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"We Demand Transparency" Conference - FAILURE!!!! (93 posts)
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Posted 15 years ago #
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Total failure!!!
The first think I see is the word "Fuck." The second think I see is the Obama Joker that AJ's been pushing.
Posted 15 years ago # -
That is definitely a Sander signature webpage. The "Fuck Goldman Sachs" thing is certainly not a good approach for legitimacy.
Posted 15 years ago # -
Mike Berger has teamed up with William Lewis, who made In Plane Site and 9-11 Ripple Effect?
In 2006, Mike Berger founded Connect the Dots LLC., a video production company. Berger produced and directed his first documentary, Improbable Collapse: The Demolition of our Republic. In his most recent documentary, Life on the Edge of a Bubble: Blowing the American Dream, he teamed up with filmmaker William Lewis of Bridgestone Media Group to examine the financial crises that have plagued our nation for more than 200 years. The repeating pattern culminated most recently in the greatest bubble and financial panic in more than three quarters of a century but we have yet to learn how to stop playing the same old game. http://www.911blogger.com/node/20893
See: http://www.bridgestonemediagroup.com/ http://www.takebackwashington.com/
Posted 15 years ago # -
They seem to now have removed all the offensive crap.
Posted 15 years ago # -
Too bad they do not pay attention to us to get rid of CIT and Barrett.
Has anyone contacted Berger on why he is working with William Lewis?
Posted 15 years ago # -
i recently found these forums and find the approach to reasoned discourse with the perspective of weeding out the crap that is so prevalent around 9/11 truth refreshing.
i myself have been turned off for years of even considering listening to the 9/11 truth movement because of the endless amount of drivel and rank speculation that is woven throughout the arguments of a lot its adherents. i only recently became acquainted with the reasoned strain in the 'movement' such as ae911truth and 911review 911research etc. so, if my personal testimony is worth anything, self critique of a perspective/understanding is some of the most important work to do. and i'll say, you've got a lot of work ahead of you. truth is a collective project.
but with that said, russ baker being on this conference is definitely an asset. hell, reading 'family of secrets' recently got me to give alot of 9/11 truth info another look. russ baker isn't a conspiracy writer, but his research on the bush family ventures into the territory and does a good enough job to get an endorsement from bill moyers and other pretty credible figures. his book doesn't address 9/11, but does lay out a really good perspective for considering the 'deep political' aspects of american politics.
after reading on these and the truthaction forums all the back history with fetzer and the LaRouche elements, i feel your discouragement. but don't let it stop you.
Posted 15 years ago # -
Welcome Luxurious. I second you on Family of Secrets. His work on De Mohrenschildt's connections to Bush is first rate.
I can not tell you how many times at this point I have wanted to crawl out of my skin while seeing people fall or 'fall' for pretty obvious forms of disinformation. It is pretty difficult to watch people accept Barrett again and say that he has redeemed himself.
Posted 15 years ago # -
Let Sander know what you think about We Demand Transparency:
Posted 15 years ago # -
Bump. Please click on the following two links to give them traffic and keep them high in the search results.
Posted 15 years ago # -
Lovely prose from Kevin Barrett on the "transparency" site:
I didn't like the way Jim [Fetzer] handled the Scholars for 9/11 Truth split. I think he was manipulated and egged on by the deplorable Rick Siegal, just as Steve and his friends were manipulated and egged on by the only somewhat less deplorable Victoria Ashley. It was a real tragedy for the 9/11 truth movement, and Jim's ego bears a lot of the responsibility.
His purpose is to make Fetzer out to be a victim of everyone, which is pretty transparent, given everything they give a voice to on their radio programs.
Despite his lack of politesse, PR savvy, and sound scholarship on the "no planes" issue, Jim [Fetzer] has done a lot of good work for 9/11 truth that has been under-appreciated due to the firestorm over his championing of controversial theories
I understand Jim [Fetzer] will be doing an appearance with Korey Rowe of Loose Change in Argentina on 9/11/09, and it's slated to get nationwide media coverage there. . . . I think it's time for the anti-Fetzer brigade to call off the witch-hunt and return to responsible critique.
http:// wedemandtransparency. com/ barrett.html
The good news is that this piece and recent radio talk went far enough that some people may be starting to "get it" about Barrett.
He went this far:
What Barrett said on mainstream AM radio was: "Starting a war by invading someone else's country, somebody who didn't strike you first, is the supreme crime--worse than genocide, worse than toasting six million Jews."
Posted 15 years ago # -
Report From Disinfofest 2009
Just some notes at this point
- Barrett, Ranke, Les Jamieson and many of his associates were all there.
- Ranke had a table set up in front of the church where he was distributing free DVDs of National Security Alert
- Ranke spoke and literally had people standing up clapping when he was finished. I would not call it a standing ovation, but people in attendance were overwhelmingly supportive.
- Ellen Brown's book Web of Debt has praise on the back of it by a writer for the American Free Press.
- There were not more than maybe 200 people there. I think that most of the crowd volume was at the We Are Change event. This one attracted a much older audience than the We Are Change activities that I witnessed at Ground Zero yesterday.
- Daniel Hopsicker was not there and apparently backed out at the last minute. I am not sure if he had problems with who else was on the bill.
Posted 15 years ago # -
There were not more than maybe 200 people there.
Thanks for the reportback!
Posted 15 years ago # -
Hey, 200 people is a lot of people. The Ready for Mainstream event at Cooper Union had about 50 people the day I went. Are you sure about that 200? That would fill St. Marks.
Posted 15 years ago # -
My estimate would be 100 or even less. It was definitely a pathetic scene, that's for sure.
christs4sale, maybe you could give us some of those quotes from Sanders book on here...
Posted 15 years ago # -
I might have overestimated the people. Maybe about 100, but it was very sparse and we were there when Richard Gage was there.
In Sander's book The Big Wedding, he has a chapter on the 9/11 Truth Movement. In it he refers to theories of Flight 77 not hitting the Pentagon as a red herring. Here is an excerpt:
But, for the sake of argument here, lets consider that John Judge and Penny Schoner are correct, that the no plane theory is just a distraction. It certainly is an effective way to discredit the movement. For example, let's look at the classic swing voter by interviewing my mother, Mrs. Ann-Marie Hicks.
Mom's a right-leaning "independent" who voted for Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. She's vocal, stubborn and fiercely anti-abortion. She's also passionate and active in local foodbank, anti-poverty charities. She was a Bush supporter without fail until the London Daily Mail favorably reviewed the first 9/11 skeptics book, David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor. Then, mom saw Fahrenheit 9/11, and temporarily withdrew her support for Bush. She planned to vote for Kerry/Edwards. But what about 9/11? Are the theories that she once dismissed a "kooky" now more considerable?
"No."
Why not?
"I know two people who saw the PLANE (not a missile) go into the Pentagon."
The entire 9/11 Truth Movement is dismissed by its most outlandish theory. The 9/11 argument is a chain of logic, and in this chain there is a conspicuously weak link. Mom happens to live within ten miles of the Pentagon, and she knows a priest and a friend's daughter who saw the plane hit.
How can this movement advance when people who are skeptical and smart find an unacceptably illogical theory? They will be turned off, and run from the entire inquiry. If there is one theory out there that is obviously false, the masses can be kept in intellectual submission, because the official story will represent safety, validation, and freedom from ridicule. The 9/11 Commission Report acts as kind of a co-dependent parent, offering the promise of comfort and reinforcing the big family lie. The architects of disinformation take it as a given that people fear ridicule.
Is this the same Sander that would organize a conference with CIT as a prominent guest?
Posted 15 years ago # -
Was anyone badmouthed on stage?
Posted 15 years ago # -
I was not there for Barrett, but I was for CIT and no for that. It might have occurred with Barrett. There were enough cameras taping the actual speeches that I do not think you will have any trouble seeing video of Barrett's talk. I think the approach to this thing was to not even bring up any form of criticism of the conference or the movement. Very Sander. Just keep everything positive. Badmouthing really did not seem necessary as the crowd was so positively and passively behind all of the speakers.
Interestingly enough, Barry Zwicker's presentation had a picture of Eric S. Galt that was listed as James Earl Ray. Galt was one of the aliases that Ray used and the real Galt was a Toronto resident that worked for Union Carbide.
Posted 15 years ago # -
That is the one I'm curious about.
Posted 15 years ago # -
Barrett
Posted 15 years ago # -
We stopped in for a little bit today as well. Saw Russ Baker speak, which was good. Was also glad to see a few younger people (women!) along with usual fogies. I was quick to warn them of the pitfalls of some of these groups.
Here is a wonderful review from the LA Times of Baker's book, "Family of Secrets"
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-...
"One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows" is a characterization of Hofstadter's that might have been tailored to fit Baker's book. "It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency . . . [that] all but obsessively accumulate 'evidence.' . . . The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent -- in fact, the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world."
Baker's coherent explanation of the world purports to be "a secret history" of a vast conspiracy stretching back more than a century in which a cabal of rich, interconnected men -- mainly involved in oil and gold extraction -- have used, first, private intelligence agents and then, later, the government spy agencies they helped found to manipulate . . . well, just about everything. Along the way, readers with enough stamina to wade through the mind-numbing accretion of names, dates and places will discover heretofore "hidden" explanations for the American entry into World War I, the formation of the CIA, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Watergate scandal (which, by the way, turns out to have been a secret coup engineered by the petro-intelligence access).
Here it's necessary to declare a personal bias. I regard the belief that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone as an important indicium of mental health. In fact, I think there are three things that every serious American needs to believe about our recent history: Kennedy was killed by a lone lunatic, Americans really did land on the moon and the Twin Towers were destroyed when they were struck by two fully fueled airliners that had been hijacked by Islamic extremists organized by Al Qaeda. People who do not believe in these things are, within reasonable limits, entitled to sympathy. They are not entitled to a seat at the table where serious discussions occur.
Posted 15 years ago # -
What you put in bold is classic. Table where serious discussions occur? With JFK clearly the most scholarly and serious research is done on the pro-conspiracy side. We have John Newman, Gerald McKnight, Anthony Summers and Peter Dale Scott to show us that. I think that most if not all of those who have done scholarly work in favor of a conspiracy to kill JFK believe that we DID land on the moon.
The portion of the conference today with Baker was really good. It was a lot of the same stuff that I had heard from Baker before, but he is always very informative. There were about 60 people there and like Truthmod said, it was almost entirely white men over the age of 50.
Posted 15 years ago # -
It's hard to believe that ANYONE believes the "no moon landing" nonsense.
It's interesting that Fox TV ran a program promoting the no moon lunacy in February 2001, which is debunked nicely at
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html
This is one of the more contrived fake conspiracy claims, probably not intended to become very popular, just to be used as a straw man. It only took a few gullible people to bite on this bait in order to include it on the list of things not to believe in, as if believing in the Warren Commission is in the same mental framework as knowing that the moon landings happened.
Note that the following month Fox ran their infamous "Lone Gunmen" show, which depicted a conspiracy of a small group inside the government to hijack a commercial jet via remote control under the cover of a war game exercise and crash it into the World Trade Center in order to boost military spending. I'm glad that such things could never happen in real life.
Posted 15 years ago # -
Is this the same Sander that would organize a conference with CIT as a prominent guest?
It's fascinating that his book would be that different from what he does in person. He appears to a salesman first . . . or something. Truths or mixing of real and false don't really matter when an audience is to be gathered. Same for some others I know who are primarily out to market products . . . or something.
Posted 15 years ago # -
Sander seems to have a track record of leaving companies in this state:
This happened to many authors at Soft Skull Press under former publisher Sander Hicks. Hicks, the son of an economist at the World Bank and an outspoken socialist, ran Soft Skull until August of 2001, when, under pressure from Soft Skull’s board, he announced that he would take an indefinite leave of absence and moved to his aunt’s house on Long Island. Richard Nash, the company’s chairman of the board, took over as the new publisher and soon unearthed what can best be described as a disaster.
Before Hicks left, Nash had heard anecdotally that many authors hadn’t been paid or that they had been paid only very little. The 2000 publication of J.H. Hatfield’s unauthorized biography of George W. Bush, Fortunate Son, aggravated this dilemma. The company was sued because of alleged inaccuracies in the author’s preface, and the book’s inventory was frozen at the warehouse. Since the company’s working capital was tied up with Fortunate Son, it seemed likely that Soft Skull would fold.
To make things worse, Nash discovered upon examining the company’s books that the records Hicks had been keeping were incomplete to an extraordinary degree. He saw, too, that there was little money available to pay anyone, from printers to shippers to authors, and suspected that it was the authors who had been suffering disproportionately.
http://www.nypress.com/article-8217-the-resurrecti...
Vox Pop:
Sander, who founded Vox Pop as a politically progressive cafe (with the hopes of franchising the idea), was reluctant to close the Lower East Side branch. Debi told Sander that she would take over the Brooklyn branch for 60 days if he would attempt a last ditch effort to make the Vox Pop at the Bowery Poetry Club profitable. It had already become a serious financial drain on the Brooklyn cafe.
Soon after it became apparent that the Bowery Vox Pop would have to close and that the Brooklyn cafe would need new leadership to get it through its economic travails. Sander resigned as did the original board of directors. A new board was formed and Debi took over as CEO. Soon after, Debi, who was trying to untangle Vox Pop's financial mess discovered that there was an unpaid fine to the Health Department for $30,000. Not only that: due to this the Health Department had the right to close Vox Pop down and they did just that.
After that, Debi and I sat downstairs on a banquette and continued our talk. I was curious about what happened to Sander Hicks, the charismatic visionary behind the cafe. She provided me with some history. In 2004, Sander and his then wife Holley Anderson started the cafe with seed money from the sale of Holley's family farm. In fact, the children's loft section (which looks a little like a barn) is actually from that farm. The original conception was a cafe/bookstore/performance space/community center and self-publishing mecca (called Publish Yourself) that would morph into a national franchise of political cafes.
Vox Pop was the first cafe of its kind on Corteylou Avenue and it quickly became a community destination with its decidedly progressive politics, its free trade coffee and its vegan menu. Since opening, other restaurants like The Farm on Adderly, Sycamore and other neighborhood spots have opened and Corteylou Avenue now has a growing mix of ethnic businesses, basic service shops run by longtime shopkeepers and new shops catering to the gentrifying neighborhood.
It can't have been easy for Sander to walk away from his unique creation. Ultimately it may have been the best thing for him and for the cafe. And in Debi he may have found a perfect successor to keep his vision alive. All in all, it seems a peaceful transition of power with a board made up of long-time Vox Poppers including Sander's ex-wife, Holley.
As for Sander, Debi told me that he has a couple of book deals in the works and is set to go on tour as part of his Inaugurate Yourself campaign. Seems to me he personally has a strong brand as a charismatic visionary. There's even an indie film based on his life. For a guy who thinks big, that might be a better route than operating a local cafe.
In the last weeks, this plan has raised close to $65,000 to help Vox Pop pay off its $30,000 debt to the Health Department, 4 months of back rent to the landlord and whatever else will get them out of the red.
Posted 15 years ago #
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