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host · 02-01-2008, 05:22 AM

After reading some of the posts in the other thread in Politics about the city of Berkeley, CA attempts to stop military recruiting, I read this and it "hit home" with me:

Quote:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...ght/index.html
Glenn Greenwald
Thursday January 31, 2008 07:33 EST
Enemies everywhere

Writing about last night's GOP debate, John Hinderaker of Powerline, Time's 2004 Blog of the Year, <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/01/019682.php">shared this observation</a>:

<i>Businessmen, in my experience, are generally more idealistic than politicians. Businessmen really do make deals with a

handshake. No one would dream of doing that with Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi or the Clintons. . . .

I don't view this as an argument in Romney's favor. <h3>As President, he wouldn't be dealing with honorable, law-abiding

businesspeople. He would be going up against the Vladimir Putins, Osama bin Ladens and Harry Reids</h3> of the world."</i>

That passage was then <a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDEzYzkxNDMzMWNlOTBiYWZhY2FiZjUzOWYyMjdlNGU=">promptly

quoted</a> by National Review's Mark Steyn, who said that Hinderaker "might be on to something."...

.....Why don't Democrats become more bipartisan? Why are liberal bloggers and The Angry Left so hateful? Why does Bush Derangement

Syndrome cause people to say such mean things, make such extreme accusations, about the Commander-in-Chief? After all, the right-

wing of the Republican Party is so reasonable and sober and so eager to work cooperatively with Democrats for what's best for the

country that it's just inexcusable for liberals to view politics as warfare and refuse to shed their hostility in order to get

things done.

And besides, the nation's poor War Cheerleaders of the Right are always so besieged by vicious Enemies lurking on every corner --

people who are ruthless, without scruples, and who are even willing to break the law. Like Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, and

Harry Reid.

They're treated very unfairly everywhere -- by the press, by colleges, by political elites, by other countries, by the U.N., by

minorities. <h3>There is no more besieged and victimized group anywhere on the planet than white, Christian, American conservative

males (except, perhaps, right-wing Jews, the only worthy competitor for the glorious mantle of Most Persecuted).</h3> Among other

things, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={0D04F5F9-E7DC-4D8E-A7D8-209D50FF9BCD}">they must battle</a.

"the unholy alliance of leftists, Islamists and multiculturalist racial pressure groups."

Every institution treats them unfairly; every sector poses a threat to their Goodness; they are surrounded by soul-less Enemies

who wish to do them harm. <a href="http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/8627.html">Nobody</a> deserves the slightest sympathy -- <a href="http://instapundit.com/archives2/014735.php">nobody's plight merits the slightest concern</a> -- except for theirs. They are

<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/opinion/31Cohen.html?hp">the best people on Earth -- actually, the best people ever in
all of human history. And everyone is against them.</a> Everyone is waging war on them. Enemies everywhere work together to

threaten and harm them. It's all deeply unfair. And they must wage vicious war -- against all the Enemies, Everywhere -- if they

have any hope of being protected.

<h3>I'm thinking we're locked in a long running battle with the heirs of our great-grandfathers' political enemies, and this is an

example of the "liberal democrat", "Angry left", lack of "bipartisanship. Scott Horton thought that he knew Mukasey, and originally thought he should be confirmed by the senate to "restore" the "law" at the DOJ:</h3>

Quote:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/09/hbc-90001230
Confirm Michael Mukasey
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED September 17, 2007

The president has nominated former federal judge Michael Mukasey to serve as the next attorney general. The Senate will have

plenty of questions to ask and issues to raise, and it should take this confirmation seriously. But it should move expeditiously

to approval, recognizing that this is the first essential step towards taking the Justice Department off of life-support and

making it a functioning agency once more.

I have known Michael Mukasey for over twenty years and I have a pretty good sense of his views on a great many issues. Frankly,

there are not many issues on which we agree. I am a civil libertarian and human rights advocate, while Mukasey is driven by a

concern for national security–his many years on the bench tell him that our criminal justice system is inadequate to the task of

trying terrorists. I recently parsed his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal looking for some important points I could agree with,

and struggled to find them. Many of the civil liberties that Mukasey sees as vulnerabilities I see as strengths.

Nevertheless, I consider Mukasey a highly qualified candidate and am prepared to support him with enthusiasm. Why? First, the

president is entitled to nominate a candidate who represents his views on legal policy. I don’t think there’s room for a ray of

light to pass between the Bush Administration and Mukasey, frankly. Mukasey has been close to Rudy Giuliani for many years, but

those who know him also recognize that Mukasey is more of a traditional social conservative than Giuliani, which is to say he is

actually closer to Bush than to Giuliani on a series of legal policy issues. Critics who argue that the next attorney general

should turn from the Administration’s viewpoint are not being realistic. That is not the way our system works, and to hold to such

a posture would only result in an administrative gridlock that would serve no one’s interests.

....Third, Mukasey is a lawyer’s lawyer. He actually cares a great deal about the law and what it provides; he approaches a

question very carefully and with appropriate respect and deference for statutes and precedent. <h3>He knows how to separate and he

does separate his own political views from what the law says</h3>. We haven’t had an attorney general like that in quite a long

time and we’re past due. In fact, having an attorney general who places emphasis on the traditional virtues of a great profession

will be a very good thing for the Bush Administration and for the Justice Department.

Fourth, the Department of Justice faces a crisis of morale and confidence the likes of which it has rarely seen in American

history. The only recent parallel was in the months following Watergate, when Gerald Ford chose Edward Levi as attorney general

(and that nomination is certainly the closest in modern times to the selection of Mukasey). Mukasey is a man who first made his

career as a prosecutor working for the Department of Justice and who was clearly moved, long into his later career, by love for

the Department. That makes him a perfect person to address the internal problems of the department. We face a number of pressing

policy issues relating to law and the administration of justice, but they are all somehow dwarfed by the institutional troubles of

the Department of Justice. This great ship has been tragically steered into a shoals and it is now in real danger. I think Mukasey

is just the pilot to steer it clear again.

Civil libertarians will find no shortage of things to dislike about Michael Mukasey. But they should stop and recognize that he

reflects the fundamentally conservative values which are essential to making our government work, and which have been often

missing in a government that calls itself conservative, but really is not. Mukasey is a true conservative in much the same sense

that Edmund Burke was a conservative. And perhaps that’s the strongest argument that can be mustered for his confirmation.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/11/hbc-90001567
TITLE
The Torture Litmus Test
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED November 2, 2007

Several days before his first meeting with the Senate Judiciary Committee, Michael Mukasey’s Justice Department handlers arranged

a private meeting for him with a number of “movement conservatives.” Two different administration sources have described the

meeting to me. During the meeting, Mukasey’s counterparts, largely figures associated with the Federalist Society, pushed him on

two points in particular.

First, they wanted him to undertake that he would not appoint a special prosecutor to look into the U.S. attorneys scandal and

related charges concerning political prosecutions. At this point it is clear that if an independent investigation were to be

launched, it would quickly run head-on into some of the same figures who sat in the room with Mukasey. The email traffic which has

surfaced already—and it is only a tiny fraction of the total—shows how Rove and Miers repeatedly relied upon the Federalist

Society and its members to help them out in addressing recalcitrant U.S. Attorneys who would not debase their office by converting

it into a political tool. Let’s be cynical and say that the first request they put to Mukasey was designed simply to protect

themselves and keep their behind-the-scenes involvement with the Justice Department’s highest profile scandal so far out of the

spotlight.

And second, they pushed aggressively on the torture question. They wanted Mukasey to pledge that he would toe the Administration’s

line on “the Program,” that he would continue to protect those who authored the program with the cloak of an Attorney General

opinion keeping them safe from prosecution.....

....The New York Times says the issue is one of legal culpability of those who have administered the program. In a speech I

delivered in Ohio last October, <a href="http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/10/when-lawyers-are-war-criminals.html">“When Lawyers Are

War Criminals,”</a> I went over this analysis in some detail and concluded it was incorrect. The CIA personnel, military personnel

and contractors all have immunity. But there is a class of persons who are probably not immunized in any effective way by the

current statutes, namely the administration officials who authored this scheme: Dick Cheney, David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld, Jim

Haynes and a handful of others. They are the figures “on the line” who are most adamant that Mukasey (or any substitute for

Mukasey) provide them with the protection they feel they need.

Hence, the debate around Michael Mukasey has really ceased to be about Michael Mukasey and his qualifications to serve as attorney

general. It has become a debate about the torture issue. And protecting the authors of a criminal scheme from their certain

ultimate fate: prosecution.

I have very strong conflicting views about the vote which is coming in the Judiciary Committee. I believe that Mukasey, as an

individual, is exceptionally well qualified to serve as attorney general. I would approve the Mukasey who says he “personally”

finds waterboarding abhorrent. <h3>But I am troubled by the “official” Mukasey who is being trotted out as something different.

And I believe that the nation cannot, at this stage, accept the appointment of an attorney general who refuses to come clean on

the torture issue.</h3> In the end this is essential to national identity, and to the promise of the Justice Department to serve

as a law enforcement agency. Too much of what the Justice Department has done of late has little resemblance to law enforcement.

Rather it looks to be just the opposite.

If the Bush Administration wants to turn torture into a litmus test, so must Congress. The question therefore ultimately becomes

one of principle and not personality. <h3>The Judiciary Committee should not accept any nominee who fails to provide meaningful

assurance on this issue. And, though it saddens me to say this, Michael Mukasey has not.</h3>

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hbc-90002285
TITLE
‘Reasonable Minds Can Differ’
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED <h3>January 31, 2008

....Watching Mukasey was a painful experience. . . .The Senate Judiciary Committee put Michael Mukasey to the test yesterday. And

he left the hearing room as an embarrassment to those who have known and worked with him over the last twenty years, and who

mistakenly touted his independence and commitment to do the right thing, come what may.......</h3>

The sad thing, <h3>the most alarming thing....</h3> is that "the reds" in our own midst, and "the brown people", the "other", the

"islamo-fascist terrorists", and even bin Laden himself, are no match for our perennial, tireless, "enemy of the people", but we

seem to forget who "the enemy" is, as one generation fades into another, and a compliant corporate media fades the "news":

Quote:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...romoid=googlep
Monday, Sep. 10, 1973
Go-Getters
By Lance Morrows

THE PLOT TO SEIZE THE WHITE HOUSE

by JULES ARCHER

256 pages. Hawthorn. $7.95.

Now, in the midst of Watergate, 40 years after the incident occurred, it has a certain sinister plausibility not widely evident in

1933. At the time, the newspapers reported some allegations that a big business cabal had hatched a "plot"—the headlines generally

put it in quotes. Its aim was to undo F.D.R.'s power and install a "Secretary of General Affairs" to take effective control of the

Executive as a dictator.

Obviously the plot failed. Jules Archer, journalist-historian, supplies some fascinating details that make the episode

considerably more than a paranoid fantasy. In 1933 emissaries purporting to represent an organization called the American Liberty

League approached a retired Marine general named Smedley Darlington Butler. The League was devoted to laissez-faire capitalism and

backed by such people as the Du Ponts and J.P. Morgan. The general was offered an extravagant budget — $3,000,000 for starters,

with a possible $300 million if necessary — to mobilize an army of 500,000 veterans and lead them to Washington, there to force

Roosevelt into accepting "the popular will." The cabal even had a man touring Europe to study the Fascists' success with certain

veterans' groups.

Butler seemed a likely candidate — twice a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, an authentic soldiers' hero. But he

reported the plot in detail to the House Un-American Activities Committee, then chaired by Massachusetts' John McCormack, later

Speaker of the House. At the hearings, the gobe tweens denied everything, and the com mittee was simply afraid to call titans of

finance as witnesses.

Another problem was that the whole thing seemed too preposterous a plan to be taken seriously. And it was never decided whether

the important figures of finance knew what was being proposed on their behalf. The American Liberty League was finally disbanded

in 1936. But Author Archer believes the plot was in earnest — and so did John McCormack, who once told Archer: "They were going to

make it all sound constitutional, of course, with a high-sounding name for the dictator and a plan to make it all sound like a

good American program."

∙Lance Morrows

http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_art...terling_clark/
The dark history of Sterling Clark

By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist | May 2, 2007

It is true that I have an unhealthy obsession with Sterling Clark, the meta-rich , right-wing maniac who built the lovely Sterling

and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. A lifetime ago I lived across the street from the institute, actually an art

museum flush with gorgeous Impressionist paintings. And no, I did not pal around with my famous South Street neighbors, author Joe

McGinniss and "Empress" Farah Pahlavi , the widow of the deposed Shah of Iran, both of whom have since decamped.

Only recently has the dark history of Clark, whom the Institute describes in official biographies as a moneyed thoroughbred

aficionado married to a Paris showgirl, resurfaced. In 2004, Joel Bakan's book "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of

Profit and Power" resuscitated the story of an attempted coup d'etat against Franklin Roosevelt by right-wing financiers in 1934,

and Clark's role in funding the effort.

It is a tangled tale. Clark, busily squandering his Singer sewing machine fortune in Paris with the above mentioned showgirl, also

fell in love with European Fascist politics. He and some cronies approached two-time Medal of Honor winner, Marine General Smedley

Darlington Butler , to lead a putsch against Roosevelt. Butler wasn't interested, and ratted out Clark & Co. After the plot came

to light, Clark threatened to sue Time magazine for reporting on his role, and promised to return to the United States to defend

his reputation. True to form, he did neither.

To date, mainstream historians have dismissed the coup talk as overblown. "The gap between contemplation and execution was

considerable," the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in "The Age of Roosevelt." "It can hardly be assumed that the republic was in

much danger." Roosevelt biographer Conrad Black thought Clark's coup effort was absurd, and described the Singer heir as "sort of

batty . . . he was never taken seriously by anybody."

Well, OK. But here's a new book, "The Clarks of Cooperstown," by historian Nicholas Fox Weber , which seems extraordinarily well

researched and takes the coup attempt very seriously indeed. (Coincidentally, Jules Archer's 1973 book, "The Plot to Seize the

White House," has just been republished.) Weber leans on Archer's account, and on the archives of the House Un-American Activities

Committee, chaired by former Boston trial lawyer John McCormack . Weber calls Sterling "a volatile reactionary," who habitually

called Roosevelt "Rosenfart." The historian definitely believes Clark was angling for regime change on Pennsylvania Avenue.

As did McCormack, the future speaker of the House, who later called the plot "a threat to our very way of government by a bunch of

rich men who wanted fascism." "It was one aspect of European culture that Robert Sterling Clark did not succeed in bringing to

America," Weber writes.....

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...929494,00.html
Monday, Dec. 12, 1932
Married. Jouett Shouse, new president of <h3>the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment</h3>

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...787825,00.html
Monday, May. 07, 1934

Unsuccessful last fortnight were a group of Senate silverites who <h3>tried to enlist the support of President Roosevelt for legislation to up the metal's price from 45¢ to $1.29 per oz. by huge treasury purchases.</h3> Before their White House visit, however, hard money Senators had already made what they hoped would be a strategic move to head off Inflation by the silver route. Adopted by the Senate was a resolution calling upon Secretary Morgenthau to supply a list of all big silver owners. Unlike gold, silver is not an illegal private possession but if it could be shown that the loudest silverites, in or out of Congress, were also heavy owners of the commodity for private profit, the cause of bimetallism would receive a bad moral tarring before the country.

Last week Secretary Morgenthau submitted his lists. <h3>As expected the biggest silver holders turned out to be banks and precious few bankers are silverites. Chase National of Manhattan nominally owned the largest amount (18,000,000 oz.). Since futures for silver are normally higher than spot prices, the banks had bought and stored spot silver while selling equal quantities for future delivery. Such transactions gave them a profit of 2½% on their investment, about five times as much as they could get</h3> on other short term investments.

Not a silver Congressman was found on the list. Democrat Joseph Tumulty and <h3>the wife of Democrat Jouett Shouse made small headlines as silver owners</h3> but neither the onetime secretary to Woodrow Wilson nor the wife of the onetime party manager could be called insiders with the silver bloc. Notable catches were Errett Lobban Cord, member of the Committee for the Nation, owning 1,651,000 oz.; Frank A. Vanderlip Jr., son of another member, owning 300,000 oz.; Amy Collins, treasurer of the Radio League of the Little Flower, mouthpiece for ardent Silverite Father Coughlin, 500,000 oz.; A. Atwater Kent, radio tycoon, 675,000 oz.; Everett Sanders, chairman of the Republican National Committee, 75,000 oz.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...747824,00.html
Monday, Sep. 03, 1934

Prior to March 4, 1933, when a statesman solemnly announced that he favored upholding the Constitution, U. S. citizens quietly turned to their sports pages and forgot him. If he asserted that the Government ought to protect property rights, ought to encourage men to earn, save, acquire and keep property, he could not stir even a flutter of interest. <h3>But last week when six eminent gentlemen propounded these propositions they made front-page news. Finally it seemed as if the New Deal were to meet something more potent than the disorganized opposition of Herbert Hoover's well-beaten henchmen.

A strange political nosegay were the six gentlemen:

John William Davis, Democratic nominee for President in 1924, Morgan attorney, a high-minded and thoroughly conservative Democrat.

Jouett Shouse, active head of the Democratic National Committee during the Raskob regime, who, upon his ousting at Chicago, consolidated the Wets for the final drive upon the 18th Amendment.</h3>

Alfred Emanuel Smith, most famed Democratic liberal until the New Deal shoved back the liberal frontier and moved out on the Santa Fe trail of experiment.

James Wolcott Wadsworth, well-born Republican conservative who opposed Al Smith in the New York Legislature, served twelve years as a U. S. Senator, started his political career all over again in the House last year and is today probably the most notable member of his party in that chamber.

Nathan Lewis Miller, onetime (1921-23) Republican Governor of New York, who now serves U. S. Steel Corp. as its chief counsel.

Irenee du Pont, of the Delaware du Fonts, Republican in days gone by, but a supporter of Smith in 1928, of Roosevelt in 1932; a generous donor to what he considers worthy causes.....

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...787940,00.html
Monday, Jan. 21, 1935

"The League is in no sense a political party," insisted the American Liberty League's President Jouett Shouse last week. "It has no intention of placing its own candidates in the field for any public office." Just to be on the safe side, however, President Shouse filed with the clerk of the U. S. House the League's annual financial report required of all political organizations under the Federal Corrupt Practices Act. Some League investors:

Irénée du Pont $5,000 Lammot du Pont 5,000 Edward F. Hutton (General Foods) 5,000 Sewell Lee Avery (Montgomery Ward) 5,000 George Monroe Moffett (Corn Products) 5,000 Rufus Lenoir Patterson 2nd (American Machine & Foundry) 5,000 Samuel Bayard Colgate (Colgate-Palmolive-Peet) 5,000 Robert Sterling Clark (broker) . . 4,900 Archibald M. L. du Pont 2,500 Hal Roach (cinema comedies) . . 2,500 William Lockhart Clayton (cotton broker) 1,000 Renée W. Baruch (daughter) . . . 100 Mrs. Clarence Mackay 100

Nothing but their names gave the League's well-to-do founders John W. Davis, James W. Wadsworth and Alfred E. Smith. Founder-President Shouse received a salary of $12,000 for Sept. 15-Dec, 29, plus $6,000 traveling expenses.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...5432-2,00.html
Helpful Harold
Monday, Dec. 16, 1935

...."Liberty League—A term of unconscious humor applied to itself by a group of multimillionaires and their worshipful hangers-on who indignantly insist that the Federal Constitution is an instrument written by Alexander Hamilton for the exclusive protection of large aggregations of property, howsoever acquired.

http://www.thisnation.com/library/sotu/1936fdr.html
State of the Union Address
Franklin D. Roosevelt

3 January 1936

Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate and of the House of Representatives:

..Now, after thirty-four months of work, we contemplate a fairly rounded whole. We have returned the control of the Federal Government to the City of Washington.

To be sure, in so doing, we have invited battle. We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed. The very nature of the problem that we faced made it necessary to drive some people from power and strictly to regulate others. I made that plain when I took the oath of office in March, 1933. I spoke of the practices of the unscrupulous money-changers who stood indicted in the court of public opinion. I spoke of the rulers of the exchanges of mankind's goods, who failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence. I said that they had admitted their failure and had abdicated.

Abdicated? Yes, in 1933, but now with the passing of danger they forget their damaging admissions and withdraw their abdication.

They seek the restoration of their selfish power. They offer to lead us back round the same old corner into the same old dreary street.

Yes, there are still determined groups that are intent upon that very thing. Rigorously held up to popular examination, their true character presents itself. They steal the livery of great national constitutional ideals to serve discredited special interests. As guardians and trustees for great groups of individual stockholders they wrongfully seek to carry the property and the interests entrusted to them into the arena of partisan politics. They seek--this minority in business and industry--to control and often do control and use for their own purposes legitimate and highly honored business associations; <h3>they engage in vast propaganda to spread fear and discord among the people--they would "gang up" against the people's liberties.</h3>

The principle that they would instill into government if they succeed in seizing power is well shown by the principles which many of them have instilled into their own affairs: autocracy toward labor, toward stockholders, toward consumers, toward public sentiment. Autocrats in smaller things, they seek autocracy in bigger things. "By their fruits ye shall know them."

If these gentlemen believe, as they say they believe, that the measures adopted by this Congress and its predecessor, and carried out by this Administration, have hindered rather than promoted recovery, let them be consistent. Let them propose to this Congress the complete repeal of these measures. The way is open to such a proposal.

Let action be positive and not negative. The way is open in the Congress of the United States for an expression of opinion by yeas and nays. Shall we say that values are restored and that the Congress will, therefore, repeal the laws under which we have been bringing them back? Shall we say that because national income has grown with rising prosperity, we shall repeal existing taxes and thereby put off the day of approaching a balanced budget and of starting to reduce the national debt? Shall we abandon the reasonable support and regulation of banking? Shall we restore the dollar to its former gold content?...

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,755611,00.html
Monday, Jan. 13, 1936
League's Lenders

All it takes to start a political organization are two members and one slogan. But to keep a political organization alive requires real money. Very much alive, therefore, was the American Liberty League according to its year-end financial report filed with the Clerk of the House of Representatives last week. The League had taken in $483,175.46 in 1935, still had more than $93,000 in the bank.

Biggest single outlay: $36,750 salary and $18,000 expenses for cold-eyed President Jouett Shouse. Biggest single item of income: a $79,750 "loan" from Irenee du Pont. League lenders in the $10,000 class included Lammot, Pierre, S. Hallock and William du Pont, John J. Raskob, Alfred P. Sloan Jr., Ernest T. Weir, Joseph E. Widener, all good haters of the New Deal. In the $5,000 class were Phillips Petroleum Co. and Edward F. ("Let's Gang Up") Hutton.

http://books.google.com/books?q=scri...G=Search+Books
The Scripps-Howard press and its United Press wire service, an exception to the
... a story headlined: "Liberty League Controlled by Owners of $37,000,000,000.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...761800,00.html
Monday, Jul. 31, 1939

Hearing that Democratic Chairman James Aloysius Farley, GOP Chairman John D. M. Hamilton, Liberty Leaguer Jouett Shouse, Stiff-necked Democratic Senator Joseph O'Mahoney, Republican Congressman Ham Fish and John and Anna Roosevelt were all sailing for Europe on the same ship, Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked : "That will be a great boatload," observed that if someone didn't get thrown overboard before the ship reached Southampton he would miss a guess. It would not, he predicted, be Jim Farley....

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000651
TITLE 1934: The Plot Against America
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED July 28, 2007

....A story in the New York Times and several other newspapers reported on it, and a special Congressional committee was created to conduct an investigation. The records of this committee were scrubbed and sealed away in the National Archives, where they have only recently been made available.

The Congressional committee kept the names of many of the participants under wraps and no criminal action was ever brought against them. But a few names have leaked out. And one is Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the incumbent president. Prescott Bush was of course deep into the business of the Hamburg-America Lines, and had tight relations throughout this period with the new Government that had come to power in Germany a year earlier under Chancellor Aldoph Hitler. It appears that Bush was to have formed a key liaison for the group with the new German government.

Prescott Bush, of course, went on to service as a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, and his son, George H.W. Bush emerged from World War II as a hero.

The Plot Against America portrayed in this episode of the BBC series “Document” gives fascinating insight into a dark and little known piece of American history in which the nation stood on the brink of betrayal. The role of the most powerful political dynastic family in the nation’s history in this whole affair is shocking.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/02/2933/
Published on Thursday, August 2, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
The Threat of U.S. Fascism: An Historical Precedent
by Alan Nasser

Perhaps the most alarming slice of twentieth-century U.S. history is virtually unknown to the general public, including most scholars of American history. One hopes that a recent BBC documentary titled The Plot Against America and an article of the same name by Columbia Law School professor and longtime human rights activist Scott Horton, on the website of Harper’s magazine, will sound an alert.

In 1934 a special Congressional committee was appointed to conduct an investigation of a possible planned coup intended to topple the administration of president Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace it with a government modelled on the policies of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The shocking results of the investigation were promptly scotched and stashed in the National Archives. While the coup attempt was reported at the time in a few newspapers, including The New York Times, the story disappeared from public memory shortly after the Congressional findings were made available to president Roosevelt. It was the recent release from the Archives of the Congressional report that prompted the BBC and Horton commentaries.....

....Today’s Democrats’ abdication of the role of opposition party is far more consequential than Roosevelt’s decision to permit our embryonic fascists to continue to gestate. The difference between FDR and his Republican antagonists was far greater than the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats today. Today’s Democrats have internalized and identified with the interests of those whom they should be actively mobilizing the population against. The Republocrats are now all of them heir to the fascist instincts inherent in the ruling elite. Republican elites manifest this in their policies as the party in power; Democratic elites evidence their unsavory class heritage by railing ritualistically against the Republicans even as they betray their fed-up constituencies by supporting the fundamental policies of their alleged “opponents”.

Effective opposition at the current historical juncture requires the only force capable of defeating the neoliberal and imperialist obsessions of the mainstream parties and their financial masters: street politics, the mobilization and eventual organization of the people against a ruling establishment seen by an increasing number of Americans as terminally corrupt and indifferent to their most pressing needs.

Lest this popular disaffection be siphoned into an impotent and resigned cynicism, it would seem that intense educational efforts regarding the desirability and possibility of a third party, a genuine party of labor, become a priority for serious progressives. MoveOn must yield to MoveBeyond. As harder economic times threaten the not distant future, the economic stagnation and austerity that is fertile soil for the growth of fascist politics poses an unmistakbly clear and present danger. Thinking and acting outside the political box has never been as pressing an impertive as it is now.

<i>Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia Wa.</i>

Quote:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...=&pagewanted=2
May 24, 1994
Villalba Journal; How Don Calo (and Patton) Won the War in Sicily
By JOHN TAGLIABUE,

Biagio Plumeri sits at the desk of the man a lot of people around here regard as a key to the Allies' speedy occupation of Sicily in World War II.

Mr. Plumeri, a 55-year-old tomato farmer who has been part-time mayor on and off since 1967, is not much troubled that President Clinton will not stop at Villalba in June when he visits Italy to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Rome by Allied forces.

Mr. Clinton, who will attend the D-Day commemorations in France, plans to visit Anzio and Nettuno, the beaches between Rome and Naples where Allied forces went ashore on the Italian mainland in January 1944. But the Allies actually stepped into Europe six months earlier, on July 9-10, 1943, when American soldiers of Gen. George Patton's Seventh Army and British troops of Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery's Eighth Army made amphibious landings at Licata and Gela and along the beaches of Sicily's southern coast. A month later, the island was in Allied control.

"We don't really mark the day," Mayor Plumeri admitted.

Villalba's moment of glory came in 1943 because of one of Mr. Plumeri's predecessors, a prosperous local farmer named Calogero Vizzini, known locally as Don Calo. Mussolini's Fascists hated him; the American invaders named him Mayor, and most people around here say he was considerably more than just a footnote in the history of the invasion.

"They came up Route 121 from Caltanissetta, armored vehicles, jeeps," Mr. Plumeri recounted, mixing childhood memories with what older folks had told him about that sunny day. "One tank was hit near the turnoff when the Germans took them under fire, and a soldier died.

"One guy took a white sheet and fixed it to a pole, and we all walked out, even us little kids, like a parade. They only stayed 24 hours, and then pushed on to Palermo. But they named Don Calo mayor."

Don Calo, he said, had established his fortune in the town in 1922, before the Fascists came to power, when he led disgruntled peasants who grabbed land from the aristocratic absentee landlords. Every peasant got a plot, he said, but Don Calo, with characteristic forethought, kept more than 12,000 acres, for himself.

Among those who remember, sitting like lizards in the sun on benches around the town's main piazza, dressed in the customary black cardigans and soft peaked caps, oral history is at best an inexact science. But Don Calo is recalled as a kind of St. Francis in baggy high-rise trousers and suspenders.

"Don Calo was a magnanimous person, a good man, not vindictive, despite the many outrages committed," said Giuseppe Selvaggio, 72, who deserted his Italian Army unit in Rome at the twilight of the war and walked 40 days home to Sicily.

Sitting in the Catholic Men's Social Club, he described Don Calo as an indulgent man. "When the Fascist mayor and political secretary were supposed to be arrested," Mr. Selvaggio said, "Don Calo told the Americans: 'Let them go. They're good people. They aren't molesting anyone.' "

"The Vizzini family was anti-Fascist," he recalled. "They struggled against Mussolini, especially Calo Vizzini. He was under house arrest on his own property."

For decades after the war Vill alba's politics were rock-solid Christian Democratic, though in the last elections the majority voted for Silvio Berlusconi, the tycoon-turned-politician who is Prime Minister of a right-wing coalition. But no one ever much liked the Fascists around Villalba.

When Don Calo died in 1947, a death notice read: "He received from friends and foes alike, that most beautiful of all tributes: He was a gentleman."

Indeed, dozens of anti-Fascists like Don Calo were named mayors when the Americans arrived in Sicily, including Don Calo's friend Giuseppe Genco Russo, who was appointed mayor over in Mussomeli, a nearby farming village.

But in 1974, an Italian parliamentary commission investigating the resurgence of organized crime concluded that at the time of his appointment during the American Seventh Army's one-day visit to Villalba, Don Calo had probably been the boss of all bosses of the Mafia. Mr. Genco Russo, who later succeeded him, was at the time his No. 2.

When the black market sprouted in postwar economic confusion, the commission said, Don Calo's men ran it. When the Communists held a rally in Villalba in September 1944 that ended in a shootout, it said Don Calo probably sent in the gunmen.

In his book, "Crime in America," Senator Estes Kefauver wrote how in the course of investigating organized crime in the United States, he found indications that American intelligence agencies used Mafiosi to contact anti-Fascist figures in Sicily before the invasion. That could explain why Sicily fell rather quickly.

Senator Kefauver said that Moses Polakoff, the lawyer for Meyer Lansky, had told him about being a go-between for Naval Intelligence with Lucky Luciano, who was born the next big town up from Villalba.

After the war, stories sprouted and became legend. One had it that when the American tanks arrived in Villalba, Luciano himself jumped from one of them to embrace Don Calo.

Most historians caution against such reports. But Nicola Cattedra, a former editor of l'Ora, a Palermo paper, and author of the book "The Black Line," has revived the debate.

"I don't want to criminalize the United States," Mr. Cattedra said. "But they met formidable resistance, and then after only a very few days, they arrived in Palermo. The Americans wanted to win the war, and they found a group within the country that counted."

http://ciadrugs.homestead.com/files/blumprep.html
Congressional Investigator Jack Blum's
Prepared Statement
The following text is an electronic reproduction of the statement prepared by Jack Blum for his testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on October 23, 1996

Statement of Jack A. Blum, Esq.
Former Special Counsel
Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Drug Trafficking and the Contra War

October 23, 1996

My name is Jack A. Blum. I am a partner in the Washington D.C. law firm of Lobel, Novins & Lamont. From January of 1987 to May 1989 I served as the Special Counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In that capacity I staffed the investigation by the Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism, and International Operations into whether the effort to achieve foreign policy objectives had interfered with law enforcement efforts to control the flow of narcotics into the United States.

From time to time we have trained groups to run a covert operation. When the operation is over we have had a "disposal" problem. The difficulty has been finding safe and useful work for people trained in the arts of killing, smuggling, and bomb making. Our disposal efforts have been only marginally successful and covert operations alumni have peopled the ranks of criminal organizations for decades.

<i>Comments: Yes, and these alumni seem to creep back into future covert operations.</i>

The first marriage of obvious marriage of convenience was the Lansky-Luciano cooperation with the Office of Naval Intelligence during World War II. Meyer Lansky brokered a deal for Lucky Luciano that allowed Luciano to be freed on parole and deported to Italy in exchange for intelligence information and protection against axis spies on the docks of New York. Luciano delivered and he was freed to resume his criminal career in Sicily. Part of that career included the post war reintroduction of heroin to the United States.

<i>Comments: I'm sure the Congressmen knew the rest of the Meyer Lansky story: Lansky settled in Cuba, where his mob activities (prostitution, gambling and narcotics) played a central role in supporting the Batista regime. Finally the Cuban people revolted, and Fidel Castro came to power. Escaping Castro's rise to power, the Lansky mob moved on to run rackets in Miami.</i>

That was followed by covert assistance to the organized criminal gangs in the port of Marseilles. The gangs opposed the Communist unions and helped ensure that France stayed in the non-communist world. The gangs also went on to become the "French connection" in the heroin trade. We worked with the Japanese Yakuza to contain the communists in Japan after World War II. The Yakuza became a major source of methamphetamine in Hawaii.

Khun Sa, the well known leader of the heroin business in the golden triangle succeeded in the heroin business because of American and French support for remnants of the defeated Kuomintang Chinese army that fled across the border to Burma when Mao took over and the rest of the nationalists went to Taiwan. We are still living with the resulting heroin problem even though our ally has just retired from the trade.

To quote Al McCoy:

In retrospect, the entire Burma operation of the 1950s appears as one of the most dismal episodes in the history of the CIA. At the most basic level, the KMT's rag-tag invasion was easily repulsed by Yunnan provincial militia after an advance of only sixty miles, thus failing in its main mission of drawing regular Chinese forces away from the Korean front. Although this disaster contributed to the abolition of the responsible CIA affiliate, the Office of Policy Coordination, the agency's internal review failed to grasp the full implications of the Burma operation. Drawing upon an interview with CIA veteran Tom Braden, one historian explained that the CIA would not admit that the KMT campaign had become "a drug producing operation" and later "hatched elaborate plans for the army, knowing full well they were engaged in nonsense but not prepared to jeopardize careers ... by admitting to so monumental a mistake." By failing to repudiate the KMT and its involvement in the opium trade, the CIA had, in effect, created precedent that would allow later covert operations to become similarly compromised. [1]

The story of the connection between our covert allies in the Vietnam war especially the hill tribes in Laos -- and the drug trade, has been documented in Al McCoy's book "The politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia." It has also been mocked in the movie "Air America". Returning Vietnam veterans brought a heroin epidemic home with them.

More recently our efforts in Afghanistan have helped turn the region into one of the world's largest producers and exporters of heroin. The war focused the Afghan farmers on their best crop - opium poppy. The poppy requires little attention. Opium paste is light weight is very valuable and can be moved to market over high mountains on the backs of donkeys. It is the perfect crop for people fighting a guerrilla war. That covert" operation has also produced a bumper crop of terrorists trained by us. They turned against us and everything Western the minute the Russians left Afghanistan. These folks brought us the World Trade Center, bombings in Paris, Cairo, Bombay, Saudi Arabia, and on two Air India flights. There have been assassinations of Americans here and in Karachi. If there was a "disposal" effort in Afghanistan it was pretty dismal. .....

John Hindraker of powerlineblog, in the opening article was quoted as saying that a future republican president will have a much easier time, dealling with "honest" businessmen, before lumped senate democratic majority leader, Harry Reid, into a separate group of the "hard to trust"...along with Putin and bin Laden. Newly appointed Attorney General Mukasey came out in senate questioning as saying , when it comes to torture, the president is above the law.

What has changed in the last 80 years? The chairman of he biggest US bank in 1932 was investigated and prosecuted by <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=2357006&postcount=29">Ferdinand Pecora</a> for the crimes of bringning down investors, rigging markets, and misrepresenting valuations of securities, just as we see happning now, and seven years ago, in the Enron collapse. Now, as in those times, the criminal business people finanace the campaigns of and sit next to the elected officials who are supposed to be representing us.

Today, the powerful wealthy conservative cabal is represented by Council for National Policy, and 70 years ago, it was something called American Liberty League. The message and goals are always the same, fear used to leverage political control, war with "blowback" as we see with the military and CIA partnering with mafia eingpin Lucky Luciano and a Sicilian Don, for convenience sake. The result was the resurgence of the mafia in Italy and in the US and Cuba, and the heroin trafficking in Cuba that put drugs on US streets and hastened Castro's ousting of Batista, in Cuba.

Through all 80 fucking destructive and costly years of it, we should learn that these manipulative, selfish, aggressive assholes are not out to "lead" us, they think we are expendable "marks". Notice the move to persuade the US treasury in the '30's to push up silver prices by more than double. Who would benefit?

Notice that money party democrats were then and now, on the same page, working an agenda that benefited only their wealthy patrons and themselves, as their equally corrupt, greedy and cynical republican "partners".

We won't stop them by waging a "war on terror" in Iraq and Afghanistan, or by passing a 4th amendment busting, telecom amnesty included permanent FISA neutered bill. The guns need to be shifted from the "brown people" that they are pointed at now, and instead trained on these fucking great grandsons of the criminal parasites who were sucking the wealth out of the country, back in the '30's.

<h3>How do some of you still buy their shit?</h3> It is as plain as day that we could bring home the troops, restore the tax rates to where they were on Jan. 20, 2001, and the military budget to where it was thens, and launch some investigations with real teeth, after the DOJ is purged of politcal operatives and attempt to govern ourselves and end this cycle.

It's getting so old, and it's killing our future.