Friday, March 20, 2015

Let There Be Light Hillary: Will the Clintons Be the Light Bearers on the American Shadow Government’s War Based Economy?



Oh what a week it has been in the New America.  The New America is ruled by the illegitimate government that was installed December 12, 2000 that brought us the 911 attacks, the endless wars and the deregulation of banks that led to the criminal collapse of the world economy by Wall Street Bankers and the “new normal” of a war based economy.


The demands are loud, shrill and feigning outrage.  Hillary must hand over every thought, every personal moment in her life to Republicans in order to be in compliance with the nonexistent rules and laws that apply only to a Clinton as Secretary of State.  So, I say “give them what they want, Hillary.”  Let there be light!


MSNBC who colluded with Democrats in the U.S. Senate to conduct a smear campaign against the Clintons in order to throw the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary, is leading the pack of wolves to gin up hatred and suspicion against Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server to destroy her possible bid for the Presidency.  After all, it won’t be as easy to corrupt the outcome of the 2016 primary as it was in 2008.



There’s probably really good reason that Hillary’s server was used for her private and government business e-mails.  Just like there’s probably good reason why Colin Powell used his personal e-mail server as Secretary of State in an administration that came to power after the American government was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the United States Supreme Court and Democratic and Republican Senators.


Both Secretaries of State had to battle to tamp down the war mongering lunatics in the Vice President’s Office and the dubious personal handlers of the Presidents they would serve.  Both George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama are merely spokes models, not really in control of anything.   It’s interesting that the same war hawks, with only a tenuous hold on mental stability, who served Cheney’s White House now serve Biden’s White House.



So when I saw a real scandal related to the Clinton e-mails, the scandal that Barack Obama’s “Rasputin” Valarie Jarrett was the source of the leaks, I had to laugh.  Jarrett’s taxpayer paid office was used to leak selective, salacious stories about the former Secretary of State’s e-mail account in order to try to destroy a Clinton Presidential campaign using taxpayer funded government assets.  From the NewYork Post:


Excerpt:


President Obama’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett leaked to the press details of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email address during her time as secretary of state, sources tell me.


But she did so through people outside the ­administration, so the story couldn’t be traced to her or the White House.


In addition, at Jarrett’s behest, the State Department was ordered to launch a series of investigations into Hillary’s conduct at Foggy Bottom, including the use of her expense account, the disbursement of funds, her contact with foreign leaders and her possible collusion with the Clinton Foundation.


Six separate probes into Hillary’s performance have been ­going on at the State Department. I’m told that the email scandal was timed to come out just as Hillary was on the verge of formally announcing that she was running for president — and that there’s more to come….


Seems to me the person who should be the subject of an investigation is Valarie Jarrett and her personal wealth gained in her tenure in the White House as well as her slumlord past with the Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama steering government funds into her coffers.


So on the heels of the White House scandal of a staffer ordering in 6 separate investigations of a former Secretary of State, by the State Department at taxpayer expense to satisfy a long held grudge on the part of Jarrett, the White House has decided to claim they are not bound by FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests.  From USA Today:


Excerpt:


WASHINGTON — The White House is removing a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act, making official a policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to reject requests for records to that office.


The White House said the cleanup of FOIA regulations is consistent with court rulings that hold that the office is not subject to the transparency law. The office handles, among other things, White House record-keeping duties like the archiving of e-mails….


"It is completely out of step with the president's supposed commitment to transparency," she said. "That is a critical office, especially if you want to know, for example, how the White House is dealing with e-mail."


Maybe we should be looking at all of Valarie Jarrett’s e-mails particularly when she tried to bring the Olympics to Chicago using the muscle of the White House.  Just think of the killing she would make when all her slums would be torn down to make room for the Olympics.


"This is an office that operated under the FOIA for 30 years, and when it became politically inconvenient, they decided they weren't subject to the Freedom of Information Act any more," said Tom Fitton of the conservative Judicial Watch.


That happened late in the Bush administration, when CREW sued over e-mails deleted by the White House — as many as 22 million of them, by one accounting. The White House at first began to comply with that request, but then reversed course.


In 2009, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled that the Office of Administration was not subject to the FOIA, "because it performs only operational and administrative tasks in support of the president and his staff and therefore, under our precedent, lacks substantial independent authority."



Yep, Bush packed the appeals courts with Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University lawyers and voila “every” decision is in favor of the Administration’s secrecy.  After all, it’s a war based economy.


The appeals court ruled that the White House was required to archive the e-mails, but not release them under the FOIA. Instead, White House e-mails must be released under the Presidential Records Act — but not until at least five years after the end of the administration…


In the notice to be published Tuesday, the White House said it was not allowing a 30-day public comment period, and so the rule will be final.


And don’t forget, according to the Presidential Records Act, Reagan’s Presidential papers were scheduled to be released during the Gore Presidency.  That was another reason that the staffers and cabinet members from the Reagan and Bush Administrations had to overthrow the American government. 


You know, all that Iran Contra stuff, the death squads in Columbia and Honduras, overthrowing governments, assassinations, all the stuff that’s “legal” in a war based economy.  From History Commons:


Excerpt:


The standard of the 1978 Presidential Records Act is to make presidential records and documents available after twelve years, if not voluntarily made available sooner, and with some obvious exceptions such as classified materials concerning national security. 


The first president to whom the new law applies is Ronald Reagan, and his vice-president, George H.W. Bush.


My, my, my.  I guess it’s pretty convenient that the son of the Vice President whose papers are scheduled to be released, who lost the election by over a half million votes was installed as President just in time.




Bush’s order will declare that not only can a former president assert executive privilege over his papers against the will of the incumbent president (a measure Reagan instituted just before he left office) but that a sitting president could also block the papers of a predecessor, even if that predecessor had approved their release.


The implications of this change are breathtaking. “It’s pretty fishy,” says Anna Nelson, an American University My,history professor. “The precautions on ‘national security’ are extreme.


So when Valarie Jarrett is able to instruct the State Department of the United States to conduct a taxpayer funded witch hunt of a former Secretary of State, a former First Lady and former presidential candidate, Jarrett is protected because:


“In 2009, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled that the Office of Administration was not subject to the FOIA, "because it performs only operational and administrative tasks in support of the president and his staff and therefore, under our precedent, lacks substantial independent authority."


That’s mighty handy.  But back to the Secretary of State and why the secretary would want to keep their e-mails on a private server.  Case in point, Colin Powell.


A lot of people only voted for George W. Bush because they trusted Colin Powell and Bush vowed he would make Colin Powell Secretary of State.  And Powell is nothing if not the “good soldier.”  So I remember reading this article in The Guardian back in 2003.


Excerpt:


Fresh evidence emerged last night that Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, was so disturbed about questionable American intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that he assembled a secret team to review the information he was given before he made a crucial speech to the UN security council on February 5.


Colin Powell was so disturbed about the questionable intelligence coming from Cheney’s office that he set up a secret team to review the “bullshit” he was supposed to spread at the United Nations for the Bush Administration….



Much of the initial information for Mr Powell's speech to the UN was provided by the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, set up a special unit, the Office of Special Plans, to counter the uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq.


Mr Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, US News and World Report says today. At one point, he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine….


However, a common theme of the meetings was the failure of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to produce a convincing case against Saddam. Despite the increasingly belligerent statements from the administration's hawks, the CIA had disturbingly little proof.


Oh, and if you want to take a look at the e-mails from that period of time, you can’t. Unlike Hillary Clinton who turned over 55,000 e-mails, Colin Powell destroyed his e-mail treasure trove.  A big win for the Bush Administration.  According to Joe Conason:


Excerpt:


It is almost eerie how closely Hillary Clinton's current email scandal parallels the beginnings of the Whitewater fiasco that ensnared her and her husband almost 20 years ago. Both began with tendentious, inaccurate stories published by The New York Times; both relied upon highly exaggerated suspicions of wrongdoing; both were seized upon by Republican partisans whose own records were altogether worse; and both resulted in shrill explosions of outrage among reporters who couldn't be bothered to learn actual facts….


Hypocritical as they may seem, none of those examples compare with the truly monumental email scandal of the Bush years, when millions of emails went missing from White House servers — and many more were never archived on those servers, as required since 1978 by the Presidential Records Act, because dozens of Bush White House staff were using private email accounts provided by the Republican National Committee…



Various investigations and lawsuits eventually uncovered the astonishing breadth of the Bush White House email fiasco, such as the "recycling" of back-up tapes for all of its archived emails between Inauguration Day 2001 and sometime in 2003.


This meant, for instance, messages pertaining to the 9/11 terrorist attack went missing of course — along with whatever Rove and his aides might have communicated on that topic, or weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or countless other topics of public concern.


And former Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose office was also involved in both the Plame and WMD scandals, admitted recently that he used private emails in office — but that he turned over and retained none of them — zero. By contrast, Clinton has turned over tens of thousands of her emails to the department.


I would be nice to have access to those e-mails leading up to the Iraq War.  A lot of people who were in the administration screaming for a war based economy are now very rich after peddling lies about mushroom clouds and WMD’s.  From the Baltimore Nonviolence Center:




Excerpt:


How the Iraq War Financed a Beltway Real Estate Boom


Back in the DC real estate doldrums of the mid-1990s, before he helped pave the way for war in Iraq, Stephen Rademaker owned a modest condo in Arlington, Va.


Then, a few years later, as a House staffer on the International Relations Committee, Rademaker wrote the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which called for regime change, a phrase that altered the course of history.


Bill Clinton signed the Act, which became the basis for the congressional authorization for the use of force against Saddam Hussein four years later; by then Rademaker was working at the State Department.


Things soon took a turn for the better, at least for Rademaker; he left government and went to work as a lobbyist, eventually joining countless numbers of retired government officials who cleaned up, directly or indirectly, by leading the country into war.


It would be nice to have his e-mails from his time in the State Department.


I wrote the other day about two of these former senior government officials, who have made a killing in the post-9/11 era: former CIA director George Tenet and former FBI director Louis Freeh. But when it comes to those who profited directly from the last thirteen years of war, Exhibit A perhaps is Rademaker, a man for whom the Iraq war became a giant piggybank.


Rademaker, who was a strong backer of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and has generally never met a war he didn’t want, from Syria to Libya, is now a principal at the Podesta Group–the lobbying and public affairs firm founded by Tony and John Podesta, two of the worst people in Washington. At the Podesta group, Rademaker has advised the firm’s international clients, including the Iraqi government.


That contract was originally signed in 2013 and was worth close to $1 million; it was renewed last year and paid the Podesta Group about another $1 million. I’m told by a well-informed source that Podesta Group lobbyists get a 20 percent cut of business they bring in…


Also worth mentioning is that Rademaker is married to neocon Danielle Pletka, another former Hill staffer who is now senior vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, and who clings by her nails to the cliff’s edge of sanity.


She and her think tank were major proponents of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and last August, Pletka co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed that called President Obama’s response to ISIS “inadequate.” She demanded that Obama arm the Syrian opposition, send military advisers and trainers to Iraq “by the thousands, not hundreds,” and stop “blocking the delivery of much-needed weapons” to Iraq.


Resuming those shipments—which had been delayed by annoying human rights concerns, like widespread “politically motivated sectarian and ethnic killings” in the words of a U.S. government report—is one of the things that Pletka’s husband gets paid to lobby for, my source said, so it’s nice she can use the Journal’s op-ed pages to help him out.


In the meantime, Rademaker has taken a nice step up from the Arlington, Virginia condo that he sold in 1995 for $148,000. Now he and Pletka live in a 6,138-square-foot 6-bedroom home in McLean, Va.—big enough to fit a few of the over one million Iraqis who have been displaced or fled their country since the 2003 invasion. Rademaker and Pletka bought the house, currently assessed at $1.8 million, a year after the war began.


Nice job if you can get it.  So the Republicans have now rolled out their new budget for the war based economy.  And oh what a budget it is.  There will be celebrations in the war profiteer households like that of Rademaker and Pletka.  From The National Memo:


Excerpt:


WASHINGTON — Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate say their budget proposals add up. It takes some creative math and logic to make that true.


The plans unveiled this week call for the U.S. government to collect more than $1 trillion in taxes in the next decade that Republicans have little or no intention of collecting. Some of that revenue comes straight from taxes to pay for Obamacare — which they want to repeal.


Republicans also gloss over details of where they’d cut more than $5 trillion to balance the books. Senate Budget Chairman Mike Enzi’s plan cuts $430 billion from Medicare without saying how. House Budget Chairman Tom Price’s proposal includes $1 trillion in “other mandatory” reductions that aren’t laid out.


Well now you’re talking real money.  These budget hawks are cutting, cutting, cutting. $430 billion from Medicare, $1 trillion in “other mandatory” reductions.  That would be school lunches, food programs, medical programs, social security, etc.


The House proposal includes about $94 billion for a special war-funding account that isn’t subject to spending limits set by Congress in 2011. The Senate plan includes $58 billion in war funding, the same amount requested by President Barack Obama.


Price of Georgia would boost defense spending through something called the Overseas Contingency Operations account, which funds military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, and which critics call a slush fund.


Such spending is exempt from budget limits because it is supposed to be for activities related to overseas conflicts. Price initially set a spending level $36 billion above the president’s request.


Earlier this month, 70 House Republicans signed a letter saying they would block the budget if military spending wasn’t increased.


Come on, baby needs a new pair of war boots. And up and coming Senator Tom Cotton who secured the signatures of 47 Senators to stop peace negotiations with Iran immediately met with Defense Contractors in celebration of more war.  From The Intercept:


Excerpt:

In an open letter organized by freshman Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., 47 Senate Republicans today warned the leaders of Iran that any nuclear deal reached with President Barack Obama could expire as soon as he leaves office…

The NDIA is composed of executives from major military businesses such as Northrop Grumman, L-3 Communications, ManTech International, Boeing, Oshkosh Defense and Booz Allen Hamilton, among other firms.

Cotton strongly advocates higher defense spending and a more aggressive foreign policy. As The New Republic’s David Ramsey noted, “Pick a topic — Syria, Iran, Russia, ISIS, drones, NSA snooping — and Cotton can be found at the hawkish outer edge of the debate … During his senate campaign, he told a tele-townhall that ISIS and Mexican drug cartels joining forces to attack Arkansas was an ‘urgent problem.’”

On Iran, Cotton has issued specific calls for military intervention. In December he said Congress should consider supplying Israel with B-52s and so-called “bunker-buster” bombs — both items manufactured by NDIA member Boeing — to be used for a possible strike against Iran.


You might be interested in seeing all of Tom Cotton’s e-mail correspondence with defense contractors, but guess what, congress excluded itself from FOIA laws.  They don’t have to have their e-mails read by anyone.


So, come on Hillary, Let There Be Light!  Let’s get all the records, e-mails, correspondence regarding all government officials, especially congress and the White House.  No more bullshit, we don’t have to comply with the laws we write.  Let’s see Valarie Jarrett’s records from when they were flying around on taxpayer dollars trying to get the Olympics to come to Chicago.


Will the Clinton's be the Lightbearers?  Let there be Light Hillary!




By Patricia Baeten




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