SOTT FOCUS: Paris Under the Nazis – New York Under the Neocons – The Darker Context

By Laura Knight-Jadczyk, SOTT.net:

Reading an article from the current issue of Time Magazine really makes one stop and think. At the beginning of the photo, one sees a lovely color photo that, except for a few fashion details, could have been taken last week in Paris.

©Andre Zucca

One of the photos showing the supposedly sunny, happy life in Paris during the German occupation

And then, one reads the text:

The photographs from the early 1940s show Paris as sunny, airy, bursting with color. Its inhabitants appear carefree, content and refreshingly unaware of their proclivity for looking très chic. It’s all very much at odds with the prevailing image of the French capital suffering and smoldering under the yoke of its Nazi occupiers. Indeed, that very dissonance has made the current photo exhibit “Parisians Under the Occupation” one of the city’s most controversial cultural events of late. Was life in Nazi-controlled Paris really as idyllic as these pictures suggest?

I would say that life in Nazi-controlled Paris was exactly as idyllic as life is in Neocon controlled New York City where Machine Gun-Toting Officers will be Patrolling the NYC Subway and several citizens were quoted as actually saying they now feel “safer,” never mind that the Phantom Terrorist menace is exactly as real as the Jewish Terror Menace was to the Germans. This must, of course, give us pause to consider…

The Time article continues:

The exhibit at the City of Paris’ Historic Library has drawn what organizers say is an unexpectedly strong turnout of 11,000 visitors since it opened on March 20. But in recent days the exhibit’s 250 photographs have become the subject of a heated debate over how history ought to be presented.

“How history ought to be presented. Well, now, there it is, right out in the open. Photographic evidence that life went on as normal for MOST people – exactly as it is doing today – is supposed to be suppressed so that we forget that nothing has really changed and that what is going on today is exactly the same as what was going on then.

Detractors claim the curators neglected to inform spectators that the pictures were outright Nazi propaganda, commissioned and shot to show a German public just how happily the French lived under Occupation. That contextual omission, critics contend, not only allows the photos to broadcast a deceptive view of Nazi rule more than 60 years after they were shot; it also insults the memory of Holocaust victims from the traditionally Jewish right-bank neighborhood within the Marais, a stone’s throw away from the exhibit.

The problem is, of course, that we have the same propaganda today – only better. Our television and newspapers and magazines show the public just how happy people are to be living under what amounts to exactly the same sort of Fascist repression as existed during Nazi times. Isn’t what we are doing insulting to the living (or dying, as the case may be) reality of over a million Iraqis, the hundreds of thousands of suffering Palestinians living under a far worse occupation of Zio-Nazis in their own land, not to mention all the other areas of the world that have been raped, pillaged and plundered by the Zionist controlled U.S. Secret Services, Psy-Ops and War Machine for the past 70 years or so?

“It’s total manipulation, and it made me ill,” protested Christophe Girard, the Socialist deputy mayor of Paris in charge of cultural issues, in the weekly Journal du Dimanche Sunday. He has called for the show to be canceled before its planned end of July 1.

What a sick hypocrite! This guy calls showing photographs of what life was like under the Nazis “total manipulation.” What does he call the U.S. claiming to bring “freedom and democracy” to Iraq by force, or the ongoing occupation of Palestine and genocide of its inhabitants? Frankly, that makes ME ill and it makes me even sicker to read pusillanimous platitudes promulgated by protesting Parisian Pipsqueak mayors who haven’t got the guts to stand up for people who are suffering NOW from exactly the same macro-social disease that gripped most of Europe under that gang of pathologicals called the Nazis.

Well, guess what? Pathologicals exist in all kinds of places, parties, and behind all ideologies. France has been involved in some pretty pathological activities itself, to name North Africa for but one, and Viet Nam for another. Can we say “imperialistic occupation and genocide”??

But pulling the plug on the show isn’t going to happen, Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë said Monday night. Delanoë regretted that the exhibition hadn’t made more explicit the great suffering, privation, and death that amounted to the larger context for “people who also weren’t living too badly” in the photos. But he said canceling the show would constitute “adding a fault to errors,” and ordered its continuation.

Thank god for a little sanity and truth. There it is: in the midst of the great suffering, privation and death that amounts to the larger context for Palestine and Iraq and Africa, Central America, Viet Nam, South America, and so on, almost daily genocide ongoing for the past 70 years, there are a lot of people who aren’t living too badly. And that’s a fact then, and a fact now.

Nothing has changed, just the names of the perpetrators and the victims. It’s always and ever pathologicals in charge and decent people of conscience who suffer, and the rest turning their eyes away for fear that they, too, will get trapped in the jaws of the beast.

By the time Delanoë made that call, the curators had moved to provide that context. Visitors to the Historic Library are now informed in several languages that the pictures were shot by André Zucca, a Frenchman hired by the German magazine Signal to capture scenes of Paris flourishing under Nazi rule. Zucca’s bosses’ gave him extremely rare and valuable rolls of Agfacolor film to shoot his busy shoppers, café-lounging lovers, parks filled with parents and playing children, and ultra-chic Parisiennes sporting the last word in fashionably enormous eyewear.

And exactly the same thing could be done – and IS done – today, in our own time, while these other, “hidden things” are going on:

FBI wants widespread monitoring of ‘illegal’ Internet activity

Homegrown Radical: Wisconsin police misuse powers to track blogger ‘guilty’ of criticism

Feds to Require International Visitors Be Fingerprinted Before Leaving U.S.

Privacy becoming more elusive for Americans

Making a ‘Killing’ on the ‘War on Terror’
Propaganda Special: Israel’s UN ambassador calls Jimmy Carter ‘a bigot’

The Pentagon Invades Your Life

Pathological Thinking: Ashcroft’s Bizarre Torture Comments
The High Crimes of John Yoo: The President’s Executioner

Addington, Gonzales Witnessed Gitmo Interrogations In 2002; Approved Of ‘Whatever Needs To Be Done’

Gaza’s only power plant to shut down by tomorrow due to lack of fuel

UN suspends Gaza food deliveries

Israel rejects Hamas truce offer, insists Palestinians unconditionally stop resisting brutal occupation

In Gaza: No shoe nor a drop of fuel

Palestinian Islamists, Christian Activists Make Last-Ditch Effort to Save Orphans from Israeli State Terror

Hebron orphanage under threat by the army, hundreds of children will be homeless

Breaking the Silence – Israeli Soldiers Speak

Civilian casualties mount in Iraq as Shiite clashes spread in response to US crack down

And that’s just a quick grab from the latest in the pot. It’s actually a lot more dire and getting worse by the day, if not by the minute.

But, stop the presses! A show of photographs in Paris just might depict life went on as usual while Jews were dying.

Yeah, no doubt; they were; the Nazis were evil bastards. How dare they show that anyone else was enjoying life while the Jews were dying.

Well, how dare anyone even consider living or enjoying a normal life while millions of Iraqis and Palestinians and Africans are suffering the same damn thing going on right now???

Give me a break fer cryin’ out loud!

Despite the photographs’ propagandistic intent, curators note that their esthetic quality – not to mention their rarity as color prints from that period – make the case for their display. Indeed, even Girard noted that “had it been clearly explained to the public that these were propaganda photos on display, the exhibit could have been very interesting.” While most photos clearly present an idealized and flattering picture of occupied Paris, other shots featuring Nazi flags, German installations, and huge numbers of uniformed soldiers mingling on familiar Parisian streets leave little doubt as to the actual context.

Duuuh! And will we have future photos of all the happy people in New York with the machine-gun armed protectors standing about in the background leaving little doubt about what is going on??

“What shocked a lot of people were the advertising posters and outdoor displays of the photos that seemed to suggest, ‘This is how it really was; it wasn’t so bad,’” says a woman who has seen the exhibit and identifies herself as Anne, a long-time resident of the traditionally Jewish rue des Rosiers just down the street from the Historical Library. “Almost everyone here lost family in the Shoah, and knows that wasn’t how it was. In fact, I don’t think anyone who lived in or knows people who lived in Paris during the Occupation thinks those photos show how it was.”

Sorry, lady, but that IS how it was for a lot of people. And even moreso today. What’s more, that is how it was for about 50 million other people back then who didn’t happen to be Jews, but I don’t hear a lot about them. Did you know that Poland lost over 6 million Poles and that only about half of them were Jews? When do we ever hear anybody talk about that? Where is their “Holocaust Museum”?

Still, she emphatically agrees with those who say that the curators should have been more explicit in laying out the darker context of death, deportation and repression: “That’s the one thing people can never be reminded of too often.”

Indeed, truer words were never spoken, but I doubt that they were spoken in truth. People should, indeed, be more explicit in laying out the darker context of our reality; that’s the one thing people can never be reminded of too often.

And that’s what sott.net does, every day, remind you of the darker context of this reality in which life goes on… for some.

The Criminalization of Raw Milk

These gestapo techniques should be used on those that deserve it, like companies that sell mad cow beef and other contaminated foods. A friend of mine has been consuming raw dairy from Mark for years, and says that it’s made a huge difference in his health.

One of the most important issues these raw milk persecution cases highlight is our right to have private contracts without interference from the state.

A Mennonite Farmer is Hauled Away

By LINN COHEN-COLE, Counterpunch:

On April 25, 2008, in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Mark Nolt, a Wenger Mennonite (Horse and Buggy Mennonite) dairyman, threatened for months with arrest for selling raw milk without a permit was removed from his property by state troopers.

Jonas Stoltzfus, a friend, fellow farmer, and Church of the Brethen, was asked by Mr. Nolt to speak for him, and said of the raid yesterday – “Six state troopers and a man with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture trespassed onto his property, and stole $20-25,000 of his product and equipment.”

Mr. Stoltzfus explained that Mr. Nolt did not have a permit because “he chose to turn his permit back in because it did not cover all the products he was selling. He felt he was being dishonest selling stuff that was not covered by the permit. He is a man of great integrity.”

“According to reports from neighbors and the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, several officials of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture participated in the raid, and while Mark was being transported by police car to the courthouse, PDA officials confiscated $20,000 to $25,000 worth of dairy products and production equipment. Neighbors reported the farm had been closed and that a large group of officials had gathered, with videos prohibited.”

“Mr. Nolt was told that people had gotten sick from eating his food, but no one ever came forward and no proof was ever offered.”

“This is a Gestapo raid,” Jonas Stotlzfus said, “complete with state troopers, raiding a hard-working farmer selling milk to friends and customers. And his customers ARE his friends.” Mr. Nolt

Mr. Stoltzfus said of Mr. Nolt, “he is not going to stop [selling raw milk] til he is ready to stop. He is the equivalent of that little black lady in Alabama who wouldn’t go to the back of the bus. He is doing the same thing, he won’t go to the back of bus.” Mr. Stoltzfus said “she got arrested for that and so did Mr. Nolt. He ignored [the threat] and kept on selling. He is a courageous man.” Mr. Stoltzfuz said “Mark believes it is his right to sell, according to the constitution, just like it was Rosa Park’s right to sit wherever she wanted on the bus. Same deal. There is nothing in the constitution to prevent Mr. Nolt from buying and selling, especially to his friends,” Mr. Stoltzfus said.

Stoltzfus commented that Mr Sheridan of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (Stoltzfus does not have the spelling and believes he is with the licensing division) used to work for Dean Foods and Hershey Foods, big corporate operations, and that Sheridan was “jealous that farmers make a better product” and called the raid by Mr. Sheridan “a vendetta.”

This case is similar to that involving Meadowsweet Dairy LLC in New York, in that both Pennsylvania and New York allow raw milk sales, but adamantly oppose the sale of other raw dairy products.

Mr. Nolt was doing things the way his community has for generations, selling milk straight from his cows to those he knows.

Mr. Nolt contends that the regulations have not been approved by the legislature and shouldn’t apply to him because he is selling directly to consumers, via private contracts that are outside the purview of the state, making a privilege out of a right he believes he has – the right to private contracts.”

The permitting issue, ostensibly for food safety, is contradicted by a look both at raw milk itself and at its competition, corporate milk – pasteurized and often from cows injected with rBGH.

Four issues stand out:

1. INDEPENDENCE of farmer and customers

Raw milk: Farmer sell raw milk from their own cows, to neighbors and friends at a price farmers set themselves, paid by people who value their product, without a middleman.

A growing number of people prefer raw milk (unpasteurized milk), considering it not only safe but healthier than pasteurized milk because it is still rich in pro-biotics not killed off by pasteurization. l

Farming communities have consumed raw milk for generations. The exchange between farmers and neighbors play a central part in the web of relations sustaining those communities. Yet raw milk is banned in many states.

Corporate milk: Dairy farmers sell their milk to milk “producers” who pasteurize it, may add things to it, bottle it, distribute it, often at great distances. Dairy farmers must accept a price set by others, in a large competitive market. Nothing in the process promotes local farming communities.

“…The system of influence and control..is highly skewed in favor of the corporate and financial system.” – Vincente Navarro, (Professor of Health and Social Policy, John Hopkins U.).

2. HEALTH

Raw milk:

“[For years, m]illions [in California] consumed commercial raw milk, … not a single incidence was reported. During the same period, there were many instances of contamination in pasteurized milk, some of which resulted in death. [I]f we withdrew … every food type responsible for a case of food poisoning, there would be virtually nothing left to eat. But only raw milk has been singled out for general removal from the food supply.

“… the bacteria in raw milk is the healthy bacteria of lactic-acid fermentation while the bacteria in pasteurized milk is the bacteria of spoilage. … Both raw and pasteurized milk contain E. coli, normally a benign microorganism. The most likely source of the new strains of virulent E. coli is genetically engineered soy, fed to cows in large commercial dairies. If there is any type of milk likely to harbor these virulent breeds, it is commercial pasteurized milk. … Children fed raw milk have more resistance to TB, scurvy, flu, diphtheria, pneumonia, asthma, allergic skin problems and tooth decay. In addition, their growth and calcium absorption was superior.” (In California, there is currently an effort to ban raw milk.

“Four distinct groups of bacteria survive pasteurization….the strep of pasteurized milk are the most frequent cause of rheumatic fever –the most deadly disease of childhood.’” – USDA

Corporate milk:

During the Clinton administration, a new study was released “conclud[ing] that milk from cows injected with [genetically engineered bovine growth hormone - rBGH) increases risks of breast and colon cancers in humans.
....
"rBGH poses an even greater risk to human health than ever considered," warned Samuel Epstein M.D., Professor of Environmental Medicine .... "The FDA and Monsanto have a lot to answer for. Given the cancer risks, and other health concerns, why is rBGH milk still on the market?"

Since 1986, independent scientists have expressed concern about the lack of research on rBGH milk.

Michael Colby, Executive Director of Food and Water said, "Monsanto 's claims that rBGH is perfectly safe have been proven dead wrong today .... Only Monsanto is benefiting from this drug. It's time for dairy companies to side with consumers by adopting a policy that they will not allow rBGH, under any circumstances, to be used by their farmers."

Epstein said: "The entire nation is currently being subjected to a large-scale adulteration of an age-old dietary staple by a poorly characterized and unlabeled biotechnology product which is very different than natural milk."

In 2007 - when Mark Nolt was first arrested for selling raw milk (natural milk) - a citizens' petition to the FDA on rBGH milk showed 30 scientific journals indicating an up-to-7-fold increased risk of breast cancer, and an increased risk of colon and prostate cancern.

3. PROMOTION

Raw milk is sold primarily through word of mouth.

Corporate milk is promoted through large, expensive ad campaigns.

The California Milk Processor Board is now targeting teens:

"Goodby, Silverstein and Partners created a page on MySpace to promote White Gold and the Calcium Twins, a team of new fictitious characters turned rock stars who spread their love of and devotion to milk through music. TV spots, print ads and PR will also support the promotion.

"The Milk Processor Education Program ... is funded by the nation's milk processors ... committed to increasing fluid milk consumption." http://www.thinkaboutyourdrink.com.

4. LABELING

Raw milk is just milk. Those who buy it know that and seek it out for that reason.

On the corporate side, Monsanto continues pushing bans on labeling rBGH-milk. Customers usually do not know they are consuming rBGH milk.

During its approval process,

"FDA scientist, Dr Richard Burroughs concluded ... Monsanto was manipulating the [test] figures. In 1989 he was sacked after complaining to Congress … To deal with the … controversy Monsanto assembled …PR companies … of which [BURSON-MARSTELLER] was one.”

During the Clinton administration, Monsanto employees were appointed to run the FDA. Monsanto’s rBGH – the first genetically engineered product ever, was approved.

“[In]1994, people at the FDA [wrote] an anonymous letter to … Congress, [fearing] retribution … The basis of our concern is that Dr. Margaret Miller … wrote the FDA’s opinion on why milk from [rbGH]-treated cows should not be labeled. However, before coming to the FDA, Dr. Margaret Miller was working for the Monsanto company as a researcher on [rbGH].”

In 1996, there was a press conference on rBGH’s medical risks. “Given the potential health impacts of consumption of milk and other dairy products derived from rBGH treated cows, all such products at a minimum be labeled so that consumers are aware of what they are purchasing and consuming. More prudently the FDA approval of rBGH should be withdrawn until the agency performs adequate long term testing …”

“… Wisconsin, Minnesota, California and Vermont attempted to enforce labelling of milk produced with, and containing, this hormone. Their efforts were thwarted by Burson-Marsteller acting on behalf of these companies.”

Burson-Marsteller has been a long-term (now campaign) advisor to Hillary Clinton, through its CEO, Mark Penn. And Monsanto’s effort to ban labeling of the milk continues today.

Banning of labeling of rBGH milk in effect puts millions of Americans into a human experiment with genetic engineering, exposing them to greatly increased risk of cancers. The Nuremberg Code makes clear that experimental subjects must give informed consent.

Mr. Stoltzfus added up losses for Mark Nolt: “Trepass on private property, private personal merchandise stolen, being deprived of a significant amount of hard work he and his family put together. He is being deprived of the opportunity to market his product now, they are throwing it away. It’s a shame.”

Mr. Nolt did not have a permit. He has twice lost thousands of dollars of work or material, and faces jail.

Monsanto sells rBGH-milk associated with cancers, Clinton hired Monsanto employees which approved their own genetically engineered product, Hillary Clinton has been silent up to today about the risk rBGH poses to women, PR firms strongly push the milk on all ages. None face jail or fines for altered facts, for PR campaigns encouraging even children to drink rBGH-milk, or for banning labeling of it, which has put the entire US population at medical risk for years. Monsanto, the Clintons, Burson-Marsteller and Goodby, Silverstein and Partners are all making millions.

Mr. Nolt, released after being taken off by state troopers, refused to accept a ride from them. He started walking. Friends gave him a lift home.

Linn Cohen-Cole can be reached at: lcohencole@gmail.com

All the president’s liars

Fun new game! Which TV news “military expert” is really a whore for the Bush administration? (Hint: all of them

By Mark Morford, SF Gate:

Did it work? Were you duped?

Were you calmly and methodically and rather nefariously led to believe that maybe, just maybe, the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan and Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and the rest, right along with tales of soldier suicides and torture and staggering civilian body counts and the utterly disastrous Bush military policy weren’t really all that bad after all?

Did you watch any CNN or Fox News or MSNBC, lo, these past five or six years, listen to the pundits and ponder the wise, informed comments of all the military experts the networks brought on to discuss Iraq policy, then conclude that maybe this war, this appalling invasion might actually be positive, that maybe the surge is working and torture ain’t all that bad and the democracy is taking root and America is proud and perky and victorious once again?

Did you believe any of it? Because oh my God, they sure as hell worked us over like a rabid dog works a hunk of gristle.

Who are “they,” exactly? Why, they’re the newly discovered and rather unexpected fraternity of expert BS artists, a highly specialized group known to gullible Americans as stoic, stern-faced retired generals, colonels, majors, military advisers, former Pentagon officials, the ones you’ve heard and seen on TV news for years, but who are known to the Bush administration as a delightfully dishonest gaggle of preferred liars, lackeys, shills, puppets and mouthpieces for Dick Cheney and Donny Rumsfeld and Dubya himself.

The truth is as sad as it is revolting: You have been lied to, again and again, perhaps even more than you imagined, in a rather unexpected way, perhaps like no other time in American history, in a more carefully orchestrated and widespread effort than any presidential administration has managed to attempt in the past.

Here is the New York Times, still managing to do what it does best despite the era of dying newspapers and disrespected journalism, running a simply astonishing piece on all the dishonest “military consultants” who’ve appeared for the past half decade on every major network — and yes, Fox adores these liars best of all — to discuss Iraq, surges, U.S. military strategy, the works.

Here is the Times revealing, after two years of battling the Defense Department to release the 8,000 pages of incriminating documents by way of instigating lawsuits and leveraging the Freedom of Information Act — and barely even then — that this entire dour fraternity of deceitful military cretins has been in service of BushCo since Sept. 11 — and still is, to this very day.

To clarify: Whenever you’ve seen one of those dour-faced retired generals discussing details of U.S. war strategy on MSNBC, chances are staggeringly good he was/is in the pocket of Rummy or Cheney. Whenever a wise old colonel has appeared on Fox or CNN or CBS News to say the surge is working or troop morale is strong or that all those suicide bombings aren’t really so bad, chances are overwhelmingly good that he is lying outright and you’re hearing exactly what Donald Rumsfeld wanted him to say. Isn’t that refreshing?

The Times story is simply astounding. Up and down the line, from major to general to colonel to every sort of expert they have, it’s the same story. Over and over again, presented “tens of thousands of times” and totaling countless hundreds of TV and radio hours, it’s been a near constant stream of calculated deception and misrepresentation and bogus pro-Iraq spin. Neutrality? Fair analysis of the war? Criticism of Bush? Not a chance.

You may ask: Why would they do such a thing? What’s in it for the generals and the colonels to lie outright to the American populace and the embarrassingly blind news networks, to whore their credentials and trash their distinguished reputations in favor of defending a lost war and useless president?

That’s easy: Access. Access to the White House, to the corridors of power and influence; access to the perks and the pals and snifters of brandy, the backroom handshakes, the business deals, the hugely lucrative military contracts, the sweet, sweet piles of cash and privilege and power awaiting them if they just toe the line and keep their real opinions to themselves. Also worth mentioning: Many are military men down to the bone. Failed war and inept commander in chief or no, they will defend any U.S. military operation, simply because it’s a U.S. military operation. It’s just automatic.

Reminds me, in a depressing sort of way, of that gaggle of Big Tobacco CEOs who banded together not long ago in a hilarious attempt to convince the nation — and the courts — that cigarettes aren’t all that bad and there’s little evidence smoking causes cancer or impotence or death, and in fact small children really love secondhand smoke and so do puppies and flowers and Jesus, and if you want to have fun sometime, walk into a hospital nursery and fire up a fresh Marlboro and blow that yummy smoke straight into the faces of the newborns. Watch them squirm with delight!

Except wait, no, it’s not like that at all. One major difference: Big Tobacco execs are professional liars, de facto and a priori and understood. It’s what they do. Not even the most ardent smoking advocate would trust one those jackals as far as he could throw him into a vat of chemotherapy drugs.

Different, at least in theory, with these high-grade military men. They have a potent aura of trustworthiness, fairness, decency. They are f—ing generals, for chrissakes, and hence we like to think of them as straight-talking, no-BS working men whose word is solid and whose authority unquestionable and therefore no wimp-assed monkey-faced president or scabrous Defense secretary could make them say something they didn’t actually believe.

Wrong. Oh, how horribly wrong.

So I ask again, did it work? Was America duped? Well, yes and no. There’s little doubt that this insidious, sustained PR attack — and make no mistake, it was/is an attack on the American people; such calculated “psychological operations” aimed at U.S. citizens are actually very illegal, though it’s enormously difficult to prove so in court — swayed millions of Americans, gave fuel to the preemptive attack argument, inflamed (and still inflames) the warmongering right, scammed the media, fanned the pro-war fires for years before the public recoil finally kicked in.

But oh, kick in it did. This is the fascinating thing. Even all those high-ranking military experts lying like well-decorated dogs in one of the most impressive, appalling PR campaigns in American history could not keep Bush from collapsing, could not prevent Americans from learning the real facts of the failed war and toxic presidency — eventually.

And maybe this is a good thing. Because now, given the scope of the Bush administration’s lies — the true scale of which we may never fully know — the recoil is even more forceful than it ever might’ve been, the anti-neocon, anti-Bush revolt is potent and heartening and enormously helpful to the Democratic cause, perhaps far more than if Bush and his cronies had told the truth in the first place.

Then again, if they had been the slightest bit honest, if Bush had even a hint of integrity, we’d never have launched this staggeringly botched, futile war in the first place, and maybe we wouldn’t be where we are now, with the American experiment under Bush far less of an experiment and far more of a cyanide tablet.

“Unraveling?” The Syrian Nuke Facility Story

By David Kurtz, Talking Points Memo:

First, it was supposed to be video of North Koreans inside of Syria’s alleged nuke facility. Then it turned out the “video” was really just the intel community’s own presentation, which contained still photographs.

Now Reuters seems to knock the story back another notch:

A U.S. official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to discuss classified matters, said that among the intelligence the United States has was an image of what appeared to be people of Korean descent at the facility.

“Appeared to be people of Korean descent”?

As a friend of the site wondered in a email a little while ago: “I’m not sure how one would recognize NKs in photos…’Hard Rock Café Pyongyang’ T-shirts?”

Late Update: The Financial Times offers a more definitive account from a source:

One photograph shows a North Korean nuclear scientist named Chon Chibu standing beside a person believed to be his Syrian counterpart. Mr Chon has worked at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor, which produced the material for the bomb North Korea tested in 2006, and has dealt with US officials in the past. The US official said the date of the meeting was unclear, but said the vintage of a car that appears in the background suggests it was sometime after 2005.

The Plunge Protection Team: An Elite Group Protects the Financial Sector

Commentary by kevin Phillips, The Washington Independent:

Some people foolishly think that Washington’s recent high-profile effort to steer, subsidize and protect the American financial sector is the beginning of something new — a revolutionary development.

It isn’t. Consider that the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets – nicknamed “the Plunge Protection Team” by The Washington Post in 1997 & ndash; quietly observed its 20th birthday on Mar. 18.

“Quietly,” in fact, is an understatement. “Semi-secretly” would be more like it. The Working Group, or PPT, is much-pondered but reclusive group that has declined to submit to the federal Freedom of Information Act or to testify in detail before Congress about its activities. This is true even though its current chief, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. – Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke is another prominent member — made no secret of revving up its operations after he took took over at Treasury in 2006.

The curious reader will wonder: Just what does the PPT do?

Right now, Congress ought to able to pursue this basic question: Is the PPT a kind of committee for the extra-legal coordination, manipulation and subsidization of financial institutions and markets? Has it been stepping in when free-market forces have become too perilous to profits and asset values — in financial crisis years like 1998, 2001 and 2007. Has Washington decided to protect the financial sector more than any other element of the U.S. economy?

Over the last decade or so, the Treasury Dept. and the Fed have both developed something of a scofflaw attitude toward strict interpretation of federal statutes and regulations. For example, both winked in the late 1990s, as federal regulators allowed Citibank to merge with Travelers Insurance, despite contrary law still on the books. Both winked in more recent years, as major banks set up huge multi-billion-dollar structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, to do on an off-the-books basis what they were not allowed under banking law. Now we have the federally funded J.P Morgan Chase takeover of Bear Stearns. The PPT may well have had a quiet role in some of these actions.

For the bigger picture, look back to the stock market crash of 1987 — the sickening Oct. 19 fall when the Dow-Jones Industrial Average lost 508 points or 23.6 percent of its value in a single trading day. Alan Greenspan had just taken over as the Federal Reserve Bank chairman, and some believe that the Fed intervened to support the market the next day — by either buying Standard & Poors futures or telling several collaborative broker-dealers to do so.

Tim Metz, in “Black Monday,” contends that “some leaders and market makers at the New York Stock Exchange and Chicago Mercantile Exchange collaborated to save the stock market by rigging stock information and prices.” Tony Dye, a British fund manager, made a similar charge of intervention by U.S. authorities. London Sunday Telegraph, Mar. 22, 1998).]] Edward Chancellor, in his 1999 book, “Devil Take the Hindmost,” noted that if these interventions occurred, they raised a major issue of “moral hazard.”

The likelihood they did occur is increased by the fact that a year after the PPT group’s launch, a retiring Fed board member, Robert Heller, wrote a much-discussed article in The Wall Street Journal that in the case of an another emergency like 1987, there might be a better alternative than the Fed’s usual remedy — interest rate reduction. “Instead of flooding the entire economy with liquidity, and thereby increasing the danger of inflation, ” Heller wrote, “the Fed could support the stock market directly by buying market averages in the futures market, thereby stabilizing the market as a whole.” No public mention was ever made of the Fed or the Working Group embracing the Heller scheme, but that may have happened privately.

Such accusations are a long way from being conclusive. But they do help explain the milieu in which the Working Group, or PPT, was set up by presidential proclamation – Congress had no role — in March 1988. The proclamation authorized the Working Group to “enhance the integrity, efficiency, orderliness and competitiveness of financial markets” — language that may have been intended to provide a broad and loose authorization for intervention in the 1987 mode, should it be required again.

Media discussion of the Working Group, negligible in 1988, rekindled after the tribulations over the Asian and Russian debt and currency crises of 1997 and 1998. Washington’s ambitions to manipulate seem to have been on the upswing. In a January 1997 speech in Belgium, Greenspan indicated that the Fed could pursue “direct intervention in market events” — a bold new legal interpretation.

A month later, The Washington Post ran a big article, revealing details never repeated by any other major publication. The article describes how the Working Group had set up a financial “war room;” assembled a global as well as national list of key emergency contacts, and carried out simulated emergency drills.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, media attention to possible government market intervention and manipulation refocused again — though less in the United States than in foreign English-speaking media. The London Observer reported, later that September, the Working Group-cum-PTT was “ready to coordinate intervention by the Federal Reserve on an unprecedented scale. The Fed, supported by the banks, will buy equities from mutual funds and other institutional sellers if there is evidence of panic selling in the wake of last week’s carnage.”

The group was cited again a half-year later. The authoritative Financial Times quoted a Fed official, who declined to be identified, but acknowledged that policy-makers had considered “buying U.S. equities” — not just futures. The Fed, said the official, could “theoretically buy anything to pump money into the system,” including “state and local debt, real estate and gold mines, any asset.” That sounds much like the same broad conception of empowerment Greenspan had injudiciously taken note of in 1997.

Two months later, the Australian Financial Review weighed in, wondering whether a 234-point intra-day surge on the New York Stock Exchange could be attributed to the PPT: “There is a belief that this team represents a powerful and secretive hand that is ready to act any time the Dow looks ready to tank big time.”

After 2001-02, there was little mention of the PPT group for several years. But come 2006, when Paulson decided to renew the Working Group as a major player, the British financial pages, if not the American, renewed their interest. The London Telegraph described the PPT as a “shadowy body with powers to support stock index, currency and credit futures in a crash.” It added that the former Clinton aide, George Stephanopoulos, had earlier described the group as having “an informal agreement among the major banks to come in and start to buy stock if there appears to be a problem.”

Not all U.S. financial journalists have been baaing sheep, ready to ignore the issue. John Crudele of The New York Post has pursued it in several columns, and others have acknowledged hearing about the buy orders from friends in the S&P trading pits. Another columnist, James Pethokoukis of U.S. News & World Report, described at length how in the final two trading hours on Aug, 16, 2007, the Plunge Protection Team might have encouraged one or two major institutions to buy stock index futures, because a 300-point Dow decline was briskly wiped away. But then he felt obliged to close with a semi-disavowal: “there’s never been any official confirmation of this,” and that insiders both in Washington and Wall Street “totally dismiss” these reports.

With the recent market panics and surges, the Working Group — if not its deepest secrets — might have again appeared on the front pages. But this did not happen.

However, in March 2008, the Senate Finance Committee’s top Democrat, Max Baucus (D-Mont.), and top Republican, Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), were consumed by interest in whether Paulson pressured Bernanke into having the Federal Reserve broker the controversial deal in which J. P. Morgan Chase got $30 billion to help take over Bear Stearns.

Baucus and Grassley asked for all kinds of details. However, they seem not to have asked for information on how closely Paulson and Bernanke had been collaborating since 2006 in their mutual roles on the Plunge Protection Team. and how they interpreted their powers under the 1988 presidential proclamation. This is unfortunate.

Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, a well-respected senior statesman, stated his concern bluntly. “To meet the challenge,” Volcker said, “the Federal Reserve judged it necessary to take actions that extend to the very edge of its lawful and implied powers, transcending certain long-embedded central banking principles and practices.”

Volcker is regarded as one of the last honest men in U.S. finance. But since 1987, the lawful and implied powers of the Federal Reserve have probably been extended further than the former Fed chairman would like – and, conceivably, further than he knows.

Kevin Phillips is the author of the new book, “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.” His previous books include “Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street and the Frustrations of American Politics” and “Boiling Point: Republicans, Democrats and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity.”

The Media Falls for Fake News Once Again: Syrian Nukes: the Phantom Menace

By JOHN W. FARLEY, Uruknet:

Last September 6, Israel bombed a Syrian building at Dair el Zor. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, little was said in public, by either Israel or Syria, but later the Israelis started claiming that the Syrians were building a nuclear reactor. On the radio today (April 25), I heard NPR’s Tom Jelton repeat, as if it were undisputed fact, the US. government claim to have “proof” of a Syrian-North Korean nuclear connection. Now I see that AP writers Pamela Hess and Deb Reichmann have a story headlined “White House says Syria ‘must come clean’ about nuclear work,” while ABC news has a video entitled “Syria’s Nuclear Reactor”.

Are the wonderful mainstream media, who gave us Saddam’s mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction, lying to us again? The answer is yes.

Last fall, journalist Laura Rozen spoke with Joseph Cirincione, director of nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress. Cirincione says

“In attacking Dair el Zor in Syria on Sept. 6, the Israeli air force wasn’t targeting a nuclear site but rather one of the main arms depots in the country. Dair el Zor houses a huge underground base where the Syrian army stores the long and medium-range missiles it mostly buys from Iran and North Korea. The attack by the Israeli air force coincided with the arrival of a stock of parts for Syria’s 200 Scud B and 60 Scud C weapons.”

Cirincione says that there is a small Syrian nuclear research program, which has been around for 40 years and is going nowhere. “It is a basic research program built around a tiny 30 kilowatt reactor that produced a few isotopes and neutrons. It is nowhere near a program for nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel,” he said. Over a dozen countries have helped Syria develop its nuclear program, including Belgium, Germany, Russia, China and even the United States, by way of training of scientists, he said.

So what is really going on here? Cirincione told the BBC that “This appears to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted ‘intelligence’ to key reporters in order to promote a preexisting political agenda.” The preexisting political agenda may be promoting a war with Syria and/or Iran, or torpedoing negotiations between the US and North Korea. Finally, Cirincione adds ominously “If this sounds like the run-up to the war with Iraq, then it should.”

A big salute to the intrepid Justin Raimundo of the Libertarian website www.antiwar.com, who had this all figured out last October 15. This column is much indebted to Raimundo and Rozen. For ABC, AP, Tom Jelton and National Pentagon Radio, it’s just another day of journalistic infamy.

John W. Farley writes from Henderson, Nevada.