May 6, 2012
By Jack Cashill
American Thinker:
Within hours after Dylan Byers of Politico created a mini-firestorm on Wednesday with the article titled "Obama: 'New York girlfriend' was composite," David Graham of the Atlantic had all but smothered the flames with his article, "Obama's Composite Girlfriend: How Politico and Drudge Created Fake News."
Graham argued that since Obama owned up to using composite characters in the forward of the book in question, his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, there was nothing shady about the practice. Not surprisingly, Graham overlooked the real problem. So did Byers. So did veteran Washington Post reporter David Maraniss, whose forthcoming book, Obama: The Story, ignited the controversy when it was excerpted in Vanity Fair. No, the real problem with Dreams is the inexcusable dishonesty throughout the book. The promiscuous use of composites is merely a symptom of the larger problem.
In the Vanity Fair excerpt, Maraniss profiles two former Obama girlfriends, heretofore unknown to Obama fans. One of them, the Australian Genevieve Cook, seems to have provided most of the grist for Obama's white "mystery woman," the only girlfriend mentioned in Dreams -- and she only briefly.
"Like many characters in the memoir," says Maraniss of Cook, "[Obama] introduced her to advance a theme, another thread of thought in his musings about race." What Maraniss does not say, and may not know, is that most, if not all, of the dramatic racial moments in the book are fully manufactured.
With the help of his muse and co-author, Bill Ayers, Obama wove a series of racial grievances into the narrative to toughen up Obama's life story. These stories aren't "compressed," as Obama claims. They are contrived. In his own memoir, Fugitive Days, Ayers likewise shows a casual disdain for facts. "Is this then the truth?" he asks. "Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me." When lesser memoirists do the same -- James Frey of A Million Little Pieces fame comes quickly to mind -- they get trashed on national TV by Oprah.
In the case of composite girl, for instance, Obama tells of how their relationship came to a bitter end over her failure to understand black angst. "We had a big fight, right in front of the theater, writes Obama. "When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn't be black, she said." Cook denies that this ever happened.
As Obama later explained to Maraniss, "I thought that [the anecdote] was a useful theme to make about sort of the interactions that I had in the relationships with white girlfriends." Frey felt much the same way. "A memoir literally means my story. A memoir is a subjective retelling of events," he protested, adding, "I never expected the book to come under the type of scrutiny that it has." When Obama used the theater story in Dreams, he never expected this kind of scrutiny, either. At the time, no one beyond his neighborhood knew who Obama was. Nor did Obama expect scrutiny when he shared in Dreams the following racial life lessons, all of which have since been proven false (For a fuller accounting, see Friday's WND):
As a nine year-old, he saw in Life magazine a story about a black man turned grotesquely white in a desperate chemical effort to lighten his appearance. Life never ran such an article. When challenged, Obama claimed that it was Ebony. Ebony ran no such article, either.
In his first days at his Hawaiian prep school, Obama shamefully rejects "Coretta," the only other black student, lest he be tainted by her blackness. Obama biographer David Remnick found the girl. She had no such memory. "He was my knight in shining armor," she gushed. In his book, A Kind and Just Parent, Ayers tells much the same story. He talks of a useful reading assignment about the travails of Clint, one of two black students in an otherwise all-white school, who rudely tries to distance himself from Marvin, the other black boy. Like Obama, Clint feels guilty on reflection.
After Columbia, Obama worked for what he describes in Dreams as "a consulting house to multinational corporations." He observes, "As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company." In full grievance mode, he considers his unique status "a source of shame." A former coworker (and fan) revealed Obama's account to be a "serious exaggeration." It was not a multinational corporation, but a "small company that published newsletters." Obama was not the only black. He did not, as claimed, have his own office, wear a jacket and tie, interview international businessmen, or write articles.
In Dreams, "Frank," the real-life Communist Frank Marshall Davis, slams college education. "Understand something, boy," he tells the college-bound Obama. You're not going to college to get educated. You're going there to get trained." Adds Frank, "They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit." Davis would never say this. In his memoir, Livin the Blues, he tells of the richly rewarding years he spent at Kansas State University: its "beautiful" campus, its "usually agreeable" students, its "excellent" journalism department. Later, he would see open-minded white college students as the hope for America's racial future. His college poetry-reading tours on the mainland in 1973 and 1974 were huge successes. It was Ayers who had the grudge against orthodox education. "Education is for self-activating explorers of life, for those who would challenge fate, for doers and activists, for citizens," he writes in his 1993 book To Teach. "Training," on the other hand, "is for slaves, for loyal subjects, for tractable employees, for willing consumers, for obedient soldiers." Sound familiar?
In Dreams, the composite character "Asante Moran" tells Obama, "The public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period." Social control -- no surprise here -- is an Ayers obsession. "The message to Black people was that at any moment and for any reason whatsoever your life or the lives of your loved ones could be randomly snuffed out," he writes in Fugitive Days. "The intention was social control through random intimidation and unpredictable violence."
To shore up the black base in a book calculated to get Obama elected mayor of Chicago, Obama suggests that the mystery white woman was the only white woman he dated. "There are several black ladies out there who've broken my heart just as good," Obama tells his half-sister Auma. This has yet to be proven false, but I doubt if even Maraniss will turn up any of these ladies.
Although I believe Maraniss wrote the Obama book in good faith, too much of what he learned from these two women in question is too convenient. The events they "remember" fill holes in the Obama narrative much too neatly. Maraniss has been misled by useful memories of old Obama friends before. In fact, on the eve of the election in 2008, he misinterpreted one such memory so completely it may have saved Obama's campaign -- but more on this later. Given Obama's elusiveness, Maraniss should have been more on guard here. He should have asked out loud why he was allowed to "find" sources no one else, including Obama's most prominent biographer, David Remnick, had.
When celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen went looking for the mystery woman post-election, he came up with nothing. "No one," he writes in Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, "including his roommate and closest friend at the time, Siddiqi, knew of this mysterious lover's existence." Siddiqi apparently regained his memory. Maraniss writes, "If Barack and Genevieve were in social occasions as a couple, it was almost always with the Pakistanis. ... Sohale Siddiqi was part of the crowd."
Here is what I wrote about this narrative hole in my book Deconstructing Obama: "Given Remnick's list of the allowable ways to interpret Dreams -- verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping -- I choose 'D' for the mystery woman, 'invention.' In the absence of any contrary information, best evidence argues for a creation largely of Ayers' contrivance."
Ayers' great lost love, Diana Oughton, a Weatherwoman killed in a 1970 bomb blast, matches the brief description of this woman in Dreams even better than Cook does, right down to the "specks of green" in her eyes and a multi-generational estate with a lake in the middle. "The house was very old, her grandfather's house," Obama writes of his girlfriend's country home. "He had inherited it from his grandfather." In real life, Oughton's father's grandfather built the main house on their estate, a 20-room Victorian mansion, which is now on the national historic register.
Maraniss makes a point to establish that Cook and Obama visit a family house in the country in the fall. He concedes that it is not her father's house, but her stepfather's, and that Cook has "flecks of brown, not green, in her hazel eyes," but otherwise Cook does seem to fill the bill. In its inimitably oily way, Media Matters noticed. The discovery of Cook, the reader is told, undermines "one of the main pieces of 'evidence'" in my book. Media Matters headlined its article, "The Obama Ex-Girlfriend Conspiracy Inevitably Falls Apart." My suspicion is that Team Obama green-lit the Cook story expecting the Media Matters spin to prevail, not Politico's. The White House could not have been pleased with the results. All the e-mails I received were congratulatory.
It should be noted too that Cook, an avid diarist, does not produce any diary entries to corroborate the trip to the country. At least, Maraniss does not share any. Nor is there a diary entry to back Cook's least credible recollection. In his memoir, Obama relates a preposterously detailed dream about his father that sets him on his quest to find his roots. "Genevieve recalled the morning he awoke from that dream," writes Maraniss of a day thirty years prior. "He woke up from that dream and started talking about it," Cook tells Maraniss. "I think he was haunted." This memory is much too useful. It validates the legitimacy of Obama's quest and gives him full ownership of the book's thesis.
Maraniss writes for the kind of audience that reads Vanity Fair. Most of them are barely aware that serious questions have been raised about Obama's identity, his origins, and the authorship of his two books. Maraniss makes no effort to enlighten them. Unwittingly or otherwise, he immunizes his audience against the charges that will continue to bubble up as we approach November.
Alex McNear, the second and lesser mystery girl, helps shore up the "Obama as writer" myth that got him get elected in 2008. McNear apparently knew Obama at Occidental College and reconnected with him when she spent the summer of 1982 in New York. Like Cook, she conveniently kept a "lasting record" of her relationship with Obama, McNear's in the form of 30-year-old letters. One of these letters from Obama, Maraniss reproduces at length. Here are some excerpts:
Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he [T. S. Eliot] accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality.
Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.
... but you're pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.
Graham of the Atlantic dismisses Obama's youthful take on writer T.S. Eliot as "awful, pretentious gibberish," and he is not far off the mark. But the letter leaves a different first impression on casual readers, as evidenced by this e-mail from a foreign correspondent supportive of my research:
Jack,
reading Obama's letters quoted in the Vanity Fair article
I wonder whether his share in the writing of Dreams
was not bigger than you (and I) thought.
I still think that the structure of the book points to Ayers
as the main "plotter" and that he is responsible for ideas
like having composite characters. He must have edited
Obama's ramblings and improved on them.
At first glance, I felt the same way this fellow did, and then I noticed a major red flag: the letter is entirely free of the problems with punctuation, noun-verb agreement, and participle use that dog Obama to this day. From Maraniss's account, Obama's would seem to have written the letter in his senior year at Columbia, the same year he wrote the one fully documented writing sample from that era, his 1,800-word article for the Columbia Sundial, "Breaking the War Mentality." Let me cite just a couple of quick samples from this article with commentary:
The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAM's energies alive.
This is one of an incredible five sentences in the piece in which the noun and verb do not agree. This should read, "The belief ... keeps SAM's energies alive." The random use of commas throws everything off. Plus, the word choice sucks all logic out of the sentence. The reader is told that these institutions are "moribund" -- that is, "nearly dead." How their debilitated state keeps the "energies" of the Students Against Militarism (SAM) "alive" is not exactly clear.
Regarding Columbia's possible compliance, one comment in particular hit upon an important point with the Solomon bill.
The subject of "hit upon," not an apt verb to begin with, should have been a person, not a "comment." Obama did not understand participle use.
What members of ARA and SAM try to do is infuse what they have learned about the current situation, bring the words of that formidable roster on the face of Butler Library, names like Thoreau, Jefferson, and Whitman, to bear on the twisted logic of which we are today a part.
I went back and reread the hard copy on this sentence to make sure it had not been deformed when digitized. This, alas, reads as weirdly as written. "Infuse" is the wrong word. One infuses something "into" something else. There should be an "and" after "situation," not a comma. Obama utterly mangles the "bring to bear" phase." It should read something like "bring the words of those formidable men on the face of the Butler Library -- Thoreau, Jefferson, Whitman -- to bear." As to how or whether we are part of a "twisted logic," I will leave that to the reader's imagination.
These same grammatical problems surface in Obama's awkward 1988 article "Why Organize" and in a published letter on affirmative action he later wrote while a student at Harvard Law. They continue to show up in his spoken words today. The letter that Maraniss reproduces, by contrast, is exquisitely punctuated and free of all such errors. The author of the letter even uses his or her participles correctly.
Given the questions around Obama's writing skills and the fact that Team Obama has been credibly accused of forging a birth certificate, Maraniss owes his reader some proof of this letter's legitimacy. He should tell us whether he saw a hard copy of the letter, whether it was typed or hand-written, and why it reads so much better than Obama's published work of the same period.
Maraniss has been down this road before. In a lengthy biographical piece on Obama for the Washington Post in August 2008, Maraniss mistakenly shored up the myth of a happy little Obama family, the myth on which Obama built his candidacy. Maraniss did so by relying on the testimony of Susan Botkin, a childhood friend of Obama's mother, Ann Dunham. In the process, he made an amateurish botch of the timeline of Obama's early years.
As Maraniss acknowledges, Obama Sr. left Hawaii for the mainland and ultimately Harvard in June 1962. Maraniss implies that the family had been living together since Obama's birth in August 1961. Based on Botkin's testimony, Maraniss contends that Dunham stopped by Seattle in the fall of 1962 on her way to visit her presumed husband at Harvard. Botkin reportedly tells Maraniss, "[She said] he had transferred to grad school and she was going to join him." Maraniss adds, "But as Botkin and others later remembered it, something happened in Cambridge, and Stanley Ann returned to Seattle. They saw her a few more times, and they thought she even tried to enroll in classes at the University of Washington, before she packed up and returned to Hawaii."
Other earlier interviews with Botkin, one of which was posted online, yield a much clearer picture. In these, Ann had come to visit "briefly" with Barry at Botkin's family home. Botkin placed the time as "a late August afternoon" in 1961 "when Barry was just a few weeks old," and she claimed to have changed Barry's diaper.
In April 2008, Botkin told the Seattle Times that Ann was excited about her husband's plans to return not to Harvard, but to Kenya. Botkin said the same thing to writer Michael Patrick Leahy, who interviewed her early in the summer of 2008. Here, too, Botkin adds a clarifying detail: "[Dunham] left [Hawaii] just as soon she had clearance from her doctor to travel with her new baby."
As Botkin acknowledged in several interviews, she never saw her friend again. The visit at Botkin's mother's house had to be in 1961, a year before Barack Sr. left for Harvard. Dunham arrived in Seattle in August 1961 and stayed for a year, enrolling at the University of Washington. Obama would not see Obama Sr. until he was ten.
What Maraniss needs to do is explain whether he was misled by Botkin or whether he willfully misinterpreted what she told him. He also should reveal whether he actually saw the letters that Dunham allegedly sent Botkin detailing her romance with Obama Sr., the only such proof of the same. If Maraniss can correct the record on Obama's origins and tell us a little more about those heart-breaking "black ladies out there," I may even buy the book.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
The Social Welfare State – Motivated Not By Compassion But Political Self-Interest
Economic Noise:
The siren song of Socialism contains the seeds of destruction that now threaten the very foundations of civilization. Socialism as a disease progresses slowly, but has been undway for more than 100 years. The malignancy is now metastasizing. Unfortunately we are the generations that will experience its pernicious outcomes.
Feckless politicians blame anyone and everything but themselves for the impending tragedy. They are responsible for the condition of the world. Ultimately, “we the people” are also responsible. We allowed these political opportunists to create this world threat.
What Went Wrong?
Deterioration in the quality and orientation of government is a long story which has been a long time developing. No one political villain can be blamed.
The decline did not begin with the rants and ravings of Karl Marx nor any of his disciples. The fountainhead was Otto von Bismarck in the late 19th Century.
Bismarck is considered the founder of the welfare state, which is modern day Socialism. He detested Marxian Socialism. He was a pragmatist, not an ideologue and is considered the founder of realpolitik which translates to “practical politics.” He was not an idealist trying to improve people’s lives. He acted purely in his own best interest.
The motive behind Bismarck’s concept of a social welfare state was simple. It was to placate the masses in order to obtain votes and solidify his hold on office. As he expressed it (emboldening added):
My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.
Bribery to create an illusion designed to expand the wealth and power of the State at the expense of productive people is hardly an admirable course of action or objective. His simple deception provided powerful means for subsequent political classes. Specifically it provided the means for politicians to grow and expand their power and wealth while solidifying their tenure in office.
Despite the pious claims of current welfare state advocates, Bismarck never espoused noble purposes beyond that of his political self-interest.
Politicians in Western democracies saw the power in Bismarck’s idea and patterned their careers on winning election and re-election via the Bismarckian bribe. Convincing the public that government existed for their sake and their welfare enabled expansion into areas previously considered off limits.
Tradition and law were eventually brushed aside. The US, constrained by a magnificently sculptured Constitution and a predisposition toward liberty, held out longer than its European counterparts. Its later start and slower progression is a fact often cited as a reason why the US economy was able grow from a backwoods beginning to an economic colossus by the early 1900s.
Progressives in the US initially used the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution as justification for a social welfare state. Deliberate ignorance and distortion of the Founders’ original intent was an important aspect of their attacks. Subsequent attacks used the argument that the Constitution was a “living document” meant to be changed to reflect modern day”needs.”
Eventually tradition and law succumbed to the incessant battering of progressive activists in the US. The people’s defense against government tyranny was weakened. Government was then emboldened to redefine itself in almost whatever fashion it chose.
Bismarck’s method of “bribery” was the model that altered the nature of politics practiced in democracies. With voter bribery, Government as Santa Claus was possible. The people loved this myth and the initial effects. Politicians loved buying votes as evidenced by political campaigns where competing political factions tried to outbid each other with more “freebies.”
The Advance of Socialism
For almost one hundred years, Bismarckian bribery, via an expanding welfare state, has been the predominant political strategy. Over time strategies grew bolder, ratcheting to higher levels each election cycle.
Today modern economies are being destroyed by Socialism as practiced via the welfare state. After generations of propagandizing Statism, the goodness of government, intervention as a necessary means to equity and prosperity and the need to invade and manage virtually every aspect of our lives, a majority of voters believe the myth.
Even the term “welfare state” was phony. It was a marketing euphemism to avoid the proper, but pejorative, description — Socialism. The euphemism conveniently conveyed the Bismarckian myth that government cared for and could take care of its citizens.
In reality, the social welfare state was backdoor Socialism. The euphemism also provided convenient cover for what amounted to political enrichment and job security.
The Effects of Socialism
A good description of the effects of current Socialism was provided by Joseph A. Harriss. Although Mr. Harriss described France and Sarkozy’s re-election chances, these conditions apply to most other leaders in European states as well as the US:
What no politician had the courage to say was that the French are witnessing, in slow motion, the end of their welfare state, known locally as the French Social Model. For the last 30 years it has been sustained through political sleight of hand and financed on credit. The French were assured they were entitled to work only 35 hours a week, take five weeks vacation, have single payer health care, pocket generous unemployment benefits, and enjoy a cornucopia of handout programs. As a result, they work on average six fewer weeks a year than the Germans, fewer hours even than the laidback Greeks.
Let the good times roll was the implicit program of politicians both left and right. Now the inevitable bill is coming due right at election time. There’s no way Sarkozy can avoid paying the political price.
Countries have now run out of both time and money. The malignancy of Socialism nears its ugly end, in the manner predicted by Margaret Thatcher:
The trouble with Socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.
All welfare states have attained her “sooner or later” point, with most at the “sooner” end of the spectrum.
Sarkozy is in political trouble for the same reason that politicians in all social welfare states are in trouble. Whether he is the right or wrong man for the job is irrelevant. He, like his peers, is a victim of history. He just happens to be the unfortunate one holding the bag when the music is ending. There is no right man for the job in France or anywhere else. The Socialist scam is imploding.
The three-legged stool that supported the fantasy of the social welfare state for the last 100+ years was based on the following:
Prosperity is available without effort.
Government creates prosperity.
Government will take care of its people
Politicians were able to support this hoax only with “other people’s money.” It is now apparent to many that none of these premises were true.
The money obtained to sustain the myth has seriously damaged economies. Some of it was obtained by destroying the seed capital provided by previous generations. Some of it was obtained via obscene levels of taxation. Much of it was obtained via borrowing funds that were never intended to be paid back. The ability to obtain additional funds from these sources is dubious, particularly the last one.
The funds were obtained via coercion and under false pretences. Inarguably, the social welfare state has crippled modern economies. The game is about over as the scam becomes more apparent by the day.
The damage done to our political system is likely irreparable. Consider current day politicians as compared to our Founders. George Washington was offered a kingship and turned it down. How many current politicians would reject a similar offer?
Current politicians are indistinguishable from clever street hustlers with inflated self-images of their importance and wisdom. They pass laws in areas they cannot possibly understand, often not even bothering to read the bills on which they vote. One wonders whether they would even understand them.
Self aggrandizement has transformed into pay and perquisites that even some well-to-do are unable to obtain. The immoral economic rewards of public office, both above and below the table, have turned politics into a career rather than public service. The political class has set themselves apart as elites in every regard, including protection from laws the rest of us must follow.
As bad as the changes to the political system and the character of politicians have been, the effects of Bismarckian bribes have ruined modern day economies. Here are a few examples:
The incentive structure and work ethic for large sections of each country’s population has been destroyed. Instead of having citizens with the natural human spirit to progress, all countries now have a zombie class, untrained, unmotivated citizens living off government handouts.
The regulatory state and its onerous taxes has destroyed productivity. Entrepreneurs and risk capital have fled to climes where they are treated fairly. Much of the manufacturing base has been outsourced to emerging countries where jobs and not snail darters are appreciated.
The zombie class is growing. The “takers” rather than “makers” find it more comfortable (or lucrative) to not work but to collect welfare. This class has forgotten or never learned work habits and consider themselves entitled to live at the expense of others.
The shrinking productive sector is forced to support the growing zombie class. Up til now, much of this support has come via enormous government borrowings, sheltering the productive class from the real costs that they will eventually have to bear. The era of leverage is ending and with it will come lack of support for the government-created and supported zombies.
Developed economies have been crippled and hollowed out to the point where decades of slow or no growth is the best that can be expected. Many of these economies will implode.
Standards of living are decreasing and have been for a while. Bill Bonner points out that the average real hourly wages of non-high school graduates has declined by 47% percent over the last 32 years! Separately it has been shown that the average weekly earnings in this country, again in real terms, are below where they were in 1966.
Governments have bankrupted themselves, their financial systems and their central banks. They attempt to continue the charade by having bankrupt central banks bail out bankrupt financial systems so that they can purchase bankrupt government securities.
Despite all the propaganda from the Statist machine, government produces nothing and never has. It depends upon a thriving private sector and bond market to play Santa Claus and continue the pretension that it is the source of prosperity.
The fraud cannot go on much longer because governments have crippled the golden goose via onerous rules, regulations and taxes. For three or four decades government was able to hide the problem by spending more than it took in. Governments around the world have reached the point where spending levels can no longer be sustained via tax revenues and bond markets. The latter source has practically dried up for some governments. Eventually it will for all.
France and other social welfare states (including the US) are virtually tapped out. Living standards are going down and insolvent Governments can no longer hide this fact via the charade of “debt” prosperity.
The dirty secret of Socialism has become apparent: It was never anything more than a political gimmick to gain or retain office and power. Politics has turned into what Bismark envisioned – an elaborate scam of voter bribery.
As a result, the world faces sovereign defaults, financial system collapse, civil unrest and a Depression that will make the 1930s look mild in comparison.
Thanks Otto von Bismarck for providing the the clever idea to our modern day criminal class who pose as politicians. One can only hope that civilization is not destroyed in the coming financial apocalypse.
This post originally appeared on American Thinker.
Feckless politicians blame anyone and everything but themselves for the impending tragedy. They are responsible for the condition of the world. Ultimately, “we the people” are also responsible. We allowed these political opportunists to create this world threat.
What Went Wrong?
The decline did not begin with the rants and ravings of Karl Marx nor any of his disciples. The fountainhead was Otto von Bismarck in the late 19th Century.
Bismarck is considered the founder of the welfare state, which is modern day Socialism. He detested Marxian Socialism. He was a pragmatist, not an ideologue and is considered the founder of realpolitik which translates to “practical politics.” He was not an idealist trying to improve people’s lives. He acted purely in his own best interest.
The motive behind Bismarck’s concept of a social welfare state was simple. It was to placate the masses in order to obtain votes and solidify his hold on office. As he expressed it (emboldening added):
My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.
Bribery to create an illusion designed to expand the wealth and power of the State at the expense of productive people is hardly an admirable course of action or objective. His simple deception provided powerful means for subsequent political classes. Specifically it provided the means for politicians to grow and expand their power and wealth while solidifying their tenure in office.
Despite the pious claims of current welfare state advocates, Bismarck never espoused noble purposes beyond that of his political self-interest.
Politicians in Western democracies saw the power in Bismarck’s idea and patterned their careers on winning election and re-election via the Bismarckian bribe. Convincing the public that government existed for their sake and their welfare enabled expansion into areas previously considered off limits.
Tradition and law were eventually brushed aside. The US, constrained by a magnificently sculptured Constitution and a predisposition toward liberty, held out longer than its European counterparts. Its later start and slower progression is a fact often cited as a reason why the US economy was able grow from a backwoods beginning to an economic colossus by the early 1900s.
Progressives in the US initially used the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution as justification for a social welfare state. Deliberate ignorance and distortion of the Founders’ original intent was an important aspect of their attacks. Subsequent attacks used the argument that the Constitution was a “living document” meant to be changed to reflect modern day”needs.”
Eventually tradition and law succumbed to the incessant battering of progressive activists in the US. The people’s defense against government tyranny was weakened. Government was then emboldened to redefine itself in almost whatever fashion it chose.
Bismarck’s method of “bribery” was the model that altered the nature of politics practiced in democracies. With voter bribery, Government as Santa Claus was possible. The people loved this myth and the initial effects. Politicians loved buying votes as evidenced by political campaigns where competing political factions tried to outbid each other with more “freebies.”
The Advance of Socialism
For almost one hundred years, Bismarckian bribery, via an expanding welfare state, has been the predominant political strategy. Over time strategies grew bolder, ratcheting to higher levels each election cycle.
Today modern economies are being destroyed by Socialism as practiced via the welfare state. After generations of propagandizing Statism, the goodness of government, intervention as a necessary means to equity and prosperity and the need to invade and manage virtually every aspect of our lives, a majority of voters believe the myth.
Even the term “welfare state” was phony. It was a marketing euphemism to avoid the proper, but pejorative, description — Socialism. The euphemism conveniently conveyed the Bismarckian myth that government cared for and could take care of its citizens.
In reality, the social welfare state was backdoor Socialism. The euphemism also provided convenient cover for what amounted to political enrichment and job security.
The Effects of Socialism
A good description of the effects of current Socialism was provided by Joseph A. Harriss. Although Mr. Harriss described France and Sarkozy’s re-election chances, these conditions apply to most other leaders in European states as well as the US:
What no politician had the courage to say was that the French are witnessing, in slow motion, the end of their welfare state, known locally as the French Social Model. For the last 30 years it has been sustained through political sleight of hand and financed on credit. The French were assured they were entitled to work only 35 hours a week, take five weeks vacation, have single payer health care, pocket generous unemployment benefits, and enjoy a cornucopia of handout programs. As a result, they work on average six fewer weeks a year than the Germans, fewer hours even than the laidback Greeks.
Let the good times roll was the implicit program of politicians both left and right. Now the inevitable bill is coming due right at election time. There’s no way Sarkozy can avoid paying the political price.
The trouble with Socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.
All welfare states have attained her “sooner or later” point, with most at the “sooner” end of the spectrum.
Sarkozy is in political trouble for the same reason that politicians in all social welfare states are in trouble. Whether he is the right or wrong man for the job is irrelevant. He, like his peers, is a victim of history. He just happens to be the unfortunate one holding the bag when the music is ending. There is no right man for the job in France or anywhere else. The Socialist scam is imploding.
The three-legged stool that supported the fantasy of the social welfare state for the last 100+ years was based on the following:
Prosperity is available without effort.
Government creates prosperity.
Government will take care of its people
Politicians were able to support this hoax only with “other people’s money.” It is now apparent to many that none of these premises were true.
The money obtained to sustain the myth has seriously damaged economies. Some of it was obtained by destroying the seed capital provided by previous generations. Some of it was obtained via obscene levels of taxation. Much of it was obtained via borrowing funds that were never intended to be paid back. The ability to obtain additional funds from these sources is dubious, particularly the last one.
The funds were obtained via coercion and under false pretences. Inarguably, the social welfare state has crippled modern economies. The game is about over as the scam becomes more apparent by the day.
The damage done to our political system is likely irreparable. Consider current day politicians as compared to our Founders. George Washington was offered a kingship and turned it down. How many current politicians would reject a similar offer?
Current politicians are indistinguishable from clever street hustlers with inflated self-images of their importance and wisdom. They pass laws in areas they cannot possibly understand, often not even bothering to read the bills on which they vote. One wonders whether they would even understand them.
Self aggrandizement has transformed into pay and perquisites that even some well-to-do are unable to obtain. The immoral economic rewards of public office, both above and below the table, have turned politics into a career rather than public service. The political class has set themselves apart as elites in every regard, including protection from laws the rest of us must follow.
As bad as the changes to the political system and the character of politicians have been, the effects of Bismarckian bribes have ruined modern day economies. Here are a few examples:
The incentive structure and work ethic for large sections of each country’s population has been destroyed. Instead of having citizens with the natural human spirit to progress, all countries now have a zombie class, untrained, unmotivated citizens living off government handouts.
The regulatory state and its onerous taxes has destroyed productivity. Entrepreneurs and risk capital have fled to climes where they are treated fairly. Much of the manufacturing base has been outsourced to emerging countries where jobs and not snail darters are appreciated.
The zombie class is growing. The “takers” rather than “makers” find it more comfortable (or lucrative) to not work but to collect welfare. This class has forgotten or never learned work habits and consider themselves entitled to live at the expense of others.
The shrinking productive sector is forced to support the growing zombie class. Up til now, much of this support has come via enormous government borrowings, sheltering the productive class from the real costs that they will eventually have to bear. The era of leverage is ending and with it will come lack of support for the government-created and supported zombies.
Developed economies have been crippled and hollowed out to the point where decades of slow or no growth is the best that can be expected. Many of these economies will implode.
Standards of living are decreasing and have been for a while. Bill Bonner points out that the average real hourly wages of non-high school graduates has declined by 47% percent over the last 32 years! Separately it has been shown that the average weekly earnings in this country, again in real terms, are below where they were in 1966.
Governments have bankrupted themselves, their financial systems and their central banks. They attempt to continue the charade by having bankrupt central banks bail out bankrupt financial systems so that they can purchase bankrupt government securities.
Despite all the propaganda from the Statist machine, government produces nothing and never has. It depends upon a thriving private sector and bond market to play Santa Claus and continue the pretension that it is the source of prosperity.
The fraud cannot go on much longer because governments have crippled the golden goose via onerous rules, regulations and taxes. For three or four decades government was able to hide the problem by spending more than it took in. Governments around the world have reached the point where spending levels can no longer be sustained via tax revenues and bond markets. The latter source has practically dried up for some governments. Eventually it will for all.
France and other social welfare states (including the US) are virtually tapped out. Living standards are going down and insolvent Governments can no longer hide this fact via the charade of “debt” prosperity.
The dirty secret of Socialism has become apparent: It was never anything more than a political gimmick to gain or retain office and power. Politics has turned into what Bismark envisioned – an elaborate scam of voter bribery.
As a result, the world faces sovereign defaults, financial system collapse, civil unrest and a Depression that will make the 1930s look mild in comparison.
Thanks Otto von Bismarck for providing the the clever idea to our modern day criminal class who pose as politicians. One can only hope that civilization is not destroyed in the coming financial apocalypse.
This post originally appeared on American Thinker.
George Will on the People’s Rights Amendment
Ilya Somin • May 5, 2012 5:46 pm
George Will recently published a good Washington Post column on the ill-conceived People’s Rights Amendment, which Eugene Volokh and I blogged about here and here. Will points out several serious flaws in the proposal, and builds on some of the points we made:
Controversies can be wonderfully clarified when people follow the logic of illogical premises to perverse conclusions….
Joined by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), 26 other Democrats and one Republican, [Rep. James McGovern] proposes a constitutional amendment to radically contract First Amendment protections. His purpose is to vastly expand government’s power — i.e., the power of incumbent legislators — to write laws regulating, rationing or even proscribing speech in elections that determine the composition of the legislature and the rest of the government. McGovern’s proposal vindicates those who say that most campaign-finance “reforms” are incompatible with the First Amendment…
His “People’s Rights Amendment” declares that the Constitution protects only the rights of “natural persons,” not such persons organized in corporations…
McGovern stresses that his amendment decrees that “all corporate entities — for-profit and nonprofit alike” — have no constitutional rights. So Congress — and state legislatures and local governments — could regulate to the point of proscription political speech, or any other speech, by the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association, NARAL Pro-Choice America or any of the other tens of thousands of nonprofit corporate advocacy groups, including political parties and campaign committees.
Newspapers, magazines, broadcasting entities, online journalism operations — and most religious institutions — are corporate entities. McGovern’s amendment would strip them of all constitutional rights. By doing so, the amendment would empower the government to do much more than proscribe speech. Ilya Somin of George Mason University Law School, writing for the Volokh Conspiracy blog, notes that government, unleashed by McGovern’s amendment, could regulate religious practices at most houses of
worship, conduct whatever searches it wants, reasonable or not, of corporate entities, and seize corporate-owned property for whatever it deems public uses — without paying compensation. Yes, McGovern’s scythe would mow down the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as well as the First.
One can argue for the constitutionality of campaign finance regulations on several grounds. But doing so on the basis that people organized into corporate entities have no constitutional rights does indeed lead us down the dangerous path dramatically illustrated by the Peoples’ Rights Amendment.
SOURCE: Volokh.Com
George Will recently published a good Washington Post column on the ill-conceived People’s Rights Amendment, which Eugene Volokh and I blogged about here and here. Will points out several serious flaws in the proposal, and builds on some of the points we made:
Controversies can be wonderfully clarified when people follow the logic of illogical premises to perverse conclusions….
Joined by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), 26 other Democrats and one Republican, [Rep. James McGovern] proposes a constitutional amendment to radically contract First Amendment protections. His purpose is to vastly expand government’s power — i.e., the power of incumbent legislators — to write laws regulating, rationing or even proscribing speech in elections that determine the composition of the legislature and the rest of the government. McGovern’s proposal vindicates those who say that most campaign-finance “reforms” are incompatible with the First Amendment…
His “People’s Rights Amendment” declares that the Constitution protects only the rights of “natural persons,” not such persons organized in corporations…
McGovern stresses that his amendment decrees that “all corporate entities — for-profit and nonprofit alike” — have no constitutional rights. So Congress — and state legislatures and local governments — could regulate to the point of proscription political speech, or any other speech, by the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association, NARAL Pro-Choice America or any of the other tens of thousands of nonprofit corporate advocacy groups, including political parties and campaign committees.
Newspapers, magazines, broadcasting entities, online journalism operations — and most religious institutions — are corporate entities. McGovern’s amendment would strip them of all constitutional rights. By doing so, the amendment would empower the government to do much more than proscribe speech. Ilya Somin of George Mason University Law School, writing for the Volokh Conspiracy blog, notes that government, unleashed by McGovern’s amendment, could regulate religious practices at most houses of
worship, conduct whatever searches it wants, reasonable or not, of corporate entities, and seize corporate-owned property for whatever it deems public uses — without paying compensation. Yes, McGovern’s scythe would mow down the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as well as the First.
One can argue for the constitutionality of campaign finance regulations on several grounds. But doing so on the basis that people organized into corporate entities have no constitutional rights does indeed lead us down the dangerous path dramatically illustrated by the Peoples’ Rights Amendment.
SOURCE: Volokh.Com
UN Food Monitor to Investigate Hunger...in Canada?
By Aaron Goldstein on 5.5.12 @ 10:18PM
The Spectacle Blog
Check out this article in the National Post written by Hillel Neuer, the Executive Director of UN Watch which is a NGO based in Geneva.
Despite the fact there is a food and water shortage in Syria, Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on Food, will be turning his attention to Canada. Beginning tomorrow, de Schutter will be north of the border for 11 days to promote the right to food for all Canadians. You know the UN has its priorities backwards if it's more concerned about access to food in Halifax than in Hama.
The Spectacle Blog
Check out this article in the National Post written by Hillel Neuer, the Executive Director of UN Watch which is a NGO based in Geneva.
Despite the fact there is a food and water shortage in Syria, Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on Food, will be turning his attention to Canada. Beginning tomorrow, de Schutter will be north of the border for 11 days to promote the right to food for all Canadians. You know the UN has its priorities backwards if it's more concerned about access to food in Halifax than in Hama.
UN tells US to return 'stolen land' to Indians
Saturday, May 05, 2012
This is rich.... The United Nations has told the United States that it should return 'stolen land' to the Indians Native Americans (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
A United Nations investigator probing discrimination against Native Americans has called on the US government to return some of the land stolen from Indian tribes as a step toward combatting continuing and systemic racial discrimination.
Only some?
James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, said no member of the US Congress would meet him as he investigated the part played by the government in the considerable difficulties faced by Indian tribes.
Anaya said that in nearly two weeks of visiting Indian reservations, indigenous communities in Alaska and Hawaii, and Native Americans now living in cities, he encountered people who suffered a history of dispossession of their lands and resources, the breakdown of their societies and "numerous instances of outright brutality, all grounded on racial discrimination".
"It's a racial discrimination that they feel is both systemic and also specific instances of ongoing discrimination that is felt at the individual level," he said.
So is Obama going to give the Native Americans back any land? How about if he cancels the Louisiana purchase (yes, I know France was the seller, but under this scenario, they had no rights to it either) and returns all of that to the Indians, we'll give the 'Palestinians' a little bit of territory too. Like say 50% of the original British mandate. What's that? We already gave up 78% when they broke off the 'Kingdom of Jordan'? Oh. Never mind.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to make light of he poor conditions under which Native Americans live (and if you read the entire article, you will see that those conditions really are poor). But give them land, as if that's going to solve the problems? That's absurd.
Here's the best part.
Anaya said he had received "exemplary cooperation" from the Obama administration but he declined to speculate on why no members of Congress would meet him.
Is part of Obama's second term plans giving land to Native Americans? Who does he think is going to go along with that?
And what will Congress say if the UN General Assembly passes a resolution calling on the US to give land to the Native Americans that has been in other people's hands for more than 100 years? Maybe that will finally be the impetus for the US to quit the farcical UN.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ Israel Matzav
This is rich.... The United Nations has told the United States that it should return 'stolen land' to the Indians Native Americans (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
A United Nations investigator probing discrimination against Native Americans has called on the US government to return some of the land stolen from Indian tribes as a step toward combatting continuing and systemic racial discrimination.
Only some?
James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, said no member of the US Congress would meet him as he investigated the part played by the government in the considerable difficulties faced by Indian tribes.
Anaya said that in nearly two weeks of visiting Indian reservations, indigenous communities in Alaska and Hawaii, and Native Americans now living in cities, he encountered people who suffered a history of dispossession of their lands and resources, the breakdown of their societies and "numerous instances of outright brutality, all grounded on racial discrimination".
"It's a racial discrimination that they feel is both systemic and also specific instances of ongoing discrimination that is felt at the individual level," he said.
So is Obama going to give the Native Americans back any land? How about if he cancels the Louisiana purchase (yes, I know France was the seller, but under this scenario, they had no rights to it either) and returns all of that to the Indians, we'll give the 'Palestinians' a little bit of territory too. Like say 50% of the original British mandate. What's that? We already gave up 78% when they broke off the 'Kingdom of Jordan'? Oh. Never mind.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to make light of he poor conditions under which Native Americans live (and if you read the entire article, you will see that those conditions really are poor). But give them land, as if that's going to solve the problems? That's absurd.
Here's the best part.
Anaya said he had received "exemplary cooperation" from the Obama administration but he declined to speculate on why no members of Congress would meet him.
Is part of Obama's second term plans giving land to Native Americans? Who does he think is going to go along with that?
And what will Congress say if the UN General Assembly passes a resolution calling on the US to give land to the Native Americans that has been in other people's hands for more than 100 years? Maybe that will finally be the impetus for the US to quit the farcical UN.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ Israel Matzav
Keystone pipeline controversy returns to dog Obama
by Hayley Peterson - Staff Writer
May 5th, 2012 at 6:00pm
Washington Examiner:
A truck travels along highway 14, several miles north of Neligh, Neb., Thursday, April 19, 2012, near the proposed new route for the Keystone XL pipeline. After it's original route through the Nebraska sand hills was blocked, Calgary-based TransCanada submitted to Nebraska environmental officials on Wednesday it's preferred alternative route that runs north of Neligh. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)
President Obama is back at the center of the controversy surrounding the Keystone XL oil pipeline with labor leaders pushing a new route for the pipeline, which environmental activists adamantly oppose.
Obama rejected the proposed northern half of the pipeline in January, citing environmental concerns it would contaminate a drinking water source in Nebraska.
The issue is resurfacing because TransCanada, the company that wants to build the $5.3 billion project linking Canada to Steele City, Neb., has proposed a new route for the disputed leg of the pipeline.
Labor unions and manufacturing companies are hailing the new proposal and lobbying Obama to approve it, but environmentalists say their concerns remain.
"The Keystone project will deliver 20,000 manufacturing and construction jobs -- with an additional 118,000 indirect jobs -- to an economy that badly needs them," said Jay Timmons, president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers. "Second chances don't come around very often, and manufacturers are urging the president to do the right thing and approve the Keystone XL pipeline."
Timmons said Obama buckled under political pressure in January when he rejected the pipeline.
"The president said no to a clear opportunity to create jobs and improve energy security," he said.
Proponents say the pipeline would deliver a glut of crude oil from Canada to refineries in Texas and help push down the price of gas. But environmental groups say the new route is unacceptable and that the pipeline could still contaminate drinking water in Nebraska.
"There is no amount of jobs that can replace the clean water that our state relies on for the main economic driver, which is agriculture," said Jane Kleeb, executive director of BOLD Nebraska, a group opposing the pipeline.
Another group, Friends of the Earth, said costly oil spills remain a concern.
"It's time to stop beating around the bush: TransCanada's behavior, and that of the federal agencies overseeing the review process for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, has been nothing short of criminal," said Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth. "TransCanada's 'new' route for the northern leg of the pipeline still crosses the sensitive Sandhills and the Ogallala, threatening our heartland with costly spills."
Nebraska officials say their review of the alternative route will likely take nine months, and the U.S. State Department can't move forward with TransCanda's proposal until Nebraska's review concludes. That means it's likely there will be no decision on the pipeline before Election Day. But that won't stop Republicans from making it a campaign issue.
"We'll build it, if I have to build it myself," said presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
May 5th, 2012 at 6:00pm
Washington Examiner:
President Obama is back at the center of the controversy surrounding the Keystone XL oil pipeline with labor leaders pushing a new route for the pipeline, which environmental activists adamantly oppose.
Obama rejected the proposed northern half of the pipeline in January, citing environmental concerns it would contaminate a drinking water source in Nebraska.
The issue is resurfacing because TransCanada, the company that wants to build the $5.3 billion project linking Canada to Steele City, Neb., has proposed a new route for the disputed leg of the pipeline.
Labor unions and manufacturing companies are hailing the new proposal and lobbying Obama to approve it, but environmentalists say their concerns remain.
"The Keystone project will deliver 20,000 manufacturing and construction jobs -- with an additional 118,000 indirect jobs -- to an economy that badly needs them," said Jay Timmons, president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers. "Second chances don't come around very often, and manufacturers are urging the president to do the right thing and approve the Keystone XL pipeline."
Timmons said Obama buckled under political pressure in January when he rejected the pipeline.
"The president said no to a clear opportunity to create jobs and improve energy security," he said.
Proponents say the pipeline would deliver a glut of crude oil from Canada to refineries in Texas and help push down the price of gas. But environmental groups say the new route is unacceptable and that the pipeline could still contaminate drinking water in Nebraska.
"There is no amount of jobs that can replace the clean water that our state relies on for the main economic driver, which is agriculture," said Jane Kleeb, executive director of BOLD Nebraska, a group opposing the pipeline.
Another group, Friends of the Earth, said costly oil spills remain a concern.
"It's time to stop beating around the bush: TransCanada's behavior, and that of the federal agencies overseeing the review process for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, has been nothing short of criminal," said Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth. "TransCanada's 'new' route for the northern leg of the pipeline still crosses the sensitive Sandhills and the Ogallala, threatening our heartland with costly spills."
Nebraska officials say their review of the alternative route will likely take nine months, and the U.S. State Department can't move forward with TransCanda's proposal until Nebraska's review concludes. That means it's likely there will be no decision on the pipeline before Election Day. But that won't stop Republicans from making it a campaign issue.
"We'll build it, if I have to build it myself," said presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
Top General: Obama Knew About OBL’s Hideout in Abbottabad Since Summer of 2010 – Refused to Act Until May (Video)
Posted by Jim Hoft
May 5, 2012, 8:09 PM
The Gateway Pundit:
General Jack Keane (Retired), the former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, told Mike Huckabee tonight that Barack Obama knew about Osama Bin Laden’s hideout since the summer of 2010. But Barack Obama refused to act for several months. He wanted absolute proof first that Osama was living there. It wasn’t until May of 2011 that he agreed to attack Bin Laden’s compound, almost a year later.
This follows the news from yesterday that the Obama Administration drafted a memo to protect the president from blame if the mission to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden would have failed.
May 5, 2012, 8:09 PM
The Gateway Pundit:
General Jack Keane (Retired), the former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, told Mike Huckabee tonight that Barack Obama knew about Osama Bin Laden’s hideout since the summer of 2010. But Barack Obama refused to act for several months. He wanted absolute proof first that Osama was living there. It wasn’t until May of 2011 that he agreed to attack Bin Laden’s compound, almost a year later.
This follows the news from yesterday that the Obama Administration drafted a memo to protect the president from blame if the mission to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden would have failed.
9/11 defendants ignore judge at Guantanamo hearing
May 05, 2012 -- 6:31 PM
Washington Examiner
In this photo of a sketch by courtroom artist Janet Hamlin and reviewed by the U.S. Department of Defense, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed reads a document during his military hearing at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, Saturday, May 5, 2012. The self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed repeatedly declined to respond to a judge's questions Saturday and his co-defendant Walid bin Attash was briefly restrained at a military hearing as five men charged with the worst terror attack in U.S. history appeared in public for the first time in more than three years. (AP Photo/Janet Hamlin, Pool)
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — They knelt in prayer, ignored the judge and wouldn't listen to Arabic translations as they confronted nearly 3,000 counts of murder. The self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and four co-defendants defiantly disrupted an arraignment that dragged into Saturday night in the opening act of the long-stalled effort to prosecute them in a military court.
Their refusal to participate in the hearing helped bring their arraignment to a crawl. It took more than eight hours for the judge at the U.S. military base in Cuba to ask the men to enter pleas to 2,976 counts of murder and terrorism in the 2001 attacks that sent hijacked jetliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The men all deferred their pleas.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted 9/11 architect, cast off his earphones providing Arabic translations of the proceeding and refused to answer Army Col. James Pohl's questions or acknowledge he understood them. All five men refused to participate in the hearing; two passed around a copy of The Economist magazine and leafed through the articles.
Walid bin Attash was confined to a restraint chair when he came into court, released only after he promised to behave.
Ramzi Binalshibh knelt in prayer alongside his defense table with Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali in the middle of the hearing, then launched into an incoherent tirade about the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and declared he was in danger. "Maybe they will kill me and say I committed suicide," he said in a mix of Arabic and broken English.
The detainees' lawyers spent hours questioning the judge about his qualifications to hear the case and suggested their clients were being mistreated at the hearing, in a strategy that could pave the way for future appeals.
It was the defendants' first appearance in more than three years after stalled efforts to try them for the terror attacks, in which hijackers steered four commercial jets into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a western Pennsylvania field. Nearly 3,000 people were killed.
The defendants' behavior outraged 9/11 family members watching on closed-circuit video feeds around the United States at East Coast military bases. One viewer shouted, "C,mon, are you kidding me?" at the Fort Hamilton base in Brooklyn.
"They're engaging in jihad in a courtroom," said Debra Burlingame, whose brother, Charles, was the pilot of the plane that flew into the Pentagon. She watched the proceeding from Brooklyn.
The Obama administration renewed plans to try the men at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay after a bid to try the men in New York City blocks from the trade center site faced political opposition. It adopted new rules with Congress that forbade testimony obtained through torture or cruel treatment, and argued the defendants could be tried as fairly here as in a civilian court.
Human rights groups and defense lawyers say the secrecy of Guantanamo and the military commissions, or tribunals, will make it impossible to defend them. They argued the U.S. kept the case out of civilian court to prevent disclosure of the treatment of prisoners like Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.
Mohammed's civilian lawyer, David Nevin, said he believed Mohammed was not responding because he believes the tribunal is unfair. Jim Harrington, representing Binalshibh, said his client would not respond to questions "without addressing the issues of confinement."
Cheryl Bormann, a civilian attorney for bin Attash, appeared in a conservative Islamic outfit that left only her face uncovered and she asked the court to order other women present to wear "appropriate" clothing so that defendants do not have to avert their eyes "for fear of committing a sin under their faith."
Pohl warned he would not permit defendants to block the hearing and would continue without his participation.
"One cannot choose not to participate and frustrate the normal course of business," Pohl said.
Pohl brought translators into the courtroom to interpret the proceedings live once the men refused to use earpieces attempted to stick to the standard script for tribunals, asking the defendants if they understood their rights to counsel and would accept the attorneys appointed for them.
The men were silent.
In the past, during the failed first effort to prosecute them at the U.S. base in Cuba, Mohammed has mocked the tribunal and said he and his co-defendants would plead guilty and welcome execution. But there were signs that at least some of the defense teams were preparing for a lengthy fight, planning challenges of the military tribunals and the secrecy that shrouds the case.
Defendants typically do not enter a plea during their arraignment but are offered the chance to do so. Lawyers for the men said they were prohibited by secrecy rules from disclosing their clients' intentions.
Army Capt. Jason Wright, one of Mohammed's Pentagon-appointed lawyers, declined to comment on the case.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced in 2009 that Mohammed and his co-defendants would be tried blocks from the site of the destroyed trade center in downtown Manhattan, but the plan was shelved after New York officials cited huge costs to secure the neighborhood and family opposition to trying the suspects in the U.S.
Congress then blocked the transfer of any prisoners from Guantanamo to the U.S., forcing the Obama administration to refile the charges under a reformed military commission system.
Mohammed, a Pakistani citizen who grew up in Kuwait and attended college in Greensboro, North Carolina, has admitted to military authorities that he was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks "from A to Z," as well as about 30 other plots, and that he personally killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Mohammed was captured in 2003 in Pakistan.
Binalshibh was allegedly chosen to be a hijacker but couldn't get a U.S. visa and ended up providing assistance such as finding flight schools. Bin Attash, also from Yemen, allegedly ran an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan and researched flight simulators and timetables. Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi is a Saudi accused of helping the hijackers with money, Western clothing, traveler's checks and credit cards. Al-Aziz Ali, a Pakistani national and nephew of Mohammed, allegedly provided money to the hijackers.
___
Associated Press writer Verena Dobnik in New York contributed to this report.
Washington Examiner
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — They knelt in prayer, ignored the judge and wouldn't listen to Arabic translations as they confronted nearly 3,000 counts of murder. The self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and four co-defendants defiantly disrupted an arraignment that dragged into Saturday night in the opening act of the long-stalled effort to prosecute them in a military court.
Their refusal to participate in the hearing helped bring their arraignment to a crawl. It took more than eight hours for the judge at the U.S. military base in Cuba to ask the men to enter pleas to 2,976 counts of murder and terrorism in the 2001 attacks that sent hijacked jetliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The men all deferred their pleas.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted 9/11 architect, cast off his earphones providing Arabic translations of the proceeding and refused to answer Army Col. James Pohl's questions or acknowledge he understood them. All five men refused to participate in the hearing; two passed around a copy of The Economist magazine and leafed through the articles.
Walid bin Attash was confined to a restraint chair when he came into court, released only after he promised to behave.
Ramzi Binalshibh knelt in prayer alongside his defense table with Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali in the middle of the hearing, then launched into an incoherent tirade about the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and declared he was in danger. "Maybe they will kill me and say I committed suicide," he said in a mix of Arabic and broken English.
The detainees' lawyers spent hours questioning the judge about his qualifications to hear the case and suggested their clients were being mistreated at the hearing, in a strategy that could pave the way for future appeals.
It was the defendants' first appearance in more than three years after stalled efforts to try them for the terror attacks, in which hijackers steered four commercial jets into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a western Pennsylvania field. Nearly 3,000 people were killed.
The defendants' behavior outraged 9/11 family members watching on closed-circuit video feeds around the United States at East Coast military bases. One viewer shouted, "C,mon, are you kidding me?" at the Fort Hamilton base in Brooklyn.
"They're engaging in jihad in a courtroom," said Debra Burlingame, whose brother, Charles, was the pilot of the plane that flew into the Pentagon. She watched the proceeding from Brooklyn.
The Obama administration renewed plans to try the men at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay after a bid to try the men in New York City blocks from the trade center site faced political opposition. It adopted new rules with Congress that forbade testimony obtained through torture or cruel treatment, and argued the defendants could be tried as fairly here as in a civilian court.
Human rights groups and defense lawyers say the secrecy of Guantanamo and the military commissions, or tribunals, will make it impossible to defend them. They argued the U.S. kept the case out of civilian court to prevent disclosure of the treatment of prisoners like Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.
Mohammed's civilian lawyer, David Nevin, said he believed Mohammed was not responding because he believes the tribunal is unfair. Jim Harrington, representing Binalshibh, said his client would not respond to questions "without addressing the issues of confinement."
Cheryl Bormann, a civilian attorney for bin Attash, appeared in a conservative Islamic outfit that left only her face uncovered and she asked the court to order other women present to wear "appropriate" clothing so that defendants do not have to avert their eyes "for fear of committing a sin under their faith."
Pohl warned he would not permit defendants to block the hearing and would continue without his participation.
"One cannot choose not to participate and frustrate the normal course of business," Pohl said.
Pohl brought translators into the courtroom to interpret the proceedings live once the men refused to use earpieces attempted to stick to the standard script for tribunals, asking the defendants if they understood their rights to counsel and would accept the attorneys appointed for them.
The men were silent.
In the past, during the failed first effort to prosecute them at the U.S. base in Cuba, Mohammed has mocked the tribunal and said he and his co-defendants would plead guilty and welcome execution. But there were signs that at least some of the defense teams were preparing for a lengthy fight, planning challenges of the military tribunals and the secrecy that shrouds the case.
Defendants typically do not enter a plea during their arraignment but are offered the chance to do so. Lawyers for the men said they were prohibited by secrecy rules from disclosing their clients' intentions.
Army Capt. Jason Wright, one of Mohammed's Pentagon-appointed lawyers, declined to comment on the case.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced in 2009 that Mohammed and his co-defendants would be tried blocks from the site of the destroyed trade center in downtown Manhattan, but the plan was shelved after New York officials cited huge costs to secure the neighborhood and family opposition to trying the suspects in the U.S.
Congress then blocked the transfer of any prisoners from Guantanamo to the U.S., forcing the Obama administration to refile the charges under a reformed military commission system.
Mohammed, a Pakistani citizen who grew up in Kuwait and attended college in Greensboro, North Carolina, has admitted to military authorities that he was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks "from A to Z," as well as about 30 other plots, and that he personally killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Mohammed was captured in 2003 in Pakistan.
Binalshibh was allegedly chosen to be a hijacker but couldn't get a U.S. visa and ended up providing assistance such as finding flight schools. Bin Attash, also from Yemen, allegedly ran an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan and researched flight simulators and timetables. Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi is a Saudi accused of helping the hijackers with money, Western clothing, traveler's checks and credit cards. Al-Aziz Ali, a Pakistani national and nephew of Mohammed, allegedly provided money to the hijackers.
___
Associated Press writer Verena Dobnik in New York contributed to this report.
All the Little Communist Occupiers in a Row
Hat Tip: Nancy Jacques / Zombie
By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
Violent Occupiers Confront Outnumbered Police
Ah! Smell and experience the chaos in Oakland, Boston, Seattle and across the land of anarchy. Violence is only a breath away… Just waiting for that one tiny confrontation to set off an inferno that will engulf our nation. Hell’s bells are ringing for the Occupy movement, while the Communists, radicals and anarchists gleefully rage in anticipation of the spillage of blood to grease their wheels of revolution.
Hundreds, even thousands, gathered in places such as Oakland to protest financial institutions and to further class warfare. You know, the pot that our President stirs at every opportunity to engender a plea from the masses to help them by just making it stop – and if they do, the top will come slamming down from the government, because you will have just invited in the biggest vampire of all and he’s very, very hungry. The Progressives are very well organized and have a very detailed plan for taking us down. They even have manuals and instructions for children concerning revolution and anarchy. Nothing is beneath them and the truth means nothing to these people. The ends justify the means.
Anarchists on Parade
Protesters far outnumbered the police who bravely stood their ground in some areas, not giving an inch, while in other cities, they stood passively by while Occupiers spread their hate and abuse. Choking, stinging gas was used in some instances; batons in others. Police were hit by paint, food, bottles and refuse. On and on it went and we are just at the beginning of possibly the most nationally turbulent summer in our history since the Civil War.
Last year, we told you this was coming and by what I have seen, it is going to be worse than I thought. Don’t shrug these lunatics and freaks off, they are deadly serious and they will kill for what they perceive is theirs.
Blocking traffic, calling for general strikes, breaking windows, destroying cars – it was all in a day’s fun for the anarchists, Communists and radicals – the very heart of the mayhem was the Black Bloc. Hardcore anarchists bent on destruction and violence and their numbers are growing. All of them want revolution and it doesn’t matter whether you believe in their cause or not. They are bringing it to your door.
Supporting the New Black Panthers – who would kill her for the crime of being white
Many of the protesters, including anarchists, sported peace symbols on their shields, signs and shirts. They must have a different definition of ‘peace’ than most of us do. People proudly supported the New Black Panthers, like the girl above. Ironically, if they got their way, she would have her throat slit. But she wasn’t the only useful idiot. Many wore Marx, Mao and Guevara shirts – unwittingly singing the praises of those who murdered millions. Many more sported Communist insignia or anarchist chic attire and flags. Death, death and more death. When the long knives come out, these useful idiots will be among the first to die.
The Young, The Stupid, The Violent
One wonders what their parents think seeing them on television? Have they tried to warn them? Explain to them that this is evil and deadly? Do their families mourn them as already lost or celebrate them as martyrs to the cause? Or do they celebrate them as Marxists? Will they weep when it is finally too late?
Thousands came out across the world to protest austerity measures and demand that they be given more money, whether they earned it or not. But the truth is, there really is no more money and the worldwide party has already ended, they just don’t realize it yet. As more and more realize that austerity isn’t just an option, but a way of life, they will ratchet up the violence even more and the innocent will die with the rest of them. Yes, even here in America. With our debt and weak kneed leaders, we are no longer immune to darkness spreading its wings across the globe. If we don’t cut spending and reverse course — and soon — permanent financial night will fall across our land and a new form of the Dark Ages will come into being.
All the Little Communist Occupiers in a Row
It will be a long, brutal summer and this fall may be even worse leading up to the election. I want you to remember something. The people you see rioting are not the majority of Americans. They are not what we stand for. They are being used. They are the “one percent.” There is a choice between good and evil and they chose, either knowingly or unwittingly, evil. If we stand with God and with what is right, we will win. Good always prevails in the end, its just takes longer in some instances than others.
While all the little Communist Occupiers line up in a row, make sure your family isn’t part of that. Stay away from it as long as you can. Violence only begets more violence and it is this that the government needs to further their goals of bringing America down. Talk to your friends, family and neighbors. Vote for the most conservative candidate next election period. If Obama is reelected, we are done as a nation.
Zombie has three great posts up – make sure you read them. Time is short – don’t turn away from this. We must confront evil to defeat it.
MUCH MORE AT NoisyRoom.Net
By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
Violent Occupiers Confront Outnumbered Police
Ah! Smell and experience the chaos in Oakland, Boston, Seattle and across the land of anarchy. Violence is only a breath away… Just waiting for that one tiny confrontation to set off an inferno that will engulf our nation. Hell’s bells are ringing for the Occupy movement, while the Communists, radicals and anarchists gleefully rage in anticipation of the spillage of blood to grease their wheels of revolution.
Hundreds, even thousands, gathered in places such as Oakland to protest financial institutions and to further class warfare. You know, the pot that our President stirs at every opportunity to engender a plea from the masses to help them by just making it stop – and if they do, the top will come slamming down from the government, because you will have just invited in the biggest vampire of all and he’s very, very hungry. The Progressives are very well organized and have a very detailed plan for taking us down. They even have manuals and instructions for children concerning revolution and anarchy. Nothing is beneath them and the truth means nothing to these people. The ends justify the means.
Anarchists on Parade
Protesters far outnumbered the police who bravely stood their ground in some areas, not giving an inch, while in other cities, they stood passively by while Occupiers spread their hate and abuse. Choking, stinging gas was used in some instances; batons in others. Police were hit by paint, food, bottles and refuse. On and on it went and we are just at the beginning of possibly the most nationally turbulent summer in our history since the Civil War.
Last year, we told you this was coming and by what I have seen, it is going to be worse than I thought. Don’t shrug these lunatics and freaks off, they are deadly serious and they will kill for what they perceive is theirs.
Blocking traffic, calling for general strikes, breaking windows, destroying cars – it was all in a day’s fun for the anarchists, Communists and radicals – the very heart of the mayhem was the Black Bloc. Hardcore anarchists bent on destruction and violence and their numbers are growing. All of them want revolution and it doesn’t matter whether you believe in their cause or not. They are bringing it to your door.
Many of the protesters, including anarchists, sported peace symbols on their shields, signs and shirts. They must have a different definition of ‘peace’ than most of us do. People proudly supported the New Black Panthers, like the girl above. Ironically, if they got their way, she would have her throat slit. But she wasn’t the only useful idiot. Many wore Marx, Mao and Guevara shirts – unwittingly singing the praises of those who murdered millions. Many more sported Communist insignia or anarchist chic attire and flags. Death, death and more death. When the long knives come out, these useful idiots will be among the first to die.
One wonders what their parents think seeing them on television? Have they tried to warn them? Explain to them that this is evil and deadly? Do their families mourn them as already lost or celebrate them as martyrs to the cause? Or do they celebrate them as Marxists? Will they weep when it is finally too late?
Thousands came out across the world to protest austerity measures and demand that they be given more money, whether they earned it or not. But the truth is, there really is no more money and the worldwide party has already ended, they just don’t realize it yet. As more and more realize that austerity isn’t just an option, but a way of life, they will ratchet up the violence even more and the innocent will die with the rest of them. Yes, even here in America. With our debt and weak kneed leaders, we are no longer immune to darkness spreading its wings across the globe. If we don’t cut spending and reverse course — and soon — permanent financial night will fall across our land and a new form of the Dark Ages will come into being.
It will be a long, brutal summer and this fall may be even worse leading up to the election. I want you to remember something. The people you see rioting are not the majority of Americans. They are not what we stand for. They are being used. They are the “one percent.” There is a choice between good and evil and they chose, either knowingly or unwittingly, evil. If we stand with God and with what is right, we will win. Good always prevails in the end, its just takes longer in some instances than others.
While all the little Communist Occupiers line up in a row, make sure your family isn’t part of that. Stay away from it as long as you can. Violence only begets more violence and it is this that the government needs to further their goals of bringing America down. Talk to your friends, family and neighbors. Vote for the most conservative candidate next election period. If Obama is reelected, we are done as a nation.
Zombie has three great posts up – make sure you read them. Time is short – don’t turn away from this. We must confront evil to defeat it.
MUCH MORE AT NoisyRoom.Net
Obama Launches Campaign in Empty Arena
by Alexander Marlow
5.5.12
Breitbart News:
Barack Obama launched his campaign in unspectacular fashion today at Ohio State University, the largest college in the crucial swing state. A photo posted to twitter by Mitt Romney's campaign spokesman Ryan Williams reveals sparse attendance. The above image, according to Williams, was taken during the President's first official campaign speech.
During the speech, Obama ripped into the presumptive GOP nominee and discussed nation building at home, but the most newsworthy item of the day was not the talking points Obama delivered: it was the crowd... or lack thereof. According to ABC News, the Obama campaign had expected an "overflow" of people. Instead, the arena looked half-empty. The Columbus Dispatch reports that Obama organizers even had people move from the seats to the floor of the gym in order to project a larger crowd on television.
According to the Toledo Blade, the venue for Obama's rally seats 20,000 but "there were a lot of empty seats." Comparatively, Obama drew a crowd of 35,000 at Ohio State when he campaigned for former Governor Ted Strickland in 2010.
The official Barack Obama Tumblr boasts a figure from ThinkProgress that 14,000 attended the event--70% of the stadium's seating capacity.
It's a campaign faux pas to hold an event in a room that isn't full; to promise the media a more-than-capacity crowd then fall this far short of that promise is utter incompetence. In 2008, Obama ran a near-flawless campaign, buoyed by enthusiasm and effective organizing. But it's not 2008 any more, and on day one of the 2012 campaign, Team Obama has already made an embarrassing blunder.
Alexander Marlow is Breitbart News Managing Editor. Follow him on twitter @alexmarlow.
ON BREITBART TV
Schultz: 'Damn Right' I Would Give Money To Obama 'If I Could'
Cinco de Mayo and the American Civil War
Saturday, May 5, 2012
History on Purpose by Dennis Jamison
SAN JOSE, Ca., May 5, 2012 - Although Cinco de Mayo has become a well celebrated holiday in the United States, it remains relatively insignificant within most of Mexico. Despite the festivities celebrated on this day all across the United States, the average American may not know the why behind the celebration.
Many American’s believe Cinco de Mayo is Mexican independence day, but that is actually celebrated in September.
The celebration of Cinco de Mayo marks the extraordinary victory of about 4000 Mexican patriots over several battalions of French troops on May 5, 1862. The French force, which possibly outnumbered the Mexicans by a margin of 2:1, were soundly defeated in this battle due to the strategy of the Mexican leader, General Ignacio Zaragoza SeguÃn. Seguin used everything at his disposal to beat the French, including Native American Indians from central Mexico and a local herd of cattle stampeded into the core of advancing French troops.
The question which is usually raised at this point of the narrative is why the French Army was even in Mexico in 1862. Ostensibly, they were sent to collect a debt.
The story begins with Mexican indebtedness to France, Great Britain, and Spain after securing loans to mitigate the government’s near bankrupt status as a result of the Mexican Civil War of 1858 and the internal Reform Wars between liberal and conservative political factions.
The period known as “La Reforma” ended with the liberals taking control in 1860 with the intent to create a more modern Mexican civil society with a capitalist economy using the United States as a model.
In March of 1861, Benito Juárez, the first Native American to be elected president of Mexico, was provided a four-year term under the Constitution of 1857. Unfortunately, as he took the reigns of government he discovered the real economic circumstances of a destitute treasury.
By July 17, 1861, Juarez issued a moratorium aimed at suspending all foreign debt payments for two years. It was not a good move. France, Great Britain, and Spain all sent warships into the Gulf of Mexico and jointly seized the custom house in the port city of Veracruz in December of 1861.
The obvious intent of the troika was to stay until they collected on their respective outstanding loans. Britain and Spain simply renegotiated the debt with the Juarez administration and the troops got in their ships and sailed back to Europe. But, the French did not. France left their ships parked in the Gulf of Mexico and left their troops on alert. Their intent was not initially obvious, but Napoleon III, the French emperor, had cleverly decided to utilize the crisis to establish a French empire in Mexico. The emperor had sent Maximilian von Habsburg, a younger brother of the Emperor of Austria, to become the new emperor of Mexico.
Marching from Veracruz towards Mexico City, the first major battle occurred near the little village of Puebla. It was there on May 5, 1862 the powerful French battalions with 8,000 troops encountered heavy resistance from a Mexican band which numbered about 4,000 consisting of Mexican cavalry, troops, and Zapotec and Mixtec Indians as well as a herd of cattle that the Mexicans stampeded into the oncoming French footsoldiers. This victory surprised the French and galvanized the Mexican resolve to fight for their freedom.
Unfortunately, it was simply a temporary setback for the French forces.
In 1863 with 30,000 troops, the French forced the Juarez government to flee north and ultimately to the city of El Paso del Norte, which is now know as Ciudad Juárez. Here is where he established his government in exile. In July of 1863, the French took over Mexico City. On April 20, 1864, the French installed Maximilian as Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico and essentially made Mexico a French colony. The United States could not do anything because our country had splintered and the nation was in the midst of the Civil War.
One of the fears of the Lincoln administration was that the French were in a great position to aid the Confederacy, which some historians believe was one possible effect of the French colony. Jefferson Davis had appealed to the British and French to assist the Southern cause in the “Second Revolution” against the tyrannical Federal administration under Lincoln. Because of the victory at Puebla, it delayed French attempts to assist the Confederates for one full year.
By July of 1862, Lincoln felt grave concern over the ability of the Union forces to prevail and decided to issue an edict to free the slaves as he was uncertain that the Army of the Republic had not been effective in prevailing over the Confederate forces. He was aware of Napolean III taking advantage of the situation. With the Union victory at Gettysburg, which came 14 months after the Battle of Puebla, the tide of the war began to turn and Lincoln regained confidence. In 1864, Congress issued a resolution which expressed opposition to the monarchy in Mexico.
President Lincoln developed a new policy regarding the Latin American crisis, which in addition to the Monroe Doctrine, addressed the issue of the sovereignty of the autonomous nations in the Western Hemisphere. Unfortunately, with the resolution of the Civil War in April of 1865 and the U.S. being able to act forcefully to back up the policies, President Lincoln was assassinated. Nevertheless, Andrew Johnson followed the initiative of Lincoln and took action to push the French out of Mexico.
This incredible period of shared crisis should strengthen the ties that bind the U.S. and Mexico as neighbors. The very lethal threat to Mexican sovereignty and independence, although not easily dealt with at the outset, was met with decisive action by the united States when our internal war had subsided. Also, the potential threat to the continued unity of the United States was hampered by the victory at Puebla on May 5, 1862. Those are two good reasons to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, but beyond that it is just plain fun to celebrate with neighbors.
This article is the copyrighted property of the writer and Communities @ WashingtonTimes.com. Written permission must be obtained before reprint in online or print media. REPRINTING TWTC CONTENT WITHOUT PERMISSION AND/OR PAYMENT IS THEFT AND PUNISHABLE BY LAW.
Occupiers Storm Boston Tea Party Rally
Submitted by Terresa on May 3, 2012 – 4:54 pm EST
NoisyRoom
Hat Tip: BB
MRCTV
Warning – foul language and lewd content.
Source: TrevorLoudon.Com
NoisyRoom
Hat Tip: BB
MRCTV
Warning – foul language and lewd content.
Source: TrevorLoudon.Com
Dreams of My Ghostwriter’s Ex: Did Bill Ayers Use Dead Weather Underground Terrorist Diana Oughton as Model for Obama’s ‘Composite’ Girlfriend?
May 5, 2012
“I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books.”
– Christopher Buckley, Oct. 10, 2008
In 2008, conservative journalist Jack Cashill presented evidence that Barack Obama’s bestselling 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father had been written with the assistance of Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground radical who was Obama’s neighbor in Chicago. Now, the revelation that an ex-girlfriend in Dreams was a “composite” or “compression” of several women — as President Obama reportedly told biographer David Marannis — has focused new attention on Cashill’s argument that Ayers was Obama’s ghostwriter.
The so-called “New York girlfriend” in Obama’s memoir bears specific resemblance to Ayers’s ex-girlfriend Diana Oughton, one of three Weather Underground members killed in 1970 when a bomb the terrorist group was building accidentally exploded.
Like the girlfriend in Obama’s memoir, Oughton had brown hair and green eyes, and came from an affluent background. Furthermore, Oughton’s family estate in Illinois is strikingly similar to one described in a sequence in Dreams when Obama and his “New York girlfriend” visit her family. Cashill wrote in a 2010 article at The American Thinker:
One weekend, the woman invites Obama to her family’s country home, which had been her grandfather’s, and “he had inherited it from his grandfather.” The library is filled with old books and photos of the grandfather with presidents, diplomats, industrialists. “It was autumn,” Obama recalls, “beautiful, with woods all around us, and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected along the shore.” . . .
According to a Time Magazine article written soon after her death, Oughton “brought Bill Ayers and other radicals” to the family homestead in Dwight, Illinois. . . .
The main house on the Oughton estate, a twenty-room Victorian mansion, was built by Oughton’s father’s grandfather. Formally known as the John R. Oughton House, it was placed on the national historic register in 1980. Despite forty years of encroaching development since Oughton’s death, aerial photos show the Oughton estate (103 South Street) with a small lake in the middle and a thick ring of trees around it, very much like the estate in Dreams.
In the wake of Maraniss’s report that Obama had admitted the ”New York girlfriend” was ”compressed” — a composite character – the similarities to Oughton previously noted by Cashill caused the Bookworm Room blog to remark: “I mean, what are the odds that you’d combine a whole lot of different women in your life, and then come up with Bill Ayers’ girlfriend?”
Cashill says that Ayers’s own 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, show him to be “obsessed with Oughton.”
Oughton’s “badly mangled” body was found in the rubble of a townhouse in New York’s Greenwich Village destroyed by a March 6, 1970, bomb blast. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, Oughton had been studying for a master’s degree at the University of Michigan in 1966 when she met and fell in love with Ayers, then a leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Oughton followed Ayers into the radical “Weatherman” faction, which split from SDS in 1969, and was a participant in the violent ”Days of Rage” protests in Chicago. The explosion that killed Oughton and fellow Weather Underground terrorists Ted Gold and Terry Robbins occurred while they were constructing a bomb they reportedly planned to plant at a NCO dance at the Fort Dix, N.J., Army base.
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!
SOURCES:
Ace of Spades HQ, May 5: Barack Obama’s College “Composite” Girlfriend, Who Doesn’t Exist, Just Happens To Match the Description of Bill Ayers’ Former Girlfriend, Who Does
Bookworm Room, May 4: It’s rather strange that Obama’s composite girlfriend matches Bill Ayers’s real one
Dylan Byers, Politico, May 2: Obama: ‘New York girlfriend’ was composite
Jack Cashill, American Thinker, April 18, 2010: Barack Obama’s Missing Girlfriends
Jack Cashill, World Net Daily, Nov. 2, 2008: Yavelow Study Confirms Ayers Hand In Obama’s “Dreams”
Jack Cashill, American Thinker, Oct. 9, 2008: Who Wrote Dreams From My Father?
Mark Gado, TruTV Crime Library: Ambush: The Brinks Robbery of 1981
Source: The Other McCain
“I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books.”
– Christopher Buckley, Oct. 10, 2008
In 2008, conservative journalist Jack Cashill presented evidence that Barack Obama’s bestselling 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father had been written with the assistance of Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground radical who was Obama’s neighbor in Chicago. Now, the revelation that an ex-girlfriend in Dreams was a “composite” or “compression” of several women — as President Obama reportedly told biographer David Marannis — has focused new attention on Cashill’s argument that Ayers was Obama’s ghostwriter.
The so-called “New York girlfriend” in Obama’s memoir bears specific resemblance to Ayers’s ex-girlfriend Diana Oughton, one of three Weather Underground members killed in 1970 when a bomb the terrorist group was building accidentally exploded.
Like the girlfriend in Obama’s memoir, Oughton had brown hair and green eyes, and came from an affluent background. Furthermore, Oughton’s family estate in Illinois is strikingly similar to one described in a sequence in Dreams when Obama and his “New York girlfriend” visit her family. Cashill wrote in a 2010 article at The American Thinker:
One weekend, the woman invites Obama to her family’s country home, which had been her grandfather’s, and “he had inherited it from his grandfather.” The library is filled with old books and photos of the grandfather with presidents, diplomats, industrialists. “It was autumn,” Obama recalls, “beautiful, with woods all around us, and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected along the shore.” . . .
According to a Time Magazine article written soon after her death, Oughton “brought Bill Ayers and other radicals” to the family homestead in Dwight, Illinois. . . .
The main house on the Oughton estate, a twenty-room Victorian mansion, was built by Oughton’s father’s grandfather. Formally known as the John R. Oughton House, it was placed on the national historic register in 1980. Despite forty years of encroaching development since Oughton’s death, aerial photos show the Oughton estate (103 South Street) with a small lake in the middle and a thick ring of trees around it, very much like the estate in Dreams.
In the wake of Maraniss’s report that Obama had admitted the ”New York girlfriend” was ”compressed” — a composite character – the similarities to Oughton previously noted by Cashill caused the Bookworm Room blog to remark: “I mean, what are the odds that you’d combine a whole lot of different women in your life, and then come up with Bill Ayers’ girlfriend?”
Cashill says that Ayers’s own 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, show him to be “obsessed with Oughton.”
Oughton’s “badly mangled” body was found in the rubble of a townhouse in New York’s Greenwich Village destroyed by a March 6, 1970, bomb blast. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, Oughton had been studying for a master’s degree at the University of Michigan in 1966 when she met and fell in love with Ayers, then a leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Oughton followed Ayers into the radical “Weatherman” faction, which split from SDS in 1969, and was a participant in the violent ”Days of Rage” protests in Chicago. The explosion that killed Oughton and fellow Weather Underground terrorists Ted Gold and Terry Robbins occurred while they were constructing a bomb they reportedly planned to plant at a NCO dance at the Fort Dix, N.J., Army base.
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!
SOURCES:
Ace of Spades HQ, May 5: Barack Obama’s College “Composite” Girlfriend, Who Doesn’t Exist, Just Happens To Match the Description of Bill Ayers’ Former Girlfriend, Who Does
Bookworm Room, May 4: It’s rather strange that Obama’s composite girlfriend matches Bill Ayers’s real one
Dylan Byers, Politico, May 2: Obama: ‘New York girlfriend’ was composite
Jack Cashill, American Thinker, April 18, 2010: Barack Obama’s Missing Girlfriends
Jack Cashill, World Net Daily, Nov. 2, 2008: Yavelow Study Confirms Ayers Hand In Obama’s “Dreams”
Jack Cashill, American Thinker, Oct. 9, 2008: Who Wrote Dreams From My Father?
Mark Gado, TruTV Crime Library: Ambush: The Brinks Robbery of 1981
Source: The Other McCain
It’s rather strange that Obama’s composite girlfriend matches Bill Ayers’s real one
Much is being made of the fact that it’s finally becoming big news that Obama, in Dreams From My Father, “compressed” a girlfriend. That is, he’s acknowledged in his book that some people referenced in the book were “composites.” It’s just that no one realized that at least one of the girlfriends who got a lot of airtime in the book was one of those compressions.
What’s equally interesting is the fact that this composite, who is supposedly an amalgam of many Obama girlfriends, perfectly matches Bill Ayres’ 1960s-era girlfriend:
As I have argued from textual analysis, and as Andersen has confirmed from his own reporting, Obama had help with the book. As Andersen tells it, after four futile years of trying to finish the contracted book, a “hopelessly blocked” Obama delivered his family’s “oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes” to “friend and neighbor” Ayers for a major overhaul.
Any number of incidents in Dreams recall Homer’s Odyssey. In his quest, Obama encounters blind seers, lotus-eaters, the “ghosts” of the underworld, whirlpools, a half-dozen sundry “demons,” and even a menacing one-eyed bald man. These encounters likely run the full range of stylistic possibilities from verifiable fact to artful shaping to pure invention.
The mystery woman recalls the temptress Circe. Like Obama’s unnamed girlfriend, Circe lives in a “splendid house” on “spacious grounds.” She too wants her lover, Odysseus, to stay forever. Like Obama, Odysseus has shared his bed with this alien seductress for one year. But her world can never be his.
“You god-driven man,” Odysseus’s mates warn him, “now the time has come to think about your native land once more, if you are fated to be saved and reach your high-roofed home and your own country” (Ian Johnston translation).
If Obama’s friend nicely fills the Circe role, then she is almost surely grounded in the real-life person of Diana Oughton, Ayers’ lover who was killed in a 1970 Greenwich Village bomb factory blast. Ayers was obsessed with Oughton. In Fugitive Days, he fixes on her in ways that had to discomfit the woman that he eventually married, their fellow traveler in the Weather Underground, Bernardine Dohrn.
Physically, the woman of Obama’s memory, with her “dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes,” evokes images of Oughton. As her FBI files attest, Oughton had brown hair and green eyes. The two women share similar family backgrounds as well. In fact, they seem to have grown up on the very same estate.
According to a Time Magazine article written soon after her death, Oughton “brought Bill Ayers and other radicals” to the family homestead in Dwight, Illinois. There, “she would talk politics with her father, defending the revolutionary’s approach to social ills.”
The main house on the Oughton estate, a twenty-room Victorian mansion, was built by Oughton’s father’s grandfather. Formally known as the John R. Oughton House, it was placed on the national historic register in 1980. Despite forty years of encroaching development since Oughton’s death, aerial photos show the Oughton estate (103 South Street) with a small lake in the middle and a thick ring of trees around it, very much like the estate in Dreams.
I mean, what are the odds that you’d combine a whole lot of different women in your life, and then come up with Bill Ayers’ girlfriend? Maybe this peculiar coincidence is just the random effect of too many drugs in Obama’s system, but somehow I doubt it.
[Note: I decided what I posted originally was too rough, so I've gone back and fleshed this post out a little.]
Posted May 4th, 2012 @ Book Worm Room
What’s equally interesting is the fact that this composite, who is supposedly an amalgam of many Obama girlfriends, perfectly matches Bill Ayres’ 1960s-era girlfriend:
As I have argued from textual analysis, and as Andersen has confirmed from his own reporting, Obama had help with the book. As Andersen tells it, after four futile years of trying to finish the contracted book, a “hopelessly blocked” Obama delivered his family’s “oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes” to “friend and neighbor” Ayers for a major overhaul.
Any number of incidents in Dreams recall Homer’s Odyssey. In his quest, Obama encounters blind seers, lotus-eaters, the “ghosts” of the underworld, whirlpools, a half-dozen sundry “demons,” and even a menacing one-eyed bald man. These encounters likely run the full range of stylistic possibilities from verifiable fact to artful shaping to pure invention.
The mystery woman recalls the temptress Circe. Like Obama’s unnamed girlfriend, Circe lives in a “splendid house” on “spacious grounds.” She too wants her lover, Odysseus, to stay forever. Like Obama, Odysseus has shared his bed with this alien seductress for one year. But her world can never be his.
“You god-driven man,” Odysseus’s mates warn him, “now the time has come to think about your native land once more, if you are fated to be saved and reach your high-roofed home and your own country” (Ian Johnston translation).
If Obama’s friend nicely fills the Circe role, then she is almost surely grounded in the real-life person of Diana Oughton, Ayers’ lover who was killed in a 1970 Greenwich Village bomb factory blast. Ayers was obsessed with Oughton. In Fugitive Days, he fixes on her in ways that had to discomfit the woman that he eventually married, their fellow traveler in the Weather Underground, Bernardine Dohrn.
Physically, the woman of Obama’s memory, with her “dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes,” evokes images of Oughton. As her FBI files attest, Oughton had brown hair and green eyes. The two women share similar family backgrounds as well. In fact, they seem to have grown up on the very same estate.
According to a Time Magazine article written soon after her death, Oughton “brought Bill Ayers and other radicals” to the family homestead in Dwight, Illinois. There, “she would talk politics with her father, defending the revolutionary’s approach to social ills.”
The main house on the Oughton estate, a twenty-room Victorian mansion, was built by Oughton’s father’s grandfather. Formally known as the John R. Oughton House, it was placed on the national historic register in 1980. Despite forty years of encroaching development since Oughton’s death, aerial photos show the Oughton estate (103 South Street) with a small lake in the middle and a thick ring of trees around it, very much like the estate in Dreams.
I mean, what are the odds that you’d combine a whole lot of different women in your life, and then come up with Bill Ayers’ girlfriend? Maybe this peculiar coincidence is just the random effect of too many drugs in Obama’s system, but somehow I doubt it.
[Note: I decided what I posted originally was too rough, so I've gone back and fleshed this post out a little.]
Posted May 4th, 2012 @ Book Worm Room
VIDEO: Are You Better Off Now Than You Were Four Years Ago?
Posted by Ben Howe
Saturday, May 5th at 3:59PM EDT
This is a question that will come up over and over as the election season unfolds. Luckily President Obama has provided the answer.
Source: Red State
Saturday, May 5th at 3:59PM EDT
This is a question that will come up over and over as the election season unfolds. Luckily President Obama has provided the answer.
Source: Red State
A Psychologist Analyzes The President
May 2, 2012
I received the following from a reader who happens to be an MD. It was written by another MD whose name I have deliberately withheld for privacy reasons.
Here it is:
Dr. Sam Vaknin is an Israeli psychologist. Interesting view on our president.
Dr. Vaknin has written extensively about narcissism.
Dr. Vaknin States “I must confess I was impressed by Obama from the
first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a black candidate.
He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident — a
wholesome presidential package. I was put off soon, not just because
of his shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in
his demeanor that was unsettling.. His posture and his body language
were louder than his empty words. Obama’s speeches are unlike any
political speech we have heard in American history. Never a
politician in this land had such quasi “religious” impact on so many
people.
The fact that Obama is a total incognito with Zero accomplishment,
makes this inexplicable infatuation alarming. Obama is not an ordinary
man. He is not a genius. In fact he is quite ignorant on most
important subjects.”
Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of the Malignant Self Love believes “Barack
Obama appears to be a narcissist.” Vaknin is a world authority on
narcissism. He understands narcissism and describes the inner mind of
a narcissist like no other person. When he talks about narcissism
everyone listens. Vaknin says that Obama’s language, posture and
demeanor, and the testimonies of his closest, dearest friends suggest
that the man is either a narcissist or he may have narcissistic
personality disorder (NPD).
Narcissists project a grandiose but false image of themselves. Jim
Jones, the charismatic leader of People’s Temple , the man who led over
900 of his followers to cheerfully commit mass suicide and even murder
their own children was also a narcissist. David Koresh, Charles
Manson, Joseph Koni, Shoko Asahara, Stalin, Saddam, Mao, Kim Jong Ill
and Adolph Hitler are a few examples of narcissists of our time. All
these men had a tremendous influence over their fanciers. They created
a personality cult around themselves and with their blazing speeches
elevated their admirers, filled their hearts with enthusiasm and
instilled in their minds a new zest for life. They gave them hope!
They promised them the moon, but alas, invariably they brought them to
their doom.
When you are a victim of a cult of personality, you don’t know it
until it is too late. One determining factor in the development of NPD
is childhood abuse “Obama’s early life was decidedly chaotic and
replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations,”says
Vaknin. “Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents
went through a divorce when he was an infant two years old. Obama saw
his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. Then his
mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia , a foreign
land with a radically foreign culture, to be raised by a step-father.
At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal
(white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the
following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979. “She
died of cancer in 1995.”
One must never underestimate the manipulative genius of pathological
narcissists. They project such an imposing personality that it
overwhelms those around them. Charmed by the charisma of the
narcissist, people become like clay in his hands. They cheerfully do
his bidding and delight to be at his service. The narcissist shapes
the world around himself and reduces others in his own inverted image.
He creates a cult of personality. His admirers become his
co-dependents. Narcissists have no interest in things that do not help
them to reach their personal objective. They are focused on one thing
alone and that is power. All other issues are meaningless to them and
they do not want to waste their precious time on trivialities.
Anything that does not help them is beneath them and does not deserve
their attention.
If an issue raised in the Senate does not help Obama in one way or
another, he has no interest in it. The “present” vote is a safe vote.
No one can criticize him if things go wrong. Those issues are unworthy
by their very nature because they are not about him.
Obama’s election as the first black president of the Harvard Law
Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race
relations. The University of Chicago Law School provided him a lot
longer than expected and at the end it evolved into, guess what? His
own autobiography! Instead of writing a scholarly paper focusing on
race relations, for which he had been paid, Obama could not resist
writing about his most sublime self. He entitled the book Dreams from
My Father.
Not surprisingly, Adolph Hitler also wrote his own autobiography when
he was still a nobody. So did Stalin. For a narcissist no subject is
as important as his own self. Why would he waste his precious time and
genius writing about insignificant things when he can write about such
an august being as himself?
Narcissists are often callous and even ruthless. As the norm, they
lack conscience. This is evident from Obama’s lack of interest in his
own brother who lives on only one dollar per month.. A man who lives
in luxury, who takes a private jet to vacation in Hawaii , and who
raised nearly half a billion dollars for his campaign (something
unprecedented in history) has no interest in the plight of his own
brother. Why? Because, his brother cannot be used for his ascent to
power. A narcissist cares for no one but himself.
This election was like no other in the history of America . The issues
were insignificant compared to what is at stake. What can be more
dangerous than having a man bereft of conscience, a serial liar, and
one who cannot distinguish his fantasies from reality as the leader of
the free world?
I hate to sound alarmist, but one is a fool if one is not alarmed.
Many politicians are narcissists. They pose no threat to others. They
are simply self serving and selfish. Obama evidences symptoms of
pathological narcissism, which is different from the run-of-the-mill
narcissism of a Richard Nixon or a Bill Clinton for example. To him
reality and fantasy are intertwined.
This is a mental health issue, not just a character flaw.
Pathological narcissists are dangerous because they look normal and
even intelligent. It is this disguise that makes them treacherous.
Today the Democrats have placed all their hopes in Obama. But this man
could put an end to their party. The great majority of blacks voted
for Obama. Only a fool does not know that their support for him is
racially driven. This is racism, pure and simple.
The downside of this is that if Obama turns out to be the disaster I
predict, he will cause widespread resentment among the whites. The
blacks are unlikely to give up their support of their man. Cultic
mentality is pernicious and unrelenting. They will dig their heads
deeper in the sand and blame Obama’s detractors of racism. This will
cause a backlash among the whites. The white supremacists will take
advantage of the discontent and they will receive widespread support.
I predict that in less than four years, racial tensions will increase
to levels never seen since the turbulent 1960′s.
Obama will set the clock back decades. America is the bastion of
freedom. The peace of the world depends on the strength of America ,
and its weakness translates into the triumph of terrorism and victory
of rogue nations.. It is no wonder that Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, the
Castrists, the Hezbollah, the Hamas, the lawyers of the Guantanamo
terrorists, and virtually all sworn enemies of America are so
thrilled by the prospect of their man in the White House.
America is on the verge of destruction. There is no insanity greater
than electing a pathological narcissist as president.
Sam Vaknin did not author the above, but you can review Dr. Vaknin’s credentials here or a list of his articles on narcissism here.
SOURCE: Economic Noise
I received the following from a reader who happens to be an MD. It was written by another MD whose name I have deliberately withheld for privacy reasons.
Dr. Sam Vaknin is an Israeli psychologist. Interesting view on our president.
Dr. Vaknin has written extensively about narcissism.
Dr. Vaknin States “I must confess I was impressed by Obama from the
first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a black candidate.
He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident — a
wholesome presidential package. I was put off soon, not just because
of his shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in
his demeanor that was unsettling.. His posture and his body language
were louder than his empty words. Obama’s speeches are unlike any
political speech we have heard in American history. Never a
politician in this land had such quasi “religious” impact on so many
people.
The fact that Obama is a total incognito with Zero accomplishment,
makes this inexplicable infatuation alarming. Obama is not an ordinary
man. He is not a genius. In fact he is quite ignorant on most
important subjects.”
Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of the Malignant Self Love believes “Barack
Obama appears to be a narcissist.” Vaknin is a world authority on
narcissism. He understands narcissism and describes the inner mind of
a narcissist like no other person. When he talks about narcissism
everyone listens. Vaknin says that Obama’s language, posture and
demeanor, and the testimonies of his closest, dearest friends suggest
that the man is either a narcissist or he may have narcissistic
personality disorder (NPD).
Narcissists project a grandiose but false image of themselves. Jim
Jones, the charismatic leader of People’s Temple , the man who led over
900 of his followers to cheerfully commit mass suicide and even murder
their own children was also a narcissist. David Koresh, Charles
Manson, Joseph Koni, Shoko Asahara, Stalin, Saddam, Mao, Kim Jong Ill
and Adolph Hitler are a few examples of narcissists of our time. All
these men had a tremendous influence over their fanciers. They created
a personality cult around themselves and with their blazing speeches
elevated their admirers, filled their hearts with enthusiasm and
instilled in their minds a new zest for life. They gave them hope!
They promised them the moon, but alas, invariably they brought them to
their doom.
When you are a victim of a cult of personality, you don’t know it
until it is too late. One determining factor in the development of NPD
is childhood abuse “Obama’s early life was decidedly chaotic and
replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations,”says
Vaknin. “Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents
went through a divorce when he was an infant two years old. Obama saw
his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. Then his
mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia , a foreign
land with a radically foreign culture, to be raised by a step-father.
At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal
(white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the
following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979. “She
died of cancer in 1995.”
One must never underestimate the manipulative genius of pathological
narcissists. They project such an imposing personality that it
overwhelms those around them. Charmed by the charisma of the
narcissist, people become like clay in his hands. They cheerfully do
his bidding and delight to be at his service. The narcissist shapes
the world around himself and reduces others in his own inverted image.
He creates a cult of personality. His admirers become his
co-dependents. Narcissists have no interest in things that do not help
them to reach their personal objective. They are focused on one thing
alone and that is power. All other issues are meaningless to them and
they do not want to waste their precious time on trivialities.
Anything that does not help them is beneath them and does not deserve
their attention.
If an issue raised in the Senate does not help Obama in one way or
another, he has no interest in it. The “present” vote is a safe vote.
No one can criticize him if things go wrong. Those issues are unworthy
by their very nature because they are not about him.
Obama’s election as the first black president of the Harvard Law
Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race
relations. The University of Chicago Law School provided him a lot
longer than expected and at the end it evolved into, guess what? His
own autobiography! Instead of writing a scholarly paper focusing on
race relations, for which he had been paid, Obama could not resist
writing about his most sublime self. He entitled the book Dreams from
My Father.
Not surprisingly, Adolph Hitler also wrote his own autobiography when
he was still a nobody. So did Stalin. For a narcissist no subject is
as important as his own self. Why would he waste his precious time and
genius writing about insignificant things when he can write about such
an august being as himself?
Narcissists are often callous and even ruthless. As the norm, they
lack conscience. This is evident from Obama’s lack of interest in his
own brother who lives on only one dollar per month.. A man who lives
in luxury, who takes a private jet to vacation in Hawaii , and who
raised nearly half a billion dollars for his campaign (something
unprecedented in history) has no interest in the plight of his own
brother. Why? Because, his brother cannot be used for his ascent to
power. A narcissist cares for no one but himself.
This election was like no other in the history of America . The issues
were insignificant compared to what is at stake. What can be more
dangerous than having a man bereft of conscience, a serial liar, and
one who cannot distinguish his fantasies from reality as the leader of
the free world?
I hate to sound alarmist, but one is a fool if one is not alarmed.
Many politicians are narcissists. They pose no threat to others. They
are simply self serving and selfish. Obama evidences symptoms of
pathological narcissism, which is different from the run-of-the-mill
narcissism of a Richard Nixon or a Bill Clinton for example. To him
reality and fantasy are intertwined.
This is a mental health issue, not just a character flaw.
Pathological narcissists are dangerous because they look normal and
even intelligent. It is this disguise that makes them treacherous.
Today the Democrats have placed all their hopes in Obama. But this man
could put an end to their party. The great majority of blacks voted
for Obama. Only a fool does not know that their support for him is
racially driven. This is racism, pure and simple.
The downside of this is that if Obama turns out to be the disaster I
predict, he will cause widespread resentment among the whites. The
blacks are unlikely to give up their support of their man. Cultic
mentality is pernicious and unrelenting. They will dig their heads
deeper in the sand and blame Obama’s detractors of racism. This will
cause a backlash among the whites. The white supremacists will take
advantage of the discontent and they will receive widespread support.
I predict that in less than four years, racial tensions will increase
to levels never seen since the turbulent 1960′s.
Obama will set the clock back decades. America is the bastion of
freedom. The peace of the world depends on the strength of America ,
and its weakness translates into the triumph of terrorism and victory
of rogue nations.. It is no wonder that Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, the
Castrists, the Hezbollah, the Hamas, the lawyers of the Guantanamo
terrorists, and virtually all sworn enemies of America are so
thrilled by the prospect of their man in the White House.
America is on the verge of destruction. There is no insanity greater
than electing a pathological narcissist as president.
Sam Vaknin did not author the above, but you can review Dr. Vaknin’s credentials here or a list of his articles on narcissism here.
SOURCE: Economic Noise
Barack Obama participates in Horse Race
Saturday, May 5, 2012
The Kentucky Derby was today, let's check in and see how Barack's horse is doing... NO! Barack you're going the wrong way!
The Morlock Revolt © 2012
Posted by Matt Dawson at 7:32 PM
The Kentucky Derby was today, let's check in and see how Barack's horse is doing... NO! Barack you're going the wrong way!
The Morlock Revolt © 2012
Posted by Matt Dawson at 7:32 PM
It’s official: Arizona bans funding of Planned Parenthood
Posted by The Right Scoop
May 5th, 2012
Gov. Brewer just signed the ban on state funding of Planned Parenthood into law. It’s about time:
FOX NEWS – Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on Friday signed into law a bill to cut off Planned Parenthood’s access to taxpayer money funneled through the state for non-abortion services.
Arizona already bars use of public money for abortions except to save the life of the mother, but anti-abortion legislators and other supporters of the bill have said the broader prohibition is needed to make sure that no public money indirectly supports abortion services.
“This is a common sense law that tightens existing state regulations and closes loopholes in order to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to fund abortions, whether directly or indirectly,” said Brewer, a Republican. “By signing this measure into law, I stand with the majority of Americans who oppose the use of taxpayer funds for abortion.”
Arizona has said a funding ban would interrupt its preventive health care and family planning services for nearly 20,000 women served by the organization’s clinics. The organization has said it will consider a legal challenge.
The measure targeting funding for Planned Parenthood for non-abortion services was one of several approved by Arizona’s Republican-led Legislature related to contentious reproductive health care issues during a 116-day session that ended Thursday. Brewer is a Republican.
Other approved Arizona bills include one generally banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which Brewer has already signed, and one loosening a state law that generally requires health care plans to cover contraception.
May 5th, 2012
Gov. Brewer just signed the ban on state funding of Planned Parenthood into law. It’s about time:
FOX NEWS – Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on Friday signed into law a bill to cut off Planned Parenthood’s access to taxpayer money funneled through the state for non-abortion services.
Arizona already bars use of public money for abortions except to save the life of the mother, but anti-abortion legislators and other supporters of the bill have said the broader prohibition is needed to make sure that no public money indirectly supports abortion services.
“This is a common sense law that tightens existing state regulations and closes loopholes in order to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to fund abortions, whether directly or indirectly,” said Brewer, a Republican. “By signing this measure into law, I stand with the majority of Americans who oppose the use of taxpayer funds for abortion.”
Arizona has said a funding ban would interrupt its preventive health care and family planning services for nearly 20,000 women served by the organization’s clinics. The organization has said it will consider a legal challenge.
The measure targeting funding for Planned Parenthood for non-abortion services was one of several approved by Arizona’s Republican-led Legislature related to contentious reproductive health care issues during a 116-day session that ended Thursday. Brewer is a Republican.
Other approved Arizona bills include one generally banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which Brewer has already signed, and one loosening a state law that generally requires health care plans to cover contraception.
Judge Jim Gray Is the 2012 Libertarian Party Vice Presidential Nominee
Mike Riggs
May 5, 2012
Reason magazine:
Former two-term New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson will be the Libertarian Party's 2012 presidential nominee, and former judge James "Jim" Gray will be his running mate.
Gray beat out Lee Wrights and one other candidate for the vice presidential nomination.
Gray, a former Orange County Superior Court Judge who ran against Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) as a Libertarian in 2004, announced his candidacy last week. Shortly after, Johnson expressed his preference to have Gray as his running mate if he won the presidential nomination.
“The process all along has been to find somebody that can articulate libertarian ideals and beliefs and I’ve thought all along that [Gray] would be a really solid pick,” Johnson told Reason last week. “He’s been through the fire and he will be one heartbeat from the presidency and I think he would be very capable of that."
Gray is a leading critic of the war on drugs, and supported California's Prop 19. You can watch him below talk to Reason.tv about groups that benefit from the drug war.
May 5, 2012
Reason magazine:
Gray beat out Lee Wrights and one other candidate for the vice presidential nomination.
Gray, a former Orange County Superior Court Judge who ran against Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) as a Libertarian in 2004, announced his candidacy last week. Shortly after, Johnson expressed his preference to have Gray as his running mate if he won the presidential nomination.
“The process all along has been to find somebody that can articulate libertarian ideals and beliefs and I’ve thought all along that [Gray] would be a really solid pick,” Johnson told Reason last week. “He’s been through the fire and he will be one heartbeat from the presidency and I think he would be very capable of that."
Gray is a leading critic of the war on drugs, and supported California's Prop 19. You can watch him below talk to Reason.tv about groups that benefit from the drug war.
Rogue Democrats Loot Detroit As Nation Sleeps
May 5, 2012
Walter Russell Mead
Few readers will be surprised to learn that decades of incompetence and entrenched corruption in Detroit’s government have not only helped wreck the city; firms linked to former Democratic mayor Kwame Kilpatrick also looted the pension fund.
The latest scandal, which leaves even hardened observers of the abysmal Democratic machine that has run the city into the ground bemused, involves a real estate firm which gave the felonious mayor massages, golf outings, trips in chartered jets and other perks as this enemy of the people went about his hypocritical business of pretending to care about the poor while robbing them blind. The firm, apparently run by a sleazy low class crook named by the reprehensible Kilpatrick to be the Treasurer of what was left of Detroit’s finances, used Detroit pension funds to buy a couple of California strip malls. Title to the properties was never transferred to the pension funds, and they seem to be out $3.1 million.
Kilpatrick’s partner in slime is his ex-college frat brother Jeffrey Beasley, who is accused of taking bribes and kickbacks as he made bad investments that cost pension funds $84 million. Overall, a Detroit Free Press investigation estimates that corrupt and incompetent trustees appointed by Democratic officials over many years in Detroit are responsible for almost half a billion dollars in investments gone wrong.
I honestly don’t know why there is so little national outrage about this despicable crew and the terrible damage they have done. The ultimate victims of the crime are Detroit’s poor and the middle class and lower middle class, mostly African-American municipal workers who may face serious financial losses in old age.
The 41 year old Kwame Kilpatrick may well be the worst and most destructive American of his generation; his two terms as Mayor of Detroit are among the most sordid and stomach churning episodes in the storied history of American municipal corruption. Now under federal indictment for, essentially, running Detroit City Hall as a criminal enterprise, Kilpatrick reportedly turned down a plea bargain that included a 15 year prison term. Insiders say that since the maximum time for the charges he faces was 18 years, the offer from the prosecutors indicates strong confidence in their case. Indicted with him was his father; it’s nice to think that father and son will have some quality time in the can.
We must all hope for mercy in this world and the next and VM doesn’t exactly wish the worst on these people, but if between the civil penalties, fines and lawsuits from those they have wronged Kilpatrick and company are picked so clean that they have to depend on their prison earnings for snack money in jail, helping them out won’t be at the top of our charitable giving list. And one thing Michigan legislators should check is whether the state has a nice harsh pension forfeiture law.
These judgments are always subjective, but it seems to me that there is not nearly enough national publicity about and outrage over the crimes of Kwame Kilpatrick. If a white or Asian Republican pol had looted fire and police pension funds, blighted the lives of a generation of minority kids and helped do more damage to a great American city than Hurricane Katrina, I don’t think this would be primarily a local news story. I would expect that the scandal would grip the nation, and there would be wall to wall national media coverage.
As there should be.
As it is, an eerie silence envelopes the subject. Outside the Michigan area, only the most dedicated news hounds and political junkies follow this story.
Three factors seem to be at work. One is quite simply financial; falling newsroom budgets in the MSM mean that it is harder for national papers and legacy networks to cover the country.
The second factor is more disturbing: there is a pervasive national sense of ennui and despair about urban areas in which African Americans are the majority. ‘We’ expect decline, decay and corruption in these places, so the Kilpatrick story strikes many editors and journalists as just another ‘dog bites man’ story: not news. Cory Booker is news; Kwame Kilpatrick isn’t.
That ennui and despair intensify when the subject is Detroit. Frankly, while the genteel world hates the thought of being racist, in reality there is a widespread belief in even the most liberal and well educated portions of the white upper middle class that nothing much better can happen in Detroit. I don’t believe that, and this is one of the reasons the city’s decline makes me angry as well as sad. Lax law enforcement and oversight from federal and state authorities allowed a climate of unrestrained corruption to grow up in Detroit over many years.
Putting a lot more people in jail much earlier in their careers, and instilling a healthy fear of the law in Detroit’s political class would have slowed the decline at least, and might well have created openings for better politicians to emerge. The failure of Detroit’s political class must also be seen as a dramatic failure of national and state law enforcement. The horses had been out of this stable for a long time before the authorities showed up with padlocks in hand. One hopes that the Department of Justice will move aggressively to target big city machines for investigation before more Detroits pop up. Similarly, state governors might want to suggest to their attorneys general that corruption bears watching. Michigan taxpayers are going to be stuck with huge bills as the state struggles to cope with the consequences of misrule in Detroit; smart governors might not want to wait until their cities collapse.
Finally, there is a disconnect between important local news and our national news culture today. The New York Times does a lousy job covering New York city and New York State; in the rarefied world of Times readers, local news is dull. Many of our national news editors and writers see themselves as cosmopolitan citizens of the world, interested in much more exciting and important things than the grubby realities of local and municipal life.
In this, the journalists faithfully reflect the thinking of many members of the genteel upper middle class; it is a kind of weird Platonic vision of reality in which the ‘lower’, grubby levels of politics and national life count for less than the ‘higher’, ‘nobler’ levels. Call it the gentrification of news; before Ivy Leaguers filled the newsrooms, American papers focused on the nuts and bolts of life. Now, they are much too highfalutin and hoity-toity for crime and city hall reporters to be the cocks of the walk.
Thus, even as interest in and reporting on the economic and social meltdown of so many once prosperous American cities and states ebbs, the ‘aristocracy’ of the press corps intensifies its endless and endlessly overdone coverage of the national election cycle. Very little that is said or done in either the Romney or Obama campaigns right now has much to do with what voters will be thinking about and voting on six months from now. But that doesn’t stop the legacy press from obsessing about it while ignoring far more consequential developments taking place on every side.
Detroit doesn’t matter all that much to the New York Times and many of its readers for the same reasons that Albany, Queens, Buffalo and Schenectady don’t matter. The new American elite wants to live and think as if it has transcended all that dreary provincial mess and lives on high in a world of Big Ideas and Global Issues. Mrs. Jellyby is much more interested in visionary programs to uplift the inhabitants of Borrio-Boola-Gha than on making sure her own children are well dressed and well cared for.
(At the American Interest we are trying to change this pattern. Go here to read a review of some recent books on Detroit by John G. Rodwan that appears in our May/June print issue.)
There is something profoundly wrong with an American political culture that accepts chronic misgovernment in major cities as OK. It is not OK; the people who do these things may call themselves liberal Democrats and wear the mantle of defenders of the poor, but over and over their actions place them among the most cold blooded enemies and oppressors of the weak.
American cities have been festering pits of graft and bad governance since at least the early 19th century, but there is a difference between the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall and the nihilistic destruction practiced by some of today’s urban machines. Today’s situation, in which some city machines are so dysfunctional that the parasite is literally killing the host (and not just in Detroit), is new and, again, the most vulnerable in our society suffer the worst consequences. Minority children are the greatest ultimate victims of this loathsome corruption: they attend horrible schools and grow up in decaying, unsafe urban landscapes where there is no growth, no jobs and no opportunity for the young.
How is it anything but racist not to care about that — and not to burn with the desire to put the scabrous thugs who misgovern our cities and waste our social funds in prison where they belong?
Walter Russell Mead
Few readers will be surprised to learn that decades of incompetence and entrenched corruption in Detroit’s government have not only helped wreck the city; firms linked to former Democratic mayor Kwame Kilpatrick also looted the pension fund.
The latest scandal, which leaves even hardened observers of the abysmal Democratic machine that has run the city into the ground bemused, involves a real estate firm which gave the felonious mayor massages, golf outings, trips in chartered jets and other perks as this enemy of the people went about his hypocritical business of pretending to care about the poor while robbing them blind. The firm, apparently run by a sleazy low class crook named by the reprehensible Kilpatrick to be the Treasurer of what was left of Detroit’s finances, used Detroit pension funds to buy a couple of California strip malls. Title to the properties was never transferred to the pension funds, and they seem to be out $3.1 million.
Kilpatrick’s partner in slime is his ex-college frat brother Jeffrey Beasley, who is accused of taking bribes and kickbacks as he made bad investments that cost pension funds $84 million. Overall, a Detroit Free Press investigation estimates that corrupt and incompetent trustees appointed by Democratic officials over many years in Detroit are responsible for almost half a billion dollars in investments gone wrong.
I honestly don’t know why there is so little national outrage about this despicable crew and the terrible damage they have done. The ultimate victims of the crime are Detroit’s poor and the middle class and lower middle class, mostly African-American municipal workers who may face serious financial losses in old age.
The 41 year old Kwame Kilpatrick may well be the worst and most destructive American of his generation; his two terms as Mayor of Detroit are among the most sordid and stomach churning episodes in the storied history of American municipal corruption. Now under federal indictment for, essentially, running Detroit City Hall as a criminal enterprise, Kilpatrick reportedly turned down a plea bargain that included a 15 year prison term. Insiders say that since the maximum time for the charges he faces was 18 years, the offer from the prosecutors indicates strong confidence in their case. Indicted with him was his father; it’s nice to think that father and son will have some quality time in the can.
We must all hope for mercy in this world and the next and VM doesn’t exactly wish the worst on these people, but if between the civil penalties, fines and lawsuits from those they have wronged Kilpatrick and company are picked so clean that they have to depend on their prison earnings for snack money in jail, helping them out won’t be at the top of our charitable giving list. And one thing Michigan legislators should check is whether the state has a nice harsh pension forfeiture law.
These judgments are always subjective, but it seems to me that there is not nearly enough national publicity about and outrage over the crimes of Kwame Kilpatrick. If a white or Asian Republican pol had looted fire and police pension funds, blighted the lives of a generation of minority kids and helped do more damage to a great American city than Hurricane Katrina, I don’t think this would be primarily a local news story. I would expect that the scandal would grip the nation, and there would be wall to wall national media coverage.
As there should be.
As it is, an eerie silence envelopes the subject. Outside the Michigan area, only the most dedicated news hounds and political junkies follow this story.
Three factors seem to be at work. One is quite simply financial; falling newsroom budgets in the MSM mean that it is harder for national papers and legacy networks to cover the country.
The second factor is more disturbing: there is a pervasive national sense of ennui and despair about urban areas in which African Americans are the majority. ‘We’ expect decline, decay and corruption in these places, so the Kilpatrick story strikes many editors and journalists as just another ‘dog bites man’ story: not news. Cory Booker is news; Kwame Kilpatrick isn’t.
That ennui and despair intensify when the subject is Detroit. Frankly, while the genteel world hates the thought of being racist, in reality there is a widespread belief in even the most liberal and well educated portions of the white upper middle class that nothing much better can happen in Detroit. I don’t believe that, and this is one of the reasons the city’s decline makes me angry as well as sad. Lax law enforcement and oversight from federal and state authorities allowed a climate of unrestrained corruption to grow up in Detroit over many years.
Putting a lot more people in jail much earlier in their careers, and instilling a healthy fear of the law in Detroit’s political class would have slowed the decline at least, and might well have created openings for better politicians to emerge. The failure of Detroit’s political class must also be seen as a dramatic failure of national and state law enforcement. The horses had been out of this stable for a long time before the authorities showed up with padlocks in hand. One hopes that the Department of Justice will move aggressively to target big city machines for investigation before more Detroits pop up. Similarly, state governors might want to suggest to their attorneys general that corruption bears watching. Michigan taxpayers are going to be stuck with huge bills as the state struggles to cope with the consequences of misrule in Detroit; smart governors might not want to wait until their cities collapse.
Finally, there is a disconnect between important local news and our national news culture today. The New York Times does a lousy job covering New York city and New York State; in the rarefied world of Times readers, local news is dull. Many of our national news editors and writers see themselves as cosmopolitan citizens of the world, interested in much more exciting and important things than the grubby realities of local and municipal life.
In this, the journalists faithfully reflect the thinking of many members of the genteel upper middle class; it is a kind of weird Platonic vision of reality in which the ‘lower’, grubby levels of politics and national life count for less than the ‘higher’, ‘nobler’ levels. Call it the gentrification of news; before Ivy Leaguers filled the newsrooms, American papers focused on the nuts and bolts of life. Now, they are much too highfalutin and hoity-toity for crime and city hall reporters to be the cocks of the walk.
Thus, even as interest in and reporting on the economic and social meltdown of so many once prosperous American cities and states ebbs, the ‘aristocracy’ of the press corps intensifies its endless and endlessly overdone coverage of the national election cycle. Very little that is said or done in either the Romney or Obama campaigns right now has much to do with what voters will be thinking about and voting on six months from now. But that doesn’t stop the legacy press from obsessing about it while ignoring far more consequential developments taking place on every side.
Detroit doesn’t matter all that much to the New York Times and many of its readers for the same reasons that Albany, Queens, Buffalo and Schenectady don’t matter. The new American elite wants to live and think as if it has transcended all that dreary provincial mess and lives on high in a world of Big Ideas and Global Issues. Mrs. Jellyby is much more interested in visionary programs to uplift the inhabitants of Borrio-Boola-Gha than on making sure her own children are well dressed and well cared for.
(At the American Interest we are trying to change this pattern. Go here to read a review of some recent books on Detroit by John G. Rodwan that appears in our May/June print issue.)
There is something profoundly wrong with an American political culture that accepts chronic misgovernment in major cities as OK. It is not OK; the people who do these things may call themselves liberal Democrats and wear the mantle of defenders of the poor, but over and over their actions place them among the most cold blooded enemies and oppressors of the weak.
American cities have been festering pits of graft and bad governance since at least the early 19th century, but there is a difference between the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall and the nihilistic destruction practiced by some of today’s urban machines. Today’s situation, in which some city machines are so dysfunctional that the parasite is literally killing the host (and not just in Detroit), is new and, again, the most vulnerable in our society suffer the worst consequences. Minority children are the greatest ultimate victims of this loathsome corruption: they attend horrible schools and grow up in decaying, unsafe urban landscapes where there is no growth, no jobs and no opportunity for the young.
How is it anything but racist not to care about that — and not to burn with the desire to put the scabrous thugs who misgovern our cities and waste our social funds in prison where they belong?
Former AG: Obama had memo drafted to blame military if Bin Laden assassination failed
Sunday, May 06, 2012
Israel Matzav:
You will remember that about two weeks ago, I reported that President Obama voted present on the Bin Laden assassination. Contrary to his attempts to present himself as a leader who made a 'gutsy call' to kill Bin Laden, Obama left the decision up to commanders in the field. Well, it's worse than that.
On Friday, Sean Hannity showed an interview with former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who said that Obama had Leon Panetta draft a memo to protect the President politically in case the operation failed. If the operation to kill Bin Laden had failed, the US military was to be blamed.
Let's go to the videotape. This video is devastating to Obama, and not just because of his attempts to cover his tail in the Bin Laden assassination, but also because of the comparisons to Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower.
Much more from my friend Jim Hoft here (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
Israel Matzav:
You will remember that about two weeks ago, I reported that President Obama voted present on the Bin Laden assassination. Contrary to his attempts to present himself as a leader who made a 'gutsy call' to kill Bin Laden, Obama left the decision up to commanders in the field. Well, it's worse than that.
On Friday, Sean Hannity showed an interview with former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who said that Obama had Leon Panetta draft a memo to protect the President politically in case the operation failed. If the operation to kill Bin Laden had failed, the US military was to be blamed.
Let's go to the videotape. This video is devastating to Obama, and not just because of his attempts to cover his tail in the Bin Laden assassination, but also because of the comparisons to Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower.
Much more from my friend Jim Hoft here (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
The World’s Richest People Lost A Combined $17 Billion This Week
David De Jong, Bloomberg
May 5, 2012, 8:33 PM
The world’s 40 richest people lost a combined $17 billion this week as concerns about American jobs and European manufacturing drove global equities to their biggest weekly loss of the year.
Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson’s fortune fell by $775 million during the week as shares of his Nevada-based Las Vegas Sands Corp. dropped 3.11 percent through May 4. The 78-year-old is the 11th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $24.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
“There’s renewed economic concern in light of the continuing slowdown in Europe, political uncertainty due to the upcoming elections in France, and the possibility of reopening discussions on debt rescue packages,” John Carey, who helps oversee about $220 billion at Pioneer Investment Management Inc., said in a telephone interview from his Boston office.
Global markets retreated this week after U.S. employers added fewer jobs than forecast and services and manufacturing output in the euro region shrank more than estimated. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index fell 2.44 percent to 1,369.10, its worst weekly decline of the year. The STOXX Europe 600 lost 2.36 percent to close at 253.00.
Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s estimated fortune dropped $2.9 billion after the company said it planned to sell 337.4 million shares for $28 to $35 each in an initial public offering May 17. At the upper end of that range, Zuckerberg’s stake would be $17.6 billion.
Crystallizing Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg’s cut of Facebook, the world’s most popular social-networking site, had been valued at $20.5 billion based on trading of the company’s stock in private markets.
The 27-year-old will sell 30.2 million shares in the public offering, according to a regulatory filing. Most of the proceeds will be used to pay taxes associated with the exercising of 60 million Facebook options. He ranks 36th on the index.
“However the IPO plays out, it will crystallize Zuckerberg’s personal net worth,” Jack Ablin, chief investment officer of Chicago-based Harris Private Bank, said in a telephone interview. “He’s now set to become Silicon Valley’s next big billionaire.”
Three candy heirs joined the index this week. Forrest E. Mars Jr., John Mars and Jacqueline Mars each own one-third of Mars Inc., the world’s second-largest confectionery, which they inherited from their father, Forrest Mars Sr. Each is worth $19.6 billion.
Fontbona, Bezos
Iris Fontbona, the matriarch of Chile’s richest family, lost $1.6 billion during the week after shares of copper producer Antofagasta Plc, the family’s most valuable holding, fell 11 percent.
The company announced May 3 it experienced a 13 percent drop in first-quarter output from the previous three months because of a disruption at its Esperanza mine in northern Chile. Fontbona is worth $17.3 billion.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, the largest web retailer, lost $277 million during the week as shares of the world’s largest online retailer fell 1.26 percent in New York. The 48-year-old overtook Google Inc. founders Larry Page, 39, and Sergey Brin, 38, to become the third-richest technology billionaire after Google shares dropped 2.93 percent.
Larry Ellison, 67, chief executive officer of Redwood City, California-based Oracle Corp., lost $969 million as the company’s shares fell 2.84 percent in New York trading. He is worth $36.1 billion.
Four Richest
Carlos Slim, 72, remains the world’s richest man with a net worth of $73.8 billion. He was the week’s biggest gainer, adding $818 million to his fortune as shares of his mobile-phone company America Movil SAB rose 4.77 percent as the company struck a deal with Mexico’s Federal Competition Commission to avoid paying a fine of almost $1 billion. The company agreed to cut wireless fees and offer calls to competitors for no extra change.
Bill Gates, 56, ranks second on the list with a net worth of $62.2 billion. Behind him is Warren Buffett, 81, who is worth $45.4 billion, up $369 million during the week. The Berkshire Hathaway chairman is preparing for the company’s annual shareholder’s meeting in Omaha, Nebraska this weekend.
Ingvar Kamprad, the 85-year-old founder of the Ikea retail empire, is Europe’s richest man with an estimated net worth of $41.7 billion. Kamprad maintains control over the business through a network of holding companies and legal entities established more than 30 years ago.
World’s Tallest Tower
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s fortune has increased 18.2 percent, or $3.2 billion, this year, as shares of his Kingdom Holding Co., a diversified investment group that is planning to build the world’s tallest tower, rose 36.2 percent year-to-date. The 57-year-old ranks 25th on the index with a net worth of $20.5 billion.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index takes measure of the world’s wealthiest people based on market and economic changes and Bloomberg News reporting. Each net worth figure is updated every business day at 5:30 p.m. in New York and listed in U.S. dollars.
SOURCE: Business Insider
May 5, 2012, 8:33 PM
Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson’s fortune fell by $775 million during the week as shares of his Nevada-based Las Vegas Sands Corp. dropped 3.11 percent through May 4. The 78-year-old is the 11th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $24.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
“There’s renewed economic concern in light of the continuing slowdown in Europe, political uncertainty due to the upcoming elections in France, and the possibility of reopening discussions on debt rescue packages,” John Carey, who helps oversee about $220 billion at Pioneer Investment Management Inc., said in a telephone interview from his Boston office.
Global markets retreated this week after U.S. employers added fewer jobs than forecast and services and manufacturing output in the euro region shrank more than estimated. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index fell 2.44 percent to 1,369.10, its worst weekly decline of the year. The STOXX Europe 600 lost 2.36 percent to close at 253.00.
Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s estimated fortune dropped $2.9 billion after the company said it planned to sell 337.4 million shares for $28 to $35 each in an initial public offering May 17. At the upper end of that range, Zuckerberg’s stake would be $17.6 billion.
Crystallizing Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg’s cut of Facebook, the world’s most popular social-networking site, had been valued at $20.5 billion based on trading of the company’s stock in private markets.
The 27-year-old will sell 30.2 million shares in the public offering, according to a regulatory filing. Most of the proceeds will be used to pay taxes associated with the exercising of 60 million Facebook options. He ranks 36th on the index.
“However the IPO plays out, it will crystallize Zuckerberg’s personal net worth,” Jack Ablin, chief investment officer of Chicago-based Harris Private Bank, said in a telephone interview. “He’s now set to become Silicon Valley’s next big billionaire.”
Three candy heirs joined the index this week. Forrest E. Mars Jr., John Mars and Jacqueline Mars each own one-third of Mars Inc., the world’s second-largest confectionery, which they inherited from their father, Forrest Mars Sr. Each is worth $19.6 billion.
Fontbona, Bezos
Iris Fontbona, the matriarch of Chile’s richest family, lost $1.6 billion during the week after shares of copper producer Antofagasta Plc, the family’s most valuable holding, fell 11 percent.
The company announced May 3 it experienced a 13 percent drop in first-quarter output from the previous three months because of a disruption at its Esperanza mine in northern Chile. Fontbona is worth $17.3 billion.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, the largest web retailer, lost $277 million during the week as shares of the world’s largest online retailer fell 1.26 percent in New York. The 48-year-old overtook Google Inc. founders Larry Page, 39, and Sergey Brin, 38, to become the third-richest technology billionaire after Google shares dropped 2.93 percent.
Larry Ellison, 67, chief executive officer of Redwood City, California-based Oracle Corp., lost $969 million as the company’s shares fell 2.84 percent in New York trading. He is worth $36.1 billion.
Four Richest
Carlos Slim, 72, remains the world’s richest man with a net worth of $73.8 billion. He was the week’s biggest gainer, adding $818 million to his fortune as shares of his mobile-phone company America Movil SAB rose 4.77 percent as the company struck a deal with Mexico’s Federal Competition Commission to avoid paying a fine of almost $1 billion. The company agreed to cut wireless fees and offer calls to competitors for no extra change.
Bill Gates, 56, ranks second on the list with a net worth of $62.2 billion. Behind him is Warren Buffett, 81, who is worth $45.4 billion, up $369 million during the week. The Berkshire Hathaway chairman is preparing for the company’s annual shareholder’s meeting in Omaha, Nebraska this weekend.
Ingvar Kamprad, the 85-year-old founder of the Ikea retail empire, is Europe’s richest man with an estimated net worth of $41.7 billion. Kamprad maintains control over the business through a network of holding companies and legal entities established more than 30 years ago.
World’s Tallest Tower
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s fortune has increased 18.2 percent, or $3.2 billion, this year, as shares of his Kingdom Holding Co., a diversified investment group that is planning to build the world’s tallest tower, rose 36.2 percent year-to-date. The 57-year-old ranks 25th on the index with a net worth of $20.5 billion.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index takes measure of the world’s wealthiest people based on market and economic changes and Bloomberg News reporting. Each net worth figure is updated every business day at 5:30 p.m. in New York and listed in U.S. dollars.
SOURCE: Business Insider
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