"They Drove Woody Guthrie"

(chorus)
If you write too many songs and you side with the poor
And you refuse to be a wage slave
They will say you’re “insane”, they will put you away
Like they drove Woody Guthrie to his grave.

(verses)
He walked around the land and spoke with men and women
And wrote a thousand songs to tell the truth
The media barons, they felt he was too red
And his exclusion drove him to booze. (chorus)

He wrote a big long book which no one would publish
Because it spoke too much of love
He saw that nine-to-five was a big waste of life
But few understood what he said. (chorus)

They said he was “too old” to refuse to settle down
They ordered him to act like other men
But when he refused, they said he had “a disease”
And they locked him in a mental hospital bed. (chorus)

The capitalists got rich from the songs of the communist
Whom they kept hidden away with the insane
They marketed his legend while they took away his pen
Yes, they drove Woody Guthrie to his grave. (chorus)

The They Drove Woody Guthrie protest folk song was written in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

To listen to the They Drove Woody Guthrie protest folk song, you can click on the following links:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Biographical+Folk+Songs/They+Drove+Woody+Guthrie+to+His+Grave

or

http://www.mp3.com/artist/bobafeldman/songs/

As early as 1947, U.S. folksinger Woody Guthrie urged people to fight against the Big Media. In a May 15, 1947 letter, for instance, Guthrie wrote the following:

“We’ve got to break down this log jam, this taboo, this blacklist, this door of distribution that is locked against us. And if I sign over on the log jammers side I’d be used against everybody and everything we believe in.” (Downtown 7/27/94)

For more information about Woody Guthrie, you can check out the official Woody Guthrie website at http://www.woodyguthrie.org/ .

Next: Woody Guthrie’s FBI File

Columbia University's DARPA War Research

As an article posted on the www.telegraph.co.uk site in 2003 observed, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] “is an inner circle of scientists and defense bureaucrats whose job is to dream up the next battlefield tools.” The same 2003 article also noted that "the Pentagon's search for an `Extended Performance War Fighter’ concentrates on employing advanced genetics and neurological science rather than the drugs which have been used since the Second World War to keep warriors awake and alert.” Much of the DARPA research for keeping U.S. pilots away by “zapping” their brains with an electro-magnetic energy called TMS is apparently being done in laboratories at Columbia University’s neurological science department under the supervision of Columbia University Professor Yaakov Stern, as part of a multi-million dollar DARPA war research contract.

In 2003, Columbia Professor Stern apparently told a Telegraph reporter:

"I am convinced that we can help the Pentagon. I have identified the parts of the brain that seem to control the response to sleep deprivation, and we have the technology to stimulate that part to improve the resistance to lack of sleep. The generals want a man who is awake and alert for up to a week. We think we can actually do that.”
Next: They Drove Woody Guthrie lyrics

IDA's 21st-Century Irregular Warfare Planning and Experimentation Studies

The Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA]’s Studies and Analyses Center has been conducting weapons research studies for the Bush Administration’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan in the area of irregular warfare planning and experimentation during this 21st-century “era of permanent war and blogging.” As IDA’s web site (www.ida.org) notes:

“Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have produced most of the recent battle casualties among U.S. and Coalition forces in Iraq… In 2005, the Joint IED-Defeat Task Force asked IDA to review existing DoD organizations and processes established to defeat the IED threat and to identify opportunities for improvement.

“IDA formed a team of more than 30 researchers from six research divisions, including the military component of IDA’s Joint Advanced Warfighting Program (JAWP). The study’s main source of information was the IED-Defeat community itself – from soldiers and Marines in the field to home-based organizations supporting their efforts.

“The team formed task groups that focused on functional dimensions of the IED challenge. JAWP’s senior military officer led a team of military and civilian analysts in Iraq for five weeks that collected warfighters’ perspectives throughout the region, ranging from headquarters to combat patrols. A complementary effort in the United States visited training installations and gathered insights from recently returned veterans. Other teams addressed the following: the adequacy of IED training programs; the intelligence community’s support to the warfighter; the process for identifying, developing, and rapidly fielding new counter-IED technologies; the process for developing and disseminating new IED-defeat tactics; the process for tracking and analyzing operational performance in order to gauge progress and determine the effectiveness of tactics or technologies; and DoD’s capacity to integrate these elements into a coordinated and responsive program.

“In each area, teams made recommendations, which DoD is considering as it refines its approach to defeating the IED threat.”
University of South Carolina President Emeritus John Palms is the Chairperson of the IDA board of trustees. MIT Institute Professor Sheila Widnall, MIT and Harvard University Broad Institute Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Programs Director Jill Mesirov, Harvard University JFK School of Government Lecturer in Public Policy John White and University of Texas at Austin LBJ School of Public Affairs Professor Edwin Dorn also sit on the IDA board of trustees these days.

Next: Columbia University’s DARPA War Research

How Hillary Clinton Got Her Law Firm Job

Although Hillary Rodham-Clinton apparently planned long ago to use her husband’s special influence within the patriarchal Democratic Party Establishment to become the first woman president of the United States in 2009, she did not get any of her 20th-century jobs by being chosen in an election by U.S. voters. Hillary: Her True Story by Norman King describes how the 2008 Democratic Party presidential candidate obtained, for instance, her lucrative corporate lawyer job at Arkansas’s Rose Law firm during the 1970s:

“When her husband took the oath of office in January 1977 and prepared for two years of dealing with the enforcement of law in the state of Arkansas. Hillary looked around for some kind of legal work…She was pleasantly surprised to land a place at the Rose Law firm…

“Conflict-of-interest questions frequently arose because the Rose organization was so ingrained in the Arkansas establishment…The firm specialized in…business litigation…Many of its clients were corporations, including General Motors,…the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, and Tyson Foods.

“…According to partner George Campbell of Rose, `Herb [Rule] was responsible for getting her’…Clinton and Rule, a former member of the Arkansas House of Representatives, had been friends since Rule’s campaign for the 1974 congressional seat. `I was the point person on recruiting,’ Rule recalled, `and I got the word that she was coming, and I tracked her down.’” (Downtown 12/22/93)

Between 1985 and 1992, the Clinton Administration in Arkansas, coincidentally, dished out over $240,000 in Arkansas government contracts to the Rose corporate law firm that employed Hillary Clinton, according to the April 27, 1992 issue of U.S. News & World Report. Of the $240,000 in state contracts Hillary Clinton’s law firm received from her husband’s administration, $135,000 came from Arkansas state agencies and $109,000 came from Arkansas state bond counseling work. Although Bill Clinton’s economic program in Arkansas enabled his family to accumulate over $1 million in assets during the 1980s, in 1991 only seven other states had a greater percentage of people living in poverty than had Arkansas. (Downtown 9/23/92) Only four other states had a lower average income than Arkansas in 1989, when Arkansas’s average income was over $5,000 less than the U.S. national average and nearly $10,000 less than the average income in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. (Downtown 3/25/92)

Next: IDA’s 21st-Century Irregular Warfare Planning and Experimentation Studies

Hillary Clinton and Laila al-Attar's Death

In his April 12, 2006 “Fulbright Prize Address” at the IMF headquarters in Washington,D.C., the husband of 2008 Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, recalled what happened the last time the Clintons occupied the White House:

“We used to have meetings in the White House sometimes, when we thought we might have to have military action on occasion. We did. We bombed Kosovo for seventy-seven days…The United Kingdom and the United States bombed what we thought were Saddam Hussein’s storage sites for chemical and biological materials when he kicked our inspectors out.”

One military action that Hillary Clinton’s husband ordered which he didn’t mention, however, was the June 27, 1993 U.S. missile attack on Baghdad which killed Laila al-Attar and her husband, as well as other Iraqi civilians. As Dennis Bernstein noted in a 1998 Salon article (www.salon.com/news/1998/02/23newsa.html), Laila “was a director of the Iraqi National Art Museum and a powerful force in gaining recognition for women artists throughout the Middle East.”

[The following additional information about the Clinton White House’s decision to attack Iraq on June 27, 1993 previously appeared in Downtown (7/21/93)]:

Among the Iraqi civilians killed by some of the 23 cruise missiles which Bill Clinton ordered to be launched against Baghdad was a prominent woman painter, Laila al-Attar. According to the New York Times (6/28/93), “She and her husband were found dead under debris at their home” after some of the Clinton White House’s missiles “blasted craters as deep as 30 feet in Al Manour, an exclusive residential area.” The Times reported on its back page that “A German opposition spokesman on Middle East affairs, Dieter Schinzel of the Social Democratic Party charged that the attack was counter to international law.”

Although former CIA Director Bush was no longer the U.S. Establishment’s commander-in-chief in 1993, according to the Times, “Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton talked by telephone for about 15 minutes…before the raid” and “later that day, Mr. Bush met with” the Clinton Administration’s first secretary of state, Warren Christopher “and an aide for about 30 minutes at Mr. Bush’s home in Kennebunkport, Maine.” The Times also reported that the Clinton White House’s June 27, 1993 missile attack “came after weeks of preparation and was planned with such secrecy that no more than five top White House aides knew of the discussion, administration officials said.”

Perhaps Hillary Clinton should now fully describe the historical role she played in helping to determine the Clinton White House’s militaristic foreign policy in relation to Iraq and Yugoslavia during the 1990s?

Next: How Hillary Clinton Got Her Law Firm Job

"They Killed The Rosenbergs"

They killed the Rosenbergs
They killed them on the electric chair
They killed the Rosenbergs
They killed them to make people scared.
They arrested the Rosenbergs
They broke into their home
They jailed the Rosenbergs
They ignored their sons who moaned.
They framed the Rosenbergs
They used false evidence
They tortured the Rosenbergs
They used a lying witness.
They smeared the Rosenbergs
They charged them with "conspiracy"
They sentenced the Rosenbergs
They sent them up to Sing Sing.
They murder the innocent
They execute the powerless
With barbaric hands they pulled their switch
For the Rosenbergs would not submit.

To listen to "They Killed The Rosenbergs" protest folk song, you can go to following music site link:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Biographical+Folk+Songs/They+Killed+the+Rosenbergs

Many years after the Rosenbergs were executed on June 19, 1953 by the U.S. government and no longer alive to deny that they were guilty of any crime, some U.S. academics and mainstream journalists claimed that de-classified KGB documents “prove” that the Rosenbergs were not framed. Yet, as I noted in Downtown (2/17/93), during the 1980s, former Village Voice writer Deborah Davis came into possession of a set of revealing U.S. Justice Department documents. The de-classified documents apparently indicated that, when he worked as a Press Attache’ in the U.S. embassy in Paris, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee “was a central figure” in “a State Department/CIA campaign against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg” which “was designed to persuade Europeans that the Rosenbergs were guilty of espionage and deserved to be put to death,” according to the second edition of Davis’s book, Katharine The Great: Katharine Graham and The Washington Post.

According to Davis, “the documents show” that in the early 1950s “Mr. Bradlee went to the Rosenberg prosecutors in New York under orders of `the head of the CIA in Paris,’ as he told an assistant prosecutor, and that from their material he composed his `Operations Memorandum’ on the case, which was the basis of all propaganda subsequently sent out to foreign journalists.”

In an April 1, 1987 letter to Deborah Davis, however, Bradlee (currently a vice-president of the Washington Post Company media conglomerate) wrote:

“I worked for the USIA as the Press Attache’ of the United States Embassy in the early 1950s. I never worked for the CIA. I never participated in a `CIA propaganda campaign’…”

Yet a December 13, 1952 U.S. Government Memorandum from Associate Prosecutor Maran to Asst. U.S. Atty. Myles Lane apparently stated:

“On December 13, 1952 a Mr. Benjamin Bradlee called and informed me that he was Press Attache’ with the American Embassy in Paris, that he had left Paris last night and arrived here this morning. He advised me that…he was sent here to look at the Rosenberg file…

“He advised me that it was an urgent matter…He further advised that he was sent here by Robert Thayer, who is the head of the C.I.A. in Paris…”
For more information on the Rosenberg Case, you can check out the web site of the Rosenberg Fund for Children at www.rfc.org/case.htm .

Next: Hillary Clinton and Laila al-Attar’s Death

Kunstler's Advice To Young Lawyers

In 1971, the now-deceased William Kunstler offered the following advice to young lawyers in the Radical Lawyers: Their Role In The Movement And In The Courts anthology:

“If you lose sight of the goal, or begin to think that you’re foolish when you see your friends driving expensive motorcars, or living in expensive apartments or homes, so foolish and such a misfit that you must start to re-enter the system, then you are in danger. That is what will destroy the young lawyer.”

In his 1994 autobiography, My Life As A Radical Lawyer, Kunstler also made the following reference to Harvard University Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz:

“I would also never represent an individual like Leona Helmsley, who, although she has the same civil rights as anyone, is a rather detestable character with few redeeming qualities. This mogul could well afford a hired gun and did, in fact, eventually hire Alan Dershowitz; a frequent critic of mine, he is not one of my favorite people. I find it reprehensible when a man presents himself as a civil rights attorney, then represents wealthy clients for huge fees…If I’m going to be sensitive about disapproval from…a lawyer like Alan Dershowitz, who once called me the David Duke of the legal profession, I should have been a real estate salesman. Actually, criticism makes me feel that I’m doing exactly the right thing.”

(Downtown 9/20/95)

Next: They Killed The Rosenbergs lyrics