By Warren Hinckle

Editor, argonatut360.com

It is alas a last twist of the knife in Michael Jackson’s tortured life and death that the man who will most profit by from the androgynous diva’s demise is his cultural and political nemesis, the Colorado right-wingnut Phil Anschutz.

The reclusive Anschutz is a deliberately low profile media baron – Forbes called him “a stealth media mogul” — who spends good money on an Everyready battery of lawyers to keep himself out of the spotlight that his cash cow Jackson so adored.

Anschutz is the honcho of AEG, the promotion company that fronted the late Mr. Jackson’s comeback tour and was on the hook upon his unexpected death for some $40 million in advance ticket returns – which Anschutz edged in half by craftily offering Jackson’s bereaved fans “souvenir” tickets to the concert they would never see.

Part of the Anschutz deal with Jackson was the intellectual property rights to the tour – which are now worth widely more with Jackson dead than any possible sum from the physically declining star attempting to do it alive in 40 venues – a grueling tour which the near- bankrupt Jackson who was doing it for the money reportedly begged Anshutz to give him a break on the number of appearances. No sale.

Now Anschutz stands to make mega millions off the film and video rights of the faltering Jackson’s gala rehearsals at Staples Center in Los Angeles – contraire to live concerts, there will be no bad moves a film you can edit.

How far to the cultural and political right is Anschutz, the promoter and now graveyard editor of Jackson’s grand finale? He stood stalwartly against everything Jackson represented, or would have politically stood for, if he had roused from his childish indulgences to stand up for anything.

Anschutz helped fund the repeal move against the Colorado statute giving rights to gays. He poured millions into a losing Christian flicks movie company that made family value-only movies. He had no lack of screens as he is the owner of the largest string of movie theaters in the country.

His Examiner newspapers spun from the decranited original Hearst San Francisco Examiner, which had fallen on hard times, were originally based on a wet dream of  many Examiners – he ambitiously trademarked 40 or 60 Examiners, the number was in  multiple of 20’s, throughout the country in a demented vision of throw- away tabs in journo drag fronting for the right wing of the National Chamber of Commerce’s agitprop. There are many sensible people in the Chamber but Anschutz’s buddies there do not sing in that choir.

There was a Baltimore Examiner, which folded through a combination of public disinterest and neighborhood lawsuits against the environmentally incorrect plastic-wrapped uninvited free rag cluttering doorways. Anschutz’s give away tabloid Washington. D.C Examiner has occasional UFO-people writing on its opinion  pages and has distinguished itself in the political culture of the Federal City as being more to the unreasonable right than the well-designed  broadsheet creationist daily of the Moonies the Washington Star, Anschutz is no stranger to hypocrisy in business, and can rightfully claim a religious exemption usually granted from that part of the Good Book by the extremist Protestant sects the religious Anschutz frequents. He owns the Millennium Dome in London which is losing money but according the British press the abstenious

Anschutz is hoping to recoup his losses by getting rights to a Super Casino. That would all be fair and square enough, but the fabulous irony of  uptight Phil Anschutz making mega-millions from the death of his arch cultural enemy Michael Jackson is as difficult to stomach as the bad stomach that killed Jackson.

(Ed. Note: As I confessed clipping junkie, I constantly rip stuff out of newspapers and magazines and one of the keepers was this pre-presidential piece last fall in the Village Voice by Wayne Barrett on Sarah Palin. It is a classic of shoe-leather investigative reporting, and if the muse takes you to peruse it you can understand why the state of Alaska’s Xerox machines were, according to her, going bust because of an avalanche of freedom-of-information document requests from pissed-off citizens. The details here-in are a classic of small-town cronyism/corruption. It is small wonder she took a hike before more heat came on in Big Snow country.)

THE $12.5 MILLION sports complex and hockey rink that is the lasting monument to Palin’s two terms as Wasilla mayor is also a monument to the kind of insider politics that dismays Americans of both parties. Six months before Palin stepped down as mayor in October 2002, the city awarded nearly a half-million-dollar contract to design the biggest project in Wasilla history to Kumin Associates. Blase Burkhart was the Kumin architect on the job-the son of Roy Burkhart, who is frequently described as a “mentor” of Palin and was head of the local Republican Party (his wife, June, who also advised Palin, is the national committeewoman). Asked if the contract was a favor, Roy Burkhart, who contributed to her campaign in the same time frame that his son got the contract, said: “I really don’t know.” Palin then named Blase Burkhart to a seven-member builder-selection committee that picked Howdie Inc., a mostly residential contractor owned at the time by Howard Nugent. Formally awarded the contract a couple of weeks after Palin left office, Nugent has donated $4,000 to Palin campaigns. Two competitors protested the process that led to Nugent’s contract. Burkhart and Nugent had done at least one project together before the complex-and have done several since.

 A list of subcontractors on the job, obtained by the Voice, includes many with Palin ties. One was Spenard Builders Supply, the state’s leading supplier of wood, floor, roof, and other “pre-engineered components.” In addition to being a sponsor of Todd Palin’s snow-machine team that has earned tens of thousands for the Palin family, Spenard hired Sarah Palin to do a statewide television commercial in 2004. When the Palins began building a new family home off Lake Lucille in 2002-at the same time that Palin was running for lieutenant governor and in her final months as mayor-Spenard supplied the materials, according to Antoine Bricks, who works in its Wasilla office. Spenard actually filed a notice “of its right to assert a lien” on the deed for the Palin property after contracting for labor and materials for the site. Spenard’s name has popped up in the trial of Senator Stevens-it worked on the house that is at the center of the VECO scandal as well.

 Todd Palin told Fox News that he built the two-story, 3,450-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-bath, wood house himself, with the help of contractors he described as “buddies.” As mayor, Sarah Palin blocked an effort to require the filing of building permits in the wide-open city, and there is no public record of who the “buddies” were. The house was built very near the complex, on a site whose city purchase led to years of unsuccessful litigation and, now, $1.3 million in additional costs, with a law firm that’s also donated to Palin collecting costly fees from the city.

 Dorwin and Joanne Smith, the principals of complex subcontractor DJ Excavation & Development, have donated $7,100 to Palin and her allied candidate Charlie Fannon (Joanne is a Palin appointee on the state Board of Nursing). Sheldon Ewing, who owns another complex subcontractor, Weld Air, has donated $1,300, and PN&D, an engineering firm on the complex, has contributed $699.

By Matt Gonzalez

“[N]or shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” US Constitution, 5th Amendment, Takings Clause

When James Madison wrote the “takings clause” he couldn’t have expected courts would misread it in subsequent years.  Madison plainly wrote that only a “public use” would justify taking private property by government, but courts have found that takings resulting in a “public benefit” meet those criteria.  This reading falls far from its origins. [Read more →]

By Clive Crook

Published: June 28 2009 19:09 | Last updated: June 28 2009 19:09

As he promised last year, Barack Obama has brought climate change and healthcare reform to the centre of the nation’s attention. As well as evangelising, he is pressing Congress to act. Last week the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill to curb carbon emissions, a measure that, if enacted, would touch every part of the US economy. Both House and Senate have drafted far-reaching healthcare bills, with stunning price tags. [Read more →]

(This is an extended version of an article that appeared on the Op-Ed Page of the San Francisco Chronicle about the Transbay Authority’s callous attitude toward small businesses in its path. Attorney Gonzalez, the past president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, analyzes the history and inequities of the eminent domain process in the accompany commentary written for argonaut360.com)

By Jello Biafra, Matt Gonzalez and Warren Hinckle.

If we can learn from our ancestors, attention should be paid to Black Bart. The legendary gentleman stage coach bandit robbed only the strong boxes, not the passengers. He was always polite, apologized for any inconvenience, and even left a poem on his departure.

Some people, especially those whose property is being taken, see the eminent domain process as robbery. That is an arguable proposition, and it is not our purpose to argue it here: but what is inarguable is that the in process of taking private property using governmental authority and taxpayers funds the procedures should be polite and above all financially fair to the victims of progress.  This regrettably has not been the case in the actions of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA), whose communication with the owners whose property is taking  has not been poetry but more the bureaucratic equivalent of rude subway graffiti.

On June 21, 2005, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved the Transbay Redevelopment Plan which called for the development of “the Grand Central Station of the West”.  While the ultimate goal of the plan is laudatory, providing a central terminal for Bay Area trains and buses (with ability to connect to Los Angeles via high speed rail in the future), there is an unfortunate underside of this project. [Read more →]

San Francisco Stories

News Conference

Contact: Lee Houskeeper (415) 777-4700 Newsservice@aol.com

San Francisco’s Free Woodstock 40th Anniversary Concert Will Fight New York’s Woodstock Ventures Cease and Desist Shakedown Attempt

WEDNESDAY 1:00 PM PRESS CONFERENCE

Country Joe, Barry “The Fish” Melton, Former DA Terrence Hallinan, Producer Boots Hughston and Woodstock Veterans Will Announce They Reject Demand by GreedStock Promoter Michael Lang Not To Use “Woodstock” or Book “His” Acts

Lang Doesn’t Own Peace & Music . . .

That Was Born in San Francisco 42 Years AGO. . .Boots Hughston

San Francisco – -Those Summer of Love folks who revisit their Hippie Sacred Ground in Golden Gate Park every 10 years in great numbers to celebrate San Francisco’s Human Be In that beget the Summer of Love that beget the Woodstock Generation and the Age of Aquarius will hold a Press Conference on Wednesday, May 27 at 1:00 PM (John’s Grill-63 Ellis St).

Council of Light leader and producer Boots Hughston, Former District Attorney Terrence Kayo Hallinan, Woodstock veteran musician and attorney Barry The Fish Melton and his partner Country Joe McDonald along with Lester Chambers of The Chambers Brothers and Supper Lotto Winner Dennis Mr. Lucky Sanfilippo will announce that despite a Cease and Desist demand from NY’s Woodstock Ventures their day long free show on Sunday, October 25th is fully permitted and financed and will take place as scheduled. They will also complain of what they say is an old fashioned shakedown tactic by Woodstock producer Michael Lang.

Lang whose own 40th Anniversary of Woodstock event never materialized has been using a high-powered NY law firm to demand payment from any event in the world that plans to celebrate the “40th Anniversary of Woodstock or use art or phases that contain  PEACE & MUSIC.

The group of Summer of Love and Woodstock veterans will demand that Woodstock Ventures recognize that the Peace, Love & Music they wish to cash in on was created in San Francisco. The wish to remind Lang that no less than 18 of acts that performed at the original Woodstock flew in from San Francisco.

1878 Map Of San Francisco’s WOODSTOCK District To Be Shown

At Wednesday’s Press conference Former San Francisco District Attorney, Terrence Hallinan will unveil a map of San Francisco made by Governor HH Haight that shows a large part of San Francisco was designated Woodstock in 1878.

Lee Houskeeper

Managing Editor

San Francisco Stories

615 Burnett Avenue, Suite 2, San Francisco, CA 94131

http://www.sanfranciscostories.com/

(415) 777-4700 Newsservice@aol.com

For anyone that remembers Woodstock, IT ALL MAKES SENSE TO ME NOW!

Finally, after 40 years, someone has opened the vault and revealed the answer to a question that has clawed at our brains since the 1969 Woodstock album was released:

What the heck were the lyrics to Joe Cocker’s version of ‘A Little Help From My Friends’?

He was so wigged-out and loopy on a multitude of drugs, no one has been able to understand his garbled version… ..until now!

Click link below for the lyrics …. FINALLY IT’S CRYSTAL CLEAR!

Finally!

By John Pilger

The American soap Madmen offers a rare glimpse of the power of corporate advertising. The promotion of smoking half a century ago by the “smart” people of Madison Avenue, who knew the truth, led to countless deaths. Advertising and its twin, public relations, became a way of deceiving on a scale imagined by those who had read Freud and applied mass psychology to anything from cigarettes to politics. Just as the Marlboro Man was virility itself, so politicians could be branded, packaged, and sold. (This omits Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, who took “credit” for starting women smoking in the 1920s and 30s.)

It has been more than 100 days since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The “Obama brand” has since been named Advertising Age’s “marketer of the year for 2008,” easily beating Apple. David Fenton of MoveOn.org describes Obama’s election campaign “an institutionalized, mass-level, automated technological community organizing that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful force.” Deploying the Internet and a slogan plagiarized from the Latino union organizer Caesar Chavez – Si se puede! – “yes, we can,” the “mass-level, automated technological community” marketed its brand to victory in a country desperate to be rid of George W. Bush. No one knew what the new brand actually stood for.

So accomplished was the advertising – a record $75 million was spent on TV commercials alone – that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous “change you can believe in,” it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. “We will be the most powerful!” he declared. Perhaps the Obama brand’s most effective advertising was supplied free of charge by those journalists who, as courtiers in a rapacious system, promote shining knights. They depoliticized him, spinning his platitudinous speeches as “adroit literary creations, rich, like those doric columns, with allusion” (Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian). San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote that “many spiritually advanced people I know … identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who … can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.

In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus, and demanded more secret government. He has kept Bush’s gulag intact and at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. On April 24, his lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo prisoners were not “persons” and therefore had no right not to be tortured. His national intelligence director, Adm. Dennis Blair, says he believes torture works. One of his senior officials in Latin America is accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala; another is a Pinochet apologist. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, America experienced a military coup under Bush, whose secretary of “defense,” Robert Gates, along with the same warmaking officials, have been retained by Obama.

All over the world, America’s violent assault on innocent people, directly or by agents, has been stepped up. During the recent massacre in Gaza, reports Seymour Hersh, “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ’smart bombs’ and other high-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” and being used to slaughter mostly women and children. In Pakistan, the number of civilians killed by American missiles called drones has more than doubled since Obama took office. In Afghanistan, the U.S. “strategy” of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the “Taliban”) has been extended by Obama to give the Pentagon time to build a series of permanent bases right across the devastated country where, says Secretary Gates, the U.S. military will remain indefinitely.

Obama’s policy, one unchanged since the Cold War, is to intimidate Russia and China, now an imperial rival. He is proceeding with Bush’s provocation of placing missiles on Russia’s western border, lying that they are a counter to Iran, which he accuses, absurdly, of posing “a real threat” to Europe and the U.S. On April 5, in Prague, he made a speech reported as “anti-nuclear.” It was nothing of the kind. Under the Pentagon’s Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program, the U.S. is building new “tactical” nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. Perhaps the biggest lie – the equivalent of smoking is good for you – is Obama’s announcement that the U.S. is leaving Iraq, the country it has reduced to a river of blood. According to unabashed U.S. Army planners, as many as 70,000 troops will remain “for the next 15 to 20 years.”

On April 25, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, alluded to this. It is not surprising that the polls are showing that a growing number of Americans believe they have been suckered – especially as the nation’s economy has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it. Lawrence Summers, Obama’s principal economic adviser, is throwing $3 trillion at the same banks that paid him more than $8 million last year, including $135,000 for one speech. Change you can believe in.

Much of the American establishment loathed Bush and Cheney for exposing, and threatening, the onward march of America’s “grand design,” as Henry Kissinger, war criminal and now Obama adviser, calls it. In advertising terms, Bush was a “brand collapse,” whereas Obama, with his toothpaste-advertisement smile and righteous clichés, is a godsend. At a stroke, he has seen off serious domestic dissent to war, and he brings tears to the eyes, from Washington to Whitehall. He is the BBC’s man, and CNN’s man, and Murdoch’s man, and Wall Street’s man, and the CIA’s man. The madmen did well.

(John Pilger writes for www.antiwar.com)

Whats she hanging on to?

 His stimulus package?

 

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