To me it is clear that the International Bankers are the head of the shadow government,at their right hand are the CIA/MI6/Mossad's State Intelligence agencies,along with various other intelligence/military agencies throughout the world.I would say this,for an agency that was NOT supposed to have anything to do with domestic affairs how come I find their HUGE footprint all over,from Wall St,to Vegas, from Vegas to banks,and now once again we have this 51st state thing AGAIN. Do I need to say who is behind this push?Because of something I seen in another article a couple days ago about this island, I would say a good guess is that American companies are involved,drug making companies in the article I read.I got the sense from the article that these companies, are not out to heal 3rd world countries,but will sell them their pills,even those discontinued in America for various reasons.Also the Puerto Rico piece goes along way to show that Mockingbird never left, and has been in place up to this very day.Check out Dave's archives,very good stuff, take care all.
Censored by Amazon
When I sent my review of the powerful new book by Phillip Nelson, Ronald Kukal, Ernest Gallo, and Phillip Tourney, Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas, to Amazon.com this past Monday morning, I went the extra mile to make sure that it would be displayed so people could read it. I have noticed that Amazon first displays only the reviews of customers who are “verified purchasers” of the book from Amazon. Although the review I had written and had already put on my web site was based upon a review copy that Nelson had sent me a few weeks before the actual publication date, I went to the trouble and expense of buying a copy from Amazon as a gift for a relative. Indeed, when I access the Amazon page for the book from my computer, I have this little reminder at the top of the page, “You purchased this item on June 10, 2017.”
What I attempted to put up was the review that I had posted on my web site with the exception of the section entitled “From ‘Catalyzing Event’ to Cover-up.” That excision of almost a third of the original review was done as a further precaution against the non-posting of the review because it was too long. The only links I had in the review were to the Amazon pages of the various other books on the Liberty massacre.
When I had finished and hit the button for posting the review, I got a message that my review had been received, that it was being reviewed, or words to that effect, and that I would receive an email message as soon as it was posted. Four days have now passed and I am still waiting. It’s pretty clear that the review is never going to see the light of day on Amazon, and other evidence suggests to me that this is a clear act of censorship on the part of the company that also now owns The Washington Post.
Ruddy-Book Review Hidden
The primary reason for my suspicion is the treatment that Amazon has given to my review of The Strange Death of Vincent Foster by Christopher Ruddy. As you can see here, I posted it on Amazon on September 15, 2007, I gave the book three stars, and at the time that I accessed the page 45 of 46 people had “found it helpful.” The favorableness with which readers had judged the review had more than qualified it to be touted for several years as the “top critical review.” Apparently a review is judged to be “critical” if it carries fewer than four stars.
Recently, though, I checked on the Amazon page for Ruddy’s book and found that my review had been bumped from its prominent place. The “Top critical review” that they are now touting was only posted on April 23 of this year and only two people so far have found it “helpful.” That review gave the book the same three stars that I did. By anything resembling an objective standard, my review has it all over that one.
Right above the title of that review, Amazon invites you to “See all 9 critical reviews,” and you can do that by clicking on the embedded link. What comes up are only four reviews, neither of which is mine, and I can find no way to discover what the other five reviews are short of scrolling through all 73 reviews at the link where one is invited to do so. By that method I was able to discover that my review is now buried away on the fifth page that one reaches through the scrolling process. That is apparently the only way in which the review can now be found. If you try clicking on their little bar chart for all the 3-star reviews, only two of them come up and neither of them is mine.
Special Attention
It is pretty clear that my review of The Strange Death of Vincent Foster is still receiving some special attention by the people at Amazon, but not on account of the review’s merit. What, one must wonder, caused them to kick me into the outhouse, as it were? Permit me to engage in some speculation. Followers of current events might have noticed that Ruddy has recently risen to a new position of prominence in the country as a crony of President Donald Trump. Most recently, he was the source of the news that Trump is thinking of dismissing Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller. Even The Washington Post, which in the forefront of media opponents of President Trump, has had a major fluff piece on Ruddy characterizing him as “the Trump whisperer.”
Once again, we must remind you that Jeff Bezos, the ostensible founder and owner of Amazon is now also the ostensible owner of The Washington Post. I say “ostensible” because shortly after Bezos purchased The Post Amazon received a $600 million contract from the CIA to provide “cloud services” to the agency. In my review of The Money and the Power I talk about media moguls and other prominent businessmen who are most likely to be front men for intelligence agencies and provide evidence that, even before Bezos bought it, The Post was little more than a front for the CIA. Similarly, in “Double Agent Ruddy Reaching for Media Pinnacle,” I argue that Ruddy’s Newsmax is also a front for an intelligence organization, although more likely for Israel’s Mossad than for the CIA.
It was probably that article, more than anything else, that attracted the adverse attention from Amazon, got my review of Ruddy’s book hidden away, and made me a marked man when it came to especially sensitive topics. In retrospect, to shorten my original review I think I might have done better to leave off that last section if “sensitivity” had been my biggest concern. That might well be what got the review canned, and, as a reminder, I must repeat it here:
Where Does Your Allegiance Lie?
Although half a century has now passed, hardly any event, when looked at in the clear light of day, permits us to come to grips more completely with the political reality of the United States today than does the assault on the USS Liberty. We live in an era in which members of the United States military have never been more venerated. From sports events to airport encounters, we’re expected to honor them at every turn. “Support the troops” is seemingly an admonition that no one can disagree with.
All of the military reverence comes to a screeching halt, though, when it comes to the surviving crewmen of the USS Liberty. They can only be brushed aside, with their demands for a true accounting for what was done to them by our great “ally” with the connivance of their own leaders. For our politicians to do otherwise and to get to the bottom of what happened there in the Eastern Mediterranean on June 8, 1967, would put them on a collision course with the real ruling power in the country. When it comes down to the choice of supporting our troops or supporting the ethnic-supremacist state of Israel, whose fundamental nature was revealed as much by the Liberty attack as it was by the Lavon Affair, and for whom we regularly pour out our fortune, our credibility, and our blood, Israel it has to be.
Concerning that ethnic-supremacist state and its historical tactics, I feel that I was a bit remiss in my review of Remember the Liberty in not taking issue with Nelson’s apparent argument that President Lyndon Johnson played a bigger role in conceiving and orchestrating the Liberty attack than did Israel’s leaders themselves. I would remind him that Johnson could certainly have had nothing to do with the false-flag Lavon Affair or with the false-flag 9/11 attacks. Furthermore, as Henry Makow documents, false flag terror is “the oldest trick in the Zionist toolbag.”
As a final note, we can’t help but notice that the number of customers’ reviews of Remember the Liberty seems to be stuck on three. We know from our own failed attempt that Amazon has received at least four at this point. One can’t help but wonder if the order has come down from the owner, Bezos, or from whoever pulls his strings, that the popularity of this extremely eye-opening book must be suppressed. One must wonder how many other reviews Amazon has received besides mine and how many it might receive in the days ahead that will never be permitted to see the light of day.
Heretofore, Amazon’s customer reviews have been sources of information that one might not receive anywhere else. It was from reading such a review that I learned about the attempt by the Zionist Stern Gang to assassinate President Harry Truman in 1947. Are we now witnessing the insertion of a plug in this little leak in the dike that prevents us from learning the truth about the founders and the leaders of the little country that now seems to have this big country’s politicians and its news media in its hip pocket?
David Martin
June 29, 2017
lets look at this money and power link for the connection
The Money and the Power
A review
John Hinderaker wrote the following passage about a year ago about Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid:
When a guy shows up at a Las Vegas emergency room on New Year’s Day with severe facial injuries and broken ribs, and gives as an explanation the functional equivalent of “I walked into a doorknob,” it isn’t hard to guess that he ran afoul of mobsters. Yet the national press has studiously averted its eyes from Reid’s condition, and has refused to investigate the cause of his injuries. To my knowledge, every Washington reporter has at least pretended to believe Reid’s story, and none, as far as I can tell, has inquired further.
No one who has read Sally Denton and Roger Morris's important and powerful 2001 book The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America would be at all surprised that something like this apparent beating of a prominent and ostensibly powerful government official could happen and even that the press would cover it up. This is from page 336:
An FBI wiretap elsewhere caught Tropicana mobster Joseph Vincent Agosto bragging about his influence with the ranking state gaming regulator he called “Mr. Clean,” or “Cleanface,” an official widely believed by law enforcement to be the former Gaming Commission chairman and future congressman and senator Harry Reid, who of course loudly denied it.
Nine pages further we encounter this revealing passage:
Four months later, also in part the result of [FBI agent Joseph] Yablonsky's relentless pursuit, the already convicted Joe Agosto turned government informant, sending a shudder through Nevada, and especially politicians like his “Cleanface.” “No one proved conclusively that Harry Reid was 'Cleanface,' Yablonsky recalled of the allegations against the rising Mormon politician and future U.S. senator, “but when Agosto became a federal witness, Reid freaked.”
Denton and Morris’s book was made to look all that much better for understanding the real power in our country when this man from the very small state of Nevada rose to his position of great Senate power in 2006. Until the Republicans obtained their own majority in 2015, Reid had been Senate Majority Leader since 2007.
The Mob in the Saddle
Anyone who has done no more than watch the movie Bugsy knows that organized crime made Las Vegas into a gambling and entertainment mecca. With the passage of time, though, the city’s image, through various takeovers and makeovers, has slowly improved, as has that of the gambling industry. Similarly, we are given to believe by the opinion molders of the country that organized crime in the country, primarily through its Mafia embodiment, is pretty much a thing of the past.
Read The Money and the Power and you will realize that the opposite is more nearly the case. One of the measures of the power of organized crime in the country, in fact, is that we see and hear so little about it these days. Its power extends to the molders of public opinion, which explains like nothing else why they should be so credulous about Reid’s explanation of his injuries.
Here are some key passages that capture well the Las Vegas of the turn of this century:
Yet beyond the glamour and massiveness of the once again reinvented city, its essence never changes. The new corridors of affluence and pretension still lead to the gigantic casinos that are the heart of the matter, the reason for all the rest. However discreetly lit or adorned, electronically encased or programmed, the racket works now as it always has, with the single ultimate purpose of taking the public’s money in a manner no other industry in the world can match. Those who see that reality most clearly, the few who knew the old Las Vegas, are unfazed by the new façade. “A joint’s a joint,” says a casino manager who came to the city with Meyer Lansky.
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By any measure economic or political, the oligarchy that ruled Las Vegas at the millennium was—as it had been in essence for fifty years—an exclusive regime. As always in the city, the juice belonged to a handful of prominent men, representing larger, less conspicuous interests behind them, and with their own power inseparable from their emblematic pasts. The umbrella companies of end-of-century Las Vegas were with few exceptions traded on Wall Street. “America, Inc. buys out Murder, Inc.,” was how David Johnston summed up the apparent advent of corporate chain ownership of casinos and what Las Vegas would officially celebrate as yet another cleansing crossing of casinos into “mainstream American business.” Yet, as in the earlier passages with Del Webb, Parvin-Dohrmann, Continental Connectors, Recrion, Argent, and dozens more publicly chartered entities, the corporate veil remained in many ways as thin and deceptive as it had always been.
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[The five men in effective control] were mostly creatures of the city’s culture, or at least of its ethic practiced elsewhere. Shadows of early Miami connections and securities schemes had hung over [Kirk] Kerkorian as he moved, without challenge, in and out of a Las Vegas in which the Syndicate was arbiter over nearly four decades. [William] Bennett rose in the same milieu over the same span, from host and night manager to boardroom baron. He had been an intimate of the infamous Allen Dorfman, his career entangled with Teamster-financed and Syndicate-controlled Jay Sarno. [Steve] Wynn’s provenance was clear enough. [Sheldon] Adelson, the billionaire promoter and right-wing Zionist with business and political ties to Israel, had gotten his start distributing vending machines in the fifties on the streets of Brockton, Massachusetts, where the Patriarca branch of the Syndicate rarely allowed competitors in the field, and his reactionary anti-unionism echoed the animus of the old mob toward independent organized labor. A crass new mogul who behaved with the arrogance and impudence of an old boss, he went about the city in the nineties, even into the editorial offices of the Review-Journal, with ex-Mossad bodyguards brazenly carrying semi-automatic weapons.
[Arthur] Goldberg had made a fortune as an executive in the rarefied world of New Jersey trucking. He had moved on to Bally’s with that company’s heritage of organized crime ties, and then engineered its merger with the casino-hungry Hilton, conditioning the agreement on his own enrichment by tens of millions in a questionable stock swap, and provoking a shareholder suit alleging kickbacks. His deal created the world’s largest single casino operator, although conglomerate scale was no bar to hoary Strip methods. At the end of 1999, New Jersey regulators scathingly censured Bally’s for political payoffs in Florida in a scheme in which Goldberg’s chief aide was a former head of the Newark FBI office.
Readers will notice in that list of names a man who has since risen in prominence to the position of virtual kingmaker of the national Republican Party, Sheldon Adelson. Considering the source of so much of his wealth one might think that association with him would be political poison, but our opinion molders make nothing of it, so it is not.
Et Tu, Donald?
If little is made about the associations of this would-be kingmaker, even more remarkably, little is also being made about those of the would-be “king,” real estate and casino magnate, Donald Trump. Just the fact that he has been a major player in real estate in New York and New Jersey would have put him in close association with mobsters in the construction trade, as pointed out in this Federalist article. The writer, David Marcus, who clearly deeply opposes Trump as a potential president appears to be completely exasperated by the failure of the major news media to make an issue of these associations. Indeed, my local newspaper, The Washington Post, which I read daily, has thrown everything but the kitchen sink at Trump, but underworld associations have so far been out of bounds.
Trump, with his casino investments in Atlantic City is outside the scope of the Denton-Morris book, but it is full of clues as to why his likely underworld connections would be out of bounds for The Post. We begin with the authors’ use of the term, “Syndicate,” as opposed to “Mafia.” The focus on the latter term by the mainstream press, they say, is deliberate because it leaves the impression that organized crime is exclusively an Italian, mostly Sicilian-American enterprise. To the contrary, they say, the older term “Syndicate” is more appropriate because the underworld of organized crime that they have seen in control of Las Vegas they estimate to be about half Jewish, a quarter Italian, and the rest of other ethnicities. Among those other ethnicities, particularly involved in the financing of Las Vegas casinos, the Mormon Church and many of its devotees, like Harry Reid, loom large.
The Las Vegas gambling business from its inception to the present is also a lot dirtier in many ways than is generally known. We had previously heard of pension funds from corrupt unions like the Teamsters being used to build casinos, but the degree to which money from drug trafficking built Las Vegas was a big eye-opener. Casino gambling, as the authors point out, continues to provide an ideal way to launder ill-gotten profits of various kinds, particularly drug money. The enormous profits are also used to buy political influence, that is to say, to corrupt the political system and buy protection so that the corrupt practices of the casino operators can continue unmolested by the law.
The Government Underwold
One cannot talk about power and corruption in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century without mentioning the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). We learn from Denton and Morris that the well-known collaboration between the CIA and the mob in the attempt to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was hardly an anomaly. As wielders of secret power, the mob—or the Syndicate if you prefer—and the CIA are in the same business, and they have found it in many instances to work together rather than to compete. The cooperation has been so complete in such things as illicit drug smuggling and the laundering of money that it is often difficult to figure out where one of them stops and the other begins. I lost track at a count of 30 pages as I was going through the various sub-categories in the index for mention of the CIA (e.g. assassination plots, 71, 174, 208, 209-10, 213, 246, 253, 293, 295-296, 297, 298, 299, 306-7, 307-12; drug trade and, 6, 52, 103, 143, 311-12, 329; JFK assassination and, 253-4, 297, 310), but none of those pages have any mention of the casino-owning company, Resorts International. The company is listed under the company’s name in the index with the pages 284, 285, and 353, and those pages also come up under Meyer Lansky, whose index listings make up almost half a column of the index. In their various descriptions of the company and its activities, I can’t determine whether it was or is a CIA front company or whether Meyer Lansky controlled it. In fact, it’s not an either-or thing as the late Michael Collins Piper described it in a 2013 American Free Press article:
Donald Trump’s rise to stardom came as a consequence of his having been a flamboyant front man for some unsavory behind-the-scenes sponsors. Here’s the story:
In his memoir, Trump proudly described how in 1987 he bought his first casino interests when he purchased 93 percent of the voting stock in the Resorts International (RI) gambling concern.
What Trump didn’t say was that RI was controlled by a clique of sordid, international big-money elements in alliance with the Jewish crime syndicate which was, in turn, collaborating with the CIA and Israel’s Mossad in an array of inter-connected money-laundering operations.
The casinos laundered money for the CIA and the Mossad. In return, these agencies used their influence to ensure the mob remained protected from interference by law enforcement… [I need to take a deeper look from a few different angles,but I think there is a good chance that R.I. the writers are referring to now has a huge stake in MGM International Resorts.makes sense given the premise of power and money in Denton's book. DC]
Piper doesn’t say that Trump knew of all the company’s criminal and governmental connections, but it’s hard to believe that he would have been completely ignorant in that regard. His article is useful primarily for fleshing out Denton and Morris’s more sketchy description of the company and its origins.
Front Man Howard Hughes
Though Piper states flatly in his first sentence that Trump was merely a front man, he provides no evidence for his claim in the article. Everything is by inference. One might add to the inference with the example of a similar man to Trump whom the authors examine in great length in Money and Power, Howard Hughes. Hughes, like Trump, was born to wealth, but each took the family fortune to great new heights. Each in his earlier years was also a high-living playboy. Compared to Hughes, Trump has only dabbled in casinos. At one point Hughes virtually bought up Las Vegas and much of Nevada:[Of course Trump was the front man in New Jersey for I.R. and thus Lansky and friends,CIA included DC]
In his grand gesture, it was to be believed, he bought out the disreputable elements that threatened the city’s prosperity. Single-handedly, tycoon as hero, he ransomed Las Vegas from its unsavory past, staved off looming scandals, and made gambling at last a legitimate investment for reputable corporate America. No Nevadan actually saw him behind the shuttered windows high above the Strip. But respected men, leaders of the community—a senator, a governor, a publisher, a banker, prominent lawyers—all vouched for the story, saying Hughes was Nevada’s benefactor, its deliverer.
Almost none of it was true.
Hughes, according to Denton and Morris, was the ultimate front man. Behind him were a number of top mobsters and the CIA. Many of his top operatives were members of the secretive Mormon Church. The authors don’t say it, but one gets the suspicion that much of Hughes’s business success even before he plunged into Las Vegas in his early sixties was operating as a front man for dirty money, and much of that could have been ill-gotten CIA money. A large part of his fortune, after all, was built upon military contracts, contracts that might have benefited from a favored inside track. One of the sub-categories for the CIA in the index is “Hughes and.” It is discussed on pages 269, 279, 286, 289-90, 296, and 304.
Readers may gather at this point that Money and Power is about much more than gambling and the Mafia or even about the Syndicate. It’s about the Deep State that really runs the country. In a poem that I posted in 1998 that was based largely upon my close examination of the Vince Foster death case, I concluded that it is a criminal Deep State run by the “C.C.E,” the controlling criminal elite. Money and Power, published three years later, confirms my every suspicion.
One of my suspicions concerns the frequent use of phony front men. Number 16 of the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression mentions the paying of rich people “who will pretend to spend their own money.” In the BCCI episode they were known as “nominees,” typically rich Arab businessmen who lent their name to the buyout of various banks, when, in fact, it was the corrupt Bank of Credit and Commerce International that was actually taking over the bank.
Media Front Men?
Nowhere does the word “nominee” come to mind more than in the realm of opinion molding. Why should supposedly astute businessmen create or take over newspapers and magazines that only lose money, and have no realistic prospects of ever making money? What, one might ask, did the Reverend Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church gain from all the millions he ostensibly poured into the money-losing Washington Times? Did Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch get rich making such business decisions as the founding of the Weekly Standard money pit? And then there’s the man whose money, we are told, kept the “vast right-wing conspiracy” going against the Clinton's, Richard Mellon Scaife, the man ostensibly behind Christopher Ruddy. In that article about Resorts International, Michael Collins Piper writes of William Mellon Hitchcock of the “Mellon dynasty—one of America’s largest family fortunes which has collaborated closely with the CIA for years.” Seeking verification for Piper’s assertion, we quickly found on the Net this extraordinarily revealing article, “How organized crime, bankers and covert ops gave birth to hippies in Laurel Canyon.” Almost the entire sordid cast of characters is there, including Mary Carter Paints and Resorts International. Hitchcock, we learn, was involved with Timothy Leary who had his own CIA connections, and Hitchcock also worked closely with Meyer Lansky. It’s very depressing.
That brings us back to the matter of why The Washington Post is unlikely to be pushing the organized crime angle as a part of its ongoing onslaught against Trump. What has Amazon’s Jeff Bezos gained from his ostensible takeover of this big money loser? It continues to be exactly the same newspaper it was with the same writers and the same editorial policy as it was before he was said to have opened up his wallet to fund it. Why would he do that? What’s in it for him? A personal anecdote might shed some light on what is going on.
I have an acquaintance who lives in the Washington, DC, area who is fond of talking about the achievements of one of his sons. This son has an undergraduate degree from one Ivy League university and a Ph.D. from another. Knowing how heavily the CIA recruits in the Ivy League, particularly Yale, and considering the son’s major and background, I casually asked the acquaintance one day if anyone at his college had tried to get him to join the agency. “No,” he responded, “not at college, but when he was working at his summer job writing for The Washington Post.” One of the editors, whom he named and whose name I clearly remember but will not repeat here, had, over lunch, told him that if he wanted his career to flourish at the newspaper he should join the CIA. The son took it as an invitation, which he declined, not over any matter of principle but because his career aspirations were in academia instead of journalism. The acquaintance told me all this in a very matter-of-fact manner as if he didn’t see anything wrong with it.
More Fruits of Working in Washington
This information fits with what I have previously related from personal experience with respect to CIA influence and control of the media in “CIA Plots Puerto Rico Statehood.” Another anecdote reveals, I think, some of their use of nefarious techniques in the protection of crooked finance of the BCCI variety. It involves the phony investment firm of Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham and Wong in Hawaii. The defense offered by its principal officer, Ron Rewald, was that it was a CIA company and that he was simply fronting for them.
A neighbor of mine at the time of Rewald’s trial was an Englishman who worked as a producer for the BBC. He made an attempt to cover the trial in Hawaii. Some months later he related to me over dinner at my home that upon return from Hawaii, he was called out of the baggage claiming line at Dulles Airport by police who told him that they had been given a tip that he was transporting illegal drugs. His immediate fear was that drugs had been planted in his suitcase and his coverage of the Rewald trial would thereby be quickly neutralized as he was sent off to jail. As it was, no drugs were found, but he definitely took the episode as a shot across the bow by very powerful people. Jim DiEugenio reports that in order to neutralize ABC’s coverage, it took over the network. He concludes:
The exposure of myriad illegal activities taken part in by Rewald and Bishop Baldwin—up to and including murder—form the backdrop for the [William] Casey-Cap Cities buyout of ABC. It also helps explain who owns and controls the major media in this country and why. And through that fact it helps give an appropriate background to why ABC is prolonging a lie about the murder of President Kennedy forty years after the fact. And why that particular lie is also publicly shared by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Governed by Gangsters
When we hear of some gangster who has met his end prematurely, we usually don’t spend a lot of time wondering why it might have happened. It’s just the nature of the underworld. Anyone who has read and comprehended the meaning of Money and Power doesn’t have the whole crime solved for him before he is skeptical of a “suicide” explanation for the death of someone like Vince Foster or an “accident” explanation for the death of former CIA director William Colby. Colby had been acting as legal counsel to the corrupt Nugan Hand bank, which was connected to Rewald’s operation.
Foster spent his last weekend meeting at the estate of real estate magnate and major Democratic Party contributor Nate Landow, who had been denied the ambassadorship he sought because of revelations about his Bahamian casino investments that he had made jointly with the Meyer Lansky organization and the Gambino family. In his work for the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, where Hillary Clinton was a close associate, Foster was the main person in charge of the Jackson Stephens account. Stephens is credited with bringing BCCI to the United States. The autopsy doctor in the Foster case, Dr. James Beyer, had, as with Foster, rendered a corrupt autopsy in the case of a young man who had been coerced into doing undercover work for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Bill Clinton’s former security chief in Arkansas, Jerry Parks, when he heard of Foster’s death turned pale, according to his wife and said, “I’m a dead man.” He was. He was murdered gangland-style a few weeks later, and his murder is still unsolved. Parks’ widow also told British reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that Jerry and Vince Foster once returned from the notorious Mena Airport in Arkansas in a car whose trunk was filled with $100 bills.
Hillary Clinton no doubt spoke from the heart when she said upon hearing of Foster’s gunshot death, “Of a thousand people who might commit suicide, I would never pick Vince.” Ever since she has quietly gone along with the obvious cover-up of her friend’s murder, though.
“President Clinton—raised in Hot Springs, his family deeply involved in the backroom gambling there in the fifties when it rivaled Las Vegas, his own political career launched by the backing of his uncle Raymond, who ran slot machines in the town for the Marcello family—seemed to understand the city’s bipartisan politics as clearly as any politician of the century,” write Denton and Morris.
Read this book and you will see clearly the criminal nature of our current leadership.
David Martin
March 10, 2016
Addendum
For more from Morris on the involvement of the CIA in drug smuggling, see this 2007 interview. I reference that interview in an addendum to my article “Rotten Goulden/Corn.”
David Martin
March 14, 2016
now we are going to link back to the Puerto Rico Statehood Issue which I recall seeing as a trending within the last couple of months.When I opened the link I expected this to be a very recent post,I was somewhat surprised to learn at the end, that in fact, it was a 19 year old link. The headline ties all 3 together,and the question that has to be asked is:are they still at it 19 years later.
CIA Plots Puerto Rico Statehood
Who could have ever asked for a better, more effective public relations man? Typically, such people send out press releases and they schmooze with their counterparts in the news business so as to influence them in whatever direction the client wants to influence them, and that's it. That old saw about advertisement goes as well or better for public relations: "Only half of it does any good. The problem is to determine which half." Imagine if you will a PR guy who writes up lots of editorials extolling the virtues of the client's position, sends them out to large and small newspapers around the country, and has them reprinted verbatim, without attribution, as the editorial opinion of the receiving newspapers.
We are talking about the late Scott Runkle, president of Washington International Communications. I had the pleasure of watching the man in action from my office two doors from his at the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, the office of the Governor or Puerto Rico in Washington, for several years. His service to the pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party (PDP) went back to the early days of the commonwealth status, the mid-1950s. He had been very close to the governor and founder of the PDP, Luis Muñoz Marin. In fact, it can be said that virtually from its inception in 1952, Runkle had been the chief publicist not just for Muñoz, but for that nebulous rearrangement of the old territorial status dubbed "commonwealth" in English and estado libre asociado (freely associated state) in Spanish. Muñoz, who had been reared in the Washington area as the son of Puerto Rico Resident Commissioner (non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives) Luis Muñoz Rivera, was certainly no piker at selling himself, whether in Puerto Rico or the U.S. mainland, but the remarkably good press that both Muñoz and commonwealth received in the U.S. through the years is also heavily attributable to the work of Runkle as well.
When Muñoz Marin's anointed successor, Rafael Hernández Colón, made it back into the Puerto Rico governor's mansion in 1985, he did the sensible thing and put Runkle's company back under contract, though Runkle by this time was past the usual retirement age. It was in that last capacity that I got to see the man's remarkably successful work. In fact, from time to time I helped him compile some of his press releases when they dealt with economic matters. The editorials, on the other hand, were almost always pure paeans to the wonderful commonwealth status and I usually didn't see them until they came back in the form of newspaper clippings.
In 1991 Runkle, by then 77 years old, suffered a ruptured aorta, something that is almost always fatal, especially for a person his age. Fortunately, he was meeting with Governor Hernández Colón at the time and he was able to get the best emergency medical treatment available in Puerto Rico at the University Medical Center. Within a couple of months, with the help of a new nylon aorta, he was back on the job promoting commonwealth, that is, Hernández Colón's "improved" version of it in which Puerto Rico was to get both more autonomy and more federal money. Not even Runkle could make that sound palatable to U.S. lawmakers. Defeated in his effort and suffering greatly in the polls, Hernández Colón retired and the PDP was swept out of power in 1992. Runkle had worked his last for Puerto Rico, but I managed to get a four-year reprieve.
The next I heard from him was a couple of years later when a card arrived for me in the Puerto Rico office from France, where he had been vacationing. He recounted to me a very enjoyable but exhausting day of sightseeing. That same day I received word that he had died in France from heart failure.
I thought of Runkle the other day as I was reviewing a pro-statehood web site called the Puerto Rico Herald. They have been in tall clover lately what with the reelection of statehooder Pedro Rosselló as governor in 1996 along with Resident Commissioner Carlos Romero Barceló and the narrow passage in March by the U. S. House of Representatives of a Puerto Rico status plebiscite bill that is so tilted toward statehood that it is hard to escape the conclusion that Romero himself had a hand in writing it. Remarkably, on that web site is a list of 32 U.S. newspapers with the complete texts of their editorials and columns generally favoring the pro-statehood legislation. If the legislation was not actually written by a Puerto Rican statehood partisan, many of these editorials read as though they were. Included among them were two powerful newspapers that Runkle always had virtually in his hip pocket, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
What, I wondered, has happened? Can one anonymous public relations man make such a big difference? Is there now so suddenly a new generation of newspaper people who have forgotten the persuasive arguments of Runkle that they used to pass on as their own? Did the Popular Democratic Party, as well as Runkle himself, make the critical mistake of not grooming anyone to step into his shoes and keep his old contacts in play? I began to reflect on his methods and the reason for his success, and why it apparently has not been replicated.
"You have to understand what pressure they're under to fill that editorial space every day," he once told me. "I'm just here to give them a hand. Most of them know next to nothing about Puerto Rico. All I have to do is write something that sounds plausible and sometimes is tilted a little toward their particular interests or ideology and they'll print it every time, that is, as long as I don't push too much on them and wear out my welcome."
He made it sound really easy. I wondered how widespread was the practice in the public relations business, and I also could not help being struck by the cynicism of it all After all, he wasn't just influencing editorialists to see things his way, he was feeding them canned editorials. Apparently it wasn't so widespread that the statehooders had as yet caught on to it, because he pretty much seemed to have his way with America's newspapers when it came to Puerto Rico and its political status.
I had a particularly eye-opening experience one day after reading a piece by the noted New York Times columnist, Tom Wicker. Governor Hernández Colón had made a swing through the states, and one of the people who had interviewed him, ostensibly, had been Wicker. The subject of the interview was primarily the grandiose plans that Puerto Rico had for helping its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, with its severe electric power problems. Plans were in the works, said the governor through Wicker, for Puerto Rico to build an undersea cable between the two islands so that Puerto Rico might share its power surplus with its neighbor. Financing for the project would come from something called "936 funds," after the section of the Internal Revenue Code that permitted U.S. companies to accumulate tax-free profits in Puerto Rico.
Here, then, was the real purpose of the article. The tax provision was eternally under siege, and Hernández Colón had decided to defend it by showing how it was furthering U.S. policy interests in the Caribbean. There was a general problem with this approach in that the tax-free profits belonged to the companies and there was little the government of Puerto Rico could do to channel them into the Caribbean. The specific problem with the scheme in question was that Puerto Rico has severe electric power problems of its own, and any cheap financing that might be available should be directed toward that problem, not toward some highly dubious scheme, both technically and economically, to share power across the treacherous depths of the Mona Passage.
But appearances are everything in the PR business. Reality counts for nothing. What would any New York Times reader outside Puerto Rico know about any of these matters? I happened to see Runkle the day the Wicker column came out and asked him with a smile, "Didn't I see your fine hand at work in Tom Wicker's column today?"
Wearing the expression of the cat that had swallowed the canary he responded proudly, "Modesty forbids me to comment on that," and he left it at that.
In his sly way Runkle seemed to have given me more than I had asked for. My question was intentionally ambiguous, and so was his answer, but his manner conveyed something that would be well-nigh unthinkable to the average newspaper reader. But then they would also be shocked to learn that many of the unsigned editorials they read are not actually written by the newspaper editors themselves. Could not the same thing be true from time to time with respect to the signed work of a prominent columnist?
Concerning The New York Times, surely it could not be the case that such a major opinion leader, able to get the best writers and researchers that money can buy, would be so desperate to fill its editorial pages that it, too, would be susceptible to Runkle's offerings. Yet I know a former Puerto Rico government employee who got a look at one of the Runkle editorials that he hand delivered to The Times office, and, lo and behold, it was published exactly as Runkle had written it. I did not confront Runkle with this intelligence, though I learned of it while he was still in the nearby office, but he did volunteer to me once one source of his great influence with America's "newspaper of record." It was nothing more than the "old boy" network in action, he would have me believe. You see, the man in charge of the editorial page of The New York Times had been a colleague of Runkle's in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the national intelligence forerunner of the CIA, during World War II.
Scott Runkle: Spy, Propagandist
Here is Scott Runkle's background as I was able to piece it together. He had graduated from one of the Ivy League colleges, Dartmouth, I believe, in the mid-1930's, with a liberal arts major of some kind, and he was particularly good in French. He had gone to work immediately for the O.S.S, specializing in things related to France, which was no doubt of great importance during the war. A couple of things he told me suggested that he was not just a minor bit player. In my readings on intelligence matters I ran across a passage in which the observation was made that those O.S.S agents who had been infiltrated into France after D Day went by a special nickname, "Jedburghs," and later constituted something of an elite club within the CIA. I showed Scott the passage and asked him if he had been one of those. "No," he responded. That had originally been the plan, but the decision had been reached that it would not be prudent because he knew the codes.
Taking him at his word, I found this tidbit quite tantalizing. Those who would later constitute an elite corps within the CIA were in 1944, on the eve of the invasion of the European mainland, lower in the O.S.S hierarchy and were thus more expendable than was Scott Runkle. One might think that he had made a bad career decision in leaving government service, so well situated was he in the waning days of the war. The government, too, would seem to have lost a valuable commodity at the end of the war when one of their experts on France, fluent in the language, ostensibly left their service to become Paris correspondent for Time magazine.
Time obviously valued his expertise, and here is an anecdote that reveals the expertise further. When Oliver Stone's movie, JFK, came out, Runkle was among those who, with offhand remarks, showed me that he had the conventional take on Stone's opus, that it was just some more wild conspiracy theorizing. I let it pass at the time. Later, I caught him off-guard with this: "Scott," said I, "You're an intelligent guy, and very well read, too. How could you possibly swallow that ridiculous stuff we have been fed by the Warren Commission?"
"Well you can't read everything," he said. "As far as the Kennedy assassination is concerned, I just go with what the 'good press' tells me," which I took as a very curious admission, indeed, from one actively engaged in manipulating that "good press."
At that point, in an apparent attempt to change the subject while not appearing to do so he said, "I knew John Kennedy quite well when he was a Senator. You know, he was a big critic of French colonial policy, particularly with respect to Algeria, and he used to pick my brains on the subject."
Not letting him off the hook, I responded, "What you are telling me reinforces the theory that Kennedy was killed for policy reasons. No one as interested in French colonial affairs as you are telling me Kennedy was could have possibly repeated their errors in Vietnam the way Lyndon Johnson did. He was planning to get out of Vietnam, and that's one of the main reasons he was killed."
At that, Runkle folded his tent and simply broke off the conversation, but he left me well impressed with his prominence as an expert on France and with Kennedy's foreign-policy acumen in seeking him out.
It was the best of times to be a young American bachelor, well-paid and fluent in French, in Paris in 1945. We were their liberators from the Nazis, and the French women were duly appreciative. This was what Scott really wanted to talk about. They were very fond recollections for a man now in his twilight years, and it was with no small amount of envy that I heard him out. Eventually it was not a mademoiselle but a senorita who had won his heart. He married the daughter of parents who, like so many, had fled the political violence in Spain only to get caught up in the larger European war. He also had a change of jobs which took him away from France and back home to the states. He became the U. S. correspondent for Paris Match in Washington.
When he told me of it he knew the apparent change to a less-desirable job needed some explanation, so he volunteered that his wife was pregnant with their first child and the sanitary conditions in the post-war French hospitals were not among the best. He acknowledged that his wife, who was a virtual native, would have hardly known or expected better, but, in so many words, that was his story and he was sticking to it.
I never delved into the actual mechanics of how he got these plum journalistic jobs, virtually starting at the top of the profession, and he volunteered nothing about it. I did ask once if he had been a journalism major, or if he had had any courses in journalism, and he responded in the negative. That is really not too surprising because journalism majors and journalistic courses of study are actually of fairly recent vintage, the absence of such credential-granting gatekeepers having been one of the profession's strengths in the past, to my mind. Still, I would have loved to have known how he went about applying for and getting the Time and Paris Match jobs. Somehow, I had the feeling that they had been assigned to him.
I heard of no other full-time work for an employer after Paris Match and before he landed the public relations contract with Governor Muñoz Marin of Puerto Rico sometime in the mid-1950's, though I know he did do some major public relations contract work for Japanese automobile exporters. He once showed me a very slick and professional short, anonymously-authored book on Japan he had done for them. All in all, it looks like a very peculiar career progression, a steady retreat from prominence after his first civilian job.
Runkle was not at all what you would imagine as the head of a public relations company. He was not exactly the typical hard-charging, extroverted glad-hander. He struck most people as reticent, almost secretive in his manner, a small, quiet person whom you would have to see several times before you remembered what he looked like. As with so many people in Washington, public policy was not just a job for him, it was his passion as well. He had a large bookshelf well-stocked with such things as biographies and memoirs of public figures and books of history, particularly military history. In particular, he had a good collection of books on the Korean War, and I had done thirteen months in Korea with the U.S. Army, so we lent Korean War books to one another and discussed them. He really struck me as more like the professors who had been my colleagues before I went to work for Puerto Rico than the public relations man that he was.
The day I learned of Runkle's death is worth remarking upon not only for the fact that I received a post card from him that very same day. Reflecting upon his career, a long-time acquaintance said to me, out of the blue, "You know, he was an intelligence officer." It was the first time I recall that the topic of Scott Runkle had ever come up between us. "Well, I know he was in O.S.S in World War II, but do you mean he continued to work in intelligence even while he was working for Puerto Rico?" I asked.
"Yes," he responded.
"How do you know?" was my natural next question. At that he demurred and said he'd rather not continue the conversation.
The next day I encountered the acquaintance again and repeated my question of the day before.
"Well, they're all dead now, so I suppose it's okay if I tell you. I heard Governor Muñoz talking about Runkle's exploits to his, the governor's wife. He said that that quiet little fellow was a brave man and had done some very dangerous things as an intelligence officer. I also visited him in his office when it was just across the street from the Soviet embassy, and he had some pretty elaborate-looking radio equipment there."
There you have it. To be sure it is only a single source, and mainly hearsay at that, but it is completely independent of all that I had learned about Runkle's O.S.S background and of his amazing ability to get his writings published in newspapers around the country. Apart from the unlikely event that Runkle would have broken his code of silence, himself, or the Central Intelligence Agency would own up to manipulating public opinion through our national media, it's about as good a confirmation that Runkle was a career-long O.S.S-CIA agent as one is likely to get.
The Muñoz Metamorphosis
In point of fact, the real blockbuster here was not the confirmation of what by this time had become pretty obvious to me, Runkle's intelligence connection, but the fact that Puerto Rico's pivotal figure of the twentieth century, Governor Luis Muñoz Marin, was fully aware of the fact and nonetheless worked extremely closely with him. The implications of this revelation are absolutely enormous, possibly casting new light on much of modern Puerto Rican history, not to mention the light it casts upon the workings of the CIA and its involvement in domestic politics and the media.
Though he would not become Puerto Rico's first elected governor until 1949, he had been the power of Puerto Rico politics since 1940 when the Popular Democratic Party, the party that he founded, won a narrow upset victory and gained control of Puerto Rico's legislature. Muñoz became president of the Senate. The strongly leftist nature of the party is illustrated by its slogan, Pan, Tierra, Libertad (bread, land, liberty) and its symbol, the pava, a red silhouette of a farmer in a traditional straw hat (pava). Muñoz made no bones of the fact that he favored independence for Puerto Rico and a large percentage of his followers supported him for just that reason. Others supported him for his strong, Roosevelt-like rhetoric against the island's powerful moneyed interests, particularly against the sugar barons, the big land-owners both native and from the U.S. mainland who often bought the votes of economically-desperate landless agricultural laborers. The secret of his initial electoral success is that he was able to shame so many into voting for their longer-term economic interests.
And, initially, he delivered. Working closely with the last and most activist appointed mainland governor, Roosevelt brains-truster, Rexford Guy Tugwell, the law which had been on the books for a long time limiting ownership or control of land to 500 acres was enforced, and many jibaros, or Puerto Rican mountain folk, became land owners for the first time. A government Land Authority took over control of much of the sugar land and many of the mills, a government Planning Board was established, and the government got into the manufacturing business. Using the windfall of rebated U.S. excise taxes on Puerto Rican rum, the sales of which had soared during the war when many U.S. distilleries had their production diverted to fuel and European sources had been cut off, the Puerto Rican government built factories to make boxes, bottles, cement, shoes, and textiles.
This headlong rush upon a socialist road was taking place against a strongly-contrasting U.S. backdrop. The famous "iron curtain" had descended over Eastern Europe, Greece had become a battleground between factions aligned ultimately either with the Soviet Union or the United States, as had Italy, though without the wholesale bloodshed. To counter the new perceived international threat the U.S. had reorganized its security establishment in 1947 with the National Security Act, the act which, among other things, created a separate Air Force from the Army, a cabinet level Department of Defense, and a Central Intelligence Agency to consolidate intelligence gathering and covert operations. It didn't take very long for the active involvement in the domestic politics of countries around the world known as covert operations, all in the name of fighting communism, to become the dominant activity of the CIA.
The ardent cold warriors of the CIA have shown themselves to be particularly hostile toward independent-minded social democrats such as Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. It is hard to imagine their tolerating under the American flag a practicing socialist and advocate of independence of the Muñoz stripe. Though the symbol and the slogan of the PDP remained, as did the Planning Board and the Land Authority, over the period 1945-1950, Muñoz' policies underwent a remarkable metamorphosis. He had pragmatically set aside the status issue to get his party in power, but the "Libertad" in the party's slogan was unmistakable. He stood for independence. But at the end of the decade he used his enormous personal prestige to put the old wine of Puerto Rico's colonial, territorial status into a new bottle called "Commonwealth," and the people bought it.
The standard explanation for Muñoz's abandonment of independence is that in his campaigning around the island he had come to the realization that the common people, as opposed to the urban intellectuals, feared the economic consequences of independence greatly, so it was a political loser. That their fears were not without foundation is said to have been brought home to Muñoz by a study prepared by economist Ben Dorfman of the United States Tariff Commission in 1946. "It was not that independence was impossible for the United States, but it is for us.' The realization that independence must be sacrificed was traumatic; after a long conversation with Dorfman, Muñoz sat down and cried." -- Raymond Carr, Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), p. 117.
On the economic policy front Muñoz' transformation was just as dramatic. As we have noted, his rhetoric was pure economic populism. That's where the pan and the tierra come in in the party's slogan. The villains were the exploiters, particularly the big absentee owners of sugar lands. Once in office his policies were socialistic, and in that he was completely backed up by Governor Tugwell and by his boss, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and they were roundly attacked by conservatives in the U.S. Congress for those socialistic actions.
Then, after Tugwell's retirement and the appointment of the first Puerto Rican governor, Resident Commissioner and Muñoz party associate, Jesus T. Pineiro, in 1946 the emphasis suddenly changed. With legislation that was passed in 1947 and went into effect in 1948, Muñoz stopped vilifying the Yankee exploiters and began to invite them in with the most generous inducements on the planet, 10 years without paying a dime of corporate income taxes. No state could match it nor could any country. U.S. legislation in 1921 designed to make U.S. corporations operating in the then U.S. territory of the Philippines competitive with foreign corporations exempted the former from U.S. taxes. For consistency's sake, the law applied to all the territories. A U.S. company excused from a tax in a foreign country would no longer have the foreign tax credit and would have to make it up dollar for dollar with U.S. taxes. Similarly, such a company excused from state taxes would lose the state tax deduction and his federal taxes would be just that much higher. No one, in short, could offer what Puerto Rico could in terms of freedom from the tax man, and advertisements were begun to welcome manufacturers to "Profit Island USA."
The standard explanation for the change is that "the Populares (PPD) realized by 1947 that their original program of agrarian reform and government-sponsored enterprises could not provide a decent living for more than a small sector of the population; moreover, both the industries and the farms set up under government auspices were economic failures." (Carr, p. 203) The man credited with the tax exemption idea is Teodoro Moscoso, the first head of Puerto Rico's Economic Development Administration (EDA), who purportedly paraphrased Oliver Wendell Holmes saying, "If the power to tax is the power to destroy, then the power not to tax is the power to build."
I had long wondered about this bold, audacious tax exemption move. It was so completely out of character, both for Muñoz and the more prominent Americans involved with Puerto Rico. Both Tugwell and Ickes were strongly opposed to this "industrialization by invitation" idea. That it could spring from the minds of members of a Latin American left-populist party, who would more than likely regard it as "exploitation by invitation," always struck me as frankly amazing. That they would admit so quickly that their other initiatives were failures, even with the red ink, is no less amazing.
From 1979 to 1983 I was head of the Office of Economic Research of EDA in San Juan. At that time, I had the opportunity to have lunch with the late Hugh Barton, one of the earliest and best known holders of that same office. I put the question to him. "Did Moscoso really dream up the idea, or was someone from the states whispering in his ear?"
It was definitely all Moscoso's idea, he assured me. Now I wonder. You see, I have since learned--and it is no big secret--that Barton, like Runkle, was with O.S.S during World War II and we see now what that meant for Runkle's later activities. After Barton left E.D.A he continued to get consulting contracts from his Puerto Rico base with the U.S. Agency for International Development throughout Latin America. Surely, if it had been Barton himself or someone that he knew of doing the whispering, or perhaps even the arm-twisting, there is no chance that he would have told anyone outside the Agency.
When I shared a first draft of this paper with a couple of other old Puerto Rico hands I came up with more reasons to doubt Barton's assurances. Moscoso, one of them said, was primarily a salesman, and a very good one at that, but the tax-exemption scheme, he did not think, had been his idea. He named several associates of Barton who he thought were involved in the process. Chief among them was a graduate of Reed College in Oregon and former Rhodes Scholar by the name of Sam van Hyning. Van Hyning, he said, was also a former O.S.S man and had been very close to President Roosevelt's intelligence chief, William (Wild Bill) Donovan during World War II. He had been responsible for devising a system for estimating German battle casualties. Assisting van Hyning was an economist named Mo Moses, who was also an O.S.S alumnus. The only one of the team of advisers to Moscoso whose background my informant was unsure of was the senior partner in Runkle's public relations operation, Mort Sontheimer. Sontheimer was the man who dealt with the media at the publisher level while Runkle worked at the editor, columnist, reporter level. Should no prior connection to O.S.S ever be established for Sontheimer, his influence and his associations strongly suggest, nevertheless, that he was working for the Central Intelligence Agency in Puerto Rico.
The second source placed the responsibility back into the lap of Barton, speaking on better authority than the first could claim for himself, that at least Barton's physical presence in Puerto Rico had preceded that of the others by several years. His well-connected sources told him that Barton was advising Moscoso before the tax exemption scheme was put forward and that the others relocated to the island in the 1950's.
Speaking of behaving out of character, could we really have expected the inveterate meddlers of the CIA to keep their hands out of Puerto Rico's politics? We have already mentioned the super-heated international Cold War climate and Muñoz's intolerable socialism. There was also the fact that Muñoz had a considerable threat from his own left. The Independence Party finished second to the Popular Party as late as the 1952 elections. There were strong pro-independence elements within Muñoz's own party. The violent Nationalist followers of Pedro Albizu Campos, who would later shoot up the U.S. House of Representatives and attempt to assassinate President Harry Truman, were also a factor in an island that had demonstrated its strategic importance during World War II. Moreover, economic development after the war was turning into an important ideological battleground throughout the world. America could not afford to permit its large Latin American possession to flounder economically.
Today (December 1965) the two most notoriously repressive federal agencies operate on the island: the C.I.A. (the North American Intelligence Service, the official agency of international espionage and terrorism, with an astronomical budget and complete freedom of action, which uses sabotage, bribery, blackmail, assassination, and the like in every country of the modern world) and the F.B.I (the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which does not operate with the brutally terroristic methods of the C.I.A.). We have, as well, the Intelligence Service of the United States Army, the Federal Immigration Service, the Federal Postal and Customs Services, and the Federal Communications Commission. -- René Marqués, The Docile Puerto Rican (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), p.71.
If they operate on the island, what might they do? Did the tax exemption idea have the stamp of approval of Barton's likely bosses at the CIA? The chances I would say are very great. The main argument I can think of against it is that, if it is too sensible and enlightened for Puerto Rico's P.D.P, the same thing might be said for the CIA. It is, to put it bluntly, not thuggish enough. But the boys over at Langley are fond of saying that their necessary secrecy prevents them from getting all the credit that is their due. We hear about the things that blow up in their faces like the Bay of Pigs invasion, or those covert actions that don't work out too well over the long haul like the overthrow of governments in Iran and Guatemala, but we don't hear of their big successes, and Puerto Rico's Operation Bootstrap, based upon the tax exemption, was undoubtedly a resounding economic and political success. Puerto Rico was transformed from an agricultural to an industrial island, the standard of living rose dramatically, and overt support for independence fell just as dramatically. The island was touted as a showcase for democracy and the free enterprise system, and the State Department brought officials from developing countries all over the world to see how well things were going. When President John F. Kennedy announced his Alliance for Progress for Latin America, Puerto Rico's Moscoso was appointed U.S. Coordinator.
Marques left one very important activity of the CIA off his list. That is propaganda. Knowing what we now know about Scott Runkle, we can say with virtual certainty that the CIA helped sell Operation Bootstrap, and with it Muñoz and the commonwealth arrangement to the Puerto Rican and the mainland American public. How many of the public relations people and journalists on the island and the mainland are really CIA we can only guess at, but where there is known to be one there are bound to be others. Runkle did not carry around his own green light for his editorials to be printed.
Propaganda is the bread and butter of covert action. In "normal" times it is done both for its own sake and to sustain the infrastructure for expansion should need arise. Of the thirty-odd covert actions undertaken by the CIA in Chile between 1961 and 1974, propaganda was the principal elements of a half dozen. It was an important subsidiary part of many others, when Washington did not see times as normal. “In attempting to influence the 1970 Chilean elections, the CIA managed to generate at least one editorial a day at El Mercurio, the major Santiago daily, based on American guidance."
In addition to buying propaganda retail--that is, supporting individual assets and stories--the CIA sometimes buys it wholesale. It subsidizes--or establishes--friendly media outlets that might not exist without American support. This is propaganda writ large, propaganda merging with political action. From 1953 through 1970 in Chile, for example, the CIA subsidized wire services, magazines written for intellectual circles, and a right-wing weekly newspaper (support for which had to be terminated when it was judged to have become so ideological as to turn off responsible Chilean conservatives. -- Gregory F. Treverton, Covert Action, The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World (New York: Basic Books, 1987), pp. 14, 18. Treverton, it should be noted, can hardly be dismissed as some far out leftist. At the time of the authorship of the book he was a senior fellow at the ultra-establishment Council on Foreign Relations where he served as the head of the European-American project.
So Don Luis Muñoz Marin made his great change of direction, and it proved to be, as they are fond of saying these days, a "win-win" proposition all around. Puerto Rico had its burst of economic development for which he got all the credit, with some help from the CIA's propaganda machine, and the independence movement on the island, which both Muñoz and the U.S. government thought of as the biggest political threat, was neutralized. Imagine how dicey things would have been for the U. S. if Puerto Rico had continued to be the Poorhouse of the Caribbean while things were going so badly for it in that other last Spanish colony in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba.
Predetermined Statehood ?
In 1989 I had an article published in the Journal of Hispanic Policy entitled "Industrial Policy by Accident: The United States in Puerto Rico." Now I am beginning to wonder if my friend Runkle might not have chuckled to himself as he read the paper, "He's doing our job for us, and we didn't even have to pay him. Just let them keep thinking it was an accident."
I do not intend to make the same mistake twice. A well-informed person following the heavily statehood-tilted legislation that narrowly passed the House in March in virtual national secrecy might conclude that the United States government is once again stumbling along on Puerto Rico without realizing what it is doing. Since the mid-1970's Puerto Rico has been virtually bribed to remain cemented to the United States with a rain of federal assistance, most notably more than one billion dollars a year in free money mislabeled "Nutrition Assistance." The bill, which we shall call the Young Bill after its principal sponsor, Rep. Don Young of Alaska, contains several pointed reminders that as long as Puerto Rico remains in its existing status limbo, that money is subject to the whims of Congress and could easily be snatched away. The bill also goes out of its way to calm Puerto Rican fears about losing their language and culture under statehood, making it appear, in fact, that the Spanish language might be in greater jeopardy under the existing arrangement than under statehood.
Without such advantages statehood lost to commonwealth 48.6% to 46.3% in 1993. Another major fear at that time was that the job-stimulating tax provision, Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code, would be lost if Puerto Rico were to become a state, but the Congress took care of that. In 1995, with Republicans in control of both Houses of Congress, it eliminated the provision.
"Beg, bribe, threaten, promise. What more do we have to do to get that 46.3% up to 50% plus one?" the Congress seems to be asking the people of Puerto Rico. Well what about this? "You do your part and produce that simple majority, and we shall obligate ourselves to put the historic measure on a Congressional fast track, making passage of a Puerto Rico statehood enabling act considerably easier than the passage of an ordinary bill. Oh, and by the way, if you don't choose statehood in a plebiscite that would be held before the end of this year, you must hold another one ten years hence and every ten years thereafter until you do choose statehood. Do we make ourselves clear?"
This is the legislation that has received the overwhelming editorial support of America's newspapers, though they have not seen fit to do much reporting on the bill's particulars. It has completely gone without mention in the weekly news magazines and virtually without mention on the TV networks. Many Americans have been told what to believe about the Young Bill, but they have been given very little information with which to form an opinion of their own. From the quality of the editorials one might say the same thing for the newspapers themselves, but they have offered their opinions nevertheless. Please excuse my skepticism about their independence, but the indications are very strong that those who once gave the green light for Scott Runkle's editorials have now changed their signals. The decision has been made, it would appear, that commonwealth as the principal bulwark against independence for Puerto Rico, in the view of whoever is calling the signals, has outlived its usefulness. American public opinion counts for no more than what most Puerto Ricans feel in their heart, and the fix for statehood is in.
Knowing now that the strong pro-commonwealth editorials written by Scott Runkle that appeared in newspapers all over the country in all likelihood had the blessings of his powerful "other" employer, what should one make of "A 51st State," the editorial that appeared in the March 15, 1998 issue of The Washington Post, since Watergate, very likely America's most politically influential newspaper? In the very first paragraph they seem to have gotten ahead of themselves and to have given us a preview of the type of pressure they will try to exert if everything goes according to plan and the Congress and then the Puerto Ricans knuckle under and produce the desired bare majority for statehood: "To end a century of territorial--some would say colonial--(The Post would never have breathed this word before ed.) rule by inviting Puerto Rico's bid for self-determination and then repudiating its choice of statehood would be the ultimate disaster."
The third paragraph could have been lifted out of the speech of any Puerto Rican statehood advocate at any time this century, but it never before graced the editorial pages of this very influential newspaper:
Commonwealth embodies the second-class citizenship (no federal tax but no federal vote) that generates perpetual discontent. Independence appears too bold for many. Statehood would extend to Puerto Ricans full citizenship rights and responsibilities. Termination of their second-classness is what the status bill is first about.
Could they make it any plainer? "As soon as we power-brokers get this bill passed you Puerto Ricans are expected to go for the not-too-bold alternative that will end your second-classness' once and for all," they might as well have said.
By what foolishness have the Puerto Ricans insisted on voting against statehood every time they have been given a choice, the reader must wonder. Oh yes, there is that matter of their cultural and linguistic distinctiveness, their resistance, to put it bluntly, to being ultimately swallowed up by their conqueror.
Don't worry. Those Neanderthal conservative Republicans with the idea that being an American had anything to do with speaking English were put it their place:
House supporters of a national "English only" movement sought to apply their rigid rule to the largely Spanish-speaking, culturally distinctive island that the United States casually picked up from Spain in 1898. Bill sponsors countered reasonably with an amendment to apply official mainland language requirements and to increase English proficiency in the schools. These are worth doing regardless of status.
They would be worth doing in Mexico as well, and so watered down were the English requirements in the Young Bill they would probably be acceptable there. Only the continuation of the current requirement that proceedings in federal court be in English would give them problems. This happy acceptance of dominant Spanish comes at a time that Hispanics in California are rebelling against so-called bilingual education which they feel confines them to the Spanish ghetto, that is, continues to make them second-class citizens. The Post is also intentionally misleading here. The amendment that was offered would have made English the official language of the entire country, not just in Puerto Rico. Were such a provision to be put to a national vote it would certainly pass as handily as Puerto Rico statehood would fail, but those of us who have lived in the Washington area for some time suffering under its arrogance know that The Post knows best. The American people know nothing.
Apart from misgivings about bringing into the Union a state where most of the people are monolingual in Spanish and don't really identify with the larger country in their hearts, Americans are also concerned about Puerto Rico's poverty and welfare dependency. The fact that Puerto Rico has a per capita income less than half that of the poorest state, Mississippi, should concern them, as well as the fact that over the last decade Puerto Rico has fallen farther behind even as federal expenditures on the island have soared to over $10 billion a year. Here is how The Post finesses that issue:
Puerto Rico's poverty, worse than the 50 states' worst, also requires attack regardless of status. Statehood would mean major extra federal welfare payments. But it would also mean additional revenues perhaps greater than these costs. The numbers need work.
Surely they must know that there is virtually no truth in that statement. The General Accounting Office has calculated that because of the numbers of people who would qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit and the very narrow tax base, less than $100 million in new income tax per year would be picked up. Supplemental Security Income for Aged, Disabled, and Blind, from which Puerto Rico is currently completely excluded, would cost over a billion dollars a year by itself. Returning Puerto Rico to the full food stamp program from which it was removed in favor of a Nutrition Assistance block grant in 1983 would cost perhaps a half billion more. The removal of the very low current caps on Medicaid and Aid to Families and Dependent Children as well as changing the special formula, particularly in education, by which the island is currently funded would add hundreds of millions more to the cost. It would take very creative work on the numbers indeed to come to the conclusion that the additional revenues from making Puerto Rico a state could exceed the costs.
One keeps reading this editorial and dozens of others around the country hoping to see some realization of the biggest problem of all with Puerto Rico statehood, the thing that more than anything has kept the island so far from statehood all these years. The opposition to it among Puerto Ricans is wide and it is especially deep. The Post merely glosses over the matter by observing in its second paragraph that
In a straw poll on the island in 1993, a variant of commonwealth took 48 percent, statehood 46 and independence 4. But the variant now offered is less generous to Puerto Rico. Moreover, statehood is being made more attractive by the status bill pledge for Washington actually to act on Puerto Rico's choice.
The San Francisco Chronicle, in a March 27 editorial, by contrast and much to its credit, gets right to the point in the first paragraph, "But the arguments to date have not answered a fundamental question: do an overwhelming majority of Puerto Ricans want statehood?" It might have noted, but did not, that when Alaska became a state 84% of its people were for it and in Hawaii 93% were in favor.
Toward the end of their editorial they raise all the proper questions concerning that issue. "The latest polls show the population remains divided. The statehood process should be about welcoming in enthusiastic newcomers, not a divided family. Even if Puerto Rico chose statehood by a bare majority, would this number be enough to signal Puerto Rico's firm purpose? Statehood is irrevocable, but what if a political reversal produced a secessionist boomlet?"
As one reaches the powerful Post's last paragraph, for an instant one thinks that the realization of this problem may have sunk in, but no, it's just a case of murky writing concealing more of The Post's attempt to stampede a reluctant country toward statehood:
Mainlanders would reasonably expect any Puerto Rican bid for statehood to be approved by a healthy majority. Mainland Democrats, with an eye partly on those new congressional seats, would welcome such a bid. For 58 years the GOP has formally affirmed Puerto Rico's right to apply for statehood. But 80 percent of House Republicans, though not the speaker, voted against the new proposal, and Senate Republicans are wobbling. Both parties and both branches need to think hard about just what mainland Americans owe their fellow citizens in Puerto Rico.
Translated, what this means is the greater welfare of the country be damned, the Democrats should be expected to put their party over their country. All six of Puerto Rico's Representatives, who, by the way, would not be new in the sense that they would be added on to the current total (The law limits the total to 435.), could be expected to be Democrats as could their two Senators. The Republicans, for their part, should forget both country and party and adhere to the commitments made by presidential candidates who have regularly paid lip service to Puerto Rican statehood, quite inconsistent with the desires of their constituents, simply because the meager little Republican Party of Puerto Rico is dominated by statehood advocates.
Now it's time to take some serious stock. Just as with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the strengthened General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the bailout of Mexico, the leaders of both the Democrats and the Republicans favor the legislation, which they are sugar-coating by calling it a bill for Puerto Rico's long-overdue self-determination. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott has calmed the American public for the time being by saying that he will not bring the bill up in the Senate this year, but rumors are swirling that the maneuver is a ruse to prevent the natural groundswell of opposition in the U.S. to form that would be inevitable should the voters come to realize what is at stake. Lott's professed reason for holding the legislation up does not ring true. He said that its passage by one vote in the House showed how controversial it is and the Senate lacks the time to address such a contentious issue. But the bill would hardly be contentious at all in the Senate, where the overwhelmingly positive vote on the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) shows us how powerful are the globalist expansionists and how weak are the Main Street conservative populists of the Patrick Buchanan stripe.
The editorials in The Post and The New York Times and numerous others around the country tell us that somebody wants very badly for this legislation to pass. Reflection upon the Scott Runkle career gives a very strong indication as to who that very powerful "somebody" might be. Absolutely nothing in the background of Senator Trent Lott suggests that he would be the man to stand in their way.
One hardly has to read The Post editorial between the lines to conclude that passage of the Young Bill is expected to be tantamount to making Puerto Rico the 51st state, and it will have been pulled off virtually out of sight of the American people. Perhaps someday, looking back upon the apparently thoughtless way in which the United States changed its national character forever, some historian will write a monograph entitled "Imperial Policy by Accident." It won't be me.
David Martin
July 21, 1998
Now a couple of recent links on this latest attempt to bring the island into the Union.
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