Writing a blog like The Oligarch Kings can lead one down strange rabbit holes in the internet, filled with weird assertions and peopled by bizarre middle-aged men who live on their own and wear tin foil hats.  Sometimes they write books which are even odder.

This is not one.

The CIA Makes Science Fiction Look Unexciting and published by AK Press scares one silly, and rightly so. The book is a pocket sized format, which here seems to mean a small, difficult to read booklet, written by Abner Smith edited by Joe Biel and printed in small print.  Persist though, it is extremely well written, calm, thoughtful and frightening book where Smith shows how far down the slippery slope America has slithered.

The book divides into a number of long essays on present and past events that have fed into the CIA’s present state of paranoia.

First off we see the influence the CIA had in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; then follows a discussion regarding the AIDS virus which I am not so convinced by; next a well argued exposé of the killing of Filiberto Ojeda Rios, a Puerto Rican independence movement leader whom you probably have never heard of; but should have; then a searing review of the woeful Patriot Act; finishing up with a romp through the Iran-Contra affair.

Taken together the book is scathing on the United States’ foreign and domestic policies since the fifties. Yes indeed the claims are radical, but Smith presents these so calmly and with such a light humour, (usually so missing in the left), that one is carried along.  Any lingering doubts are dealt with by the level of solid scholarship, and the wealth of supporting footnotes and further reading.  It is a great starter for the new reader short on facts to explain current events and the worldwide anti-American backlash.

$9.95 in USA, so at the same cost as a couple of heavyweight Sunday papers it’s not too bad a price.

I just wish the look of the book was better!

Copyright David Macadam 2013

I first spotted this young oligarch about town, Christopher Cox, when he was standing in 2010 for Congress.  At that time I noted that he seemed somewhat shy of pushing the fact of his Nixon relationship, even though it is his middle name. 

Following that failed try at Congress he seems to have shed his reticence and embraced his family warts and all.  This week, to world wide attention, he turns up in China to help commemorate his grandfather’s famous visit forty years ago – and give his political ambitions a damn good shove.

And a wonderful time he has of it with photo-opportunities aplenty.  His wife is Andreas Catsimatidis, daughter of John Catsimatidis, billionaire and political donor as well as failed candidate for New York Mayor.  She too has been able to use the trip as a try out on the celebrity/political stage.  She has managed very well too, and despite the snipping of some commentators about her looks, her dress sense and her more than impressive cleavage, she has not put a foot wrong.

Chris we must remember is the son of Nixon’s daughter Tricia, and Edward Ridley Finch Cox, the chairman of the New York Republican State Committee, so no small cheese he.  Eddy Cox’s own family is noble and long on oligarchic descents from the Finches, the Coxes, the Livingstones and the Delafields.

Another oligarch on the make.

Copyright David Macadam 2013

There is something serious happening on Cuba. in America’s own Gulag at Guantanamo.  It’s not getting too much attention on the public media, although the internet is keeping tabs. There many of the remaining 160 prisoners trapped, tired and frustrated by years of official indifference to their rights have gone on hunger strike.  So now five years following Obama’s profession that he will close this abomination on the face of American Justice, what we see is the threat of men killing themselves to get justice from the American legal system.  They have been cast into a modern day oubliette and left to be forgotten by the world.  A symbol of America’s paralysed political divisions and the excesses of this “war on terror”.

Which is odd considering America’s stance at other times.

Back in June 1987 Reagan gave a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, where he entreated with Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” and to open the prison that he saw Eastern Europe as being.  His rhetoric soared implying that all East Germany was a great prison gulag.

And his had not been the first.  Back in the early seventies the British, faced with a virtual civil war in Northern Ireland, took the action of interning in prisons like Long Kesh (later the Maze) any Catholics they felt belonged to the IRA.  These were remarkably similar to Guantanamo in that they too were held indefinitely without trial.

Time passed and the prisoners in the Maze tried to catch the world’s attention to their plight.  They began a ”dirty protest”, not wearing prison clothes and smearing the walls with their excrement.  They did not wash. and wore only the blankets they had for bedding.  Hence their name of the “Blanket boys”.  Finally, lead by Bobby Sands they started a hunger strike.  Several died, including Bobby Sands who had been elected to the British parliament.  America’s reaction was strident and hectoring.

Edward Kennedy addressed the US Senate in 1981, saying “the death of Bobby Sands is a symptom of a deeper crisis — a crisis that will go on and on and on in Northern Ireland, until the Government of Great Britain, the Government of Ireland, and all who truly seek an end to violence care enough to speak and work for peace”

On May 6, 1981 Kennedy and several other politicians, including Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., and Gov. Hugh L. Carey, wrote a telegram to Margaret Thatcher to convey their dissent to the British policies of force-feeding and denying trial: “We question a posture of inflexibility,” they wrote, “that must lead inevitably to more senseless violence and more needless deaths in Northern Ireland”.

American politicians can therefore be said to see the mote in your eye but ignore the beam in their own.

That America, with over two hundred law schools and a million plus lawyers can not see that not bringing a prisoner to trial in ten years is not just a bad idea, but is fundamentally unjust, showing that theirs is a system broken possibly beyond repair is extraordinary.

One prisoner is dead already.  Adnat Lalif was send home to Yemen in a pine box after what was called “an overdose of pills” which only begs the question of how a prisoner on 24 hour surveillance found the opportunity to acquire the pills and take such an overdose.

Obama said within his first week of his first term that he would rid America of this carbuncle.  Yet five years on it still disfigures the face of her liberties.  Why does he not just live up to the rhetoric and release them or take them to court?

Have you ever been fed by a tube?  I have, and it not pleasant.  There are, as I recall, three phases to the experience.  First the tube is thrust up your nose and down the back of your sinuses into the back of your throat.  This makes you gag.  Second as it goes down the gullet there is the roughness and abrasion as it goes, as well as more gaging.  Finally as it is pushed through the sphincter into the stomach there is an overwhelming urge to be sick.  Pulling the tube back up is every bit as bad.

Slips down a treat….

This happens to the prisoners twice a day every day whilst they are strapped to a chair.

Yes, the prisoners may well be dangerous.  They may be crazy too, but the prison systems in America are already filled with the crazy and dangerous.  To say they cannot deal with these additions is not credible.

And remember these are prisoners who have not been charged, and are denied due process to have their cases heard in court.  There is no habeas corpus here.  It is a massive failure of publicity, legality and humanity.

Surely it is time for the American people to call on their President and shout “Mr Obama tear down this fence” and let the men there either face justice or be sent home.

Copyright David Macadam 2013

“How safe is America?” or a similar question, endlessly rephrased a hundred different ways, is definitely the question of the week.  The airways are thick with it, because America is undergoing one of its fits of being made to feel scared of the other, the outsider, the alien.   We have witnessed, indeed we have been treated – so lavish was the coverage, to quite the most extended period of security theatre for years, stretched out over every channel in town. Thus justifying all that tax-payer money.

Goodness they even shut the city for it.  One wounded gunman limping away and an entire city of four million is placed under military curfew.  This is a wonderfully American over-reaction designed simply to instil a sense of overwhelming fear in its people.  What other reason could there be?  They weren’t very competent bombers.  I mean seriously, a pipe bomb in a pressure cooker charged with black powder?

It doesn’t happen elsewhere.  It didn’t happen in France during the days of the OAS in 1962 when they even tried to assassinate De Gaul on several occasions.  It didn’t happen during the days of the Baader Meinhoff terrorists in 1970’s Germany who were truly murderous, and it most certainly did not happen in the 1980’s in Britain, even when the IRA managed to blow up the hotel that the Prime Minister and her cabinet were in for a party conference.  At no time in any of these dark days was Paris, Bonn, or London closed.  Grief, they never even put Belfast under a curfew and they were bombing and knee-capping people there every other night.

Whilst not taking away any of the horror of the outrage itself, or the individual tragedy for those caught up, it is an extraordinary action.

One might even suspect that far from seeking to encourage a stiff upper lip attitude, a sense of “Keep calm and carry on”  a spirit of the blitz mentality, the government positively wants people to feel endlessly afraid of their neighbours and anything that does not exactly fit their accepted norm. To be made to think that what has happened is utterly extraordinary, and they are at elevated risk.  To make them feel dependent on them the Government for their safety and above all not to ask why?

The actions this week have been called Terrorism, where elsewhere, like say Chicago or downtown Los Angeles four dead on one day would be called “Wednesday” or every-day. Five people died yesterday in a shooting in Seattle, and sadly I doubt anyone will remember it by the end of the week.

Last week I have estimated the deaths by firearms in the United States at about 85.  Eighty five this week, next week, and every week to the end of time.  Even at a rough extrapolation this is a staggering 4420 deaths by gunfire every single year not counting the maimed and injured.  Year on year, on year.

If the American government wants to make your streets safer, more attention should be paid to sorting out Gun Control rather than concentrating entirely on terrorists.  But that is just too difficult, and too many vested interests keep the legislature from acting in the interests of its people.

Copyright David Macadam 2013

]]> http://theoligarchkings.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/how-safe-is-america/feed/ 3 theoligarchkings Keep-calm-and-carry-on-scan http://theoligarchkings.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/wal-mart-and-ignorance/ http://theoligarchkings.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/wal-mart-and-ignorance/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:47:44 +0000 David Macadam http://theoligarchkings.wordpress.com/?p=4976 ]]>

A funeral will take place in London today.  It is, we are told, strictly not a State Funeral although this fiction is increasingly hard to maintain.  If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, then it’s a State Funeral.  Goodness me, the Queen is attending, the route is lined by the British armed forces, the coffin is borne on a gun carriage wrapped in a flag, traffic is stopped and the bells of Big Ben are muffled and they are playing nationalistic hymns.  We concern ourselves that Obama will not come, but are pleased Mr & Mrs Cheney will.  Of course it’s a bloody State Funeral.

So what’s wrong with that you might ask?  Well quite a lot really.

One major difference between America and Britain is that we separate the powers of Chief Executive from those of the Head of State.  Our Head of State is the Queen and her functionary is the Prime Minister who gets on with the grubby business of day to day power.  Our Queen is a unifying figure whose principal role is to draw the country together and epitomise the values that hold us together in a national family. Monarchs have State Funerals.  Monarchs do the fancy stuff in ermine and pearls and stunning state dinners.  Monarchs have “ceremonial funerals”.  Politicians by their very nature must be divisive figures, who press their philosophies first on party and then country.  Politicians get down and dirty, doing the deals that are needed.  By nature they are factional, which is why in the modern era there has only been one such funeral before, that of Churchill in 1965.

MacMillan never had a State funeral, he was buried quietly on his estates, nor did Wilson, or Callaghan or Home.  Heath had a big old service in Salisbury Cathedral but his was a private celebration albeit on the lavish side.  All these figures, great as they no doubt were, were by nature people who espoused differences in the state.  None of them would have countenanced a State Funeral.  Orwell would have argued that provided politicians have no great public funerals we can never have a Stalin.

Faction was Thatcher’s middle name.  Never in this last century has a politician divided the country as much as she did.  Even Tony Blair is a mere contentious shadow compared to the visceral spitting emotions this woman could still raise twenty odd years after removing from office.

Well, you might argue she was “transformational”, that she turned the country round, but so too was Attlee who ushered in the Welfare state and the NHS.  He though was buried simply, in a quiet church in 1967, devoid of soldiers and flags and the trappings of state, in a service with 150 friends and family.

This decision by Cameron and the Conservative party is not tradition, far from it, it is a novel constitutional innovation that should have been resisted.  By introducing this we blur further the division between Prime Minister, and Monarch.  The people are not raised by this, rather we are diminished.

We can only hope today that the British will not allow this ceremony to be turned into a triumphalist Conservative party political broadcast, and will turn their backs on this sorry event.

Copyright David Macadam 2013

]]> http://theoligarchkings.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/thatchers-state-funeral/feed/ 2 theoligarchkings 534220_10151878247169199_1560748005_n http://theoligarchkings.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/clinton-a-new-generation/ http://theoligarchkings.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/clinton-a-new-generation/#comments Sun, 14 Apr 2013 10:05:12 +0000 David Macadam http://theoligarchkings.wordpress.com/?p=4963 Continue reading »

It’s shaping up to be a busy time for our favourite oligarchical clan the Clintons.  We already know that mummy Clinton is set fair for a second go at Presidential glory come 2016 but what about the rest?

This week Chelsea Clinton has graciously allowed it to be known that should an opportunity present itself, should the call come her way, then she would, reluctantly of course, allow her name to go forward; to step in at these difficult times to aid her country and bring solace to the people.  Biting your hands off to get a nomination more like.  Of course Chelsea has experience, and not simply a childhood at the White House.  She stepped forward to help her mother Hilary during the 2008 campaign where she showed an inheritance of her father’s skill of working crowds, glad-handing with the best of them, and an evident enjoyment of the whole thing.  It’s only now a matter of timing for Chelsea to try out for her own ticket.

Meantime her mother-in-law, former US Representative Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky has been spotted by Politicalticker as a possible candidate for Pennsylvanian 13 Congressional district because the sitting representative Allyson Schwartz is tipped to go for Governor.

Marj, frankly, is not a great bet politically, and in this blog’s opinion is only sustained in her deluded dreams by the fact of her daughter-in-law’s talents and connections and being part of the greater oligarchic Clinton clan.  A political bed-blocker of the first water, she only managed a single two year term as Representative last time.  In 1998 she ran for Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania pushed through the Primary selection process to lose the election itself.  Her ex-husband Edward Mezvinsky was also a Congressman who fell from grace in 2001 over a fraud case involving $10,000,000.  He served five years.  Like Weiner she is simply another scandal tainted Clinton politician hoping for rehabilitation.

Oligarchy, alive and well and looking to 2014 and 2016.

Copyright David Macadam 2013     

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Well you might just be the lucky one!  I mentioned previously, back in January, that Ol’ Bubba himself is coming to wow his many fans in Scotland, at the Scottish Business Awards ceremony where he will deliver a speech entitled “Embracing our common humanity”.

The Scottish Business Awards ceremony usually has the all fervour and red carpet appeal of a Rotarian Dinner, or the annual Masonic AGM.  It’s not exactly the most newsworthy event in the social calendar, but now the event on Friday 21^st June at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre is certain to be a sell-out.

Not only will some 1400 of Scotland’s unco guid be offered “VIP” tables where they and their guests are guaranteed a photo and a cuddle with the great man (going for £3,000), but now it seems you can bid for a date with the bold boy.  A date with Bill Clinton!  A whole day in New York in the company of the ex-pressie himself, it’s quite a coup.

How much?  Well don’t expect too much change from this side of £60,000 (not including your air-fare or room costs I suspect).

Copyright David Macadam 2013

]]> http://theoligarchkings.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/a-date-with-bill-clinton/feed/ 3 theoligarchkings HRC_contest_top http://theoligarchkings.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/margaret-thatcher-is-dead/ http://theoligarchkings.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/margaret-thatcher-is-dead/#comments Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:04:38 +0000 David Macadam http://theoligarchkings.wordpress.com/?p=4951 Continue reading »

“Ronnie, Ronnie is that you darling?”

Like Nixon, Maggie Thatcher was more loved abroad than at home.  Like Kennedy, many will cheer her death and toast her demise with off colour jokes and a party.  Unlike Carter, there was no lengthy healing glow of a political afterlife wandering the world as a pro-consul “doing good”.  Maggie is marmite; you either loved her or loathed her.  Today, as we learn of her death, there is no consensus in Britain as to her legacy.  The nation does not join together in polite respect for a public figure who served her country as Prime Minister for eleven years, half the nation mourns her passing, the other rejoices.  The wounds run deep and sore.

Like almost no other politician in my remembering (except perhaps Churchill who also instilled similar divisions) she divides the country even today, nearly twenty five years after her rule.

Like it or not we all live in a country made in Maggie’s image, we are all her children.  She achieved great changes here and across the western world, but my feeling is that as the years pass the judgement of her posterity may be less and less kind.

She came to power because the country had simply had enough of the post-war construct.  A lethal combination of over weaning Trade Unions, more bloody minded than Bolshie, hopeless industrial management who felt the world owed Britain a living for winning the war and saving the world (as if) and an incompetent series of governments that could not keep out of the way, brought Britain to a grinding, shuddering halt through strikes and ghastly economic management.  Maggie came as little less than a saviour.

She undid much of the worst aspects of Britain.  But her reforms damaged as much as they solved.  She destroyed the Unions’ power, ultimately emasculating them and leaving unable to help the working classes in this present worst of economic winters.

The middle classes loved this union bashing, this was exactly the reform they had cried out for, until she hollowed out their professions and closed shop associations with the same zeal.  Sluggish, complacent middle class middle management was decimated.  Doctors no longer ran the hospitals, now the manager ruled supreme.  In Maggie’s Britain the world had been delivered to the bean counters who knew the value of everything and the value of nought.  Teachers were reduced to functionaries, Universities brought to heel.  Most famously she de-regulated the stock market with its “Big Bang” making her the grandmother of the 2008 economic crash.

She did not recognise the value of the old structure.  Famously she said there was no such thing as “society”.  Individualism and greed walked together, and they still do.

She bought into Globalisation seeing that markets could be opened up to all and sundry, that service to customers improved and items were made more cheaply.  Britain was transformed.  No longer did you wait three weeks to a month to get a telephone. Industries closeted from foreign rivals for decades disintegrated in the face of faster quicker thinking, better managed foreign imports.  True, the cars we drive today are better than the clapped out old bangers of my youth.  But my car today is a Volkswagen and the home grown car industry died.  My phone is mobile and cheap, but it is also not made here.  These industries died from the medicine Maggie applied, as did shipbuilding, electronics, and, most divisively, coal mining.

Britain is a rock built on coal and the Union which gave Thatcher the most trouble and tried hardest to depose her was the National Union of Miners.  Never mind, she could convert the power stations to gas and so set about to break the union.  She succeeded in this, but we lost the entire industry.  In killing King Coal she devastated whole towns and neighbourhoods, left them ripped apart never to recover, prey to chronic unemployment, crime and drugs.  We are still putting sticking plasters on these communities today.

All of which was paid for by oil a wasting resource, and Banking a bubble waiting to burst.  Rather than, as Norway, which ploughed the spoils of the North Sea into infrastructure, she used it to bolster the reforms and bribe the electorate with tax cuts wasting the advantages her revolution gained.

True, she showed resolve in retaking the Falkland Islands.  For the first time since Suez, the empire struck back.  She faced down American opposition in this, but also joined with Reagan to bring down the Soviet Empire (not that it needed too much of a push). It all aided her in going for a khaki election and romping home over a lacklustre Labour challenge.

Her success with the Falklands was overweighed by her failure to persuade the Chinese to renew the lease on Hong Kong.  Its not a great balance sheet to save the Falklands but lose Hong Kong.

Her tough “handbagging” of Europe won plaudits but undid the work of Heath bringing Britain to the top table where she wasted many opportunities.

Her “Poll Tax” was the political equivalent of opting for a winter offensive on Moscow.  Here her natural nous for getting the feel of the electorate failed her.  Doomed from the start, it dragged her faltering reign down.  Even today the hatred of this unfair tax means there is only one Conservative MP in all Scotland and most Conservative support lies in the affluent south-east of the country where the limited benefits were to be felt.

We are a very different country today from before she was Prime Minister.  It is a more divided, shallower and less confident country.

Copyright David Macadam 2013 

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Miscegenation 2013

Forty-five years after the death of Martin Luther King jr there is still segregation in the South.  This week we were told of the almost astonishing fact that still, today, in 2013, schools in Georgia allow racially separate school Proms to go ahead.

Despite Brown v Board of Education in 1954 change comes dripping slow in Georgia.

In Georgia, America’s undimmed Pharos of enlightenment and liberality, they still hold that if the children have to be taught together, then by God they will do their damndest to make sure they don’t meet socially.  Hence the fuss over the annual leavers dance which in America is known as the Prom.

Wilcox County High School get round the law by the entirely contrived argument that since the dance is held “off campus”, and they don’t get involved and don’t put any public funds to it, it’s nothing to do with them.  A piece of southern sophistry that has not done them any favours whatsoever.  Backpedalling in the face of national and international opprobrium is obvious from their thin forced apologies.  Wilcox County School District tell us that they will deign to “consider a motion” regarding the matter for next year 2014.  Oh how very good of them, oh how very meaningful.  A motion.  What a bunch of colostomy-bags.  Just get the bloody thing changed and do it now!  Before you make yourselves even more of a set of pariahs than you are already.  Dear God do you need to be shown up by a few seventeen year olds before you do the right thing?

Gawker got hold of them and they reportedly said :”While the school has no official stance on the matter, it did decide that there should be only one homecoming king and queen this year.

But it was an empty gesture: The white king and black queen were not allowed to take joint photographs for the yearbook, and neither is allowed to attend the other’s prom.”

Clearly interracial dancing is objectionable to the so called grown-ups in the county as any coloured person trying to go to his school dance would be forcibly removed by Police.  In 2013.  Keep remembering this, it’s today not the nineteen fifties.

Not that Wilcox County is all on its own in this.  Oh no.  There were segregated proms in Montgomery County sixty miles away until 2009 and Taylor County High School near Columbus Georgia only threw its first integrated Prom in 2002.

Racism may not be limited to the South but boy do they know how to showcase it.

If you find this as offensive as I do. and you would like to show these kids your support, then head to their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/IntegratedProm2013

Copyright David Macadam 2013