Saturday, January 31, 2009

Profiles of America's Beloved TV Celebrities (35) - Everything You Wanted to Know about Neo-Con Michelle Malkin (but were too Repulsed to Ask)

Edited by Alex Constantine

Marriage to RAND CORP.

" ... Malkin was born on October 20, 1970 in Philadelphia to Filipino parents, Rafaela and Dr. Apolo Maglalang, while they were in the United States on student visas. She grew up in Absecon, New Jersey. Malkin graduated from Oberlin College. ... In 1993 she married Jesse Malkin, a Rhodes Scholar and former economist for the RAND Corporation. As of 2004, Jesse was a stay-at-home dad raising their two children. ... "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Malkin

MICHELLE'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET: JESSE MALKIN IS MUCH MORE THAN A "STAY-AT-HOME DAD" ...

GHOST BLOGGING?
malkin-watch.blogspot.com

... [Michelle] Malkin does this for a living. But the weird thing is, she keeps it up no matter what. For example, on September 8th, the day she was on her way to speak at Berkeley, she posted four times, including one in-depth post about Eric Muller. She then posted a wrap-up of the talk and a review of her schedule at two am pacific time, before posting again at 9:30 the next morning. ...

... Michelle's husband, Jesse Malkin, first met Michelle when they were students at Oberlin College. From Goldsea's not-exactly-flattering profile:

" ... Jesse Malkin's first assignment for his new Filipino American reporter was collaborating on an article denouncing Oberlin's affirmative action program. Fellow students found the article offensive and showed their displeasure to Malkin & Company. ... "

Jesse earned his PhD in economic policy analysis from the Rand Graduate School, with most of his study related to the economics of health care. Goldsea:

"His PhD thesis was The Postpartum Mandate: Estimated Costs and Benefits. That subject would be reprised in a paper Malkin later co-authored as a RAND consultant with three others titled Postpartum Length of Stay and Newborn Health: A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis. Essentially, it finds medical benefit in extended hospital stays for women who had given birth. Another of his co-authored papers is titled How Much Does Global Warming Matter? and subtitled, 'What the world's population needs most are more lavatories and better sewage systems.' ... ”

Interestingly enough, the one area in which Michelle seems to straddle the line between liberal and conservative is health care. Here she admits that her health-care costs have risen dramatically, and here she actually uses the words "agree with Krugman" - that our health-care system is broken, particularly for the self-employed.

"After my husband quit his job earlier this year (to become a full-time stay-at-home dad), we had a choice. We could either buy health insurance from his former employer through a program called COBRA at a cost of more than $1,000 per month(!) or we could go it alone in Maryland's individual market. Given our financial circumstances, that "choice" wasn't much of a choice at all. We had to go on our own."

Very admirable of Jesse to become a stay-at-home dad. But was that the only reason he quit?

James Capozzola from the Rittenhouse Review had a run-in with Jesse in November of 2003, in which Jesse defended his wife against something Jim wrote.

Michelle has nothing against immigrants per se and would be the first to acknowledge that many immigrants make positive contributions to our country. She does, however, think that immigration should occur in a controlled, legal manner--and is particularly concerned that people who enter this country not be known terrorists or criminals. She also believes that tolerance of high levels of illegal immigration depresses wages among poorly-skilled workers and is unfair to those who wait in line to come here legally.

Jesse, apparently, did this without Michelle's knowledge.

What is this adding up to? Well, let's add one more piece of evidence: The royal we.

Here: "You remember the West Seattle High School anti-war student assembly we blogged about last week. ... "

Here: "No, we're not turning into Wonkette, but our friend Spokane Spokesman-Review columnist Dave Oliviera has an exclusive blog post... "

Here: "Don't miss this hatchet job on our friends at powerline by Jim Boyd... "

Once is a typo, twice is a figure of speech, three times - plus all the other evidence - makes me ready to state my conclusions for the records:

Malkin not only has a "gold-plated intern", it's her husband.

Or to put it another way, Jesse Malkin has a great deal of influence on Michelle's writing, even to the point of posting on her blog, probably on a regular basis. I think it's very possible that the books were cowritten as well; In Defense of Internment was written over a period of sixteen months, the last six (or so) of which Jesse was at home.

Don't misunderstand; Michelle is clearly very capable - she wouldn't be able to handle the media as well as she does if she weren't - and certainly is responsible for much of what is written in her name. But it seems clear that her husband is more deeply involved in her career than expected.

This is important because, for me, it calls into question Malkin's motivation. If her husband is a partner in punditry, where do Michelle's opinions end and Jesse's begin?

http://malkin-watch.blogspot.com/2005/04/ghost-blogging.html
•••
Michelle Malkin's Big Hustle
The Blogging of the President: 2004

http://malkin.blogspot.com/

... So, let us hail the diversity of everyday Democrat donors: The pardon-pushing socialite. The Communist-coddling corporate sellout. The reckless Asian-American rainmaker. And the nicotine-stained heiress/almost-felon who keeps on giving. - Michelle Malkin, July 7, 2004, Townhall.com On who is the average Democratic donor.

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin just came out with a book called 'In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror'. Asian American rights groups are already incensed and protesting, and she's sure to spark substantial debate when she goes on her book tour. As someone trained in the arts of how to get exposure, she'll have plenty of media time to give her point of view. Malkin is in fact already well-known as both a conservative columnist, and a moderate one. Her conservative self sits on Townhall.com, whereas her moderate demeanor as a simple and concerned 'security mom' comes out in Op-Eds in mainstream publications like USA Today.

When she goes on TV to promote her book, she'll be placed against people who will attempt to debunk her work. Maybe she'll come out on top, maybe not, but it's interesting how the blogosphere replicated those same dynamics, only faster and more completely. Her thesis, that the internment camps of Japanese Americans during WWII were essential to national security, sparked a mini-volcano online. Eric Muller, professor and guest on the well-respected Volokh Conspiracy led a rebuttal of the points in her book with an eleven part series (her response is on herblog). Muller, a credible academic, debated Malkin on the blog, and it was loose, unruly, and fascinating. Ed Cone thinks she lost, summing up the conflict as follows: "[Malkin's] contempt for people who disagree with her turned into hubris: she knows she's right, and they're wrong, so the facts will obey her commands. But facts are stubborn things." Cone seems to be right - even the right wing Instapundit backed away from Malkin. Cone goes even further than that, and discusses the institutional response to her book on the part of bloggers. "It's another fine moment for the blogosphere -- a scurrilous and potentially dangerous book by a well-known author pretty much discredited before it is officially released, because of the rapid deployment of intellectual firepower on the web."

Cone's point is interesting. Unlike TV debates, a passionate defender of the historiography of the time took her on without going through any media gatekeeper. One part of the story not yet told is the background on what Malkin materially gets out of having this debate. For it is not too hard to trace the links and find out that Malkin has built a profitable career out of hewing to a specific ideology. She does not just use sloppy and biased research methods in her academic work, it seems like she is actually just paid to update the right-wing isolationist ideology by those who helped propagate it from the 1930s to the 1960s.

But let's find out who this Malkin is.

Production of Ideas

Michelle Malkin began her career as a columnist in 1992, working for the Los Angeles Daily News until 1994. She made very little money, living on cheap food and cheaper bedding. In 1996, after a gap of two years, she moved to the Seattle Times, where she worked as a columnist until 1999. Both newspapers are mainstream papers, though her editorial stances were generally hard-right. In 1999, she quit mainstream editorial writing and started ranting about Clinton, HOV lanes, Britney Spears, taxes, and immorality. Her career as a right-wing pundit quickly took off.

Malkin's column is now syndicated by the Creators Syndicate, which mostly sells right-wing content (which is a reflection of editorial tastes of the papers who buy from them, not a specific ideological bent on the part of the Creators Syndicate). She writes for the Heritage Foundation's Townhall.com, comments for Fox News, and published her first book, "Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists Criminals & Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores", in 2002, courtesy of Regnery Publishing. Her books are distributed through the Conservative Book Club, membership 75,000 (a spinoff of the Goldwater candidacy of 1964 which sells conservative books to its member for $1 apiece). To promote her first book, she got interviews from Enter Stage Right, the National Review Online, C-SPAN, , Insight magazine, Right Wing News, and reviews from the American Conservative, VDare, Mark Krikorian, the National Review, Reason, David Limbaugh, James Edwards Jr., and Frank Gaffney at Fox News. Yes, her book was basically reviewed only by partisan sources.

The intent of her book is not to right history, but to advance a right-wing agenda. Read the bullets on the review of her book from the Conservative Book Club, and you'll see very quickly that her claims that Japanese Americans needed to be imprisoned is actually an unsubtle general attack on 'leftists' who advocate for civil liberties. In fact, the owner of her publishing house has a long history of rewriting history in favor of reactionary ideas, specifically those surrounding the legacy of WWII and its modern impact. But we'll get into that in a moment.

The important part is to note that Michelle Malkin is being gradually inserted into the mainstream press, through Fox News, the Heritage Foundation, and now USA Today. Muller shows that in the debate in the blogosphere, she essentially concedes that her thesis is untenable. Still, whether she believes her own stuff at this point is irrelevant, because her career and livelihood is entirely tied up in the right-wing superstructure of financial and media support. While real thinkers are able to change their minds (and sometimes do), Malkin doesn't have that luxury, not if she wants to keep her career (one could say she has 'right-wing tenure'). Regardless of whether she is debunked, she can't relent, because the right-wing superstructure won't let her, and it is those people who are selling her books and making her career.

The Backers

So if Malkin is doing bad history to advance an extreme and partisan political agenda, who is paying for her to make a controversial and easily debunked splash? All I have to say is, well, get ready for crazy city.

Regnery Publishing is the publisher of her books. The publishing house has John Birch society ties, the Birch society of course being the 1950s group so extreme in their right-wing ideology that they thought Eisenhower was a communist stooge. Alfred Regnery, the owner of the publishing house, is close friends with both Ken Starr and Lucianne Goldberg. There are rumors the CIA helped subsidize the publishing house, which would not be surprising considering the strongly pro-German interests of the founders of the CIA (documented extensively by Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty) and their ties to the right-wing. The following passage is the best summary of Regnery I have found, though the details are quite freely available around the web elsewhere:

William Regnery was also one of the founders of the American Security Council - he was later replaced by his son Henry. Regnery and two other isolationists began broadcasting Human Events and in 1947 started the Regnery publishing business. Interestingly enough, the first two titles published by Regnery were critical of the Nuremberg Trials.

The third book Regnery published was another pro-Nazi book attacking the allied air campaign. In 1954, Regnery published two books for the John Birch Society. He was also the publisher behind Buckley's God and Man at Yale. In light of the publishing of the pro-Nazi books it is interesting to note that Regnery Publishing was subsidized by the CIA, according to Howard Hunt. The reader is reminded to remember this point in a later chapter concerning the CIA and its involvement with Nazi war criminals. Henry Regnery along with Bunker Hunt funded Western Goals, an organization that is now dead.

Western Goals was another group that reportedly compiled list of people they deemed subversive. In 1986, Reagan appointed Alfred Regnery to help dismantle the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice. In the 1990s, the Regnery publishing house has been the publisher of numerous venomous smears attacking President Clinton.

One of the first books published by Regnery was The Nuremberg Trials, a 'detailed critical examination of trials by the U.S., including problems with procedure, jurisdiction, punishability, substantive law, etc.'. The publishing house also put out books stating that Clinton would put a blanket over himself and drive downtown while President to go whoring, and that Clinton was a cocaine addict. Regnery's appointment by Reagan, the vicious anti-Clinton tracts, and his family's ties to right-wing extremism and WWII era pro-Nazi isolationism lead naturally to the institutional support of Malkin's 'In Defense of Internment'. She literally couldn't have found a better publisher, and Regnery couldn't have found a more fitting book to put out.

Ok, so we have a CIA-subsidized Nazi-apologist right-wing extremist publishing house on tap - what's next? Ah, the Heritage Foundation, the publisher of Townhall.com and employer of Malkin (as a columnist). Heritage is an extraordinary institution, dedicated as much to selling its policies as creating policies that make sense. They have enormously useful content and training, such as how to plan an event in eight weeks, and how to work with the media to get effective placement of ideas. The primary goal of the Heritage Foundation is to serve as the armory for the war of ideas, building relationships with media personnel and using those relationships to further policy goals. Much of this work requires pseudo-academic experts, and media friendly pundits like Michelle Malkin.

Townhall is one of their fastest growing outlets. Just how important is Townhall.com, and how important is Malkin to Townhall? Good question. Let's read Heritage's Annual Report to find out.

"Online since 1995, townhall.com gained its 100th member organization in 2003. It ended the year with more than 110 partners, ranging from National Review to the Federalist Society to the Young America’s Foundation.

Townhall.com also delivers daily, via e-mail, one of the Web’s best opinion pages, Opinion Alert. With a lineup of more than 70 conservative ommentators—including Mona Charen, Charles Krauthammer, Michelle Malkin and Cal Thomas—it provides the context and conservative insight often missing in the news."

As you can see from the chart (linked here), Townhall is the Heritage's most direct channel to the public, with 25 million visits last year (and an ambitious community building strategy through Meetup,which so far has 27,000 members). Townhall.com, with its extremist rantings defending the Confederate flag, Japanese internment, neo-eugenic pseudo-science, racist behavior, attacks on liberals, and anti-Muslims propaganda, is often fodder for the even more extremist right-leaning community site, the Free Republic.

Here are a few highlights from Townhall.com:

From Kathleen Parker on Falluja:
I suppose it would be considered lacking in nuance to nuke the Sunni Triangle.
From Sam Francis on South Carolina's flying of the Confederate Flag:

The state's Democratic Senate has already passed a bill that would take the flag down and put it in "a place of honor" on the capitol grounds. But the NAACP's race warriors will have none of that; they want the flag not only taken off the capitol but consigned to oblivion. "Your heritage is our slavery," they and their followers like to rant at demonstrations against the flag.

Of course, in saying that, they are actually saying that American blacks are not really part of American civilization, which is defined in large part by the heritage its past created. If all black Americans can see in the American past is their own slavery, oppression and exploitation, how can they claim to be part of the nation? And why would they want to be? ...

As for the "treason" of the Confederacy, someone needs to explain to Thompson and his 27 co-sponsors (mostly members of the Black Caucus) that the states of the Confederacy voted to secede from the Union peacefully and legally. You can believe in the right of secession or not, but a lot more people in North and South in the 1850s believed in it than they do today, and it's not even in the same solar system as "treason."

And then there's Malkin herself, whose attitude towards Islam nicely dovetails with her support of Japanese internment:

Sgt. Asan Akbar, a Muslim American soldier with the 326th Engineer Battalion, had an "attitude problem." According to his superiors and acquaintances, Akbar's attitude was bitterly anti-American and staunchly pro-Muslim. So how did this devout follower of the so-called Religion of Peace work out his attitudinal problems last weekend?

By lobbing hand grenades and aiming his M-4 automatic rifle into three tents filled with sleeping commanding officers at the 101st Airborne Division's 1st Brigade operations center in Kuwait.

Akbar is the lone suspect being detained in the despicable attack, which left more than a dozen wounded and one dead. Surviving soldiers say Akbar, found cowering in a bunker with shrapnel injuries, was overheard ranting after the assault: "You guys are coming into our countries, and you're going to rape our women and kill our children."

"Our"? At least there's no doubt about where this Religion of Peace practitioner's true loyalties lie.

Naturally, apologists for Islam-gone-awry are hard at work dismissing this traitorous act of murder as an "isolated, individual act and not an expression of faith." But such sentiments are willfully blind and recklessly p.c.

Sgt. Akbar is not the only MSWA -- Muslim soldier with attitude -- suspected of infiltrating our military, endangering our troops and undermining national security.

I've been to a Townhall.com Meetup, and this attitude underlying these Op-Eds is the norm. From anti-gay zealots who want to 'cure the gay disease' to liberal haters who just like protesting and harrassing (and a few who told me they were just waiting for someone to give the order to put on the brownshirts), they are a very real face of the far right-wing. These are the people the Heritage Foundation touches most directly through a web channel controlled exclusively by Foundation itself. While Heritage also houses media friendly experts, it puts on a moderate face to journalists because it must. Here's a clip from its guide to media relations:

Maintain your own stable of credible and reliable experts to whom you can refer journalists. Remember, if they know that a call to you always nets them a snappy sound bite or an angle on a story that they hadn’t considered, or an expert contact that they might otherwise spend hours digging up, they will come back again and again for their purposes. And that is crucial when you remember that what you are after is to make your self-interest and theirs coincide.

As an aside, I should say that it will be very helpful, I’d even say essential, that you treat with respect people and ideas that you disagree with. Treat them as intelligent people whose only failing is intellectual error. When journalists call, be sure that you understand what the other side is liable to say about your position, report it respectfully, and offer them names of experts on the other side.

I say this because journalists are extremely attuned to what I call "personal energies." You want to project an image of yourself as self-confident, respectful and evenhanded, but with firm ideas of your own, thoughtfully expressed. Then, when the other guys try to trash your ideas, they look belligerent and defensive.

This is especially true if you’ve politely steered the journalist to this opposing expert. Never forget that the journalist is automatically going to seek out someone to give a different point of view whatever you do, so jump in and try to shape how the journalist is liable to receive the opposing point of view. How you handle these personal questions will affect the tone of the stories that they write.

So while it must compromise on the channels it must work through indirectly, the reality of what the Heritage Foundation is really pushing comes through the channel that it builds directly. But what is the Heritage Foundation?

Well, it was founded by Paul Weyrich, conservative organizer extraordinaire. Surprise surprise, it's also well funded. On the board of Heritage is Jay Van Andel, the founder of Amway, who along with Richard Mellon Scaife and the Coors family helped fund much of the modern right-wing. The Heritage Foundation is also in bed with Reverend Moon, the holocaust apologist who allegedly sold submarines to North Korean crazy dictator Kim Jong-Il.

There's more. A lot more. David Brock's new book is on the case, as is Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest. But the key points are simple. Right-wing institutional support, with places to house people to create ideas, outlets to distribute and promote them, and the tactics and relationships to turn these ideas into the mainstream, is breathtaking. It's not that the media is tilted to the right-wing because of ideology, but because the right has worked to make themselves useful sources to lots of journalists. At the same time, they provide care and feeding and an enormously powerful incentive to toe the line for people like Michelle Malkin, and a whole demand side for propagandizing. All people like Malkin have to do to succeed is draw attention to themselves.

In other words, this book was never about influencing the marketplace of ideas through effective logic or discourse, but through slick marketing and a host of well-oiled right-wing and mainstream channels. And the defeat in the debate in the blogosphere notwithstanding, all those channels and outlets remain standing and functioning. Because she picked a topic that got a bunch of people riled up, Malkin is just a bit better known. Maybe she lost some credibility among academics, if she had some any the first place. But the founder of Amway didn't suffer for the propagandizing he funded, even though he and his ilk are the one who paid for all the free marketing. And because of that, he's just going to to buy more.

Link to original story posted on BOP News.com by Matt Stoller
posted by Malkin Watch at 6:46 PM | 3 comments

posted by Malkin Watch at 3:15 PM | 0 comments

Michelle Malkin Bio
From One People's Project:

NAME:Michelle Malkin
A/K/A:Michelle Maglalang (maiden name)

Get to know this one because it won't be long before she takes up the Ann Coulter/Pat Buchanan mantle as one of the most rabid hatemongers in the country today. Of course, that will also make her a laughing stock as well. The jokes should start coming soon enough, because as you can see from her picture, she is not exactly someone who one would think would have articles appearing in VDARE, a anti-immigration, white nationalist website. She actually has that kind of dirt on her, however. It never ceases to amaze us how many times we keep running into these idiots of color who want to pretend that they can be just as racist towards everyone as their white racist comrades, but we hope they are not stupid enough to think that we will extend any kind of respect to them.

A nationally known journalist, Michelle Malkin has appeared on national news programs like NBC Nightly News, The Lehrer Report, The McLaughlin Group, 20/20, and Faux News. Born in Philidelphia, she is the daughter of Filipino immigrants that were in her words, "rock-ribbed Reagan Republicans." In 1992, she graduated from Oberlin College (which was once an underground railroad location), and is currently living in Montgomery County, Maryland with her white, Jewish husband Jesse and two children in an upper middle class suburban neighborhood in Montgomery County, Maryland. We make these points because she has written many articles and commentaries on minority issues in America - none of them favorable to minorities or their presence in America. Can you say, "confused?"

It gets better. Oberlin College, known for its progressive campus was where she decided to be politically active - but it seems like it was as a form of rebellion. Apparently it was all that concern for people of color rising up and being a intergral part of this society that made her mad, as this excerpt from a CSPAN transcript shows:

MALKIN: Well, I was editor of my high school newspaper, but not really politically energized yet. That happened at Oberlin. And that's where I first really encountered the vicious response you can get when you stand up to a political orthodoxy. It's an extremely liberal campus. And even if -- even if you tread very lightly on political sacred cows, there was a huge negative response, especially from somebody who was a minority, standing up and saying, Well, all these self-appointed minority groups in campus don't speak for me.

And I think that's a theme that I've carried throughout my journalism career, and it's certainly something that's central to this book because I talk about -- in a section of the book, I talk about hate crime howlers, and these are a number of these ethnic grievance groups and pro-illegal-alien lobbying groups who -- you know, who claim to speak for all minorities and immigrants and their families in this country, with an agenda of keeping our borders as loose and open as possible. And I certainly don't believe in that, and I know there are so many naturalized Americans and their families who embrace the rule of law, and that includes immigration laws. And we don't accept that we ought to maintain a state of immigration anarchy in a post-September 11 world.

And somebody needs to stand up to all of those groups and say, No, this is not right. It's not right, first of all, to invite so many millions of illegal line-jumpers into the country ahead of all the millions of people around the world who are waiting to do it the right way. That's just a matter of fairness. But also, it's now, more than ever, a matter of life and death. You cannot have open borders and win a war on terror at the same time. It's incompatible.

BRIAN LAMB: Were you controversial at Oberlin because of your stance?

MALKIN: Well, I really just came into being as a political journalist towards the end of my campus experience, and it was really after I had left and come to D.C. and started, you know, writing on my own and -- I mean, it was really more social conservatism than economic conservatism that I started with my -- with my column-writing. So no, I would say I was not, you know, a huge lightning rod until the -- you know, the end of my career -- I mean, end of my tenure at Oberlin.

Okay, having an adversity towards racial hustlers, fine. Hooking up with white racial hustlers and adopting their viewpoints does not exactly solve the problem though. Read her writings and viewpoints, and take a look at the organizations she affiliates with, and you will see a racist who literally trashes on every non-white race in America.

The type of news and political organizations she works for are typically extreme right-wing organizations who preach racism, xenophobia, and white superiority. Among the worst racist right-wing organizations she works for are the National Review, the aforementioned VDARE, and Townhall. In countless articles written for them, Michelle typically bashes and encourages racism against Muslims, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and especially immigrants.

Her first major publication was a book she wrote, called, Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists Criminals & Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores, first published in 2002. Attempting to copy Peter Brimelow's hateful bashing of immigrants when he wrote Alien Nation several years earlier, Malkin produces similar hate-mongering garbage against immigrants. Like Alien Nation, Malkin book Invasion is just another xenophobic, right-wing racist propaganda, filled with lies, bogus statistics, fallacies of logic, and references to right-wing racists and organizations.

Being an immigrant basher, she naturally attempts to associate all immigrants to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, using illogical arguments to label all immigrants as terrorists and to justify ending immigration. Filled with more hateful diatribe, she concludes immigration must end, a wall must be built between America and Mexico, and border patrol must be increased. Being illogical and dimwitted, she trashes on every U.S. agency responsible for border patrol as incompetent, then she declares we must increase our border patrol by 50,000 - trained by the same agency she calls incompetent! A statement in the book summarizing her views on immigration, "It's time that we give immigrants to this country a swift kick to the seats of their pants and show them the exit door."

Immigrant bashing is only the tip of the iceberg of her racism. Her countless writings trashing on minorities reveal Malkin's hateful side, and if you didn't see her picture, you would think she's a white-supremacist racist.

Her most hateful writings come from VDARE, however. She trashes on Blacks, publishing her filtered hate crimes. She likes to publish marginal hate crime stories of blacks attacking whites, and hate crime hoaxes, but she deliberately omits the reality of hate crimes, that Blacks are the most frequent victims of hate crimes. When the Washington D.C. beltway sniper was active in 2002, Malkin openly attacked police chief Charles Moose, a Black man, as incompetent and greedy, although she had no credible evidence. It turned out to be a personal attack based on her racist views and references to right-wing racists. When the sniper was caught by Charles Moose and the Montgomery County, Maryland police department, she continued trashing on Mr. Moose anyway, largely based on her brainwashed racism against Blacks.

Now you know that with this, she has to have some diatribe in her resume against hip-hop. Indeed, she got a lot of play on Faux News Channel (and nowhere else, mind you) about a column that appeared in June 2004 that attacked the Worchester, Mass. school system for including on their summer reading list for children "The Rose That Grew From Concrete" by Tupac Shakur. The column was simply a juvenile diatribe against Tupac and his poems, which she referred to as "tripe" and ridiculing the late rapper's penchant for using numbers in place of words in some areas, a common form of artistic expression, but a sign of stupidity to Malkin. She particularly aimed not only at Tupac, but also at the school board for even considering him, and in doing so leveled a shot at multiculturalism. "The Western literary canon has been flushed down the cultural toilet in favor of shallow ramblings by celebrity thugs whose thoughts are best left on bathroom walls," she wrote. "As 2Pac might have responded: 3 Cheers 4 Diversity."

For the next week we were treated to this kind of vitriol and more from Ms. Malkin as she did the rounds on the Faux News Channel. When she appeared on former US Rep. John Kasich's program on July 3, 2004, it was a different story. She ditched the vitriol and the hatemongering (but still managed to take a quick shot a multiculturalism), and made an even-tempered case against the decision to include not only Tupac's book, but also folk singer Jewel's book of poems that was published a few years ago. Jewel was never brought up until this point, not even being noted in the original column. When she was mentioned, it was only as a footnote. The difference? Malkin appeared on the program with a black community leader who was there as a counterpoint and probably not too familiar with Malkin's hate routine.

Michelle Malkin loves to trash on Muslims as well. After the 9-11 attacks, she was swift to trash on Muslims, attempting to associate all Muslims to that event. Like a instigative hate-monger, she will find any news event as an excuse to trash on all Muslims (or any non-white race). When the media revealed the two estranged Washington D.C. beltway snipers were Muslim, she naturally took the opportunity to associate all Muslims to the two snipers, to carry out her racist propaganda.

Finally, although an Asian American herself, she sure doesn't have any love for her own race, either. Malkin has written a few times on Asian American issues, but see writes more like a white supremacist. When the Pearl Harbor movie by Disney came out in 2001, some Asian American civil rights group were concerned about possible anti-Japanese/Asian sentiment which may erupt. Malkin as usual attacks any attempt to relieve racism and hatred. No Michelle, the Asian American groups were not trying to rewrite or suppress American history. They, as most Asian Americans, were concerned about possible racism that may emerge, and finding ways to move above such racism, rather than letting the racism repeat itself. Of course, like how hate-mongers like Malkin trash and lie about all immigrants and Muslims being connected to the 9-11 attacks, it doesn't come as a surprise she would play a similar tactic against Asian Americans.

During the Abercrombie Fitch incident in 2001, where A&F sold racist shirts with anti-Asian caricatures and later pulled off the shelf after a massive protest by the Asian American community, Malkin immediately attacked the Asian American protesters as greedy money-grubbers and downplayed the whole incident. A year later, when A&F was facing a major civil rights lawsuit for discriminating against Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics in the employment process, she makes no mention of this. Of course, any major news stories where minorities may advance and become more equal in America is unacceptable for racists like Michelle Malkin.

Michelle Malkin is indeed a pathological racist who doesn't seem to know her own color. Surely many white supremacist and right-wing groups have use for her outside appearance, although her inside is filled with hatred and racism. Some have suggested her husband has been somewhat of an influence with the anti-Arab sentiments plus mad support for the so-called "War on Terror" being a constant thread (Jesse Malkin works for the RAND Corporation, which has been called out as war profiteers). Like Black sellout racists like Ezola Foster and Star Parker, the white supremacist groups have found a sellout to recruit to the Asian community and to spread their racism, and that is Michelle Malkin. Oh, one more thing. She has a new book out now: In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling". As we did not read the book yet, we will hold back an opinion, but a review of the book says that it "offers a ringing justification for the most reviled wartime policies in American history: the evacuation, relocation, and internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II. It also defends racial, ethnic, religious, and nationality profiling as effective defensive measures in today's War on Terror."

Would someone tell this idiot that if anything she believes in was to be put into wide practice, she would suffer the same fate as the rest of us dark-skinned folks?

posted by Malkin Watch at 2:01 AM | 9 comments

Historians' Committee for Fairness - Open Letter

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We represent the Historians' Committee for Fairness, an organization of scholars and professional researchers. Michelle Malkin's appearance on numerous television and radio shows and her comments during these appearances regarding her book IN DEFENSE OF INTERNMENT represent a blatant violation of professional standards of objectivity and fairness. Malkin is not a historian, and she states that she relied almost exclusively on research conducted or collected by others. Her book, which purports to defend the wartime treatment of Japanese Americans, did not go through peer review before publication. This work presents a version of history that is contradicted by several decades of scholarly research, including works by the official historian of the United States Army and an official U.S. government commission. In fact, the author's presentation of events is so distorted and historically inaccurate that, when challenged by reputable historians, she has herself conceded that her main thesis in incorrect, namely that the MAGIC intercepts of prewar Japanese diplomatic cable traffic, explain and justify the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. As Malkin states, her critics have noted that "once the decision was made to evacuate ethnic Japanese from the West Coast, many ancillary decisions were made--and MAGIC doesn't explain all or even most of them. True...." (see her website, www.michellemalkin.com, August 6, 2004)

It is irresponsible of your producers to permit Michelle Malkin’s biased presentation of events to go unchallenged as a factual historical presentation. We therefore respectfully demand that you formally apologize to the Japanese Americans who have been slandered by Ms. Malkin's reckless presentation and invite a reputable historian to present a more even-handed view of the evidence.

Sincerely yours, (list incomplete, institutions for identification only)
Allan Austin, Misericordia College
Eiichiro Azuma, University of Pennsylvania
Allida M. Black, George Washington University
Matthew Manuel Briones, Harvard University
Laura Card, University of Utah
Elena Tajima Creef, Wellesley College
Louis Fiset, University of Washington
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University
Heather Fryer, Creighton University
Stephen Fugita, University of Washington
Thomas Fujita-Rony, California State University, Fullerton
James Gatewood, Brown University
Neil Gotanda, California School of Law
Arthur W. Hansen, California State University, Fullerton
Michiko Hase, University of Colorado
John Howard, King’s College, University of London
Moon-Ho Jung, University of Washington
Scott Kurashige, University of Michigan
Tom Ikeda, DENSHO
Tetsuden Kashima, University of Washington
Eileen Kurahashi, National Center for the Preservation of Democracy
Karl Kwong-Liem Kwan, Purdue University
Kevin Leonard, Western Washington University
Daryl J. Maeda, Oberlin College
Robert Maeda, Brandeis University
Takeya Mizuno, Bunkyo University
Mitchell Maki, California State University, Los Angeles
Eric R. Muller, University of North Carolina Law School
Don T.Nakanishi, University of California Los Angeles
Franklin Ng, California State University, Fresno
Setsuko Matsunaga Nishi, Brooklyn College, CUNY
Gail M. Nomura, University of Washington
Greg Robinson, Université du Québec À Montréal
George Sanchez, University of Southern California
Mitziko Sawada, Hampshire College
Robert Shaffer, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania
Stephen H. Sumida, University of Washington
Andrew B. Wertheimer, University of Hawaii
Yuh Ji-Yeon, Northwestern University

[reprinted]

Welcome to Malkin Watch

A new "pundit" has emerged from the many in these past three years after 9/11.

Michelle Malkin is a loud and respected voice in conservative circles.

Malkin's noteriety is based on simple-logic, black & white, conservative backed diatribes against liberals, people of color and immigrants.

Many have viewed her increasing popularity of late with alarm.

This blog has been created as a repository for information about Malkin and commentary on her published works.

Anyone who shares our concerns about Michelle Malkin is welcome to contribute to this blog.

Email malkinwatch@gmail.com

Mitt Romney's Mentor was Mormon Bircher Cleon Skousen

This is what fascism looks like. This is what fascism looks like. This is what fascism looks like ...

Edited by Alex Constantine
(Revised)

Mitt Romney is so right-wing that even the CIA-subsidized fascists at the National Review consider him a radical:

"Over the weekend, a YouTube video of Mitt Romney arguing with an Iowa talk-radio host began rocketing around the Internet. The 20-minute conversation was somewhat startling in that Romney talks about his Mormon faith in greater depth than he publicly has thus far. ... "

"'You and I share a common affection for the late Cleon Skousen,' the radio host says. The former governor agrees, affirming Skousen was his professor and when the radio host professes his fondness for Skousen’s book The Making of America, while he acknowledges he hasn’t read it, Mitt quickly says 'That’s worth reading.' ... ” - Mark Hemingway, "Romney's Radical Roots":
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDRhZWFkNWE2OTQ0MGIwYzZmMWQ3MjA5OWIxYzQ0YTU=
••••••••••••••••••••
Pastor Chuck Baldwin, a "Christian" fascist tight with the Birch Society Nazi front (also, like Romney, a recent presidential candidate): " ... In 1958, Cleon Skousen, a former FBI agent (a man I was fortunate enough to get to know before his death), wrote a book entitled The Naked Communist. In it, he outlined the long-term communist agenda. Since then, the movers and shakers of the New World Order have successfully achieved many of these goals within the U.S. ... "
http://www.newswithviews.com/baldwin/baldwin488.htm

CLEON SKOUSEN

From Commie Basher To Rock 'n Roll Trasher: The Legacy Of The Late, Latter-Day Looney Cleon Skousen
Jan 21, 2006

Steve Benson

W. Cleon Skousen was, without a doubt, a real piece of work who, despite his schmoozings of top Mormon leadership, ultimately became an official LDS embarrassment

In the wake of Skousen's recent death, below are some observations assembled from my personal Ezra Taft Benson and Skousen files (combined with research from other sources in my home library) on Skousen's colorful, controversial life and his bizarre mix of apocalyptic religious/political beliefs:

CLEON CLINGS ON TO McKAY: SKOUSEN'S INSIDE TRACK WITH THE MORMON CHURCH HIERARCHY

President David O. McKay's Official Mormon Church Blessing of Skousen's Radical Right-wing Agenda

In 1962 LDS General Conference, McKay recommended that members of the Church avail themselves of Skousen’s book, The Naked Communist, declaring:

“I admonish everybody to read that excellent book of [former FBI agent and then-Salt Lake City Police] Chief Skousen’s.”

(David O. McKay, “Preach the Word,” Improvement Era, 62 [December 1959], p. 912, quoted in D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1997], p. 82)

In his officially Mormon-blessed book, Skousen warned readers to be on the alert against a worldwide Marxist revolution dedicated to:

. . . “the total annihilation of all opposition, the downfall of all existing governments, all economies and all societies,” through the creation of “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.”

To fight the international Red menace, Skousen extolled Brigham Young University as a pre-eminent religious training ground in the “war of ideologies” and urged concerned parents:

“We should not sit back and wait for our boys and girls to be indoctrinated with materialistic dogma and thereby make themselves vulnerable to a Communist conversion when they are approached by the agents of force and fear who come from across the sea.”

(W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist [Salt Lake City, Utah: Ensign Publishing Company, 1958], pp. 2, 377-378)
_____
SKEPTICAL OF SKOUSEN'S RABID RADICALISM: AN OPPOSING NON-MORMON VIEW

Shining an altogether different light on Skousen’s work, Richard Dudam, author of the book, Men of the Far Right, wrote:

“Skousen’s book, the Naked Communist, is a Bible of the right-wing movement and is promoted heavily by many of the extremist groups. In it, he asserts that the first Russian sputnik was built with plans stolen from the United States after World War II and that President Batista, the former Cuban dictator, was really a sincere, pro-labor, popular ruler.

"Skousen advises legislators to overthrow Supreme Court restrictions on actions against persons suspected of being communists. He urges businessmen . . . to seek help from the American Security Council [a Chicago-based group of ‘right-wing military men and businessmen’ that operated ‘a private loyalty-security blacklist where employers could check their employees and job applicants for indications of left-wing connections.’]”
_____
SKOUSEN'S BEWILDERING BACKGROUND

Salt Lake City’s Fired Totalitarian Police Chief

Skousen was removed from his post as Salt Lake’s police chief by then-city mayor J. Bracken Lee, who called him “an incipient Hitler” who “ran the [SLC] police department in exactly the same manner as the Communists in Russia operate their government.”

(Dudman, Men of the Far Right [New York, New York: Pyramid Books, 1962], pp. 127-28)
_____
Super Supporter of Far-Right Anti-Communist Crusades

Skousen was an active barnstormer and speaker for Fred C. Schwartz’s ”Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.” Life Magazine noted that Schwartz “preached doomsday by Communism in 1973 unless every American starts distrusting his neighbor.”

(Dudman, pp. 8, 118)
_____
Diehard Defender of the John Birch Society Against Alleged International Communist Plotters

Although not an official member of the John Birch Society, Skousen was a die-hard supporter, serving as an active cohort in its “American Opinion Speakers Bureau,” which included among its Far Right allies my uncle and high-ranking Birch Society officer, Reed Benson.

(Benjamin R. Epstein and Arnold Forster, Report on the John Birch Society 1966, [New York, New York: Vintage Books, 1966], p. 95.

In 1963, Skousen published a pamphlet, The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society, in which he claimed that the Birch Society had been “dishonestly ridiculed and smeared at the instigation of the international Communist conspiracy.”

He further claimed that the Birch Society was “marked for annihilation because it was becoming highly successful in awakening the American people.”

He also accused Americans who criticized the Birch Society as “promoting the official Communist party line.”

(Skousen, The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society [Salt Lake City, Utah: Ensign Publishing Company, 1963], pp. 11-12)
_____
SKOUSEN'S INCENDIARY CLAIM THAT COMMUNISTS WERE BEHIND ATTACKS ON THE MORMON CHURCH'S RACIST ANTI-BLACK DOCTRINE

In 1970, amid growing college protests against BYU sports teams for the LDS Church’s anti-Black priesthood policy, Skousen published a tabloid featuring the screaming headline, The Communist Attack on the Mormons.

The article asserted that:

" . . . [Professional] Communist-oriented revolutionary groups have been spearheading the wave of protests and violence directed toward Brigham Young University and the Mormon Church,” [employing] “Marxism and Maoism as their ideological base and terror tactics as their method . . .”

Skousen warned that Communists were plotting to manipulate press reports into depicting the Mormon Church as being “rich, priest-ridden, racist, super-authoritarian and conservative to the point of being archaically reactionary.”

He claimed that, in fact, the Mormon Church was one of the Communists’ “prime TARGETS FOR ATTACK” because it is “STRONGLY PRO-AMERICAN” and that the ‘Negro-priesthood issue” was being used as a “SMOKESREEN” to “further their ulterior motives.”

Citing Ezra Taft Benson’s speech, Civil Rights: Tool of Communist Deception, he warned that Communist-inspired assaults on the Mormon Church were designed to:

" . . . create resentment and hatred between the races by distorting the religious tenet of the Church regarding the Negro and blowing it up to ridiculous proportions."

(Special Report by National Research Group, American Fork, Utah, 84003, March 1970, p. 1, emphasis in original)
_____
SKOUSEN'S FOUNDING OF THE EXTREMIST, BOOK OF MORMON-BASED FREEMAN INSTITUTE AND HIS SOLICITATION OF EZRA TAFT BENSON'S SUPPORT

Skousen eventually established the Freeman Institute in Provo, Utah. The group derived its name from the Book of Mormon “freemen” and initially drew many Mormon Birchers into its ranks. My father, Mark Benson, was the Institute’s “Vice President in Charge of Development” and my grandfather formally spoke to its members.

(Quinn, pp. 109-111).
_____
SKOUSEN'S DIRE WARNING TO EZRA TAFT BENSON OF AN INTERNATIONAL SCHEME FOR ONE-WORLD GOVERNMENT, ORCHESTRATED BY WALL STREET BANKERS

In a letter sent to my grandfather (which, despite its form fundraising format, my grandfather marked in red pen with a handwritten notation, “Confidential”), Skousen warned:

". . . [The] so-called ‘Council on Foreign Relations’ [has been] “set up . . . to groom ambitious one-world political personalities for leadership in all major departments of the American government from the President on down. . . .

“Their latest triumph was the election of Jimmy Carter. . . .”

Skousen ominously claimed that “members of the Establishment have directed foreign policy from Wall Street in the past.” He told my grandfather that because of President Gerald R. For, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and other “master-planners,” the “foreign-policy establishment of Wall Street bankers and lawyers . . . moved into the very heart of the Establishment and took over.”

Skousen further declared:

“I wonder how people who say there is ‘no such thing as a conspiracy’ will deal with this one?”

He also forewarned Ezra Taft Benson that the one-world planners intended to celebrate the upcoming “200 anniversary of the United States Constitution by scrapping it.”

In an apocalyptic conclusion to his letter, Skousen, under the sub-heading “We Need Millions of Freeman,” told my grandfather:

“I don’t know how all this affects you, but it puts a fire in my veins. I hope that in this coming year we can double or triple the number of Freeman and eventually we can challenge these advocates of world serfdom and drive them out of power. . . . I pray it will happen soon. And we must do everything we can to help make it happen. That’s what you are helping to accomplish, and I am grateful to you for your support.

“See you next month!”

(W. Cleon Skousen, letter to “Elder Benson,” January 1977, copy in my possession)
http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_stevebenson_section3.html#pub_28950431
••••••••••••••••••••••••
Hansen: Best part of Romney interview was off air

By MARC HANSEN
DES MOINES REGISTER COLUMNIST
August 9, 2007

The interview began peacefully enough. Mitt Romney told WHO radio host Jan Mickelson that Des Moines feels like home.

As a young consultant to Fisher Controls in Marshalltown, he spent a lot of time around here in the late '70s.

The interview was late getting started, so Mickelson politely asked if they could "dispense with the niceties." It's amazing how quickly a set of niceties can vanish.

He opened with their "common affection" for the late Cleon Skousen.

At that point, Mickelson's listeners were probably struggling to place Cleon Skousen. Didn't he play first base for the Yankees?

They didn't know the Libertarian host and the Republican candidate would soon be squabbling with each other about abortion and the Mormon Church.

They had no idea the candidate would be walking out of the studio, saying he didn't appreciate Mickelson calling him a bad Mormon.

You'd call it great radio, except for one thing: Some of the best stuff took place off the air.

The camera never stopped rolling in the studio, though, and you can watch it all online.

If you do, you'll witness a side of Romney the public seldom sees. Mickelson wouldn't agree, but it's a side the candidate should channel more often. Look! He's quick on his feet. He's showing some fire, some passion, some spontaneity.

I'm not saying Romney sometimes comes across as an overly scripted, overly programmed, overly controlled robot. Delete overly controlled. But this was a different guy.

Skousen, for the record, was a constitutional expert. Romney was in his class at Brigham Young University. Mickelson read his book,
Mickelson loves the book. He says it takes you inside the minds of the framers when they drew up the Constitution.

"You can never be hustled by a politician again," he told Romney.

Niceties out of the way, Mickelson got to the point:

"Is Roe v. Wade the law of the land?"

"It is now," Romney said. "It is ..."

"You just flunked Cleon Skousen's test."

"It was improperly decided, I'm sorry to ..."

"Cleon is spinning in his grave, sir."

It was downhill (or maybe uphill) from there. They argued about the church's official position on abortion and what is or isn't grounds for disciplinary action. Mickelson compared Romney to "cafeteria Catholic" Ted Kennedy.

They interrupted and corrected each other. When they left for a commercial break, Mickelson took the opportunity to tell Romney he was making a big mistake, distancing himself from his religion.

Romney said he wasn't. If you have sex outside marriage, the church says you should be excommunicated. Just because you believe in something, do you turn it into a law?

Romney: "Let me say once again that I understand my faith better than you do. You don't believe that, do you?"

Mickelson: "Well, I'm not sure."

Romney: "Then it's hardly worth having a discussion, then."

The "discussion" continued anyway.

"I don't like going on the air here and have you going after my church," Romney said when Mickelson suggested they could do this again when they had more time.

Mickelson said he wasn't attacking Romney's church. In fact, he said he agreed with Romney's church. There's nothing at all wrong with being a Mormon. Just be a morally consistent Mormon.

After the on-air interview, Mickelson told Romney he takes "this stuff seriously."

An exasperated and sarcastic Romney: "Oh, I don't, though. For me, this is all frivolous. Come on! I'm running for president!"

Running for president, leading the Republican field in Iowa.

Romney told Register reporter Thomas Beaumont he didn't realize the camera was rolling during the break, but it wasn't an issue. It goes with the territory.

"So I don't have a complaint."

Romney said he wasn't hearing many complaints about his radio performance. At an appearance Wednesday, he got a compliment.

"A man came up and said: 'I'm sure glad you expressed yourself so vehemently. I want someone with a backbone who can fight for us in Washington. I saw you on that WHO interview and I see you can stand up for yourself.'"

Mickelson wasn't backing down, either.

"He was giving me a politically pragmatic answer to a pro-life question," he said Wednesday. "I served up a softball and he hit a grounder. I'm happy he's pro-life, but the position is based on his feelings and thinking alone. He considers himself the highest authority on the issue. He's building a house on sand."

Then he backed off just a bit.

"I have to admit I went a little Chris Matthews on the guy," he said, "but I felt I was getting hustled."

That was apparent.

Columnist Marc Hansen can be reached at (515) 284-8534 or mahansen@dmreg.com

http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070809/OPINION01/708090383/-1/NEWS04

Alabama: Mobile Nazi Industrial Front Links American, German Cultures

It's a scaled-down version of another Nazi industrial front, the German-Marshall Fund. Both were organized to put a happy face on German fascism. - AC

Lutz Goergens

January 21, 2009
By JEFF AMY
Business Reporter


If you were looking for a symbol of friendship between Germany and Mobile, the "old-fashioned apple pecan strudel" might have been a good place to start at a recent meeting of the American-German Business Club. ...

In its third meeting since its founding last year, the club was hailed by visiting German diplomat Lutz Goergens. The German consul general based in Atlanta, Goergens assists German citizens and promotes his country's business and political interests in six states, including Alabama.

"If German business does well, it amazingly boosts Germany's standing in the American community," Goergens told the gathering. "The club would not exist, I would not stand here, if there was not such success by ThyssenKrupp, Evonik (Degussa) and many other fine companies."

[ThyssenKrupp: This "fine" company was an ally of Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman and other domestic fascist investors, and was key to Nazi aggression in the '40s: " ... Fritz Thyssen, the elder son of August, is remembered more for his association with Adolf Hitler than for his business skills. Frustrated by his father's long tenure at the head of the company, Fritz channeled his energies into right-wing politics aiming to subvert the Weimar Republic. He became an early supporter of the Nazi party. Fritz later fell out with the Nazis and recanted in a ghostwritten autobiography titled I Paid Hitler. He fled Germany in 1939, was captured in Vichy, France, and incarcerated from 1941 to November 1943 in a mental asylum and then until the end of the war in concentration camps. After World War II, Fritz's break with the Nazis was largely accepted by a denazification court, which fined him 15 percent of his German properties. At the end of 1948 he immigrated to Latin America. ... "]
http://www.answers.com/topic/thyssenkrupp-ag

[Krupp and the Nazis: " ... use[d] 100,000 slave laborers to make weapons at Auschwitz and other death camps. Boss Alfried Krupp was sentenced to 12 years for war crimes but was freed in 1951--cynics say because the Korean War had just broken out and the U.S. needed Krupp's industrial might as a bulwark against the Reds. Its assets restored, Krupp again became a corporate giant and remains so today. ... ]
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1095/did-krups-braun-and-mercedes-benz-make-nazi-concentration-camp-ovens

The Mobile chapter was founded in the wake of ThyssenKrupp AG's announcement that it would build a $4.65 billion steel mill in Calvert. The club is open to anyone who wants to build ties between the two countries.

Klaus Jeschke [an advisor to Mobile's Chamber of Commerce, and an executive at Expense Reduction Analysts, consultants in business cost-cutting] and others organized the club in August. It has now surpassed 75 members.

The Association of German Business Clubs has 10 chapters in Germany, plus one in the Washington, D.C., area. Jeschke has been a member of the Dusseldorf chapter. The group was founded by American executives in 1964 in Frankfurt, and has grown to more than 700 members. ...

"We want to make sure that the German families are out making friends with Americans," he said. "I think we should learn something of the American culture and American food. The Americans should learn Germany is more than ThyssenKrupp."

The Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce [an enclave of industrial fascists] is aiding the club, in part because it could be an amenity in recruiting other German companies to the area. The area's most prominent German-owned companies include ThyssenKrupp, Evonik Degussa, and Berg Steel Pipe Corp. [or Bergrohr, a manufacturer of oil well pipes, founded in 1979, does business with Iran] German executives from all three of those firms are involved.

The American members include economic developers, people who would like to do business with relocating Germans, and Mobilians with ties to Germany.

A similar organization, the Alabama Germany Partnership, is based in Birmingham. It was founded after the opening of the Mercedes Benz assembly plant in Tuscaloosa

[Straight dope: " ... Daimler-Benz ... avidly supported Nazism and in return received arms contracts and tax breaks that enabled it to become one of the world's leading industrial concerns. (Between 1932 and 1940 production grew by 830 percent.) During the war the company used thousands of slaves and forced laborers including Jews, foreigners, and POWs. According to historian Bernard Bellon (Mercedes in Peace and War, 1990), at least eight Jews were murdered by DB managers or SS men at a plant in occupied Poland. There was a report that Daimler-Benz built mobile poison gas vans, but this has never been corroborated and is doubtful.

"Many big German companies used slaves during World War II. The most important was I.G. Farben, the German chemical monopoly. IGF had a substantial interest in one of the companies making Zyklon B, the poison used to gas the Jews. (The director of that company got five years; the heads of the other one were hanged.) The Allies ordered IGF broken up after the war but the pieces are still around, including such well known companies as Bayer and BASF. ... ]
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1095/did-krups-braun-and-mercedes-benz-make-nazi-concentration-camp-ovens
•••
The state's list of German-based industries in Alabama, with what they produce and their estimated employment:

Alabama Precision Mold, Cottondale, plastic injection molds, 21-30.

Aluminum Technology Schmid, Auburn, aluminum parts for automotive hydraulic applications, 31-40.

ATS Light Alloy Wheels, Auburn, aluminum wheels, 151-200.

Aviagen North America, Huntsville, poultry hatcheries, 76-100.

BASF Catalyst, Huntsville, catalytic converter systems, ozone converters, air purifiers, 451-500.

BASF Corp., Decatur, paint, 101-150.

Benteler Automotive, Opelika, automotive chassis systems, 201-250.

Berg Steel Pipe, Mobile, iron and steel pipe, not available.

BHS-HARREX, Tuscaloosa, product rework facility, 41-50.

Big Dutchman, Cullman, poultry equipment, 11-15.

Borgers USA, Brookwood, auto rear compartment interior trim and floor panels, 51-75.

Brose Tuscaloosa, Vance, automotive door modules, 76-100.

CRH North America, Clanton, auto seat adjuster systems, 451-550.

Degussa Corp., Theodore, chemicals, 751-900.

Diehl Avionics, Sterrett, aircraft product support and maintenance, 21-30.

Eberspaecher North America, Cottondale, auto exhaust systems, 101-150.

Eissman Automotice North America, Pell City, leather components for auto interiors, 76-100.

Esser Twin Pipe, Alabaster, twin wall pipe fabrication, 6-10.

ETEC/Durawear Corp., Birmingham, industrial ceramics, 11-15.

Fasco America, Muscle Shoals, pneumatic tools and fasteners distribution, 6-10.

Formel D USA, Birmingham, automotive support services provider, not available.

Hightex, Auburn, headliners, pillars and seat coverings, 6-10.

Hoerbiger Automatic Comfort Systems, Auburn, hydraulic actuating mechanisms, 51-75.

Hoerbiger Drivetech USA, Auburn, brake and clutch disc plates, 21-30.

INEOS Phenol, Theodore, phenol and acetone, 101-150.

ISE Innomotive Systems US, Tuscaloosa, front and rear end modules, 1-5.

J&S/AST North America, Auburn, pillar loops for seatbelt systems, 16-20.

KAUTEX Textron Alabama, Cottondale, fuel tanks, 1-5.

Knauf Insulation, Huguley, fiberglass insulation products, 301-350.

Kommering USA, Huntsville, rigid PVC foam sheets and trim board, 101-150.

Kostal Mexicana SA, Tuscaloosa, switches and electronics, 1-5.

Laempereich Corp., Trussville, core equipment for foundries, 11-15.

Lehigh Cement, Lees, cement, 101-150.

Linde Gas, Decatur, hydrogen gas, 6-10.

Linde Gas, Saraland, hydrogen gas, not available.

MAHA USA, Pinkard, auto lifts, 21-30.

MEMS Optical, Huntsville, micro-optic and micromachines, 21-30.

Mercedes Benz US International, Vance, sports utility vehicles, more than 4,000.

Oris Automotice Parts Alabama, McCalla, auto parts and accessories, 21-30.

Polyamide High Performance, Scottsboro, nylon automobile airbag yarn, 51-75.

Rehau, Cullman, auto exterior moldings, 351-450.

Sherman Industries, Birmingham, pre-stress concrete and ready-mix concrete, 351-450.

Siemens VDO Automotive Electronics, Huntsville, auto electronic parts, 1,501-2,000.

Siemens Westinghouse Power Corp., Fort Payne, electrical components, 251-300.

ThyssenKrupp Krause Inc., Madison, customized powertrain assembly systems, 11-15.

Turner Universal, Huntsville, general contractor, not available.

VST Keller Inc., Pell City, heat coating of stamping dies, 21-30.

WKW Erbsloeh Automotive Group, Pell City, metal automotive trim, not available.

Z/I Imaging Corp., Huntsville, geo-data management, 31-40.

ZF Industries Inc., Tuscaloosa, auto axle systems, 201-250.

http://legacy.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/news/070521/germany.shtml

Friday, January 30, 2009

Did U.S. Intelligence Assets Kill Antioch College?

Concerning, among others, "Obama's Yoda," Brent Scowcroft ... - AC

18 July 2007
Column: Bob Fitrakis
The Free Press
July 16, 2007

At the time of its announced closure, Antioch College, perhaps America’s most progressive and well-known peace college, had a few visible capitalist hawks on its Board of Trustees.

Bruce P. Bedford, one of only three trustees not a former alum, had been appointed to the board of Arlington, Virginia company GlobeSecNine in 2005. The company is described by a representative of investment corporation Bear Sterns as having "a unique set of experiences in special forces, classified operations, transportation security and military operations."

One can only speculate why the nation’s longest-standing anti-imperialist education institution would appoint a trustee with extensive ties to the military and security industrial complexes.

Business Wire on May 4, 2005 described GlobeSecNine as follows: "GlobeSecNine invests in companies providing U.S. defense, security, global trade management and supply chain solutions to the public and private sectors, and has a strategic alliance with The Scowcroft Group, a business advisory firm headed by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft."

Bedford served on the GlobeSecNine board of advisors with Scowcroft and co-founder of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center Fred Turco. Others affiliated with the company are tied directly to the prison industrial complex and the anti-liberal "war on drugs," for example Jack Lawn, former Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who serves on the board of directors.

On July 3, 2007, Michael Alexander’s name was removed from the list of Antioch trustees. Two days earlier, he had been sworn in as president of Lasell College in Newton Massachusetts. There has been speculation that Antioch’s campus would make a great retirement community, much like the one at Lasell, known as Lasell Village, "a state-of-the-art eldercare community with the first-of-its-kind built in educational component."

In 1998 Alexander founded AverStar, where he served as chairman and chief executive officer, and did business primarily with NASA and the Defense Department. In 2000, Alexander’s AverStar defense company merged with the Titan corporation.

In March 2005, Titan pled guilty and paid the largest penalty under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in history for bribery and filing false tax returns.

L-3 Communications acquired the Titan Corporation on July 29, 2005. As their corporate website described the company, it "is a leading provider of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems, secure communications systems, aircraft modernization, training and government services. The company is a leading merchant supplier of a broad array of high technology products, including guidance and navigation, sensors, scanners, fuzes, data links, propulsion systems, simulators, avionics, electro optics, satellite communications, electrical power equipment, encryption, signal intelligence, antennas and microwave components. L-3 also supports a variety of Homeland Security initiatives with products and services. Its customers include the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, selected U.S. Government intelligence agencies and aerospace prime contractors."

The L-3 Communications Titan Group brags that 8000 of its 10,000 employees have "security clearances" and that they are a leading provider of C4ISR, Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance – "developing and supporting the systems of today and tomorrow for the United States and Allied Militaries and defense-related agencies in order for them to carry out their assigned missions," according to their website.

While Anitoch board members Bedford and Alexander cozied up with U.S. intelligence and Homeland Security, students at the university sponsored a national teach-in to expose the atrocities of Guantanamo Bay on October 5, 2006.

How a college targeted by the FBI and its notorious COINTELPRO operation during the Cold War as a "vanguard of the New Left" managed to place two "spook"-connected trustees on their board is a mystery worth exploring.

Antioch resides in the shadow of the Wright Patterson Air Force Base and its legendary Foreign Technologies Division that reverse engineers weapons systems from other nations. Its larger neighbor to the west, Ohio State University, has long been tied up with the CIA’s favorite nonprofit institution, Battelle, and was one of the 30 or so universities involved in the MK Ultra mind control LSD experiments in the 1960s.

The Dayton Daily News is reporting that a $5 million accounting error caused the radical college to close. Others have pointed to the long-standing rumors of intelligence ties to the Antioch Europe in Transition study program.

If the CIA or U.S. intelligence services were involved in the subversion of America’s most pro-peace college, it wouldn’t be the first time that the progressive college campuses have been infiltrated. The CIA subverted the National Student Association in the late 50s and early 60s. The agency also has been accused of subverting everything from fraternities to Fullbright scholars to Peace Corps workers.

The role of these trustees must be heavily scrutinized. Antioch alumni should be ashamed to allow their college to die until they get to the bottom of this spooky mystery.
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Bob Fitrakis is the author of The Fitrakis Files: Spooks, Nukes, and Nazis, on the role of the CIA in Ohio politics. This article was published by http://freepress.org.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0707/S00243.htm

Book Review: Jonathan Yardley on 'The Big Rich' - The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes

" ... Hunt, a bigamist, 'a strange man, a loner who lived deep inside his own peculiar mind,' was famous during his lifetime for extreme right-wing activities, but his name now means less than that of his universally well-liked son Lamar, a founder of the American Football League and engineer of its momentous merger with the National Football League. ... "

Hugh Roy Cullen was a fifth-grade dropout who used his millions to joust with politicians from Wendell Willkie to Dwight Eisenhower. (Dmitri Kessel/time & Life Pictures/getty Image)

Review of THE BIG RICH
By Bryan Burrough
Penguin Press. 466 pp. $29.95


By Jonathan Yardley
February 1, 2009; Page BW15

For me as doubtless for uncountable thousands of others, the image of oil-rich Texas was shaped for good by the second half of George Stevens's sprawling film "Giant" (1956), adapted from Edna Ferber's bestselling novel. Jett Rink, a charmingly loutish wildcatter played by James Dean, strikes oil on a tiny patch of land, builds it into a vast empire, transforms himself into the epitome of nouveau-riche vulgarity and, in the climactic scene, makes a drunken fool of himself before an audience of other arrivistes brought together to celebrate his spectacular wealth. As Bryan Burrough summarizes it in The Big Rich:

"The mass media's discovery of ultrawealthy Texas oilmen in 1948, and the resulting caricature of flamboyant, jet-setting billionaires popularized in Giant, introduced the country to a new regional archetype -- funny, silly, harmless Texans who rode ostriches, wooed Hollywood stars, and scattered silver dollars on the sidewalks of Houston and Dallas like so much pocket lint. It was as if American had acquired an exotic new animal for the national zoo, Texas oilicus."

The stereotype persisted for years, indeed is widely believed in to this day, though it has expanded to include "secretive oil billionaires plotting an ultraconservative takeover of America," the "alternately kooky and villainous portrayals of Texans in Dallas and movies such as Doctor Strangelove and Oliver Stone's JFK," Texas "millionaires who were seen as unlettered, uncouth know-it-alls," and "the Evil Texas Oilman" engineering assassinations and other vile deeds. Still more dimensions were added during the administration of Bush II, with gun-slinging cowpokes swaggering into foreign territories and vast conglomerates raking in the profits from these international adventures.

Like most stereotypes, this one contains elements of truth as well as exaggeration and condescension. It is one of Burrough's aims in The Big Rich to separate truth from stereotype, a task he performs meticulously and occasionally amusingly. A native Texan, former Wall Street Journal reporter and co-author (with John Helyar) of Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, he is slightly defensive about his home state but sufficiently clear-eyed to recognize wretched excess when he sees it. His chronicle begins in the 1920s, when people started drilling for oil in Texas in a serious way; follows the development of the great oil fortunes through the ensuing four decades; then chronicles their decline "as their industry withered" and the Middle East became the greatest of all the world's gushers. It's a cautionary tale about the evanescence of wealth and glory, but it's also first-class entertainment.

Burrough's focus is on four men who by the early 1930s had presided over one of "the greatest periods of wealth generation in American history, in size perhaps the largest creation of individual wealth between the Gilded Age and the Internet boom of the 1990s." He writes: "The fortunes forged during the Depression created a new top layer of Texas society, what came to be known in later years as the Big Rich. This was wealth on a scale entirely new to the state, and during the 1930s Hugh Roy Cullen, Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson and H.L. Hunt, soon to be known as the 'Big Four' oilmen, laid the foundations of a flamboyant lifestyle that would come to define the image of Texas oil. There were mansions to build, presidents to meet, European vacations to take, islands to buy, and children to raise."

To say that all four men are now almost completely forgotten outside Texas would be an exaggeration, but not by much. Cullen, "a fifth-grade dropout who in his heyday was probably America's richest man," may be remembered beyond Houston "as an early champion of Texas ultraconservatism," but even that memory is fading rapidly. The root of Murchison's fortune was an "instinctive mastery of banking and lending practices [that] translated easily into an understanding of oil field drilling and geology," but he's chiefly remembered now as the original owner of the Dallas Cowboys. Richardson, who "at his death controlled more petroleum reserves than three major oil companies . . . left few footprints on history [and] attracted no biographer." Hunt, a bigamist, "a strange man, a loner who lived deep inside his own peculiar mind," was famous during his lifetime for extreme right-wing activities, but his name now means less than that of his universally well-liked son Lamar, a founder of the American Football League and engineer of its momentous merger with the National Football League.

As Burrough says, "In the first years after World War II," these four "had emerged as a handful of the richest men in America -- and no one knew it. It wasn't just that few people understood how wealthy they were. Beyond the insular world of Texas oil, almost no one knew they existed." By 1948 "the Big Four had garnered precisely three references in the nation's newspaper of record, the New York Times." Then in that same year, Life and Fortune magazines published articles about the Big Rich that "triggered a seismic shift in the way America viewed Texas, especially its oilmen." The Big Four weren't especially eager to cooperate with the press, but in a fifth oilman, "many writers found exactly the kind of Texan they were looking for." Burrough continues:

"The stereotype of the raw, hard-living, bourbon-swilling, fistfighting, cash-tossing, damn-the-torpedoes Texas oil millionaire did not exist before Glenn McCarthy rocketed into the national imagination in the late 1940s. Yet McCarthy was all that and more. Little remembered today, it was McCarthy, and his quixotic dreams, who, more than H.L. Hunt or Roy Cullen or his wealthier peers, introduced Americans to the changes oil had brought to Texas. The distilled essence of swaggering Texas id, McCarthy rubbed elbows with Howard Hughes and Hollywood stars, drank and brawled his way from Buffalo Bayou to Sunset Boulevard, and, at the peak of his fame, adorned the cover of Time. No Texas oilman ever rose so high or fell so hard."

McCarthy, who was the model for Dean's Jett Rink character in "Giant," was, in the words of another oilman, "possibly the best practical oilman the country had produced, an improviser who could drill with junk [and who possessed] a knack for finding oil he couldn't explain because it came installed in his system like an antenna." He amassed a huge fortune in the 1940s, blew it, amassed another, blew that too. He built a great hotel in Houston and staged a garish opening party that was the model for the movie's climax, then gradually faded into obscurity, reappearing from time to time to refurbish his image as "the Lone Star playboy, the swinging oilman who romances starlets between trips on his airplane to see his next gusher." Eventually, though, he stayed away from the spotlight, and at his death in 1988 few remembered him.

A considerably more lasting presence in American life has been big oil's "contribution to the growth of right-wing policies and politicians, especially in their most radical guises . . . bankrolling everything from mainstream Republican thinktanks to Senator Joseph McCarthy's red-baiting campaigns of the 1950s to extremist groups that openly espoused racism and anti-Semitism; later, oil money helped bankroll the birth of the religious right." Burrough argues that the explanation lies in "the deep-tissue insecurity of the nouveau riche. As one oilman told a magazine writer in 1954: 'We all made money fast. We were interested in nothing else. Then this Communist business suddenly burst upon us. Were we going to lose what we had gained?' "

That's fine as far as it goes, but another explanation lies in the frontier mentality that has always characterized Texas and much of the West as well, the passionate belief in individualism combined with deep suspicion of government and any other large outside agency. In league with the "Southern strategy" that Richard Nixon employed to exploit racial fears in the Old South, Texas radicalism completely transformed the Republican Party, replacing Robert Taft and Everett Dirksen with Strom Thurmond and Tom DeLay. Whether this radicalized "base" will be able to continue its dominance of the GOP after the 2008 election remains unclear, but its influence on the country has been disproportionate to its actual size.

The Texas oilmen who helped spawn it are long since gone, and their fortunes have been diminished for many reasons. Burrough is right to insist that they weren't quite the caricatures that Easterners found amusing or frightening, but his forthright, unsentimental book leaves little doubt that the caricatures had their roots in reality. ·

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/01/30/ST2009013001617.html