“The Marriage from Hell: Jane Harman & the Woodrow Wilson Center�

Last year investigative journalist David Boyajian wrote two exposés on Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center, revealing how the center has been violating its Congressional mandate and been up to its neck in tainted corporate cash. You can read Boyajian’s exposés here and here. Many agreed with Boyajian’s damning assessment, including a prominent journalist who called the WWC “a global joke.� I too wrote a follow up article on WWC with a special focus on its ‘oily’ President, Mr. Lee Hamilton. By oily, I mean ‘glisteningly greasy.’ I am sure you recognize his name from his highly publicized position and face as one of the 9/11 Commissioners, but his possibly pay-off position with WWC was not the lone factor for his glistening status in my report. Here are a few excerpts from my piece to illustrate what I mean:

Fortunately one independent reporter researched and reported on one such case, call it ‘chased the egg,’ on one of the 9/11 Commissioners, a Former Representative, Mr. Lee Hamilton, which I happened to come across yesterday. It was truly interesting to see how many ‘honorary’ positions Mr. Hamilton has been given, handed, by our government alone, just check out a few here:

-Co-chair of the Department of Energy Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future with Brent Scowcroft

-Serves on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board & the FBI Director’s Advisory Board,

-Serves on the US Department of Homeland Security Task Force

- Serves on the CIA External Advisory Board

The White House, the CIA, and the FBI must have been extremely well-served by Hamilton’s performance as the commissioner to grant him this many prestigious quasi positions. No? For me, the most interesting aspect which was covered by CounterCurrents.Org had to do with Hamilton’s position with and current salary from the Woodrow Wilson Center, and his questionable corporate ties, particularly with BAE Systems, the main sponsor of his forthcoming gala dinner…

You can read my entire article ‘9/11 Commissioner’s Turkey Baste: Chicken or the Egg?’ here. Now back to the focus of this post.

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Hastert & Emanuel: Who Made Hay While The Sun Shined?

 “Lobbyists make more money than Congressmen because lobbyists write more laws than we do.â€� – Congressman Ron Paul (TX)

Government work can inspire a certain image, particularly if you are still swayed by idealistic grade-school texts that extolled the work of ‘public servants.’  These are people working not for themselves, primarily, but for a greater good.  Government workers accept a discount from what they could earn in the private sector, because they care about the public.  We owe them our gratitude.

Well, some of them, to be sure. 

In economics, there is a fundamental principle called ‘rationality.’  A lot of students tend to rebel against this notion, and it has some critics from the behavioral finance profession as well.  But I still remember the day one of my favorite professors in economics, facing heat from students on this score, stepped back and defined rationality simply as ‘self-interested, purposive behavior.’  People don’t intentionally try to harm themselves, even if they don’t always make consistent or good decisions.  People try to pursue their own self-interest, to try to make themselves better off.  In a world without significant government intervention, this tendency usually promotes cooperation among buyers and sellers, and the common good as well.

Does public service make for a vow of poverty?  Our public servants are people, like the rest of us.  As a general tendency, we all tend to pursue our self-interest.   And in the public service world, some of the most ambitious, loudest champions about what is good for the rest of us are also intensely self-interested.  When self-interest combines with the pursuit of profit through government intervention, public servants can make themselves better off while leaving the rest of us worse off.

Assuming that policymakers pursue their own self interest is a central tenet of the public choice school of economics.   The “Chicago School� of regulation (the University of Chicago economics department, not the City of Chicago) similarly calls for us to suspend any enduring belief that public servants are always unselfish.  And when public servants serve themselves, well-organized special interest groups can more easily capture regulatory policy and drive it to their own benefit.  In turn, the revolving door, with our servants moving seamlessly between government and the regulated, and back again, can be a very lucrative business.   

Lobbying can also lead government policy to generate results the opposite of what is being advertised.  For example, anti-trust policy can actually make consumers worse off, particularly if well-organized producers run the show.  Government financial regulation can actually destabilize the financial system, if public guarantees spawn moral hazard and gambling with the public purse.  And the resulting crises can become a lever for taking more money from the many, in order to stabilize and cement the positions of the favored few. Read more È

I’ve been meaning to write about this for weeks, and just got around doing it. Maybe the subconscious procrastination was due to the conscious sanitization of this news by venues like this. Maybe it was the dread of having to tackle one of the quasi media phony darlings like this guy. Or maybe it was the repressed exhaustion-frustration I went through a couple of years back with this. Okay, allow me to start with the fairly recent development reported ‘incompletely and badly’ by the New York Times:

Representative Jean Schmidt, Republican of Ohio, has been ordered by the House Ethics Committee to repay a Turkish-American group $500,000 for legal services it improperly paid for to help her pursue a defamation lawsuit and other legal proceedings against a Democratic opponent in the 2008 election.

As you can see, very consciously the Times avoids naming ‘that Democratic opponent.’ Because naming him, David Krikorian, would require some fact citing and more context-background on the case; the case they together with the rest of the mainstream media went out of their way to black out. And doing ‘that’ would God forbid bring up the long-blacked-out state secrets privilege in my case. And ‘that’ my dear friends, is something that has been forbidden to these stenographers in the media circus.

So let’s continue the no-coverage coverage of a very significant case involving Congresswoman Jean Schmidt and the twisted and rechanneled Turkish Foreign Lobby dollars:

The action by the House committee, disclosed Friday, did not come with a formal punishment, because ethics investigators concluded that Ms. Schmidt had been misled by her own lawyers from the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund about who was paying the legal bills.

Ms. Schmidt was ordered to amend her annual personal financial disclosure reports to acknowledge the gift from the Turkish Coalition of America, which actually paid the bills, and then reimburse the lawyers.

 The report above casually, and very quickly, glosses over one of the implicated, that is, directly implicated, parties in this case: Schmidt’s lawyer- the lawyer who supposedly, and intentionally, misled his client, and did so with a dollar amount not in the thousands, but actually half a million dollars. Ordinarily this slip by a government garbage disposal facility like the Times would not raise big flags. However, this lawyer is no ordinary lawyer. The lawyer in question here happens to be a famous, very public, high-profile and very deviously and shrewdly marketed man. The lawyer in this case is none other than deceivingly perceived Bruce Fein.  A man who has gotten very wealthy thanks to the foreign lobby, in this case the Turkish lobby in need of a man who knows the maze that gets the cheese to the congressional mice:

In 2007, Ayasli transferred $30 million in stock to fund a new endeavor, the nonprofit Turkish Coalition of America. The organization is headquartered in a Washington suite that has also been listed as the address for the Turkish Coalition USA PAC, the lobbying firm of Lydia Borland (who has represented the Turkish government), and the law firm of Bruce Fein and Associates (Fein comprises half of the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund).

…

In addition to the advocacy done through the ATC (which also funds trips to Turkey for congressional staff), a handful of its members–Citigroup, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, Chevron, Textron, United Technologies, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, which spent a combined $80 million lobbying Washington last year lobbied Congress directly on the genocide resolution and other issues important to Turkey; the Aerospace Industries Association, a trade group, helped coordinate the effort.

…

Oh wait, Bruce Fein is married to Mattie Fein, the Republican candidate who ran against Jane Harman in 2010. Had she won, how would one go about calculating and deducting her campaign-donation  ‘gifts’ from her husbands million-dollar foreign lobby gifts? Isn’t it interesting? And as far as Turkey’s former partner lobby, the Israeli Lobby, this is where Bruce & his voluptuous wife stand when given the Zionism litmus test:

7. Would you support Israel taking military action to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons? Under what circumstances?

The United States should support whatever Israel believes is justified by national security worries over Iran.

I know Mr. Fein has many pro-liberties fans out there who are mistaking him for ‘real;’ some consider him a real constitutionalist who stands for liberties and against secrecy. That’s very similar to those who fell for Obama the constitutionalist. Remember, Obama the author of a very constitutional book? Recall the beautiful words spoken and sold as pro liberties, pro change, anti secrecy and beyond? Well, you have a similar situation with Mr. Fein: he talks a good talk, and writes well. As for who Mr. Fein is: you are looking at a man long succumbed to foreign lobby and military industrial complex lobby dollars. You are looking at a man far more loyal to Israel and its lobby than to our nation. You actually have a man who believes any war would be justified for the sake of Israel. And in the latest Schmidt case you are looking at a man who helped funnel half a million dollar foreign ‘Bakshish’ to his congresswoman friend, and even indicted by the lame Congressional Ethics Committee as an attorney who intentionally misled his client. Read more È

BFP Nightly Quote

“If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom: and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too.” - W. Somerset Maugham

International Newsworthy

Spinning Iran’s Centrifuge

NATO & Turkey Support Armed Rebels in Syria 

NATO Report: US Raids in Afghanistan Tripled Since 2009 

Report: Libyan Rebels, Government Hold Talks in Tunisia 

Azerbaijan: Baku Hedging Its Economic Bets 

Israeli Black Hole in Kosovo 

Israel Seeks 20 More F-35 Stealth Jets 

UK: Concern Social Networks Targeted as BlackBerry Helps Police Identify Rioters 

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Mainstream media is up in arms over the latest revelations in the ever-growing Murdoch scandal. In a firestorm of outrage, reporters are screaming at the top of their lungs about stunning privacy violations. Members of Congress passionately demand that everyone responsible be investigated and prosecuted. In his letter to FBI Director Mueller, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, had cited reports that News of the World journalists “attempted to obtain phone records of victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 through bribery and unauthorized wiretapping.�

He also cited reports that the reporters had solicited a New York police officer “to gain access to the content of private phone recordsâ€� of the 9/11 victims. The NYPD does not intend to conduct an investigation into these shocking allegations. They’re leaving it up to the federal authorities, even though accusations of bribery against one of its own would certainly be within the police department’s purview. Ironically, the FBI has been aware of News Corp’s criminal misconduct for years, but elected not to pursue it until now.

We could only wish that our politicians, law enforcement and the mainstream media were eager to act when our own government engages in the same abuses against law-abiding citizens. Anyone responsible for conducting warrantless surveillance, wiretapping and hacking should be held accountable. The Department of Justice announced that it does not intend to prosecute any government officials responsible for unlawful acts committed under the guise of a “war on terror�. Instead, whistleblowers who exposed the very unlawful acts in question are the ones being prosecuted.

In the mean time, the Murdoch firestorm continues to spread high and wide, engulfing mainstream media’s power structure in its wake. Implications of this case go far beyond the unsavory tabloid tactics employed by the international media empire. It will mar and negatively alter the image of journalism, politics and law enforcement. This case exposed the corruption and media manipulation on a mind-boggling scale that involves 9/11 victims, politicians, celebrities, the royal family, police corruption, murdered children and victims of the 2005 London subway bombings. Murdoch tried to downplay the magnitude of this fiasco by telling his own publication, the Wall Street Journal, that his executives had made only “minor mistakes.â€� These peccadilloes went far beyond digging through garbage bins. They reportedly included unauthorized wiretapping, bribing the police to gain law enforcement access to confidential records (including medical and financial files of prominent politicians) and hacking. Read more È

According to our inside sources a new Bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Prozac will be launched before the end of the 112^th Congress. The primary purpose of the Prozac Caucus will be to raise awareness and advocate for this ‘miracle drug’ aka ‘happiness pill,’ on the grounds of combating homegrown terrorism and domestic violence, lowering the national divorce rate, and increasing the level of general job satisfaction among the restless American workforce. “Increasing the level of general satisfaction and happiness, while decreasing the effects of violence and despair inducing factors such as anxiety and depression, are the major keys to achieving long term national security, family unity, and work force stability. With Prozac we believe we can achieve all that and more,� said a congressional aide who wished to remain anonymous. The caucus will have an interactive website with easy-to-print promotional materials and a password protected section for physicians titled ‘Patriotic Physicians for a Secure America.’

Let’s start with what is a congressional caucus, or at least what it is supposed to be, in theory that is. A congressional caucus is a coalition of House and Senate members who meet to discuss specific legislative priorities and policy issues. Caucuses ‘supposedly’ allow members to discuss issues to determine their positions and make sure their votes are informed. They can also give ‘advocates’ a chance for a group of legislators to champion their cause on the Hill. You may go ahead and change ‘advocates’ to ‘lobby and you’ll be even more on target.

When we look at the long list of these caucuses, a list that initially had only a few but seems to lately  have taken off rapidly, we see some caucuses that seem rather ‘ordinary and expected;’ for example,  Children’s Environmental Health Caucus or Congressional Dairy Farmers Caucus. We also see some ‘amusing’ ones, such as Congressional Bike Caucus, Congressional Soccer Caucus, and Congressional Boating Caucus.

You follow me so far? Okay, then there are more than a few caucuses that are ‘confusing:’ Democratic Israel Working Group, Congressional Israel Allies Caucus, Congressional Friends of Jordan Caucus, and other ones for Turkey, Jordan, etc.  Why do I say ‘confusing’? Well, in the above paragraph we outlined the caucus definition, which includes ‘giving advocates, aka lobbies, a chance to influence, aka lobby, their cause through the members of their caucus. In this case, the advocates, aka lobbies, are foreign, and this means ‘direct foreign influence,’ and that in turn would make the representatives in these caucuses who then influence and lobby the rest of the Congress ‘foreign agents.’ Think of it as two-tiered foreign lobbies: Read more È