controlled America

[theist]

interesting site. Got this from coast to coast last night.

 

http://controlledamerica.com/

[I_love_krishna_]

It could be just a hunch... however, I do not believe that you can control your brain waves that easily. It is just like the issue with "Sightings of UFO" . Most of them are not true, but may be there have been advancements that could lead to such research in the future, like in 1000 years. But we barely know what lobes function how in the brain. So, it is almost impossible that they can control our brains.

[Guest guest]

90% of the American budget goes down this hole under the heading of defense. And basically - as supported by this site - the people are paying for their own destruction.

 

This is the extreme danger of ignorance.

 

From your post, I can hope you are getting a little insight into who the real terrorist are.

 

Guess Guest

[theist]

Not news to me GG. Although some details are to how quickly they have progressed in their nefarious efforts are. As well as the wave control of thoughts and feelings. Scarey stuff.

 

It was a few years back I heard the man from here in Berkeley,on the radio bragging about his work. His project was to make a implantable chip that would not be rejected by the body. He has successfully done that. It was a hurdle for them to find a biological coating for the chip that the body would accept. Now that they have found it the ____ will hit the fan fast.

 

Likely scenario will be to appeal to parents who fear their children being stolen. They will be pressured to have their children implanted in the name of being good parents. Then who wouldn't support the implanting of criminals. It will start with pedophiles playing on the same fear. Then all prisoners. Maybe immigrants from the middle east. People with medical problems. Then it eventually will be done at birth.

 

Imagine the feeling of God-like control if you are able to satelite track everyliving human as they move through their lives.

[Guest guest]

Yes, Americans are the biggest 2 faced liars on the planet.

 

With all their bravado about being the greatest nation, etc., they aren't satisfied. They have to control everything. Of course, this isn't so much satisfaction as it is demoniac indulgence of the false ego.

 

Unfortunately, like most anywhere in the world, the citizens are blissfully ignorant of their leaders faults and they don't recognize the importance of getting involved. People were sheep when the fanatical church was in power and they are sheep now that the scientists are in power. They simply have a poor fund of knowledge; they are so stupid they think technology will save them.

 

It's such a crying shame that so much of the citizens wealth and energy is being used by those in power to enslave them. And like animals to the slaughter, they have no fear. Therefore, people are not human if they don't know what is to be feared.

 

All these things like mind control and drug experiments and everything they do really, has very little return when considering the money they throw at it. But hey, what do they care? We write the checks!

 

This is an example of why faith is so important. The government and scientist have the masses duped, they have captured their faith. Therefore, the citizens will willingly be led to ruin.

 

So you seem to know these things now. I'm just using you as a sounding board.

 

I brought it up in the first place noting your comments on the Iraq issue.

 

Guess Guest

[theist]

look upon the war in Iraq as justified. Also I consider your position that Americans are the biggest two faced liars on the planet somewhat suspect.

[Guest guest]

But you're coming around.

 

Guess Guest

[theist]

To be sure I won't be coming around to where you are.

[Guest guest]

Ah, Theist feels quipped and has to lash out in return. How determninistic. Bah - bah.

 

You really can't be sure who or where you will be in the future. Things change. And that's especially true of people who base their beliefs in shadows.

 

You express alot of ignorance concerning America's goodwill and ability to lead - even as all the pretexts and promises justifying theft and slaughter crumble into dust... what to speak of all the history of the distant and recent past.

 

Some people can be pushed to far, others will willingly go to slaughter. If you do not fear being lead to the slaughterhouse, then your intelligence is no better than a sheep.

 

Guess Guest

 

 

[Guest guest]

...alot of people say the same thing about Hare Krsnas.

 

But what do they know?

 

Guess Guest

[theist]

Synopsis from:

 

http://www.presidentialufo.8m.com/newpage11.htm

 

At one time while in his home state of Georgia, President Cater claims he saw a UFO in the sky. During his campaign he promised the public to make all the Government knowledge on the subject.

 

His first approach was to seek information from the Pentagon who told him "there is no information because there are no UFO's."

 

He was again shut out when he had his briefing with the CIA director George Bush Sr. During this highest level meeting Carter, as the new President, was briefed by the CIA director Bush on the various exotic weapons programs but Bush refused to tell him what was known about UFO's. And told Carter to try other avenues for the knowledge.

 

Carter, not wanting to fight with Bush, agreed to that proposal.

 

He then had the Congressional Research Service ask to review the documents the Vatican Library has on the subject and they also refused the request that was made by the new President.

 

So the most "powerful man" in the world was unable to fulfill his campaign promise. His promise to give this knowledge out was considered too dangerous.

 

 

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.-President James Madison

 

 

Layers upon layers of control. Lucky for everybody the Lord is at the top.

[Guest guest]

everything you ever wanted to know,

but the establishment media is afraid

to tell you.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/TWTwebsite_INDEX.html

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Preparing for the Restoration

 

By Arnold K. Garr

 

Many religious reformers and others unknowingly but courageously played parts in the divine drama that set the scene for Joseph Smith, the great prophet of the last days.

 

Arnold K. Garr, “Preparing for the Restoration,” Ensign, June 1999, 34

The story of the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ began long before the spring of 1820, when our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, appeared to young Joseph Smith in the Sacred Grove. Elder Bruce R. McConkie (1915-85) of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles taught, “Beginning in the 14th century, the Lord began to prepare those social, educational, religious, economic, and governmental conditions under which he could more easily restore the gospel for the last time among men.” 1 Latter-day Saint leaders and authors have variously described this 500-year pre-Restoration period as the “grand design,” “great prologue,” and “prelude to the Restoration.” 2

 

The Old Testament prophet Joel foresaw the Spirit of the Lord working among individuals to help prepare the world for the Restoration. The Lord said, “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions:

 

“And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit” (Joel 2:28-29).

 

Of Joel’s vision, President Joseph Fielding Smith said: “I think, properly, we could go back into the days of the revival of learning—the renaissance, as it is called—and the reformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to find the beginning of the fulfilment of this promise.” 3 Those forerunners to Joseph Smith, the long-prophesied seer of the last days (see JST, Gen. 50:30-33; 2 Ne. 3:6-7), did not have access to the fulness of the gospel, but their efforts were vitally important in laying the foundation for him.

 

Elder Mark E. Petersen (1900-84) of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles wrote, “The restoration of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in these latter days, together with the advance preparation of conditions which made it possible, was indeed a divine drama which had many stages and many scenes, some of which were world shaking.” 4 Early acts of this drama were staged in Europe during the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. Later acts were staged in America, where courageous people—ancestors of Joseph Smith among them—colonized the New World, signed the Declaration of Independence, fought the War for Independence, and ratified the United States Constitution.

 

The Renaissance

When the Great Apostasy took place nearly 2,000 years ago, the world entered a state of spiritual darkness from which it did not begin to recover until the Renaissance. Elder McConkie described the period of universal apostasy during the Middle Ages: “When the gospel sun went down almost two millennia ago, when the priesthood was taken away … and when those on earth no longer were taught and directed by apostles and prophets, then spiritual darkness reigned.” The scriptures were often kept from public use, false creeds were adopted, numerous pagans were forced to convert, and thousands of people accused of heresy were put to death. “The terrors of the night were real and the night was long—long and dark and black.” 5 If the Lord had restored the fulness of the gospel under such oppressive spiritual conditions, it seems improbable that the Church would have survived, let alone flourished.

 

During the Renaissance, the rebirth of learning that blossomed from about A.D. 1350 to 1550, two events took place that were vital in preparation for the final dispensation: Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the mid-1400s and Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the Americas in 1492.

 

In the centuries before the invention of the printing press, the majority of people could neither read nor write. Even Charlemagne, perhaps the greatest ruler of medieval Europe, was illiterate. Books were written by hand, and many ecclesiastical leaders strongly resisted the idea of circulating the Bible among the common people. One clergyman argued, “We must root out printing, or printing will root out us.” 6 However, once Gutenberg’s invention became widespread, “the publication of books, including the Bible, was too great a force to be stemmed,” wrote President Joseph Fielding Smith. “Like an irresistible flood, printing, and the desire to read what was printed, swept over the entire land.” 7 Among the first books Gutenberg printed was the Bible.

 

One historian wrote: “None of the technological innovations [of the Renaissance] has had a greater effect over a longer period of time and upon more people than the invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century. Some scholars have pronounced it the single most important development of the Renaissance and perhaps of the entire modern world.” 8 Elder McConkie concurred: “Few tools were more effective than printing in paving the way for the great revival of learning, for the religious reformation, and for the breaking away of peoples and nations from religious domination. Without the discovery of movable type in about A.D. 1440 the barrier of gross darkness covering the apostate world could scarce have been pierced.” 9

 

Christopher Columbus’s personal study of the Bible greatly increased the influence of the Holy Ghost in his life. Two millennia before Columbus, Nephi prophesied: “And I looked and beheld a man among the Gentiles, who was separated from the seed of my brethren by the many waters; and I beheld the Spirit of God, that it came down and wrought upon the man; and he went forth upon the many waters, even unto the seed of my brethren, who were in the promised land” (1 Ne. 13:12). President Gordon B. Hinckley said: “We interpret that to refer to Columbus. It is interesting to note that the Spirit of God wrought upon him.” 10 Columbus himself declared: “With a hand that could be felt, the Lord opened my mind to the fact that it would be possible to sail and he opened my will to desire to accomplish the project. … This was the fire that burned within me. … Who can doubt that this fire was not merely mine, but also of the Holy Spirit … urging me to press forward?” 11

 

President George Q. Cannon (1827-1901), a counselor in the First Presidency, said: “Columbus was inspired to penetrate the ocean and discover this Western continent for the set time for its discovery had come; and the consequences which God desired to follow its discovery have taken place. … We believe it was a preparatory work for the establishment of the Kingdom of God.

 

“This Church and Kingdom could not have been established on the earth if [Columbus’s] work had not been performed.” 12

 

The Protestant Reformation

The activities of Gutenberg, Columbus, and other prominent figures of the Renaissance helped set the stage for another great movement in European history: the Protestant Reformation. This religious movement, which took place primarily during the 16th century, was so powerful that “no area of Europe or field of thought and activity was unaffected by it.” 13 Elder McConkie wrote: “The spirit of inspiration rested upon Wycliffe, Hus, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Knox, and others, causing them to rebel against the religious evils of the day and seek to make the Bible and other truth available to all who would receive such.” 14 Elder Petersen called the work of the Reformers a “significant prelude to the great events in which the Prophet Joseph Smith was the primary figure.” 15

 

Englishman John Wycliffe (1330-84) has been called “the Morning Star of the Reformation.” 16 A priest and an Oxford University professor, Wycliffe was courageous and outspoken about religious corruption, and consequently his church condemned him. In 1382 Wycliffe was put under house arrest, under which circumstances he died two years later. However, before he passed away he began the first English translation of the Bible, which his followers completed after his death.

 

Wycliffe’s ideas fell on fertile soil in Bohemia—located in today’s Czech Republic—where a young priest named Jan Hus 17 (1372-1415) embraced them. Hus was ordered to stand trial for heresy, but he refused and was excommunicated along with his followers. In 1414 the Emperor Sigismund and his councilors interrogated Hus about his attitude toward the teachings of John Wycliffe. Although Hus was more moderate than Wycliffe and did not agree with all of Wycliffe’s teachings, he refused to denounce them in their entirety. Hus was condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake.

 

Hus and Wycliffe were precursors to the most prominent figure of the Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther (1483-1546). Luther was an Augustinian monk and a professor at Germany’s University of Wittenberg. After a monk came to Saxony in 1517 selling indulgences—essentially permission to commit sin—to raise money for Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Luther protested such corruption and worldliness by nailing his historic 95 theses—statements urging reform—to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. Antagonism between Luther and the church grew, and in 1521 he was summoned by Emperor Charles V to appear before the Diet (Council) of Worms, where he made this courageous statement: “Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. … Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.” 18

 

Luther was officially banned from the empire, but several German princes protected him. He translated the Bible into German for the masses, and Lutheranism spread throughout northern Europe and caused an ecclesiastical revolution. Elder McConkie said, “Luther’s break with Catholicism was part of the divine program; it came as an Elias preparing the way for the Restoration.” 19

 

About a hundred years after Wycliffe’s English Bible translation, William Tyndale (1494-1536) made an even more significant English translation of the Bible from Greek and Hebrew. When Tyndale could not find a publisher in England, he arranged for copies to be printed in Germany and smuggled into England. Tyndale’s translation was later used extensively by the King James translators of the Bible. In words that evoke the destiny of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Tyndale said: “If God spare me I will one day make the boy that drives the plough … to know more of Scripture than the Pope does.” 20 Tyndale was executed in Belgium as a Protestant heretic.

 

Other inspired men led the Protestant Reformation elsewhere in Europe. Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531) worked to purify Christianity in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. In 1523 he presented 67 articles of reform to the city, which were accepted, but in 1531 he was killed while serving as a chaplain in a battle between Protestants and Catholics. Also in Switzerland, influential John Calvin (1509-64) carried out the work of the Reformation in Geneva. Among his many religious innovations, Calvin conceived a church organization governed by elders, which evolved into Presbyterian, or Reformed, churches. In Scotland, John Knox (1513-72) expounded and established Calvin’s doctrines. Before long, the Pilgrims and Puritans would take the ideals and thoughts of Calvin and other Reformers to the New World, America.

 

Events in America

On the occasion of the Church’s centennial in 1930, the First Presidency declared: “It was not by chance that the Puritans left their native land and sailed away to the shores of New England, and that others followed later. They were the advance guard of the army of the Lord, [foreordained] to establish the God-given system of government under which we live … and prepare the way for the restoration of the Gospel of Christ.” 21

 

President Ezra Taft Benson taught that “all of the great events that have transpired [in America], including the coming of Columbus and of the Pilgrim fathers, were foreseen by ancient prophets.” 22 After prophesying about Columbus, Nephi continued: “I beheld the Spirit of God, that it wrought upon other Gentiles; and they went forth out of captivity, upon the many waters” (1 Ne. 13:13). Writers such as Plymouth Plantation governor William Bradford (1590-1657) described the persecution and imprisonment the Pilgrims endured in Europe before they fled to America in search of religious liberty.

 

Nephi foresaw that the colonists would “humble themselves before the Lord” (1 Ne. 13:16). William Bradford recorded that as the Pilgrims set sail on their voyage to America, “they had a day of solemn humiliation,” their pastor proclaiming “a fast, that we might humble ourselves before our God.” 23 Acting under inspiration, the Pilgrims drew up the Mayflower Compact, said to be “the first written constitution in North America,” 24 which called for obedience to laws enacted by the group rather than decreed by a monarch.

 

The Puritans subsequently settled in Massachusetts Bay and eventually absorbed the Pilgrims. However, the Puritans were not tolerant of those who did not believe as they did. One of the dissenters among the Puritans was Roger Williams, who believed in religious freedom and maintained that the apostolic church organized by Christ was no longer on the earth. After banishment, Williams and his followers founded Providence, Rhode Island, and adopted principles that became important traditions in the United States, such as democracy, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.

 

Colonists in other parts of America also worked for religious freedom. Under the leadership of the Calvert family, Roman Catholics settled in Maryland and in 1649 passed the Act of Toleration, which advocated freedom of conscience. In 1681 the king of England granted a charter of land to devout Quaker William Penn, whose colony in Pennsylvania became a model of religious tolerance. Of these colonists President Benson wrote, “The Pilgrims of Plymouth, the Calverts of Maryland, Roger Williams, William Penn—all had deep religious convictions that played a principal part in their coming to the New World. They too, I believe, came here under the inspiration of heaven.” 25

 

The final event that Nephi observed in his vision of the American colonies was the War for Independence. He wrote:

 

“And I beheld that their mother Gentiles were gathered together upon the waters, and upon the land also, to do battle against them.

 

“And I beheld that the power of God was with them, and also that the wrath of God was upon all those that were gathered together against them to battle.

 

“And I, Nephi, beheld that the Gentiles that had gone out of captivity were delivered by the power of God out of the hands of all other nations” (1 Ne. 13:17-19).

 

President Wilford Woodruff taught: “Those men who laid the foundation of this American government and signed the Declaration of Independence were the best spirits the God of heaven could find on the face of the earth. … General Washington and all the men that labored for the purpose were inspired of the Lord.” President Woodruff also related: “Every one of those men that signed the Declaration of Independence, with General Washington, called upon me, as an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, in the Temple at St. George, two consecutive nights, and demanded at my hands that I should go forth and attend to the ordinances of the House of God for them.” 26

 

George Washington gave credit to God for the victory of the United States. In his farewell address to his army, he said: “The disadvantageous circumstances on our part, under which the war was undertaken, can never be forgotten. The singular interpositions of Providence in our feeble condition were such, as could scarcely escape the attention of the most unobserving; while the unparalleled perseverance of the Armies of the [united] States, through almost every possible suffering and discouragement for the space of eight long years, was little short of a standing miracle.” 27 President Spencer W. Kimball said: “The Lord permitted these few poorly armed and ill-clad men at Valley Forge and elsewhere to defeat a great army, … a few against the many, but the few had on their side the Lord God of heaven, that gave them victory. And there came political liberty and religious liberty with it, all in preparation for the day when a young boy would come forth and would seek and make contact with the Lord and open the doors of heaven again.” 28

 

After the colonists won their independence, they experimented for a short time with a government under the Articles of Confederation. When they found that method inadequate, leaders turned their attention to drafting a new form of government. Few, if any, people on earth hold the resulting United States Constitution in higher esteem than do Latter-day Saints. The Lord has said: “That every man may act in doctrine and principle … according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment. …

 

“And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood” (D&C 101:78, 80).

 

The Constitution and Bill of Rights applied directly to the needs of a new religion because they provided for freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly. Later the Prophet Joseph Smith taught that “the Constitution of the United States is a glorious standard; it is founded in the wisdom of God. It is a heavenly banner.” 29

 

The Coming of Joseph Smith

“It was decreed in the councils of eternity, long before the foundations of the earth were laid,” said Brigham Young, that Joseph Smith “should be the man, in the last dispensation of this world, to bring forth the word of God to the people and receive the fullness of the keys and power of the Priesthood of the Son of God. The Lord had his eye upon him, and upon his father, and upon his father’s father. … He has watched that family and that blood as it has circulated from its fountain to the birth of that man. He was foreordained in eternity to preside over this last dispensation.” 30

 

Thus, many of the Prophet’s ancestors were God-fearing Christians, including his parents, Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith, who were married in 1796, seven years after the Constitution was ratified. Before Joseph’s birth, his grandfather Asael Smith said: “It has been borne in upon my soul that one of my descendants will promulgate a work to revolutionize the world of religious faith.” 31 Years later the Prophet Joseph Smith related that his grandfather died “after having received the Book of Mormon, and read it nearly through; and he declared that I was the very Prophet that he had long known would come in his family.” 32

 

Elder Petersen noted that it was only a handful of years “after America was established as a free constitutional nation that one of the great spirits in the [premortal existence] was sent to earth to be born on December 23, 1805, in a little farmhouse; and he was named Joseph Smith.” 33 With the birth of the Prophet, the curtains closed on the divinely orchestrated prelude to the Restoration, and conditions were ready for the dispensation of the fulness of times.

 

Gospel topics: Joseph Smith, prophecy, restoration, U.S. Constitution

 

[illustration] Johannes Gutenberg, a German printer shown here holding a Bible, invented movable type in 1438. Some historians include that no invention “has had a greater effect over a longer period of time and upon more people.”

 

[illustration] Bohemian religious reformer Jan Hus refused to renounce the teachings of earlier reformer John Wycliffe. Condemned as a heretic, Hus was burned at the stake in 1415.

 

[illustration] Columbus and his men are pictured above giving thanks after their arrival in the New World in 1492. Columbus wrote that the Holy Ghost influenced him to make his voyage of discovery. (Landing of Columbus in America, 1492 © Superstock Inc.)

 

[illustration] Martin Luther is depicted nailing his 95 theses of religious reform to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517. He was one of the most prominent figures in the Protestant Reformation. (Detail from painting by Dale Kilbourn.)

 

[illustration] The Pilgrims, shown offering prayer at a feast of thanksgiving, were among many religious groups that sought asylum in the New World. Freedom of religion later became one of the cornerstones of the United States Constitution. (Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving Dinner, by William VanDoren © Superstock Inc.)

 

[illustration] George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and numerous others are depicted signing the United States Constitution on 17 September 1787 in the Pennsylvania State House. (Signing of the United States Constitution, by Howard Chandler Christy, courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol.)

 

 

[theist]

Guest, your post in not readable. When using copy and paste sometimes all those bugs appear. If you register then you will be able to use the edit function and go back through and clean out the bugs. I know its a problem but its the only way it works

[Guest guest]

Official Secrets

 

 

 

Is the Bush administration using terrorism fears to shield

government--and business--from public view?

 

People who live near chemical plants can no longer go online and find

out which hazardous materials are stored near their home. Air travelers

can no longer see Federal Aviation Administration records on

airport-security violations. Journalists and elected officials no longer

have access to a string of reports pinpointing weaknesses in the

nation's antiterrorism defenses.

 

When the federal government scrambled to remove vast amounts of

information from official libraries and websites in the wake of

September 11, most assumed that access would be restored after officials

had a chance to carefully evaluate security risks. But instead, many

observers now say, the administration has used a string of laws and

executive orders to reverse a decades-long trend toward government

openness. The new measures are so broad, critics warn, it's impossible

to say whether officials are protecting national security or simply

expanding their power to operate without public scrutiny. "An iron veil

is descending over the executive branch," warns Rep. Dan Burton

(R-Ind.), chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform.

 

The first of the new secrecy measures was rushed through Congress in

October 2001 as part of the USA Patriot Act, which gave law-enforcement

agencies the authority to search homes and businesses without a warrant

(a practice known as "sneak and peek") and to secretly track an

individual's Internet surfing, library records, and book purchases. When

the House Judiciary Committee asked last June how many times the FBI had

used each of the new powers--many of which were taken away from the

bureau in the past because of abuses--the Justice Department said that

information was classified. "Their attitude seems to be that even

Congress isn't entitled to know how they're using the authority that

Congress gave them," says outgoing Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.).

 

The push toward secrecy has extended far beyond law enforcement. Under a

new policy restricting access to "sensitive but unclassified"

information, agencies have made it harder for the public to see records

that are often used by health and safety advocates and that industry has

long sought to keep secret. The EPA, for instance, now limits access to

the "risk management plans" that companies must file to inform

communities what is being done to prevent toxic chemical accidents, and

the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has withdrawn information on

hazardous materials stored at power plants.

 

In some cases, officials are withholding information that could

embarrass government agencies or businesses. Last summer, the Department

of Agriculture tried to suppress a National Academy of Sciences study

that revealed no government secrets but warned that terrorism using

foreign pests or pathogens could "pose a major threat to U.S.

agriculture." (The academy went ahead and published the report on its

own.) The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry no longer

allows online access to a report that characterizes security at chemical

plants as "fair to very poor." The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has

restricted access to two reports--one of which had been available for 20

years--that suggest that nuclear power plants are not adequately

protected against airplane crashes. And at the EPA last summer,

officials, arguing that disclosing information about new appointees

constituted a security risk, censored résumés to remove information on

education levels and job experience.

 

Soon, even private companies may be able to seal off information they

don't want the public to see--simply by sending it to the federal

government. Attorney General John Ashcroft has singled out "sensitive

business information" as one of the categories federal officials should

shield from Freedom of Information Act requests. And under legislation

creating the Department of Homeland Security, most information provided

by business--on anything from software security problems to toxic

spills--will be exempted from public-access laws. For example, notes

Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Jon Devine, if an improperly

stored load of hazardous material were to explode at a chemical plant,

information on the substances involved--and even evidence of negligent

storage--could be off-limits to firefighters, local investigators, and

the victims themselves. "The only thing the government can use the

information for," Devine says, "is to determine whether they need more

security. But they can't force the company to do anything about it."

 

Across the country, state officials are following the federal

government's lead in closing off public records. Pennsylvania has

dismantled a database with environmental information about mines and

soil conditions. Iowa has classified architectural information on school

buildings. And several states, including Louisiana, have passed

anti-terrorism laws that allow local police to keep secret any

information gathered in connection with terrorism investigations. Since

local police have no jurisdiction over foreign terrorists, notes Joe

Cook of the Louisiana Civil Liberties Union, the provisions most likely

will be used to conceal files on political activists. "It puts in

jeopardy groups that have no intention of being involved in terrorism,"

he says.

 

The full implications of these and other measures--including additional

secrecy provisions tucked into November's homeland-security

legislation--have yet to emerge as officials begin to make full use of

their powers. "It's only been one year," says David Cole, a professor of

law at Georgetown University. "These laws lie around like loaded guns

that law enforcement can pick up whenever they please. They don't pick

them all up at once."

 

To read more on right-to-know and privacy issues, go to

www.motherjones.com/rights <http://www.motherjones.com/rights> . MJ.com

 

~~~~~~~~

 

By Daniel Franklin

 

To the top

_____

 

 

_____

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

 

the organized crime/politial /corporate/spy nexus

brought to you by the great american patriots and

assorted hobgoblins the public just loves,

but knows nothing about,

our beloved heroes in D.C.

paul laxalt, Reagans campaign chairman and Mob senator from nevada,

was put into office by the mormon establishment,even though he was running

against a mormon and he isn't-

http://www.thereporter.com/Current/Forum/forum061001_3.html

for more on your government and mob and other fun guyz

including stuff on michael deaver, reagans speechwriter,who at the same

time was representing the triad homeland of taiwan in amercia

as a lobbyist,and other fun stuff

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/ReaganContraCommit_TICC.html

stuff on George the first,in china,with all the soy sauce you like,

oh and brent scowcraft,national security adviser,mormon elder,

and kissinger associates star.

http://www.tarpley.net/bush14.htm

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/TWTwebsite_INDEX.html

http://www.moldea.com/MCA.html

http://www.electricnevada.com/pages96/mob3.htm

http://www.the-catbird-seat.net/BCCI.htm

the white house just loves the triads(taiwan/kuomintang)

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/apr2001/taiw-a27.shtml

why taiwan and florida ,jebs state,are sister states, who duh thunk it?

http://www.taiwanheadlines.gov.tw/20001109/20001109p5.html

http://cndyorks.gn.apc.org/yspace/articles/bmd/galloway.htm

[Guest guest]

http://iresist.com/cbg/mobpres.html

 

http://www.disinfo.com/pages/dossier/id329/pg1/

 

http://prorev.com/wwindex.htm

 

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MENA/mena.html

[theist]

It seems the sites you draw from all all from the left of the political spectrum. I am thinking there is something happening beyond this left and right. I also suspect that keeping the public bickering between left and right is playing into *their* hands is a distraction.

 

What do you think?

[Guest guest]

 

read the facts,then make your judgements.

 

for a primer on the over all scene in the halls of real power Roger morris is the best,more details are available

at these links i gave, but his book "PARTNERS IN POWER:THE CLINTONS AND THEIR AMERICA" will tell you what is going on

in washington by a former national security aide to

Kissenger in the nixon admin, Morris quit after the invasion of cambodia,and has been the premier investigative journalist ever since, the establishment hates him with a vengeance, the so called left AND right,

all the left versus right in american politics is explained by him, its all just pandering for votes,

the truth is a criminal/corporate/intel/politican

nexus of corruption , left and right are only

used as ways to get votes, and have no real

meaning in american government,its all about money

and power.

[Guest guest]

BIG DEAL IN VEGAS

 

 

 

And How the Local Press Missed It

 

Worldwide headlines heralded the deal. On March 6, the MGM Grand mogul

Kirk Kerkorian captured Steve Wynn's Mirage Resorts in a $6.4 billion

takeover that created a vast oligopoly in the trillion-dollar casino

industry. But in Las Vegas, headquarters of the oligarchs, the

history-making buyout went largely unexplored by the local press,

another sign of how much America's fastest-growing city has become

hostage to the corporate lords of gambling.

 

The takeover left more than a dozen of the largest hotels on the strip

owned by just two companies. Kerkorian's new MGM-Mirage colossus emerged

with controlling interests in nearly half of gambling's global empire,

which reaches forty-seven states, scores of Indian reservations, and

dozens of foreign countries. The stakes are enormous. Thirty-four

million people visit Las Vegas yearly, 127 million more frequent casinos

nationally. By the year 2000, Americans were spending more on gambling

than almost all sports and entertainment combined.

 

The deal was a resounding business story: the buccaneering Wynn

--prodigal son become reigning king -- now seen as one more profligate

c.e.o, besieged by shareholders. His nemesis, the billionaire

octogenarian Kerkorian, the "Lion of Las Vegas" to the local media, was

known in the zoology of the national press simply as the "old jackal,"

or "Wall Street's nastiest raider." Behind the familiar profiles of the

two men were richer, relatively untold stories. But in a city constantly

reinventing reality, burying history, and throwing up glitzy new

facades, Las Vegans found little of substance in the local coverage of

the most important transaction in the annals of the Strip.

 

Las Vegas's latest coup -- bid per share replacing a bullet -- was seen

by many as another cleansing of excess in a tradition begun with the mob

execution of Bugsy Siegel in 1947. Readers of The New York Times, The

Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and other business journals knew for

months that Wynn's Mirage was "ripe for takeover," as one account put

it, and that Kerkorian was jockeying to acquire it. Wynn, given to

lucrative personal stock options, sweetheart corporate leases of his

art, and the seating of his wife on the board; and with a $2.5 million

annual salary, $1.25 million annual bonus, and $5.2 million leasing

arrangement that made him one of the most lavishly paid executives in

the U.S., had watched Mirage stock plummet from a high of $26.38 in May

1999 to $10.88 at the end of January. There had been reports of

outbursts of Wynn's temper and bizarre behavior at an investors'

gathering last winter. It all stoked shareholder unrest. "Why haven't

they thrown the bum out?" the New York Observer's Christopher Byron

asked two months before Kerkorian's move.

 

Just as Wynn was teetering on the corporate edge last spring, The

Independent of London summed up his Nevada power with a candor unknown

in the Las Vegas press. "Politicians jumped at his command, candidates

prostrated themselves to seek his endorsement and his campaign

contributions, city planners re-routed roads and sewers at his behest,

water authorities allowed him to siphon off millions of precious gallons

to feed his private golf course..."

 

Despite the national coverage, Kerkorian's takeover struck the Strip

like a thunderbolt out of a clear desert sky. Neither the Review-Journal

(circulation 214,000) nor the Las Vegas Sun (circulation 225,000) had

reported how shaky Wynn's hold had become, leaving readers stunned by

the purchase. "Las Vegans would have had to go to a library to find out

what was happening in an industry that totally dominates their state,"

said one retired journalist. "I am still in shock;' the Sun's owner,

Brian Greenspun, wrote days after the takeover. "I just don't remember

our coverage," said the Sun editor, Mike Kelly. Repeated calls to others

at the paper, including publisher Greenspun, went unanswered.

 

The MGM-Mirage deal was a classic example of what much of Las Vegas

journalism has become at the millennium -- euphemistically calling the

hostile takeover a "merger;' masking the humiliation of a tycoon who had

been off-limits to critical reporting. Local stories attributed the

decline of Mirage stock to Las Vegas competition, Wynn's "frustration

with Wall Street," and losses at his Mississippi casino. The

Review-Journal portrayed Wynn and Kerkorian as "both shrewd businessmen

whose power is matched only by their fortunes," and praised Wynn as a

"lofty visionary." For its part in the most important business story in

the city's history, the Sun relied mostly upon The Associated Press. Its

own reporters wrote a fluffy feature on how Kerkorian had "pumped life

into MGM," and on how Wynn was known for "parlaying family contacts and

a knack for smart investment." As if to sum up the blithe reporting in

both papers, the Review-Journal blandly editorialized that Wynn was

exiting "a winner."

 

"I think we could have done a better job, but we did a pretty good one

covering the high points," said the Review-Journal's editor, Tom

Mitchell. "It was a complex deal and I'm sure there were backroom deals

we'll never know." Mitchell added that since the transaction the paper

has hired three new reporters to cover the gambling industry.

 

While his face was being saved at home, national coverage of Wynn was

less indulgent. "The most powerful man in Las Vegas is fighting a rising

chorus of investor discontent over spiraling costs and the timing of

financial disclosure," said Business Week in December 1999. The

Independent of London revealed that Wynn had nearly lost his license in

Atlantic City "after a Mafioso called Tony Castelbuono was caught

recycling the profits of heroin trafficking at the gambling tables." The

March 9, 2000, article referred specifically to a lengthy, 1983 Scotland

Yard file alleging Wynn's "links to the Genovese Cosa Nostra family."

Scotland Yard had investigated Wynn when he sought a gaming license in

Great Britain, and Wynn had subsequently withdrawn the license

application. But that famous decision had never made it in any detail

into the Las Vegas newspapers.

 

Apart from that murky history, The New York Times reported the deal as

less the result of Wynn's dissatisfaction with Wall Street than Wall

Street's skepticism about Wynn. Time similarly noted in its March 6

issue that "hours after Kerkorian launched his offer, five Mirage

shareholders brought class actions in Las Vegas to demand that Wynn and

his board seriously consider all bids." Another report in Mergers and

Acquisitions Journal cited the departure of a top Mirage executive, Dan

Lee, who had been highly critical of Wynn's management style. Among the

intriguing stories after the deal was an April 10 piece in the New York

Observer describing "a cozy agreement.., for Mr. Wynn to purchase

masterworks at below-market-prices -and sell them again to interested

parties." One buyer was the media magnate S.I. Newhouse, a longtime Wynn

friend, who boarded his corporate jet the night before Wynn's exit from

Mirage to dine with the casino kingpin as part of Newhouse's effort to

acquire a 1942 Picasso. But little of this colorful by-play was

elaborated or analyzed in Las Vegas.

 

"I long ago learned that if I wanted to know what was happening in Las

Vegas I had to read the Los Angeles Times," a local historian says in

reflecting on the Las Vegas coverage of the buyout.

 

Las Vegas journalism was not always so tame. Nevada was once known for

its courageous and independent press. Mark Twain had made history taking

on the mining, railroad, and cattle barons from his pulpit as writer for

the Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise. A century later, the

Sun's founder, Hank Greenspun, was briefly one of the nation's

publishing legends I a lone voice against Nevada boss Pat McCarran and

Wisconsin demagogue Joe McCarthy. But if he once took on tyrants and

even prominent Strip gangsters like the Cleveland thug Moe Dalitz, who

owned the Desert Inn and whose philanthropy made him a civic hero,

Greenspun also yearned to be an inside player. "Greenspun's substantial

holdings ... have made him so rich," Time reported in 1975, "that he may

be losing his maverick feistiness."

 

The abdication reduced the Sun to the paleness of the older

Review-Journal, which took a diffident view of the Strip's powerful

masters. "From this day forward, Mr. Siegel of the Flamingo will never

be referred to as 'Bugsy,'" read a 1946 posting in the R-J newsroom. A

longtime R-J editor, Al Cahlan, himself owned a piece of a casino. By

the 1990s, the substantial kinship between the Sun and Review-Journal

was sealed with a joint operating agreement, and Las Vegas's gambling

empire was safer than ever from prying local journalism.

 

Notably missing from local coverage of the Kerkorian-Wynn deal was the

Wynn biographer John L. Smith. Smith's 1995 biography, Running Scared:

The Life and Treacherous Times of Las Vegas Casino King Steve Wynn, had

detailed accounts of Wynn's continuing proximity to organized crime, and

promptly drew down a sweeping libel suit in which a Las Vegas jury found

for Wynn in August 1997, bankrupting the publisher, Barricade Books.

Though Smith was personally dismissed as a defendant and his book itself

judged libel-free -- the litigation was over the wording in the

publisher's catalogue -- the suit made it awkward if not impossible for

the city's most respected journalist to write about Wynn lest it be

perceived as a vendetta.

 

While Smith keeps turning out his enormously popular column, and insists

that he's never had a story killed by Review-Journal editors, he rarely

mentions Wynn. But the impact of what he and others refer to as the

libel suit's "big chill" is not always visible. What happened to Smith

as the author of a meticulously researched book on the premier

businessman and political patron, is illustrative of the fate of Las

Vegas journalism.

 

"John L. is one of the two or three all-time best reporters in Nevada

and maybe in the entire American West," says a competing editor who

asked not to be identified. A fourth-generation Nevadan whose family has

been in the state since 1881, Smith was one of six children of a

hard-working union painter and his political-activist wife in the

sprawling Las Vegas suburb of Henderson. After graduating from Western

Washington University, he began as a sportswriter at the Sun in the

early 1980s and soon graduated to a daily opinion piece at the

Review-Journal. "I saw him as the rocket here and tried to open doors

that had long been shut," Smith says of covering Wynn. "Other reporters

were afraid to upset him because they wanted access to him as a source

for stories. I knew he couldn't be a source for a story because he was

the story."

 

According to several accounts, when Wynn learned that Smith was writing

Running Scared, he called the reporter's bosses demanding to know what

the paper was "going to do" about the writer. Editors told Smith not to

mention the book in his column, but before the biography was even

completed, Wynn filed a multimillion-dollar action against Smith and his

publisher, Lyle Stuart and Barricade Books. The suit was directed not at

Running Scared, but at the catalog copy written by Stuart. Paraphrasing

the Scotland Yard file that Wynn had "been operating under the aegis" of

organized crime, Stuart used the term "front man" to describe Wynn

because he thought "aegis" would not be commonly understood. The

Review-Journal reported the case on page 5B, under the headline WYNN

SUES LOCAL WRITER, an inside-page obscurity Smith has never forgotten.

"That's when I knew I was on my own," he says. Las Vegas's most powerful

businessman was suing its pre-eminent journalist over issues at the

heart of the history and legitimacy of the state's ruling industry, and

the story was treated as a relatively minor dispute.

 

When Smith was dropped from the case before the trial began in July

1997, Wynn went to the Nevada Supreme Court to appeal his removal. "He

wants to bust you out," Stuart told Smith, using casino parlance.

Meanwhile, lavish character witnesses appeared for Wynn, including

Governor Bob Miller of Nevada and Mayor Jan Laverty Jones of Las Vegas,

both of whom had received contributions from Wynn and, in Jones's case,

transportation on the Mirage corporate jet. "Las Vegas is the quid pro

quo capital of the world;' Smith says of the politicians. "It hurts, and

reminds you of how small you are in the system. Steve Wynn's influence

in our society has been great and deep. It's hard to sit there and watch

as your side catches the frowns from the judge and the other side gets

all the smiles and accolades." A Las Vegas jury initially awarded Wynn

$3.1 million for punitive and compensatory damages. As the verdict came

in, Wynn was at the Mirage hosting President Bill Clinton, himself a

recipient of Wynn contributions.

 

By the time of the Kerkorian buyout last March, Stuart's appeal of the

verdict was before the Nevada Supreme Court, where Wynn's lawyers still

sought to restore Smith as a defendant. At a June 16 hearing, a judge

pointed out that all seven justices of the highest court had received

contributions from Wynn's empire, though none regarded the money as

disqualifying. (A decision is expected later this year.)

 

"Did they let me keep my job despite every effort by Wynn to fire me?

You bet they did," Smith says of the Review-Journal editors after the

explosive revelations of Running Scared. "Did they assign a team of

investigative reporters to check out the facts? No." His disappointment

is plain. "It gets pretty lonely when no one else wants to rock the

boat. It's not that you can't write critically about Wynn, but if you do

you get the whining, threatening, and cajoling that comes with it. It's

not that editors are killing stories. Reporters just don't want the

hassle. They're terrified of getting sued. And I can see why. I had

sources who were themselves worth $300 million afraid to go on the

record about Wynn."

 

Geoff Schumacher, editor of Las Vegas's lively if lower-circulation

alternative weekly, City Life, whose relatively penetrative coverage of

the deal included major feature stories as well as much commentary,

echoes the theme of suppression by default. "There's not a restriction

at the Sun or R-J against criticizing Wynn or the industry," he says.

"They either self-censor or they're just not very good, aggressive

reporters. It's a built-in lazy culture."

 

Local critics point to several reasons for the unevenness of the Las

Vegas press, though typically not for attribution in a town where few

are willing to speak openly. Las Vegas reporters, they say, have been

notoriously underpaid for decades. Like many cities its size in the

American West, Las Vegas was both journalistic waystation and backwater.

"If you were aiming to move up and get out of town and wanted to do good

reporting, your editors would be leery," says a University of Nevada

professor. "But if you hoped to stay in town, you didn't want to piss

off anybody in the casinos who you might want to hire you later." The

judgment seems borne out by the number of reporters who, like elected

politicians and other public officials, tend to end up on the public

relations staffs of casinos. There are literally dozens of examples of

the revolving door.

 

The cost of all this in public policy terms, as well as in the integrity

of the press, is difficult to overestimate. The MGM-Mirage deal was a

once-in-an-era opportunity to examine the inner reality of a massively

powerful business. Local papers might have dealt with crucial

bread-and-butter issues of their rapidly growing city -- what the deal

held for labor where the notoriously anti-union MGM is now the state's

largest employer, and where the worldwide gambling oligopoly is in even

fewer hands.

 

Some in Las Vegas seem to understand that as the headquarters of an

international empire, the city has become a kind of shadow capital of

the nation, and that coverage of its enormous power is as much the

responsibility of the local press as of any outside media. But reporting

on a shadowy world capital is an imposing task for a journalism become

cautious, if not compromised and captive.

 

PHOTO (COLOR): STEVE WYNN

 

PHOTO (COLOR): KIRK KERKORIAN

 

PHOTO (COLOR): Unlike the national business press, Las Vegas papers were

stunned when Kirk Kerkorian's MGM Grand Hotel and Casino bought out

Steve Wynn's Mirage Resorts.

 

PHOTO (COLOR): John L. Smith's biography brought a million-dollar

lawsuit

 

~~~~~~~~

 

By Sally Denton and Roger Morris

 

Sally Denton and Roger Morris are the authors of The Money and the

Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, forthcoming in

February.

 

To the top

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

PW TALKS WITH SALLY DENTON AND ROGER MORRIS

 

 

 

PW: How did you mutually decide to write The Money and the Power, about

the history and evolution of Las Vegas?

 

RM: Well, it's almost as if two people were driving toward Las Vegas

from two different directions. Sally had a strong background in

investigative journalism with the New York Times and the Washington

Post, and she's a third-generation Nevadan.

 

SD: Yes, and almost every story I did inevitably led back to Vegas.

 

RM: I had worked in politics with Johnson and Nixon before becoming a

historian and biographer. I kept discovering these dirtier, murkier

threads in American politics that led back to Vegas's gambling interests

and criminal connections. I'd be writing a book, thinking I was doing

serious, mainstream, conventional American history, and then the tracks

would drag me into the netherworld

 

PW: You share careers as writers and as a married couple: is it easy to

collaborate?

 

RM: It was after we signed the contract for the book that we got

married. It was as though our background, knowledge and perspectives

were wonderfully complementary. I could write the history and do

research, but found myself again and again relying on Sally for sources.

She knew where the bodies were buried and, if not, she knew where to

look.

 

SD: Both of us thought Vegas was going to be a metaphor: America

silhouetting Vegas. But as we got deeper into the story, the city itself

began taking on its own strength and drama. Maybe we were naive, but we

were shocked at how deeply organized crime and narcotics are imbedded in

American history. It goes back as far as Prohibition. If you look at it,

someone like Pat McCarren [Democratic senator from Nevada, 1932-1954]

was a much larger figure in American history than anyone could ever

imagine.

 

RM: When dealing with American politics you try to follow the money, and

that's where it leads you. It doesn't take you to the electoral college

or to Princeton. It takes you down the darker alleys of American life.

 

PW: So much of the book is historical and involves figures who have been

written about often. How did you get the new stories you write about?

 

SD: Lots of cross-referencing. We started at the Library of Congress and

spent a lot of time at the University of Nevada, Reno, library and their

oral history archive, which have fabulous information. There are no

secret documents in the book. All of the information is in the public

domain, and many records from Senate investigations into organized crime

have been unsealed by the Freedom of Information Act.

 

RM: And we went through hundreds of FBI files on people like Bugsy

Siegel and Frank Sinatra, which are pretty raw. But those are naturally

suspect, especially if they come from under the auspices of J. Edgar

Hoover.

 

SD: Vegas is a place where everyone's been on a first-name basis with

their senator for 50 years, so people know a lot, but very few people

there talked. You can count the real insiders on two hands, and a lot of

those people are quite elderly. They're taking it to their graves.

 

PW: At the same time, you're writing about criminals and revealing a lot

about their connections to politics and other powerful people. Were you

ever concerned for your safety? Are you worried now?

 

SD: There's always the possibility of danger. It's always in the back of

your mind. Susan Berman was killed [the daughter of a Las Vegas mobster

and author of two memoirs that were about to be filmed]. But we're

riding on the shoulders of other writers and scholars who were on the

frontlines 20 or 30 years ago when it was clearly more dangerous. But

the old Mob was more colorful and straightforward than the new. The old

mob wouldn't shoot unless you got involved in their business. There is a

sense that someone like Johnny Rosselli (a '60s mobster) was a

first-class guy. The rules are different now. Exposure is your best

protection.

 

~~~~~~~~

 

By Ed Nawotka FORECASTS EDITOR; Charlotte Abbott; Sarah F. Gold and Mark

Rotella, EDITOR

 

To the top

_____

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Nonfiction The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000

 

SALLY DENTON AND ROGER MORRIS. Knopf, $26.95 (416p) ISBN 0-375-40130-X

 

This ambitious, jolting investigative history simultaneously explores

the "secret history" of Las Vegas malfeasance and the expansion of the

city's ethos of greed and artifice into a wholesale American model.

Married co-authors Denton (The Bluegrass Conspiracy) and Morris

(Partners in Power) offer an expansive, finely detailed, slightly

convoluted cultural narrative, beginning with concise biographies of key

figures (mobsters Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, news tycoon Hank

Greenspun, anti-crime-crusading Senator Estes Kefauver). Failed 1950s

reform movements allowed for the ascendance of organized crime,

fortified by huge "skim" profits from casinos. Operation Underworld, a

WWII collaboration between government and "Syndicate" forces, forged

extensive relationships between federal agencies, corrupted police and

gangsters that proved central to Las Vegas's economic boom. The profits

radiated corruption outward, evinced in such "blowback" as repeated

CIA-Mob assassination attempts on Castro. Formidable researchers, Denton

and Morris train gimlet eyes on compromised officials like J. Edgar

Hoover, gambling tycoons like Benny Binion and killers-cum-businessmen

like Sam Giancana. They look into the growth of more malignant,

polyethnic (and, they claim) CIA-supported organized crime facilitated

by stereotyping of the Italian Mafia. Although their conflation of

glitzy Vegas profligacy with corporate politics and consumerism may seem

unwieldy, the book is undeniably disturbing and engrossing. It concludes

with the 1999 mayoral election of Oscar Goodman, notorious Syndicate

attorney, which was an augury of business as usual in what the authors

portray as democracy's spiritual capital. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Mar.

26)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

 

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were labeled 'imperial presidents,' recalls former White House adviser Roger Morris. But neither could hold a candle to today's George Bush.

 

From Republic to Empire

 

by Roger Morris

Globe & Mail - Canada

April 14, 2003

 

Whatever his triumph in Iraq, George W. Bush already enjoyed a victory of historic proportions in the United States. By unique dominance of Congress and the rest of government, and to the approval of the American media and an impressive majority in the polls, Mr. Bush had acquired power beyond the grasp of any predecessor. Before U.S. forces ever roared through Baghdad, their Commander-in-Chief was America's most imperial president.

 

The specter of an emperor in the White House is familiar to an American system that lurches between the wider powers of the modern president and the long-sacred constitutional restraints placed on executive supremacy. In his noted 1973 book, The Imperial Presidency, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned of "presidential power so spacious and peremptory as to imply a radical transformation of the traditional polity." Cases in point were Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, whose conduct from the Vietnam War to the Watergate scandal seemed to many to be a dangerous culmination of might and pretension assembled in the Oval Office.

 

By the mid 1970s, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Nixon had left Washington in disrepute. Congress reasserted itself in the War Powers Act, which limited the unilateral power of the president to go to war, and take certain other steps. Presidential authority shrank under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

 

As Capitol Hill and the White House divided between Republicans and Democrats, the traditional shifting balance between legislative and executive branches continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s under the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. An imperial presidency seemed the relic of a bygone era.

 

Now George W. Bush has sharply reversed that history. His empire began with the surrender of Congress, a collapse almost as sweeping as the fall of the Baghdad regime.

 

In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson had his Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the 1964 act that endorsed U.S. entry into the Vietnam War. President Johnson liked to refer to it as "grandma's nightshirt" because the legislation covered everything. To strike Iraq, Mr. Bush demanded and got from legislators an even broader cloak for invasion, occupation, and further military action in the Middle East and elsewhere.

 

Like the Tonkin measure, hastily voted amid what proved to be false reports of a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. vessels, this Congress's Iraqi resolution passed with scant debate and a brandishing of bogus intelligence, such as the forgery of Iraqi nuclear procurement from Niger. In a stroke, the blank check for Mr. Bush swept away the legal requirement of a congressional declaration of war or even compliance with the 1973 War Powers Act.

 

As a result, the White House was ceded sovereign authority to justify and launch full-scale hostilities -- a right vested by the Constitution in the Congress precisely to prevent such fateful power falling to any one president and handful of advisers.

 

The groundwork for this usurpation was laid last September with the National Security Strategy Mr. Bush sent to Congress. In this document, the President claimed the right -- indeed, responsibility -- to take pre-emptive action against perceived future threats to the security of the United States. From this, it was but a short jump to his Iraqi venture. Claiming a prerogative to invade Iraq as a "clear and present danger" to peace -- it was by no means "clear" to much of the world or even Iraq's closest neighbors, and it was by no means "present" even in his prediction of a threat "in one year or five years" -- Mr. Bush erased long-recognized limits on the right of any nation to attack another.

 

If the unilateral abrogation alarmed allies, friends and the United Nations, however, it went unchallenged on Capitol Hill, another sign that any internal democratic restraint on the President's war-making was a dead letter.

 

Added to all this was an equally historic concentration of power in domestic affairs. By the Patriot Act and other enabling laws in the pervasive new realm of "Homeland Security," Mr. Bush has brought an imperial presidency home to a depth and breadth that Lyndon Johnson, with his furtive FBI spying on antiwar groups, or even Richard Nixon, with his Watergate "plumbers" and other extraconstitutional means, never contemplated. Under Attorney-General John Ashcroft, the Justice Department now has the kind of licence to conduct the political surveillance without probable cause or court sanction that many of the Nixon men went to prison for. As no other federal government before it, the Bush administration wields the authority to arrest and hold suspects without charge, detain prisoners indefinitely, and deny access to legal counsel, all with unparalleled secrecy.

 

It would be easy to attribute this singular massing of power to predictable chauvinist politics in America's reaction to the shock of Sept. 11. There is comfort in thinking of Mr. Bush as one more president riding the crest of a breaking wave -- and that the tide will turn back, as always, to constitutional balance. Yet, even apart from the uncertain course of the "war on terrorism," or Washington's open-ended evocation of it, that optimistic view ignores decisive new realities in U.S. politics -- and the emerging reality of George W. Bush himself.

 

Today's imperial presidency looms over political parties and a Congress very different from those of the recent past. President Johnson faced formidable critics from his own party, such as senators William Fulbright, Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. Mr. Nixon fought to the end a Democratic-ruled Senate and House, and the resistance of many influential Republican moderates. President Bush, on the other hand, will deliver his Iraqi war victory speech to houses of Congress dominated by conservative Republicans, with GOP moderates a rarity and rebels extinct. Their religious fundamentalist leaders, as well as the rank and file, not only back the President's new reach with domestic repression and foreign retribution, but also share the larger geo-strategic urge to American hegemony behind the war on Iraq.

 

In their all but silent minority, today's congressional Democrats are similarly to the political right of their predecessors, and bow no less to enlarged presidential power at home and abroad -- if not to Mr. Bush benefiting from it. The "bipartisan" approach by this Congress that goes beyond terrorism and Iraq is an abdication of legislative responsibility. Congress has ceded the White House exceptional authority over trade agreements, allowed it to rewrite the usually sacrosanct farm bill, capitulated on the $400-billion military budget. The sort of party revolt that forced Mr. Johnson to retire, or the bipartisan ballast to Mr. Nixon's command, are nowhere in the offing for Mr. Bush.

 

Not least in a new calculus of an imperial presidency is the man in the Oval Office. George W. Bush, of course, was an unlikely emperor -- America's least informed modern president in world affairs. For the first nine months of his term -- it now seems hard to remember -- he was a lackluster, evidently purposeless and unprepossessing politician of ridiculed syntax and shrouded electoral legitimacy. Questions about his suspect business dealings, or the sway over his administration of corporate interests, even more egregious than Washington's accepted captivity to moneyed power, began to swirl about the White House. Then, in perhaps the most dramatic effect of its kind in American history, Sept. 11 transformed the man as well as the political setting.

 

"Every president reconstructs the presidency," Mr. Schlesinger wrote of the imperial impulse, "to meet his own psychological needs." Elevated by terrorist attacks from a butt of satire to a commanding leader disposing an awesome, vengeful power, Mr. Bush took on his own reconstruction with earnest determination, even gusto, finding his yet undefined political destiny in an expansively defined war on terrorism.

 

As the first inside testimony of his presidency tells, he remains much the man he was before his new power and purpose, still lacking knowledge and experience, while still caustic about opponents, still convinced of his own sound judgment and moral rectitude. By all accounts, he has adopted naturally the concept of a "spacious" and "peremptory" authority that Mr. Schlesinger saw in the elected emperor. In contrast to Lyndon Johnson's Washington-backroom politicking or Richard Nixon's aloof cynicism, it is Mr. Bush's mixture of his old defiant self-assurance and his new sense of mission that makes his exercise of the imperial presidency all the more formidable.

 

That grip only tightens with the President's domination of the government beneath him, as well as the acquiescence, if not outright support, he enjoys from the American media, and the personal popularity he wins. The role of a small clique of officials in the decision to invade Iraq -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Pentagon consultant Richard Perle and others who have long advocated an attack -- is well known from coverage of the war. Less noted, however, is how much their bureaucratic dominance of the military, State Department and intelligence agencies in the process added to the power of a president who embraced their strategy so completely. Mr. Bush and his hawkish advisers face another battle altogether in their ambitious vision of Iraqi democracy and its inspiration for freer regimes across the Middle East. But their swift military victory disarmed, along with Saddam Hussein, any U.S. bureaucratic opposition to the President's writ, fixing a White House mastery over foreign affairs not seen in Washington since the policy autocracy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

 

So, too, Mr. Bush stands likely to have a prolonged honeymoon with the American media. It is not only that television coverage in particular -- epitomized by the ironically named "embedded reporters" -- has cheerled the advance into Baghdad. Crippled by self-censorship, often by its lack of knowledge or sensibility, and without a vocal opposition in Congress to report by default, American journalism will give the new imperial president publicity his forerunners could only envy.

 

Finally, there is Mr. Bush's paradoxical popularity. If 70 per cent to 75 per cent of Americans approve of his war and performance, the same number question a sagging economy and other issues that are his least-imperial domains. Yet the White House has a manifest capacity to keep the terrorist threat a political preoccupation. Its public shows an equally clear acceptance of a strong leader to deal with the post-Sept. 11 world. The combination will certainly rescue Mr. Bush from the return to domestic concerns and resulting fall in popularity that his father suffered after the first war in the Persian Gulf -- yet another reason why this imperial presidency will not soon wane.

 

All this makes for a certain irony when Mr. Bush comes before the Congress to announce the triumph in Iraq, basking in his new power won at the constitutional expense of the very chambers that will hail him.

 

Not that this should surprise us. Shortly before he died in 1989, the eminent American writer Robert Penn Warren, author of All The King's Men, a novel about a democratic demagogue and dictator, was asked if he foresaw another president with too much power.

 

"Well, it'll probably be someone you least expect under circumstances nobody foresaw," he said. "And, of course, it'll come with a standing ovation from Congress."

 

Roger Morris, a member of the National Security Council under presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, is the author of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician and Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[theist]

read the facts,then make your judgements.<<

 

Actually the question was to you as a person not to this flood of links.

 

The idea was to spark a discussion.

 

[Guest guest]

http://www.electricnevada.com/pages03/newface2.htm

 

http://www.1st100.com/part2/thomas.html

 

http://www.electricnevada.com/pages96/mob1.htm

 

well ,an educated discussion on this subject will

be substantial if you understand the facts,

otherwise how can you talk intelligently

about reality ?

 

i dont know what you mean by right wing versus left,

those concepts are only seen as political expediants

by those in political power, for example the

republicans have become identified with the right wing, this is solely to get the christian right to vote

for them, with the help of Ralph Reed, ex head of the christian coalition,along with other right wing christian

leaders , the mindless christian right has been misled

into thinking that the republicans represent their values, this was done by two methods, first getting the leaders of the christian right to preach to their followers

that the republicans are on their side, and then the republicans voice their strong support for the most cherished christian topics, abortion and homosexuals.

 

by doing this the christian right goes out in mass and votes as a block, while the rest of the country barely

votes at all, the result is that witha tiny percentage

of the actual population, the republicans have taken

over.

 

don't be fooled by the democrats, they simply couldn't

do what the republicnsa have done, they would have liked

to, but it would look to much like pandering.

 

either way, both parties are con men, with their only agenda being the satisfaction of their corporate,

wealthy patrons, both criminal cartels and

"legitamite business".

 

heres some stuff on Reed

http://www.georgiaparty.com/110102pr.htm

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=5397