(Excerpted from Chapter 5: The Great Escape: The Grateful Unrich…)

Exiles traveling to true home – Father John Eagan

Downtown Minneapolis

6-25-88

Tonight in my Nicollet Avenue cubicle it all comes clear. Maybe it is the bus ticket that I will be buying tomorrow. Maybe it’s the timely sale on backpacks at Herman’s recently posted in the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune. Possibly it’s the slightly altered state I am in, compliments of a gracious peddler at yesterday’s Grateful Dead concert at the Metrodome. Tonight for the first time, in this hollow concrete giant known as Minneapolis, I feel the content that comes when one knows that one’s spirit is about to launch yet another assault on society’s gatekeepers.

This urban beast has held me for two months in a state of frantic survival mode. If I wasn’t returning weakened from the plasma center with a 44 oz. Big Gulp in hand, I was riding my $10 bike across the mighty Mississippi to get behind the wheel of an ice cream truck owned by mujahadeen Iranians. The Hassidic Jews of St. Louis Park found my ice cream none too kosher. The rich housewives of Edina – intensely fearful of that ringing bell approaching – could muster up only the occasional quarter for a Popsicle. Sometimes I’d invade a rival’s turf in South Minneapolis, where the projects could always be counted on for a $75 day peddling choco-tacos, Neapolitan ice cream sandwiches and other high-dollar specialties. Most days a $50 bill was good, though the 4th of July park scene was worth over $250. Still, it was all cash. And I liked my Iranian bosses. No whitey power trip attitudes. No one looking over my shoulder.

Down at the Plasma Center

Black Virgil’s either trippin’ or just another Hollywood star today

At the lab rat festival

Sponsored by Cutter’s finest minds

Leroy liked those Euro-ladies with nothin’ on when his father was in the

Army, being all he could be

Richard’s pants are too short like all the old white folks here with

Nicotine-stained eyeballs and bloodshot brains, Shaking uncontrollably in the corner of their lives

The res. warriors all wear bandanas these days around their

Floating lost heads spinning

Hobos rolling through need less bodily fluids and more fire water to forget

And a 400 pound red skin hides his shame behind

Cheap sunglasses

Two months of ice cream sales and plasma loss was quite enough. I found myself lurking at The Travel Store, checking out their wide selection of world maps, though I knew exactly where I was going. Last week I bought Lonely Planet’s South Asia on a Shoestring. Ever since Zipolite, I haven’t been able to get India off my mind. I’d been able to save about $3,000 selling ice cream, bodily fluids and the pulseras I’d bought in Oaxaca. I made $150 selling the wristbands at a Pink Floyd concert, then bought tickets to the show and a couple hits of acid for Cass and me.

I know my grubstake will buy countless Third World days and $2 hotel nights. I’ve had it with Uncle Sam and his corporate climbers. I will plot my escape into the dark night in search of something more than normal, something deeper than my soul has ever known – a deeper soul, my own soul, and the soul of the planet. My brief encounters with the poor so-called developing world gives me a sense that it is this soul that remains the strongest, despite the best efforts of the Wall Street vulture ruling elite to stifle it. I am convinced that India holds the key to my own salvation.

Planning begins. I land a one month position at the World Fellowship Center in northern New Hampshire. I’ve never been to New England. The job will serve as a nice geographical stepping stone to a flight from the East Coast to Europe, then on to India. The plan is to catch a ride back to Faulkton to see my mother and sisters one last time. From there I’ll take a bus out of Aberdeen to New Hampshire. When the job ends in September, I’ll have my ticket and the necessary gear and be bound down a new highway, to a new land with new people. Asia, a land as shrouded in mystery and legend as any on earth, a land that now pulls me closer each day.

Go Greyhound

7-26-88

The appropriately painted red, white and blue cruiser growls miserably as it chews up pavement, setting sail across the wooded flatlands of central Minnesota. Rolling onto Highway 75 out of Ortonville, I realize that my home state of South Dakota will be but a memory for the next year or so. I will miss my family. I know they worry. But my journey around this suspended piece of matter we call Earth has officially begun. The sad purr of the diesel motor seems perfectly in tune with my feelings of melancholy as the Western horizon recedes upon my childhood.

Four hours down the road we pull into the Minneapolis terminal. One more stop in this parched thirsty wasteland where – disillusioned with Anarchist Bowling League attempts at farm boy revolution (though the tossing of bowling balls through the Army recruitment center’s front window was a nice touch) – I’d hatched my plan for industrial escape. As I hop off the bus for a smoke, my smiling friend Cass is there to meet me. He hands me a going away present – a copy of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, fresh from the shelves of the Hungry Mind Bookstore.

We share last words of wisdom and solidarity. We the lost generation – too late for the Beatniks. We who had chosen to resist and rise above the institutionalized decadence at the root of American culture. We the true patriots, we the dreamers, we the guardians of hope in an age of cynicism – fighting blind faith, fighting moral bankruptcy, fighting fighting. We the American refugees volunteering to leave at every possible opportunity – hoping to bring home hope while faithfully keeping the faith.

It is again my time to crawl out of the belly of the beast, peering back only for a moment to glimpse its rapidly decaying skeleton, slowly caving in on the souls of the many. I will travel for strength and for understanding. The road will demand much of both. I will seek the very best in others in places where people still know they have a “best”, where hope and faith in human nature have not yet been crushed by phony neo-Darwinism and Nazi Fourth Reich media control. I will harness hope and I will bring it on home.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

(Excerpted from Chapter 14: Chinese Hard Seat Class: The Grateful Unrich…)

When they think they know the answers, people are difficult to guide.  When they know they don’t know, people can find their own way - Tao Te Ching

Shanghai to Guilin, China

In all of my travels I have never experienced anything as excruciating as this. The aisles are impassable, packed tight with anxious-looking Chinese peasants. The horde collectively grabs onto the overhead luggage rack then, realizing that the car is so crowded they need not hang on to anything, they let go in unison, swaying into one another like puppets as the train winds its way across badly scarred landscape west of Shanghai. This is “hard-seat class”.

My attempt to reach the bathroom is met by curses. It is impossible. The man seated across from and facing me is clearing his nasal passages, clogged with industrial pollution and low-quality cigarette smoke. He launches huge yellow globs of a revolting nature in my general direction. I shuffle my feet to avoid his wrath. My teeth now floating, I ponder pissing out of window. Just then a man in a green General-looking uniform comes to my rescue, apparently tipped off by an empathetic passenger. He leads me to the kitchen car and points to the sink. I possess neither the Mandarin nor the bladder to question the General’s judgment.

I return to my seat and find Jill turning green. A second man seated across from us, our knees touching his, is busy inhaling several styrofoam bowls of three yuan rice. He holds the bowl at a ninety-degree angle, his face hidden from view. Within seconds he has swept most of the rice into his mouth with chopsticks. The remainder is either on his face or Jill’s pant leg. A third man seated opposite us – there are four in all on a bench seat meant for two – suddenly begins spitting sunflower seeds like a rapid-fire Uzi submachine gun. They carom off my chest and onto the increasingly nasty looking floor.

Jill buries herself quickly in Gone with the Wind. Her color returns. I cannot help but laugh heartily under my breath. This is the most hard-core train ride of my life – a 36-hour torture session that makes the Reynosa-San Luis Potosi Mexican run look like Amtrak and the Bombay-Trivandrum Nevarati Express feel like a commuter train in Tokyo. It is just the tonic we need to break free from Japanese imperial mind control designs.

I can’t help trying to score a free onward ticket to Yang Shuo when we switch trains at Guilin. I feel like breaking every rule in sight. The conductor is instantly onto my dumb foreigner attempt at skipping the turnstiles. He rebukes me with a wry smile, as if cognizant that I have just escaped some forced labor camp and can’t help myself.

Yang Shuo, China

A snappy Chinese melody rings out from the used electronics store across the street. Shu Li – our waitress at the aptly-named Hard Seat Cafe – chimes in with the high-pitched voice of an angel. A steady stream of bicycles flows by the restaurant, clanging their bells. They are loaded down with bamboo baskets full of giant cabbages, grapefruit the size of soccer balls, chickens, ducks and the occasional live hog. Shu Li tells us she makes five yuan – less than $1 – a day waiting tables. She lives in a tiny room just across the street. Her family lives down the Yang Shuo River in the village of Fu Li. “No money, no boyfriend,” she laments, only half joking. “During Wanx people go to Moon Hill to pray. I go once a year.”

The Hard Seat Cafe was named after a lengthy contest held among Western backpackers visiting this magical corner of China, many of whom had taken the same hell-train we had. The place is run by Mike and Charley – a pair of aspiring, if a bit shady, capitalists in this, the new China. Mike, whose real name is Li Ming Qiang, says 80% of Chinese people are still farmers. His father, himself a farmer, is apprehensive about the path down which Premier Deng Xiao Ping is leading this nation of 2 billion. Mao Tse Dong had once accused Deng of being a “capitalist roader”.

“Long time ago,” laments Mike, “there were many tigers here and many trees on the hills, but lately everyone thinks they can cut trees to sell firewood. Now the trees are gone. Maybe my father also cut too much wood. But it was very difficult. There are eight children in my family. In 1983 the government privatized the farms. Before people worked together. Now some clever people get too much. Most farmers don’t like the government. Government buys rice very cheap. Farmers sell rice to the state marketing board, which sells rice cheaply to factory workers in the cities. Now farmers are the poorest people in China.”

Charley, whose real name is Li, says the changes started in 1978 after Henry Kissinger met with Zhou En Lai to forge the detente agreement. Suddenly education and health care – considered basic human rights by Mao’s revolutionaries – were no longer free. “People still pay heavy tax to the government,” Charley explains, “only now they get nothing in return”.

This official extortion led Li to become involved in the burgeoning black market. He buys and sells electronics, changes dollars and makes an occasional smuggling trip into Vietnam – where Western goods he buys from tourists fetch an even higher price than in China. We sell him our camera for $100. His brother, a member of the Chinese Army contingent that patrols the Vietnamese border, helps facilitate his crossings. Li says the army frequently steals chickens from Vietnamese farmers, exacerbating tensions between the two nations, who fell out following Chinese support of the Cambodian madman Pol Pot following the American withdrawal from Vietnam. The border between the countries remains closed – much to my chagrin, since I had hoped to cross into Vietnam in a few weeks.

The chocolate drop-like karsts are emerald green behind an eerie blanket of morning mist. The water rushes by us as the boatman steers towards shore. He is a quiet man, donning a Chairman Mao hat and a blue uniform to protect him from the brisk morning air. We have arrived at Fu Li village, a few miles down the mighty Yang Shuo River. We unload our bikes, which we have rented for an overland journey back to Yang Shuo later this afternoon.

Not far from the jetty, we arrive at the home of Mo Dong Fa. His paintings, he tells us, have become world famous. It is easy to see why. They are stunningly beautiful portraits of the waterfalls, mountains and jungle that now enshroud us. He is quick to show us an order that he has just received from Australia. One painting – which portrays Mao Tse Dong, Lord Buddha and Lao Tzu standing together – is particularly intriguing.

“Mao did many things for the people”, says Mo, sensing my interest. “Free food. Free medicine. Free education. These things are good.” Mo grew up here and never ventured far from the village. There are no cars here – only bicycles and an occasional truck. The market here has become a regular attraction for package tourists staying in the expensive hotels of Guilin. Vendors peddle everything from the bamboo cages we’ve seen on the bikes to fresh snake meat. As we walk through the market an old woman holds up a live puppy, hoping to entice us with its well-marbled muscles and plump belly.

We buy some of Mo’s paintings and take his address should they be a big hit back home. The ride back to Yang Shuo is surreal as we join a sea of bikes, maneuvering its way through a maze of rice paddies and dodging the occasional government lorry. We arrive back at the Hard Seat and find most of the foreigners waiting on an expensive meal of snake, which they have been anticipating all week. We opt for chicken and talk to Yohannas, a half-crazy Swede who I feel may have intelligence connections. He tells us how he once tried to save a dog from an inauspicious ending at the Fu Li market. He told a woman he would buy the dog later that afternoon. When he returned to pick it up, it was cut into neat slabs of red meat.

Wuzhou, China

The bus ride to Wuzhou lasts nine hours, traversing badly deforested hills now carved into rice paddies. There are no machines anywhere, only machetes and wooden carts to haul the firewood. The slopes appear sick, red globs of clay with tiny half-burned whiskers protruding from their sullen faces. Our flu-like sickness – derived from either the smoking of extremely low quality cigarettes, the close quarters afforded by the train ride from hell, the industrial pollution around Shanghai, or any combination of these three things – has finally subsided.

At Wuzhou the Li Jiang and the Xian Jiang meet to form the mighty Pearl River, which empties into the South China Sea between Hong Kong and Macau. Upon arriving in Wuzhou we get immediate assistance finding food and our way to the ferry terminal from a woman calling herself Cherry – who claims to be a “government travel consultant”. She shows us the way to a cheap restaurant where we eat greasy chicken with ginger and pepper and even greasier noodle soup. Tea is on the house, as it is in most places in China.

We head for the ferry terminal for the trip to Guangzhou. We sit munching on lychee-cream cookies. A smiling middle-aged man approaches on a bike. “Ni-hau!” he yells out, eager to talk to foreigners. The conversation quickly turns to politics. “The biggest problem in China is corruption”, he states, “The Chinese system is a socialist system based on the Chinese character. But although the theory is socialist, some officials in the government behave like capitalists. Now we have better relations with Vietnam and there is more trade, which is good. We are an ever-changing country in an ever-changing world. Mao was a great man, but I think he went too far. But everyone has their weak points.”

The man holds a great deal of empathy for humanity and its condition. His attitude seems so light-hearted and forgiving, absent the cynicism present in myself and other Westerners. He gives freely of both his cigarettes and his laughter. Is this attitude common in China? Am I witnessing the emergence of “socialist man”? Could an economic and cultural revolution leave such a huge impact on the very nature of mankind? On the other hand, how could it not? It’s all the more reason to worry about Deng’s reversion to capitalism.

The boat ride is enchanting. Bunk beds line both sides of the ship. Slowly the beds fill up with families and merchants headed down the Pearl River to the bustling new free trade zone of Guangzhou. The man running the tiny food kiosk on board begins ranting and raving that he has sold hardly a thing. He whirls coyly, setting out with newspaper in hand to drum up some business. Some cannot resist his charm. Business begins to pick up steam. I fall off to sleep to the low rumbling sound of the engine.

Morning brings a different world. The Pearl has widened and is now a huge waterway known as the Xi – teeming with barges and ocean freighter traffic. Its banks are lined with factories, puffing all manner of noxious fumes into the troubled sky. Small pipes protrude from the shoreline – then bigger pipes – spilling steamy concoctions of toxic compounds into the ailing Xi. The pipes keep getting larger as we near Canton (Guangzhou). There is a thick oily coating on the water now.

Guangzhou is far too busy for rural folk, so we grab a quick morning bus to the Macau border. As we pass through Chinese customs, Jill is suddenly pulled aside for questioning. It quickly dawns on me. The camera we had sold in Yang Shuo had been declared upon entry in Shanghai and the official wanted to know where it was now. We try the calm approach to no avail. They want us to pay a hefty fine. Jill is taken to a room and questioned. When she emerged nothing has changed. I begin yelling and she begins crying, making as big a scene as we can. The increasingly red-faced officials have seen enough and wave us through.

Macau is an old Portuguese colony with beautiful architecture and casinos on every corner. It is also very expensive – quite a shock after China. We decide we will wander around tonight – hopping from one 24-hour casino to the next – and forego an expensive hotel. The neatly swept streets conceal something very messy lurking beneath the surface. These casinos serve as laundry mats for the infamous Hong Kong heroin trade.

The morning is sunny as we board a hydrofoil for the 100mph journey across the bay to Hong Kong. We wander through the neon streets and buy Jill a decent backpack. Tiring quickly of modernity, we take a boat to Hong Kong Island, where we catch a relaxing tram ride to the top of a mountain. We escape onto a hiking trail that circles the peak of the mountain and offers breathtaking views of Kowloon Island and busy Hong Kong harbor – where freighters come and go more frequently than anyplace on earth. From here the harbor traffic looks like a bunch of little ants scrambling about for a last crumb of food. We descend and take the boat back to bustling Kowloon, where we decide that all this place is good for is one Western-style pizza and two $100 one-way tickets to Thailand. On the way to the airport we pass the tallest building in the city – the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank (HSBC) headquarters. Sitting next to it is the largest Freemason Lodge I have ever seen.

Hong Kong Airport

They parade around the departure lounge with their Uzis and their little blue berets pretending to look for bandits and drug smugglers. I feel as though I should inform them that their higher-ups are in fact running these rackets. They should relax and have a coffee. There are more churches, Masonic Lodges and organizations beginning with the word “Saint” in Hong Kong than in anyplace I’ve been. These institutions are either a damn good cover for the corruption that has occurred here since its British Hong inception following the British/Chinese opium wars of the 1800’s, or are necessary as places of repentance for the many sins of this long-time colonial outpost. My best guess is that they serve both purposes.

Hong Kong is where the concept of off-shore banking began. Lead by HSBC – which was founded by the British opium smuggler William Jardine – this shady secretive banking hub is the nexus for the washing of Golden Triangle heroin proceeds. The British old money families that control HSBC – and with it virtually the entire economy of Hong Kong – have names like Jardine, Matheson, Swire, Inchcape and Hutchinson. The Jardine Matheson conglomerate owns the seedy Hong Kong Jockey Club, while the Swire’s control Cathay Pacific – Hong Kong’s airline. The Inchcape’s Peninsular & Orient Steamship Navigation Company – now P&O Ned Lloyd – owns more ports than any company in the world. They are sophisticated drug smugglers. Nowhere are public service announcements condemning drug use more prevalent than in Hong Kong. They are also brutal, despite their white-glove appearances. Anyone who gets close to the truth of what really goes on here is simply snuffed out.

The Qantas Airlines 737 sticks its nose nearly straight towards the sky, pinning us back in our seats as it negotiates the precarious climb over the ring of mountains that surround Hong Kong. A new airport is scheduled to open soon. Too many planes have not made it over the mountains here lately. The sun casts its golden rays upon a pillow of clouds that seem to hold the Aussie plane in place. Our distance from Japan grows greater. We are headed for territory that I know well from my trip three years ago. It’s time to relax.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

http://www.americanfreedomradio.com/Region_10_Report_13.html

(Excerpted from Chapter 13: USS Persian Gulf: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

The Carrot and the Big Stick

The Gulf War provided a golden opportunity for the US to find out who their friends were and, more importantly, who their enemies were.  President Bush Sr., having served as CIA Director, knew he was serving up a geopolitical agent provocateur, which would drag out of the closet all enemies of the US for targeting.  After the war countries that supported the effort were rewarded, often with Saudi and Kuwaiti funds.  Those who sympathized with Iraq were isolated and cut off from the global financial grid.

Shortly after the Gulf War began Egypt, Syria and the GCC nations signed the Damascus Declaration at US urging.  The agreement was a blueprint for post-war financial, political and military compensation for those who supported Operation Desert Storm.  At the outset of the Gulf War, Egypt owed foreign creditors $35 billion.  When President Hosni Mubarak consented to the use of Egyptian troops, the US announced plans to forgive $6.7 billion in Egyptian military debts. [1]  The Saudis and Kuwaitis announced $7 billion in debt relief.  As part of the deal 38,000 Egyptian troops remained on the Saudi Peninsula.  Egypt received $2.2 billion in annual US military aid which it used to purchase Apaches, F-16s, and Hellfire, Stinger and Hawk missiles.

Israel’s military aid was bumped up to $3.1 billion/year.  In 1993 Kuwait announced an end to its 42-year-old boycott of Israel, while the Saudis quit enforcing their boycott. [2]  When Syria refused to negotiate with Israel, Saudi Prince Bandar intervened.  Israel serves as a forward base for the Rothschild/Rockefeller oil combine and their European fondi banking pals.  Ashqelon, Israel is crucial to the DeBeers diamond trade which is financed by Union Bank, a subsidiary of Bank Leumi, Israel’s largest commercial bank.

Bank Leumi is controlled by the British Barclays, one of the four British banks that preside over Caribbean Silver Triangle drug money laundering.  Bank Leumi chairman Ernst Israel Japhet’s family controls Charterhouse Japhet, of which Barclays also holds a large stake. Charterhouse monopolizes the Israel/Hong Kong diamond trade.  The Japhets are a German banking dynasty. They were involved in the Chinese Opium Wars with the Keswicks, Inchcapes and Swires.  Bank Leumi Trustee Baron Stormont Bancroft, a former Lord in Waiting to Queen Elizabeth II and owner of Cunard Lines, is a member of the Samuel family that owns big chunks of Royal Dutch/Shell and Rio Tinto. The Bancroft family owns a big stake in the Wall Street Journal.

Japhet was director at Tibor Rosenbaum’s BCI, which was set up in 1951 after Israel’s creation to serve as Swiss money laundry for the Mossad.  Rosenbaum was important to the Zionist creation of Israel, but he was no friend of the Jewish people.  Tibor was an associate of Dr. Rudolph Kastner, whose good friend Adolf Eichmann sent 800,000 Jews to their death at Auschwitz.  A 1967 Life magazine expose said BCI received $10 million in dirty money from Meyer Lansky’s World Commerce Bank in the Bahamas.

Israel’s second largest bank is Bank Hapoalim, whose founder and owner is British Viscount Erwin Herbert Samuel, another Royal Dutch/Shell insider.  Samuel heads the Israeli Red Cross, an arm of British intelligence, and is a Knight of St. John Jerusalem.  Bank Hapoalim was also affiliated with BCI.  A third Israeli banking behemoth is Israel Discount Bank, which is 100%-owned by Barclays, controls the brunt of Israel’s financing and funds the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).  Sir Harry Oppenheimer, chairman of DeBeers’ parent Anglo-America, sits on the Barclay’s board, which contains five members of Queen Elizabeth’s Knights of St. John Jerusalem, the most of any firm in the world. [3]

Paz Oil holds a monopoly over Israel’s oil, petrochemical and shipping sectors.  Paz is controlled by the Rothschild family, which was instrumental in founding Israel. Shareholders include Tibor Rosenbaum’s Swiss-Israeli Trade Bank, Detroit mob boss and United Brands insider Max Fischer, and Sir Isaac Wolfson, member of an old-money European dynasty and policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  Swiss-Israeli Trade Bank board members include Permindex insider General Julius Klein, Argentine banker David Graiver and Carter Secretary of Commerce Phillip Klutznick. [4]

Syria sent troops to fight Iraq and received Saudi and Kuwaiti financing to purchase 48 MIG-29 fighters, 300 advanced tanks and a new air defense system.  In February 1991, Syrian President Hafez Assad was given $2 billion in aid by the Saudis and Kuwaitis.  Syria was allowed to seize territory in northern Lebanon during the war, crushing General Michele Aoun’s Christian militia in the process.  On October 15, 1990 Syrian troops took Beirut.

Senegal had $42 million in debt canceled by the US for participating in Operation Desert Storm and for sending peacekeepers to Liberia where CIA puppet Samuel Doe was on the ropes vis-à-vis Charles Taylor’s revolutionaries.  Doe, who was protecting Firestone rubber plantations and DeBeers diamond mines, was overthrown, charged with treason and executed.  In 2003, according to the Economist, the CIA funneled military aid to Guinea and used it to fund two Liberian counterrevolutionary groups to force now-President Charles Taylor into exile in Nigeria.  The US then issued an Interpol warrant for Taylor, which Nigeria refused to recognize.

Morocco and Tunisia sent troops to the Gulf and were rewarded with Saudi and Kuwaiti aid.  Fellow Mahgreb North African nations Algeria, Mauritania, Sudan and Libya all vehemently denounced the US bombing of Iraq.  Yemen, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority did the same.  In 1990, Saudi Arabia banned oil sales to Mauritania, Yemen, Sudan and Jordan.  Both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait canceled the $100 million which they were to give the Palestinian Authority, while continuing to fund the fundamentalist Hamas.  At a December 1991 Islamic Summit in Dakar, Senegal, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah responded to an attempted embrace by Yasser Arafat with a terse, “No kisses please”.  Adbullah also refused to talk with Jordan’s King Hussein.

Security Council members who voted “yes” on Resolution 678 were also rewarded.  China got a $140 million World Bank loan. Russia got $7 billion from the GCC nations.  Congo had a big chunk of foreign debt forgiven and received military aid, while Columbia and Ethiopia received World Bank aid.  The US promptly paid the $187 million in delinquent UN dues which it owed. [5]

The day after Yemen cast the lone “no” vote on Resolution 678, the US canceled a $42 million aid package to Yemen.  The UN Ambassador from Yemen was told by a US diplomat the day Yemen cast the vote, “That’s the most expensive vote you ever cast”.  The Saudis punished their southern neighbor by requiring thousands of Yemeni workers employed in the Kingdom to find Saudi sponsors or face expulsion.  After the war Yemeni, Palestinian and Jordanian workers were replaced en masse throughout the six GCC nations, who also canceled $28 million in aid to Yemen. [6]  Jordan lost $200 million in Saudi aid, assistance which normally provides for 15% of Amman’s budget.  The US canceled a $37 million aid package to Jordan which, as Iraq’s main trading partner, has suffered the additional economic consequences caused by the UN embargo. [7]

For some countries the consequences of criticizing US foreign policy were more drastic.  In Ethiopia the government of Mengitsu Haile Mariam began denouncing the US war against Iraq despite its earlier UN “yes” vote.  Mariam was overthrown by a coalition of Tigrean, Eritrean and Oromo rebels, who later guarded the US Embassy in Addis Ababa, where thousands of Ethiopians gathered to protest US involvement in the coup. [8]

In Algeria, where that country’s Oil Minister and OPEC President Sadek Boussena accused the US and energy futures traders of manipulating oil prices during the Gulf War, the fundamentalist Armed Islamic Group (AIG) launched a bloody terror campaign.  Algeria was a leader of the OPEC price hawks and the Saudis wanted Boussena out as OPEC President.  Algerian President Chadli Benjedid blamed the Saudis for funding AIG. Many Algerians saw the hand of the CIA.  Algeria’s currency was devalued and in January 1992 Benjedid resigned.  The first order of business for the new government was to pass the Hydrocarbon Law, which opened Algeria’s oilfields to the Four Horsemen.  Algeria’s oil, sought after due to its low sulphur content, was historically handled by the state-owned Sonatrech.  Many members of AIG resurfaced to fight in the CIA war against Yugoslavia.

[1] “Power, Poverty and Petrodollars: Arab Economies after the Gulf War”. Yahya Sadowski. Middle East Report. May-June, 1991. p.7

[2] “Report Says Bush’s Sons Lobbied for Kuwait Business”. AP. Joplin Globe. 8-30-93. p.3A

[3] Dope Inc.: The Book that Drove Kissinger Crazy. The Editors of Executive Intelligence Review. Washington, DC. 1992. p.200

[4] Ibid

[5] “An Enemy of Mankind”. Storm Warning. Seattle. January 1992.

[6] Sadowski. p.10

[7] Morning Edition. National Public Radio. 6-20-91

[8] “Birth Pains of a New Ethiopia”. Gayle Smith. The Nation. 7-1-91. p.1

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

It came as no surprise to students of Middle East history when al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri called for the ouster of Syria’s “pernicious, cancerous regime,”. Progressive Syria has been targeted by al Qaeda in the past, and is currently under attack by Islamists from the CIA/Mossad-trained Free Syrian Army.

When al-Zawahiri headed Egyptian Islamic Jihad in 1984, Reagan’s CIA brought his mujahadeen buddy Ali Mohammed to the US where was put to work training Afghan terrorists in Brooklyn and Jersey City on weekends. During the week he instructed US Special Forces at Fort Bragg. In 1998 he helped bomb the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Blowback’s a bitch.

Later the CIA helped Islamic Jihad terrorists escape Egyptian justice by sending them to fight with Bosnian Muslims assigned to tear apart Yugoslavia, and with the heroin-infested Kosovo Liberation Army. Islamists were used to murder Gaddafi and privatize the Libyan central bank for the Rothschild Cartel.

Now these creations of Western intelligence – Israel, Turkey, the GCC and NATO – are being used to attack the Assad government in Syria and to capture Syria’s central bank for the Zionist Illuminati banking cartel.

And the road to attacking Iran runs straight through Damascus.

The following article by Dr. Boris Dolgov – senior research fellow of the Centre for Arabic Studies of the Russian Institute of Oriental Studies – is the best I’ve read on the situation.

The current situation in Syria remains one of the most important components of the Middle Eastern and international policies. Using Syria’s domestic crisis and pursuing their own goals NATO, Israel, Turkey and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf are trying to undermine the Syrian regime.

Since the beginning of the crisis in Syria I have made two trips to that country as a member of international delegations in August 2011 and in January 2012. If we watch the dynamics of situation’s development over that period on the one hand we can state intensification of terrorist groups in Syria and on the other hand we see a broader people’s support of President Bashar Assad and a clear demarcation of political forces’ positions.

“Two car bombers blew themselves up outside the heavily guarded compounds of Syria’s intelligence agencies, killing at least 44 people and wounding dozens more in a brazen attack in December 23, 2011.

In the last two months Syria has seen a number of terrorist attacks. The terrorist attacked Syrian servicemen and military facilities, law enforcement agencies institutions, blasts on oil pipelines, railroads, murders and taking of hostage among peaceful citizens (In the city of Homs insurgents killed five well known scientists), arson of schools and killing of teachers (since March 2011, 900 schools have been set on fire and 30 teachers have been killed).

Terrorist attacks in Damascus became one of the bloodiest. Two of them were carried out on December 23, 2011 when cars loaded with explosives went off in front of the buildings of state security service killing 44 and injured about 150 people. On January 6, 2012 on a busy street a suicide bomber attack killed 26 and wounded 60. There were officers of the law enforcement agencies among the victims but most of the victims were occasional by-passers.

In January 2012, Damascus has a more severe look in comparison with summer of 2011. Security officers check passports on the way to the airport, asking people what country they are from. Entrances of many state institutions are protected with concrete blocks. There are check points with sand bags near the police stations which are protected by soldiers in bullet proof vests. Lifting gates which close entrances to some of the streets are also by guarded by soldiers and young people with machine guns – these are volunteers from pro-governmental youth movements. But everyday life has not drastically changed. There are no servicemen, armed vehicles or document checks in the city. Damascus is still a busy city, with no vacant seats in internet cafes and on weekends streets are crowded with family couples and young people.

After terrorist attacks in Damascus demonstrations with slogans supporting Bashar Assad and condemning terrorists were held everyday. Similar demonstrations were organized in other large cities such as Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Daraa, Deir az Zor. These demonstrations were covered by the Syrian TV. During our stay in Syria we could move around the city freely and speak with people as we liked but we did not see any single anti-governmental rally. Most of the rallies’ participants were young people.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad waves at supporters during a public appearance in Damascus on January 11, 2012 in which he vowed to defeat a “conspiracy” against Syria.

The most massive rally which gathered tens thousands of people was held on January 1 in the center of Damascus. At that rally Bashar Assad addressed to the nation starting his speech with the words: “Brothers and sisters!” He was speaking about a thousands year long history, the need to fight terrorism and the support terrorists receive from abroad. Assad’s speech was received with real enthusiasm and there were no signs that this reaction had been staged.

The whole square (tens thousands of people) shouted a popular slogan “Allah, Syria, Bashar!” (“Allah, Syria va Bashar bas!”). On January 8, in the memory of victims of terrorist attacks in Damascus a commemoration ceremony was held in St. Cross Cathedral in Damascus. The Mufti of Syria Ahmad Badr Al-Din Hassoun, the metropolitan of the Syrian Orthodox Church and the prior of the Catholic monastery spoke at the ceremony. In their speeches they condemned “the killers and those who put weapons in their hands and sent them to Syria”. The tragedy of the mufti of Syria, whose son was killed by the members of the Islamist terrorist group after the mufti had refused to act on the side of the foreign opposition, which goal was to overthrow Bashar Assad, is a telling example in itself.

After the adoption of a new law on political parties an active process of their creation has been underway in Syria. Although formally the constitution envisaged a multiparty system and seven parties were represented in the parliament, in compliance with clause 8 the leading role belonged to the ruling Baath party. Currently there is a wide discussion in Syria about this clause. An official with the Syrian Foreign Ministry told us that in the new constitution (on which the national referendum would be held in February), this clause would be abolished if most of the public and political forces spoke for it.

In his address to the nation Bashar Assad said that the new constitution would be approved in March 2012. The parliamentary elections are to be held in May-June 2012. Along with the law on political parties new laws on general elections, local administration and mass media were adopted. In compliance with the new law in December 2011 elections to the local governments were held. But because of the threat of terrorist attacks the turnout was only 42%, which was confirmed by the Baath officials. Nevertheless, the local administrations were elected and began to work. Under the recently adopted law new mass media are being formed in addition to the current 20 TV channels, 15 radio stations and 30 newspapers.

At present there are three main trends in the Syrian patriotic opposition – democratic, liberal and left, which is mainly a communist one. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party is the most influential party among the democratic forces. It is also the oldest party which was established in 1932. As Iliah Saman, a member of the political bureau of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party said, the party’s program is more conservative in comparison with the Baath’s program. Nevertheless there are no differences of principle between the two parties. According to him, the policy of the US, France and England is the main destabilizing factor in Syria. He said that those countries were acting in the interests of Israel and had the goal to divide Syria into five state formations on the basis of religious and ethnical differences.

The liberal trend of the opposition is represented by the recently registered secular democratic social movement led by Nabil Feysal, one of the Syrian intellectuals, a writer and a translator. He is an outright opponent of the Islamic fundamentalism, supporter of the liberal democracy. His goal is to turn Syria into “Middle Eastern Denmark”.

The National Committee for the Unity of Syrian Communists is the most influential component of the left (communist) trend of the opposition within the country. Recently it has changed its name for the Popular Will Party which is headed by Qadri Jamil, a prominent Syrian economist and the professor at the Damascus University. He is the only representative of the opposition who entered the committee on the design of the new constitution. Jamil believes that the national dialogue and creation of the government of the national unity (which would include representatives of the patriotic opposition) is the only way out of the crisis. At the same time he thinks that it is necessary to remove all the politicians who are not interested in conduction of reforms from the government, to clean up the opposition from destructive factors and to suppress its radical members who tend to use violence.

The coordination committees are also significant political force which has contacts with the Popular Will Party. These committees on the one hand organize demonstrations demanding concrete reforms and better living conditions on the other hand act as self-defense units which armed people protect their districts from attacks of terrorist groups in particular from a so called Liberal Syrian Army. It should be noted that although in the beginning of protests in Syria, part of the population, including intellectuals shared the opposition discontent with the regime and supported demands on democratization now, after intensification of terrorist groups, they tend to support the regime and the reforms proposed by the government.

A telling example of terrorist crimes was the shelling of a quarter in Homs on January 11 which killed eight local residents. Giles Jacquier, a reporter with France-2 TV, became one more victim of the attack. We spoke with Jacquier shortly before his tragic death and he was convinced that people’s protests were suppressed by the authoritarian regime in Syria. He was looking for the opposition everywhere trying to make a report. On failing to find it in Damascus he moved with a group of Dutch and Swiss colleagues to Homs. But in Homs he also met people who were supporting Bashar Assad and demanding to protect them from terrorists. A group of local residents and Giles Jacquier who happened to be near came under a grenade thrower fire, which was a common thing in that district. Commenting the tragic death of the French reporter Mother Agnes Mariam, who is the prior of the St James Catholic Cathedral in Damascus, said that there is no protesting opposition in Syria but only bandits who are killing people.

Many people we contacted in Syria including independent foreign reporters told us about the information war against Syria. According to them, Qatari channel Al Jazeera, for example, in order to broadcast a report on mass anti-governmental rallies in Syria made a fake footage with the help of computer editing using dozens of atmosphere players and decoration of Syrian streets, a kind of “Hollywood village”.

As for the Syrian opposition abroad, its political part is represented by the Syrian National council with the headquarters in Istanbul. It is headed by Burhan Ghalioun, a Syrian-French political scientist at the Sorbonne University in Paris. It is quite a heterogeneous formation which comprises groups with different goals. They represent the Muslim Brotherhood and other Sunnite organizations, Kurdish separatists, Liberal-Democratic dissidents who usually reside in Europe and in the US.

The armed opposition which conducted terrorist attacks in Syria is represented by a number of groups from a military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood to the Libyan radical Islamists and Al Qaeda. According to the information we receive from our Syrian colleagues there are training camps for insurgents in Lebanon and Turkey. The officers of security services of NATO, Turkey and some Arab states are in charge for the training and armament of the insurgents, while the monarchies of the Persian Gulf provide the financing.

The future development of the situation in Syria depends in many ways on the ability of the ruling regime to consolidate public forces and conduct the announced reforms. Other priorities are the liquidation of terrorist groups and stabilization of the domestic situation. In its turn this issue is directly linked to the development of the global policies and will depend on the activities of the leading countries of NATO, Turkey, the Arab League (which sent its monitors to Syria) Russia and China.

As for Russia, it firmly declares that repetition of the “Libyan scenario” in Syria is inadmissible.”

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

http://www.presstv.ir/ussection/3510802.html?id=0

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

While much remains to be known about Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, RT reports that their mother Zubeidat believes they were set up, stating that the FBI had been harassing her family for years. [1]

Veteran’s Today editor Gordon Duff revealed in an article for Press TV that the bombings were a false flag attack, and that high-level security officials believe the FBI was heavily involved in the bomb plot. [2]

Most likely the brothers were framed and encouraged to carry out the bombing. This explains why Russian warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnev’s connection to Islamists were ignored.

The days following the bombing included extensive use of security cameras, a no-fly zone, a city-wide lockdown, the glorification of an overwhelming and expensive security apparatus, and a decision not to read US citizen Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda Rights.

These precedent-setting jabs at the Constitution represent the rise of a techno-fascist state where privacy is vanquished and Big Brother is welcomed into our cities, neighborhoods and even homes.

The Ides of April

The April 15^th date of the Boston bombings is significant, since mid-April is a time of Satanic Illuminati carnage. Here is a short list from just the past 20 years:

April 19, 1993 – ATF sets fire to the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, TX – 76 dead

April 19, 1995 – Timothy McVeigh bombs federal building in Oklahoma City – 168 dead

April 20, 1999 – Massacre at Columbine High School – 13 dead

April 16, 2007 – Massacre at Virginia Tech – 32 dead

April 20, 2010 – BP Deepwater Horizon Blowout – 11 dead, Gulf of Mexico devastated

April 18, 2013 – Ferilizer plant explosion in West, TX – 14 dead

Before It’s News is reporting that the explosion at the fertilizer plant may have been some type of bomb. [3]

According to Bibliotecapleyades,

“April 19-May 1 constitute a 13-day Satanic ritual relating to fire for the Illuminati. Fire sacrifice is required on April 19^th.

Blood Sacrifice To The Beast, a most critical 13-day period. Fire sacrifice is required on April 19.
April 19 is the first day of the 13-day Satanic ritual day relating to fire – the fire god, Baal, or Molech/Nimrod (the Sun God), also known as the Roman god, Saturn (Satan/Devil). This day is a major human sacrifice day, demanding fire sacrifice with an emphasis on children. This day is one of the most important human sacrifice days, and as such, has had some very important historic events occur on this day.
Remember, the Illuminati considers war to be a most propitious way to sacrifice, for it kills both children and adults.” [4]

The CIA’s Chechen Rebels

Western intelligence agencies have made a habit of using Islamist jihadis to destabilize governments who will not allow the Rothschild bankers to control them. From Indonesia to Iran to Afghanistan to Libya and now Syria, this pattern has remained in place.

The breakaway Russian regions of Chechnya and Dagestan – from where the Tsarnaev brothers cme – was no exception. If the brothers did receive terrorist training it most likely came at the hands of al Qaeda CIA assets.

(What follows is excerpted from Chapter 17: Caspian Sea Oil Grab of my book Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network):

“Ever since Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov proposed a strategic triangle between India, Russia and China as a counterbalance to US global hegemony in 1998, US establishment think tanks have been scratching their heads at how to derail the idea.  The Harvard-linked Olin Institute proposed attacking India, the weakest part of the triangle.

Not content with the Polish Solidarist-led grab of Eastern Europe and the partitioning of Soviet Central Asian republics, the CFR/Bilderberger crowd now used mujahadeen surrogates to further squeeze Russia.

In 1994 35,000 Chechen fighters were trained at Amir Muawia camp in Afghanistan’s Khost Province, the camp Osama bin Laden built for the CIA.  In July 1994 Chechen Commander Shamil Basayev graduated from Amir Muawia and was sent to advanced guerrilla tactics camp at Markazi-i-Dawar, Pakistan. There he met with Pakistani ISI officials, who have historically excelled at carrying out the CIA’s dirty laundry. [5]  The other Chechen rebel Commander was Saudi-born Emir al-Khattab.

The Chechen Islamists took over a big chunk of the Golden Crescent heroin trade, working with Chechen crime families affiliated with the Russian Alfa Group that did business with Halliburton.  They also had ties to the Albanian heroin labs being run by CIA-backed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

A Russian FSB report stated that the Chechens began buying real estate in Kosovo in 1997, just prior to the US-led partition of Kosovo from Yugoslavia.  Chechen Commander Emir al-Khattab set up guerrilla camps to train KLA Albanian rebels.  The camps were funded by the heroin trade, prostitution rings and counterfeiting.  Recruits were invited by Chechen Commander Shamil Basayev and funded by the House of Saud Muslim Brotherhood Islamic Relief Organization. [6]

On September 20, 2002, after emerging from a White House meeting on Iraq with President Bush, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov dodged all questions regarding another round of US harassment targeting Iraq.  Instead he stated that the al Qaeda-trained Chechen rebels still targeting his country were being given safe-haven by the closest US ally in Central Asia- the government of Georgia.  The Four Horsemen’s strategic Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline was to run right through the Georgian capital Tblisi.

A month later Chechen rebels strapped with explosives entered a Moscow theater, taking hundreds hostage.  The timing was interesting, since the Russians were refusing to go along with Bush’s plans to invade Iraq.  Nearly 200 people died after Russian Special Forces stormed in to overtake the Chechens.  The US news media, fixated on al Qaeda’s every move just months earlier, ignored the link between the Chechens and their bin Laden-led cohorts.  Instead they blamed the Russians.

A week after the incident Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev claimed responsibility for the siege on a rebel website. [7]  Kremlin officials saw Basayev’s comments as a smokescreen to protect Chechnya’s elected leader Aslan Maskhadov, who was on his way to Sweden to take part in a conference on Chechnya.  Basayev was killed in Ingushetia in July 2006.”

[1] http://rt.com/usa/tsarnaev-brothers-parents-innocent-124/

[2] http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/04/20/299247/us-most-obvious-false-flag-attack-yet/

[3] http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/04/west-texas-explosion-might-have-been-triggered-by-militarized-blast-eyewitness-says-it-was-a-plane-2625986.html

[4] http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/cienciareal/cienciareal20.htm

[5] “Who is Osama bin Laden?” Michel Chossudovsky. http://www.copvcia.com 12-17-01

[6] Ibid

[7] “Rebel Warlord Takes Credit for Theatre Seige”. Springfield News Leader. 11-2-02

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

http://www.presstv.ir/Program/298947.html

(Excerpted from Chapter 9: The Power of Compound Interest: Stickin’ it to the Matrix)

Every high school in this country should teach a required course on how to save money and, more importantly, regarding the power of compound interest.

And every parent should teach their children these same two things.

The trouble is that most parents nowadays are themselves unaware of the power of compound interest. This entire generation of parents and especially grandparents has largely bought into the matrix-controlled “get-rich” stock market scam at one level or another.

Many have taken a very cold bath. Some have taken several. And still, many cling to some fantasy that they too will be a millionaire someday if they just keep their head low and play by the matrix rules. It defies logic, not to mention indicates a moral bankruptcy unprecedented in humanity’s span of time on this planet.

The seminal event in the downgrading of the concept of savings in the US came with the Reagan Administration’s introduction of the 401K plan. This essentially privatized the retirement pension programs that most companies used to offer their employees for FREE.

The new 401K system was marketed as the best new thing since sliced bread. It sounded great since your employer would match your contributions to this stock exchange-based roulette scheme dollar for dollar.

What in fact had actually happened was that you were now matching your employer’s contribution to your retirement plan dollar for dollar, essentially taking that corporation off the hook for the other 50% of your retirement that it used to pay.

Thank you very much sir, may I have another?

Worse yet, that previously stable and secure pension fund that nearly every American used to be able to count on in their old age was tossed onto the roulette wheel of derivatives, hedge funds and dark pools. Free from these billions in pension liabilities, for a while the Dow Jones went straight up.

Some who retired a few years ago were able to ride the up escalator and retire millionaires. But that once-in-a-generation aberration has since turned into another bloodbath for the masses, most of whom saw their retirement savings flushed away when the various bankster-conjured bubbles, with names like Internet, NASDAQ and Housing, burst and came crashing to earth.

A handful of Illuminati banks own 90% of every company listed on a stock exchange. They buy low and sell high – to YOU. You are extremely naïve if you believe otherwise.

I was lucky to be burned early by these lunatics, and my losses were minimal. Ever since, I have taken a much safer and simpler approach to the retirement we are already enjoying.

We buy Certificates of Deposit (CDs) offering the highest interest rates available in the US. And our rate of return in most years beats the pants out of that which we could get by investing in stocks.

You can find the best CD rates in the country online at Bank Rate Monitor and various other sites. We are currently going through a rough patch for savers, with record-low interest rates, but this won’t last forever.

Luckily, I locked in two five-year CDs paying 5.25% and 5.26% APY respectively in 2008. Both banks get a 5-star CAMEL rating, meaning on a scale of 1-5, they are also considered to be two of the safest banks in the country. This is important.

Never invest your money in a bank that gets less than 3 stars on this scale. Try to stick with only those that get a 4 or 5-star rating. If a bank collapses, you will get your FDIC-insured money up to $125,000 per person or $250,000 per couple. Never keep more than these amounts in any one bank. Even so, it could take years to get all your money back from an insolvent bank, so stick to buying CDs at only the very safest ones.

In addition to that, buying a CD costs nothing. There are no brokerage fees and no capital gains tax when you cash it out. In normal economic times I prefer one-year CDs, since usually a better interest rate has come along by the time that year is up. But I guessed right that interest rates would go steadily down in 2008 and locked in the above rates for five years.

In the recent past I’ve gotten as high as 7% on a one-year CD. Nowadays even 5% is unheard of, but that will change.

Other than the lack of nickel-and-dime matrix fees and the fact that my CDs have easily outperformed the S&P 500 over the last 20 years; the other thing people miss about buying CDs is the difference between the interest you are now paying on a mortgage, a car, or whatever, and the interest you are being paid on a savings account or CD.

Assuming principle amounts to be equal, let’s say you have a car loan at 4% and a mortgage at 5% and no savings or CD. You’re down 9% to the matrix.

If you tighten your belt, pay off that car loan and buy even a 2% CD, you are now down only 3% to the matrix, since you still owe 5% on your mortgage, but have a 2% offset from the CD.

Now let’s say you tighten your belt even more and pay off your mortgage. You now have the matrix in hock to you at a 2% annual clip. Pretty cool!

My wife and I now live almost completely off the interest paid to us by the banksters from CDs. To me there is something incredibly revolutionary about this. Imagine if everyone could be a creditor to these scoundrels, instead of a debtor. What a different world we would live in.

Once you have the bankers paying you to live, the power equation vis-à-vis the matrix, shifts in a fundamental way. You no longer have to bite your tongue at some slave wage job which services your debt. Self-censorship (the worst kind) can end in your life once and for all.

You can quit your meaningless job and take up something that really matters to you in this world. You can cease to define yourself according to your job. What matters to me is growing food, writing, travel and political activism. What matters to you will be different.

I really do believe that everyone has a calling in life. It’s just that too many remained trapped in the matrix and never have the time to realize that higher purpose. With Americans working longer hours than ever, and husband and wife both now trapped in the matrix cubical, this has never been more true.

Computers were supposed to make things easier so we could all work less, right? Instead, these tracking devices enslave us even more to matrix central command structure, speed up our lives and consume even more of our precious time.

Economic liberation is the key to starting down a life path that has meaning. Once you have that grubstake earning you a regular income from the matrix banksters, you truly are on the road to living your dreams.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

(Excerpted from Chapter 8: The Grubstake: Stickin’ it to the Matrix)

The goal of all of the above is to first get out of debt and then to start saving money, for this is the grubstake you will need to get free from the urbanized prison you live in which is a wholly-owned cash cow for the matrix.

Remember that little things add up. And lots of little things can add up surprisingly fast. If at any point along the way while saving that grubstake, you still have debt, pay it off immediately. Then stay out of debt for the rest of your life.

At some point you will cease to give a shit about your all-important “credit rating” – one of the central Illuminati fear tools to keeping its slaves in line. This disgusting financial parasite branch of the matrix is lorded over by three spooky private companies cozy with the national security apparatus, who keep a healthy dossier on every American.

At some liberating point, your “credit rating” will not matter, because credit is a bad thing that makes you a debtor and you will want nothing more to do with it.

Another very important old adage (amazing how many of these anachronisms turn out to be true) to remember is that it’s not how much money you make, it’s how much money you save that counts.

There are many financial downsides to having a “job” that are not often considered. First, there’s the expense of getting to and from your workplace, for which you are not compensated and which has become increasingly expensive as gas prices skyrocket.

You’ll also have to buy clothing for that job, sometimes even – God forbid – an expensive monkey suit which mimics the ridiculous power-tripping matrix.

You’ll also need to eat something mid-shift and for most matrix slaves, company food is no longer free. Nowadays carpenter hires are even told to “bring your own tools”. It’s ridiculous and degrading how working people are treated in this country.

Get in the habit of packing your own lunch from home; otherwise, you’ll squander your precious grubstake at some overpriced chain restaurant or diabetes-laden fast-food joint.

Make your own coffee and breakfast too, so you don’t end up veering into some cartel-owned gas station for a high-priced muffin.

There are also payroll deductions for income tax, Social Security and Medicare. These take a huge bite out of your paycheck and reduce your hourly pay quite dramatically.

My wife and I strive to remain just below the threshold for which a couple is required to pay federal income tax. We are legal war resisters. The threshold this year was around $19,000. We made a little over $18,000. Perfect!

Since we don’t have paychecks, we don’t have deductions. I’ve worked “real jobs” so sporadically over the years that any time I did get a “real job” I would always request a W-4 form from my new employer.

This little known IRS form asks two questions: (1 did you make enough money last year to owe federal taxes? (2 do you expect to make enough money this year to owe federal taxes?

If you can answer “yes” to both questions (more importantly the first, since the second is hypothetical and anyone can and should answer “yes” to it), you can sign this form, have your employer sign and they will submit it to the IRS. Once this is done you will not have federal income tax withheld from your paycheck.

A big reason why owner-occupied housing is such a great investment is that after you’ve lived there for two years you can sell it without owing any capital gains tax.

If you use this strategy – as we have for years – you can maintain an income just below the federal tax threshold, but still bring in those BIG chunks of nontaxable income each time you sell that house you’ve lived in rent-free for two years or more.

Yes, this strategy is predicated on moving, but I can tell you that we’ve enjoyed our opportunities to see the country and the world by living in different places, and also by traveling somewhere nice in between owning each place.

I can also tell you that the place we live now, which we paid cash for less than a year ago, is the coolest place we’ve ever lived. So despite certain inconveniences, we’re both really glad we kept moving until we found this place.

We’re also glad we were patient, working our way up to this totally private 42 acres at the end of the road with a new cabin and some good outbuildings and fences.

Too many people go for that dream home too early in life. As a result they take on a massive mortgage payment which – in a down housing market like we are experiencing now in which selling a house is difficult – becomes a giant albatross around their necks.

Start with a fixer upper or three and work your way up to that dream place. Borrow on the first, pay it off, sell it, and pay cash from then on. Again, if you live like no one lives now, you can live like no one lives later.

Once you’ve got it engrained in you that a growing savings account is your grubstake – your key to unlocking the matrix cell you’ve been living in – you will begin to spend less, save more and set your sites on the entirely possible goal of emancipation.

When you have saved enough for a big down payment on a house, you have attained your initial grubstake. Better yet if you can buy that first house for cash. But unless you were born to money, chances are you will have to finance that first house.

When you do, set it up so that you can pay it off as soon as possible – at the most, five years. If you can’t do it in five years, I would say you can’t afford the house.

Keep renting and save some more money. If you finance any longer than that you are back in the debt cycle for too long a term to ever make a clean break.

Make sure you have a clause in the contract for deed that states that you can pay off the contract early and without penalty. Banks would rather you didn’t do this, since they make their money on interest payments. Make a conscious attempt to do just that. We had a five-year loan on our first place and paid it off in less than one year.

Again, look for cheap rundown property with good bones to buy. Do the required cosmetic improvements, spend elbow grease instead of capital, and plan on moving in a couple years, once you are exempt from paying capital gains on the sale.

In the meantime, pay down that mortgage as fast as you can. Remember, if you pay it off completely, every penny of the selling price of that house goes into your pocket. Your grubstake just got a whole lot bigger. And you may be able to pay cash for the next house.

Lather, rinse and repeat until you are both financially set and have found that dream place you want to live for the rest of your life.

Incidentally, I do realize that all of this moving would more difficult with children. But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. I know people with children who have done it. And all that moving around has made their kids some of the happiest and smartest I know. Besides, when you do move, you don’t necessarily have to move far.

Ironically and karmically, once you start down this road of investing in, fixing up and selling distressed real estate, it will be the banksters who will begin paying your ticket out of the darkness of their matrix.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

Bukit Lawan

(Excerpted from Chapter 22: Chiang Mai to Lake Toba: The Grateful Unrich…)

The MV Ekspres Bahagia II is at first comfortable and very fast. But when we hit seven foot swells in the middle of the Melacca Strait our stomachs jump into our throats and vertigo sets in. Most passengers end up losing their breakfast in the bathroom at the rear of the ferry. Soon the smell is enough to induce a second trip to the pisser. We sit next to a crazy Saskatchewan redhead named Mike. He talks non-stop.

Belawan is pirate central and feels dangerous right off the bat. We clear immigration and I negotiate a bimo into Medan for a lost-looking gaggle of backpackers and ourselves. Medan is a shit hole supreme. Everyone excels at lying and is trying to sell you something. The air is horrific. It’s like breathing from a smokestack.

Our hotel room is stuffy and mosquito-ridden. We walk down the street past the mosque for dinner then continue on to a shopping mall, which is accessed via overhead crosswalk. When we get to the top a few steps are missing. Rather than risk falling to our death, we descend and take our chances crossing the road filled with insane traffic.

We change money this morning and catch a bimo across town to the bus station. Our bus to Bukit Lawan is sized for midgets and painted like a hippie van. Bukit Lawan is the terminus of a rough patch of pavement (sort of) heading north and west from Medan. We are met by “Jungle Eddy” at the bus station. He and his pals lead us to Indha Guest House on the banks of the Sungai Bohorok – a clear clean river that in 2003 overran its banks severely, killing nearly 400 people.

The town is still rebuilding. Hope, sadness and joy intertwine here. Daniel, one of the many under-worked guides, talks of the animist traditions of his Batak people who inhabit this place next to Gunung Leuser National Park – home to what the World Wildlife Foundation office here calls, “a biological diversity unequaled anywhere in the world”.

Today we walk to Bat Cave. Just a few steps down the trail we see a massive red and black centipede. There are large butterflies of purple, black and lime green color; a troupe of long-tailed macaques and – at the bat cave entrance – another troupe of Thomas’ Leaf Monkeys. Heading back through the musical cacophony of this upland jungle, we meet kids cutting firewood with small machetes. I am recruited for a game of sepak takraw. It’s like volleyball, but the ball is made of rattan and you can only use your head, chest and feet to hit. It is challenging and I miss as many shots as I make, but my team was behind when I arrived and we win. We walk home through rubber plantations.

We’re up at 6:30 this morning. Breakfast consists of excellent Sumatran coffee and a huge vegetable cheese omelet. We cross the tiny footbridge over the river and hike the thirty minute trail to where a boat takes us back across the river to Gunung Leuser National Park. The boat uses a pulley and ropes and can only take three passengers at a time across the narrow, but raging Sungai Bohorok.

We check in with permits at park headquarters, home to a unique orangutan rehabilitation project started by two Swiss women in the 1970s. Already thirty-year-old Abdul is coming to the back door for morning bananas. He has a younger sidekick who enjoys hanging one-handed from a coconut palm. A mother with a baby at her breast scampers by Jill, two middle-aged German tourists and myself. Orangutan means “man of the jungle” in the Bahasa Indonesia language. Looking into the eyes of these beautiful empathetic creatures is eerily like looking into a mirror.

The mother named Jackie grabs the hand of Dharma – a very sincere and intelligent volunteer. She is letting him know it’s time to go to the feeding station, a steep 300-meter climb into the jungle. It’s as though she doesn’t want to eat the bananas here at headquarters, but in the jungle where the majority of rehabilitating orangutans eventually set out on their own. She too wants to learn to be free again.

Bananas and milk whey is what’s offered each day. The idea is that this monotonous diet will push the orangutans to eventually choose to set out on their own into the food-rich lowland jungle of North Sumatra where over 300 kinds of wild fruits await. Just north of the Equator and just south of Banda Aceh – where the December 26, 2004 tsunami claimed over 100,000 lives – Gunung Leuser is home to the endemic Sumatran rhinoceros, though less than fifty remain. There are also elephants, tigers, clouded leopards, resplendent pheasant and seven species of primates including Thomas’ leaf monkey and siamang gibbon – with its extensive oratory skills. There are tapirs, slow loris and green snakes whose bite kills in thirty minutes. North Sumatra is home to the wildest jungle I’ve ever seen, even more intense than the Lake Arenal region of Costa Rica.

Tonight we go to the Batak market near the bus station. We catch a morning bus to Medan’s northern Pinang Baris bus station, cross town and board another bus bound for Berstagi. The driver keeps stopping at different places in Medan, this time for ½ hour. It’s 12:30 and we’re sweating our asses off in a bus made for midgets. Indonesians are tiny. The recent discovery of a miniature human race that lived here long ago is not surprising. Medan is a city of three million people. The air pollution is unreal. Everything on the road here is burning oil. I write so I don’t go insane. Desperation shows in the faces here, men scrambling to put food on the table.

At Bukit Lawan the constant attempts by local guides to bag you as tour bait got annoying, as did their pot-smoking gigolo mentality towards European women. It’s a reverse version of Thailand. But I understand their desperation and keep passing out cigarettes. It seems to me there are two very distinct and well-marked paths you can go down in life – love or fear, empathy or greed, God or Satan. Those on the first more honorable path slip and make mistakes to be sure. But they remain on that path.

The other path is full of Freemason bankers who see Indonesia as a nation of useless eaters, needing to be culled from the earth through their alchemist magic. I am more and more convinced that these arrogant reptilian elites go straight to a hell of their own making and in the very present tense. There is justice in the now.

We begin our ascent of the escarpment that leads to the Sumatran Plateau soon after we finally get out of Medan. The driver careens around switchbacks like a madman, followed closely by a passel of other buses and smoke-belching lorries, all painted in the most psychedelic of colors. This Guatemalan-style bus was built for dwarfs and it’s three to a seat. We reach Berstagi at 2:00 PM. Seven hours on a bus is enough for one day. At 4,600 feet, it’s nice and cool here. Good sleeping weather.

We take the second hotel we look at, unusual for us since we usually gladly drop our packs at the first. But the first place we stop has an attitude. We order nasi goreng – the Indonesian national dish of fried rice, with a fried egg and fried onions on top. I think it’s the best fried rice in the world and eat it often. We chat with two Belgian women – age 29. They travel like us. No guides. No tours. It’s refreshing to meet someone else doing it old-school and figuring stuff out for themselves. So far the Indonesian travelers we’ve met are more like this. There are not many travelers here. We attribute this to fear. The tsunami, the Bali bombings, bird flu. Indonesia has had a string of bad luck. The Belgians tell us of a shortcut to Lake Toba. Tonight we meet another nice traveler from Singapore named Joe. He and his girlfriend Pat are here doing relief work on Nias Island. He invites us to stay at his place when we get to Singapore.

We set out at 8:45 AM to climb the 2,095 meter active Sibayak Volcano. The weather is looking fine. Yesterday over 4,000 people died in an earthquake south of Yogokarta on the island of Java south of here after Merpati Volcano blew its stack. That’s a little unnerving, but it’s sunny and cool after days of rain so we take it as a good sign and set out. After a long steep initial climb of two hours it levels off. We see gibbons and another kind of monkey that we can’t identify. The trail heads straight up again.

We pass a Dutch couple who had passed us earlier. We enter the crater where vents are hissing loudly and spewing yellow sulphur gas. The Dutch catch up and we share some snacks with them, then head down a shorter and much steeper trail. At the bottom we cross through a forest of giant bamboo, then soak in some very hot geothermal springs.

Oh, Sumatra! What a magical place full of friendly people. Laos and Indonesia are now my favorite stops. Indonesia is crazier and less predictable than Laos – but so interesting, so poor, so desperate, so kind.

The internet is down this morning in Berstagi, so we shift gears and decide to move on. Joe and Pat from Singapore come with us. We send out an email update to family from Kanojahe – the provincial capital. We want to let everyone know we’re ok, since the Java earthquake made international news. We hop another bus to Siantar, then a third to Parapat on Lake Toba.

Just as we sit down on the bus, it stops again. Hilda – the friendly 24-year-old woman we’d met at Tony’s Restaurant in Bukit Lawan – climbs aboard. It’s her birthday. I pass out cookies and we talk the whole way.

At the ferry dock in Parapat, the Dutch couple we climbed the volcano with show up. It’s a cool weird sort of reunion. There are scores of touts on the boat and we each choose a different guest house. We go for LaBertad – a small place near the main ferry dock. We score a second-story treetop level bungalow in a traditional Batak house with private bath, mosquito net and huge porch for 15,000 rupiah ($1.65)/night.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

Listen to the interview here: http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/295949.html

We sit on a mat on a clay floor, nervously anticipating what will come next – the two Australians, the English girl and I. Nimche has invited us to his family’s home after a very unique combination dance and bingo party bombed miserably this Dewali (New Years) – the year 1009 Katmandu time. After three days in this enchanting city I am beginning to feel its groove. Suddenly plates of Nepali food appear before us. The children bring chutney, water buffalo steak and sweet bread. They are followed by Nimche’s shy mother, who dons five earrings pierced through the outer edge of each ear and carries a full pot of chang – a sweet potent Nepalese rice wine. She and Nimche share this 3rd floor apartment with her husband, two other sons and two even more shy daughters.

The family is dressed in their traditional best. The not so shy English girl commandeers the role of chief photographer and promises Mom she’ll send photos. Ashok, a friend of Nimche’s, passes out Yak cigarettes as if he’d just knocked over a lorry full of them. Mom keeps our clay cups of chang brimming, until our increasingly slurred speech gives way to smiling laughter. We brothers and sisters of planet earth are feeling as one.

We exchange addresses. Nimche, Ashok and their friend Raju insist on walking us all back to our respective hotels. Ashok and Raju ask eagerly if we will come and visit their families tomorrow. Back in my room and inebriated, an ember from my cigarette burns a hole in my pillowcase. I sacrifice my bandana and spend all night sewing a quite beautiful patch.

Katmandu is a large city with the feel of a small barrio. Around each corner a new celebration explodes into view. There is always a different pagoda, a fresh clan of raggedy children, a different aroma wafting from yet another pie shop. The formerly named Pig Alley has deservedly taken on the more sophisticated and urbane name Pie Alley. Moneychangers work the thriving black market, fruit vendors drive a hard bargain and monkeys lurk at the bottoms of the stairways leading to each monument to the Lord Buddha – rising into the heavens. The vibe is positive. There is no hatred or tension in the air, no violence waiting to pounce upon the unsuspecting.

There is nothing in particular to do here. No great museums, no amusement parks or zoos, no homes of the famous to fawn over, no tractor factories or tractor pulls or tractor junkyards. Yet the soul is content to wander through these freaky streets, never planning, never asking for directions, never searching; only absorbing this mellow collage of wonderment, hope and gratification. It is such a stark contrast to the cynicism and despair that rush through the streets of America – a nation that will sadly soon crown King George Bush as its latest Illuminati Masonic Grand Wizard.

The exploitation of the Third World by the Western colonial powers has been going on for centuries. These days, the resource grab takes on more subtle forms, often involving the blue helmet surrogates of the UN or the backing of moderate puppet Christian Democrats instead of outright fascist butchers. On a more personal level Westerners continue to sew their own spiritual rot, as in the case of a man from New York whom I now observe yelling at a group of adorable four-year-old Nepalese girls begging for rupees outside this cafe. Or as in the case of the World College West students at the next table who have rudely informed the waiter that their lasagna – an absolute must try here – is cold.

What are the motives of most of these travelers? Is it the allure of becoming the big boss and ordering their very own Third World subjects around for a spell? In their small minds they are so proud to have escaped the mainstream travel industry, but are not their attitudes the same as those who stay at the Hilton? Is it simple curiosity and a desire to seek truth and unspoiled lands that brings them here? Maybe the problem is having any motive at all. Early explorers were curious too. The price of their curiosity was colonialism. Some tourists seek spiritual renewal, but this is also a motive. Look what has happened to the world’s indigenous people at the hands of those seeking “spiritual renewal”. Genocide happened.

I scurry around Katmandu ridding myself of all unnecessary Western goods. In my final act of madness I trade my camera and backpack for a beautiful thangka portraying Lord Buddha amidst a mob of naked women. I buy a multicolored Nepalese duffle bag for 270 rupees and take some cheap passport photos for visas down the road. I am struck by the man in the picture – a scraggly tanned troubadour with the calm confident snake eyes of a permanent roadie. I reach the bus station at 4:45 PM, high from last night’s hash and this morning’s valium, which is available over-the-counter at any Katmandu pharmacy. The bus pulls in just past 5:00 and we are off, bound for Kakarvitta, the Indian border station in West Bengal.

After a mellow few weeks in Nepal and armed with a special permit to visit the war-torn Darjeeling District, I am ready to plunge back into the Indian malaise. The trip is surreal. We hurl ourselves towards white crags, a setting red sun pushing us along. I linger between states of sleep and wakefulness. I begin to hear voices. A mother is telling her child that he is too small to be playing in the road. Another voice warns to beware of toothpicks and cigarettes. I think of Maude, a beautiful French woman I’d met in Katmandu who was bound for Darjeeling with her 5-year-old son Wesley. I feel strongly that something terrible has happened. Death is nearby. I can feel it.

I finally block it out of my consciousness and fall asleep. I am abruptly awakened as a Nepali man sits down next to me. He talks nonstop, first blathering about his problems with the Ministry of Agriculture and his unwavering support for the corrupt king. He then heaps scorn upon Nepali peasant farmers who, he snickers, sit by their fields all night to keep renegade rhinos from eating their crops. He veers off on the wildlife tangent, bragging of his manly encounters with rhinos and tigers in the Terai region of Nepal.

At around 2:00 AM, just as I am preparing to strangle the fat chatty man, we surge forward as the bus breaks to a screeching halt. The passengers rise in unison to see what lie in the road ahead. A crowd is gathered on either side of the road staring at a long trail of bloody pavement, littered with appendages and bits of flesh. The trail ends at the limp body of a small child, whose head is flattened beyond recognition. No one goes near the child. They all just stare. A woman, who must be the child’s mother, thrashes frantically on the ground nearby. The bus veers left and continues on, as if this sort of thing happens daily. The noise box next to me chimes in nonchalantly, “Life. It comes and it goes.”

Darjeeling, India

The mountain air is chilly. I wonder if it was wise to have cashed in my Gortex at the Katmandu bizarre. Still, there is a warm feeling emanating Dharamsala-style from this mountain hamlet’s Tibetan population. The quiet meditation that is life here is interrupted only by the throngs of loud Indian Brahmin tourists who fill the streets today. The men wear striped suits and ties and polished white shoes. The women vainly toss their silk saris about, wishing to own every trinket in the crowded market.

Mt. Kanchenjunga towers over the bustle to the northwest. At 26,000 feet it is the fifth highest peak in the world. On a clear day Mt. Everest can also be seen from this lush valley of carefully trimmed tea plants, which since the days of British Ghurka rule, have produced the famed Darjeeling tea. The Ghurkas are still doing the Crown’s bidding here, currently demanding an independent Ghurkaland via an armed insurrection against the Marxist West Bengal state government. Somehow I am sure this has everything to do with the King of Nepal’s penchant for drug trafficking and with his country’s proximity to both West Bengal and Kashmir – the CIA-coveted prize on Nepal’s western border.

We take a 4:30 AM jeep to a vista where we watch the sunrise over Mt. Kanchenjunga this cold morning. It is spectacular. I am the only Westerner not madly snapping photos, but I know pictures can never do what lies before me justice anyway. We return and I find a warm cafe for coffee and breakfast. As I wander out of door, I am chewing on a toothpick. I have picked up a bit of a cold from this mountain climate, so I am coughing. But that doesn’t stop me from striking up a Yak filterless. With both the cigarette and the toothpick in my mouth, I suddenly cough, inhaling the tiny sliver of wood. It takes nearly a minute to dislodge the toothpick. I can hardly catch my breath. I recall the other voice I’d heard on the bus. Time to head south to a warmer climate where I can shake these voices and this cold.

Calcutta

I arrive in the intellectual capital of India on a full moon and the 525th birthday of Gorananak – the Babul ruler who was born during the Mogul’s reign over the Punjab, in what is now Pakistan. It is appropriate that I should meet Amolok Singh Jassal, a Sikh who prefers to be called Tommy. The Sikhs are not allowed to cut their hair, so they bundle their long dark locks under turbans. All go by the surname Singh. They demand an independent state in the Punjab and have not been above using terrorism to make their point. Tommy says the Sikhs agitate in Punjab as revenge for India’s assistance in the independence of Bangladesh in 1972. Since 1947, when India got its independence from Britain and Muslims got Pakistan from India, Bangladesh had been known as East Pakistan. The Sikhs fled to India to escape Islamist law in Pakistan then pushed for the division of Punjab into Himachel Pradesh and Haryana.

Sikh bodyguard Suckedv Singh assassinated Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar in the early 1970’s. Sikh leader Jagjit Singh Chanhan was a British intelligence asset and a member of the Lausanne, Switzerland-based Nazi International, which CIA Director Allen Dulles helped bolster through his Saudi-backed Banque Commercial Arabe. It was Chanhan who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. Later radical Sikhs launched the Kalistan independence movement with arms from the UK and the US. The Punjab is an area of immense natural resources. There have been reports in the Indian press that Pepsi is trying to buy up land there to grow wheat. There have also been reports of CIA involvement in the Kalistan effort. Punjab adjoins the strategic and disputed Kashmir region.

The dormitory falls silent and I process the images of Calcutta that entered my being today: an old wise woman smoking burning rope bidi cigarettes, a vengeful vendor sharpening knives on the sidewalk, a naked child bathing in murky water surging from a broken pipe, a saddu holy man brushing his teeth at a fire hydrant with an acacia twig.

I hear a shrew chewing its way through the bathroom floor, then munching on tidbits of food near the Australian’s backpack. Guido – the Italian with the strange uniform – has fallen asleep with his Bible in his ample lap, a rosary beside his shaved head and incense still burning on the table beside him. The American salesman with balding worried forehead snores from the next bed. The Salvation Army belongs to the night.

I skip the sticky oatmeal routine in favor of egg curry and chapatis at a nearby diner. I locate the Air India office and plead my case to have the Delhi-Bangkok portion of my ticket changed to Calcutta-Bangkok. You’ll save fuel, I argue, and I don’t have to backtrack to Delhi to catch my plane. They agree with my logic and it’s a done deal, a small coup that will save both time and money. I spend the rest of the day checking out the many excellent used bookstores in the city. I buy The CIA in South Asia, published in Moscow, then bail the Sally Army compound for the Paragon Hotel.

Good move. The crowd is much better here. Tonight I meet a young New York City writer named Stosh who is finishing up a first draft of a book of poetry. We exchange book titles and ideas and smoke Kerala green bud. Soon a Japanese nomad named Kenchi joins us and throws some Katmandu hash into the mix. He says he is an expert in acupressure and asks if we’d like to experience his craft. Stosh goes first, breathing in all the air he can muster until suddenly Kenchi squeezes his neck with a Vulcan death grip. Stosh falls limp, his eyes open, but his mind temporarily shut down – body and soul floating in the nether world. Is he dead, I wonder? Stosh rejoins us and says I have to try it. The peer pressure is overwhelming so I give it a go, floating off in a flash of light then awakening re-energized.

We decide to head up to the rooftop and watch Calcutta grind to a halt for the day. We are joined there by Ravi – a young Indian Muslim who fills us in on West Bengal politics – and Giovanni – an Italian refugee who has spent two months in Calcutta. He has ditched his romantic notions of the city, which so many Westerners here seem desperate to hold on to. He talks of a local mafia that breaks people’s limbs then sets them on every street corner to beg before resurfacing from their gutter each evening to take every rupee each beggar has received. He details a medical racket where people sell their body parts to Western pharmaceutical companies before they even die just to make ends meet and laments that fathers are often forced to sell their daughters into prostitution for the same reason.

It seems the Calvinist Judeo-Christian alchemist industrialists, whose expansionist program wrecked this nation, have left in their wake a nation still painfully ripping off its bandages covering the gaping wounds of colonialism. Calcutta’s bandages are coming off in particularly brutal fashion. New patients arrive daily from the hinterlands – Bengali peasants who find themselves in hock to the mahajan village banker and land in the slums of Howrah to escape his wrath. Dispossessed of land and the serenity of rural life that affords dignity to impoverishment, all that is left is slow death – pervasive seeping death. Western saviors like Mother Teresa, Dr. John and Stephen Kovalski stream into Calcutta in futile attempts at closing the gashing imperial wounds opened by their ancestors.

In Strait Rows

Up in the awkward dawn they find their place

Marching centipede toward elusive mirage

Toting seeds of separateness, long since

Cultivated deep in unsure fallow awareness

Sprinkling bags of mental Molotov confusion

Perfect straitjacket rows for Judas’ henchmen to clearly read

Sweating beads of hypocrisy, winds swirling in disgust, linear labors

Rustling recently planted prisoners swaying in disgruntled unison

Reconsidering maligned roots with each falling leaf

Nearby, a logical step by absurdity’s calculations

More dangling puppets audition for the power play

Locke harvests Mother as Calvin steals Her daily bread

Towers of serenity felled for Babylon expansion

Shackled, delivered to manifested mind, scarred pathway of deceit

Machiavelle reads the inscribed charge:

“We Want Furniture”

Centipedes sentenced to alleged thought

Lay each new potential profit

In strait rows

Morning comes too early. I pile onto a thirty-five-capacity bus with 100 others for the ride to Dum-Dum Airport. The Tata family industrial conglomerate produces all buses in India. One Tata sits on the board at Chase Manhattan. They emerged from the British Raj to become – along with the Birla family – kings of Indian commerce. Their incredible wealth has weathered Nehru’s socialism comfortably – their millions stashed in offshore accounts, safely out of Delhi’s reach.

The old man crammed in beside me keeps nodding off, his thick glasses slide down his wrinkled nose until he jolts back to life and pushes them back into place. The scene repeats itself for the nearly two hours it takes to reach the airport. Maybe the train to Delhi would have been faster after all. The old man, dressed in a flowing white robe, finally awakens and rises at his stop. Just before hopping off, he spits out his first sentence to me, admonishing, “Why don’t you dress properly?”

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

The Chase Manhattan Two-Way Mirror

Chase Manhattan Bank’s board of directors had a huge presence on Banca Nacionale de Lavoro’s (BNL’s) Consulting Board for International Policy.  In fact the two boards mirrored one another.  Along with Chase Chairman David Rockefeller and his long-time lieutenant Henry Kissinger, interlocks between the boards included Fluor Saudi partner Sheik Ahmed Juffali, Indian tycoon Ratan Tata, Royal Bank of Canada insider Gustavo Cisneros, Giovanni Agnelli of the Italian Fiat conglomerate, Pehr Gyllenhammer of the Swedish Volvo, Mitsubishi Chairman Koichiro Ejiri and British Lord Carrington.  Members of the BNL advisory board included former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, former British Defense Secretary Lord Thornycroft, Britain’s Lord Ezra and chairman of Petrofina Jean-Pierre Amory. [1]

Roy William Harris didn’t hang out with this cadre of international oligarchy elite, but he was a star trader at Salomon Brothers Philbro Energy trading unit, which Salomon (now part of Citigroup) purchased from the Oppenheimer family.  With financing from David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan, Harris founded Arochem, a private oil refining company that went bust in 1992 after squandering $200 million.  Harris insists he lost the money on oil trades, but the judge who sent him to prison wasn’t buying it.

Harris did deals with Bayoil, an affiliate of the Iraqi weapons front Bay Industries.  Bayoil was run by David Bay Chalmers and in 1987 served as middleman for an Iraqi oil for arms network involving Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen, who had ties to Pinochet’s DINA secret police.  Cardoen owned Industrias Cardoen-Chile and quickly became the biggest arms supplier to Iraq.  The company built and shipped weapons for the South African company Armscor- a long-time CIA conduit.  According to an ABC Nightline investigation, Bush CIA Director Robert Gates worked closely with Cardoen.

Bayoil once claimed to own Arochem. The companies shared an office building in Stamford, Connecticut.  The $200 million which Harris had misplaced was likely skimmed from the Chase-financed Arochem to bankroll Cardoen’s CIA oil for arms scheme.  Harris’ attorney was David Lewis, CIA defense lawyer for Company fall guys Manuel Noriega and Ed Wilson. [2]  Bayoil was founded as Bay Petroleum in 1935 by Chalmers’ great uncle- an OSS operative.  Bay was sold to Tenneco is 1955 and Chalmers’ father started Coral Petroleum, which operated throughout the Middle East.  Coral went bust in 1983, but David’s father found the means to retire on a grand estate in Mexico. [3] Coral Petroleum is also the name of the Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz firm which has joint Caspian Sea ventures with the Four Horsemen.

David Bay Chalmers started dealing with the Iraqis in 1987 while working with Carey Petroleum, which was owned by New York Governor Hugh Carey’s brother Ed.  Chilean arms dealer Cardoen was sending boatloads of cluster bombs to Saddam.  The shipments were paid for in Iraqi oil, deals which Chalmers brokered for Cardoen, who was getting zirconium for his cluster bombs from the Oregon-based Teledyne Industries. [4]

DEA informant John Pastis said Chalmers assured him that the US government had approved the deals.  In 1988 Chalmers floated plans to construct a $3 billion PC-2 mustard gas complex in Iraq, later built by Bechtel.  That same year Oscar Wyatt, chairman of oil refiner Coastal Corporation, bragged to Vanity Fair that he did many favors for Reagan CIA Director Bill Casey in Coastal’s numerous dealings with the Iraqi government.

Roy William Harris founded Arochem when he bought a Puerto Rican benzene plant in 1987.  Chase Manhattan financed the deal, putting up twice the money Harris actually needed, money that may have been diverted to Cardoen’s efforts.  Harris associate John Moller ran USA Petroleum in Los Angeles.  He and Harris would buy put options on overpriced stocks, with the profits from this short-selling going into private Harris accounts.  Delaney Petroleum of London, which was owned by David Bay Chalmer’s friend Michael Linehan, was also buying put options and skimming profits.  One of Delaney’s oil traders was Coastal Chairman Oscar Wyatt’s son Steven.

The mastermind of these complex oil and metals trades was Irwin Vosko, who ran Bayoil’s office in the Bahamas with Peter Shaddick.  Shaddick helped Banco Ambrosiano President Michelle Sindona loot the pedophilia-ridden Franklin National Bank in 1974.  Sindona, a good friend of Nixon Treasury Secretary David Kennedy, was never convicted. Shaddick received a paltry one year prison sentence.  Arochem had its offshore offices in the Cayman Islands, where Saudi Intelligence was busy laundering Medellin Cartel drug money.

When the Attorney General of Connecticut launched a probe of Arochem, Chase Manhattan hired future FBI and CIA Director William Webster.  Webster made sure an FBI unit close to him nabbed Roy William Harris before a different FBI group in Stamford, CT could. Arochem skated.  Chase Manhattan dumped its bad Arochem loans on a syndicate of small European banks who took a $15 million bath, then sold Arochem’s refinery in Puerto Rico to Israeli investor Gad Zeevi, who owns another Chase-financed refinery on the island, for $6 million.  The European banks sued Chase and lost.  A lawsuit by Arochem’s bankruptcy trustee alleged that Chase “looted Arochem’s assets”.  Chase denied any knowledge of its Arochem loans brokering Iraqi arms for oil deals. [5]

Another international oil high-flyer Roger Tamraz donated $300,000 to the Democratic Party in 1995-1996.  Tamraz was charged with fraud and embezzlement in France, where he controlled Paris-based Banque de Participations et Placements from 1987 until the French government shut it down at the same time the Bank of England was shuttering BCCI.  Tamraz’ bank’s name was strikingly similar to the BCCI Swiss branch Banque de Commerce et de Placements.  The story line is similar as well, with depositors, including the Congolese government, getting swindled when $47 million disappeared into thin air.  Tamraz transferred the money to his Almashrek Bank of Beirut in his home country of Lebanon, taking Almashrek depositors to the cleaners for another $200 million. [6]

Tamraz was President of both Oil Capital Ltd. and Tamoil Inc.  He was an early promoter of the Caspian Sea oil pipeline from Baku, Azerbaijan through Turkey and had taken Chinese National Petroleum Company as a partner in the project.  He accompanied Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown on trade missions to Russia and headed First Arabian Corporation of Luxembourg, whose investors included Gaith Pharaon and Sheik Mohammed Bedrani, nephew of Saudi Intelligence chief and BCCI crook Sheik Kamal Adham. [7]

Tumbleweed’s nephew went gambling in Monte Carlo.  Ron Brown died of a gunshot wound to the head in a plane crash over Yugoslavia.  Caspian Sea pipeline pioneer Tamraz became expendable and went to jail.  And the Caspian Sea Pipeline Consortium opened November 28, 2001 under the control of the Four Horsemen, whose buddies at Bechtel built it.

In May 2005 a scandal emerged involving illegal Iraqi oil deals done during the 1990’s sanctions period..  According to a May 18, 2005 report on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, it was Bayoil that imported over 200 million barrels of black market Iraqi crude during the sanctions period.

See No Evil

From July 27-29, 1989, a week before the FBI raided BNL Atlanta offices, the bank wired large amounts of money to BCCI through Morgan Guaranty Trust.  On August 4th, the day of the raids, William Hendricks III, a top official at the Bush Justice Department, resigned to take a job with a law firm representing BNL.

There he joined former Carter Attorney General Griffin Bell, who had earlier brokered the BCCI takeover of National Bank of Georgia; and William Rogers, former Nixon Secretary of State and Eisenhower Attorney General.  Bell was retained by George Bush during the Iran/Contra hearings and worked for EF Hutton when that company was accused of check-kiting in 1985.  Bell represented Exxon during the Valdez oil spill, stumped for AH Robbins during their Dalkon Shield controversy and went to bat for Dow Corning when it came under scrutiny for its bogus silicone breast implants.  Rogers came to the rescue of Saudi Intelligence Chief Adham during the BCCI investigations.

Bush Justice Department official Joe Whitley quietly stepped down to join an Atlanta law firm representing Matrix-Churchill.  For his efforts Whitley was named US Attorney for Atlanta by Attorney General Richard Thornburgh the day after Iraq attacked Kuwait.  Whitley replaced William Barr, who moved up to replace Thornburgh as Attorney General.  Thornburgh named Roberto Martinez, the lawyer representing Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen, as US Attorney for Miami. [8]

BNL’s New York auditor Louis Messere was shredding documents during the FBI raid. A few days after the raid, Italian military attaché to Baghdad Colonel Guiseppe Schiavo was gunned down at his home in Turin.  Former Citigroup executive Paolo Di Vito took charge of damage control at BNL Rome on the recommendation from Henry Kissinger.  US Ambassador to Italy Peter Secchia aided in the Rome sanitation effort.

Bush Justice Department hacks served up BNL’s Atlanta manager Christopher Drogoul as fall guy in the ensuing cover-up.  BNL official Franz von Wedel put a serious dent in this strategy when he testified that Drogoul had acted on advice from the bank’s consultants- Kissinger Associates.  Drogoul was debriefed for six weeks by a government BNL investigative task force led by Arthur Wade, who testified under oath that RD&D was a CIA front for BNL/Iraq transactions.  Yet official court transcripts show a “no response” to this question.  Customs officials who tried to call Dale Toler, the NSA spook who headed of RD&D, were disconnected immediately. [9]

Justice sent a memo to the Federal Reserve telling it not to provide 70 BNL-related documents to House Banking Committee Chairman Henry Gonzalez (D-TX), who launched the most thorough investigation of BNL to date.  The Federal Reserve also blocked Gonzalez’ attempts to find out who really owned Iraq’s Central Bank.  The National Advisory Council, headed by Bush Treasury Secretary James Brady, withheld minutes of its 1989-1990 meetings on BNL from the Gonzalez hearings. The fiery Gonzalez, who was threatened at the San Antonio airport for his inquiry by G. Gordon Liddy, concluded, “The US has no regulatory oversight on the $800 billion known as ‘Foreign Financial’, much of which is tied to the drug trade”. [10]

NSA Kissinger Associate Brent Scowcroft and (Texas) Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher ignored invitations from Senate Banking Committee Chairman Don Riegle (D-MI) to testify about BNL.  Scowcroft invoked “executive privilege” in dodging similar requests from both House Banking and House Judiciary Committees.  Six days before Christopher Drougal was indicted, Henry Kissinger stepped down from BNL’s advisory board.  That same day Iraq surrendered in the Gulf War.

Atlanta Federal Circuit Court Judge Marvin Shoob, who heard the Justice tirades against Drogoul, shared Gonzalez’ suspicions, once stating, “Smoke is coming out of every window.  I have to conclude the building is on fire.”  Shoob stepped down from the BNL case in October 1992, issuing a 15-page statement exposing a CIA/BNL Rome cover-up.  In a parting shot, Judge Shoob refused to sentence five defendants who plea bargained with prosecutors, describing them as “bit players and pawns in a far more wide-ranging conspiracy”.

In 1992 Shoob’s replacement Judge Frederick Lacey issued a statement denying the need for a special prosecutor because there was “no evidence of CIA involvement in arming Saddam Hussein”.  Rep. Charles Schumer (D-NY) accused both Lacey and Attorney General William Barr, who appointed Lacey, of having conflicts of interest.  Schumer said of the Lacey dismissal, “I think it’s a run around the facts.”[11]

Barr colluded with Lacey in denying repeated Congressional requests to appoint an independent counsel to investigate BNL, the first such denial by an Attorney General since the independent counsel provision was created in 1978.  Rep. Jack Brooks (D-TX) accused Barr of stonewalling, while House Banking Committee Chairman Gonzalez prepared a House Resolution calling for Barr’s impeachment on obstruction of justice charges.  Rep. Charlie Rose (D-NC) stated, “I believe documents have been falsified, government officials have lied to Congress and there has been a cover-up by the White House.”

As the chorus of dissent grew louder, Barr ordered FBI Director William Sessions to open an investigation by his agency into BNL connections higher up the political and economic food chain.  Four days later Justice announced that it would launch a separate investigation into the Attorney General’s use of his expense account.  Someone was sending Barr a not so subtle message.  The FBI probe never got off the ground.

Lacey, Barr and Thornburgh all have close ties to the intelligence community.  Lacey was formerly one of seven judges who sit on the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), which issues quick warrants for NSA electronic and phone intercepts.  Another former FISA judge Albert Bryan is Grand Master of the Freemason Lodge in Washington, DC, the most powerful in the nation. [12]  Chairman Gonzalez accused CIA cover-up point man Thornburgh of, “delaying the BNL indictments and repeatedly trying to have the investigation of the committee obstructed and curtailed under the false pretense that it would endanger national security.”

In 1993 President Clinton issued a statement exonerating Bush officials of wrong doing in the BNL case after his Justice Department blocked attempts by Christopher Drogoul’s lawyers to subpoena George Bush, Lawrence Eagleburger and James Baker III.  Federal Judge Marvin Shoob said Clinton’s conclusion could only be reached in “never-never land”.  Clinton then refused to release executive branch documents to the Gonzalez investigation.  Clinton’s rush to clear the decks had much to do with protecting the First Lady.

From 1990-92 Hillary Clinton, a Wal-Mart director, was also corporate agent and board member at LaFarge Corporation, an affiliate of Kennametal, one of the companies illegally arming the Iraqis through BNL.  According to a letter from US Attorney Marianne Gasior to Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Kennametal was shipping its arms to Iraq via the Ordnance Center at LaFarge’s Marblehead Peninsula facility in Ohio.

In the end lead counsel Griffin Bell won a $400 million settlement for BNL. US taxpayers- already reeling from Iraqi defaults on BNL, CCC and EIB loans- got the bill, while corporations and bankers partied with Saddam in Baghdad.

The Gnomes of Zurich

A 1981 Italian investigation revealed that five top BNL Rome executives, including director general Alberto Ferrari, were members of the Italian P-2 Freemason Lodge. [13]  P-2 had a penchant for working with South American dictators, fascist death squads and drug traffickers.  P-2’s activities affected the European continent as well.  P-2 Grand Orient Lodge leader Robert Calvi controlled Banco Ambrosiano.  Calvi was once invited to John Connelly’s Texas ranch where the two founded another P-2 front called Committee for the Defense of the Mediterranean.

Calvi was referred to as “God’s banker”. When Pope John Paul I launched an investigation into Banco Amrosiano and its connection to the Vatican bank Instituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR), he was found dead only thirty-four days after becoming the Holy See.  Calvi was shortly thereafter found hanging from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London with $15,000 cash in his pockets and a brick (a Masonic symbol) hanging around his neck.  Hours earlier Calvi’s secretary, Graziella Corrocher, was pushed through a 4th story window at Ambrosiano’s Milan headquarters.  She had also been the bookkeeper for the P-2 Freemasons. [14]

Nixon Treasury Secretary David Kennedy’s good friend Michelle Sindona was Robert Calvi’s partner at Banco Amrosiano.  Sindona funneled CIA cash to the Vatican and to European Christian Democratic Parties, which the CIA much preferred to the Socialists.  Sindona teamed up with IOR and the Vatican’s chief US banker Continental Illinois to buy Milan-based Banca Privata Finanziara (BPF) and Geneva-based Banque de Financement.  The consortium launched Moneyrex in Rome, which over 850 international banks used to move Italian mafia and P-2 heroin proceeds out of Italy. Much of this was laundered through the Vatican to Switzerland. [15]

Sindona had close ties to the Gambino crime family. He looted Franklin National Bank which, according to former Nebraska State Senator John DeCamp’s book The Franklin Cover-up, was at the epicenter of an international pedophile ring.  In 1969 Sindona was financial adviser to Pope Paul VI and the Vatican Bank became Ambrosiano’s biggest shareholder. [16]  In 1986 Sindona was convicted for ordering the death of estate liquidator Giorgio Ambrosoli, who was shot in 1979 after finding evidence of criminal activity while working at Sindona’s home.  Two days after being sentenced to life in prison, Sindona was found dead in his jail cell from cyanide poisoning.  Just before his death Sindona stated, “They are afraid I could reveal some very delicate information that they don’t want divulged.”[17]

In 1967 Continental Illinois sent $4 million through BPF to finance a CIA-sponsored right-wing coup in Greece that toppled the Socialists and gave rise to the November 17 underground left, which has since killed both US and British military officers and bankers.  During the 1972 elections Continental used BPF to channel $10 million in CIA funds to the Italian Christian Democrats.  In 1973 Continental CEO David Kennedy joined the board of FASCO, the Liechtenstein holding company which controlled Banco Ambrosiano.  FASCO was a CIA conduit for funding the Italian P-2 and had close ties with Gulf & Western Corporation, controlled by United Brands powder pushers Carl Lindner and Max Fischer.

Continental made frequent loans to the Four Horsemen and was conduit for Chicago diocese funds controlled by CIA asset Bishop Paul Marcinkus, who helped the Company bankroll the Polish solidarity movement and now presides over the National Bank of Cicero, the BCCI immaculate resurrection based in the “Al Capone land” Chicago suburb of Cicero.  P-2 leader Calvi was paymaster to the Polish solidarity movement and helped the Vatican buy US properties, including the Watergate complex.  When Continental went under BCCI-founder Bank of America took control of it for pennies on the dollar at a bankruptcy auction.

The Vatican’s secretive Opus Dei, often referred to as the “saintly Mafia” was behind the ascent of Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla to Pope John Paul II.  The new Pope launched an Opus Dei/Vatican offensive to roll back Latin American liberation theology movements and East European communism. Robert Calvi had been on his way to meet with Opus Dei financiers the night his brick-laden body was discovered.  In its January 2004 issue, Counterpunch revealed that US Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia is a member of Opus Dei.

Further south Calvi P-2 associate Stephen Delle Chiaie founded Patria y Libertad in Chile.  Delle Chiaie met frequently with General Augusto Pinochet, while P-2 worked with the CIA Trak II program to overthrow socialist President Salvador Allende.  Patria y Libertad and Delle Chiaie associate Michael Townley delivered P-2 violence to the streets of Washington in 1973 when he planted a car bomb killing Pinochet critic Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit of the leftist Institute for Policy Studies.

Letelier was on a hit list that was part of the same Operation Condor under which Chilean DINA agent Carlos Cardoen was smuggling weapons to Iraq.  Others on the CIA hit list were Chilean General Carlos Prats, Argentinean nationalist Juan Torres, Uruguayan politicians Hector Gutierrez and Zelmar Michelini, and Bolivian General Joaquin Zenteno. [18]  CIA Director George Bush, who’d already helped cover up the JFK hit, now suppressed evidence of DINA role (and possibly his own) in the Letelier and Moffit assassinations.  The bloodshed was far worse in Chile where Pinochet unleashed a reign of terror on the Chilean left.

Lucio Gelli, a pro-Franco Spanish Civil War veteran, was P-2’s founder.  He helped the OSS lay down the “rat line”, by which Nazi war criminals escaped to South America.  Gelli was an early version of Carlos Cardoen, negotiating numerous arms for oil deals on behalf of the Four Horsemen and CIA.  He served as economic consultant to Argentine strongman Juan Peron and was Ambassador of the Knights of Malta to Uruguay, a major South American drug money laundry where Vatican chum Umberto Ortolani owns a major bank.  Gelli was a business partner of Klaus Barbie and an honored guest at the 1980 inauguration of President Reagan.  Gelli claimed to be friendly with George Bush, honorary P-2 member and 33rd Degree Mason.

By 1981 Italian authorities had uncovered what one court document described as “a secret structure (that) had the incredible capacity to control a state’s institutions to the point of virtually becoming a state-within-a-state”.  In a search of Lucio Gelli’s home, police found a list of fellow Freemason collaborators that included three cabinet ministers, forty members of Parliament, forty-three military generals, eight admirals, intelligence heads, police chiefs of four major cities, industrialists, bankers, diplomats and celebrities. [19]

They also found a document titled The Strategy of Tension, which proposed fabricating terror to discredit the leftist Italian Red Brigades and to compel Italians to demand a more authoritarian fascist government.  The plan evolved from Gladio, a secret NATO strategy implemented after WWII that advocated an alliance between the mafia, CIA, Vatican and Knights of Malta.

In 1980 P-2 operatives bombed a Bologna train station killing 85 people, then blamed it on the Red Brigades.  In 1978 Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped and murdered, allegedly by the Red Brigades.  Both Moro’s widow and one his closest associates say Moro was told by Henry Kissinger to halt his stabilizing policies or “you will dearly pay for it”.  Kissinger was called as a character witness by ex-Italian Prime Minister Guilion Andreotti- a close friend of Lucio Gelli’s- who was being tried for mob involvement. [20]  A London Independent article stated that Moro’s murder may have been a CIA/P-2 hit.

P-2 financed Manzur al-Kassar’s top-secret CIA COREA heroin trafficking ring in Syria. The Italian media reported that P-2 was financed through a Panamanian company called Amitalia and claimed that part of the purpose for the US invasion of Panama was to destroy documents connecting George Bush, the CIA and P-2 Freemasons to the Lockerbie bombing.  P-2 recruited high-ranking South American military officials, ran guns and drugs, and supported both extreme right and extreme left parties, utilizing this “strategy of tension” to create a climate of fear conducive to military coups which would bring “law and order” fascists to power. [21]

The Vatican’s Opus Dei had strong ties to P-2 and Patria y Libertad South American fascist movements.  The CIA and P-2 propped up the narco-terrorist regime of Alberto Fujimori in Peru during the 1990s, through their Peruvian surrogate the National Intelligence Service, whose acronym is quite appropriately SIN.  Fujimori launched a state terror campaign against the Peruvian left, temporarily obliterating two Indian rebel groups, the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru.  In 1991 SIN killed seventeen civilians in the poor Lima suburb of Barrios Altos.  Two years later SIN disappeared nine university students and a professor in La Cantuta.  The head of SIN was Vladimiro Montesinos, who defended drug traffickers in court as a sideline.

In 1996 Tupac Amaru rebels seized the Japanese Ambassador’s residence in Lima and took several hostages.  Fujimori’s chief negotiator during the crisis was Bishop Juan Luis Cipriani, a right-wing Fujimori backer and member of Opus Dei.  SIN and Peruvian Special Forces tunneled into the house and ended the month-old standoff in typically bloody fashion, killing all the kidnappers.  One hostage who was released early was Kieran Metcalfe, a Canadian mining executive.  Metcalfe said of his captors, “I’m not sure if anybody took sides with the people involved, but I think many people developed some respect for these people (Tupac Amaru)”.

In 2001 SIN Chief Montesinos was found in the pay of drug traffickers and forced to flee to Panama to avoid prosecution.  President Fujimori knew he was next and fled to Japan, his ancestral home, where he was quickly given a teaching appointment at Kyoto University.  The new Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo requested that Japan extradite Fujimori to stand trial.  The Japanese government refused.  Toledo, a former World Bank executive, became increasingly unpopular due to his privatization agenda.

In 1993 Argentine President Carlos Menem, a close friend of Citigroup and the Bush family, resigned amidst a major drug scandal.  Menem was just the latest in a series of crooks to run Argentina, long a favorite drop point for Southeast Asian HSBC-financed heroin entering Latin America.  In 1968 the CIA began training police and right-wing death squads in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina to attack leftist revolutionary groups.  The region became an Orwellian nexus of bloody fascist dictators and CIA/P-2 drug running.

The Argentine juntas were particularly brutal.  The CIA used August Ricord’s Corsican heroin mafia to infiltrate leftist movements.  In Argentina Ricord smuggler Christian David infiltrated the Tupamoros revolutionary group which kidnapped CIA torture experts Dan Mitrione and Claude Fry.  Mitrione was executed. [22]  David recently stated from his prison cell that he was offered a contract to assassinate John F. Kennedy, but turned it down.  He said old money Sicilian banking families ordered the Kennedy hit.

In 1997 Mothers of Plazo de Mayo, an Argentine group of mothers whose sons and daughters died in that country’s CIA-sponsored genocide, accused the Vatican’s Envoy to Argentina from 1974-1980, Pio Laghi, of playing a role in the tortures, disappearances and murders of their children.  Laghi was Vatican Envoy to the US and currently heads the Congregation of Catholic Education, which oversees Catholic schools worldwide. [23]

Decades of drug corruption have left the Argentine economy in shambles.  In late 2001 Argentina defaulted on its $132 billion debt to the international bankers led by Citigroup.  Argentine protestors attacked banks, the Argentine peso was severely devalued and the IMF issued the typical austerity demands.  Five Presidents later, Argentina has refused to comply with IMF demands and remains cut off from international lending.

The directorate that presides over the P-2 Freemasons who terrorized South America and armed Saddam through BNL is based in Switzerland at the Alpina Lodge.  Members of the Alpina Lodge Directorate include Stephan Delle Chiaie, Lucio Gelli, Club of Rome founder and depopulation advocate Aurelio Peccei and Henry Kissinger.  The Alpina Lodge is joined by every Swiss banker worth his salt.  The Alpina power-brokers are often referred to as the Gnomes of Zurich.  The Alpina Lodge, Banco Ambrosiano, P-2 and Lucio Gelli have all been linked to Priory of Sion through a pro-Nazi French group known as Alpha Galates. [24]

P-2 predecessor P-1 was founded by Guiseppe Mazzini, the 33rd Degree Grand Master Mason of the Grand Oriente Lodge in Rome, whose name is synonymous with mafia.  Mazzini’s P-1 did not consist of the illiterate Italian restaurant goons which the US corporate media likes to pass off as the mafia, ala The Godfather, The Sopranos, etc.  Rather P-1, P-2 and Freemason lodges worldwide, which house the real mafia, are chartered by the delicate tea-sipping white glove hands of the Duke of Kent in London, who answers directly to his cousin Queen Elizabeth II, the Bush family relative who presides over the British House of Windsor. [25]

Numerous Priory of Sion documents housed in the French National Library were published by the Alpina Lodge.  French journalist Mathieu Paolio claims to have seen these same documents in the Alpina library.  A short time after publishing a book detailing the Priory’s interest in the Merovingan bloodline, Paolio was reassigned to Israel where he was executed as a spy.  Other Priory of Sion documents which list genealogies for the Merovingan dynasty were held at Silver Triangle player Lloyd’s of London until 1979.  All Englishmen connected to the Priory are executives at a huge insurance firm known alternately as Guardian Assurance and Guardian Royal Exchange Association. [26]  All have aristocratic titles or are connected to international banking, the Churchill family or British Intelligence.

[1] “Kissinger Associates, Scowcroft, Eagleburger, Stoga, Iraq and BNL”. Chair Henry Gonzalez. H2694. Senate House Banking Committee. 4-28-92

[2] “Oilman, Trader, Banker, Spy”. James Norton. Forbes. 1-30-95. p.84

[3] Ibid

[4] Shell Game: A True Story of Banking, Spies, Lies, Politics and the Arming of Saddam Hussein. Peter Mantius. St. Martin’s Press. New York. 1995. p.56

[5] Norton. p.85

[6] “Fundraising Figure Faces Trial in France”. Anne Swardson. Washington Post. 10-10-97

[7] “Oil Financier Got US Security Briefing While Negotiating to Build Big Pipeline”. Michael K. Frisby. Wall Street Journal. 3-14-97. p.14

[8] “A Gift for George: Why is Bill Clinton so Desperate to Bury Bush’s Iraqgate Scandal?” Stephen Pizzo. Mother Jones. 11/12, 1993. p.62

[9] “CIA to Furnish Files in BNL Case”. John J. Fialka. Wall Street Journal. 9-21-92. p.A1

[10] “My Advice to the Privileged Orders”. Chairman Henry Gonzalez (D-TX). H1107. Senate House Banking Committee. 3-9-92

[11] Evening Edition. National Public Radio. 12-9-92

[12] The Puzzle Palace: America’ National Security Agency and its Special Relationship with Britain’s GCHQ. James Bamford. Sidgwick and Jackson. London. 1983

[13] Mantius. p.101

[14] Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons and the Great Pyramids. Jim Marrs. HarperCollins Publishers. New York. 2000. p.258

[15] Hot Money and the Politics of Debt. R.T. Naylor. The Linden Press/Simon & Schuster. New York. 1987. p.52

[16] In Banks We Trust. Penny Lernoux. Anchor Press/Doubleday. Garden City, NY. 1984. p.146

[17] Marrs. p.259

[18] The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence and International Fascism. Henrik Kruger. South End Press. Boston. 1980. p.204

[19] Marrs. p.257

[20] Ibid. p.258

[21] Naylor. p.78

[22] Kruger. p.78

[23] “Group Accuses Papal Envoy of Role in Argentina’s Dirty War”. AP. Missoulian. 5-21-97

[24] Dope Inc.: The Book that Drove Kissinger Crazy. The Editors of Executive Intelligence Review. Washington, DC. 1992. p.367

[25] Ibid

[26] The Robot’s Rebellion: The Story of the Spiritual Renaissance. David Icke. Gateway Books. Bath, UK.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

 (Excerpted from Chapter 14: Saddam’s Banker in Atlanta: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

Bush League Criminals

In 1984 Vice-President George Bush pressured Export-Import Bank (EIB) President William Draper into providing Saddam’s government with $1 billion in US taxpayer-backed loans for a pipeline project in Iraq.  Bush received a secret memo from Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Richard Murphy, whose Murphy Associates later cleaned up in Kuwait, which read, “Liberalize export controls, help Iraq construct pipeline to Jordanian port of Aqaba, arrange Ex-Im financing”. [580]

The pipeline was built by Bechtel, where Reagan Secretary of State and CFR Director George Pratt Schultz was director.  In 1987 Bush met with Iraq’s US Ambassador Nizar Hamdoon to promise the Iraqis military technology.  Bush intervened upon EIB President John Bohn, persuading him to provide $200 million more to Saddam.  Bohn was hesitant because Iraq had a well established record of defaulting on its loans.  As of 1986 it owed over $100 billion to Western governments.  Britain, France and Japan had suspended all loans to Iraq.

Bush didn’t care if Iraq defaulted, leaving US taxpayers in the lurch, so long as his oil and defense buddies made a buck on the Iraq deals.  From 1984-89 $5 billion went down the drain in Commodity Credit Corporation and EIB loans to Iraq.  Welfare-case corporations receiving EIB financing through Banca Nacionale de Lavoro (BNL) included Snap-On, Bristol Meyers, Dow Chemical, John Deere, Warner Lambert, Singer and Cyanamid International.  In 1989, two years after Saddam gassed the Kurds, Bush signed NSD-26 committing the US to “improve and expand our relationship with Iraq”.  Iraq joined the short-lived US-orchestrated Arab Cooperation Council with Egypt, North Yemen and Jordan.

The Iraqis got US guns and grain, while the Four Horsemen got cheap Iraqi oil.  In 1988 the US bought only 80,000 barrels of crude a day from Iraq.  By the time Saddam attacked Kuwait, that figure had jumped to 1 million barrels/day on, according to a State Department memo, “favorable terms”.  Just prior to Saddam’s move into Kuwait, the US ratcheted up oil imports from Kuwait to 1.1 million barrels/day.  Exxon was the biggest buyer.  In the months before the Gulf War, the US Department of Energy purchased 3.4 million barrels/day from Kuwait.  In 1991 EIB loans began flooding into Kuwait to finance the Fortune 500 rebuilding party.

In January 1990 Bush approved preferential trade status for the Iraqi regime, shortly after Congress voted to ban all loans to Iraq.  That same month Harken Energy was awarded the biggest offshore oil concession ever off the coast of Bahrain.  Harken was controlled by George W. Bush, who had received $50,000 in seed money, possibly from Saudi Sheik bin Laden, to launch Harken predecessor Arbusto Energy with Halliburton crook and Bush Jr. Vice President Dick Cheney. [581]  Attorney Allen Quasha swung the Harken deal for Bush Jr., just as his Nugan Bank insider father William had, in 1961, helped George Bush Sr. gain rights to drill the first oil well in Kuwait with drug-infested Zapata Offshore Oil. [582]  Bush Jr. sold his 66% stake in Harken at 200% profit just before “Poppy” sprang Operation Desert Storm.

According to Pittsburgh Attorney Marion Gasior, many corporations providing arms to Iraq had ties to the blue blood Brown Brothers Harriman, where Grandpa Prescott Bush had worked.  Once the Gulf War began, President Bush signed an executive order, exempting eleven top cabinet members from conflicts of interest generated by their stock holdings in firms that profited from the war.  Among them was Secretary of State James Baker, who held stock in Exxon, Texaco, Amoco and other oil companies who rang up record profits during the Gulf War.  Baker also held stock in Chemical Bank, Salomon Smith Barney, and defense contractor United Technologies.

Also exempted were Kissinger Associates Eagleburger and Scowcroft, who cleaned up in similar fashion.  Scowcroft owned a $1 million stock portfolio in 40 corporations including 11 major defense contractors and several oil giants.  His most significant holdings were Mobil, Westinghouse, Monsanto, Lockheed, ITT, Halliburton, Bank of America, Lehman Corporation, General Motors, General Electric and Royal Dutch/Shell. [583]

Weapons of Mass Destruction Anyone?

BNL was the main conduit through which General Motors had vehicle sales to Iraq financed.  A good chunk of Wall Street was using BNL in similar fashion.  More disturbing was the fact that BNL was covertly supplying Saddam Hussein with a wide array of high-tech military know-how which furthered his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.  Saddam received sensitive military software, electron-beam welders for uranium enrichment, mainframe defense computers, rare uranium enrichment lubricants and a glass fiber processor to make missile casings for Scud missiles.  Brett Coulson, who sat on Bush’s NSC from 1989-1991, said later, “We knew Iraq was progressing on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs.”[584]

Bechtel and Lummus Crest built PC-1 and PC-2 plants in Iraq which manufacture ethylene oxide and ethylene glycol, key components in making thyodiglycol, out of which Saddam derived the mustard gas he used against the Kurds in 1987.  US soldiers who fought in Operation Desert Storm testified that barrels of chemical agents found in Iraqi bunkers were marked “Made in America”.  In 1988-1989 the Reagan/Bush Administrations sent binary VX nerve gas to Iraq in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 598.  Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, US troops found VX canisters at the Alcaca weapons depot.  The bills of lading showed that Carlyle Group had facilitated the shipments. [585]

European Customs officials were keeping their eyes on Euromac, which through its Italian and British offices acted as Iraq’s weapons procurement agent on that continent.  Euromac once tried to get a nuclear circuit for a bomb from CSI Technologies, a California company.  CSI informed the CIA and got no response.  Bryan Seibert, head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Classification and Technology Policy, got a similar response from Energy’s intelligence unit, when he told them of suspicious Iraqi deals.  Euromac was run by Dr. Safa Haji al-Habobi, who headed the Iraqi Ministry of Industrial & Military Production and oversaw Iraq’s NASSR weapons complex.  Al-Habobi also ran Matrix-Churchill in the UK and Babil International of Paris, two of the main BNL Iraqi arms procurement fronts.

Often BNL-financed weapons were smuggled into Iraq through East European BNL contacts who were compensated with the same type of CCC loans paid to Mossad agent Gerald Bull and Cargill Continental. [586]  The CIA knew of at least five BNL-financed deals from 1985-1990 bound for Iraq’s Defense Industry, but Bush Commerce Secretary and Texas Commerce Bank insider Robert Mosbacher told his people to approve the $1.5 billion worth of contracts. [587]  Rockwell International, Hewlett-Packard and Tektronix were among those who benefited from Mosbacher’s empathy for Saddam Hussein.  On one occasion a BNL deal with Iraq’s Central Bank- there were over 3,000 telex lines between the two- involved nuclear triggers.

CIA told Secretary of State James Baker about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities in September 1989.  A month later Baker assured Iraq’s Foreign Minister that export controls toward his country would not be tightened, while approving a $1 billion food aid package to Baghdad.  In July 1989 an Energy Department Task Force tracking intelligence reports on Iraq was suddenly disbanded.  The CIA not only knew that US exporters of sensitive material to Iraq were Iraqi front companies; it ran many of those fronts.  According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, both RD&D and Rexon Technology were CIA fronts to arm Iraq.  Dale Toler, head of RD&D, had worked at NSA.

William Muscarella, President of XYZ Options, said the CIA was fully aware that his firm was training Iraqi technicians in Topeka, Kansas to run a secret arms factory to be built at Iraq’s al-Atheer complex.  In 1987 Dr. Richard Fuisz was invited to tour a Terex plant at Motherwell, Scotland.  Terex had been spun off by US/Iraqi Business Forum member and BNL client General Motors a year earlier.  Fuisz testified to Congress that he saw all-terrain trucks whose hauling bins were replaced with sheets of metal with pre-drilled holes.  The plant manager told him the trucks would become “missile launchers for the Iraqi military”.  They were later mounted with the Scud missiles fired at US forces and Israel during the Gulf War. [588]

Canira Technical Corporation of Ireland was an important Iraqi weapons procurement front, as was Kintex of Bulgaria.  Kintex, like the Milan-based Stibam Corporation that swung the Iranian hostage release deal, is a front company for Turkish Gray Wolves fascists, who use this Sophia conglomerate to smuggle Golden Crescent heroin into Europe via Bulgaria.  When the Shah of Iran was deposed, the Gray Wolves found a new supplier in the Afghan mujahadeen and their Pakistani handlers.  Now they were using their Kintex front to arm Saddam with a wink and a nod from Langley.

Bert SerVass, an Indianapolis friend of the Quayle family and leading supporter of both Pat Robertson and Robert Schuler Ministries, got BNL financing for his Servass Inc. to build a brass shell recycling plant in Iraq.  SerVass got help from Vice-President Dan Quayle, whose family controls Eli Lilly, where Dan’s boss George Bush had been CEO. Quayle’s appointment as Vice-President was presumably a payback for the pharmaceutical giant’s funding of Bush’s political career.

Servass was Indianapolis City Council President, owned the Saturday Evening Post, served with the OSS in China and was a vocal supporter of the South African apartheid regime.  A Post writer once told of how SerVass wanted him to write an article, at the request of Richard Helms, extolling the virtues of CIA.  The writer said when SerVass called Helms, “he always got through right away.”  Indianapolis is also home to CIA assassin John Hull.

BNL collateralized a loan made by Tulsa-based American Bank & Trust Company (ABTC) to Iraq’s State Machinery Company.  ABTC Chairman Fred Henke headed Utica National Bank & Trust, which loaned millions to Farhad Azima’s Global International Airways, which was central to Reagan’s effort to arm the Ayatollah.  ABTC’s prior Chairman Victor Thompson was forced to step down due to improprieties while heading Reagan’s Synthetic Fuels Corporation.  Thompson’s son Robert formed a consulting firm with Prescott Bush in 1983. He served in Reagan and Bush Sr. Administrations as a top aide.  Both were under investigation by Congress for deals with aptly-named Arizona businessman and S& L looter James Fail. [589]

The Germans got into the act too.  Krupp-Widia and Hertel sold Iraq tungsten carbide cutting tools to make artillery shells, which were manufactured by Kennametal of Latrobe, Pennsylvania.  Ironically, when an Iraqi Scud missile hit a US military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, most of the twenty-eight US soldiers killed were from Latrobe.  Kennametal had dealings with Matrix Churchill and Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen in supplying Iraq’s NASSR munitions complex.  Other German corporations who helped build up Iraq’s military included Daimler-Benz, Messerschmitt, Gildemaster, Ferrostaal, Thyssen, SMS Hasenclever, Karl Kolb and Siemens.  Karl Kolb subsidiary Pilot Plant built the Samarra chemical weapons plant which made the mustard gas used against the Kurds.  Siemens provided Saddam with sensitive nuclear technology. [590]

The Condor II Project was a joint military program between Argentina, Egypt and Iraq which was financed by BNL, with contracts going to Mack Truck, Hewlett Packard, Halliburton’s Dresser Industries, Caterpillar, Ingersoll Rand and Mannesmann Demag.  BNL financed French arms sales to Iran in 1984 for Luchaire, France’s largest private arms manufacturer.  In 1989 BNL was one of the two largest lenders to Mexico, where President Carlos Salinas and his brother Raul were busy laundering drug money through James Baker’s Texas Commerce Bank.  BNL became a NATO conduit for P-2 Freemason activity and financed US Sidewinder missile sales to Italy in 1986.  Convicted double-agent Aldrich Ames had an account at BNL-Rome.

When the BNL scandal broke 68 Commerce Department documents were altered to read “commercial” instead of “military”.  Undersecretary of Commerce Dennis Kloskie, who was ordered to alter the documents, later said his actions were approved by an inter-agency panel.  NSA Norman Bailey admitted, “…the authorities knew all about it and approved it.  They were using this channel for the financing of certain activities.”  Iraq purchased $46.7 billion worth of arms during the 1980’s, the largest accumulation of modern weaponry by a Third World country ever.  The buildup was financed by BNL, with the tacit approval of the US government. When Iraq defaulted on those BNL loans, the US taxpayer became de facto paymaster for Saddam Hussein in his drive towards developing weapons of mass destruction.

[580] “Bush Lobbied to Aid Saddam for Years”. Los Angeles Times. 3-3-92

[581] The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Heart of BCCI. Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne. Random House. New York. 1993. p.226

[582] “Arming Saddam Hussein”. Patrick Barnard. Commonweal. 6-5-92

[583] “Kissinger Associates, Scowcroft, Eagleburger, Stoga, Iraq and BNL”. Chair Henry Gonzalez. H2694. Senate House Banking Committee. 4-28-92

[584] “US Contributed Significantly to Saddam’s Bomb Arsenal”. AP. Northwest Arkansas Morning News. 11-1-92. p.1

[585] “Paranote”. Paranoia. #41. Spring 2006. p.64 (waynemadsenreport.com)

[586] “Arming Saddam Hussein”. Patrick Barnard. Commonweal. 6-5-92 p.5

[587] “CIA Knew about Defense Sales to Iraq”. Rocky Mountain News. 10-30-92

[588] Shell Game: A True Story of Banking, Spies, Lies, Politics and the Arming of Saddam Hussein. Peter Mantius. St. Martin’s Press. New York. 1995. p.80

[589] American Banker/Bond Buyer. 4-27-92

[590] “My Advice to the Privileged Orders”. Chairman Henry Gonzalez (D-TX) H206. Senate House Banking Committee. 2-3-92

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

The US and their Western allies weren’t concerned with dual use items being shipped to Iraq during the 1980’s.  From 1985-1990, 771 licenses for dual-use exports from the US to Iraq were approved, as US defense contractors, not content with the Ayatollah’s money, armed Iraq, while the CIA passed intelligence to Saddam.  When Hussein gassed the Mossad-backed PUK Kurds in 1987, President Reagan opposed sanctioning Iraq.  Instead, Mossad agent Gerald Bull and his Space Research Corporation helped the Iraqis develop three “super guns” code-named Babylon.

Space Research was controlled by the Canadian Bronfman family, the Pure Drug Company “whiskey men” whose Eagle Star Insurance interlocks with Silver Triangle Canadian banks.  The Bronfmans married into the Rothschild family and launched the careers of Detroit mob boss/United Brands insider Max Fischer and the Buffalo Jacobs mob, which conveniently owns concessions on Gulf of Mexico oil drilling platforms. Montreal police have identified Mitchell Bronfman as a kingpin of organized crime. [1]

Gerald Bull peddled arms for the CIA in South Africa, where Space Research supplied guns and advisers to UNITA terrorists in Angola and RENAMO thugs in Mozambique under direction of CIA Angola Chief of Station James Potts. [2]  Bull was introduced to the Iraqis by Armenian-born arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian, a CIA asset who supplied the Iraqis with Bell Helicopters. [3]  When Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Andre Cools uncovered a memo exposing Bull’s program and its links to the CIA and Mossad, both Cools and Bull were assassinated.

BCCI helped Bull smuggle propellant for his super guns from Belgium to Iraq and loaned $72 million through Bank of America to Space Research financier Banca Nacionale de Lavaro (BNL).  BNL had its US offices at the posh Peachtree Center in Atlanta.  From 1983-1989 BNL busied itself financing Saddam Hussein’s arms procurement efforts in tandem with the Iraqi Central Bank and Rafidain Bank of Iraq, which had numbered accounts at Bank of America, Bank of New York, Chase Manhattan and Manufacturers Hanover Trust. BNL’s clearing agent on all transactions was Morgan Guaranty Trust.  When Saddam defaulted on the loans, the US multinationals which benefited were paid in full, while US taxpayers were charged $347 million. [4]

BNL is Italy’s largest bank.  Its headquarters is across from the US Embassy in Rome.  BCCI-founder Bank of America was first known as Bank of Italy and is controlled by the Rothschild family.  A report by the Italian Senate stated that BNL Rome ran the Iraqi weapons procurement program and that BNL Atlanta was launched by “some circles in the American political-military-industrial complex”.  BNL was 96%-owned by the Italian government. It often transferred funds to Iraq using BCCI, where Saudi intelligence officers laundered drug money for the Medellin Cartel.

Kissinger Associates

BNL’s Consulting Board for International Policy included Henry Kissinger and his boss David Rockefeller, now chairman of Rockefeller Group. [5]  Kissinger received $10,000 per meeting, serving on the board from 1985-1991.  In 1984 the US/Iraq Business Forum was established in Houston with a push from Kissinger Associates, a private consulting firm co-founded by CFR/TC insider Henry Kissinger, who in 1989 was named in to the Bush Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; and former British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, former secretary general of NATO and president of both the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) and Bilderberger Group.  Carrington is on the board of Hollinger Corporation, chaired by Jerusalem Post and London Daily Telegraph Zionist owner Conrad Black.  Black- one of Canada’s wealthiest citizens- runs his financial empire from Toronto. He owns the Toronto Globe & Mail and frequents the Bronfman family’s Toronto Jockey Club. [6]  Black, a CIIA member and Bilderberger insider, was convicted in 2007 for fraud and obstruction of justice.

BNL was a Kissinger Associates client from 1986-1988, as was National Bank of Georgia, which BCCI agent Ghaith Pharaon helped Bert Lance slide out from under.  Kissinger is a good friend of Pharoan and an even better friend of his father, who was adviser to the House of Saud.  Several Kissinger Associates clients got BNL financing for Iraqi projects including Midland Bank (now HSBC), Chase Manhattan, Fiat, Asea Braun Boveri, Lummis Crest, Volvo and Hewlett Packard.  President Bush Sr. included two directors of Kissinger Associates in his cabinet- Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and NSA Brent Scowcroft.  Both had worked on the BNL account, which was funneling taxpayer-guaranteed money to Saddam so that he could dole out contracts to US/Iraqi Business Forum members. [7]

The rotund Eagleburger, a long-time Kissinger deputy, was US Ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1977-1981.  He was president of Kissinger Associates from 1984-89.  He was on the board at Nazi/Pinochet backer ITT, Alcatel, Bethlehem Rebar, Mutual of New York, Josephson International and Best Mart.  In 1993 he joined the board of Dresser Industries, a subsidiary of Halliburton where Dick Cheney ran the show.  Prescott S. Bush Jr. (George Sr’s. brother) was an executive at Dresser. [8]

Scowcroft joined Kissinger Associates as vice-chairman in 1982.  He owned stock in many of the multinationals who were members of the US/Iraqi Business Forum including ITT, Westinghouse, GM, AT&T and Hewlett Packard.  These five companies were granted 100 of the 800 export licenses which the US government approved for sales to Iraq. [9]  Scowcroft was consultant to Lockheed, now the world’s largest defense contractor after its merger with Martin Marietta produced Lockheed Martin.

Scowcroft and Eagleburger led the charge in the Bush White House to sell arms to Iraq and any other country that would buy them.  Under pressure from the Aerospace Industries Association and the CEOs of Lockheed Martin, United Technologies, LTV, Raytheon, Grumman and ITT Defense, they lobbied to change the name of the State Department’s Office of Munitions Control to Center for Defense Trade.  US Embassies worldwide were now advised to play salesmen for US defense contractors.  United Technologies, LTV and Raytheon soon announced a $10 billion military modernization in Turkey compliments of the Istanbul embassy staff.

Chief economist and director of Kissinger Associates was Allen Stoga, also chief economist at the CIA favorite First Chicago Bank.  First Chicago’s Chairman was Robert Abboud, now at First City Bank of Houston and chairman of the US/Iraqi Business Forum.  The port of Houston, where the Texas oil mafia had just satisfied their S&L looting cravings, was now supplying the brunt of Saddam Hussein’s needs, including 20% of the US rice harvest.  Abboud was also president of Kuwaiti-owned Occidental Petroleum.  In the fall of 1989 Stoga met several times with BCCI officials, who had a year earlier been indicted in Tampa on money laundering charges.

In 1984 Abboud and fellow First Chicago cronies John Drick and Gaylord Freeman signed a letter to authors/investigators of the Priory of Sion- Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln.  The letter bore the Prieure de Sion logo and a crest containing the letters ‘R’ and ‘C.’, possibly a Rosicrucian insignia.  The letter was also signed by Pierre Plantard, self-proclaimed Merovingan dynasty descendent and Priory Grand Master.  It warned legal action against anyone who would take or fake Priory documents.  Gaylord Freeman sat on the board of ARCO with contra ranch hand Robert O. Anderson and was an insider at the Shah-friendly Aspen Institute and the MacArthur Foundation.

Henry Kissinger was rewarded for his efforts in 1995 when Queen Elizabeth II bestowed upon him the title of Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael & St. George, the highest honor granted by the British House of Windsor to non-British citizens. [10]

Jolly Grain Giants

In October 1988 Kissinger joined the board of Continental Grain, the French Fribourg family-controlled private firm that was the second largest grain company in the world until its 1999 merger with Cargill.  Cargill is the grain trade’s biggest fish and is privately held by the Minneapolis-based Cargill and MacMillan families.  Cargill Continental now controls over 50% of the world’s grain trade.  It is one of four giant privately held companies that have quietly monopolized the world’s grain business since the mid 1800’s.  Cargill Continental, the French Louis Dreyfus, the Brazilian Bunge and the Swiss Andre constitute the Four Horsemen of grain.  Dan Morgan’s book Merchants of Grain is an excellent expose of these grain dynasties.

In 1989 Bush Secretary of State James Baker ordered Secretary of Agriculture Clayton Yeuter to increase credits to Iraq via the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) after Eagleburger, Robert Kimmitt and Iraq’s CCC lobbyist and CIA agent Kevin Kattke lobbied for a $1 billion CCC loan.  Kattke got help from Oliver North and TGS International, an Arlington, Virginia firm named for CIA old hand Ted Shackley. [11]

Gerald Bull was paid by Saddam for his super gun efforts with money from these CCC loans, for which BNL served as conduit.  BNL worked through one of three banks who handle all CCC business in the Middle East- National Bank for Cooperatives of Denver, Morgan Guaranty and First City Bank of Houston, whose Priory of Sion chair Robert Abboud now chaired the US/Iraq Business Forum.  Morgan Guaranty was the US clearing agent for both Iraq’s Central Bank and BNL. [12]

Cargill Continental and the other grain giants were the main beneficiaries of the taxpayer-guaranteed CCC loans through grain sales to Iraq.  Continental, with Kissinger on its board, also used BNL to finance Yugoslavian grain shipments. In 1988-89 BNL financed Russian Exportkhleb purchases of grain from Cargill, Continental, Louis Dreyfus and Conagra.  A favorite middleman for Cargill deals with Iraq was the Turkish Entrade, a subsidiary of Enka Holdings, Bechtel partner on Iraqi construction projects and LTV partner on NATO missile programs in Turkey.

Another grain giant middleman favorite was Amman Resources, owned by Jordanian shipping merchant and CIA contact Wafai Dajani.  Dajani worked with Norwegian shipping giant Gearbulk through their jointly held Araba Holdings to ship Iraqi goods into the Jordanian port of Aqaba.  Dajani was close to the American Wheat Association, the Rice Council, USDA and the French Louis Dreyfus grain giant.  Dreyfus also received BNL financing to ship CCC grain to Iraq. Some was delivered on their own substantial fleet of cargo ships.  Other times the shipper was Araba Holdings.

Dajani is the straw man for US agribusiness interests in the Middle East.  He runs joint ventures with Comet Rice of Houston and the British sugar giant Tate & Lyle.  Eighty percent of all BNL CCC shipments went through Amman Resources or another of Dajani’s companies, which include Wafai Dajani & Sons, Araba Holdings and Aqaba Packing.  Dajani was a close friend of Jordan’s late King Hussein. His brother was the country’s Minister of Interior.  His family had long been the agent for Mobil in Jordan.

Dajani also worked with Carlos Rosa’s Armiberica of Portugal and A & L Management Services of Cyprus in shipping Howitzers, ammunition and small arms to Saddam Hussein.  Later when BNL-Atlanta fired manager Christopher Drougul, who served as the fall guy for the BNL ordeal, Dajani hired him as a $50,000/year consultant.  Drougal maintained that BNL was part of an Italian-American covert operation to arm Iraq.  When the BNL case came to trial a number of small-time Cargill employees were singled out as un-indicted co-conspirators, while the Big Grain fish swam under the net.

[1] Dope Inc.: The Book that Drove Kissinger Crazy. The Editors of Executive Intelligence Review. Washington, DC. 1992. p.417

[2] “Naming Names”. Louis Wolf. Covert Action Information Bulletin. Summer 1989. p.14

[3] Shell Game: A True Story of Banking, Spies, Lies, Politics and the Arming of Saddam Hussein. Peter Mantius. St. Martin’s Press. New York. 1995. p.55

[4] “Bankrolling the War”. Jim Donahue. Multinational Monitor. March 1991. p.6

[5] “Gonzalez’s Discovery”. David Corn. The Nation. 5-13-91. p.620

[6] The Robot’s Rebellion: The Story of the Spiritual Renaissance. David Icke. Gateway Books. Bath, UK. p.195

[7] “Kissinger Associates, Scowcroft, Eagleburger, Stoga, Iraq and BNL”. Chair Henry Gonzalez. H2694. Senate House Banking Committee. 4-28-92

[8] Ibid

[9] “Arms and the Man”. Doug Ireland. Village Voice. 5-5-92. p.8

[10] “Bow for Kissinger”. AP. Missoulian. 6-14-95

[11] Mantius. p.34

[12] Ibid. p.30

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

(excerpted from Chapter 7: Trekking with God: The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries)

As a butterfly lost in a flower. As a bird settled in a tree. As a child fondling mother’s breast. For 67 years of this world I have played with God - Sasaki Roshi

In search of a hotel, I wander down a side street and notice a sign that says “Tibetan Guest House”. I walk up a narrow staircase and a pudgy 14-year-old girl comes to the door. Her pleasant demeanor captures my imagination. She and her six brothers and sisters are huddled around a television watching Bill Cosby. I take a room.

The girl brings me a huge bowl of vegetables and noodles with chopsticks, followed by the best coffee I’ve had in India. Her little brother climbs up on a chair, grabs of pack of Four Square cigarettes from atop the refrigerator and offers me one. Their mother brings me a soda. Their father walks in with fluorescent bulbs for the whole house, as if my arrival has brought them spirited rejuvenation. The kids surround him and wait for their turn at a hug. Some are content with a pat on the head. These are people who know intimately the secrets to happiness. I need to stay awhile.

I wonder if praise is not one of our biggest mistakes. When an Ituri Pygmy hunter comes home from having killed a springbuck, he gets no praise from his fellow tribesmen and is the last to receive his portion of meat. Out of this silence the hunter learns humility. He learns that his fate and that of his tribe are one. Praise for his efforts would only create a schism of the whole and fill the hunter with arrogance. In America, when one praises a friend exceedingly, that friend often begins to mistreat his or her admirer. To praise someone is to put them on a pedestal – separate from the masses of un-praised others. It is a product of dualistic thinking athe root of scores of flawed Western philosophical underpinnings.

This conundrum may explain why I always feel that I need to leave America where I treat everyone as if they are intrinsically good. Westerners, trained in dualistic thinking, take this as weakness on my part. They see my kindness as a green light to take, to gain some emotional advantage. I do not find such a dilemma in India or for that matter any other Third World nations I have visited. Here kindness is greeted by reciprocation.

I guess Reagan and his supply-siders are right in one sense about their trickle-down theories. An evil government imparts its paranoid set of values to its citizenry, whose collective denial of a bloody colonial history only reinforces the “taker” mindset. To stop and question the rules of this rigged game would be to risk losing one’s television or VCR or, God forbid, one’s cherished automobile. Westerners live in a state of guilt, shame and fear – knowing in their guts, but never acknowledging, the trail of tears they have left in their wake. Their penance is their work, their half-hearted daily grind, their boring monotonous meaningless assignment from the cruel Great White teacher. Their weekends are spent indulging in a swirl of contradictions that, by gosh, they deserve after spending all week doing penance. They break out their speedboats, gorge at fine restaurants, guzzle copious amounts of alcohol and throw their hard-earned money back into the whirling cogs of the system. They do not deserve freedom. They must repent. They are the system.

No one’s heart is sad at birth. No one is filled with gloom when their tiny eyes first awaken to the world outside their mother’s womb. No amount of phony social Darwinist propaganda can make it so. Charles Darwin, whose “survival of the fittest” terminology is often invoked by wealthy fat Republicans as justification for their callous journey through this life, actually argued that the most important key to human and animal survival was “cooperation within species”. The entire debate over whether man is naturally good or evil is itself a dualistic windstorm that could only take place within the simplistic minds of the colonial West.

Surely man has the ability to do both good and evil. He must choose which path to embark upon – one of fear and greed, or one of love and compassion. Yet his circumstances greatly influence the nature of his soul. His environment plays a much greater role than his DNA. Most pit bulls are socialized to be family protectors or worse – stone cold killers. But some pit bulls are not instructed so, and are as gentle as lambs. A grizzly bear in Kodiak, Alaska – well-fed on salmon and unused to human interaction – is much less likely to maul a person than one in Yellowstone National Park, where his habitat is a tiny island of government protection and where ignorant humans are constantly pestering him for photographs.

While the Aryans have a lock on colonization, there were rapists among the Zulu and murderers among the Lakota. These bad apples likely were impacted by negative events in their childhood and the like. But Aryan history books exaggerate these anomalies in an attempt to justify colonial endeavors. Tribal peoples treated their offenders much more compassionately. Wrongdoers in tribal cultures were shunned and sent away for a period of time. Wrongdoers in colonial cultures are executed, upsetting the cosmic balance and reinforcing the dualistic thinking that alienates industrialized man from both earth and other cultures. We can kill criminals because we believe in the dualism that they are the bad people and we the good. The fact that tribal cultures did not kill their criminals speaks volumes to their humility, to their lack of dualism-driven fear and to their earth-inspired wisdom. By all accounts the shunning of offenders worked. Recidivism among Lakota offenders was virtually non-existent. The person knew he did wrong, but he also discovered that his life was too valuable to be taken. Thus, the value of all life was reinforced in both his mind and in the collective mind of the culture.

Modern-day prisoners in South Africa, Israel, the US or China – all subject to death at the whim of their governments – hold no such respect for human life. Nor do the people who live in those countries. The nature of human existence holds no relevance in arguments for or against the death penalty. Nor does it matter in any discussion of social policy. Our decision is one of which path we shall take from right here and now. Will we choose a path of darkness and nihilism, or will we choose one that restores balance and harmony to earth and its inhabitants? When we feel good about who we are we do good things. Happiness and justice are two results of harmony – one and the same thing.

McLeod Ganje sits above Dharamsala, which is perched at 6,400’ above sea level. McLeod is a refuge for Tibetans who fled their homes following the 1949 Chinese Revolution. Their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama led them to this new mountain home, also a refuge for travelers to India who grow weary of the hot crowded hassle-ridden lowlands. Here there is much compassion and deafening silence, echoing cheerfully off snow-capped peaks.

Today the 14th Dalai Lama speaks at a three-day celebration of Tibetan culture. His presence is gentle power to an open heart. His message is compassion, which is the central tenet of Tibetan Buddhism. This ideal emerged from the philosophies of Ghautama Buddha, who centuries earlier in northern India, recognized that of all the values revered in his native Hinduism, compassion was the only one that really mattered. The Dalai Lama does not blame the invasion by Chairman Mao’s Red Army for his people’s tribulations. He attributes the act to the karma of the Tibetan people themselves. He discourages divisive language of any kind since it creates a reality where dualistic thought becomes the paradigm. Without duality there can be no enemies. He encourages compassionate living as the path to good karma and nirvana. To en-courage is to be courageous. To dis-courage is cowardice.

This tiny village is living peace – heaven on earth. I have not seen a happier, more content or more compassionate people. I feel it in the simple gourmet food, in the sparse spotless hotel rooms that you pay for when you leave, in the suddenly smiling Westerners taken aback by the joy of the place, and in the Himalayan foothills that surround the village and remind me of my smallness – peaks now shrouded in gray-white billowy clouds through which even more remote villages come into view. This evening the sound of Tibetan gongs mingles with the chattering of rhesus monkeys and macaques playing in the surrounding forest. The few cars here carry Indian tourists back down the mountain, leaving in their wake a silence so profound that I feel every dry swallow and breath of air. The sun lays itself to rest over the Changra Valley and the gentle hand of the Buddha blankets McLeod Ganje in starry darkness.

After my usual breakfast of lemon curd cake and mint tea at the Toepa Restaurant, I begin my ascent towards the Tibetan children’s village, where a festival is in its second day. I pass dancing monks in outrageous costumes and a monastery where young monks debate with the fire of Fidel Castro. I can’t stop walking. Soon I arrive at Dal Lake. I turn left on a road heading up into the Daula Dar range. I pass through the village of Niddi, where Gadi nomadic herder girls tend their sheep and goats. At the next village of Talanu the pavement ends. I take a narrow winding dirt path around the side of a majestic mountain and suddenly, I am struck with awe.

Perched high on a ridge jutting out amidst a panorama of Himalayan peaks sits Nande Ashram. I walk to the door and am greeted with a gentle smile. The man does not say a word, but motions me inside. He leads me to a bare room, closing the door behind him as he leaves. I sit in lotus position and meditate for many hours, focusing on the in and out motions of my diaphragm muscle – focusing on my breathing, emptying my mind. I emerge into the fresh mountain air a new person. I have escaped the torture of my own mind. I notice everything. I have empathy and love for everyone. I cannot wipe the smile off my face. I pass a young Gadi girl herding goats as I begin my walk down the trail. She is glowing in her bright purple dress and headscarf. She is God.

I float back to the dancing monks feeling myself a tiny but important part of a collective streaming consciousness. Surrounded by Tibetan children, I take a seat at the festivities towards the back of the crowd where I can observe the entire scene – the dancing monks, the exuberant crowd, the sun on the meadow. Westerners snap photos, bored children fidget, and mothers serve their families tea from air pots sitting on blankets on the cool grass. The colorful monks move in slow motion to the deliberate rhythms of a small drum corps, occasionally twirling suddenly as if disturbed from their slumber.

Tonight I go to Bhagsu School, site of an all-night party. I am greeted at the door with a glass of Tibetan beer. Before I am finished, I have another full glass in my hand, then another. There is no talk of money. Only more smiles and more rice beer. Three hours later I stumble down the hill. In the moonlight I notice a woman. Soon we are laughing uncontrollably and smoking hash. She is a gem-smuggler from the Netherlands. I zigzag my way back to the Tibetan Guest House for one last night’s sleep in heaven.

A man on a scooter picks me up in the morning chill just outside Dharamsala. He agrees to take me to his hometown of Kanga. We stop for a warm-up and tea. He is an Indian lawyer, a well-educated public defender. He launches into a political diatribe denouncing CIA involvement in the Punjab drugs for guns trade that fuels the war in Kashmir just north of here. He says the CIA pushes brown sugar (unrefined heroin) on India’s youth in an attempt to shut down their minds, while providing arms to separatists in an attempt to partition India. He says that India’s leadership in the Non-Aligned Movement is what makes his socialist country a target of the US.

I wait at the bus station in Kanga, fending off Indian youth and their predictable inquiries regarding American women and war movies. The bus to Dehra Dun leaves at 10:00 PM. I will go to Rishikesh, where John Lennon and George Harrison spent time meditating on the meaning of life. The Garwhal Mountains beckon. I pass time reading J. Khrishnamurti, who proclaims that it is at the very moment when one sees oneself as separate from the other – from the whole – that corruption begins.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

But it sure was a hoot yesterday watching neo-cons warmongers like Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) squirm and bristle at Paul’s filibuster attack on the Obama Administration drone policy.

Equally entertaining was watching MSNBC liberal parakeets from Maddow to Schultz to O’Donnell make fun of Paul’s 13-hour filibuster, before being corrected by more brain-laden lefty guests who weren’t too keen on having drones circling over their houses in the future either.

It was a moment of hope, where the muddy middle of the political road – which the powers-that-be strive to keep well-trafficked – washed out and was, for a fleeting moment, discredited.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t for a second buy into the currently in vogue notion proposed by Alex Jones and the like, that the entire right/left paradigm is a fallacy. Once you’ve toiled on a jobsite for a lazy bellicose boss/owner, that idea doesn’t have a chance in hell of sticking.

When you’ve traveled to places where people with names like Sandinista, ZANU-PF, FMLN, New People’s Army and Viet Minh have formed guerrilla armies to struggle against a rich land-hoarding oligarchy, always backed by US corporations and their European bankers; that dog don’t hunt anymore.

Historically, the right/left paradigm is as real as it gets in politics.

Trouble is, in the US there is no organized left and hasn’t been since the days when Socialist leader Eugene Debs was in jail, while International Workers of the World rabble rouser Wild Bill Haywood was on his way into exile in Russia to avoid the right-wing death squads who killed many of his Wobblie comrades.

To call President Obama a liberal is a stretch. To call him a Communist is absurd. He is a moderate Democrat. In this country that means right of center. If you don’t believe me, ask the widow of Hugo Chavez.

Obama’s continuance of Reagan-inspired monopoly capitalist policies has created the greatest wealth concentration in this country’s history. Socialism? Come on man!

Many well-meaning right-wing “truthers” have no background in political theory. Maybe they grew up wealthy and unconsciously became Republicans. Maybe they never took any Political Science classes in college.

Maybe they never found themselves behind a shovel for ten hours a day, seven days a week for minimum fucking wage while some asshole making ten times that spent his day in the heated cab of a brand new pickup driving aimlessly about.

Still, politics should be thought of as a circle, since circles (not straight lines) constitute all of natural reality. So at some point extreme right meets extreme left on the “far side”. There may very well be a shit storm if one or both have a real chance to take power – which has also never happened in the US. Nevertheless, the two extremes do meet and can find themselves agreeing on many things.

It is clear to the nation that Republicans have abused the filibuster to the point of Congressional atrophy. It is not very popular right now. Kudos to Sen. Rand Paul for having the courage to use the filibuster as it should be used – to bring into the national political conversation a topic on which both progressives and paleo-cons can agree.

Yeah, he said some crazy stuff and maybe he’s gunning for the 2016 Republican nomination.  But these fucking drones have got to go!

Maybe someday Americans will realize that being in the middle of the road isn’t really where it’s at. Bob Dylan said that. Or was it Chrissie Hynde?

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

Maduro also used the press conference to accuse the US and other foreign countries of poisoning or infecting Chavez to bring on his terminal cancer. Maduro compared Chavez’ condition to that of former Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat just before he died in France in 2004 less than a month after becoming sick.

In November 2012 Arafat’s widow Suha ordered his body exhumed, after she was told by French authorities last summer that high levels of deadly radioactive polonium-210 had been found on Arafat’s toothbrush, sheets and clothing.

Many considered the timing of Arafat’s death highly suspicious and pointed to the Israeli Mossad as the perpetrators. The French investigation is ongoing.

Vice-President Maduro is favored to win the upcoming special election to replace Chavez – who died just two months into his fourth six-year term. They represent the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

Maduro stated today, “We have no doubt that Commandante Chavez was attacked with this illness, we have not a single doubt. The established enemies of our land specifically tried to harm the health of our leader. We already have leads, which will be further explored with a scientific investigation. There have been many cases throughout history, including the most recent, of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat; it’s widely known that was poisoned medically.”

Maduro announced the expulsion today of US military attaché David Delmonaco, while Foreign Minister Elias Jaua announced that a second US Air Force attaché was also kicked out of the country.

Of Delmonaco, Maduro said, “He’s got 24 hours to leave Venezuela. We’re after other forces that are conspiring in this poisonous effort. They’re trying to create disruption. They have taken all possible measures to hurt our economy.”

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was created at the behest of the US and received its funding and direction from its NATO sponsors. [1]  The very concept of an ad hoc tribunal established with the intent of judging events that occur in only one geographic location violates the standard of equity of law.  Attempts by the world community to establish an International Criminal Court, which would have jurisdiction around the world, have failed due to US insistence that American citizens be exempt from prosecution by the court.

This US attitude of being above the law is nothing new.  In 1984 when the World Court ruled that the US should compensate Nicaragua for mining its harbor at Corinto, the US simply ignored the verdict.  As Slobodan Milosevic wrote of the ICTY, “The United States itself, immune from control or prosecution and above the law, uses its power to cause persecution of enemies it selects to terrorize and further demonize.”

The way the ICTY is set up the judge acts in tandem with the prosecution, rather than serving as an impartial arbiter in the case.  As retired British barrister Geoffrey Locke pointed out, “The tribunal makes up its own rules of procedure and evidence and is answerable to nobody…a judge of the very court which is to try the case is not merely empowered, but positively directed, to act as counsel for the prosecution in the preparation of the case and suggest how it could be bolstered or improved”. [2]

The Yugoslav government handed Milosevic over to ICTY after they were promised new loans from the IMF.

For over a month, Milosevic was kept in solitary confinement, unable to talk even with his lawyers, who had trouble even getting visas to the Netherlands.  His cell contained cameras, which recorded his every move.  Milosevic, an accomplished lawyer, wanted to represent himself before the court, but the ICTY at first denied him this basic human right and appointed three amici curiae (friends of the court) to represent him.  The court said Milosevic would not even be allowed a say in his defense strategy, something even the Nazis had allowed Bulgarian Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov, who was able to lead his own defense in the Reichstag Fire Trial of 1933.

Under international pressure, the court finally backed off from this draconian measure.  Still, Milosevic wasn’t allowed to speak at his arraignment without twice having his microphone switched off.  Later at a status conference, where the defense is supposed to be allowed to raise issues of concern, his microphone was again shut off and the judges walked out of the room.  At a third ICTY appearance the court again shut off Milosevic’s microphone after he questioned the court’s legitimacy.

In February 2002 the sham trial of Milosevic commenced.  When on February 13th Milosevic argued that the court had no legitimacy and that the ICTY had orchestrated a “parallel media trial” to establish a verdict before evidence was even presented, Judge May told him that his comments were “irrelevant”.

The next day Milosevic, who had spent seven months in solitary confinement, countered that his “…show trial was part of a larger Western attempt to control the world”.  He then showed a video proving the Racak massacre was a fraud. [3]  A witness he called said that the much-publicized Serb massacre at Srbenica was, in fact, instigated by French intelligence.

By August 2002 Milosevic had turned the tables on the kangaroo court, presenting a steady stream of well-documented information that exposed the CIA/mafia partition of Yugoslavia.  The media suddenly quit covering the trial.  In March 2006, a healthy Slobodan Milosevic suddenly died in his Hague prison cell.  His lawyer and numerous supporters say he was poisoned.

While the US and NATO couched their Yugoslav intervention in ethnic terms, plenty of Croats, Bosnians, Moldavians, Macedonians, Montenegrins and Albanians also continued to see the West as the enemy.  While the US media fixated on the Albanians fleeing US bombings in Kosovo for safety in Macedonia, thousands more Albanians fled the other direction into Belgrade where they supported Milosevic and cursed the NATO aggressors.

One Albanian who landed in Belgrade was Fatmir Seholi, who had been Chief Editor at Radio Television Pristina until NATO troops expelled him from the province.  Seholi had this to say about the war, “Every NATO bombing was a big problem.  The man who could command NATO to bomb people is not human.  He is an animal.  After the bombing at Djakovica I saw decapitated bodies…I saw people without arms, without feet…Who is Clinton to accuse anyone?  I would like to say to Hillary Clinton that her husband is an immoral person.  That man ruined our state for no reason.  What would he say if someone bombed the White House?  Who is the evil man here?  Milosevic, who is protecting the territory of Yugoslavia and protecting the people of Kosovo, or Clinton, who bombs us?”

[665] “War Criminals, Real and Imagined”. Gregory Elich. Covert Action Quarterly. Winter 2001. p.24

[666] Ibid

[667] CNN Headline News. 2-14-02

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

Henderson & Press TV: The Money Trail: The Rockefellers & Trilateral Commission

http://www.presstv.ir/Program/291237.html

In 1996 the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) began training the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The Bundesnachrichtendienst had been launched in 1956 to succeed the Nazi Gehlen organization.  The idea of a Greater Albania was a vision of the Nazis during their WWII occupation of Yugoslavia.  That vision was now shared by NATO.  BND was headed by Hasjorg Geiger, who set up a huge BND regional station in Tirana, Albania in 1995.

The CIA set up a large operation in Tirana a year earlier.  President Sali Berisha had taken charge of the country of Albania earlier in the 1990’s.  Darling of the IMF, he opened Albania’s economy to Western multinationals and banks and was rewarded with a huge IMF loan package.

In 1994, the same year the Company landed in Tirana, a bank pyramid scheme over which Berisha presided with his new IMF kitty suddenly collapsed, obliterating the life savings of thousands of Albanians.  The scheme fit into a pattern of earlier IMF/BCCI coordinated rip-offs of Third World debtor nations.  Berisha was ousted from Tirana, but fled to northern Albania and took control of this increasingly lawless region, which became a major smuggling route for Golden Crescent heroin and arms.

With help from the Albanian secret police (SHIK), CIA and BND recruited potential KLA fighters from the ranks of these smugglers, many of whom the CIA had helped get into the smack business in Peshawar, Pakistan a decade earlier[1].  German Kommandos Spezialkrafte (KSS) wearing black uniforms trained the KLA and armed them with East German weapons.  Later in neighboring Kosovo there were many reports of men wearing black uniforms terrorizing Kosovo peasants.  While the US claimed these were Yugoslav Special Forces they were likely members of the German KSS who were leading KLA raids inside Kosovo.

The KLA took to wearing Bundeshehr combat jackets with German insignia.  Germany was the first country to recognize Croatia in 1990, even before Croatian separatists had begun their revolt against Belgrade.  The Germans spearheaded the campaign that encouraged Croatia to secede from Yugoslavia.  When the new government was established in Zagreb, it adopted the flag and national anthem of Hitler’s puppet Utashe.  In 1998 the KLA had been a small terrorist cell with only 300 members.  After a year of steady arms shipments and training from the US, Britain and Germany; the KLA became a major guerrilla army with 30,000 members.  Osama bin Laden senior lieutenant Mohammed al-Zawahiri served as a KLA commander.

KLA provocations served as the pretext for NATO aggression against Yugoslavia and for the partition of mineral and oil-rich Kosovo.  Yugoslav security forces battled KLA terrorism while also clamping down on incidents of excessive Serb retaliation, arresting more than 500 Serbs for crimes against Albanian civilians. [2]  President Milosevic had always advocated ethnic equality and harmony.  His delegation to the Rambouillet peace talks in France consisted of people from every ethnic group in Yugoslavia, including Albanians.  Serbs were actually a minority in the delegation.

A 1992 speech was typical of Milosevic’s thinking on ethnic tensions in Kosovo, which Western intelligence agencies had historically exploited.  He stated, “We know that there are many Albanians in Kosovo who do not approve of the separatist policy of their nationalist leaders.  They are under pressure, intimidated and blackmailed.  But we shall not respond with the like.  We must respond by offering our hand, living with them in equality and not permitting that a single Albanian child, woman or man be discriminated against in Kosovo in any way.  We must…insist on a policy of brotherhood, unity and ethnic equality in Kosovo.  We shall persevere on this policy.”[3]

By the end of its Yugoslav bombing campaign NATO had moved into Kosovo as an occupation force under the auspices of KFOR.  NATO continued to turn a blind eye to renegade KLA bands who attacked Serb civilians under KFOR watch, while aiding and abetting NLA rebels now attempting to lop off a piece of Macedonia for the international banker cause.  The US built its biggest military base since Vietnam in Kosovo. [4]

Meanwhile Albania was being turned into a CIA terrorist training camp, heroin production center and arms supermarket.  A March 6, 1995 report from the Greek Athens News Agency quoted Greek Public Order Minister Sifis Valyrakis as saying that he believed the government of Albania was involved in the production and trafficking of narcotics from Skopje, Macedonia, where US and NATO troops massed during the war in Kosovo.

Valyrakis said opium was being grown in the Chimarra area of southern Albania where heroin labs had sprung up in a triangle area formed by the cities of Gevgeli, Prilep and Pristina in the countries of Albania, Macedonia and breakaway Kosovo.  He cited involvement in the heroin traffic of the US-allied Macedonian military and the Turkish Gray Wolves mafia, long a CIA ally.  He noted a flourishing arms trade developing in Macedonia and Kosovo and said Albanian separatists in Yugoslavia were at the center of both heroin and arms rings, which were being based out of Pristina, home to the NATO KFOR “peacekeeping” effort in Kosovo.

According to historian Alfred McCoy, “Albanian exiles used drug profits to ship Czech and Swiss arms back to Kosovo for the separatist guerrillas of the KLA.  In 1997-1998, these Kosovar drug syndicates armed the KLA for a revolt against Belgrade’s army… Even after the 1999 Kumanovo agreement settled the Kosovo conflict, the UN administration of the province… allowed thriving heroin traffic… Commanders of the KLA… continued to dominate the transit traffic through the Balkans.”[5]

A report filed with Reuters on June 16, 1995 by Benet Koleka from Tirana charged the Albanian government with secretly dumping tons of weaponry into Rwanda prior to the genocide which occurred in that central African country.  Albania’s largest daily Koha Jone reported that several Antonov 122 cargo planes left Gjadri Airbase in Albania loaded with arms bound for Rwanda.  Amnesty International interviewed four of the pilots who flew the Antonovs. All claimed they were working for a British company.

They said they flew the weapons to the Democratic Republic of Congo and unloaded them at Goma airport near the Rwandan border.  They said they also flew loads of weapons to Goma from Israel and that there were Israeli Mossad agents working at Gjadri Airbase who supervised the Albanian operation.  That same year a spooky US defense contractor known as RONCO was in Rwanda under the pretext of de-mining.  Ronco was actually importing military hardware for the Pentagon and passing it out to Rwandan forces just before the Rwandan depopulation began. [6]

The Washington Times reported in 1999, “The Kosovo Liberation Army, which the Clinton Administration has embraced and some members of Congress want to arm as part of a NATO bombing campaign, is a terrorist organization that has financed much of its war effort with profits from the sale of heroin”. [7]

In 1999 a Times of London expose found that the KLA was the world’s main supplier of heroin, inheriting that claim from the last CIA surrogates – the mujahadeen.  Europol joined the governments of Sweden, Switzerland and Germany in investigating KLA ties to the heroin trade.  Walter Kege, head of the drug enforcement unit of Swedish police intelligence stated, “We have intelligence leading us to believe that there is a connection between drug money and the Kosovo Liberation Army.”  Germany’s Berliner Zeitung quoted a Western intelligence report which stated that 900 million Deutsch marks had flowed into Kosovo since the KLA began attacking the Yugoslav government in 1997.  Half was derived from drug proceeds.

German police noted a parallel between the rise of the KLA and an increase in ethnic Albanian heroin trafficking in Germany, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries.  Police in Czechoslovakia tracked down an Albanian who escaped a Norwegian prison where he was serving 12 years for heroin trafficking.  In his apartment they found documents linking him to several arms purchases made on behalf of the KLA. [8]  Germany’s Federal Criminal Agency concluded, “Ethnic Albanians are now the most prominent group in the distribution of heroin in Western consumer countries.”  Europol is preparing a detailed report on KLA/Albanian heroin trafficking for the World Court in The Hague.  Many KLA fighters had been trained at the same heroin-infested camps in Pakistan from which the Afghan Taliban emerged.

In 1997 Chechen warlords trained at those same camps began buying large chunks of real estate in Kosovo.  Saudi-born Chechen rebel leader Emir al-Khattab set up camps in Chechnya to train KLA troops.  Both endeavors were financed through heroin sales, prostitution rings, arms dealing and counterfeiting. [9]  After the KLA was unable to take Kosovo from what remained of Yugoslavia on their own, the US propaganda machine once again ratcheted up the pressure, accusing the Serb majority of conducting another ethnic cleansing campaign, this time against the Kosovo Albanian heroin mafia.  Again the media parroted the CIA campaign to demonize the Serbs.

On March 24, 1999 US bombs rained down on Belgrade.  Milosevic was stalked by Armenian contract killers hired by CIA.  Schools, factories, hospitals, power plants, buses, trains and hay carts loaded with civilians were bombed.  The economic infrastructure of Yugoslavia was decimated- Pink Plan-style.  In a moment of historical irony NATO bombed the same Novi Sad Bridge over the Danube River where thousands of Serbs had died fighting during the Nazi invasion of 1941.  The city of Novi Sad lost two other bridges and an oil refinery.  Resident Jasminka Bajic told of how she lost her husband Milan, as he stood in the doorway of their Novi Sad house, “It was 12:20 AM on June 8, 1999.  No one expected the bombs to hit that close to the houses.  I had to sell all my cattle to buy the gravestone.”[10]

The city of Pancevo near Belgrade was leveled along with numerous fertilizer and petrochemical plants and an oil refinery.  Noxious gases filled the air. Ammonia, mercury and crude oil polluted the Danube.  Pancevo mayor Borislava Kruska called the NATO bombing, “An environmental disaster…a crime against humanity.  The international community is primarily concerned about Novi Sad bridges not because of our suffering but because they want their navigational route opened.”[11]  On May 7, 1999 a NATO bomb destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, provoking sharp rebukes from the Chinese government and its people.  That same day NATO bombs destroyed a hospital and market in Nis killing fifteen people.  Protestors in Belgrade took to calling NATO the Nazi American Terrorist Organization.

All told 2,000 Yugoslav civilians were killed by the NATO bombings and 10,000 more injured.  Thousands more lost their homes and apartments, which were deliberately targeted by NATO bombs in an attempt to convince the Yugoslav people to cry “uncle”. [12]  At Stari Trg mine Director Novak Bjelic, who worked for the Yugoslav state-owned Trepca, said when the US bombing began, “The war in Kosovo is all about the mines, nothing else.  In addition, Kosovo has seventeen billion tons of coal reserves”.

One of the most publicized “massacres” purportedly carried out by the Yugoslav Army against Kosovo Albanians occurred at Racak.  A group called Kosovo International Monitors spearheaded the hype.  Its leader was William Walker, who earlier helped Oliver North’s Enterprise arm the contras.  While Walker spewed his version of the events at Racak to an eager US media, many European media outlets including the BBC, the German Die Welt, Radio France International and the French Le Figaro, began to question Walker’s account, which of course blamed the Serbs.

A French TV crew in Racak when the alleged massacre occurred said the “massacre” had actually been a firefight between the Yugoslav Army and KLA ambushers.  Later men in black uniforms came to the scene and redressed the KLA dead in civilian clothing.  Yugoslav forensics experts agreed that the Racak Massacre was a hoax.  It bore striking similarities to the Breadline Massacre in Bosnia, where it was later found that Muslim fighters had stage-managed a massacre for the Western media. [13]  The incident led to UN sanctions against Yugoslavia.  The French newspaper Le Monde reported from Pristina on January 21, 1999 that two AP journalists had contradicted Walker’s account of the events at Racak.  They said there were few empty rifle cartridges at the site and hardly any blood near the bodies.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe sent in a team of Finnish pathologists at the request of the Yugoslav government, which also invited a second team from Belarus.  Both teams confirmed Yugoslav suspicions that the victims had died from long-range gunshots, with short-range bullet holes and knife wounds inflicted on the already dead bodies.  They also found that bullet holes didn’t match up with tears in the clothing on the bodies, indicating that the clothes had been changed by those black uniformed men- probably the same KSS German Special Forces who trained the KLA.  Neither report was ever published in the US media. The incident was reminiscent of a maneuver that Adolf Hitler used in 1939 to justify his march into Poland.  Hitler dressed dead prisoners in Polish Army uniforms and left them near a border radio station, which Hitler then claimed was attacked by the Polish Army. [14]  Within a week 1.5 million Nazi troops marched into Poland.

BBC News reported in December 2004 that a $1.2 billion oil pipeline, south of that massive US Army base in Kosovo, was approved by the governments of Albania, Bulgaria and Macedonia. [15]

[1] “KLA a Creation of Western Intelligence”. Anthony Wayne. http://www.lawgiver.org 4-11-99

[2] “Milosevic Defiantly Defends His Role in Kosovo Conflict”. Fox News. 8-24-01

[3] “Milosevic Addresses Kosovo Polje Rally”. Radio Belgrade. 12-17-92

[4] Escobar

[5] The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. Alfred W. McCoy. Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press. Chicago. 2001. p.517

[6] Silverstein

[7] Washington Times. 5-3-99

[8] “The KLA: Drug Money Linked to Kosovo Rebels”. The Times of London. 3-24-99

[9] Chossudovsky

[10] “The Danube: Europe’s River of Harmony and Discord”. Cliff Tarpy. National Geographic. March 2002

[11] Ibid

[12] “War Criminals, Real and Imagined”. Gregory Elich. Covert Action Quarterly. Winter 2001. p.22

[13] “Statement on Kosovo in Tandem with the Rockford Institute”. Chronicles. 3-25-99

[14] Marrs. p.171

[15] “al-Qaeda, US Oil Companies and Central Asia”. Peter Dale Scott. Nexus. May-June 2006. p.11-15

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

(Part three of a five-part series excerpted from Chapter 15: Yugoslavia Bad, Greater Albania Good: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

Al Qaeda to the Rescue

Even as President Clinton was hailing an outbreak of peace in the region, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili- now a director at Carlyle Group- was meeting with Croat military commanders in Zaghreb to coordinate the deployment of 25,000 US troops to back the breakaway armies in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Islamic fundamentalists poured into Bosnia. They were trained by ex-Afghan mujahadeen leaders, including Osama bin Laden.  Iranian mullahs were also sending fighters, with blessings from the Clinton Administration.  Bin Laden’s al Qaeda operatives trained a cell of Bosnian fighters known as Takfir wal Hijra (Expiration and Exile).  Some in the Clinton State Department were nervous about the growing ranks of Islamists in Bosnia, but CIA argued against the expulsion of al-Qaeda. [1]  They even arranged to have certain terrorist groups deleted from a State Department watch list so that members could travel freely to the Balkans to take part in the war.

Across the Adriatic Sea in Italy, Imam Anwar Shaban was recruiting fighters for Bosnia at the Islamic Center in Milan.  Shaban was a follower of the radical Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, whom the CIA had brought to the US during the 1980’s to recruit mujahadeen fighters for the Afghan War.  Rahman was spiritual leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, an offshoot of the secret society Muslim Brotherhood that holds sway in the House of Saud.  The Milan Islamic Center was funded by Ahmed Idris Nasreddin, a wealthy Kuwaiti who served as Kuwait’s Honorary Consul to Italy.  Nasreddin founded Al Taqwa, a Swiss Bahamas-based company which changed its name to Nada Management to honor Chairman Youssef Nada, a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Nada Management has recently come under investigation for its role in funding global terrorism. [2]

In 1995 as the government of CIA-protege Gulbuddin Hekmatyar stepped aside in Afghanistan giving way to the Taliban regime, the Taliban handed over its training camps on the Pakistan border to the Pakistani Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), which had supported the rise of the Taliban in close cooperation with Pakistani ISI intelligence.  The JUI recruited and trained volunteers to fight in Bosnia and later in Kosovo.  The Bosnian Army, whose MPRI training was being funded by the Saudis and Kuwaitis, was also being bankrolled by the Golden Crescent heroin trade, whose traffickers were now establishing smuggling routes to Europe through Bosnia. [3]

The CIA arranged safe passage for Islamic Jihad members wanted in Egypt and for Armed Islamic Group (AIG) terrorists on the run in Algeria, where they had toppled the nationalist government of Chadli Benjladid, who had refused to pass the Hydrocarbon Law for the Four Horsemen.  On January 18, 2002 an AIG cell of six operatives was nabbed planning to blow up the US Embassy in Sarajevo.  The embassy’s locksmith was a father-in-law of one of the suspects. He had given AIG keys and access codes to carry out their planned mission.  Thousands of angry Bosnian Muslims protested as the Saudi-backed terrorists were handed over to the US. [4]

Suddenly the US corporate media sounded a less than sympathetic tone towards the Bosnian Muslims, who a few years earlier had been electronically engineered to bring tears to the eyes of every American household.

Ethnic Cleansing in Reverse

Thousands of Bosnian Serbs gathered daily in the Sarajevo suburb of Ilijas to protest the handing over of predominantly Serb suburbs of the city to the Muslim/Croat Federation via the Dayton Accords.  French General Jean-Rene Bachelet, who commanded UN troops in Sarajevo, termed the deal “ethnic cleansing”, the phrase which the US used against the Serbs throughout the war.  Bachelet initially refused to have his troops enforce the Dayton Accord provisions, but eventually bowed under pressure from Paris.

The Yugoslavs were also protesting the presence in their country of 60,000 NATO troops. [5]  Pale Television reported that “NATO forces used low-intensity nuclear weapons when they conducted air strikes on Serb positions around Sarajevo, Gorazde and Majevica in August and September 1995.  Experts have concluded that some people show signs of being contaminated by radiation.”  Pale also reported that “Yugoslav General Djordje Djukic had been tortured by the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague.”  Shortly after the court released the general he died.  As he struggled for his life, Djukic condemned Tribunal Chief Justice Richard Goldstone as a “murderer with a child’s face and a hater of Serbs”. [6]

Pale aired another program titled Genocide, which documented al Qaeda terror against Serbs and featured Borvivoje Sendic, Deputy Chair of the Serb Democratic Party, who commented of the upcoming Yugoslav elections, “The international community will try to intervene in the forthcoming elections.  But the Serbs will not allow themselves to be cheated this time out of respect for all the victims who have fallen…”  Mirjana Markovic, wife of President Milosevic and head of the United Left Party, which is allied with her husband’s Socialist Party, said in 1996 that protestors in Belgrade were fomenting civil war, many carrying US and German flags.  Markovic denounced both nations as “dark powers” behind the tumult.

US interference in Belgrade continued into the new millennium.  On February 7, 2000 Yugoslav Defense Minister Pavle Bula was assassinated at his cousin’s Belgrade restaurant.  Yugoslavia’s Information Minister issued a statement saying “foreign intelligence services” were responsible.  Vojoslav Seselj, leader of the Serbian Radical Party, said the assassination had been carried out by “either US, British or French operatives”. [7]

Milosevic, who was re-elected head of the Socialist Party in November 2000 carrying 86.55% of the vote, was handed over to the War Crimes Tribunal in return for an IMF aid package to the new Belgrade government.  Milosevic was defiant in The Hague, saying he didn’t have to answer questions because the court had no legitimacy or jurisdiction.  He called the Tribunal “the new Gestapo in the Hague”, and said “genocide had been carried out against the Serbs by part of the international community”.

Peter Finn, the Washington Post journalist who had led the attacks on the Milosevic, uncritically spewing out the CIA-fabricated charges of ethnic cleansing by Serbs, spent the year 2000 admitting he had been hoodwinked regarding alleged Serb atrocities.  Finn wrote in the January 17, 2000 issue of the Post, “Western accusations that there were Serb-run rape camps…and poorly sourced allegations in some publications that the Serbs were engaging in mutilations of the dead and the living…all proved false.”

Yugoslav children had their own way of protesting the hijacking of their country.  At Peter Petrovic Nyegos primary school students were asked to lend their artistic talents to help summarize the war being waged on their country.  One child drew a picture of a fat American prostitute walking a little dog named “Europe”, another portrayed the Ku Klux Klan lynching Serb soldiers, while a third depicted UNICEF airplanes bombing Serb children.

The Brown & Root of the Problem

The Croatian Army bought many weapons from German arms dealer Ernst Werner Glatt, a favorite CIA supplier to both the Nicaraguan contras and the Afghan mujahadeen.  At one point Glatt was shipping the Croats $200 million worth of arms per year, with much of the tab picked up by the Saudis.  Glatt did so well for himself that he was able to retire on a Virginia estate that he calls Black Eagle.  The black eagle was the official emblem of the German Nazi government and had been Oliver North’s code-name for the contra-cocaine operations being overseen by Panamanian General Manuel Noriega on behalf of his CIA and Mossad bosses. [8]

Military contracts were being doled out like candy throughout the Balkans conflict, but no firm received more than did Brown & Root, which later merged with construction giant MW Kellogg to become KBR. KBR is a subsidiary of Houston-based Halliburton, where Dick Cheney was at the helm.  Halliburton also owns Dresser Industries, where Lawrence Eagleburger was on the board of directors.  The firm is a global octopus with operations in 130 countries and over 100,000 employees.  Cheney wasn’t particular about his firm’s customers, doing brisk business with Nigerian dictators, Saddam Hussein and the military junta of Myanmar alike. [9]

Brown & Root was paid $546 million to build latrines, barracks and other infrastructure necessary to maintain NATO and UN troops occupying Yugoslavia.  Three years later the company was paid another $400 million for logistical support in Bosnia, Croatia and Hungary, where a Brown & Root subsidiary known as International American Products provided troop support.  Its Hungarian kitchen workers accused US troops who frequented their workplace of constant sexual harassment and exploitation.

Cheney’s company also got contracts to beef up US military bases in Italy.  Brown & Root, which has enjoyed a no-bid monopoly over the troop support business since the Gulf War, made over $260 million doing similar work during US military adventures in Haiti, Somalia and Rwanda. [10]

In 1999 it received a $900 million contract in the Balkans.  In 2000, the year Cheney stepped down to become the running mate of candidate Bush Jr., Brown & Root was awarded a $300 million contract by the US Navy to improve overseas bases, a $100 million contract to improve US Embassy security around the world and a $40 million contract to maintain the National Institutes of Health.  Cheney received a whopping $20 million retirement package from Halliburton.  He kept $10 million in stock options. Cheney’s salary at Halliburton, where he was Chairman and CEO from 1995-2000, was $1.3 million/year. [11]

In 1996 US Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor arrived in Zaghreb with representatives of 18 US multinationals.  Kantor and his entourage negotiated an investment agreement to rebuild Croatia that would be a boon to the companies.  Bechtel, never remiss to sniff out a government contract, got two to build power plants from the government of Croatia.  Much of the Bosnian reconstruction effort was headed by the 353rd Civil Affairs Command, a Bronx Army Reserve Unit with big-time connections to corporate America.  The unit was headed by US Army Colonel Michael Hess, who frequented the brand new World Bank office set up in Sarajevo.

Hess’ usual employer was Citigroup, where he served as Relationship Manager for Scandinavia, Finland and the Benelux nations.  Another member of the 353rd was a vice-president at ABN Amro Holdings NV, the Dutch banking giant that in 1997 took over the failed British old-money Barings Bank and was later merged into Royal Bank of Scotland.  The 353rd included an engineer for Schering-Plough, a broker for Merrill Lynch and a former AT&T executive.  Other members worked with Texas Instruments, American Airlines, private Saudi military trainer BDM International and defense giant Lockheed Martin.  ABN Amro banker Renato Bacci took charge of training Bosnia’s bankers in the transition from socialism to capitalism.  353rd Lieutenant Colonel Gerry Suchanek taught economics at the University of Iowa.  He said of his job, “Everything I do at home is about teaching capitalism.  Everything I do here is similar.”[12]

The CIA had completed its partition of most of Yugoslavia and the agents of international capital were taking over.  Problem was, Yugoslavia still controlled Stari Trg mine, massive coal reserves and the Adriatic oilfields which Big Oil coveted.  Gaining those assets would require the severing of one more chunk of territory from the unruly Belgrade central government.

[1] Bin Laden’s Invisible Network”. Evan Thomas. Newsweek. 10-29-01. p.42

[2] “New Links in the bin Laden Money Chain”. Mark Hosenball. Newsweek. 11-12-01

[3] “Who is Osama bin Laden?” Michel Chossudovsky. http://www.globalresearch.ca 11-2001

[4] CNN Headline News. 1-18-02

[5] “Serbs Will Never Give In, Military Chief Says”. AP. Great Falls Tribune. 12-3-95. p.1

[6] “TV Station Feeds Serbs Exclusive Propaganda”. Chris Hedges. New York Times. 6-9-96

[7] Cody. p.1

[8] Silverstein

[9] “The Roving Eye: Pipelineistan, Part I: The Rules of the Game”. Pepe Escobar. Asia Times Online. 1-25-02

[10] “Bosnia Mission Enriches Firm Headed by Ex-Defense Official”. AP. Missoulian. 3-23-96

[11] “Cheney’s Firm Profited from Military Roles Bush Attacked”. AP. St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 8-27-00. p.A1

[12] “An Army Reserve Unit Guides Reconstruction of Postwar Bosnia”. Thomas Ricks. Wall Street Journal. 6-10-96. p.A1

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

Material possessions are a positive hindrance to the elevation of mankind

(This article first appeared in Multinational Monitor and is part of Chapter 3: Chiapas via Alaska: The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries)

A century of mining and decades of clear-cutting have taken their toll on Western Montana’s formerly pristine Blackfoot River. Once a world-class trout stream and the subject of Norman McLean’s classic novel A River Runs Through It, the river has been transformed into a muddy concoction of heavy metals and silt flowing west from the Continental Divide into the Clark Fork River just east of Missoula, Montana.

There are virtually no fish in the river now. The Blackfoot drainage has been so badly denuded by Wall Street robber barons that when Robert Redford came to Montana to produce the recent movie based on McLean’s novel, he chose to film on the Gallatin River instead. In April 1992 American Rivers listed the Blackfoot among the ten most endangered rivers in the United States, noting that the river may not be able to withstand another industry onslaught. It now appears this day of reckoning is just around the bend.

In 1989, while Champion International was busy clear-cutting the lower Blackfoot to feed its newly retooled mill at Bonner, Montana, mining firms began exploring for gold east of Lincoln, Montana – near the headwaters of the river. The two companies, Phelps Dodge and Canyon Resources, formed the Seven-Up Pete Venture, later renamed the McDonald Gold Project. By 1992 it had become apparent that the project site contained 8.2 million ounces of gold. If given the go-ahead, it will be the largest gold mine in North America, and one with potentially dire ecological consequences.

“A century of mining, grazing and logging have all but destroyed [the Blackfoot] river,” says Dan Funsch, outreach director for the Missoula-based Alliance for the Wild Rockies. “Now, for a few lousy wedding rings, the McDonald Gold Project wants to finish it off.”

Enter Echo Bay

With gold prices on the rise and mounting opposition from environmentalists and sports enthusiasts, Phelps Dodge Mining Company announced in June 1994 that it will sell its 72% majority share in the McDonald Gold Project for $150 million. Under the proposed deal, Canyon Resources Corporation would increase its share of the mine from 28% to 45% percent. Echo Bay Mining – a notorious Canadian gold mining company – would become majority owner and operator of the McDonald Gold Project.

The McDonald Gold Project will employ cyanide heap leaching to recover the gold. In this process a cyanide solution is sprayed over heaps of extracted ore. Gold settles at the bottom of the solution onto a heap leach pad and the toxic ore is hauled to a waste site. The process became popular in the mid-1970s and has resulted in a gold mining boom in Montana and elsewhere, since it is much cheaper and faster than other methods of gold mining. The environmental consequences are also much more nefarious.

The project plans call for creating an open pit a square mile wide and 1,400 feet deep that would not be reclaimed. As a result, the pit will eventually fill with runoff containing thirty-three different elements, many of which will be highly toxic metals. Since the water table in the area is as high as 300 feet below the surface of the ground, many fear this toxic soup could easily contaminate the area’s drinking water. The mine is located where Landers Fork – an important bull trout spawning stream – and the Blackfoot meet. Any leaks under the leaching pad could dump cyanide into the groundwater supply or into the river itself.

Company representatives deny the cyanide heap leaching process is environmentally harmful. Cheryl Martin – director of investor relations at Canyon Resources Corporation – claims, “We feel that we can build a permittable mine that will not impact the [Blackfoot] river in any way.” Rick Lambert, McDonald Gold Project chief engineer for Phelps Dodge says, “You have to understand the geological situation. Here we have an oxide deposit since there is primarily gold. In Butte where there have been problems with acid water, the deposit is sulfide since it’s mostly copper. Spraying cyanide over gold is like pouring salt into water. The only problems that could occur are if cyanide reacts with other gases.” An Echo Bay Mining representative declined to comment on the mine, stating, “I cannot speak for a mine that we do not own.”

Environmentalists fear other detrimental consequences of the mine. They note with concern that the mining project, which is expected to last 12 years, will produce 400 million tons of cyanide-laden ore waste, which will be piled near Landers Fork close to Highway 200.

Some environmentalists believe the project is actually the first stage of a grand plan by the mining industry. The mining companies will apparently be designing their facilities to accommodate more ore than they intend to extract at the McDonald Gold Project. Geological evidence points to incredible mineral wealth in the entire Upper Blackfoot Valley.

Independent filmmaker and mining industry critic Gene Bernofsky of Missoula thinks Montana may be entering another round of mineral colonization. Bernofsky recently won acclaim for A River Cries, a film that chronicles the Blackfoot’s demise and the proposed mine. He says Montana may be heading toward a heyday for global mining firms comparable to the early 1900s – when the Rockefeller-controlled and viciously anti-union Anaconda Company created what is now the biggest Superfund site in the nation near Missoula, Montana. “Echo Bay aspires to go down in history next to the Anaconda Company. We aspire to keep them out of Montana,” he says.

The Baucus Connection

The McDonald Gold Project covers forty-four square miles of state and private lands. The private land is owned by Sieben Ranch Corporation – the largest sheep ranch in Montana owned since 1896 by the Baucus family. Montana’s Democratic Senator Max Baucus holds between $250,000 and $500,000 in stock in Sieben Ranch. Whether Baucus has a financial interest in the success of the McDonald Gold Project is unclear. Curt Rich – Baucus administrative aide who specializes in natural resources policy – says he knows of no royalties or lease agreements. “Siebens is run by Max’s brother. Max does not get involved in management decisions of the corporation,” says Rich, who failed to follow up on a promise to research the financial agreement between Siebens and the McDonald Gold Project and then contact Multinational Monitor.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

(This article first appeared in Multinational Monitor in 1992 and also appears in Chapter 12: Zootown: The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries. The article remains timely though Burlington Northern has gotten yet more powerful, swallowing up Sante Fe RR to become BNSF – the largest railroad corporation in the US)

Burlington Northern (BN) gave pink slips to 190 out of 250 workers at its locomotive repair shop in Havre, Montana. Eight percent of the locomotive repair workers at BN’s Glendive, Montana shop were also given notice. Similar job cuts occurred at BN facilities in Minnesota, Nebraska, Illinois and Washington – saving the company about $9 million a year. The cuts were made in the wake of General Electric’s production of new high-technology locomotives that are able to traverse the entire High Line between Chicago and Seattle without any en route servicing.

Job insecurity is nothing new to railroad workers, and certainly not to BN employees. Over the last decade, the company’s payroll has plummeted from 52,000 to below 30,000, despite protracted campaigns waged by rail unions – including the United Transportation Union (UTU), the International Association of Machinists, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers and Blacksmiths. Since deregulation of the railroads via passage of the 1980 Staggers Rail Act – which removed government controls on rail shipping rates – the industry has undergone massive changes. With BN leading the pack, the industry has experienced a flurry of mergers, the shutdown of smaller depots and spur lines (lines that branch off from main tracks) and rapid replacement of human labor with technological innovation. The consequences have been devastating for dozens of communities and thousands of workers.

When BN merged with San Francisco/Santa Fe Railroad in 1980, it became the largest of the remaining rail oligopolies in North America – with over 26,000 miles of track stretching from Pensacola, Florida to Vancouver, British Columbia. That same year, Milwaukee Road Railroad went bankrupt, leaving BN with a virtual monopoly over rail traffic from the Midwest to the Pacific Ocean. Scores of Midwestern towns like Eureka, South Dakota – which had depended on the railroad to haul their bountiful wheat harvests – saw their steel rails abandoned, even torn up, by BN workers. BN regarded stops not located on the High Line as inefficient.

BN has been aided and abetted by the U.S. federal government in undertaking the activities which have cruelly dislocated workers and communities. There is a strange logic to the federal government’s role. It helped create and continues to subsidize BN, despite the company’s dismal social and environmental record.

Railroading Workers

All of organized labor has been under attack from management since Ronald Reagan gave striking PATCO air traffic controllers the ultimatum to return to work or be fired in 1981. Since then, rail workers have had to fight not only their corporate employers, but also federal regulators.

In 1987 BN transferred its southern Montana main line – which connects Sandpoint, Idaho with Huntley, Montana – to Montana RailLink. RailLink was resurrected from obscurity by Missoula-based business mogul Dennis Washington. The spin-off came during pending contract negotiations between the UTU and BN. Washington hired scabs, eliminated the job of caboose engineer and sent thousands of union workers packing. UTU members from North Dakota to Washington went on strike, but just five hours into the picket, U.S. District Court Judge Dennis Steart issued BN a restraining order to force an end to the strike. Although RailLink is not a legal subsidiary of Burlington Northern, BN retains control over the main line, since it owns and operates all connecting lines.

In 1991 UTU and the International Machinists union called a strike against BN in response to the company’s foot-dragging on the workers’ contract, which would ultimately cut crew sizes. On April 17, 1991 Congress issued Joint Resolution 222, which curtailed workers’ right to strike, ordering unionists back to work while federally appointed special mediators arbitrated between the unions and BN. The arbitrators approved all recommendations made by Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) 219, an ad hoc group created by the Bush administration which advised industry to streamline operations by cutting jobs, and urged the federal government to grant huge tax breaks to companies that followed PEB prescriptions.

The key PEB 219 recommendation was that crew sizes on trains be cut from 3.65 persons to 2.25 persons. Six months after the recommendations were issued, Burlington Northern announced the elimination of brake operator jobs on 65% of its lines and additional ground service cuts – amounting to 5,100 jobs sacrificed. Backed into a corner by Congress, UTU was forced to swallow the dubious medicine or lose members’ jobs altogether. According to John Peter Paul, chair of the International Machinists Union, “Ninety percent of railroad workers did not accept the contract. It was shoved down their throats by PEB 219.”

The United Transportation Union is still trying to negotiate a new contract with BN. UTU General Chair Rick Marceau says that the union is “…of course most insistent that our members who are disadvantaged receive a level of protection. It has always been UTU’s stance that any jobs that are eliminated should be as a result of attrition – like when the numbers of firefighters were reduced during the 1960s.”

Burlington Northern was rewarded by the Bush administration with a $735 million second quarter 1991 special charge tax deferral which will go toward worker relocation, workers’ compensation claims and anticipated environmental cleanup. In other words, U.S. taxpayers will subsidize BN’s injuries against workers and the environment.

As for the May 1992 cuts, Roger Campbell – director of external communications at BN – says simply, “All affected employees were offered similar positions at other BN facilities in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Seattle, Washington.” He adds that in the case of the UTU, BN offered “an opportunity for voluntary separation in return for severance payments of up to $60,000 per employee.” BN Chief Executive Officer William Greenwood said at the time of the lay-offs, “The decision was especially difficult for BN because of the exceptionally high quality work performed by all our shop’s employees. Their contributions to our locomotive and car operations have been superb.”

BN’s Family Tree

The history of the BN empire provides a textbook case of corporate welfare. The company became official in 1970 when Chief Justice Earl Warren – in a departure from his normally regulationist stance – declared legal a 1901 gentlemen’s agreement between James Hill and J.P. Morgan to consolidate their respective railroads – Great Northern and Northern Pacific (NP). Prior to the ruling the companies had functioned almost as a single entity, occupying the same headquarters despite the fact that an official merger had been disallowed on anti-trust grounds by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1904.

Under the 1864 Northern Pacific Land Grant, Morgan’s company had received 40 million acres of free land in return for NP promises to lay railroad track from Lake Superior to the Pacific Coast. NP did not deliver on its promises, but kept the land, winning a lawsuit brought against it by the U.S. government in 1880. When NP went belly-up in 1893, J.P. Morgan stepped in to prop up the company with 100 and 150-year bonds secured by Land Grant property.

The Morgan liens were retired in 1988 when then-BN chair Richard Bressler unhitched the railroad from its Land Grant properties by creating Burlington Resources (BR). With bondholders paid off, Burlington Resources was able to fully exploit the mineral, oil and gas deposits on the Land Grant properties which have made BN one of the U.S. West’s largest landholders. Properties that had no resource value were liquidated by a BR subsidiary – Glacier Park Inc. – which was formed as a real estate company to market unwanted BN Land Grant properties. As of December 31, 1991 proceeds from these sales totaled over $400 million – most of which has been invested in coal, oil and gas properties.

Since the spin-off of Burlington Resources, BN has engaged in a frenzy of limited partnerships and partial sales to take advantage of the 1987 tax reform law, which contains a loop-hole whereby resource companies which form limited partnerships do not have to pay any federal taxes. But while BN has spun off several companies, it has kept control of its empire through interlocking directorates and major stockholdings.

The BN Empire

Burlington Northern owns portions of most major railway terminals and also boasts trucking firms, real estate development companies in New Mexico and Arizona, a communications company in Virginia and a railroad car leasing unit – BN Leasing Corporation. Amtrak operates service on BN tracks, under contract with and heavily subsidized by the U.S. government. The company has offices throughout the world, with significant joint ventures in Japan with Sumitomo and Mitsubishi, and in South Korea with the Korea Electric Power Company. BN also operates the only foreign-owned railroad in the former Soviet Union.

Soon after BN’s official formation in 1970, the company began swallowing up smaller resource companies, which became integrated components of its rail monopoly. BN has made important acquisitions, including El Paso Natural Gas – an oil and gas holding company which operates 20,000 miles of natural gas pipeline from Oklahoma to California. El Paso – purchased by BN in December 1991 – is 50% owner of the Mojave pipeline, the only gas pipeline to California. Another substantial subsidiary is Meridian Oil – a Houston-based company which holds title to ten million acres of proven oil and gas reserves from Alabama to North Dakota. In 1991 Meridian purchased off-shore Gulf of Mexico properties and is now the largest non-integrated oil company in the United States.

Sacrificing Forests

On December 31, 1992 Burlington Resources sold its general partnership interest and other remaining interests in what had been perhaps its most significant subsidiary – Plum Creek Timber. In 1989, only a year after BR was created as the resource branch of BN, Plum Creek – 11% of which was owned by BN – was spun off as a limited partnership. While Burlington Resources retained an 11% interest as one partner, it was able to transfer $325 million in long-term debt to Plum Creek, thereby avoiding a potential leveraged buyout. Since 1989 Plum Creek has paid nothing in federal taxes. The company owns more old-growth timber (1.4 million acres) and more grizzly bear habitat than any other private landholder in the United States.

Since BN bought the company in the early 1970s, Plum Creek has carved out 640-acre clearcuts from the Cascade Range to Montana’s Swan Valley, leading Rep. Rod Chandler (D-WA) to proclaim the company the “Darth Vader of the timber industry.”

Most of the trees which Plum Creek cuts in the Cascade Range are not processed locally. They are sent to the Pacific Rim in raw form for milling – primarily to Japan through BN’s joint venture with Sumitomo Forestry. After consummating its relationship with Sumitomo in early 1990, Plum Creek shut down all of its West Coast sawmills, putting thousands of mill workers out of their jobs. By way of justifying the job cuts, industry propagandists concocted the infamous spotted owl crisis, dividing timber workers and environmentalists despite the fact that over-cutting and raw log exports shut down mills before the owl was listed as an endangered species.

While Plum Creek shut down its coastal mills, it re-tooled mills in the intermountain region with high-tech capital-intensive equipment. Plum Creek’s Evergreen, Montana facility – which recently received the largest fine ever levied by Montana’s Department of Health and Environmental Sciences for air quality violations – provides a classic example of the costs associated with capital-intensive mills. In the past few years, the mill has slashed its workforce by over 30%. Nonetheless, more trees must be cut to keep pace with the new saws. It is this kind of short-term, cut-and-run corporate ethic which has created both a timber shortage and a job shortage in the region. In 1989 Plum Creek cut a record 597 million board feet of timber.

Loren Rose – financial officer for Pyramid Lumber of Seeley Lake, Montana – says, “If you drive up the Swan Valley, you get sick in a big hurry. It’s not that logging in itself is bad, but the way Plum Creek does it is intense.”

Plum Creek Director of Corporate Affairs Sharon Kanariss responds, “We disagree that we over-log. We are working to get our logging into a managed state. Currently in the Rocky Mountain area 80% of our logging is done through selective harvesting and only 12% by clear cutting.”

Through market manipulations, the company has ensured that there are no competitors to provide an alternative milling model. In 1989 Rep. Pat Williams (D-MT) accused Plum Creek of deliberately bidding the price of federal Forest Service timber beyond the reach of locally owned mills in order to eliminate future competition. Three years later mills such as Stoltze-Connor, WTD Industries and Intermountain Lumber are out of business in western Montana. Williams’s claim now seems beyond dispute.

Mike Bader, executive director of the Missoula, Montana-based Alliance for the Wild Rockies, says, “Plum Creek means environmental terrorism. The company epitomizes a colonial power coming in to extract resources, demonstrating blatant disregard for both the land and its people.”

BN’s Big Appetite

While BN reaches into numerous industries, rail transport remains its bread and butter. One third of BN’s cargo is coal. The company currently hauls all coal from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin and will be the exclusive transporter of coal from the Bull Mountains Mine north of Roundup, Montana where mining activity will begin early this year.

After coal, the railroad’s second biggest money-maker is grain. In 1986, San Antonio’s Public Service Board filed a complaint against Burlington Northern for excessive freight charges during the height of the Texas wheat harvest. A number of Montana elected officials – including Rep. Pat Williams and Public Utilities Commissioner John Driscoll – also accused the company of hiding freight cars – that is, lying about their grain-hauling capacity – to create the illusion of a rail car shortage to justify its exorbitant rates.

In 1989 the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) – after receiving numerous complaints from farmers – ordered BN to repay $9 million to Great Plains farmers whom the railroad overcharged for hauling their grain to Pacific ports. On February 9, 1993, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals overruled the ICC decision.

Many farmers can testify to BN’s outlandish hauling charges. Randy Johnson, former president of the Montana Graingrower’s Association, claims that BN takes 20-34% off the top of the state’s wheat crop each year. Ted Schye, a Glasgow, Montana wheat farmer, says “I feel almost like a sharecropper to BN…,” because the company takes “…a third of my crop every year.”

Former Montana Public Service Commissioner John Driscoll blames BN for many of Montana’s economic woes. “We’re being made economically anemic by this parasite,” says Driscoll. BN’s monopoly over rail traffic puts it in an extraordinarily powerful position in rail-dependent Montana. Here the company services 98% of all grain elevators. In Texas and Oklahoma, BN controls 90% of grain transportation.

Cheating on Public Land

Like the titans of numerous U.S. industries, BN is heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, harms the environment, exploits its workers and hurts small business. Critics wonder why the company is given such free rein.

Like any successful business rogue, Burlington Northern is a major player in the game of Washington influence peddling. Its various political action committees contribute almost $1 million a year to a cross-section of the Congress and Senate, with the largest donations going to representatives from states with a major BN presence. Last year, for example, BN’s railroad political action committee contributed $10,000 to Sen. James Exxon (D-NE) and $9,000 to Sen. Larry Pressler (R-SD). Burlington Resources has its own political action committee, as do several of its subsidiaries. BN’s efforts are supplemented by the industry group Association of American Railroads, which gives generous donations at election time, and which is supported by Burlington Northern.

Over the past twelve years, BN has been given federal encouragement to mechanize people out of jobs and export valuable resources tax-free to foreign countries, while the Bush administration and industry hammered spotted owls and “jobs vs. the environment” arguments into the public psyche. Many people are no longer buying this rhetoric.

Don Driscoll – mayor of Havre, Montana – has seen his community devastated by BN job cuts. Driscoll says bluntly, “Jobs are not being created [by increased logging] and don’t let anybody tell you they are. Corporate America needs to examine its soul. All I see inside [BN officers’] heads is numbers jumping over numbers. What about American workers and their families?”

Dr. John Osborne – President of Spokane, Washington-based Inland Empire Public Lands Council – thinks he has the solution to the problem of Burlington Northern. “If BN has not lived up to the letter and spirit of [its] Land Grant, [Burlington Northern] should forfeit [its] lands,” he says. By law, Congress can force Burlington Northern to do just that, as soon as it finds the courage to do so.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

(Part two of a five-part series excerpted from Chapter 15: Yugoslavia Bad, Greater Albania Good: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

Untermenschen

The CIA-fed US media never once examined the shameful historical parallels to their demonization of the Serb people.  Nearly a half a century earlier Adolf Hitler used the exact same tactics to justify his genocide against Serbs.  In 1939 Hitler’s Nazis invaded Yugoslavia.  He called the Serbs untermenschen, which means “less than human”.  Meanwhile the aristocratic families of Yugoslavia, largely Muslims who gained power during the reign of the Ottoman Empire, banded together with the largely Croat business class, to form the pro-Hitler Utashe, which committed horrific acts of genocide against the working class Serb majority.

The Serbs are largely Eastern Orthodox, while Yugoslavia’s 4.7 million Croatians are mostly Roman Catholic.  The Vatican has been accused by Jewish holocaust victims’ groups as having served as a repository for the gold which the Utashe plundered from Jews and Serbs alike during their terror campaign.  Pope Pius XII never once spoke out against the Nazis. [1]

When Hitler invaded Austria, Catholic bishops told their congregations to support the Nazis. Swastikas flew over the Vienna Cathedral.  Rudolf Hess was the SS officer at the center of the secret Nazi-Vatican-US alliance during WWII.  The Nazi business combine I.G. Farben, which made the Zyklon B poison gas used for the Auschwitz genocide, while using the prisoners there as slave labor, has morphed into Sterling Drug, Hoechst and Bayer.

In 1998 Pope John Paul II confirmed the Papacy’s position when he beatified Croatian Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, who was Archbishop of Zaghreb during WWII.  When Germany invaded Yugoslavia in 1939 Stepinac embraced the pro-Nazi government of Ante Pavelic as “God’s hand at work”.  Pope Pius XII was apparently impressed, promoting Stepinac to Cardinal.  Marshall Tito, the great nationalist who during WWII united the Yugoslav people against the Nazi invaders, was not so enamored with Stepinac.  Tito tossed the archbishop into the poky for his collaboration with the Nazis and Utashe.  President Franjo Tudjman, who would rule the new Croatia until his death in 2000, adored Cardinal Stepinac. [2]

The international banks also backed the Nazis.  Max and Paul Warburg sat on I. G. Farben’s board, as did H. A. Metz, who was director at the Warburg Bank of Manhattan- later Chase Manhattan.  Bank of Manhattan director and Federal Reserve Board member C. E. Mitchell sat on the board of I. G. Farben’s US branch.  In 1936 Avery Rockefeller set up a combination with the German Schroeder family, who served as Hitler’s personal bankers.  Time magazine called the new Schroeder, Rockefeller & Company “the economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis”.  Morgan Guaranty Trust and Union Banking Corporation (UBC) also funded the Nazis.  UBC board member Prescott Bush is President George Bush Jr.’s grandfather. [3]

US corporations pitched in for the Nazi’s as well.  Farben joined forces with ITT, along with GM, Exxon, Ford and GE in sending funds and key military goods to Himmler’s SS.  ITT’s Sosthenes Behn was a director at National City Bank, now Citigroup.  ITT supplied the Nazis with radar equipment, air raid warning devices, artillery shell fuses and all the ingredients that went into the rocket bombs that later reigned down on London.  Nazi armored vehicles were manufactured by Ford and the GM subsidiary Opel.  Henry Ford was a great admirer of Hitler, who also held Ford in high regard after the 1920 publication of Ford’s treatise, The International Jew.  Hitler’s Mein Kampf incorporated entire sections of Ford’s book.  In 1938 Ford received the highest Nazi honor possible for a non-German- the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle. [4]

In 1932 leaders of German industrial behemoths Krupp, Siemens, Thyssen and Bosch signed a petition urging Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler Chancellor of Germany.  A year later at banker Baron Kurt von Schroeder’s home a deal was cut to bring Hitler to power.  Attending the meeting were brothers John Foster and Allen Dulles of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, which represented Schroeder Bank.  Schroeder managing director T. C. Tiarks was a director at the Bank of England. [5]

In the spring of 1934 Bank of England Chairman Montagu Norman convened a meeting of London bankers who decided to covertly fund Hitler.  Royal Dutch/Shell Chairman Sir Henri Deterding helped in this effort.  He hoped Hitler would march on the Soviet Union and return RD/Shell assets seized by revolutionaries at Baku, Grozny and Maikop.

Even after the US went to war with Germany, Exxon Chairman Walter Teagle remained on the board of I. G. Chemical, the US I. G. Farben subsidiary.  Exxon was integral in supplying the Nazis with tetraethyl lead, an important component of aviation fuel.  Only Exxon, Du Pont and GM made the stuff.  Teagle also supplied the Japanese with his product. [6]

Exxon and I. G. Farben were such close business associates that by 1942 Thurman Arnold, head of the US Justice Department’s Anti-Trust Division, produced documents that showed, “Standard and Farben in Germany had literally carved up the world markets, with oil and chemical monopolies established all over the map.”  As of 1998 there were still scores of lawsuits pending against Ford, Chase Manhattan, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Allianz AG and several Swiss banks for their dealings with the Nazis.

At the heart of Hitler’s inner circle were the secret societies Germanordern (brothers of Yale’s Skull & Bones), the Thule Society and Vril.  The concepts of “Great Masters”, “Adepts” and the “Great White Brotherhood” which the Nazis used to justify their idea of Aryan superiority, were ancient ideas that had been carried forth by the Egyptian Mystery Schools, the Teutonic Knights, the Illuminati, and Hebrew Cabalists.  These same concepts can be found in today’s New Age Movement, whose New Age magazine was first published by the Grand Orient Masonic Lodge of Washington.  Henry Kissinger was an early supporter of the New Age movement.  The global center of this fascist thinking can be found at the Rothschild-controlled Business Roundtables of London.

The German occultists believed ancient German tribes were the true keepers of the Ancient Mysteries which had their origin in Atlantis, when seven races of God-men were introduced to Earth, possibly by the Annunaki.  Thule was a Teutonic Atlantis believed by the Nazis to house these long-vanquished races, who had lost their godly powers by interbreeding with mere humans.  At the inner core of the Thule Society were Satanists who practiced black magic.

The Master Adept of the group was Dietrich Eckhart, who later incorporated these ideas into Heinrich Himmler’s SS.  Vril was derived from Business Roundtable spiritual guru Lord Edward Bulwer-Litton’s book Vril, which discusses an Aryan super-race that came to earth in the distant past.  General Karl Haushofer was the leader of Vril and mentor to Hitler and Rudolf Hess.  Heinrich Himmler was a Vril member.  Haushofer worked with CIA and P-2 Italian Freemasons to lay the “rat line” to South America.

Hitler became obsessed with the Spear of Destiny, used by Roman soldier Gaius Cassius to kill Jesus Christ as he hung on the cross.  Hitler believed, as do the powerful modern-day secret societies, that whoever possesses the spear controls the world.  Author Tex Marrs and others have predicted that a likely Illuminati candidate for crowning as New World Order Sangreal King is Philip of Spain, who is a Hapsburg.  The Hapsburg family is said to currently possess the Spear of Destiny.

The swastika was a symbol connected to a Sun god, which symbolized Lucifer.  Roundtable insider Rudyard Kipling spread the symbol to India, while Madam Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society spread it throughout Europe.  Hitler was once described as a “child of Illuminism”. [7]

According to Dr. Walter Langer, who did a wartime psychoanalysis of Hitler for OSS, Hitler may himself have been a Rothschild.  Langer uncovered an Austrian police report proving Hitler’s father was an illegitimate son of a peasant cook named Maria Anna Schicklgruber, who at the time of her conception was a servant in the Vienna home of Baron Rothschild. [8]

In May 1941, two years after Nazi troops stormed Yugoslavia, Rudolf Hess parachuted into the estate of the Duke of Hamilton, saying a supernatural force told him to negotiate with the British.  Hitler was ostensibly visited by this same apparition and suddenly turned vehemently against occultism.  He ordered a crackdown against Freemasons, Templars and the Theosophical Society.  Suddenly the international banker crowd pulled the plug on Hitler’s finances and began to denounce him.  Six months later the US entered WWII.

Evisceration Time

By June 1991, with the Gulf War just ended, Croat and Muslim separatists declared independence in two regions of Yugoslavia.  Arab fundamentalist fighters funded by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and trained by the CIA were arriving in Yugoslavia to help defend the new enclaves.  In 1992 1,200 UN Peacekeeping Troops arrived in newly formed Croatia.  By the end of April their ranks had swelled to 14,000. [9]

Additional UN troops were deployed to new Bosnian and Slovenian enclaves.  US Marines arrived in the Mediterranean region. An Adriatic Sea naval flotilla representing seven nations led by the US lurked off the Yugoslav coast.  US-based charities like Americares and the Maltese Cross were landing in Zaghreb- the Croat stronghold- with food, supplies and toys.  The 600,000 ethnic Serbs living within the breakaway enclave got no toys. Instead, they were terrorized. [10]

Bush Secretary of State James Baker was point man in blasting the Yugoslav government, which he was referred to as the ‘Serb’ government, as if Yugoslavia had suddenly vanished from world maps.  His imported Islamist fighters now moved on Bosnia.  The Assassins came from the likes of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the bloody Algerian Armed Islamic Group and al Qaeda.  These fanatics overtook major cities and proclaimed Alija Izetbegovic and his cronies rulers of the Bosnia-Herzegovina region.  In 1992 Slovenian right-wing nationalists followed suit and declared independence from Yugoslavia. [11]  The Yugoslav government lodged a protest at the UN, saying the US was siding with the separatists.

The US responded by flying $1 million worth of supplies to Bosnia on Air Force planes flying from Italy.  US envoy Ralph Johnson met with Bosnia’s self-declared President Izetbegovic.  The US recognized Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia as independent nations. The Bilderbergers scurried to prepare teams of athletes from these new nations to participate in their 1992 Olympic Summer Games.  The US persuaded the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on remaining Yugoslav republics Serbia and Montenegro.  Lawrence Eagleburger and the House of Saud pushed for a lifting of the UN arms embargo on Yugoslavia to get arms to the Muslim fighters which the CIA was training. [12]

Oil imports were blocked, airline service suspended and Yugoslav sports teams banned from the Olympic Games.  President Bush froze $214 million in Yugoslav assets and announced the imposition of an Iraqi-style no-fly zone over Bosnia-Herzegovina. [13]  The US threw money at the campaign of Milan Panic, a millionaire living in the US who now rode his corporate media-crafted white horse back into Belgrade to be elected Yugoslav Premier.  In his victory speech Panic took a subtle whack at socialism stating, “No idea is worth dying for at the end of the 20th century”.

As Yugoslavia tried to stop the CIA-led partition of their country, the fighting intensified.  When US Marines came ashore in Somalia, CFR Director George Pratt Schultz called for a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia from his Chevron Texaco perch.  Soon NATO warplanes were bombing Yugoslav forces, who were trying to re-take Bosnia.

Russian lawmakers voiced their outrage at this first-ever NATO-led bombing effort, passing a law imposing trade sanctions on Croatia for “genocide against the Serb people”.  Boozing IMF poster boy and Russian President Boris Yeltsin vetoed the bill.  Russian media reports claimed the CIA was behind the attack on the Sarajevo marketplace, which the US had noisily blamed on the Serbs as a pretext for the bombing campaign.  Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev called the NATO bombing, “an evil path leading to the past, to nowhere.”[14]

Both the Bosnian Army of the newly created Muslim Croat Federation and the Croatian Army were trained and equipped by Turkish and American advisers.  The training was overseen by a private firm known as Military Professional Resources (MPRI), a US company made up of retired generals and colonels.  MPRI was paid $400 million to train the Bosnian Army by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Brunei and Malaysia.  Many Bosnian Army members were Islamic extremists who are now al Qaeda leaders.

After receiving MPRI training, the Croatian Army launched an offensive into northwest Yugoslavia, grabbing more territory around Banja Luka and Krajina and destroying peace talks underway in Belgrade.  In the five days preceding the Croat offensive, code-named Operation Lightning Storm, MPRI General Carl Vuono, who was US Army Chief of Staff during both the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War, met at least ten times with Croatian General Varimar Cervenko on Brioni Island in the Adriatic Sea. [15]

Operation Lightning Storm gave new meaning to the phrase “ethnic cleansing”.  During the bloody Croat assault on Krajina, entire Serb villages were sacked and burned, leaving hundreds dead and 170,000 more homeless.  During the Croat assault on Srbenica, US advisers backed a bloody slaughter causing 200,000 more Serb peasants to flee.  Many Croat militiamen deployed in the effort were members of the fascist Croatian National Congress (CNC), which had received funding from such international pariahs as Nicaraguan dictator Anastacio Somoza and Paraguayan strongman Alfredo Stroessner.  The leader of the CNC is convicted Nazi war criminal Janko Skrbin, who continues to avoid imprisonment from his US refuge. [16]

Yugoslav Military Commander Momcilo Krajisnik said of the Croat offensive, “We find ourselves in the position to either have the peace talks (in Belgrade) collapse, or to make it crystal clear that we shall not accept such a false cease-fire and such an approving attitude of the international community toward Muslim and Croat behavior.  If individual actors in the crisis continue to destabilize and destroy the state, the army of the Republic shall undertake measures to defend integrity, sovereignty and constitutional order”. [17]

NATO bombs rained down on Bosnia. The Croats went on a US-backed offensive. The Yugoslav government was forced into the US-sponsored Dayton Peace Accords, which rubber-stamped the partition of Yugoslavia. [18]  In 1995 President Milosevic said he had been misled at Dayton by the US delegation, which was led by Clinton envoy Richard Holbrooke, former investment banker at Credit Suisse First Boston, the old Eastern Establishment opium bank that served as paymaster for the Kennedy and deGaulle hits and handled Richard Secord’s Lake Resources accounts.

In December 1995, amidst a flurry of foreign troops arriving in the new nations of Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia to “keep the peace”, Yugoslav Army Commander Ratko Mladic called on the Yugoslavian people to “defend what has been ours for centuries”.  He said of NATO’s Iron Mountain-style peacekeeping efforts, “We must not allow our people to come under the rule of butchers.  Those who bombed us have now infiltrated like lambs, saying they want to protect peace.”

Mladic was later indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal (IWCT), along with Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic.  Before prosecuting the Yugoslav leaders in abstentia, IWTC Chief Prosecutor Richard Goldstone met for two days with Clinton CIA Director John Deutch, former director at Citibank and SAIC.

[1] “Vatican’s Finances in WWII being Questioned”. Naftali Bendavid. Chicago Tribune. 8-29-97. p.A1

[2] “Pope Beatifies Croatian Archbishop”. AP. Minneapolis Star Tribune. 10-4-98. p.A19

[3] The Robot’s Rebellion: The Story of the Spiritual Renaissance. David Icke. Gateway, UK. 1994. p.168

[4] Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons and the Great Pyramids. Jim Marrs. HarperCollins Publishers. New York. 2000. p.165

[5] Ibid. p.164

[6] Ibid. p.178

[7] Ibid. p.157

[8] Ibid

[9] “Arriving UN Soldiers Carry Hope to Croatia”. AP. Missoulian. 4-15-92

[10] “Plane Carrying Aid, Holiday Gifts for Croatians Allowed to Land”. Reuters/Kyodo. Japan Times. 12-27-91. p.1

[11] “Slovenians to Choose President, Parliament”. AP. Tulsa World. 12-16-92

[12] Evening Edition. National Public Radio. 12-13-92

[13] “UN Swats Yugoslavia”. AP. Missoulian. 5-31-92

[14] “NATO Bombs Stir Russian Anger”. AP. Missoulian. 9-15-95. p.A1

[15] “Privatizing War: How Affairs of the State are Outsourced to Corporations Beyond Public Control”. Ken Silverstein. The Nation. 7-28 to 8-4, 1997.

[16] The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence and International Fascism. Henrik Kruger. South End Press. Boston. 1980. p.217

[17] “Supporters of Karadzic Ready to Battle in Bosnia”. Misha Savic. Denver Post. 8-23-97

[18] “As the War Winds Down, Troop Training Starts Up”. Missoulian. 2-11-96

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

(Part one of a five-part series excerpted from Chapter 15: Yugoslavia Bad, Greater Albania Good: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

It was no coincidence that Yugoslavia was Banca Nacionale de Lavoro’s (BNL) second largest customer after Iraq.  Both countries call their currency the dinar and both would, after rebuffing the global “privatization” crowd, see those currencies severely devalued.  Yugoslavia, like Iraq, has a long history of defying outside interference in its affairs.  Its economy, like Iraq’s, has tilted toward socialism ever since Marshall Tito routed the Nazi Utashe during WWII.

Moreover, Yugoslavia became a world leader in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a large group of nations traditionally led by India who chose not to align themselves with either the US or the Soviets during the Cold War.  The international bankers despised NAM because its members tended to be left-of-center nationalists who guarded their resources from Big Oil and other multinationals.

NAM was a thorn in the side of the CFR/Bilderberger crowd who wished to portray all Third World revolutionary struggles against their financial hegemony as Soviet-backed Communist threats.  They could then play the “Red Menace” card to justify their bloody wars of depopulation.

Economic Warfare 101

Yugoslavia was the only East European nation which was never a member of the Warsaw Pact.  The country succeeded India as the Chair of NAM and became a respected leader of the G-77 group of developing nations, which tried to divert OPEC oil revenues away from international banks and into Third World development.

Yugoslavia was an important supplier of inexpensive machinery to Third World factories and peasant-owned farms.  Where once these countries were forced to buy expensive equipment from the West, using up valued hard currency and sinking further into debt, they now turned to newly industrialized Yugoslavia, which was often willing to trade machinery for commodities.

The Western multinationals were fuming.  What really galled them was that, like Iraq, Yugoslavia had created a highly successful socialist economy no longer dependent on the unjust international financial system.  Other Third World countries took note of the Yugoslav example, despite Illuminati propaganda that “socialism was dead”.

As Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who was served up as demon by the globalization crowd, pointed out, “…the remaining socialist government threatening capitalist control of Europe”…, …provided “living proof that history has not ended, that more than one economic system was possible.”

Yugoslavia’s natural resources are vast.  The Four Horsemen discovered significant deposits of oil off the coast beneath the Adriatic Sea.  Some oil industry insiders believe the fields could equal those lying beneath the sand dunes of Saudi Arabia.  Yugoslavia contains seventeen billion tons of coal and vast mineral wealth, including the huge Stari Trg mining complex, the first facility Hitler’s Nazi Reichstag seized when they invaded Yugoslavia in 1941.

Hitler mined lead at Stari Trg to supply batteries for his U-Boats.  But Stari Trg also contains gold, silver, cadmium, zinc and platinum worth at least $5 billion.  The Yugoslav land mass figures into any overland pipeline route connecting Four Horsemen Caspian Sea oilfields to mainland Europe.  It also sits astride a major highway that connects Europe to Central Asia, while the strategic Danube River flows through the center of the nation.  In the eyes of the international oligarchy, ripe Yugoslavia now demanded harvest.  Enter BNL and Kissinger Associates.

Lawrence Eagleburger was US Ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1977-1981 and was later president of Kissinger Associates.  During this latter stint he was director at LBS Bank, a subsidiary of Ljubljanska Banka, Yugoslavia’s second largest bank.  While at LBS Eagleburger was also in charge of the BNL client relationship with Kissinger Associates.

A 1989 Federal Reserve examination found that 20-25% of LBS Bank’s business came from BNL, including millions in BNL loans to Iraq; loans which LBS conveniently repurchased just before Saddam defaulted on them.  LBS repurchased rotten BNL loans from grain giant Cargill and financed a Yugoslav shipyard which built oil tankers for Mobil.  Eagleburger provided buffet-style corporate welfare for his pals, while LBS ate a steady diet of bad loans.

Eagleburger also served on the board of Global Motors, which manufactured the Yugo automobile. The Yugo was a symbol of national pride in Yugoslavia, representing a giant step forward for the country, which saw itself joining the ranks of industrialized nations.  Global is a subsidiary of Zavodi Crevna Zastava, the backbone of the Yugoslav arms industry.

In 1988 after Eagleburger had conveniently moved on, LBS was charged with money laundering.  Yugoslav authorities found that Eagleburger had fudged the books at LBS, whose parent Ljublijanska Banka then became embroiled in a scandal involving fake promissory notes.  The scandal shook the Yugoslav banking system.  Global Motors went bankrupt in 1989.

The dinar took a serious tumble, leading to more bankruptcies and widespread financial panic.  In 2000 Yugoslav intelligence officials stated that they had evidence that CIA had air dropped counterfeit dinars as part of their plan to destabilize the nation’s economy. The sabotaged Yugoslav ship was sinking and its Bilderberger saboteurs were grabbing the last life boats.

The West was quick to blame Yugoslavia’s economic woes on the ills of socialism, while the CIA began to sew ethnic division in country.  The global powers wanted to smash socialist Yugoslavia into tiny fiefdoms modeled after their GCC puppet emirates.  The US organized the Balkan Stability Pact, which called for a regional free market while CIA-backed Croat and Muslim separatists called for armed revolt.

For forty-five years the US had played the ethnicity card in the Balkans, a region traditionally colonized by Western powers.  During WWII over a million people died in the Balkans, most at the hands of Nazi-armed right-wing paramilitaries like the Croat Utashe.  Their victims were largely Serbian, Jewish and communist.

Now the US was, for propaganda purposes, dumbing their resource grab down to an ethnic skirmish.  The US media picked the winners, siding with the wealthier Croats and Muslims, while demonizing the generally working-class socialist Serbs.  The US justified its support for Muslim and Croat separatists by accusing the Yugoslav Army of ethnic cleansing.  Though there were plenty of Muslims and Croats in that Yugoslav Army, the US spin machine collectively bludgeoned the Serbian people.

An August 17, 1992 Newsweek article finally admitted that, “Most of the horror stories (attributed to Serbs) are impossible to confirm.”  Even the US puppet International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague charged Croat and Muslim leaders with genocide as often as it did Serbs.  The US anti-war movement, which had already fallen asleep at the wheel during the Somalia fiasco, parroted State Department propaganda.  No war in history has been so driven by a frothy, emotive and completely unquestioning corporate media than was the war about to be waged against the people of Yugoslavia.

John Swainton, Chief of Staff of the New York Times from 1860-1870, explained as well as anyone why when he stated upon his retirement, “There is no such thing as a free press. You know it and I know it.  There’s not one of you who would dare to write his honest opinions.  The role of journalism is to destroy truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to fawn at the feet of Mammon…We are tools and vassals of the men behind the scenes.  We are jumping jacks: they pull the strings, we dance; our talents, our possibilities and our lives are the property of these men.  We are intellectual prostitutes”.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

 

Development decisions, whether made by public administrators in Montana or in the Third World are presently made within the parameters allowed for by the international capitalist economy.  The structure of this economy allows for absentee land owners, transnational processors and their creditors to exploit resources and labor on a global scale.  Local people who produce actual wealth with their labor are forced into price competition with workers half way around the globe and are left in poverty by those who control the means of production, processing and marketing of the goods they produce.

The rise of the multinational corporation (MNC) created a global factory.  Where once sovereign North nations colonized certain South nations, MNCs with no particular allegiance to any national emblem are now free to plunder any area of the globe where labor happens to be cheap, where a local government is conciliatory and/or where resources are abundant.  Though in general a North/South dichotomy of rich and poor nations still prevails, certain areas lying within Northern regions of the globe, such as Montana, have suffered exploitation of resources and labor similar to that of Southern nations.

In the absence of significant international labor unions, MNCs are able to utilize their great mobility to manipulate the vast global labor pool.  If cane workers in the Dominican Republic become disgruntled with the low wages and dangerous conditions on a Gulf & Western sugar plantation and demand fair play, G&W can simply hire desperate Haitian immigrants to replace them.  Disparity in the value of national currencies also plays into the hands of the MNCs.  Countries where currencies are undervalued- a common IMF/World Bank prescription for Third World debtor nations- offer extremely cheap labor to the MNCs.  In this climate of MNC blackmail and coercion, workers in neighboring countries are often found competing for meager wages.  Governments attempting to provide employment opportunities for their restless people are often subservient to MNC demands, including generous tax holidays and subsidies.

Banana Republics

Multinational corporations and international banks led by the World Bank and IMF have historically promoted an export-led path to development for Third World nations.  Often one or two commodities, exported in raw form, come to provide the backbone of Third World economies.  The beneficiaries of this strategy of “development” are MNC shippers, processors, packagers and marketers who depend on South-South competition to create continual surpluses of all commodities, thus driving down world market prices for these commodities, which provide MNC middle-men with cheap factory stock.  A handful of local elites are cut into this scheme to ensure continued compliance by the producer nation.

The power and influence over Third World economies by MNCs can be illustrated by the history of United Fruit Company (now United Brands) in Latin America.  Until very recently the company held a complete monopoly over banana exports from Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Columbia and Ecuador.  United Brands also monopolized the shipping of these bananas to the US and Europe, as well as importation and distribution of the fruit in the North nations. (Galeano, 114)  In 1928 United Fruit goons gunned down striking peasants on the largest latifundio in Columbia, then took the plantation over.  During the 1930’s the company massacred thousands of Salvadoran peasants in what became known as La Matanza.  In 1954 it provided planes and funding for the CIA overthrow of the democratically-elected Arbenz government in Guatemala after Arbenz attempted to buy up the company’s vast landholdings (only 8% of which were even under cultivation) for redistribution to landless campesinos. (Galeano, 123)  Following the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua United Brands executive Francisco Urcuyo briefly stepped in as President after his friend Anastacio Somoza was forced to flee to Costa Rica.  Until the 1980’s, United Brands virtually governed Honduras.

The company’s influence is so great that they operate outside the purview of Customs in these countries.  A DEA report cited United Brands banana boats entering Baltimore harbor as suppliers of one-half of all US bound cocaine during the 1970’s.  The company still exerts enormous power in Central America, where much of its previous holdings have been sold to wealthy local contract farmers who agree to sell their bananas to United Brands.  In this manner, the farmer takes on all risk associated with weather, pests, disease and nationalization; while United Brands is ensured a steady stream of cheap bananas.  Honduras remains an exception to this rule.  Here the company still owns vast tracts of land and is frequently caught bribing government officials.

Many IMF/World Bank-funded projects involve the mono-cropping of luxury crops for export to the North.  The owners of these plantations are either local elites allied with MNCs or the MNCs themselves.  In the Dominican Republic, for example, Gulf & Western controls the La Romana Free Zone, an export processing zone set up under the David Rockefeller-funded Caribbean Basin Initiative where workers are paid $.34/hour to harvest G&W sugar.  (Barnet, III)  Much of the foreign exchange which G&W claims to be providing the country by exporting its sugar actually ends up being blown on G&W tourist schemes or is exported back to the US to purchase equipment for G&W operations. (Moore Lappe, 231)

In the Philippines MNCs control 75% of all agricultural exports.  Most of these are luxury crops with pineapple being the most important.  In 1926 Del Monte seized peasant lands on the Philippine island of Mindanao to establish their first pineapple plantation in the country.  When the angry peasants resisted, the company called in the Tad Tads, a group of right-wing religious fanatics, who hacked the peasants to bits with machetes. (Miller, 32)

Copper Republics

By 1929 US investment is Chile exceeded $400 million.  Most of that was in the copper industry, which was controlled by two giant MNCs- Kennecott and Anaconda.  In 1969 Anaconda alone garnered a $79 million profit from its Chilean mines or 80% of the company’s global profit for the year. (Galeano, 161)  When Salvador Allende was elected President of Chile a short time later he moved to nationalize the copper mines held by Kennecott and Anaconda.  Under pressure from Anaconda owner David Rockefeller and his long-time lieutenant and then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, President Nixon ordered the assassination of Allende by the CIA in 1973.  General Augusto Pinochet seized power and provided protection for MNC interests while embarking upon a reign of terror against the Chilean left.

The Rockefellers had purchased Anaconda with their Standard Oil monopoly in 1899.  That year the tiny town of Anaconda, Montana became home to the world’s largest ore smelter and Montana soon produced 23% of the world’s copper.  Anaconda Company, which has since been purchased by ARCO (now itself part of BP Amoco), still owned seven out of the fourteen daily newspapers in Montana as of 1959.  The company’s history of violence against striking Butte mineworkers is legendary and culminated in the assassination of IWW leader Joe Hill.  The company also controlled vast tracts of Montana timberlands until the late 1970’s, when they sold the lands to another MNC- Champion International.  The Anaconda Company’s influence on Montana underdevelopment cannot be understated.

Another giant mineral cartel with tentacles in both Montana and the Third World is American Smelting & Refining (ASARCO).  In addition to mines in Mexico, Bolivia and Chile; ASARCO, which is also controlled by the Rockefeller fortune, owns Southern Peru Copper Corporation and Corporacion Minera Nor Peru SA in Peru, now a leading world exporter of copper.  In Montana ASARCO owns the biggest copper mine in the US- the Rock Creek Mine just outside of Troy, MT.  It also owns numerous smelters, including the massive East Helena lead smelter, which is far and away the leading polluter in Montana.  Leukemia is rampant among children living in East Helena.  Ninety percent of all the lead processed at the smelter comes from Peru.

Joe Drexler, an international organizer for the United Mine Workers who organizes at the Troy mine sums up ASARCO’s Montana-Third World connection succinctly, “What good is a company that cripples its workers, exports the wealth and leaves a mess?  During strikes against ASARCO in Peru union leaders were killed.  Here we are being treated like the Third World!”

Exporting Jobs & Profits

By hitching its wagons to corporate-controlled extractive industry, Montana has coalesced to its own underdevelopment.  Raw materials are exported at rock bottom world market prices and the revenue goes into out-of-state corporate bank accounts.  Copper is only one example of this neo-colonialism.

In 1864 Northern Pacific Railroad received nearly 40 million acres of free land throughout the West in return for building a railroad to transport settlers into the new frontier.  The company later merged with Great Northern Railroad to form Burlington Northern.  The merger was financed with junk bonds issued by J. P. Morgan and it wasn’t until 1988 that BN settled with Morgan’s heirs. (Josephson, 417)  BN diversified its interests into natural resources, purchasing Glacier Park Inc., Meridian Oil, Meridian Minerals and Plum Creek Timber.  Plum Creek currently operates on the 900,000 acres of free Montana timberland which the railroad came to control, despite the fact that it never fulfilled its agreement to build the railroads it said it would.  In 1989 fully one-half of all Plum Creek timber harvested was exported as raw logs to Asia. (Porterfield, 7)

The two arguments presented by Plum Creek to show that their colonial extraction is good for Montana are that they provide an important tax base and that they provide jobs.  Yet in 1988 the company paid $0 in taxes to the state of Montana, while neither Plum Creek nor BN paid any federal taxes, due to reorganizations that made them limited partnerships and thus exempt under new Reagan tax loopholes.  The jobs argument is equally transparent.  US timber firms export 4 billion board feet of raw logs to Japan each year.  This represents a loss of 10,000 jobs/year for American sawmill workers. (Porterfield, 8)  Mechanization of Plum Creek mills has also cost the state of Montana jobs.

According to the Montana Bureau of Business and Economic Research, between 1979-1986 2,000 jobs were lost in the state due to mechanization and raw log exports.  An estimated 3,000 more will be lost by year 2000.  Meanwhile industry wages have decreased by 13%, labor costs are down 53%, output per worker is up 80% and total production is up 30%.  Mechanization and lack of value-added production also put a severe strain on Montana’s ecosystem.  More trees can now be cut in less time and with less workers.  And more trees are required to keep Plum Creek’s retooled high-tech mills running at full capacity.

Similar patterns of mechanization haunt Third World workers and resources.  In Columbia a group calling itself the Farm Mechanization Working Group has formed the School of Agricultural Mechanization to promote the use of high-tech Western machinery and chemical fertilizers by Latin American farmers.  Behind the group are powerful MNCs such as Caterpillar, John Deere, Fiat, FMC, Massey Ferguson, Mitsui, BP & Shell. (Moore Lappe, 176)

Mechanization in and of itself is not necessarily negative.  But when Western technologies are promoted as a fix-all for Third World problems, it has more to do with capitalist venture than with sincere attempts at development.  Montana, like the Third World, must develop its own technologies, ones that suit our particular needs.  This will decrease dependency on imports of spare parts, machinery and chemicals which are very costly.

Urbanization

Another barrier which stands in the way of development in both Montana and the Third World is the trend towards increased urbanization of the populations.  As people are forced off their land by the economic hardship caused chiefly by the low world commodity prices which MNCs promote, they relocate to urban areas where they lose their ability to feed themselves and become more dependent on the international capitalist system.  Much of the rural flight in Eastern Montana and many Third World nations can be attributed to a consolidation of economic power in the world food system and to government policies which have legitimized this consolidation.

In 1963 Melvin Middents met with President Kennedy to propose the Middents Plan.  The plan, which was adopted immediately under heavy lobbying pressure from agribusiness interests, proposed subsidizing US farmers.  In reality the ensuing government price supports for commodities which the plan called for helped international grain conglomerates most.  By forcing the governments of countries to pay farmers a subsidy for grain, the MNCs get away with paying the farmers a lower market price.  It was no coincidence that Middents was a grain trader at the world’s largest grain company, the Minneapolis-based titan Cargill, which controls a full 25% of the global grain trade. (Morgan, 173)  Cargill and five other giant firms- Continental, Bunge, Mitsui/Cook, Louis Dreyfus and Andre- have controlled the global grain trade since the 19th century and today account for 85% of the world’s grain flows.  All but Mitsui/Cook are privately held by aristocratic families.  At Cargill 33 members of the Cargill and MacMillan families and a handful of senior executives own virtually all the company’s stock. (Wessel, 104)

These firms are also vertically integrated.  Cargill, for example, is the 2nd largest flour miller in the US, owns the largest US cattle feedlot operation, is the world’s leading crusher of soybeans and rates second in global animal feed production.  They are the #2 US beef packer, the #3 US pork packer, the #3 US turkey producer, the #4 US egg producer and the leading exporter of Brazilian orange juice.  They own a huge fleet of container ships through their Panamanian Tradax subsidiary and grain terminals at most major world ports.

These food oligopolies have wiped out and swallowed up much of their competition, leaving small producers in Montana and the Third World little choice but to sell their various commodities at whatever price they can get from these MNCs.  Many farmers have been run out of business by the low prices offered by the grain traders.  Others survive only because of government subsidies and massive bank debt.  Those who leave farms move to growing urban centers.  Sioux Falls, South Dakota is the largest city in that farming state.  In 1980 its population was 72,000.  By 1989, after a decade of economic hardship for the state’s farmers, its population eclipsed 100,000.  Population influx into urban centers is even more pronounced in the Third World.  It is estimated that by year 2000 the population of Mexico City, for example, will swell to over 20 million.

Often the same MNC grain traders end up owning the fleeing farmer’s land.  In 1971 Bud Antle, a subsidiary of Mitsui/Cook, along with the World Bank and German Development Bank, bought a huge tract of land in Senegal for production of lettuce to be exported to Europe in winter.  Much of the land was simply taken from peasant farmers, most of whom ended up migrating to the crowded streets of Dakar. (Moore Lappe, 286)

As urbanization gains steam, people become more dependent on the imported food handled by the grain giants.  In 1973 Continental Grain built a flour mill on the Congo River near the Zairian capital of Kinshasa.  Since the dictator Mobutu-Sese-Seiko had come to power following the CIA assassination of Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba, wheat imports had steadily increased.  What started out as PL 480 US food aid soon became a gold mine to the grain oligopolies as Mobutu and his MNC cronies seized peasant lands and Kinshasa’s population swelled.  These dispossessed farmers, with help from Continental, soon developed a taste for bread.  This process of bread substitution was praised by the US attache in Zaire, who noted that bread was, “winning the war against chilwanga (manioc) at the breakfast table”. (Barnet, I)

Similar dependencies were fostered by Cargill in formerly rice-eating South Korea and by Ralston Purina and Quaker Oats in Columbia, where 407,550 acres of peasant lands in the Sabana de Bogota Valley were forced out of production due to these companies’ US government subsidizes cheap wheat imports. (Moore-Lappe, 374)

Solutions

The barriers I have presented above are all components of a neo-colonialism carried out by the global oligarchy at the expense of the majority global poor.  Political borders are not as important as class lines in this analysis.  Solutions are actually quite obvious.  Development is not an insurmountable task.  It is a matter of our leaders possessing the political will necessary to alienate the minority rich class (a class to which most of them belong due to the insidious intersection of money and politics), while embracing the needs of the majority.  Each of the following three proposals represent moves towards self-reliance, local autonomy and redistribution of wealth:

(1 Increase domestic manufacturing, processing and technological research

(2 Encourage small-scale rural based projects and development

(3 Increase and enforce taxation of MNCs

Focus on Domestic Manufacturing

In both Montana and the Third World it is necessary for governments to increase manufacturing, processing, packaging and transport of raw materials.  Primary to this task is the funding of value-added research at the university level.  Simultaneous to this research, people should be trained in the implementation of these schemes so that reliance on outside “experts” is reduced.  Value-added processing reduces capital flight and increases revenues which the state/country earns from its raw materials, while at the same time providing needed jobs.  By adding value to raw materials prior to export, less raw material needs to be harvested, thus lessening negative impacts on the local ecosystem.

Types of manufacturing and research will depend on the state/country’s raw material resources.  In Western Montana universities, value-added processing of logs, mineral ores and petroleum/natural gas should be studied; while at Eastern Montana universities the emphasis should be on grain milling technologies and the clean processing of coal.  In Ghana research would focus on nickel processing and chocolate factories, while in Jamaica the universities would focus on producing aluminum from the country’s rich reserves of bauxite.  Currently these manufacturing processes are closely held as trade secrets by the MNC and technology transfer to host governments has not been forthcoming.

At the same time domestic manufacturing is increased, import substitution should be discouraged.  Tax breaks should be given to farmers who use organic fertilizers such as manure instead of expensive chemicals which keep the farmer in debt, while poisoning the ecosystem.  Likewise, loggers who use horses to skid logs rather than buying expensive imported machine skidders should receive tax breaks.  Credit should be readily available from a state-owned bank at low interest rates for those who buy local materials since this stimulates the local economy.  Private banks should be required to invest a certain percentage of their earnings and deposits in-state/country.  At the same time imports of luxury items, MNC plant machinery and other expensive capital intensive debt-trap imports should be heavily taxed to discourage dependency on transnational capital.

Conversely, raw material exports should be discourages through heavy taxation.  Highly strategic industries such as mining, food processing  and oil refining should be nationalized or state-owned.  Other industries such as farming and forestry should be focused on a more bioregional and local level.  Local milling and value-added processing can produce products which can then be packaged for export as a finished good.  In this manner, the state/country receives the maximum amount of revenue, while providing high-paying technical jobs for local residents.  An example of this would be the establishment of a “Montana-made” furniture industry, which could cater to wealthy Japanese and East Coast customers.  Such a labor intensive industry would provide more jobs with less timber harvested and would bring more money into state coffers.

Small-Scale Rural Development

To combat urbanization and its resultant dependencies, emphasis should be placed on rural development projects.  To decentralize economic power these projects should necessarily be small-scale cooperative efforts, run by the people who live in the project area.  Tax incentives should be provided for families who wish to de-urbanize.  Rural education should be well-funded, as should rural health care.  Both have been sorely neglected of late in the US in favor of urban education and health facilities.  The value-added endeavors mentioned above should be located in the very rural areas from which the raw materials necessary for manufacture are derived.  This will decrease transportation costs and serve as a disincentive towards further urbanization, possibly even reversing this negative trend.

Organic food cooperatives should be encouraged in food-producing areas through tax incentives, local market developmental assistance and even construction of centrally-located warehouses for storage.  Banks should be forced to provide low-interest credit for such projects, while national chain store supermarkets which operate in the state/country should be forced to buy locally produced organic food.

In Montana we should utilize the state’s natural beauty to our advantage by keeping our ecosystems pristine and intact.  Tourism and wildlife recreation related activities are currently the second leading revenue generators for the state.  With proper promotion of our hunting and fishing outfitters, our hotels and bed & breakfasts, and our eco-tourism businesses; revenue can be increased further.  Out-of-state hunting and fishing license rates should be dramatically increased, since the clientele is extremely wealthy and would be willing to pay much more for their Montana wilderness experience.  These types of non-extractive industries should be rewarded with tax breaks and easy credit.  Retraining and environmental education should be made available for extractive industry workers moving into the value-added, organic food or tourism sectors.

Cooperative milling ventures should be promoted for Eastern Montana’s farmers and cooperate slaughterhouses would help area ranchers break the meatpacking monopoly.  The raising, processing and marketing of “Montana-raised organic beef” should be promoted with incentives since this value-added product could prove a boon to the state.  Rural adult education programs should be conducted with special emphasis on career options, self-sufficient living and cross-cultural education.  In Montana this would mean learning from our state’s seven Indian tribes.  In Guatemala it would mean introductions to Quechua, Kachikkel and Mam cultures.

In urban areas recycling plants and garbage dumps should be run by the municipal government and alternative transportation systems should be researched to reduce pollution and dependency on imported oil.  High-speed superconductor trains could not only provide city transportation, but could link regions in an efficient and ecologically friendly manner.  Revenue from recycling and garbage facilities could channeled into a fund to enhance bike trails and construct public transportation networks.

Increase Taxes on MNCs

Since 1981 Montana’s tax base has been reduced by $128 million.  As stated earlier, Plum Creek and Burlington Northern currently pay no taxes to the state.  The same is true of numerous other MNCs, who also fail to pay taxes in many a Third World country in which they operate.  Instead, they often receive tax credits just for showing up.  In 1987 alone, Montana granted $38 million in valuable tax base to several coal mining companies.  Just weeks ago Westmoreland Mining Co. was granted a million dollar tax break on its Eastern Montana coal operations. (Towe)

Taxes should be levied on a progressive sliding scale with the largest businesses paying the highest rates, since they have obviously benefited the most from society to have gotten so large in the first place.  Gross income should be used as a basis, so that MNCs would pay the highest rates, while local businesses would pay much less.  Such an increase in MNC taxation may well drive certain corporations to other locales, so this effort should be coordinated as much as possible with other governments.  Some MNC assets should also be nationalized.

Still a look at US states reveals that a high corporate tax state such as Minnesota, while losing some jobs to low tax neighbors like South Dakota, has retained most corporate operations due to the high education level of its work force, a quality park system and a top-notch health care system; all of which were paid for by precisely the high corporate tax rate.  In other words, MNCs are often willing to pay a higher tax rate for such benefits and the risk of corporate flight is exaggerated as a scare tactic.

If we are to develop this state’s economy we must dramatically raise taxes on these Wall Street businesses.  This requires a rejection of the neo-colonial mindset of subservience to foreign capital which has been well-cultivated here by decades of colonial extraction of our many resources and exploitation of our workers.  We should demand that corporations like Burlington Northern, Plum Creek, Champion, ASARCO, Noranda, Louisiana Pacific and Chevron pay their fair share of taxes as well as a fair price for our resources.  If they refuse, they can leave and we can train local people to fill the void through more sustainable value-added industries.  As former State Senator Thomas Towe stated, “Tax relief for natural resource exploration companies not only does not work, but it makes our colonial economy even more colonial.”  If we fall short of implementing laws which transfer key industries to local control, then at least we should make Wall Street speculators and the idle rich pay dearly for our treasures.

Conclusion

There are many similarities between the economy of Montana and that of a Third World South nation.  Both struggle against the tyranny of absentee robber barons who have, in large part, even rewritten the histories of their various colonial jewels, so as to mask reality.  We must first admit the unpleasant aspects of our history if we are to make future change.  We must face our colonial masters squarely with courage and without delusion.  For only when we finally comprehend the global reach of these money powers will we be able to plot a course for sustainable development, while feeling solidarity with our South brothers and sisters, who struggle against different tentacles of the very same beast.  Working together, we can help one another liberate our respective regions from the shackles of neo-colonial underdevelopment.

Development Administration 463, Final Individual Project, U of Montana, Dean Henderson, Spring 1991

The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.  Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between man and his objects and obtains them for him-

Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, 1849

David Rockefeller is the conspicuous representative of the ruling class, a multinational fraternity of men who shape the global economy and manage the flow of capital-

Bill Moyers, The World of David Rockefeller

What we call progress is a mysterious marriage of creativity and plunder.  Civilizations have flowered when humans have devised ingenious ways to organize production.  This has historically been accomplished with stolen goods- Richard Barnet, A Reporter at Large: The World’s Resources

Bibliography

Barnet, Richard J. “A Reporter at Large: The World’s Resources”. New Yorker. 3 parts.

Galeano, Eduardo. The Open Veins of Latin America: Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly

Review Press. New York. 1973.

Miller, Brad. “Land Grab in the Philippines: US Corporations Make Their Own Law”. Progressive. 11-

89.

Moore Lappe, Francis & Joseph Collins. Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity. Ballantine. New

York. 1978.

Morgan, Dan. Merchants of Grain. Penguin Books. New York. 1980.

Josephson, Matthew. The Robber Barons. Harvest/HBJ. New York. 1962.

Porterfield, Andrew. “Railroaded: The LBO Trend on Wall Street is Playing Havoc with the Nation’s

Forests”. Transitions. 2-90.

Schumacher, E. F. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Harper & Row. New York.

1975.

Torrie, Jill. Banking on Poverty: The Global Impact of the IMF and the World Bank. Between the Lines.

Toronto. 1983.

Towe, Thomas. “It’s Time Montana Stop Selling Itself Down the River”. Missoulian editorial. 6-18-90.

Wessel, James. Trading the Future: Farm Exports & the Concentration of Economic Power in our Food

     System. Institute for Food & Development Policy. San Francisco. 1983.

 

Intertwined with the social crisis is a crisis that has emerged directly from man’s exploitation of the planet – Murray Bookchin, The Concept of Social Ecology

The Philippines ranks 14th in terms of world food production, with just a fraction of the global population living on its soils.  Yet, according to conservative World Bank statistics, 75% of its children are malnourished and 65% of all Filipinos live below the poverty line, 30 million of whom live in “absolute poverty”, not even able to satisfy basic needs.

Urbanization is a growing trend.  The populations of Davao and Cebu, the second and third largest cities in the Philippines, respectively, are approaching one million.  And well over 4 million people have found their way into Manila, where 35% of all families are illegal squatters. (Chapman, 26)  Many live on Smoky Mountain, the notorious garbage dump on Manila’s East side, awaiting the arrival of the next truck.

Despite this trend towards urbanization, the country’s population remains largely rural, consisting predominantly of landless peasant farmers who rent or sharecrop from a minority of wealthy landlords at premium rates.  An example of this is the case of copra sharecroppers in Pitoga, Quezon.  Peasants there work the coconut land of the town mayor’s wife, contributing all the labor and seeds for only 30% of the return.  Copra is an important export crop and recently the price has been very low.  If a sharecropper has a bad year he goes into debt to the mayor’s wife creating a situation where she can drop his percentage even further, effectively making him her slave. (Hawes, 19)

The farmer would be much better off planting a subsistence crop such as maize or beans, but the landlords seldom allow this because they want a cash return from an export crop.  This situation leaves the sharecroppers to the whims of both the international commodity markets and the landlord.  Those peasants who tire of this arrangement or are denied access to rental lands do one of two things: they either move to the city or move higher into the hills to farm more marginal lands.

Uplands Migration

By late 1986, nearly one-third of all Filipinos, or 18 million people, lived in the upland regions of the country, while millions more are expected to migrate there by the end of the century. (Myers, 202)  Most who migrate onto these marginal lands become kaingineros (the Tagalog term for slash and burn farmers), often penetrating deep into the forests via commercial logging roads.  Still, the role of kaingineros in deforestation and other forms of environmental degradation in the Philippines is often exaggerated by government officials.  Even the World Bank admits that by far the leading cause of deforestation in the country is both illegal and licensed cutting by commercial loggers.

Any assessment of the damage done by these kaingineros must take into account the pressures which forced them to migrate into these sensitive watershed uplands in the first place; pressures such as unfair land ownership patterns and export mono-cropping on the nation’s most fertile lands.  Still, the damage done by these upland peasant farmers is significant.  Much of the farming is done on slopes of a 45 degree incline or greater. (Myers, 208)  As trees are felled from these slopes to create clearings for farming, the entire hydrological system is affected.  Without trees to soak up the rains, water instead runs down the steep slopes into the valleys, causing severe slope erosion, flooding and sedimentation of rivers.

Clearly the trend towards upland migration in the Philippines is cause for concern among those wishing to save the last Philippine rainforests, but, to borrow a concept from Henry David Thoreau, let us not needlessly hack away at the branches of this problem.  Let us instead get to its roots.

A History of Colonialism

In 1521 Ferdinand Magellan landed on the island of Cebu with a small army and a band of missionaries.  Though Magellan was himself killed by Chief Lapu-Lapu, after which his crew headed for home with a large booty of spices, the Spaniards soon returned in a more forceful manner.  While Spanish missionaries hastily converted tribal peoples to Catholisism, Spanish traders brought cattle to the islands to graze them.  Whereas the tribal people had survived primarily through hunting, gathering and shifting cultivation, leaving 90% of the towering Philippine forests intact; the Spaniards quickly began to burn these old growth forests to produce rangeland for their cattle.  They also introduced a sort of housing code which required that homes be built out of wood, so as to stimulate the domestic timber industry.  By the end of the 19th century, the archipelago was only 70% forested. (Wernstedt, 239)  Enter the Americans.

Admiral Thomas Dewey sailed into Manila Bay in 1898 to launch a 50-year period of American rule over the Philippines.  Plantations of hemp and sugar sprang up overnight to supply US markets.  American missionaries picked up where their Spanish counterparts left off.  Today the Philippines is the only predominantly Christian nation in all of Asia.  Ninety percent of its citizens are Christian, while 85% are Catholic. (Wheeler, 406)  And US multinational corporations began to establish a firm foothold in the nation, promoting a process of colonial export-led development which still prevails today.

Multinationals now control 75% of the agricultural export trade of the Philippines. (Galang, 64)  They occupy the best farmlands, enjoy generous tax holidays compliments of the corrupt government in Manila and, according to the Alternative Resource Center in Davao City, frequently organize into cliques to control prices and markets.  To better understand how the presence of these companies contributes to poverty and thus to increasing environmental degradation in the country, one needs only to look to the island of Mindanao.

Mindanao is home to the best farmlands in all the Philippines.  Most of this land is owned by a wealthy Filipino aristocracy, who contract to grow pineapples and bananas for the US multinationals (MNC’s) Dole, Del Monte and United Brands.  Dole and Del Monte, which are subsidiaries of Castle & Cooke and RJR Nabisco, respectively, together control 95% of all pineapple production and 70% of all banana production in the Philippines. (Galang, 64)  Yet it is nearly impossible to find a pineapple in the markets of Manila and the only bananas to be found are those that are small and of low quality.  Land which could be used to feed a hungry nation is instead used to grow fruit for export, enriching only the multinationals and their local cronies.  Three-quarters of Mindanao’s forests have already been destroyed to make room for these plantations and the MNC’s continue to expand production, pushing more farmers into the marginal uplands, where yet more forests are cleared. (Canuday, 7)

In 1926 Del Monte had established its first pineapple plantation in Bukidnon Province on Mindanao.  When local peasants and tribal people resisted the intrusion and seizure of their traditional lands, Del Monte organized the Bolo Battalion, a fanatically religious and militant faction of the Tad Tads, who brutally hacked up the resisters on behalf of del Monte. (Miller, 32)  In the early 1960’s, the MNC’s undertook a huge expansion in the Philippines.  Amidst a growing global awareness of imperialism, they transferred their stolen lands to Filipino straw men, financed their startups, organized subsidiaries and made them overnight millionaires, creating a Filipino ruling class.  This strategy of contracting out actual production effectively alleviates the MNC’s of all production and expropriation risk, while leaving them firmly in control of the processing, shipping and marketing of the fruit.  This strategy has been followed by MNC’s worldwide.

Brutality on these plantations continues to this day.  Two Del Monte contract farms- Delta Farms and A.M. Sorianto- regularly beat and harass peasants who refuse to leave their lands during regular company “expansions”.  Often the peasants’ houses are bulldozed.  In 1972 Lapanday Security Forces, a Scout 2nd Ranger Battallion, was called in to provide security for the farms.  Owned by Ferdinand Marcos crony Don Luis Lorenzo, Lapanday also joined forces with the Asian Institute for Free Labor Development- an arm of the AFL-CIO with known CIA connections- to form the Lapanday Employees Union.  The union covers workers on the MNC contract farms and Firestone’s large rubber plantations, preaching company loyalty and anti-communism.  Workers on the plantations often work 15 hour days and, according to the National Development Authority, make one-third of what a family of six needs to survive at the most basic level. (Miller, 33)

At Polomok in South Cotabato Province Dole executives live on Kalsingi, a country club estate with swimming pools, tennis courts and a golf course, while below in Little Tondo (named after a Manila slum) workers live without electricity.  TADECO, a grower for United Brands, in 1988 claimed additional tribal lands.  When tribal chiefs protested to the Office of Southern Cultural Committees they were told that if they tried to take the land back they would be jailed.  This was no great surprise to the chiefs since in 1974 PANAMIN, another government agency which deals with tribal affairs, took 50% of the tribe’s harvest and forced them to work for TADECO for nothing. (Miller, 22)

The latest export craze in the Philippines is prawns and the Japanese can’t get enough.  MNC’s, along with large Filipino corporations like monopoly brewer San Miguel and the giant Ayala conglomerate, were quick to grab their share of this booming market.  Dole recently entered a joint venture to run the largest prawn farm in the country on Mindanao, receiving a generous four-year tax holiday from the Aquino government for its efforts. (Broad, 20) This latest round of export-led “development” not only does nothing to alleviate poverty in the Philippines, since it again benefits only a handful of wealthy Filipinos and their MNC partners, it is also an environmental disaster.

Prawn farming requires a mixture of salt and fresh water, so the ponds must be located near the ocean.  Coastal farmers and fishermen on the island of Negros, where prawn farming got its start in the country, complain that these man-made ponds are sucking too much water from the already low water table there.  When the water table is drawn down far enough, salt water from the ocean begins to creep in, dramatically increasing salination levels.  Excessive salination levels on Negros have already ruined much of the island’s coastal agricultural lands, itself cleared at the expense of old growth forest. (Broad, 21)

The Filipino Oligarchy

The neocolonialist extraction of natural resources from the Philippines by MNCs, which has left millions in extreme poverty and the environment in such dire straits that even former dictator Ferdinand Marcos declared it a “national emergency”, is only possible via the complicity of a small group of Filipino elites.  This handful of extremely wealthy families, many of whom served as government officials and constitute a social circle which coalesces around Marcos, continue to profit from a model of export-led development which has relegated most Filipinos to indentured servitude and outright slavery.

In the Philippines the line between government and business is blurred at best.  Corruption and nepotism are rampant and wealth disparity great.  Conservative estimates hold that 18% of the population receives over 50% of all income. (Andrews, S-4)  In reality, that figure is misleading since the black market flourishes and is also controlled by this oligarchy.  For example, official estimates put the value of 1988 timber exports at $200 million, but unofficial estimates are closer to $1 billion. (Andrews, S-4)  Sixty percent of the timber goes to Japan.  As demand grew in industrializing Japan during the 1960’s, Marcos began doling out timber concessions to his business cronies via hand-written edicts.

By the mid-70’s Marcos and Aquino Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and other cronies owned large chunks of these timber leases. (Broad, 23)  Enrile controls the conglomerate Jaka, which owns San Jose Timber Corporation, Delores Timber Corporation and Casilyan Softwood Development Corporation, as well as numerous matchwood plantations on the island of North Samar. (Clad, 44)  Enrile was a Presidential hopeful in 1992.

So was the Speaker of the House Ramon Mitra, President Corazon Aquino’s closest confidant and leader of her new coalition party.  In a November 24, 1988 article the Far Eastern Economic Review exposed Mitra’s dealings with Jose Alvarez, another timber tycoon currently clear-cutting the pristine forests on the island of Palawan.  Alvarez became rich exporting Indonesian timber to Japan during the 1970’s and gained his Palawan concessions through his friendship with Teodoro Pena, who was Natural Resource Minister under Marcos.  Apparently Mitra has become his latest advocate in Manila.  Through his companies- Pagdanon Timber Products and Nationwide Princesa Timber Inc.- Alvarez controls the destiny of 61% of Palawan’s remaining forests, which he is currently cutting at a rate of 47,000 acres per year.  Palawan is still 54% forested and contains the last significant rainforests in the Philippines. (Broad, 22)

In 1986 Pres. Aquino replaced Ernesto Mercado as head of the Dep’t of Environment & Nat’l Resources (DENR) due to his mishandling of timber concessions.  But the new head of DENR, Fulgencio Factoran, proclaimed that often the corruption occurs at a regional level and is thus beyond Manila’s control.  He says often his directives are simply ignored. (Clad, 19)  Regional officials are easily bought off because their pay is meager and a refusal to be bribed by the timber barons could prove hazardous to their health.  One official in Palawan who tried to stop illegal logging was murdered, allegedly by a body guard of one of the island’s most powerful politicians. (Broad, 28)  The timber industry is just one industry of many in the country which is plagued by corruption and tightly controlled by the elite.  The Economist once estimated that 60 families hold domain over the economy of the Philippines.

The Ayala and Zobel families are the primary magnates of both banking and property.  The Soriano family controls the San Miguel Corporation, the nation’s largest firm which controls San Miguel Breweries and dozens of other corporations, including Atlas Mining, the nation’s largest mining company.  San Miguel got its legs in 1952 when its predecessor Andres Soriano Corporation, still the country’s only multionational and one of only a handful of Third World multinationals, entered into a joint venture with the Rockefeller-family controlled International Paper Company, the world’s largest paper producer, to form Paper Industry Corporation of the Philippines (PICOP).  All Soriano family members are now US citizens and many reside in the US.  Emmanual Soriano was National Security Advisor to President Aquino. (Tiglao, 82)

The Benedicto family holds a virtual monopoly over the country’s sugar industry, while the Cojuango family controls the billion dollar coconut industry which employs one-third of all Filipinos.  Eduardo Cojuango’s firm United Coconut Mills, which controls processing, milling and exporting of most all coconuts, is a subsidiary of United Coconut Planter’s Bank, where he is CEO.  The bank has more branches throughout the nation than any other, loaning money to small coconut growers at interest rates as high as 50%.  The Cojuango family is the richest in the Philippines and controls interests all over the world, including a 5,000 acre mare stud ranch in Australia.  It’s most famous family member of late is President Corazon Cojuango Aquino. (Manning, 21)

The stark contrast between Filipino rich and poor has given rise to groups like the New People’s Army, which now controls vast stretches of land, mostly in the Cordillera Mountains of North Luzon Province, land seized from wealthy absentee landowners and given over to peasant farmers who survive on what they can produce on the land.  The Kilusang Magbudukid ng Pilipinas or Philippine Peasant Movement (KMP) has also gained momentum of late, concentrating its efforts on the issue of land reform, which the Filipino poor see as necessary in closing the massive gap the country’s rich and poor.

Aquino Land Reform & the IMF

Catherine Caufield has aptly stated that, “tropical rainforests are used as a safety valve for governments who refuse to enact significant land reform measures.”  Without decent land to farm, peasants in the Philippines are migrating into the forested uplands to become kaingineros, in the process destroying entire watershed systems.

When Corazon Cojuango Aquino took office in 1986 she attempted to pacify a burgeoning left which had formed from the blatant corruption of Marcos.  She campaigned on a platform of “people power” and cited land reform as crucial.  Upon election she immediately formed a Cabinet Action Committee (CAC) to deal with the issue.  But when the CAC announced plans to redistribute 2.2 million hectares of land; large landowners, bankers and government officials voiced strong opposition.  Sugar growers in Negros threatened to recruit and train their own armies to defend their property.  Foreign investors threatened to pull out of the country and the Philippine peso plummeted in value. (Hawes, 22)

What resulted was an extremely watered-down version of land reform, which many say is worse than the earlier half-hearted attempts of Marcos.  The land reform only covered land currently producing corn and rice and redistribution of the land was based on the land’s market value.  Although the government subsidized part of the price for buyers, the poorest landless farmers got nothing since they had no way of coming up with the remaining amount needed to buy the land.  The program was riddled with fraud; there were cases where wealthy landowners aquired even more land through the program. (Tiglao, 15)

Aquino herself refused to sell any part of her family’s vast holdings to peasant farmers.  Ayala Land Inc., one of the largest property-holders in the nation announced that it would develop an industrial estate in Laguna Province in partnership with Mitsubishi and Kawasaki Steel; this on property which was slated for land reform dispersal. (Cohen, 38)  Clearly the political will to carry out the significant land reform necessary does not exist within the Aquino Administration.  Realizing this, KMP members have begun to encourage squatting by peasants on the lands of absentee landowners, a situation which is sure to polarize Philippine politics even further. (Hawes, 22)

Although the failed December coup attempt by members of the Reformed Armed Forces (RAM) movement was covered scantily by Western media and the ideological bent of RAM never discussed, the Far Eastern Economic Review reported in a recent issue that RAM’s platform in many ways mirrored that of the National Democratic Front’s Communist Party, of which the NPA is the militant wing.  Though RAM had apparently formed a tentative alliance with ex-Marcos cronies (including, it was rumored, Juan Ponce Enrile) for financial reasons, it appears that the coup attempt may have been a signal of growing frustration among the left due to Aquino’s unwillingness to deliver on land reform.  Significantly, three weeks after the coup attempt Aquino dismissed her Minister of Agrarian Reform, Miriam Defensor Santiago, as part of a major reshuffling of her cabinet, which many on the left saw as purely cosmetic in nature. (Missoulian, C-3)

Much of the pressure to abandon significant land reform measures in the Philippines has come from the international banking community, most notably the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  With an external debt of nearly $30 billion and a flailing economy, the Aquino Administration finds itself at the mercy of IMF austerity measures if it wishes to continue borrowing hard currency from the multi-lateral institutions on which the country has become so dependent.  In 1987 the World Bank, through its subsidiary Internatinal Finance Corporation, began to finance steps towards the further privatization of the country’s economy. (Tiglao, 74)  This was hardly a direction conducive to state-funded land reform.

Last March the Philippines government signed an agreement with the IMF under which the country agreed to four draconian provisions if it is to receive continued funding: import liberalization, increased privatization of the economy, increased taxes (the Philippines tax system is extremely regressive with the poor currently paying at an average rate of 27%, while the rich pay at an average rate of 18%), and a willingness to continue hosting US military bases. (Tasker, 13)  This final stipulation concerning US bases is instructive of the sway which the US holds over the decision-making of both Manila and IMF officials.  Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Base are the two largest US military bases on foreign soil.  In addition, the US operates 19 nuclear facilities in the Philippines. (Arkin, 3)

On June 23rd of last year, Economic Planning Secretary Solita Monsod resigned under pressure, following her outspoken criticism of IMF policies. (Tiglao, 68)  She was one of only two Aquino Administration officials who did not come from the private sector.  Her duties were assumed by Roberto Villanueva, a former member of the Lopez business group.

Currently the Philippines is buying back $1.3 billion of its debt for $650 million, with multilateral banks absorbing the rest.  But Citicorp, Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust, Fuji Bank and Bank of Tokyo are already planning to invest new money exceeding that amount into the country. (Awanohara, 56)  Since infusions will exceed debt buy-back, the Philippines will only sink further into debt.

The lack of environmental provisions in the current IMF plan, coupled with the status quo economy it promotes, can only lead to increased poverty and deforestation in the Philippines.  Alowing for the easier import of Japanese cars for the rich and continuing to export food and natural resources unprocessed and away from the poor will only deepen both environmental and social crises.

People of the Forest

There are no less than eighty distinct cultural-linguistic indigenous tribes scattered throughout the more than 7,000 islands that make up the Philippines. (Caufield, 86)  As export-based plantation agriculture and extractive industries have continually infringed upon traditional tribal hunting, gathering and subsistence agricultural lands, increasing numbers of tribal peoples have been decimated.  The destruction of primary forests encompasses the entire scope of life which the forest supports- the plants, the animals and the people.

The Philippines is a country of rich ecological diversity.  Like many tropical rainforest nations, it is home to many endemic species of plants and animals, as is Southeast Asia generally.  Of the 180 mammal species found in the Philippines over half are endemic. (Caufield, 61)  Many of these, including the ancient wild cow, are also endangered species.  The same is true of the nation’s bird population, which includes the rare Philippine (monkey-eating) eagle, from which the environmental group Haribon takes its name.  Plant diversity is astounding.  Mt. Makiliang alone has more woody plant species growing from its rich volcanic soil that does the entire United States.  Hunters and gatherers on Mindanao recognize over 1,600 species of plants just on that one island. (Gradwohl, 38)

There are four distinct types of forests in the Philippines: mangrove, pine, molave and dipterocarp.  While the first three types have been badly damaged, they collectively comprise only 25% of the nation’s forests.  The dipterocarps, which cover the remaining 75% of the archipelaego, are a valuable hardwood, much coveted by the export logging industry. (Wernstedt, 240)  Together, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Gabon and Ivory Coast export 80% of the world’s tropical hardwoods. (Gradwohl, 38)  Today, the Philippines has only 20% of its forests left intact and the ecological consequences are severe.

Over 16,000 sq.km. of deforested lands lie on watersheds important to supplying water for irrigation projects, hydroelectric dams and urban water systems.  The Magat watershed in North Luzon supplies the largest irrigation system in the country, as well as providing the Cayagan Valley with the hydro-power necessary for economic development.  When the dam was constructed in 1982, its life expectancy was 95 years.  But due to heavy siltation of the reservoir, resulting from the deforestation and ensuing erosion of the watershed, the life expectancy is now estimated at only 40 years. (Myers, 208)

Likewise, the Ambuklao Dam reservoir is fed by the badly deforested Agno River watershed.  Due to siltation, this dam is still not even fully operational.  Its initial 75-year life expectancy has recently been downgraded to 30 years.  This being the case, the Philippines government will lose $25 million on the project. (Caufield, 24)  An increase in wet season flooding, dry season drought and unpredictable typhoon activity also represents evidence of damage to the country’s entire hydrological system.

Many Filipinos derive their livelihood from fishing and much of this is done within the spectacular series of coral reefs which surround most of the Philippines islands.  These reefs are rich feeding grounds for scad, sardines, herring, caesio, surgeon fish, croaker, lizard fish, mullet, bonito, mackeral and tuna; all of which provide sustenance and income for Filipino coastal families. (Wernstedt, 231)  But these reef ecosystems are also under attack.  Most seriously, they are being smothered under mountains of silt running off of deforested hillsides, then being carried to the sea by muddy rivers.  Many of the people affected by the loss of fishing grounds which has resulted are tribal people.

In 1974 President Marcos signed Decree 410 into law which declared, “ancestral lands occupied and cultivated by national cultural communities alienable and disposable and for other purposes”.  Eleven days later Cellophil Resources Corp., a subsidiary of the Herdis Group, was awarded a license to log a million acres of land in Abra which belonged to Tinggian tribal people and four other indigenous groups.  The tribes had used the land to hunt and fish and had created an ecologically sound system of terraced rotational agriculture.  The land also contained four supposedly protected watersheds and Balbalasang, a world-reknowned National Park.

Herdis Group was headed by Herminio Disini, a relative of Imelda Marcos and a golfing partner of her husband’s.  Disini became briefly infamous when Time magazine uncovered his role as middle-man in a bribery scandal through which Westinghouse Corp. secured a contract from the Marcos regime to build what became a white elephant nuclear reactor at Bataan.

Both Mitsubishi and Swiss-based Bauminter Corp. have invested in a pulp mill which will benefit from the Cellophil land grab and which is financed by American and European banks.  In addition the world Bank is financing a parallel forestry operation to satisfy future Cellophil needs.  The Tinggians and the other tribes were never consulted about the project and when tribal leaders made even modest requests that the company not cut down certain trees on stream banks or float logs down certain streams (these two activities would damage Tinggian fish traps and irrigation systems), the Marcos regime began calling the tribes “squatters” and proclaimed they had no rights to land use, depsite thousands of years of history that dispute this absurd notion.

The military soon increased its presence in the area and eventually most tribal people were simply removed to government camps, modeled after the strategic hamlets which the US employed during the Vietnam War in a futile attempt to pacify South Vietnamese peasants.  The area now suffers from chronic erosion, frequent landslides, siltation and flooding.  Water is no longer drinkable and Tinggian fishing streams are seriously damaged.  In May 1983, the Battalion Troops of 623 entered five Tinggian settlements and began to interrogate villagers about their alleged support of NPA rebels.  According to the Catholic Church, soldiers killed at least three people, including a 4-year-old girl and her pregnant mother, and tortured numerous others. (Caufield, 103)

The World Bank has financed other similar forestry projects, including one which usurped traditional tribal lands to provide trees for PICOP, the aforementioned joint venture between International Paper and the Soriano family, now the largest paper producer in Asia.  The T’boli, Manabo, Blit and Tasaday tribes (the later only discovered in 1972 with 26 members) of south Cotabato, Mindanao have been victims of an onslaught of gold-diggers and loggers in recent years.  PANAMIN and the Office for Southern Cultural Committees (OSCC), the two government agencies set up to ostensibly protect indigenous people in the Philippines, both have board’s of directors which read like a “Who’s Who” of the Filipino oligarchy.  These agencies have focused on removing tribal people from traditional lands and placing them on “reservations”.

Some anthropologists see these moves as “forced primitivism” which cater to the tourist trade, but Dinualdo Gutierrez, the Catholic bishop of South Cotabato diocese, sees a more sinister plan in the works.  Gutierrez, one of a growing number of clergymen to ally himself with the tribal people, claims the reservation system was formed to, “lock (tribal) people out so certain financial interests could exploit the area’s natural resources”.

The T’boli people have lived in this area for over 1,000 years, yet today only 20% of the tribe’s 60,000 members control land.  A combination of lowland settlers from neighboring Visaya, the MNC pineapple and banana plantations and, most recently, gold prospectors and loggers infringing upon their traditonal lands has pushed the T’boli further into the upland forests where they have taken to slash and burn kaingineros agriculture. (McCarthy, 10)  Outraged at this situation, many Catholic priests and bishops have begun to speak out.  Last spring, Father Carl Schmitz, an American missionary, was gunned down by company vigilantes when he became too vocal.  Two other priests in Mindanao have suffered similar fates for their opposition to increased logging activity.

Peter Walpole, a Manila-based Jesuit scholar sees the destruction of the environment and the destruction of tribal cultures as two symptoms of the same socio-economic injustice.  Unless drastic measures are taken, Walpole says, “ten years and we’re gone”. (McCarthy, 9)  Walpole’s prediction is already ringing true on Palawan, where rampant logging of almaciga trees, from which the Batac gather resin, is threatening to drive that tribe into extinction. (Broad, 20)

The Battle for Mt. Apo

Mt. Apo overlooks Davao City in Mindanao.  It is an active volcano and the highest mountain in the Philippines.  The mountain is sacred to the Ata, Bagabo, Kaulo, Manabo, Ubo and K’lagan tribes who live nearby.  They understand a spiritual pact with Sandawa, the spirit of Mt. Apo. (Canuday, 8)  The area provides the last remaining habitat for the endangered Philippines eagle and is one of the most pristine and ecologically rich areas of the Philippines.  In 1936 President Quezon signed a proclamation declaring Mt. Apo Sandawa a National Park.  In 1984 ASEAN recognized the area  as one of the richest botanical reserves in SE Asia and classified it as an ASEAN Heritage Site. (Fay, AA)

A year later the Philippine National Oil Company (PNOC) began exploratory geothermal development operations inside Bagabo tribal territory. The chairman of PONC was Presidential Executive secretary Catalino Macaraig.  Funding for the exporation came from the Japanese Overseas Development Bank and Philippine Geothermal Incorporated, a wholly-owned subsidiary of UNOCAL. (Fay, AA)  Opposition to the geothermal development plan is strong and the issue is quickly becoming a lightning rod for the growing environmental movement in the Philippines.  The Lumads (tribal communities of Mindanao) were the first to voice their opposition to the project.  Last April the nine tribes of Mt. Apo Sandawa held a dayandi (blood compact) at which they agreed to defend their ancestral grounds, “to the last drop of blood”. (Lopez, 14)

Not since the Chico Dam proposal have the nation’s tribal people been so vocal about their opposition to a project.  The Kalinga and Bontoc people of the Chico River Valley in North Luzon’s Cordillera won that battle when they stopped a World Bank-funded dam which would have flooded their traditional rice terraces.  That battle was not without bloodshed.  The Kalinga and Bontoc formed a military alliance with the NPA and took up arms to defend their territory in the mid-70’s.  In April 1980, Macli-ing, a Kalinga village leader, was assassinated in his home. (Fay, 24)  The event proved a catalyst, as the World Bank was forced by the bad publicity to abandon the project.  Opposition to the Mt. Apo project is even more widespread.

In 1988 the Philippine Catholic Bishops held a pastoral conference which culminated in a pastoral letter titled What is Happening to our Beautiful Land.  The manifesto attacks industry and government for their abuses of the land and the people of the Philippines. (Broad, 21)  The tone of the letter reflects an increasing consciousness among Catholic church leaders that the environmental and social problems of the nation are products of the unjust export-led development model which the country is following.  Mindanao bishops, clergy and lay people have established their own campaign against any development on Mt. Apo Sandawa.  International NGOs have joined Haribon, the leading Filipino environmental group, in the fight to save Mt. Apo Sandawa, as have leading Filipino intellectuals such as Dr. Delfin Ganapin of the U. of the Philippines/Los Banos, who was highly critical of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) which PONC submitted to DENR for the proposed project.

Considering that PNOC is a government-owned entity, it is significant that an EIA was even filed.  Much of the credit for this must go to the new DENR secretary Fulgencio Factoran who, on July 25, 1988, sent a memo to President Aquino stating that in DENR’s view any geothermal development inside the National Park boundary would be “patently illegal”.  DENR had denied PNOC a permit to explore in the park earlier in the year, but PNOC proceeded anyway. (Fay, AA)  Recently, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have met with the Aquino government to discuss their possible roles in financing the geothermal project.  PONC continues to lobby Manila to segregate a section of the park for exploration.  Many environmentalists believe Aquino will soon cave into this pressure. (Fay, AA)

Logging Ban?

Both domestic and international support for the Philippine environmental movement is growing.  In 1988 the World Wildlife Fund entered an agreement with Haribon and the DENR to purchase $2 million worth of Philippine debt and to use the money to create two new National Parks on Palawan. (Broad, 26)  The New People’s Army has agreed to enforce logging bans in critical areas, while reducing taxes on companies who replant trees on land controlled by NPA forces.  The broader coalition of the Filipino left, the National Democratic Front, has incorporated an environmental plank into its 15-point political program. (Broad, 21)  Increasingly, the Filipino left and environmental groups like Haribon are viewing their struggles as one ans the same.

This recent coalition-building among domestic and international NGOs concerned with the exploitation of the people and environment of the Philippines has begun to make a difference.  On July 1st, under heavy pressure from this informal coalition, the Dep’t of Environment & Nat’l Resources announced a total ban on the export of unprocessed wood products.  This move towards a value-added economy is a bold one and the multinational logging companies have launched a multi-million dollar media blitz to discredit it.  Meanwhile, illegal logging has increased dramatically and problems of enforcement and internal corruption remain.

Some environmental groups have taken to monitoring logging activities, while Catholic bishops have agreed to act as DENR monitors in their respective regions.  Maximo Kalaw, President of Haribon, is constantly receiving death threats for his efforts, as are many priests, bishops and activists involved in the monitoring. (Broad, 25)  On December 25, 1989 at Port Barton, Palawan eyewitnesses observed Jose Alvarez’ Pagdanon Timber Company loading raw logs bound for Japan onto the freighter Eastern Jupiter.  The next day C.T. Skinner photographed the M.V. Isabella being loaded with Pagdanon raw logs. (EC, 169)  The mayor of Port Barton is Jose Alvarez’ brother.

Conclusions

The environmental crisis in the Philippines is deepening, despite a growing environmental movement here.  Despite her campaign promises, President Aquino has followed the same course of neo-colonial export-led development as her predecessors.  This strategy caters to the Philippine oligarchy, of which Mrs. Cojuango Aquino is herself a member, and to the MNCs who control 75% of all the country’s agricultural exports.  These MNCs utilize the country’s most fertile lands, while driving tribal people and peasant farmers into forested uplands where they become kaingineros, destroying forests and watersheds in their attempts to survive on these marginal soils.

Marcos-era corruption caused massive deforestation as logging companies supplied insatiable Japanese markets.  Though corruption has been less obvious under President Aquino, it is still pervasive and must be understood as a major force in Philippine politics.  The increased privatization of the Philippine economy called for by the IMF and international bankers will excacerbate wealth disparity and transfer government corruption into the private sector where there are even less checks.  Since most government officials are also wealthy businessmen, the same oligarchy class with benefit from the corruption.

Lack of significant land reform and political will to make sweeping structural changes to the export-led economy will strengthen the position of the radical left, spearheaded by the NPA, while further polarizing Philippine society along class lines.  The recent coup attempt by RAM illustrates this point.  It is instructive of the neo-colonial nature of the Philippine economy that US bombers from Clark Air Force Base were used to put down the rebellion.  Without significant land reform, both the environment and the Filipino poor will continue to suffer.  IMF stipulations run directly contrary to land reform or other social spending and with a $38 billion debt hanging over her head President Aquino will find it difficult to deliver on her “People Power” promises.  Instead, she will likely continue to serve her own elite class and their international banker and MNC counterparts.

Bibliography

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Tropical Forest Ecology. D.J. Maberly. Blackie. London. 1983.

“The Marcos Mafia: Crony Capitalism Meets Popular Democracy”. Robert Manning. New Republic. 6-25-84.

“Land Grab in the Philippines: US Corporations Make Their Own Law”. Brad Miller. Progressive. 11-89.

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California Press. Berkeley. 1967.

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Econet Action Alert: 8-28-89. Chip Fay & Jim Barnes. Topic 169. 12-29-89.

Simultaneous to this Crown-inspired treason, Southern Senate Republicans - well-paid by the foreign auto-makers who have flocked to their retrograde states to avoid paying union wages - concurred.  These are the very same people who parade around Washington playing “super patriot” when it comes to bombing civilian populations and feeding the military-industrial complex.  But a ribbon on the bumper of your SUV doesn’t do shit for our misplaced troops, one of whom is my best friend whose convoy was attacked near Ramadi two years ago.

The big talkers from down South showed their true colors.  They were ready to sacrifice the last vestige of America industry - one of the manufacturing prospects left since these same Republicans busied themselves passing “free-trade” agreements which have gutted our nation’s industrial sector.  It was not enough to give multinationals tax breaks to move jobs overseas.  Now they wanted to take down the only decent union jobs left in America - jobs that accounted for only 10% of the Big Three budget.

This is pure Rush Limbaugh: Crown-inspired serfdom masquerading as “free market” ideology.  It is a further race to the bottom for living standards of working people.  We need more good-paying union jobs in this country, not less.

Despite two months of revelations about Wall Street corruption and the failure of deregulating Big Business, these Southern traitors still didn’t get it.  They gave JP Morgan Chase, et al access to a $750 billion giveaway, but when American workers who actually made shit needed a loan of $15 billion they blamed those very workers.  These people who had nothing to do with the demise of American industry were pummeled every step of the “free market” way.  These Southern shills will conjure up the memory of John Calhoun when history makes its final judgment.

Thirty years of ”free-market think” produced a mindset among Americans that it is the poor who get the government handouts.  Yet if one looks at history they will see that it is the oligarchy that has always gotten the free lunch.  The latest banker bailout was only the latest installment of this saga.

All one has to do is to look at various government agencies and you will see how the super-rich get the vast majority of benefits from our collective tax dollars.  Take the SEC, which supposedly polices Wall Street.  They are there to regulate for the investor class.  The poor get nothing.  What about the FAA, which regulates air travel?  Do you know many poor families who fly once a week?  Well the rich sometimes fly every day.  Or what about the Coast Guard?   When was the last time a poor person owned a barge that needed rescuing, or a speed boat, or a yacht?  The Department of Agriculture writes the biggest checks each year to the biggest farmer.  The Department of Energy aids and abets ExxonMobil.  The Pentagon deploys force to protect the property of the shareholders of multinational corporations.  Then Halliburton shareholders get more government money to clean up the mess.

Not too many poor folks getting a handout here.

Yet many Americans continue to blame the poor for the shake down of the middle class by the Money Power.  This vital piece of propaganda, delivered to you daily by Limbaugh and Fox News on behalf of the taxpayer-subsidized oligarchy, continues to divide us.  This enables the Illuminati to more easily control us.  This mindset must change if America is to climb out of the abyss.

What I have just laid out is the very basis for progressive taxation.  The super-rich should pay more taxes because they GET more from government.  Under FDR the super-rich paid income tax at a rate of 90%.  Even as recently as the Nixon Administration, they paid at a rate of 72%.  Now, Warren Buffett’s own secretary pays the same rate as he does, while if state and local taxes are included, the poor pay a GREATER percentage than the Rockefellers, who mostly pay nothing at all by utilizing off-shore tax havens and foundations.

It is absurd that these Illuminati shills who whine on about their rich idols have any shred of credibility.  Wake up!

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

Unless one is willing to debunk the War on Terror there can be no exit from the fear-based reactionary politics that have decimated our Bill of Rights, bankrupted our Treasury through the buildup of Homeland Security apparatus, and pulled us into anti-democratic occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The hard pill which the American people have yet to swallow is that now that the US occupation has ended in Iraq, Prime Minister Malaki will fall.  Likewise, as soon as we pull all troops out of Afghanistan, Prime Minister Karzai is toast.  The idiot Republican “look how great the surge worked” crowd, basking as ever in their Empirical delusions, will immediately blame these collapses on Obama-ordered withdrawals.  Nothing will be further from the truth.  Again.

The reality in both cases is that the US has backed crooked, unpopular tin cup dictators whose rule is only possible due to the imposition of Imperial Army dictates.  We backed Karzai because he used to work for Unocal (now part of Chevron) and was willing to go forward with a key natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Kandahar to the Port of Karachi.  We backed Malaki because he was an exiled South of France millionaire beholden to the international corporate/banking glitterati.

Both are destined to fall, not because of Obama’s withdrawal orders, but because these Halliburton cronies are hated by their people and for good reason.  If we are really interested in promoting democracy in the region these regimes need to fall.  That’s how far out of whack US foreign policy is.  When they do fall the blame should be placed squarely on the heads of Bush, his Republican Boy Scout cheerleaders and the “Bush kept us safe after 911 (just not ON 911?)” morons, all 27% of whom could benefit from a few days in Guantanamo before we shut her down completely.

Obama must recognize that al Qaeda is run by the Israeli Mossad and British MI6.  Transferring troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan was a fool’s errand.  This move signaled that the War on Terror mentality was alive and well and that Obama had bought into this nonsense.  Instead he should pull all US troops out of everywhere and let tyrants fall.  A full investigation of bin Laden’s ties should focus on his ties to the Saudi royal family and the British Crown.

Special forces battalions inserted into the tribal areas of Pakistan have decimated al Qaeda.  Unlike many progressives, I have no problem with this.  I know who they work for.  Texas, Wyoming, Tel Aviv and the City of London are now the areas where 911 criminals should be hunted down.  Like dogs.

If Obama can break out of the imperial double-think that is the War on Terror he can slash the military budget, attack the corporate welfare queens and easily pay for the public infrastructure which is needed to keep us out of a depression.  If he does not break from this mindset, his well-intentioned domestic agenda could be derailed in much the same way that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society plans were largely squandered in the jungles of Vietnam.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

The real issue underlying the 2008 economic collapse has yet to be dealt with.  Until banks began acting like banks and lend money again, instead of gambling QE1-3 at the commodities bubble casino, the economy will be unable to count on the private sector to pull it out of its downward spiral.  We need a massive New Deal to both provide work for people and to modernize out ailing infrastructure.

Consider the recent track record of the Illuminati Money Power that owns the Federal Reserve money center banks.

In early 2000 they created Internet IPOs out of thin air, ran up their stock prices, offloaded the shares onto salivating yuppie middle class investors, then burst the NASDAQ bubble, making billions on the way up and on the way down through short sales.

In the ensuing five years they ordered their minion bankers to loan trillions on overpriced real estate, packaged these inflated loans into real estate investment trusts, and created credit default swaps to ensure themselves against the imminent real estate collapse.  They then made billions shorting real estate.  In the summer of 2008 these parasitic job destroyers bought oil, food and gold futures, creating yet more economic bubbles and making billions more while the world’s poorest people literally starved to death.

As that commodity bubble was bursting in September 2008, Goldman Sachs and the other thieves had already exited those markets while middle class investors had begun loading up on the overpriced stuff.  Goldman and the others now shorted oil and made billions more as that bubble burst.

Lather.  Rinse. Repeat.

The banksters create money out of thin air through fractional reserve lending.  This allows them to loan out money they do not even have.  They have to create manias and bubbles to sucker people into certain sectors of the real economy when prices have peaked and the banksters want out.  When those respective bubbles burst, the banker can then call in the loan and “foreclose” on the REAL asset - be it a house, a farm, a barrel of oil or a company.  This is how these financial parasites make money and expand their power.

This is exactly what happened during the Great Depression.  The bankers created the crisis by abruptly ceasing to lend money, then calling in existing loans and seizing the REAL assets of the country.  They have done this over and over throughout American and world history.  This is why, for example, in 1900 nearly half of all Americans owned and lived on farms. Today less than 3% do. Why? Because the people’s assets have been stolen by these bankers. Mister small hog farmer in Missouri has, for example, been replaced by Morgan Stanley-owned giant hog confinements.

When you understand this, the 2008 “credit crisis” takes on a new and more sinister meaning.  The Illuminati bankers have created this credit crisis as a means to further consolidate their power.  That is why JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup – the Four Horsemen of banking in my book Big Oil & Their Bankers… – received the spoils of the recent “crisis” which included the assets of Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, Countrywide, Wachovia, et al.  This is why they were also the biggest recipients of TARP money.  You bought those assets for them.   It was the greatest bank robbery in American history.

How Obama handles these age-old robber barons in his second term will be critical to how and when we come out of this downturn.  For despite their recent power grab these people are not omnipotent.  They have overreached in their greed and have been exposed then their is opportunity. This is where we find ourselves now.

If we are to create real change in America we must deal with these bankers.  The Four Horsemen of banking should each be nationalized.  So should Goldman and the other Wall Street vultures.  Since they comprise most of the New York and San Francisco Federal Reserve banks, this would constitute a Fed nationalization, something both Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy attempted to do shortly before each was assassinated.

A note to the Obama skeptics out there who, despite lacking any evidence of his Illuminati/Mason/banker associations, think the man is just another Establishment shill:  If he musters up the guts to push for a New Deal, while simultaneously taking these bankers on, swallow your pride and get behind him quickly.  There is safety in numbers and he will need all of us to have his back.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

For far too long Israel has dictated US foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere.  This is because, as I outline in my book Big Oil & Their Bankers…, Israel is not so much a “Jewish homeland” as it is a creation of the Rothschild central banking monopoly which controls our Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, Royal Dutch Shell and scores of other financial and industrial behemoths.

Israel serves as military gendarme to this inbred monopoly by keeping the Arab world stirred up and at war with itself.  That is why the Israeli Mossad finances Islamic extremists in every corner of the globe.  The Rothschilds know that if they can keep the Arabs divided amongst themselves and hated by the Evangelical Christian movement in the West, which is also an unwitting tool of the Mossad, then they can maintain their monopoly over Middle East oil, which is the lifeblood of the global financial system.

American Evangelicals have been hoodwinked into an unwavering support of Israel, while AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) makes sure that politicians who don’t show unwavering support for Israel have no chance of being elected.  If you criticize Israel you soon become a target for B’Nai Brith and the Anti-Defamation League who will claim wrongly that you are an anti-Semite.  Of course you can criticize the Arabs all day long and no such clamor will occur, despite the fact that any ethnographer will tell you that the Arab people are also Semites.

What fuels these lies is the massive money-printing monopoly that is our Federal Reserve, a monopoly which is largely owned by the Rothschilds and their interbred kissing cousins the Warburgs, Goldman Sachs, Kuhn Loebs, et al.  These people disdain the average Jewish person in the same way they despise average Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and animists.

They make up stories like The DaVinci Code to justify their bloodline rule and to convince us that groveling at their feet is our destiny.  It is the same Divine Right of a Kings philosophy which has existed on this planet for the past 2000 years, enslaving all of us while making a handful of interbreeding knuckleheads masters of the universe.

Our founding fathers were well aware of this family banking monopoly.  The writings of Jefferson, Madison and Adams in particular are full of warnings about these money changers and the network of secret societies (Freemasons, Illuminati, etc.) they have spawned to keep their money printing game out of public view.  Unfortunately this history has been suppressed by the corporate media, which is owned by these same families.

Americans of all political stripes, but particularly progressives have been brainwashed into the idea that any talk of conspiracy must be instantly discredited.  Why do you suppose this is?

Because if one does enough research, as William Burroughs said, “a man who is paranoid is one who knows a little something”.

Conspiracy theories are one thing.  Then there are conspiracy facts.  When I was completing my Master’s thesis on the Middle East oil game in 1991, I came across SEC documents which showed that the Rockefeller family still owned controlling stock in Exxon, Mobil, Chevron and other oil companies.  Yet my progressive PhD thesis advisor, a good friend of mine, suggested that we should leave this information out of the final paper because these facts indicated a conspiracy.  I refused to do so.

It is not easy to spend your life as a progressive political activist.  It is yet more difficult when people who share that point of view constantly abandon and discredit you publicly for stumbling upon uncomfortable truths which they do not have the courage to investigate for themselves.  We are to think within certain parameters which have been laid out for us by the Money Power.  Anyone who thinks outside these parameters is targeted for marginalization by a deputized Thought Police which 95% of Americans have become.

The same is true of our belief systems.  The New Age spirituality trap that so many progressives have fallen for is rife with the same pyramid top-down structures that exist in a right-wing Evangelical church.  But if you reject both dualities and tell them you talk to your ancestors, the animals and the trees; you are a nutter, despite the fact that this is what indigenous people have done for tens of thousands of sustainable and harmonious years.

Political and spiritual awakening are the same thing.  All religious traditions and Nature itself teach the same basic tenets of Love, Compassion and Justice.  Yet the fundamentalist movements now growing inside Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and the New Age alike move people away from these simple truths into a realm of exclusivity, arrogance and intolerance.

We need to break down these false spiritual and political barriers.  We must focus on uniting to free ourselves from the Money Power, which fans the flames of fear, extremism and division.  We should make it a priority issue to declare our independence from the Federal Reserve by nationalizing it.  And we should pursue a foreign policy which is in the interest, not of the Rothschilds, the British Empire or their Israeli surrogate, but of the United States of America.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

When we do have a room with a TV while travelling we are always struck by the varying quality of the international news channels.  In Thailand we got Le Monde out of France, the British BBC, DW from Germany, China’s CCTV, Al Jazeera from Qatar, NHK out of Japan, as well as news channels from South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Russia and the US.

What is most disturbing is that the US news - Fox News and CNN – are far and away the worst. In fact they are not even news channels.  They titulate and entain with their Ken and Barbie fashion show, hiring illiterate supermodels to deliver the daily dose of gossip column quality distraction.

My wife had a great idea for a t-shirt: FOX- Fear Or Xenophobia.  I won’t bother to define the latter word since those who don’t know what it means are problem busy watching, well, Fox News.  From the scary Swine Flu to the ominous Guantanamo prisoners who would surely somehow bomb New York if tried there, to the goulish ”socialist” health care bill.  Every purported news story on Fox News one morning was instead a giant fear bomb dropped on the viewer to put them into a mindless inert state of blind obedience to some invisible right-wing robocop fascist corporate state.

Al-Jazeera is one the best news channel I watched there. That’s why many of the best US and European journalists including David Frost have been hired away from the fluff channels and now work for Al-Jazeera.  Yet al-Jazeera is barely shown in the US.  Ostensibly, I suppose, because Fox has told it’s viewers that it is run by “those people who attacked us”?  Ignorance and fear are a very bad combination.

Al-Jazeera has, however, gained a foothold in the US.  Their recent purchase of Current TV should expand their presence.  I would encourage all of you to write a letter of support to both your Congressperson and the FCC in support of this excellent news source.  While you’re at it, suggest the possibility that Fox News and CNN have, by virtue of their dumbing down of the population, become a threat to our national security and that their licenses shoud be revoked.

Two even better television news networks are Russia’s RT News and Iran’s Press TV.  I have recently had the honor of working with the latter network, which is owned by the government of Iran.  Recently Press TV was dropped by Eurosat in a blatant act of censorship by the EU.  You will find links to both of these excellent news sources in the links section of this blog.

News media have a contractual obligation to serve the public good.  All news has a certain bias, if only because of what is considered newsworthy in the first place.  A diversity of opinion is healthy in a democracy.  But the public owns the nation’s airwaves, which the FCC is charged with doling out to radio and TV stations.  The public then, has the right to decide on a democratic basis who gets to use those airwaves. It’s not about “money equals free speech”, as the whacko far right would have us believe.  The Constitution says nothing about that.  It’s about public airwaves employed for the public good.

I would argue that neither CNN nor Fox News in their current form serve the public good.  There must be more worthy news sources who deserve an FCC license to operate in the US.  Press TV, RT News and Al-Jazeera are just a few that come to mind.

Fear Or Xenophobia – brought to you by the Zionist Rupert Murdoch and Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal – the two biggest shareholders of Newscorp.  It’s time to rid our democracy of this mindless indoctrination.  It is a threat to our national security.  I’m calling for a publicly circulated referendum to pull the plug on both Fox News and the billionaire Ted Turner’s CNN.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

A couple of years ago the IMF announced that it would begin liquidating its gold holdings- the world’s 3rd largest stash after the US and Germany.  Buyers included the governments of India, Sri Lanka and Mauritius.  Do you think the IMF would be selling gold at a market bottom?  Bubble #1 about to burst – Gold.

Both Venezuelan and Vietnamese governments announced devaluations of their currencies, striking fear into the hearts of Southeast Asian governments, who fear a repeat of the 1997 Asian Crisis.  Vietnam has benefited from the highly speculative dollar carry trade, through which investors borrow US dollars at near 0% interest, then reinvest those free dollars in 12-13% Vietnamese bonds.  Much of the money which we forked over to Wall Street banks via QE 1-3 has made it’s way into these speculative markets, rather than being loaned to US home buyers, for example.  Bubble #2 about to burst – The US Dollar Carry Trade

Another financial shock came out of Dubai, where the overbuilt property sector is reeling.  Dubai is one of five emirates ruled by undemocratic monarchies which make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE).  The UAE only got its independence from Great Britain in 1973.  As the Vietnam War wound down, the Golden Triangle (Thailand, Burma, Laos) heroin trade found a new home in the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran).  And Afghanistan became a permanent war zone.  Hong Kong had been built up as the banking center for the SE Asian guns/drugs/oil/war reconstruction trade.  Now Dubai serves that same purpose - first for Afghanistan and later for the war in Iraq.

The Dubai financial scene is dominated by the very same two British old money banks who control Hong Kong  – HSBC (the world’s 2nd largest bank also known as Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation) and Standard Chartered.  As discussed in my book Big Oil & Their Bankers…, these banks were launched by proceeds from the British Freemason’s opium wars on China in the mid-1800′s and are controlled by blue-blood British aristocratic families such as Swire, Inchcape, Jardine Mathesson, Keswick and Rothschild.

On September 10, 2001, Mohammed Atta received a $100,000 wire transfer from a Standard Chartered account in Dubai controlled by the head of the Pakistani ISI intelligence service.  Pakistan is home to the Agha Khan Foundation, which was launched by British Intelligence during the partition that same year of Pakistan and Bangladesh from India.  Agha Khan is considered the spiritual leader for Muslim fanatics worldwide, including the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda.

It gets more interesting when you discover that the Agha Khan Foundation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Crown Agency - a branch of the British Crown.  And that this same Crown Agency also owns Securacom- the company that had the security contract on the World Trade Center.  And that Marvin Bush - Georgie the traitor’s brother - was the CEO of Securacom.  Do you think it is a coincidence that the world’s tallest building is now the Burj Dubai?  Or that Halliburton moved its headquarters to Dubai?

So when Dubai Ports, the emirate’s biggest financial concern announced a couple years ago that it would suspend payments to its creditors- HSBC and Standard Chartered- it rocked the financial world.  The British Crown had trusted their al-Maktoum monarch pals in Dubai, even threatened Americans that they would shift the global second-in-line (let’s not forget London is #1) financial hub from New York to Dubai.  Now the sheiks were broke.  And the British masters of the universe bankers would be left holding the bag. Booh! Hooh!

So why does this matter? Dubai was perhaps the most dramatic attempt by the international bankers to reflate the global economy. It was the old “war is business and business is good” trade. And it is over. With US troops gone from Iraq and the Afghan quagmire winding down, the glittering Rothschild-inspired Dubai - built on of blood, drugs, gold and oil - is set to collapse.  Bubble #3 about to burst – The Global Reflation Trade.

With Dubai’s collapse will go the gold market, the dollar carry trade and the global reflation trade.  Global deflation, Japanese-style, looks set to take hold.  The dollar should rebound sharply.  The housing market will see another leg down.  The stock market will go through the March 2009 lows like a knife going through butter. On the positive side, it could mark the end of a global economy dependent on war profiteering and, if we play our cards right, an end to the global banking monopoly.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

(Excerpted from Chapter 15: Back to the Land: The Grateful Unrich…)

In April I buy a culvert and hire a backhoe to put in another driveway off the highway. We buy a metal frame building kit from our crazy neighbor Fred and put it up near the road.

We drive to Tahlequah, Oklahoma where Jill drops me off. I have $1,000 in my pocket, most of what we have to our name. I hitch a ride with a trucker all the way to the Mexican border, then catch consecutive buses all the way to Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. I spend $400 on Guatemalan textiles, spend one night in a hotel, and head back north via Palenque, Mexico where I spend another $400 on Yucatan hammocks. Without sleeping I catch the next bus for the US border.

I arrive at the border around midnight carrying a grain sack full of hammocks and my old Nepalese rucksack full of textiles. I am told that due to the volume I will have to wait until morning and clear customs. There is no way in hell that I am going back into Matamoros at this hour. I light a cigarette and drift back into the shadows. At 1:00 AM there is a shift change. Using the chaos to my advantage, I slip across the border unseen.

I stop at a phone booth to call Jill and to make sure they haven’t seen me. I tell her the deal, hang up and take off on a dead sprint through weeds head high with 100 pounds of now-contraband goods on my back. I do not stop until I reach downtown McAllen five miles later. It’s 2:00 AM. I duck into Denny’s and drink coffee all night.

At 5:00 AM I go to the Greyhound station, get a ticket and am soon headed north. The bus is stopped at a checkpoint south of San Antonio. I panic. But my contraband goes undetected. Jill picks me up in Fayetteville. The entire trip takes just eight days. Trail of Tears Trading Post is now open for business. The highway department takes down our signs – hand-painted and constructed from rotting plywood. We drive down to their office, retrieve them and put them back up. They take them down again. We go get them and put them back up.

Eventually we wear them down. We buy bulk trinkets from Sunday New York Times ads and go to auctions for additional inventory. We cover the metal frame structure with a blue tarp. We are open Friday-Sunday, hauling the stuff out every Friday morning and bringing it back in on Sunday night, barring rain.

We dig and plant a huge organic garden. We can pickles, tomatoes and sauerkraut; and freeze corn, peppers and okra. We plant fruit trees, strawberries and forsythia. We sell produce at our stand. Jill learns to make jewelry, with the help of a girl from Bartlesville who stops by our stand one day. Her name is Joni. In a three day weekend we usually knock down $350 or so.

Joni stops by again, this time accompanied by a friend. We agree to let Larry move his VW van into our back woods. Soon he is joined by his Oklahoma fugitive friends – Chris and Ken. I am leery but want to help them escape the city. At first the woods seem to transform them from their urban pettiness. But my naive attempt to reform these common criminals has no lasting effect.

I purchase a 1978 Chevy van for $550, so I let Larry drive away the Plymouth, which I’ve allowed Ken to buy with no money down. They take it on a 150-mile joy ride to some Tulsa bar and blow the engine.

I agree to let Ken do work to pay off the car. He starts complaining, none of them find work and our chickens began disappearing. They begin to spend more time in the house than in the woods and generally become a major drag.

Tonight a car pulls up at our stand at midnight. I grab my .22 rifle and fire a high shot in its general direction. I hear voices plea for mercy. It’s Chris and Larry. They have been on a midnight raid, stealing a canoe from a nearby White River outfitter. They want to stash it in our woods. I am livid.

Ken has the mind of a child wrapped in a 6’2” 230 lb. body. He is growing increasingly frustrated at Larry’s unwillingness to pay him for blowing up his car so that he can pay me off. Today he physically attacks the much smaller Larry in our home. I step between them and tell them to take it outside, which they do.

I sense a looming showdown with Ken. He has done a ton of cocaine in his time and is unbalanced. Part of me wants to kill him and bury him in the woods. I would be doing society a favor. He brags of his prominence on the streets of Stillwater, streets ruled by the same fear that runs these factories, that runs America. He is a symbol of the might-is-right paradigm that rules the land. I finally kick them out.

It is the end of October, a full year since we loaded the Plymouth and tore out of the cultural desert of Great Falls, MT. The initial landing was a rough one, our feet churning instantly, having gambled our life savings for a chance to live in the country, a chance to move further from the grid of industrial America.

Political activism has taken a back seat to on-the-job political struggle and the politics of separation from the system, of creating a new system. Lacking the collective will to form a revolutionary army, much less a back-to-the-land brigade, we tired of waiting and set out on our own to make real revolutionary change in our own lives. It has been a lonely road of endless work and endless struggle. But we have succeeded in many ways.

Today I make the last payment on our land. Bill Trotter is so blown away that he takes an extra $750 off the price. We have gained his respect.

Our neighbor Bob has grown his hair longer. We drink whiskey together sometimes and I sense a curiosity in him to learn more. Still he clings to his Roundup and his 9-5 routine. His wife June – a ward of Bentonville-based Wal-Mart – has an intense fear of fire, especially of the two acre blaze we lit last spring to burn the front area where the garden now lies.

Our neighbor on the opposite side is Maggie Cochrane, who knows everything and will tell you all about it until your spinning head feels like it might fly right off your neck. She’s a gatekeeper for the system and doesn’t like it much that we’re selling hippie garb on the highway. She complains weekly that our chickens are dangerously close to her petunia patch. During her latest rant I promise, to her horror, to kill them all that very day. And I do, bringing Bob and June the very last one.

Maggie’s daughter Patti – a real piece of city work – is building a $100,000 house behind Maggie’s and far too close to our trailer. Her security light – an oxymoron if ever there were one – shines directly into our bedroom window.

Where we hoped to find serenity, we discovered only the constant whir of lawnmowers, weed eaters, brush hogs and other tragedies of industrialization. Some days I wonder if we would enjoy more sanity in the heart of New York City, where at least I wouldn’t have to pretend to like the idiots behind the machines.

Winter has come early to the Ozarks, sending tour buses scurrying west out of Eureka Springs in search of straighter roads. My mother is on one of those buses and visits briefly. While she is here our friend Joni hits a tree while driving drunk. We rescue her from the emergency room before the persistent but fumbling nurses can attempt yet another botched blood-alcohol test, then nurse her back to health at our house.

Karen Menges – who has ditched her coke-head husband – visits. So do Grandma Henderson, Uncle Claire and Mary. Jill’s nephew Gabriel comes to stay with us for two weeks. Jill’s folks come for a visit. We rescue a hitchhiking carnie from a looming ice storm and are stuck with him for three days. He tells us exactly how each carnival game is rigged so you can’t win.

My mind remains tangled in the same knot of worry and rage that has defined my existence here. America is crumbling amidst the bloody entrails of the global poor – victims of greed and deception. Arkansas is a prime laboratory for a flurry of unsavory economic experimentation. The carnage is visible. Little Rock has a higher per capita murder rate than Washington, DC.

This corner of Northwest Arkansas is home to the worst union-busting corporations in America. Firms like Wal-Mart, JB Hunt – the trucking firm that pioneered the use of on-board satellite tracking systems to monitor its drivers – and Tyson – whose corporate chickens lay scattered on area roads – are a fine metaphor for those Mexican desperados and urbanized hillbillies who have forsaken their simple rural lives for the promise of cash and a daily snort of methamphetamine.

There are rumors that Tyson is involved in the Columbian coke transfers near Mena. Northwest Arkansas foreshadows America’s future – a low-wage manufacturing base run on fear, an Orwellian nightmare incarnated in the form of fast-moving assembly lines manned by crystal meth freaks, a rest stop for headless corporations bound for Haiti or Taiwan or Sri Lanka.

Our ten acres are filled with the sadness of a thousand slaughtered warriors who resisted this looming nightmare, who wanted only to remain on their land. Most days my insides feel like metal grinding on metal. I am irritated and impatient. The writing is on the wall. It’s time to go.

We put a sign up at the Eureka Springs library advertising our place for rent for $275/month. A pair of lesbian fruitatarians answer the ad and we agree to let them move in early. They live with us for nearly a month. It is not pretty. They have three dogs of their own.

I sell the metal frame building and build a bed in the back of the 78’ Chevy Van, supported by milk crates we grabbed on a midnight run from behind the Garfield Quick Stop. I arrange two R/T courier flights from Miami to Caracas, Venezuela for $100 each. I have to get out of this country again for awhile. The lesbians will watch Buck and Milo while we’re gone, then we’ll meet them in Florida in January where we’ll pick up the boys. After paying off our place we have only $1000 left.

It is December 3rd. We arise at 8:00 AM in the parking lot of a Jonesboro, AR truck stop. Last night I slept better than I had in a long time, free of sedentary life in a home-made bed atop all we own in the world in the back of the 1978 Chevy van that we now affectionately call Tubs.

This morning I set about cleaning the house on wheels. Our departure had been hasty. I am struck by how a space gets easier to clean as its size decreases. It is a nice change from the drudgery of keeping up a home, growing a massive garden, feeding chickens and continually putting “things” away. Simplify, simplify, simplify!

Often life seems a trade-off between boredom and danger. It occurs to me that there will be new dangers in our life on the road. I load my .22 rifle and stash it in a safe but easy to reach location. The road has a history of abusing nomads, whether denying them the right to graze their herd or running them out of a grocery store parking lot. My nerves are not calmed when the first thing I see upon entry into the truck stop are shiny laminated clubs – sawed-off baseball bats that seem to beckon every fat paranoid trucker to step up to the plate and take a whack at the pizza delivery guy.

We stop for the night in Birmingham. The weather has been gloomy all day and I keep seeing grey herons – birds of incredible sadness. We pull into the driveway of Jill’s Aunt Linda and Uncle Jimmy. Jimmy works in the steel mills and is a union man. Linda has numerous health problems, which somehow seem connected to those steel mills. The road out of Birmingham is covered with freezing rain, turning quickly to a sheet of ice.

We drive in rain until we reach Tallahassee, FL. I like this college town, despite getting run out of a hotel parking lot where we munched down a $3.99 Hungry Howie’s large pepperoni. It’s nice to be around black folks. They make more sense to me.

Once we pass Crystal River, things turn from redneck hunting camp to geriatric ward for the East Coast rich. We head east at Naples and drive through the Everglades on the Tamiami Trail, watching alligators with egrets on their backs.

We roll into Miami after dark. Jill has a premonition that we will die if we fly out of here. I wonder if it is real, or just a fear-inspired thought brought on by this city of venomous impoverished rage and haughty opulence living side-by-side. The drive from Little Havana to Coral Gables tells the tale. I feel as though sometime in the near future this city will explode from a fire caused by internal combustion.

We try parking in a couple of different places, but I keep finding myself reaching for my rifle. Finally we decide to head back out into the Everglades and get some peace and quiet. If Jill wakes up and still feels her vision of doom, we will forego the trip and head back north. If not we will come back in the morning when things are a bit less volatile. We find a nice quiet pull-out and doze off to a symphony of frogs, crickets and cicadas.

At first light there is a knock on the van. It is a park ranger and she informs us that we have spent the night at a place known locally as “Dead Body Road”. We tell her it beat the hell out of 42nd Street in Miami. She doesn’t like that response. Now she gets very serious and tells Jill to come with her. She asks her who I am and if she is in danger. It takes awhile for Jill to convince her, but finally we are left to morning coffee.

Jill feels better today about Venezuela, so we drive back to Miami and hatch a plan. First, we pick up our courier flight tickets near the airport. Then we stop by a storage unit and ask how much it will cost to store the van for one month. When the man says “Fifty dollars” I nearly faint. That’s the price of a hotel. I forego fainting and pop the critical question, waving fifty greenbacks in front of him, “Would you mind if we sleep in the van tonight in the storage unit?” No problem. It’s a coup d’teat. We cook dinner over our two burner stove in the quiet, dark and safe storage unit. We sleep like babies.

Morning is hard to judge, but we manage to arise by 8:00. We walk to a nearby La Quinta Hotel. We casually walk into the lobby and ask when the next airport shuttle is leaving. “Ten o’clock sharp!” replies the portly Haitian woman. I nod disinterestedly, playing the role of arrogant businessman, and head for the free breakfast bar. I grab two coffees and several Danishes and carry them to a bench outside where Jill waits with our backpacks. We finish these and I head back in for coffee refills and a few oranges and apples for later.

It is 10:00 and I am about to authenticate my standing in the community with loud complaints about the slow service, when the Haitian woman pokes her head out of door. “Are you waiting for the airport shuttle?” she inquires. “Yeah”, I respond briskly, while scratching my balls. She quickly ducks back inside and makes the call. Soon we are on our way to Miami International Airport, a good five mile drive, on our own private airport shuttle bus.

I fly out today, while Jill will fly tomorrow. The one drawback to these $100 courier flights is that there is only one flight per day. No problem. We have located the top floor pool and shower rooms in the airport hotel. Jill can sleep safely at the airport and even get freshened up for her trip tomorrow. I wave goodbye to her at the American Airlines departure gate and ready myself for a solo plunge onto the mean streets of Caracas.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix.

You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

The low point in the talk radio-driven mental mush came in New Jersey when a woman in a wheel chair was berated by a goon squad of 8th-grade educated repeaters who had probably all just come from their all-too-regular doctor’s visits billed to Medicare.  I’ve traveled to 50 countries and can safely say that was the worst behavior I’ve ever seen.  It was not even human.  The other people in that room should have gotten up and kicked some ass on those scumbags.  It’s the only thing a bully understands.

These people are sociopaths and cowards, drawn to the like-minded psycopaths at Rupert Murdoch’s Mossad-controlled Fox News.  They are the people everyone knew were losers in high school.  They are willing tools of Big Insurance and Big Pharma and Big Whatever Else might command their subservience.  They get their rocks off running down the powerless and bending over for the Power Elite.  They are whores of the Rothschild syndicate.  They are disgusting!

A timid Obama and his gutless Blue Dog Democrat cohorts also behaved like recently castrated steers.  They should have put forward a simple bold single-payer expansion of Medicare from the get-go.  Instead they find themselves scrambling to keep any kind of public option at all.  The progressive caucus in the House should have held their ground.  No public option.  No bill.

As to the American illiterati featured on the socially-engineered corporate media, here’s the answer (assuming they don’t accept the Tel Aviv package): no more evil socialist government for any of them.

If your house gets broken into and you’re a Republican, forget calling 911.  You will hereafter be denied police protection.  Fire at the lake home.  Don’t bother calling.  You are no longer ENTITLED to the evil socialist tenet known as fire protection.  Drive on a public highway?  I don’t think so.  Try a Goldman Sachs-owned toll road instead.

National Forest?  Forget it.  Those socialist trails are now open only to those who appreciate having PUBLIC lands.  Public school for your chubby potato chip-eating kids.  Not gonna’ happen.  Teach your kids at home.  That outa’ work out real well.  It has so far.

Medicare when you ignorant shills get old?  What are you kidding me?  If you had any shred of moral fiber you’d burn that socialist Medicare card as soon as it comes in the mail.  Ditto your Social Security “free ride”.  But you have no value system so, don’t worry, we’ll help alleviate your hypocrisy for you.  Under this new plan we’ll just go ahead and cancel aforementioned evil socialist benefits for you.

America was founded by brave people escaping the scourge of British mercantilism – read unfettered East India Company corporate control.  Right from the get-go our economy had both capitalist and socialist components.  The self-proclaimed ”real Americans” have lost their Illuminati-sponsored battle to put this nation back under corporate control via blind obedience to the whims of monopoly capital.

The ”real Americans” are actually traitors to the revolutionary principals under which this country was founded.  It’s time for the real, real Americans to stand up and fight!

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

A man is rich in accordance to the number of things he can leave alone – Henry David Thoreau

The 69’ Reliant runs like a top all the way to a cheap Indian-run hotel in Hays, Kansas.  Through a canopy of frozen fog we enter the ghostly Ozarks.  We careen down ribbons of twisting highways in search of land.  We sleep one night in the cramped car behind a repair shop.  On Day #2 we sign a contract for deed on ten acres and an old mobile home fronting Highway 62 between Gateway and Eureka Springs in the northwest corner of Arkansas.

The asking price is $29,900. We offer $20,000 with $10,000 down and the balance payable monthly over five years.  They accept – fully expecting with one glance at our old car full of everything we own in this world that we will never be able to pay off the remainder and they will get the property back, along with our ten grand.  We later have a feeling that happened to some before us on this piece of land.

We move in immediately and have just enough left of our Japanese grubstake to buy 400 gallons of propane, hook up the power and phone and stock our old refrigerator.  Furniture will have to wait.

With the passage of a right-to-work law, Arkansas is the bottom rung of the American wage ladder.  For $5.00 – $6.00 an hour poor country folks are lured into the industrial cities of Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale and Fayetteville, which are increasingly connecting into one big nightmarish sprawl.  Most work as temporary employees at monotonous and technically difficult assembly work, one step away – due to its complex nature – from being farmed out to some Mexican maquiladora.

With no money left and our first $250 mortgage payment due next month, I hit the ground running.  I sign up with Manpower and get instant temporary work assembling BB guns at Daisy Manufacturing in Rogers for $5.75/hour.  I drive thirty twisty miles one way to work the night shift.  On Christmas Eve the company big shots show up for a factory Christmas meal.  After dinner they announce that over 100 workers will be laid off, since the busy Christmas season is over.  I don’t have to wait for the pink slip to know that I am one of them.  Merry fucking Christmas!

Jill gets a job selling ads for a radio station forty miles away in Fayetteville.  We borrow $4,000 from her parents to buy her a late-model Mazda pickup for her commute.  I quickly get a job tending to exotic deer and sheep near Garfield.  For $6.00/hour, I clean ibex barns, mend oryx fences, haul pails of grain to mouflon sheep and water red deer, fallow deer and water bucks.  The animals are miserable and unhealthy.  Several suffer from foot rot.  A virus kills several more.  They need to be back in their native African, Himalayan and South American habitats.  They were not meant to live like this.

Sensing my alarm at the animals’ conditions and leery that his stay-at-home wife has taken a shine towards me, the owner Frank James decides he could “use” me at his Rogers’ construction site hauling concrete.  My job is to mix concrete in a wheelbarrow, then push the overloaded cart of mud down a narrow 2×6 to the masons.  I also keep them supplied with concrete blocks, tossing them ever higher as the walls go up.  When the mud runs out I mix more, at the same time trying to keep a steady supply of concrete blocks in their largely inert hands.  While Frank and his buddy Joe lay mud with a trowel and place blocks, Duane and I do the humping.  Joe is paid $20/hour, while Duane and I are promised $6/hour.  Frank is increasingly absent from the job site.

Duane is Frank’s full-time whipping boy. At age 20 the Arkansas native prides himself on being a “super-nigger”.  He has more energy than most folks care to come into contact with, but a good heart.  Being a “super-nigger” is a coping mechanism for desperate Ozark youth wishing to somehow rise out of poverty in a place where opportunities do not abound.  Duane’s loyalty to Frank is unbending, feeding into Frank’s notion of himself as some sort of God/King.  In Duane’s mind, Frank is like the father he has never known.  In Frank’s mind, Duane is a mind-controlled easily exploitable super-nigger.

My first paycheck is short $50.  I suspect Frank does this regularly to Duane, who can barely read.  I confront Frank at his home in front of his wife, Duane, Joe and the ibex tribunal.  He gets defensive and I home in, delivering ever sharper accusations as to his questionable business practices and even more questionable wild animal preserve.  Frank suddenly realizes he has underestimated me.  I am an educated super-nigger.  When I mention that the Arkansas Labor Board may find interest in his multiplication deficiency, he quickly hands over $50 in cash.  I grab it and tell him I quit.  I hope a watchful Duane has learned something.

High on this windy Ozark ridge we meet soul-to-soul with the Trail of Tears.  Hardship and suffering whistle through the dense sassafras thicket, up and down steep hollers, through the swaying tops of white oaks old enough to have witnessed the cause of this sadness.  Very near here – maybe even right here at this very place – the Cherokee Indians were driven on a brutal forced march to reservation concentration camps in Oklahoma.  Their land was stolen by white settlers.  They walked through rugged terrain in the middle of a winter not unlike this one.  And on this most brutal stretch of the trail, many died or were left to die on the cold dolomite glades and limestone ridges of the Ozarks.  Locals talk of hearing crying voices in the night, restless spirits appalled at forgetfulness.

Highway 62 parallels the Trail of Tears between Rogers and Harrison.  Our ten acres fronts this busy highway full of 10-mph curves and negotiated daily by RVs, travel trailers and tour buses that frequent the area.  Eureka Springs – twelve miles east of here – is the epicenter of the tourism boom.  It has always held an allure. In times past people came to Eureka from all over the world – drawn by the promise of the cleanest, purest water anywhere – a proverbial Fountain of Youth emanating from the many springs in town.  In the 1970’s the area was invaded by back-to-the-land hippies who discovered that they could grow almost anything here, especially the marijuana, which they openly smoked on Eureka Springs’ main street.

It is late January and there is light at the end of the deep tunnel that we have plunged ourselves into.  Sometimes in life it is necessary to reach down inside, taking strength from pain and hardship that gnaw at your stomach, using that reservoir of burning flame to become yourself a burning ember.  It is 5:33 AM, time to arise from this $5 lumpy auction mattress and step onto the cold floor of our fiberglass hillbilly castle.  I rustle together the daily rations – a couple of bologna sandwiches.  I empty the coffee pot and walk out into the cold dark Ozark morning.

The Valiant fires right up.  This morning that new heater core will come in handy.  I traverse crooked Highway 62 as it crisscrosses various ridge tops before plunging down into the White River Valley.  The sun is waking up a few minutes earlier each day, casting an expansive band of corals and maroons upon the dark silent Ozark hilltops.  I ask my Dad and my recently deceased Grandpa – who once visited me in Montana as a grizzly bear – to help me through another day.  In the majestic sunrise I read their response, “Stand tall”, they say, “Help those who need help”.

At the Beaver Dam construction site that would be pretty much everybody.  Steve – the quintessential Missouri hillbilly pig farmer – is two hours late again this morning.  Charley the big boss is waiting for him.  He tells him for the umpteenth time to not let it happen again or he’ll be out of a job.  Here in these Ozarks, where the quiet Third World of America unfolds before me, that kind of talk has been known to strike terror into some.  Arkansas’s long history of poverty and right-wing Southern politics make it ripe for Clinton’s economic miracle.  But Steve is from Missouri and I am beginning to learn that despite its proximity things are quite different in the Show-Me State.

Two brothers named Clayton and Quinn are also from Missouri.  They are also always late to work.  The threats of the bosses just bounce right off them.  Last week they just quit showing up all together.  These Missourians have great dignity.  Maybe it is because they fought with the Union, while these bended-knee Arkansans fought with the British-backed Confederate slave-owners.  Maybe it is because one may purchase liquor in Missouri.  The border town of Seligman, MO is five miles from our place and fills up each weekend with dry-county Arkansans looking for a drink.

At $7.00/hour this jobsite offers the best pay in the area.  I work 70 hours per week, racking up the overtime.  I am a roustabout for the operator of a 6’ diameter diamond drill bit, boring through Ozark limestone in an attempt to fix a leak that has developed far beneath Beaver Dam.  The goal is to drill a series of 300’ deep holes, then dump a sealant to the bottom in hopes that the fissure will be filled.  The workers here are all poor locals, while the equipment operators are regular employees of an Italian-American multinational.  The Italians are generally more agreeable than the Americans, who are extremely condescending towards us laborers.

Today the boss’s son – a tall rude yuppie named Steve – begins dumping bentonite into Beaver Lake.  I have become a leader of the laborers because I work hard and have the quick mind necessary here to avert any number of looming disasters.  I quickly confront Steve and scold him for polluting the lake, telling him to show some fucking respect for the place where I live.  He is taken aback, not used to being lectured by a lowly laborer.  He stalks away to complain to Daddy, who knows better than to say anything to me.  He knows I’m right and he knows I carry the load of three or four men on this job sight.

It’s March and I’m growing tired of this work.  Jill couldn’t take her job anymore and has already quit.  We’ve paid off the $4,000 on her pickup and decide to sell it.  We get $4,600. I go to Bill Trotter’s office and ask him how much we owe on our place.  I am shocked when he tells me we owe more than my records show.  I had been deducting $250 each time I made a monthly mortgage payment.  He explains the wonders of amortization, the biggest scam the bankers ever created.  I write him a check for $4,000 on the spot and resolve to pay off our 5-year mortgage by November.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

Meanwhile, the Rothschild-led City of London Illuminati banksters who run the dog and pony show otherwise known as Israel, seek to grab more global resources – this time in the north African country of Mali.

On February Tuareg rebels based in northern Mali, with help from al Qaeda remnants trained and armed by Rothschild intelligence agencies MI6 and Mossad to overthrow the neighboring Qaddafi government in Libya, attacked government troops in the Algerian border town of Tinzaouaten.

Secular Tuareg tribal people – represented by the Azawad National Liberation Movement – have for decades demanded greater autonomy from the central government in Bamako. Yet they have always been content to remain in their northern Mali homeland.

But Libyan al Qaeda in the Maghreb forces calling themselves Ansar Dine called for the imposition of Islamic law in northern Mali, then mysteriously attacked to the south. Why, if they were attempting to turn northern Mali into an al Qaeda safe-haven (as the “official” story goes), would they attack the central government in Mali and blow their cover?

These Islamists, who were also responsible – with help from the UAE – for the attack on the US embassy in Bengazi which killed US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others, fit the age-old pattern of M16/Mossad destabilization on behalf of the Rothschild-led City of London resource vampires (see my book Big Oil & Their Bankers…).

While speaking last week at the Ralph Bunche Center, the head of AFRICOM – General Ham – admitted that the US had trained many of the Mali rebels involved in the 2012 coup, including its leader Captain Amadou Sanogo. (http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/01/29/us-trained-mali-rebels-commander-visited-us/)

On April 8^th, 2012 twice democratically-elected President Amadou Toumani Toure was forced to step down, just prior to scheduled Presidential elections in which he was not eligible to run. Interestingly, all other potential winners in this election were against any foreign intervention in Mali to “put down” the “al Qaeda” rebellion.

Despite the anti-intervention mood of the people of Mali, soon there were cries from ECOWAS and the UN Security Council for the need to insert foreign troops into Mali. On January 11^th the French former colonial masters did just that.

So why did the French intervene in Mali, but not in the Central African Republic, whose government had also been attacked by rebels?

The real reason for the al Qaeda provocation which “required” foreign intervention may lie in the rich mineral resources recently discovered beneath Mali’s soil. Already Africa’s third largest gold producer, Mali is also rich in diamonds, uranium, iron ore, manganese, bauxite, lithium, phosphate, lignite, copper, gypsum and marble.

Oil exploration has recently increased in Mali and the nation has the potential to become a major transportation route between sub-Saharan Africa and Europe.

With yet another Rothschild resource grab in progress – this time mostly paid for by generous middle-class French taxpayers – the confirmation of Chuck Hagel can be seen as a seminal event. If confirmed, we could see both a significant move away from Israel and substantial Pentagon cuts.

Border bombings, escalations and other threats aside, it’s time the flush the Israeli terrorists out of the briars and follow the stench all the way up the food chain to the inbred Rothschild scum that runs these provocateurs.

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

The rigs were bound for oil tar sands mines in northern Alberta, where Peace River tribes are already being poisoned by this most environmentally destructive oil extraction process.  Montana - ever a resource colony of the Eastern Establishment - was offered $86 million in highway funds by Imperial.  That wouldn’t even have covered the cost of the asphalt needed to fix the roads on the heels of these passing monstrosities - asphalt which I assume would be purchased from another Exxon Mobil subsidiary if history is any sort of guide.

(What follows is excerpted from Chapter 7: The Four Horsemen: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf…)

By the late 1800’s John D. Rockefeller had become popularly known as “the Illumination Merchant” during a time when oil was powering the reading lamps of every American household.  Rockefeller had figured out that it was the refining of oil into various end products and not actual crude production which held the key to control of the industry.  By 1895 his Standard Oil Company owned 95% of all refineries in the US while expanding operations overseas.

Summing up his attitude towards his new oil monopoly, Rockefeller once stated, “The day of combination is here to stay.  Individualism is gone never to return.  Competition is a sin”.

Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust began Illuminating the New World with funding from the Kuhn, Loeb and Rothschild banking families.  While the Rockefellers worked the American side of the energy matrix, the Rothschilds consolidated their control over Old World oil resources via Shell Oil.

In 1906, amidst a rising tide of populist anger, Republican President Teddy Roosevelt ordered the dissolution of the Standard Oil Trust, charging that Standard had violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.  Congress concurred.  On May 15, 1911 the US Supreme Court declared, “Seven men and a corporate machine have conspired against their fellow citizens.  For the safety of the Republic we now decree that this dangerous conspiracy must be ended by November 15th”.

But this “breakup” of Standard Oil only increased the wealth of the Rockefeller family who retained 1/4 interest in each of the newly created companies.  Six decades later, Rockefeller’s companies began re-merging.

Standard Oil of New York merged with Vacuum Oil to form Mobil in 1966.  In 1972 Standard Oil of New Jersey became Exxon.  In 1984 Standard Oil of California joined with Standard Oil of Kentucky and the Mellon-family owned Gulf Oil to become Chevron.  Standard Oil of Indiana joined with Standard Oil Nebraska and Standard Oil of Kansas and became Amoco in 1985.

Amoco, Standard Oil of Ohio and ARCO were merged into British Petroleum.  In 1999 Exxon and Mobil, always the long arms of the Rockefeller octopus, merged in a $75 billion monster deal creating Exxon Mobil.  A year later Chevron and Texaco merged and soon Royal Dutch/Shell bought Pennzoil.

The Rockefeller/Rothschild oil cartel is now more powerful than ever before.  Hurricane Katrina was their pretext to push pump prices to the moon and they’ve never come back.  Oil company profits are consistently outrageous.  Congress seems to agree that “competition is a sin”.  Not one member has had the guts to utter the words “anti-trust”.  And Four Horsemen- Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, Chevron and British Petroleum- ride roughshod over the planet, vertically integrating the oil sector from Saudi wellhead to gas pump.

For Montanans - haunted by a history of subservience to the likes of Anaconda Copper, ARCO and ASARCO – three other Rockefeller tentacles, it’s time to cut the Illumination Merchant and his Pony off at the Pass.

Check out a You Tube 8-minute film about Exxon Mobil’s Big Rig plans at http://www.janeoholly.com/

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com