Whozzoomingwho?
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Whozzoomingwho ?
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http://www.onepennysheet.com./category/track-911/
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Mar 29, 2004 ... Remember Ronald Reagan's October Surprise? It Never Happened. By Daniel Pipes. Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. ...
October Surprise " Remember Ronald Reagan's October Surprise? It Never ...
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... all stories about the " October Surprise" that never happened converge. ... She has subsequently included all of this in her book, October Surprise. Around the same time, William Casey assured a journalist that if anything happened to help ... Exactly 15 minutes after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office, ...
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Sick wrote that in October 1980 officials in Ronald Reagan's presidential .... Newsweek never printed a correction.. Newsweek also alleged that the story was ... continue to claim that the October Surprise conspiracy actually happened. ...
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Nov 28, 2010 ... They forgot the 1980 “ October Surprise” too. stewartm ... I remember, in the latter years of Reagan's presidency, ... Ronald Reagan was a clueless clown who never had an original thought in his life. ... But that never happened, because everyone with even minimal critical thinking skills knew that ...
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1980 October Surprise ( Reagan/Bush deal with Iran to >delay< hostage release until after ... I remember, I saw it as it happened. When I looked for developments and ..... "We never, of the Reagan team, never thought of these battles as ...
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Oct 15, 2010 ... Reagan. Main article: October surprise conspiracy theory. During the Iran hostage crisis, the Republican challenger Ronald Reagan feared a last-minute deal to release ... As it happened, in the days prior to the election, ... If the name Lee Hamilton sounds familiar, you might remember he was the ...
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... has still not digested Ronald Reagan's presidency, October Surprise offers some solace. ... As it happens, five years later I found myself dealing with ... The Israeli government has officially stated that Ben-Menashe never held an ... Indeed, in a 1988 interview in Playboy, a year before he “ remembered” this ...
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Dec 11, 1999 ... Remember too that the U.S. had frozen Iranian funds and had military spare parts desperately ... and the victory of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. ... It would never have occurred to me to even think of doing this. ... The October Surprise coup d'etat led to the 12-year Reagan-Bush Administration. ...
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After Reagan took office in 1981, Casey became CIA director, a position he .... After the 1980 New Hampshire primary, William Casey took over Ronald Reagan's then-troubled campaign. ... [See The October Surprise X-Files or Trick or Treason. ] ... but it would be stupid for me to talk about what happened in France ...
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http://hnn.us/articles/4249.html
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3-29-04
Remember Ronald Reagan's October Surprise? It Never Happened.
By Daniel Pipes
Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org.
The October Surprise conspiracy theory holds that in October 1980, Ronald Reagan conspired with the Islamic Republic of Iran to beat Jimmy Carter in the U.S. presidential elections on 4 November . The deal: in return for the Khomeini government keeping its U.S. hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran until after the election, damaging the Carter's candidacy, Reagan would reward it with armaments. The conspiracy theory endured for over a decade, from 1980-93, but has since disappeared.
The idea originated with Lyndon LaRouche, one of the most prolific, original, and bizarre of U.S. conspiracy theorists. Just after the 1980 election, one LaRouche magazine ( Executive Intelligence Review , 2 December 1980) first laid out the conspiracy theory, then another one repeated it three years later ( New Solidarity , 2 September 1983). The idea attracted minimal attention, however, until the Iran-Contra scandal of late 1986 seemed to fulfill the terms of the alleged deal. The former president of Iran, Abol Hassan Bani Sadr, tentatively tried out this theory in an article on 12 April 1987 in the Miami Herald . When commentators in the United States (Christopher Hitchens in particular, writing in The Nation , 4-11 July 1987) endorsed the idea, Bani Sadr felt emboldened to make ever-larger and more elaborate claims (the New York Times , 3 August 1987; the Miami Herald , 9 August 1987; and an August 1987 interview [Cockburn, 192-3; 281]).
A handful of conspiracy theorists in the United States (Barbara Honegger, Martin Kilian, David Marks, Robert Parry, Jurgen Roth, and Craig Unger) began researching Bani Sadr's allegations and stumbled upon an array of self-promoters, con men, and criminals from several countries. The cast included Israelis (Ari Ben-Menashe, Ahran Moshell, and Will Northrop), Frenchmen (Robert Benes and Nicholas Ignatiew), Iranians (Jamshid Hashemi, Ahmed Heidari, Houshang Lavi, Hamid Naqashan), Americans (Richard Babayan, Richard Brenneke, William Herrmann, Oswald LeWinter, Heinrich Rupp and Gunther Russbacher), and even a South African (Dirk Stoffberg). Not only did they confirm the story and add their own elaborations, but the researchers carelessly contaminated their sources by informing them of others' statements, further stimulating them to grandiose claims.
After a year, Bani Sadr returned to the topic and found his conspiracy outline fully fleshed out; he was especially impressed by Brenneke's allegations at a 1988 trial in Denver, which in his eyes offered official documentation of the plot. Encouraged by this new information, the former Iranian president now hypothesized a much larger and longer-lasting conspiracy between Reagan and Khomeini ( Playboy , September 1988; and the interviews he granted to Jean-Charles Deniau in September and October 1988, forming the basis of their joint book [Deniau and Sadr, 48; 57]).
Although the October Surprise theory had now ripened, it remained the guilty pleasure of die-hard conspiracy theorists. Only when the New York Times on 15 April 1991 devoted an exceptional two-thirds of its opinion page to this thesis did it become a public issue. The author of this article, Gary Sick, brought to the issue an establishment pedigree (navy captain, Columbia University Ph.D., Ford Foundation program officer, Human Rights Watch board member) as well as the credibility of having served as principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. Sick alleged that "individuals associated with the Reagan-Bush campaign of 1980 met secretly with Iranian officials to delay the release of the American hostages until after the U.S. election. For this favor, Iran was rewarded with a substantial supply of arms from Israel." Sick also raised the possibility that George Bush was one of those Americans, thereby impugning the legitimacy of at least one subsequent Republican president.
The October Surprise instantly vaulted to national importance. Leading television shows devoted hours to the subject, weeklies made it the subject of cover stories, and Jimmy Carter called for an investigation. A January 1992 poll showed 55 percent of Americans believing these allegations to be true and just 34 percent finding them false (Goertzel, 733). As part of his preparations to run for the presidency, H. Ross Perot sent his associates to talk with Gunther Russbacher in his Missouri jail cell. WSJ 14 Apr 92 In February 1992, the House of Representatives voted in favor of an investigation of the chargesNYT 6 Feb 92 and the Senate followed suit soon after.
Sick himself expanded his op-ed into a 278-page book, October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan . Here, Sick characterized the 1980 election as a "covert political coup." To give his story the feel of authenticity so important to a conspiracy theory, he chronicled in loving detail events that (it turned out) never took place. Thus, discussing a phantom meeting in Madrid on 27 July 1980, for example, he provided this little touch: "The conversation was interrupted twice, when hotel waiters arrived to serve coffee" (Sick, 83).
So much attention to the October Surprise theory meant it had to be checked in sober and exhaustive detail, and under such scrutiny it promptly collapsed. Several journalistic investigations started the process, especially Frank Snepp, "Brenneke Exposed," Village Voice, 10 September 1991; John Barry, "Making of a Myth," Newsweek , 11 November 1991; Steve Emerson and Jesse Furman, "The Conspiracy That Wasn't," New Republic , 18 November 1991; and Frank Snepp, "October Surmise," Village Voice , 25 February 1992.
Two congressional inquiries then confirmed these conclusions. The Senate stated that "by any standard, the credible evidence now known falls far short of supporting the allegation of an agreement between the Reagan campaign and Iran to delay the release of the hostages" (Committee on Foreign Relations 1992, 115). The House report went further, declaring that "There was no October Surprise agreement ever reached." It found "wholly insufficient credible evidence" that communication took place between the Reagan campaign and the Iranian government and "no credible evidence" of an attempt by the campaign to delay the hostages' release. The report also expressed concern that "certain witnesses may have committed perjury during sworn testimony" (Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union 53; 7-8; 239).
Surprisingly, given that once started, conspiracy theories tend to live on indefinitely, this one did not. For once, research successfully discredited a conspiracy theory. Symbolic of this was that Oliver Stone decided not to make a movie on this topic. But a devout conspiracy theorist sticks to his guns and Sick continued to forward the October Surprise thesis, writing ( the New York Times, 24 January 1993) that the House report "does not lay . . . to rest" his claims of campaign contacts with Iranians; and that it "leaves open the possibility" of Republican interference with the Carter administration's foreign policy negotiations.
The October Surprise episode holds much interest as a conspiracy theory case study. In particular, two features stand out: Gary Sick's having single-handedly transformed it from a story only taken seriously on the left-wing fringe into a credible mainstream claim; and the clarity with which it confirmed the conspiracy theorists' tendency to accuse others of what they themselves are doing. On this latter point: again and again, one finds that whereas the conspiracy theorists' accusations of collusion and illegal behavior were unsubstantiated, they themselves engaged in precisely such behavior . Examples include:
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They claimed Casey and Bush pretended to be in the United States when they were in Paris and Madrid. Richard Brenneke, perhaps the single most important informant for the October Surprise thesis, claimed to be in Paris and Madrid when credit card receipts proved he was in Portland, Oregon.
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They accused Reagan campaign officials of plotting to save their necks, when this is what the conspiracy theorists were doing; at least seven of them (Robert Benes, Richard Brenneke, Ahmed Heidari, Nicholas Ignatiew, Oswald LeWinter, Hamid Naqashan and Will Northrop) were implicated in a 1986 sting operation and the October Surprise offered a way to rehabilitate their reputations.
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Sick, a former Carter Administration official, accused the Reagan campaign of secretly working out an arms deal with the Iranians. In fact, as Sick himself already disclosed in 1985, Jimmy Carter initiated such a deal.
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Sick accused others of withholding information, yet this is precisely what he did, keeping quiet about the hundreds of thousands of dollars he received from Oliver Stone for the movie rights to the October Surprise story.
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Sick accused U.S. government officials of lying, yet he was less than honest himself. He wrote in his New York Times article that he had heard rumors of a Reagan-Khomeini deal during the 1988 election campaign but he "refused to believe them." Not so: on 30, Oct. 1988, at the very peak of the 1988 election campaign, he told The Rocky Mountain News , "At first I dismissed this, but not any more. I'm convinced on the basis of what I heard that there were some meetings in Paris."
References
Cockburn, Leslie. 1987, Out of Control . New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press.
Deniau, Jean-Charles, and Bani Sadr. 1987. Le Complot des ayatollahs . Paris: Editions la Découverte.
Goertzel, Ted. 1994. "Belief in Conspiracy Theories." Political Psychology 15.
Sick, Gary. 1991. October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan . New York: Times Books.
U.S. House. 1993. Committee of the Whole House on the Steven Emerson, "No October Surprise" American Journalism Review (March 1993) http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id394.htm
State of the Union. Joint Report of the Task Force to Investigate Certain Allegations Concerning the Holding of American Hostages by Iran in 1980 . Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
U.S. Senate. 1992. Committee on Foreign Relations. The "October Surprise" Allegations and the Circumstances Surrounding the Release of the American Hostages Held in Iran. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
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http://www.mybudget360.com/jobs-for-middle-class-gone-under-banking-dominance/?utm_source=feedburner
Jobs for middle class expansion are long gone – The struggles to create
jobs that will create a vibrant middle class have vanished under the foot
of banking dominance.
Posted by mybudget360 in Employment, banks, economy, government, income, middle class, recession, unemployment, wall street
matter). In fact, over the past decade average Americans are doing much worse adjusted for inflation.
The defined contribution plan or pensions has given way to 401k/403b plans that push people into gambling
on the casino known as Wall Street. Job protection is weaker than we have seen since the end of the Great Depression. Yet we are told that the economy is good without a solid job market?
If you want to put this into perspective take a look at this chart:
If you want to put this into perspective take a look at this chart:
Source: Minneapolis Fed
This is as bad of a recession as we have had in our generation. The employment market has been broken down piece by piece.
If you think of the 1990s and the technology boom, the employment market seemed to be bustling and growing at a rapid pace.
That is, until companies realized they could offshore jobs and pay overseas workers one-fifth or less for the same kind of work.
Then the decade of 2000 came along and everyone was making money gambling in the housing market. The unemployment rate fell
to record lows as everyone that wanted a job pretty much had access to one (even though wages were stagnant debt masked this
major problem). When that bubble burst, typical American workers were thrown under the bus for the sacrifice of the banking sector
once again. Ultimately that is the problem. From the start of the recession back in late 2007 the entire focus has been on protecting
banks and keeping home prices inflated to keep banks propped up. Home prices fell while bigger banks consolidated power and
became more powerful. What should have occurred was a focus on creating jobs to ensure a vibrant middle class in the U.S.
That question never appeared anywhere for policy discussion.
Here is another perspective on how bad the job market is:
With the latest jobs report we realize that employment growth is weak to non-existent in many sectors. The jobs that do come back
are lower paying jobs in many cases. A recent article talks about the difficulty of employers to hire people back at lower wages:
“(Slate) What gives? Employers these days seem taken aback when highly qualified, experienced people fail to rush to apply for the openings they post. The article supplies several possible explanations: For jobs that require specialized skills, there simply might not be enough qualified applicants; employees accustomed to working at higher-paying office jobs aren’t eager to take lower-paying jobs at truck stops and restaurants; some of the unemployed might prefer collecting a few hundred dollars per week in unemployment benefits, while they last, to working a job that pays $8 per hour.”
Though I agree with some aspects of the article, what they fail to focus on is lower level financial positions and construction work for
example has been decimated in this massive housing bubble. These jobs are not coming back. Did many of those tech jobs ever come
back after the tech boom and bust? Of course not. Many of these jobs won’t be coming back, at least anytime soon, because we have
built way too many homes and have inventory for years to come. So to expect that these better paying finance jobs (i.e., mortgage
broker, personal banker, real estate agent, financial analyst) or construction jobs to come back might be premature. The article goes
on to focus on why some of the lower paying jobs sit empty:
“In theory, given the high level of unemployment, huge numbers of enthusiastic, qualified workers should be flocking to all the openings that are available, even if the wages aren’t fantastic. In this kind of climate, you should accept the offer you get and be happy with it. And for many jobs, that might make sense. Going from making $80,000 after being downsized from a local law firm to making $70,000 at one in the neighboring office building might be a bummer but would be manageable. Taking a 15 percent pay cut to stay on at the restaurant that just went bust might make sense. But the labor market isn’t a perfectly efficient one. Most companies, especially small ones, hire from local labor pools. And if you’re in an area where the population is stagnant, declining, or aging, the numbers may be working against you. If jobs require people to commute a great distance or to move themselves to another state, or to another hemisphere, employers may find they need to sweeten their offers.”
This is not realistic thinking. The median household income in the U.S is $52,000 and has gone down further in this recession.
To think there will be $70,000 jobs that are plentiful in this market is not going to happen. Unless you work on Wall Street, try going
out there and demanding a higher wage and see what happens. The fact of the matter remains that 4 out of 10 Americans work in low paying service sector jobs and this sector is growing. The article basically confirms the continuing erosion of the middle class.
For manufacturing jobs, this has been going on since the 1970s:
We have grown by leaps and bounds with population but the actual number of nominal workers in manufacturing has fallen by half
since the 1970s. These were good paying jobs that provided access to the middle class. The banking propaganda would lead you
to believe that as long as you work in the service sector and give your money to some Wall Street broker that after 30 years, you
too will have a little nest egg stashed away. How has that turned out with the current casino? Jobs in construction have also
tanked in this recession:
You’ll notice after every recession above, construction jobs jump back in a v-shape when the recession ends. We are nowhere
close to that and given the glut of commercial real estate and residential real estate, it is likely to remain depressed for years to come. Banks will continue to raid the taxpayer’s wallet and make sure they get their keep even though they are largely the most responsible
party in this economic calamity. When the propaganda hits from investment banks, just look at the facts and where the jobs are
(or in this case, where they don’t exist).
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http://www.mybudget360.com/jobs-for-middle-class-gone-under-banking-dominance/?utm_source=feedburner
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When a Congressional investigation cleared the Reagan campaign team led by ...
that brought the USA to the verge of, even worse than the present ones, wars,
... October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald ...
As the mainstream media sought to dismiss the October Surprise theory, ...
Reprise of the October Surprise: Is the Worst Surprise Still to Come? ....
Exactly 15 minutes after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office, the hostages ...
Then-Israeli Ambassador to the US Moshe Arens told the Boston Globe in October
...
Apparently, being a Massachusetts liberal is only slightly worse than the next
... (more than even Ronald Reagan) other than the guy he was running against.
...
Jul 8, 2010 ... When Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president in January 1981, ... But if there
is a Second 9/11 attack on America this October, and worse than the first, ...
There will be an October Surprise pulled off by the Dems, ...
Jul 9, 2010 ... When Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president in January 1981, ... is a Second 9/
11 attack on America this October, and worse than the first, ...
Worst of all, Sick accuses U.S. government officials of lying, yet he appears
less than honest himself. In a May 2, 1991 article in ... My main writings on
the "October Surprise" conspiracy theory, in chronological order: ... "Review of
October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan.
...
With the October Surprise cover-up in shambles, the evidence points to a CIA-
Likud ... role in covering up the worst political crimes of the Reagan-Bush era.
... "October Surprise" has been more mysterious or more influential than the one
.... In the early 1990s, the word of Ronald Reagan's friend Earl Brian helped
...
May 8, 2010 ... A Russian government report, which corroborated allegations that Ronald Reagan's
presidential campaign .... This is fucked up for more than just the Reagan thing
. .... Perhaps the Iranians figured that Reagan would be worse for ...... If
this October surprise was intended to beat Carter and win the ...
Jul 18, 2010 ... In the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, Mexican president Jose Lopez Portillo ... Far
worse than under apartheid. Double the unemployment rate and ...
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