This is the first of several high-level political analyses motivated by a need to better understand the politics that led to both the JFK assassination and the Nixon Watergate Affair. It deploys as the primary theoretical model, C. Wright Mills “Theory of the Power Elite” and the framework in Carroll Quigleys book “Tragedy and Hope.”
With these tools, Carl Oglesby posits an interesting thesis: that JFKs assassination, instead of being a random act by a lone nut was in fact a carefully planned and professional executed ongoing coup d' etat a la Americaine, a not so silent coup by the same forces responsible for the murders of JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X and possibly the demise and eventual destruction of the billionaire Howard Hughes.
What all of these events had in common was that they were links in a chain designed to replace one set of power elite (members of the old moneyed “peace promoting” Eastern Yankee Establishment) with another (the Nuevo Riche and newly arrived, “progress through war” Western Cowboys). Thus it is argued here that the events connecting Dallas, Memphis, Watergate and the demise of the Hughes empire, are but threads in a common fabric, growing and evolving directly out of the systematic corruption of American politics and out of contemporary political realities.
Along with Carl Oglesby's The Yankee [and] Cowboy War and Michael Piper Collins' Final Judgment, this is the best book ever written on the JFK Assassination. It may also be the best book ever written on the way the American political process ACTUALLY works. It is certainly the most honest one.
Deep Politics should be required reading for undergraduates in all American college and university Political Science courses. If for no reason other than that, in the course of getting at the bottom of the assassination of JFK, Professor Scott did not hesitate to expand the context of American political life to those unacceptable areas that lay just beneath the American consciousness and at the bottom of the American political undercurrents.
Once one is guided through his process of expanding the context of understanding (or actually “over-understanding”) the machinations of the American Political process (its corruption, deceptions, cover-ups, and other pretexts for explaining away its immorality), then the details of the assassination itself, are almost a foregone conclusions – little more than a logical afterthought.
5.0 out of 5 starsFree Online and Worth Buying to Support the Endeavor, March 14, 2014
This is a riveting movie with phenomenal visuals. I'd rather it had been an hour long instead of two, but in the spirit of slow food and slow Internet, certainly worth two hours of your time as an inspiration to change how you live for the rest of your life.
The movie is a personal contribution of Foster Gamble of the Proctor & Gamble family, but he grew a soul starting in elementary school and by the time he finished at Princeton, he was on his way to being a full-blown radical thinker with libertarian tendencies.
The first third of the movie is focused on free energy and all the pioneers from Telsa to Trombly to Bedeini to Hutchinson to Mallove who created proven sources of free energy only to suffer raids from the FBI (we do not make this stuff up) and other abuses including in some cases the torching of their labs and murder. I am hugely impressed by this portion of the movie, which includes short interviews, and I strongly recommend the movie for this part alone if you lack patience for what follows.
5.0 out of 5 starsMost Credible Consistent Truth-Teller I Read…., February 21, 2014
I have been following Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of Treasury in the Reagan Administration, for years. Originally he specialized in economic commentary, and I was much taken with his hard-hitting critical commentary and particularly his illumination of the false statistics being released by the Bush and Obama Administrations with respect to unemployment and other major measuring rods of our Nation's health. He was the commentator that introduced me to shadowstats.com, which documents 22.4% unemployment at a time when the Obama Administration claims 7.5% more or less — never mind lies that are 300% removed from reality.
Paul Craig Roberts is non-partisan in his critical commentary. I consider him a patriot with a brain, a capable author, and a voice much needed within all political circles, and most particularly within the Republican Party which is now at war with itself as the real common-sense conservatives recognize that the GOP has been hijacked by Zionists, Evangelicals, and other nut-cases who are all about personal privilege (including pedophilia) and personal profit and both personal and institutional power while disregarding the Constitution and betraying the Republic.
6 Stars on Substance, Revolutionary Illumination, February 20, 2014
This is a book for smart people who care about the Constitution, the Republic, and America the Beautiful — the America of good people with big hearts and strong souls who do the best they can while trapped amidst a complex of corrupt systems that now include most labor unions, most non-profits, and most religions — all the safety nets are gone. It is not an easy read but it could be the most important book you could read right now, as we prepare for the 2014-2020 civil war between the 99% and the 1%. For a sense of where I see Danny Sheehan in modern US history, see my review of Arsonist: The Most Dangerous Man in America. Danny Sheehan's is to the second American revolution as James Otis was to the Founding Fathers. The 1% and their political bi-opoly (the best of the servant class in the eyes of the 1%) are the target for a massive apolitical cross-cultural uprising rooted in natural law, social justice, and common sense.
Danny Sheehan
The book cannot be fully appreciated without first understanding that the author has been a major player in every fundamental Constitutional case having to do with public agency — the sovereignty of the public versus the assumption by the “government” that it has inherent powers once reserved for kings, and that the citizens “donate” (abdicate) their powers once they “elect” said government. I highly recommend Wikipedia's biography on Daniel Sheehan (attorney). This — or the timeline below — is what should have opened the book in the first place. I take the trouble to do this because the value of this book lies with the next generation, the generation now in college and graduate school (or unemployed and unOccupied), not in the generation that rose with Danny and failed to beat down New York money, Texas energy, and the Nazi hydra combined with elite embrace of drugs, money laundering, and pedophilia, among other high crimes against the Republic.
This is a story about what one American saw atop the tip of an iceberg called the “American national security state.” In the end, Ed Snowden, a 29-year old, $200,00/year High School dropout turned Computer Systems Administrator for Dell, and then Booz Allen Hamilton, both of which were under contract with the NSA, is little more than a proxy for the rest of us: the “paying customer” zombies and drones for the American “national security state.”
As he tried to “ride out” his tenure astride this violently bucking institutional Orwellian Frankenstein, Snowden quickly realized that he was losing ground to this secret self-fashioned protector of America's deepest values. In our life time, the NSA had joined a long string of other self-justifying, self-certifying, security institutions, like the CIA, the FBI, Swat Teams, the DEA, even local police intelligence units, especially in America's inner cities. In our lifetime, these institutions have acquired immense and unwarranted powers, often even unauthorized, unconstitutional and unearned and even criminal influence over our democratic institutions. Today, as this evolving behemoth huffs and puffs and bucks wildly out-of-control, Snowden decided he had no choice but to “jump ship,” taking with him a treasure trove of all that lay below the national security waterline.
What exactly is it that Ed Snowden saw that frightened him out of his wits and out of his $200k job and into the hands of a most curious savior of last resort: Vladimir Putin's Russia, the ex-Communist ex-superpower that, since it was forced to commit suicide as an empire, has now become a capitalist Wild West frontier, a land full of out-of-control oligarchs, which is exactly where Ed Snowden's favorite political hero, Ron Paul would like to take America — if he is ever elected president, that is.
As he now sits ensconced somewhere in Russia, one thought above all else must have occurred to Mr. Snowden: Is this some kind of sick joke? That me, a freedom-loving American, who willingly exercised my civic duty as a free-thinking defender of American values and the U.S. Constitution, conveying crimes being committed against that very Constitution, is now forced to run, hide and seek refuge in a failed ex-Communist state?
That Snowden's reality is true in a nation that is still living on moral credit, and that takes much more credit for being democratic than it deserves or its historical record can substantiate, is almost as embarrassing an irony and contradiction as seeing the U.S. being “in hock up to the hilt” to Reagan's other Axis-of-evil: the last standing Communist Police State, “Red China.” And lest we conveniently forget, said “Red China,” is the same state that less than three decades ago, we were referring to mockingly and derisively as being backwards? Now, that they are in bed with our capitalist oligarchs (the Red Chinese “Job Creators,” par excellence) rather incongruously, China has now become the world's leading capitalist country, holding 60% of our debt, while the U.S. slides noisily, defiantly, but nevertheless persistently and decidedly, backwards. There is an embedded poetic logic to this irony that Snowden's Ron Paul-Ayn Rand Libertarian sensibilities seems to have missed?
This book rather inarticulately unravels the story of exactly what it is that Ed Snowden saw; why he was so alarmed; and why he had no choice but to expose what he saw to the American public and then had to run. It tells how in the ultimate act of patriotic suicide, Snowden had to respectfully sue for the mercy of the “Obama Courts.” However, since he knew that with the “Obama Justice Department,” a fair trial was already off the table, he had no choice but to “punt early” by “going on the lam,” and seeking protection and a haven elsewhere.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has published a new story about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant catastrophe that took place in 2011.Ā Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster (The New Press) was written by David Lochbaum, head of the UCS's Nuclear Safety Project; Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist in UCS's Global Security Program; and journalist Susan Stranahan, who led the Philadelphia Inquirer's coverage of the Three Mile Island Accident in Dauphin, Pennsylvania.