Killing Kennedy -- Motivations: The Decline and Fall of Democracy

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: LBJ wasted no time making sure he was officially President.  Nixon was later to say, "Both Lyndon and I wanted to be President, but I wasn't ready to kill for it." (Watergate Tapes.)

          Nobody believes the Warren Report anymore.  In fact, even their lead investigator had his doubts early, but he wisely shut up.[i]  Twenty-two key witnesses died within two years.  RFK actually did investigate for a while, moved off, and was killed himself when it became possible that he would become president.  It is in the past.

          So why do we care?  Well, Kennedy made mistakes, mostly in foreign policy or actions, but they actually embarrassed him to the point of asking Eisenhower for advice.  Eisenhower told him next time (after the Bay of Pigs fiasco), to ask his advisors independently, not in front of others.  Kennedy was amazed.  At any rate, he went back and saw who was advising him on that matter and got rid of them, or shut them up.  In other words, after each mistake, he fixed it, not by trying to increase interference in other countries, but by getting at the source of the mistake, the advice itself.  This was also, as mentioned before, the case with the so-called “missile gap” that he found was a fabrication to increase spending of such things.  The mistakes almost always had one thing in common:  the Dulles crowd (for lack of a better term) and the corporate interests they represented.  When he weeded out those people, he gained lethal enemies.

          Our interest was simple and a matter of intellectual curiosity.  We wondered if there was some reason each President seemed worse than the one before.  With Obama, who had so much promise and said all the right things, it seemed possible that this trend would be stopped.  It has not, so the question is why not and when did this process start?  It started with the death of JFK.  It seems that every President since then, no matter what the hopes were, turned into a different person once he was elected, and certainly once he was in office.  Perhaps he was told exactly what happened and that it could happen to him.

          So, how does the cover-up continue?  It continues by overload.  So much is published on the subject with so many conflicting theories that the role of the military-industrial-corporate complex is pretty well obfuscated.  The authors who do point to that answer are most vigorously labeled as “conspiracy theorists,” while others are free to disseminate their ideas with abandon. 

          One of the main alternative theories is organized crime and there is certainly enough evidence to support them.  It is more likely, however, that any hand the “Mob” had in it was as an instrument, not as planners.  Bobby had long investigated the Mob and that gives even more credence to the idea.  But really, do you think Frank Sinatra would allow that?  (Never mind, this just gets too depressing.)

          Actually, you can see the relationship between these corporate interests, the mob, and Cuba in Godfather II: the group sitting around the table with Battista before Castro’s revolution represents a good cross-section.  There are a couple members of organized crime present, but the rest are all corporate interests. 

          You can also see one other aspect of this in the following interview:  The Sherman Anti-Trust Act.  The act has been tacitly ignored since Kennedy with the single exception of Carter who broke up the phone company.  That, along with his sympathy for the Palestinians, has ensured that he be marginalized at any function of ex-Presidents.  (Johnson was wise enough to keep his mouth shut when Israel attacked our USS Liberty in 1967.)

          So, we have two things below: one is a list of sources on the JFK Assassination, especially on TV, and the other an interview with Thom Hartmann who at least shows insight into the Anti-Trust situation:

RELATED NEWS COVERAGE

Broadway World, History to Premiere Two Specials Commemorating JFK Assassination, 11/22, Staff report, Oct. 15, 2013. Fifty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, about which conspiracy theories still run rampant, there appears to be one thing most Americans now agree on: that shooter Lee Harvey Oswald was telling the truth. According to an eye-opening national survey conducted by History 74% of Americans believe that Oswald was the fall guy for a larger alternate theory. That's just one of the eye-opening findings revealed in "JFK Assassination: The Definitive Guide, a provocative two-hour special that premieres Nov. 22. History polled thousands of Americans -- the most expansive survey on the Kennedy assassination ever attempted, and the first in nearly a decade, representing citizens of every state and covering a wide range of ages and ethnic, economic and educational backgrounds -- to learn exactly what the country does and doesn't believe regarding the shooting on that fateful day in Dallas and who was responsible. Public skepticism of the so-called "Lone Gunman Theory," supported by the Warren Commission in 1964, is shockingly high. A total of 71% of Americans polled now don't believe that explanation. The show explores the myriad alternative theories that Americans find more plausible. It's an entirely new way to look at the assassination: through the eyes of the American people.

New York Daily News, ‘JFK: The Smoking Gun,’ TV review: David Hinckley, Nov. 2, 2013. An Australian detective concludes that Kennedy died from friendly fire. Reelz puts forward detective Colin McLaren's case that JFK died from an errant Secret Service shot.

Daily Mail, John Kerry doesn't believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot President Kennedy as he says the government investigation didn't 'get to the bottom' of the assassination, Meghan Keneally Nov. 8, 2013. John Kerry has revealed that he does not believe that President Kennedy's assassin worked alone as the government claimed in their official finding. The Secretary of State added more credibility to conspiracy theories surrounding the former president's death by becoming one of the highest-ranking politicians to openly admit to being suspicious of the official finding. 'To this day, I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone,' Kerry told NBC's Tom Brokaw in an interview timed with the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's death.

·                          Secretary of State John Kerry thinks that the shooter was influenced

·                          Suggests it has something to do with the time Oswald spent in the Soviet Union and his connections to communist sympathizers

·                          Does not support the 'grassy knoll' theory or the idea that the CIA was involved

Parkland -- The Movie -- A Review, Roger Stone, Oct. 30, 2013. I went to see Parklandthis past weekend because I was hopeful that director Tom Hanks and his account of the JFK assassination would become as powerful and influential as Oliver Stone's. Parklanddeeply upset me. The movie bends the facts and disposes of the evidence. The Warren Commission would be proud of Tom Hanks and this subtle, manipulative, fictional version of JFK's assassination. 

USA Today, 'Parkland' shines new light on Kennedy assassination, Bryan Alexander, July 28, 2013. The 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy continues to prompt controversy regarding motives and means for the killing -- and the implications for history since then to the present.

National Enquirer, 2nd Gunman Named In JFK Assassination! John Blosser and Robert Hartlein, Oct. 23, 2013. Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone – and the Enquirer can finally name the second gunman who fired the fatal shot at President John F. Kennedy from the grassy knoll in Dallas 50 years ago! In a blockbuster exclusive, the Enquirer has learned that a Cuban exile with ties to both the Mafia and the CIA confessed to being involved in a conspiracy to kill America’s beloved 35th president. The startling new evidence was uncovered by re­spected author Anthony Summers, who revealed the assassin’s identity in an update to his classic 1998 book on Kennedy’s slaying, Not In Your Lifetime.

FireDogLake, “Oops I Shot the President” and Other JFK Conspiracies, Lisa Derrick, Nov. 6, 2013. November is conspiracy month, at least on cable TV, and this November there is a richer crop than ever since this is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas Texas at Dealey Plaza. Piers Morgan has already blown CNN’s Kennedy wad by having Oliver Stone as a guest, but expect more from the cable and networks – both pro-conspiracy and pro-lone-nut–later in the month. Cable channel Reelz has taken over from The History Channel and Discovery as the super-conspiracy channel, running a series of documentaries starting out with JFK: The Smoking Gun, which is running through the next two weeks. JFK: TSG‘s theory bolsters the Warren Commission by saying Oswald acted alone to purposefully kill Kennedy, but adds that the shot that shattered the president’s skull was from a different gun using a hollow point fragmentation bullet. Only, that shot wasn’t on purpose.

 

SELECTED JFK FILMS AND VIDEOS

Evidence of Revision. Terrence Redmond. Etymon Productions, 2011.

Executive Action. Starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, written by Dalton Trumbo, Donald Freed and Mark Lane, and directed by David Miller. 1973. As described in Wikipedia: The film opened to a storm of controversy over the depiction of the assassination: in some places in the U.S., the film ran only 1 to 2 weeks in movie theaters or got pulled from them altogether. The movie was part fiction, but it would contest other reports of the assassination, including the controversial Warren Commission report of 1964, which led to attacks against the film. The trailers for the film never ran on certain television stations, including WNBC-TV in New York City. The criticism of the film and its suggestion of a Military-industrial complex conspiracy led to the film being removed totally from the movie theaters by early December 1973 and getting no TV/Video runs until the 1980s and mid-1990s, when it got legal release and distribution for TV and video. The film was originally released on November 7, 1973, almost two weeks before the tenth anniversary of the JFK Assassination. Donald Sutherland has been credited as having the idea for the film and for hiring Freed and Lane to write the screenplay.

Into Evidence, Forensic Sciences and Law Education Group, Duquesne University, a Corton Production, 2004.

JFK. Producer and Director Susan Bellows. JFK premieres on American Experience on Monday and Tuesday, Nov. 11-12, 2013, 9:00-11:00 p.m. ET on PBS.

JFK, Producer and Director Oliver Stone, starring Kevin Costner, 1991. The movie's popularity led to the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.

Jim Garrison Tapes, The. John Barbour, Blue Ridge/Film Trust, 1992.

JFK: The Smoking Gun. Reelz, 2013. This is based on Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK, a 1992 non-fiction book by Bonar Menninger reporting a theory by sharpshooter, gunsmith and ballistics expert Howard Donahue that a Secret Service agent accidentally fired the shot that actually killed President John F. Kennedy.

I Shot JFK: The Shocking Truth. 2013. Convicted felon James E Files, speaking from prison, admits he pulled the trigger from the grassy knoll, and that organized crime figures Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli and Chuckie Nicoletti were behind the hit. This is one of trilogy of Shocking Truth documentaries from producer Wim Dankbaar that includesConfessions from the Grassy Knoll: The Shocking Truth and Spooks, Hoods and JFK: The Shocking Truth.

Men Who Killed Kennedy, The. Actors: Hilary Minster and Robert J. Groden. History Channel, 1988.

Mysterious Death of Number 35, The. Directed by Braddon Mendelson. Noisevision Productions, 2008.

Parkland is a 2013 American historical drama film that recounts the chaotic events that occurred following John F. Kennedy's assassination. From Wikipedia description: The film is written and directed by Peter Landesman, produced by Playtone's Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and Bill Paxton with Exclusive Media’s Nigel Sinclair and Matt Sinclair. The film is based on the bookReclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, by Vincent Bugliosi. Parkland weaves together the perspectives of a handful of ordinary individuals suddenly thrust into extraordinary circumstances: the young doctors and nurses at Parkland Hospital; Dallas’s chief of the Secret Service; an unwitting cameraman who captured what became the most famous home movie in history; the FBI agents who were visited by Lee Harvey Oswald before the shooting; the brother of Lee Harvey Oswald, left to deal with his shattered family; and JFK’s security team, witnesses to both the president’s death and Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s rise to power. Peter Landesman had an ambitious task with his film Parkland -- finding a fresh look at the thoroughly examined assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The screenwriter and first-time director focused on the smaller players with vital but overlooked roles in the chaotic drama which played out on Nov. 22, 1963.

Untold History of the United States, The, Director: Oliver Stone. Writers: Oliver Stone, Peter Kuznick, Matt Graham. Producers: Oliver Stone, Tara Tremaine, Rob Wilson, Carlos Guillermo, Chris Hanley.

 

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2013

Thom Hartmann on "The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America—and What We Can Do to Stop It"

Could the United States face another economic collapse? Writer and broadcaster Thom Hartmann looks back at past financial crises and comes to a startling conclusion. "As long as you don’t look too closely at our nation, things seem under control — the United States looks whole … but when you go around to the 'dark back side' of the nation, you see the shocking truth. There you see a nation whose core fundamentals have been hollowed out," writes Hartmann in his new book, "The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America — And What We Can Do to Stop It."

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: A new analysis by the Associated Press finds that budget cuts imposed this year under sequestration promise to to be far more painful in 2014. Spending is already frozen at 2013 sequestration levels, and the operating budgets of federal agencies could shrink by billions more. The cuts now in place will remain in effect for the next eight years unless Congress acts to change them. Federal funding for food stamps alone could face a nearly $10 billion reduction over the next decade as part of a compromise bill to break a House-Senate deadlock on spending.

Meanwhile, a new report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds the cuts outlined in the House Republicans’ version of the bill would disqualify some 170,000 U.S. military veterans from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, which provides food aid to one-in-seven Americans. All of this follows the so-called "Great Recession," which began in 2007 and is the longest, deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression of the ’30s. Meanwhile, income inequality is at levels not seen since just before the 1929 Wall Street crash.

Well, our next guest argues in his new book that the country’s past financial crashes—in 1770, in 1856, in 1929—offer valuable insight into how the wealthy have hijacked the government’s response to the most recent crash. Thom Hartmann is the author ofThe Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America—and What We Can Do to Stop It. He’s written more than two dozen best-selling books. He’s the host of the nationally syndicated show, The Thom Hartmann Program.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Thom.

THOM HARTMANN: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: And congratulations on the book today. So, the title is The Crash of 2016. Why 2016?

THOM HARTMANN: Well, we’re actually in this crash. It really started in 2006 when the housing market started falling apart, just like in 1927 when the housing market fell apart. And that crash lasted for quite some time, as Hoover did nothing. Now we have a situation where it’s not just do nothing. Obama was successful in the first few months of his administration at putting enough of a band-aid on it that they’re holding it back with baling wire and bubble gum. But Bush had hoped—he saw this coming. The Bush administration had hoped that they could wait until November of 2008, so it would be after the elections, so it wouldn’t hurt the Republican candidates. He was unsuccessful. The Obama administration is now—because they’re not doing the real structural change necessary, they’re hoping they can push it off to 2016. And that’s why we chose that date. There’s an enormous amount of effort in our government and in the Fed to try to hold this off until after the elections of 2016. Whether they’re going to be successful or not, I don’t know. It literally could happen next week.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s the royalist conspiracy?

THOM HARTMANN: We are seeing a repeat of what we saw in the 1920s, what we saw in the 1850s, what we saw in the 1760s and 1770s, which is, basically, very wealthy, very powerful interests rising up and—you know, they’re anti—fundamentally anti-democratic. They’re trying to create an oligarchic form of government, and in many cases succeeding. It’s the war of the rich against the poor and the working—the working people, the middle class, in short summary.

AMY GOODMAN: Name names.

THOM HARTMANN: Well, in this generation, you know, we see the Kochs and the Adelsons, and they’re the more visible ones. There are many more who are far less visible. You have—last year on Wall Street alone, you had 10 people who took over $2 billion in income. You’ve got—you know, the president of UnitedHealthcare has taken over a billion dollars in income, Stephen Hemsley. The guy before him, Bill McGuire, took over a billion-and-a-half dollars in income. There’s—there are a number of people, since the rules got changed during the Reagan administration. It was a real—a genuine revolution that set this up, and then the big changes at the end of the Clinton administration that Phil Gramm pushed through, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Since then, these people have basically been unleashed. I mean, in the '20s it was the DuPonts and the Morgans and the Rockefellers, and now it's this new bunch. But it’s always the same group.

AMY GOODMAN: And how did they gain by the recession?

THOM HARTMANN: Well, the—some of the biggest fortunes in America over the last century were made during the last Great Depression. If you’re cash rich and everybody is desperately selling everything they have for almost nothing, because they—you know, they’re facing tax liens and they’re going out of business and things, it’s an enormous opportunity to get even richer. So, that’s—they’re benefiting—they are and will benefit from [inaudible].

AMY GOODMAN: In your intro, you’ve got several interesting stories, like about Joe Stack.

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah. Joe Stack flew—infamously or famously, I suppose—his plane into the IRS—into an IRS building and killed an IRS worker. He was a small businessperson who just got basically eaten by the recession. And we describe him as America’s first suicide bomber. I think that Joe Stack, on the one hand, the Occupy movement, and in some ways the tea party movement, at least at the grassroots where people don’t realize who’s pulling the strings, are all signs of this growing populist rage of a nation that is pregnant with, to paraphrase Jefferson, revolution—I’m not talking violent revolution; as I said, the Reagan revolution was a revolution, the FDR revolution, you know—that there is so much pressure right now to—you know, for something to happen. And we’re seeing this. We’re seeing this in the rise of suicides all across the United States. We’re seeing it in the rise of homelessness.

In 1920—in 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt came into office, the White House was occupied. There was an Occupy movement then; it was called the Bonus Army. And literally, from the edge of the White House all the way down to the Potomac River was a sea of people. FDR confronted this enormous occupation. It was the consequence, of course, of three years of the crash not being addressed. I would guess, had he not been able to get this very small stimulus, that stopped us from losing 700,000 jobs a month and took us to kind of a flat level—flat painful, but flat—that there would—you know, that the Occupy movement would have been 10 times larger now, and we’d be looking at something like that.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to FDR, his inaugural address in 1933.

THOM HARTMANN: Yes.

PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our great natural resources.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his inaugural address in 1933. You say President Obama is missing the FDR moment.

THOM HARTMANN: He missed it. I mean, he had—he had that during the first few months of his presidency. And before Scott Brown was put in in the Senate, he had a—I don’t know, I think it was about 13 weeks with a filibuster-proof Senate, and had an opportunity to do these things. But basic—in all probability, he got the same speech Bill Clinton got from Rubin and Summers—or Rubin and Greenspan, rather, when he—when he was installed after running on his "New Covenant" speech, which was a very FDR speech, and then governing as a—as basically an Eisenhower Republican.

The—on the one hand, it’s fairly easy to blame Obama for that. On the other hand, I don’t think that any president in a long, long time has faced such an implacable wall of opposition. And now, because of Citizens United, Buckley v. Valeo, First National Bank, because of these Supreme Court decisions, these politicians on the right—the Republicans, by and large—are funded massively, massively by these billionaires. And so, I think, much like in the '30s, much like in the 1850s, much like in the 1770s, it's going to take a major economic crisis to produce the political will necessary to create the fundamental changes, structural changes in our political and economic system that can make this country work again.

AMY GOODMAN: You relate crashes in the economy with war.

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah, I do. Arnold Toybee—it may be an apocryphal quote, but it’s often attributed to him—said that when the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable, that we remember the glories but not the horrors. And you could say the same of economic disasters, when, you know, we’ve forgotten not only the horrors of the Great Depression, in many ways, but also the lessons that we learned out of them. Every one in the past, every one of these economic disasters, has been followed by a war—the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II. Whether this one is—and each war has been horribly more destructive, because technology improves. Whether this one is is going to depend probably a lot on what is going on around the rest of the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, it was a Republican president, President Dwight Eisenhower, who said in his famous farewell speech to the nation, January 17th, 1961:

PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER: My fellow Americans, this evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Three-and-a-half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Eisenhower’s farewell address, January 17th, 1961. That’s an excerpt from the documentary Why We Fight. More than 50 years later, that speech, many argue, is—well, the arguments of the military-industrial complex are more relevant than ever.

THOM HARTMANN: And there’s what’s referred to in economics as a perverse incentive built into this, just like we see with the private prison industry arguing for longer drug sentences and laws because they want to fill up more beds. Ed Snowden worked for a company, Booz Allen, which was owned at one point in time by the Carlyle Group, which was in part owned at one time, ironically, by the bin Laden family. I mean, figure this one out. And we find that, you know, roughly 70 percent, apparently, of the intelligence budget of the United States has been outsourced. Massive chunks of the Pentagon have been outsourced.

So it’s not just, you know, is there going to be a war like, you know, military conflict, intra-country stuff, but we have an industry in the United States that is so powerful and that the Supreme Court has empowered to behave as if they were citizen lobbyists in ways that were unthinkable in—well, actually, has happened in past, but during Eisenhower’s day would have been much more difficult, and certainly after Nixon, that—I mean, for example, the wealthiest zip code in the United States is no longer Beverly Hills. It’s just north of Washington, D.C., where all the mansions of these defense contractors are.

So, there’s an enormous pressure to do something. And I was surprised that we didn’t go to war with Syria. I think the country has been so badly burned by George Bush’s lies and wars that—and that’s another thing that gives me some hope that this depression, this crash, might not be followed by a war. But we’re going to have to wait and see what happens in the Middle East and what happens with Taiwan and China and all these other things.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about the issue of climate change, that you also focus on and just made a video about—

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —how this fits into the coming crash of 2016?

THOM HARTMANN: It’s another stressor. There—it’s a very, very significant stressor. And the video that we just did, Last Hours, which is over at lasthours.org, in that, we point out the thing that the IPCC is not talking about right now, but the scientists are, people are hysterical about, is the—or very concerned about, is that there are trillions of tons of methane hydrate, methane frozen up in ice in the Arctic and around continental shelves. If that melts, then there will be a sudden global warming. And when you look at the five past extinctions on the planet Earth, every single one was triggered by one of these methane releases. And that is the worst-case scenario. We’re hopeful that we can avoid it.

AMY GOODMAN: How does Arctic drilling fit into that? Because, of course, the Greenpeace, the Arctic 30, the 28 Greenpeace activists and the two journalists who are now being shipped across Russia, jailed, they were protesting Russia engaging in Arctic drilling.

THOM HARTMANN: Yes, and we’re also on the edge of doing that same thing, and other countries are, as well. The—NASA right now has an experiment called CARVE, Carbon in Arctic Reservoir Vulnerability Experiment. And in our video, we have Charles Miller, one of—the head researcher. And he pointed out to us that there’s over—they’re quite sure there’s over a trillion tons of methane in the Arctic, maybe as much as two and two and change in the Arctic; worldwide, somewhere between four and seven trillion tons. To trigger an extinction might take as little as one to two trillion tons being released. So, when you do away with the ice sheet, and then you—and the Arctic Ocean is rather shallow, frankly—and then you start running ships through there that are stirring the warm waters in, you’re playing with fire.

AMY GOODMAN: So how do you change all this? How do you prevent the crash of 2016? You have a chapter called "Democratize the Economy."

THOM HARTMANN: Yes. To prevent the crash of 2016, we would have to make the fundamental changes that we’re going to have to make afterward. You would have to start enforcing the Sherman [Antitrust] Act again. You would have to—

AMY GOODMAN: Which is?

THOM HARTMANN: Which says that—right now—it was passed in the 1880s, and it says that basically any company that gets so large that they dominate an industry is illegal. And not only the company gets broken up, but people in the company can go to jail, in the Sherman Act. And Reagan, in his second year of his presidency, stopped enforcement of it, functionally, and no president since then has made a serious effort. The last one was Jimmy Carter breaking up AT&T. So, now we have not just the media, but every significant industry in the United States controlled by two, three, four, five at the most, companies. This is—you know, when you look at biological systems, broad and diverse is strong. Top-heavy and narrow is fragile. So, our economy is insanely fragile in that regard.

So, bring back the enforcement of the Sherman Act, thus break up the big banks. Bring back Glass-Steagall, separate commercial banking from gambling banking. Do away with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Phil Gramm took us from virtually no gray or black market in these bets on bets on bets, these CDOs, to $800 trillion worth in 2008. And, you know, his wife Wendy was on the board of Enron. Ken Lay desperately wanted to be able to play these games. Phil Gramm got his legislation in 1999 and 2000. Bill Clinton, I think, had no idea what this would mean, just happily signed it. And that was when this was set. So, if we did these things, we could prevent this. There’s clearly not the political will, which is why I’m asserting that the crash will happen, and that will generate the political will.

AMY GOODMAN: What gives you the most hope, when you see grassroots movements, which you cover, too, on The Thom Hartmann [Program]?

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah. Oh, yeah. What gives me the most hope is the fact that young people are waking up. They’re getting it, particularly—I mean, you see it just on the ground in their student loans, that their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents never experienced, that the predator class in this country is eating everything in its path. And the Occupy movement was a great beginning for that. We’ll see what’s next. And then, on the other hand, you’ve got a lot of boomers who are still very politically active. It’s the people in the middle who are just desperately trying to raise a family and work that are—

AMY GOODMAN: You focus a good deal on the Koch brothers and what you call the Kochtopus.

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah, yeah. Well—

AMY GOODMAN: Why are they so significant today?

THOM HARTMANN: Because they fund so many different pieces of what has become the Libertarian/Republican machine, this notion that government is bad somehow, that Reagan introduced in his first inaugural. The thing that people have to get is, you know, if you don’t like government, that’s fine, but if you take government out of the way, if you take—if you stop administering the commons by the government, there’s an enormous vacuum. And there’s a whole lot of billionaires who are just waiting to step into that vacuum. So, if we don’t have government regulation, for example, of, you know, smokestack things, then the Kochs make more money, but all the rest of us get more cancers.

AMY GOODMAN: And their wealth comes from?

THOM HARTMANN: It’s interesting. Their father, you know, cut a deal with Joe Stalin to develop the oil fields in Russia. So—and today—I mean, there was a report a few weeks ago—we haven’t been able to confirm all of it—that if the Keystone pipeline is built, it goes to refineries in part owned by the Koch brothers, that they could make as much as $100 billion. That’s more than they’re actually worth right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us the story of James Richard Verone.

THOM HARTMANN: The fellow who committed suicide?

AMY GOODMAN: The—he robbed the bank for one dollar.

THOM HARTMANN: Oh, yes! Yes, I’m sorry, there’s—

AMY GOODMAN: Many stories in the book.

THOM HARTMANN: I know the stories; I’m terrible with names. Yeah, this was a—this was a fellow who—he couldn’t find a job. He had a growth in his chest. He was concerned about, you know, "Where do I go? What do I do?" And he walked into a bank and gave the teller a—you know, "I’m robbing this bank for one dollar." And then he sat down and waited to be arrested. And it was because he needed medical care. And he said, you know, "If you don’t have your health, you have nothing. I’d rather be alive and in jail than be dying."

AMY GOODMAN: And get healthcare in prison.

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah, yeah. And he did, by the way. He got healthcare as soon as he was arrested.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break. When we come back, I want to ask you about the secretary of state, John Kerry’s comments that he doesn’t think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, on this 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Kennedy. You wrote a whole book about this. We’re talking to Thom Hartmann, the nationally syndicated talk show host of The Thom Hartmann [Program]. His new book, out just today, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America—and What We Can Do to Stop It. Stay with us.

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TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2013

As John Kerry Questions Official Story of JFK Killing, Thom Hartmann Discusses "Legacy of Secrecy"

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. It is a topic our guest Thom Hartmann wrote about the 2009 book, "Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination," co-authored with Lamar Waldron. Warner Brothers is now making the book into a movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of FBI informant Jack Van Laningham. The topic of JFK’s assassination has also been in the news after last week’s interview with Secretary of State John Kerry on NBC, in which he expressed doubts about whether JFK’s accused shooter acted alone. Kerry was questioned about those remarks Sunday by NBC’s David Gregory. Kerry declined to elaborate on his beliefs about a possible conspiracy surrounding the assassination.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Next week, November 22nd marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 1963. It’s a topic our guest, Thom Hartmann, wrote about in his 2009 book that he co-authored, Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination. Warner Brothers is now making the book into a movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of FBI informant Jack Van Langingham.

Well, the topic of JFK’s assassination has also been in the news after last week’s interview with Secretary of State John Kerry on NBC, in which he expressed doubts about whether JFK’s accused shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone. Kerry was questioned about those remarks Sunday by NBC’s David Gregory.

DAVID GREGORY: Mr. Secretary, a final question before you go. You gave some comments in light of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy to NBC News that have now been widely broadcast and reported on. And in those comments, you said this: "To this day, I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone." That certainly would be surprising to a lot of people that those are your views. Would you care to elaborate?

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: No. I just have a point of view. And I’m not going to get into that. It’s—you know, it’s not something that I think needs to be commented on, and certainly not at this time.

DAVID GREGORY: Do you think the conspiracy theories—his involvement with Russia, motivation from the Soviet Union or Cuba—are valid at some level?

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: David, I’m not going to go into it. It’s just inappropriate, and I’m not going to do more than say that it’s a point of view that I have. But it’s not ripe or worthy or appropriate for me to comment further.

AMY GOODMAN: That was John Kerry this weekend on—speaking to NBC’s David Gregory. Your response to this, Thom Hartmann, and why you think this is at all interesting to look at 50 years later?

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah, well, John Kerry’s saying, you know, it probably wasn’t Oswald and maybe it was a conspiracy, it’s like, surprise, surprise! The House Committee on Assassinations did an exhaustive look at this, and they concluded not only, you know, that Oswald did not act alone, but that all the evidence indicated that there was a conspiracy, and that, in all probability, Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante, the two big mob bosses that Bobby was aggressively prosecuting, had the motive, means and opportunity—phrase of the House Select Committee—to have committed the crime. So, you have that. Secondly, you have—you know, naval intelligence did an exhaustive look at Lee Oswald, specifically, after all this, and concluded that there was no possibility that he could have been the shooter.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet you have the Warren Commission that said not only was he the shooter, but that he acted alone.

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about who was on that commission and when they came out with their findings.

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah, there’s a reason for this. Jack and Bobby Kennedy, just before the assassination, were doing two simultaneous things. One, they were very aggressively—and very, very close to successfully—trying to negotiate peace and rapprochement with Castro. At the same time, they were planning an assassination of Castro. It was going to be on December 5th of 1963. And the assassination—that plot to assassinate Castro was found out about and somewhat infiltrated by the mob, by Trafficante and Marcello. And they turned—they used—how to say this? When the assassination happened, LBJ concluded, very quickly—in fact, a number of people in the government concluded very quickly, because of the apparent involvement of Oswald—that Castro was somehow involved.

Now, right after the Cuban missile crisis, we almost had World War III. If the American people thought that Castro had killed the president of the United States, there would have been such a hue and cry for a war against Cuba, which Kennedy knew would cause Khrushchev to very probably start World War III, and it would be a nuclear war, and civilization might not even survive, that the American people had to be convinced, at all costs, that Castro had nothing to do with this. And yet, at that point in time, many of the people, senior people in the government, were convinced that Castro was responsible. So, the Warren Commission report—I mean, this is why Earl Warren had the tears running out of his eyes when Jack—when President Johnson commissioned him to do it, because he basically said, "We’ve got to cover this thing up." And so, the Warren Commission report was largely a whitewash to avoid that from coming out.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about the significance of today’s secretary of state, John Kerry, saying, "I don’t want to talk about it, but I think it involves Russia and Cuba, and I think that the story that we know, the establishment story, is not true."

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah, yeah. The—with virtual certainty, I can say that, you know, it was the mob who killed Jack Kennedy. At that—in that context, I mean, there was involvement of others within our government and whatnot, but principally it was the mob. The FBI was following these people. You know, the FBI failed, in many ways, hugely, and to this day they would really rather not own up to that. Jack Van Laningham, for example—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain who he is. You know, he’s going to—

THOM HARTMANN: Jack—

AMY GOODMAN: This is—he’s the focus of—

THOM HARTMANN: He’s the character for this movie, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —the film that—

THOM HARTMANN: Jack’s still alive. He lives in Los Angeles.

AMY GOODMAN: —Leonardo DiCaprio’s going to play.

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah. And Jack was the cellmate with Carlos Marcello for a number of years, and he was an informant for the FBI. And they were audio-taping his conversations with Marcello, where Marcello basically laid out they did everything. I mean, this—it’s just—it was fairly straightforward.

AMY GOODMAN: And why does it matter now?

THOM HARTMANN: It matters now, I think, because—well, for two reasons. One, the killing of Jack Kennedy was a consequential change in the direction, the political direction, of America. And number two, I think it’s really important that we know our own history, even when it’s unpleasant, even when it involves our own government agencies screwing up or even worse.

AMY GOODMAN: And when is the movie coming out?

THOM HARTMANN: We’ll see. Hopefully next year.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Thom Hartmann, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Thom Hartmann is the nationally syndicated TV and radio talk show host ofThe Thom Hartmann Program. He’s the New York Times best-selling author of two dozen books. Today’s book, that was just published, is called The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America—and What We Can Do to Stop It. His book about the Kennedy assassination is called Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFKAssassination.

And that does it for our broadcast. If you’d like to get a copy of today’s show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. Again, we’re headed to Warsaw, Poland, at the end of this week. We’re the only global broadcast to be broadcasting daily hour throughout next week, from Warsaw, from the United [Nations] climate change summit in Poland.

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The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

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[i] In the years following the Warren Report's release, several of the commissioners and staff members distanced themselves from their own report and publicly criticized the manifold deceptions of the agencies on which they had relied, namely the FBI and CIA. Among those who suffered grave doubts was lawyer David Slawson, the man who had been the Warren Commission's lead investigator into whether JFK was the victim of a conspiracy. In 1975 Slawson aired his criticisms to the New York Times, attacking the CIA for withholding vital information from the commission and calling for a new JFK investigation. Within days of the story breaking in the Times, Slawson received a strange and threatening phone  call from James Angleton, the spectral CIA counterintelligence chief. Angleton -- who had not only closely monitored Oswald for several years before Dallas, but later took charge of the agency's investigation into the alleged assassin -- adopted a decidedly sinister tone during his call with Slawson, making it clear to the lawyer  that he would be wise to remain "a friend of the CIA." Slawson and his wife were deeply unnerved by the call. He thought the message was clear: "Keep your mouth shut."

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