the resemblance ends.

I thought that in general, Kerry was a clean hands kind of guy. My only real grudge against him was when he didn't fight for his election by contesting the Ohio results where something very very strange went on in plain sight.

Aside from that, I thought it was a good sign that people in State seemed to be trying to actually fulfill FOIA and Benghazi committee requests since that is when the whole knowlege of Hillary's email was revealed, after she left.

But, it now seems that State is slow walking as much as they can and I read a disturbing article that State awarded John Kerry's daughter a no-bid contract for her non-profit, which has to do with staging medical personnel around the world. I think she may have a wonderful non-profit and it may do good work, but it's the no-bid part I object to. Everyone in politics seems to be climbing on the non-profit band wagon. All well and good, but there needs to be way better oversight, reporting and auditing of these organizations.

Rhode Island is always a nice lab in which to view new variations in corruption since they strive to be on the cutting edge in this arena - the statehouse there is very into the whole non-profit scam game. Many miscreants are discovered to have ties to basically cookie jars disguised as non-profits which they plunder at will. They also award public grants to these apparent slush funds.

(edited for typos and redundant redundancies)

Sat, 09/24/2016 - 9:28am — on the cusp

Isn't voting for her and helping her get elected
giving her the ultimate support?
I am still unconvinced she is less fascist than Trump.
I can envision a seamless cooperation between her Whitehouse and Corporate Amerika.

Which already exists. (Not to mention multinational corporations as well.) They're in her freaking campaign as well as that frackin' private agreement which she pushed around the world, setting up for global corporate law to rule over free countries (already with protections against traitors built right into domestic law/constitutions) a betrayal which cannot simply be accepted as a 'done deal' - unless the people of all countries do - especially regarding that country, America, from where, it seems, the locally worst originate, having by far the world's largest military and - as of 2011 - at least outposts in 148 countries, all ready for global corporate domination.

These corporate coups need to be stopped at source...

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/sep/14/ron-paul/...

Ron Paul says U.S. has military personnel in 130 nations and 900 overseas bases

By Louis Jacobson on Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

... For the personnel question, we turned to a Sept. 30, 2010, Pentagon document titled, "Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country."

We tallied up all the countries with at least one member of the U.S. military, excluding those with personnel deemed to be "afloat." We found U.S. military personnel on the ground in a whopping 148 countries -- even more than Paul had said. (There are varying standards for what constitutes a "country," so that may explain the divergence from Paul’s number.)

However, we should add a caveat. In 56 of these 148 countries, the U.S. has less than 10 active-duty personnel present. These include such obscure locales as Mongolia, Nepal, Gabon, Togo and Suriname.

By contrast, the U.S. has disclosed only 13 countries outside the United States and its possessions that are host to more than 1,000 personnel. They are: Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Japan, Bahrain, Djibouti, South Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait.

In addition, this is a snapshot of the global military footprint, so it may not include all temporary training missions and humanitarian assistance activities. "Such activities are so pervasive you almost have to wonder how the other 70 countries manage to avoid hosting such operations," said John Pike, the director of globalsecurity.org, a national security think tank.

Bases

For this question, we turned to an official Pentagon accounting of U.S. military bases around the nation and the world, the "Base Structure Report, Fiscal 2010 Baseline."

According to this report, the U.S. has 662 overseas bases in 38 foreign countries, which is a smaller number than the 900 bases Paul cited. But here again, the list omits several nations integral to active operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, so it’s conceivable that the actual number of sites approaches 900.

The Pentagon "is very reluctant to label anything a ‘base’ because of the negative political connotations associated with it," said Alexander Cooley, a political scientist at Barnard College and Columbia University who studies overseas bases. "Some of these facilities, such as the Manas Transit Center in Kyrgyzstan, may not be officially counted as ‘bases,’ but it is the most important U.S. facility in central Asia, staging every U.S. soldier transiting in and out of Afghanistan and conducting refueling operations."

Still, caveats are in order here, too. Of the 662 overseas sites listed -- that is, those outside the active war zones -- all but 32 of them are either small sites (with a replacement value of less than $915 million) or sites essentially owned on paper only.

For instance, the sole site listed for Canada is 144 square feet of leased space -- equal to a 12-foot-by-12-foot room. That’s an extreme case, but other nations on the list -- such as Aruba, Iceland, Indonesia, Kenya, Norway and Peru -- have just a few U.S. military buildings, many of them leased. Some of the sites are unmanned radio relay towers or other minor facilities. "Most of them are a couple of acres with a cyclone fence and no troops," Pike said. ...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/america-still-has-hundreds-m...

America Still Has Hundreds of Military Bases Worldwide. Have They Made Us Any Safer?
How our global military presence works to facilitate, not prevent, war.

David VineNov. 14, 2014

But much of the US military indenture is also not publicly itemized, even to Congress, in large Black Budget items.

This is very old, from 1995, and makes a reference to a decline in the power and prestige of the intelligence community, lol. Unless that was due to the private industry take-over, which is not-so-lol.

Bolding and other emphasis mine.

https://www.wired.com/1995/11/patton/

Phil Patton Magazine Date of Publication: 11.01.95.

Exposing the Black Budget

The Cold War is over. So why, Paul McGinnis wanted to know, are major CIA, NSA, and Department of Defense programs still being kept secret from Congress and US taxpayers?

It's the world's wildest high-tech toy catalog, the Pentagon's annual Dear Santa letter. It includes secret weapons programs with baffiing code names such as Elegant Lady, Tractor Rose, Forest Green, Senior Citizen, Island Sun and Black Light, White Cloud and Classic Wizard. These are the "black budget" programs that pay for spy satellites, invent stealth cruise missiles, tinker with Ladar – laser radar – and experiment on aircraft that change color and helicopters that evade tracking systems. Covering expenditures for intelligence and weapons research, the Pentagon's black budget is the most titillating portion of the massive classification program that has swelled almost unabated since World War II.

This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue.

The black budget is the government's illusory and tangled accounting of what it spends on intelligence gathering, covert operations, and – less noticeably – secret military research and weapons programs. It admits to no easy calculation, but by estimates of those who watch it, the black budget may hit US$30 billion a year – a figure larger than current federal expenditures for education. It includes spending by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and military R&D.

Documented – vaguely – in funding requests and authorizations voted on by select committees of the US Congress, the black budget is published with omitted dollar amounts and blacked-out passages. It hides all sorts of strange projects, not just from enemies, foreign and domestic, but from the public and elected officials as well. Last year, for instance, it was revealed that the National Reconnaissance Office had for several years used the black budget to hide from Congress the cost and ownership of a $300 million office building, even though the structure was plainly visible from Route 28 west of Washington, DC. ...

(My interjection: The Purloined Letter 'hiding in plain sight' method, as applied to public money and far too many things. When law and the duty of democratic government is permitted disregard by those engaged in it, this will become the norm, as it has, and abuse will expand. The appropriate response is not to 'let it stand as a done deal', but to object in some fashion. Bolding and other emphasis, mine.)

..."I became interested in the subject of excessive military secrecy," McGinnis e-mailed me recently, "because it struck me as wrong that the US military was still acting as if the Cold War was happening. A turning point came with a September 1993 Freedom of Information Act case

I filed on the classified aircraft codenamed Senior Citizen (Program Element 0401316F) and Groom Lake."

McGinnis found himself exchanging letters with an Air Force colonel named Richard Weaver (then Deputy for Security and Investigative Programs for the Secretary of the Air Force). Reading the censored case files he received from his request, McGinnis became convinced that the Air Force (and other military services) had large numbers of senior officials who held arrogant attitudes toward the average American taxpayer.

"You can imagine the anger I felt when I saw censored internal Air Force memos from Colonel Weaver with lines like 'His appeal justification is the standard (blacked-out censored area) provided by almost everyone else who makes similar requests for this information. All have been turned down.' And 'Mr. McGinnis's rationale that he somehow should be allowed to perform those oversight functions of Congress, while novel, is not compelling.'"

This kind of response turned a mild-mannered inquirer into a much more fervent muckraker. "I was merely pointing out the Air Force's violations of US classification policy, contained in Executive Order 12356, and how secret spending violated Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the US Constitution," McGinnis argues with typical mastery of the obscure. He's referring to the requirement that Congress approve all federal spending. The black budget, McGinnis argues, violates that provision by hiding the purpose of expenditures. ...

(My interjection: the US Constitution has been routinely violated by those charged with upholding/defending it - meaning the rights of its citizens - for so long that, like polluting and other industry believing that they have a right to destroy human and environmental health and life for increased profits after long having done so with relative impunity, the validity of this document - involving the inalienable rights of American citizens - is, by many, not regarded with any degree of respect or as pertaining to their duty. The possession of guns can pass, as it provides an excuse to shoot civilians? This following is interesting, in the light of what we know about the Clintons. Optics being all in all to them, especially where their often rather transparent excuses and efforts to deceive are concerned. Please note that 'civil applications' works out to privatization and sale of military developments at public expense. Trump has nothing on the Clintons for grimy deals intended to benefit themselves at cost to others. Bolding and other emphasis mine.)

... There are signs of reform. The Clinton administration has split the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which developed vital weapons (and the Internet) in the past, from the Pentagon and charged that its research should now focus on dual-use technologies with both civilian and military applications.

And after years of heaving and groaning, a new policy seems to be arriving. Late last spring, President Clinton issued a long-awaited executive order on secrecy reform. Effective this last month, the order will declassify hundreds of millions of pages of Cold War documents. Under the new policy, most current secret documents will be automatically declassified after 25 years, and classification from now on will automatically expire after a decade – approximately the same length of time that has passed since government officials began drafting the new order.

There are loopholes, however, that will keep many sensitive documents under lock and key, including those relating to the president and to foreign government involvement. And it will be the unenviable task of something called the Information Security Oversight Office to handle the laborious duty of declassification.

With this order and with John Deutch, the newly installed head of the CIA, promising both a fresh look at classification policy and a new spirit of openness, it might seem that the work of McGinnis and other black budget watchdogs has come to an end. But it is far from clear that the new openness is real. A Congressional committee on secrecy policy, which brings together such unlikely allies as New York Democratic Senator Pat Moynihan and North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms (both share a concern over excess security), has yet to produce specific recommendations for bringing the black budget out of the shadows. And the panic reaction that followed the arrest of Aldrich Ames has created a thick and swirling atmosphere of fear that dims the prospects of secrecy reform.

But the current administration has already declassified a huge number of documents – from World War II, the '50s, and the '60s. Many of these represent what the black budgets of the past really meant. They are the meat on the bones of old numbers. And, emerging like fiickering images from some time machine's screen, they seem almost surreal: they represent in effect the government's first admission of things that every history book already records. ...

And what of the mysteriously missing trillions of US taxpayer dollars - what various things - or who - could they be funding/buying? Dunno anything about this site, (mostly too tired to do any actual research, but some might like to check this and/or her site out?) but the fact of missing trillions is known. Here, secret space investment is suggested - with space, as we know, being privatized. But who actually knows where - or whom - this money variously vanishes to?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-missing-trillions-from-us-budget-sa...

Sarah K. Westall

Entrepreneur, Partner, Adjunct Prof, and Radio Host at Conscious Business Radio

Where are the Missing Trillions from the U.S. Budget?
Oct 13, 2015

Hear this episode and all previous episodes at http://sarahwestall.com/

In the last few decades, there has been trillions of dollars missing from the U.S. budget. Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense under Ford and Bush Junior, identified $2.3 trillion missing dollars (which was actually confirmed to be $2.7 trillion) in 2001 and recently Catherine Austin Fitts, the assistant department of Housing secretary under George Bush senior claimed that over the past few decades “upwards of 40 Trillion dollars is missing” from almost every agency in the country. What in the world is going on? First, is it even possible that this much money could be missing? My mind probably would not be able to entertain this idea even remotely until I saw the first, and only, audit of the Federal Reserve, showing $16 Trillion dollars being funneled to off shore banks. While this in and of itself doesn’t prove anything, it certainly does open up my mind to listen and question what is going on. ...

Is much of this missing taxpayer money going to finance the hostile global take-over of the world at their victim's expense? With the degree of corporate welfare going on, paid for by austerity for the citizens in various countries, this hardly seems unlikely.