Reply #60: A traitor by any other name...

[Octafish]

... still stinks. What was said 2,047 years ago still holds.

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious, but it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formable, for he is known and carries his banner openly, but the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not as a traitor, he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and garments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 42BC


What was said 71 years ago still stands:


The Attempted Coup Against FDR

By Barbara LaMonica

The John F. Kennedy assassination represents a theme in our political history. The causes, even the inevitability, of the assassination were born out of the power struggles among the ruling elite which are consistent throughout the American story. These struggles revolve around questions of what is the proper role of government vis a vis the business community’s pursuit of its own self-interest. Is the government’s role minimal or laissez-faire? Should government only provide a stable environment of "law and order", through increased police powers, conducive to the maximization of profits and the minimization of workers wages and benefits? Or does the government have a higher purpose? Is it responsible for the common good? Is it the one entity capable of implementing justice, equality, and a partial redistribution of wealth through the regulation and taxation of corporations in order to provide a cushion against the more egregious effects of the free market? Should it ensure the worker’s share in the profits they helped to create?

At various times factions of what has become known as "corporate America" have argued over which role of government is ultimately more advantageous to their own ends. Generally speaking, banking and Wall Street favor less government. Retail, light manufacturing and small to medium size corporations are more tolerant of an activist government which might put more money in the hands of their consumers, and protect small businesses against the unfair competitive practices of larger corporations.

The stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression dramatically thrust the question of government’s role to the forefront of American political and corporate life. The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt represented a revolutionary realignment of political power: the ascendancy of the Democratic party facilitated by new voting coalitions of rural south and industrialized north which dislodged the Republican Party’s nearly seventy-year dominance, signaling the abandonment of laissez-faire economics in favor of state regulation. The losers in this political process coalesced into right-wing Republicanism, and the next sixty years of American history is, in part, the story of their attempt to regain power, reinstitute Lassiez-faire policies, and dismantle the New Deal.1 I would like to suggest that the forces behind the assassination of President Kennedy were born in the furies which the Great Depression unleashed between these competing sectors of American political and economic life.

I believe that in 1934 there was a foreshadowing of the JFK assassination. A conspiracy was uncovered in which right-wing elements of big business, namely the DuPont family and the Morgan banking interests, planned to finance and arm a veteran’s army to march on the White House and hold President Roosevelt captive.2 The conspiracy was reported by two- time Congressional Medal of Honor winner Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler. Although the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities found his allegations credible, it failed to call major conspirators to testify, and the Committee deleted crucial testimony from its final report to the public. The press relegated the story to the back pages, and discredited those, including Major Butler, who tried to alert the public to the threat against republican government. No prosecutions were forthcoming from the Justice Department, in part because the main witness who would have substantiated Butler’s claims died suddenly from pneumonia at the age of 37. In short, there was a cover-up, maybe worse.

CONTINUED...

http://www.webcom.com/ctka/pr399-fdr.html


What happened five months ago still matters:


A Corrupted Election

Despite what you may have heard, the exit polls were right

By Steve Freeman and Josh Mitteldorf

Recall the Election Day exit polls that suggested John Kerry had won a convincing victory? The media readily dismissed those polls and little has been heard about them since.

Many Americans, however, were suspicious. Although President Bush prevailed by 3 million votes in the official, tallied vote count, exit polls had projected a margin of victory of 5 million votes for Kerry. This unexplained 8 million vote discrepancy between the election night exit polls and the official count should raise a Chinese May Day of red flags.

The U.S. voting system is more vulnerable to manipulation than most Americans realize. Technologies such as electronic voting machines provide no confirmation that votes are counted as cast, and highly partisan election officials have the power to suppress votes and otherwise distort the count.

Exit polls are highly accurate. They remove most of the sources of potential polling error by identifying actual voters and asking them immediately afterward who they had voted for.

The reliability of exit polls is so generally accepted that the Bush administration helped pay for them during recent elections in Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine. Testifying before the House Committee on International Relations Dec. 7, John Tefft, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, explained that the Bush administration funded exit polls because they were one of the "ways that would help to expose large-scale fraud." Tefft pointed to the discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote count to argue that the Nov. 22 Ukraine election was stolen.


CONTINUED...

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1970/

Same people, these turds. Traitors.