Russ Baker – USA

nked with Obama Should Worry About the Bush Family Tentacles Undermining His Plans.

Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter with a track record for making sense of complex and little understood matters. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. He has also served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005 Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush’s military record. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy /the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization, operating at whowhatwhy.com. (on family of secrets.com).

He says (on Bush): … « Based on early feedback, I’d say there are a number of contenders. Could be the four chapters of never-before-revealed facts surrounding the JFK assassination. Or the evidence I have uncovered suggesting a new interpretation of Watergate. Some are most intrigued by the new examples of George W. as a naughty fellow and moral hypocrite – including on the matter of abortion. And some say that my examination of W.’s military service record is especially effective in settling the dispute over whether this eager-beaver “warrior king” skipped out on his own military obligations. Finally, some are most struck by the new evidence of a cynical calculation behind George W’s so-called religious rebirth. For me, the big story is simply the cumulative sense, based on hundreds and hundreds of fresh facts, of the extent to which elites write our history. And the realization that, as we flee the Bush years, we remain utterly in the dark about so much … (on russbakeer.com, December 30, 2008).

Russ Baker is the founder of the Real News Project (seems still under construction today). He may be reached by e-mail. (on The Nation, 2008).

His website.

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Russ Baker – USA

Watch these videos:

… According to his own website: « Russ Baker is an old-fashioned muckraking journalist and pamphleteer using the newest technologies. In his reporting and writing he brings the best of mainstream methods (balance and rigor) to the alternative media, and the best of the alternative media (passion for the truth and the larger story) to the mainstream. He focuses on getting past the rhetoric to expose the hidden levers and machinations that shape our world. Baker’s investigative reporting, analysis pieces, features, and essays on politics, power, and perceptions have appeared in many of the world’s finest publications » … (full text).

Reviews of the book: Family of Secrets, The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America, by Russ Baker, (Bloomsbury. 577 pp.):

  • He (Gore Vidal) has some kind things to say about Family of Secrets, beginning at about the four-minute mark: There’s a wonderful book, by the way, I’m reading called Family of Secrets by…Russ Baker. He spent many years on it. And it’s a family — forgive me, Bushes and Bushettes — a family of criminals. Why they’re not all in jail I don’t know. If I seem a little dazed, I’ve been reading about their crimes, and proposed crimes, and how they got away with it. (on familyofsecrets.com, February 25, 2009);
  • … Baker begins this dispiriting tome with a couple of reasonable questions that probably are on a great many minds as George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency sputters to a close: « What did the ascendancy of this frighteningly inadequate man signify? Could anything be learned from the George W. Bush phenomenon that would help us understand how we Americans choose our leaders and chart our collective course? » … (full text, January 7, 2009);
  • Halfway through the concluding chapter of Family of Secrets, Russ Baker mentions, not entirely modestly, that when a colleague heard some of the things he would be disclosing in his almost 600-page book about the Bush family and its connections to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Watergate and many other pivotal events, the colleague suggested, only half in jest, that the book be called Everything You Thought You Knew Is Wrong … (full text);
  • family of secrets – flowing data, added by visual think map on 15 February 2009;
  • as long as Bush is trying to shape his legacy on his way out the door … Russ Baker examines the history of the Bush family … interviewed hundreds of people … tons of footnotes … 577pp. Baker explains the 4 generations of the Bush family and the tentacles of their power and influence … (full text);
  • Linda Eckstein sent this graphic along to show the main ideas of Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets. In Linda’s words, « [T]he idea was for me to come up with a visual representation of the scope and complexity of Baker’s book. In a way, it’s the unWordle. Wordle only analyzes what is said, sometimes it’s necessary to remind the public of what is NOT said » … (full text).

… BuzzFlash has often said that « conspiracy theories » exist because a threshold of people believe that the official version of an event or personal history does not pass the believability test.  But then the fun begins, because theories are just that, so you become an advocate of one perspective or the other, hopefully based on the strength of the argument and the backing of documentation.  But that becomes more difficult as time passes and access to the unofficial version of events becomes more difficult … (full text, 12/30/2008);

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Russ Baker: “on assignment… but not ours”, 36.16 min, January 14th, 2009.

The Top 10 Corporate Democrats-For-Hire, By Russ Baker, AlterNet. August 24, 2006: They claim to be ‘centrists,’ but these D.C. Dems – whose corporate agendas aren’t too different from Bush administration policies – are living proof that the system needs fixing … (fullt text, August 24, 2006).

  • .. In 2004, Baker devoted himself largely to researching stories that provided disturbing insights into the pre-presidential behavior of George W. Bush. He also explored the integrity of the voting system and examined instances of alleged election fraud.
  • In 2005, Baker founded Who What Why/The Real News Project, a news organization dedicated to producing ground-breaking, transformative, independent investigative journalism.
  • In 2009, Baker’s book, FAMILY OF SECRETS: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America is being published by Bloomsbury Press.
  • … (full text, 2008).

Find him and his publications on AlterNet; on amazon; on alibri; at Katra on March 8, 2007; on ZoomInfo; on freelibrary; on Google Video-search; on Google Group-search; on Google Images-search; on Google Book-search; on Google Scholar-search; on Google Blog-search.

… Baker has received Society of Professional Journalists, Mencken and Common Cause awards, served as a panelist for the national conference of Investigative Reporters & Editors, and been a member of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He appears frequently in the electronic media to discuss current events. (on MaximsNews).

He writes:

  • – IN THE CLINTONS’ PURSUIT OF POWER, there is no such thing as a strange bedfellow. One recently exposed inamorata was Norman Hsu, the mysterious businessman from Hong Kong who brought in $850,000 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign before being unmasked as a fugitive. Her campaign dismissed Hsu as someone who’d slipped through the cracks of an otherwise unimpeachable system for vetting donors, and perhaps he was. The same cannot be said for the notorious financier Alan Quasha, whose involvement with Clinton is at least as substantial – and still under wraps. Political junkies will recall Quasha as the controversial figure who bailed out George W. Bush’s failing oil company in 1986, folding Bush into his company, Harken Energy, thus setting him on the path to a lucrative and high-profile position as an owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, and the presidency … (full long 5 pages, October 18, 2007);
  • – … With the growing evidence of the Bush Administration’s effort to control and spin the news, put out false stories and anoint fake reporters, it’s apparent that few insider “revelations” or leaks of any kind should be taken at face value. Put bluntly, we are being naïve if we do not at least scrutinize each new development for signs of chicanery from right-wing allies of the president, or even from the White House itself. According to the Times, Bush’s “old friend” Doug Wead secretly taped more than a dozen conversations with the then-Texas Governor between 1998 and 2000. Summarizing the most eye-opening material, the article notes that on the tapes Bush “weighs the political risks and benefits of his religious faith, discusses campaign strategy – and appears to have acknowledged trying marijuana” … (full interview text, 07 Mar 2005);
  • – … To skeptical observers, the strategy of Karadzic and his supporters is to outwait the international community, and then, when the foreigners leave, to annex the Serbian enclave of Bosnia to Serbia proper, despite the fact that it once housed huge numbers of ethnic Muslims and Croats, who have been slowly returning to their prewar homes. Karadzic’s continued freedom gives those returnees a sense that all has not yet been put right, while his aura of invincibility has grown among Serbia’s Serbs and the 700,000 Bosnian Serbs. Among Bosnian Muslims, constant speculation and conspiracy theories abound–especially the belief that the international community leadership does not want Karadzic caught … (full long text, January/February 2004).

Two Years Before 9/11, Candidate Bush was Already Talking Privately About Attacking Iraq, According to His Former Ghost Writer, by Russ Baker, October 28, 2004.

links:

The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills;

Bush’s mess left to others to clean up, Dec 2, 2008;

Bush Secrecy.org;

Obama is cleaning up George Bush’s mess, 02/21/2009;

Power Elite on wikipedia;

The rise of the superclass;

Reuters says cleaning up Bush’s mess could cost a trillion, March 5, 2009;

Poem: Bush’s Mess, May 29, 2007.