Is Obama a CIA creation?

[Douglas Caddy]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/madsen1.1.1.html

[Guest Tom Scully]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/madsen1.1.1.html

Does it matter, one way or the other?

The large group not deemed too big to fail is the bottom 4 quintiles of the population, 280 million people manipulated through their weaknesses, religious delusions, racial prejudices, and conditioning to resent the poorest and least powerful on the rungs below them, and there is this, the "trump" card.:

"Most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor" - John Dickinson, 1776

These are Obama's two biggest VISIBLE, early financial benefactors, two of the most corrupt family fortunes in the country.:

411 F.2d 658

by Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit - 1969 - Related articles

Abraham N. PRITZKER, Jack N. Pritzker, Jay A. Pritzker and Stanford Clinton, individually and as co-partners, practicing law as Pritzker, Pritzker and ...

http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/411/411.F2d.658.17271.html

Stanford Clinton

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=stanford+clinton+teamsters&btnG=Search+Archives&hl=en&ned=us&scoring=a

http://njlegallib.rutgers.edu/legallib/njar/v10/p0465.pdf

In The Matter of The Application for Playboy-Elsinore Associates

For a Casino License

Decided: April 7, 1982

.....Page 4

B. Areas of Concern Identified By The Division

At the close of the evidentiary phase of this hearing, the Division in its summation indicated that it would have no objection to the licensure of Eslinore if the following two conditions were imposed by the Commission:

....number one, there is no more dealing in any way, shape or form with any, Division or subdivision of the Teamsters fund.

Secondly, that the Pritzker family make efforts to insulate or extricate themselves from existing ties that they may have with Teamsters fund or funds in any way, shape, or form..

Penny Pritzker

http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2008/08/the_power_of_penny_pritzker_bl.html

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=+lester+crown+unindicted&btnG=Search+Archives&hl=en&ned=us&scoring=a

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=+lester+crown+thompson&btnG=Search+Archives&hl=en&ned=us&scoring=a

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=bazelon%20friend%20colonel&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbo=u&tbs=bks:1&source=og&sa=N&tab=wp

Supermob: how Sidney Korshak and his criminal associates became ...

Gus Russo - 2006 - 623 pages - Snippet view

Even prior to that, in April 1941, when Ziffren and Bazelon were at the Gottlieb firm, Ziffren had inquired of the ... friend Colonel Henry Crown purchased a twenty-six-thousand-acre abandoned coal mine in Farmersville, California, ...

Captive city

Ovid Demaris - 1969 - 366 pages - Snippet view

The Alien Property Custodian in 1947, the year the Colonel purchased the Farmersville mine, was David L. Bazelon, ... Considered close friends, Ziffren and Bazelon joined in several multimillion-dollar ventures across the country. ...

Whoever moved Obama along on the fast track is after the last 12.3 percent of the private wealth still in the hands

of the bottom 280 million residents, Obama has demonstrated that he is advancing the goal of wresting this wealth away from these people, and into the hands of his sponsors.

http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf

(bottom of page 32)

"..it is possible to provide a partial update of the wealth figures to July 1, 2009 based on two notable developments....

...Trends in inequality are also interesting.... The share of the top 1 percent advanced from 34.6 to 37.1 percent, that of the top 5 percent from 61.8 to 65 percent, and that of the top quintile from 85 to 87.7 percent, while that of the second quintile fell from 10.9 to 10 percent, that of the middle quintile from 4 to 3.1 percent, and that of the bottom two quintiles from 0.2 to -0.8 percent. ..the share of households with zero or negative net worth, from 18.6 to 24.1 percent."

[John Dolva]

lol I started an answer with ''Without having read the link. : Does it matter?''

Thought twice about posting.

However : What I was going to say was an Obama as president has important implications. He is human. ie Blacks are human. One could then even begin to consider neighbours as human.

He has brought some pretty ugly worms out of the woodwork, and while no JFK, serves to highlight contradictions. In this way his PRESIDENCY can be seen as progressive and even as a progression of Kennedy. His very existence is a testament to Kennedy and Civil Rights and its relationship with Capital.

The US is displaying more and more Imperial traits, to my mind alike the ancient formula that has kept the chinese civilisation in place for some 5000 years. One could also argue it has some roots in '' Visigoth Philosophy ''. basically summed up as ''nothing without gain''. Kennedy was striving to reflect a globally moral stance which has predictable limitations of conflict in a bourgeois dictatorship.

edit typo

edit add

Edited September 7, 2010 by John Dolva

[Guest Tom Scully]

lol I started an answer with ''Without having read the link. : Does it matter?''

Thought twice about posting.

However : What I was going to say was an Obama as president has important implications. He is human. ie Blacks are human. One could then even begin to consider neighbours as human....

John, the idea that those pulling the levers in the U.S. might someday regard their neighbours as "human" is a great

way to describe the problem; it amounts to a deficit in their own humanity.

Have you read this purported, mid '00's Citigroup "memo"? Whether it is counterfeit, or not, the employees names on the document are those of real people in the financial industry, now or formally employed at Citigroup.

Their hubris is monumental, but the comments help to explain that Obama was probably put out there to accomplisj just

what has been accomplished. His candidacy and election no matter what has happened subsequently, eased the concerns

of his sponsors about "push back" in response to the destructiveness of the Bush years.

We ad early voting in October, 2008,. in response to distrust of the voting infrastructure after what happened in Ohio in 2004 and in Florida in 2000. Although I had no expectations that Obama's candidacy was going to be any kind of a panacea, my eyes teared up when I drove past a polling place on a sunny October afternoon and I saw a line that

seemed a mile long, with cars parked everywhere. On that afternoon, and then long into 2009, people believed. Their hope was renewed.

The plutocrats do not even regard most of us in the U.S. as human, John. We are considered another resource to be mined and then discarded. We are a complication because, although we seem capable of absorbing whatever they throw

at us or take away from us with nary a whimper, the plutocrats expect that our capacity to be pushed quietly into serfdom is not infinite. Obama, or Hillary if the primary vote went her way, were intended as a chill pill. JFK probably was, also, in his era. His father being at the time, one of the top 15 wealthiest people in the country, influence me to be less certain of that than I am that this is the purpose of Obama being their front man at this time.

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0BzgUudifBc68ZGUyNzA0MzAtZDZkZC00ZmZjLTkwY2ItNzBlZWRmNjI1ZTNm&hl=en

Equity Strategy

Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances

page 2

"4) In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK

consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in

number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take.

There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for

surprisingly small bites of the national pie."

page 3

"Let’s dive into some of the details. As Figure 1 shows the top 1% of households in the

U.S., (about 1 million households) accounted for about 20% of overall U.S. income in

2000, slightly smaller than the share of income of the bottom 60% of households put

together. That’s about 1 million households compared with 60 million households, both

with similar slices of the income pie! Clearly, the analysis of the top 1% of U.S.

households is paramount. The usual analysis of the “average” U.S. consumer is flawed

from the start. To continue with the U.S., the top 1% of households also account for

33% of net worth, greater than the bottom 90% of households put together. It gets better

(or worse, depending on your political stripe) - the top 1% of households account for

40% of financial net worth, more than the bottom 95% of households put together. This

is data for 2000, from the Survey of Consumer Finances (and adjusted by academic

Edward Wolff)."

(Inequity has grown even worse..)

page 24

"IS THERE A BACKLASH BUILDING?

Plutonomy, we suspect is elastic. Concentration of wealth and spending in the hands of

a few, probably has its limits. What might cause the elastic to snap back? We can see a

number of potential challenges to plutonomy.

The first, and probably most potent, is through a labor backlash. Outsourcing,

offshoring or insourcing of cheap labor is done to undercut current labor costs. Those

being undercut are losers in the short term. While there is evidence that this is positive

for the average worker (for example Ottaviano and Peri) it is also clear that high-cost

substitutable labor loses.

Low-end developed market labor might not have much economic power, but it does have

equal voting power with the rich. We see plenty of examples of the outsourcing or

offshoring of labor being attacked as “unpatriotic” or plain unfair. This tends to lead to

calls for protectionism to save the low-skilled domestic jobs being lost. This is a cause

championed, generally, by left-wing politicians. At the other extreme, insourcing, or

allowing mass immigration, which might price domestic workers out of jobs, leads to

calls for anti-immigration policies, at worst championed by those on the far right. To

this end, the rise of the far right in a number of European countries, or calls (from the

right) to slow down the accession of Turkey into the EU, and calls from the left to

rebuild trade barriers and protect workers (the far left of Mr. Lafontaine, garnered 8.5%

of the vote in the German election, fighting predominantly on this issue), are concerning

signals. This is not something restricted to Europe. Sufficient numbers of politicians in

other countries have championed slowing immigration or free trade (Ross Perot, Pauline

Hanson etc.).

A second related threat, might come from productive labor no longer maintaining its

productive edge. Again, we find Kevin Phillips’s arguments in his book, Wealth and

Democracy, fascinating. Phillips highlights the problems in the late 1700s Netherlands,..."

[John Dolva]

At first readings and prob future there is much of merit there imo.

One thing I disagree about ( and it is semantic and world view centric to some extent ) is the statement about protectionism being a left cause. I think it can very well appear so. However Marx did not preface the communist manifesto with Working Men of all Countries, Unite (sorry ladies, those were the times.) His first international was disbanded, the second transformed into what became the grouping that united Labor parties in the West. This grouping downplays the role of the aspirations of the petit bourgeisie and these elements often take on a protectionist stance in preserving the working class in one country. Another matter is the Marxist analysis of Nationalism. It can be both progressive and regressive depending on in what circumstances it arises. Most I've read on this is material from the fourth international (Trotsky). (btw, is there any discussion of the fifth international in the US?)

[Terry Mauro]

lol I started an answer with ''Without having read the link. : Does it matter?''

Thought twice about posting.

However : What I was going to say was an Obama as president has important implications. He is human. ie Blacks are human. One could then even begin to consider neighbours as human.

He has brought some pretty ugly worms out of the woodwork, and while no JFK, serves to highlight contradictions. In this way his PRESIDENCY can be seen as progressive and even as a progression of Kennedy. His very existence is a testament to Kennedy and Civil Rights and its relationship with Capital.

The US is displaying more and more Imperial traits, to my mind alike the ancient formula that has kept the chinese civilisation in place for some 5000 years. One could also argue it has some roots in '' Visigoth Philosophy ''. basically summed up as ''nothing without gain''. Kennedy was striving to reflect a globally moral stance which has predictable limitations of conflict in a bourgeois dictatorship.

edit typo

edit add

John,

This video tops your Sinead Oconnor.

SNL- The Sinatra Group

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/the-sinatra-group/668225/

[Douglas Caddy]

lol I started an answer with ''Without having read the link. : Does it matter?''

Thought twice about posting.

However : What I was going to say was an Obama as president has important implications. He is human. ie Blacks are human. One could then even begin to consider neighbours as human....

John, the idea that those pulling the levers in the U.S. might someday regard their neighbours as "human" is a great

way to describe the problem; it amounts to a deficit in their own humanity.

Have you read this purported, mid '00's Citigroup "memo"? Whether it is counterfeit, or not, the employees names on the document are those of real people in the financial industry, now or formally employed at Citigroup.

Their hubris is monumental, but the comments help to explain that Obama was probably put out there to accomplisj just

what has been accomplished. His candidacy and election no matter what has happened subsequently, eased the concerns

of his sponsors about "push back" in response to the destructiveness of the Bush years.

We ad early voting in October, 2008,. in response to distrust of the voting infrastructure after what happened in Ohio in 2004 and in Florida in 2000. Although I had no expectations that Obama's candidacy was going to be any kind of a panacea, my eyes teared up when I drove past a polling place on a sunny October afternoon and I saw a line that

seemed a mile long, with cars parked everywhere. On that afternoon, and then long into 2009, people believed. Their hope was renewed.

The plutocrats do not even regard most of us in the U.S. as human, John. We are considered another resource to be mined and then discarded. We are a complication because, although we seem capable of absorbing whatever they throw

at us or take away from us with nary a whimper, the plutocrats expect that our capacity to be pushed quietly into serfdom is not infinite. Obama, or Hillary if the primary vote went her way, were intended as a chill pill. JFK probably was, also, in his era. His father being at the time, one of the top 15 wealthiest people in the country, influence me to be less certain of that than I am that this is the purpose of Obama being their front man at this time.

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0BzgUudifBc68ZGUyNzA0MzAtZDZkZC00ZmZjLTkwY2ItNzBlZWRmNjI1ZTNm&hl=en

Equity Strategy

Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances

page 2

"4) In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK

consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in

number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take.

There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for

surprisingly small bites of the national pie."

page 3

"Let’s dive into some of the details. As Figure 1 shows the top 1% of households in the

U.S., (about 1 million households) accounted for about 20% of overall U.S. income in

2000, slightly smaller than the share of income of the bottom 60% of households put

together. That’s about 1 million households compared with 60 million households, both

with similar slices of the income pie! Clearly, the analysis of the top 1% of U.S.

households is paramount. The usual analysis of the “average” U.S. consumer is flawed

from the start. To continue with the U.S., the top 1% of households also account for

33% of net worth, greater than the bottom 90% of households put together. It gets better

(or worse, depending on your political stripe) - the top 1% of households account for

40% of financial net worth, more than the bottom 95% of households put together. This

is data for 2000, from the Survey of Consumer Finances (and adjusted by academic

Edward Wolff)."

(Inequity has grown even worse..)

page 24

"IS THERE A BACKLASH BUILDING?

Plutonomy, we suspect is elastic. Concentration of wealth and spending in the hands of

a few, probably has its limits. What might cause the elastic to snap back? We can see a

number of potential challenges to plutonomy.

The first, and probably most potent, is through a labor backlash. Outsourcing,

offshoring or insourcing of cheap labor is done to undercut current labor costs. Those

being undercut are losers in the short term. While there is evidence that this is positive

for the average worker (for example Ottaviano and Peri) it is also clear that high-cost

substitutable labor loses.

Low-end developed market labor might not have much economic power, but it does have

equal voting power with the rich. We see plenty of examples of the outsourcing or

offshoring of labor being attacked as “unpatriotic” or plain unfair. This tends to lead to

calls for protectionism to save the low-skilled domestic jobs being lost. This is a cause

championed, generally, by left-wing politicians. At the other extreme, insourcing, or

allowing mass immigration, which might price domestic workers out of jobs, leads to

calls for anti-immigration policies, at worst championed by those on the far right. To

this end, the rise of the far right in a number of European countries, or calls (from the

right) to slow down the accession of Turkey into the EU, and calls from the left to

rebuild trade barriers and protect workers (the far left of Mr. Lafontaine, garnered 8.5%

of the vote in the German election, fighting predominantly on this issue), are concerning

signals. This is not something restricted to Europe. Sufficient numbers of politicians in

other countries have championed slowing immigration or free trade (Ross Perot, Pauline

Hanson etc.).

A second related threat, might come from productive labor no longer maintaining its

productive edge. Again, we find Kevin Phillips’s arguments in his book, Wealth and

Democracy, fascinating. Phillips highlights the problems in the late 1700s Netherlands,..."

The Ruling Elite have written off the United States. In fact they want the U.S. destroyed. They have plundered the nation’s wealth and in their wake have left the U.S. a bankrupted shell.

The Ruling Elite are citizens of the world. They feel equally at ease in their numerous multi-million Dollar/Euro/Pound homes located in the most desirable places around the globe.

To the Ruling Elite the average American is now as disposable as tissue paper. They have engineered the exporting of jobs from America to overseas lands so that the prospect of real employment in the U.S. is now and for the foreseeable future merely an illusion. To the Ruling Elite the unemployed and the underemployed in America, which constitute the majority of citizens of mature age, are irrelevant. For the Ruling Elite, money is to be made by paying subhuman wages to workers in foreign lands.

The average American has not wakened to this reality. He still thinks the present recession/depression will eventually go away and the old potential of prosperity will return. However, it is only a matter of short time when the average American will finally put two and two together and come to realize what the Ruling Elite have wrought.

There are millions of Americans, not members of the Ruling Elite, who are highly educated and smart. Once they are aroused, the Ruling Elite may find while they can run, they cannot hide. What American is going to watch his family slowly starve while the Ruling Elite feasts upon caviar?

[John Dolva]

Terry, for some reason I can't watch the vid link you posted (settings, plugin or something). Can you post a youtube link, or name of song or lyrics, please?

[Peter McGuire]

Until recently, I have tried to compare the "recession" of the early 80's when I just got out of college to the present situation. It is getting harder and harder to do so. There is no interest rate or inflationary comparison for one, and as you mention, so many jobs are not coming back.

The recent plan to rebuild our infrastructure although a good one, is in my opinion, but a zero sum plan.

If you take a close look at rural America, in places that were boom towns a hundred years ago, and now are sleeping farm towns, you can see 100 years of a declining United States already.

Now I see, unlike the situation 25 years ago, when I was young and dumb and full of energy, a situation that is going to be tuff to fix in my lifetime or beyond.

If the American people do not educate themselves in science and math and other subjects that will help this country move forward, there is quite possibly no hope for this country as you suggest.

It would be great if the present generation of Americans could finish High School, and get a high paying job in the factory for life. But we know that is not going to happen.

The factories of our time are Call Centers, where anyone can get in the door , but rarely last very long. The pay is low and turnover high - and any product that can be serviced will be outsourced overseas anyway. So does anyone wonder why the economy is in the shape that it is?

Yet we import IT professionals because we do not have enough - yet some complain about this.

The time is now for American students to hunker down and educate themselves.

Edited September 8, 2010 by Peter McGuire

[Douglas Caddy]

Until recently, I have tried to compare the "recession" of the early 80's when I just got out of college to the present situation. It is getting harder and harder to do so. There is no interest rate or inflationary comparison for one, and as you mention, so many jobs are not coming back.

The recent plan to rebuild our infrastructure although a good one, is in my opinion, but a zero sum plan.

If you take a close look at rural America, in places that were boom towns a hundred years ago, and now are sleeping farm towns, you can see 100 years of a declining United States already.

Now I see, unlike the situation 25 years ago, when I was young and dumb and full of energy, a situation that is going to be tuff to fix in my lifetime or beyond.

If the American people do not educate themselves in science and math and other subjects that will help this country move forward, there is quite possibly no hope for this country as you suggest.

It would be great if the present generation of Americans could finish High School, and get a high paying job in the factory for life. But we know that is not going to happen.

The factories of our time are Call Centers, where anyone can get in the door , but rarely last very long. The pay is low and turnover high - and any product that can be serviced will be outsourced overseas anyway. So does anyone wonder why the economy is in the shape that it is?

Yet we import IT professionals because we do not have enough - yet some complain about this.

The time is now for American students to hunker down and educate themselves.

The Khan Academy offers free educational videos on 1400 topics. Bill Gates has his son watching these educational aids. If American youth wants to hunker down and learn essentials, it has never been easier.

[Guest Tom Scully]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/us/09secrets.html?hp

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals voted 6 to 5 to abdicate the responsibility to uphold the law mandated to it under the U.S. Constitution. Instead it ceded to the executive branch unaccountable authority to commit crimes against humanity outlawed under international law and treaties signed and ratified by the U.S. Senate.

An excerpt from the dissenting minority of the judges of the 9th Circuit Court.:

http://bit.ly/cG4I9f

No. 08-15693

D.C. No. v. 5:07-CV-02798-JW

BINYAM MOHAMED; ABOU ELKASSIM ü

BRITEL; AHMED AGIZA; MOHAMED

FARAG AHMAD BASHMILAH; BISHER

AL-RAWI,

Plaintiffs-Appellants,

ý

JEPPESEN DATAPLAN, INC., OPINION

Defendant-Appellee,

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Intervenor-Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Northern District of California

James Ware, District Judge, Presiding

Argued and Submitted En Banc

December 15, 2009—San Francisco, California

Filed September 8, 2010

13572

MOHAMED v. JEPPESEN DATAPLAN

...Arbitrary imprisonment and torture under any circumstance is a “ ‘gross and notorious . . . act of despotism.’ ” Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507, 556 (2004) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (quoting 1 Blackstone 131-33 (1765)). But “ ‘confinement [and abuse] of the person, by secretly hurrying him to [prison], where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten; is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.’ ” Id. (Scalia, J., dissenting) (quoting 1 Blackstone 131-33 (1765)) (emphasis added).

Edited September 9, 2010 by Tom Scully

[Peter McGuire]

The Khan Academy offers free educational videos on 1400 topics. Bill Gates has his son watching these educational aids. If American youth wants to hunker down and learn essentials, it has never been easier.

What I did not like was Gates and Buffet giving away all of their money. Did the power Eastern Power Elite do that?

These people could have been a countering force to all that wealth.

Instead, they neuter themselves like some heros.

[Peter McGuire]

That combined wealth is rumored to be approaching the TRILLION mark , which would have been accumulated for nearly a millennia.

GATES and Buffass would have a ways to go , I understand, but why not consider this?

[Douglas Caddy]

The Khan Academy offers free educational videos on 1400 topics. Bill Gates has his son watching these educational aids. If American youth wants to hunker down and learn essentials, it has never been easier.

What I did not like was Gates and Buffet giving away all of their money. Did the power Eastern Power Elite do that?

These people could have been a countering force to all that wealth.

Instead, they neuter themselves like some heros.

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

Gates Foundation Acknowledges Flaws in Report .ArticleCommentsmore in US

Associated Press

SEATTLE—The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has taken another step toward increased transparency, acknowledging in its annual report that the world's largest charitable foundation is too secretive and hard to work with.

The report, posted online Tuesday, includes the usual financial information and a look at the foundation's plans. But it also offers a glimpse of the organization's attempts to be more open.

CEO Jeff Raikes draws attention in the report to a grantee survey that gave the foundation poor marks for communicating its goals and strategies, and for confusing people with its complicated grant-making process.

Mr. Raikes originally released the survey results in June—a day before Bill Gates made headlines for launching a campaign with investor Warren Buffett to get other American billionaires to give at least half their wealth to charity.

Few but charity insiders noticed the unfavorable review, and the foundation could have let it fade into obscurity.

Instead, Mr. Raikes points out the results for all to see in the annual report, right next to his letter outlining the foundation's priorities for the near future.

The editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy believes the foundation is clearly making an effort to improve its communications.

Stacy Palmer credits Raikes, with his years at Microsoft Corp., for knowing the importance of customer relations. But she thinks the foundation has a ways to go.

The Gates Foundation also has been criticized for having a small board of directors—the co-chairs and Mr. Buffett—running such a large charitable organization, Ms. Palmer said.

Pablo Eisenberg of Georgetown University's Center for Public & Nonprofit Leadership said the foundation has a moral obligation to share its decision-making process more broadly as it distributes what is partly taxpayer dollars they saved on taxes by giving the money away.

"There's no substitute for other points of view and perspectives around the table when a so-called board is about to make a decision on priorities and programs affecting $3 billion a year or more," Mr. Eisenberg said.

The foundation does have several advisory boards and other consultants, but Mr. Eisenberg considers them a poor substitute for a governing board that includes strong outside voices.

He wonders if a larger board would have chosen to spend so much money on vaccines or would have pushed the foundation to move in other directions, both globally and in the U.S.

"The question we might ask is why Gates has not put a huge amount of money into our own dysfunctional health system," Mr. Eisenberg said. "They could have led the way and led public opinion."

The foundation, which has an endowment of $33 billion, made grants totaling $3 billion in 2009. By far the biggest portion went to global health, where grants totaling more than $1.8 billion were made last year.

Global development including agriculture and financial services for the poor was the next biggest grant area, followed by U.S. education and construction of the foundation's new Seattle headquarters.

In his annual letter, Mr. Raikes says eradicating polio will be a major push next year, both in dollars granted and vocal advocacy.

Global health, particularly vaccine research and distribution, will continue to be the focus, with an eye toward meeting the United National's Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

"The next five years offer a historic opportunity to have an impact on the health and welfare of people in the developing world," Mr. Raikes wrote. "Even in the face of very tough economic times across the globe, I am optimistic when I think about all that we can accomplish together with our partners."

The public and the grantees acknowledge the Gates Foundation is making a difference around the world, but they want to know more, Ms. Palmer said.

"Who decides how much to spend? Who do they consult about the best ideas and the smartest ways to do things?" she asks. "They don't have a lot of openness about how that process works."

Foundation spokeswoman Kate James said the organization is making an effort to be more transparent, both to better its relationship with grantees and to help build understanding and awareness of its efforts.

At the same time, the foundation has been finding its voice on social media. In 2009, it established accounts on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, including Bill Gates' verified Twitter account that now has more than 1.4 million followers.

Other new elements in the report include videos of staff and workers in the field, a focus on the organization's nonprofit partners and a section on the foundation's "online communities."

[B. A. Copeland]

Very interesting topic. I was wondering when anyone would catch onto Obama's possible CIA ties. I would lean towards the view that he indeed either an asset/operative. a creation of the financial elite for the most part. It seems to me that if it is indeed true, he disgusts me, unworthy of the presidency and simply put into to place to "calm the peasants". I offer a couple of reference links in defense of such a view.

1) http://www.colony14.net/

2) http://breakfornews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5353

3) http://www.breakfornews.com/TheCIAInternetFakes.htm (more on ops of the CIA/G8/G20, etc, this is an article I think many should read and/or consider strongly in today's world)

Edited September 9, 2010 by B. A. Copeland