The Other Side of the News – Jan 21, 2013 – The Ohio Rights Group to legalize cannabis for therapeutic and industrial use
Bob Fitrakis and Mary Jane Borden discuss the new initiative to amend the Ohio Constitution so that people may use cannabis for medical illnesses and use hemp for food, fuel, paper, and other uses.
Bob Fitrakis
January 3, 2013
It was inevitable. Those of you who have been wondering about so-called “chemtrails” need to read the December 11, 2012 article in Britain’s Daily Mail. The headline screams “Could we re-freeze the Arctic? Scientists suggest radical solution to global warming.”
This miraculous feat of geo-engineering comes to us courtesy of Harvard Professor of Applied Physics David Keith, who has authored papers proposing the massive spraying of reflective particles over the Arctic Circle in the journals Nature Climate Change and Environmental Research Letters.
They call it “spraying,” the street name is “chemtrails.” They have been doing it for years. It is the use of chemicals sprayed from planes to alter the environment, create military antennas in the sky, to build fake clouds and a toxic reflective sunscreen for the planet. You have probably seen it happen with a long-lasting white trail streaking high in the sky behind one or more planes, sometimes making a criss-cross checkerboard design. And when you call your local news station to ask what’s going on, usually they send out the jolly local weatherman to tell you not to believe your lying eyes.
There’s nothing new about the idea of weather modification. It’s been in vogue among certain advocates of “better living through chemistry” and high-ranking militarists since the mid-50s.
In an anthology published by CICJ Books, Star Wars, Weather Mods, and Full Spectrum Dominance, I have documented the long history of weather modification and the corporate and military implications behind it.
Throughout the Cold War, both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union actively investigated military applications of weather modification. In 1958, Captain Howard T. Orville, then serving as the White House’s Chief Advisor on weather modification, publicly announced that the Defense Department was studying “ways to manipulate the charges of the earth and sky and so affect the weather through electronic beams to ionize and de-ionize the atmosphere.”
In the 1990s, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, emerged as a major proponent of weather modification. The April 24, 2001 New York Times reported that Teller “had promoted the idea of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to counteract global warming.” Scientist Ken Calderia from the Lawrence Livermore Weapons Laboratory where Teller served as Director Emeritus prior to his death, admitted to the Free Press that they were modeling computer simulations on the use of aluminum oxide to counter global warming.
Calderia told me “We originally did this study to show that this program [massive spraying for weather modification] shouldn’t be done. Calderia felt such large scale weather modification was doomed because of the possibility of negative health effects. The chemicals used for the spraying the atmosphere come to earth as toxic particles that could cause respiratory and other health problems when ingested.
What’s new here is that this is being reported in British tabloids and repeated in the Columbus Dispatch’s EarthWeek section. What did not appear in the Dispatch’s briefer version was the last quote paragraph in the Daily Mail article. “Such drastic geoengineering could have disastrous unintended effects but could be a viable response to a ‘climate emergency’ such as the sudden collapse of ice sheets or a killing drought,” Professor Keith suggested.
The Mail also mentioned Professor Keith’s belief that such “open-air and large-scale geoengineering” violates the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. Also a 1977 United Nations treaty, the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of the Environmental Modification Techniques, specifically prohibited “the use of techniques that would have widespread, long-lasting or severe effects through deliberate manipulation of natural processes and cause such phenomena as earthquakes, tidal waves, in climate and weather patterns.”
Just like you can’t separate Teller’s chemical geo-engineering from his nuclear bomb – nor can you separate weather modification from the United States military.
In 2001, U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced the Space Preservation Act of 2001. The bill not only sought a “permanent ban on basing of weapons in space,” but also specifically banned “chemtrails.”
With these recent revelations in the Daily Mail, readers should recall that Dr. Bernard Eastlund who developed HAARP, the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, admitted to Wired magazine that the existing version controlled by the U.S. military in Alaska has weather modification capabilities.
Climate change is real and we need with it through sustainability, not by spewing a toxic band-aid in the sky. All people should demand environmental impact testing before any chemtrail spraying is done and we should demand that the U.S. government open its files on weather modification whether it be for geo-engineering or military purposes.
Remember that back in the 70s, former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted that “Technology will make available, to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need to be appraised. . . techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm.” What the world needs now, is full transparency.
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Bob Fitrakis is the author of the anthology Star Wars, Weather Mods, and Full Spectrum Dominance published by CICJ Books and for sale at Free Press.
Please support this documentary project at whatever level you can afford at http://www.indiegogo.com/swingstate
Trailer for an Indiegogo project – a documentary on the inside story of how investigative reporting, the Green Party, the Election Protection movement, pre-emptive litigating and just plain angry voters saved the Dems from Karl Rove in a key 2012 battleground state.
12/25/1996
Nosedive
by Bob Fitrakis
Looks like Assistant City Attorney Glenn Redick-the man charged with the task of taking on Police Chief James Jackson and ferreting out police corruption-took a dive in the mayor’s prosecution. Either the fix was in, or Redick was sleepwalking during the hearings. As one veteran reporter covering the hearings commented, “The rug is getting thicker and thicker as they sweep the dirt under it.”
A scenario floating from various sources goes like this: about two weeks ago, attitudes began to change in the Jackson probe. As a precursor to this, Columbus City Council members John Kennedy, Les Wright and Michael Coleman had pressured the mayor’s investigation team to wrap up quickly. Rumors abounded that a deal was being struck between the mayor and Council members. The Chief and his backers were battling back with embarrassing information they had in their possession. Did they really want the Chief under oath testifying about everything he knew concerning escort services? The public exposure of the Arthur Shapiro murder file finally cemented the deal. The Chief, who, after all, was protecting some of the most important political and business movers and shakers in Columbus, was to get a slap on the wrist. And it will be business as usual in systematically and institutionally corrupt Cowtown.
This takes us to Arthur Shapiro. Let’s rehash that story. Local attorney and everyone’s favorite creative accountant, Shapiro, was gunned down in what was considered a mob hit the day before he was to testify to federal authorities concerning problems he was having with the IRS in 1985. A partner at Schwartz, Shapiro, Kelm & Warren, Shapiro’s clients included The Limited, and he was at the time being investigated for his dealings with Berry L. Kessler, an accountant later convicted of helping Shapiro avoid paying income tax. Kessler is serving time in Florida for hiring a hitman to kill a business partner. He also was suspected of having a hand in the Shapiro slaying.
Because Shapiro worked for The Limited, Elizabeth Laupp of the Organized Crime Bureau did linkage analysis that pointed out in a June 6, 1991 memo the obvious connections between The Limited’s Les Wexner, former City Council President Jerry Hammond and current City Councilwoman Les Wright. Wexner helped fund Hammond’s now-defunct Major Chord nightclub in the Short North, and Wright served as vice president of the company that owned it. Shapiro reportedly worked on a land deal that paved the way for Wexner’s vast New Albany Company development, and Hammond’s and later Wright’s votes on Council helped facilitate that development.
Attorney James Balthaser took over some of Shapiro’s most interesting work at Schwartz, Kelm, Warren & Rubenstein. Balthaser is now at Thompson, Hine and Flory, where he is a law partner with the Chief’s lawyer, Bill Wilkinson. Wilkinson and Balthaser both happen to work for the firm that’s the primary legal counsel for the mighty Banks Carbone Construction Company, recently listed in Business First as Greater Columbus’s leading minority-owned firm with sales nearly equal to the second- and third-ranked firms combined. A miraculous success story for high school graduate T.G. Banks, the Chief’s close buddy. They share a lot of things, like an interest in the steel industry. The Chief, we recall, is a steel magnate; he runs Interstate Steel from his home on Bryden Road. We know from the Ohio Department of Taxation that he’s the president, secretary and treasurer of Interstate. But less well known is that Banks was listed as the owner of the company when it was incorporated in 1992. In most cities, a police chief operating a steel business with no steelyard in a residential neighborhood might raise eyebrows. Not here.
Anyway, Wilkinson looked like a heavyweight champ against the lackluster punching-bag Redick. And the Chief can soon go back to protecting and serving. After all, he’s done such a fine job. It was the Chief who insisted that Ted Oshodi be our Civilian Crime Prevention Coordinator although he was rated last among half a dozen candidates and was investigated last year for allegedly repeatedly raping his daughter from 1986-’88. While the charges weren’t brought to a grand jury for criminal prosecution since the daughter reported them years later and only had a polygraph to back her up, they still were open for a police Internal Affairs investigation that doesn’t have to meet “a beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. When Oshodi was ordered to take a polygraph on these charges, an August 11, 1995 memo from Officer Cathy Collins of the polygraph unit complained about an order she received “per chain of command … not to ask any questions of Ted Oshodi … prior to his hire date” of December 6, 1994. Interestingly, the alleged rapes took place prior to his hire date. And, the order reportedly came directly from the top. Eventually, Collins won out and she concluded the following: “that Mr. Oshodi was NOT TRUTHFUL when answering” four questions about sexually abusing his daughter. She also determined that the daughter was “truthful” on all four questions.
Redick forgot to ask the Chief about the bizarre restrictions he supposedly placed on Oshodi’s polygraph test. Also, Redick did not call Sharlynn English, the Chief’s very close friend and admitted former employee of “Dulcet” Escort Services; nor English’s good friend, next-door neighbor and close companion to Commander Walter Burns, Carol Huffman; nor Gail Richey, who observed the Chief’s relationship with English in the late ’80s. English’s sworn deposition reveals that the Chief visited her regularly two to three times a week for six to nine months at 5318 Karl Road for nooners. Right next door, at 5328, Richey was receiving then-Lieutenant Walter Burns, whose alleged involvement with the prostitution ring spurred the Jackson investigation.
http://www.talktainmentradio.com/podcasts/110712%20Fight%20Back.mp3
Fight Back – Episode: 11/07/12 Stealing Votes
Come to the Free Press FREE film night – Free For All
Tuesday, October 23 — 7:30pm
Free For All is a documentary film by John Wellington Ennis. John Ennis is planning to be here for the showing. This is a re-release of his original film with updated information.
How did America get so off track? Nagging doubts about the legitimacy of the 2004 election force John Ennis to get off his sofa and investigate Ohio leading up to the 2006 elections – even though he is just some dude. He meets with journalists, politicians, election officials, attorneys, activists, and everyday Ohioans in a search for truth. Along his journey, Ennis uncovers a web of schemes that swing U.S. election. Re-released with updated information including the mysterious death of Mike Connell.
Followed by a discussion.
Free and open to the public as part of the Free Press Film Night at the Drexel. This screening is co-sponsored by the Free Press, the Columbus Film Council, the Central Ohio Green Education Fund, and the Drexel.
Location: Drexel Theater, 2254 E. Main St., Bexley
Phone: 253-2571
Email: truth@freepress.org
New York City press conference, Monday, October 22, 2012
THE GREAT GOP ELECTION THEFT PARTNERSHIP:
The Romney Family, Hart InterCivic, a major American voting machine company and Karl Rove’s Wireless Election Management Empire…
Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis of the Free Press (www.freepress.org) will present shocking new information on the Bain Capital part ownership of one of America’s chief voting machine companies, Hart InterCivic that counts many votes around the US. Additionally, Jill Simson and Jim March will present on the wireless empire of Karl Rove and associates for possible election manipulation. Both presentations will be part of a panel which also includes NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller and election activist Lori Grace on other possible upcoming election manipulations in the November 2012 elections nationwide.
Time: Monday, October 22nd, 12:00-2:00 pm. EST
Place: New York Open Center, 22 E. 30th street, New York, NY 10016
Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis are the editors of the Free Press www.freepress.org which has played a major role in exposing election manipulations since 2004. Bob Fitrakis and Cliff Arnebeck have participated in the KingLincoln Bronzeville lawsuit against Bush where they held him and Rove accountable for election stealing in 2004. Mark Crispin Miller is author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform.
by Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis
October 20, 2012
As previously reported in by the Columbus Free Press, the Romney family, namely Mitt, Ann, G Scott and Tagg Romney, along with Mitt’s “6th son” and campaign finance chair have a secretive private equity firm called Solamere Capital Partners. This firms ties to Romney’s campaign and bundlers is already well documented, along with its connection to the manufacture and distribution of voting machines. What is not as well documented is a subsidiary of that secret bank hiring employees of a failed firm tied to a ponzi scheme that has a long history of money laundering for Latin American drug cartels and to the Iran-Contra scandal.
As reported by ThinkProgress, Solamere Capital Partner’s subsidiary Solamere Advisors is a investment advisory group, providing advice to Solamere clients and boosting sales. Would-be corporate pugilist Tagg Romney is a director. According to the New York Times, all but one of its 11 employees came from the Charlotte office of the Stanford Financial Group, the US investment arm of convicted felon R. Allen Stanford’s offshore banking and fraud network that comprised a host of companies including the Stanford International Bank, Stanford Capital Management, The Bank of Antigua, Stanford Trust and Stanford Gold and Bullion. Three of these employees, Tim Bambauer, Deems May, and Brandon Phillips, received incentive compensation related to their direct sales of securities linked to a fraud that brought down this banking network.
Tim Bambauer has left his position as managing partner at Solamere Advisors. May and Phillips remain employed as partner and chief compliance officer respectively.
Allen Stanford is currently serving a 110-year prison sentence for convictions on 13 counts of fraud. His companies were placed in receivership. $8 billion of Stanford’s stolen money has yet to be recovered and the victims are in court to recover those funds and incentive pay bonuses to Stanford employees (including Bambauer, May and Phillips) for fraudulently getting people to invest in an operation that later bilked many of them out of their life’s savings.
Stanford’s shady history and criminality did not begin with the fraudulent investments that lead to his downfall, nor was it unknown at the highest level of United State’s Government. In a 2006 diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, the US Ambassador to Antigua advised “Embassy officers do not reach out to Stanford because of the allegations of bribery and money laundering. The Ambassador managed to stay out of any one-on-one photos with Stanford during the breakfast. For his part, Stanford said he preferred to conduct his business without contacting the Embassy, resolving any investment disputes directly with local governments. It is whispered in the region that Stanford facilitates resolution with significant cash contributions.”
Similarly investigations by the SEC, FBI and Scotland Yard into Stanford’s empire stalled or failed all the way back to the 1980s. The Independent Newspaper in the UK alleges that Stanford’s network was on the FBI’s radar for more than 20 years. Stanford set up his first offshore bank in 1986, just as Eugene Hausenfaus, shot down while gun running for the CIA in Nicaragua, was being connected to another company named Stanford, in this case the “Stanford Technology Trading Group” owned by Richard Secord, Albert Hakim, and 4 unknown other persons, perhaps including Allen Stanford. According to Iran-Contra Whistleblower Al Martin (Lt. Cmdr. USNR ret.) “Anything with the name Stanford on it belonged to Secord”. When finally brought to trial, Stanford employed the same defense attorney, Dick DeGuerin, as Iran-Contra defendant Oliver North.
As the Iran-Contra explosion crippled the CIA’s Caribbean bank of choice, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), Stanford’s offshore banking empire got using the same techniques and embracing the same moral category of clients. Stanford’s banks were known to have laundered money from the Juarez Cartel and alleged to have done so earlier for the Medellin Cartel, and one of his private planes has been seized by the Mexican government in a drug case.
On top of legal woes in the United States and Mexico, the London Daily Telegraph reported that Stanford’s Venezuelan offices were raided by Venezuela’s military intelligence over claims that its employees were paid by the CIA to spy on the South American country. When asked about this in a CNBC interview which was cited in a story by independent journalist Tom Burghardt, Stanford declined to comment on any involvement with the CIA rather than outright deny it.
All of the these dealings by Stanford, and the complicity of his employees in facilitating them, was public information before January 2010, when Mitt Romney addressed the first full meeting of Solamere’s investors. Yet his son Tagg chose to hire into his family these alleged white collar criminals as soon as Stanford’s criminal empire collapsed. The Romney family stands by the new employees associated with their secret bank, as evidenced by Tagg’s response to interview questions from ThinkProgress regarding Solamere’s ability to reign them in: “Hey guys, We’re done here”.
Tuesday, October 23,2012, 7:30pm
PAY 2 PLAY is a documentary on the costs of running for office, weaving compelling characters and campaign drama with art and activism to show the path to reform.
PAY 2 PLAY shows the need for campaign reform through the compelling stories of first-time candidates in the battleground state of Ohio. From the Supreme Court decision Citizens United to the billionaire Koch Brothers, the film outlines a corporate strategy spanning decades to manipulate the media, the courts, and the public to turn our elections into one big game of Pay to Play politics.
And that’s why PAY 2 PLAY uses a game to make these challenges fun and comprehensive. We use an analogy to the game Monopoly, to show how candidates running for office face costly monopolies in their quest for public service, and how improving the rules of the game through political reform would help our country flourish.
This screening is co-sponsored by the Free Press, the Columbus Film Council, the Central Ohio Green Education Fund, and the Drexel.
Drexel Theater, 2254 E. Main St., Bexley
253-2571
truth@freepress.org
Bob Fitrakis
October 5, 2012
CICJ Books has just released “Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: The Election Integrity Movement’s Rise and Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People’s Vote, 2000-2008” by Marta Steele.
Marta Steele has done yeoman work for the election integrity movement. She has plowed through more websites and blogs than one can even imagine. She set out with the nearly impossible task of writing the definitive historical narrative of the folly of electronic voting in the United States between 1988 and 2008. More shockingly, she accomplished that task.
Electronic voting machines are perfectly designed to steal elections. That’s their principle purpose. Ireland has just gotten rid of them altogether. Germany, Japan, Canada, Switzerland all use paper ballots. Why? Because you can actually count them in public, and then count them again.
But here in the US, elections are corporate-owned and operated. Anyone who experienced pushing the e-spot for John Kerry and having the name George W. Bush light up—as happened so often in Ohio 2004—knows all too well that what Marta Steele documents in this remarkable book has become the defining reality in American election theft.
What she has done by way of documentation is truly impressive. Never again will those who question the validity of electronic voting be called “conspiracy theorists.” Through sheer tenacity, the author has scoured the vast morass of cyberspace and brought back all the essential data and assembled it in an understandable and analytical fashion. Readers can only draw one conclusion from her work – those who deny the death of democracy are foolish “coincidence theorists.”
She accumulated mountains of incidences that show the so-called “red shift” in favor of the Republican Party is not an anomaly or computer “glitch,” but evidence that there is systematic tampering of computerized voting machines by private companies connected to the Republican Party. Although our newspaper, the Columbus Free Press, and our website freepress.org published plenty on the flaws of electronic voting and election irregularities, we were nonetheless overwhelmed by the research documented in this volume. Those who read this book will no longer fall for the easy propaganda lines and talking points put forth by Karl Rove and his cohorts in explaining away impossible election results.
This book is important because its research is so detailed, its history so clear, and its analysis so convincing. The book destroys the mythology that “it can’t happen here” – that our system is an old and infallible democracy that can’t be corrupted. This powerful work will force all who read it to take a side, but more importantly, to take action, perhaps even direct action.
A key breakthrough that the book allows is to shatter the absurd notion that the empire of the United Stated may very well meddle in and steal election abroad, but would never use these tactics at home. The fact that the Bush family, with their patriarch George Herbert Walker Bush being the CIA director, is so inextricably linked to the rise of electronic voting and improbably election results, should be no surprise. That’s why it is no coincidence that she starts her history of election voting irregularities in the year that George H.W. Bush wins the New Hampshire and becomes president.
The Bush family ascendancy corresponds to black box, nontransparent voting in America. The more we’ve privatized our software and hardware and called it “trade secrets,” the better the Bush family candidates have done, against all odds. Their presidential victories, with the official exit polls falling well outside the margin of errors and predicting victories for their opponents, would easily be denounced by election observers in a Third World country.
Small wonder that when push came to shove, Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell refused to allow United Nations observers into the Buckeye State polling places to check the veracity of the 2004 balloting.
We believe this book does more than any other to expose the evils of electronic voting. The endnotes alone amount to a giant step forward in revealing the crimes of privatized e-voting in our nation.
As Al Gore and John Kerry refused to do, we must now face the reality that as long as our balloting process is dominated by electronic machines, the outcome of any election can be flipped by a governor or secretary of state with a few late-night key strokes. Considering the hundreds of millions the rich and super-rich are willing to spend to control the government, would you ever doubt they would hesitate to buy an election?
What Marta Steele has done is to confirm far beyond any reasonable doubt that as long as electronic machines are at the core of our vote count, there is no such thing as democracy in the USA. What we have instead is an electronic corporatocracy….proprietary, secretive, anti-democratic and for sale (or lease) to the highest bidder. The real question is: now that Marta had made this all perfectly clear, what are we going to do about it?
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~ with Harvey Wasserman
Buy this book at the Free Press Online Store
