RFK assassination information

Great post on the Real History blog.

Report: Billions in defense spending unchecked

Pentagon auditors say billions of dollars in military spending is going unchecked because they are having trouble keeping pace with the ever-expanding defense budget and combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a recent report, the Defense Department inspector general estimates that nearly half of the military's $316 billion weapons budget went unchecked last year because the IG's office lacked the manpower. Whereas 10 years ago when a single auditor would have reviewed some $642 million in defense contracts, individual investigators are now charged with auditing more than $2 billion in spending.

The IG also has been stretching its staff to investigate corruption and fraud cases overseas, primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan where the military is hiring contractors to help run operations.

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Behind the rise in prices: The plan to torpedo the dollar - by Danny Schechter

Who do you think was one of the Bush Administration's key players on the economy?

If you say Paulson or Bernanke, you might be half right. But there's another no-name lurking around in the background who tends to be doing the wrong thing at every key moment in the covert history of the Bush (or should we day "Bush League") Republic.

His name is Jim Wilkinson. He helped organize the GOP "protest"/obstruction of the Miami election recount in 2000. He was the White House's key media spinner at the Doha Coalition Media Center in 2003. A reporter from Texas said he used techniques first perfected by Stalin. He was an architect of the Republican convention in New York in 2004. He was later dispatched to keep an eye on, and act as "dissembler-in-chief" for Condi Rice.

But at a crucial moment in the history of the Western world, Mr. "I work in the shadows" Wilkinson became chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the Goldman Sachs embed in the Cabinet.

Operative Wilkinson was then given the assignment of monitoring the world's financial markets in a secret operation modeled no doubt on the great intelligence plan that produced the Iraq War.

His qualifications for this historic role?

See above.

As Mike Whitney reported for Information Clearing House at the end of October in 2006 -- a day before Halloween -- the US was then engineering the drop in the dollar to "improve competitiveness" -- i.e. subsidize US exports in a flawed attempt to reduce the growing balance of trade gap. Was it a trick or treat? Read on.

The result was summed up in his headline: "The U.S. Dollar is kaput. Confidence in the currency is eroding by the day."

Whitney saw then what our media has still yet to report or understand.

"The financial crisis that we now face was created by design. It is intended to destroy the labor movement, crush the middle class, quash Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, reduce our foreign debt by 50 or 60%, force a restructuring of America's debt, privatize all public assets and resources, and create a new regime of austerity measures which will divert more wealth to the banking and corporate establishment."

This was months before the sub-prime meltdown in August 2007, or the more recent hike in food prices and oil prices. Their plan, blessed by business and the banks, was implemented step by step. The consequence was intended.

News, as we know, passes by so fast, and unless a story is repeated ad nauseam, no one remembers it or looks for the context and background of breaking developments.

Whitney referenced Richard Daughty's prescient article, "The Phase of Impact." According to Daughty, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Dept. have already manned the battle stations.

Here's an excerpt:

"Mr. Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury, is, by virtue of his ascension to the throne, now the head of the shadowy President's Working Group of Financial Markets (which was created by Presidential Order 12631) and he is insisting that they meet more often, namely every 6 weeks!


This whole Working Group thing was originally set up as a fallback, ad-hoc, if-then defense to deal with possible economic emergencies, but now they are routinely meeting every 6 weeks. He has even ordered Jim Wilkinson, his chief of staff, to 'oversee the creation of a Treasury Command Center to track markets world-wide and serve as an operations base in a crisis"! (Wall Street Journal) World-wide!!

The American government is moving to take control of the world-wide economy as the result of an anticipated crisis? Yikes!" 


Now let's fast-forward to the present, well after this widely foreseen crisis erupted. As oil prices climb, the public is angry. And who do they mostly blame -- the oil companies and the oil-producing states, of course. They have no clue that this crisis was the consequence of decisions made by the Bush Administration to devalue the dollar with its "crisis manager" Jim Wilkinson playing a central role.

Political writer Jerry Policoff questioned the "politicized polls" on who is responsible for the oil hikes. He noted that most people and pollsters don't realize that the fall of the dollar precipitated all of this.

I asked him if he thought this squeeze had been orchestrated.

His response:

"I don't think there is any doubt about that, and the Saudis said as much when Bush asked them to rev up production to bring down the price. Their reaction was pretty much that the U.S. should stop undermining the value of its own dollar before asking other countries to take a financial hit on oil."

And sure enough, once again, as AP reported last Friday, President Bush "failed to win the help he sought from Saudi Arabia to relieve skyrocketing American gas prices."

The President's own bombast was also faulted for driving oil prices higher, as Bill Scher noted, "Bush's saber-rattling with Iran raises concerns of war and more disruption of oil supplies, which prompts speculators to raise prices."

A day later, Paulson was asked what he was going to do to strengthen the dollar. He waffled -- claiming a "strong dollar" is important but then changing the subject to "market fundamentals" in a speech to pump up CONfidence. (The first three letters of that word gave the real mission away.) He avoided a straight answer with a flurry of "uh, uh, uh,", halting phrases and contradictory assertions. The speech was characterized as "optimistically pessimistic."

Ach, so maybe there's more to this than meets the eye and the wallet. In Europe the press is already blaming the banks for their role in the continuing economic collapse. On May 13th, the President of Germany, Horst Kohler, a former head of the International Monetary Fund lashed out at bankers, calling them, get this, MONSTERS.

It takes one to know one.

In a page one story in the Financial Times, Kohler said global financial markets have become a "monster" that must be "put back in place" for their "massive destruction of assets." He called for tougher and more efficient regulation.

This is the strongest criticism of bankers by a European leader since 2005 when German Vice-Chancellor Franz Muntefering attacked hedge funds as "swarms of locusts" whose profit maximization strategies "posed a danger to democracy."

No one was listening then. Is anyone listening now?

Crises just don't happen out of the blue unless there is a natural disaster, and even those are made worse by a deranged military junta like the one in Burma, inadequate preparations, and flawed building standards thanks to corruption.

When I was in China visiting the Three Gorges Dam, for example, I was told about a major revolt in the National People's Assembly against the dam because it was in a known earthquake zone. The leadership rejected the concerns and imposed its will. So far, the big Dam is safe, but 400 others aren't. 32,000 people are not alive either.

There is a financial quake still underway today with its own shocks and aftershocks. Will anyone in our media look at the precipitating role played by the bankers and the Bolsheviks including our old friend/fiend Jim Wilkinson?

You can almost predict that wherever he shows up, there's gonna be a disaster.

And you can also predict that the mainstream press will be looking the other way, more than happy to attack any critics suspected of telling the truth or living in what the all knowing New York Times columnist David Brooks so cleverly sneers at as "Noam Chomskyland."

Ha! Ha!

Tell that to the cashier the next time you pay too much for a loaf of bread.

~ From : Smirking Chimp ~

'The Grail is like Everest: you climb it because it's there.'

Like Jones, Rahn was an archaeologist, like him he fell foul of the Nazis and like him he was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail - the cup reputedly used to catch Christ's blood when he was crucified. But whereas Jones rode the Grail-train to box-office glory, Rahn's obsession ended up costing him his life.

However, Rahn is such a strange figure, and his story so bizarre, that simply seeing him as the unlikely progenitor of Indiana Jones is to do him a disservice. Here was a man who entered into a terrible Faustian pact: he was given every resource imaginable to realise his dream. There was just one catch: in return, he had to find something that - if it ever existed - had not been seen for almost 2,000 years.

[ ... ]

Rahn decided that he was going to go one better: he would use the 13th-century epic Parsifal as his guide to finding the Holy Grail. Why did he think Parsifal would lead him to his goal? This is a tricky one - and, as with anything to do with the Holy Grail, one should never underestimate the power of wishful thinking.

But Rahn was also a serious scholar and the more he pored over Parsifal, the more he became convinced that the Cathars, the medieval Christian sect, held the secret to the Grail's whereabouts. In 1244, shortly before the Cathars were massacred by a Catholic crusade, three Cathar knights had apparently slipped over the wall of Montsegur Castle in the Languedoc area of France. With them, hidden in a hessian bag, was a cup reputed to be the Holy Grail.

Rahn arrived at Montsegur in the summer of 1931. He didn't find the Grail, but he did find a complex of caves nearby that the Cathars had used as a kind of subterranean cathedral. If he'd been of a less optimistic bent, he might have shrugged his narrow shoulders and gone home. Rahn, however, wasn't the going-home type. Certain he was on the right track, he wrote a book called Crusade Against the Grail in which he described his quest.

It was at this point that Rahn met his Mephistopheles. One day in 1933 he received a mysterious telegram offering him 1,000 reichsmarks a month to write the sequel to Crusade Against the Grail. The telegram was unsigned, but he was instructed to go to an address in Berlin - 7 Prinz Albrechtstrasse.

When he arrived, he was understandably surprised to be greeted by the grinning figure of Heinrich Himmler, the head of Hitler's SS. Not only had Himmler read Crusade Against the Grail; he'd virtually committed the thing to memory. For the first time in his life Rahn met someone even more obsessed with finding the Grail than he was. Indeed, so confident was Himmler of finding the Grail that he'd already prepared a castle - Wewelsburg in Westphalia - for its arrival. In the basement, surrounded by busts of prominent Nazis, was an empty plinth where the Grail would go.

 

~ From: The original Indiana Jones: Otto Rahn and the temple of doom ~

 

Olmert: 'Greater Israel' a delusion

Only fantasists can believe that in this day and age, and in the current situation, it is still possible to cling to the vision of 'Greater Israel,' Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday.
 
Olmert participated in the committee's session to brief them on the resumption of negotiations with Syria and to address criticism of his apparent willingness to cede the Golan Heights as part of a final peace agreement. "Today we face the choice between Greater Israel and a Jewish nation – the two are mutually exclusive. They only exist together in the minds of deluded fantasists who misconstrue reality," he said.
 
The Israeli prime minister explained the decision to keep the talks under wraps despite the fact that the matter had been hotly debated by the committee on past occasions was the sensitive nature of the negotiations.
 
"Anyone in my chair understands that these moves need to be made with the utmost caution, and secrecy is a necessary part of that. Not even the entire cabinet could be privy to the information. I initiated this move in February 2007, with a record of four predecessors who went to Damascus and committed to painful concessions, and let no one put me to the test on proving those commitments – they are all accounted for."
 
As for international responses to the talks, particularly that of the United States, Olmert stressed that "there is not a single party in the world that told Israel not to negotiate for peace. Regardless of this, I certainly shared our thoughts and the developments with our closest friends – as is natural.
 
"What tipped the scales what the burning question of what might happen if, heaven forbid, we would be drawn, due to a miscalculation, into a violent confrontation with Syria. Then I would be asked - how can it be that they were seeking peace and you did not even examine the possibility?"
 
Greater Israel or Jewish state – not both Olmert also touched on the Palestinian issue, saying that negotiations with the Palestinian Authority were serious and going forward in good faith, but that time was a vital factor in the peace efforts.
 
"I was one of those who thought the two-state solution was wrong, but that was a mistake," he said. "Most today understand that the choice is between two states for two peoples or one state in which all have an equal right to vote," Olmert said.
 
Livnat: Olmert the delusional one
MK Limor Livnat (Likud) slammed Olmert's statements and called them "delusional for someone at the end of his political rope."

 

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