Richard Mellon Scaife Page

Who is Richard Mellon Scaife?

Sources: Salon Magazine; Atlanta Journal Constitution; N.Y Times; Article by Robert G. Kaiser, Washington Post; Slate Magazine; and several other news sources

UPDATE: During the GOP convention in Philadelphia, artists were rounded up and arrested before they ever got to leave their building (the 'puppet warehouse') They had the intention of protesting against Bush via street theater. They were INFILTRATED by the PA State Police, accused of being terrorists (there was paint thinner and wire in the warehouse used to make puppets but classified initially as bomb making materials). In investigations by the ACLU and the Philadelphia Inquirer, it was revealed that the PA Police infiltrated the group on a tip from a 'Scaife funded' organization -- that basically accused the group of being 'communists' (because a small communist group had donated $200 for materials to build the puppets). Scaife is scared to death of the anti-global trade/fair trade message that this group was really going to talk about. He sees it as a direct threat to his personal wealth (as was discussed in lengthy Washington post articles about his background).

What was most alarming to me about this episode was that the far right culture war, funded by people like Scaife to silence the left, used PUBLIC AGENCIES such as the Pennsylvania and Philadelphia Police departments to forward a POLITICAL AGENDA OF SILENCING DISSENT. As taxpayers, we should expect our police agencies to be fair and to not take sides with regard to what a person's beliefs are. People should not be arrested for their BELIEFS. This is ultimately why municipal judges in Philadelphia dismissed all the cases (over 450, with the exception of 12 provable misdemeanors) in the Philadelphia convention crackdown. There was no evidence against these people. They were rounded up to prevent them from expressing themselves, as they have a right to do in a free country. The far right"

continued....

Who Is Richard Mellon Scaife?

"Who Is Richard Mellon Scaife?

He's very rich and very partisan, but is he behind an anti-Clinton conspiracy?
By Brooks Jackson/CNN

WASHINGTON (April 27) -- Who is Richard Scaife? He's a 65-year-old billionaire Republican wielding power from the shadows.

According to President Bill Clinton's allies, he's the main money man behind a right-wing anti-Clinton conspiracy, attacking with his money. Former White House counsel Lanny Davis argues, 'He's using it to destroy a president of the United States.'

If it's a conspiracy, it's a pretty open one. Scaife's tax-exempt foundations disclose their grants on the Web. Among them: $2.4 million over several years to American Spectator to pay for anti-Clinton reporting, even a private eye to dig up dirt. And millions more went to other anti-Clinton groups."

Continued..........

Washingtonpost.com: Scaife: Funding Father of the Right

Scaife: Funding Father of the Right

Richard Mellon Scaife
Conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. (AP)
By Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 2, 1999; Page A1

First of two articles

One August day in 1994, while gossiping about politics over lunch on Nantucket, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh billionaire and patron of conservative causes, made a prediction. "We're going to get Clinton," Joan Bingham, a New York publisher present at the lunch, remembers him saying. "And you'll be much happier," he said to Bingham and another Democrat at the table, "because Al Gore will be president."

Bingham was startled at the time, but in the years since – as Clinton has struggled with an onslaught from political enemies – Scaife's assertion came to seem less and less far-fetched.

Scaife did get involved in numerous anti-Clinton activities. He gave $2.3 million to the American Spectator magazine to dig up dirt on Clinton and supported other conservative groups that harassed the president and his administration. The White House and its allies responded by fingering Scaife as the central figure in "a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president," as Hillary Rodham Clinton described it. James Carville, Clinton's former campaign aide and rabid defender, called Scaife "the archconservative godfather in [a] heavily funded war against the president."

Continued......
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know thine enemy........

The Stanford Prison Experiment: A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment

John Wayne

Remind anyone else of George Bush?

The prisoners even nicknamed the most macho and brutal guard in our study 'John Wayne.' Later, we learned that the most notorious guard in a Nazi prison near Buchenwald was named 'Tom Mix' -- the John Wayne of an earlier generation -- because of his 'Wild West' cowboy macho image in abusing camp inmates.

Where had our 'John Wayne' learned to become such a guard? How could he and others move so readily into that role? How could intelligent, mentally healthy, 'ordinary' men become perpetrators of evil so quickly? These were questions we were forced to ask."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A fascinating study and slide presentation. I encourage everyone (and everybody you know) to go back to the beginning and take the time to look at and discuss this slide-show presentation.

Gary Williams

New Proof that Coca-Cola Buys Andean Coca Leaves

-------- Original Message -----
January 28, 2005
Please Distribute Widely

Dear Colleague,

Acting Publisher Luis A. Gómez weighs in today on a statement just released by Peru's drug control agency, the National Commission for Development and Life Without Drugs (shortened in Spanish to DEVIDA). The document supports, although timidly, the industrialization of the coca leaf in Peru, a long-sought goal by many in that country as a way to both legitimize this ancient, sacred plant, and to boost the Peruvian economy.

snipped

The DEVIDA statement contains another bombshell: confirmation that the Coca Cola Company, despite repeated denials, does in fact buy coca leaves from both Peru and Bolivia. While small farmers, and even local Peruvian companies trying to incorporate coca leaves into drinks and other products, face constant state harassment and repression, one of the biggest corporations in the world is buying tons of coca, using it in their drinks and lying about it to the world – getting ever-richer off the sacred plant of the Andes, while the people who grow and maintain it suffer for their labor.

Gómez writes, of the DEVIDA document:

"The good part comes in that same point #5. The end of the paragraph reads: 'Coca Cola, the globally recognized soft drink manufacturer, buys 115 tonnes of coca leaf from Peru and 105 tonnes from Bolivia per year, with which it produces, without alkaloids, 500 million bottles of soda per day.' You read correctly, kind readers, Coca Cola buys coca leaves. We have said so ourselves in past reports, and the Peruvian government says the same thing now. And so now we are sure that the 'spark of life' ('La Chispa de la Vida' is Coke's Spanish-language slogan) has coca – in at least 500 million bottles a day. And that process that Nils Ericsson has told us about helped the company earn 13.3 billion dollars in net profit last year, according to their own financial reports.

Read the full report:

http://www.narconews.com

From somewhere in a country called América,

Dan Feder
Managing Editor, Narco News
http://www.narconews.com
webmaster@narconews.com
Narco News is supported by:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
P.O. Box 71051
Madison Heights, MI 48071 USA
http://www.authenticjournalism.org

The Fund receives online donations at this web page:
http://www.authenticjournalism.org

TomPaine.com - Reining In Cheney

Reining In Cheney
Ray McGovern
January 25, 2005

As long as the Bush administration continues to trot out the bogus claims of Iraq's WMD capacity, we will continue to challenge them. This time, Vice President Dick Cheney is basing his claim that Iran is a threat on Iraq's alleged nuclear capacity before we invaded. McGovern—who spent more than 20 years in the CIA—explains how outraged intelligence analysts are reacting to Cheney's most recent embellishment of the known facts.

Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush, chairing estimates and briefing the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Quick! Anyone! Who can put the brakes on Vice President Dick Cheney before we have another war on our hands? Current and former intelligence analysts are reacting with wonderment and apprehension to his remarks last week in an interview with Don Imus. Cheney made questionable claims about Iran's nuclear program and resuscitated his spinning on why attacking Iraq was the prudent thing to do.

Continued.......

Guantánamo: What the World Should Know

The Inquisition Strikes Back

"And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."

--John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII, 1623

Review by Jules Siegel

Original at

1200 words

Guantánamo: What the World Should Know
By Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray
Chelsea Green Publishing Company
184 pages

We have by now all seen much of this material before, but reading it all in one piece, told by human voices in this book-length interview, is not easy to take. "Guantánamo: What the World Should Know" becomes a heart-stopper once you cross the line and realize that you could be any of these victims.

Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, is co-counsel in Rasul v. Bush, the historic case of Guantánamo detainees now before the U.S. Supreme Court. His interviewer, Ellen Ray, is President of the Institute for Media Analysis, and a widely published author and editor on U.S. intelligence and international politics.

It's hard to say which is more disgusting, the descriptions of the torture or the bone-chilling analyses of how the president of the United States gave himself the powers of an absolute military dictator. Under Military Order No. 1, which the president issued without congressional authority on November 13, 2001, George W. Bush has ordered people captured or detained from all over the world, flown to Guantánamo and tortured in a lawless zone where, the White House asserts, prisoners have no rights of any kind at all and can be kept forever at his pleasure. Despite the at-best marginal intervention of the American courts so far, there is no civilian judicial review, no due process of any kind.

Continued.......Original at

Democracy - It's not God's gift

"Democracy - It's not God's gift

Gwynne Dyer

01/26/05 'NZH' -- Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of the organisation that calls itself 'al Qaeda in Iraq', says: 'We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy.'

Zarqawi is the bogeyman that the United States Government blames for almost everything that has gone wrong in Iraq, but he does speak essentially the same language as President Bush.

Continued.......... "

RE: The "Terminator"? Embassy Reply

Austrian Embassy

OTTAWA
Ref # 20.95/7/2005



Mr. Williams,

the Embassy hereby informs you that your e-mail has been forwarded to the appropriate authorities in Austria.

Sincerely

Sigurd Pacher

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Mycos [mailto:mycos@shaw.ca]
Gesendet: Sonntag, 23. Jänner 2005 20:35
An: #Ottawa OB Postfach
Betreff: The "Terminator"?

Ambassador Ditz,

AS A CANADIAN, a citizen of a fellow country which has evolved....has come to realize that Capital Punishment has no place in the world of civilized men and women, I ask that you pass along to the appropriate officials my desire to have Arnold Schwarzenegger (Governor of California) denounced, degraded, and subsequently expelled as a citizen of Austria.

I make this request on the grounds that Mr. Schwarzenegger, as a citizen of your country, is engaging in an act of state-sanctioned killing. Further, this takes place not in war-time nor under any special circumstances regarding "terrorism". Therefor I submit that Mr. Schwarzenegger, as an Austrian, a country which has clearly affirmed that civilized men do not engage in such actions, has turned his back on you, your country, and your most sacred ideals.

I place the suggestion at your feet that such behaviour does not befit an Austrian. I would further suggest that Austria should not be seen to be "proud" of such an individual. Therefore, it is in Austria's best interest to distance itself from any further affiliation with individuals who proscribe capital punishment. Austria's own history is all to clear about the shame such an association is capable of creating.

Thank you for any consideration you may give my appeal. It is important to me, but it is more important to history and to the evolution of civilization itself that you give my request more than passing notice.

With Great Respect,

Gary D. Williams --

Rumsfeld scraps Munich visit over war probe

Rumsfeld scraps Munich visit over war probe

21 January 2005

MUNICH - United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has cancelled a planned visit to Munich.

Rumsfeld has informed the German government via the US embassy he will not take part at the Munich Security Conference in February, conference head Horst Teltschik said.
The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights filed a complaint in December with the Federal German Prosecutor's Office against Rumsfeld accusing him of war crimes and torture in connection with detainee abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison."

Continued.........

The "Terminator"?

Ambassador Ditz,

AS A CANADIAN, a citizen of a fellow country which has evolved....has come to realize that Capital Punishment has no place in the world of civilized men and women, I ask that you pass along to the appropriate officials my desire to have Arnold Schwarzenegger (Governor of California) denounced, degraded, and subsequently expelled as a citizen of Austria.

I make this request on the grounds that Mr. Schwarzenegger, as a citizen of your country, is engaging in an act of state-sanctioned killing. Further, this takes place not in war-time nor under any special circumstances regarding "terrorism". Therefor I submit that Mr. Schwarzenegger, as an Austrian, a country which has clearly affirmed that civilized men do not engage in such actions, has turned his back on you, your country, and your most sacred ideals.

I place the suggestion at your feet that such behaviour does not befit an Austrian. I would further suggest that Austria should not be seen to be "proud" of such an individual. Therefore, it is in Austria's best interest to distance itself from any further affiliation with individuals who proscribe capital punishment. Austria's own history is all to clear about the shame such an association is capable of creating.

Thank you for any further consideration you may give my appeal. It is important to myself but it is much more important to history and to the evolution of civilization itself that you give my request more than passing notice.

With Great Respect,

Gary D. Williams

--

Gary Williams

Inaugural Protests in Many Cities

Inaugural Protests in Many Cities: "Published on Friday, January 21, 2005 by CommonDreams.org Inaugural Protests in Many Cities "