Income trajectories from 1967 to 2016: We examine changes in income and class position over two fifteen-year periods (1967 to 1981 and from 2002 to 2016). According to the Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) the findings are: -The median income growth experienced by prime-age Americans over a fifteen-year period has been cut by almost two thirds, from 27% to 8%. -The proportion experiencing a large income loss has more than tripled, from 4% to 12%. -The upper middle class has expanded significantly, while the “middle” middle class (MMC) has shrunk from 50% to 36%. -Income growth at the top of the distribution has been almost twice as fast as in the middle (48% at the 95th percentile, compared to 26% at the median). -Upward mobility out of poverty has declined, from 43% to 35%. -Downward mobility from the MMC has doubled, from 5% to 11%. -More education has become more closely associated with a higher income; 59% of those with a BA+ are in the upper middle class or higher, up from 37%. The analyses presented here confirm the broadly accepted picture of rising income inequality and slowing income growth for middle-class. Slower income growth for of the rest of the population, combined with a heightened risk of losing economic ground over time, may help explain the current discontent of many in the American middle class. Source: www.brookings.edu
On the Trail of the Assassins sold about forty thousand copies when it was originally released in hard cover. Jim Garrison's book was the primary source material for Oliver Stone’s hit film JFK—is Garrison’s own account of his investigations into the background of Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of President Kennedy, and his prosecution of Clay Shaw in the trial that followed. In what was probably an unprecedented campaign in the history of American cinema, the MSM attacked the film JFK seven months in advance of its release. In fact, Ben Bradlee and the The Washington Post sent George Lardner to Dallas to write a story as the film was being shot in Dealey Plaza. Lardner’s article was the first volley in a seven-month MSM campaign that was intended to make sure that the reception of JFK was jaundiced in advance. Many of the same people who attacked Garrison back in the sixties were brought back to do so again, like Hugh Aynesworth and Edward Epstein. The fact that neither of these men was at all credible or objective on the subjects of the Kennedy assassination or Jim Garrison was irrelevant. The goal was to savage the film before it had a fair hearing.
In spite of this assault, JFK did well at the box office, both at home and abroad. It was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture. But to show the reader just how nutty the anti-JFK crusade was, consider the following. On the eve of the Oscars, an anonymous author bought an ad in the trade journal Variety. The ad asked that no voters cast their ballot for the film as Best Picture. Researcher Rich Goad did some detective work and found out that the ad was paid for by the late Warren Commission counsel David Belin. Garrison had always insisted that, for various reasons, he was never able to reveal most of the evidence he had secured from 1967-69. Authors like William Davy, Joan Mellen and myself went through what the ARRB attained and we saw The Garrison files in the Archives hold an abundance of utterly fascinating material on a wide array of subjects dealing with many aspects of the JFK case. Does the MSM reveal any of this to the public? No. In the twentieth century, and up until today, the American media has been controlled by an oligarchical class. Some authors call this class the Eastern Establishment. Some call it the Power Elite.
As sociologist Donald Gibson explained in his fine book Battling Wall Street, President Kennedy was not a part of that group. He never joined the Council on Foreign Relations; he did not join any secret societies at Harvard; he didn’t like working intelligence during World War II. He got transferred out to the South Pacific and served with a bunch of Joe Six Pack guys on what were close to suicide missions. As this author demonstrated in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed, both in the Senate and in the White House, Kennedy was opposed to much of what this Power Elite was doing abroad, especially in the Third World. After his death, the progress that he did make in the White House was largely reversed. Jim Garrison was probably the first critic of the Warren Commission who understood this matter. And it is probably one of the reasons the MSM decided to smear him beyond recognition. With the release of Garrison’s files by the ARRB, there is no doubt today that Clay Shaw used the pseudonym of Clay Bertrand. The declassified files contain over ten witnesses who stated this was the case. It is further revealed that the FBI knew this as well.
It is also now shown that Clay Shaw lied about his association with the CIA. That association has turned out to be a long service and a lucrative one. Not only did Shaw lie about it at his own trial, the CIA continually lied about it, and Robert Blakey fell for it. In the HSCA volumes, Shaw is referred to as part of a large businessman’s contact program in the Agency. Not true. Shaw was a well-compensated contract agent from at least the fifties. The CIA tried desperately to cover up these facts, even going as far as altering Shaw’s files. (William Davy, Let Justice Be Done, p. 200) The ARRB later discovered the CIA had gone even further and destroyed Shaw’s 201 file. As the late Yale educated attorney Allard Lowenstein once said regarding the Robert Kennedy assassination: in his experience as a lawyer, people who have nothing to hide don’t hide things. As authors like William Davy and Joan Mellen have shown, the media utterly destroyed Jim Garrison. Before Garrison took on the Kennedy assassination, he had a promising career ahead of him as a Louisiana politician. Many thought he could have been governor or senator from the state. That career was utterly wrecked by the two-year roasting he took in the press from almost every outlet imaginable: CBS, NBC, NY Times, Life Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, to name just a few. Garrison was eventually defeated in his District Attorney re-election bid due to two sets of phony pinball kickback charges, which he defeated at trial. But the publicity weakened his position and strengthened his opponent Harry Connick, who defeated him in a close election in 1973. To most legal observers, Connick turned out to be a very poor DA compared to Jim Garrison.
After Jim Garrison was retired from the DA’s office, it took him years to recover from the ordeal he went through. At that time, people who visited him in New Orleans said he had a small office that he rented from a larger firm. This is the man who likely would have been residing in the governor’s mansion if not for the JFK case. As the declassified files reveal, before Garrison’s probe was exposed, he was making a lot of progress. Afterwards, it was open season on him. And he was targeted by the big guns of the media. NBC sent in Sheridan, Newsweek sent in Hugh Aynesworth, and the Saturday Evening Post sent down James Phelan. Many writers have shown how these men obstructed Garrison once his inquiry was out in the open. Although the coroner ruled David Ferrie had died because of a ruptured berry aneurism, he left two typed, unsigned suicide notes. A later coroner, Frank Minyard, pointed out that in photos, one could see bruising on the inside of Ferrie’s mouth and inside the lower lip. Minyard theorized that Ferrie could have been poisoned with some kind of solution that could have caused the aneurism. As Bill Davy and others have demonstrated, Garrison had called Shaw in for questioning as early as December of 1966. Davy analyzed why Shaw’s answers during questioning provoked Garrison’s further interest in the man. As his inquiry began to pick up steam, Garrison discovered that Shaw knew Ferrie, Banister, and Oswald. And he was seen in the Clinton/Jackson area with Ferrie and Oswald. The idea that somehow Shaw was an admirer of President Kennedy, is contradicted by no less than Ferrie himself. Ferrie said that Shaw hated JFK. The CIA eventually declassified documents which show Shaw was well compensated for his services dating back to the fifties. As per the expenses for his defense, Shaw’s defense team was getting tons of help from Washington. Source: kennedysandking.com
Jim DiEugenio: Lyndon B Johnson reversed almost all of Kennedy's major foreign policy programs: Congo, Indonesia, Dominican Republic, and Vietnam. He also completely mishandled Kennedy's civil rights program and his planned war on poverty, which ended up being stillborn. Harry Truman did to FDR what LBJ did to Kennedy. Once FDR died disastrous things happened: the atomic bombings of Japan--killing over 200,000 civilians in three days--and the igniting of the Cold War. And we are living with those two horrendous events today. This is why Republicans like George Will like Harry Truman. He is the indirect father to the neocon movement, which controls foreign policy today. The alternative was FDR and Henry Wallace. Eisenhower, as the authors of that fine book Subversion as Foreign Policy note, was the father of American assassination plots and regime change in the Third World. It was Ike who directly ordered the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. It was Ike who ordered the plans to overthrow Castro. He gave free rein to the Dulles brothers and their ideas about American dominance in the Third World: Guatemala and Iran.
The idea that Woodrow Wilson was a progressive president is also belied by his creation of the privately held Federal Reserve Board, the stock in that monstrosity was owned by the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Warburgs. This is progressive? Obama promised us Hope and Change. Yet his plan on salvaging the economy differed little from what Paulson originally announced in 2008 (TARP) and started doing in January of 2009. Geithner essentially revised it a bit and expanded it. People like Krugman criticized the program on the grounds that they were really non-recourse loans from which asset managers would benefit greatly--in other words, not only would no one be indicted, they would be rewarded for the disaster they created. In foreign policy, did Obama stop any of the NSA surveillance programs? Did he get us out of Afghanistan? It's pretty bad when Trump does the things that Obama should have done. Defending Obama by saying that he did not have a veto proof senate reminds me of the shameless defense of Clinton that says well, derivatives and the destruction of Glass Steagall had the votes anyway! Well, Clinton could have vetoed both. He did not.
In 1936, after the first New Deal, FDR made his famous speech upon being nominated. He said words to the effect that in his first term he had tamed the wild beasts of corporate greed. In his second term he planned on bringing them to their knees. With the Obama/Biden actions of 2009, Wall Street brought Washington, the White House and the American taxpayers to their knees. The annual deficits rose under Obama as compared to George Bush, and they were pretty bad under Bush. They did not begin to stabilize until about 2013. But even then, they were worse than they were under Bush. The price of all this is America became a bankrupt country. To do anything now one needs to use the Fed. And we will be paying for it for a long time.
When JFK began his partial test ban treaty everything was stacked against him. He worked on it day and night: it passed overwhelmingly. When he began his civil rights bill in 1963 he was not even close to getting it passed--back then you needed 67 votes to dodge a filibuster. So, in June of 1963, he began the biggest lobbying program in modern history. That program paid off when, after his death, RFK, Hubert Humphrey and Tom Kuchel broke the filibuster in the summer of 1964. Senator Richard Russell later admitted that it was JFK's courting of, and bringing into Washington, the midwest Protestant ministers that eventually broke the filibuster. To me, that's leadership. Source: educationforum.ipbhost.com
No comments :
Post a Comment