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The Police
State Road Map
Chapter 7
First published January
2004
Last updated March 2005
THE ECONOMY
7.1 THE FUNCTION OF POVERTY
7.2 MONETARY AND FISCAL
POLICY
DEPRESSIONS:
7.3 FREE TRADE
AGREEMENTS
JOB
LOSSES
7.4 OPEN
BORDERS
7.5 THE
ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
7.6 WAR AS A
MEANS
7.7
CRIMINALIZING SOCIETY
7.8 DISEASE
Chapter 7 End Notes
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7.1 THE FUNCTION OF POVERTY
The standard of living
of the average American has to decline...
- Paul Volcker, Chairman
of The Federal Reserve, New York Times, 18 October 1979,
p.1, Volcker Asserts U.S Must Trim Living Standard.
'Money is power'.
Well, to be precise, it's the gap between the rich and poor that
counts. The objective of the elite is to maintain the capitalist
structure as it is with one vital difference. There will be no
middle class in the New World Order. Under public-private
partnership, the middle class, free markets, and consumer choice
will be replaced with a neo-feudal society in which the Money
Trust dictates to an impoverished populace through a
supranational technocracy. This is international socialism, run
for the benefit of the financial elite who own the economy and
control the emerging continental Politburos. The polite name for
it is 'The Third Way', but less deferential commentators call it
'corporate fascism'. The corporations need government to
restrict consumer choice in the market place, allowing the
cartel to determine what we can buy, sell, or even do in our own
homes. The 'Third Way' is the path to utopia for our
self-appointed philosopher kings, advocated by the likes of Bill
Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schroder - their senior
political puppets. There is no difference between ostensibly
right and left wing political parties about the eventual
destination, even if they appear to be travelling at different
speeds towards it.
Real power, then, is
achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials
of life, granting and withholding them as if they were
privileges, as George Orwell reflected:
From the moment when
the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all
thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore
to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the
machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork,
dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few
generations But it was also clear that an all-around increase in
wealth threatened the destruction... of a hierarchical society.
In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to
eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and
possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and
perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have
disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no
distinction. Such a society could not long remain stable. For if
leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass
of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would
become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and
when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize
that the privileged minority had no function, and they would
sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only
possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance... It is deliberate
policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink
of hardship because a general state of scarcity increases the
importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the
distinction between one group and another... The social
atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a
lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and
poverty.
The difference between
riches and poverty is often the difference between pleasure and
pain. Orwell concluded this idea in the torture episode at the
end of 1984.
How does one man
assert his power over another, Winston?' By making him suffer.
Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be
sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in
inflicting pain and humiliation... Progress in our world will be
progress towards more pain.(1)
In The Creature
from Jekyll Island, G. Edward Griffin discusses the
relationship between 1984 and The Report From Iron
Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace by
Leonard Lewin. It has never been established whether or not this
report published in 1966 was written by a U.S. government think
tank or if it was an elaborate political satire. On 26
November,1967, the report was reviewed in the book section of
the Washington Post by Herschel McLandress, which was the
pen name for Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith.
Galbraith, who also had been a member of the Council on Foreign
Relations, said that he knew firsthand of the report's
authenticity because he had been invited to participate in it.
Although he was unable to be part of the official group, he was
consulted from time to time and had been asked to keep the
project a secret. Furthermore, while he doubted the wisdom of
letting the public know about the report, he agreed totally with
its conclusions. For the purposes of Griffin's comparison, it
makes no difference whether it is a satire. The report credits
Orwell for many of its ideas and it is a blueprint for what has
occurred since. Importantly, it agreed with Orwell's view that
poverty is a prerequisite for a hierarchical society:
The continuance of the
war system must be assured, if for no other reason, among
others, than to preserve whatever quality and degree of poverty
a society requires as an incentive, as well as to maintain the
stability of its internal organization of power.
The economic
destruction of the world's middle class is well advanced.
Personal debt, bankruptcies, and unemployment are soaring while
investments are destroyed in the stock-market and incomes
decline. Like Manchurian Candidates, the Western middle class
have played their essential part in creating the
techno-bureaucracy of the new feudalism which will enslave them.
This chapter describes seven significant methods being used to
reduce living standards around the world. These are: 1. money
supply and taxation; 2. free trade; 3.free movement of labour;
4. environmentalism; 5. wars; 6. the criminal justice system;
and 7. disease.
Stock cultivates land;
stock employs labour. A tax which tended to drive away stock
from any particular country, would so far tend to dry up every
source of revenue, both to the sovereign and to the society.
- Adam Smith, The
Wealth of Nations
THE BURDEN OF TAXATION
In 1900 the combined
national and local tax burden in the U.S. was a mere 5.7% of
income. By year 2000 it reached an all time high of 33%.
(2)
The U.K.'s tax
burden has grown from 8.5 % of GDP in 1900 to 31% in 1963 and to
a peak of 39% in 1982. It is now around 38%.(3)(4)
The E.U.'s
tax burden now averages 40.5%.(5)
The burden of taxation
on middle income bracket families has grown in line with the
overall increase. In 1958 the median two-earner American family
($68,605) paid 17.9% of its income in taxes. In 1998 that
percentage was 37.6 % in 1998. In year 2000, taxes claimed a
greater share of the median two-income family's income (39.0
percent) than food (8.9 percent), clothing (3.9 percent),
housing (15.9 percent), and transportation (6.9 percent),
combined.(6)The
U.S now has the same household taxation levels as Britain
reached at the end of the 1970s and where they remain today:
between 35 and 40% of household income.(7)
HIGH LABOUR TAXES
One of the most
confounding economic trends in the United States during the past
20 years has been the relative stagnation of workers' real
wages. One of the primary reasons for flat wages is that taxes
and other government mandates on employers have been expanding
steadily, crowding out worker take-home pay. Combined Federal
Income taxes and payroll taxes increase the average cost of
employing a manufacturing worker by 28%.(8)
In Europe the
situation is even worse, but due to the rigidity of the labour
market it has caused high unemployment rather than driving wages
down. In 1970, the tax-to-GDP ratio of the E.U. was similar to
America but then it grew by 8 percentage points largely due to
an expansion of the welfare state. The tax hike was largely
imposed upon labour. The average effective tax rate on labour is
about 10 percentage points higher in Europe than in the U.S.
with the exception of the U.K, Ireland and Portugal whose rates
are similar. The average effective tax rate imposed on labour in
1997 reached 38% compared to 24% in the U.S. This largely
accounts for the high unemployment rate.(9)
THE HIDDEN TAX: INFLATION
Inflation is another
form of taxation. It is an indirect tax therefore it falls as
heavily on the poor as it does on the rich. In the early stages
of inflation, the business class actually benefits from the easy
credit. The government causes inflation by going into debt
therefore is one of the major collectors of this tax. As
described at the beginning of this book, the central bank prints
money for the government to borrow. As John Maynard Keynes
explained:
Lenin is said to have
declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was
to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation,
governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an
important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method
they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and,
while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches
some... The process engages all the hidden forces of economic
law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which
not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
- John Maynard Keynes,
The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919, Ch. 6
Alan Greenspan elaborates:
Stripped of its
academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a
mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the
productive members of a society to support a wide variety of
welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is
effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to
recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the
amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to
programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow
money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare
expenditures on a large scale... The abandonment of the gold
standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the
banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of
credit.... As the supply of money (of claims) increases
relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices
must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive
members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the
economy's books are finally balanced, one finds that loss in
value represents the goods purchased by the government for
welfare or other purposes with the money proceeds of the
government bonds financed by bank credit expansion.
- Alan Greenspan, Gold and
Economic Freedom, The Objectivist, July 1966
(10)
This new money can be
expanded up to ten times when it passes through commercial banks
therefore their private borrowers are also tax collectors as
Congressman Ron Paul suggests:
An astute stock
investor or home builder can make millions in the boom phase of
the business cycle, while the poor and those dependent on fixed
incomes can't keep up with the rising cost of living.(11)
The inflationary
effect of lending is exacerbated when borrowers get into trouble
and the debts are "rolled over", "re-scheduled" and eventually
"bailed out". A non-performing loan causes inflation because the
freshly printed money injected into the economy via the
borrowing corporations and individuals has not been accompanied
by a sufficient increase in production to keep up repayments.
There have been some major corporate bailouts in the U.S.
amounting to billions of dollars: Penn Central railroad and
Lockheed in 1970, Commonwealth Bank of Detroit 1972, New York
City 1975, Chrysler 1978, First Pennsylvania Bank of
Philadelphia 1979 and Chicago's Continental Illinois in 1982.
All of these were saved from bankruptcy by Congress acting as
lender of last with the guarantee of freshly printed money from
the Fed. This is inflationary not just in the final stage where
money is sourced from the Fed but in the first, second and all
the other intermediary stages on the way to default.
(12)
The main event in the
bail-out Super Bowl has not been played at home. It's the game
between Third World governments and the IMF/World Bank. All of
these non-performing loans to foreign governments cause domestic
inflation when the new money eventually returns to our shores in
exchange for our products and services. Loans to most Third
World governments started to fail by 1982. By 1983 third world
governments owed $300 billion to banks and $400 billion to
western governments.(13)
In preparation for the
bail-out phase of the international lending Super Bowl, the U.S.
central bank was brought onto the field in 1980, when Congress
passed the Monetary Control Act authorizing the Fed to print
money for foreign governments.(14)
Since then,
the size of bailout packages has become mind-boggling.
Mexico is just one
example of the IMF/World Bank Third World bailout system. In
1982 it owed $85 billion to the banks, an inflationary loss to
the American taxpayer which is being sustained to this day by
central banks who initially made new loans and eventually
underwrote almost the entire debt. In 1982 the IMF organized a
$4.5 billion loan from Western central banks, and in 1989, a
further $7.5 billion. This is the roll-over and reschedule play,
whose purpose is to enable interest payments to continue on the
original non-performing commercial loans and prevent them going
into default and bankrupting the commercial banks. However the
day of reckoning inevitably arrives: Mexico could no longer
afford even the interest payments. On 31 January 1995, President
Clinton, acting independently of Congress, authorized a $50
billion package of loan guarantees: $20 billion from the U.S
Exchange Stabilization Fund, $17.8 billion from the IMF, $10
billion from the Bank of International Settlements and $3
billion from commercial banks.(15)
Joseph Stiglitz
declared one of the functions of the central bank /IMF/WorldBank
to be a banker's welfare system. In relation to the $95 billion
bailout package during the 1997 Asian crisis:
The money served
another function: it enabled the countries to provide dollars to
the firms that had borrowed from western bankers to repay the
loans. It was thus, in part, a bailout to the international
banks as much as it was to the country.(16)
Whilst the commercial
banks profit from the interest rates, which are often vastly
inflated for debtor governments, the Western taxpayer pays off
the loans through inflation at home. This system is designed to
go on forever, draining the West of its wealth in order to build
socialist dictatorships abroad and enrich the banking elite. The
total foreign debt of low and middle income countries rose from
$1.4 trillion in 1990 to $2.3 trillion in 2001.(17)
To summarize
inflation: There are three bands of thieves who work as a
cartel. The central banks acting as lender of last resort have
enabled the commercial banks and the government to expand the
money supply at our cost by increasing government deficit
spending, sustaining non-performing loans and bailing out major
corporate failures. Since 1971 when Nixon destroyed the last
remnants of the Gold Standard, the U.S. national debt has
increased from $408 billion to $6.8 trillion, a 1600% increase.
In 1971, M3 money supply was $776 billion; today it stands at
$8.9 trillion, a 1100% increase. During that time the dollar has
lost almost 80% of its purchasing power.(18)
In addition
to all the other state and federal taxes, the hapless taxpayer
has paid another 5% per year in inflation.(19)
A 1999 UK
Parliamentary report shows that inflation in Britain accelerated
after WWII. The pre-war annual inflation rate was about 2.5% and
the post -war rate averaged 6%. Over the whole century, the
Pound lost 98.5% of its purchasing power.(20)
It is no
coincidence that during this period the gap
between rich and poor and the size of government has grown
significantly.
In Globalization
and its Discontents, Joseph Stiglitz describes how the
contractionary policies of the IMF exacerbated the 1997 east
Asia crisis. In any economic downturn, there is a standard
government response: stimulate demand by either cutting taxes,
increase expenditures, or loosen monetary policy. The IMF pushed
exactly the opposite course. By continuing to advocate
contractionary policies the IMF caused the contagion to spread
from one country to the next as exports decreased. The IMF
monetary remedy was to impose interest rate hikes of more than
25%, throwing fuel onto the fire.(21)
This had the effect
of driving even more capital out of the country as it pushed
companies towards bankruptcy. Furthermore it imposed
restructuring in the banking sector which closed down any banks
with significant non-performing loans. In Indonesia, sixteen
private banks were closed which caused a run on the remaining
private banks and a retreat of capital to the state run banks.
The effect on the Indonesian banking system and the economy was
disastrous.(22)
Riots followed when welfare, especially food and fuel subsidies
for the poor, were cut back. Businessmen and their families were
targeted. This exacerbated the retreat of capital out of the
country since riots do not restore business confidence.
According to Greg
palast's interviews with Stiglitz, "IMF riots" were virtually
written into the 111 conditionalities formulated at the end of
the 1980s. One of the IMF condionalities on Ecuador was to raise
the price of cooking gas by 80% at the same time as they were
cutting back pensions and laying off government workers. Poor
Andean Indians came down from the hills and set fire to cars in
the capital bringing troops onto the streets.(23)
In Argentina, when the banks put their interest rates up to
21-70%, the government had to change the law against
loan-sharking because the banks would have been in breach of it.
Stiglitz laments that
deepening a recession not only causes more pain today but also
more pain tomorrow. An economy which has a deep recession may
grow faster as it recovers, but it never makes up for lost time.
The deeper today's recession, the lower income is likely to be
twenty years from now.(24)
The IMF was not the
first to use fiscal tightening as a weapon of economic warfare.
In 1920-21, America went through an agricultural depression.
This was caused solely by the monetary policy of the Government
and Federal Reserve. The farmers had borrowed large amounts of
money to buy land at the instance of the government. They had
become very prosperous. However, with an eye on closing down the
smaller banks in the South West, the Wall St. controlled Fed
decided to drastically cut credit in May 1920. Unable to keep up
repayments, thousands of farmers were bankrupted and brought
down their local banks with them. G. Edward Griffin describes
this episode as "Country-Duck Dinner in New York."(25)
However, this was just the starter before the
main course. At the behest of the Wall St. Money Trust, the Open
Market Committee was formed in 1922, to coordinate the purchase
of Treasury bonds by the twelve regional Reserve banks. From
1923 onwards low interest rates caused new money to flood into
the economy causing a massive speculative boom on the stock
market. By 1929, half of retail transactions were on credit.(26)
On 9 August 1929, the Fed started selling Treasury bonds in the
open market and reversed its easy credit policy. It raised
interest rates on loans to commercial banks to 6% and the money
supply rapidly contracted; speculators who had borrowed money to
purchase shares could no longer keep up repayments to their
brokers. The pin had been inserted. On 29 October 1929, an
avalanche of selling on Wall Street wiped out millions of
investors. The bankers and their preferred clients had exited
the market long before only to re-enter at rock bottom and
devour stock like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Some of the
greatest fortunes in America were made in this fashion.
Today, consumers in
the U.K. and U.S. hold record levels of debt. These extreme debt
ratios make us very vulnerable to the manoeuvres used in the
past. Figures from the U.K. Office for National Statistics
showed that consumers now owed an average of £5,330 ( about
$8500) in unsecured debt, which excludes mortgages.(27)
CONCLUSION
Fiscal and monetary
policy has been used by the bankers to redistribute wealth to
themselves and the corporations they control as well as to
national governments. Whilst taxation policy is overt, a hidden
transfer of wealth is achieved by monetary policy- the public
endure inflation whilst the debtor governments grow in size and
the bankers grow rich collecting interest on the loans that
cause it. The fleecing of the Western taxpayer accelerated
during the post-War period, with the creation of the IMF/World
bank.
GATT/WTO
On 1 January 1995, The
World Trade Organization replaced The Global Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which had regulated global trade
tariffs since 1947.(28)
Three months before, Sir James Goldsmith, a British billionaire,
gave a speech to the U.S. senate in which he warned about the
effect global free trade would have on Western employment and
wage levels.(29)
Goldsmith argued that GATT and the theories on which it is based
were flawed. If implemented, it would impoverish and destabilize
the industrialized world while at the same time cruelly ravaging
the third world. The principle of global free trade is that
anything can be manufactured anywhere in the world to be sold
anywhere else. That means that these new entrants into the world
economy are in direct competition with the workforces of
developed countries. In most developed countries, the cost to an
average manufacturing company of paying its workforce is an
amount equal to between 25 percent and 30 per cent of sales. If
such a company decides to maintain in its home country only its
head office and sales force, while transferring its production
to a low-cost area, it will save about 20 percent of sales
volume. For every French employee, a company could have
recruited 47 Vietnamese. Many economists believe that the growth
in service industries will compensate for lost jobs in
manufacturing. However even service industries will be subjected
to substantial transfers of employment to low-cost areas.
On the other hand, the
real cost to consumers of cheaper goods will be that they will
lose their jobs, get paid less for their work and have to face
higher taxes to cover the social cost of increased unemployment.
According to figures published by the U.S. Department of Labor,
since 1973 real hourly and weekly earnings, in
inflation-adjusted dollars, have already dropped respectively by
13.4 per cent and 19.2 per cent, and that was before the 1995
GATT negotiations known as the Uruguay Round. If 4 billion
people enter the same world market for labour and offer their
work at a fraction of the price paid to people in the developed
world, it is obvious that such a massive increase in supply will
reduce the value of labour. Organized labour will lose
practically all its negotiating power.
Regional free trade
zones should only be established between countries with similar
levels of economic development. The 1957 Treaty of Rome between
France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg
created the European Economic Community, the largest free market
in the world. Within the EEC, there would be no tariffs, no
barriers, and a free and competitive market. Trade with nations
outside the EEC would be subject to a single tariff. This
concept was known as community preference. In other words,
priority would be given to European jobs and industry. About
twenty years ago, quietly, the technocrats who run Europe
started to alter this fundamental principle and move
progressively towards international free trade. Ever since,
unemployment in Europe has swollen despite growth in GNP. The
1992 Treaty of Maastricht enshrines this change and makes global
free trade one of the fundamental principles on which the new
Europe is to be built.
Regarding the economic
success of Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan, special economic
concessions granted by the West combined with their cheap and
skilled labour made them successful. Over the past thirty years
the balance of trade between these countries and the West has
resulted in a transfer of tens of billions of dollars to them.
However, a balance of trade in monetary terms can disguise huge
job losses because, as Mr Goldsmith noted, he could employ 47
Vietnamese for the price of one Frenchman.
The U.S. has lost
millions of manufacturing jobs due to a growing trade deficit
over the past three decades. This trend accelerated when The
North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed by the
U.S., Canada and Mexico, designed to remove tariff barriers over
a fifteen year period. NAFTA eliminated 766,030 actual and
potential U.S. jobs between 1994 and 2000 because of the rapid
growth in the net U.S. export deficit with Mexico and Canada.
The majority of the job losses were in the manufacturing sector
so workers who found jobs in the service sector are paid on
average 23% less. Almost all new American jobs being created are
in this sector and wages in the manufacturing sector are kept
down due to the threat of job relocation overseas. The growth in
U.S. trade and trade deficits has put downward pressure on the
wages of "unskilled" (i.e., non-college-educated) workers in the
U.S., especially those with no more than a high school degree.
This group represents 72.7% of the total U.S. workforce and
includes most middle and low wage workers. A large body of
economic research has concluded that trade is responsible for at
least 15-25% of the growth in wage inequality in the U.S. (U.S.
Trade Deficit Review Commission 2000, 110-18).(30)(31)
In some areas of the
U.S. the loss of manufacturing jobs
to
Mexico has caused disturbing levels of poverty. Since George
Bush won Ohio in the 2000 presidential elections, the state has
lost one in six of its manufacturing jobs. A string of local
factories have relocated to Mexico in the last two years. Two
million of the state's 11 million population resorted to food
charities in 2002, an increase of more than 18% from 2001.(32)WHITE COLLAR JOB LOSSES
A study by Forrester
Research predicts that U.S. companies will transfer 3.3 million
service jobs overseas by 2015, compared with just 102,000 jobs
shifted in 2000. The job exports are predominantly in the areas
of information technology (including software and product
development), customer service, back-office accounting and
sales.(33)
On 10 August 2003,
USA Today warned that white collar workers are going to
experience the devastating job losses that occurred in
manufacturing in the previous thirty years. Almost any
professional job that can be done long distance is suddenly up
for grabs. Jobs done by financial analysts, architectural
drafters, telemarketers, accountants, claims adjusters, home
loan processors and others at higher levels of the labour food
chain are being farmed out to workers in other countries. "We're
not just talking about call-center jobs, but all kinds of jobs,"
says Deloitte Consulting analyst Christopher Gentle. "It doesn't
leave any part of the corporation untouched." Major U.S.
companies, including such giants as IBM, Microsoft and Procter &
Gamble, are leading the pack. Tens of thousands of jobs already
have been shipped out, and analysts project that millions more
will go -- just as the fragile economy attempts a rebound. "We
see it as a threat to America's middle-class work force, in
terms of wages and benefits," says Marcus Courtney, president of
Washington Alliance of Technology Workers in Seattle. "The
service sector is not immune to the forces of globalization.
We're talking about highly skilled, best-paying jobs. It's
raising the concern of workers."(34)
In the U.K., HSBC Bank
just announced that it is shipping 4000 back office jobs from
the U.K. to Asia. By 2006, that will have increased to 7000, 13%
of its current U.K. workforce.(35)
Whilst free-trade
allows capital to travel to developing countries in search of
cheap labour, lax immigration controls have allowed cheap labour
to travel to the West in search of capital.
The immigrant
population in the United States has increased to 33 million, a
five percent increase in the last two years. The new Census
Bureau data show that immigrants account for 11.8 percent of the
U.S. population. In California 27% of the population are foreign
born. The immigrant population in the U.S. is now larger than
the entire population of Canada.(36)
9 million Mexicans make up 30% of these foreign born residents.
Over a third of them are illegals.(37)
BLUE COLLAR WORKERS
Throughout the
economic boom of the 90s, when the unemployment rate got as low
as 3.9 percent, economists marveled at the U.S. economy's
ability to grow jobs without sparking wage-led inflation. Many
speculated that the waves of low-paid immigrants had created a
"safety valve," keeping average wages low enough for the economy
to grow without an increase in prices. An article in the Labor
Department's "Monthly Labor Review" has laid out just how
important those foreign-born workers were for the U.S economy:
foreign-born workers earned about 75.6 cents for every dollar
earned by the native born in 2000.(38)
Economic theory suggests that immigration that is complementary
to the native workforce can boost wages all round. The most
extreme example is Middle East countries that have oil but no
oil expertise, so importing oil industry workers from the West
makes the locals rich. In contrast, substitute workers are
likely to reduce the wages of those they compete with in the
labour market while boosting the profits of the owners of
capital. However, the lower cost of production associated with
cheaper labour makes goods cheaper and keeps wage inflation
down. George Borjas, professor of political economy at Harvard
University, an authority on the economics of migration, is
sceptical of claims that immigration boosts wages when it goes
beyond meeting skills shortages. "I find very sizeable negative
effects of immigration on wages," he says. "The numerical effect
is strong and the statistical significance is strong. It will
turn the economics of migration on its head."(39)
The National Academy
of Sciences estimates that approximately 44 percent of wage
depression among low-skilled Americans ( 70% of workforce)
during 1980-1994 was due to immigration. Also an estimated
1,880,000 American workers are displaced from their jobs every
year by immigration.(40)(41)
The American food and
agriculture system has become dependent on foreign-born workers,
a substantial number of whom are illegals. Until 15 or 20 years
ago, meatpacking plants in the United States were staffed by
highly paid, unionized employees who earned about $18 an hour,
adjusted for inflation. Today, the processing and packing plants
are largely staffed by low-paid non-union workers from Mexico
and Guatemala. Many of them start at $6 an hour. A few years
ago, the Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated that
about 25 percent of meatpacking workers in the Midwest were
probably illegals.(42)
A government study estimated that nearly 40 percent of farm
labourers are illegals.
WHITE COLLAR WORKERS
Immigration has also
suppressed wages of white collar workers because U.S immigration
has granted huge numbers of working visas. More than 100,000
American computer programmers are unemployed but when those who
are underemployed or working in other jobs because they cannot
find programming jobs, the total grows to about half a million.
At the same time, more than 450,000 H-1B visa workers are
employed as programmers in the United States.(43)
I.T. companies are
subcontracting thousands of jobs to outsourcing companies such
as Tata, Infosys Technologies, and Wipro Technologies, the three
largest Indian software servicing companies, who can provide
Indian employees who will work for a third of the wages.(44)
Furthermore a 2001
National Research Council report found that H-1Bs have an
adverse impact on overall wage levels. The Independent Computer
Consultants Association reports that the use of cheaper foreign
labour has forced down the hourly rates of U.S. consultants by
as much as 10 to 40 percent.(45)
BY DESIGN NOT BY ACCIDENT
None of this has come
about by chance: Since 1986, Congress has passed 7 amnesties for
illegal aliens. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA)
gave amnesty - legal forgiveness - to all illegal aliens who had
successfully evaded justice for four years or more or were
illegally working in agriculture. As a result, 2.8 million
illegal aliens were admitted as legal immigrants to the United
States. Amnesties to date total 3,356,021.(46)
Cheered on by
editorials in the The Wall St Journal,(47)
President of Mexico Vincente Fox, is currently negotiating a
blanket amnesty of millions of Mexican workers.(48)
Republicans and Democrats are proposing different pieces of
legislation which, if all passed, would give amnesty to all 8-11
million illegals. This is one of many steps being taken to merge
Mexico and the U.S. as a prelude to a Pan-American Union from
Alaska to Chile.(49)
UK
Research indicates
that, on current trends, we can now expect a net inflow of at
least 2 million non E.U. citizens per decade.(50)
Total net
Immigration from
outside the E.U. has more than trebled in the past five years
and is still rising. Each year nearly a quarter of a million
people come to live in Britain.(51)
However this is
nothing compared to the problem looming from the newly enlarged
E.U. The floodgates for cheap labour opened on 1st May 2004 when
10 former Eastern Bloc countries join the E.U. making their 73
million citizens eligible to work anywhere within the EEA.
Created in 1992 The European Economic Area (EEA) consists of the
15 member states of the European Union (EU) plus Norway, Iceland
and Liechtenstein. There is free movement of people, goods and
services within the area. So long as nationals of the countries
are exercising their freedoms under these the various treaties,
they are not strictly subject to immigration control, and may
work or set up in business without restriction. These rights
extend also to members of the households of EEA nationals
accompanying them to the U.K.. 13 countries have applied to
become new members: 10 of these countries -Cyprus, the Czech
Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland,
the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia joined on 1st May 2004. They
are currently known by the term "acceding countries". Bulgaria
and Romania hope to do so by 2007, and Turkey is currently
negotiating its membership.(52)
The E.U. estimates
that around 335,000 people will migrate each year from Eastern
Europe after the barriers to free movement come down, including
100,000 workers. This may be a deliberate understatement of the
tidal wave of cheap labour which is about to demolish wage
levels in Western Europe.(53)
Another revolution is
quietly taking place in another aspect of immigration aimed
directly at the middle class. The Government has been clamping
down on illegal immigration but massively expanding legal
migration for skilled workers, most noticeably through expanding
the work permit scheme to about 200,000 people this year. David
Blunkett, the Home Secretary, has said he is proud to have
produced the largest work permit programme of any country. These
workers will be able to bring their families and, on past form,
most will be accepted for settlement after 4-5 years if they so
wish. This massive expansion of the work permit scheme therefore
represents a major new avenue of immigration. The Government has
also set up the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme, which has so
far brought in 3,000 of the of the world's brightest and best.
The scheme makes it easier for foreign students to carry on
working in the U.K. after their course finishes. No doubt many
will come from poor countries and will accept significantly
lower salaries than native workers.(54)(55)
The effect of
immigration policy on the labour market is the same as in the
U.S.. While the highly skilled in London enjoy wages up to 80
per cent higher than the national average, a recent report by
Incomes Data Services showed that shelf-fillers in London suffer
wages 10 per cent below the national average. Immigration has
pushed unemployment 2 per cent higher than it would otherwise
be. National unemployment has been at just over 5 per cent for
two years now, and in London, where most immigrants live,
unemployment is the second highest in the UK at 6.6 per cent.(56)
Britain's top labour economist, Professor Richard Layard of
London School of Economics, who helped to design Labour's
welfare to work programme, stated in a letter to the
Financial Times:
There is a huge amount
of evidence that any increase in the number of unskilled workers
lowers unskilled wages and increases the unskilled unemployment
rate. If we are concerned about fairness, we ought not to ignore
these facts. Employers gain from unskilled immigration. But the
unskilled do not.(57)
CONCLUSION
The elite have
promoted free trade and open borders with full knowledge of
their destructive consequences. Poor workers are glad to work
for higher wages either by migrating to the West or by working
in the new steel factory at home. This analysis has not
addressed their plight, which is already well documented, but
has shown the serious damage to employment and wage levels in
the West.
THE REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN, 1966
The purpose of the
study was to analyze methods by which a government can
perpetuate itself in power. The authors concluded that, in the
past, war has been the only reliable means to achieve that goal.
Under world government, however, war would be impossible so the
challenge was to find other methods for controlling populations
and keeping them loyal to their leaders. It concluded that a
suitable substitute for war would require a new enemy which
posed a frightful threat to survival. Neither the threat nor the
enemy had to be real, they merely had to be believable. Several
surrogates for war were considered, including a staged
space-alien invasion, but the only one holding real promise was
the environmental pollution model. This was viewed as the most
likely to succeed because firstly, it could be related to
observable conditions such as smog and water pollution - in
other words, it would be based partly on fact and, therefore,
believable. Secondly, predictions could be made showing
end-of-earth scenarios just as horrible as atomic warfare.
Accuracy in these predictions would not be important. Their
purpose would be to frighten, not to inform. Not only does the
environmental pollution model justify expansive and
authoritarian government, it also requires citizens to
impoverish themselves thereby widening the gap between leaders
and followers.
Matching the Iron
Mountain brief, part of the environmental movement aims to
reduce living standards in the West, especially in the U.S.. The
questionable intellectual credibility for this plan was provided
in the benchmark publication from Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, The Limits To Growth, commissioned by The
Club of Rome in 1972. The book introduced the concept that the
environment would be irrevocably damaged if its "carrying
capacity" was breached. On current trends it predicted total
collapse of industrial civilization in the second half of the
twenty-first century unless capital and population growth were
severely limited. Whilst polices designed to reduce consumption
under the rubric of 'sustainable development' are high on the
political agenda, real environmental health and pollution issues
are either being swept under the carpet or being created by the
petrochemical- pharmaceutical cartel. The last chapter of this
book proves that, actually, the elite regard human beings as
Earth's primary contaminant.
FINANCING ENVIRONMENTALISM
A few years after the
Report from Iron Mountain was published in 1966, the
environmental movement was hijacked by the banking cartel.
Instead of staying focused on scientific study of conservation,
it became a catch-all for a radical political agenda, now
spearheaded by ex-KGB chief Mikhail Gorbachev and his Western
banker colleague Stephen Rockefeller.(58)
Dr Michael Coffman's
fascinating article Why Property Rights Matter, details
the high-level funding of environmentalism:
In a dazzling display
of raw power, foundations with interlocking directorates funded
the Nature Conservancy in 1996 to the tune of $203,886,056, or
60 percent of its annual revenue. Initially the foundations
banded together under the name Environmental Grantmakers
Affinity Group of the Council on Foundations. Under the umbrella
of Rockefeller Family Fund 136 foundations formed the
Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA) in 1987 which has
grown to over 200 by the end of the twentieth century.
Congressman Richard Pombo (R-CA) claimed in 1999 that there are
"3,400 full time employees, including leaders who often make
$150,000 or more, as well as a small army of outside contractors
such as scientists, lobbyists, lawyers, and public affairs
specialists" in Washington DC. Citing a 1999 Boston Globe
article, Congressman Pombo said: …"foundations invest at least
$400 million a year in environmental advocacy and research. The
largest environmental grant-maker, Pew Charitable Trusts, gives
more than $35 million annually to environmental groups
".....When the additional 2,300 foundations that donate to
environmental activism are considered, plus the billion dollars
or so contracted to environmental organizations by various
agencies of the federal government, the Boston Globe [
newspaper] estimates the total funding for environmental
activism to be around four billion dollars annually!".(59)
Substantial financing
and leadership of the United Nations came directly from the
corporate elite as well as from national governments. In 1946
John D. Rockefeller Jr. brought the U.N. to America by gifting
$8 million for the purchase of the land for the U.N. building in
New York. Canadian multi-billionaire and Rockefeller associate,
Maurice Strong, was the first Director of the U.N. Environmental
Program (UNEP) created after The Stockholm Conference, ('Earth
Summit 1') in 1972. Mr Strong was secretary general of all three
Earth Summits 1972, 1992, and 1997. He initiated The Earth
Charter Project in 1994, the 'Ten Commandments' of sustainable
development. Gorbachev was co-chair of The Earth Charter
Commission and Stephen Rockefeller was Chair of the drafting
committee. The ceremony to launch the Earth Charter initiative
in May 2000, involved the presentation of the document to
regular Bilderberg attendee, Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of The
Netherlands. This illustrates how top-down the environmental
movement is, despite its significant grass-roots support.(60)
The Earth Charter
developed an earlier Rockefeller initiative, the 1972
Rockefeller Brothers Fund report entitled Use of Land:
A Citizen's Policy Guide to Urban Growth. This was a
bench-mark publication on subjecting property rights to
government censure.(61)
Ted Turner is another multi-billionaire environmentalist. In
September 1997 he set up The United Nations Foundation to
distribute funds to U.N programmes with a gift of (U.S.) $1
billion.(62)
Former Nazi SS officer and I.G. Farben employee, Prince Bernhard
of The Netherlands was one of the founders of The World Wildlife
Fund in 1961.(63)
Britain's Prince Philip was the first President of the World
Wildlife Fund UK (WWF) from its formation in 1961 to 1982, and
International President of WWF (later the World Wide Fund for
Nature) from 1981 to 1996. Since 1985, World Wildlife Fund has
invested over 1.5 billion dollars in 11,000 projects in 130
countries.(64)
Prince Philip also founded the Alliance of Religions and
Conservation in 1995.(65)
Prince Charles set up The Prince of Wales Business Leaders Forum
in 1990 to promote environmental issues in the business world
and it now has support from 65 major multinational
corporations.(66)RURAL CLEANSING
Less than 5 percent of
the U.S. is urban, but urban areas comprise 77.2 percent of the
population. The population density in the U.S. is only 77.7
people per square mile, compared to the U.K. which is 629.4. The
reason the environmental lobby has been so successful in the
U.S. since the 1970's is that the courts have generally ruled in
favour of the primacy of public use when judging property
rights. In the spirit of Rousseau, the thrust of the 1972 Use
of Land report supported the premise that development rights
of private property owners should be censured by the government.
Environmental protection areas would be protected "not by
purchase but through the police power of the federal
government." The Endangered Species Act was passed the following
year, a key weapon for restricting property rights.
The plundering of
rural America has gotten so bad that a Wall Street Journal
editorial on 26 July 2001, called it "rural cleansing". The
WSJ cites the case in which the federal court forced the
Bureau of Reclamation to cut off irrigation water in April 2001
that undeniably belonged to 1400 farmers in the Klamath Basin
Irrigation Project, a watershed straddling the California and
Oregon border. The action turned their once lush green farmland
to swirling dust reminiscent of the Oklahoma dust bowl days of
the 1930s Great Depression. The suit began in 1988 when two
sucker fish were listed as "endangered" under the Endangered
Species Act of 1973. The coho salmon was later added as a
threatened species. Citing the U.S. Endangered Species Act,
Oregon District Judge Ann Aiken ruled in Federal Court on April
6, 2001, to give all the water to the endangered species. The
decision was the result of a lawsuit brought by the Oregon
Natural Resources Council (ONRC).(67)
The WSJ claimed
, "The goal of many environmental groups - from the Sierra Club
to the…ONRC - is no longer to protect nature. It is to expunge
humans from the countryside." Just as in the Klamath basin
example, the WSJ determined that,
The strategy of these
environmental groups is almost always the same: to sue or lobby
the government into declaring rural areas off-limits to people
who live and work there. The tools for doing this are the
Endangered Species Act and local preservation laws, most of
which are so loosely crafted as to allow a wide leeway in their
implementation. In some cases the owners loose their property
outright. More often the environmentalists' goal is to have
restrictions placed on the land that either render it unusable
or persuade owners to leave of their own accord.
Congressman Richard
Pombo laments this attack on America's natural resource-based
industries:
Federal policies
implemented as a result of environmental advocacy financed by
private foundations are trampling on property rights. They are
shutting down the timber industry, the mining industry and the
oil and gas industry. These policies are creating misery in
rural areas dependent on resource production. Small communities
and families in rural areas are reeling, while environmental
groups are collecting rewards of six figure grants from rich,
private foundations. Why is this sort of activity subsidized by
the taxpayer?
The land grab is also
being directed by the federal government. President Clinton used
the 1906 Antiquities Act to set aside tens of millions of acres
of federal land as national monuments preventing any commercial
use. In 1998 he initiated the Clean Water Action Plan which
withdraws thousands of miles of federal roads and also imposes
buffer zones of natural habitat on private land along millions
of miles of streams and rivers.(68)
Following the 1968
U.N. Conference on Man and the Biosphere, the U.S. government
instituted their own program called The United States Man and
the Biosphere Program-U.S. MAB. There are currently 47 biosphere
reserves and 20 World Heritage Sites in America, as designated
by the U.N.. The counties surrounding the biosphere
reserves/World Heritage Sites are "buffer zones." At some point
there will be no human activity in the biospheres and the buffer
zones are to protect the biospheres where there will be limited
human activity.(69)
This plan first appeared as part of The Wildlands Project, a
grandiose design to transform 50% of the U.S. into a biosphere
cleansed of modern industry and private property and the rest
into buffer zones. The U.S. Senate came close to endorsing this
plan in 1994 when considering ratifying the U.N. Biodiversity
Treaty. At the eleventh hour it was pointed out that the study
on which the Treaty was based, the 1994 Global Biodiversity
Assessment, endorsed the Wildlands Project strategy.(70)
The Biodiversity Treaty also proposes an unaccountable U.N.
Trusteeship Council to regulate any human activity that presents
potential harm to biological diversity.
With 1.8 million acres
Ted Turner, billionaire and radical environmentalist, is now the
largest land owner in America. According to Forbes Magazine,
Despite his reputation
as a die-hard conservationist, the cable pioneer makes plenty of
money off his land. He sells bison meat to restaurants
(including his own). He opened some of his New Mexico holdings
to gas and coal exploration. Timber is harvested and sold.
Hunting and fishing fees generate $5 million a year. "I'm doing
things as natural as I can and trying to make some money at the
same time"
(71)
URBAN SPRAWL?
The key principles of
The Use of Land were adopted at the 1976 U.N. Conference
on Human Settlements (Habitat I) held in Vancouver:
Land... cannot be
treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and
subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market.
Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of
accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore
contributes to social injustice... Public control of land use is
therefore indispensable.
"Smart growth"
advocates seek to preserve land in a natural or agricultural
state by encouraging individuals to live in denser communities
that take up smaller tracts of land per housing unit. Such
communities also encourage residents to rely more on walking or
public transit than on cars for mobility, and they more closely
mix retail and other commercial facilities with residential
units to foster easy access to jobs and shopping. The density of
the average U.S. suburban area is 1-3 housing units per acre.
The Sierra Club's definition of urban efficiency is 100 units
per acre. Reaching that goal, however, would require living
arrangements that are 2.4 times as dense as all Manhattan, twice
as dense as central Paris, and ten times that of San Francisco.
At least nineteen states have state growth-management laws or
task forces to protect farmland and open space. Dozens of cities
and counties have adopted urban growth boundaries to contain
development and prevent the spread of urbanization to outlying
and rural areas. Portland Oregon is a model for smart growth and
since the 1970s it has had the most stringent planning laws in
the U.S..(72)
The Federal
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) partially
funded a 2002 report called Growing Smart Legislative
Guidebook: Model Statutes for Planning and the Management of
Change by the American Planning Association (APA). This
report not only applies the smart growth principle to future
land use, but also to current land use by introducing the idea
of "amortization of non-conforming uses. " This will require the
local government to seize property without just compensation
where property owners fail to adjust the use of their property
to fit revised zoning ordinances or new plans for a particular
geographical area in the community.(73)
REGULATING CONSUMPTION
One of the key
concepts of the sustainable development agenda is "Factor 10".
This theory proposes exponential decrease in resource use
especially in OECD countries which are required to reduce
material consumption by 90%.
(74)
The 1994
statement of the Factor Ten Club demands and end to private
property:
The process of
dematerialization must involve a shift in thinking toward the
'life-cycle' approach, meaning that improvements are in no way
limited to products, but can and will have to incorporate
changes in the way products are produced, packaged, transported,
sold, used, reused, cascaded, recycled and disposed of...
Use-sharing, renting, leasing and borrowing are just a few
examples of concepts which result in reduced material flows.
It also demands
increasing the cost of capital (natural resources) in relation
to labour using taxation.(75)
Whereas the first U.N.
Habitat Conference in 1974 dealt with land use issues, Habitat
II in June 1996 dealt with consumption issues. The underlying
theme was that people of the world would have to pay a tax for
the usage or depletion of a resource in addition to the service
provided. Therefore, if you pay $1.00 per thousand cubic feet
for water consumed, they are then saying that they want you to
pay another $1.00 for the depletion of the water used. What the
World Bank and IMF are working on is to find a formula to
measure how much a person produces at their job and at home.
From that amount they would then subtract out how much of the
Earth's resources they use such as water, energy, food,
material, heat, etc.. If the net figure is a plus, the person is
adding back to the Earth's resources. If it is a negative, he is
taking away from the earth's resources and is therefore a bad
global citizen.(76)
The conference
identified Public-Private Partnership as instrumental to this
task. The Public-Private Partnerships for the Urban Environment
initiated by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
became operational in 1996, the year of the Habitat II
conference.
(77)
This is the key socio-economic component of the global feudal
state. Whilst property is transferred into the hands of a
private ruling elite, the use of that property by the masses
will be regulated by a large body of laws restricting
consumption and consumer choice.
As described in
chapter 6, Prince Charles' Prince of Wales Business Leaders
Forum (PWBLF) was set up in 1990 to promote Public-Private
Partnership. The official website of PWBLF makes specific
reference to key role of PPP market regulation in the New World
Order:
The International
Business Leaders Forum is an international educational charity
set up in 1990 to promote responsible business practices
internationally that benefit business and society, and which
help to achieve social, economic and environmentally sustainable
development, particularly in new and emerging market economies.
From the outset, the Forum has pursued three pathways:
· in making the case
that in the new world order,[emphasis added] well-led and
competitive businesses have a positive role to play in
development challenges, through responsible core business
practices and engagement with society
· in showing that -
while partnership and collective action is difficult - in the
networked society it is essential to combine business skills and
resources with community support and public accountability
· in demonstrating that
scale can only be achieved and economic exclusion addressed
through `enabling environments' in which governments,
international institutions and the media play a part.(78)
This is preparation
for the strait jacket of U.N. environmental and social
legislation being fastened onto to the global economy. its main
purpose is to reducing living standards, restrict consumer
choice, and limit property rights in order to empower the ruling
elite.
THE GLOBAL WARMING SCAM
Whilst there are many
real and serious environmental problems, man-made global warming
is a contrived political issue. The end of earth scenarios
linked to global warming have been successful in mobilizing
public opinion in favour of reducing industrial activity in
order to cut CO2 emissions. However, an independent petition
organized by the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine
signed by 17,000 independent scientists states that increased
CO2 levels do not cause deleterious changes in climate or
weather; indeed they lead to increased plant growth.(79)
Iron Mountain
style propaganda has resulted in a raft of anti-car measures
being introduced across the developed world. Private motoring
has to rank as one of the highest achievements in personal
freedom of the twentieth century. Now the elite are doing
everything possible to curtail that freedom. A tax on carbon is
now one of the major proposals of advocates of global taxation(80)
and the
U.K. government has already announced plans to impose satellite
vehicle tracking and road tolls (see chapter 12).
The blueprint for the
economic destruction of the U.S through war is the policy paper
entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses written by the
neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century
in year 2000. (81)
It recognizes the
need to pursue an indeterminate series of wars in order to
protect American interests. The U.S. Government has also stated
that the War on Terror may never end.
In 1984 George
Orwell outlined the real Machiavellian purpose of war:
The primary aim of
modem warfare... is to use up the products of the machine
without raising the general standard of living... The essential
act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but
of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to
pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the
depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to
make the masses too comfortable...
The Report From
Iron Mountain repeats Orwell's conclusion:
The production of
weapons of mass destruction has always been associated with
economic "waste." The term is pejorative, since it implies a
failure of function. But no human activity can properly be
considered wasteful if it achieves its contextual objective...
In the case of military "waste," there is indeed a larger social
utility. In advanced modern democratic societies, the war
system... has served as the last great safeguard against the
elimination of necessary social classes... The continuance of
the war system must be assured, if for no other reason, among
others, than to preserve whatever quality and degree of poverty
a society requires as an incentive, as well as to maintain the
stability of its internal organization of power.
OVERALL ECONOMIC COSTS OF CRIME
U.S. expenditure on
prisons is currently $ 46 billion a year. The overall cost of
crime in terms of lost productivity is in excess of $1 trillion
per year.(82)
Put another way, total loss of productivity due to crime is 10%
of GDP (10.4 trillion in 2002). Including stolen assets the
figure is $1.7 trillion. This has not come about by chance.
Increasing the crime rate has been deliberate policy of the U.S.
government over the last two decades and drug crime has been
central to it.
THE WAR ON DRUGS
The total economic
cost of drug abuse and drug crime in the U.S between 1992 and
2000 is calculated at $1.1 trillion, increasing each year from
$102 billion in 1992 to $160 billion in 2000.(83)
Lost productivity accounted for 69% and health costs 9%.
Imprisonment is the single largest cause of lost productivity,
accounting for 30% of the total.
THE COCAINE IMPORT AGENCY (CIA)
In March 1998, the CIA
Inspector General testified that there had existed a secret
agreement between the CIA and the Justice Department, wherein
"during the years 1982 to 1995, the CIA did not have to report
the drug trafficking by its assets to the Justice Department."(84)(85)
As Michael Levine
commented,
"..[to]a trained DEA agent this literally means that the CIA had
been granted a license to obstruct justice in our so-called war
on drugs; a license that lasted, so the CIA claims, from 1982 to
1995." That understanding remained in effect until August of
1995, when Attorney General Janet Reno rescinded the agreement.
The CIA collusion with allied drug traffickers led to the
formation of a protected narcotics pipeline, resulting an
increase in supply and drop in price. Former DEA agents have
repeatedly pointed out that 50%-70% of the cocaine entering the
U.S. went via drug cartels that enjoyed CIA protection.(86)
Despite the
exponential growth in spending on the alleged "drug war",
illicit drugs are cheaper and purer than they were two decades
ago, and continue to be readily available. Between 1981 and
1998, the price of heroin and cocaine dropped sharply while
their levels of purity rose.
DRUG OFFENDERS ACCOUNT FOR THE EXPLODING PRISON POPULATION
In 2001 the Federal
Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) estimated
that there were 1,586,900 State and local arrests for drug abuse
violations in the U.S. an increase of 200% from the half million
in arrests 1982 when the War on Drugs began. This accounted for
11.5% of all arrests.(87)
The War on Drugs has resulted in the arrest, prosecution and
incarceration of tens of thousands of persons each year for
crimes associated with the sale, possession and use of illegal
drugs. 500,000 drug offenders are in prison, 25% of a two
million prison population.(88)
In 1986 and 1988
Congress enacted mandatory minimum sentencing laws, which forced
judges to deliver fixed sentences to individuals convicted of a
crime, regardless of culpability or other mitigating factors.
The most common mandatory sentences are for 5 and 10 years, and
are based on the weight of the drug or the presence of a
firearm. Simple possession of any quantity of powder cocaine by
first-time offenders is considered a misdemeanor, punishable by
no more than one year in prison but simple possession of crack
cocaine results in a five-year mandatory sentence.(89)
The average sentence for a first time, non-violent drug offender
is longer than the average sentence for rape, child molestation,
bank robbery or manslaughter.(90)
While the intent was
to punish high-level drug offenders, the laws have had the
opposite effect-jailing low-level drug offenders for unusually
long sentences. Enforcement agencies focus their efforts on
those minor actors in the trade who are the most easily
arrested, prosecuted, and penalized, rather than on the middle
and high-level criminals who are drug dealing's true masterminds
and profiteers who are able to trade information in return for
significantly reduced prison sentences.
Before the sentencing
guideline concept took root, however, state lawmakers began
enacting mandatory minimum penalties for drugs. This began in
1973 with the passage of the notorious "Rockefeller drug laws"
in New York (named after then Gov. Nelson Rockefeller) requiring
mandatory 15-year prison sentences for sales of small amounts of
narcotics.(91)
THE PRISON ECONOMY
By increasing rates of
crime and incarceration, the U.S. Government has not only
reduced living standards but has laid the foundations for the
new coercion economy. The warning from past and present events
is that private corporations can meet a substantial portion of
their labour requirements through slave labour. There's nothing
wrong with putting prisoners to work providing they are genuine
criminals and basic human rights are upheld. However, in both
Nazi Germany and modern day China, slave labourers were not
criminals, they were enemies of the state or targets of
genocide; they were ruthlessly abused, tortured and murdered.
Private corporations were glad to use labour under these
conditions. For this reason, the exponential growth of the U.S.
prison population accompanied by a deterioration of civil
liberties is cause for serious concern. Also, when prison labour
starts to become significant, as it now is in China, that has a
negative effect on wage and employment levels.
The number of inmates
in state and federal prisons has increased more than six-fold
from less than 200,000 in 1970 to 1,440,655 by the end 2002. An
additional 665,475 are held in local jails. As of 30 June 2002,
the nation's prison and jail population exceeded 2 million for
the first time in history. At the end of 2002, 1 of every 143
Americans was incarcerated, the highest incarceration rate in
the world. The number of persons on probation and parole has
been growing dramatically along with institutional populations.
There are now 6.7 million Americans incarcerated or on probation
or parole, an increase of more than 265 percent since 1980.(92)
In the U.K. the
prison population was about 45,000 in 1990. By 2009 it could be
as high as 107,000 according to home office predictions.(93)
The 1979 U.S. Federal
Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program gave private
industry the green light to put state and federal prison inmates
to work. Major companies such as Texas Instruments, Honeywell,
Hewlett-Packard, Siemens, Microsoft and Boeing sub-contract some
low-end assembly work to prisons. They can pay the same or lower
wages as they would in Mexico but can use the 'made in USA'
label.(94)
(95)
In
July 2003 Dell Computer Corp. was admonished by an environmental
group for running a primitive recycling operation that exposed
prisoners to toxic chemicals.(96)NAZI SLAVE LABOUR
The use of slave
labour by two major German industrial giants was scrutinized at
the Nuremberg Trials. I.G. Farben had an estimated 83,000 slaves
at its Auschwitz factory and Krupp industries use around 75,000
slaves. However the full scale of slave labour was brought to
light in 1999 when The American Jewish Committee presented the
results of their investigations.(97)
Aware of this investigation, major companies employed their own
historians to look for skeletons in their closets. Deutsche
Bank's company historian discovered that it helped finance the
construction of Auschwitz from which tens of thousands of slaves
were taken.(98)
In February 1999
thirteen major corporations who used slave labour came clean and
agreed to set up a compensation fund for the victims to head off
law suits: Allianz AG, BASF AG, Bayer AG, BMW AG,
DaimlerChrysler AG, Deutsche Bank AG, Degussa-Hüls AG, Dresdner
Bank AG, Friedr. Krupp AG, Hoesch-Krupp, Hoechst AG, Siemens AG
and Volkswagen AG. In December 1999, The American Jewish
Committee produced a list of 257 companies that used slave
labour. More than 50 companies on AJC's initial list of 257
firms, including multi-nationals Shell & DEA Oil GmbH, and Ford
Motor Co, joined the general compensation fund. Ten days after
the list was issued, negotiators agreed on a fund totaling $5.2
billion dollars. Professor Ulrich Herbert of, University of
Freiburg, an expert on Nazi slave labour points out that the
firms identified on the AJC list account for just a fraction of
all German companies that used slave or forced labour. Indeed,
virtually every industrial company of any size in Germany used
slave or forced labour. The total number of slaves is estimated
at 12 million. German historians estimate that of the thousands
of companies that used forced and slave labour, more than 500
are still in operation.(99)(100)
The compensation fund
is now called The German Economy Foundation Initiative, whose
stated purpose is,
...guaranteeing that
all German companies, including foreign affiliates and parent
companies, will be protected against lawsuits relating to the
Nazi era and that they will be able to work on international
markets under conditions of comprehensive and lasting legal
security.(101)
CHINA
The Laogai Research
Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to collecting
information about China's vast system of forced-labour camps.
The foundation was started by Hongda Harry Wu, who has written
three books on his experiences as a Chinese prisoner for over 19
years. Currently, there are estimated eight million prisoners in
China's slave labour camp system known as 'Laogai'. As a tool of
political repression, the Laogai serves to silence all voices of
political dissent throughout China. Once in the Laogai, inmates
are forced to confess their "crimes," denounce any anti-Party
beliefs and submit to a regime of reeducation and labour.
Although Chinese law forbids torture and the use of torture to
extract confessions, the practice remains widespread in the
Laogai. Anyone in China can be held for up to three years in
with no trial or sentencing procedure of any kind. All that is
necessary is the directive of any official in China's Public
Security Bureau. All prisoners in the Laogai are forced to
labour. Labour conditions vary from region to region and camp to
camp. There are many reports of prisoners working up to 16 to 18
hours a day to meet labour quotas that are enforced through
withholding of food rations. Prisoners also often labour in
highly unsafe conditions including work in mines and with toxic
chemicals. Sometimes conditions are less arduous with more
reasonable working hours and more humane treatment. Prisoners do
not receive payment for their labour or any profit generated
from the products they produce. According to documented evidence
gathered by the Laogai Research Foundation and other human
rights and media organizations, the practice of harvesting the
organs of executed prisoners in China began sometime in the late
1970s. Organs harvested from prisoners are used in transplant
operations for privileged Chinese and for foreigners. According
to the statistics of Amnesty International, China executes more
prisoners every year than the rest of the world combined.
The deliberate
application of forced labour by the Chinese government has
spawned an entirely new field in China's economy: the economics
of slavery. One theorist clearly defined this policy in the
following statement:
The fundamental task
of our Laogai facilities is punishing and reforming criminals.
To define their function concretely, they fulfill tasks in the
following three ways: (1) Punishing criminals and putting them
under surveillance; (2) Reforming criminals; (3) organizing
criminals in labour and production, thus creating wealth for
society. Our Laogai units are both facilities of dictatorship
and special enterprises.
- Criminal Reform
Handbook, PRC Ministry of Justice, Laogai Bureau,Shaanxi
People's Publishers, 1988 (102)
Western companies are
still using slave labour today on a huge scale by trading with
China. The U.S. imports approximately $70 billion worth of
Chinese goods.(103)
The import of
Chinese forced labour-made goods into the U.S. is illegal,
according to section 1307 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which makes
it is illegal to import any product that is produced in whole or
in part by prison labour of any kind. In 1992, the need to
directly confront the Chinese regarding this issue became
apparent, leading to the signing of a document known as the
"Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States of
America and the People's Republic of China on Prohibiting Import
and Export Trade in Prison Labor Products". In the most recent
State Department Report on Human Rights from 1999, U.S.
authorities admit that the MOU has been "nearly impossible" to
enforce and that Chinese authorities have been "uncooperative.
When a product is labeled "Made in China," it may hide the fact
that it was made in the Laogai by Chinese prisoners. Until China
reveals the extent of their Laogai production, and U.S.
companies are willing to release the location of all of their
manufacturing facilities in China, there is no way for the
Western consumer to be certain that s/he is not financially
contributing to the Laogai system.
Examples include
Chrysler's joint venture in China to make Cherokees called
Beijing Jeep Company and Volkswagen's joint venture in China to
make the Santana model called Shanghai Volkswagen Automobile
Company. The Laogai foundation investigation showed they were
sourcing parts from prison labour.(104)
The success of China's prison economy is evidenced by all the
"made in China" toys in our shops. The China National Toy
Association (CNTA) is actually a front for People's Armed Police
(PAP) and the Chinese Army (PLA) Laogai system.(105)
Spending on health
care in the U.S. is projected to rise from 14% of GDP (2000)
($1.42 trillion ), to 17% in 2011.(106)
Total health care
expenditure in the E.U. averages 8% of GDP. (107) The
pharmaceutical companies are the major beneficiaries of disease
as indicated by their market value. At the time of writing,
Britain's GlaxoSmithKline was Britain's fourth largest company.
Pfizer was America's fourth largest company and the fourth
largest in the world. Novartis was Switzerland's largest
company, 35% larger than second place Nestle. The world's top
ten drug/healthcare companies had a total market value of $ 1.1
trillion (see chapter 2).
What we are witnessing
is on the one hand is a form of indenture through illness, a
pharmaceutical feudalism. As disease increases so does the
tariff that society pays to the petrochemical sorcerers who
provide symptomatic treatments and abuse their power over
medical research to block any curative or preventative
treatments. However the other Orwellian economic goal of public
health policy is to make us poorer. Nothing illustrates this
second point better than the emergence of extremely disabling
new diseases during the 1980s which are described in the final
chapter of this book. The economic consequences of Western
public health policy are clear from the statistics of
disability, unemployment and healthcare spending. The percentage
of the population who are disabled is similar in Europe and the
U.S.. In the E.U., disability is estimated to affect 10-20% of
each country's population and the U.K. and U.S. both have 15%
disabled.(108)(109)
So
much for the medical 'breakthroughs' of the twentieth century.
In the U.K. 3.8 million disabled people of working age are out
of work, 11% of the total 34 million of working age. In the
U.S., 13 million disabled people of working age are out of work
8.5% of the total 159 million of working age. Incomes of
households with at least one disabled person are 20-30% lower
than the incomes of all households. For Federal Reserve Bank
Chairman Paul Volcker and Co. who require a substantial decline
in living standards in the West, these statistics represent
success not failure of the healthcare system.CONCLUSION
The dream of prosperity
for all is dying out around the world. Developing countries
which had an expanding middle class in the early 1980s have been
ransacked. Almost 5 billion people on the planet do not have
basic property rights enjoyed in the West. At the same time,
Westerners are getting poorer year by year. In the U.K., the
enormous increase in house prices has made home ownership an
impossibility for most young people.
1. George Orwell, 1984,
part 3 chapter 2. Full text available on-line at
2. Special Report:
America Celebrates Tax Freedom Day, The Tax Foundation,
April 2003.
3. Jane Hough, The
Burden of Taxation, economic policy and statistics section,
House of Commons library,10 May 2001, ref. 01/51, appendix.
4. Technical Appendix,
Tax Freedom Day website.
5. How The UK Compares,
Tax Freedom Day website.
6. New Study Profiles
Total Tax Burden of Median American Family, The Tax
Foundation, 9 March 2000
7. Jane Hough op cit., p.21
Table 4
8. Dean Stansel, The
Hidden Burden Of Taxation: How the Government Reduces
Take-Home Pay, Cato Policy Analysis No 302, 15 April 1998.
See
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-302.html
9. Isabelle Joumard, Tax
systems in European Union Countries, OECD, economics
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ECO/WKP(2001)27 pp.10-16. See
10. Alan Greenspan, Gold
and Economic Freedom, The Objectivist,1966. See
11. Ron Paul, Congressman,
speech in the House, Money as a Moral Issue, Paper Money and
Tyranny, 5 September 2003. See
http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2003/cr090503.htm
12. G. Edward Griffin,
The Creature from Jekyll Island, American Media, Fourth
Edition, 2002, Ch. 3
13. Ibid., pp.116 and 120
14. Ibid., p.115
15. Ibid. pp116-119
16. Joseph Stiglitz,
Globalization and its Discontents, Penguin Books, 2002, p.95
17. 2003 World
Development Indicators, The World Bank, 4.16 External Debt,
pp 246 -249. See
18. Today's Conditions,
Ron Paul op cit.
19. U.S. Inflation
Rates, Simple and User Friendly Calculator-Database Applications,
Russell Software Inc. See.
http://www.russellsoftware.com/inflarates.htm
20. Joe Hicks & Grahame
Allen, A Century of Change:Trends in UK Statistics since 1900,
social and general statistics section, House of Commons library,
ref. 99/111, 21 Dec.1999.
21. Sliglitz, op cit., p109
22. Ibid., pp.116-117
23. World Bank Secret
Documents Consumes Argentina: Alex Jones Interviews Greg
Palast,
4 March 2002. Transcript at
Greg Palast's website. See
24. Stiglitz, op cit.,
p.122
25. Griffin, op cit., Ch 23
26. Ibid., p.487
27. Rate rise forecast
prompts debt warning, BBC, London, 6 November 2003. See
28. W.T.O. website.
29. Sir James Goldsmith,
The New Utopia: GATT and Global Free Trade, Federal Document
Clearing House Congressional Testimony,
Senate Commerce GATT
Implementation, 5 October 1994. See
30. Robert E. Scott,
NAFTA's Hidden Costs: Trade agreement results in job
losses, growing
inequality, and wage suppression for the United States,
Economic Policy Institute, April 2001.
31. Dean Baker and Mark
Weisbrot, Will new trade gains make us rich? An assessment of
the prospective gains from new trade agreements, Center for
Economic Policy and Policy Research
3 October 2001.
32. Long queue at
drive-in soup kitchen, A Special Report, The
Guardian, London, 3 November 2003. See
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1076608,00.html
33. Philipp Harper, Will
your job move to India?, MSNBC Money Central, 30 Sept
2003. See
34. Michelle Kessler and
Stephanie Armour, Increasing export of white-collar jobs is
cause for concern, USA Today, 10 August 2003. See
copy on the website of The Salt Lake Tribune
35. Anger as HSBC cuts
4,000 UK jobs, BBC, London, 17 October 2003. See
36. Immigrant Population
Climbs to 33 Million, Federation for American Immigration
reform website, October 2003. See
37. Immigration's Impact
on the U.S, op cit..
38. John McAuley,
Immigrants Keep U.S. Economy Supple, Minnesota Star Tribune,
4 Sept. 2002. See copy on Numbers USA website
http://www.numbersusa.com/text?ID=1259
39. Anthony Browne, Cost
of the migration revolution, The Times, London,
01 March 2003.
40. Lower Wages for
American Workers, Federation for American Immigration
Reform
(F.A.I.R.),October 2002.
See
41. National Academy of
Sciences Immigration Study, F.A.I.R., October 1997.
42. David Barboza,
'Meatpackers' Profile Hinges on Pool of Immigrant Labor'
New York Times, 21
December 2001.
See copy on Numbers USA
website
http://www.numbersusa.com/text?ID=885
43. High-tech worker
visas, Numbers USA website, 2003
44. Brian Grow with Manjeet
Kripalani, A Visa Loophole as Big as a Mainframe,
BusinessWeek, 10 March 2003. See
45. Deleting American
Workers: Abuse of the Temporary Foreign Worker System in the
High
Tech Industry. Federation for American Immigration reform
website, 2003. See
46. Why Amnesty Isn't
the Solution, F.A.I.R. See
47. Robert L. Bartley,
Open Nafta Borders? Why Not?, The Wall St Journal
Editorial Page, 2 July 2001. See
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/rbartley/?id=95000738
48. Dane Schiller and
Guillermo X. Garcia, Fox feels buoyed by U.S. visit, San
Antonio Express-News , 7 November 2003. See
http://news.mysanantonio.com/
49. Dan Stein, Why
Legalization Programs for Illegal Aliens Won't Solve the
Problem, 17 October 2003, F.A.I.R. See
http://www.fairus.org/Media/Media.cfm?ID=2253&c=35
50. Who Are We?
Migration Watch UK website.
51. Ibid., Key Points:Is
there a problem?
52. EU enlargement,
E.U. website.
53. Steve Schifferes,
Who gains from immigration? BBC, London, 17 June 2002. See
54. An overview of UK
migration, Migration Watch UK. See
55. Anthony Browne, op
cit.,
56. Ibid.
57. Sir Andrew Green,
Government grasping at straws to justify immigration policy,
The Daily Telegraph, London, 22 September 2003. See copy
on the website of Migration Watch UK
58. Green Cross
International, founded by Mikhail Gorbachev. See
59.Dr Michael Coffman,
Why Property Rights Matter, pp.13-14
Short Version
http://www.discerningtoday.org/PropertyRights2.pdf
60. Earth Charter
Initiative, Newsflash, July 2000. See
61. Coffman, op cit.,
62. The Turner Foundation.
See
63. NationMaster.com
encyclopedia. See
64. About WWF, WWF
website. See
65. Interview with
Prince Philip, Alliance of Religions and Conservations
website. See
66. Who are we and what
do we stand for? International Business Leaders Forum
website.
67. Coffman op cit., p8
68 Dr Michael Coffman,
Globalizing Mining in America, Mining Voice Magazine
Volume 6(2):26-35. See
http://www.discerningtoday.org/globalizing_america.htm
69. Joan M Veon, Tyranny
by Another Name - Protecting the Environment. See
70. Coffman op cit.,
71. Monte Burke and William
P. Barrett, This Land Is My Land, Forbes Magazine, 6 October
2003. See
http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2003/1006/050.html
72. Dr Michael Coffman,
The Smart Growth Fraud, NewsWithViews.com, 15 July 2003.See
73. Wendell Cox,
Forfeiting the American Dream: The HUD-Funded Smart Growth
Guidebook's Attack on Homeownership, Backgrounder #1565, The
Heritage Foundation, 2 July 2002. See
74. Concepts,
Instruments for Change, International Institute for
Sustainable Development, Canada. See
http://www.iisd.org/susprod/principles.htm
75. 1994 Declaration of The
Factor Ten Club. See
76. Joan Veon, op cit.
77. Public Private
Partnership for the Urban Environment, UN Department of
Social and Economic Affairs, Division for Sustainable
Development. See
http://www.unece.org/operact/ppp/introduction.htm
78. Mission, Strategy
and distinguishing characteristics, International Business
Leaders Forum. See
http://www.iblf.org/csr/csrwebassist.nsf/content/f1a2a3.html
79. Global Warming
Petition, Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine. See
80. James A. Paul and
Katarina Wahlberg, Global Taxes for Global Priorities,
Global Policy Forum and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, March
2002. See
81. Rebuilding America's
Defenses, Project For the New American Century, 2000. See
82. David Anderson, The
Aggregate Burden of Crime, Journal of Law and Economics,
January 1999. See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=147911
and synopsis at David A Anderson
http://www.argmax.com/mt_blog/archive/000260.php
83. The Economic Costs
of Drug Abuse in The United States 1992-1998, Executive
Office of the President, Office of National Drug Control
Policy,Washington, D.C. 20503, September 2001. See
84. Lisa Ronthal, CIA
admits drug trafficking, cover-up, WorldNetDaily.com, 27
Oct.1998. See
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=20384
85. Allegations of
connections between CIA and the Contras in cocaine trafficking
to the United States:
Report by The CIA Inspector General.(96-0143-IG). See
86. The CIA and drugs,
See
http://ciadrugs.homestead.com/files/outline.html#intro
87. Drugs and Crime
Facts, U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.
See
88. Economic
Consequences of the War on Drugs, The Drug Policy Alliance.
See
89. Crack Vs Powder
Cocaine Sentencing, Families against Mandatory Minimums.
90. Mandatory
Sentencing, The Drug Policy Alliance. See
91. History of Mandatory
Sentences, Families against Mandatory Minimums. See
92. Drug Policy and The
Criminal Justice System, 2001, The Sentencing Project,
Washington D.C. See
http://www.sentencingproject.org/pdfs/1035.pdf
93. Rachel Councell and
John Simes, Projections of long term trends in the prison
population to 2009 England and Wales, Home Office, 9 Dec.
2002. See
94. Jennifer Sullivan,
Made on the Inside for Use on the Outside, Wired News, 02
Dec. 1997. See
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,8867,00.html
95. Slavery With a New
Name, Prison Activist Resource Center, California. See
96. David Koenig, Dell
drops recycling company that used prison labor, San
Francisco Chronicle, 03 July 1997
97. American Jewish
Committee. See
http://www.ajc.org/
98. Thane Peterson and Joan
Warner Holocaust Reparations: German CEOs Unlock Their
Vaults, Business Week Online, 22 Feb 1999. See
99. Carol J. Williams,
Corporate Profit: Fortune 500 Companies Profit from Nazi Slave
Labor,
Los Angeles Times, 8
December 1999.
See copy at
http://www.worldfreeinternet.net/news/nws187.htm
100. Hagalil.com
101. Members, German
Economy Foundation Initiative Steering Group.
See Members
http://www.stiftungsinitiative.de/eindex.html
102. FAQ's, The
Laogai Research Foundation
103. Congressman Sherrod
Brown, Brown wins house approval of measure enforcing ban on
goods made with slave
labor, Press Release,13 July 2000.
104. Immoral and Illegal,
The Laogai Research Foundation, Case #2: Shanxi Province Number
3 Prison (also known as Shanxi Linfen Automobile Manufacturing
Plant). See
105. Charles Smith, GI
Joe and the Chinese slave trade, WorldNetDaily.com, 8
Sept 1998. See
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=20477
106. Marc Leduc, Healing
Daily.com.
107. Bringing mental
health issues into the mainstream of a health-conscious society,
Health and Consumer
Protection Directorate-General, EU Commission Press Release,
Brussels, 6 April 2001.
108. Disability: Some
Facts, Employer's Forum on Disability. See
109. Andrew Houtenville,
Disability & Employment in the USA: National Overview based on
2000 Census, Disability World. See
Copyright © by Michael
Nield 2004, 2005
All rights Reserved.
Permission granted to
reproduce for personal and educational use only. Commercial
copying, hiring, lending is prohibited
|
The
Last Circle
By Carol Marshall
...I have in my possession five boxes of documents,
obtained from a convicted methamphetamine chemist
whose closest friends were a 20-year CIA operative
and a former FBI Senior-Agent-in-Charge of the
Los Angeles and Washington D.C. bureaus.
The labyrinthine involvements of these people
and their corporate partners is revealed in this
manuscript, along with information obtained by
Washington D.C. journalist Danny Casolaro
prior to his death in 1991...Read
More