BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : 'The People's Pension' and the War Against Social Security

'The People's Pension':
The war against social security

The opponents of this program are not interested in saving money, a fairer distribution of benefits, or helping the elderly. They are serving an ideological agenda of social Darwinism.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / June 26, 2012

[The People's Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan by Eric Laursen (2012: AK Press); Paperback; 750 pp.; $27.]

It seems like every few months alarms are sounded warning U.S. workers that Social Security is going bankrupt. Oftentimes, the follow-up to these alarms includes a warning that the only way to save the system is to turn all or part of the funds involved over to Wall Street investment houses like Goldman Sachs.

Usually the alarms are sounded by right-wing politicians from the Republican Party. In recent years however, this cacophony of lies has been assisted by more and more Democrats.

According to Eric Laursen, in his new book titled The People's Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan, the desire to end what is Washington’s most successful government program has been underway since Social Security’s inception. It has only intensified in recent decades. As the title suggests, that intensification sharpened in 1981, the year Ronald Reagan became president.

As anyone with an understanding of neoliberal capitalism and the role played by investment houses in this stage of capitalism knows, that year coincides more or less with an increased interest in Social Security funds by those houses. Why? Because their required growth requires more funds to invest and there are billions of dollars in funds sitting in the Social Security reserves.

Laursen provides the reader with a brief history of the philosophy behind Social Security. Harkening to the writings of 19th century anarchists and leftists, he describes part of the impetus behind Social Security as coming from the ideas of mutual aid; where every citizen is cared for. More specifically, he traces the institution of the social security system to the Townsend clubs begun in the 1930s by Dr. Francis Townsend of California.

It was Townsend’s idea that old people should be guaranteed an income based on their work and funded by taxes. His reasoning was simple, if senior citizens had an income, they could remain consumers, thereby helping stimulate the economy. Millions joined these clubs, exerting political pressure that led to the Social Security Act of 1937. Naturally, this act was fervently opposed by many corporate executives and the wealthy as being socialist and un-American.

Most of today’s opponents are not so blunt in their assessment. However, their proposals to privatize the system suggests that they too oppose a government program that does not benefit their corporate benefactors. Instead, they would rather turn it over to the Goldman Sachs of the world. This desire is certainly related to the substantial campaign donations they receive from Goldman Sachs and their cohorts.

One expects right wing politicians opposed to any government expenditures not related to benefiting private industry and the Pentagon to oppose Social Security. It is the Democratic opponents who deserve our real attention. Laursen’s history is also a history of the gradual shrinking of support among Democrats and other so-called liberals.

The People’s Pension puts the beginning of the current assault on Social Security in the lap of the Reagan administration. Laursen makes it very clear that the opponents of this program are not interested in saving money, a fairer distribution of benefits, or helping the elderly. They are serving an ideological agenda of social Darwinism.

Furthermore, every attack on Social Security is nothing more or less than an attempt by the corporate world and its right-wing supporters to end it once and for all. Laursen further points out that the arguments used by Social Security’s opponents never address the economic consequences of ending the program; they only draw up flimsy prognostications of disaster should the program continue.

Privatization would  be nothing more than one more method for corporate America to take public monies and privatize the profits while insuring the continued socialization of the risks and loss. As Laursen points out, this is exactly what is done by the defense industry and any scheme to privatize Social Security would do the same thing.

A fact that is not very well known outside of certain circles is that the model for privatization promoted by the so-called supply side economists was developed in the fascist Chile of Augusto Pinochet. Championed by many Republicans and their banker/corporate sponsors, this model is ultimately more expensive than keeping things as they are and its greatest benefits would be to the banking industry.

Furthermore, this and other privatization schemes assume an ever-growing capitalist economy -- a phenomenon less certain than it was before the crash of 2008. Despite this, politicians continue to include Social Security in their gunsights. Whether it's Alan Simpson calling Social Security a "Milk Cow with 310 Million Tits,” or so-called Blue Dog Democrats suggesting that benefits be changed, the assault on the program never goes away.

Eric Laursen has written a comprehensive and exhaustive history of the Social Security program in the United States. The People’s Pension is an honest, detailed, and even eye-opening discussion of the program’s origins and continuing efforts to provide elderly and disabled Americans with a livable income.

Equally important, it is a discussion of the attempts to alter and ultimately destroy the program by forces whose only interest seems to be profit and the elimination of any government institution that guarantees every citizen worker an income in their old age.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Tarq : Revisionist History and the 'Great Presidency' of Ronald Reagan

Center stage: Ronald Reagan on the set at the General Electric Theater, 1954-62. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Ronald Reagan and revisionist history

The Reagan era brought us depression, war, and mass murder in the Global South.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / February 1, 2011

The right wing media have resumed the historical revisionism that portrays Ronald Reagan as a great president. The occasion for this is the 100th anniversary of President Reagan’s birth. He is being trotted out by Republicans and Tea Party spokespersons to celebrate the political life of “the great communicator,” the savior of America.

Let us be clear: the policies and programs instituted in the 1980s that led to 30 years of economic decline at home, dramatic increases in military spending, and massive killing of peoples of color in the Global South, have their roots in the demands of economic and political elites before President Reagan assumed office.

In addition, the disastrous 30 years of public policy was created with the willful collaboration of powerful figures in both political parties and a political economy that makes such pain and suffering likely.

However, the Reagan era (preceded by the rise to power of Reagan’s mentor, Margaret Thatcher, prime minister in Great Britain) can be seen as introducing a qualitative shift in public policy from state and market collaboration as exemplified by the New Deal (1932-1976) to the celebration of the market as a source of economic well-being and political stability.

While government grew enormously during the last 30 years, the official ideology was used by Republicans and Democrats alike to reduce or eliminate government programs that were targeted to assist the vast majority of the people, the working class.

Looking at economic policy, the Reagan administration launched a campaign to destroy the U.S. labor movement, reduce rudimentary public services and supports for the poor (President Clinton finished the job), radically reduce corporate taxes, provide tax incentives to encourage manufacturers to move plants overseas, and expand the deregulation of banking and financial speculation (begun by President Carter).

The impacts of these policies included reducing the rights and living conditions of workers, resuming the historic process of shifting the wealth and income of the country to the top one percent of the economic elite, reducing the middle class, and increasing the percentage of the people living below the poverty line.

While the proportion of the society’s wealth controlled by the economic ruling class grew, the rate of economic growth of the economy as a whole since Reagan declined by one third compared to the period from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Reagan’s global economic policies, commonly referred to as “neoliberalism,” used debt, induced by the IMF and private banks, and military power to force virtually every country in the world to cut back on public services to their citizens, privatize their economies, shift from producing goods and services for their own people to producing for exports (to earn foreign exchange so that they could pay back western banks that forced them to borrow billions of dollars).

As the economic vulnerability of workers grew in poor countries, they became desperate, pliant, and cheap labor was forced to manufacture goods for 10 percent of the wage costs of workers in the United States. By 2000, half the world earned $2 a day or less. In the United States, wages stagnated; earnings at the dawn of the new century in real dollars were no higher than the early 1970s.

Also, the Reagan administration of the 1980s increased war-making and complicity in the deaths of millions of people around the world. As a candidate, Ronald Reagan convinced many Americans that a “window of vulnerability” had opened in America’s security posture because of the escalation of military spending by “the evil empire,” the former Soviet Union.

As president, Reagan launched the biggest arms buildup, aside from World War II, in United States history. And, as was the case in 1960 when candidate John F. Kennedy campaigned with claims of a “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union, the claim was a lie.

Hamstrung by the post-Vietnam fear Americans held about the U.S. getting involved in another quagmire, what beltway policy wonks called “the Vietnam Syndrome,” Reagan defense intellectuals shifted to what they called “low-intensity conflict.” LIC meant that the United States would fund anti-communists, reactionaries, and militarists who would fight our wars for us.

The United States funded anti-government rebels in Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Afghanistan, including followers of Osama Bin Laden. Arms sales to right-wing regimes, such as those in El Salvador, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Pakistan, skyrocketed as Reagan lifted Carter administration sales limitations. Conservatively 2 million people in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East died because of these policies.

Finally, the Reagan administration shifted strategic doctrine from Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) which emphasized maintaining the capacity to deter a Soviet surprise attack on the United States to a “counterforce” strategy that called for plowing resources into developing a first strike nuclear capacity, which included the Hollywood fantasy, the “Strategic Defense Initiative” or “Star Wars.”

Given the Reagan public discourse concerning “evil empires,” threats that the Soviets had better give up their system or expect war, and the new military doctrines, the world was lucky to survive the 1980s without nuclear war.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of the threats to human survival waned but the neoliberal global agenda continued through the first Bush presidency and the Clinton years. The global military agenda resumed in the new century as the creators of the Reagan era military programs assumed positions of power in the Bush administration.

The Rumsfelds, Cheneys, and their subordinates, who gained experience back in the Nixon days and became foreign and military policy influentials in the Reagan (and George H.W. Bush) periods, and who had organized out of power in the Clinton period, were back in the saddle. They used the 9/11 tragedy to project military power on a global basis.

So when hometown papers publish articles with headlines like “ ‘Great Communicator’ Still Resonates” (Journal and Courier, Monday, January 31, 2011) be prepared to remind people what really happened in the 1980s and that the public policies adopted then have caused so much pain ever since. Probably some of these newspapers will continue to expand their revisionist project in other subject areas as well; for example, suggesting that the Founding Fathers opposed slavery in the United States.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Conservative Economics : Just Plain Loco

Cartoon by Daryl Cagle / MSNBC.
Still trickling after all these years...
The insanity of conservative economics

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / July 9, 2010

Like a bunch of lemmings following each other over a cliff to disaster, conservative politicians, pundits, and economists refuse to give up their allegiance to Reagan's "trickle down" economics in spite of the fact that the last 30 years have shown it simply does not work.

They cling to the belief that if we just keep making the rich people even richer they will share their good fortune with everyone else. They have obviously overlooked the natural greed of humans (especially after they have amassed a lot of money).

What has this ridiculously simplistic view of economic policy done to this country?

• It has tripled the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1% and the middle and poorest fifths of the country since 1979.
• It has increased the wealth of the top 1% of families from 10% of the country's income to about 25%.
• By de-regulating Wall Street and the financial industry it created the conditions leading to the financial meltdown that kicked off the current recession.

Instead of creating an economic vitality that resulted in increased wealth for everyone, it has just created an ever-growing and enormous gap between the rich and everyone else in this society. Making sure the rich got richer has been a real boon for the rich, but it has been an economic disaster for everyone else.

Now some conservatives would like to take this "make the rich even richer" policy even further. A member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Stephen Moore, appeared on CNBC and said the government shouldn't let Bush's tax cuts for the rich expire next January. He went on to say, "In fact, if I could have my 'druthers, I'd raise the 10 percent tax rate to 15 percent and lower the [top] rates."

Incredible! He wants to raise taxes on those taxpayers who make the least money and lower the taxes on those who make the most. How will this help to end the recession? It won't. It will do nothing but vastly increase the huge gap between the haves and the have-nots and mire those have-nots even deeper into the recession. But he is certainly not the only conservative wanting to "make the rich even richer" as an answer to our economic problems.

Arthur Laffer, a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Board, has an even crazier idea. Laffer said in a Wall Street Journal article that the best way to stimulate the economy is to eliminate all federal taxes. He said:

No income tax, no corporate profits tax, no capital gains tax, no estate tax, no payroll tax (FICA) either employee or employer, no Medicare or Medicaid taxes, no federal excise taxes, no tariffs, no federal taxes at all, which would have reduced federal revenues by $2.4 trillion annually. Can you imagine where employment would be today? How does a 2.5% unemployment rate sound?

Amazing! How does he think the federal government is going to fund the military (and the two unending wars we are fighting), social security, Medicare, education, small business and housing loans, government salaries, food stamps, and myriad other federal programs. Does he want to do away with the federal government altogether? We tried a version of that under the Articles of Confederation and it didn't work at all. Without the federal government we don't have a country -- regardless of what many right-wingers think.

The truth is that we must have a federal government and it must be able to finance itself -- and the only way to logically do that is through a fair system of taxation. Conservatives in Congress are already complaining about this country's deficit. They have refused to extend unemployment benefits or fund a new stimulus program to create new jobs because they claim it would increase the deficit. But Laffer's idea would increase the nation's debt by many trillions of dollars, instead of the few billion a badly-needed stimulus program would cost.

And it would not create any new jobs. Laffer's idea that eliminating all federal taxes would create an unemployment rate of 2% is laughable at best. Lowering taxes (or eliminating them) does not create jobs. If Laffer had ever run a business he would know that there is only one thing that causes an employer to hire one or more new workers -- need.

An employer will only hire a worker if he needs that worker to either increase production of goods or deliverance of services that the business needs to meet customer demand. Hiring fewer workers than needed will hurt production of goods and delivery of services, and cost the company customers (who will go to a company that can't meet its needs). Hiring more workers than are needed will just needlessly cut into company profits (something no business wants).

A business will hire the number of workers it needs to meet demand, regardless of whether taxes are high or low. If taxes get too high the business will raise prices. If taxes get lowered the business will put the extra profit in the bank. But taxes will not cause the business to hire either more or less workers than needed to meet demand.

Laffer is simply an idiot, especially considering the big deal most other conservatives are making over the federal deficit. Most of them seem to believe that cutting the deficit is the way out of the recession. But cutting government spending in the midst of a serious recession will do nothing but deepen and extend the recession. The deficit is not nearly as important as job creation in the midst of this recession (which has cost the country between 12 and 15 million jobs).

The American people seem to understand this even if the conservatives do not. A new Gallup Poll shows that at least 60% of Americans approve of more government spending to stimulate the economy and create new jobs. They know that the only real way to cut the deficit without hurting the country is to create new jobs. When enough new jobs are created with those new workers paying more in taxes, the deficit will be reduced.

Americans also disagree with other aspects of conservative economic policy. Around 55% would like to see the government expand regulation of major financial institutions (to prevent another financial meltdown that hurts Main Street more than Wall Street). And 56% believe the government should regulate energy output from private companies to reduce global warming (a move that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says would save $19 billion).

Conservatives may believe that the way to a healthier economy is to make rich people richer, but the American people aren't buying it any more. They know from painful experience that money doesn't "trickle down" in our capitalist economy -- it flows upward. When workers are doing well everyone does well. That's just the way it is.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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Spying on Americans : Reagan and the PROMIS Conspiracy

It's a national tradition:
Spying on Americans

• Part II: Reagan administration acquires PROMIS software

By James Retherford and Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / February 2, 2010

[This is the second installment in a series about the U.S. government's extensive and inglorious history of spying on its own people.]

After Watergate and other revelations of illegal government intrusions led to Congress-mandated clamping down on intelligence operations in the mid-1970s, Ronald Reagan immediately set out to roll back the reforms. With former CIA director George H. W. Bush as his running mate, Reagan received considerable assistance from the intelligence community in the election of 1980. This may have included a secret trip to Paris -- as has been widely asserted -- to make a deal with Iranians guaranteeing that Jimmy Carter would not be able to retrieve the 42 American hostages before the November election, the so-called "October Surprise."

Reagan approved hiring the many private intelligence firms founded by former agents who had been ousted in the 1970s. He also brought psy-op people from the agency to the White House and State Department, using them in “public diplomacy programs” to mold public opinion. Vice President George H.W. Bush oversaw efforts to harass and spy on dissidents.

The coup de grace: the Reagan Justice Department “commandeered” (i.e., stole) a remarkable computer database program called Prosecutor's Management Information System or PROMIS which would serve as the basis for domestic and global surveillance operations for decades to come.

The story of PROMIS has become a Hollywood-style thriller replete with drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, rogue agents and alleged contract murderers, high-tech looting and international espionage, drug cartels, the Mafia, and the Yakuza, allegations of mass murder and massive cover-up, and near war with Japan... all fingers pointing to massive government corruption by Ronald Reagan’s coterie of friends in the Ed Meese Department of Justice.

This is compelling stuff for any legit investigative reporter, and indeed many — such as Joel Bleifuss, Barron’s, and Richard L. Fricker in the inaugural issue of Wired — have taken a shot at connecting the dots. But the scent of blood has also lured the conspiracy sleuths and rightwing demagogues ranging from Alex Jones to Lyndon LaRouche and the Moonies.

Here is what we make of the story.

Reagan rolled back reforms initiated after the Watergate break in.

The PROMIS... and more

Funded by grant money from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), PROMIS software had been developed in the 1970s by the INSLAW Corporation, a small software development company owned by William and Nancy Hamilton, for integrating criminal justice records.

“But the real power of PROMIS,” Fricker writes in Wired,

“is that with a staggering 570,000 lines of computer code, PROMIS can integrate innumerable databases without requiring any reprogramming. In essence, PROMIS can turn blind data into information. And anyone in government will tell you that information, when wielded with finesse, begets power. Converted to use by intelligence agencies, as has been alleged in interviews by ex-CIA and Israeli Mossad agents, PROMIS can be a powerful tracking device capable of monitoring intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.”

As it was being pitched to the Justice Department, government officials quickly recognized that its capability potential was for more advanced than any data integration system previously developed. PROMIS could be programmed to do everything from tracking all kinds of financial transactions to mapping troop movements in all parts of the world to monitoring intelligence operations, agents, and targets. It could used to acquire and integrate data in various foreign languages. Through an artificial intelligence component codenamed “Brainstorm,” PROMIS extended personality profiling into the realm of predicting an individual’s thoughts and future actions.

The Justice Department first signed a $10 million contract to lease the software and then simply seized it and drove INSLAW into bankruptcy, trying to force liquidation to a rival firm, Hadron, inc., controlled by a key Reagan crony named Dr. Earl Brian.

Brian had already ridden the coattails of Reagan and Attorney General Ed Meese from the former California governor’s state cabinet to a number of lucrative business holdings, including United Press International and Financial News Network (FNN), and allegedly was a key player in the so-called October Surprise, in which Reagan operatives, including vice presidential candidate Bush, have been alleged to have met with Iranian diplomats in Paris and arranged a deal to short circuit Jimmy Carter’s hostage release negotiations until after the 1980 election.

Ignoring the licensing agreement, the DoJ soon passed PROMIS along to other government agencies, including the CIA, though the U.S. government consistently denied this. There followed a long battle through the courts in which INSLAW unsuccessfully tried to obtain redress for the government’s theft of its intellectual property. Those who still believe in the integrity of our judicial system should research the case. For a time INSLAW was represented by Elliott Richardson, who argued compellingly that the matter called for a special investigator.

The CIA was not the only place where illegal versions of PROMIS showed up. According to former Israeli spy Ari Ben-Menashe, the U.S. sold the program to Israel. Ben-Menashe claims that Mossad counterterrorism expert Rafael Eitan first thought of the idea of bugging PROMIS and then selling it to Israel’s enemies in order to snoop on their security and intelligence activities undetected; Israel’s “trapdoor” was reportedly designed by an Israeli American living in Chatsworth, CA.

In turn, the Israelis sold the software to a number of national intelligence services, including Jordan and Iraq, as well as financial institutions, most notably the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) which used PROMIS to track money flow on behalf of U.S. and British intelligence agencies before imploding into a spectacular bank failure in 1991. Though Degem, a software company owned by British media mogul (and secret Israeli agent) Robert Maxwell, PROMIS was sold to the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries.

The software also slipped into Dr. Brian’s hands, allegedly as a payoff towards favors owed for Brian’s help during the October Surprise. From there Brian engaged the services of rogue computer expert Michael Riconoscuito to create a U.S. version with a secret backdoor allowing undetected U.S. intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on PROMIS users’ activities.

These modifications were done at a facility located on the Cabazon Indian reservation in Indio, CA, owned by Wackenhut, a Florida-based security company with FBI and CIA connections (and an alleged weapons fencing operation for Oliver North’s Iran-Contra dealings).

Wackenhut was founded by retired FBI and CIA executives and is often called the “FBI’s FBI.” Biological weapons and explosives were also developed at its Cabezon facility, located on tribal land officially administered by a self-professed former CIA operative, John Philip Nichols, who later would be convicted of murder solicitation in the death of a tribal official who allegedly had information linking Nichols to misappropriated money involving Wackenhut, illegal arms deals, gaming, and the mob.

Through Hadron, Brian sold the bugged PROMIS to Britain, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Iraq, and Canada. The illegal sale to Canada was discovered by accident when a Canadian government agency telephoned INSLAW requesting a French-language version of the software.

Perhaps the murkiest allegations about the distribution of the Trojan Horse-version of PROMIS came from Debra von Trapp, a technical expert who was hired by the Bush I administration and claims to have worked on a number of clandestine operations, including the bugging and installation of spyware in the White House as Bill Clinton prepared to move in. Von Trapp also claims to have been involved in a CIA project, staged out of a Xerox plant in Germany, to install spyware-enhanced PROMIS on hard drives being sold to Eastern Bloc intelligence agencies, including the KGB.

During the senior Bush’s term, von Trapp was a member of a team developing software to mine all sorts of information about people’s personal lives, allegedly run out of Oliver North’s office at the Department of Justice.

At the same time Riconoscuito was developing a spyware backdoor, another consultant, Barry Kumnick, whose father Frank was an Aryan Nation ideologue living next door to Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, ID, was creating an artificial intelligent component called Brainstorm which could allow technicians to predict an individual’s thinking and future action. Kumnick’s early work later morphed into the Total Information Awareness program under the second Bush. It is said that work on the program was stopped when Bush Senior was not reelected, but the work just as likely continued under the radar.

Investigative reporter Danny Casolaro's was "suicided" and his notes and tape recorder were missing.

Like any good spy story, the Islaw-PROMIS saga is marked by its trail of dead, disappeared, and discredited, with claims of as many as 50 murdered. The most remembered casualty was investigative reporter Danny Casolaro, whose naked body was found in a blood-filled bathtub in a Martinsburg, WV, hotel room with multiple slash wounds on his arms and wrists.

Missing was his ever-present briefcase, tape recorder, and notes and outline of his proposed book about the web of intrigue surrounding Iran-Contra, the savings and loan meltdown, BCCI, Contra-connected Wackenhut, Wackenhut-connected INSLAW, the INSLAW-connected October Surprise, and possibly including a secret group of well-connected work-for-hire former spooks running drugs for the Contras.

Casolaro called this high-level conspiracy “The Octopus” and had shown friends his research findings only days before his death. He was in Martinsburg to interview a source who, he told friends, would help him nail down a last piece of evidence in the INSLAW software theft case.

Bleifuss, reporting on the Casolaro death in In These Times, talked to a close friend who said Casolaro began receiving death threats eight or nine months before his demise. The last one, according to Casolaro’s brother, came five days before his trip to West Virginia. Casolaro reportedly told his brother that “if anything happens to me, don’t believe it is an accident.”

Casolaro’s body was found on a Saturday and was embalmed the following Monday -- before family members could be notified -- without a careful autopsy or forensic investigation; the death scene was quickly sanitized by a “cleaning contractor.” Four days later authorities ruled the young journalist’s death was a likely suicide.

Two years later attorney and corruption investigator Paul Wilcher, representing jailed former CIA operative Gunther Russbacher while also looking into the Inslaw case and its possible connections of other high-level conspiracies and cover-ups, was found dead in his bathroom with no apparent cause of death.

Days earlier Wilcher told a friend, now deceased White House correspondent (and Tyler, TX, native) Sarah McClendon, that his investigation had taken him deeper into the conspiracy than Casolaro’s had and that he had become a “danger signal” to powerful interests.

Wilcher’s personal records, documents, computer files, and other information also disappeared, and his body was cremated without positive identification, fingerprinting, or complete forensic examination to determine cause of death. Wilcher was 40 years old and, according to friends, in good health.

Russbacher claims that, as a aviator attached to the Office of Naval Intelligence, he piloted George Bush to Paris in 1980 to rendezvous with Iranian revolutionaries and hammer out details for the hostage release delay. He also claims that $40 million was handled over to the Iranians in Paris to seal the deal. Furthermore, Russbacher said that he had cockpit tape showing the former CIA director in the back seat of the SR71 spy plane used in the return flight.

Russbacher convinced Milcher that his intimate knowledge of the October Surprise as well as other agency “dirty tricks” was the real reason he had been imprisoned, charged, he said, with violating parole in fictional criminal cases originally fabricated by the government to provide cover in his clandestine work.

Riconoscuito also is in the slammer, convicted of illegal drug manufacture. He says he was framed as punishment for going public with his dealings with Brian, the development of PROMIS’s backdoor, and Wackenhut weapons manufacturing and Contra connections.

The developer of the Brainstorm AI component, Barry Kumnick, disappeared amidst the PROMIS scandal fallout. Before disappearing, Kumnick told his sister in Idaho that his new program would be extremely dangerous if it got into the wrong hands. Kumnick has recently resurfaced but has had little to say about INSLAW or his disappearance.


The Inslaw case is indeed an octopus with tentacles reaching into many dark places, and this telling barely scratches the surface of the layers of deception and intrigue.

For instance, we have omitted Debra von Tripp’s story of how the U.S. came perilously close to war with Japan over CIA intrusions into confidential Japanese business dealings and Japanese bugging of the White House; her allegations connect the Saran gas attack in Tokyo, the mid-air explosion of a Lear jet carrying the assistant secretary of the Army, and the Oklahoma bombing, planned and carried out, she said, by rogue U.S. intelligence agents working for the Japanese government.

Von Tripp states that the FBI-CIA dual-assignment agent behind these plots, Robert Goetzman, also murdered Vincent Foster because he “got greedy” and started selling NSA code to the Israelis. She states that one of Goetzman’s covers was as an executive for MCA/Universal, a Japanese-owned multinational entertainment conglomerate with ties to both the Yakuza and American organized crime... and also to Ronald Reagan -- who was represented by the MCA talent management company during his Hollywood career. That is her story, and she is still alive and free and apparently sticking to it, though few are listening.

In 2001, the Unification Church-owned Washington Times and Fox News each quoted federal law enforcement officials familiar with debriefing former FBI agent Robert Hanssen as claiming that the convicted spy had stolen copies of a PROMIS-derivative for his Soviet KGB handlers.

These reports further stated that Osama bin Laden later bought copies of the same PROMIS-derivative on the Russian black market for $2 million and used the software to penetrate database systems in order to move funds throughout the banking system and evade detection by U.S. law enforcement.

In 2006, former Polish-CIA double-agent and now international journalist David Dastych alleged that Chinese military intelligence (PLA-2) devised their own double backdoor through which they penetrated the PROMIS database systems in the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in order “to steal U.S. nuclear secrets."

Despite first a federal bankruptcy judge’s blistering ruling that “through trickery, deceit, and fraud,” the U.S. Department of Justice “took, converted, and stole” software belonging to INSLAW, and then an equally damning investigation by the House Judicial Committee, chaired by Texas congressman Jack Brooks, which also called for a full investigation of Danny Casolaro’s death, the Department of Justice and the CIA have managed to divert or outright quash every serious investigation into the PROMIS affair and the web of shadowy subplots surrounding the story.

INSLAW has not received an additional penny for the massive theft and widespread sale of its intellectual property. Faced with closing its doors due to bankruptcy, the company was rescued by a substantial cash investment by IBM and is still in business, though perhaps just barely judging from its modest presence on the World Wide Web.

The possible moral: Crime pays... if you are the Department of Justice.

Please see:

• Part I of this series: U.S. Government : Six Decades of Spying on its Citizens: LBJ and Nixon / by Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / January 5, 2010

Also see:

• James Retherford's 2009 Rag Blog series, Who Watches the Watchman? COINTELPRO and the Federal Government’s Clandestine Attack on the U.S. Constitution,
• And for more background on the domestic surveillance of dissidents in Austin and Texas, read The Spies of Texas by Thorne Dreyer / The Texas Observer / Nov. 17, 2006.

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Rogues and Centrists : How Media Frame the World

The symbolic uses of politics:
The Gipper and the Rogue

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / November 20, 2009

Moderate Republicans -- yes, they are not extinct, though most are in hiding -- scoff at Sarah Palin and wish she would go away.

...Reagan piously gave lip service to the right-wing social agenda while doing nothing to further it by legislation.

...The ‘Gipper’ talked tough about the Russians -- while doing more that any other president to foster détente.

...But it’s no coincidence the Eisenhower ‘50s and Reagan ‘80s were periods of unusual peace and prosperity.

Evan Thomas, 'Gone Rogue,' Newsweek, November 23, 2009.

Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc.

Karl Marx, ‘Preface,’ The German Ideology

Insights from social science

A long time ago the eminent political scientist Murray Edelman wrote a book entitled The Symbolic Uses of Politics. In it he postulated that most people experience the political world not through concrete reality but through emotional symbols. For example, the classic way in which people relate to their political institutions is through the flag of their nation.

Americans viewing the flag see images of men in combat fighting for freedom or men and women standing in line waiting to vote for their preferred political candidates. A colorful cloth with stars and stripes gets transformed in our consciousness into a rich, glamorized history even when the emotive images are in direct contradiction with people’s lives.

In addition, Edelman suggests the ways in which the emotional symbols get embedded and reinforced in the consciousness of peoples by borrowing from anthropological writings on myth and ritual. Myths are networks of emotional symbols that collectively tell a story that explains “reality.” Rituals reinforce in behavior the mythology of public life. We need only reflect on the pledge to the flag that opens elementary and secondary school class sessions in rich and poor communities alike or regular meetings of AFL-CIO labor councils.

Edelman pointed out that emotional symbols (he called them “condensational”) provide the primary way people connect with the world beyond immediate experience. The extraordinary complexity of the modern world is reduced to a series of powerful symbols such as the threats of “international communism” or “terrorism.”

Media analyst Todd Gitlin, wrote about “media frames;” that is the ways in which media construct the symbols and myths that shape information about the world. Print media shapes what we read, who are regarded as authoritative spokespersons, and what visual images shape our thinking about countries, issues such as war and peace, trade, investment, and the global climate. Television emphasizes visual images rather than words. Whatever the media form, points of view are embedded in the words and images communicated.

Writers such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, and Robert McChesney accept implicitly Edelman’s counsel that people experience the world indirectly and usually in emotional form. They also assume, as does Gitlin, that what we read, see, and hear about the world is framed for us. They go further to suggest that what Marx called the “false conceptions about ourselves” in symbols, myths, rituals, and frames are usually the product of ruling class interests.

Enter Rogues and Centrists

The Newsweek article cited above was selected not because it was unique but rather because it was representative of ongoing and dominant media discourse. Sarah Palin, while popular with an undetermined but substantial segment of the U.S. population, is presented as an extremist. The article hastens to add that a similar collection of “Democrats can be just as rigidly partisan on the left.” The article suggests that these extremes represent big problems for the political parties in which they operate and most importantly this “polarization” is a threat to the well being of the United States itself.

The article then refers to the “two greatest postwar presidents,” Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. They were great in part because they presided over two periods, the '50s and the '80s, “of unusual peace and prosperity.” Reagan was the president who did the most to stimulate détente with the former Soviet Union.

In addition to this curious revisionism about “peace and prosperity,” the author claimed that while these two presidents were products of conservatism in their respective Republican parties, they ruled from the center.

To generalize from this extraordinary historical rendition, therefore, contemporary politicians must learn that “populism” from the left or right must be avoided if American society is to survive and thrive.

Further, the article says that the Eisenhower and Reagan years symbolize peace. The collapse of the former Soviet Union occurred because of the policies of the latter. And, despite an enormous array of data and human experiences to the contrary, the 50s and 80s were years of prosperity as well as peace. One can conclude from the description that history is myth, symbol, and ritual, and it is packaged and provided to us in media form as frames.

Perhaps the most potent assumption embedded in this mystification is the proposition that only centrist politics can work.

What role for the Rogues?

It is clear that the centrist agenda could not be defended on its own terms. It is an agenda that supports militarism, financial speculation, deindustrialization, and globalization. The byproducts of these processes are experienced directly by working people throughout the country as joblessness, declining real wages, inadequate access to health care, education, and transportation, and forms of pollution that can be seen from many people’s bedroom windows.

But if Americans can see “extremism” from the “left and right,” often shown on the screen as screaming protesters, then the centrist logic becomes more compelling even though people know that centrism means a weak public option in health care and Wall Streeters regulating themselves.

And which political extremist today can better promote the symbols, myths and centrist media frame than Sarah Palin. So while journalists and their bosses have nothing but scorn for her, she is trumpeted on every news and talk show on television.

The analysis above is not too surprising but what remains more difficult is figuring out a progressive agenda for recapturing the production of symbols and myths and establishing a space to provide more effectively alternative media frames. While alternative media and advocacy groups exist, the need to develop a national and global progressive media agenda still is required.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical, where this article also appears.]

The Rag Blog

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Obama Speech : You Read it Here First

Leaked: 'The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation. These are facts and we simply must face them.'
By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / December 24, 2008

So it looks like a copy of Barack Obama's inauguration speech has been leaked.

Here's an excerpt...

"Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny. Our excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous toll on our economy and our people. It's a cause of the increased inflation and unemployment that we now face. This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our nation.

The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation. These are facts and we simply must face them."

Now for the truth...

What you just read is not an excerpt from a leaked version of Obama's inauguration speech. It's an excerpt from a speech made by President Jimmy Carter on July 15, 1979.

Shortly afterward, President Reagan ripped the solar panels off the White House roof. Literally and figuratively.

The Rag Blog

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ECONOMICS : John McCain Has Embraced Republican Orthodoxy

The Enforcer: Ronald Reagan brought laissez-faire economics to government.
Laissez-Faire Economics? It's a Code Word for One-Sided Interventions
By Steven Conn

Steven Conn is a professor of history at Ohio State University and a writer for the History News Service.

As he refines his economic message on the campaign trail this summer, Republican John McCain has made it clear that, previous positions notwithstanding, he has now embraced the Republican economic orthodoxy: eliminate regulation, cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and the free and unfettered market will take care of everything.

This economic formula was fashioned most thoroughly by economist Milton Friedman in the mid-20th century, and brought to the federal government by Ronald Reagan. Friedman and his current devotees have looked to the late 19th century for their model of how an economy should work. They have imagined that era as a golden age of free-market competition and laissez-faire government. Many of these Friedmanites want us to return to that golden age.

The problem is that these free marketeers have their history exactly wrong. The Gilded Age, as Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner archly called it, was certainly not a period of a genuinely free market or of laissez-faire government. Government at a variety of levels and in many ways intervened regularly in the economy. It did so, however, on behalf of big business. Take just a few examples:

Railroads were among the biggest enterprises of the industrial age. After the Civil War, much of their expansion came because of government land grants. In fact, in the trans-Mississippi West, railroads received roughly 185 million acres of public land free in exchange for laying track. Free public land, therefore, lay at the foundation of the railroad industry.

The courts did their part to help big business as well. In a series of cases, most importantly the 1886 decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Supreme Court used the 14th amendment, written originally to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, to define corporations as "persons." As such, they thus enjoyed the same constitutional protections as individual citizens. The effect of these decisions was to put corporations largely beyond the reach of any state legislature or Congress that might regulate their abuses.

Nowhere was the laissez-faire ethos flouted more than over the question of labor unions and strikes. During the 1890s, as the Supreme Court was refashioning the 14th amendment to protect corporations, it used the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act to undermine many union activities, ruling that unions constituted illegal "cartels." When workers went on strike, big business repeatedly called upon the armed force of the state -- local police, state guards, federal troops. They got it.

Far from "leaving alone," government intervened in the economy during the late 19th century over and over, but almost always in one direction, on behalf of private businesses and against the interests of citizens, consumers and workers.

So it is today in our new Gilded Age. Banks and mortgage companies, which lobbied to have regulations in their industry loosened, came to Washington expecting to be bailed out when the real estate bubble popped. And they were, even as millions of Americans faced foreclosure without any help from government. Oil companies want access to even more public land, and large-scale agribusiness lobbies successfully for tariffs on lower-cost ethanol from Brazil.

Even Free-Marketer-in-Chief George Bush has benefited from the public intervention in the private market. When he sold his stake in the Texas Rangers, Bush profited handsomely because the value of the team increased dramatically when a new stadium was built. The citizens of Arlington, Tex., subsidized that stadium to the tune of nearly $200 million. They have seen almost none of the revenue returned to them.

Since the late 19th century, those who have called for laissez-faire government have never really wanted government to stay out of the economy. Rather, they believe that the power of government ought to be used to promote business interests, whether suppressing strikes one hundred years ago, or propping up the mortgage industry today.

Over the next several months, we ought to have a vigorous debate over the direction of the nation's economic policies. When we do, we ought to acknowledge that there never was a golden age of laissez-faire economics. Government has been and will always be involved in the economy. The real question we need to ask is: on whose behalf?

Source / History News Network / Posted July 21, 2008

Thanks to Steve Russell / The Rag Blog

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