Today I’m filling in for Sam who will be taking Kevin’s regularly scheduled stop. Kevin had to drop off the schedule due to his work schedule.
I didn’t get to finish this clip last week, so I’ll play it again.
Making a big deal over Geithner not paying $34,000 in taxes or what ever it was, was a diversion. Geithner worked for the Kissinger Associates Council on Foreign Relations, the International Monetary Fund, and then the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He could not have a more sinister background.
People really need to look at this Geithner’s worked history because you could not find a more vetted insider.
Why would Obama have picked such a piece of crud to be the Treasury Secretary?
Perhaps the answer lies in Obama’s own work history. This is an excerpt from a news letter put out by William Blum who wrote Rogue a Guide to the World’s only Superpower.
The question that may never go away: Who really is Barack Obama?
In his autobiography, “Dreams From My Fathers”, Barack Obama writes of taking a job at some point after graduating from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as “a consulting house to multinational corporations” in New York City, and his functions as a “research assistant” and “financial writer”.
The odd part of Obama’s story is that he doesn’t mention the name of his employer. However, a New York Times story of 2007 identifies the company as Business International Corporation.10 Equally odd is that the Times did not remind its readers that the newspaper itself had disclosed in 1977 that Business International had provided cover for four CIA employees in various countries between 1955 and 1960.11
The British journal, Lobster Magazine – which, despite its incongruous name, is a venerable international publication on intelligence matters – has reported that Business International was active in the 1980s promoting the candidacy of Washington-favored candidates in Australia and Fiji.12 In 1987, the CIA overthrew the Fiji government after but one month in office because of its policy of maintaining the island as a nuclear-free zone, meaning that American nuclear-powered or nuclear-weapons-carrying ships could not make port calls.13 After the Fiji coup, the candidate supported by Business International, who was much more amenable to Washington’s nuclear desires, was reinstated to power – R.S.K. Mara was Prime Minister or President of Fiji from 1970 to 2000, except for the one-month break in 1987.
In his book, not only doesn’t Obama mention his employer’s name; he fails to say when he worked there, or why he left the job. There may well be no significance to these omissions, but inasmuch as Business International has a long association with the world of intelligence, covert actions, and attempts to penetrate the radical left – including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)14 – it’s valid to wonder if the inscrutable Mr. Obama is concealing something about his own association with this world.
Blum’s reference links give specific reference information, but do not link to the actual source material — so I tracked it down:
Dan Armstrong, who worked with Mr. Obama at Business International Corporation in New York in 1984 and has deconstructed Mr. Obama’s account of the job on his blog, analyzethis.net, wrote: “All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks.”
In an interview, Mr. Armstrong added: “There may be some truth to that. But in order to make it a good story, it required a bit of exaggeration.”
Mr. Armstrong’s description of the firm, and those of other co-workers, differs at least in emphasis from Mr. Obama’s. It was a small newsletter-publishing and research firm, with about 250 employees worldwide, that helped companies with foreign operations (they could be called multinationals) understand overseas markets, they said.
I had to pay $3.95 to get a copy of this article, but I verified it did say Business International had employees working for the CIA, along with just about every U.S. news organization.
The organizations, which range from some of the most influential in the nation to some of the most obscure, include ABC and CBS News, Time Life and Newsweek magazines. The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, The Associated Press and United Press International.
Also included were the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers. The Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, The Louisvill Courier-Journal and Fodor’s a publisher of travel guides.
Among the lesser known organizations were the College Press Service, Business International, the McLendon Broadcasting Organization, Film Daily and a defunct underground newspaper published in Washington, The Quicksilver Times.
The Lobster article is another one you have to pay to get access to. I have not purchased it yet, but here is a link to the summary, and the site where it can be purchased:
This is a complicated series of combination. Before I begin, I would like to once again bring up a quote from Gabriel Kolko I previously mentioned. Keep in mind Kolko pulled this information from the testimony records for the U.S. Industrial Commission:
The Industrial Commission accepted the necessity and inevitability of industrial combinations, urging that “Their power for evil should be destroyed and their means for good preserved.” More significantly, the commission’s hearings provided a forum for key businessmen on the question of federal regulation. Of some type in some specific area, and no interest was as strong in this demand as Standard Oil. John D. Rockefeller, John D. Archibold, and H. H. Rogers of Standard called for a national incorporation law and the federal regulation of accounts and financial publicity.
The film Orwell Rolls in His Grave warns of corporate consolidation in the media.
On June 2, 2003 the FCC voted to loosen ownership rules
Currently almost all of the major media in the US is owned by one of 10 companies (this chart is from 2000 so is likely outdated).
If you look at the 10 companies who own the media you will see General Electric currently owns NBC. Now Comcast is attempting to buy into NBC. We already have the combination of GE and Microsoft in the form of MSNBC. Fox News reported:
In agreeing to buy 51 percent of NBC Universal from General Electric Co., which has controlled NBC since 1986, Comcast hopes to succeed in marrying distribution and content in a way Time Warner Inc. could not. AOL and Time Warner are undoing their ill-fated marriage Dec. 9. Time Warner has already shed its cable TV operations.
. . . .
GE would retain a 49 percent stake, with the option of unloading half its stake in 3 1/2 years and all of it in seven years. The new NBC Universal would borrow $9.1 billion that would partially go toward covering the money GE owes Vivendi.
Comcast would name three people to the board and GE two, and Comcast would manage the joint venture. Jeff Zucker would remain NBC Universal’s CEO and report to Comcast Chief Operating Officer Steve Burke. NBC Universal’s headquarters are expected to stay in New York.
Consumer groups fear that a Comcast-NBC combination would be so threatening that rivals would strike similar deals just to compete — a sentiment echoed by DirecTV Chairman John Malone in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
And if media ownership were further concentrated, consumers would see higher prices and fewer choices, said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, chief executive of the Media Access Project. He warned that online video and other new forms of competition could be squashed “before they can gain a toehold in the market.”
Satellite TV rival Dish Networks Corp., meanwhile, worries that Comcast would be in a stronger position to withhold channels from competitors. CEO Charles Ergen has complained that a regulatory loophole lets Comcast bar his company from carrying Philadelphia sports games shown on Comcast’s regional sports network. Comcast did not respond to requests for comment.
The Comcast-NBC deal is widely seen as a test of the Obama administration’s resolve to fight media consolidation, but consumer groups aren’t confident regulators will find a legal means to block the transaction.
Net Neutrality may become a big issue if Comcast owns NBC. The reason is Comcast will own a great deal of web content and they will have a vested interest in what web sites you access. What that means is Comcast will have an intensive to give packet priority to their own web sites. What packet priority means is the connection speed to a particular web site. An internet service provider has the ability to dedicate bandwidth, meaning connection speed to one site over the other.
Does this mean we should job on the Net Neutrality band wagon. Maybe. The only problem is people are easily conned by politicians from the party the identify with, so people may throw their weight behind a Net Neutrality bill that does the exact opposite of what they think they are doing.
A prime example of a bill that did the exact opposite of what everyone was told it was going to do is NAFTA. NAFTA accelerated extreme poverty in Mexico, causing illegal immigration to increase by 60% rather than helping the poor and reducing illegal immigration.
Let’s take a look at what we currently have with General Electric’s ownership in NBC.
Jeffrey R. Immelt the CEO of General Electric. Immelt is also the “Public Representative” for the Federal Reserve Bank
There are supposed to be public voices on the board of the New York Fed. The Fed is a sort of an odd entity. The Fed is a quasi governmental, quasi private entity. It’s board members chosen partly by the Board of Governors of the Fed in Washington, partly by the banks that control the Fed. The public representative, I’m going to try not to strike too close to home here, the public representative chosen by the banks–public–Jeffrey Immelt. The chairman of GE. Also the chairmen of this company — but wait a minute — he is the public voice who’s bonds are being guaranteed by the Fed.
“The intersection between GE’s interests and government action is clearer than ever,” General Electric Vice Chairman John G. Rice wrote in an Aug. 19 e-mail to colleagues.
. . . .
“On climate change,” Rice wrote, “we were able to work closely with key authors of the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill, recently passed by the House of Representatives. If this bill is enacted into law it would benefit many GE businesses.”
Most of all, Waxman-Markey would profit a GE joint venture called Greenhouse Gas Services, which deals in greenhouse gas credits, products that have value only if a cap-and-trade bill like Waxman-Markey passes.
The leaked e-mail shows how tightly GE connects PAC contributions and lobbying efforts. “Our Company is heavily impacted by a number of issues pending in Washington this fall,” Rice wrote.
Perhaps the issue shouldn’t be what major corporation owns NBC, but allowing any major corporation to buy a media outlet so they can control the media. I would argue media ownership should be limited to create diversity within the media because media ownership consolidation does just the opposite.
Happiness Machines [58:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Today’s show will be a simple one. I will be playing an excerpt from the BBC program Century of Self. To see the full film click on Century of Self.
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