...
Hope springs eternal, I guess, but The Intercept is turning out to be no more enlightening than HuffPo or The Daily Mail. Of course, we all knew there was extremely little chance it would end up helping us get to the truth. How are you going to figure out ways to actually improve life here if this is the best crap you have to go on?
Shouldn't that be a litmus test for what gets your eyeprints?
It so happens that on this subject there is much better crap to go on, and what is up with The Intercept to not even hint at it?
Here is the acid test.Was that too hard for The Intercept? Evidently. Are they too lame? Yes. Are they too timid? Yes. What depth is in their piece? None. How much accuracy? Not much. [To borrow a Farrellism, just like a multiple choice quiz – Who killed JFK? a.)Aaron Burr b.)Mark Chapman c.)Lee Harvey Oswald d.)Josie Wales... no option for 'none of the above'....] One long literate-sounding bundle of material omissions. Are they worth our time? No.
It's August 1996. Gary Webb has just broken the story in the San Jose Mercury News about the CIA helping to deal drugs into South Central LA. He has put the legal documents up on their website. The proof is hard. The government is dealing drugs.
Catherine Austin Fitts's company is publishing a tool on the web called Community Wizard that shows maps with Geographic Information Systems software that include patterns of defaults on HUD mortgages in the areas of LA with the heaviest concentration of CIA supported Iran Contra drug trafficking.
The patterns between HUD defaulted mortgages and narco dollars are much too close for comfort.
What would you do if you were Bob Rubin (Secretary of Treasury, now Co-Chairman of Citicorp), Larry Summers (Deputy Secretary of Treasury, now President of Harvard), John Hawke (Undersecretary of the Treasury; now Comptroller of the Currency), Al Gore (Vice President, now teaching) and John Deutch (Director of the CIA, now teaching) sitting on the national security council or the related narco dollars task force?
Would you target Webb and get him fired and the story discredited or would you let the story grow and flourish?
Would you target Fitts and have her business and her software tools and databases destroyed or would you let her business flourish, allowing every community to see and track the narco dollars that were helping to drive their Solari Index to 0% while driving the Dow Jones Index higher?
Which will it be in an election year? Will you do everything you can do to attract the reinvestment of the narco dollars into your campaign and into the stock market or will you let Fitts and Webb continue to illuminate "how the money works" on narco dollars in a way that might crash the stock market and make it harder and more expensive for the government to finance the deficit?
Before you answer, let me tell you one more story.
In 1999, I was at a revival for Christian women. One of the presidential candidates made a guest appearance. A friend of mine, an Afro-American minister, who used to work for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), leapt to her feet to applaud him with tremendous enthusiasm. I was surprised at her response given that she understood his success in attracting narco dollars – not to mention his and his colleague's silence on Gary Webb's Dark Alliance reports and the subsequent CIA admission of drug dealing by the government.
She looked at me and said, "He is going to be the winner." So I said, "You mean, I am a loser because I tried to stop the corruption and he is a winner because he profited from it and helped it grow. So you will clap for him and not for me." She replied, "That's right. You are a loser. He is a winner."
Not such an easy decision to vote for the "rule of law" is it?
Indeed, Webb got fired and Fitts' was targeted and, after spending $6 million on legal and related expenses, my fortune sank down to the same 0% as the Solari Index.
But whatever I do, I can't blame it just on the top guys. Whatever they did, whoever it was, they were doing what it took to please and win the crowd.
Americans love a winner.
I think I am shortly to abandon their front page. Maybe I will bookmark Glenn's blog and poke my nose in there occasionally. Despite all, he really does still manage to get outside the lie machine box betimes.
I just need to stress that the system of pipes is no better than the mainstream tripe, and maybe even worse because we flatter ourselves it is better, everywhere inauthentic people keep cranking out affectations on a theme in place of vision and depth of understanding. Can you not tell the difference?
Many, many, and maybe even most, of us are too caught up in the silly abstractions that keep us polarized and distracted to notice that the facts they obfuscate are crucial to our lives. We keep letting psychopaths ruin everything because we will settle for shit like this piece from The Intercept while fancying ourselves discerning advocates of decency.
Quit racing into cul-de-sacs! Quit eating food-flavored plastic! Quit spending all day on your hamster wheels. No! We don't know everything! The crucial stuff has been covert for so long it is extremely difficult to drill down to it, and, obviously, at least that difficult for those who have to get the word out. There is a lot we don't know, but way more we could know if we quit squandering our attention on form over function.
always and any time....
