Official: Deborah Jeane Palfrey committed suicide

Tarpon Springs, Florida--I haven't been reading my email for several days, but this was no surprise and nothing missed. Jeane Palfrey killed herself by her own hand. Not to be outdone by reality, entrepreneurial demagogues like Alex Jones are going to keep digging deeper holes insisting that there's a cover-up. Keep digging, Alex, everyone cranes their necks at a car wreck. At least ethically-impaired author Bill Keisling understood what we were looking at on May 1st of this year--suicide. I'm not so sure in the case of Palfrey's erstwhile civil attorney Montgomery Blair Sibley. Recently, he seemed to be leaning towards a strong possibility that Palfrey was the victim of foul play. Why exactly that would be necessary for his version of the narrative escapes me. Doesn't it seem obvious that the woman was unwell?

The unasked question remains: why was there no competency hearing during the legal proceedings of Deborah Jeane Palfrey? Are the answers in sealed court documents? I'm saying yes. How sick and depraved is it to use the legal system to run a mentally-unbalanced woman to her death? What kind of message does that send? At best, a pretty weird one. This was a witch trial-of-sorts, make no mistake of it. But it wasn't the kind that Ms. Magazine and other outlets are saying it was. Palfrey was a businesswoman, a capitalist, an employer, but most of all, she was a pimp. She wasn't an ordinary one, however, and there's no indication that she was any more abusive and exploitative than any other American employer. She was not.

But her clients were extremely well-heeled, even incredibly powerful. Does that mean they "murdered" her? No. There was no reason to after her conviction, and she was holding a bad hand--there were no more "big" names that Palfrey was aware of. By the end, it was a bluff on her part, though it's possible there are other names yet to be revealed in her remaining phone records. She was playing a very dangerous game considering her clientele. Her crime was telling us some their names, their identities. The common mistake of the press--namely the mainstream media--was that this was all about "big names," a trap that Palfrey fell into herself. The reasons for this error on their part is complicated, and this new report isn't going to fuel anything but the most base and paranoid of imaginations. Proof: you have none. She killed herself because she was disturbed. Get over it, and yourself.

Along with the Jack Abramoff and Randy Cunningham scandals, Palfrey proved that there's an institutionalized culture of bribes that include sex in Washington D.C., and that blackmail is likely a part of a very noxious-mix. In a surveillance culture like our own, someone is always watching, taking notes, and that the implications for frail politicians (and the rest of us) are grim. The government and the mainstream press did their best to keep the rest of us from knowing that what she did was commonplace in the nation's Capital.

The downing of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer during her legal proceedings only underscored the fact that the government is constantly watching and cherry-picking who gets "outed" based on who's running the executive branch at the time. The case of Republican Senator David Vitter's treatment after his own indiscretions were made public just makes the hypocrisy all-the-more obvious. Justice? Good luck finding much in America these days, guilty-or-not. My former co-researcher Monique Rawlings (aka "SP Biloxi,") is likely to contend that Jeane was "innocent," another assertion that I find not only intellectually dishonest, but utterly bizarre.

That's not important now, the truth is. I told you so.

The bailout negotiations, sex-for-contracts, and getting laid in D.C.

Washington D.C.--Why would anyone expect the people who created this mess in the first place to act otherwise? One of the things to appreciate in all of this is that apathetic Americans are finally all affected by the corruption in Congress, the White House, and in the judiciary. There's nowhere left to run and hide, responsibility is coming. Lies won't do it. Threats won't work. Everyone sees-through the manipulations now. For all these reasons, the Spitzer scandal deserves a radical reappraisal in the context of our current economic crisis.

As New York's state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer went a very long way indeed in apprehending white collar criminals on Wall Street. In fact, he was so good that these same individuals and institutions pulled-strings in Washington D.C. to see if someone was already surveilling the attorney general, then known as "the Sheriff of Wall Street." Ah, but they almost always are, as Senator David Vitter discovered in the summer of 2007. Yet, Vitter escaped Spitzer's fate. Why is that? Besides the fact that he's an obvious egomaniac with delusions of adequacy, someone had his back. That doesn't speak well of New York Democratic Party leadership and their own relationship with Wall Street, not at all. What you have here is a bipartisan form of political corruption with numerous compromised players, just everywhere.

Yet it's worse than that for those hoping for some real solution to the problem of corruption on Wall Street. The perpetrators want to blame those who discovered the bad investments in the first place:

"It's easy to blame accounting because it doesn't fight back," said Jack Ciesielski, author of the Analyst's Accounting Observer, a financial newsletter. "Now that there's somebody out there putting some light on the financials, it's shoot the messenger."

Lynn E. Turner, a former SEC chief accountant, said he remembered fielding questions about the accounting provision six months ago from lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

"What the banks are telling everyone is that the accounting has caused the problem," Turner said. "The only thing fair-value accounting did is force you to tell investors you made a bunch of very bad loans."("Wall St. Points to Disclosure As Issue," The Wall Street Journal, 09.23.2008)

But these same elements--again, we'll say that they're "bipartisan" in their corruption--couldn't get Spitzer on anything until his own sexual indiscretions got caught on the FBI's radar. One could even imagine the taps were done as part of the war on terror, a catch-all excuse to spy on one's political enemies, and practiced by both major political parties. When you're doing these things when you're in power, oversight is not desirable, hence we get none with the FBI and other police agencies.

And so finally, someone did answer-back to these unknown business and finance criminals from their field outpost that they had Spitzer on some surveillance logs, cherry-picked with tenderness and care so that the GOP's own wouldn't be caught-up in the net and the inevitable press coverage. Hey, wouldn't you? Why sure you would, quit shitting yourself. So, they--some of whom must surely populate the ranks of the now-dead financial institutions these days, some still standing--got their man, namely Eliot Spitzer. Why? Spitzer wasn't going to stop the investigations into Wall Street, naturally, and he was now governor. Who needs rules? That's for the public. As we know, former Governor Spitzer had a problem over "getcha little somethin' that you can't get at home," like the aforementioned Sen. David Vitter, a Republican. We've had a lot of selective investigation and prosecution under the Bush II administration, but knowing this takes some deduction and investigation on-the-part of the public, never mind the press's coverage and their take on these stories, which was absurdly narrow. None of this is news to this writer.

My own experience with the Palfrey scandal has taught me the hard lesson that the press often don't want to know the details about corruption and that they're being leaned-on heavily not to look too closely into such stories by editors and ownership. In the context of all of this, it should be crystal-clear these days that the prosecution of Deborah Jeane Palfrey was damage control by an already embattled political and economic establishment. The Bush administration were merely the expediters for someone else, and it all could have happened under a Democratic presidential administration that controlled the Justice Department. That's how entrenched the corruption is, and has been for some time.

With the recent revelations of sex-for-contracts at offices of the Interior Department in Colorado and in Washington D.C., Palfrey's stories about Brent Wilkes, Randy Cunningham, and even Shirlington Limo don't seem so wild any more. While it's true that she didn't know exactly what was in her phone records, she did make what I believe was a valid claim to have spoken with Brent Wilkes on a few occasions over the telephone. He's hardly the only shady government contractor in her phone records, however, and there are many others waiting to be discovered.

Some researchers have probably already found all of the realtors that pepper the phone records of Pamela Martin & Associates, making for a charming snapshot of a totally corrupt boom period. The bailout, the bailout, I know. It's the coda to all of this. Had Palfrey waited long enough, she might have lived to see the system that had judged her collapse. What I find surprising is that some of the other members of the Palfrey defense team from the Sibley period are so silent about these possible connections to the financial scandal, and others. I question their sincerity in these areas. Perhaps they're biding-their-time for that big book with HarperCollins, Knopf, Time-Warner (TV rights! coffee table books, Amway product tie-ins!), or some other gargantuan conglomerate that threatens to topple in the current economic climate anyway. Who knows? Better spend that money while it's worth something, a certainty.

The need for a bailout came from this whole mess of corruption surrounding the political process and its intersections with the business and financial world.That's right, the world of lobbying.

Some Democrats still want a provision allowing bankruptcy judges to rewrite mortgages to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. Thune said that would be "a deal-breaker" for Republicans.

The compromise legislation that seemed to be emerging Saturday "is not the proposal that we got from Secretary Paulson," Reid said. But lawmakers said it would be much closer to Paulson's original plan than to the alternative offered by House Republicans several days ago. ("Senate leader: Significant progress on bailout," AP, 09.27.2008)

Why should the public get something for nothing when that's the traditional role of corrupt American business? It's all about the lobbying, and as Brent Wilkes showed, many of these government contractors do their own lobbying which often includes getting people laid.

We need to start asking the question: How widespread are these corrupt practices in the halls of Congress, in the bureaucracy itself in the form of crony appointees, and the White House? The intersections are everywhere in this, and yes, even in the sexual ones. A bailout isn't going to fix entrenched-corruption or a political culture rife with it. This opens-up terrifying implications that most of us suspected all-along about American civilization.

If the system isn't run on merit--something most of us likely knew a long time ago--what holds it all together? It doesn't appear to be business acumen, so what is it? These are the same kinds of issues that appeared in the collapse of the Soviet system. After this kind of connections-based crony-capitalism proliferates to a point, does it implode? How do you "fix" such a system if it's just going to keep perpetuating the same old mistakes over-and-over as part of how it's able to exist at all? At the end, then, it's all based on the belief of the public in that order, and that belief is eroding rapidly. There's every good reason for it to do this, namely from a lack-of-accountability in the halls of business and government. All they're trying to do in Washington is to bail themselves out, ultimately. Being mostly criminals, they will fail in this endeavor, the crisis will deepen, and objective-reality will correct things. The public is part of that reality.

Eventually, certain mechanisms of law and order are likely to kick-in. If this doesn't occur, then the chances of insurrection are substantial, and there is no military force on this earth that's capable of pacifying even half of the American public if they are up-in-arms over the way things are bound to be headed. The examples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and just about every popular uprising prove that it's an unwinnable situation. Welcome back history, we missed you.

"Wall St. Points to Disclosure As Issue," The Wall Street Journal, 09.23.2008: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/22/AR2008092202688.html

"Senate leader: Significant progress on bailout," AP, 09.27.2008:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080927/ap_on_bi_ge/financial_meltdown

The Missing-Thread in Coverage of the Spitzer Scandal

New York City--Soon-to-be former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, has a lot to be proud of and ashamed of. When he was New York State's Attorney General, he was busting many of the same shady lending and mortgage firms who were bailed-out by the fed and J.P. Morgan today. $200 billion was given in-loans to Bank of America (current owner of Countrywide, now under investigation), Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and all the other sub-prime lenders--namely Bear-Stearns--who have run amok in a regulation-free environment thanks to the Bush administration looking the other way. But then along came state Attorney Generals like Spitzer.

Was the federal bust of Spitzer selective--was it payback for all the busts the former "Sheriff of Wall Street" made? We don't know this yet, but it's a possibility. The timing is very curious: just a few days before the bailout, we get the break in the Spitzer story and his name is thrust into-the-foreground.

What about the other clients identified in the investigation? If they're Republicans, we're not going to find-out anytime soon. Recall that Senator Vitter's presence on wiretaps of a 2001 investigation in New Orleans were suppressed for years by the Bush Justice Department. Then there were all the "mysterious" break-ins during 2007 at the campaign headquarters of Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and the offices of Senator Christopher Dodd.

It's a real twilight time. But all that aside, one has to wonder if the newly-appointed Governor Paterson will be initiating any new investigations on Wall Street. Taking-down Spitzer surely had the aim of limiting them, underscoring the stupidity of his actions.

Historians are likely to be stunned at how selective most of the Justice Department investigations were under the Bush administration, and how Congress looked-aside when it was obvious for all to see. Funny how Americans are the last to know their own history. This aspect of the whole story is likely to be neglected into oblivion, down the memory hole, but the questions and suspicions are going to be there, forever. They'll just be classified until all the primary players are dead.

"National Security" will be the tired refrain, which in some respects is accurate: if Americans knew half of what's going-on under the color of authority, they might revolt. With all of the economic-woes created by this unprecedented era of corruption, it's unsurprising that both parties are alright about domestic surveillance--they might need it to survive our wrath when things have gotten so bad from their actions.

But if you look at how the exposure of Republican Senator David Vitter was handled and look at Spitzer's case, the Democratic governor's treatment certainly appears to be selective and blatantly partisan. This is not coming from a fan of the Democratic Party. Not only that, but it should be noted that the Spitzer case has a strange parallel with the blank inaction to impeach the vice president and president for far more heinous crimes. Calls for impeachment from the Republicans was resounding, while we can readily recall the sound of crickets on-their-part when it comes to their own.

Centrally, these would be war crimes, but the scope and depth of the Bush administration's overarching crimes are going to be marveled at for generations. Remember reading about slavery, or the Holocaust? Remember saying to yourself, "Were they stupid? Why did they put-up with that?!" Welcome to why not, your wondering is over. Have fun looking in the mirror tomorrow morning, then write, call, e-mail, and contact your representative and ask them what the hell they actually do there in Washington D.C. Better yet, if you have no ties to the establishment, why not run for office? Do what you do best.

The Return of the Return of the Return to Sender of Sam Eardth

Sammichland--Sam's writing again folks--well, attempting to. For those who don't know, once I began writing about Ronald Roughead and Mark Capansky (two names found in the phone records of the "DC Madam"), I got a series of phony "cease and desist" e-mails from "Sam," therefore making it likely that it's Capansky or a parent of his. He's written me two more missives, here are the titles: "No reply huh?" [Ed.--Nope. Your title needs a comma.], and "Elliot Spitzer" [Ed.-Spitzer's first name only needs one "L."].

Thanks Sam--you little faggot--I needed one more thing to write about today. I guess he never heard of the ability to block e-mail. Come visit me sometime, we have deadly-force laws here in Indiana. No one gives-a-shit what you think, asshole, but you are entertaining. The posts and information on Roughead and Capansky are never going away, and you can rest assured that they've been copied ad-infinitum by hackers in Holland and elsewhere--and by every intelligence agency in the world.

You're exposed, "Sam," and there's nothing you can do about it. It's there forever, a part of posterity, little man. Do a site search of the two names, folks. Enjoy, you'll have several laughs at their expense as I have (still laughing). If there are future generations (no thanks to people like Sam), they'll laugh too. That's good, because they're probably going to need a good one while they search for food in the ruins of human civilization.