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War. However, an official report to the Pentagon inspector general in 2004 obtained by the Washington Times cited "significant and credible evidence" of involvement by Mr. Auchi's companies in the Oil for Food scandal and illicit smuggling of weapons to the Hussein regime.

In 2003, Mr. Auchi began investing in Chicago real estate with Mr. Rezko. In April 2007, after his indictment, Mr. Auchi loaned another $3.5 million to Mr. Rezko, a loan that Mr. Rezko hid from U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's office. When Mr. Fitzgerald learned that the money was being parceled out to Mr. Rezko's lawyers, family and friends, he got Mr. Rezko's bond revoked in January and had him put in jail as a potential flight risk.

In court papers, the prosecutor noted that Mr. Rezko had traveled 26 times to the Middle East between 2002 and 2006, mostly to his native Syria and other countries that lack extradition treaties with the U.S. Curiously, Mr. Auchi has also lent an unknown sum of money to Chris Kelly, who, like Mr. Rezko, was a significant fund-raiser for Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (himself under investigation by a federal grand jury as an alleged beneficiary of the Rezko shakedowns). Mr. Kelly is himself under indictment for obstructing an IRS probe into his activities.

That's right, one of the prime fundraisers for Gov. Blagojevich received an 'unknown sum' , and Chris Kelly, the man who received that money, is under IRS investigation.  He was indicted on 13 DEC 2007 for tax fraud charges, according to The Capitol Fax Blog and was later named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Rezko case (Source: Chicago Sun Times blog by Natasha Koreckion, 14 APR 2008).

Pretty bad, huh?

Like I said, I didn't have to search far to find this stuff as I had already put most of it up and linked to other articles having it.  It isn't like this stuff is new under the sun, with some of these articles going back pretty damned far.  I linked to a grand total of two new articles, that just following up on Chris Kelly's status a bit.

Dot connection?

Damned simple and easy to do.

Trying to get those who are being willfully blind and deaf to actually take in facts?

Apparently, impossible, as those living in with 'Real World Politics' have no connection to any ground on any planet in this reality.  A large segment of the American population is putting on blinders and earplugs... soon they will be asking for fetters and chains so they need make no decisions at all, ever again.  Being enslaved to blind politics is no better than any other form of enslavement, save that, at the end, the real form hits you pretty hard and you start asking just 'why didn't I bother to open my eyes and uncover my ears?'

By then it is far too late.