My wife forwarded me an email she got from a friend. It was about how we need to fear John Kerry, because his wife, Theresa Heinz Kerry, is the “fairy god-mother of the radical left” and donates huge sums of money to radical causes. Of course, I can’t let sleeping neocon dogs lie, so I set out to rebut the email:
Oh, so we’re going to play the “follow the money” game, are we? Well, then, let’s take a look at Theresa Heinz Kerry, and then a look at George W. Bush. First let’s deconstruct the attempt at Kerry character assassination:
>Maria Teresa Thiersten Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry was born in
>Mozambique, the daughter of a Portuguese physician, and was educated in
>Switzerland and South Africa. Fluent in five languages, she was working
>as a United Nations interpreter in Geneva in the mid-60’s when she met
>a handsome young American, H. John Heinz, III, who worked at a bank in
>Geneva. He told her his family was “in the food business.”Oh no! An intelligent potential First Lady! Educated abroad, fluent in five languages, worked at the UN… everything good Repugnicans hate. Why can’t this woman just know her place like Laura Bush, Barbara Bush, and Nancy Reagan? Why does she have to be so… so… so “Rodham Clinton”-esque?
>Heinz Kerry is not shy about telling people that she required Kerry to
>sign a pre- nuptial agreement before they were married.Even worse! A woman with money and power and prestige who was smart enough to protect her vast fortune as she entered her second marriage.
> A lot of hard-earned money, made through many years of hawking
>catsup, pickles, and soup, has fallen into the hands of two people who
>despise successful entrepreneurship and who believe in the confiscatory
>redistribution of wealth.Let me run those through my neocon translator:
Despise successful entrepreneurship = not willing to let corporations have their way
Confiscatory redistribution of wealth = forcing corporations to pay their fair share of taxes>According to the G2 Bulletin, an online intelligence newsletter of World
>Net Daily, in the years between 1995-2001 she gave more than $4 million
>to an organization called the Tides Foundation. And what does the Tides
>Foundation do with John Heinz’s money?Ahem, John Heinz is dead. The money was inherited by Theresa Heinz. Therefore, it is Theresa Heinz’ money to spend. But phrasing it this way makes her look like a golddigging Anna Nicole Smith instead of a legitimate heiress who may spend HER OWN MONEY any way she chooses.
>They support numerous anti-war groups, including Ramsey Clark’s
>International Action Center. Clark has offered to defend Saddam Hussein
>when he’s tried.Oh no! Offering counsel to a criminal defendant in a trial! How consitutionally American of Mr. Clark! I don’t care if Saddam Hussein is Satan himself, he deserves as much right to a competant legal defense as did John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Timothy McVeigh, Sirhan Sirhan, Lee Harvey Oswald, etc.
>They support the Democratic Justice Fund, a joint venture of the Tides
>Foundation and billionaire hate-monger George Soros. The Democratic
>Justice Fund seeks to ease restrictions on Muslim immigration from
>”terrorist” states.From http://www.tidesfoundation.org/, their website: “The Iraq Peace Fund, a short-term grantmaking effort, made grants to organizations working to organize and elevate the voices of peace and justice in response to the Bush administration’s intention to attack Iraq.” Yeah, that sounds like hatemongering to me! And yes, they do support the rights of LEGAL IMMIGRATION for Muslims — how dare they!
Speaking of George Soros, he is a leading contributor to many organizations, including MoveOn.org (a grassroots political organization dedicated to defeating George W. Bush) and the DRCNet (Drug Reform Coalition – dedicated to ending the War On [Some Americans With Certain] Drugs). He has given away nearly $5 billion to promote democracy in the former Soviet bloc, Africa and Asia.
From the Washington Post: Soros believes that a “supremacist ideology” guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. “When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans.” It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit (“The enemy is listening”). “My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me,” he said in a soft Hungarian accent.
Sounds like a hatemonger to me.
>They support the Council for American-Islamic Relations, whose leaders
>are known to have close ties to the terrorist group, Hamas.I’d like to see the proof of that. But meanwhile, here’s some of the dastardly things the CAIR have been promoting to their members:
3/25/2004 Ask your senator to defend academic freedom
3/16/2004 FCC complaint filed over Islamophobic radio skit
3/2/2004 Muslims urged to vote on Super Tuesday
2/26/2004 CA college investigates anti-Muslim discrimination
2/11/2004 NY Congressman calls U.S. Mosque Leaders ‘An Enemy Amongst Us’
2/5/2004 Ask congress to defend religious freedom on France
1/15/2004 Alabama Muslims denied right to Islamic attire
1/12/2004 CAIR launches Eid u-Adha voter registration driveSounds to me like CAIR is the Islamic version of the NAACP.
>They support the National Lawyers Guild, organized as a communist front
>during the Cold War era. One of their attorneys, Lynne Stewart, has been
>arrested for helping a client, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, communicate
>with terror cells in Egypt. He is the convicted mastermind of the 1993
>World Trade Center bombing.Here’s what their mission statement is: The National Lawyers Guild is an association dedicated to the need for basic change in the structure of our political and economic system. We seek to unite the lawyers, law students, legal workers and jailhouse lawyers of America in an organization that shall function as an effective political and social force in the service of the people, to the end that human rights shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests.
Our aim is to bring together all those who recognize the importance of safeguarding and extending the rights of workers, women, farmers and minority groups, upon whom the welfare of the entire nation depends; who seek actively to eliminate racism; who work to maintain and protect our civil rights and liberties in the face of persistent attacks upon them; and who look upon the law as an instrument for the protection of the people, rather than for their repression.And their history: Founded in 1937 the National Lawyers Guild was the nation’s first racially integrated bar association. The first Guild lawyers supported President Roosevelt’s New Deal, assisted the emerging industrial labor movement, and opposed the racial segregation policies of the American Bar Association and the larger society. During its 65 year history, the NLG has been an important part of the American people’s struggle for real democracy, for economic and social justice, and against oppression and discrimination based on race, ethnicity, immigration status, class, gender or sexual orientation.
Communist front in the Cold War era? Get your history straight. The Cold War did not begin until after World War II when the Soviets and the Americans remained as the last world superpowers, more specifically in the 50’s when the Soviets developed nuclear capacity.
>They support Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Rights Action
>League, and the Abortion Action Project.Oh, God, no! They give money to groups that support and defed a woman’s right to choose the destiny and sovereignty of her own body! You say that like it is a bad thing!
>They support the most violent of all homosexual action groups, ACT-UP
ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) began in 1987 as a response by the gay community to the epidemic of AIDS. They support civil disobedience as a means to coerce government officials to seriously consider the plight of HIV-positive citizens in our society and to work for legislative change to assist those citizens. If anyone has any evidence of their so-called “violent” actions, I’d love to see it.
>They support the “Barrio Warriors,” a radical Hispanic group whose
>primary goal is to return all of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and
>Texas to Mexico.I couldn’t find any mention of that in their Mission Statement or manifesto. They seem to be a Chicano-rights group, seeking Chicano self-determination, socio-cultural awareness, and unity and pride in “La Raza” (the Race). They mention that the northern states of Mexico were annexed by the “Yanqui” (that would be us, and yes, we did take Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas from Mexico by force) but nowhere did I find that they supported ceding those lands back to Mexico. It looks to me like they just want Arizonan, Californian, New Mexican, and Texan Hispanics to know their culture and history.
>If voters will only try to imagine a woman such as Teresa Heinz Kerry,
>the fairy god-mother of the radical left, laying her head on a pillow
>each night just inches from the President of the United States,
>hopefully they will decide that the only way these two will ever be
>allowed into the White House is with an engraved invitation in hand.And if the election-stealing neocons in the Bush White House, along with their friends from Diebold, have their way, it won’t matter even if we do vote John Kerry and his wife into the White House.
But while we’re on the subject of “follow the money”, let’s look at where Bush’s money comes from and goes to:
George W. Bush made $15 million off the Texas Rangers deal with the help of $135 million in corporate welfare from Arlington taxpayers;
Took $4.5 million from the business interests clamoring for “tort reform” and rewarded them with laws that make it harder to sue irresponsible businesses;
In 1979, Bush’s first business, Arbusto Energy, obtained financing from James Bath, a Houstonian and close family friend. One of many investors, Bath gave Bush $50,000 for a 5 percent stake in Arbusto. At the time, Bath was the sole U.S. business representative for Salem bin Laden, head of the wealthy Saudi Arabian family and a brother (one of 17) to Osama bin Laden;
After several incarnations, Arbusto emerged in 1986 as Harken Energy Corporation. When Harken ran into trouble a year later, Saudi Sheik Abdullah Taha Bakhsh purchased a 17.6 percent stake in the company. Bakhsh was a business partner with Pharaon in Saudi Arabia; his banker there just happened to be powerful Saudi Arabian banker and BCCI principal Khalid bin Mahfouz. (BCCI: Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) who have gone on to fund Osama bin Laden. BCCI defrauded depositors of $10 billion in the ’80s in what has been called the “largest bank fraud in world financial history” by former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. During the ’80s, BCCI also acted as a main conduit for laundering money intended for clandestine CIA activities, ranging from financial support to the Afghan mujahedin to paying intermediaries in the Iran-Contra affair.);
Bin Mahfouz allegedly has been financing the bin Laden terrorist network — making Bush a U.S. citizen who has done business with those who finance and support terrorists. According to USA Today, bin Mahfouz and other Saudis attempted to transfer $3 million to various bin Laden front operations in Saudi Arabia in 1999. ABC News reported the same year that Saudi officials stopped bin Mahfouz from contributing money directly to bin Laden. (Bin Mahfouz’s sister is also a wife of Osama bin Laden, a fact that former CIA Director James Woolsey revealed in 1998 Senate testimony.);
Clear Channel Worldwide Inc., the nation’s largest owner of radio stations (over 1200 stations in all 50 states and DC), sponsored the numerous “patriotic rallies” which were held in various cities around the country. They organized, advertised, provided speakers and entertainment for them, and even handed out numerous American flags to participants. The Vice Chair of the company is Tom Hicks, a member of the Bush Pioneer club for elite (and generous) donors. The relationship between Bush and Hicks goes back even further, however. The two were embroiled in scandal when Hicks, as University of Texas Regent, was responsible for granting endowment management contracts of the newly created (under legislation signed by Bush) UT Investment Management Co. (UTIMCO). The contracts were given to firms politically connected to both Hicks and Bush, including the Carlyle Group – a firm which has the first President Bush on the payroll and had the second one on the payroll until just weeks before receiving this lucrative business. The board of UTIMCO also included the Chair of Clear Channel, L. Lowry Mays. In addition, Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers from George Bush, making him a wealthy man through a deal that was partially sweetened by a shiny new taxpayer financed stadium, which included valuable land obtained at below market rates through the use of eminent domain. The potential for the alignment of big media and the government should concern us all, especially as FCC Chair Michael Powell continues to push to reduce the barriers to even further media consolidation;
Let’s not forget Bush’s cozy ties to Ken “Kenny Boy” Lay, former CEO of Enron, the company that lied about earnings and plundered the 401k’s of their employees, all while donating thousands and a corporate jet to Dubya’s presidential bid. Enron and its officials have been Bush’s largest career campaign donor, and the administration acknowledged earlier this year a series of contacts between former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay and several Bush Cabinet members;
The oily links of the Bush presidency and the GOP do not end with energy and telecom giants like Williams Companies and Enron. On January 18, Williams named to its Board of Directors W. W. “Bill” Hanna, the former vice chairman of Koch Industries, an oil, gas and petrochemical company that was a major contributor to the Bush campaign. All told, Koch contributed some $325,000 to the national GOP with a sizeable chunk going to Bush.
I’ll take the ketchup-lady’s ties to NARAL and ACT-UP over Dubya’s ties to big oil and bin Ladens any day.
____________________________________________________________________
|
_ | "RADICAL" RUSS BELVILLE | Read More at http://radicalruss.net/blog/
| Portland, Oregon U.S.A. | Permission is granted for reprint of this
| © 2004 by Russ Belville | post, as long as this footer is included.
