The U.S. M$M is a Joke!

[Nbadan]

A major McCain Fund-raiser funded right-wing paramilitary murder groups in South America and the left-wing terra group FARC, even paid a multi-million dollar fine, and the M$M yawns....


sToSzM71zCA

..make no mistake about it, the M$M is asleep at the wheel again just like before the illegal 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq and if the American people don't wake the media the Fuck up were gonna wind up with a third Bush term with John McCain....

[Marcus Bryant]

If it's on TYT and posted on YouTube it's got to be true.

[AZLouis]

The co-host of a recent top-dollar fundraiser for Sen. John McCain oversaw the payment of roughly $1.7 million to a Colombian paramilitary group that is today designated a terrorist organization by the United States.

Carl H. Lindner Jr., the billionaire Cincinnati businessman, was CEO of Chiquita Brands International from 1984 to 2001, and remained on the company's board of directors until May 2002. Beginning under his tenure, Chiquita executives paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known by the Spanish acronym AUC), which is described by George Washington University's National Security Archive as an "illegal right-wing anti-guerrilla group tied to many of the country's most notorious civilian massacres."

Following a Justice Department indictment last year, Chiquita admitted to illegally funding the paramilitaries and agreed to pay a $25 million fine. Chiquita's payments to the AUC began in 1997 and lasted seven years; roughly half of the funds came after the group was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department in 2001.

According to the Justice Department, the payments "were reviewed and approved by senior executives" of Chiquita, who knew by no later than September 2000 "that the AUC was a violent, paramilitary organization."

Late last week, Lindner co-hosted a $25,000-per-person fundraiser for McCain and the Republican Party in the wealthy Indian Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. The event raised about $2 million; Lindner also serves on McCain's Ohio Victory Team.

While Lindner was CEO of Chiquita, the company began sending money to the AUC through its shipping subsidiary Banadex. A report by the Organization of American States states that Banadex also engaged in arms trafficking, helping to deliver 3,000 Nicaraguan AK-47 rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition to the AUC in 2001. According to federal prosecutors, when company officials realized the arrangement was illegal, they switched to making the payments in cash.

"We believe they saved people's lives," a Chiquita spokesman told Time magazine last year, alleging that the company was simply trying to avoid violence against their employees.

Chiquita's funding of violent paramilitaries does not end with the right-wing AUC. The fruit giant "had been making similar payments to the leftist FARC and ELN guerrillas" since 1989, also on Lindner's watch.

Those payments ended in 1997 as "control of the company's banana-growing area shifted" to the AUC, according to the Associated Press.
McCain, who is currently visiting Colombia to promote free trade, has described FARC as "one of the worst" terrorist groups and accused his opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, of being unwilling to support Colombian President Uribe's anti-terrorist efforts.

That the Arizona Republican is raising funds from a man whose company once paid that very same terrorist group seems likely to sully his charge.

Aides to the Senator did not return request for comment, though they have repeatedly argued that the campaign does not have direct connections to companies represented by such fundraisers or advisers and, as such, should not be held accountable for their actions or presumed to be persuaded by their interests.

However, in the past, McCain has done favors on Lindner's behalf. Last May, the Washington Post reported that in the late 1990s, McCain "promoted a deal in Arizona's Tonto National Forest involving property part-owned by Great American Life Insurance, a company run by billionaire Carl H. Lindner Jr., a prolific contributor to national political parties and presidential candidates."

Moreover, McCain's chief political adviser, Charlie Black, lobbied for Chiquita on two separate occasions in 2001. According to records, Black was paid $80,000 to work on foreign trade issues.

Black, as the Huffington Post reported on Tuesday, has represented other controversial clients with operations in Colombia. From 2001 through 2007, his work brought his firm more than $1.6 million in lobbying fees from Occidental Petroleum, a company whose security arm was accused of bombing a Colombian village and killing 17 civilians in 1998.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/0..._n_110354.html

[Aggie Hoopsfan]

Obama's associated with terrorists, where's the outrage there? Oh right, it's only bad when the Republican candidate does it...

[Anti.Hero]

LMFAO at someone complaining the M$M is silent about a rep. and not even mentioning the other side.

LMFAO x2.

[Nbadan]

Obama's associated with terrorists, where's the outrage there? Oh right, it's only bad when the Republican candidate does it...

Obama hardly garnered the financial support of a known terra-ist - big difference...if this had been the other way around the wing-nut echo-chamber along with it's shills in the M$M would have been over this like stink on shit, but since it's McCain........the Maverick.....there's not a peep....

[Marcus Bryant]

Yeah, the media has been fawning over McCain and ignoring Obama. Small wonder nobody in TX politics has even heard of this forum.

[Winehole23]

n December, two Republican senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, pushed Congress and the president into giving away what could amount to over $130 billion in public property.

That’s enough to provide every single unemployed American a minimum-wage job for an entire year. That’s enough to pay for a year of tuition at a public institution for every college student in the US.
And yet the GOP big-shots call themselves “fiscal conservatives”! “Fiscal conservatives,” my you-know-what.


I’m talking about the huge giveaway to the mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton in the Defense Authorization Act. It was splayed across ten pages of the bill, pages 441 to 450 (out of 697).

[Winehole23]

n a land-swap deal, the Defense Authorization Act took four square miles of Tonto National Forest—public land in Pinal County, just outside Superior, Arizona—and gave it to Resolution Copper, so that Resolution Copper can build a copper mine on the site. According to Resolution Copper’s website (http://resolutioncopper.com/the-project/), the copper resource under that land contains 1.6 billion metric tons of copper-rich ore, which itself contains 1.47 percent copper. (That’s roughly 30 pounds of copper in every ton of ore.) So there are approximately 23.5 million tons of copper sitting under those four square miles of public property.

As I write this, copper goes for $5666 per ton. So the copper under those 2,422 acres of national park land is worth roughly $133.8 billion, at current prices.


The law does say that if the land Resolution Copper gives the federal government in return is less than the federal land they just got, they’ll have to pay the difference in cash. But that Resolution Copper gets a say in which appraiser gets chosen, and it’s not clear that the appraisal will fairly incorporate the value of the copper reserves.


(Wouldn’t it have been much simpler to put the land up for competitive sale, with a prescribed mandatory royalty? That’s how oil and gas leases on federal property are handled. But then there would be no way to “throw” the property to Resolution Copper, or to finagle the consideration for it.)

http://www.thenation.com/article/198129/did-gop-just-give-away-130-billion-public-property#

[Winehole23]

McCain and Flake pressed hard for this rip-off to be included in the Defense Authorization bill, even though it has nothing to do with defense. The Defense Authorization bill is a “must-pass” bill, like appropriation bills and debt ceiling bills. It has passed Congress, and been signed into law by the president, fifty-three years in a row.


Rio Tinto and BHP’s minions had tried to get the Resolution Copper swindle through the House of Representatives as a separate bill. They failed, even when the GOP controlled the House. But when McCain and Flake stuffed it into a huge defense bill, it sailed right throughsame

[Winehole23]

There is a certain irony that Senator Jeff Flake, of all people, earmarked this public land for Resolution Copper. During his twelve years in the House of Representatives, Flake was famous for exactly one thing: trying—and failing—to kill other congressmen’s earmarks. 60 Minutes glorified him as a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington character (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/rep-flake-on-cutting-congressional-pork/) for that. Flake offered 140 amendments to kill individual earmarks. The House voted against Flake on 138 of them. One was ruled out of order. One of them passed, in which Flake blocked a $129,000 grant to a charity in North Carolina.


So Flake kept $129,000 out of the hands of a charity, ran for the US Senate on that basis as an anti-earmark champion, and won. And now he has helped the two largest mining companies in the world to land worth over $130 billion.

[Winehole23]

Mogrovejo, you listening? Yr precious Jeff Flake, sucking up to special interests.

[boutons_deux]

Flake and McLiar probably have received, and certainly will get, $Ms in campaign, etc contributions in quid pro quo corruption.

and the stuffing pork and other shit in "must pass" bills, like the govt funding bill, passed up against a "govt shutdown" deadline, that made taxpayers liable for Wall St inevitable bankruptcies from gambling with Main St deposits.