None Call It Treason

In the late nineties when the heroic investigative reporter, Gary Webb documented how both the Reagan and Bush I administrations used a Bay Area drug ring to sell tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs in order to funnel millions to Nicaraguan Contras he was pilloried in the mainstream press. This despite the fact that ten years earlier Mass. Sen., John Kerry, had direct proof that the CIA was using illicit drug profits for covert operations in Central America in order to evade Congressional scrutiny.

Even after Webb was vindicated by the CIA's own report, The New York Times, like the Washington Post and L.A. Times, gave the story short shrift. The justly outraged black community was greeted with the newspapers' eminent 'liberal' scorn: the collective response amounted to, "what else would you expect from those people... they believe stuff like Kentucky Fried Chicken will make you sterile."

If you didn't know better you'd be tempted to think our mainstream press was complicit .

In her new book "Rogue Economics" Loretta Napoleoni describes how ties between intelligence agencies and organized crime are now woven into the new world economy: "The transition from Cold War economics ... left large regions unguarded ... the vacuum created by the absence of state authority guaranteed the survival of [what] became a rogue force."

At the same time Webb was exposing the CIA's drug running writers in India were decrying the increase in sanctioned government crime and corruption.

"The image of organised crime etched deep in the public mind in the media is of graphic and gratitude violence... these images, no doubt, have a sound basis in fact. To the extent, however, that they exhaust or dominate our entire vision of organised crime today, they are both false and misleading. The emergence of global financial and trading systems, and the progressive dismantling of trade barriers and, internal restrictions on businesses within the country over the past decade, has fundamentally changed the context in which criminal organisations operate... criminal organisations have expanded their territorial reach and augmented their wealth and power relative to national governments."

It is hard to gauge whether the neo-cons were crafty and venal or simply the elite's useful idiots. Now that the US is broke, our military mired in Afghanistan, a largely secular Iraq converted to an Islamic Republic more closely tied to Iran one wonders what-- if anything-- was their beef with bin Laden. From the billions that have disappeared from the Pentagon it is clear that for the fortunate few the WOT is a handy honey pot. To round out this macabre spectacle of the absurd members of Congress solicit funds for their election campaigns by inciting revolution, claiming the Obama leads a gangster government. Yet none call it treason.

If there is a single blunder that will haunt us long after the disastrous Bush years it is the reactionary and unconstitutional Patriot Act. By demonizing Muslims while compelling US banks to disclose their large transactions, trillions in Middle Eastern oil revenues and criminal black market funds that used to be laundered in Miami and New York have migrated to Naples and London where our simpatico partners in the "War on Terror" can now join hedge funds that make their money by ripping up public companies and auctioning them off as private equity.

Typically, “prominent investors” will buy the company’s debt, package it into “collateralized debt obligations” (financial weapons of mass destruction that were pioneered by Michael Milken’s team at Drexel Burnham Lambert), and then trade it in such a way as to make it seem as if the company is in trouble.'

In the middle of this indecipherable criminal mess are our beleaguered journalists. For them the choice is stark: tell the truth like Gary Webb, lose your job and perhaps end up dead ... or play along and make the most of it.