Jo Becker, David Gellman, Jerry Sandusky and the Degeneracy of Robust Survival

Award winning Washington Post and NY Times insider-reporter, Jo Becker, has interviewed Jerry Sandusky for his view of the charges against him. 
 

 By Winsip Custer CPW News Service

     Jerry Sandusky tells his highly redacted story to Jo Becker who admits at the outset that Sandusky's facial expressions are not always included in the interview.  A 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner for The Reckoning: Behind Biggest Insurer’s Crisis, A Blind Eye to a Web of Risk: How a Small Freewheeling Unit Brought A.I.G to Its Knees,  Jo Becker co-authored the piece with Grechen Morgenson,Peter S. Goodman, Charles Duhigg, Carter Dougherty, Eric Dash, Julie Creswell, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton.  As the title suggests, the Wall Street financial crisis was not the result of a systemic culture of runaway greed and corruption, but of a small, well-defined worm-eaten bad apple in a barrel of delicious healthy red fruit.  While Gretchen Morgenson's book Reckless Endangerment pummels the system as well as key individuals within it her glove never really touches the conservative Republicans whose leadership is historically tied to the Franklin Cover-Up in Omaha, Nebraska.  If you read the Prologue to Reckless Endangerment she argues that Barney Frank, James Johnson and Bill Clinton caused the 2008 economic melt-down.  Steve Labaton has left The Times and is now a full-time consultant for Goldman Sachs in Washington.  Gretchen, not only worked for Malcolm Forbe's magazine, the employer of convicted Iran-Contra conspirator, Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, but also for Malcolm's son, Steve Forbes, in his presidential bid.

     “Basically, whoever wrote that apple sauce in Reckoning was an apologist for the big boys,” said Herman K. Winklemintz of the Society for Truth in Investigative Journalism of Vancouver, British Columbia.  Winklemintz has spent much of his career researching pedophilia in Vancouver and its relationship to the children and power elites of that region with roots in Omaha, Nebraska and Washington, D.C..  Winklemintz is working on a twelve year study of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with the Lindberg child kidnapping case and he notes that "the timing of the release of the film on J. Edgar's life, written by the author of Milk, during the week of the Nebraska and Penn State game is highly suspicious....especially given the film's total disregard for the most chilling chapter in U.S. history, the near Nazi coup de'tat by Lindberg and his friends, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone and Philidelphian industrialist, Joseph Early Widener," said Winklemintz who admitted his anger that this was never taught to him in his formal education in the United States.  "The FBI's dealings with this case is totally hidden like it never happened and disappeared with J. Edgar's secret file," said Winklemintz who cited the firing of O. John Rogge, the U.S. government's chief investigator of the Lindberg, Ford and Firestone plot.   Winklemintz noted that a hand delivered letter from U.S. Attorney General, Thomas C. Clark in 1946 was delivered to Rogge by  an FBI agent named 'Mr. Savage'.  Savage had intercepted Rogge in Spokane, Washington.  "The incident is in both Rogge's book, The Official German Report and Dale Harrington's book Mystery Man," said Winklemintz indicating that America's far right and the Mafia which for forty years was given a pass by J. Edgar Hoover showed their mutual distrust of moderation which might lead toward Joseph McCarthy's feared Communist subversion.   This concordat between the FBI and organized crime provided a  "petrie dish for the kind of crap and corruption we see on Wall Street today," said Winklemintz noting that former FBI Director, Louis Freeh has been brought into the fray as Penn State's damage controller.  "Whatever rises must converge," said Winklemintz, "and I suspect that coach Sandusky's operation leaned against some very high and well established walls in Pennsylvania that link to places like Vancouver, Omaha and Washington."

     Winklemintz noted that Sandusky's interviewer, Jo Becker, also won a UCLA Anderson School of Management Award with Barton David Gellman whose book Angler:  The Vice Presidency of Dick Cheney was summarized in Harper’s magazine by Gellman as…"There's no venality here. Cheney was not trying to aggrandize himself, to steer money to friends, or to set himself up for higher office. He simply believed that the stakes were high and he was more capable than others. He saw the world, he believed, as it truly is and was prepared to do the "unpleasant" things that had to be done to safeguard us. Cheney is a rare combination: a zealot in principle and a subtle, skillful tactician in practice.”

     “For any journalist to have written that in 2008, two years after Dick Cheney unloaded birdshot into his close friend’s face….’a skillful tactician in practice’….and even after everything else we know about Cheney, he would have to be a loose wing nut or another apologist for the big boys,” said Winklemintz. In fact, that is what Winklemintz believes both Jo Becker and Barton David Gellman are…apologists.
     I challenged Winkelmintz's assessment. "But Becker and Gellman won a 2009 Gerald Loeb Award in journalism," I recommended.  "So did Michael Lewis in 2011 for The Big Short which is pure propaganda for Kyle Bass and the gold and gun merchants," said Winklemintz citing my own work on the subject in Boomerang: The Big Short Is Big Bull.
     “You have to consider the entire field of business and financial reporting provides the proper context for the whole Sandusky and Penn-State scandal.  Why would an up and coming business affairs writer take on a coaching scandal in an Ivy League school?  This is not Jo Becker of Human Rights Watch's (HRW) children's unit who works with David Gellman's friend Kenneth Roth, HRW's president and a former U.S. government Iran-Contra investigator....and remember the snow job that the whole Iran-Contra fiasco proved to be as it ultimately protected Reagan who admitted that he had a lapse in memory.  This Jo Becker's interview is not exactly in the mainstream. Why not a NY Times leading sports writer? An expert in adult and child psychology or pedophilia? Why business?” asks Winklemintz, "or Jo Becker of Human Right's Watch?  As Edward R. Murrow said...'if all of this doesn't confuse you, you don't understand.'  I believe it is because Sandusky’s legal team is calling the shots for him and knows that what he knows is his salvation, not his innocense.   They know that the stakes in this long-lingering series of incidents, as evidenced by the disappearance of a District Attorney, is far broader and wider and damning than the public yet realizes,” said Winklemintz.

Jo Becker, Sandusky interviewer (l) and Jo Becker
Human Rights Watch child advocate (r).

     Winklemintz noted that Becker’s writing partner, David Barton Gellman, does not swim in any mainstream either and is a highly decorated investigative journalist anyway.  “The mainstream is all over the place,” said Winklemintz.  Consider that Al Gore’s mentor was Roger Revelle who is known for his arguments about global warming and his work at San Diego’s Scripps Oceanographic Institute, but that Gellman delivered a talk on his book Angler about Dick Cheney at the Revelle Forum.

     It was learned that in 1991 Roger Revelle made a speech at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California, where he apologized to some of the world’s most powerful industrialists for his research that sent so many people in the wrong direction on global warming.

     "Revelle worried about the political fallout from the United Nations' IPCC and Al Gore. A man named Don Michael Schmidtman who lives in the San Francisco area was there that day. Reportedly Schmidtman remembers the Revelle speech very well and told about it in some detail.  That was in 1991.  Revelle died of a heart attack shortly after that presentation in the same year forever solidifying his recantation in the public forum," said Winklemintz.

     Attempts to confirm Winklemintz's assertion containing the Revelle 1991 speech at Bohemian Grove only provided a report on the internet appearing to begin with a site titled Uncensored with the posting on March 30, 2009 by Clare Swinney, an author tied by other stories to the 9/11 Truth movement, but nothing more.  If there had been an attempt to discredit Revelle with claims that he had jettisoned his belief in the dangers of global warming, this was set to rest by a September 13, 1992 Washington Post article by Revelle's daughter, Carolyn Revelle Hufbauer titled "Global Warming: What My Father Really Said".  Still, why the high profile interest in the sad situation in State College, Pennsylvania by writers of the larger U.S. business  and government reporting community?

     Winklemintz noted that the Revelle Forum was domiciled in the University of California’s Neurosciences Institute headed by renowned brain scientist from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and Nobel prize winner, Dr. Gerald M. Edleman .  “Edeleman’s unique contribution to mind science is, I believe, found in his argument that degeneracy contributes to robustness of biological traits.  In other words, the reason that the strong survive is because they are less averse to whatever it takes to survive than those little weaklings that cannot ‘take one for the team’,” said Winklemintz as he reflected on how  and why Sandusky would tell young boys “it’s not what happens to you, but how you handle what happens to you.”

     If this is a recurring theme in the Sandusky story as more and more witnesses who were "worked out" by the coach come forward, it may "indicate a form of radical Darwinism of the type applied by Nazi mind scientists during World War II and incorporated in the Cold War's CIA mind control programs," said Winklemintz.  When asked if he believed that this was somehow related to the wounded Texas attorney Harry M. Whittington thanking Dick Cheney for his friendship after receiving a near-deadly load of bird pellets in the face and torso, Winklemintz, said “Yes, I can imagine Mr. Cheney saying,’hey, Whittington, it’s not the fact that you were shot, but what you do with it’ and then Whittington saying ‘thank you Dick’”, said Winklemintz noting the collectivism inherent in both communist/socialist and fascist thinking and its destruction of the individual.  "Western civilization was built on the value of the individual and we are at war over its proper place within a spectrum of lesser, but highly motivated and devious, philosophies," Winklemintz concluded citing America's fight against British monarchical imperialism, World War II's battle against Fascist tyrrany, the Cold War's fight against the collective oppression of Communism and this spring's revolutions across longstanding monarchical models of world government which found us often backing the wrong philosophies for narrower nationalistic interests....mostly oil," said Winklemintz.
     "The Jewish community didn't learn this lesson in Germany?" I asked Winklemintz citing the possibility that Gellman, Edleman and even Winklemintz, himself, were of Jewish heritage.  "They have always held it. Rule of law that is.  The value of the individual.  King David, the leader of Israel's Golden Age did not inherit his role like a son of a first-born king as did Mr. Widener or Bush or Cheney.  Sadly, people forget," said Winklemintz, "from every corner of life they forget with great fan fare....and usually for a price."