The Bush Family's Favorite Terrorist

By Jerry Meldon & Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews.com
April 25, 2005

EXCERPT...

Bush Embarrassment

A thorough investigation of Posada also could prove embarrassing for the Bush family, since the Cubana Airline bombing was part of a wave of right-wing terrorism that occurred in 1976 under the nose of then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush.

If Posada ever told his full story, he might shed unwelcome light on how much the senior George Bush knew about the terrorist attacks in 1976 and the Iran-Contra operation a decade later, where Posada also showed up.

SNIP...

If the Letelier-Moffitt murders had been solved quickly, there was a danger the revelations could have hurt Republican election chances in 1976, when President Gerald Ford was in a tight race with Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Linking the Chilean government to an audacious terror attack in the heart of the U.S. capital would have revived critical press coverage of the CIA’s role in the overthrow of Chile’s elected socialist government in 1973, a coup that had put in power Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who, in turn, launched “Operation Condor.”

At the time of the Letelier-Moffitt car bombing, Bush’s CIA had evidence in its files that implicated Pinochet’s secret police in the plot to kill Letelier, an outspoken critic of the military regime. But Bush’s spy agency withheld the incriminating information from the FBI and misdirected the investigation away from the guilty parties. (For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.)

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/042405.html

CHILE WASHES ITS HANDS OF THE LETELIER ASSASSINATION

EXCERPT...

2. MORE RECENTLY, THE PRESS PICKED UP TWO WIRE SERVICE
REPORTS AS EVIDENCE OF THE GOC'S FULL EXONERATION OF ANY
COMPLICITY IN THE DEATH OF LETELIER. FIRST, THE PRESS
-- ENCOURAGED BY A GOC BACKGROUNDER -- HEADLINED THE
"NEWSWEEK" PERISCOPE NOTE THAT THE CIA NO LONGER SUSPECTS
THE CHILEAN GOVERNMENT OF INVOLVEMENT IN THE ASSASSINA-
TION, SINCE THE CRUDENESS OF THE BOMB WAS NOT WORTHY OF
A NATIONAL SECRET SERVICE. AND ON OCTOBER 7 THE GOC REPLAYED A
REPORT THAT "DEFENSE AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS DAILY" NAMED
THE SOVIET UNION AS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE KILLING.
IN ITS COMMENTARY THE PRESS THEREFORE NOW TAKES IT FOR
LIMITED OFFICIAL USE

The Seminal Work on This-Propaganda by Alex Carey

Review of Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Propaganda in the US and Australia

(University of NSW Press, 1995. 214 pp., $19.95)

Reviewed by Alex McCutcheon in Green Left Weekly

As Alex Carey sees it, "The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy''.

Throughout this book of collected essays with its unified theme, Carey succeeds in showing the reader that far from being a natural outcome of "market forces'' or some natural "law of nature'', the present hegemony that corporations enjoy has been the result of a consciously pursued goal whose origins lie within corporate America.

Carey makes the crucial (and often forgotten) point that in a technologically advanced democracy, "the maintenance of the existing power and privileges are vulnerable to popular opinion'' in a way that is not true in authoritarian societies. Therefore elite propaganda must assume a "more covert and sophisticated role''.

In the US, corporate propaganda has played upon the high level of religious beliefs in the community, beliefs which leave its citizens predisposed to see the world in "Manichean terms''. This outlook leads towards a preference for action over reflection, a "pragmatic orientation'' that is perfectly suited to the corporate aim of identifying positive symbols with business, while assigning negative values to those that oppose them, such as labour unions and welfare provisions.

The organised dissemination of these symbols had its initial impetus in groups such as the National Americanization Committee, which succeeded in manipulating nationalist and patriotic symbols during World War I to associate corporate values with the "American way of life''. The psychological power of this association cannot be discounted: it has proved to be an enduring feature of the political climate in the US today.

Since then the corporate agenda has embraced all areas of society - media, schools, academia and the workplace - with focuses on different levels from "grassroots'' to "tree-tops''. It has succeeded via the mass media in identifying capitalism with democracy and in portraying any challenge to corporate elites as either "subversive'' or "extremist''.

This campaign to vilify those who do not adhere to the desired apathy is exemplified by the shameful way in which some industrial psychologists portray economic interests of employees to be somehow neurotic or dysfunctional. Their shabby efforts to lend an air of science to this field are put under the spotlight by Carey and found severely wanting.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/25/006.html

Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda
The Attack on Democracy

The 20th century, said Carey, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. Carey wrote that the people of the US have been subjected to an unparalleled, expensive, 3/4 century long propaganda effort designed to expand corporate rights by undermining democracy and destroying the unions. And, in his manuscript, unpublished during his life time, he described that history, going back to World War I and ending with the Reagan era. Carey covers the little known role of the US Chamber of Commerce in the McCarthy witch hunts of post WWII and shows how the continued campaign against "Big Government" plays an important role in bringing Reagan to power.

John Pilger called Carey "a second Orwell", Noam Chomsky dedicated his book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. And even though TUC Radio runs our documentary based on Carey's manuscript at least every two years and draws a huge response each time, Alex Carey is still unknown.

Given today's spotlight on corporations that may change. It is not only the Occupy movement that inspired me to present this program again at this time. By an amazing historic coincidence Bill Moyers and Charlie Cray of Greenpeace have just added the missing chapter to Carey's analysis. Carey's manuscript ends in 1988 when he committed suicide. Moyers and Cray begin with 1971 and bring the corporate propaganda project up to date.

This is a fairly complex production with many voices, historic sound clips, and source material. The program has been used by writers and students of history and propaganda. Alex Carey: Taking the Risk out of Democracy, Corporate Propaganda VS Freedom and Liberty with a foreword by Noam Chomsky was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1995.

SOURCE: http://tucradio.org/new.html

Propaganda and Class Structure

Michael Parenti, 1988

excerpted from the book Stenographers to Power

p43
MP: I would define propaganda as the mobilization of information and arguments with the intent to bring people to a particular viewpoint. In that sense there could be false and deceptive propaganda, and there could be propaganda that has a real educational value. You can after all inform people and mobilize them toward truth. In the United States the word "propaganda" is unrelievedly negative. In certain other countries, propaganda has a more neutral implication.

p44
MP: The first premise of propaganda in the United States today is at doesn't exist, that there is no propaganda from the established media and from the government and that we have only "information." Propaganda is something that other people do. That's reflected in that definition of a doctrine. And nobody in the United States says they're selling or pushing a doctrine; they all say they're just reporting it like it is. That's the first premise: the denial that there is propaganda. The second quality of propaganda in the United States is that it operates all the time and its major dedication is to avoid any kind of confrontation regarding class struggle in the United States. It denies any recognition that there is exploitation of labor, that the rich exploit the poor, that we exploit the third world, etc. We've now reached the point where you can talk about racism and sexism, but you cannot really talk about class power in America, and if you do, you are said to be engaging in propaganda.

p46
It's no secret. The Council on Foreign Relations was formed in 1922 by John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Nelson Aldridge and by J.P. Morgan. It's a council whose personnel are drawn from the corporate elite, with some college presidents, academics, news media people, and political leaders thrown in. The Council on Foreign Relations, the Committee on Economic Development, the Trilateral Commission are all organizations that have been formed, financed and staffed by these corporate elites. They provide the personnel who then serve in various administrations. The Council on Foreign Relations has placed its members as Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense in every administration, whether its Republican or Democratic.

Jimmy Carter had 12 members of the Trilateral Commission in his cabinet, including himself and Walter Mondale. The Trilateral Commission was started by David Rockefeller. These elites have a capacity to place their members in the top decision-making positions unequalled by any other interest group in America. There's no labor union, no farmers' group, no teachers' group, there's no pro-abortion or anti-abortion group that could hope to place their leaders the way these people do. Their role is not to pursue the interests of any one particular corporation. Their role in these councils is to look at what are the common interests of all the various multinational corporations, what is the common interest, what is the common interest of the financial class.

p47
MP: You can't talk about these kinds of things in the mainstream media because the media are owned by the very same people who staff these councils and staff our top decision-making positions. Capitalism is not only an economic system, it's an entire social order. Its function is not just to produce cars and refrigerators and make a profit for its owners. It also produces a whole communication universe, a symbolic field, a culture, a control over various social institutions like universities, museums and churches. Those of us who have a view which is anti-capitalist are frozen out, or we are consigned to small publications. You can say, well, you're consigned to small publications because you don't have that much to say or people don't care about what you're saying. It's not true. People would be interested in our message if they'd get a chance to hear it. And in any case, why not give them a chance to reject it? Why don't we get a chance to get on networks? Why don't we get the syndicated columns that appear in 300 newspapers? Why don't we get space in the mass-circulation magazines, in Time and Newsweek? Why don't we get commentaries on ABC, NBC, CBS? Why don't we get on Nightline?

p49
MP: There will be times when dissident perspectives can come through because the ideological control isn't all that efficient. Somebody might get something in, but only once. Take, for example, the time Bill Moyers described imperialism in Guatemala. He talked about how a democratically elected government under Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 was overthrown by the CIA with the instigation of the multinationals in a country where 2 percent of the population own 80 percent of the wealth and how today in Guatemala there's no occupational safety controls, no labor unions, no minimum wage, and much misery and poverty. He was able to say that in his report on Central America once. You never heard it again. So occasionally little things like that will come in.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporate_Media/Propaganda_Parenti_STP.html

The nation at the heart of the offshore scandal: Britain

Britain's relationship with its overseas territories means it could – if it wanted – easily tackle offshore global secrecy

James Ball
guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 April 2013

EXCERPT...

But such a stance ignores that one nation in particular has ties to offshore havens everywhere. It's a veritable nexus of offshore influence, related to havens in the Caribbean, and much closer to home. That nation is, of course, the United Kingdom.

The clue is quite often in the name. The British Virgin Islands are perhaps rivalled only by Switzerland as a global capital for the offshore industry, with more than 1m offshore companies registered on the Caribbean island (population 31,900). Plaques for registration agents, solicitors and more line almost every wall of the islands' tiny capital.

The islands are a British Overseas Territory: legally under the jurisdiction of the UK (and with a British governor), but in practice self-governed. Other havens with this UK imprimatur include the Cayman islands, Gibraltar, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Closer to home, the UK wields even more control over the crown dependencies: Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, whose role in legal tax avoidance techniques has been documented time and again for decades.

Even within the UK itself, little is done against tricks of the offshore trade that have been known for decades. In 1999, Sark islander Philip Croshaw was struck off as a UK director for acting as a "nominee" – a sham director who hides a company's real controllers – for thousands of companies in the UK.

CONTINUED...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/05/offshore-industry-britain

Report: Big business no stranger to offshore tax havens

CBS News
April 3, 2013

As millions of Americans get ready to file with the IRS, some big companies will pay little or no taxes this year - thanks to loopholes in U.S. tax laws. Firms can legally avoid paying taxes on money made in America by shifting profits offshore to countries with minimal or no taxes - places like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

According to a new report from U.S. Public Interest Research Group, 83 of the nation's 100 largest publicly traded corporations take advantage of these so called tax havens, costing the country billions in lost revenue. "Tax dodging is not a victimless offense," says U.S. PIRG analyst Dan Smith. "When companies use accounting gimmicks to move their profits to tax haven shell companies, the rest of us have to pick up the tab."

The consumer group's report, entitled "Picking up the Tab 2013: Average Citizens and Small Businesses Pay the Price for Offshore Tax Havens" estimates "tax haven abuse costs the United States approximately $150 billion in tax revenues every year." That amounts to an average of $1,026 per taxpayer and $3,067 for small businesses, which typically cannot afford to use accounting tricks and may face a competitive disadvantage as a result.

The U.S. PIRG report also notes that Ugland House, a five-story office building in the Cayman Islands, is the registered address for more than 18,000 companies -- yet about half of these firms are U.S. subsidiaries using the location as a post office box.

Top 25 corporate tax dodgers

Among the major corporations cited in the report for using tax havens are:

General Electric: GE has "more money parked offshore than any other U.S. company," with $108 billion and 18 subsidiaries in tax haven countries, according to its most recent SEC filing. Four years between 2002 and 2011, "the company paid no federal income tax while receiving subsidies from the government."

SNIP...

Pfizer: Pfizer is ranked second among U.S. multinational corporations with the most revenue offshore, with 172 subsidiaries and $73 billion in tax haven states, according to its most recent SEC filing. U.S. PIRG's report concludes, "The world's largest drug maker made over 40 percent of its sales in the U.S. between 2010 and 2012, but managed to report no federal taxable income in the U.S. for the past five years."

SNIP...

Microsoft: The software giant "pays its Puerto Rican subsidiary 47 percent of the revenue generated from its American sales, despite the fact that those products were developed and sold in the U.S." According to its most recent SEC filing, Microsoft has five subsidiaries and the third highest amount offshore, $60.8 billion, which is "70% of the company's cash." The report estimates Microsoft "would owe $19.4 billion on that income if it had to pay U.S. tax."

SNIP...

Citigroup: This bank bailed out by U.S. taxpayers in the 2008 financial crisis "ranks eighth for most money sitting offshore," with 20 subsidiaries and $42.6 billion in tax haven countries, according to its most recent SEC filing, "on which it would owe $11.5 billion in taxes."

CONTINUED...

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57577914/report-big-business-no-stranger-to-offshore-tax-havens/

Obama Finally Lays His Cards on the Table

Eric Zuesse
Huffington Post Posted: 04/05/2013 10:53 pm

EXCERPT...

On 16 January 2009, four days before Obama was inaugurated, Michael D. Shear headlined in the Washington Post, "Obama Pledges Entitlement Reform," and he reported about "a wide-ranging 70 minute interview with Washington Post reporters and editors," in which Obama endorsed efforts by Republicans and conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats in the Senate to cut Social Security and Medicare. Progressives were already disturbed at what their friends in Congress were leaking to them about Obama's strong commitment to doing this, and so a few blog posts were issued to ring alarm bells publicly about it. Paul Rosenberg at openleft.com headlined on January 17th (three days before Obama's Inauguration), regarding "Obama's 'Mandate' To Slash Medicare, Medicaid & Social Security," and he presented polls showing that the public not only didn't want to cut any of these programs, but that 74% wanted Medicare and Medicare spending increased, and 62% wanted SS spending increased. Even 65% of self-declared "conservative" Americans wanted the medical programs increased, and 62% of them wanted SS spending increased. To Obama, his plan to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, was an act of political courage. It was his long-term plan, even though the polls showed widespread opposition to it by the public.

Obama has long socialized with top Wall Street and hedge fund executives. He likes their company, and personally identifies with them. He truly respects them. He cannot stand the idea that they would be sent to prison for any crimes. To him, they are good people.

On 3 April 2009, Politico bannered innocuously (and deceptively, given the shocking core that was buried here - Obama's statement), "Inside Obama's Bank CEOs Meeting." Eamon Javers reported Obama telling Wall Street's CEOs, inside the White House, "My administration ... is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." (This essentially secret meeting, and the comment itself, had occurred on 27 March 2009, but Javers failed to cite the date, which was indicated only under the accompanying AP wire photo of the CEOs coming out of this publicly unannounced event.) Obama's remark was implicitly analogizing here: he implied that he was protecting these people not from prosecutions for crimes (which he actually was), but instead from angry irrational mobs outside, who were driven by blind hatred (like the lynch mobs were in the Old South). Obama was metaphorically siding here with the plantation owners, not with the slaves; with the KKK, not with their victims. This elite Black was telling them that he would protect them from prosecution. He wasn't going to protect the public - which he here analogized to simply a hate-obsessed mob of bigots.

The crimes that these elite men had committed had, indeed, crashed the U.S. economy. Shahien Nasiripour, at huffingtonpost, bannered, on 16 May 2011, "Confidential Federal Audits Accuse Five Biggest Mortgage Firms Of Defrauding Taxpayers," and he reported that the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had carried out audits of Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Ally Financial, and found, in each case, that they had swindled the Federal Government. "The internal watchdog office at HUD referred its findings to the Department of Justice, which must now decide whether to file charges" under "the False Claims Act, a Civil War-era law crafted as a weapon against firms that swindle the government." All of "the audits conclude that the banks effectively cheated taxpayers by presenting the Federal Housing Administration with false claims: They filed for federal reimbursement on foreclosed homes ... using defective and faulty documents." Yet again - as with Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein, and with Countrywide Financial's Angelo Mozilo, and with the Republican former Senator John Ensign - the Obama "Justice" Department was being challenged to prosecute banksters and conservative politicians. Nearly three years into his Presidency, Obama hadn't pursued even a single one of them.

The men who were in the White House at that secret meeting had made billions by deceiving mortgage-borrowers at one end, and by defrauding investors in mortgage backed securities (MBS) at the other end, taking enormous sales commissions and bonuses for themselves along the way, while they bankrupted their banks, which U.S. taxpayers then bailed out. Obama was telling these people that he would let them get away with it, and that they would keep their loot.

SNIP...

Obama has refused to prosecute even a single one of these "control fraudsters," as criminologist William K. Black calls them. In fact, the prosecutions of all white-collar crimes under the Obama Administration are at a record low, lower even than they were under George W. Bush, who was the previous record-holder for this coddling of the corrupt.

CONTINUED...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/obama-finally-lays-his-ca_b_3025743.html

Yes, It Really is a Capitalist Plot

The Fall of Greece

by DIANA JOHNSTONE
CounterPunch MARCH 01, 2010

EXCERPT...

To put it simply, the Greek crisis shows what happens when a weak member of this Union is in trouble. It is the same as what happens on the world scale, where there is no such morally pretentious union perpetually congratulating itself on its devotion to human rights. The economically strong protect their own interests at the expense of the economically weak.

The crisis broke last autumn after George Papandreou’s PASOK party won elections, took office and discovered that the cupboard was bare. The Greek government had cheated to get into the EU’s euro zone in 2001 by cooking the books to cover deficits that would have disqualified it from membership in the common currency. The European Treaties capped the acceptable budget deficit at 3 per cent and public debt at 60 per cent of GDP respectively. In fact, this limit is being widely transgressed, quite openly by France. But major scandal arrived with revelations that Greece’s budget deficit reached 12.7 per cent in 2009, with a gross debt forecast for 2010 amounting to 125 per cent of GDP.

Of course, European leaders got together to declare solidarity. But their speeches were designed not so much to reassure the increasingly angry and desperate Greek people as to soothe “the markets” – the real hidden almighty gods of the European Union. The markets, like the ancient gods, have a great old time tormenting mere mortals in trouble, so their response to the Greek problem was naturally to rush to profit from it. For instance, when Greece is obliged to issue new bonds this year, the markets can blithely demand that Greece double its interest rates, on grounds of increased “risk” that Greece won’t pay, thus making it that much harder for Greece to pay. Such is the logic of the free market.

What the EU leaders meant by “solidarity” in their appeal to the gods was not that they were going to pour public money into Greece, as they poured it into their troubled banks, but that they intended to squeeze the money owed the banks out of the Greek people.

The squeezing is to take the forms made familiar over the past disastrous decades by the International Monetary Fund: the Greek state is enjoined to cut public expenses, which means firing public employees, cutting their overall earnings, delaying retirement, economizing on health care, raising taxes, and incidentally probably raising the jobless rate from 9.6 per cent to around 16 per cent, all with the glorious aim of bringing the deficit down to 8.7 per cent this year and thus appeasing the invisible gods of the market.

SNIP...

There was no such supervision of the financial fiddling which caused this mess. The EU statistics agency Eurostat recently discovered and revealed that in 2001, Goldman Sachs secretly (“but legally”, protest its executive officers) helped the right-wing Greek government meet EU membership criteria by using a complicated “currency swap” that masked the extent of public deficit and national debt. [See Andrew Cockburn and Marshall Auerback, on this site.] Who understands how that worked? I think it is fair to guess that not even Angela Merkel, who is trained as a scientist, understands clearly what went on, much less the incompetent Greek politicians who accepted the Goldman Sachs trickery. It allowed them to create an illusion of success – for a while. Success meant being a “member of the club” of the rich, and it can be argued that this notion of success has actually favored bad government at the national level. Belonging to the EU gave a false sense of security that contributed to the irresponsibility of incompetent political leaders.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/03/01/the-fall-of-greece/