Tomgram: Ira Chemus, Obama 's Risky Middle East Fantasy!

Had you searched for Israel, nuclear weapons at Google News in the wake of President Obama's recent trip to the Middle East, you would have gotten a series of headlines like this. Obama: Iran, more than a year away from developing nuclear weapon (CNN), Obama vows to thwart Tehran's nuclear drive, the Times of Israel, Obama: No nuclear weapons for Iran, US, Israel increasingly concerned about construction of Iran's plutonium producing reactor, Obama says there is still time to find diplomatic solution to Iran nuke dispute: Netanyahu hints at impatience, Iran's leader threatens to level cities if Israel attacks, criticizes US nuclear talks. By now, we're so used to such a world of headlines, about Iran's threatening nuclear weapons, and its urge to wipe out Israel, that we simply don't see how strange it is. at the moment, despite one aircraft carrier task force sidelined in Norfolk, Virginia, theoretically because of sequester budget cuts, the US continues to maintain a massive military presence around Iran. That modest sized regional power, run by theocrats, has been hobbled by ever tightening sanctions, its skies filled with US spy drones, its offshore waters with US warship. Its nuclear scientists have been assassinated, assumedly by agents connected to Israel, and its nuclear program attacked by Washington and Tel Aviv, in the first cyber-war in history. As early as 2007, the US Congress was already ponying up hundreds of millions of dollars for a covert program of destabilization that evidently involved cross border activities, assumedly using US special operations forces, and that's only what's known about the pressure being exerted on Iran. With this, and the near apocalyptic language of nuclear fear that surrounds it, has gone a powerful, if not always acknowledged, urge for what earlier in the new century was called regime change. Who can forget the neocon quip of the pre Iraq invasion moment: Everyone want to go to Baghdad, real men want to go to Tehran? And all that of this is due, so we are told, to what remains a fantasy nuclear weapon, one that endangers no one, because it doesn't exist, and most observers don't think that Tehran is n the process of preparing to build one either. In other words, the scariest thing in our world, or at least in the Middle Eastern part of it, if you believe Washington, Tel Aviv, and much reporting on the subject, is a nuclear will o the wisp. In the meantime, curiously enough, months can pass without significant focus on or discussion of Pakistan's expanding nuclear arsenal.         

Richard Hooke: Did George HW Bush Coordinate a JFK Hit Team?

This is not the first time, and surely will not be the last, that George H W Bush, former Director of the CIA, and the 41st President of the United States, has been implicated in the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, our 35th president. In an earlier study, for example, Was George HW Bush involved in the assassination of JFK? John Hankey and I both address this question, where he provides a great deal of evidence, supporting a role for GHWB in the Dealy Plaza turkey shoot. In this new study, Richard Hooke substantiates that claim, and advances additional proof of his own. I believe that they are right! That GHWB knew Malcolm Mac Wallace from Yale, is especially stunning. Mac Wallace was LBJ's personal hit man, and murdered as many as a dozen persons for Lyndon, including one of his own sisters, who was talking too much about his business, to allow her to continue to speak. There is substantial proof, that LBJ was involved in the assassination, where his life had been dedicated to becoming the president of all the people. As Phil Nelson, LBJ: Mastermind of JFK's Assassination, was relentless in his pursuit. Madeleine Duncan Brown, Texas in the Morning, 1997, Barr McClellan, Blood, Money & Power, (2003) and Billy Sol Estes, A Texas Legend (2004) have also identified LBJ as the pivotal player, which has been confirmed by E Howard Hunt, Last Confessions (2007), who identified LBJ, Cord Meyer, David Atlee Phillips, William Harvey, and David Sanchez Morales as in "the chain of command". Even Jack Ruby, who was in the position to know, asserted that, if someone else had been Vice President, the assassination would never have occurred. McClellan concluded that Texas oil men, such as Clint Murchison and HL Hunt, had provided financing for the assassination, in order to preserve the oil depletion allowance at 27.5%, which remained unchanged under LBJ. I had over 100 conversations with Madeleine Duncan Brown, who began an affair with Lyndon in 1948, and bore him a son, Steven, in 1950, who was not his only child out of wedlock, but was his only male offspring, who told me about their renderzvous at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, Tx, on New Year's Eve, only six weeks after the assassination, when she confronted him with rumors that he had been involved, since no one stood to gain more personally, where upon Lyndon blew up, and told her, that the CIA and the oil boys had decided that JFK had to be taken out. That Mac Wallace was involved is not in serious doubt!   

MIchael Winship: 40 Years After Watergate, It's Almost

Impossible to hold the Government accountable. At moments, The Lessons of Watergate conference, held a couple of weeks ago in Washington, DC by a citizen's lobby Common Cause, was a little like that two man roadshow, retired baseball players Bill Buckner and Mookie Wilson have been touring. In it, they retell the story of the catastrophic moment, during the bottom of the last inning of game six of the 1986 World Series, when the Mets' Wilson hit an easy ground ball toward Buckner of the Red Sox, who haplessly let it roll between his legs. That notorious error ultimately cost Boston the championship. As The New Yorker magazine's Reeves Wiedeman wrote of the players' joint public appearance, "It is as if Custer and Sitting Bull agreed to deconstruct Little Bighorn." Or those World War II reunions, where aging Army Air Corps men meet the Luftwaffe pilots who tried to shoot them down over Bremen. So, too, in Washington, four decades after the Watergate break in scandal that led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon. Up on stage, was Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, one of the first victims of Nixon's infamous plumbers, the burglars who went skulking into the night, to attempt illegal break ins, including one at the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. I want to add something to the history here, that I've never told, Ellberg said, then asked. Is Alex Butterfield still alive? A voice shouted from a corner of the room, I'm over here. And sure enough, it was Alexander Butterfield, former deputy to Nixon chief of staff HR Bob Haldeman, and a pivotal, if accidental notable in the Watergate saga. In July 1973, Butterfield let slip to the Senate Watergate committee, that Nixon made secret audio tapes of all his meetings at the White House, a revelation that cracked the scandal wide open. We never did hear the story Ellsberg wanted to tell, he decided he needed to clear it with Butterfield before he went public. The Common Cause event was filled with such slightly surreal Moments, kind of like a Comic Con for history buffs and policy wonks. Just moments before Ellsberg spoke, I had been chatting with former Brooklyn Congresswoman Liz Holtzman, when Butterfield walked over, introduced himself, and told Holtzman, I was in love with you, even when I was at the White House. Holtzman was a prominent member of the House Judiciary Committee, that in July 1974 passed three articles of impeachment against Nixon. He resigned less than two weeks later.  

Ellen Brown: It Can Happen Here, The Bank Confiscation Scheme

for US and UK Depositors. Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks,, it seems, was not a one off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone troika officials, scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Bank of England, dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making. That they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland, and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds. New Zealand has a similar directive, discussed in my last article here, indicating that this isn't just an emergency measure for troubled Eurozone countries. New Zealand's Voxy reported on March 19th. The National Government is pushing a Cyprus style solution to bank failure in New Zealand, which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts. Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is Finance Minister Bill English's favored option dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors will have their savings reduced overnight, to fund the banks bail out. Can They Do That? Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositors funds, as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the banks, and we become unsecured creditors, holding IOU's or promises to pay. Until now the bank has been obligated to pay the money back on demand, in the form of cash. Under the FDIC-BOE plan, our IOU's will be converted into bank equity. The bank will get the money, and we will get stock in the bank. With any luck, we may be able to sell the stock to someone else, but when and at what price? Most people keep a deposit account, so they can have ready cash to pay the bills. The 15 page FDIC-BOE document is called Resolving Globally Active. Systematically Important. Financial Institutions. It begins by explaining that the 2008 banking crisis has made it clear, that some other way, besides taxpayer bailouts is needed to maintain financial stability. Evidently anticipating that the next financial collapse will be on a grander scale, than either the taxpayers or Congress is willing to underwrite, the authors state: An efficient path for returning the sound operations of the G-SIFI to the private sector, would be provided, by exchanging or converting a sufficient amount of the unsecured debt, from the original creditors of the failed company, meaning the depositors, into stock.   

Tara Lohan: The Coming Crash, Our Addiction to Endless

Growth on a finite planet. If you want to understand how much energy costs, don't look at your electric bill. Instead, get a copy of the new book, Energy, Over-development and the Delusion of Endless Growth. This massive coffee-table book, contains hundreds of arresting images, showing the effects of our energy choices, including oil spills, nuclear accidents, massive solar arrays, tar sands mines, fracking operations, transmission lines, and more. The photos are complemented by essays from leading writers, like Wes Jackson, Wendell Brown, and many others, which put into context our growing energy problems, and what we can do about them. The book is a collaboration of great minds, including editors Tom Butler and George Wuerthner, and contributing author Richard Heinberg. It's also a partnership between the Post Carbon Institute, and the Foundation for Deep Ecology, co-published by PCI and Watershed Media. While the book delves greatly into different energy sources, and their limitations, the heart of the book is really not so much about what kinds of energy we use, but how much. To get a clearer understanding of this, Alter-Net spoke with contributing writer Richard Heinberg, a senior fellow at PCI, and the author of numerous books, including The End of Growth: adapting to our New Economic Reality (June 2011), Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last Energy Crisis (2009) and Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (2007). Tara Lohan: How did this book project come about? I know it started out as a book about tar sands, but then it evolved into so much more. Richard Heinberg: The economy is all about energy. Almost all of our environmental issues relate to energy. Almost all of our environmental issues relate to energy in one way or another. Certainly, climate change does. War and peace, it's all about energy. Upping the energy literacy of the American people, and thought leaders is a pretty high priority. Explain a little bit more what you mean by energy literacy, because I know you talk about that in the book as well. RH: Well, surprisingly few people have really looked at or thought about, or studied what energy is. It's in all our lives. We all depend on it for everything we do, but energy is pretty elusive. You can't hold a jar of pure energy in your hands. Useful energy comes to us in various forms.

Shamus Cooke: How Obama Chose War Over Peace in Syria!

With Syria on the brink of national genocide, outside nations have only two options: Help reverse the catastrophe or plunge this torn nation deeper into the abyss. Countries can either work towards a peaceful political solution, or they can continue to pour money, guns, and fighters into the country to ensure a steady gushing into the bloodbath. President Obama will have no talk of peace. He has chosen war, since the very start, and he's sticking to it. A recent New York Times article revealed that President Obama has been lying through his teeth, about the level of US involvement in the Syrian conflict since the beginning. The President recently said, that the US government continues to give only "non-lethal" military aid to the rebels, but the New York Times revealed that the CIA has been actively funneling and distributing massive shipments of weapons to the rebels,over the borders of Jordan and Turkey. This "arms pipeline" of illegal gun trafficking, has been overseen by the US government since January 2012. It has literally been the lifeblood of the Syrian rebels, and thus the cause of the immense bloodshed in Syria. The New York Times reports: "The CIA role in facilitating the weapons shipments gave the United States a degree of influence over the process of weapons distribution. American officials have confirmed, that senior White House officials were regularly briefed on the weapons shipments." The article also explains, that a conservative estimate of the weapons shipment to date is 3,500 tons. So while Obama has repeatedly lied about non lethal military aid, he has been personally involved in overseeing a multi-country flood of weapons into Syria, many of which are given to terrorist organizations. The only effective fighting force for the Syrian rebels has been the terrorist grouping the Al Nusra Front, and now we know exactly where they got their guns. If not for this US sponsored flood of guns, the Syrian rebels, many of them from Saudi Arabia, and other countries, would have been militarily defeated long ago. Tens of thousands of lives would thus have been spared, and a million refugees could have remained in their homes in Syria. The large scale ethnic religious cleansing, initiated by the rebels, would have been preventable. But Obama is so intent on war, that he will not even discuss peace with the Syrian government. He has repeatedly stated, that there are preconditions for peace negotiations, the most important one being the downfall of the Syrian government, ie, regime change. If a toppling of a nation's government is Obama's precondition for peace, then Obama is by definition choosing war!  

Robert Rosebrock: General Shiinseki Ordered yo Surrender

General Eric K. Shinseki, Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, has continuously failed our Military Veterans, including failing to file and execute disability claims in a timely manner, and to provide quality healthcare and housing for disabled homeless Veterans, particularly in Los Angeles, where there's already a National Veterans Home, established 125 years ago, but the buildings are vacant and rat infested, while the land is misappropriated for non Veteran use. It's well documented that nationwide, the VA has a shameful back log of over 900,000 disability claims with Veterans waiting up to 650 days to get necessary health care and disability benefits. During a recent Senate Hearing, members of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, demanded the VA turn over its internal performance data, to give Congressional lawmakers direct insight as to why the agency is so dysfunctional. Consistent with the VA's modus operandi, Allison Hickey, the VA's undersecretary for benefits, was evasive, vague, dismissive, non cooperative, and refused to turn over requested data. Think about it: If the VA openly and defiantly stonewalls the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, and denies them pertinent information, what must it be like for lonely disabled Veterans in the isolated office, of intimidating and confrontational VA bureaucrats? Under General Shinseki's antagonistic command, the VA's willful neglect and bureucratic malice, has compounded the stress of intimidating and confrontational VA bureaucrats? Under General Shinseki's antagonistic command, the VA's willful neglect and bureaucratic malice, has compounded the stress, and depression of disabled Veterans, which can only lead to homelessness. Homelessness can lead to hopelessness and desperation, which can only lead to suicide, as 22 Veterans voluntarily take their lives every day, on average, across the nation. We have found the enemy, and it is the VA. This ruthless war against or nation's disabled Veterans must cease! Thus, it's no longer the days of yore, when we pleaded: "Mr. Secretary, this is to respectfully request that you do the right thing, and resign." Now it's an order! General: Surrender your command, posthaste! That's right General, it's over! You lost the despicable war you and your bureaucrats have been waging against our nation's disabled and homeless Veterans.