Economic Aspects of "Love"

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Aug 28, 2012 2:58 pm

SUSTENANCE: A POEM FOR LEONARD PELTIER | LORNA DEE CERVANTES

Image

All you wanted was to feed

The People, and a hunger entered

your Spirit. All you wanted

was to end the pain, and the pain

of your Sundance entered your heart.

“Where are our warriors?” a Grandmother

asked and the small boy in you rose up,

a sweet smoke offering. You gave

your life, but all you wanted was life

on Earth for all your starving relations.

You spoke for the young as a young man

and your Spirit-Song answered. You stoked

the fire for The Elders, until now, an Elder,

you fan the flames of Freedom in our lifetime,

keeping the fire of all our dishonored treaties.

You studied Liberty while they waged war

upon us, and upon those who looked like us,

the flower of your Spirit opening to let us all

inside your cell. You wanted the many colors of

the Rainbow, your warrior-Spirit becoming you.

You gave us your life, your words,

your Rainbow on the whitened page.

You fed us all. They locked up your Light

but not your fire. It blazes like sage, smolders

in the concha, the smoky prayer of your resistance.

All you wanted was to feed, to end the hunger—

of the flesh, of the the Spirit, of conscience.

Now, with starvation all around, a mold that

just won’t wash, you feed us, The People, with

your fasting, your writing, your glowing example.

Here, in this sacred circle of Earth, fed by

the Sundance that is you, may you walk

and love among us once again, telling

the Truth of the Old Ones, of the ones not yet

born. We are fighting for your freedom still.

Well fed by you, we know,

we tell, and we demand:

FREE LEONARD NOW!

FREE LEONARD NOW!

FREE LEONARD NOW!


Lorna Dee Cervantes

Sept. 12, 2010

for Leonard Peltier’s 66 birthday

and for peace with dignity and justice
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Aug 30, 2012 9:47 am

http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listse ... 29866.html


an excerpt from:
The Great Heroin Coup - Drugs, Intelligence, & International Fascism
Henrik Kruger

Jerry Meldon, Translator
South End Press©1980
Box 68 Astor Station
Boston, MA 02123
ISBN 0-89608-0319-5
240pps - one edition - out-of-print
Orginally published in Danish
Smukke Serge og Heroien
Bogan 1976
--[21]--

TWENTY-THREE
THE MIAMI CONSPIRACY


Early in 1980 Alan Pringle, head of the DEA's Miami office, told an
Associated Press reporter that Miami banks constitute "the Wall Street" of
the drug dealers. To the reader of this book that should come as no surprise.
Nor should Patrice Chairoff's claim to me that Miami was the main station of
the Fascist front organization, World Service. Yet the significance of Miami
in the netherworld of international fascism remains one of America's better
kept secrets.

In June 1976 Herve de Vathaire, the financial director for Mirage jet
manufacturer Marcel Dassault, spent a week in Miami together with soldier of
fortune Jean Kay of Spain's neo-Fascist Paladin group.[1] While there they
had several meetings with Cuban exiles. Upon their return to France the two
disappeared with over $1.5 million in aircraft corporation funds. It was then
reported that the money went to support Christian Falangists fighting in
Lebanon, but some French observers believe it financed two great French bank
robberies.

On the weekend of 17-18 July 1976, twenty men set out on an expedition
through the sewers of Nice to the Societe Generale Bank. There they stole
upwards of $10 million. When the robbery's mastermind, Albert Spaggiari, was
arrested that October, he fingered La Catena, cover name for a coalition of
Spanish and Italian Fascists, the Paladin group in particular. Most of the
take went to finance their operations.

A second sewer heist was executed in August 1976, this time at the Societe
Generale Paris branch on Ile Saint-Louis. The amount was $5 million.

Immediately after the Nice heist, Spaggiari travelled to the U.S. and
contacted the CIA. According to a confidential source, he had also been in
Miami shortly before the heist. The French Le Point and L'Aurore reported
that the agency was compelled to pass on its information about Spaggiari to
French authorities.

In early 1977, Spanish police arrested Jorge Cesarsky of Argentina's Fascist
terror organization, the AAA, and Carlos Perez, a Miami-based Cuban exile, in
connection with a string of murders of young Spanish leftists. According to
the Spanish daily El Pais, Perez and a large number of other Cuban exiles
were in Spain as part of a newly created Fascist International.[2]

In 1976 OAS and Aginter Press terrorist Jean-Denis Raingeard was in the
United States seeking the support of such right wing leaders as Senator Strom
Thurmond of South Carolina for an OAS coup in the Azores in the wake of
Portugal's left wing military revolution. The coup, if successful, would
bring a rightist government and U.S. control over the militarily strategic
Atlantic archipelago. According to an FBI investigation of Raingeard, on 19
November 1969 the Bureau had sent Portuguese police a questionnaire on his
connection to an OAS front (Aginter Press). The questions concerned a prior
Raingeard trip to Miami, during which he had a run-in with the law. When
asked about Raingeard's troubles, the State Department's Portugal desk
officer in 1975, William Kelly, said: "I would prefer not to address the
question of the French Connection."[3]

What are European Fascists doing in Miami before and after major operations?
Why are Miami-based Cuban exiles executing contracts on young Spaniards? Why
was the main station of the CIA-supported Fascist front World Service in
Miami? Why did bank robber Spaggiari contact the CIA in the United States?

Miami is the center of a huge conspiratorial milieu whose personnel wind
through the Bay of Pigs, attempts on Castro's life, the JFK murder and the
great heroin coup, and which is now reaching out with a vengeance to Latin
America and Europe.

To trace the roots of this milieu we must refer to the immediate aftermath of
World War II, when the CIA began its close cooperation with Adolf Hitler's
espionage chief, Reinhard Gehlen, and the Soviet general, Andrei Vlassov, of
Russia's secret anti-Communist spy network. Vlassov's organization was
absorbed into Gehlen's, which evolved into a European subsidiary of the CIA.
U.S. and German agents mingled in Berlin and West Germany, paving the way for
inroads into U.S. intelligence by former Nazis, SS agents, and Russian
czarists.

Headquarters of the CIA/Gehlen/Vlassov combine, staffed in the mid-fifties by
4000 full-time agents, were in Pullach, near Munich.[4] There Gehlen sang to
the tune of more than one piper, having remained in touch with the old Nazi
hierarchy relocated in Latin America, whose coordinator, Otto Skorzeny, was
in Spain. Skorzeny had infiltrated the Spanish intelligence agency DGS, and
effectively controlled it single-handedly.

With the onset of the Cold War, Gehlen's agents were recruited by the CIA for
assignments in the United States, Latin America and Africa. One agent,
reportedly, was Frank Bender, allegedly alias Fritz Swend, a key figure in the
Bay of Pigs invasion.[5]

U.S. historian Carl Oglesby sees the origin of much of the CIA's later
sinister record in the alliances it forged almost immediately upon its birth,
with the Gehlen/Vlassov organization and, through Operation Underworld, with
the Lansky crime syndicate: "Everything after this [the Gehlen alliance], on
top of Operation Underworld, was probably just a consequence of this merger.
How can a naive, trusting, democratic republic give its secrets to crime and
its innermost ear to the spirit of Central European fascism and expect not to
see its Constitution polluted, its traditions abused, and its consciousness
of the surrounding world manipulated ultimately out of all realistic
shape."[6]

Well put. Moreover, it is ironical that Europe's contribution to U.S. fascism
is now returning home and threatening the continent in a conspiracy supported
by U.S. economic and clandestine forces. The forces Oglesby speaks of were
united during and after the Bay of Pigs affair, and their bedfellows were big
businessmen with their own private interests. The merger was toasted in Miami.

The Bay of Pigs invasion itself was not the most important phase in the
development. That was CIA Station JM/Wave and its Operation 40, the agency's
secret war on Cuba from the summer of 1961 until the end of 1965 -four years
during which a truly conspiratorial powerhouse was forged in Miami. Station
JM/ Wave was unique in the annals of the CIA, as attested to by then Deputy
Director of Intelligence Ray S. Cline: "It was a real anomaly. It was run as
if it were in a foreign country, yet most of our agents were in the state of
Florida.

People just overlooked the fact that it was a domestic operation."[7]

With the start of its secret war, the new station became the agency's largest
and the command post for its anti-Castro operations worldwide. Its annual
budget of $50-100 million financed the activities of 300 permanent employees,
most of them case officers who controlled an additional several thousand
Cuban exile operatives. Each major CIA station had at least one case officer
assigned to Cuban operations who ultimately reported to Miami. In Europe all
Cuban matters were routed through the Frankfurt station, which in turn
reported to JM/Wave.

JM/Wave covered anything and everything Cuban, wherever in the world it might
be. Cuban representatives were shadowed in Japan, and a Cuban exile-led
commando unit was sent to Helsinki to sabotage the 1962 International
Socialist Youth Conference.[8] As JM/ Wave was closing down in 1967, the
agency sent another team of saboteurs to France to contaminate a shipment of
lubricant bound for Cuba with a bacterial substance developed under its
mind-control project, MK-ULTRA. When poured in oil, it would ruin motors and
other machines.[9]

I mention these scattered incidents only to elucidate the situation around
the October 1965 murder of the exiled Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben
Barka in Paris. Ben Barka must have been JM/Wave's number two target after
Fidel Castro between the fall of 1963 and the end of 1965. Castro in 1963 had
asked Ben Barka to arrange the first Tricontinental Congress, which was to be
held in Cuba in January 1966. The conference, aimed at Third World solidarity
against U.S. imperialism and support for Castro and Cuba, would signal a
major setback for JM/Wave and the CIA's plans for Latin America, where all
the agency's major operations in the 1962-66 JM/Wave era were focussed.

In 1963 the agency masterminded a revolution in Honduras, another in the
Dominican Republic, and a third in Guatemala. In 1964 it assisted in General
Branco's military coup in Brazil. In 1965 the Special Forces joined U.S.
Marines in suppressing civil war in the Dominican Republic, and in 1966 the
CIA aided and abetted Colonel Ongania's military coup in Argentina.

Cuba was an especially hot number in 1965. Led by JM/Wave personnel, the CIA
had planned a new invasion of the island to follow one of its attempts to
assassinate Castro. The planners included Howard Hunt and James McCord.[10]
Unlike the Bay of Pigs invasion, this time the agency was offering leadership
in addition to training and financing. However, one by-product of the 1965
intervention in the Dominican Republic was the aborting of the plan to invade
Cuba.

The CIA, station JM/Wave in particular, must have been anxious to know Ben
Barka's plans for the Tricontinental Congress, and to sabotage them if
possible. And time was running out after Ben Barka's September 1965 visit
with Castro. Thus the key to solving the Ben Barka murder case appears to lie
with three men: JM/Wave chief Theodore Shackley, Morocco station chief Robert
Wells, and the head of the CIA station in Frankfurt.[11] CIA contract agent
Fernand Legros is also known to have associated with Ben Barka in Geneva —
the same Legros who frequented Miami, the Bahamas, and other spots in the
Caribbean.[12]

When JM/Wave was dismantled, Shackley and his staff left Miami for Laos,
leaving behind a highly trained army of 6000 fanatically anti-Communist
Cubans allied to organized crime and powerful elements of the U.S. far Right.

In 1966, following the Tricontinental Congress which proceeded without Ben
Barka, a counterfront, the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), was chartered
in Seoul, South Korea by hardline reactionaries from the world over. That
same year Aginter Press, sponsored by WACL and the intelligence agencies of
the United States, France, and Portugal, was created in Lisbon as a cover for
OAS terrorists and other European Fascists. Led by the Frenchman Yves
Guerin-Serac, its aim was the subversion, through espionage, sabotage and
murder, of all that the Tricontinental. Congress had stood for.[13]

In that same period Cuban exile activist organizations sprouted all over
Miami's Little Havana. They spawned, in turn, terrorist subgroups like Alfa
66 and Omega 7, whose more notorious leaders -Guillermo and Ignazio Novo,
Orlando Bosch, and Nasario Sergen -had all been trained by the CIA. Between
1965 and 1971 they staged sporadic acts of sabotage and assassinations, with
Guillermo Novo repeatedly arrested only to be released each time. Cubans,
terrorists among them, were also being paid by Santo Trafficante and the
Syndicate to help spin their intricate U.S. narcotics web. And they also
found the time for dirty tricks on behalf of Richard Nixon and his White
House staff.

However, incidents like Operation Eagle of 1970—when the BNDD rounded up
Cuban exile drug traffickers and found many to have been trained by the
CIA—had made the Cubans an increasing embarrassment to the agency. As the
seventies began the CIA's Cubans had become an angry, confused, and divided
lot, who felt betrayed by their former employer. Still, they experienced a
comeback midway through 1971, when the powers-that-be, CREEP in the fore,
again sought their services. And in 1973, with the military in power in
Chile, they found a new employer in the ruthless Chilean secret police, DINA.
Other dictators south of the border have since followed suit.

In 1974-75 a reign of terror struck Miami's Cuban community as opponents of
Orlando Bosch were liquidated.[14] The campaign continued well into 1976,
during which Miami was rocked by over 700 bombings.[15] And that year there
was a notable upsurge in Cuban exile activity beyond the territorial U.S.

On April 6 two Cuban fishing boats were attacked and destroyed, and one
fisherman was killed. On April 22, a bomb exploded at Cuba's Lisbon embassy,
killing two and seriously wounding several others.

In June 1976 in the Dominican Republic town of Bonao, the Cuban Action
Movement, Cuban National Liberation Front, Brigade 2506, F-14 and the Cuban
Nationalist Movement merged as Bosch's Coordination of United Revolutionary
Organizations (CORU).[16]

On July 5 a bomb exploded at the office of Cuba's UN delegation. On July 9
another went off at Kingston airport in Jamaica, in baggage about to be
loaded onto a Havana-bound Cuban flight. The next day there was an explosion
at the Bridgetown, Barbados office of British West Indian Airways, which also
represented Cubana de Aviacion.

On July 17 bombs went off in the Cuban airline office and embassy in Bogota,
Colombia. On July 23 a Cuban technician was killed in Merida, Mexico trying
to stop the abduction of the Cuban attache. On August 9 terrorists kidnapped
two diplomats assigned to the Cuban embassy in Buenos Aires. On August 18 a
bomb exploded at the Cubana de Aviacion office in Panama.

On September 21 Chile's former Secretary of State, Orlando Letelier, and his
coworker Ronni Karpen Moffitt were killed in Washington when a bomb decimated
their car. On October 6 yet another explosion gutted a Cuban airliner off
Barbados, killing seventy-three. On November 7 one exploded at the Cubana de
Aviacion office in Madrid. Finally, on November 9 kidnappers seized an
Argentine employee of the Buenos Aires Cuban embassy.

Orlando Bosch's army of anti-Castro Cuban terrorists was responsible for all
these acts. When the Cuban airliner went down, Bosch himself was arrested in
Venezuala.

But the extremists had not waited until 1976 to take part in international
terrorist operations. In 1975 one hundred anti-Castro Cubans joined European
Fascists in the Army for the Liberation of Portugal (ELP). From neighboring
Spain, the ELP -whose core comprised Aginter Press OAS veterans -attempted to
overthrow Portugal's progressive military regime.[17]

The 1975 attempt in Rome on the life of Chilean Christian Democratic Party
leader Bernardo Leighton was a joint action of DINA, the youth wing of the
Italian Fascist party, MSI, and anti-Castro Cubans.[18] The 1976 murder of
Letelier and Moffit, a DINA/CORU job, was planned in Miami. Four of the five
Cubans involved in it were CIA veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion.[19] The
Leighton attempt and Letelier murder were each coordinated by the
American/Chilean DINA agent, Michael Townley.

The common denominator in CORU, as well as Internacional Fascista—a combine
of anti-Communist extremist organizations chartered at an October 1976
meeting in Rome attended by CORU representatives[20]— appears to have been
the CIA, or at least a faction thereof. CORU's headquarters are in Miami.
Originally, it was sustained by tight collaboration with the CIA and the
Chilean junta's secret police. According to the Cuban former CIA agent Manuel
d'Armas, the CIA coordinated DINA's acts with CORU's, and supplied the latter
with funds, advisors and explosives. The head of DINA's Miami-based force was
reportedly Eduardo Sepulveda, the Chilean attache in Miami and a top dog in
DINA.[21]

Internacional Fascista is the outgrowth of many years of planning in Madrid
by the late Nazi, Otto Skorzeny, who in the fifties had worked for the CIA.
On its rolls are former SS agents, OAS terrorists, hatchet men for Portugal's
dreaded secret police (PIDE), terrorists from Spain's Fuerza Nueva, Argentine
and Italian Fascists, Cuban exiles, French gangsters from SAC, and former CIA
agents hardened by terror campaigns in Operation 40, Guatemala, Brazil, and
Argentina.

Besides CORU, Internacional Fascista's militants have at various times
numbered the Army for the Liberation of Portugal (ELP) and its Aginter Press
contingent under Yves Guerin-Serac; the Italian Ordine Nuovo led by Salvatore
Francia and Pierluigi Concutelli; Spain's Guerillas of Christ the King,
Associacion Anticomunista Iberica and Alianza Anticomunista Apostolica (AAA),
which is not to be confused with the Argentine AAA that is also represented
in Internacional Fascista; and the Paladin group.

SS Colonel Skorzeny was the kingpin of the Paladin mercenary group until his
death in 1975.[22] Dr. Gerhard Hartmut von Schubert, formerly of Joseph
Goebbels' propaganda ministry, was its operating manager.[23] Headquartered
in Albufera, Spain,[24] its actual nerve centers were Skorzeny's
Export-Import offices and cover firm M.C. located at a Madrid address shared
with a front for the Spanish intelligence agency SCOE under Colonel Eduardo
Blanco,[25] and also an office of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.[26]
The cozy relationship of Spanish right wing terrorists with U.S. and Spanish
intelligence is further underlined by the SCOE's purchase in the
mid-seventies of WerBell's silenced M10 machine pistols, prior to which the
ideal terrorist weapon had been unavailable in Europe.[27] Shortly
thereafter, the M10 turned up in the hands of Spanish and Italian
terrorists.[28]

A melange of former OAS and SAC figures, and West German rightist activists
and mercenaries, Paladin joined terrorist actions in Europe, Africa, Latin
America, and even Southeast Asia. Along with Italian Fascists, Paladin is
responsible for the 17 December 1973 bombing of Rome's Fiumicino airport
which claimed thirty-two lives.[29] On behalf of the Spanish government
Paladin kidnapped and murdered leaders of the Basque ETA and in 1974-76
engineered some fifty bombings in Basque country.

Paladin's bankrollers included Skorzeny's weapons empire and Libyan
head-of-state Moammer Qadaffi.[30] The Skorzeny-controlled World Armco, with
main offices in Paris, was registered in the name of Paladin manager von
Schubert.[31] Upon the death of Skorzeny in 1975, von Schubert moved to
Argentina, but returned six months later to reorganize. In the spring of 1976
he raised eyebrows with a want ad in the International Herald Tribune for a
pilot, navigator, captain, three demolitions experts, two camouflage experts,
two specialists in Vietnamese, and two in Chinese. Applicants were directed
to a Paladin office in Spain.

Internacional Fascista was a crucial first step toward fulfilling the dream
not only of Skorzeny, but also of his close friends in Madrid exile, Jose
Lopez Rega, Juan Peron's grey eminence, and Prince Justo Valerio Borghese,
the Italian Fascist money man who had been rescued from execution at the
hands of the World War II Italian resistance by future CIA
counterintelligence whiz James J. Angleton.[32] They, and other Nazi and
Fascist powers throughout Europe and Latin America, envisioned a new world
order built on a Fascist Iron Circle linking Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lima, La
Paz, Brasilia and Montevideo.

In 1973 their goal seemed near. Chile's President Allende had been
overthrown. Peron had regained the Argentine presidency after seventeen years
of exile. Hugo Banzer was still in control in Bolivia, as was Alfredo Stroessn
er in Paraguay, and other right wing military regimes ruled Brazil and
Uruguay. When he returned to Argentina, Peron brought with him Lopez Rega as
an advisor. The latter would wield great influence over both the aging
president and his wife Isabel, and import hatchet men from Spain to help the
Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA) slaughter the Argentine Left.

In 1976, however, Fascist plans suffered a setback. Isabel Peron, who had
succeeded her late husband, was ousted from office and Lopez Rega was chased
out of Argentina.[33] Argentina's contingent of international terrorists then
followed Lopez Rega back to Spain, and were joined there by several of their
Argentine colleagues, among them Commissioner Morales and Colonel
Navarra.[34] Portugal's revolution, and the liberation of Mozambique and
Angola that followed, further complicated the Fascist game plan. However,
Third World terrorist actions continued.

In 1976 a seven-man Fascist commando group dispatched from Spain was arrested
in Algeria following an act of sabotage. Its leader identified himself as
Aurelio Bertin. In truth he was Jay S. Sablonsky, a native Philadelphian also
known as Jay Salby.[35] Another member of the unit disclosed that he had
contacted it in Madrid through one Gille Maxwell, an American working for a
real estate agency run by the former U.S. Air Force colonel August Woltz.[36]

Salby was a ringleader of Aginter Press, and later the ELP.[37] Together with
Guerin-Serac and other Euro-Fascists, he had worked for the CIA in Guatemala
from 1968 to 1971 in the unprecedented terror campaign which followed the
August 1968 assassination of U.S. ambassador Gordon Mein.[38] The campaign,
allegedly set in motion by Mein's successor Nathaniel Davis, was modelled
after Vietnam's Phoenix program. It afforded an early glimpse at the teamwork
of European Fascists with Miami-based, CIA-trained Cuban exiles. According to
Amnesty International, some 30,000 people were either killed or disappeared
in Guatemala in the decade beginning in 1962, the worse of it coming in
1970-71.[39]]

A later-released FBI document revealed that Salby and former OAS terrorist
Raingeard (mentioned at the start of this chapter) had been in Miami in 1969,
on leave from participating in mass murder in Guatemala.[40] Correspondence
in 1971 from Aginter Press leader Serac to Sablonsky is addressed to Jay
Salby, Seaboard Holding Corp., 1451 NE Bayshore, Miami.[41] Raingeard again
shuttled between Miami and Guatemala in late 1973.[42]

As to Ambassador Davis, he moved on to bigger things in Chile.[43] A
terrorist contingent which would train commandos for the Chilean Fascist
party, Patria y Libertad (whose co-leader was reportedly Davis's next-door
neighbor), followed soon on his heels from Guatemala. After a coup d'etat
replaced Salvador Allende with Augusto Pinochet's military junta, some
terrorists moved on to Argentina, while others, Salby among them, rejoined
Aginter Press in Portugal.

As Fascist terror then struck Europe, Davis became the U.S. ambassador in
Bern, Switzerland. By coincidence, DINA's chief of foreign operations, Pedro
Ewing, set up an office in the same city. The southern European Left, most
vocally the Italians, then protested repeatedly against the presence of
Davis, who was regarded as a coordinator of the terror. Eventually he was
relegated to the happy hunting ground of the foreign service, the Naval War
College in Newport, Rhode Island.

In 1976-77 Internacional. Fascista made its presence felt often in Europe.
West Germany's Fascist and neo-Nazi groups doubled. After Spain and Italy,
though, it was in France that the Fascists were most industrious, with the
old standbys from SAC assuming a new role. When 7000 SAC agents were fired in
1972-73, many joined Fascist groups in Spain -Paladin in particular.
Paladin's OAS contingent let bygones be bygones.[44]

What has made sleuth work difficult is Internacional Fascista's attempts to
camouflage itself as an arm of the Left. When General Joaquin Zenteno Anaya,
Bolivia's ambassador to France, was shot down in Paris in May 1976, a caller
to the police claimed the Che Guevara Brigade had murdered him to avenge the
1967 capture of Guevara in Bolivia. An eyewitness, moreover, claimed to have
recognized the assailant as the infamous left wing terrorist Carlos, However,
one month later the Nouvel Observateur reported that the assassination had
been planned at Madrid's Consulade Hotel by Bolivian intelligence agent
Saavedra and three terrorists from the Paladin group. Furthermore, inspection
of Zenteno Anaya's politics revealed his opposition to Bolivian President
Banzer, and allegiance to ex-President Torres, whose murder in Argentina
followed shortly after Zenteno's. Then it was the turn of former Chilean
foreign minister Orlando Letelier to be murdered by Chilean and Cuban
terrorists in Washington-soon after which the establishment U.S. press,
citing CIA and FBI sources, pointed the finger at the Chilean left.

In connection with these assassinations it's appropriate here to quote, in
its entirety, a recent report entitled "Latin America: Murder Inc.": "A still
classified staff report on 'questionable foreign intelligence operations' in
the United States, prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on
international operations, sheds some new light on cooperation in security
matters between Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay.
According to the Senate report, which has been leaked to the press in the
United States, the joint operation is known as 'Condor.' The Senate report
mentioned a 'phase three' of Operation Condor, which involved the formation
of special teams to carry out 'sanctions,' including the assassination of the
enemies of its constituent governments.

"The best known killing of this type was the bomb attack on Orlando Letelier
in September 1976 in Washington. Condor's role in this emerged during the
testimony of the FBI agent, Bob Scherer, who investigated the case and gave
evidence at the trial of Michael Townley. He testified to the use of Condor
as the channel by which the Chilean DINA chief, General Manuel Contreras,
tried to get U.S. visas for two of the agents involved.

"An impressive list of murders may now be laid at the door of Operation
Condor. These include the killings of General Carlos Prats of Chile and Juan
Jose Torres of Bolivia in Argentina, the Uruguayan politicians Hector
Gutierrez Ruiz and Zelmar Michelini, also in Argentina, Bolivia's General
Joaquin Zenteno Anaya and Uruguay's Colonel Ramon Trabal in Paris, and the
attempted assassination of the Chilean senator, Bernardo Leighton.

"The Senate report disclosed that Condor had considered establishing its own
operational base in Miami in 1974, but that this was headed off by a CIA
protest 'through regular intelligence channels.' In this case, the CIA
informed the Chilean DINA of United States displeasure and no Miami station
was opened. According to the Senate report, the FBI concluded early in its
investigation of the Letelier assassination that the murder might have been
carried out as a third phase of Operation Condor.'

"Presumably 'third phase' will now go into the lexicon of euphemisms
alongside the CIA's 'to terminate with extreme prejudice.' The fact that the
operation was well known to the United States at least five years ago makes
nonsense of its shocked surprise at the time of Letelier's death. "[45]

. The advent of democracy in Spain was fought bitterly by Internacional
Fascista. At least seventy lives fell victim to the struggle within the first
half of 1977. On January 24 Fascists armed with machine pistols stormed a
midtown Madrid attorneys' office and opened fire on twelve lawyers who had
defended leftists. Six of the lawyers were killed, the rest were seriously
wounded. Over the next three days right wing terrorists murdered four others,
two of them students, which led to the arrest of Carlos Perez, the Cuban
exile associated with the Argentine AAA.

On 22 February 1977 Madrid police discovered a factory where Italian Ordine
Nuovo Fascists had manufactured hand guns. The building had been rented from
an order of nuns by Otto Skorzeny's friend, Mariano Sanchez Covisa.[46]
Following up their discovery, the police investigated a bankbox in the name
of Italian Fascist kingpin Elio Massagrande. In it they found a small fortune
and three gold bars traceable to the $10 million bank robbery masterminded by
OAS alumnus Albert Spaggiari.[47] This led to the roundup of most of Spain's
Italian Fascist elite: Stefano della Chiaie, Marco Pozzan, Elidore Pomar,
Clemente Graziani, Salvatore Francia, Flavio Camp, Mario Rossa, Enzo
Salzioli, plus Massagrande and his wife Sandra Cricci.[48]

Spanish authorities, however, were pressured by the Italians' local
protectors, and the terrorists were soon released. Many of them headed to
Argentina and eventually returned to Europe.[49] Massagrande and one Gaetano
Orlando went to Paraguay, where they were arrested in December 1977 and
released within days on orders from dictator Stroessner. There they
remained.[50]

In August 1977 the Spanish AAA stole jewels worth $20 million from the
cathedral at Oviedo. The police recovered most of the jewels when several
terrorists were stopped at the Portuguese border. That same month
Internacional Fascista's Italian, Spanish, Argentine, and Cuban exile
terrorist contingents were represented at a Taiwan assembly of the World
Anti-Communist League.[51]

In April 1978 the parties behind Internacional Fascista formed an umbrella
organization, Euro-Droit (Euro-Right) as a response to Eurocommunism.[52]
Charter members included Georgio Almirante's Italian Fascist party (MSI),
Spain's Fuerza Nueva led by Blas Pinar, France's Forces Nouvelles (PFN) led
by Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, Belgium's Front National and Greece's
Rassemblement General.[53] In May Almirante and others represented Euro-Droit
at the WACL assembly in Washington.[54] On 27 June 1978 Euro-Droit met in
Paris,[55] and on July 18 its leaders met in Madrid with Latin American
observers including Ricardo Courutchet of Argentina.[56] Its representative
at the April 1979 WACL assembly in Paraguay was Fuerza Nueva's Pinar.[57]
Finally, in 1979, several Euro-Droit members were elected to the first
European Parliament.

The springboard of this chapter was what I deem The Miami Conspiracy.
Inevitably I am drawn to suspect that international Fascist operations are,
to some degree, directed from Miami. World Service, the cover organization
Patrice Chairoff told me was based in Miami, was of the same ilk as Aginter
Press, whose agents Raingeard and Salby were in and out of Miami. Miami
Cubans joined Aginter Press terrorists in Guatemala. The Nice bank robber
Albert Spaggiari was allegedly in Miami before his heist, and was definitely
in touch with the CIA in the U.S. after it. Ten months later money and gold
stolen from the bank were in the safe-deposit box of an Italian terrorist
leader in Spain. Mirage director de Vathaire and Paladin agent Kay flew to
Miami before their theft of Mirage millions, and met there with Cuban
exiles.[58] One hundred Florida-based Cubans joined the Aginter Press-ELP
army in Spain, where they became involved in acts of terrorism. Michael
Townley and other DINA agents were in Miami to plan the murder of Orlando
Letelier, and Townley also engineered an attempt on Bernardo Leighton's life
in Rome.

The old JM/Wave operation is born again. Only it is no longer confined to
Cuba and the Third World, but now encompasses a bitter struggle against a new
enemy, Eurocommunism. The home town of CIA fronts like the Sea Supply
Corporation, Double-Chek Corporation, Zenith Technical Enterprises, Gibraltar
Steamship Corporation, and Vanguard Service Corporation, and the site of
ominous Fountainebleau. Hotel meetings between Santo Traffiicante, Sam
Giancana, John Roselli, Robert Maheu, William Harvey, and Meyer Lansky,
remains the birthplace of conspiracy. And to close the circle, let us not
forget that gangsters and former espionage agents among Internacional
Fascista and CORU's minions were knee-deep in the heroin trade; that still
floating in the quagmire are extraordinary, international agents E. Howard
Hunt and Fernand Legros[59]; and that several Spaggiari gang bank robbers had
been the close associates of both Francois Chiappe and Christian "Beau Serge"
David, whom this book was, at one time, to have been all about.[60]

pps. 203-219

--[Notes]--


1. L'Express, 13 September 1976.

2. El Pais, 3 February 1977.

3. F. Strasser and B. McTigue: "The Fall River Conspiracy," Boston, Novem-
ber 1978.

4. E.H. Cookridge: Gehlen, The Spy of the Century (Random House, 1971).

5. L. Gonzalez-Mata: Cygne (Grasset, 1976).

6. C. Oglesby: The Yankee and Cowboy War (Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1976).

7. T. Branch and G. Crile III: "The Kennedy Vendetta," Harper's, August 1975.

8. Ibid.

9. J.D. Marks: The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (Times Books,
1979).

10. T. SzuIc: Compulsive Spy (Viking, 1974).

11. According to Patrice Chairoff: Dossier B ... comme. Barbouzes (Alain
Moreau, 1975), three agents assigned to the CIA's West German station were in
on the plot: Otto-Karl Dupow, Friedrich Stoll and Paul Welles.

12. It was while station JM/Wave was in full swing that the Cuba-based French
intelligence (SDECE) agent Thyraud de Vosjoli teamed up with the CIA.
Particularly interesting is de Vosjoli's close friendship with
Leroy-Finville, who was jailed—in the Ben Barka case. Furthermore, in his
book Le Comite (Editions de I'Homme, 1975), de Vosjoli refers to a certain
Legros in the same affair.

13. It is interesting, in light of the 1965 murder of Ben Barka and the 1966
appearance of Aginter Press, to note that CIA agent Howard Hunt was in Madrid
in 1965-66, following cancellation of the planned second invasion of Cuba
(Szulc, op. cit.). In Madrid, Hunt's family lived in an apartment owned by
the brother of his good friend, William Buckley, as reported by Hunt in Underc
over (Berkeley-Putnam, 1974). Buckley was one of the Americans instrumental
in the creation of WACL, and was later in contact with an agent of Aginter
Press, according to Frederic Laurent in L'Orchestre Noir (Stock, 1978).

14. Portugal's revolution and the ensuing defeat in Angola of the
CIA-supported FNLA by the Cuba-supported MPLA no doubt conspired to make
Bosch's work easier.

15. S. Landau: They Educated the Crows (Transnational Institute/Institute for
Policy Studies, 1978).

16. Anon.: "Miami, Haven for Terror," The Nation, 19 March 1977.

17. Counterspy, Vol. 3, No. 2,1976.

18. J. Dinges: "Chile's Global Hit Men," The Nation, 2 June 1979.

19. Landau, op. cit. Recently the FBI reportedly assigned "highest priority"
to seizing members of the Union City, New Jersey-based Omega 7, a group of
anti-Castro Cubans responsible for twenty bombings in the New York City
metropolitan area between 1 February 1975 and 13 January 1980 (New York
Times, 3 March 1980).
According to the well-informed investigative reporter Jeff Stein ("Inside
Omega 7," Village Voice, 10 March 1980), high-ranking New York City law
enforcement officials "believe that nothing can be done to stop the terrorist
wave without vigorous federal intervention -and so far Washington has
remained silent." Stein also reports that Omega 7 has been supported by other
anti-Castro groups including the Cuban Nationalist Movement (Northern Zone),
five of whose members were indicted in connection with the Letelier murder.
The name of Gustavo Marin — president of another, university-based exile
group, Abdala, headquartered on Twenty-Ninth Street in New York City —
appears on police files as an Omega 7 suspect. In 1974 Marin and Abdala
teamed up politically with Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church in
support of the Moonies , fast to save Richard Nixon.
Stein also reports rumors of an alliance of anti-Communist terrorist groups
involving the Croations, in particular, whose bombing activities have
recently been on the rise. Its funding, according to FBI sources, is coming
from Paraguay and that Nazi haven's recent arrival from Nicaragua, Anastasio
Somoza. Yugoslavia recently requested a U.S. crackdown on the Croation
National Congress headed by Janko Skrbin, whose extradition as a war criminal
the Yugoslavs seek for his collaboration with the Germans in the
"independent" Fascist state of Croatia from 1941 to 1945 (New York Times, 23
March 1980).
These allegations are particularly interesting in lights of the revelations
in Latin America Political Report (29 April 1977) that the Croation
representative of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) in Paraguay, Dinko
Zakic, had used $3.5 million from the WACL's regional organization, the
Confederacion Anticomunista Latinoamericana (CAL), to finance Croatian
terrorist activities. These included the murders of the Uruguayan ambassador
in Paraguay (an apparent mistake) and the Yugoslav ambassador in Sweden (not
a mistake).

20. Information, 22 February 1977; prior to the Rome meeting there had been
planning sessions in Lyons in 1974 and Barcelona in 1975.

21. Litteraturnaja Gazeta, November 1976.

22. Liberation, 24 and 25 March 1974.

23. Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 September 1974. 24. Chairoff, op. cit.

25. Le Nouval Observateur, 7 June 1976.

26. L. Gonzalez-Mata: Cygne (Grasset, 1976).

27. Laurent, op. cit.

28. Cambio 16, 20 February 1977; Time, 2 February 1977; Laurent, op. cit.

29. Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 September 1974.

30. Ibid.

31. E. Gerdan: Dossier A ... comme Arms (Alain Moreau, 1974). 32. Laurent,
op. cit.

33. Since 1976, when General Jorge Videla led a military coup in Argentina,
some 15-20,000 Argentines, according to Amnesty International, have
disappeared. At a 4 February 1980 news conference in London, Amnesty related
reports of former Argentine concentration camp inmates, that prisoners are
"tortured with electric cattle prods ... drugged and dropped unconscious from
a plane into the sea" (Boston Globe, 5 February 1980). Just prior to that
report, President Jimmy Carter's special envoy, Lt. Gen. Andrew Goodpaster,
had told Argentine officials that the Carter administration would consider
asking Congress to revoke 1978 human rights legislation prohibiting U.S.
weapons sales to Argentina.

34. Cuadernos para el Dialogo, 5 February 1977.

35. El Moudjahid, 5 March 1976.

36. Ibid.

37. In Portugal Salby/Sablonsky was known as Joaquin Castor. Colonel
Corvacho, the commandant at Oporto, confiscated Salby's false Guatemalan
passport, issued to him in the name of Hugh C. Franklin, by Guatemala's
Montreal consulate.

38. Liberation, 11 and 12 December 1974 and 19 July 1976.

39. Amnesty International recently announced that 2000 Guatemalans had been
killed for political reasons during the "alarming upsurge" in violence in the
eighteen-month period ending in December 1979. Many of the murders are
carried out by "semi-clandestine death squads" created to combat the left,
which, according to an earlier Amnesty report, "act with complete impunity"
from the nation's military rulers (New York Times, 6 December 1979). Total
U.S. military aid to Guatemala for the 1946-75 period was $39.3 million -see
N. Chomsky and E.S. Herman: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism
(South End Press, 1979).

40. Boston Phoenix, 14 March 1978.

41. Laurent, op. cit.

42. Ibid. Guatemala has always had a magnetic attraction for right wing
terrorists. According to Rend Louis Maurice's The Heist of the Century, bankro
bber Albert Spaggiari, a former member of the OAS, stopped over in Guatemala
before his 1976 visit in the U.S. with the CIA.

43. Nathaniel Davis and William H. Sullivan, who presided over the CIA's
secret war in Laos and later over the Tehran embassy during the fall of the
Shah, each graduated in the class of 1947 from the distinguished Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University outside Boston.

44. What remains to be seen is whether the Gaullist party presently led by
Jacques Chirac has also teamed up with Fascists by way of SAC. In May 1976 Mar
seilles' mayor and one of France's leading Socialists, Gaston Deferre,
accused the Gaullists of reestablishing "the notorious SAC barbouze corps" to
crack down on leftists -see H. Kruger and N. Levinsen: Fascismens
Internationale Net i Dag (Bogan, 1977). Deferre charged the Gaullists with
exploiting their position in power to once again open prison gates to release
murderers and other hardened criminals, as extensively as during the 1960,61 r
ecruitment for the battle against the OAS in Algeria. The rebuilding of the
barbouze corps convinced Deferre that the Gaullists would use force to remain
part of the ruling coalition. He and other leftist politicians demanded a
National Assembly debate on whether to dissolve SAC as a threat to French
democracy, comparing it to the Nazi SS. Within SAC and the Gaullist party as
well, old-timers who would not dream of working with the OAS have struggled
with new blood more interested in power than the prolongation of past
vendettas. It is in light of this and SAC's role in Internacional Fascista
that one should view the many "affairs" that shook France in 1976 -e.g., the
Agret and de Vathaire affairs, the murders of journalist Rend Trouve and
former Vice Foreign Minister Jean de Broglie, and the two great bank
robberies.

45. Latin America Political Report, 17 August 1979.

46. Cuadernos para el Dialogo, 5 March 1977; International Herald Tribune, 24
February 1977.

47. According to the 18 October 1979 issue of Rolling Stone, Massagrande was
himself in on the heist.

48. Cuadernos para el Dialogo, 5 March 1977.

49. Information, 21 July 1977.

50. The Leveller, October 1978.

51. Cuadernos para el Dialogo, 1 October 1977.

52. Agence France-Presse, 20 April 1978; Triunfo, 29 April 1978; Metro, 19 Jul
y 1978.

53. Metro, op. cit.

54. Washington Post, 28 May 1978.

55. Metro, op. cit.

56. Politiken, 19 July 1978.

57. Fuerza Nueva weekly magazine, 19 May 1979.

58. Journal de Dimanche, 5 September 1976.

59. A great art forgery trial, which the French spent three years preparing
against Legros, was dropped in early 1977 when the star witness, the
Hungarian painter Elmyr de Hory, died of an overdose of pills in his home on
Ibiza shortly after he was informed of his extradition to France to testify.
Legros' army of defense lawyers then wasted little time having the case
dismissed — see L'Aurore, 26 January 1977. At nearly the same time, fate
claimed another of Legros! close acquaintances, the gangster Didier Barone,
who had been closely in touch with the Felix Lesca mob and Christian David.
Barone was shot and wounded by three men as he and his wife Gisele were on
their way home one day. Gisele fled. Barone disappeared without a trace. In
Alain Jaubert's Dossier D ... comme Drogue (Alain Moreau, 1974), Barone is
also described as a specialist in forged paintings.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Aug 30, 2012 9:50 am

an excerpt from:
The Great Heroin Coup - Drugs, Intelligence, & International Fascism
Henrik Kruger

Jerry Meldon, Translator
South End Press©1980
Box 68 Astor Station
Boston, MA 02123
ISBN 0-89608-0319-5
240pps - one edition - out-of-print
Orginally published in Danish
Smukke Serge og Heroien
Bogan 1976
--[19]--


TWENTY-ONE
THE COUP


This chapter contains my personal interpretation of the great heroin coup.
Errors are possible on any or all points, inasmuch as the clandestine
operations treated in this book transpire in a closed world infested with
lies and cover-ups. There will always be loose ends.

The coup itself, which transferred control over the heroin gold mine from one
part of the world to another, I regard as a fact of life. Similarly do I
regard the involvement of elements of the White House staff. Just how high up
it went the reader can decide for him or her self.

Of the many heretofore mentioned details in the coup's planning and
execution, I find the following essential:

1) Prior to the coup, Lansky syndicate narcotics boss Santo Trafficante, Jr.
had made the necessary arrangements in Southeast Asia and Mexico, and had
started a war with the Corsican Mafia.

2) Trafficante's old partner, the CIA, had long since assumed control over
Southeast Asia opium smuggling, following Ed Lansdale and Lucien Conein's
defeat of the local branch of the Corsican underworld.

3) In 1971, when the coup's execution was seriously under way, Cuban exiles,
a group with which Trafficante enjoyed a unique rapport, appeared in the
White House's mysterious narcotics operation. They were tied especially to
Conein and E. Howard Hunt.

4) Through a succession of bureaucratic reorganizations the White House
assumed control over narcotics intelligence and enforcement.

5) U.S. narcotics officials waged an all-out war against the Corsicans'
Turkey/ Marseilles/ U.S.A. network, while warnings of a serious heroin threat
from Southeast Asia were all but dismissed.

6) When the Corsican Mafia was neutralized the narcotics enforcement
apparatus was suddenly reorganized as the DEA, and shortly thereafter heroin
began flowing into the United States from Southeast Asia and Mexico.

7) The CIA-infiltrated DEA grabbed control of Latin America's political
repression apparatus, was accused of protecting major narcotics dealers, and
was exposed as an accomplice to gun-running financed with the profits from
the narcotics traffic.

8 ) The White House protected Robert Vesco, who appears to be a central figure
in the scheme of heroin smuggling and gun-running.

In these eight points we find the will, the power and the motives, not for
the once proclaimed victory over the traffickers, but for the dramatic
transfer of underworld power that suddenly became a reality in 1973.

The Syndicate was in on it. The White House, the CIA, and special lobby
groups were in on it, too, at least indirectly. But we still need ask who in
particular and why. We will rely on logic and guesswork, only to identify
individual accomplices and their particular contributions and motives.

Let us first consider the Lansky Syndicate, represented by Santo Trafficante
and his Cuban narcotics Mafia. In addition to motives he might have shared
with the CIA, Trafficante had many other reasons to take part in the heroin
coup. First, it meant cheaper heroin deliveries and therefore greater
profits. Second, he wanted the Corsicans out because, behind his and the rest
of the Syndicate's backs, they had begun setting up their own U.S.
distribution network. Finally, Traffiicante's drug Mob did not want to see a
repeat of BNDD Operation Eagle-U.S. drug enforcement's last effective raid
against his network.

What were the possibilities for Traffiicante's playing an active role in the
coup's execution, apart from preparation of the Southeast Asia -and
Mexico-based networks? Without help from the CIA and powerful lobbies, his
chances were slim. With their assistance he could infiltrate the narcotics
nerve center, the White House. Here we might discuss just who in fact helped
him.

If it is true that Traffiicante fought the Corsicans so bitterly from 1971
on, how can it be that Marcel Boucan and his shrimpboat were seized in
February 1972 with 425 kilos of pure heroin, en route to Trafficante in
Florida? There is only one explanation, which Boucan himself offered in court
-that Boucan was set up by his American client. How else can the
unprecedented seizure by French Customs following a tip from the CIA be
explained? If it was a plot to exhaust the stocks of the remaining French
heroin rings, and thereby cause panic among the Corsicans, then it worked.

How guilty was Richard Nixon, who presided over the heroin coup? Personally,
I believe that, under strong pressure, he was a more or less willing tool,
rather than the force behind it all. Pointing to Nixon's guilt are his close
association with the Cuba Lobby, with people connected to Lansky and
Trafficante, and with Robert Vesco. In addition, his dirty tricks department
relied heavily on Cuban exiles.

The Cubans would never have supported him with dangerous criminal acts,
demonstrations, donations and votes, if he had really been out to eliminate
their most profitable business. Nixon would have been ruining the Cuban
Mafia, and to an extent the Syndicate as well—and thereby his friends in
Florida. He would have been digging his own grave. Thus Nixon tackled the
drug problem as he did every political problem—he followed the path of least
resistance. And that meant ignoring his criminal allies in Florida and
Southeast Asia while he hounded the Corsicans — who had no constituency — to
death.

That Nixon might have been involved in the heroin coup for his own personal
gain is lent credence by the following quote from Dan Moldea's respected
book, The Hoffa Wars (Charter Books, 1978): "A former Nixon aide, not privy
to the Haig investigation, says that one of his associates in the White House
mentioned to him sometime 'during the impeachment summer,' that someone high
up, maybe [White House chief of staff, General Alexander] Haig,' was
interested in Nixon's possible 'organized crime involvements.' That
conversation involved 'a massive payoff 'from those in 'Army service club
scandals in Vietnam' during 1969 or 1970. The aide says that the service club
ripoffs 'involved the Mafia and millions of dollars' and that the main focus
of the interest by 'someone high up' in the White House was on whether 'the
top Mafia guy' who ran 'all these things in Southeast Asia' had made payoffs
to Nixon. The crime figure, he says, was 'the one who was apparently known as
the so-called mastermind or architect of the Southeast Asian drug trade...
who was very powerful and very well known as a mob leader.... According to
government narcotics experts, the central figure in the Indochina-Golden
Triangle narcotics traffic was Santos Trafficante."

In my opinion the central manipulator in the whole narcotics scheme was the
CIA, or rather a faction within it. It is erroneous to treat the agency as a
monolith. Various lobby groups have their own agents in the company,
generating internal power struggles that reflect political polarizations
external to the CIA. There are, doubtless, CIA factions wholeheartedly in
favor of ending America's policeman and oppressor roles, and in favor of
social democratic rather than right wing regimes. Equally certain is the fact
that one should take the agency's new, outwardly benign face with a grain of
salt. Within the agency there remain powerful groups promoting continued
support of "old friends" in Latin America and Southeast Asia. The China/Cuba
lobby has traditionally been one of the most influential within the CIA, and
there is little reason to believe that the situation has seriously changed.
Finally, the agency has laid low of late, as the Carter administration has
lobbied for a relaxation of constraints placed upon it by Congress in the
wake of the seventies' exposes of CIA horror stories.

In addition to, or rather behind, the CIA's new official policy there is also
an unofficial one. It manifests itself in such matters as the manipulation of
the DEA to perform what previously had been CIA dirty work, and in the
toleration, if not encouragement of a large, apparently independent army of
Cuban exile terrorists, available for action in Latin America at the request
of the presiding dictators.

The evidence suggests that the forces behind the unofficial policy were able
to place many of their loyal CIA agents in the DEA, and in such private
intelligence agency covers as Intertel and Wackenhut, where they continue
their tasks while letting the agency wash its hands.[1] Intelligence is still
gathered by the CIA, but some of the dirtiest operations are now performed by
"former" agents.

We cannot, of course, discount the possibility that the unofficial policy is
in fact executed by former agents who had either been purged from the agency,
or left in protest against its more moderate line. However that implies that
a renegade CIA faction now runs an independent secret service, aided by lobby
interests -i.e., not Intertel, but an even more powerful "third force.[2] If
that is so, I can come up with only one lobby group with the relevant motives
as well as the power to back them-the World Anti-Communist League (WACL).
WACL can mobilize CIA agents closely associated with the China/ Cuba/Chile
lobby, especially the large contingent of former agents of the Gehlen/
Vlassov organization (the intelligence agency run by Hitler's masterspy
Reinhard Gehlen, which became the BND, the West German equivalent of the
CIA).[3]

E. Howard Hunt was clearly the China/Cuba/ Latin America lobby's man. That he
is also tied to WACL is suggested by the fact that William F. Buckley, Hunt's
close friend for twenty years and the godfather of his children,[4] was one
of WACL's top U.S. supporters.[5] Also connected to the same lobby groups are
Lucien Conein and the State Department's former intelligence chief, Ray S.
Cline, who continues to be a frequent guest at the Taiwan WACL stronghold.[6]

Hunt and Conein were the vital forces behind the White House's great heroin
coup. Hunt secured the Cuban exiles their necessary footing; and he got his
friends Bernard Barker and Manuel Artime to set up "hit teams" to kidnap and
murder Latin American narcotics traffickers. According to Frank Sturgis,
those traffickers included members of Auguste Ricord and Christian David's
Grupo Frances. Hunt persuaded Egil Krogh to bring CIA agents into the White
House narcotics apparatus. He told Krogh that he knew "key CIA officers who
could be temporarily detached from the agency and employed by the new liaison
group."[7] It was Hunt who recommended Lucien Conein to head the group.
Finally, it was intelligence reports from the CIA and Conein's group which
made White House narcotics actions focus almost exclusively on the Corsicans.

Conein's close friend Mitch WerBell III told journalist Jim Hougan he "found
it difficult to believe that a lifelong spy of Conein's stature could ever
really leave the CIA. Accustomed to the use of other government agencies as
CIA covers, WerBell quite naturally held open the possibility that Conein's
DEA job was no more than an exercise in 'sheep-dipping' the backgrounds and
identities of the Dirty Dozen, all of whom were CIA veterans."[8]

The desire to help its old friends in Southeast Asia and Latin America was
not the CIA's only motive for promoting the heroin coup. The Gaullists in
France, including their loyal adherents in intelligence agency SDECE, and
their dirty tricksters in SAC were, in the de Gaulle era, the CIA's arch
enemies as well as rivals for control of the world heroin trade. One can well
imagine the CIA joining forces with Georges Pompidou and other pro-U.S.
forces in France, in crushing the old Gaullist intelligence network.

In 1973, with the Corsicans finally pushed out of the picture, the White
House reorganized the narcotics effort to form the DEA. Almost immediately,
heroin began flowing to the U.S. from new sources of supply. Journalist Ron
Rosenbaum cites the following statement by a U.S. customs official: "BNDD and
Customs are finally getting somewhere, they break up the French Connection,
they're getting big conspiracy cases. Suddenly they [the White House] step in
and there's this big shake-up, and by the time people get back to work the
Mexican Connection is set up, protected and doing big business. What's that
say to you?"[9]

He might have added that the Southeast Asian connection was also protected
and doing big business.

The emergence of the DEA was the next to last phase of the heroin coup. Hunt
and Conein's CIA agents moved into DEA intelligence and operations, Conein
locating twelve Latino CIA agents in his Special Operations Group alone. The
Dirty Dozen was officially created to combat Cuban and Latin American
narcotics smugglers, allegedly following the assassination approach conceived
in the darkest corners of the White House.

It must have been a gag. Conein's forces were apparently directed, for the
most part, against small-time independents who had competed with the big-time
traffickers in on the heroin coup. The biggest Cuban network, Santo
Trafficante's, went untouched. Miami's 1974-75 murder wave in Little Havana
might even have been connected to the activities of Conein's Cubans. The
victims had opposed Orlando Bosch's drive for solidarity in terrorism, a
drive which—as suggested by writer Hougan[10]—might well have enjoyed the
support of Trafficante and Robert Vesco. Of the latter two, certainly the
first and quite possibly the second as well were central figures in the
heroin coup.

That brings us to the last, the political phase of the heroin coup, which
began with the DEA's 1974 takeover of the CIA's Latin American torture and
repression apparatus, and ended with the 1976 creation of CORU, Bosch's
terrorist mercenary army. "Ended" is, however, the incorrect word, since the
brutalities financed by the heroin coup continue. The DEA—or that part of it
penetrated by the CIA—protects the major narcotics dealers. The latter, in
turn, support—financially and through gun-running—anti-Communist paramilitary
groups which work hand in hand with Latin American police and military
forces, whose death squads and torturers are supervised by agents of the DEA.

The infiltration of the DEA, and the variety of political assignments for its
agents, have caused such violent splits within the bureau that one can speak
of two wings which fight one another. One wing carries out
guns-for-drugs-and-protection programs; the other tries desperately to combat
the drug traffic carried out or protected by the first! Among the expressions
of this bitter internal strife, apparently, are the Sicilia-Falcon and
WerBell cases, and the dismissal of DEA director Bartels for suspected
corruption.

Recently, the use of drug profits to finance right wing terrorism has been
placed in a new perspective by revelations of Cuban exile teamwork with
European and Latin American Fascists, and the economic support of WACL for
the same anti-Communist groups." And that brings us to the final link in the
chain of drugs, intelligence, and fascism.

pps.189-196

Notes


1. Wackenhut was founded in Miami in 1954, at the height of the Cold War,
McCarthyism, and domestic witch hunts, by George Wackenhut, a former FBI gym
instructor. The firm reportedly has archives containing files on everyone
investigated by the old House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and
publishes a monthly bulletin, The Wackenhut Corporation Security Review:
Communism and You. In 1974 it was awarded a $15 million contract to guard the
trans-Alaska pipeline.
International Intelligence, Inc. (Intertel) was created in 1970 by former
Naval Intelligence, National Security Agency and Justice Department
investigator Robert Peloquin. It grew out of the latter's association with
James Crosby (a partner in the Mary Carter Paint Company which became Resorts
International, and a close friend and business associate of Nixon crony Bebe
Rebozo) whose entry into the Bahamas gambling casino scene was facilitated by
a U.S. Justice Department probe, led by Peloquin, of Bahama gamblers' links
to the Mob. Once Crosby had built his own casino on Paradise Island, Peloquin
ran the security firm that policed it. Resorts International later helped
Peloquin found Intertel, whose more prominent clients have included Howard
Hughes and ITT. Thus was Intertel involved in the Thanksgiving 1970 whisking
away of Hughes to the Bahamas, and the 1972 affair involving the Dita Beard
memo on ITT's buy-off of a Justice Department antitrust action. Besides
industrial security, Intertel's specialties include economic intelligence,
data processing, systems engineering, and the behavioral sciences. See G.
O'Toole: The Private Sector (Norton, 1978).

2. Intertel. might indeed be very important in this connection, as the
Justice Department's DeFeo report reveals the close relationship between
Intertel and the DEA on such matters as Operation Silver Dollar and Operation
Croupier. Consider DEA agent Santo Allesandro Bario, who seems to have been
in on many of the operations discussed in this book. Intertel employed him on
a 1971 security project in Las Vegas. He later infiltrated New Orleans Mafia
circles as a BNDD undercover agent. In 1972-73 the BNDD/DEA sent him to
France, where he infiltrated the key Corsican Guerini family. In May 1974
Lucien Conein recommended Bario as an undercover agent to help Intertel on
Operation Croupier. Croupiers at the Paradise Island Casino were allegedly
involved in narcotics smuggling. In July 1974 Bario, Conein and acting DEA
chief inspector Phillip Smith met with Intertel director Robert Peloquin. In
August Bario was off on his mission to Nassau. Smith and Bario alike have
been under investigation for cases of fraud and misconduct involving
Intertel. Bario worked for the DEA in Mexico from 1975 until he was caught in
1978 in a mysterious fraud setup in San Antonio. He went to jail, where he
was allegedly poisoned, and was unconscious in a hospital until he died a few
months later.

3. Spearheading WACL's Latin America drive is the Confederacion Anticomunista
Latinoamericana (CAL), which is connected to the Federacion Mexicana
Anticomunista (FEMACO). Financial support for these organizations is
allegedly supplied through Shuen Shigh Kao, a Mexico-based agent of Taiwan
intelligence -see P. Chairoff: Dossier Neo-Nazisme (Editions Ramsay, 1978).
WACL's tolerant attitude towards heroin smuggling was never more evident than
in the case of Chao Sopsaisana, who in 1977 was arrested in Paris with sixty
kilos of pure heroin in his valise. Diplomatic immunity got him back to Laos,
where he continued in his role as vice president of the National Assembly as
if nothing had happened. He remains today the president of the Laotian
chapter of WACL -see Asian Outlook, January 1979.

4. E.H. Hunt: Undercover (Berkeley-Putnam, 1974); T. SzuIc: Compulsive Spy
(Viking, 1974).

5. According to Frederic Laurent in L'Orchestre Noir (Stock, 1978), documents
of the neo-Fascist terrorist group Aginter Press, recovered by the Portuguese
army in 1974, included correspondence between Buckley and Aginter agent Jay
Salby; see chapter twenty-three on the terrorists.

6. Asian Outlook, June and October 1978.

7. E.J. Epstein: Agency of Fear (Putnam, 1977). 8. J. Hougan: Spooks (William
Morrow, 1978).

9. R.Rosenbaum: "The Decline and Fall of Nixon's Drug Czar, "New Times, 5
September 1975.

10. Hougan, op. cit.

11. ABC, 27 January 1977; Latin America, 27 August 1976; Cuadernos para el
Dialogo, 19 February 1977; Triunfo, 12 February 1977; Chairoff, op. cit.; Carl
os Barbeiro Filho, the Brazilian head of the South American branch of the
WACL, runs an Asuncion, Paraguay finance company, Financiera Urundey, which
launders dirty money from Saudi Arabia and South Korea through Paraguay' wide
open foreign exchange market. Barbeiro, who has been linked to the Argentine
and Brazilian Anticommunist Alliances, the terrorist AAA and AAB, reportedly
arranges training courses in Taiwan for the Paraguayan police (see The
Leveller, October 1979).

--fini--
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Aug 30, 2012 1:51 pm



On September 3rd 1991 a fire broke out at a Chicken Processing Plant in Hamlet North Carolina.
The owner had had all the emergency doors of the plant locked and barred to save a few dollars.
25 workers burned alive, and 49 were injured.
The owner responsible for these deaths served less than 4 years in prison.

Mojo Nixon and Jello Biafra wrote this song about it,
which is found on the Prairie Home Invasion album.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Aug 30, 2012 9:08 pm

‘A spontaneous loss of enthusiasm’: workplace feminism and the transformation of women’s service jobs in the 1970s
- Dorothy Sue Cobble


Image


An analysis of the gendered dynamics in the class struggle in the 1970s US service sector.

In 1972, a group of tired stewardesses tried to explain their concerns to the incredulous male transit union officials who led their union. No, the primary issues were not wages and benefits, they insisted, but the particular cut of their uniforms and the sexual insinuations made about their occupation in the new airline advertisements. Their words fell on deaf ears. Despite their commonalities as transportation workers, the gender gap separating the two groups was simply too wide to cross. Indeed, male subway drivers could not understand why the stewardesses would object to their glamorous sex-object image. Deeply held gendered notions of unionism and politics also stood in the way of communication.

For even if the complaints of stewardesses were accepted as “real,” to many male union leaders they seemed petty: matters not deserving of serious attention, let alone concerted activity. The gender gap in labor history may not be quite as wide as that between female flight attendants and male subway drivers. But many of the same processes have blocked productive communication and hindered the intellectual development of the field. Labor history scholarship still rests upon gendered definitions of work, politics, and unionism. Just as significantly, the overall narratives that dominate the field incorporate neither the history of female-dominated occupations and industries nor that of women’s particular forms of collective action.


Continues at: http://libcom.org/library/‘-spontaneous-loss-enthusiasm’-workplace-feminism-transformation-women’s-service-jobs-19
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Aug 30, 2012 9:27 pm

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/happy-hookers/

Happy Hookers

by Melissa Gira Grant

Sex workers and their would-be saviors.


Image

The following books were not published in 1972: The Happy Secretary, The Happy Nurse, The Happy Napalm Manufacturer, The Happy President, The Happy Yippie, The Happy Feminist. The memoir of a Manhattan madam was. The Happy Hooker climbed best-seller lists that year, selling over sixteen million copies.

When it reached their top five, the New York Times described the book as “liberally dosed with sex fantasies for the retarded.” The woman who wrote them and lived them, Xaviera Hollander, became a folk hero. She remains the accidental figurehead of a class of women who may or may not have existed before she lived and wrote. Of course, they must have existed, but if they hadn’t, say the critics of hooker happiness, we would have had to invent them.

Is prostitution so wicked a profession that it requires such myths?

We may remember the legend, but the particulars of the happy hooker story have faded. Hollander and the characters that grew up around her are correctly recalled as sexually omnivorous, but desire alone didn’t make her successful as a prostitute. She realized that the sex trade is no underworld, that it is intimately entangled in city life, in all the ways in which we are economically interdependent. Hollander was famous for being able to sweep through the lobby of the Palace Hotel, unnoticed and undisturbed, on her way to an assignation, not because she didn’t “look like” a working girl, but because she knew that too few people understood what a working girl really looked like.

In The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, a 1977 film adapted from Hollander’s memoir, a scene opens with teletype bashing the screen with Woodward-and-Bernstein urgency. Flashlights sweep a darkened hall. Inside an unlocked office, a criminal scene is revealed: a senator embracing a prostitute. Hollander is called before Congress to testify. When the assembled panel interrogates her career, attacking her morals, she is first shameless, then spare but sharp in pointing out the unsurprising fact that these men are patrons of the very business they wish to blame for America’s downfall.

What’s on trial in the film is ridiculous, but the questions are real. What value does a prostitute bring to society? Or is hooking really not so grandiose as all that? Could it be just another mostly tedious way to take ownership over something all too few of us are called before Congress to testify on (the conditions of our work)?

Did you know that 89 per-cent of the women in prostitution want to escape?” a young man told me on the first day of summer this year, as he protested in front of the offices of the Village Voice. He wanted me to understand that it is complicit in what he calls “modern-day slavery.” The Village Voice has moved the bulk of the sex-related ads it publishes onto the website Backpage.com. This young man, the leader of an Evangelical Christian youth group, wanted to hasten the end of “sex slavery” by shutting Backpage.com down. What happens to the majority of people who advertise willingly on the site, who rely on it to draw an income? “The reality is,” the man said to me, not knowing I had ever been a prostitute, “almost all of these women don’t really want to be doing it.”

Let’s ask the people around here, I wanted to say to him: the construction workers who dug up the road behind us, the cabbies weaving around the construction site, the cops over there who have to babysit us, the Mister Softee guy pulling a double shift in the heat, the security guard outside a nearby bar, the woman working inside, the receptionist upstairs. The freelancers at the Village Voice. The guys at the copy shop who printed your flyers. The workers at the factory that made the water bottles you’re handing out. Is it unfair to estimate that 89 percent of New Yorkers would rather not be doing what they have to do to make a living?

“True, many of the prostitution ads on Backpage are placed by adult women acting on their own without coercion,” writes New York Times columnist and professional prostitute savior Nicholas Kristof. But, he continues, invoking the happy hooker trope, “they’re not my concern.” He would like us to join him in separating women into those who chose prostitution and those who were forced into it; those who view it as business and those who view it as exploitation; those who are workers and those who are victims; those who are irremediable and those who can be saved. These categories are too narrow. They fail to explain the reality of one woman’s work, let alone a class of women’s labor. In this scheme, a happy hooker is apparently unwavering in her love of fucking and will fuck anyone for the right price. She has no grievances, no politics.

But happy hookers, says Kristof, don’t despair, this isn’t about women like you – we don’t really mean to put you out of work. Never mind that shutting down the businesses people in the sex trade depend on for safety and survival only exposes all of them to danger and poverty, no matter how much choice they have. Kristof and the Evangelicals outside the Village Voice succeed only in taking choices away from people who are unlikely to turn up outside the New York Times, demanding that Kristof’s column be taken away from him.

Even if they did, with the platform he’s built for himself as the true expert on sex workers’ lives, men like Kristof can’t be run out of town so easily. There’s always another ted conference, another women’s rights organization eager to hire his expertise. Kristof and those like him, who have made saving women from themselves their pet issue and vocation, are so fixated on the notion that almost no one would ever choose to sell sex that they miss the dull and daily choices that all working people face in the course of making a living. Kristof himself makes good money at this, but to consider sex workers’ equally important economic survival is inconvenient for him.

This business of debating sex workers’ choices and whether or not they have them has only become more profitable under what sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein terms “post-industrial prostitution.”

After the vigilant anti-prostitution campaigns of the last century, which targeted red-light districts and street-based prostitution, sex work has moved mostly indoors, into private apartments and gentlemen’s clubs, facilitated by the internet and mobile phones. The sex economy exists in symbiosis with the leisure economy: personal services, luxury hotels, all increasingly anonymous and invisible. At the same time, more young people find themselves without a safety net, dependent on informal economies. Sex work now isn’t a lifestyle; it’s a gig, one of many you can select from a venue like Backpage or Craigslist.

Recall the favored slogan of prostitution prohibitionists that on the internet, they could buy a sofa and “a girl.” It’s not the potential purchase of a person that’s so outrageous; it’s the proximity of that person to the legitimate market.

Bernstein calls these “slippery borders,” and asks us to observe the feelings provoked by them, and how they are transferred. Anxieties about slippery market borders become “anxieties about slippery moral borders,” which are played out on the bodies of 
sex workers.

The anxiety is that sex work may be legitimate after all. In a sense, the prohibitionists are correct: people who might have never gotten into the sex trade before can and are. Fighting what they call “the normalizing of prostitution” is the focus of anti-sex work feminists. In this view, one happy hooker is a threat to all women everywhere.

“It’s sad,” said the speaker from the women’s-rights ngo Equality Now in protest outside the Village Voice. She directed her remarks at the cluster of sex workers who had turned out in counterprotest. “Backpage is able to be a pimp. They’re so normalizing this behavior that a group of Backpage advertisers have come out today to oppose us.” So a prostitute’s dissent is only possible if, as they understand prostitution itself, she was forced into it.

“Why did it take so long for the women’s movement to genuinely consider the needs of whores, of women in the sex trades?” asks working-class queer organizer and ex-hooker Amber L. Hollibaugh, in her book My Dangerous Desires. “Maybe because it’s hard to listen to – I mean really pay attention to – a woman who, without other options, could easily be cleaning your toilet? Maybe because it’s intolerable to listen to the point of view of a woman who makes her living sucking off your husband?”

Hollibaugh points to this most difficult place, this politics of feelings performed by some feminists, in absence of solidarity. They imagine how prostitution must feel, and how that in turn makes them feel, despite all the real-life prostitutes standing in front of them to dispute them.

It didn’t used to be that people opposed to prostitution could only get away with it by insisting that “happy” prostitutes didn’t really exist. From Gilgamesh to the Gold Rush days, right up until Ms. Hollander’s time, being a whore was reason enough for someone to demand you be driven out of town. Contemporary prostitution prohibitionists consider the new reality, in which they deny the existence of anyone with agency in prostitution, a form of victory for women. We aren’t ruined now. We’re victims.

Perhaps what they fear most of all is that prostitutes could be happy: that what we’ve been told is the worst thing we can do to ourselves is not the worst, or even among the worst. What marks us as fallen – whether from feminism or Christ or capital – is any suggestion that prostitution did not ruin us and that we can deliver that news ourselves.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sat Sep 01, 2012 3:33 pm

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.

— Arundhati Roy
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 03, 2012 2:18 pm

http://recomposition.info/2012/08/11/ju ... argaining/

“Just and peaceful labor relations”: Why the U.S. government supported collective bargaining

by Nate Hawthorne

The U.S. government increasingly promoted collective bargaining in the early part of the 20th century. To take one important example: In 1919, economically disruptive disputes escalated between the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and capitalists in the textile industry. In response, the New York governor appointed a state commission aimed at preventing “industrial war” which created “distrust and hostility” between classes. This commission recommended collective bargaining in order to reconcile the union and the employers. As the commission wrote, a “collective bargaining agreement calls for the utmost good faith on both sides to perform (…) every term and condition thereof; whether it refers to shop strikes on the part of the worker, lock-outs on the part of the employers, or the maintenance of its terms as to wages and hours. This Board desires to emphasize this point as fundamental in any contractual relationship.” Contracts require such good faith and, from the point of view of the capitalist state, contracts helped create such good faith.

With state help, the ILGWU won an industry-wide collective bargaining agreement, which the industry association soon violated in 1921. The ILGWU sued and won an injunction against the employers. The New York Supreme Court said it issued this injunction to prevent “the continuance of an industrial impasse.” The Court said that no matter who won the dispute, “such industrial struggles lead to lockouts, strikes and acts of violence” and in the end “the employer and employee, instead of co-operating to promote the success of the industry, become permanently divided into hostile groups, each resentful and suspicious of the other.” Therefore, “it is the duty of the court to (…) compel both parties to await an orderly judicial determination of the controversy.” In other words, the capitalist state began to believe that promoting collective bargaining agreements would help create industrial peace. The role of law is not simply to protect individual capitalists but to bring greater stability to the capitalist system as a whole. (On this point, I encourage fellow workers to read the discussion of the English Factory Acts in chapter 10 of Karl Marx’s “Capital.”)

The state’s role and strategy of promoting stability in the capitalist system by promoting collective bargaining explains U.S. labor legislation created in the 1930s. The 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (hereafter, “Recovery Act”) said “disorganization of industry (…) burdens interstate and foreign commerce, affects the public welfare, and undermines the standards of living of the American people.” The Act argued that one key tool for more efficiently organizing industry under capitalism was to promote collective bargaining agreements. Thus Congress should “remove obstructions to the free flow of interstate and foreign commerce” by “induc[ing] and maintain[ing] united action of labor and management under adequate governmental sanctions and supervision.” The Recovery Act added that contracts would raise wages for workers, “increas[ing] the consumption of industrial and agricultural products by increasing purchasing power” of workers. More money in the pockets of more workers would help stabilize the American economy by providing a larger base of consumers.

The National Labor Relations Act (or the “Wagner Act” named after its sponsor, New York Senator Robert F. Wagner) took up the labor relations provisions of the Recovery Act, adding little except for extra enforcement. Senator Wagner argued before Congress that the Wagner Act was “novel neither in philosophy nor in content. It creates no new substantive rights,” and went on to list various prior examples of workers’ legal right to collective bargaining. The real change with the Wagner Act, he argued, was greater enforcement of rights that the state already recognized workers as having. By providing better enforcement for workers’ right to collective bargaining, he said, the Wagner Act would be more conducive to industrial recovery than the Recovery Act. Wagner said that lack of adequate enforcement in the Recovery Act brought “results equally disastrous to industry and to labor. Last summer it led to a procession of bloody and costly strikes, which in some cases swelled almost to the magnitude of national emergencies.” That is, Wagner argued, it was precisely the lack of collective bargaining that led to the strike wave of 1934.

Wagner identified a second consequence to the lack of enforcement provisions in the Recovery Act. Without collective bargaining, he said, workers “cannot exercise a restraining influence upon the wayward members of their own groups, and they cannot participate in our national endeavor to coordinate production and purchasing power.” Wagner argued that Congress should pass the Wagner Act in order to “stabilize and improve business by laying the foundations for the amity and fair dealing upon which permanent progress must rest.” If Congress didn’t pass the Wagner Act, Wagner predicted that “the whole country will suffer from a new economic decline.”

The Wagner Act’s full title was “An act to diminish the causes of labor disputes burdening or obstructing interstate and foreign commerce, to create a National Labor Relations Board, and for other purposes.” Like the Recovery Act, the Wagner Act’s first priority was to keep the economy flowing as smoothly as possible by reducing labor disputes. The Wagner Act said “denial by employers of the right of employees to organize and the refusal by employers to accept (…) collective bargaining lead[s] to strikes and other forms of industrial strife or unrest.” Furthermore, “inequality of bargaining power between employees (…) and employers (…) substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry.”

The U.S. government backed contracts because they believed this would make the capitalist system more stable and resilient. As the Wagner Act said, “protection by law of the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively safeguards commerce from injury (…) and promotes the flow of commerce.” Furthermore, the Act added, collective bargaining would encourage “practices fundamental to the friendly adjustment of industrial disputes.” U.S. Congress passed the Wagner Act in 1935. When President Roosevelt signed it, he declared that the Wagner Act was “an important step toward the achievement of just and peaceful labor relations in industry.”

The Preamble to our Constitution states that the IWW’s goal is help our class advance the historic mission of abolishing the wage system and declares that the working class and the employing class have nothing in common. We should hesitate, then, before pursuing strategies which U.S. presidents and senators deliberately encouraged in order to achieve industrial peace within the capitalist system.


This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in the December 2011 issue of the Industrial Worker newspaper and atlibcom.org as part of a debate on a discussion paper called “Direct Unionism.” The original title of this piece was “A debate on collective bargaining and the IWW.”
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Sep 04, 2012 1:45 pm

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/04/ ... and-white/

SEPTEMBER 04, 2012

Valhalla of the Hipsters

Keep Portland White!

by LINDA UEKI ABSHER

Sitting in traffic and staring at the car in front of me, a tastefully muddy Subaru Outback with the requisite Thule bike rack, I spot this on the bumper:

Keep Portland Weird

Yet another Portlander proclaiming their uniqueness by slapping on their car most overused sound bite attached to the place I live.

There is an element of truth to the sentiment: to friends who suffer the ignominy of existing in California or New York, I live in hipster Valhalla: a happily ironic place where vegan food carts abound and localvore beer flows from repurposed fixtures. It’s a place where young creatives commute by fixie bikes, towing babies or dogs to careers involving DIY charcuterie, vintage buttons or recycled wooden paneling.

But as I wander pass the organic coffee houses chock-full of thirtyish men with full-on lumberjack beards and defiant beer bellies, or boutiques filled with mock Goodwill cardigans selling for prices once considered exorbitant monthly rent, the message is unmistakable: I am not a member of the Keeping-it-Weird club.

I realize that’s the first thing expected from a Portland hipster, but it’s true. I live in a ridiculously overeducated neighborhood riddled with organic farming emporiums and yoga studios. I also have a job that’s the wet dream every liberal arts graduate (librarian), But there’s one thing that makes me different from the exquisitely-toned women feeding chickens in their back yards: I am the wrong color.

Not that I’m harassed for my “interesting” (as one library user put it) looks, but quite the opposite: I am constantly celebrated for being an official person of color. Not a week goes by without someone insisting upon the opportunity to honor my person-of-colorness, which consists of describing their week/month/year trip to Japan, followed by a detailed rave about the culture, which apparently is only made up of food or interior design accent pieces. Oftentimes I’m asked to grant the Asian seal of approval for whatever side project they divulge to me, one they claim expresses their inner nature, be it bonsai, hot anime chicks in uniform, or origami bird earrings.

This practice of honoring of my culture or any culture involving people of different pigmentations is starting to wear me down: those Taiko ensembles with nary an Asian in the bunch, or the blues festivals held on rare sunny days, playing to an audience doused in Oregon-grown Pinot Gris and 75 SPF sunblock, with everyone nodding to music made by the only folks in sight with a claim to an ethnicity. So after years of enduring the eternal parade of skinny white guys possessing pork-pie hats and Asian girlfriends and blissed-out wiggers thumping day-long on African drums, I have come to one conclusion: my race is a commodity—in fact any race outside Caucasian is a commodity. It’s what keeps the Portland Hipster Machine going.

How? By providing two crucial elements: cultural authenticity and street cred. Without us, there’d be no culinary wunderkind studded with tribal ink with three-month-old-yet-already-raved-about-by-the-New-York-Times ramen restaurant, all because he had the wherewithal to track down and apprentice with a Japanese master revered for his secret noodle-making techniques. And how would the media survive without the Portland small business success meme of willowy girls hacking vintage kimonos into adorable scarves while breastfeeding their Wrens or Atticuses? We’re the raw material mined for the benefit of the Greater Hipster Good, or at the very least provide ammo for those Yelp discussions as to serves the most authentic sushi.

So the next time a hipster sidles up and grills me as to who serves the best kimchee fried rice in town? I’m gonna start charging….


LINDA UEKI ABSHER is the creator of The Lipstick Librarian! web site. She works as a librarian in Portland, Oregon.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Sep 04, 2012 2:51 pm

http://intheprocessofbeing.wordpress.co ... rt-part-i/

the force of 7 billion tons of gooey heart. part I.

we are tired of capitalism forcing us to deplete ourselves. we are exhausted of self being taken from self, of time being used for gains senses will never touch, taste, see, hear or feel, of being killed day in and resurrected day out. capitalism is no walk through cherry blossoms, no bare feet on bending grass; it is never the multiplicity of what brings us joy. it is a demand to give self endlessly with absolutely no reciprocity; capitalism is a demand to survive without the demand to live.

so, you know those times when we are asked on the streets to give to this relief corporation needing money, that bill needing a signature, this revolutionary organization needing us, we walk a little bit faster, so that we can keep what little we have left. capitalism is the greatest architect of walls and separation.

and, this is our challenge and purpose, as revolutionaries: to brick by brick burst open walls so spaciousness can fill residence, the spaciousness of sensing our collective suffering, of expanding vision through creativity, of fighting for our liberation. when we outreach, politicize, agitate, when we hold events, classes, protests, our goal cannot be to bring as many people to whatever necessary action of the day or to enlighten folks to the correct ideology.our intention as revolutionaries is to relate. this is a necessity for building a revolutionary base. we must relate to our community as vividly as we can, as connected to one another as we can reach into, so that hearts begin to widen because the absolute conviction for collective liberation can only take place in big wide hearts.

the question now becomes how can we relate our common struggle?
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 05, 2012 7:42 am

Most white feminists look at me disdainfully when I recount some of my choice violent moments. They are appalled, morally repelled by this unbecoming behavior. One even giggled, holding her breastbone ever so lightly and saying she’s not the violent type, blah blah blah. The messages are, 1) I’m educated and you’re not, 2) I’m upper class and you’re not, 3) I’m a feminist and you’re not (since her brand of feminism is equated with nonviolent moon-to-uterus symbiosis). My “men” can do the fighting, but I, gentle maiden, shan’t; the new feminism remaking a generation in the image of the suburban, wealthy, sophisticated, genetically genteel. No one protected me when a loved one cracked my head on a public street one might, not even the college educated Upper West Side white women strolling by pretending not to notice. I don’t like getting hit either, but what are you gonna do when someone grabs your tits? Meekly whisper you won’t stoop to your attackers level? and what level is that exactly? if that’s the way “women” react, how do we classify the elderly Filipinas on a subway train who, when Joe Dickwad grabbed my ass, congratulated me for whacking him as hard as I could, screaming obscenities, and chasing him - to his utter shock and dismay - through the station? They were the few who seemed to acknowledge, respect, and allow for “aggressive” forms of resistance instead of strapping on moral straightjackets for the nineties which we “women” must squeeze into. If that’s a woman, I’m not one. I am an animal who eats, sleeps, fucks, and fights voraciously - I assume a “good” woman does it gently and in the missionary position only.

Veena Cabreros-Sud, Kicking Ass
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 05, 2012 8:16 am

http://cryptogon.com/?p=31141

Not The Onion: Eurozone Demands Six-Day Work Week for Greece

September 5th, 2012

Via: Guardian:

Greece’s eurozone creditors are demanding that the government in Athens introduce a six-day working week as part of the stiff terms for the country’s second bailout.

The demand is contained in a leaked letter from the “troika” of the country’s lenders, the European commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund. In the letter, the officials policing Greece’s compliance with the austerity package imposed in return for the bailout insist on radical labour market reforms, from minimum wages to overtime limits to flexible working hours, that are likely to worsen the standoff between the government and organised labour in Greece.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 05, 2012 9:14 am

From Stephen Graham's- Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism:
The US military’s focus on operations within the domestic urban sphere is also being dramatically strengthened by the so-called War on Terror, which designates cities – whether US or foreign – and their key infrastructures as ‘battlespaces’. Viewed through such a lens, the Los Angeles riots of 1992; the various attempts to securitize urban cores during major sports events or political summits; the military response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005; the challenges of ‘homeland security’ in US cities – all become ‘low-intensity’ urban military operations comparable to conducting counter-insurgency warfare in an Iraqi city. ‘Lessons learned’ reports drawn up after military deployments whose goal was to contain the Los Angeles riots in 1992, for example, credit the ‘“success” of the mission to the fact that ‘‘the enemy’’ – the local population – was easy to outmaneuver given their simple battle tactics and strategies’. High-tech targeting practices such as unmanned drones and organized satellite surveillance programmes, previously used to target spaces beyond the nation to (purportedly) make the nation safe, are beginning to colonize the domestic spaces of the nation itself. Military doctrine has also come to treat the operation of gangs within US cities as ‘urban insurgency’, ‘fourth generation warfare’ or ‘netwar’, directly analogous to what takes place on the streets of Kabul or Baghdad.

The devastating Israeli siege of Gaza since Hamas was elected in 2006 is a powerful example [of urban war]. This has transformed a dense urban corridor, with 1.5 million people squeezed into an area the size of the Isle of Wight, into a vast prison camp. Within these confines, the deaths of the weak, old, young and sick are invisible to the outside world. The stronger individuals are forced to live something approaching what Giorgio Agamben has called ‘bare life’ – a biological existence that can be sacrificed at any time by a colonial power that maintains the right to kill with impunity but has withdrawn all moral, political or human responsibilities from the population.

… such is the contemporary right’s conflation of terrorism and immigration that simple acts of migration are now often being deemed little more than acts of warfare. This discursive shift has been termed the ‘weaponization’ of migration– shifting the emphasis from moral obligations to offer hospitality and asylum towards criminalizing or dehumanizing migrants as weapons against purportedly homogeneous and ethno-nationalist bases of national power.

Bastions of ethno-nationalist politics, the burgeoning movements of the far right are often heavily represented within the police and the state military. They tend to see rural or exurban areas as the authentic and pure spaces of white nationalism, associated with Christian and traditional values. Examples here range from US Christian fundamentalists, through the British National Party to Austria’s Freedom Party, the French National Front and Italy’s Forza Italia. The fast growing and sprawling cosmopolitan neighbourhoods of the West’s cities, meanwhile, are often cast by such groups in the same Orientalist terms as the mega-cities of the Global South, as places radically external to the vulnerable nation – territories every bit as foreign as Baghdad or Gaza.

Rowland Atkinson and Sarah Blandy point to the mounting ‘agoraphobia of the contemporary urban subject and the need to find shells to inhabit in order that security, the life of the household and the project of self are more fully assured’. They also suggest that residents of gated enclaves within hyper-unequal societies routinely use extralegal force against people seen as transgressing their boundaries. The result is a kind of social, civil war to control domestic space, which becomes integrated into the social routines of households.

Instead of legal or human rights and legal systems based on universal citizenship, these emerging security politics are founded on the profiling of individuals, places, behaviours, associations, and groups. Such practices assign these subjects risk categories based on their perceived association with violence, disruption or resistance against the dominant geographical orders sustaining global, neoliberal capitalism.

http://effusionofbiopower.tumblr.com/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 05, 2012 12:16 pm

“Don’t you stop me. I am dreaming.
We lived centuries of injustice bent over.
Centuries of loneliness.
Now don’t. Don’t you stop me.
Now and here, for ever and everywhere.
I am dreaming freedom.
Though everyone’s
All-beautiful uniqueness
To reinstitute
The harmony of the universe.
Lets play. Knowledge is joy.
Its not school conscription.
I dream because I love.
Great dreams in the sky.
Workers with their own factories
Contributing to world chocolate making.
I dream because I KNOW and I CAN.
Banks give birth to “robbers”.
Prisons to “terrorists”.
Loneliness to “misfits”.
Products to “need”
Borders to armies.
All caused by property.
Violence gives birth to violence.
Don’t now. Don’t you stop me.
The time has come to reinstitute
the morally just as the ultimate praxis.
To make life into a poem.
And life into praxis.
It is a dream that I can I can I can
I love you
And you do not stop me nor am I dreaming. I live.
I reach my hands
To love to solidarity
To Freedom.
As many times as it takes all over again.
I defend ANARCHY.


--Katerina Gogou, Anarchist poetess of Athens, 1940-1993.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 05, 2012 12:23 pm

Image
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to Data & Research Compilations

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest