Epitaph for Eric Holder: ‘Guilty!’
By Brett Redmayne-Titley | Press TV | October 5, 2014
“I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.” – Pol Pot (Dictator of Cambodia, 1963-1981)
Similarly, on Monday, Sept 15, 2014, Department of Justice (DoJ) leader, Eric Holder, announced a new set of US programs designed to increase America’s internal ability to spy and report on its own citizens.
Not content to merely spy on US phones, internet services, bank accounts, safe deposit boxes, medical records, library records and facial recognition without a warrant, United States Attorney General (USAG) Holder has combined his Justice Dept. with the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Counter Terrorism Center to train selected Americans in every city and town to spy and report on any persons who are deemed to be potentially subversive.
During Mr. Holder’s term the wide brush of “Terrorism” has grown broader than at any time in US history.
Six years hence, we are, now, all terrorists.
1-The Charges
Unfortunately, some time must elapse before history will pronounce final judgment on Attorney General Eric Holder. The full breadth of his six-year tenure of aiding and abetting national American endemic criminal corruption, when the dust of short-term memory settles, will show clearly the obvious: Mr. Holder is guilty. Guilty of the highest crime of all: the degradation of what little remained of America’s already declining morality.
American justice died long ago.
On the heels of creating his new East German style, Stasi-esque domestic spy network, Mr. Holder has now, damage done, announced his resignation. The punch-line to this political joke was the satirical announcement the next day of his accepting a $77-million per annum payback/job as Chief Compliance Officer for uber- banking criminals, JP Morgan Chase. This may yet come true.
Who better to hire than an accomplice, like Holder, with a proven, long-term track record of subordinating criminal behavior?
Considering Holder’s rap-sheet; a wise choice indeed.
The main stream press dutifully sing his praises while ignoring the consummation of his multiple bastardizations of actual justice. Hidden from view, the history of Eric Holder, USAG, shows him to be the typical self-promoting puppet who had an epiphany along his career path, that selling his morals, and his office, to the highest bidder was the true American path to political success. Gospel indeed.
Certainly, the other puppet in the White House, and the one on the Supreme Court bench, were model examples of the successful gains of devout personal hypocrisy.
2-The Crimes
Holder started on a personal drive up the road to financial success as soon as he graduated from Columbia Law School in 1976, going straight to work for the Dept. of Justice. In 1988 President Reagan appointed him as a Superior Court judge for the District of Columbia, where he served for five years.
Holder soon had his chance to “buy-in” to better judicial appointments/connections thanks to his rubbing elbows with one of the most greasy and morally bankrupt US presidents in generations.
In a White House where everything was for sale, from overnight stays and ambassadorships to presidential pardons, then President William Jefferson, “Slick Willie,” Clinton appointed, in 1993, Eric Holder as US Attorney for Washington DC, the plum of the only ninety-three US district positions. Reportedly this office was also for sale. Next, in 1997, Clinton appointed him Deputy Attorney General where he served until 2001.
Here, Holder learned quickly the value of administrative corruption culminating in the pardon of Marc Rich, fugitive criminal billionaire oil broker who had flaunted US v. Iran sanctions and an oil embargo.
Deflecting criticism of his pardon, Clinton credited Holder for his council in convincing him to pardon Rich. Sucking up to power would remain Holder’s M.O. for years to come.
During the Bush administration, Eric Holder worked at a DC law firm whose main clients included Merck Pharmaceuticals and UBS bank.
He was an early backer of candidate Barack Obama in 2008 and a major, and apparently successful, fundraising bundler for the future President.
When President Obama took office, he appointed Holder US Attorney General.
For a price. The mortita? Campaign contributions.
In his book Extortion, author Peter Schweizer details how President Obama leveraged to Holder his position as AG and the positions of Associate Attorney General to the other people who would head his Justice Dept, Thomas Perrelli, Karol Mason, and Tony West.
Schweizer writes, ‘For the first time, at least half a dozen senior positions were occupied by individuals who had been campaign bundlers (fund raisers) for a presidential candidate.”
The six-year chronology of Holder, as chief steward of the flame of justice, shows him to be more criminal than cop. His crimes fall into several categories, but follow a common, pervasive theme: allowing the wealthy the privilege to go completely unpunished for alleged and admitted criminal behavior.
Similar to the “indulgences” sold in the past by Kings and Popes, Holder offered a modern “get-out-of-jail-free” card, seemingly upon request.
Like the Mark Rich pardon, HSBC was given a pass from their admitted involvement in the largest gun running and drug money laundering scheme in US history.
Similarly, not a single member of the fraudulent financial industry guilty of causing the 2007-08 global collapse has ever been prosecuted. For good reason: The national banking criminals bought off Holder’s Justice Dept. for pennies on the dollar; the mere cost of doing business in the USA.
Bank of America and Wells Fargo used the fraud of “Robo-signing” machines to have Marshalls across America evict hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, illegally stealing their property.
Holder’s response: Force a settlement on the nation’s home owners of a paltry $2,000 for each stolen home and then indemnify the same criminal banks from further legal action by the defrauded home owners.
Nice.
When former New Jersey US senator, Jon Corzine, ripped off his company’s, MF Global, account holders for $1.6 billion, salvation for his crime was only a phone call away.
Law firm for MF Global, Covington & Burlington, who Holder had worked for, evidently used its influence with its former sibling since Holder assigned as prosecutor, Tony West, who had worked for Morrison & Foerester, the firm that was handling MF Global’s assets at the same time. So, of course, Corzine and the $1.6 billion were never indicted.
That kind of loyalty can indeed get one a $77-million pay day.
In his Sept. 15 announcement of the further evisceration of US constitutional protections and its new spy network, Holder showcased the depth of the problem. “We must never lose sight of what violent extremists fear the most…” said Holder with a somber face.
“Our unwavering respect for equality, civil rights, and civil liberties; and our enduring commitment to justice, democracy, and the rule of law.”
Of course the head of US “justice” failed to point out his further personal exemptions to his statement.
Having prosecuted, interrogated, and intimidated more journalists than any other USAG, Holder gave special treatment to the Associated Press (AP), then Fox News and New York Times reporters James Rosen, and James Risen. When Rolling Stone Magazine released the dirt on America’s “Knight-of-the-Empire”, General David Petraeus, investigator Michael Hasting’s out-of- control car strangely exploded one hundred feet before hitting a tree at one-hundred-and-forty mile per hour.
There was no investigation of this tragic “traffic accident.”
Whistleblowers who dared use the facts, like CIA agent John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Thomas Drake were among the many truth-tellers in Holder’s gun-sights, despite his protestations of “unwavering respect for equality, civil rights, and civil liberties.”
Free speech and freedom of the press were once on that list. AP President and CEO, Gary Pruitt, described the DOJ’s actions more accurately as a, “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.
The extra-judicial killing of innocent Americans was a unique machination of Holder’s reign. While his boss had his weekly Tuesday, “Kill Meetings,” Holder avoided at all costs his own John Yoo moment of having to embarrass himself nationally by torturing the English language and rule of law sufficiently, under oath and before congress, to justify his president’s wanton killing of innocents with US drones.
When White House blood lust developed a taste for American blood, Holder was quite willing to go along with the blowing-to-bits of Anwar al-Awlaki and his equally innocent sixteen-year-old son, Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki, who was born in Denver, Co.
But Holder’s willingness to kill his own citizens was not limited to foreign shores. Documents reveal that Holder knew of and supported an FBI report and plan to assassinate, using a high powered rifle, the leaders of the Houston, TX Occupy movement. Although the plan was not completed, this likely had to do with Holder razing to the ground every one of the scores of Occupy camps across America in one forty-eight hour, carefully orchestrated, national police mobilization on Feb 4th and 5th, 2012.
Holder killed the hope of Occupy instead.
Of course, as US Attorney General, Holder was above his own laws. Questions regarding the “Fast and Furious” drug dealing, gun running, money laundering, DoJ fiasco follow Holder to this day and remain unanswered.
When the main Mexican drug kingpin wanted, at least, for questioning, Manuel Celis-Acosta, was taken into custody twice by the Justice Dept, both times the DoJ released him without charges.
Holder’s silence, in refusing to testify or provide thousands of congressionally subpoenaed records of Obama Government gun running, earned him a 2012 Contempt of Congress from the US House of Representatives.
The joke continued, however, as the DoJ was, of course, the agency tasked with punishing their leader’s crimes.
3-Closing Statement
Indeed history will take this mere overview of the conflicts of interest that brought US jurisprudence to its knees before the power of money, and judge Eric Holder most harshly. But of these crimes cumulatively, the damage inflicted rises to a more monstrous crime, indeed a felony, of genocidal proportions.
Thanks to Holder’s national example the bar of justice, and its advertised availability for purchase, are now so low as to be barbaric. The world sees this clearly everyday across the globe of the attempted US empire. Americans are predictably exceptional, i.e., oblivious, to this easy observation of global hegemonic inhumanity.
And, in the Homeland?
Recently, sixteen-year-old Ethan Couch decided he was entitled to get really drunk and drive his father’s company’s brand new Ford F-350 Super Cab into a family of four working on a stalled car on the side of the country Texas road.
Young master Couch was also a pill head, as toxicology showed 0.24% blood alcohol level and valium present.
All four died and many of his truck’s passengers sustained life-long critical injuries.
But, Couch also had a rich Texas daddy who hired a rich Texas lawyer who had convenient connections with a getting-richer-all-the-time Texas State District Judge, Jean Boyd.
The privileged parents, arguing that their vehicular murderer son was the sad product of their affluence, and therefore, poor parenting, hired an attorney that brought on a psychologist to say Couch was “a product of wealth” and was accustomed to getting “whatever he wanted.”
Because he was so affluent and accustomed to never having consequences, the attorney argued that he should get therapy as opposed to jail. Soul-less Judge Jean Boyd who was of course influenced to appreciate this highly selective argument gave multi-murderer, Ethan Couch, again, what he wanted. The judge punished the spoiled brat, and spawn of endemic American greed, with a suspended sentence and $450,000 stay in an ultra-posh “Hope by the Sea,” rehabilitation center in San Juan Capistrano, Ca.
So was born a new felony criminal defense strategy, only possible in an increasingly immoral country: the defense of “Afflu-enza.”
Six dead: Four-hundred-and-fifty grand.
Cool.
Robert H. Richards IV is a member of the DuPont family, great-grandson of chemical tycoon Irenee du Pont, and rich. He is also a sick and twisted example of rich entitlement. Mr. Richards was arrested for two counts of second-degree child rape in 2009, two felonies that carry a 10-year mandatory jail sentence. He raped his three year old daughter. He was convicted. But that meant nothing in Eric Holder’s model of a new America.
The 47-year-old pedophile then enlisted one of the most high-priced law firms in the state, which helped him reach a plea deal of one count of fourth-degree rape.
Fourth-degree rape doesn’t require a mandatory minimum sentence, so Richards accepted the deal and admit to sexually assaulting his infant daughter between 2005 and 2007.
Regardless of the courtroom confession of raping a three year old girl, Delaware Superior Court Judge, Jan Jurden, ruled that Richards “will not fare well” in prison due to his sad, unfortunate life of affluence; this being odd that a Judge would somehow miss the point of mandatory incarceration.
So the Judge, Jan Jurden, applied the legal precedents set by the chief justice of the land, Eric Holder, and decided that this rich criminal would learn the error of his ways more effectively in a different posh rehab center for other rich criminals instead of, like all other rapists, prison.
While taking a lie detector test in April of 2010, Richards admitted to also sexually abusing his son in December of 2005 when the boy was just 19-month-old and continuing the abuse for roughly two years.
But with recidivism of child sex offenders running only about ninety percent who return to jail, Judge Jan Jurden’s decision of a suspended sentence and rehabilitation will be tested soon.
Three years old!
4-Guilty
Yes. Guilty as charged. On all counts.
Morality in America is now directly proportional to money and, preferably, power.
America has lost its way in every facet of normal society, most importantly in the application of justice.
America’s nationalist politicians are corrupt, its sports heroes cheaters, and its drug addled celebrities adored for sage wisdom.
And the man who should be the bastion of fair, consistent, constitutional US justice, is a crook.
So, thanks to the corruption of the national US example of justice, US Attorney General Eric Holder, the bar of justice is now so low that three year old girls are fair game for rich rapists and US kings and princes can kill with impunity, albeit for a price.
Indeed. Pol Pot, the Cambodian tyrant and authoritarian hypocrite that brought his people the “Killing Fields,” where the bodies of the older generations were dumped in favor of the reeducation of the young, made no apologies. His barbarism was so extreme that the recently post-war Vietnamese had to invade and stop it.
But the kind of barbarism that will purge its society in Cambodia starts with a methodical decent from real justice, through child rapists to wanton killers, and finally to full societal atrocity.
Thanks to USAG Holder, America’s direction has become terminal.
Throughout this entire maddening decent, the condition of destructive and deteriorating justice is tolerated, always, as “normal.”
Guilty, Mr. Holder. Guilty of making the morally unconscionable and American inhumanity to man, normal.
When a society becomes endemically corrupt it is then a good idea for its corrupt government to keep a watchful eye reporting on absolutely everyone.
Guilty!
Disparaging the Poor
By DANIEL RAVENTOS and JULIE WARK | CounterPunch | September 12, 2014
A bunch of academic pundits and media cognoscenti inform us that among the causes of a person’s becoming unemployed is a yen for job-change because he or she opts for a certain “work-related opportunity cost” so as to “optimise utility function”. Renouncing jargon, others claim the unemployed are loafers. Or The Economist informs us that “the recession this time is behaving weirdly”. All this sophistry and waffle, plus a whole lot more ill-intentioned pronouncements are supposed to “explain” unemployment and hence poverty. Naturally, the three-time Pulitzer winner Thomas Friedman has dreamed up a fantastic solution: all those “muscled out of the workforce should start charging hourly for everything, from cars to drills”. Does anyone want to rent my patch under the bridge? To his credit though, “muscled out” at least hints that leaving the workforce might not have been voluntary. Then there are a lot more horse-feathers flapping around in the hot air expelled by other prodigies who, blithely or maliciously ignoring social context and, in particular, political economy, proclaim that unemployment is about free-loading spongers. This subject is nearly as entertaining as Disneyland for anyone who thinks it’s fun to badmouth less fortunate human beings: “skivers” (as opposed to “strivers”), “wedded to welfare” (single mums), “welfare queen” (hinting at some kind of secret opulence), “misfits”, “free-riders”, “parasites”, “spongers”, “loafers”, “feral underclass”, and the latter-day Rip Van Winkle prone to “sleeping off a life on benefits”, dreamed up by George Osborne. Lurking beneath these labels is the insinuation that members of the said “underclass” are mentally handicapped, violent and criminal. It’s all their fault. They are a threat to the strivers. Owen Jones calls it the “demonization of the working class”, although it must be remembered that many members of this class are excluded from working.
Some more fortunate people are said to belong to a “middle class”, which is so fuzzy in conceptual terms that nobody’s sure exactly what it is. Then there is the group of rich people who, we are told, deserve to be rich, no questions asked. These two latter categories are filled by supposedly hard-working, ambitious, smart and successful people. Yet, despite the best efforts of our most zealous opinion makers – frequently bosom buddies of these Übermenschen – most people actually subscribe to the old saying that behind every fortune there is a crime (or few) and that, in most cases, a few easily-substantiated facts rather tarnish the Merit Theory of Wealth. The correlations tend to be wealth-corruption, wealth-tax-fraud, wealth-inheritance, wealth-robbery and, very often, a little scratching below the surface of things shows a combination of them all. They tend to go together. Otherwise there’d be no need for tax havens.
The rich and their satellites love to put down and revile poor people who depend on welfare payments, carelessly or cynically overlooking the fact that, historically speaking or very recently, their wealth has a lot to do with the poverty of their fellow men and women. The original meanings of the word “charity” are esteem or affection (from the Latin nominative caritas). The implied respect for other humans in this term is now twisted into contempt. And “contemptible” people, the ones we look down on, must be punished, as we know from the history of colonialism, racism, sexism and all the ideologies that have always depended on having somebody to trample on. People receiving any kind of public benefits are clear targets as privatisation tightens its insatiable grip on just about everything: land, water, forests, minerals, indigenous knowledge and the structure of life itself in genetic resources, along with public services such as health care, education, transport, and water and sewerage services, not to mention people-commodities traded in human trafficking, sex slavery, child labour, surrogate motherhood, the baby and child market, and organ sales. The plunderers who are taking over and filling bank vaults with the riches they are appropriating from this common wealth are not going to look kindly on people asking for any form of welfare benefits from “their” institutions. So they malign and punish the poor while they have a field day (in other people’s fields).
In Catalonia, former President Jordi Pujol, founding chairman of today’s ruling conservative party CiU, has recently admitted to very major tax fraud over thirty years. Today’s CiU president, Artur Mas, commented when Pujol was stripped of his titles, that this caused him “great pain”. But he doesn’t feel great pain for the poor. He prefers to cause it. Shortly after coming to power, Mas, considering that the measly welfare benefits paid by the Generalitat (Catalan Government) were too generous, went on the offensive and embarked on monitoring procedures that cost more than the original welfare benefits. (Here we’d like to point out that our criticism of any self-appointed father of conservative Catalan nationalism does not imply the slightest opposition to the mass-based “Process” claiming Catalonia’s democratic right to decide by voting on 9 November for or against independence although – in contrast with Scotland and its vote on 18 September – this right to decide is denied by the Spanish Government).
John Ward, a Tory councillor for Medway who, more emphatic than Mas and Co., was apparently aiming at a nice sound-bite in 2008 when he lambasted “professional spongers” who “breed for greed”, and called for “compulsory sterilisation of all those who have a second, (or third, or whatever) child while living off state handouts.” He was suspended, but not without spawning Internet forums of people who wondered whether he had merely dared to put into words what a lot of upright citizens privately thought. Sterilising the poor isn’t exactly a new idea, and it has had some illustrious proponents who used a collegiate guise to say the same thing. One such enthusiast was Thomas Nixon Carver, professor of Political Economy at Harvard (1902 – 1935), well-known “Republican Brain Truster” and President of the American Economic Association. He was very keen to wield the neutering knife. The Daily Washington Merry-Go-Round reports Point 2 of his economic plan of 1936 as reading, “Reduction of the supply of labor by sterilization of the palpably unfit; […] Marriage would be barred until the parties could afford to buy and operate an automobile”. By “palpably unfit” he meant people earning less than $1,800 per year, which is to say half the population of the United States at the time. Castratio plebis, to put it mildly.
The eugenics movement in the US took off after Sir Francis Galton (1822 – 1911) studied Britain’s upper classes and concluded that their genetic makeup was superior. Early eugenics fans believed in the innate superiority of Nordic, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples and called for the forcible sterilisation of the poor disabled and “immoral”. The movement was generously funded by such august establishments as the Carnegie Institution and Rockefeller Foundation. Some US states (with California in the lead in terms of numbers) sterilised “imbeciles” over much of the twentieth century, a total of over 62,000 individuals and especially women (61% by 1961), and Virginia’s sterilisation law was in force until 1974. By 1928 the leading universities were teaching some 376 eugenics courses. This is not a thing of the past, however. In 2013, one of Australia’s most destructive people, billionaire mining heiress Gina Reinhart, called for sterilisation of the “underclasses”. Income inequality, she says, is caused by differences in intelligence and any couple earning less than $100,000 per year should be forcibly sterilised, while higher earners should have ten or twelve children.
Now, some people might be tempted to think after the Pujol revelations in Catalonia (and other scandals featuring many more crooked paragons of society in the Kingdom of Spain and around the world, not least heads of the IMF) that this man is “immoral” and “palpably unfit” to hold any responsible job and that the country might have been better off if this father of seven (most with greedy fingers in one or other very greasy pork barrel) had been sterilised. But what people really want is change. In Spain the groundswell of support for grassroots political movements like Podemos and Guanyem Barcelona (We’re Going to Win Barcelona [City Council]), which is fast being emulated all over the country, is bringing together people from all walks of life at very sizeable meetings in the city’s streets and squares where the main themes of the day are justice, transparency, political ethics, real human rights in all spheres of life, to sum up very schematically. It’s not difficult to deduce that Pujol did Guanyem Barcelona a big favour. Suddenly, old-fashioned Catalan politics looks very rancid. People want sweeping change that extends to the structures of power. And it’s all about political economy. In 2012, it was estimated that 30% of the population of Catalonia was at risk of social exclusion. Things have only got worse since then. The Kingdom of Spain has the second highest child poverty rate – after Romania – in Europe: 21%. The growing rage among the population where youth unemployment stands at more than 55% is so great that, nowadays, only a lunatic would dare to propose the sterilisation solution. Everyone knows that the “immoral”, “palpably unfit” (and “imbeciles” too because, after all, imbecility is often inseparable from arrogance) are clustered in the privileged 1%. However, their wombs and testicles are safe because, what with the burgeoning growth of new, inclusive political formations, people have better things to think about, in particular their basic rights.
All over Spain, Basic Income is gaining ground (with more or less clarity) as part of the election programme of political parties including Bildu, IU-ICV, Anova, Equo and Podemos (heir of the 15M Occupy Movement, clearest exponent of what a universal Basic Income is and implies, and garnering astonishing electoral results that are cracking the foundations of the basically two-party power-share between the “socialist” PSOE and right-wing PP). Largely thanks to Podemos, no doubt, Basic Income is an increasingly widespread subject of discussion and, like any other radical social proposal, is gathering scores of “friends” and “enemies”. There is increasing awareness that the most basic human right, on which all the rest depend, is the right to exist and, for that to be possible, everybody must have an income above the poverty line. This, in a nutshell, is an unconditional, universal basic income for every single citizen and resident in the country. It is no longer seen as “utopian” or “hare-brained” as the well-to-do and their cronies have claimed in the past. More and more people understand that this guarantee is necessary for a truly democratic society. The obstacles faced by Basic Income have been political, just as they were (or are, depending on the place) in the cases of universal suffrage, paid holidays, and the rights to strike, to abortion and to same-sex marriage. Basic Income embodies no logical or empirical (financial) impossibility. It is an objective aspiration which, almost certainly, won’t enjoy universal support. In politics one must choose, and this is especially true of political economy.
The “idea” of mutilating people’s reproductive organs on the basis of cruel judgements by a few palpably unfit individuals merits adjectives that are much more withering than “utopian”. But conjuring them up is just a pastime. The really important, lapidary statement is Thomas Paine’s observation in Agrarian Justice that people don’t want charity; they want justice. And they have begun to claim precisely this.
Daniel Raventós is a lecturer in Economics at the University of Barcelona and author inter alia of Basic Income: The Material Conditions of Freedom (Pluto Press, 2007). He is on the editorial board of the international political review Sin Permiso
Julie Wark is an advisory board member of the international political review Sin Permiso. Her last book is The Human Rights Manifesto (Zero Books, 2013).
Billionaire tech VC Vinod Khosla owns the very tides, sea, sands (or so he claims)
By Xeni Jardin | boingboing | May 30, 2014
Silicon Valley billionaire venture capitalist and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla wants everyone to stay off Martins Beach, a lovely stretch of oceanfront south of Half Moon Bay. To that end, he is invoking The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War in 1848 and transformed California from being a chunk of Mexico to becoming part of the USA. Okay, Vinod. Whatever.
“Khosla purchased the land containing the only public access road to the beach – and then closed the road,” writes San Francisco Chronicle reporter Melody Gutierrez. He “has been locked in a court case with the Surfrider Foundation over access.”
From a related blog post at sfgate.com :
The lobbyists for Khosla are using as justification for their position a decision last October by Superior Court Judge Gerald Buchwald that said Martins Beach was still subject to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War in 1848. The treaty essentially required the United States to recognize Mexican land grants as long as the owner filed a claim. Jose Antonio Alviso, who owned the land grant at the time, filed such a claim, and a patent for the beachfront property was issued in 1865.
Judge Buchwald ruled that Alviso’s patent, handed down over the generations, extinguished all public rights to the property, including beach access rights established under the public trust doctrine in the California Constitution, which was first drafted in 1879.
The letter opposing SB968 claimed that Buchwald’s order means Khosla does not have to provide access to either the beach or off-shore submerged tidelands, which his lawyers point out were specifically mentioned in Buchwald’s ruling.
Lawyers fighting for public access to the beach were apoplectic.
“It’s preposterous,” said Joe Cotchett, the lead attorney for Surfrider, which is awaiting a decision on a lawsuit claiming that Khosla needed a California Coastal Commission permit before he could close the road or make other improvements.
Mass babies’ grave scandal pushes Irish govt, Catholic Church toward inquiry
RT | June 5, 2014
The Irish government is under pressure to order an inquiry into a recently uncovered mass grave for almost 800 children who died at a Catholic Church facility for unwed mothers and their children. Most of the bodies were dumped in a sewage tank.
The mass, unmarked grave in the town of Tuan, western Ireland, was unveiled by a local historian, Catherine Corless, who was gathering information on the mother-and-baby home which functioned there in the first half of the 20th century, run by the Bon Secours order of nuns.
Back then, unmarried pregnant women were ostracized by conservative Irish society and sent away to special church-run institutions, where mothers often had to engage in unpaid hard labor, while their children were taken away from them to be either adopted or raised in orphanages.
The burial place appeared to be one for the children who died at the facility.
“I was dismayed to find that in fact the number of children who died in the Home during its existence 1925-1961 numbered nearly 800,” Corless wrote on Facebook, commenting on her research. “I now have all those children’s names, date of death, and age at death, which will be recorded into a special book.”
Locals first learned of the mass burials in the 1970s. By that time the home for mothers and babies had been closed and the area turned in a residential one. Two boys accidentally broke apart the concrete slab over the mass grave and discovered little skeletons there. The place was then sealed again, but still remained unmarked for decades.
Corless is now engaged in a fundraising effort to get the place marked with a monument bearing all of the 769 names of the dead children. She says they died of malnutrition and neglect. A sewage tank served as a graveyard.
“If you look at the records, babies were dying two a week, but I’m still trying to figure out how they could [put the bodies in a septic tank],” Corless told the Irish Mail. “Couldn’t they have afforded baby coffins?”
“Harrowing details” as Children’s Minister Charlie Flanagan put it, of burial arrangements for children at the church-run institutions, have led to calls for an inquiry into what happened decades ago.
“Many of the revelations are deeply disturbing and a shocking reminder of a darker past in Ireland when our children were not cherished as they should have been,” Flanagan said in a statement cited by Reuters. A government report on the scandal is expected by the end of June.
Labor senator Lorraine Higgins has called for the Catholic Church to reveal more details of the incident.
“Now is the time for the church authorities to tell us where the rest of the bodies are,” Higgins said, The Irish Times reported. “We need to know how many died in each of these homes throughout the country. We need details about each one of these children and where their resting places are.”
The Archbishop of Tuam, Michael Neary, said that the diocese was not running the home. He told the order of nuns who did that it must co-operate with any inquiry into the discovery.
“Regardless of the time lapse involved, this is a matter of great public concern which ought to be acted upon urgently,” Neary said.
Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, told The Irish Examiner he would support exhumation of the children’s bodies if necessary for the investigation.
It’s not the first time that the Catholic Church in Ireland has found itself under fire over inhuman practices in its institutions in the past.
A year ago the Irish government agreed to pay up 58 million euros ($75 million) in compensation to hundreds of women, who were forced to work at the notorious Magdalene Laundries, also run by the Catholic Church. A teenage girl or young woman could be sent to the laundries just over suspicions that her behavior could be contrary to the Church’s conservative morals. The inmates at the institutions, run by Catholic nuns, were forced to do physically demanding work while living in prison-like conditions.
NATO chief, former US intelligence director among Bilderberg elite
RT | May 28, 2014
Some 140 participants representing 22 countries will be attending the 62nd annual Bilderberg meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark. The newly released list is a who’s who of business, academia, and the political world.
As is usually the case with the renowned summit, this year’s Bilderberg – which will take place May 29 to June 1 – has attracted a cadre of influential experts, including notable attendees such as NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former director of the US National Security Agency Keith Alexander, and former US national security advisor to the White House Thomas E. Donilon.
The Bilderberg meeting, which the BBC has referred to as “possibly the most influential discussion network in the world,” first began in 1954, has over the years attracted a considerable amount of media attention, both for its formidable attendee lists as well as the perceived aura as an opportunity for the world’s elite to mingle. In addition to the yearly attendees, the Bilderberg Steering Committee is likewise a list of powerful financiers, which includes Peter D. Sutherland, Chairman of Goldman Sachs International, as well as Peter Thiel, president of Thiel Capital.
Bilderberg operates under the “Chatham House Rule,” which stipulates that neither the identity nor affiliation of a speaker’s quotes may be revealed by other participants, including any media in attendance. Though it may be intended to promote the free exchange of ideas among the well-heeled, such rules have fed directly into what detractors say is an unnecessary cloud of secrecy, as well as a range of conspiracy theories that liken the summit to a shadowy gathering for architects of the “New World Order.”
Already fueling such wild speculation ahead of this year’s summit were the arrests of independent reporters Luke Rudkowski and Dan Dicks, who attempted to confront staff at the Copenhagen hotel where Bilderberg is set to take place. Video of the encounter quickly spread online.
According to an official press release, this year’s summit will be focusing on a variety of topics, including the future of democracy and the “middle class trap,” China’s political and economic outlook, and the ongoing situation in Ukraine. Interestingly, the agenda also includes the topic of privacy, as well as “the relationship in intelligence sharing,” which suggests the meeting may be used to address last year’s onslaught of NSA leaks by former intelligence contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Below is a list of participants as released by Bilderberg:
Chairman
| FRA | Castries, Henri de | Chairman and CEO, AXA Group |
| DEU | Achleitner, Paul M. | Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Deutsche Bank AG |
| DEU | Ackermann, Josef | Former CEO, Deutsche Bank AG |
| GBR | Agius, Marcus | Non-Executive Chairman, PA Consulting Group |
| FIN | Alahuhta, Matti | Member of the Board, KONE; Chairman, Aalto University Foundation |
| GBR | Alexander, Helen | Chairman, UBM plc |
| USA | Alexander, Keith B. | Former Commander, U.S. Cyber Command; Former Director, National Security Agency |
| USA | Altman, Roger C. | Executive Chairman, Evercore |
| FIN | Apunen, Matti | Director, Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA |
| DEU | Asmussen, Jörg | State Secretary of Labour and Social Affairs |
| HUN | Bajnai, Gordon | Former Prime Minister; Party Leader, Together 2014 |
| GBR | Balls, Edward M. | Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer |
| PRT | Balsemão, Francisco Pinto | Chairman, Impresa SGPS |
| FRA | Baroin, François | Member of Parliament (UMP); Mayor of Troyes |
| FRA | Baverez, Nicolas | Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP |
| USA | Berggruen, Nicolas | Chairman, Berggruen Institute on Governance |
| ITA | Bernabè, Franco | Chairman, FB Group SRL |
| DNK | Besenbacher, Flemming | Chairman, The Carlsberg Group |
| NLD | Beurden, Ben van | CEO, Royal Dutch Shell plc |
| SWE | Bildt, Carl | Minister for Foreign Affairs |
| NOR | Brandtzæg, Svein Richard | President and CEO, Norsk Hydro ASA |
| INT | Breedlove, Philip M. | Supreme Allied Commander Europe |
| AUT | Bronner, Oscar | Publisher, Der STANDARD Verlagsgesellschaft m.b.H. |
| SWE | Buskhe, Håkan | President and CEO, Saab AB |
| TUR | Çandar, Cengiz | Senior Columnist, Al Monitor and Radikal |
| ESP | Cebrián, Juan Luis | Executive Chairman, Grupo PRISA |
| FRA | Chalendar, Pierre-André de | Chairman and CEO, Saint-Gobain |
| CAN | Clark, W. Edmund | Group President and CEO, TD Bank Group |
| INT | Coeuré, Benoît | Member of the Executive Board, European Central Bank |
| IRL | Coveney, Simon | Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine |
| GBR | Cowper-Coles, Sherard | Senior Adviser to the Group Chairman and Group CEO, HSBC Holdings plc |
| BEL | Davignon, Etienne | Minister of State |
| USA | Donilon, Thomas E. | Senior Partner, O’Melveny and Myers; Former U.S. National Security Advisor |
| DEU | Döpfner, Mathias | CEO, Axel Springer SE |
| GBR | Dudley, Robert | Group Chief Executive, BP plc |
| FIN | Ehrnrooth, Henrik | Chairman, Caverion Corporation, Otava and Pöyry PLC |
| ITA | Elkann, John | Chairman, Fiat S.p.A. |
| DEU | Enders, Thomas | CEO, Airbus Group |
| DNK | Federspiel, Ulrik | Executive Vice President, Haldor Topsøe A/S |
| USA | Feldstein, Martin S. | Professor of Economics, Harvard University; President Emeritus, NBER |
| CAN | Ferguson, Brian | President and CEO, Cenovus Energy Inc. |
| GBR | Flint, Douglas J. | Group Chairman, HSBC Holdings plc |
| ESP | García-Margallo, José Manuel | Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation |
| USA | Gfoeller, Michael | Independent Consultant |
| TUR | Göle, Nilüfer | Professor of Sociology, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales |
| USA | Greenberg, Evan G. | Chairman and CEO, ACE Group |
| GBR | Greening, Justine | Secretary of State for International Development |
| NLD | Halberstadt, Victor | Professor of Economics, Leiden University |
| USA | Hockfield, Susan | President Emerita, Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| NOR | Høegh, Leif O. | Chairman, Höegh Autoliners AS |
| NOR | Høegh, Westye | Senior Advisor, Höegh Autoliners AS |
| USA | Hoffman, Reid | Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, LinkedIn |
| CHN | Huang, Yiping | Professor of Economics, National School of Development, Peking University |
| USA | Jackson, Shirley Ann | President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute |
| USA | Jacobs, Kenneth M. | Chairman and CEO, Lazard |
| USA | Johnson, James A. | Chairman, Johnson Capital Partners |
| USA | Karp, Alex | CEO, Palantir Technologies |
| USA | Katz, Bruce J. | Vice President and Co-Director, Metropolitan Policy Program, The Brookings Institution |
| CAN | Kenney, Jason T. | Minister of Employment and Social Development |
| GBR | Kerr, John | Deputy Chairman, Scottish Power |
| USA | Kissinger, Henry A. | Chairman, Kissinger Associates, Inc. |
| USA | Kleinfeld, Klaus | Chairman and CEO, Alcoa |
| TUR | Koç, Mustafa | Chairman, Koç Holding A.S. |
| DNK | Kragh, Steffen | President and CEO, Egmont |
| USA | Kravis, Henry R. | Co-Chairman and Co-CEO, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. |
| USA | Kravis, Marie-Josée | Senior Fellow and Vice Chair, Hudson Institute |
| CHE | Kudelski, André | Chairman and CEO, Kudelski Group |
| INT | Lagarde, Christine | Managing Director, International Monetary Fund |
| BEL | Leysen, Thomas | Chairman of the Board of Directors, KBC Group |
| USA | Li, Cheng | Director, John L.Thornton China Center,The Brookings Institution |
| SWE | Lifvendahl, Tove | Political Editor in Chief, Svenska Dagbladet |
| CHN | Liu, He | Minister, Office of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs |
| PRT | Macedo, Paulo | Minister of Health |
| FRA | Macron, Emmanuel | Deputy Secretary General of the Presidency |
| ITA | Maggioni, Monica | Editor-in-Chief, Rainews24, RAI TV |
| GBR | Mandelson, Peter | Chairman, Global Counsel LLP |
| USA | McAfee, Andrew | Principal Research Scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| PRT | Medeiros, Inês de | Member of Parliament, Socialist Party |
| GBR | Micklethwait, John | Editor-in-Chief, The Economist |
| GRC | Mitsotaki, Alexandra | Chair, ActionAid Hellas |
| ITA | Monti, Mario | Senator-for-life; President, Bocconi University |
| USA | Mundie, Craig J. | Senior Advisor to the CEO, Microsoft Corporation |
| CAN | Munroe-Blum, Heather | Professor of Medicine and Principal (President) Emerita, McGill University |
| USA | Murray, Charles A. | W.H. Brady Scholar, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research |
| NLD | Netherlands, H.R.H. Princess Beatrix of the | |
| ESP | Nin Génova, Juan María | Deputy Chairman and CEO, CaixaBank |
| FRA | Nougayrède, Natalie | Director and Executive Editor, Le Monde |
| DNK | Olesen, Søren-Peter | Professor; Member of the Board of Directors, The Carlsberg Foundation |
| FIN | Ollila, Jorma | Chairman, Royal Dutch Shell, plc; Chairman, Outokumpu Plc |
| TUR | Oran, Umut | Deputy Chairman, Republican People’s Party (CHP) |
| GBR | Osborne, George | Chancellor of the Exchequer |
| FRA | Pellerin, Fleur | State Secretary for Foreign Trade |
| USA | Perle, Richard N. | Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute |
| USA | Petraeus, David H. | Chairman, KKR Global Institute |
| CAN | Poloz, Stephen S. | Governor, Bank of Canada |
| INT | Rasmussen, Anders Fogh | Secretary General, NATO |
| DNK | Rasmussen, Jørgen Huno | Chairman of the Board of Trustees, The Lundbeck Foundation |
| INT | Reding, Viviane | Vice President and Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, European Commission |
| USA | Reed, Kasim | Mayor of Atlanta |
| CAN | Reisman, Heather M. | Chair and CEO, Indigo Books & Music Inc. |
| NOR | Reiten, Eivind | Chairman, Klaveness Marine Holding AS |
| DEU | Röttgen, Norbert | Chairman, Foreign Affairs Committee, German Bundestag |
| USA | Rubin, Robert E. | Co-Chair, Council on Foreign Relations; Former Secretary of the Treasury |
| USA | Rumer, Eugene | Senior Associate and Director, Russia and Eurasia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace |
| NOR | Rynning-Tønnesen, Christian | President and CEO, Statkraft AS |
| NLD | Samsom, Diederik M. | Parliamentary Leader PvdA (Labour Party) |
| GBR | Sawers, John | Chief, Secret Intelligence Service |
| NLD | Scheffer, Paul J. | Author; Professor of European Studies, Tilburg University |
| NLD | Schippers, Edith | Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport |
| USA | Schmidt, Eric E. | Executive Chairman, Google Inc. |
| AUT | Scholten, Rudolf | CEO, Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG |
| USA | Shih, Clara | CEO and Founder, Hearsay Social |
| FIN | Siilasmaa, Risto K. | Chairman of the Board of Directors and Interim CEO, Nokia Corporation |
| ESP | Spain, H.M. the Queen of | |
| USA | Spence, A. Michael | Professor of Economics, New York University |
| FIN | Stadigh, Kari | President and CEO, Sampo plc |
| USA | Summers, Lawrence H. | Charles W. Eliot University Professor, Harvard University |
| IRL | Sutherland, Peter D. | Chairman, Goldman Sachs International; UN Special Representative for Migration |
| SWE | Svanberg, Carl-Henric | Chairman, Volvo AB and BP plc |
| TUR | Taftalı, A. Ümit | Member of the Board, Suna and Inan Kiraç Foundation |
| USA | Thiel, Peter A. | President, Thiel Capital |
| DNK | Topsøe, Henrik | Chairman, Haldor Topsøe A/S |
| GRC | Tsoukalis, Loukas | President, Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy |
| NOR | Ulltveit-Moe, Jens | Founder and CEO, Umoe AS |
| INT | Üzümcü, Ahmet | Director-General, Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons |
| CHE | Vasella, Daniel L. | Honorary Chairman, Novartis International |
| FIN | Wahlroos, Björn | Chairman, Sampo plc |
| SWE | Wallenberg, Jacob | Chairman, Investor AB |
| SWE | Wallenberg, Marcus | Chairman of the Board of Directors, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB |
| USA | Warsh, Kevin M. | Distinguished Visiting Fellow and Lecturer, Stanford University |
| GBR | Wolf, Martin H. | Chief Economics Commentator, The Financial Times |
| USA | Wolfensohn, James D. | Chairman and CEO, Wolfensohn and Company |
| NLD | Zalm, Gerrit | Chairman of the Managing Board, ABN-AMRO Bank N.V. |
| GRC | Zanias, George | Chairman of the Board, National Bank of Greece |
| USA | Zoellick, Robert B. | Chairman, Board of International Advisors, The Goldman Sachs Group |
Study: Median CEO pay in US crosses $10 million for first time
Press TV – May 28, 2014
The median pay package for a chief executive officer (CEO) in the United States rose above $10 million for the first time in 201, according to a new Associated Press/Equilar pay study, while worker pay stagnates.
A typical American CEO at an S&P 500 company earned a record $10.5 million in 2013, an increase of 8.8 percent from $9.6 million in 2012, the study showed.
Chief executives, generally the most senior position in a large public company, now make 257 times the average worker’s salary, up sharply from 181 times in 2009.
Last year was the fourth straight that CEO compensation rose following a decline during the Great Recession. The median CEO pay package has climbed more than 50 percent since the recession.
“We are still dealing with a situation where CEO compensation has spun out of control and CEOs are being paid extraordinary levels for their work,” says Gary Hewitt, director of research at GMI Ratings, a corporate governance research firm.
The highest paid CEO was Anthony Petrello of oilfield-services company Nabors Industries, who made $68.3 million in 2013. The second-highest paid CEO among companies in the S&P 500 was Leslie Moonves of CBS. Moonves’ total compensation rose 9 percent to $65.6 million in 2013.
Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold CEO Richard Adkerson received a total payment of $55.3 million, making him the third-highest paid CEO last year.
CEO pay remains a divisive issue in the US. The 8.8 percent increase in total pay that CEOs got last year dwarfed the average raise a US worker received.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said average weekly wages for US workers rose 1.3 percent in 2013. At that rate an employee would have to work 257 years to make what a typical S&P 500 CEO makes in a year.
According to a study released earlier this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the growing income inequality in the United States has reached a 50-year high.
Study: Growth in US student debt linked to pay for university presidents
Press TV – May 19, 2014
American public universities with the highest-paid presidents also have the highest increase in both student debt and the use of low-wage, part-time professors, according to a new study.
The study, conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning Washington research group, examined the relationship between executive pay, student debt and low-wage faculty labor at 25 public universities with the highest-paid presidents.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, executive pay at “the top 25” has risen dramatically to far exceed pre-recession levels, the study found. Over the same period, low-wage faculty labor and student debt at these colleges rose faster than national averages.
“Like executives in the corporate and banking sectors, public university presidents weathered the immediate aftermath of the fall 2008 financial crisis with minimal or no reductions in total compensation,” the report said.
The study, titled “The One Percent at State U: How University Presidents Profit from Rising Student Debt and Low-Wage Faculty Labor,” found that Ohio State was No. 1 on the list of what it called the most unequal public universities.
The report found that from fiscal 2010 to fiscal 2012, Ohio State paid its president, E. Gordon Gee, a total of $5.9 million. During the same period, it said, student debt at Ohio State grew 23 percent faster than the national average.
Others on the “most unequal” list were Pennsylvania State University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Michigan and the University of Washington.
Student loan debt is growing public concern for millions of Americans, who currently owe $1.2 trillion, a number that has tripled in the last decade.
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Book Review
Palantir CEO Calls for Draft to Fight the Empire’s Wars
Involuntary servitude is good for business
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | April 20, 2026
In 2025, Alex Karp, the CEO of government and military tech contractor Palantir, published The New York Times best-seller, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. The Wall Street Journal praised the book as a cri de coeur, a passionate appeal “that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies,” while Wired praised the book as a “readable polemic that skewers Silicon Valley for insufficient patriotism.”
On April 18, 2026, Palantir posted twenty-two points to social media summarizing the book. In addition to taking Silicon Valley to task for insufficient patriotism, advocating a role for AI in forever war, and denouncing the “psychologization of modern politics,” the Palantir post on X declares: “National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
National conscription, a form of involuntary servitude, and the wars it portends, is good for business, especially for corporations within the orbit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the national security state. Palantir fits comfortably within this amalgamation. … continue
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