01/25/12

Evidence, George Soros’ Prediction of ‘Evil’ in America is Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

By: James Simpson
Gulag Bound

Generally speaking, George Soros cannot be trusted with anything he says. He is a calculating liar, and not nearly as smart as people credit him.

However, in the following case I agree with him. But this is not because he is making one of his bogus predictions. I believe him because he is instead saying what he expects to happen due to the destruction he, Obama and the others are willfully wreaking in this country.

At LaborUnionReport.com

Soros: “I am not here to cheer you up…”

Most people know the name George Soros, the mastermind behind…well, a lot of stuff.

This comes via the Daily Beast.

Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. “At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”
[Emphasis added]

US Debt: $15.2 Trillion

Unfunded liabilities: $117 Trillion

Liability per taxpayer: $1,038,835

Bankruptcy: Not if, but when.

Source: U.S. Debt Clock

Reminder: President Obama’s State of the Union Address starts at 9 pm EST. He is expected to make his re-election pitch in order to “finish the job.”

__________________

“Socialism has no place in the hearts of those who would secure the fight for freedom and preserve democracy.” Samuel Gompers, American Federation of Labor, 1918

James Simpson

See James Simpson’s Cloward-Piven series, which informed the Glenn Beck program, the break-through presentation of conspiracy facts connecting George Soros, community organizations, unions, foundations, and Barack Obama:

The Complete Manufactured Crisis Series


Gulag Bulletin:

From pages two and three of the Daily Beast article, Soros would appear to show the sociopathic, coldly calculating specifics about the chaos he is fomenting, in part through foundations Tides and Ruckus, emphasis ours.

While Soros, whose new book, Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States, will be published in early February, is currently focused on Europe, he’s quick to claim that economic and social divisions in the U.S. will deepen, too. He sympathizes with the Occupy movement, which articulates a widespread disillusionment with capitalism that he shares. People “have reason to be frustrated and angry” at the cost of rescuing the banking system, a cost largely borne by taxpayers rather than shareholders or bondholders.

Occupy Wall Street “is an inchoate, leaderless manifestation of protest,” but it will grow. It has “put on the agenda issues that the institutional left has failed to put on the agenda for a quarter of a century.” He reaches for analysis, produced by the political blog ThinkProgress.org, that shows how the Occupy movement has pushed issues of unemployment up the agenda of major news organizations, including MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. It reveals that in one week in July of last year the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on major U.S. TV news networks. By October, mentions of the word “debt” had dropped to 398 over the course of a week, while “occupy” was mentioned 1,278 times, “Wall Street” 2,378 times, and “jobs” 2,738 times. You can’t keep a financier away from his metrics.

As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”

See the George Soros tag for the deep information on Soros, including a history of his mayhem, Top 5 Revolutions Backed by George Soros,” by Lisa Graas.

See the Occupy Wall Street tag for the same on Soros and friends’ backing of that top-down movement, for example, by Bound journalist, Robert Beaudine, with initial comments:

…George Soros helped finance OPTOR, which spawned CANVAS, which trained some choice Egyptian activists who helped the Arab Spring create the void that will be filled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Here in the US, Soros organized and financed the OWS protests… he was behind, well, every regime change taking place. I knew CANVAS was the training center … I wrote about Egypt:

In The Neo-Marxist Globalist Engineers of ‘Leaderless Occupy Wall St.’” Gulag Bound, 10/31/2011:

CANVAS provided the necessary training. According to Tina Rosenberg’s February article in Foreign Policy, “Revolution U,” “They have worked with democracy advocates from more than 50 countries. They have advised groups of young people on how to take on some of the worst governments in the world – and in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria-occupied Lebanon, the Maldives, and now Egypt, those young people won.”

Perhaps winning is a relative term like the truth. Eight months after her article appeared, it doesn’t look like the Egyptian people have won anything except a sorry economy.

And, very directly related, see: DSA Marxists Take Over the Occupy Movement: Plan ‘Spring Offensive,’ with Widespread Occupations of State Capitols, Schools and Workplaces,” Gulag Bound, 1/16/2012.

01/25/12

Russia Today Hires WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange – Will the Kremlin Be Pleased?

By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

Is WikiLeaks biased against the West and the US in particular? This news item would tend to indicate so.

Julian Assange

According to Christian Science monitor Moscow correspondent Fred Weir, Kremlin funded media outlet Russia Today, is to hire WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. This despite the fact that Assange remains under house arrest in Britain, awaiting a Supreme Court decision on his extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations.

According to Weir:

WikiLeaks founder and controversy magnet Julian Assange has been driven off the Internet, deprived of funding and placed under house arrest. Now he will get his chance to strike back, courtesy of the Kremlin.

Starting in March, Mr. Assange will host a 10-part series of interview programs with “key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries” on Russia Today (RT), a state-funded English-language satellite news network which claims to reach more than 85 million viewers in the US alone.

According to a statement on his website, the new Assange series will explore the “upheavals and revolutions” that are shaking the Middle East and expose how “the deterioration of the rule of law has demonstrated the bankruptcy of once leading political institutions and ideologies” in the West.

Assange said in a statement published on his website:

“Through this series I will explore the possibilities for our future in conversations with those who are shaping it… Are we heading towards utopia, or dystopia and how we can set our paths? This is an exciting opportunity to discuss the vision of my guests in a new style of show that examines their philosophies and struggles in a deeper and clearer way than has been done before.”

According to Fred Weir the Kremlin should be very pleased with this coup:

The network says the series could reach as many as 600 million viewers worldwide.

The six-year-old Russia Today, which seems far better funded than most media these days, has battled accusations that it is a Kremlin vanity project since its inception.

The station tends to tiptoe gingerly around the controversies of Russian politics, but aggressively applies its own slogan – “Question More” – in its coverage of Western affairs and particularly the global role of the US.

In 2010 it opened a full-time US TV channel, RT America, which produces independent content on US politics and economics from what it calls an alternative – critics say anti-American – point of view.

Hiring Assange would seem a perfect fit for RT. Worries that WikiLeaks might dump a lot of embarrassing material about the Russian government into Internet never panned out.

However, the thousands of US diplomatic cables that it did release proved to be the gift-that-keeps-on-giving for critics and rivals of Washington, including the Kremlin.

We liked a lot of the WikiLeaks revelations. It was very much in sync with what Russia Today has been reporting about the Arab Spring, and about the duplicitous policies of the US and its allies all along,” says Peter Lavelle, a senior journalist with RT and host of its Cross Talk public affairs program.

I think the Russian government will be pleased [to see Assange working on RT]. It’s a soft power coup for Russia,” he adds.

Fred Weir

It is interesting that Fred Weir chose, (or was chosen), to break this story in the mainstream media. This is how he profiled himself in a March 2004 article in The Walrus:

I came to Moscow over twenty years ago as a correspondent for the Canadian Tribune, the now defunct weekly newspaper put out by Canada’s Communist Party. I was a third-generation red diaper baby from Toronto, and a long-time member of the party. My uncle, trained at the Lenin School in Moscow in the 1920s as an agent of the Communist International, spent many years in the USSR. I’d visited a few times, had studied Russian history up to the graduate level, but never wanted to live there until Gorbachev came to power in 1985…

I grabbed the Tribune job as soon as it was offered to me.

My own dispatches to the Tribune were mostly stories about how well Gorbachev’s plan was working out. I travelled in cramped, smoke-filled Aeroflot jets across the Soviet Union, from Leningrad to Vladivostok, and everywhere found people waking up to new possibilities…

Fred Weir is well connected to the new Russian communist/business elite:

Sometime in the spring of 1991… I was invited to a garden party at the country home of Andrei Brezhnev, nephew of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, in Zhukovka, an elite dacha settlement outside Moscow. One of the guests, whom I’d known for years as a functionary of the Komsomol (the Young Communist League) rolled up in a shiny white Volvo and told me he was now president of an import-export firm. Another, whom I’d often dealt with as an official of the Tribune’s fraternal newspaper, the Soviet Communist Party organ Pravda, boasted that he’d just been hired at a private bank. A third, even more surprising because he was the son of renowned Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, leaned over the table and handed me a card that announced him as an “international business consultant.”

In a “Statement by Konstantin Preobrazhensky, former Soviet KGB officer, on the impact and purpose of Russia Today television,” given to America’s Survival, Inc. organization, led by  journalist Cliff Kincaid, released April 1, 2011, the former KGB officer wrote the following about it.

“Russia Today” was founded in 2005 especially for propaganda abroad. It has been aimed at ‘explaining Russia’s position on the main international issues and inform foreigners about Russian life’. According to Gzt.ru, it has been financed totally by the Russian government. In 2005-2006, the government has delivered $30 million annually. i

The methods of propaganda are managed by Directorate “A” of Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. The specialty of Directorate “A” is deceiving world public opinion and manipulating it. It has got a lot of experience over decades of the Cold War.

“Russia Today” is only a part of the Russian industry misinformation and manipulation created recently in the USA by Putin’s KGB. It is including the utilization of some American think-tanks and political scientists, their direct work up by Putin  at annual meetings in Russia , putting Russian Americans under Kremlin’s control, etc. This industry aims at creating an inadequate, adorned image of Russia, provoking American to make wrong steps in their Russian politics.

Interestingly, Fred Weir is a contributing editor to Chicago based socialist journal In These Times, where he serves alongside Barbara Ehrenreich, a founder of Progressives for Obama and a member  of the US’ largest Marxist organization Democratic Socialists of America. Ehrenreich’s daughter, Rosa Brooks (named after Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg), is a senior adviser to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy.

Barbara Eherenreich also serves as a trustee to the far left Washington DC “think tank” Institute for Policy Studies – once described by Brian Crozier, director of the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict, as the “perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB.”

In These Times, began life as an official project of the Institute for Policy Studies. Its current board of editors includes such leftist luminaries as David Axelrod‘s mentor Don Rose and long time Obama allies, former Weather Underground terrorist leaders, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Moscow’s communist networks spanned the globe and in most cases still exist.

Is WikiLeaks just another chapter in the long running East West propaganda war?

A war the West is losing, because it doesn’t even realize it is still being waged.

01/25/12

Why Doesn’t Obama Ban Iranian Press TV?

By: Kenneth R. Timmerman
Accuracy in Media

Authorities in Britain revoked the license of the Iranian regime’s English-language global television channel known as Press TV because of evidence that it is a propaganda outlet controlled by the Iranian regime. But the Obama Administration permits the channel to operate on American soil without a license and in violation of U.S. sanctions regulations, which ban commercial transactions with Iran. It appears to be another example of Obama coddling the terrorist regime.

British authorities justified the move by citing the specific example of a Press TV 2009 interview with a Newsweek correspondent held in an Iranian jail. British telecom regulator Ofcom found that the interview by Press TV with Maziar Bahari, who was jailed by the Iranian regime over his reporting of the disputed presidential elections in June 2009, was conducted under duress. It held that Press TV was in violation of its British broadcasting license because its content was dictated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, the state broadcasting authority, and instructed the satellite carrier BSkyB to remove Press TV from its platform.

In the United States, the situation is even worse because although it operates openly in Washington, D.C., New York and Los Angeles, and regularly conducts interviews with such figures as Republican Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, it does not have a license from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). So far, the Obama Administration has done nothing to shut it down.

What appears to be lacking is a determination from OFAC pointing out the obvious—that the Iranian state propaganda channel is operating illegally in the U.S. Because of this failure to enforce the law, Press TV is able to operate a propaganda facility in downtown Washington, D.C. with a prestigious K Street address and send its operatives to observe and survey U.S. Government offices, under the cover of “freedom of the press.”

“While other countries might not respect the right to a free press, this is something we take very seriously,” an administration official told this reporter. “We like to stay true to our values.”

But why do our values permit accommodating the actions of an illegal television entity devoted to propaganda and support for an outlaw regime that the Obama Administration itself says supports international terrorism?

In the case at issue in Britain, Bahari was picked up by the Iranian authorities at his parents’ home in Tehran on June 21, 2009, and jailed for four months in Iran. After an international campaign won his release and he returned home four months later that October, Bahari said that his captors had forced him to read a prepared script in front of Press TV cameras, just as American POWs were forced to do in Vietnam.

Press TV has scrubbed the interview from its website but it was widely reported at the time. In the script his captors gave him to read, Bahari accused Western reporters of working “as spies,” and “confessed” that he had been covering “illegal demonstrations” as part of a Western effort to promote a “color revolution” in Iran. His family and the media dismissed his “confession” as clearly coerced.

Clinton Excuses Tehran

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed Iran hard to release Bahari, but never made a statement condemning Press TV for airing the coerced interview. “We’ve been condemning the Iranian government writ large on this, not any specific agency,” a State Department spokesman said.

The Obama Administration has continued to allow Press TV to operate unhindered in the United States, despite clear evidence that it is operating as a propaganda arm of the Iranian regime. Indeed, the State Department regularly entertains questions from Press TV reporters, and allows bloggers on its “DipNote” website to plug rabid anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda with links to Press TV articles and interviews.

“If Press TV were to request a license to operate here in the U.S., the activities that led to having their license removed in the UK would certainly be reviewed by us,” a U.S. official said. “But for now, we cannot take a similar action because they have no license.”

So because it operates illegally in violation of the law, the U.S. will take no action. This might be enough for administration lawyers, but it defies common sense.

Other Propaganda Outlets

Press TV is not the only Iranian government media organization operating in the United States. The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) operates Aftab TV, which broadcasts in Persian and operates a prominent website.

On December 28, 2006, for example, Aftab featured an interview with prominent pro-Tehran advocate Trita Parsi, who heads the National Iranian-American Council, NIAC. In prefacing the interview, Aftab stressed the importance of the “Iranian American lobby on behalf of the Iranian regime” and described it as the regime’s “unofficial diplomacy.”

Last year, IRIB opened yet another 24-hour TV network they billed as “Iran’s CNN,” called Islamic Republic of Iran News Network, IRINN TV. They began broadcasting in the U.S. with an hour-long live program from a new Washington, D.C. studio on April 6, 2011. Their flagship U.S. show is called “Two half-hours (Dow Nim Saat) that airs from 11 a.m. to noon everyday.

While most programs are in Persian, IRINN also broadcasts news in English via satellite to the U.S.

The regime has also lavished money on the print media as a means of maintaining an intimidating presence within the Iranian-American community. The U.S. edition of the Tehran daily, Etelaat, was printed in New York and flown via Federal Express to a dozen distribution points around the country for over two decades, until it was shut down last year after an undercover FBI investigation determined it was being funded illegally out of the Iranian Permanent Mission to the United Nations, a source involved in the investigation told me.

With the exception of Etelaat, the Obama Administration has continued to allow Iranian government media organizations to operate freely in the United States, mostly without licenses, despite nearly two decades of Iran sanctions that prohibit commercial exchanges between the U.S. and Iran.

Doubletalk from Obama

In a series of email and telephone exchanges, officials at the Department of the Treasury refused to acknowledge whether the administration or its predecessors had granted Press TV a license to operate in the United States.

“We are unable to comment publicly on organizations that may or may not have received licenses from OFAC. However, we note that as an official propaganda arm of the Iranian government, Press TV has a history of fabricating news and has faced lawsuits in the UK for airing forced confessions,” a Treasury Department official said.

Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Controls issues trade sanctions guidelines and maintains the list of “Specially Designated Nationals” (SDNs) banned from doing business with U.S. persons.

In the case where an organization subject to U.S. sanctions continues to operate in the United States by moving money under the radar, OFAC has often acted quickly and without warning to shut them down. But not in this case.

Spewing Filth

Press TV spews out unending streams of anti-American propaganda in a full-service program mix that includes talk shows, news reports, and TV magazines, aimed at an American audience via satellite.

Professionally-produced—often times by Americans—these shows trot out a congeries of conspiracy theorists, Holocaust deniers and their apologists, masquerading as “analysts” and “political commentators” to give them a veneer of respectability.

In this case, Press TV appears to be emulating the old Soviet Union, which specialized in propaganda for the regime and against its enemies. The Soviet-led Comintern sent propaganda specialist Willi Muenzenberg to America to recruit propaganda agents.

The Iranian regime has invested heavily in Press TV because it understands the value of propagandists who speak unaccented English and who are not openly tied to the regime to spread its ideological “payload.”

Muenzenberg wrote the playbook that was later used by Press TV and much of the “politically-correct” left in the 1920s and 1930s, when he set up a vast web of cover influence operators stretching from media to academia to America’s newsrooms that continue to make their message felt way beyond the grave.

As former CIA propaganda expert Kent Clizbe explains in his book on Muenzenberg, “the goal of the operations was to make Americans feel that their country was bad.”

“You claim to be an independent-minded idealist,” said Muenzenberg’s widow, Babette Gross. “You don’t really understand politics, but you think the little guy is getting a lousy break… You are shocked, frightened by what is going on right here in our own country… You believe in peace… You yearn for international understanding… You think the capitalist system is corrupt.”

The propaganda from Occupy Wall Street appears to be a modern-day example of the Muenzenberg approach.

Press TV takes the anti-American propaganda to a global level. Like the old Soviet propaganda networks, Press TV uses Americans to make the case against their own government and society.

Consider the case of James Fetzer, “a prominent philosopher” who went on Press TV to comment on the violent turn of the Occupy movement in Oakland last November.

He blamed the police. A professor at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, Fetzer said, “We are seeing the increase in militarization of the police forces throughout the United States and that is a very bad tendency that has been taking place since 9/11. We see the rich getting richer and the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. This gap has been widening since the administration of Ronald Reagan,” Fetzer said.

He went on: “What they are doing, the politicians are ignoring the needs of the average American and the working families. We have had increasing foreclosures, and unemployment is seen as the tip of an iceberg resistance to the corruption of politics in America… I believe this movement is not going to go away, and that what we are seeing is the real face of the police state of America has become.”

As it turns out, James H. Fetzer is indeed well-known—as a conspiracy theorist.

In a Wikipedia entry tagged by editors as “an autobiography,” Fetzer is described as “a well-known conspiracy theorist,” who has written extensively on the JFK assassination, 9/11, and the plane crash that killed U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone.

Fetzer claims, for example, that the film footage taken of the aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 was “video fakery” caused by “holographic projects,” because the high-speed crash was “in violation of Newton’s laws” of physics.

His own website highlights his book, The 9/11 Conspiracy: The Scamming of America. A YouTube video shows Fetzer arguing that Senator Wellstone was assassinated, not killed by accident in a plane crash.

After a federal judge in District Court in New York issued a finding last December that Iran “shared responsibility with al Qaeda” for the 9/11 attacks, Press TV naturally turned to Fetzer for comment. Calling the ruling “preposterous,” he said he knew who was responsible for the attacks: Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad.

“Multiple investigations by independent journalists have revealed that Israel—the Mossad—played a key role in 9/11,” Fetzer said. “Look up ‘the dancing Israelis.’ Look up ‘urban moving systems.’ Look up ‘CITS ‘and you’ll find ample indication that Israel was profoundly involved in 9/11.”

Another Press TV Propagandist

Another propagandist used by Press TV as an on-air commentator is Mark Dankof, whose support for the Ron Paul presidential campaign we highlighted in an earlier story.

In a May 2011 article aimed at discrediting the Ofcom case against Press TV in Britain, Dankof hauled out the big artillery. Why was the British government attempting to shut down Press TV? It was, of course, all because of the Jews.

“It may not be a coincidence that the British Ofcom case against Press TV Iran pops up against the backdrop of Netanyahu’s state visit to the United States to press his own case for ongoing Talmudic Death and Destruction in the Middle East,” Dankof wrote.

The “logic” of his case went like this: Press TV accuser Maziar Bahari was a contributor to Newsweek, whose late chairman, Sidney Harman, was married to Rep. Jane Harman of California, a Jewish Democrat. “Mrs. Harman, in turn…proves to be the very member of Congress wiretapped by the American National Security Agency (NSA) conveying promises to Israeli agents that the dogs would be called off from tailing and successfully prosecuting the espionage case involving key executives of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC),” Dankof wrote.

In the article, “Empire continues to sweat over Press TV,” he went on, “This is the transparent connection in this case, as it is in other recent attacks on Press TV in the West involving media outlets and correspondents with provable connections to the American Jewish lobby; Israeli intelligence; and Neo-Conservatives thirsting for a War of Civilizations with Iran specifically, and the Islamic world generally.”

“If anyone wanted to run the traps and understand the connections, they should read the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” Dankof concluded. Press TV was being persecuted because it was “one of the few exceptions to The [Jewish] Lobby’s control of global print and electronically transmitted news and analysis.”

The Protocols was a Russian forgery designed to blame the Jews for the world’s problems. Muslim religious leaders and political leaders have touted its “accuracy” to me in interviews throughout the Middle East for decades.

More material of this sort can be found in the innumerable interviews Press TV conducts with “expert” Paul Sheldon Foote, whose favorite line is that “Crypto-Jews” have initiated a war between Christians and Muslims. Such arguments harken back to the ugliest forms of Western anti-Semitism.

The Rise of Press TV

When Press TV CEO Mohammad Sarafraz announced the creation of the new English-language satellite broadcasting channel in June 2007, he stated at the get-go that the goal was to spread the propaganda payload of the Tehran regime.

“Since September 11, Western bias has divided the media into two camps: those that favor their policies make up one group and the rest of the media are attached to radical Islamic groups like Al-Qaeda. We want to show that there is a different view. Iran, and the Shi’ites in particular, have become a focal point of world propaganda. From the media point of view, we are trying to give a second eye to Western audiences,” Sarafraz said.

While Press TV made some effort in its U.S. programming to invite guests who weren’t always fans of the Iranian regime, all pretense of its propaganda aims disappeared in May 2009, just before the stolen elections that gave Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term in office.

That was when a group of Ahmadinejad supporters raided the petty cash desk at Press TV’s Tehran headquarters and used the money to support Ahmadinejad’s election campaign, according to Press TV insiders who subsequently left or were forced to leave the network.

Since the June 2009 elections, opposition politicians, such as Mir Hossein and other challengers to Ahmadinejad, have been banned from the airwaves and Press TV has abandoned any pretense of even-handedness.

Skirting the Sanctions

Press TV has used a number of subterfuges to skirt the U.S. sanctions on commercial transactions with Iran.

From the start, Press TV has maintained close ties to the Iranian Mission to the United Nations, the Iranian regime’s only legal financial base in the United States. The UN mission may have paid some staff in cash brought in through the diplomatic bag. Press TV maintained an official presence at the Iranian Mission.

Because it could not incorporate directly in the United States, Press TV worked through production companies operating in the U.S., which in turn hired crew, correspondents, and producers.

Former Atlantic Television News (ATN) correspondent Colin Campbell questioned U.S. officials on Press TV’s behalf. ATN Productions Ltd. has seven reporters currently registered with the Senate Press Gallery: Nicholas Ewing, Affra Khallash, Taleb Khallash, Zina Khallash, Dirik Rice, Mohamed Said Ouafi, and Firas Tuma. The company is registered in Denmark and produces the weekly magazine show “American Dream,” hosted by an American, Nisa Islam.

ATN operates out of production studios located on K Street in downtown Washington, D.C. AIM Center for Investigative Journalism director Cliff Kincaid was invited and appeared on its “American Dream” program a couple of times, before realizing that ATN was operating as a front for the Iranians. When he criticized the Iranian regime on one of the programs, he was not invited back.

Press TV contacted Accuracy in Media on another occasion, looking for a guest for one of its programs to discuss why Republican Representative and presidential candidate Ron Paul was not getting more favorable attention from the U.S. media. Paul has pleased the Iranian regime by defending its pursuit of nuclear weapons. AIM declined the invitation but considered the request as more evidence of how foreign propaganda channels, such as Press TV and Russia Today, have embraced the foreign policy views of the Texas congressman.

The Press TV Media Universe

Press TV also contracts with American Press and TV Services (APTVS), an outfit run by Egyptian nationals Gamal Hassanein and Samir Ezeldin. Like ATN, they hire producers and camera crews to film events and conduct interviews at Press TV’s request.

“Gamal and Sam were running the operation, because Press TV was not allowed to incorporate here,” a former Press TV insider told me.

APTVS took over Press TV’s bureau at the United Nations in 2010. Like ATN, their correspondents and camera crews have all received press passes for the U.S. Capitol complex from the Senate Press Gallery. They hired Colin Campbell away from ATN, and have also registered the following staff with the Senate Press Gallery: Ibrahim Alshamrani, Moaz Attawia, Fahd Banhawy, Umut Colak, Samir Ezeldin, and Mike Kellerman.

The Senate press passes not only give the Press TV contractors access to the House and Senate chambers, but serve as accreditation for a much wider range of events reserved for members of the press corps, including White House, State Department, and Defense Department briefings. Although each of these three issues its own credentials to beat reporters (the “White House press corps,” etc.), the Senate press pass gets most reporters through the door for the occasional event.

Although APTVS and ATN are not part of Press TV, they produce “works for hire” for Press TV. Should OFAC decide to enforce the law, this could be construed to mean that they are engaging in unlicensed commercial transactions with Iran.

In an effort to forestall precisely such an investigation, APTVS for several years received payment from Press TV through a Palestinian production company in Ramallah run by silent partner Maher Shalabi, according to former Press TV insiders. On his Facebook page, Shalabi identifies himself as General Manager of that company, PMCC TV.

“Press TV used to contract Maher, and he then contracted with APTVS in Washington,” a former insider said. “APTVS then booked the guests and studios and conducted the interviews or satellite link-ups.” Shalabi also works for “Palestine TV,” and conducted a high-profile interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for that channel in 2010.

Do the activities of Press TV and these production companies fall within the “information” loop-hole of the Iran sanctions?

“If I am sending an academic journal, or some materials that actually will help the exchange of knowledge, that is allowed,” an Obama administration official told me. “But if I am actually conducting paid journalistic work, right now I still need a specific license to allow that to happen.”

Press TV does not have a license, this official hastened to add. “Therefore, they are operating illegally.”

Yet, the Obama Administration permits the channel to continue to operate in violation of the law. Congress should investigate.

Kenneth R. Timmerman is the New York Times best-selling author of Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran (Crown Forum, 2005), among other works. His books and articles can be found at kentimmerman.com.

01/25/12

Obama SOTU Plan: Smart as Staring Into Rifle Barrel “Hunting” for New Economy

By: Jeffrey Klein, Political Buzz Examiner
Examiner.com

While watching President Obama’s lengthy State of the Union address last night, rich in irony and “Gumby-like” stretching of facts, I was struck by one of his statements near the end, whose “direction” gave me an insight as to the mechanics of his “concept of reality.”

Periphrastically, his statement was, “…Once you business people find out how you can bring more [offshored] jobs back to America, you let me know–[then] the government will do everything in its power to help you accomplish it.”

A classic case of the ‘cart before the horse,’…absolutely backwards–like defying gravity.

This is probably what caused the same gut feeling that Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) was trying to communicate yesterday, when asked about his professional relationship with Barack Obama, wherein he replied … “It’s as though we come from two different planets and speak two different languages…I feel like I’m dealing with someone who has never negotiated anything in his life.”

Although the odds are long, as I operate under the handicap of not having spent my professional life in academia or politics, but rather the private sector, I will take a stab at explaining how someone, who was elected President of the United States, could view fundamental relationships–totally backwards, with confidence.

It lies in a person having no knowledge or experience other than that of the government operating structure, which results in “backwards” thinking.

First, there is no marketing or sales department where they work–therefore, the risk that “sales” will not bring in enough cash during their pay period is a “foreign concept”–only at Treasury are their people who are concerned about cash flow, but, even then they have “unlimited” borrowing power, with the “full faith and credit of the U.S.A.” backing them up.

Second, the “First” item is driven from the fact that the services provided by the government are “paid for” by statutorily mandated taxes and fees, whose amounts are bureaucratically established, and “confiscated” from it citizens, whether they use them or not.

Third, the “Second” item is driven from the fact that there is no competition, because the government is the only monopoly allowed by law in the U.S.–because, by definition, everyone knows that competition leads to better goods and services, delivered at the lowest price.

Fourth, the “Third” item results in a government wide lack of integrity for having top-to-bottom, horizontal and vertical performance measurement, to maximize benefits at the minimum cost, with people held accountable to implement and manage them.

Fifth, the “Fourth” item is caused by the fact that the upper management of the country is populated by elected officials, a majority of which are lawyers, who for the most part are not trained and experienced in running any classic business organization at an enterprise level.

Moreover, decisions are not made autocratically, but yet democratically, according to all of the member’s political leanings and needs, because they are political creatures whose primary motivation has been “reelection,” they become experts.

Further, there is no “bonus” for coming in under budget–because elected lawmakers have nothing to lose, and even gain more power and prestige, the larger their part of the government grows, without having any real “skin” in the game.

Finally, the “Fifth” item exists because instead of having “shareholders,” who have evaluated risk and bought “stock” with their own money, to receive a single vote for each share–here, each and every eligible citizen is “given” the right to vote for these legislators, even though 47 percent do not pay any federal income tax, with 48 percent who actually receive monetary benefits from the government, funded by the other half of the people and corporations who do pay taxes.

Just like the lack of “fairness” associated with the famous [original] Tea Party slogan, upon which our country was founded … “No taxation without representation,” the situation where half of the population receives benefits funded by the other half, yet retain an absolutely equal voting right, is the core of the problem.

This view of reality strikes me as being smart as a “hunter” holding his rife “backwards” and staring into the barrel–expecting the bounty to come directly through it to him.

Imagine how it would work out for the hunter–after he sighted his pray?

That’s the Barack Obama method, and why he has been such a cataclysmic failure.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Jeffrey Klein