Sunday, October 19, 2008

The Israeli Lobby Archive

Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 6:26 AM
Subject: IRmep Launches the "Israel Lobby Archive"

The Israel Lobby Archive is an independent research unit
located at The Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy
in Washington DC. The Archive collects and publishes
declassified documents about the Israel lobby, many
obtained through Freedom of Information Act filings with
law enforcement and intelligence agencies
and IRmep directed declassification processes.

http://IRmep.org/ila

The Archive also serves as a repository for records that
briefly enter the pubic domain through court actions or
investigative journalism only to vanish into obscurity
for lack of sustained mainstream press coverage.

The Archive is dedicated to preserving and contextualizing
historical records about the Israel lobby's operations
in the US, bypassing media filters and educating
concerned Americans, students and researchers through
enhanced direct access to both recent and older primary
source material.

Initial documents now available for public download include:

*Israel's Secret US Public Relations Plan*

In the early 1960's, Israel funneled more than $5 million
into US propaganda and lobbying operations. The funding,
equivalent to more than $35 million in today's dollars, was
laundered from the quasi governmental Jewish Agency into
an Israel lobby umbrella group, the American Zionist Council.
The two page master plan was subpoenaed by the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee and entered into hearing records
on the activities of foreign agents in the United States. The
many vestiges of this plan can be seen in US media today.

*AIPAC Forming and Directing Political Action Committee
Candidate Donations*

In 1988, internal memos reveal the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee establishing Political Action Committees
(PACs) to direct donations to preferred candidates in
violation of its tax-exempt nonprofit status.

*AIPAC Founder Ordered to Re-register as a Foreign Agent*

DOJ asks AIPAC founder Isaiah L. Kenen to re-register as
a foreign agent of the Israeli government even if he leaves the
Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to lobby in the private sector.
Declassified and released under FOIA on March 13, 2008.

*The Senate Foreign Relations Committee Investigates Israel*

In 1962 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigated
the Jewish Agency and the American Zionist Council. Their
funding flows from Israel as well as lobbying and public
relations campaigns in the United States were explored
during sworn testimony on May 23, and August 1, 1963.

The complete Senate record of over 1,000 pages of documents
and testimony is presented for the very first time
on the Internet.

*DOJ Orders Israel Lobby Umbrella to Register as Foreign Agents*

In 1962 the US Department of Justice ordered the American
Zionist Council to register as foreign agents. This umbrella
organization to Hadassah and the Zionist Organization of
America was receiving millions in funds from the Jewish
Agency for public relations and lobbying in the United States.

*AIPAC executives and DOD employee Indicted*

AIPAC director of Foreign Policy Steven Rosen, AIPAC Senior
Middle East Analyst Keith Weissman and Colonel Lawrence
Franklin are indicted under the 1917 Espionage Act for covert
efforts to influence US Iran policy.

The Israel Lobby Archive may now be accessed at:

http://IRmep.org/ila

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Karl Rove: Obama Hasn't Closed the Sale

Wall Street Journal
OPINION
OCTOBER 16, 2008WSJ
Obama Hasn't Closed the Sale
Both candidates continue to tinker with their strategies.
By KARL ROVE

RB writes:

Anything by Karl Rove on the election campaign has got to be scary because of his track record on engineering voter fraud. He also gives us a clue as to where we should look to first for suppression of the Democrat vote, electronic voting games and other election fraud maneuvers



Rove writes that

McCain is...narrowing his travels almost exclusively to Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Colorado and Nevada. If he carries those states, while losing only Iowa and New Mexico from the GOP's 2004 total, Mr. McCain will carry 274 Electoral College votes and the White House. It's threading the needle, but it's come to that.


Karl Rove writes:

In the campaign's final two weeks, voters will take a last serious look at both presidential candidates. The outcome of the race isn't cast in stone yet.

Barack Obama holds a 7.3% lead in the Real Clear Politics average of all polls, but the latest Gallup tracking poll reveals that there are nearly twice as many undecided voters this year than there were in the last presidential election. The Investor's Business Daily/TIPP poll (which was closest to the mark in predicting the 2004 outcome -- 0.4% off the actual result) now says this is a three-point race.


AP
This week also brought a reminder that Sen. Obama hasn't closed the sale. The Washington Post/ABC poll found 45% of voters still don't think he's qualified to be president, about the same number who doubted his qualifications in March.

This is seven points more than George W. Bush's highest reading in 2000 and the worst since Michael Dukakis's 56% unqualified rating in 1988. It explains why Mr. Obama has ignored Democratic giddiness and done two things to keep victory from slipping away.

First, he is using his money to try to keep John McCain from gaining traction. The Obama campaign raised $67 million in September and may be on track to raise $100 million in October. Sen. McCain opted last month for roughly $85 million in public financing, giving him less than half of Mr. Obama's funds for the campaign's final two months. Even with robust Republican National Committee fund raising to augment his spending, Mr. McCain is at a severe financial disadvantage.

So Mr. Obama is spending $35 million on TV this week versus the McCain/RNC total of $17 million. Mr. Obama is outspending Mr. McCain on TV in Virginia by a ratio of 4 to 1, in Florida by 3 to 1, and in Missouri and Nevada by better than 2 to 1. The disparity is likely to grow in the campaign's final weeks.

Money alone, however, won't decide the contest. John Kerry and the Democrats outspent Mr. Bush and the GOP in 2004 by $121 million and still lost.

Mr. Obama's other strategy is to do all he can to look presidential, including buying very expensive half-hour slots to address the country next week. He wants to give a serious, Oval-Office type address. This is smart. People appreciate Mr. Obama's empathy on the economy, but as they take a long look at what he wants to do about it, they will be less impressed, especially if Mr. McCain draws sharp contrasts with clear policy proposals.

Mr. Obama is trying to make the case that his lack of experience or record should not disqualify him. But in doing so, he seems to recognize that the U.S. is still a center-right country. His TV ads promise tax cuts and his radio ads savage Mr. McCain's health-care plan as a tax increase. It's a startling campaign conversion for the most liberal member of the Senate. We'll know on Election Day if he is able to get away with it.

About Karl Rove
Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.

Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.

Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon & Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.
Similarly, Mr. McCain appears to be making three important course corrections. First, he and Gov. Sarah Palin are sharpening their stump speeches so their sound bites come off well on TV. Gone are offhand remarks and awkward comments read from notes perched on a podium. In are teleprompters and carefully crafted arguments. Mr. McCain is also more at ease than before and has an ebullient, come-from-behind underdog optimism that will serve him well in the final weeks.

Second, Mr. McCain is shaping a story line that draws on well-founded concerns about Mr. Obama's lack of record or experience. Mr. McCain is also bowing to reality and devoting most of his time to the economy. His narrative is he's the conservative reformer who'll lead and work hard to get things done, while Mr. Obama is the tax-and-spend liberal who's unprepared to lead and unwilling to act.

Mr. McCain is hitting Mr. Obama for wanting to raise taxes in difficult economic times, especially on small business and for the purpose of redistributing income, and for having lavish spending plans at a time when the economy is faltering. He's criticizing Mr. Obama for lingering on the sidelines while Mr. McCain dove in to help pass a rescue plan, necessary no matter how distasteful. And he's attacking Mr. Obama for not joining the fight in 2005 when reformers like Mr. McCain tried to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Mr. McCain's other adjustment is his schedule. His campaign understands the dire circumstances it faces and is narrowing his travels almost exclusively to Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Colorado and Nevada. If he carries those states, while losing only Iowa and New Mexico from the GOP's 2004 total, Mr. McCain will carry 274 Electoral College votes and the White House. It's threading the needle, but it's come to that.

This task, while not impossible, will be difficult. By mid-September, the McCain camp was slightly ahead in the polls. Then came the financial crisis. The past month has taken an enormous toll on the McCain campaign.

Whether it can find the right formula in the next 19 days to dig out is a question. If Mr. McCain succeeds, he will have engineered the most impressive and improbable political comeback since Harry Truman in 1948. But having to reach back more than a half-century for inspiration is not the place campaign managers want to be now.

Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

Please add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Robert Weissman & FDIC Chairperson on problems with current efforts to defuse the economic crisis

October 15, 2008
Public Ownership, But No Public Control
The Partial Nationalization of US Banks


By ROBERT WEISSMAN
http://counterpunch.org/weissman10152008.html
But the Treasury proposal specifies that the government shares in the banks will be non-voting. And there appear to be only the most minimal requirements imposed on participating banks.

So, the government may be obtaining a modest ownership stake in the banks, but no control over their operations.

The banks reportedly will not be able to increase dividends, but will be able to maintain them at current levels. Really? The banks are bleeding hundreds of billions of dollars -- with more to come -- and they are taking money out to pay shareholders? The banks are not obligated to lend with the money they are getting. The banks are not obligated to re-negotiate mortgage terms with borrowers -- even though a staggering one in six homeowners owe more than the value of their homes.

"The government's role will be limited and temporary," President Bush said in announcing today's package. "These measures are not intended to take over the free market, but to preserve it."

But it makes no sense to talk about the free market in such circumstances. And these measures are almost certain to be followed by more in the financial sector -- not to mention the rest of economy -- because the banks still have huge and growing losses for which they have not accounted.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122411533644338623.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

WSJ
OCTOBER 16, 2008

FDIC Chief Raps Rescue for Helping Banks Over Homeowners

By DAMIAN PALETTA


WASHINGTON -- Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair on Wednesday criticized the federal government for failing to take more aggressive steps to prevent Americans from losing their homes, highlighting a rift between her and other senior U.S. officials over terms of the $700 billion rescue package.

The government plan will help stabilize financial markets but it doesn't do enough to address home foreclosures, the root of the crisis, she said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Chris Floyd: The New York Times eschews accountabliity on millions of disenfranchised voters aud

Without a Trace: The Smokeless Gun of Flagrant Election Fixing

by Chris Floyd

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1625-without-a-trace-the-smokeless-gun-of-flagrant-election-fixing.html

The idea of "victimless crimes" has been around for a long time, but the ultra-modern 21st century has given us a bold new concept: perpetratorless crimes.

This is by now a familiar dynamic: Outright, undeniable crimes are committed, often very heinous ones -- mass murder, military aggression, torture, vast financial corruption and fraud, warrantless spying, egregious violations of the Constitution -- but somehow, no one is actually responsible for them. They just sort of, you know, happened, all by themselves.

The most we can possibly do about these crimes is to conduct a non-binding "investigation" -- preferably by a committee of "serious" Establishment figures -- who will then offer suggestions on how to avoid such unseemly situations in the future. Of course, most of the time it would be too "divisive," too "partisan," to do even that much. But in any case, you certainly can't prosecute anyone for these crimes.

(This innovative concept only covers crimes in which powerful people might be involved, of course. Any ordinary person remains subject to the full weight of the increasingly draconian law -- although, if said ordinary person was commiting crimes at the behest of powerful people, the application of the law can suddenly become miraculously light, or even non-existent.)

The New York Times points us to yet another of these perpetratorless crimes. In fact, the venerable Gray Goose -- sorry, Gray Lady -- of American journalism acts as close accomplice of a crime wave that seems to strike nationwide every two to four years: the deliberate and illegal disenfranchisement of millions of citizens, almost all of them the poorest and most marginalized in American society.

After eight years of a veritable Ossa of evidence of gamed, thrown, fixed and finagled elections, this week the NY Times bestirred itself to notice that something might possibly be amiss in the nation's electoral process. A headline writer topped the story with weakest possible statement of the undeniable truth: "States' Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal." And you can bet your bottom dollar (as it falls through the bottomless pit of the Beltway bailout banditry) that if the New York Times deigns to acknowledge even the "appearance" of some mischance in the divinely ordained machinery of the Establishment, the actual rot is very far gone indeed.

Thus the thoroughgoing disenfranchisement of eligible voters -- as many as three million in 2004, as Greg Palast has noted -- has finally spilled into the paper's sacred precincts. The first paragraph puts in plainly:
Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.

Hard to put it more plainly than that: voters in key states are being disenfranchised in violation of federal law. In other words, a very serious crime is being committed, a bloody shiv job to the heart of the democratic process.

Wow! Wonder who could be behind such a brazen and dastardly crime -- a crime that benefits very powerful people seeking even greater power? Why, no one, of course! Here's the very next paragraph of the story:

The actions do not seem to be coordinated by one party or the other, nor do they appear to be the result of election officials intentionally breaking rules, but are apparently the result of mistakes in the handling of the registrations and voter files as the states tried to comply with a 2002 federal law, intended to overhaul the way elections are run.

You see? It just sort of, you know, happened. And even though these open violations of federal law -- i.e., crimes -- are affecting likely Democratic voters "disproportionately," the Times says, they are not being directed by anyone toward any particular aim. Nope. It's just some kind of strange repeat of this really weird thing that happened back in 2004 and 2000, when the same kind of people were tossed from the voting rolls by the multitude.

The paper traces the crimes to the "Help America Vote Act" of 2002. The Times, along with the rest of the corporate media, continues to treat this bill as if it were a serious attempt to address the ludicrously inept and decrepit U.S. electoral process, instead of what it transparently was: an attempt to codify into law the vote-suppression machinery that threw the bollixed 2000 Florida vote into the hands of the partisan extremist faction on the Supreme Court, two of whom had family members pocketing wads of cash from the Bush campaign. HAVA was meant to spread this deliberate chaos throughout the entire country -- and it has done so.

But the tender eyes of Times readers must be shielded from such ugly truth. Instead, we get yards and yards of carefully hedged, bled-dry prose, obscurely outlining a pattern of systematic vote suppression in key states but ensuring that, once again, no one can possibly blamed for it -- and certainly no one can possibly be charged for it. It's just some kind of rare and unpleasant natural phenomenon, like, say, a boll weevil infestation. Or the war crime in Iraq. Or the American torture program. Or the destruction of the American economy. And so on.

At the moment, with the McCain campaign cratering like a merchant bank, the disenfranchisement crime wave will probably not be enough to skew the election. Even with a few million voters blocked from the polls, the widespread revulsion toward the ruling party will probably swamp the polls and put the Democrats back in the White House. Whether this result will be an unmitigated joy and genuine change in the nation's headlong degradation is another matter, one which we'll be taking up in a later column. The merits, or lack of same, of the contending candidates are not the issue here. The point is that millions of the poorest, most marginalized Americans are being denied their right to vote for whomever they please. This is, as even the New York Times acknowledges, a federal crime. But it is not, however much the Times tries to obsfuscate the issue, a perpetratorless one.

Friday, October 3, 2008

Alan Nasser: George W. Bush's Coup: Finishing what Smedley Butler Stopped

counterpunch.org
October 3 - 5, 2008
A Paradigm for Today's Democrats?
FDR's Response to the Plot to Overthrow Him

By ALAN NASSER
http://counterpunch.org/nasser10032008.html

Perhaps the most alarming slice of twentieth-century U.S. political history is virtually unknown to the general public, including most scholars of American history.

In 1934 a special Congressional committee was appointed to conduct an investigation of a possible planned coup intended to topple the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace it with a government modelled on the policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The shocking results of the investigation were promptly scotched and stashed in the National Archives. While the coup attempt was reported at the time in a few newspapers, including The New York Times, the story disappeared from public memory shortly after the Congressional findings were made available to president Roosevelt. It was the recent release from the Archives of the Congressional report that prompted the BBC and Horton commentaries.

The Congressional committee had discovered that some of the foremost members of the economic elite, many of them household names at the time, had indeed hatched a meticulously detailed and massively funded plot to effect a fascist coup in America. The plotters represented prominent families - Rockefeller, Mellon, Pew, enterprises like Morgan, Dupont, Pew, Remington, Anaconda, Bethlehem and Goodyear, along with the owners of Bird’s Eye, Maxwell House and Heinz. Totaling about twenty four major businessmen and Wall Street financiers, they planned to assemble a private army of half a million men, composed largely of unemployed veterans. These troops would both constitute the armed force behind the coup and defeat any resistance this in-house revolution might generate. The economic elite would provide the material resources required to sustain the new government.

The plotters hoped that widespread working-class discouragement at the stubborn persistence of the Great Depression would have sufficiently disenchanted the masses with FDR’s policies to make the coup an easy ride. And they were appalled at Roosevelt’s willingness after 1933 to initiate economic policies that economists and businessmen considered dangerously Leftist departures from economic orthodoxy. Only a fascist-style government, they thought, could enforce the kind of economic “discipline” that would reverse the Great Depression and restore profits.

Interestingly, it was a military man, Major General Smedley D. Butler*, assigned the task of raising the 500,000-man army, who blew the whistle after uncovering the details of the operation he was asked to lead. FDR was thus able to nip the plot in the bud.

The president might have used the occasion to alert the public to the anti-democratic impulses of a major segment of the capitalist class. But this would only have bolstered the fortunes of Communist, Socialist and other anti-capitalist political tendencies here, which were already gaining some ground among artists, intellectuals and a surprising number of working people. It is well known that Hollywood screenwriting in the 1930s was replete with Communist-inspired sentiment.

And we must not forget that FDR was himself a (somewhat renegade) member of the very class that would have toppled him. While FDR was open to watered-down Keynesian policies in a way that very few of his class comrades were, his commitment (like Keynes’s) to the “free enterprise” system was unconditional. He had no interest in publicizing a plot that might constitute a public-relations victory for anti-capitalist politics. He therefore refused to out the plotters, and sought no punitive measures against them. In the end, class solidarity carried the day for Roosevelt. The Congressional committee cooperated by refusing to reveal the names of many of the key plotters.

Thus, fascist tendencies gestating deep within the culture of the U.S. ruling class were effectively left to develop unhindered by mass political mobilization.

Might this grisly episode have important implications for our understanding of the current political moment? One may be inclined to think so on the basis of the fact that one of the architects of the plot was one Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush. Bush, along with many other big businessmen, had maintained friendly relations in 1933 and 1934 with the new German government of Chancellor Adolf Hitler, and was designated to form for his class conspirators a working relationship with that government.

While I highly recommend Bush-bashing, the implications of this unsettling piece of history for contemporary politics run deeper than many –especially soi disant “oppositional” liberals- would like to think. There is the temptation to point triumphantly to George W. Bush’s commitment to the irrelevance of the Constitution, his corresponding contempt for hitherto taken-for-granted fundamental human rights, his Hobbesian notion of unbridled sovereignty, his militarized notion of political power - there is the temptation to regard these fascist elements as the most significant contemporary remnant of the 1934 conspiracy.

But no less important is the utter absence in 1934 of liberal attempts to educate the public to, and mobilize the population against, the fascist threat. FDR stood down.

Although Rooseveltian/New Deal liberalism is dead, contemporary Democrats do sustain one of FDR’s least seemly qualities, namely his refusal to encourage effective mass opposition to fascist and imperialist politics. John Kerry boasted of having contributed to the drafting of the Patriot Act. And in the first round of legislation regarding continued funding of the war in Iraq, after the 2006 elections gave the Democrats a majority in the House and the Senate, the Democrats gave Bush everything he wanted. All the major presidentail contenders of both parties support a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. None has repudiated the conceit that Uncle Sam is the permanent global hegemon. And most importantly, no mainstream Democrat has repudiated the Neoliberal Consensus, the notion that the market should be left to operate as “freely” as the public can be persuaded to allow it to act, and, crucially, that this is a model that should be imposed globally through the power of the U.S. working in tandem with such global institutions as the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.

To the extent that this policy has been successful, inequalities between national classes and between the global North and South have widened dramatically since the decline of the Keynesian consensus in the mid-1970s. Since the Mondale candidacy, no Democrat has had a full-employment plank in his presidential platform. The median wage has been in secular decline since 1973, and the distribution of national income between capital and labor has not been as skewed toward capital since the Great Depression. But no Democrat has made a major issue of this.

These tendencies toward ever-widening inequality and the increasing immiseration of the working population will surely be exacerbated by the deepening slow-motion recession (depression?) that is certain to follow the unfolding financial meltdown. These conditions, and the deep resentment felt by masses of working people toward the lords of Wall Street and their political henchpersons, threaten to generate social “instability” in the form of increasing crime rates and a host of direct and indirect forms of resistance to the claimed legitimacy of the political order. The emergence of what Mike Whitney has called “soup kitchen America” requires a response from our rulers. And they are prepared with (literally) fascist legislation already in place for situations just like this.

Developments over the last day or two in connection with Monday’s House rejection of the bailout package for Wall Street indicate that allegations of fascist tendencies in U.S. political culture are in these times not to be taken lightly. Influential voices in the U.S. media have lamented the susceptability of the political leadership to the will of the people. On Tuesday the Washington Post ran a piece by Michael Gerson, Bush’s former speechwriter, complaining that “It is now clear that American political elites have lost the ability to quickly respond to a national challenge by imposing their collective will.” The same day Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London headlined a column “Congress is the Best Advert For Dictatorship.” And yesterday Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California), who voted against the bailout bill, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying “I’ve seen members turn to each other and say if we don’t pass this bill, we’re going to have martial law in the United States.” “going to have”? We’ve already got it, at least on the books.

On October 17, 2006, Bush signed three Acts that instantly transformed the republic into a police state. The John Warner Defense Authorization Act (DAA) effectively repeals the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act which prohibits military operations directed against the American people. The DAA declares that “the president may employ the armed forces to restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when…[among other reasons]… the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent thet the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of (or “refuse” or “fail in”) maintaining public order --- in order to suppress, in any State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

There is of course nothing in the legislation that specifies what precisely may count as “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The lone Democrat to express reservations about DAA was Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), who entered into the Congressional Record that the Act “[makes] it easier for the president to declare martial law… [T]he implications of changing the [Posse Comitatus] Act are enormous…Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.” Nothing was made of Leahy’s protestations by complicit Democrats.

The Military Commissions Act permits the President, in order to “suppress public disorder”, to assign military troops anywhere in the United States in order to trump the authority of state-based National Guard units, and without the consent of the governer.

Finally, the National Defense Authorization Act allows the President to declare martial law, dispatch National Guard units around the country and authorize military action against the domestic population should His Majesty identify a “national emergency”.

Liberal Democrats, upon being apprised of these developments (of which the vast majority are ignorant) will declare themselves shocked, shocked that Bush has “declared himself dictator”. But Bush has not signed legislation which expires when he passes from office. Every future President will have these powers. Would President Obama seek to erase these abominations? Don’t bet on it. Obama has not jettisoned the entire legacy of FDR. Like Roosevelt, Obama will stand down.

· Butler underwent a major political epiphany shortly before his retirement from the Marine Corps in 1931. In that same year, he addressed an American Legion convention on his assessment of his career. His audience was stunned by his reflections: “I spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism…. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests inb 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.” It remains a mystery why the conspirators would approach this man. But they did.

Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy and Philosophy at The Evergreen State College.