Chavez: U.S. May Have Caused My Cancer

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is hinting that the U.S. may be behind a “very strange” bout of cancer affecting several leaders aligned with him in South America, reports Bloomberg.

Chavez, speaking a day after Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, said the Central Intelligence Agency was behind chemical experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s and that it’s possible that in years to come a plot will be uncovered that shows the U.S. spread cancer as a political weapon against its critics.

“It’s very difficult to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some of us in Latin America,” Chavez said in a nationally televised speech to the military. “Would it be so strange that they’ve invented technology to spread cancer and we won’t know about it for 50 years?”

Chavez, who was diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer in June and had a baseball-sized tumor removed in Cuba, has called for a regional summit of leaders who have battled cancer including Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva and Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to EPJ readers. This is what I wrote in August:

Chavez has recently been undergoing treatment for what many suspect is cancer. Talk in certain parts of D.C. is that the CIA has slowly exposed him to very toxic, cancer causing materials.

I doubled-down on this theory in October, when I wrote:

Connecting the Dots: Gaddafi is Dead, Obama Sends Troops to Central Africa

The United States government is playing a major global power game...This is in addition to everything else that is going on in the Middle East. And my very strong suspicions about the cancer that Hugo Chavez is suffering with. A huge global chess game is being played. PCR [Paul Craig Robert]'s closing question is most apt:

Will the US collapse in economic chaos before it rules the world?

If I am looking at what is going on on the global map and I am Vladimir Putin, I'm worried, real worried.

(Thanks2Nick&AndreGrillon)

Doing a Background Check on CNN

Since CNN broadcasters seem so intent on looking back decades into promo letters and newletters put out by one of Ron Paul's organizations,when everyone admits Ron Paul did not write the letters, lets take a look at the background of some of those affiliated with CNN. It's as elitist as you can get, with strong ties to the CIA recruiting ground, Yale University.

CNN is owned by Times Warner,  CEO Jeffery L. Bewkes is a director of the Council on Foreign Relations and also serves on the board of Yale University.

Also affiliated with Yale and CNN are Anderson Cooper and David Gergen.

Anderson Cooper spent time interning, during his summer breaks in his sophomore and junior years at Yale, at the CIA.

Cooper is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt and the great-great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt. It was J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt who developed Jekyll Island, where the Wall Street elite developed the plan to launch the Federal Reserve.

Cooper is also a member of the Manuscript Society (aka The Wrexham Foundation). The Manuscript Society is a secret society at Yale University, like Skull & Bones. The society holds an annual gathering in its tomb on Halloween.

CNN senior political correspondent, David Gergen, is also a member of the Manuscript Society and was a presidential advisor who served during the administrations of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton.

It is not clear when the Manuscript Society "tapped" blacks for membership, if ever. There are no publicly known black members of the society.

As for the CNN reporter, Gloria Borger, who badgered Ron Paul, I have already reported on her background:

Well, well, it turns out hit job specialist Gloria Borger is married to Lance Morgan. Morgan is according to the web site of his employer, Powell Tate,"chief communications strategist at Powell Tate in Washington, D.C. He specializes in developing and executing communications strategies for public policy debates, crisis communications and media training."

So who might be the clients of Powell Tate, where Borger's husband is "chief communications strategist and crisis communications" adviser?

Just about every part of the military industrial-complex that Ron Paul wants to shrink or shutdown. According to the Powell Tate web site, they provide strategic communications for among others:

The U.S. Army

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services

The U.S Agency for International Development

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce

and, I'm not joking, The National Pork Board.

Bottom line Gloria Borger's husband is as inside Washington DC as you can get.

CNN is just the type of organization you would expect to go after Ron Paul, they are at the very core of elitist, establishment, hypocritical, Washington D.C.

How the CIA Would Like Us to View North Korea's Kim Jong Un

If you read the New York Post regularly, you begin to realize that they are Johnny on the spot when it comes to unflattering profiles of foreign leaders who are not viewed favorably by the U.S. government.

And if one of the leaders is captured by the U.S., NyPo will be the first to report that the leader had pictures of Hitler on his closet wall or at least porn videos (See: Osama bin Laden).

Here's what went down with Noriega, as reported by Malcom Lagauche in his book, The Mother of All Battles: The Endless U.S.-Iraq War:

After the 1989 invasion of Panama, the U.S. allowed the press to enter Manuel Noriega’s office. He was portrayed as a sexual pervert. In the office were pictures of young boys, a picture of Hitler, red underpants and pornographic magazines.

A few months later, the first Marine to enter Noriega’s office was released from the Corps. He eventually talked to a reporter and gave his story of the encounter. He maintained that the contents of the office included only a desk, a telephone, a chair, and a typewriter.

Bottom line: When the government needs to define someone, the CIA puts a call into NyPo, along with other news organizations, with a whopper of a story. Thus, it is not surprising that today's NyPo has a profile of new North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The profile says that he is a comic book-reading, Chicago Bulls fan, apparently watching Bulls games with a thumb on a nuclear missile launch button. Here's NyPo:

Much about Jong Un remains a state secret, including his age — speculation centers on 27 or 28 — the identity of his mother and his own marital status.

Former US envoy Bill Richardson, who has visited Pyongyang, said the power vacuum created by his father’s death raises “extreme concern because North Korea and the peninsula is a tinderbox.” 

He said the next 24 hours would determine how firmly Kim Jong Un is in control. That’s important because North Korea is believed to have enough plutonium for eight atomic bombs

.According to NyPo, here's how Kim Jong Un got the nod over his two older brothers:

Kim Jong Un is the youngest of three sons of a bizarrely dysfunctional family. His older brother Kim Jong Nam apparently lost his chance to succeed Kim Jong Il after he was caught in 2001 trying to sneak into Japan — using a bogus Dominican Republic passport — to visit the Tokyo version of Disneyland. Another brother, Kim Jong Chol, was said to have been ruled out of the succession race because he is “too effeminate.”

Kim Jong Un is known to speak English, German and French that he picked up in a Swiss boarding school, which he attended under an alias. 

Classmates said he was quiet and seemed to be shy or sullen and uncomfortable with women.

Nice, we now "know" there is a gay brother and a leader uncomfortable with women. The CIA just got the anti-gay conservative right and the women's movement to hate Jong Un, within three paragraphs of copy. Some of this about Jong Un may be true, or all of it, or none of it, just know that the report was very likely put through the CIA filter to put Jong Un in the most unflattering light possible.

Was Geithner in Europe to Advance a Decades Long Secret Plan of the US?

As part of the eurozone financial rescue effort, Treasury Secretary Geithner traveled to Europe four times in recent months. In fact, this week, just before the EU announced a tighter "fiscal union," Geithner was in Europe visiting government officials from  France, Italy Spain and Germany, to consult on the plan.

The result was the announcement of an agreement for a more unified financial eurozone. All European Union members, except for Great Britain. signed on to the plan, that clearly was heavily influenced by the United States efforts. Indeed, in addition to Geithner, the American and former State Department official, Robert Zoellick, the current president of the World Bank, told the WSJ CEO Council that he had been to Europe twice in recent weeks.

Given these developments, it may be instructive to review a September 2000 report by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard about then declassified documents that point to plotting by the U.S. as early as the fifties and sixties  to create a more unified Europe. Pritchard wrote in 2000:

DECLASSIFIED American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement.

The documents confirm suspicions voiced at the time that America was working aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into a European state. One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.

The documents were found by Joshua Paul, a researcher at Georgetown University in Washington. They include files released by the US National Archives. Washington's main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then.

The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA's first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement's funds.

The European Youth Campaign, an arm of the European Movement, was wholly funded and controlled by Washington. The Belgian director, Baron Boel, received monthly payments into a special account. When the head of the European Movement, Polish-born Joseph Retinger, bridled at this degree of American control and tried to raise money in Europe, he was quickly reprimanded. 

The leaders of the European Movement - Retinger, the visionary Robert Schuman and the former Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak - were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors. The US role was handled as a covert operation. ACUE's funding came from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations as well as business groups with close ties to the US government. 

The head of the Ford Foundation, ex-OSS officer Paul Hoffman, doubled as head of ACUE in the late Fifties. The State Department also played a role. A memo from the European section, dated June 11, 1965, advises the vice-president of the European Economic Community, Robert Marjolin, to pursue monetary union by stealth. 

It recommends suppressing debate until the point at which "adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable".

Huh, the crashing eurozone made the recent crisis virtually an inescapable situation for EZ members to band together, or so many EZ political leaders said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said last week while addressing the German parliament that  tighter regulation of eurozone members was the only way out of what she described as "the most difficult chapter in the history of the euro, if not the most difficult in the history of the European Union".

Also last week, Poland’s Finance Minister Jacek Rostowski, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the EU, said ““We should all be aware what the stake of the game is. Because the game is not only about the well-being of this generation or the next generation, but is goes without saying we’re also fighting for the safety of this and future generations,”

And then there's that Ford Foundation again, where Geithner's father worked, who I have long suspected is/was a high ranking CIA official.

Makes you wonder.

(htRyanUnderwood)

Now It Can Be Told: Our Man in the old Soviet Union was Debriefed by the CIA

After Richard Ebeling sent me this email, which include reports of his activities in Lithuania and Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union, I emailed back to him:

I'm beginning to think there is a secret libertarian wing of the CIA and you are heading it.

With his permission, I reproduce his reply to me:

Bob:


Actually, when I returned from Lithuania in January 1991, I was contacted by the CIA and they sent an agent to Hillsdale for a "debriefing."

I was willing to tell them what I had observed and my interpretation of the events. But I was firm that I would not give them the names of any of my Lithuanian friends and associates with whom I had been interacting while I was there during the "troubles."

They did not press me on that, and were seemingly pleased enough to have the impressions of an economist who had been there "on the ground."

Richard

The Good, The Bad and The Fantastic: An Economist Reviews the New James Bond Film

First the bad.

The opening chase seen in Quantum of Solace is probably the worst opening chase scene of any Bond movie. It's a car chase, whose reasonable facsimile, you have seen in anyone of a dozen films. It is definitely not up to Bond standards.

A second problem with the film is the sometimes quirky camera angles, which to me were more irritating than interesting.

The Good.

Your average Bond junkie is going to like this film for its standard fare. The action scenes improve markedly after the opener, and, of course, the women (Olga Kurylenko and Gemma Arterton) are gorgeous.

The Fantastic

But, here's the kicker for any student of economics, the movie is a must see, and not because of the women, but because of the plot and dialogue.

For some time after the opening scene, I wondered if there even was any plot or dialogue, since there are two more action sequences after the opener.

But once the plot starts to be revealed, and the dialogue begins, here's what you learn. The villain of the movie is a "save the planet" environmentalist! Appropriately named Mr. Greene.

But then it gets better.

James Bond (Daniel Craig) is in Haiti and the dialogue briefly touches on the former President of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and his increasing the minimum wage, which caused the CIA to overthrow him. Indeed, in exile, Aristide to this day claims it was U.S. agents, during a second coup, that forced him to leave Haiti.

So score two for the Bond writers, Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. But it continues down an interesting path from here. At least one of the writers has to have some familiarity with the John Perkins' book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and also some of the writings of Milton Friedman.

Through out the movie, the writers have the CIA in the background and in bed with all kinds of bad guys. And then they pull a Milton Friedman and have the good CIA agent say to Bond, "Haven't you heard, there is no such thing as a free lunch?"

And finally, as the piece de resistance, one of the bad guys asks to be paid in Euros because the dollar is going lower, he says because of the costs of the war. Don't get me wrong. There are no long intellectual economic analyses in this film, but for economists and students of economics this movie is one long stream of economic innuendos and asides from a generally free market point of view with government and their corporate cronies as the bad guys.

Note: The one point where some may interpret a non-free market tone is in the mention of Aristide's hike in the minimum wage. But, again, this is a James Bond film not a dissertation and the point that is trying to be made is the CIA'a intervention to help out corporate cronies, rather than a full commentary on the minimum wage. The writers deserve overall credit for understanding the role of government and crony capitalism, especially that it can exist within the Greenie-Industrial Complex.