Also in Media: On the Koch Brothers

16 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Politics, United States of America

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Oddly enough, the fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to Joseph Stalin. Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer who settled in Texas and ran a weekly newspaper. Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out of the industry. Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration. He returned to the U.S. In the headquarters of his company, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in Wichita, he kept photographs aimed at proving that some of those Soviet refineries had been destroyed in the Second World War. Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch, recalled, “As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up. I think it bothered him a lot.”

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover . . . .

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations

At a time when Americans are watching with some horror contests between the Trump Administration and responsible mainstream media, also between the Trump Administration and Congress, also between the Trump Administration and America’s ill and vulnerable, and, finally, between (not the Trump Administration) absurdly polarized American political parties, the Koch Brothers as cultural philanthropists and political activators seem ever an indirect part of the American experience.

Since reading a Mother Jones piece on the brothers, BackChannels has been compiling Koch Brothers articles without comment, but may here share the list and let that suffice for the time being.

Note: where date of publication appears embedded in the article URL, BackChannels will not repeat it in listing.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/05/koch-brothers-family-history-sons-of-wichita – 5/20/2014.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/02/opinion/woodhouse-koch-brothers/

http://www.npr.org/2016/01/19/463551038/dark-money-delves-into-how-koch-brothers-donations-push-their-political-agenda

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-The-Koch-Brothers-meet-the-crackpots-454481 – 5/19/2016

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/behind-make-america-great-the-koch-agenda-returns-with-a-vengeance – 11/21/2016.

http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/03/23/kochs-bankroll-movement-rewrite-constitution/

http://billmoyers.com/story/deep-history-radical-right/

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Americans_for_Prosperity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_family

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Also in Media: “How to save Gaza: Palestinian American says it’s time to stop blaming Israel” | by Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib | Jewish Journal | July 12, 2017

15 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Gaza, Gaza Suzerain, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia

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Now, as an American citizen living in San Francisco, I can write about my experiences and perspectives in ways that many in Gaza cannot, fearing only that my parents, siblings and other family members who remain there are not held responsible for my opinions. My folks are sometimes jealous of my ability to speak my mind and remind me frequently to consider the implications for them of what I say.

While Israel continues to play a significant role in Gaza’s affairs, the grim anniversary of the Hamas takeover warrants focusing less on Israel than the role that Palestinian political organizations have played in worsening the misery for Gaza’s more than 2 million residents. And that has led me to conclude that the United Nations, for all its problems and the hate it incurs by Israelis, is perhaps Gazans’ best hope for progress.

Read the Whole Thing: How to save Gaza: Palestinian American says it’s time to stop blaming Israel – 7/12/2017.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

Related on the Web

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9090/soviet-union-palestinians

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ru/contents/articles/originals/2017/05/palestinian-authority-stop-funding-electricity-israel-gaza.html

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/06/palestine-hamas-lebanon-hezbollah-rapprochement.html

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FTAC: MEC: Russia’s Earlier Influence of the Palestinians

13 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia

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I’ve harped on this answer around Facebook, and may have gotten a bad rep for it, but I stand behind what I have found in relation to the middle east conflict and the political history of the 20th Century:

The west and the Palestinians (together) have been duped by Moscow!

Repeat it twelve times — because it’s true.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

I know that Arafat and Abbas are deeply admired figures in the Palestinian territories, but I / we also know that the Palestinians have been deeply controlled by the powerful management of their information space accompanied by political repression.

None may have peace without integrity and none may have integrity without full acknowledgement and comprehension of how Russia’s history and political culture contributed to Nazism and to the later formulation of Palestinian “liberation” rhetoric — and then the raiding of the proceeds of the business.

Regarding the path of the forged “Protocols” and their transfer into Germany in the 1920s:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

The Palestinians may not know it, but they’re in good position, professor Dajani especially, to become the world’s leaders in bona fide intellectual history IF they can get The Bear off their backs.

That’s something to think about.

In the interest of peace, one may also lend consideration to whether evolving and modifying the systems of infantilizing disinformation (for “the masses” who would fare better being treated like human beings) and related loyalty and patronage should be changed quickly or slowly — but they have to be changed IF the Palestinians and their advocates (or interlocutors) genuinely wish for better lives — real dignity, real freedom, honorable prosperity — all the way around.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

Repressive, selfish, and totalitarian regimes hide what they do by shielding their followers from cogent and legitimate information. They basically keep their own in order — loyalty to powerful narcissists — by keeping them deprived of knowledge.

The officials who continue to harp on Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and countless rumors that serve as “blood libels” should be of another day a long time ago.

Those who sustain such practices with their mouths should be regarded as phantoms by Israelis and Palestinians equally.

The prompt for the rant had been reference to a Palestinian Authority “leader” talking up the forgery that was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the question raised was what to do today about that kind of baldfaced lying.

BackChannels shorter answer: drag it out into the sun where all may see it.

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Also in Media: In Translation: “Russia’s thorny road to democracy – Parts I, II, and III: Interviews with Dissident Igor Sharapov” | Alina Nychyk, Editor and Translator | Hold the Trend | Series from April 14 to July 9, 2017 

11 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Russia, Ukraine

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Sharapov was imprisoned for 10 years when Vladimir Putin came to power.

Prior to this, in 1993, President Yeltsin confessed to him and his teacher, Vladimir Gomelskyi, that he cannot remove communists even around him in the Kremlin.

Sharapov was an assistant to the deputy of the Commission the Legislative Assembly of the city, where Putin comes from (Saint Petersburg). He was one of the initiators of the procedure for liquidating the District Committee of the Communist Party in the city, and transferring the building to the House of Freedom. Together with Gomelskyi, he was an initiator of dismantling Lenin’s monument at the central station in St. Petersburg.

Starting from 1989 until his arrest in 2000, he was creating anti-communist trade unions without employers and their agents on the basis of the Charter of the Polish group “Solidarity”. These unions were members of the Association of Free Trade Unions “Justice”.

Sharapov won a number of court trials while protecting employee trade unions, but lost his own criminal trial. The court passed the verdict without the presence of a jury in a remote northern region of Russia, where prisoners were tortured. The court’s decision contained Sharapov’s accusation in killing of a previously convicted person with two blows into the stomach, however, the man was killed by the two policemen. In reality, the authorities could not forgive him for the organization of anti-communist trade unions independent of the government in the largest Russian port, on the main railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and in St. Petersburg’s subway, as well as for the organization of victorious workers’ strikes.

After his release, he was seen among the defenders of the Euromaidan barricades in Ukraine.

Links:

Russia’s thorny road to democracy – Part I – Hold the Trend

Russia’s thorny road to democracy – Part II – Hold the Trend

Russia’s thorny road to democracy – Part III – Hold the Trend

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FTAC: Middle East Conflict: All That Doesn’t Exist

05 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars

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I am suggesting that if rational peace were possible today — and you are rational in your thinking — it would have been achieved with the Oslo Accords or, later, when the Jews accepted their own ejection from Gaza.

Conveniently dropped from the “rational” discourse, which isn’t so rational if it avoids, covers, or masks the historic alliances, the more brutal forces of order, and the intellectual poisoning (disinformation fed to the Palestinians for incitement), in the region are elements difficult to deny.  For simpletons and “useful idiots” — Stalin’s term for those he could control and use with his mouth — the narrative will start with colonizing and theft of the land by European Jews (even though land was purchased and Jewish agricultural development grew the population in paid Arab and Jewish labor; even though the Jewish presence / residence in the land spans thousands of years — 3,500 years in Gaza; even though Hebrew could have been borne and spoken nowhere else; even though 800,000 Jews ejected from Arab states — what happened to their property? — contributed to the formation of modern Israel — and the Hebrews are justifiably back in the Land of the Hebrews).

All of that in parenthesis seems tucked away in the arguments of the anti-Semitic.

Add: the “work” of the BDS movement, the Electronic Intifada, the nominal “peace movements” and leaders that sustain the middle east conflict — and most at cost to Palestinians more than anyone else! — by promoting the same vacuous words over and over and over again in true _Animal Farm_ fashion: “The Occupation” (“the brutal occupation . . . .”) when in fact Moscow literally produced Arafat to produce in turn a pretty good conflict business that has liberated no one but the corrupt and the criminal.

Husseini-Hitler?

Shrugged away.

Hamas anti-Semitism?

Masked away with apologies and professions of good intentions made by third parties.

Arab apartheid — evidenced in the camps and much confirmed by the brutality meted to Yarmouk in the course of the Syrian Tragedy?

Not a mention of responsibility for the diminishing of the rights and status of refugees — and note: all others spilling out of other wars are at worst most reluctantly maintained in camps as they meet other migration and resettlement challenges. Only the Palestinians have been singled out by the Arab world — or the former edition of it — for use as a weapon against the Jewish (Hebrew) State. For almost seventy years, the fate of the same have been suborned to the ambitions of royals leveraging fear and hatred of the Jews and interest in religious supersession to do it.

All of that?

Gosh, it just doesn’t seem to exist, does it?

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FTAC: Middle East Conflict – So Old It has Produced Its Own Useful Boilerplate

03 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Religion

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Hamas is the occupying force in Gaza.

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/180400/hamas-killed-160-palestinian-children-to-build-terror-tunnels

Both Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires while the Palestinian main base is held captive — politically intimidated, ruthlessly exploited, frequently punished — in the interest of many money-making methods.

In many ways, the middle east conflict has been institutionalized and for the once KGB developed leaderships turned into a pretty good family business.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

Among the more interesting aspects of the conflict may be the language programming developed to keep the machinery working for the criminally wealthy: “The Occupation” (I call it “The Preoccupation with the Jews!”); “Resistance” (to meaningful education, health care, economic development, etc.). In all aspects, the rhetoric fed to the Palestinians is medieval and designed to serve the equivalent of feudal lords and connected families (a patronage system).

Notably, Hamas associates and backers, starting with Moscow / Moscow-Tehran, share investments in similarly feudal systems and absolute power.

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FTAC: “Fake News!” Cheerleaders, Enablers, Sources . . . .

02 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Journalism

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Inspiration: another baseless Trumpeted attack on CNN.

Posted elsewhere earlier today:

If there’s “Fake News” among the majors of “Big Media”, there must be fake journalists and institutions passing along their fakery to young journalists.

https://www.cjr.org/

http://www.poynter.org/

http://www.pulitzer.org/

http://ejc.net/

I’ve been arch in the opener (of course): The organizations noted have each devoted themselves and inspired young journalists toward excellence.

The weakness in democracy resides in the absence of meaningful political education in the constituents or deliberate disinformation, generally by way of the “agent provocateurs” of foreign sponsors. Basically, if the voters fail their history tests 🙂 and sustain their disinterest in most domestic and foreign affairs, then they leave the character of the government up to government elites and potentially elite influences. If that’s where we’re going, government may as well become a private business benefiting private interests and exploiting as much of the public as possible.

In some ways, such a process may be inevitable, as we rely on others to keep other machinery humming while each of us does our thing even if as free as we may be to independently read and pursue research curiosity. We’re plainly limited x time / day x energy and cannot “ride herd” on the reporting on critical issues.

Still, I would question the leader who attempts to dissolve the credibility of the professional journalism community while engaged in turning a state into something of a private fief.

Fault for American ignorance in relation to the “Fourth Estate”, not to mention the foundations of American political culture and America’s leadership (or perhaps now former leadership) in the greater world may be assigned to generations of business and technical interests on our public education systems. The failure to transmit cultural basics and values down to the floor of the economy is signal of cultural failure.

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FTAC: Lady Justice, Scales, and Power v Justice for the Palestinians

30 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philosophy

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justice-scales-gifPrompt: the image of the Scales of Justice and the remark that the mission of the just is to “keep the balance or to seek balance when there is an imbalance”.

. . . . the scales of justice do not represent the equalization of everything or refer to “cultural relativism”: they represent blind-equal-objective weighing of evidence in matters pertaining to justice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice

Justice does not seek to make the wealthy poor or the poor wealthy but rather to maintain the same ethical, legal, and moral principles as societies choose desirable and good for both classes. Rich or poor, black or white, Israeli or Palestinian Arab, all should be equal under the law.

In that the the Arab hangover from the 20th Century, the PLO, and Hamas apply different standards for the managing of Palestinian Arabs in their greater population than they do for themselves, it would seem an injustice on the part of such leaders to treat the Palestinians as less than themselves.

For Israel, military oversight is only a practical matter of defense. For the wealthy Abbas, Haniyeh, and Mashaal, the enclosure, separation, and language-borne “weaponizing” of their subject populations must be something else, i.e., the idolization of power over justice.

By way of Moscow’s practically patented habits in barbarism, including the manipulation of “the masses” through disinformation and reprehensible cultural education, the Palestinians have come to represent to the world a much confined and ill-used population anchoring for their leaders a most lucrative conflict business.

That’s just how it has been for the past 70 years: the feudal leadership directs popular anger toward Israel but keeps itself flush with serious cash.

Related on the Web:

If it had been invested shrewdly and well Gaza today could be a mini-Monaco. It could have a deepwater freight port, a flourishing fishing port and a leisure harbour crammed with the yachts of wealthy visitors. It could have resort hotels on the sea and farms, ranches and orchards in the hinterland producing nutritious food.

It has nothing of these. It is a failed state of poverty, misery and violence. So what happened to all that money? Well, a lot went on guns, explosives for bombs and material to build rockets to launch at Israel. But the bulk has certainly suffered the fate of most wealth in that neck of the woods. It has simply been embezzled, not by Israelis but by Palestinians and above all by their leadership cadres.

Forsyth, Frederick.  “So exactly how did Yasser Arafat get so rich?”  Express UK, November 15, 2013.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is currently building a $13mn presidential palace in the West Bank, just outside Ramallah.

Reportedly scheduled to take two years to finish, the palace’s construction, including two helipads, guest quarters and administrative offices over more than six acres of land, comes just months after the PA was forced to pass an emergency budget when billions in pledged international aid failed to come through.

Middle East Eye.  “In Pictures: The $13 mn Palestinian presidential palace.”  September 9, 2015.

Related:

Menachem, Yoni Ben.  “The Businesses of Mahmoud Abbas and His Sons.”  Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, September 14, 2016.

Related:

Corre, Addam.  “Hamas Leaders Worth Millions of Dollars From Allegedly Skimming Donations and Extortion: Is Anyone Surprised?”  Inquisitr, July 18, 2014; updated July 22, 2014.

Danan, Deborah.  “Gaza’s Millionaires and Billionaires — How Hamas’s Leaders Got Rich Quick.”  The Algemeiner, July 28, 2014.

Freimann, Myer.  “Hamas Killed 160 Palestinian Children to Build Tunnels.”  Tablet Magazine, July 25, 2014.

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