HOW OUR COUNTRY WAS BETRAYED BY THREE PRESIDENTS

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman for HUSTLER Magazine

The not-so-slow death of our nation by betrayal, bankruptcy and despair has not happened by accident. Three treasonous backstabs by Republicans Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan (in cahoots with George H.W. Bush) and George W. Bush have poisoned our body politic and bled us into chaos. The first act of treason came in 1968 as the Vietnam War reached a critical turning point. Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson was desperate for a truce between North and South Vietnam. His Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, was in a tight Presidential race against Richard Nixon. With demonstrators in the streets, Humphrey needed a cease-fire to get himself into the White House.

Johnson had it all but wrapped up. With a combination of gentle and iron-fisted persuasion, he forced the leaders of South Vietnam into an all-but-final agreement with the North. A truce was imminent, and Humphrey’s election seemed assured. But at the last minute the South Vietnamese pulled out.

In his 1983 book The Price of Power, Seymour Hersh revealed that Henry Kissinger—then LBJ’s adviser on Vietnam peace talks—secretly alerted Nixon’s staff that a cease-fire was looming. According to Hersh, Nixon “was able to get a series of messages to the [President Nguyen Van] Thieu government, making it clear that a Nixon presidency would have different [more favorable] views on the peace negotiations,” hence South Vietnam’s abrupt withdrawal from the Paris peace talks.

Johnson was livid. He even called the Republican Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen, to complain that “they oughtn’t be doing this. This is treason.” “I know,” Dirksen feebly replied.

Johnson blasted Nixon about this on November 3, 1968, just prior to Election Day. As Robert Parry of ConsortiumNews.com has written, “When Johnson confronted Nixon with evidence of the peace-talk sabotage, Nixon insisted on his innocence but acknowledged that he knew what was at stake.”

Said Nixon: “I would never do anything to encourage…Saigon not to come to the table. … Good God, we’ve got to get them to Paris or you can’t have peace.”

With the war still raging, Nixon claimed a narrow victory over Humphrey. He then named Kissinger as his National Security Advisor.

During Nixon’s first term, more than 20,000 U.S. troops died in Vietnam. More than 100,000 were wounded. More than a million Vietnamese were killed. But in 1973, Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the same settlement in 1972 he’d helped sabotage four years earlier.

According to Parry, Johnson wanted to go public in 1968 with Nixon’s treason. But Clark Clifford, an architect of the CIA and a pillar of the Washington establishment, dissuaded him. In particular, Clifford told LBJ (in a taped conversation) that “some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected. It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”

In other words, Clifford told LBJ that the country couldn’t handle the reality that its President was a certifiable traitor eligible for the death penalty. Fittingly, Clifford’s upper-crust career ended in disgrace thanks to his entanglement with the crooked Bank of Credit and Commerce, which financed the terrorist group al-Qaeda.

Tormented by the disastrous war that destroyed his Presidency, Johnson died just four years after leaving the White House. Nixon was reelected in 1972, again with a host of dirty dealings, then became the first U.S. President to resign in disgrace. But along the way, Nixon trained a new generation of dirty tricksters that included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, William Casey and George H.W. Bush.

It was this Bush who engineered a second act of treason that put Ronald Reagan into the Oval Office with him as Vice President. What became known as “the October surprise” began in 1979 when Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 52 American hostages, holding them deep into this country’s 1980 Presidential campaign. As Election Day neared, incumbent President Jimmy Carter announced he had a deal to bring them home.

Suddenly, however, the deal evaporated. The 52 Americans remained in Iran, and Reagan overcame unfavorable preelection polls to win a landslide victory. “Coincidentally” the hostages were released on January 20, 1981, as Reagan was being sworn in.

Very quickly a wide range of credible sources claimed the GOP had pulled off another game-changing act of treason. Gary Sick, a member of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford and Carter, wrote in the New York Times that the Reagan campaign had illegally interfered with Carter’s negotiations to bring the hostages home.

Sick’s devastating allegations were confirmed by Abholhassan Bani-Sadr, who was elected president of Iran during the hostage crisis. In his book My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution and Secret Deals With the U.S., Bani-Sadr said ex-CIA Director George H.W. Bush and future CIA Director William Casey conspired with Iranian leaders to sabotage President Carter’s attempts to free the hostages.

According to what Bani-Sadr told author Barbara Honegger— a former Reagan-Bush campaign staffer and GOP White House a n a l y s t — t h e Iranians “made a deal with Reagan that the hostages should not be released until after Reagan became President. So then, in return, Reagan would give them arms. We have published documents which show that U.S. arms were shipped, via Israel, in March [1981], about two months after Reagan became President.”

Sergei V. Stepashin, a high-ranking Russian official, made the same claims and—according to reporter Robert Parry—released corroborating files to the U.S. Congress documenting the treason. (It was Parry who broke the Iran-Contra story for Newsweek and the AP.)

Arms dealer and CIA contract employee Richard Brenneke testified that he had flown Reagan’s campaign director, William Casey, to Paris for a series of secret meetings with the Iranians while Carter was also negotiating with them. Brenneke said Casey did the deal to keep the hostages captive until Reagan was sworn in.

Brenneke’s assertions were tested in court when he was found not guilty after being charged with perjury. Jury foreman Mark Kristoff said in an interview, “We were convinced that, yes, there was a meeting, and he [Brenneke] was there, and the other people listed in the indictment were there. … There never was a guilty vote. … It was 100%.”

Ari Ben-Menashe, purportedly an Israeli intelligence agent, swore under oath before Congress that he saw Bush in Paris over the weekend of October 18-19, 1980. Ben- Menashe told Congress that Bush and Casey were in a hotel and headed into negotiations with radical Iranian cleric Mehdi Karroubi. Parry points out in his book Trick or Treason that the late Yasser Arafat—head of the Palestine Liberation Organization—disclosed to President Carter that Republicans seeking help in arranging the logistics of the October surprise arms-for-hostages deal had contacted the PLO in 1980. Alexandre de Marenches, former chief of French intelligence, confided to his biographer that the French secret service had aided Casey in meeting with the Iranians in Paris in 1980.

It is legally treasonous for private citizens to interfere with official negotiations between the U.S. government and a foreign power. Thus, Reagan’s sabotage of Carter’s attempts to bring the embassy hostages home from Tehran—like Nixon’s sabotage of LBJ’s Vietnam peace talks—clearly qualifies as a capital crime.

George W. Bush threw his hat in the ring of “aiding and abetting the enemy” by illegally outing a covert CIA agent in 2003. The felony came as part of the cover-up of the lies he’d employed to suck America into an illegal war.

In the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush declared he would bring al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to justice. Not long after that, however, Bush all but abandoned the search for Bin Laden. Instead, he told the American public, war was needed to rid Iraq’s U.S.-sponsored dictator, Saddam Hussein, of “weapons of mass destruction.”

Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. In fact, he was Bin Laden’s sworn enemy. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has since confirmed that Bush knew full well Hussein had no such WMDs. In his recent autobiography, Rumsfeld reveals that Bush’s real reason for going after the Iraqi dictator was to settle a deep psychological score with his father, George H.W. Bush.

Among other things, the younger Bush ordered Secretary of State Colin Powell to lay out before the United Nations a series of blatant falsehoods meant to win support for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. The key lie was a fabricated scenario in which Hussein supposedly tried to obtain uranium for nuclear weapons from an African country. As Bush put it in his infamous 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

That White House lie led to a horrific war that has cost the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis—not to mention a trillion or more U.S. dollars. The lie was accompanied by an impeachable felony—a blatantly illegal betrayal of a CIA agent.

On July 6, 2003—almost six months after Bush’s deceitful State of the Union address— former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV wrote a New York Times op-ed refuting Bush’s cover story for the Iraq War. In “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” Wilson—who had been sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate the supposed British claims—said he had “little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

Wilson contradicted Bush’s claim that Hussein had obtained yellowcake uranium from Niger to build a radioactive weapon. As Wilson put it, “Selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister and probably the president. In short, there’s simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired.” To cover the lie he had told to get the United States into war, Bush decided to discredit and destabilize Wilson—by putting the life of the diplomat’s wife, covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, in jeopardy. But as stipulated by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (passed while Bush’s father was Vice President), it is a felony to identify an undercover CIA agent.

The law reads in part that “whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent…shall be…imprisoned not more than ten years.” George H.W. Bush himself stated that any American revealing such info would be committing treason.

After Wilson’s op-ed appeared, senior White House adviser Karl Rove indirectly confirmed for syndicated Washington Post columnist Robert Novak that Plame was a CIA agent. On July 11, Rove did the same for Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper, according to the reporter’s subsequent grand jury testimony. Cooper had previously confirmed hearing about Plame from Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, but that Libby hadn’t mentioned her by name.

In his July 14, 2003, column titled “Mission to Niger,” Novak denounced Ambassador Wilson’s claim that the Bush Administration was manipulating data to sell an unjust war. Novak wrote: “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.”

Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan denied that Rove was Novak’s anonymous source. Following an FBI investigation and a grand jury hearing, Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice, making false statements and two counts of perjury. Neither Libby nor Rove was ever indicted for disclosing Plame’s status as a covert CIA agent to Novak. Cheney later publicly excoriated Bush for not protecting Libby. And in 2008 McClellan toured the nation with his tell-all book What Happened , charging that Bush had authorized the unmasking of Plame’s identity. McClellan told CNN that Cheney should be forced to testify under oath about the Plame leak.

In his book Daybreak, David Swanson writes that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who prosecuted Libby, had direct evidence—including a handwritten note by Cheney—that both the President and Vice President were involved in the Plame scandal. According to Swanson, Bush’s commutation of Libby’s sentence “directly interfered with the Special Counsel’s ongoing investigation of Plame’s ‘outing’ and therefore constituted obstruction of justice.”

In all, George W. Bush lied to America and the world about weapons of mass destruction he knew were nonexistent. He then feloniously outed a CIA agent, putting her life and the lives of other intelligence agents at risk, an impeachable crime. Next, he abused his Presidential power by covering it all up, another impeachable offense.

Does this constitute treason? If it doesn’t, what does?

Despite knowing about Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 act of treason, Lyndon B. Johnson chose to remain silent. Although the realities of 1980’s October surprise have been widely published, Jimmy Carter has said nothing, and Bill Clinton took no action while he was President. Now Barack Obama has refused to prosecute George W. Bush and his henchmen Cheney and Rove for Plamegate and their treasonous crimes in Iraq. Through it all the United States has been transformed from the world’s most prosperous country to the most debt-ridden. From a nation built on hopeful democratic ideals to one dominated by large corporations that care about nothing but power and profit.

What it will take to reverse the damage remains to be seen—if indeed it’s even possible. But a good start would be to charge those who committed the acts of treason that made this nightmare happen.

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Ohio-based investigative reporters Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, who write columns for FreePress.org, have coauthored a number of books on the George W. Bush era and election theft. For more, visit Fitrakis.org and HarveyWasserman.com.

Report by Jordan David

November 30, 2011

Shortly after midnight a militarized police contingent, working with ruthless efficiency, evicted the occupants of the park around L.A.’s City Hall. The operation included approximately 1,800 members of the LAPD, plus officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Defiant protesters, hoping for an influx of supporters to stand in opposition to this massive show of force, were stymied when police shut down streets and highway off-ramps. Over 200 protesters were arrested.

While the mainstream media is largely reporting that the eviction was Peaceful, with the police acting in a restrained, professional manner, that was only true of the City Hall area, where the sectioned-off press
representatives were allowed to observe the takedown. Those brave enough to venture into the streets witnessed police swinging billy clubs at peaceful demonstrators simply because they refused to get onto the sidewalks.

The nationwide Occupy movement was launched in response to the growing income disparity between America’s rich and the working class. The protesters, who call themselves the 99%, recognize that the playing field is not level and that our politicians are owned by the 1%. It is a fact that the 400 wealthiest people in this country have more money then the bottom 150 million.

A complete report on the Occupy L.A. eviction, plus those in New York City and Denver, will appear in a future issue of HUSTLER Magazine.

Photo caption: Penned in press observe policeman arresting protester./Photo by Jordan David

Did the police provoke the peaceful crowd at Occupy Oakland? Watch the video and decide…

10/25/2011

“The police line prevented any movement of the marches further and then as you can see in the video the sudden unprovoked rush by the police into the crowd. This was at about 5pm on Tuesday 10/25/2011. This was the first use of force by the police on this infamous night. An hour or so later the use of tear gas and flash grenades was again used on broadway which severely injured the marine veteran.” – Occupier

OCT. 12. 2011

EXCLUSIVE TO HUSTLER: Reporter Jordan David, at the “Occupy Wall Street”
protest, interviews one of the two young men detained by New York City
police prior to the arrest of the couple seen in the previous video. (See
the video below.)

BREAKING NEWS: Hustler reporter Jordan David, on the scene at today’s “Occupy Wall Street” protest video taped an apparent act of unnecessary police aggression. According to David the NYPD officer ordered an older female demonstrator to move along, then repeatedly shoved her apparently because she wasn’t moving fast enough in the jam packed crowd. When the woman’s male companion came to her defense both the man and woman were hustled off by the officer, presumably to be arrested.

Just prior to this incident, two college age men were arrested and hustled away from the crowd. As this was happening the marching protesters came to a stop to see what had happened. That’s when the police moved in on the older woman and her companion.

Whether on the left or the right, we don’t see how anyone could have a problem with this movement. It’s the banks that caused the economic problems we are currently suffering through. It was their actions which forced us to bail them out with our tax payer dollars. How did they repay us? By continuing to do exactly what they did when they caused our economy to collapse in the first place. It’s called casino capitalism. They’re raking in billions of dollars while giving nothing back. They are, in fact, sucking the wealth out of our country and into their pockets. And our bought and paid for politicians on both sides of the aisle are letting them get away with it. Actually, they are helping them get away with it.

Reverand Billy at the Wall Street protest. Learn more about his mission at RevBilly.com.

Michael Moore at Wall Street Protests

Photo credit: All photos by Jordan David

IS AMERICA’S FAVORITE INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER A GOVERNMENT OPERATIVE? POLITICAL COMMENTATOR RUSS BAKER OFFERS INTRIGUING EVIDENCE!

By Russ Baker
From HUSTLER MAGAZINE July 2011

In June 2009,Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward traveled to Afghanistan with General Jim Jones, then President Obama’s National Security Advisor, to meet with General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of forces there. Why did Jones allow this journalist to accompany him? Because he knew that Woodward could be counted on to deliver the company line—the military line. In fact, Jones was essentially Woodward’s patron.

The New Republic’s Gabriel Sherman pointed out that when Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee hosted a 50th-birthday party for Woodward’s wife, reporter Elsa Walsh,“Jones was a guest of Woodward. ”According to Sherman, one attendee told him, “Woodward and Elsa were glued to Jones at the cocktail party before the dinner started.”

In September 2009, McChrystal (or someone close to him) leaked a document to Woodward that essentially forced Obama’s hand. The President wanted time to consider all options on what to do about Afghanistan. But the leak, publicizing the military’s “confidential” assertion that a troop increase was essential, cast the die, and Obama had to go along. Nobody was happier than the Pentagon—and, it should be said, its allies in the vast military-contracting establishment.

FireDogLake.com chronicled the developments in a pungent essay: “Apparently General McChrystal and the Petraeus cabal aren’t willing to wait for their Commander in Chief to set the strategy. Prior to the President’s interviews, McChrystal’s people were already telling journalists that they were ‘impatient with Obama,’ as Nancy Youssef reported. This ‘Power Play’… included a veiled threat that McChrystal would resign if he didn’t get his way.

“And, sure enough, just hours after the Commander in Chief was on the airwaves, somehow McChrystal’s classified report hit the Washington Post…compliments of Bob Woodward, no less. Wow, what a coincidence!”

This episode highlights a crucial aspect of Woodward’s career that has been ignored by most of the media. Simply put, Woodward is the military’s man and always has been.

For almost four decades, under cover of his supposedly “objective” reporting, Woodward has represented the viewpoints of the military and intelligence establishments. Often he has done so in the context of complex inside maneuvering of which his readers have little clue.

Typically, Woodward uses information he obtains from his main sources (much of it self serving) to gain access to others. He then gets more “secrets” from them, and so on down the line. Woodward’s unique persona as the main repository of this inside dope has been key to the relentless success machine that his media colleagues have perpetuated.

The New York Times’ review of his recent book on President Obama laid out the formula: “In Obama’s Wars, Mr. Woodward, as usual, eschews analysis and commentary. Instead, he hews to his I Am a Tape Recorder technique, using his insider access to give readers interested in inside-the-Beltway politics lots of granular detail…. As he’s done in his earlier books, Mr. Woodward acknowledges that attributions of ‘thoughts, conclusions or feelings to a person’ were in some cases not obtained directly from that person, but from ‘notes or from a colleague whom the person told’—a questionable but increasingly popular method, which means the reader should take the reconstructed scenes with a grain of salt.”

And then, thanks to all this attention and even with that grain of salt, Obama’s Wars went to number one.

Bob Woodward’s stature as the world’s most acclaimed investigative journalist is almost entirely based on his helping to end the Presidency of the reviled Richard Nixon. As the saying goes, the past is prologue, and that long-ago affair turns out to have direct relevance to events besieging another President, Barack Obama. For a sense of how, we go back to the beginnings of Woodward’s journalistic career.

The young Woodward did not fit the profile of the stereotypical daily print reporter with a deep suspicion of the establishment, particularly in the turbulent late ’60s and early ’70s. Midwestern and Republican, Woodward attended Yale University on an NROTC scholarship and then spent five years in the Navy. He had begun with a top-secret security clearance onboard the USS Wright, specializing in communications. Some of his duties involved communication with the White House.

Woodward’s commanding officer was Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander, who would later be implicated in a well-documented military spy ring in the Nixon White House. That subterfuge, generally referred to as the Moorer Radford affair, is a segment of American history that is known to serious researchers and documented in numerous books but still somehow almost completely missing from the narrative typically offered to the public.

It involves a behind-the-scenes power struggle pitting Nixon against his former allies in the military, intelligence and corporate worlds. It is this struggle that begins to reveal the outlines of a larger battle over the Presidency and democracy itself. It leads to truths so deeply disturbing that the general reaction has been—and continues to be—denial by those who decide what books and interpretations get heavy publicity and the stamp of establishment approval.

According to the 1991 book Silent Coup, Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin’s exhaustive study of the aforementioned military espionage scandal, Woodward left his ship in 1969 and arrived in Washington, D.C. There he worked on the staff of Admiral Thomas Moorer, chief of Naval operations, again as a communications officer, this time one who provided briefings and documents on national security matters to top brass in the White House. Colodny and Gettlin wrote that Woodward frequently walked through the basement offices of the West Wing with documents from Admiral Moorer to General Alexander Haig, who served under Henry Kissinger—then Nixon’s National Security Advisor.

In a 2008 interview with me, Woodward categorically denied having any intelligence connections. He also denied having worked in the White House or having provided briefings there. “It’s a matter of record in the Navy what I did, what I didn’t do,” Woodward said. “And this Navy intelligence, Haig and so forth, you know, I’d be more than happy to acknowledge it if it’s true. It just isn’t. Can you accept that?”

Journalist Len Colodny, however, has produced audiotapes of interviews by his Silent Coup coauthor Robert Gettlin with Admiral Moorer, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, Pentagon spokesman Jerry Friedheim and even with Woodward’s own father, Al, discussing Bob’s White House service.

At a minimum, Woodward’s entry into journalism received a valuable outside assist, according to an account provided by Harry Rosenfeld, a retired Washington Post editor, to the Saratogian newspaper in 2004: “Bob had come to us on very high recommendations from someone in the White House. He had been an intelligence officer in the Navy and had served in the Pentagon. He had not been exposed to any [major] newspaper.”

In 2008, after I spoke to Woodward, I reached Rosenfeld. He remembered that Woodward had been recommended by Paul Ignatius, the Post’s president, who previously had served as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s secretary of the Navy.

In a subsequent interview, Ignatius told me: “It’s possible that somebody asked me about him, and it’s possible that I gave him a recommendation. I don’t remember initiating anything, but I can’t say I didn’t. ”When I asked Ignatius how a top Pentagon administrator such as himself would even have known of a lowly lieutenant—Woodward’s rank back in those days—he said he did not recall.

Yet even with this apparent high-level pressure to hire Woodward, the editors couldn’t justify putting in a complete novice. So Woodward was packed off to a Maryland-based weekly— the Montgomery County Sentinel—for a spell, then hired at the Post in September 1971. The eminent paper itself is steeped in intelligence connections. The Post’s owners, the Graham family, were aficionados of the apparatus and good friends of top spies such as longtime CIA Director Allen Dulles. Both the late publisher Philip Graham and Woodward’s boss and confidant, editor Ben Bradlee, had served in military intelligence during World War II.

As for Woodward’s initial introduction to the newspaper, nobody seems to have questioned whether a recommendation from someone in the White House would be an appropriate reason for the Post to hire a reporter. Nor does anyone from the Post appear to have put a rather obvious two and two together by noting that Woodward made quick work of bringing down the President of the United States, a feat that might have led to speculation about who at the White House had recommended Woodward in the first place—and with what motivation.

There was this, however: After Nixon aide Charles Colson met with Senator Howard Baker (the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate Committee) and his staff—including legal counsel (and future senator) Fred Thompson—he recounted the session in a previously unpublished memo: “The CIA has been unable to determine whether Bob Woodward was employed by the Agency. The Agency claims to be having difficulty checking personnel files. Thompson says he believes the delay merely means that they don’t want to admit Woodward was in the Agency.

Thompson wrote a lengthy memo to Baker…complaining about the CIA’s noncooperation, the fact that they were supplying material piecemeal and had been very uncooperative.”

Senator Baker sent this 1974 memo directly to CIA Director William Colby with a cover note, and within a matter of a few hours an incensed Woodward called Baker. The memo had been immediately leaked to the Post reporter. Woodward’s good connections helped generate a series of exclusive-access interviews that would result in rapidly produced bestsellers. One was Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA,1981-1987,a controversial book that relied in part, Woodward claimed, on a deathbed interview—not recorded—with former Director of Central Intelligence William Casey. (Casey’s widow and former CIA guards said the interview never took place.)

The 543-page book, which came out as George H.W. Bush was seeking the Presidency in 1988,contained no substantive mentions of any role on the part of Poppy Bush in these “secret wars,” although Bush was both Vice President with a portfolio for covert ops and a former CIA director. Bush, like Woodward, had served in top-secret Naval operations in his younger days. Veil relied on Navy Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a rival of Casey’s, as its key source. (Inman,a Texan, was closely identified with the Bush clan.)

Asked how it was possible to leave George H.W. Bush out of such a detailed account of covert operations during his Vice Presidency, Woodward replied, “Bush was, well, I don’t think he was—what was it he said at the time? ‘I was out of the loop’?”

Woodward went on to be blessed with unique access to another Bush, Poppy’s son George W. Bush—a President who did not grant a single interview to America’s top newspaper, the New York Times, for nearly half his administration. This favoritism and the resulting exclusivity guaranteed a series of automatic smash bestsellers. Woodward would also draw attention to himself for knowing about the administration’s role in leaking the identity of CIA undercover officer Valerie Plame but not writing or saying anything about it despite an ongoing investigation and media tempest. When this was revealed, Woodward issued an apology to the Post.

To its credit, in the ’60s the Washington Post had staffers doing some of the best reporting on the intelligence establishment. Perhaps the most revealing work came prior to Nixon’s tenure, while Woodward was still a Naval officer. In a multipart, front-page series by Richard Harwood in early 1967, the Post began reporting the extent to which the CIA had penetrated civil institutions not just abroad, but at home as well. As Harwood wrote, “Intellectuals, students, educators, trade unionists, journalists and professional men had to be reached directly through their private concerns [organizations].”

“Journalists” too. Woodward’s Watergate reporting partner, Bernstein, later wrote about the remarkable extent of the CIA’s penetration of newsrooms, detailing numerous examples in a 1977 Rolling Stone article. As for the Post itself, Bernstein wrote: “When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. ‘It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from,’ said a former deputy director of the Agency. Some Newsweek correspondents and stringers continued to maintain covert ties with the Agency into the 1970s,CIA sources said.

“Information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post newspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, some Post stringers have been CIA employees, but these officials say they do not know if anyone in the Post management was aware of the arrangements.”

When the Watergate burglary story broke in 1972, Bob Woodward got the assignment, in part, his editor Barry Sussman recalled, because he never seemed to leave the building. “I worked the police beat all night,” Woodward said in an interview with authors Tom Rosenstiel and Amy S. Mitchell, “and then I’d go home—I had an apartment five blocks from the Post—and sleep for a while. I’d show up in the newsroom around ten or 11 and work all day too. People complained I was working too hard.”

So when the bulletin came in, Woodward was there. The result was a front-page account revealing that E. Howard Hunt’s name appeared in the address book of one of the burglars and that a check signed by Hunt had been found in the pocket of another burglar, who was Cuban. It went further: Hunt, Woodward reported, worked as a consultant to White House counsel Charles Colson.

Yes, Woodward played a key role in tying the Watergate burglars to Nixon. Woodward would later explain in All the President’s Men (coauthored with Bernstein) that to find out more about Hunt he had “called an old friend and sometimes source who worked for the federal government.” His friend did not like to be contacted at his office and “said hurriedly that the break-in case was going to ‘heat up,’ but he couldn’t explain and hung up.”

Thus began Woodward’s relationship with “Deep Throat,” that mysterious source who, Woodward would later report, served in the executive branch of government and had access to information in the White House and Nixon’s reelection campaign committee.

Based on tips from Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein began to “follow the money,” writing stories in September and October 1972 on a political “slush fund” linked to Nixon’s reelection committee. One story reported that the fund had financed the bugging of the Democratic Party’s Watergate headquarters as well as other intelligence-gathering activities.

Eventually, of course, this reporting played a key role in Nixon’s forced departure from the White House in 1974. His successor, Gerald Ford, then took a hard turn to the right on foreign policy and elevated to prominent roles three individuals who would later become household names: George H.W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Amazingly, despite the overwhelming public sense that Nixon was somehow “behind” the scandals collectively referred to as Watergate, virtually no evidence ever emerged of Nixon’s involvement or prior knowledge, besides agreeing to bad advice on how to handle the affair once it became public through leaks via Woodward and others. Meanwhile, the collection of individuals whose “inside” testimony helped sink Nixon had, like Woodward, a history with military or civilian intelligence operations.

So let’s summarize: Young Bob Woodward, Naval intelligence officer, gets sent to work in the Nixon White House while still on military duty. Then, with no journalistic credentials to speak of and with a boost from White House staffers, he lands a job at the Washington Post. Not long thereafter he starts to take down Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, inside the White House, Woodward’s military bosses are running a spy ring that is monitoring Nixon and Kissinger’s secret negotiations with America’s enemies (China, the Soviet Union, etc.), stealing documents and funneling them back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They are then leaked to columnist Jack Anderson and others in the press.

That portrait clashes, of course, with the iconic Woodward of legend—so it takes a while for this notion to settle in the mind. But there’s more. Did you know there was really no “Deep Throat,” that the W. Mark Felt story was conjured up as yet another layer of cover in what became a daisy chain of disinformation? Did you know that Richard Nixon was loathed and feared by the military brass, that they and their allies were desperate to get him out and halt his rapprochement with the Communists? Or that a bunch of operatives with direct or indirect CIA/military connections—from E. Howard Hunt to Alexander Butterfield to John Dean—wormed their way into key White House posts and started up the Keystone Kops operations that would be laid at Nixon’s Oval Office door? Or that it was the CIA-connected Butterfield, for example, who revealed the secret Oval Office audio taping system whose carefully selected and artfully presented excerpts cooked Nixon’s goose?

If you want to learn more, Family of Secrets has several chapters on the real Watergate story. Other sources that have put pieces of this puzzle together include the previously mentioned Colodny and Gettlin, as well as James Rosen (The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate) and Jim Hougan (Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA).
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Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter and founder and editor of the news site WhoWhatWhy.com. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. Some of this material is excerpted from Baker’s book Family of Secrets. For more on Baker’s work, visit FamilyOfSecrets.com and RussBaker.com.

SHORTLY BEFORE GOING LIVE, THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA’S INTERNET VOTING SYSTEM IS TAKEN OVER BY AMERICAN WHITE-HAT HACKERS AND ACCESSED BY BLACK HATS IN IRAN AND CHINA.

By Brad Friedman
From HUSTLER MAGAZINE August 2011

In 2009 the U.S. Congress passed, and the President signed, federal legislation allocating hundreds of millions of dollars for states across the nation to initiate Internet voting for military and overseas citizens. Yes, you heard that right. The elected beneficiaries of our riggable e-voting system have decided to double down on the madness. Touch-screen voting systems weren’t easy enough to hack?

One of the first rollouts of the new federally fueled Internet voting scheme happened—or nearly did—in Washington, D.C., just before the 2010 midterm election. It would have gone live, with real (unverifiable) votes cast by real people in a very real election, but for the quick work of some patriotic “hackers” from a Midwestern university, who proved what computer scientists and cybersecurity experts have been warning for years: These systems are exceedingly—perhaps even irreconcilably—vulnerable to undetected manipulation from outside hackers and corrupt insiders alike.

Over much of the past decade we’ve detailed the very real hazards of e-voting, along with the threat of, and evidence of, the easy election fraud it allows. That effort has helped to encourage a rollback of oft-failed, easily manipulated, always unverifiable touch-screen voting systems, which had nonetheless been slated for every voter in the United States. But while use of 100% unverifiable touch-screens is finally on the wane—with numerous states dumping them in favor of verifiable, hand-marked paper ballots—the federal government, in all its idiotic “wisdom,” seems hellbent on making things worse.

The District of Columbia’s Board of Elections and Ethics (BOEE) decided to conduct a test of its new Internet voting system for military and overseas voters by inviting the public to try to hack it just before the BOEE planned to use it in a real election. Within 36 hours of opening up the system on September 28, 2010, for that public hack test, it had become completely and utterly compromised, and the BOEE didn’t even have a clue about that for the first several days.

Once someone finally discovered the University of Michigan fight song playing on the Web browsers of test voters, the BOEE shut down the experiment “due to usability issues, ” as it told the public. A few days later those “usability issues” would come to full public light. A team of U-M computer science students and their professor had decimated D.C.’s supposedly “secure” Internet voting system’s architecture. It was child’s play.

J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at U-M, subsequently traveled to the nation’s capital to explain exactly what had happened. At a hearing conducted by the Council of the District of Columbia’s Committee on Government Operations and the Environment, Halderman recalled how he and several of his sharpest students had taken over every aspect of the system— from top to bottom. But, perhaps even more chilling, it turns out they weren’t alone.

“While we were in control of these systems, we observed other attack attempts originating from computers in Iran and China,” Halderman testified in a nearly empty conference room. “These attackers were attempting to guess the same master password that we did. And since it was only four letters long, they would likely have soon succeeded.”

It hadn’t been Halderman’s first e-voting rodeo. About a month earlier, he and Princeton University Ph.D. student Ariel Feldman had revealed another remarkable hack. This one involved the same touchscreen e-voting system that was used in 2008 in 161 jurisdictions with almost 9 million registered voters. That hack, quite literally, really was child’s play. The entire voting system software was replaced by a game of Pac-Man—all without disturbing the so called tamper-evident seals that officials claim are sufficient for deterring hackers. In 2006, while a student at Princeton University, Halderman also played a key role in one of the first known hacks of a Diebold touch screen voting system.

The D.C. BOEE, for its part, was also no stranger to e-voting disasters. During a 2008 primary election, for example, thousands of inexplicable “phantom votes” were cast for write-in candidates on the BOEE’s new paper-based optical scan voting systems.

According to Halderman’s stunning testimony in Washington, the BOEE’s implementation of Internet voting was even more menacing. “Within 36 hours of the system going live,” he explained, “my team had found and exploited a vulnerability that gave us essentially total control of the voting system software. This included the ability to change votes and to reveal voters’ secret ballots. We modified all the ballots stored on the system that had already been cast by voters, and we changed the votes so that the votes would be counted for candidates we selected.”

In addition, Halderman and his team were able to discover the identity of every person who’d cast a vote and how each had voted. So much for the “secret ballot.” But that’s not all. The U-M hackers also injected into the system a script that would change every ballot ever cast on the system in the future and another script to allow them to come back anytime they wanted.
As election officials don’t tend to be experts in computer security—and even those who claim to be experts when hired really aren’t—a foolish error made entry to the system even easier than the U-M team had expected.

“We gained access to this equipment because the network administrators who set it up left a default master password unchanged,” Halderman told Councilwoman Mary M. Cheh, chairperson of the Committee on Government Operations and the Environment. (Of its five members, she was the only one who felt the issue was important enough to show up for the hearing.) “This password we were able to look up in the owner’s manual for the piece of equipment.”

It was only a four-letter password, but as it turned out, even a more difficult one would have likely been discovered in short order. That’s because the U-M team managed to take over the security camera apparatus where the election board’s servers were located.

Thus, Halderman told the committee, he and his fellow hackers were able to sit at a computer in Ann Arbor and observe in real time as the D.C. network’s operators configured and tested the equipment. They were able to, in Halderman’s words, “watch them on camera because we found [that] a pair of security cameras in the data center were on the same network as the pilot system and were publicly accessible with no password at all.”

Yes, the U-M team could actually watch the administrators typing the password into the system itself.

While comfortably inside the system, Halderman and his team discovered intrusions from computers in Iran and China, prompting the white-hat hackers from the United States to take measures to protect the D.C. system. “We decided to defend the network by blocking them out by adding rules to the firewall and by changing the password to a more secure one,” Halderman explained to Cheh.

“You changed the password of the BOEE system?” the stunned chairperson interjected.
“Of the pilot system, yes,” Halderman responded.

“You changed it?!” Cheh asked again, incredulously.

“We did, yeah, to something so that the Chinese and Iranian attackers wouldn’t get it,”he stated.

Following Halderman’s testimony, computer security and voting systems expert Jeremy Epstein told the committee, “For the first time, what computer scientists have been warning could happen in an election…isn’t just a theoretical problem.”

Happily, after all of this, the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics decided to shelve Internet voting for the 2010 midterm election.

“Many of us have been arguing that election security is a matter of U.S. national security,” computer scientist Dr. David Jefferson of Livermore National Laboratory told me during an interview after the D.C. hearing. Jefferson, who now serves as chairman of VerifiedVoting.org, has worked for more than a decade on these issues. He has testified to countless official bodies about his concerns. Jefferson most recently worked on California Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s 2007 landmark Top-to-Bottom Review of the state’s electronic voting systems. (All were found to have been easily penetrated and manipulated during the first-of-its-kind independent hack testing by an official state commission.)

“It’s really important that it not be possible for foreign governments or crazy, self-aggrandizing hackers in other countries—or in our own—to be able to modify votes and get away with it, ”Jefferson said. “But usually this warning that I have given many times, that this is a national security issue, goes, well, underappreciated, ”he explained diplomatically during our conversation.

“After this,” Jefferson added, “there can be no doubt that the burden of proof in the argument over the security of Internet voting systems has definitely shifted to those who claim that the systems can be made secure…. This successful demonstration of the danger of Internet voting is the real deal.”

During the Council of the District of Columbia’s hearing, experts noted that—unlike banking online or via ATM, processes that are open to oversight by all parties before, during and after—the secret-ballot system used in U.S. elections cannot be carried out safely at this time on the Internet. Maybe in the future when technology changes, they said, but not for at least a decade.

In short, the experts concurred, this is not “a solvable problem” no matter how much politicians, political parties and even some ill informed voters may wish it to be.

“Let me ask you this, from a legislative perspective, ”Councilwoman Cheh said to each of the panelists as the hearing was winding down. “Should the council, by legislation, just shut this down?”

The answer from each one of those testifying was an unambiguous yes.

Nonetheless, 33 states ran Internet-voting pilot programs of various forms during the 2010 midterms. And, unless something changes, you can rest assured that folks who don’t really give a damn about democracy will continue to gamble with it in 2012—whether they’re Americans, Iranians, Chinese or even al-Qaeda hackers for that matter.

The madness of U.S. “democracy” continues.
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Brad Friedman is a Los Angeles-based investigative journalist and political commentator. Besides co-hosting radio’s nationally syndicated Green News Report, he is the executive editor and publisher of The Brad Blog (BradBlog.com).

WHAT THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA HASN’T TOLD YOU
By Karl Grossman
From HUSTLER MAGAZINE September 2011

Media coverage of the Fukushima Daiishi nuclear power plant, which was severely damaged as the result of an earthquake and resultant tsunami on March 11, 2011, has been outrageously poor.  Rather than dig for the truth, mainstream journalists and their “experts” have simply parroted the assurances of Japanese and other officials that the amounts of radioactivity being released were low and thus posed “no health threat.”

Decades ago scientists thought there was a “threshold dose” of radiation.  That’s because when nuclear technology began exposing people to radioactivity, they didn’t promptly fall down dead.  But as the years passed by, it became evident that lower levels of radioactivity take time to manifest as cancer and other illnesses.  In fact, there is a five-to-40-year “incubation” period.

Now most scientists acknowledge that any amount of radioactivity can lead to illness and death, especially in fetuses and children (whose cells divide more rapidly than those of adults).  As the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself has stated: “Any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer.”

Reporters covering Fukushima have noted that potassium iodide pills being distributed in Japan “block radioactivity.” However, they work only on the thyroid gland, filling it with “good” iodine so radioactive iodine-131 cannot be absorbed and cause thyroid cancer.  But there are hundreds of other fission products for which there is no magic pill.  These include cesium-137 and strontium-90, two of the fission products discharged after hydrogen explosions rocked four of the Fukushima power plant’s reactor buildings.

The media has given voice to egregious errors.  One example is the lack of understanding about the explosions that blew the roofs off the aforementioned reactor units.  It was reported that zirconium fuel rods were to blame.  Missed was the bigger picture: Zirconium is used in a nuclear plant’s fuel rods because it allows neutrons to pass freely so a chain reaction can be sustained.  But the material is extremely volatile.  It explodes at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.  Pound for pound, zirconium has the explosive power of nitroglycerine.

At lesser heat it emits hydrogen, which also can explode.  That is what occurred twice at Fukushima.  There are around 20 tons of zirconium in an average nuclear power plant.  Using zirconium is like building a bridge with firecrackers.

Then there were the reports about three GE nuclear engineers who’d resigned in 1976 because of suspected defects in the GE Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor, the same type installed at the Fukushima Daiishi plant.  This was in line with the spin that flawed design was the problem,not nuclear power itself.  In fact, the Mark 1’s design was only one factor that prompted GE’s Dale Bridenbaugh, Richard Hubbard and Gregory Minor to leave the nuclear industry.

The main reason is summed up in their statement to Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy: “We did so [resigned] because we could no longer justify devoting our life energies to the continued development and expansion of nuclear fission power—a system we believe to be so dangerous that it now threatens the very existence of life on this planet.”

Then there were the over-the-top declarations.  “I love nuclear power,”Fox’s Geraldo Rivera declared.  Appearing on The O’Reilly Factor, right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter said that radiation is “good for you.”  Even host Bill O’Reilly was taken aback.  “You have to be responsible,” he cautioned her.

Coulter’s remark is based on a scientific concept known as hormesis, which holds that a moderate amount of a toxin can be beneficial.  Therefore, some nuclear scientists believe that exposure to radioactivity, at least in small doses, exercises the recipient’s immune system.  These scientists, many of whom are employed as health physicists in nuclear laboratories and other facilities, are supposed to protect people.  Hormesis has been dismissed by national and international agencies involved with radiation protection.

Meanwhile, there was the disinformation about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former USSR.  Reporters, commonly using it as a baseline in projecting the potential impact of radioactivity released from the Japanese reactors, have written that only several hundred people died as a result of the meltdown in Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Such a low figure ignores the most comprehensive study to date on the effects of Chernobyl: a book published in 2009 by the New York Academy of Sciences titled Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.  After studying health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports—some 5,000 in all—from 1986 to 2004,a team of scientists from Russia and Belarus determined that the accident actually caused the deaths of 985,000 people worldwide.  More, they wrote, will follow.

That’s the real baseline for a major disaster at one nuclear power plant.  Fukushima involves several reactors and a series of spent fuel pools.  The radiation assessment was raised to a level seven—the highest international rating for a nuclear accident, equivalent to the Chernobyl disaster.  But the potential toll might be far greater than Chernobyl’s—more than a million dead.

While covering the crisis in Japan, reporters have also been remiss by declaring that “no one died” as a result of the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979.  That myth was dispelled by the book Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience With Atomic Radiation by Harvey Wasserman, Norman Solomon, Eleanor Walters and Robert Alvarez (a former U.S.  Department of Energy official).

I did a TV documentary on the impact of the TMI partial meltdown, Three Mile Island Revisited.  Besides addressing the increase of cancer cases and birth defects in the area surrounding the nuclear power plant, it revealed that TMI’s owner had quietly issued payouts, many for $1 million apiece, to settle claims involving residents who’d suffered health impacts or lost family members due to radiation exposure.

Data from the Radiation and Public Health Project, a nonprofit organization, claims that infant mortality near Three Mile Island increased by 47% in the two years after the accident and that cancer-related deaths of children under ten were 30% higher in 2004 than they were in 1979.

On March 11, 2011, CNN.com went even further than declaring “no one died”: It reported that the TMI “incident caused no injuries or significant releases of hazardous material.” Moreover, the media failed to mention that in recent years Japan has become a global giant in the selling of nuclear power plant reactors.  Worldwide, about 80% of them are of GE and Westinghouse manufacture or design.

In 2006, Toshiba bought Westinghouse’s nuclear division.  Meanwhile, Hitachi entered into a partnership with GE to run its nuclear division.  How might this huge stake in selling nuclear reactors influence what Japanese officials have been saying about Fukushima? The disaster was certainly not good for business.

Then there was the media line that “we don’t have a choice but nuclear power.” The Christian Science Monitor asserted that “finding other forms of energy that can provide a stable base load of electricity—other than coal—remains difficult.”

Renewables Are Ready is the title of a 1999 book written by two Union of Concerned Scientists staffers.  Today a host of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies are more than ready.  Combined with energy efficiency, they render nuclear power unnecessary.  Also in 1999, Scientific American—a conservative publication—ran a cover story titled “A Plan for a Sustainable Future.” Its author noted, “Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100% of the world’s energy,eliminating all fossil fuels.”

More recently, in October 2009, the British magazine New Scientist presented a United Nations report declaring that “renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world’s electricity needs.”

But the mainstream media have continued to ignore the fact that safe, clean, renewable energy technologies are available to provide our energy needs.  For example, wind power is less costly than the price tag of a nuclear plant, which can range from $12 billion to $15 billion.

A pioneer journalist on nuclear technology is Anna Mayo, who from 1969 to 1989 penned a Village Voice column titled “Geiger Counter.” Japan’s nuclear industry, Mayo recently commented, “is trying desperately to conceal the extent of radiation exposure, and they’ve wheeled out the same, old lies…as usual.” Unfortunately, the media have bought this deadly nuclear deception.

Regarding the impact of the disaster on the United States, Dr. Richard Webb—a nuclear physicist and author of the landmark book Accident Hazards of Nuclear Power Plants—said it will take a year for the Fukushima reactors to cool down.  Yes, a year! And during that time “all kinds of things can happen” involving both the reactors and the spent fuel pools, Dr. Webb added.  He is especially concerned that another severe explosion could release many tons of radioactive poisons.

What has happened already is a clear-cut disaster.  But if there are even worse discharges ahead, a horrific catastrophe is in store.  The jet stream blows in an eastward direction—toward the United States.  Consider the fallout that affected so many Americans during the 1950s and 1960s thanks to atmospheric atomic bomb tests.  At that time, the devices contained 15 to 30 pounds of uranium, and fission (the splitting of atoms) lasted for just a second.

There are 200,000 to 300,000 pounds of uranium in each of Fukushima’s reactors, and nuclear fission has been taking place continuously since the power plant was commissioned in 1971.  A massive amount of lethal, radioactive poisons accumulated.  The math is clear, and we are downwind from Japan.

 
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Karl Grossman is an investigative reporter, board member of BeyondNuclear.org and professor of journalism at the State University of New York’s The College at Old Westbury.  His six books include Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power.  Grossman, the longtime host of the nationally aired TV program Enviro Close-Up, has also written and narrated Three Mile Island Revisited, The Push to Revive Nuclear Power, Chernobyl:A Million Casualties and other documentaries.

“It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system for, if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” —Henry Ford

Report by Tyler Downey

Financial catastrophe. Double-digit unemployment. Home foreclosures. An everwidening gulf between the extremely rich and the rest of us. Control of government and media in the hands of a select group of elites. Wall Street destroying the middle class. Are these the harsh realities that face Americans today? Absolutely. But they’ve always been offshoots of crony capitalism, which has a long history of wreaking havoc on this country. Whether it was the railroad bubble of 1893, the rampant financial malfeasance of the Roaring Twenties that led to the Great Depression, the dot-com crash of the late 1990s or the current real estate-driven mess we find ourselves in now, Wall Street speculation and corruption have been at the heart of America’s economic crises.

It takes an extremely courageous and patriotic leader to stand up to the Wall Street banking cartels. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a man. When he was elected President in 1932, America was beset by the worst financial crisis it had ever known. Despite assurances from the bankers that the Federal Reserve System (formed in 1913) would forever prevent the panics and economic upheaval that had previously struck the country, the Great Depression of the 1930s nearly wiped out the American middle class.

Seeing the damage inflicted by an outof- control Wall Street, FDR took drastic steps to curb the bankers’ influence. “We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering,” he declared during a campaign speech at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in 1936. “They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me— and I welcome their hatred.”

The robber barons certainly didn’t want Roosevelt, a Democrat, reelected. Once FDR took office in 1933, chief counsel Ferdinand Pecora—a former New York City prosecutor—was given the green light to rev up the Senate Banking Committee’s investigation into the practices that had triggered the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Pecora ultimately concluded: “Had there been full disclosure of what was being done in furtherance of these schemes, they could not long have survived the fierce light of publicity and criticism. Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker’s stoutest allies.”

Pecora uncovered stock offerings at discounted prices to politicians, the selling of bad loans to unsuspecting investors and the fact that J.P. Morgan Jr. and his partners had paid no income taxes in 1931 and 1932. The president of Citigroup was forced to resign. As Ron Chernow explained in a 2009 New York Times article, it was Pecora’s inquiry that paved the way for the legislation that followed.

Franklin D. Roosevelt first ordered the Treasury Department to close all banks that had been reckless with people’s money. There would be no bailout for them. He then signed into law the Banking Act of 1933, better known as the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment and commercial banking. No longer could banks speculate with money that customers had deposited into their private accounts.

FDR also pushed legislation making it much harder for banks to repossess family homes and farms. He instituted the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which safeguarded depositors’ accounts and thus restored public confidence in the nation’s banks. FDR introduced regulation into nearly every sector of the economy— energy, labor, trade—to ensure that the middle class was protected from the predations of crony capitalism.

In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt even proposed an Economic Bill of Rights. “To assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness,” it basically stipulated that no citizen should be denied employment (with a living wage), “a decent home,” “adequate medical care,” “a good education” and social security. It also called for an end to monopolies and cartels. Unfortunately, FDR died before this great goal could be realized, but his bold actions led to an unprecedented 50 years of prosperity for the American middle class.

Of course, Wall Street would fight back. appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united Abetted by massive campaign donations, media consolidation and good old-fashioned corruption, the robber barons have waged a 75-year war on the policies of FDR.

The tide turned in Wall Street’s favor with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. It was his administration that first allowed financiers to write laws that their servants on Capitol Hill enacted. How did the politicians become captives of the ruling class? Since 1990 the financial sector has spent over $2.5 billion on campaign donations alone, not including the astronomical amount spent on lobbying.

This is far and away the most money donated by a single industry—and it’s going to Republicans and Democrats! That’s why it’s impossible to differentiate between Ronald Reagan’s “deregulation” policies and those of Democrat Bill Clinton. Both Presidents were bought and paid for by Wall Street bankers. According to bestselling author Charles Geisst, the culmination of this silent war against the legacy of FDR was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Thanks to Clinton, the robber barons came back in full force, and it took less than ten years to see the result of those efforts.

The Federal Reserve’s record-low interest rates had spawned a colossal real estate bubble. Freed from the regulations of FDR, Wall Street investment firms issued riskier and riskier loans. By 2008 the corrupt system became untenable. Ordinary Americans lost $17 trillion in retirement savings, announced Treasury Department chief economist Alan Krueger. When it all came crashing down, the bankers threatened to destroy the entire financial system if they didn’t get paid off.

Democrat Barack Obama was elected with a mandate to again make government work for the people, not Wall Street. However, his campaign received nearly $40 million in contributions from Wall Street entities. It appears that despite his promises and speeches, Obama is just another politician bought and paid for by the financial industry.

Even after securing his party’s Presidential candidacy in 2008, Obama supported President George W. Bush’s decision to hand over $700 billion of American taxpayer money—with no claw-backs, no oversight and no controls—to bail out Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG and other firms. The recipients then spent about $114 million of our tax money in campaign donations in 2008 alone. They also planned to dole out roughly $14 billion in bonuses to executives.

…. Continues in HUSTLER Magazine – May 2011