The World Economy, The IRS And Bill O’Reilly

 

By Mark Howell

 

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who has visited and spoken in Key West in the past, was this year’s Coast Guard Foundation Hedrick Fellow and recently gave a speech at the Coast Guard Academy in Groton, Connecticut, last month that presented some alarming predictions.

 

 

Thanks to today’s computers, Friedman told the cadets at the academy, “in the next decade I think you’re going to hear about the last human truck driver and the last human airline pilot.”

 

 

He explained that when he began as the foreign affairs columnist for the Times in 1995, taking over from James Reston, he only had seven competitors. But now, he said, he has 70 million competitors who blog and tweet.

 

 

He said that because of computers, “your friends kill you faster than your enemies. Due to today’s computerized interlock between global financial communities, if China goes from eight percent growth to one percent growth tomorrow, the U.S. Coast Guard will have to cut its budget. I guarantee it.”

 

 

 

One of the dire effects of today’s microchips and computers is fraud. It has now affected literally millions of Americans and continues to cost the Internal Revenue System tens of millions of dollars.

 

 

We cannot say in the Keys that former Monroe County sheriff Rick Roth did not warn us. In fact he made himself hoarse calling the alarm to our prison bureaucracy, to local government and ultimately to the IRS itself many times, that all jails in the nation are now hosting among their occupants so many fraudsters filing false claims that by now it has become the norm for inmates to support their wives and families by filing fraudulent rebate claims from stolen IDs.

 

 

This season the fraud has grown to such an extent that every county in the country is affected.

 

 

Last year the IRS, the U.S., our government’s primary and only debt collector, admitted to losing multi-billions of dollars to fraudulent claims.

 

 

Because hackers this year have broken into the database of insurer Anthem Inc. which held information on about $80 million people, and of TurboTax, the country’s most popular do-it-yourself tax preparation software, the processing of state tax rebates has been temporarily suspended in most states.

 

 

In addition to this unbridled criminal enterprise, which our own sheriff loudly warned us about several years ago among America’s prison population (today the most numerous in the world), federal and state officials also blaming the most recent rash of information breaches and identity theft on “phishing” plus other sophisticated forms of cybercrime.

 

 

Meanwhile the IRS daily receives endless e-mails from people who say they did not file a 2014 income tax return but have received a check nevertheless.

 

 

Readers will remember that Maria Fonzi, widow of JFK assassination researcher Gaeton Fonzi, recently made an appearance in this column with her claim that the CIA consistently opposed her late husband’s efforts to uncover the truth about the assassination not only during the Warren Commission’s investigation but also that of the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

 

 

Now Maria is back in the news with a claim, picked up by CNN, that Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly told a lie in his book “Killing Kennedy,” as well as on the air at Fox, about

George de Mohrenschildt, who’d become friends with Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife, Marina, in Dallas, after they returned from a stay in Russia. 

 

 

Most Kennedy assassination researchers believe de Mohrenschildt to be a CIA asset and he is implicated in a number of theories about the true motive for Kennedy’s murder. In his Kennedy biography, O’Reilly tells a dramatic tale of his search for the Oswald associate. He wrote that as he knocked on the door of de Mohrenschildt’s daughter’s home, he heard the shotgun blast that marked his suicide, “ assuring that his relationship with Oswald would never be fully understood.

 

 

As Maria Fonzi points out, however, there is no evidence that O’Reilly was anywhere near the shooting. In fact, two years ago Jefferson Morley obtained a tape of a conversation between O’Reilly and Gaeton Fonzi that proves he wasn’t there. Morley, a former Washington editor, has posted the tape on JFKFacts.org, a clearinghouse for assassination news.

 

 

CNN obtained a copy of this tape from Maria Fonzi that proves O’Reilly wasn’t on the scene when de Mohrenschildt died. Gaeton Fonzi can be heard informing O’Reilly of the suicide. “They say he shot himself.”

 

 

Then O’Reilly can be heard saying, ‘I’m comin’ down there tomorrow, I’m comin’ down to Florida,” and since he discusses getting a flight, it is clear he cannot have been anywhere close to the suicide. “Bill O’Reilly did not hear a gunshot from 1,200 miles away,” confirm Morley and Maria.

 

 

Quote for the Week:

“A wolf howl is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow and contempt for all the adversities of the world.

 

 

— Aldo Leopold

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