Maggie's Farm

Charlie Trie, Hsu, and Charlie Chan in a bad B movie

I noticed that the NYT article mentioned, something like"the troubled 1990's campaign funds problem" cited some other crap and didn't mention good ole Charlie Trie but once. So lets review the bidding.

The exploits of Clinton bag man Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie produced a big hit in the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearings on campaign finance back in 1996. Testimony that he once showed up with $460,000 in $1000 doallar donation in a brown paper bag were the stuff of B-grade movies. BTW the serial numbers were sequentially numbered and the donors handwriting was all the same, just the names had changed...hmm

Democratic Party Fund officials, who say they had never heard of Mr. Trie, were trying to figure out what to do about that when, lo, he showed up a second time a month later. This time he was carrying a shopping bag. Michael Cardozo, executive director of the defense fund, remembered being less than overjoyed. "I said to myself, 'My God, he's got a million dollars this time,' Mr. Cardozo testified.

Mr. Trie left the country – he is in China – and has declined thus far to testify before the committee. Clearly one of the services he performed was to launder illegal but early sought-after contributions from abroad The hearings offered these glimpses:

Mr. Cardozo testified that at one point he met at the White House with Mrs. Clinton and deputy chief of staff and de facto campaign director Harold Ickes. ( Ickes folks is the son of an FDR man, Harold LeClair Ickes (March 15, 1874 – February 3, 1952) was a U.S. administrator and political figure. He served as Secretary of the Interior for thirteen years, from 1933 to 1946, and was known as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's point man for the New Deal. He is also an infamously mentioned person in the Venona Papers that exposed communist in FDR's administration) Ickes, Jr. is prominent in Hillary's campaign. Back to Charlie Trie

He told them about the suspect contributions from Mr. Trie. Mrs. Clinton, he said, told him in turn that the fund should vet all contributions carefully. But apparently nothing was done, then or later, to vet the large amounts of money that Mr. Trie was simultaneously funneling through the Democratic National Committee to the campaign As of thismorning Sept 12,2007 that is apparently the road Mrs Clinton has once again decided to pursue...she ain't just giv'n back $850,000 bucks .

An FBI agent testified that in the period of 1994-96 Mr. Trie received more than $900,000 in wire transfers from an Asian businessman, Ng Lap Seng. Mr. Ng, who is based in Macao, is said to be a sometime business partner of Mr. Trie's. There appeared to be a correlation between the wire transfers and transfers of money by Mr. Trie in turn to the DNC.

Only after the hearings with regard to Mr. Ng were over did the White House disclose, in response to a longstanding committee inquiry, that Mr. Ng had visited the White House 12 times during the relevant period. Most of the visits, the White House said, were social calls on former White House aide Mark Middleton, an Arkansan who now has business dealings in Asia. Three others were described as White House tours, and once Mr. Ng attended a dinner for campaign contributors as Mr. Trie's guest. The committee felt used by the White House, in that the news of the visits came only after the hearings had ended. Democratic senators joined Republicans in voting unanimously Friday to compel production of documents on time, by subpoena, in the future.

Mr. Trie's role as a conduit for campaign contributions seems to have been well known. An agricultural cooperative in Thailand wired him $100,000 a couple of weeks before two of its executives were to meet the president at a White House coffee. At least half the money was converted to cash shortly afterward; what happened to it next is unclear. The coffee was arranged by DNC fund-raiser John Huang and a businesswoman, Pauline Kanchanalak, who was the co-op's U. S. representative and herself a major Clinton campaign contributor. Some if not all of her contributions have been returned by the DNC because of questions about their source.

Hsu has simply replaced Charlie Trie. Who could be the nexus in all this. My best estimation is Sandy "Pants" Berger, for before he was BillClinton's NSA he was a lobbyist for the PRC. Red China, the ChiComs were his biggest client.
Late last nigh I wrote that Bill and Berger have had years now to perfect, along with the Chinese, a foreign money machine, complete with cut outs, bag men, etc.

The Clintons are as dirty as they come in the history of our politics and Hillary has always been acknowledged as the brainy one. I hope she burns, and how quickly we forget that this is a road well travailed by the Clintons....Bill simply preferred the direct method of selling US Defense secrets to China for cash.......and then Sandy "Pants" Berger steals top secret documents to cover up. He should have been shot.

The greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. --JFK, June 11, 1962

You know I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does. I'm perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths...FDR, May 1941

Think FDR wasn't a Commie? Very,very pink. Code Pink

SOME QUOTES ABOUT AND BY STALIN DELANO ROOSEVELT
Stalin is my brother - FDR after Tehran

FDR gave a speech in Troy, NY, 3 March 1912, in which he laid out his philosophy -*he placed the "liberty of the community" over "the liberty of the individual* ." He said competition was bad but cooperation was good. The speech was a concerted assault on the idea of private property. "...why can we not...predict that the state will compel every farmer to till his land or raise beef or horses?" He also claimed that the state could force "idle" men to labor. He imposed no limits on the power of the state. His definition "by liberty we mean happiness and prosperity" is not liberty at all but could as well mean slavery. He pointed to the Germans as proving that we "had passed beyond the limits of the individual." In his first inaugural speech, he said, "rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed" and threatened Congress and asked for dictatorial powers.
Charles Beard, the doyen of American socialists and creator of the ideas for FDR's NRA and AAA: "FDR accepts the inexorable collectivism of the American economy...national planning in industry, business, agriculture and government." "Individual economic activities and individual property rights will be altered and changed." FDR was bringing us to a 'collectivist democracy' and "worker's republic."

Earl Browder, a regular Bolshevik and General Secretary of the Communist Party USA, went wild with delight and excitement over FDR's speeches. "If the New Deal could be established, it should be possible to proceed from this, step by step, without violent overturning, to socialism." Earl, who was also a Russian spymaster, ran his base of operations from the White House and hired and fired administration officials at all levels. FDR pardoned him from a 5 year prison sentence in 1942.

George Bernard Shaw said FDR "is a communist but does not know it." Of course he did know it, but it would have been political suicide to express it.

H.G. Wells wrote "The exciting thing about him, as about Stalin, is that he, too, has more of the appearance of having modern objectives, however incompletely apprehended, than anyone else in the world." Also that FDR was feeling his way toward state capitalism and Washington and Moscow were 'the twin centers of reconstruction effort.' After reading Well's autobiography in which he called for a 'greater effort' for Communism, FDR wrote him "your direction and mine are not so far apart."
FDR said it was time for US "to become fairly radical for at least one generation. History shows that where this occurs occassionally, nations are saved from revolution...Wait until next year, I am going to be really radical." "National thinking, national PLANNING and national action are the three great essentials...'socialism' has probably done more to prevent Communism and rioting and revolution than anything else in the last 4 or 5 years." National planning necessarily requires coercion - it is the recipe for tyranny. FDR liked to call himself the Kerensky of the American revolution.

"The Russian newspapers during the last election (1932) published the photograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt over the caption 'the first communistic President of the United States'." -- Senator Thomas D. Schall
Stalin called FDR in Dec 1933, "a decided and courageous leader." In 1934 he praised FDR's "initiative, courage and determination".
Although FDR liked to pretend that Teddy Roosevelt and his family supported him, in 1935 in Philadelphia, Teddy, jr. leveled this blast at FDR: "You have been faithless. You have usurped the function of Congress, hampered freedom of the press...You have urged Congress to pass laws that you knew were unconstitutional...You have broken your sacred oath taken on the Bible."
August 13, 1938, The House Un-American Affairs received testimony from John Frey, president of an AFL union, about 280 Communist Party members in the CIO and that communists had infiltrated the government in almost every bureau through the United Office and Professional Workers Union. FDR , who was very angry, met with Chairman Dies and told him "Well, there is no one interested in Communism, no one at all. I've heard it all my life. There is no menace here in Communism...there is nothing wrong with the Communists in this country. Several of my best friends are Communist." The bitterest attack FDR ever made publicly against a public official was against Dies for his investigation of Communist influences in union sit-down strikes. FDR refused cooperation with the Dies committee and tried to kill it by blocking funds to it in 1940. Dies claimed there were 3,000 communists working in government.

"Submission, not freedom is to be the future badge of the United States...the overturn of institutions, including the Constitution, is the avowed goal of his (FDR's) immediate advisors. -- Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, in Portland, OR, Sept. 1934
Father Coughlin said in 1936 that the New Deal had its feet of clay mired "one in the Red mud of Soviet communism and the other in the stinking cesspool of pagan plutocracy." Also "the efforts are made for low, practical purposes to confuse a Christian program of social justice with a Godless program of communism."
"Now to bring about government by oligarchy masquerading as democracy, it is fundamentally essential that practically all authority and control be centralized in our national government. The individual sovereignty of our states must first be destroyed, except in mere minor matters of legislation." -- FDR March 2, 1930
When his Chief of Security Berle brought him information from the Communist courier Whittaker Chambers that there were 2 Soviet spy rings at the highest levels of his administration, naming names like Hiss, White and Silvermaster, FDR told him to "go jump in a lake." The report was suppressed for years. The KGB archives list 221 agents in the most sensitive sections of the Roosevelt administration in April 1941. There were probably a like number of Soviet military GRU agents.
The week before the 1944 election, Izvestia wrote "to announce joyfully that Mr. Roosevelt's return was secure" and predicted an American Reichstag fire.
In 1946 FDR's son Elliot wrote a book titled As He Saw It which was meant to be the memoir that his father never wrote. It quoted many important private conversations and opinions of FDR. The real inside story scandalized the keepers of FDR's myth, who said that it put the words of the communist newspaper The Daily Worker into his father's mouth. The truth hurts.
FDR and Eleanor's (and we know from her admission that Hillary talks to Eleanor, and channels her behaviors) political views were shaped by a political leech named Louis Howe who attached himself in 1912 and was always very secretive about his political beliefs. Similarly, FDR has often been called 'non-ideological' because he could not admit his ideology. Howe saw in FDR an ambitious, ruthless young man with no moral compass or ideas. Over years of conversations, and speech writing and agenda planning, and especially during the onset of FDR's polio when Howe lived with them and they depended on him, Howe shaped both FDR and Eleanor. He was their brain. They were his disciples. He taught them an ideology. They became ideologues.

In a Cosmopolitan article in April 1934, Howe wrote quoting his protege FDR "that the time has arrived to build a new kind of government founded on the doctrine of the good neighbor and not the cruel doctrine of 'rugged individualism.' " In other words, FDR stood for the obliteration of individualism at the hands of a ruthless, all powerful state.

Folks, the history of FDR communism is being unraveled by the new data available to historians just recently...FDR was deep in the heart or the marxist tradition and he remains THE icon for the Democratic party today, and for many others who believe that because he brought rural electrification to America that he was a great man....pretty cheap way to sell your soul.
Habu

..and just keep following the Democrats to the BCCI scandal ...

there are so many scandals surrounding the Democrats for the last eighty years it's hard to keep up with them all..to them it's just business as usual

Along those lines, there was a book written during Tammany Hall era in NYC by one of the ward bosses .... George Washington Plunkett.....in this small book he esxplains "honest graft" and defends the pre civil service world..one of his favorite sayings was "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em."

George Washington Plunkitt (1842-1924) was a long-time State Senator from the U.S. state of New York, representing the Fifteenth Assembly District, who was especially powerful in New York City. He was part of what is known as New York's Tammany Hall machine.

Plunkitt became wealthy by practicing what he frankly called "honest graft" in politics. He was a cynically honest practitioner of what today is generally known as "machine politics," patronage-based and frank in its exercise of power for personal gain. Plunkitt's "honest graft" however, was not so honest. The use of inside information to corner the market on municipal purchases eventually transfers cost to the taxpayer, who must support this type of speculation. Meanwhile, the specific targeting of brothels, bars, and gambling houses that Plunkitt cites as "dishonest graft" transfers extra payment only to the patrons of those establishments as a form of sin tax. In one of his speeches, quoted in Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, he describes the difference between dishonest and honest graft as working solely for one's own interests and working for the interests of one's party, state, and personal interest whenever they can.

He made most of his money through land purchases, which he knew would be needed for public projects. He would buy such parcels, then resell them at an inflated price. (This was "Honest Graft". "Dishonest Graft" according to Plunkitt, would be buying land and then using influence to have a project built on it.) Plunkitt was also a big party man, believing in appointments, patronage, spoils, and all of the corrupt practices that were curtailed by the civil service law. He saw such practices as both the rewards and cause of patriotism. He hated the civil service system that he believed would be the downfall of the entire United States governmental system.

The positive side of machine politics, as Plunkitt saw it, was the closeness between political bosses and their constituencies. He cites how Tammany bosses such as himself would assist the poor of New York in immediate and necessary ways (such as by providing emergency loans) while others, such as social reformers and the federal government, would only push for long-term improvements in the situation of the urban poor. Similarly, he argues that the machine listened to and defended the poor while others regarded them from a distanced, patronizing point of view. Thus, Plunkitt regarded the fragmented and independent format of machine governance to be the most perfect form of urban administration possible.


His book:

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1993. (Originally published in 1905)

The republic can and does push back, a great observation Walt.

And your clarity on the errant schoolboy unsupervised sneak is righteous.

Yep, but even at our birth there was division and rancor.
After the Constitutional Convention and the period of debate over it moving toward ratification the Federalists and Anti Federalists went at it tooth and nail.

As big a patriot as Patrick Henry was against the Constitution as it was originally proposed and was a leading voice in the Anti_Federalist camp. The Anti_Federalists contain many of the Founding fathers who had signed the Declaration of Independence.

No less a personage than Richard Henry Lee, of Virgina, and the original person chosen to write the Declaration of Independence was an Anti-Federalist, and wrote many insightful Anti-Federalist papers outlining the shortcomings of the original constitution.

In August, 1774, Lee was chosen as a delegate to the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1775 he became a Colonel of militia in Westmoreland County. In Lee's Resolution on the 7th of June 1776, Lee put forth the motion to the Continental Congress to declare Independence from England. which read (in part): "Resolved: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved." Due to Lee's absence from the Congress because of his wife's illness, Thomas Jefferson was to write the Declaration.

So Aristotle's observation in his sixfold classification of governments, placing democracy in the middle of the pack: that it was the worst of the best and the best of the worst, was prescient. He knew however that it was the best that mortal man could achieve.

I always worry about distortion by compression but here goes a bit on Plato's Republic

Plato at the end of Book IV, tries to show that individual justice mirrors political justice. He claims that the soul of every individual has a three part structure analagous to the three classes of a society. There is a rational part of the soul, which seeks after truth and is responsible for our philosophical inclinations; a spirited part of the soul, which desires honor and is responsible for our feelings of anger and indignation; and an appetitive part of the soul, which lusts after all sorts of things, but money most of all (since money must be used to fulfill any other base desire). The just individual can be defined in analogy with the just society; the three parts of his soul achieve the requisite relationships of power and influence in regard to one another. In a just individual, the rational part of the soul rules, the spirited part of the soul supports this rule, and the appetitive part of the soul submits and follows wherever reason leads. Put more plainly: in a just individual, the entire soul aims at fulfilling the desires of the rational part, much as in the just society the entire community aims at fulfilling whatever the rulers will.


We are still finding our way and in doing so attempting to enlighten mankind to the brighter path and greater freedoms of republics. The savages are resisting but we can persevere.