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top of the heap to third world status in one generation
- Thread starter Gry
- Start date
I read the 2525 in the post above Zager & Evans video, and "if man is still alive...." popped into my brain. Long time since the last time I listened to it.
-- Where is the Accountability for the Killers Ushering in the Climate Apocalypse?
-- The two Santa's strategy: How the GOP has used an economic scam to manipulate Americans for decades....
-- Crazy Alert! TN has appointed a conspiracy theorist to develop state social studies standards
-- Phil Ittner - Were the Ukrainians Behind Kremlin Drone Attack?
-- How Alabama is trying to use the chemical endangerment law to lock up pregnant (and not pregnant) woman...
-- Why isn't the Justice Department looking at the sketchy relationship between Trump & the Saudis?
-- MN joins alliance to elect prez by popular vote
If somebody had set your house on fire, killing your child and pets, and then your city demanded that you give that somebody hundreds of dollars a year for the next decade, how would you feel?
That’s pretty much the situation of families across America who’ve lost their homes, family members, and livelihoods to wildfires, floods, extreme heat and cold, mile-wide tornadoes, bomb cyclones, heat domes, hurricanes, and drought caused by today’s climate emergency, but nonetheless have to pay taxes that subsidize the fossil fuel industry executives who helped caused it all.
For over 50 years, the top executives of that industry have known their products would produce this exact result: a crisis that is killing an average of around 7,500 Americans a year (and over a million worldwide) and promises to kill hundreds of millions within a decade or two.
But instead of doing anything of consequence to mitigate the damage of their operations, they instead funded a massive, 50-year-long campaign to lie to the American people, cloud the science, and buy off Republican politicians.
President Biden, as part of his negotiations with Kevin McCarthy, has proposed reducing the budget deficit by $31 billion through cutting about five percent of the subsidies you and I give to the fossil fuel industry every year through our tax dollars. McCarthy, in the pocket of Big Oil, has said he won’t even consider the proposal.
Famed climate scientist James Hansen is working on a paper outlining the dimensions of the disaster facing humanity at the hands of the fossil fuel industry, and it’s shocking. My friend and colleague Thomas Neuburger did a deep dive into it this week in his excellent God’s SpiesSubstack newsletter that’s well worth the read.
In essence, Hansen is proposing that the world will soon see both a collapse of the Gulf Stream that keeps Europe’s climate capable of growing crops and a worldwide 60-meter rise in sea levels. Possibly in our children’s or grandchildren’s lifetimes. As Thomas dryly notes in God’s Spies: “For Americans, 60 meters is about 200 feet.”
Deaths worldwide both directly from such an outcome — and from the wars that will result in the destruction of entire civilizations — will be measured in billions; here in America it’ll certainly be in the millions, and probably the tens of millions. Not to mention it speeding up the ongoing species collapse often referred as the Sixth Mass Extinction.
This is what the fossil fuel industry has brought to us, and to this day is aggressively trying to continue to sell to us. Fully aware of what they are doing.
Earlier this week the World Meteorological Organization published an in-depth report with the top-line conclusion summarizing the damage these fossil fuel executives have already inflicted on our planet and our lives, all while funding climate denial and paying off politicians worldwide:
The report notes:
The fossil fuel companies and their executives pay nothing, and never have. If they can keep the GOP in their pocket, they hope they never will.
Therefore, Earth One is calling for specific reparations, paid for by those companies:
I see two possibilities, the first involving the law, and the second using the marketplace and, if that doesn’t work fast enough, the Fifth Amendment’s eminent domain provision.
First, the law:
Article 16 of the 1992 Rio Declaration explicitly calls for fossil fuel producers to pay for the damage their products and extraction processes produce. Thus, Earth One argues, Saudi Aramco (as the largest example) has cost the world so much that they should pay $43 billion a year in reparations for the next 25 years. While that seems like a lot of money, Saudi Aramco’s revenue in 2022 was $604 billion, spinning off $161 billion in pure profit.
Most of it’s executives and stockholders are already morbidly rich; this will put nobody in the poorhouse.
But isn’t the impact of this industry on our planet so consequential that — instead of just reducing their most senior executives’ income/revenue from billions to hundreds of millions — we should actually be holding the decision makers to account?
The legislature of New York State is considering a superfund bill that would move financially in this direction against domestic fossil fuel producers; other states will probably soon follow, although none are yet law.
None, though, yet target decision making senior executives as was done after World War II with the senior executives of the manufacturer of Zyklon B and the bosses and owners of the companies that ran medical experiments in concentration camps.
The discussion isn’t limited to the United States. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported this week:
Another remedy, therefore, comes from the Nuremberg principles that were created in 1950 by the United Nations after World War II. While their original goal was to prosecute Nazis and deter future genocidal actions by dictatorial regimes, they could arguably apply to today’s intentional mass murder at the hands of the world’s fossil fuel executives.
More specifically, the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague was created by the Rome Statute on July 17, 1998. It goes beyond the “war crimes” and “crimes of aggression” defined by the Nuremberg principles and specifies both those two along with “the crime of genocide” and “crimes against humanity.”
That last category is clarified as including:
The United States has never signed onto the ICC, but actions against fossil fuel executives based in the US can be brought by other signatory nations. If the effort were started outside the United States, for example, Royal Dutch Shell is based in the Netherlands, a full signatory to the Rome Statute.
As of three years ago, two US states had launched fraud investigations into ExxonMobil, although the one lawsuit by New York failed to bring a conviction (it was based on a charge that they had committed fraud against their investors).
Multiple US cities have sued fossil fuel companies for climate change damages, although there has not yet been a “breakthrough” case that could establish a precedent for others. But as damages continue to pile up and our weather becomes increasingly violent, expect more to come.
Fossil fuel companies have been following a business model since their early years in the 19th century of internalizing profits while externalizing (dumping on the public) their costs and damages.
Which brings us to a second possible solution to this crisis: nationalize the companies themselves, so their profits can be used to remedy their harms.
If ever there was an industry that merited nationalization, the fossil fuel industry is it. They manipulate prices to both enhance profits and swing elections, bribe their way through the halls of Congress, and pump out a steady stream of lies about climate change. All while pouring hundreds of billions into the money bins of their morbidly rich CEOs, shareholders, and senior executives.
America has a long and proud history of taking on companies that put profits over the public good during a time of crisis. And we could acquire controlling interest of the nation’s three largest fossil fuel players — ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips — for, according to Robert Pollin writing at The American Prospect, fewer than a half-trillion dollars.
For less than a quarter of the cost of Trump’s billionaire tax cuts we could rapidly move a long way toward saving our nation and the world from climate destruction.
All the American government would have to do is to go into the public marketplace and start purchasing the stock of each of these companies at a premium to buy majority shares in each of them. Again, the cost would be less than 1/4th of Donald Trump‘s tax cut. It could probably be done in a matter of months, possibly even weeks.
But is it even possible? Turns out that history says an emphatic, “Yes!”
During the crisis of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson nationalized the country’s railroads, phone companies, and telegraph operators. He did the same with the nation’s radio networks and radio stations. All were returned to private ownership after the war, but that temporary nationalization helped get America through the crisis.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt did the same during World War II, nationalizing airplane manufacturers, gun manufacturers, over 3,300 mines, the nation’s railroads, dozens of oil companies, Western Electric Co., Hughes Tool Co., Goodyear Tire and Rubber, and even one of the nation’s largest retail outlets, Montgomery Ward. He also nationalized 17 foreign companies doing business in the US.
After FDR died, President Harry Truman continued seizing companies that were using the war as an excuse to jack up profits to the detriment of the nation. He nationalized meatpacking facilities across the country, the Monongahela Railroad Company, the nation’s steel mills, and hundreds of railroad companies.
Like with Wilson’s nationalizations, nearly all were returned to the private sector after the war was over, although it took until 1965 before all were privatized. Many had had their boards of directors and senior management replaced with people who’d put the interests of the nation ahead of their greed for profits.
In the 1970s, in the wake of the collapse of the Penn Central Railroad, President Richard Nixon oversaw the nationalization and transfer of 20 railroads into the newly created National Rail Passenger Corporation, now known as Amtrak.
In 1974 Congress created another nationalized entity to deal with freight rail, the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail), which absorbed dozens of failing rail companies. Conrail was government held until 1987, when it was privatized in the then-largest IPO in American history.
In 1984, when the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company was in a crisis, President Ronald Reagan’s administration oversaw the FDIC, nationalizing it by acquiring an 80 percent ownership share in the company; it wasn’t re-privatized until 1991, and was bought by Bank of America in 1994.
Also in the 1980s, after Reagan recklessly deregulated the Savings & Loan industry, banksters made off with billions leaving the wreckage of crushed S&Ls all across the nation.
When the government agency that insured them, FSLIC, went bankrupt itself in 1987, Reagan and Congress created an umbrella agency — the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) — to nationalize 747 of America’s S&Ls with assets of over $400 billion. Their assets were sold back into the private market in 1995 as the RTC shut itself down, having averted a 1929-style banking crisis through temporary nationalization.
When George W. Bush was handed the White House by 5 Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, the nation’s airline security system was entirely in private hands.
They failed miserably on 9/11, so Bush didn’t even bother with the normal acquisition process that would protect the hundreds of small contractors running security at airports across the nation: he simply nationalized the entire system and created a government agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to take over airport and airline security.
President Bush also partially nationalized the nation’s airlines, creating the Air Transportation Stabilization Board that traded around $10 billion in loans to airlines in crisis (air traffic collapsed after 9/11) in exchange for company stock. We (through our government) ended up holding 7.64 million shares in US Airways, 18.7 million shares of America West Airlines, 3.45 million shares in Frontier Airlines, 1.47 million shares in American TransAir, and 2.38 million shares in World Airways.
Congress had deregulated the nation’s banks in 1999 when Republicans pushed through an end to the Glass-Steagall Act and Bill Clinton signed it into law. The resulting banking system crash in 2008 forced the Bush administration to nationalize the country’s two largest mortgage lenders (they held about 40% of all US mortgages), Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
The Bush administration then additionally nationalized a 77.9% share in AIG, a 36% share of Citigroup, and a 73.5% share of GMAC, forcing out GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner, who’d been a particularly terrible manager of that company and was actively lobbying against what Bush thought were America’s interests.
As President Barack Obama came into office in 2009, GM and Chrysler were on the brink of collapse. His administration created a new company, NGMCO, Inc., that nationalized the assets of GM and was 60.8% owned by the federal government.
GM was finally fully re-privatized by the Obama administration in 2013. Chrysler went through a similar process, although both the UAW and the Canadian government were part owners when it was temporarily nationalized.
Thomas M. Hanna, Director of Research at The Democracy Collaborative and author of Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States, compiled most of the data above in a brilliant paper titled “A History of Nationalization in the United States 1917-2009.”
Toward its end, he summarizes brilliantly the case for nationalizing — perhaps only temporarily — America’s largest oil and gas companies:
It literally threatens all life on Earth.
Yet the fossil fuel industry continues to fund climate denial and lobby against any meaningful solutions, as we saw when every Republican in the Senate along with coal baron Joe Manchin killed the $500 billion investment in clean energy the Biden administration proposed in their 2021 Build Back Better legislation.
Squeals of “socialism!” and “Venezuela!” aside, we know how to nationalize industries that are working against our nation’s interests and have done it before, repeatedly.
And this time it’s not just about saving our banks or fighting a war. This time, it’s literally about saving the world.
Thank you for reading The Hartmann Report. This post is public so feel free to share it.
-- The two Santa's strategy: How the GOP has used an economic scam to manipulate Americans for decades....
-- Crazy Alert! TN has appointed a conspiracy theorist to develop state social studies standards
-- Phil Ittner - Were the Ukrainians Behind Kremlin Drone Attack?
-- How Alabama is trying to use the chemical endangerment law to lock up pregnant (and not pregnant) woman...
-- Why isn't the Justice Department looking at the sketchy relationship between Trump & the Saudis?
-- MN joins alliance to elect prez by popular vote
If somebody had set your house on fire, killing your child and pets, and then your city demanded that you give that somebody hundreds of dollars a year for the next decade, how would you feel?
That’s pretty much the situation of families across America who’ve lost their homes, family members, and livelihoods to wildfires, floods, extreme heat and cold, mile-wide tornadoes, bomb cyclones, heat domes, hurricanes, and drought caused by today’s climate emergency, but nonetheless have to pay taxes that subsidize the fossil fuel industry executives who helped caused it all.
For over 50 years, the top executives of that industry have known their products would produce this exact result: a crisis that is killing an average of around 7,500 Americans a year (and over a million worldwide) and promises to kill hundreds of millions within a decade or two.
But instead of doing anything of consequence to mitigate the damage of their operations, they instead funded a massive, 50-year-long campaign to lie to the American people, cloud the science, and buy off Republican politicians.
President Biden, as part of his negotiations with Kevin McCarthy, has proposed reducing the budget deficit by $31 billion through cutting about five percent of the subsidies you and I give to the fossil fuel industry every year through our tax dollars. McCarthy, in the pocket of Big Oil, has said he won’t even consider the proposal.
Famed climate scientist James Hansen is working on a paper outlining the dimensions of the disaster facing humanity at the hands of the fossil fuel industry, and it’s shocking. My friend and colleague Thomas Neuburger did a deep dive into it this week in his excellent God’s SpiesSubstack newsletter that’s well worth the read.
In essence, Hansen is proposing that the world will soon see both a collapse of the Gulf Stream that keeps Europe’s climate capable of growing crops and a worldwide 60-meter rise in sea levels. Possibly in our children’s or grandchildren’s lifetimes. As Thomas dryly notes in God’s Spies: “For Americans, 60 meters is about 200 feet.”
Deaths worldwide both directly from such an outcome — and from the wars that will result in the destruction of entire civilizations — will be measured in billions; here in America it’ll certainly be in the millions, and probably the tens of millions. Not to mention it speeding up the ongoing species collapse often referred as the Sixth Mass Extinction.
This is what the fossil fuel industry has brought to us, and to this day is aggressively trying to continue to sell to us. Fully aware of what they are doing.
Earlier this week the World Meteorological Organization published an in-depth report with the top-line conclusion summarizing the damage these fossil fuel executives have already inflicted on our planet and our lives, all while funding climate denial and paying off politicians worldwide:
Last week One Earth published a peer-reviewed analysis of the cost of all this damage, quantifying it by the 21 largest fossil fuel companies around the world. They concluded that those decision-making executives of the fossil fuel industry have inflicted over $5.4 trillion in identifiable economic damages on the rest of us which, instead of paying for, they have greedily converted to their own profit.
The report notes:
In other words, the fossil fuel companies produced the global warming and cancer-causing emissions, but when people are damaged by them or the weather they are changing, government and insurance companies pay the cost.
The fossil fuel companies and their executives pay nothing, and never have. If they can keep the GOP in their pocket, they hope they never will.
Therefore, Earth One is calling for specific reparations, paid for by those companies:
So, what can we do?
I see two possibilities, the first involving the law, and the second using the marketplace and, if that doesn’t work fast enough, the Fifth Amendment’s eminent domain provision.
First, the law:
Article 16 of the 1992 Rio Declaration explicitly calls for fossil fuel producers to pay for the damage their products and extraction processes produce. Thus, Earth One argues, Saudi Aramco (as the largest example) has cost the world so much that they should pay $43 billion a year in reparations for the next 25 years. While that seems like a lot of money, Saudi Aramco’s revenue in 2022 was $604 billion, spinning off $161 billion in pure profit.
Most of it’s executives and stockholders are already morbidly rich; this will put nobody in the poorhouse.
But isn’t the impact of this industry on our planet so consequential that — instead of just reducing their most senior executives’ income/revenue from billions to hundreds of millions — we should actually be holding the decision makers to account?
The legislature of New York State is considering a superfund bill that would move financially in this direction against domestic fossil fuel producers; other states will probably soon follow, although none are yet law.
None, though, yet target decision making senior executives as was done after World War II with the senior executives of the manufacturer of Zyklon B and the bosses and owners of the companies that ran medical experiments in concentration camps.
The discussion isn’t limited to the United States. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported this week:
They based that reporting on a new peer-reviewed study published the week before in Environmental Research Letters that, the CBC noted:
But these companies have not stopped buying off politicians, making it clear that extracting money from the ones causing all this damage and death worldwide may not be enough to provoke real change from the billionaire and multi-millionaire investors and executives making the decisions. Instead, we must motivate those executives themselves.
Another remedy, therefore, comes from the Nuremberg principles that were created in 1950 by the United Nations after World War II. While their original goal was to prosecute Nazis and deter future genocidal actions by dictatorial regimes, they could arguably apply to today’s intentional mass murder at the hands of the world’s fossil fuel executives.
More specifically, the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague was created by the Rome Statute on July 17, 1998. It goes beyond the “war crimes” and “crimes of aggression” defined by the Nuremberg principles and specifies both those two along with “the crime of genocide” and “crimes against humanity.”
That last category is clarified as including:
The United States has never signed onto the ICC, but actions against fossil fuel executives based in the US can be brought by other signatory nations. If the effort were started outside the United States, for example, Royal Dutch Shell is based in the Netherlands, a full signatory to the Rome Statute.
As of three years ago, two US states had launched fraud investigations into ExxonMobil, although the one lawsuit by New York failed to bring a conviction (it was based on a charge that they had committed fraud against their investors).
Multiple US cities have sued fossil fuel companies for climate change damages, although there has not yet been a “breakthrough” case that could establish a precedent for others. But as damages continue to pile up and our weather becomes increasingly violent, expect more to come.
Fossil fuel companies have been following a business model since their early years in the 19th century of internalizing profits while externalizing (dumping on the public) their costs and damages.
Which brings us to a second possible solution to this crisis: nationalize the companies themselves, so their profits can be used to remedy their harms.
If ever there was an industry that merited nationalization, the fossil fuel industry is it. They manipulate prices to both enhance profits and swing elections, bribe their way through the halls of Congress, and pump out a steady stream of lies about climate change. All while pouring hundreds of billions into the money bins of their morbidly rich CEOs, shareholders, and senior executives.
America has a long and proud history of taking on companies that put profits over the public good during a time of crisis. And we could acquire controlling interest of the nation’s three largest fossil fuel players — ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips — for, according to Robert Pollin writing at The American Prospect, fewer than a half-trillion dollars.
For less than a quarter of the cost of Trump’s billionaire tax cuts we could rapidly move a long way toward saving our nation and the world from climate destruction.
All the American government would have to do is to go into the public marketplace and start purchasing the stock of each of these companies at a premium to buy majority shares in each of them. Again, the cost would be less than 1/4th of Donald Trump‘s tax cut. It could probably be done in a matter of months, possibly even weeks.
But is it even possible? Turns out that history says an emphatic, “Yes!”
During the crisis of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson nationalized the country’s railroads, phone companies, and telegraph operators. He did the same with the nation’s radio networks and radio stations. All were returned to private ownership after the war, but that temporary nationalization helped get America through the crisis.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt did the same during World War II, nationalizing airplane manufacturers, gun manufacturers, over 3,300 mines, the nation’s railroads, dozens of oil companies, Western Electric Co., Hughes Tool Co., Goodyear Tire and Rubber, and even one of the nation’s largest retail outlets, Montgomery Ward. He also nationalized 17 foreign companies doing business in the US.
After FDR died, President Harry Truman continued seizing companies that were using the war as an excuse to jack up profits to the detriment of the nation. He nationalized meatpacking facilities across the country, the Monongahela Railroad Company, the nation’s steel mills, and hundreds of railroad companies.
Like with Wilson’s nationalizations, nearly all were returned to the private sector after the war was over, although it took until 1965 before all were privatized. Many had had their boards of directors and senior management replaced with people who’d put the interests of the nation ahead of their greed for profits.
In the 1970s, in the wake of the collapse of the Penn Central Railroad, President Richard Nixon oversaw the nationalization and transfer of 20 railroads into the newly created National Rail Passenger Corporation, now known as Amtrak.
In 1974 Congress created another nationalized entity to deal with freight rail, the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail), which absorbed dozens of failing rail companies. Conrail was government held until 1987, when it was privatized in the then-largest IPO in American history.
In 1984, when the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company was in a crisis, President Ronald Reagan’s administration oversaw the FDIC, nationalizing it by acquiring an 80 percent ownership share in the company; it wasn’t re-privatized until 1991, and was bought by Bank of America in 1994.
Also in the 1980s, after Reagan recklessly deregulated the Savings & Loan industry, banksters made off with billions leaving the wreckage of crushed S&Ls all across the nation.
When the government agency that insured them, FSLIC, went bankrupt itself in 1987, Reagan and Congress created an umbrella agency — the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) — to nationalize 747 of America’s S&Ls with assets of over $400 billion. Their assets were sold back into the private market in 1995 as the RTC shut itself down, having averted a 1929-style banking crisis through temporary nationalization.
When George W. Bush was handed the White House by 5 Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, the nation’s airline security system was entirely in private hands.
They failed miserably on 9/11, so Bush didn’t even bother with the normal acquisition process that would protect the hundreds of small contractors running security at airports across the nation: he simply nationalized the entire system and created a government agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to take over airport and airline security.
President Bush also partially nationalized the nation’s airlines, creating the Air Transportation Stabilization Board that traded around $10 billion in loans to airlines in crisis (air traffic collapsed after 9/11) in exchange for company stock. We (through our government) ended up holding 7.64 million shares in US Airways, 18.7 million shares of America West Airlines, 3.45 million shares in Frontier Airlines, 1.47 million shares in American TransAir, and 2.38 million shares in World Airways.
Congress had deregulated the nation’s banks in 1999 when Republicans pushed through an end to the Glass-Steagall Act and Bill Clinton signed it into law. The resulting banking system crash in 2008 forced the Bush administration to nationalize the country’s two largest mortgage lenders (they held about 40% of all US mortgages), Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
The Bush administration then additionally nationalized a 77.9% share in AIG, a 36% share of Citigroup, and a 73.5% share of GMAC, forcing out GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner, who’d been a particularly terrible manager of that company and was actively lobbying against what Bush thought were America’s interests.
As President Barack Obama came into office in 2009, GM and Chrysler were on the brink of collapse. His administration created a new company, NGMCO, Inc., that nationalized the assets of GM and was 60.8% owned by the federal government.
GM was finally fully re-privatized by the Obama administration in 2013. Chrysler went through a similar process, although both the UAW and the Canadian government were part owners when it was temporarily nationalized.
Thomas M. Hanna, Director of Research at The Democracy Collaborative and author of Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States, compiled most of the data above in a brilliant paper titled “A History of Nationalization in the United States 1917-2009.”
Toward its end, he summarizes brilliantly the case for nationalizing — perhaps only temporarily — America’s largest oil and gas companies:
Today’s climate crisis dwarfs the threat of Nazism in the 1940s, Bin Laden’s 9/11 attack, or the massive bank robberies that took place during the Reagan and Bush administrations.
It literally threatens all life on Earth.
Yet the fossil fuel industry continues to fund climate denial and lobby against any meaningful solutions, as we saw when every Republican in the Senate along with coal baron Joe Manchin killed the $500 billion investment in clean energy the Biden administration proposed in their 2021 Build Back Better legislation.
Squeals of “socialism!” and “Venezuela!” aside, we know how to nationalize industries that are working against our nation’s interests and have done it before, repeatedly.
And this time it’s not just about saving our banks or fighting a war. This time, it’s literally about saving the world.
Thank you for reading The Hartmann Report. This post is public so feel free to share it.
moose eater
Well-known member
One of the United States most revered, protected, and esteemed mass murderers. He was also wanted in Central and South America for questioning relative to CIA-sponsored coups and related assassinations.
Our beloved Henry Kissinger strikes again.
No wonder immigrants get a bad rap.
theintercept.com
There are some people who ought to burn in Hell twice.
Our beloved Henry Kissinger strikes again.
No wonder immigrants get a bad rap.
Survivors of Kissinger’s Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings
Exclusive witness interviews and archival documents detail killings of hundreds of Cambodian civilians.
theintercept.com
There are some people who ought to burn in Hell twice.
moose eater
Well-known member
I had/have that on 45rpm disc. Likely still in my vinyl collection in the basement.
Chronologically, I guess it makes sense that we're still waiting for 2525.
When Kissinger was a young man, he enlisted in the army. With his ability to speak several languages,
he was assigned to intel (G2) as a translator.
Things took a turn up for him, when he was tasked with translating for Otto Skorzeny, aka
"Hitler's Commando'', the man who had rescued Mussolini from the secure island fortress where he had
been imprisoned. Skorzeny was at the end of the war, one of the most popular of men.
Everyone wanted to meet him, and did so over a period of time, with Kissinger taking on
the role of his personal translator and aide to him.
Skorzeny was involved with the inception of our own special forces, and continued on to do the
same for several other nations as well. It was as a result of Skorzeny, that Kissinger came
to know who movers and shakers were in the political world.
When John Loftus published "America's Nazi Secret" Kissinger threated to sue him.
Loftus told him to pound sand and bring it on, which never happened.
he was assigned to intel (G2) as a translator.
Things took a turn up for him, when he was tasked with translating for Otto Skorzeny, aka
"Hitler's Commando'', the man who had rescued Mussolini from the secure island fortress where he had
been imprisoned. Skorzeny was at the end of the war, one of the most popular of men.
Everyone wanted to meet him, and did so over a period of time, with Kissinger taking on
the role of his personal translator and aide to him.
Skorzeny was involved with the inception of our own special forces, and continued on to do the
same for several other nations as well. It was as a result of Skorzeny, that Kissinger came
to know who movers and shakers were in the political world.
When John Loftus published "America's Nazi Secret" Kissinger threated to sue him.
Loftus told him to pound sand and bring it on, which never happened.
Last edited:
Demand the Platonic OathInformation Disorder will only worsen as Artificial Intelligence spreads. We need a plan.
Plato and Hippocrates were contemporaries. Maybe there’s something they can offer our truth-scorched society.If truthful information is the lifeblood of democracy — and it surely is, because it’s only with a grasp of what’s true that voters can make good choices when they cast ballots — then maybe what we need now is a sort of Hippocratic Oath for information brokers. You know, a pledge like that “first, do no harm” commitment that new medical school graduates solemnly make, only in this case something for journalists, politicians, public relations practitioners, cable TV hosts and anybody else who communicates with a lot of people. Although we should note, to be perfectly accurate, that the physicians’ oath doesn’t include those precise words that are so often cited. A favored translation from Hippocrates’ original Greek typically binds new doctors to a vow to “abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous.”¹ Imagine if we asked such folks as Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene — or Donald Trump! — to likewise raise their right hands and swear to that standard. What, no mischief? You have to wonder: Would it make them think twice before they unleash some of their typical whoppers? Not likely, I suppose. For starters, if a promise mattered to Trump, he wouldn’t have been twice impeached for violating his presidential oath “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,” nor would The Washington Post have documented more than 30,000 lies he uttered during his presidency.² And, anyway, the notion is unenforceable. The practice of medicine is regulated by the state, which we’ve authorized to revoke the medical licenses of those who deviate from Hippocrates’ standards, but a free society couldn’t tolerate that kind of state intrusion into what people say or publish. Still, it’s intriguing to consider what we might gain if we created something we might call the Platonic Oath, in honor of the assertion by Plato, a contemporary of Hippocrates, “Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.” We might then ask people to take a Platonic Oath, like, “I will present nothing that is not true, and thus the beginning of every good.” (But for the religious inference, you might call it the Lutheran Oath, in honor of Martin Luther’s admirably tight phrasing, “Peace if possible, truth at all costs.” That man could have been a decent journalist.) While we’re at it, though, our 21st-century Platonic Oath of truth would have to rope in the software developers who work on artificial intelligence systems, and the digital corporate titans who finance their work, too. As the publisher of The New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger, noted at an industry conference this week, AI “is almost certainly going to usher a torrent of crap into the information ecosystem, totally poisoning it.”³ Inelegant language, but you get his point. Because AI can create false content that is so much like what’s real, and spread it before humans have time to act, it threatens to overwhelm the truth. That’s rather terrifying, since it comes even as we are already failing to effectively cope with a flood of disinformation worldwide that predates the recent emergence of AI as a threat. Two years ago, after a nearly year-long study, a blue-ribbon commission concluded, “Information Disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises. When bad information become as prevalent, persuasive, and persistent as good information, it creates a chain reaction of harm.” That report, from the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder, noted that disinformation makes progress difficult on such issues as climate change, and encourages racist, ethnic and gender attacks. Viral lies, including those sown by hostile governments, can threaten national security and undermine trust in our society. We see its effects every day in the division that is tearing our country apart.⁴ While we can’t solve Information Disorder, the commission noted, we might “mitigate misinformation’s worst harms” by such steps as compelling social media platforms to share details about their content moderation work and to contribute to a Public Restoration Fund. That fund could help fight misinformation by supporting “education, research and investment in local institutions” — the latter apparently referring to local journalism. The likelihood of that happening, though, is remote. A year ago, a Biden administration attempt to create an office to coordinate the fight against disinformation in the Department of Homeland Security was disbanded just three weeks after it was set up, after the new Disinformation Governance Board became the victim of a right-wing smear attack — ironically, the very sort of disinformation the office was intended to research. Critics claimed the new office — which had no regulatory power — was an effort by liberals to squelch conservative speech, and compared it to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984.”⁵ There was likely some justification to the right-wing fear of being targeted, of course, but that’s because the recent history of free speech in America has been suffused with distortion and outright fabrication from so many conservative forces. This is not a case of calling out one side for something that the other side engages in, as well; there is no paragon of prevarication on the left like Trump is on the right, nor a progressive commentator with the record of fabrication matching Alex Jones, Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson and so many more of their reactionary cohort. Sometimes, paradoxically, disinformation is spread by silence. This week Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, a far-right anti-government militia group, was sentenced to 18 years in prison after his conviction on seditious conspiracy charges. Rhodes was a key player in the plot to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in the Trump-inspired attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It was the first sentence for a sedition conspiracy in more than a decade, and a key development in society’s effort to deal with the lie spread by Trump that the presidential race was rigged — a lie now embraced by six in 10 Republican voters. The Rhodes sentence, and that of a colleague to a 17-year prison term, was inarguably important news for Americans to hear if the truth is ever to overcome that massive lie suggesting a terrible blot on U.S. history. But Fox News, the leading information source for Republican voters, barely mentioned the story that day — once in the hour after 1 p.m., and once in the hour after 6 p.m.⁶ That’s hardly surprising, since Fox was so eager to spread Trump’s Big Lie from the get-go that it has been compelled to pay $787 million to the voting machine company it defamed along the way. Yet it shows how easily disinformation presents itself in America today. It’s hard to imagine how we can hope for most Americans to once again trust in the legitimacy of our democracy if major news purveyors amplify and encourage distortions of the truth by people we elect to lead us. Such hostility to truth-telling in so-called legacy media underscores the even greater threat posed by the new technology of artificial intelligence, which can create and spread falsehood almost instantaneously. It’s hard to imagine that today’s Information Disorder won’t metastasize into a pandemic-like ailment, with our democracy directly in the path of its spread. Like a physician using all the tools of modern medicine to attack a disease, then, we need to commit to combatting Information Disorder in the very short time before the devastation it can wreak becomes inevitable. In the face of so massive a challenge, we can individually play a role in the necessary healing by insisting on the cleansing salve of truth-telling — by those we elect to office, and by those in the media we reward with our attention. If that is the standard for casting our vote or choosing our channel, regardless of our ideological bent or issue preferences, we might begin to stamp out Information Disorder on a cellular level, until our public life is someday dominated by people who would be willing to take the Platonic Oath. It may not be all we can do, but it is something we all can do. For, as Plato noted, “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.” We need to fight the infection. |
Three Berries
Active member
The horrors of Willowbrook State School
Shut 30 years ago, the school became an institution where the borough's most vulnerable residents were abused, starved and neglected
www.silive.com
Willowbrook State School
The horrors endured at the Willowbrook State School will never be forgotten. Built for developmentally disabled children and adults in the 1930s, the school became an institution where the borough’s most vulnerable residents were abused, starved and neglected – the opposite of its intent.
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www.silive.com
Staten Island's disabled face an urgent crisis
Dr. Klaus Schwab or: How the CFR Taught Me to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
The World Economic Forum wasn’t simply the brainchild of Klaus Schwab, but was actually born out of a CIA-funded Harvard program headed by Henry Kissinger and pushed to fruition by John K. Galbraith and the "real" Dr. Strangelove, Herman Kahn.
unlimitedhangout.com
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Bavaria, Germany, on 27 May 1923 to Paula and Louis Kissinger. The family had been one of many Jewish families fleeing the persecution in Germany to arrive in America in 1938. Kissinger would change his first name to Henry at 15 years old when arriving in America by way of a brief emigration to London. His family would initially settle in Upper Manhattan with the young Henry Kissinger attending George Washington High School. In 1942, Kissinger would enroll in the City College of New York, but, in early 1943, was drafted into the US Army. On 19 June 1943, Kissinger would become a naturalised US citizen. He would soon be assigned to the 84th Infantry Division where he would be recruited by the legendary Fritz Kraemer to work in the military intelligence unit of the division. Kraemer would fight along Kissinger during the Battle of the Bulge and would later become extremely influential in American politics during the postwar era, influencing future politicians such as Donald Rumsfeld. Henry Kissinger would describe Kraemer as being “the greatest single influence on my formative years”, in a New Yorker article entitled, The Myth of Henry Kissinger, written in 2020.
Dr. Fritz G. A. Kraemer was the most influential German in the Pentagon from 1952 to 1978. Geostrategic Advisor to the U.S. Army Chief of Staff in the U.S. Department of Defense. The true "Dr. Strangelove" – uniquewith monocle and walking stick, a last Prussian at the Potomac River in Washington DC.
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Three Berries
Active member
Three Berries
Active member
Fluoride Lawsuit Against EPA: Alleged Corruption, Shocking Under Oath Federal Statements | ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
As WWII was coming to an end, FDR ordered that there
were to be no separate surrender terms or arrangements
for anyone.
Werner Von Bruan and Walter Dornberger who was responsible for the Peenemünde complex were each
provided with contracts to go to work for GE, in Dec. of 44. They were provided the contracts through
the law firm for GE, Sullivan and Cromwell.
The attorney was Allen Dulles.
FDR was the first of many presidents that Dulles lied to,
and who he openly defied and betrayed.
The difference between treachery and treason being
that one is done in peace time, whereas the other is
done in a time of war.
were to be no separate surrender terms or arrangements
for anyone.
Werner Von Bruan and Walter Dornberger who was responsible for the Peenemünde complex were each
provided with contracts to go to work for GE, in Dec. of 44. They were provided the contracts through
the law firm for GE, Sullivan and Cromwell.
The attorney was Allen Dulles.
FDR was the first of many presidents that Dulles lied to,
and who he openly defied and betrayed.
The difference between treachery and treason being
that one is done in peace time, whereas the other is
done in a time of war.
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moose eater
Well-known member
I've recently become perplexed with the euphemisms used by my US Senator (Lisa Murkowski -R Alaska) and many others, choosing to use the term 'fallen' in referencing the war dead and others.
They didn't stumble or trip. They were shot, blown up, run over by hardware, perhaps gassed, dismembered, perforated or penetrated, missing limbs and heads some of them etc. They didn't fall.
Why does a major producer of military hardware and purveyor of military solutions insist on using soft words to describe the real outcomes of their ploys?
moose eater
Well-known member
For a number of years, Roy of Hollywood played the series "Uncle Sam and the Swastika" as a Memorial Day weekend tradition.
This makes for a strong introduction to Dave Emory.
M11 Uncle Sam and the Swastika
Part 1 44:43 | Part 2 44:44 | Part 3 44:22 | Part 4 44:30
Part 5 44:47 | Part 6 44:09 | Part 7 44:33 | Part 8 44:26
Part 9 44:29 | Part 10 44:44 | Part 11 44:49 | Part 12 43:53
Part 13 44:49 | Part 14 44:26 | Part 15 32:01
This makes for a strong introduction to Dave Emory.
M11 Uncle Sam and the Swastika
Part 1 44:43 | Part 2 44:44 | Part 3 44:22 | Part 4 44:30
Part 5 44:47 | Part 6 44:09 | Part 7 44:33 | Part 8 44:26
Part 9 44:29 | Part 10 44:44 | Part 11 44:49 | Part 12 43:53
Part 13 44:49 | Part 14 44:26 | Part 15 32:01
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