Pentagon’s $10 Million Dollar Study: Putin Has Asperger’s

When I was dabbling in real estate my mentor, Jim Davis said “if you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your bullshit” and that is the first thing that came to mind when I read this article from USA Today:

Excerpt:

Pentagon 2008 study claims Putin has Asperger's syndrome

WASHINGTON — A study from a Pentagon think tank theorizes that Russian President Vladimir Putin has Asperger's syndrome, "an autistic disorder which affects all of his decisions," according to the 2008 report obtained by USA TODAY.

Putin's "neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy," wrote Brenda Connors, an expert in movement pattern analysis at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Studies of his movement, Connors wrote, reveal "that the Russian President carries a neurological abnormality."

Wow, who knew?  So, for $10 million dollars this Brenda Connors can tell Putin’s “neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy?”  Maybe the Pentagon should have had Brenda Connors evaluate this world leader for “neurological development that was significantly interrupted in infancy.”

Researchers can't prove their theory about Putin and Asperger's, the report said, because they were not able to perform a brain scan on the Russian president. The report cites work by autism specialists as backing their findings. It is not known whether the research has been acted on by Pentagon or administration officials.

The 2008 study was one of many by Connors and her colleagues, WHO ARE CONTRACTORS for the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), an internal Pentagon think tank that helps devise long-term military strategy.

How many $10 million dollar studies has the Office of Net Assessment paid think tanks, like RAND Corporation to come up with?  Are these studies available to the taxpayers who pay for them?

The 2008 report and a 2011 study were provided to USA TODAY as part of a Freedom of Information Act request….

What??  The press has to make a FOIA request to access taxpayer funded bullshit studies?  So what is the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) that is paying millions to think tanks for bullshit, unsubstantiated studies by dubious contractors?  With sequestration why hasn’t that bullshit ended?  Looks like the head of ONA is retiring, from Defense News:  

Excerpt:

WASHINGTON — Andrew Marshall — a Pentagon institution who influenced policy makers from the Cold War to today — has signaled his intention to step down in January, according to sources.

Marshall, 93, heads the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), which months ago was spared the budget ax as part of a restructuring of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

So the Department of Defense was cutting military pensions, VA healthcare but protected 93 year-old Marshall’s bullshit office that he has had for almost his entire lifetime?  Jeebus, what is he like a Supreme Court Justice?  How has that office been spared all those years?  

Having founded the Pentagon’s internal think tank in 1973, Marshall is the only director it has ever known. His influence over the decades on defense policy analysis in Washington has been vast….

Over the summer, the office issued research contracts worth more than $10 million to a variety of organizations like CSBA, Booz Hamilton, the Hudson Institute and IHS International to carry out these projects over the next several years.

Hmmm, so on his way out the ex-RAND Corporation toady threw another $10 million to think tanks and military industrial contractors.  Nice gig.

Pentagon leaders such as Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work, Director of Cost Assessment Jamie Morin and Undersecretary for Intelligence Mike Vickers have all worked for Marshall, as have dozens of other leading national security thinkers spread through think tanks and policy shops……  

Yep, the ONA exists to funnel taxpayer dollars to think tanks to justify endless war.  That is it’s only purpose and that is why it has been spared from sequestration cuts.  Who will vouch for the value of the ONA?  Why it’s none other than Andrew Krepinevich from CSBA.  

That’s CSBA as in “the office (ONA) issued research contracts worth more than $10 million to a variety of organizations like CSBA, Booz Hamilton, the Hudson Institute and IHS International.  So what does Krepinevich have to say to justify the existence of ONA?

“The function of that office needs to be retained,” said Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), who worked for Marshall as an Army officer and whose organization still does work for the ONA.

Cripes, it’s scary to think that these people, the same people who overthrew the U.S. Government in 2000 are operating as a shadow government. 

“In order for that office to perform successfully, you need a person who understands the analytic approach to net assessment,” Krepinevich added. “It also requires a significant budget, and the independence to decide what will be studied.”

Do you believe the nerve of that asshole, that they “need a significant budget and the independence to decide what to be studies.”  What other studies have we funded through the office of ONA, with some old Nazi from World War II in charge?  I started wondering about this guy Marshall and you know something, when you start turning over rocks you never know what you’ll find.

For instance searching on Andrew Marshall I was directed to Prison Planet’s 2011 article:

Excerpt:

Climate Change, Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare, & ANDREW MARSHALL as OZ WIZARD OF 9-11 author:  various

It seems that Andrew Marshall is the strategist, while front men like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Bush, and others are amanuenses and factotums.  In other words, Andrew Marshall is one of the people, like in the Wizard of Oz, of whom you are supposed to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” 

However, he is pulling the strings and the one making the plans—particularly the plans for the Pentagon’s “transformation/revolution” in military affairs, that is moving the US military into a ‘quick-global strike in-and-out’ organization—using unmanned air vehicles and global satellite surveillance of all kinds….

Yowza

Named director of the Office of Net Assessment by Richard Nixon and ***reappointed by every president since***, the DOD’s most elusive official has become one of its most influential….

It seems he is the strategist while the front men like Rummy and Cheney and others are amanuenses and factotums.  In other words, Andrew Marshall is one of the people, like in the Wizard of Oz, of whom you are supposed to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Though he is pulling the strings. 

Ok, then.  So let’s see what the American taxpayers paid for by cutting Social Security Disability Benefits by 20%.  What other evidence is there that Putin has Asperger’s?

Connors' team has done several studies on Putin for ONA beyond those from 2008 and 2011, Henderson said.

Connors' program is called Body Leads. Military contract records show the Pentagon has paid at least $365,000 on outside experts to work with her since 2009. 

Caaaaching!  That private contractor Connors is making out like a bandit peddling bullshit Putin personality disorder reports.

The two reports mention other work she and associates have done since Putin's rise to power, including a 2005 study called "An Act of Trust to Move Ahead" and studies in 2004-05 and 2008 by movement pattern analysis pioneer Warren Lamb.

So, who is “movement pattern analysis” pioneer Warren Lamb?  From Motushumanus:  

Excerpt:

Excerpt:

Warren Lamb (1923-2014) was born in northern England and educated at Wallasey Grammar School. At 16 he left school to join Lloyds Bank. In 1941 he enlisted in the Royal Navy. 

Following active service during World War II, he returned reluctantly to banking.  A chance 

meeting with Rudolf Laban, the eminent European movement theorist, encouraged Lamb to pursue an interest in movement notation and the possibility for its use in behavioral analysis…

So it sounds like this “movement notation analysis” gravy train has its roots in the practices of Rudolph Laban so who is he?  From Academia.Edu:

Excerpt:

On the surface the movement choirs of German modern dance choreographer Rudolf Laban may seem ostensibly disparate from Nazi soldier parades and propaganda imagery. Moreover, it may appear that Laban, as a choreographer, should have no distinct connection to the German government at all. In fact, he had several links to the Nazi regime of the 1930s.

The subject of many contested debates, Laban complied with and blatantly supported Hitler’s racial purification standards, and actually had a formal relationship to the German National Socialist Party as an appointee to the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.

Jeebus, we paid millions of dollars for studies based on the theories of a member of the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.  So what else do the august scholars for hire have to say about their analysis of Putin?

Excerpt:

"Today, project neurologists confirm this research project's earlier hypothesis that very early in life perhaps, even in utero, Putin suffered a huge hemispheric event to the left temporal lobe of the prefrontal cortex, which involves both central and peripheral nervous systems, gross motor functioning on his right side (head, rib cage, arm and leg) and his micro facial expression, eye gaze, hearing and voice and general affect," the report said.

Like this?

So, as we see details of the Obama Administration budget laying out the priorities for the next year, cutting $50 million from Great Lakes Restoration and cutting Social Security Disability 20% just to name a couple, at least we can sleep at night knowing that there is unlimited money being spent by the Pentagon on bullshit studies. 

This medical evaluation of Putin is as scientific as when Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist diagnosed Terry Schiavo by video.

So front page headlines in USA Today are Pentagon 2008 study claims Putin has Asperger's syndrome, it should say Pentagon $10 Million Dollar Bullshit Study:  Putin Has Asperger’s

 By Patricia Baeten

Will the Neocon’s Bitch, the European Union be Put Down?

Will the European Union, the Neocon’s bitch, be put down?  The world is littered with the hollowed out carcasses of nations like Greece and Ukraine, lured into the EU with promises of loans.  But those loans have repayment terms that Payday Lenders and mafia hit men would salivate over, in other words the loans were designed to be a death spiral.

The European Union may be on the verge of collapse according to The Nation:

Excerpt:

Not long after the Berlin Wall fell a quarter of a century ago, the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States squandered its peace dividend in an attempt to maintain global dominance and Europe quietly became more prosperous, more integrated and more of a player in international affairs….

… the European project is currently teetering on the edge of failure. Growth is anemic at best and socio-economic inequality is on the rise. The countries of Eastern and Central Europe, even relatively successful Poland, have failed to bridge the income gap with the richer half of the continent. And the highly indebted periphery is in revolt….

When the Virtuous Turn Vicious

For decades, European integration created a virtuous circle—prosperity generating political support for further integration that, in turn, grew the European economy. It was a winning formula in a competitive world.

I think they are talking about the Clinton Economy when all boats were lifted.  Through raising taxes on the rich, welfare reform, heavy investment in science and technology, 401K retirement accounts, tuition reimbursement, paid internships, low mortgage rate loans, and a highly regulated banking system the Clinton years rose all ships. 

However, as the European model has become associated with austerity, not prosperity, that virtuous circle has turned vicious. A challenge to the Eurozone in one country, a repeal of open borders in another, the reinstitution of the death penalty in a third—it,  too, is a process that could feed on itself, potentially sending the EU into a death spiral, even if, at first, no member states take the fateful step of withdrawing.

Yes, indeed the treachery of the U.S. Supreme Court has turned America into a Taliban style government.  Science, logic and reason are no longer part of America’s lexicon and the European Union has been dragged down into the medieval abyss of darkness and ignorance.  From Reader SupportedNews:

Excerpt:

Don't ever claim that Republican Supreme Court judges are not activists. Selecting Bush President resulted in two wars at a cost estimated at $4 trillion accompanied by tax breaks for the wealthiest, a full-scale assault on civil liberties, an invasive, ineffective 'homeland security' bureaucracy, criminal acts including torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, secret government, and an agenda that will make us a fascist, militarized empire.

In selecting Bush, the Court assured the wreck of our republic. His legacy lives on in the Supreme Court.

Yes, America we hardly recognize you.

The Court has sided with corporate interests consistently for a long time: In its 'wisdom', it decided that corporations are people, some with religious beliefs, whose only motive is profit, and that money is speech. The Citizens United and McKutcheon rulings will complete our transition to an oligarchy. Elections clearly are for sale now.

A corporate person, motivated only by profit, is a sociopath. He doesn't care if the planet is destroyed by his pollution. He has no loyalty to community. He is no patriot for he has no binds of citizenship and will move to the lowest wage, least regulated country, avoid all taxes by keeping profits offshore, and will buy as many politicians as necessary to mold policy in his favor….

Republicans allowed lobbyists to draft legislation for monopoly industries and they created ALEC. This policy has led to massive redistribution of income, restructuring of the economy, corrupt politics, extreme income inequality, and an economy that is unfair, unjust, unstable, and unsustainable.

Yes, that is the model that was exported to “old Europe” by the Bush Administration and put on steroids in the Obama Administration.  A highly corrupt, untethered banking cartel stealing the wealth of nations through extortion and extraction.  In 2001, after Bush was installed in office, Goldman Sachs packaged a loan deal with Greece and we are just starting to see the details of that loan, and it is telling.  From Bloomberg:

Excerpt:

March 6 (Bloomberg) -- Greece’s secret loan from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was a costly mistake from the start….

There’s no such thing as a “mistake” on Goldman Sachs part, it was a long-planned assault.

On the day the 2001 deal was struck, the government owed the bank about 600 million euros ($793 million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005. By then, the price of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan …. had almost doubled to 5.1 billion euros, he said….

Papanicolaou and his predecessor, Christoforos Sardelis, revealing details for the first time of a contract…. said the country didn’t understand what it was buying and was ill-equipped to judge the risks or costs….

Goldman Sachs understood what it was selling a death certificate.

Goldman Sachs’s instant gain on the transaction illustrates the dangers to clients who engage in complex, tailored trades that lack comparable market prices and whose fees aren’t disclosed.

Harvard University, Alabama’s Jefferson County and the German city of Pforzheim all have found themselves on the losing end of the one-of-a-kind private deals typically pitched to them by securities firms as means to improve their finances.

Those kind of deals used to be illegal.  But when the United States Government was overthrown December 12, 2000 banks like Goldman Sachs were unleashed to bankrupt the countries of the world with their crap investments like derivatives. 

Prior to Gramm Leach Bliley rating firms, like Standard and Poor’s were paid by the investor to rate the risk involved with different investment products, to insure the integrity of the financial instrument.  Therefore, the rating agencies’ fiduciary responsibility was to the investor. 

After the deregulation of derivatives, the banks paid the rating agencies to rate the worthless crap derivatives as AAA, meaning they were safe investments and therefore could be sold to municipalities, pensions and governments who were only allowed to invest in AAA rated investments.

Goldman Sachs DNA

“Like the municipalities, Greece is just another example of a poorly governed client that got taken apart….  “These trades are structured not to be unwound, and Goldman is ruthless about ensuring that its interests aren’t compromised -- it’s part of the DNA of that organization.”

‘Extremely Profitable’

The trading costs on the swap rose because the deal had a notional value of more than 15 billion euros, more than the amount of the loan itself, said a former Greek official with knowledge of the transaction who asked not to be identified because the pricing was private….

I’ll bet that Greek official didn’t want to be identified.

To repay the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed from the bank, Greece entered into a separate swap contract tied to interest-rate swings….

Falling bond yields caused that bet to sour, and tweaks to the deal failed to prevent the debt from almost doubling in size by the time the swap was restructured in August 2005.

Greece, which last month secured a second, 130 billion-euro bailout, is sitting on debt equal to about 160 percent of its GDP as of last year.

Yes, that’s how it works.  The Federal Reserve Bank secretly bailed out crooked banks to the tune of $43 trillion dollars, paying massive bonuses to the cartel members.  From the excellent investigative journalist, Gregory Palast at TruthDig:

Excerpt:

Trojan Hearse: Greek Elections and the Euro Leper Colony

Ha ha, I love that “Trojan Hearse” how apt.

Europe is stunned, and bankers aghast, that the new party of the Left, Syriza, won Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Greece.

Syriza won on the promise that it will cure Greece of leprosy.

Oddly, Syriza also promises that it will remain in the leper colony. That is, Syriza wants to rid Greece of the cruelty of austerity imposed by the European Central Bank but insists on staying in the euro zone.

The problem is, austerity run wild is merely a symptom of an illness. The underlying disease is the euro itself.

For the last five years, Greeks have been told that, if you cure your disease—that is, if you dump the euro—the sky will fall. I guess Greeks haven’t noticed, the sky has fallen already. With unemployment at 25 percent, with doctors and teachers eating out of garbage cans, there is no further to fall.

Sound familiar America?  That’s the same plan that has been rolled out across America, by the U.S. Senate and especially GOP Governors like Scott Walker.   

In 2010, when unemployment was a terrible 10 percent, a year into the crisis, the “Troika” (the European Central Bank, European Commission and the International Monetary Fund) told the Greeks that brutal austerity measures would restore their economy by 2013….

Can Greece survive without the euro? Greece is already dead, but the Germans won’t even bother to bury the corpse. Greeks are told that if they leave the euro and renounce its debts, the nation will not be able to access world capital markets. The reality is, Greece can’t access world markets now: no one lends to a corpse.

There’s a way back across the River Styx. But it’s not by paddling on a euro.

Can Greece just dump the euro? They have happy precedents to follow. Argentina was once pegged to the U.S. dollar much as Greece is tied to the euro today. In 2000, Argentines, hungry and angry, revolted. Argentina ultimately overthrew the dollar dictatorship, the IMF diktats and the threats of creditors, and defaulted on its dollar bonds.  Free at last!

In the decade since, the Argentine economy soared. Yes, today, Argentina is under attack by financial vultures, but that is only because the nation became so temptingly wealthy.

Ha, ha.  That’s right Argentina is under assault by the United States Supreme Court ordering them to pay Paul Singer and the derivative vulture funds ransom money.

I was in Brazil when its President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told the IMF to go to hell—and rejected privatization of the state banks and the state oil company, rejected cutting pensions and thumbed his nose at the rest of the austerity nonsense. Instead, Lula created the bolsa familia, a massive pay-out to the nation’s poor….

But austerity has nothing to do with economics. It is religion: the belief by the stern Lutheran Germans that Greeks have had too much fun, spent too much money, and spent too much lazy time in the sun—and now Greeks must pay a price for their sins.

The Euro’s Father Describes His Little Bastard

Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Syriza, would like to pretend that austerity and the euro are two different things, that you can marry the pretty girl but not invite her ugly sister to the wedding.

Apparently, the Syriza chief is blissfully ignorant of the history of the euro. The horror of austerity is not the consequence of Greek profligacy: it was designed into the euro’s plan from the beginning.

Exactly, it was the plan from the beginning.

This was explained to me by the father of the euro himself, economist Robert Mundell of Columbia University. (I studied economics with Mundell’s buddy, Milton Friedman.) 

Mundell not only invented the euro, he also fathered the misery-making policies of Thatcher and Reagan, known as “supply-side economics”—or, as George Bush Sr. called it, “voodoo economics.”

Yeah St. Ronnie of Reagan was the dimwitted spaghetti western, washed up actor that was the perfect face for selling “supply-side economics.”  Reagan’s most ardent of admirers is none other than Barack Obama.

Supply-side voodoo is the long-discredited belief that if a nation demolishes the power of unions, cuts business taxes, eliminates government regulation and public ownership of utilities, economic prosperity will follow.

You know, these policies have failed over and over again, if you measure success by the living standard of the average citizen.  However if you measure success by the accumulation of wealth at the top and devastation for everyone else, supply side economics has been wildly successful.

It is argued that Greece owes Germany, the IMF and the European Central Bank for bail-out-billions. Nonsense. None of the billions in bail-out funds went into Greek pockets.  It all went to bail out Deutsche Bank and other foreign creditors.

The EU treasuries swallowed 90 percent of its private bankers’ bonds. Germany bailed out Germany, not Greece.

The EU is the bitch that has outlived its usefulness and now must be put down.  The Ukraine adventure will prove to be the end of the E.U.  From The Telegraph:

Excerpt:

Ukraine fiasco marks end of the EU’s imperial dream

The EU, dedicated to eliminating national identity, has finally run up against the rock of a national interest that will not give way.

Normally when a country’s people give a referendum vote that the EU doesn’t like, they are just told to vote again to put it right.

Yes, just like the Supreme Court in America stepped in during the 2000 election to “correct” the voters mistake and “make it right.”

In the case of Crimea, however, where 96 per cent of the people voted to return to Russia, the EU was in no position to ask them to think again. Even if they did, considering that Crimea, where the tsars, Tolstoy and Chekhov used to spend their summers, has been part of Russia for most of the past 230 years, that 60 per cent of its people are ethnic Russians and that 82 per cent speak Russian at home, they would be unlikely to change their minds.

The hard fact is that, whatever we think of President Putin, this episode has been the most salutary fiasco the “European project” has ever brought upon itself in 60 years….

For years the EU has been wooing Ukraine with that “Association Agreement” as the next step towards making it a full member. But by pushing its “soft power” right up to the Russian border, this strange organisation dedicated to eliminating national identity has finally run up against the rock of a national interest that will not give way.

And to what a pitiful state this has reduced our own supposed “leaders” in the West. They haven’t a clue what to do.

So the Ukrainians are trapped between a rock and a place that turns out to be too soft to help them, On Friday, when their acting prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, came to Brussels to sign that Association Agreement, the EU was so embarrassed that the ceremony had to take place behind closed doors, away from the eyes of the media. The poor man was not even allowed a microphone, but had to shout out his wish still to see Ukraine as an EU member.

Yep, Yats had to sneak in to sign the agreement like a cockroach avoiding the light of day.

The EU knows it is powerless to prevent Mr Putin in due course absorbing Ukraine’s Russian-speaking industrial heartland, leaving the EU to look after what remains of that bankrupt country, like a dismembered corpse.

But there is no sign that those impotent nonentities who pose as our leaders have yet realised that their ambition to take over Ukraine must now rank alongside the euro as the two leading examples of how their collective act of make-believe is finally hitting the brick wall of reality.

Yes, the rabid dog, wandering around frothing at the mouth and howling at the moon must be put down.  The EU’s rabies are becoming airborne and in danger of infecting Asia, so it must be isolated and eventually put down.  But the illegal junta in Kiev is sticking with the Reagan Thatcher failed policy.  From Russia Times:

Situation in Ukraine ‘nearing humanitarian catastrophe’ – Amnesty Intl

“While it may be too early to call this a humanitarian catastrophe, it’s clearly progressing in that direction,” Krivosheev said, adding that pensioners are the most vulnerable part of the population.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) also expressed major concern for the elderly, pointing to Kiev’s dangerous decision to transfer payouts of social benefits and pensions to government-controlled areas.

So what is the response of the illegitimate United States government?  Double down, cut Social Security Disability and send the money to Ukraine for more war.  From CNBC:  

Excerpt:

Rebels press Ukraine offensive as Obama pledges action

U.S. President Barack Obama said Washington was considering all options short of military action to isolate Russia. The European Union called an emergency meeting of foreign ministers of its 28 member states.

"We are deeply concerned about the latest break in the ceasefire and the aggression that these separatists -- with Russian backing, Russian equipment, Russian financing, Russian training and Russian troops -- are conducting," Obama told a news conference during a visit to India.

Good old, tone deaf imbecile blathers on about Russian aggression while Americans abroad are being treated like inbred relatives.  From Tom Dispatch:

Excerpt:

Americans who live abroad—more than six million of us worldwide (not counting those who work for the U.S. government)—often face hard questions about our country from people we live among. Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to explain everything that baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the United States. 

America we hardly recognize you, what happened?

Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase. Which means that we Americans abroad are regularly asked to account for the behavior of our rebranded “homeland,” now conspicuously in decline and increasingly out of step with the rest of the world….

Even after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I still met people—in the Middle East, no less—willing to withhold judgment on the U.S.  Many thought that the Supreme Court’s installation of George W. Bush as president was a blunder American voters would correct in the election of 2004.

Well Americans were not allowed to correct the Supreme Court’s decision to end democracy in the United States, the corrupt two party system has been codified into law.  The last president elected by the people of America was William Jefferson Clinton.

So now, America’s lap dog the European Union is a mangy disease riddled cur, and must be put down.  In the words of the EU’s neocon dominatrix Victoria Nuland, Fuck the EU, time to put the neocons’ bitch down. 

By Patricia Baeten

Koch Brothers vs. Brooks Brothers Who Will Win the 2016 Sale of the Century?

During the 2008 primary and subsequent election, Wall Street banks laundered three-quarters of a billion dollars into the Obama campaign.  Obama was the first presidential candidate from either party to refuse public financing since the landmark McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Law was enacted.  What we are seeing now is the Koch Brothers vs. the Brooks Brothers, whose money will buy the 2016 election?

The Supreme Court and the United States Senate are the architects of today’s elections where people like the Koch Brothers and Jamie Dimon can purchase a government with money they’ve stolen from the American people.

Funny, that it would take “Democrat” Barack Obama to make earth shattering firsts that will affect the lives of Americans for generations to come; I don’t mean in a good way.  It was candidate Barack Obama that voted give retroactive immunity to telecom companies that illegally spied on their customers for the Bush Administration. 

It would be “Democrat” Barack Obama who would be the first President to cut Social Security funding and benefits, first by withholding cost of living raises for years then a “payroll” tax holiday. 

It would be Barack Obama that would take a horrific Wall Street profit driven healthcare system and codify it into law, ensuring Wall Street profits backed by the U.S. Treasury.

So, it’s interesting to see the news that the Koch Brothers are taking a page out of the Obama 2008 campaign book and plowing an amount of money almost equal to that of the 2008 Obama campaign into the 2016 election.  Politico reports the following:

The Kochs put a price on 2016: $889 million

The Koch brothers’ operation intends to spend $889 million in the run-up to the 2016 elections — a historic sum that in many ways would mark Charles and David Koch and their fellow conservative megadonors as more powerful than the official Republican Party.

It’s interesting, that the Republican Party is beginning to feel like a whore that’s past prime and having to do things they never imagined they would do in order to exist.  Wisconsin has become the hybrid of Koch Brothers’ governments with their Frankenstein’s Bride, Scott Walker.  God help the Republican that strays away from their masters.  From PRWatch:

Excerpt:

Money Trail Revealed: Did Eric O’Keefe Pay James O’Keefe for Hatchet Job on GOP Senate President?

You remember James O’Keefe, the guy that wore his mom’s mink coat to look like a pimp?  He was all over Fox News.

In 2014, as March drew to an end but the cold Wisconsin winter refused to let go, State Senate President Mike Ellis (R-Neenah) stopped at his favorite after-work hangout to relax after a long session in the Capitol. After a few drinks, Ellis was approached by what he thought were two young constituents and the veteran GOP lawmaker started holding forth, as he was wont to do.

What he did not know, however, was that his new-found drinking buddies were not from his district or even from the State of Wisconsin. They were, however, on a mission to end his career.

A few weeks later, the right-wing’s favorite attack dog for hire, James O’Keefe, released a video of the conversation showing an inebriated Ellis spinning a tale about setting up a “Super PAC” to run attacks on his Democratic opponent in that year’s election….

..A few days later, the Senate President who was first elected to the Senate in 1982, announced that he would not be running for re-election.

Ellis was an unabashed conservative, but he had split with Governor Scott Walker and his increasingly right-wing party on issues like school vouchers and the corrupting influence of big money in politics.

Yep, poor old Mike Ellis, the corrupting influence of big money in politics got him.  So how does a political system owned and operated by billionaires work for the average Joe?  Maybe the answer is in this article from The Atlantic:

Excerpt:

After the Spill: Life in West Virginia's Coal Country

One year after the Elk River chemical disaster, has the Mountain State's approach to mining changed?

CHARLESTON, W. Va.—At 8:16 a.m. on the morning of January 9, 2014, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection received the first of what would quickly become an avalanche of complaints.

A man in Charleston, the state’s capital, called to report that there was “something in the air” and it was irritating his wife’s throat. Two-and-a-half hours later, the first media report of the incident surfaced on a local NBC affiliate’s Facebook page: “BREAKING: Firefighters are investigating a strong smell in the Kanawha Valley.” “Is it safe to go out?” asked the first commenter on the post.

DEP inspectors arrived at the Freedom Industries Charleston plant, which sits along the Elk River on the edge of town, at 11:15 a.m. They quickly discovered the source of the smell was 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, or MCHM, an industrial chemical used for purifying coal before it is burned.

The toxic substance was pouring from two small holes, one about the size of a penny and the other half as big, on the bottom of a single storage tank at the Freedom Industries facility, which had not been inspected since 1991. Over a span of at least 20 hours, approximately 10,000 gallons of the MCHM chemical mixture leaked out of Tank 396 and into the Elk River, eventually finding its way to Charleston’s main water treatment plant.

Yes, that is what you get when your government has been bought by billionaires.  Smaller government means less inspections, less safety for citizens, less government services to help citizens when they are injured as a result of unfettered, fascism.

At 5:36 p.m., Governor Earl Ray Tomblin finally issued a statement, an ominous message posted to his Twitter page: “EMERGENCY: Do NOT use tap water for drinking, cooking, washing, or bathing in Boone, Lincoln, Kanawha, Jackson, Putnam counties.”

By the end of the day, Tomblin declared a state of emergency and deployed the National Guard. A do-not-use order commanded that the contaminated water only be used for flushing toilets and extinguishing fires. The spill left more than 300,000 West Virginians, about one-sixth of the state’s total population, without access to potable water.

I don't think I would want to take responsibility for saying that water was OK to use on fires, have you seen Gasland?

Schools were closed. Restaurants, bars, and hotels were also shuttered. Residents scrambled to supermarkets, gas stations, and even vending machines to secure bottled water, which quickly sold out everywhere. Hospital emergency rooms were overwhelmed with hundreds of patients who all exhibited the same pattern of symptoms, including diarrhea, nausea, headache, itching, rash, vomiting, and stomach pain.

Yes, that’s what ordinary citizens get from a government owned by billionaires.  So, when I saw Obama was designating ANWAR as a wilderness area, I thought sounds like that’s one for the Brooks Brothers.  Dirty, filthy, environment killing energy is the Koch Brothers’ hallmark and Alaska is ruby red Republican.  From Bloomberg News:

Excerpt:

The president's move to protect more of the refuge from oil drilling has Republican officials in the state fighting mad.

Those are fighting words.

President Barack Obama's decision to ask Congress to designate parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a wilderness area, putting the land off-limits for oil drilling, is not going over well with Republicans in the state, to say the least.

Obama's plan, which the administration unveiled on Sunday, would protect 12.28 million acres in addition to the 7 million acres already designated as wilderness, according to the Department of the Interior. It comes amid falling oil prices that have left Alaska's economy on shaky ground…

“It's clear this administration does not care about us, and sees us as nothing but a territory,” Murkowski said in a statement. “The promises made to us at statehood, and since then, mean absolutely nothing to them.”

Ha, ha.  Hey, Lisa, guess what, Obama doesn’t give a rip the environment or any statehood treaties any more than you do as a United States Senator.  From Indian Country Today:

Excerpt:

57 Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians Urge Senate to Nix Sacred Land Giveaway

More than 70 tribal nations have urged the U.S. Senate to defeat or remove a section of the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act that would transfer a part of the publicly-owned Tonto National Forest that is sacred to the San Carlos Apache Tribe to a giant international corporation for a massive, environmentally devastating copper mine…

“If such a land transfer provision seems out of place in a defense bill, that’s because it is. If the idea of transferring the ownership of federal forest lands to foreign mining companies seems absurd, it’s because that’s true, too…..”

The Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act is a House bill sponsored by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ). It was tacked on to the annual must-pass NDAA along with several other land-related bills by Sen, John McCain (R-AZ)…

….If approved by the Senate and signed by President Obama, the land swap provision will allow Resolution Copper Co., a subsidiary of the controversial international mining conglomerate Rio Tinto, to acquire 2,400 acres of the federally protected public land in the Tonto National Forest in southeast Arizona in exchange for 5,000 acres in parcels scattered around the state…

Resolution Copper plans a massive deep underground copper mine on the San Carlos Apache’s sacred landscape and has already begun drilling the shaft in anticipation of the land swap bill’s approval.

Well, that would be one for the Koch Brothers, and how arrogant is that?  They are so sure of their control of congress that they already started drilling on Public Lands.  Lands that are sacred Indian trusts.  But then, the Koch Brothers have heavily invested in State judges, and it is paying off big time.  From Think Progress:

Excerpt:

The Nebraska Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s decision that nullified the controversial Keystone XL pipeline route through Nebraska Friday, meaning that Keystone XL once again has a legal route through Nebraska.

Four out of the seven judges on the Nebraska Supreme Court agreed with a district court’s February 2014 decision that Nebraska’s LB1161 law was unconstitutional, but according to Nebraska’s constitution, the court needed the agreement of a super majority — five out of the seven judges — to officially label the law as unconstitutional….

But since just four members of the court, not five, found the law unconstitutional, the Court writes that “the citizens cannot get a binding decision from this court,” and the district court’s decision is vacated.

Isn’t that rich, even though a majority of the judges said the law is unconstitutional, they lost because you need a Koch Brother majority on the court in Nebraska.

“While the outcome may not be what we had hoped for, I believe we have successfully sent the message that Nebraska citizens are willing to stand up and fight back against the politically corrupting influence of rich and powerful corporations,” Randy Thompson, one of the Nebraska landowner plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement reacting to Friday’s decision…

You’ve got that right Randy, you don’t have to tell Ex-Wisconsin State Senate President Mike Ellis about the corrupting influence of rich and powerful.

So now, Obama is opening up the Atlantic Coastline for drilling.  From New York Times:

 Excerpt:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration moved Tuesday to open up a vast stretch of East Coast waters to oil and gas drilling, a decision that could have a profound impact on the economic and environmental future of states from Virginia to Georgia….

In an announcement that outraged environmentalists and brought grudging cheers from the oil and gas industry, the Interior Department unveiled the latest part of its five-year plan for the government to sell leases for oil and gas development in federal waters from 2017 to 2022.

The plan would open up one lease sale area off the southeast stretch of the Atlantic Seaboard, an area the oil industry has long hungered to exploit.

So who will win in the 2016 Sale of the Century?  Will it be the Koch Brothers or the Brooks Brothers?

By:  Patricia Baeten