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Tailwind suits were settled and the former producer, April Oliver, But the other way that I look at it is that we have to hit a bot- just bought a six-bedroom house. I mean, CNN cannot afford to tom. Something is going to have to break. Something's gonna tell the truth, because what happened when they tried to tell the have to fall out—something's gonna have to destabilise the equi- truth is that Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell picked up the librium here before people will even begin to look at what's going phone and scared Ted Turner to death by threatening his stock on. Yes, we've made some enormous progress over the last five value on Wall Street. years because there's a real hunger for good information, but as It's very interesting to note that one of the companies I track as far as reaching the vast majority of the American people goes, far as laundering drug monies go—General Electric—happens to something's gonna have to knock 'em off their barstool! own NBC. Now, everybody knows that GE brings good things to life; they make DVDs, VCRs, television sets, telephones. When Cool. How would you characterise our "democracy", the drug money in South America says they'd like to buy 100 million two-party system? Is there any truth to the fact that we elect dollars worth of TVs and DVDs so that someone laundering drug _ our officials? money in Colombia can open a chain of appliance stores and No. It's a joke. There are two ends of the same party. There make that money legal, GE asks absolutely no questions about are two factions. There's what I like to call a Clinton faction— where that money is coming from. As a matter of fact, there are even though he is leaving office—and a Bush faction. But they no requirements for Wall Street to report drug money being are like the Genoveses and the Gambinos. If I am going to be the invested. shopkeeper who is going to be oppressed, it doesn't make any dif- If you and I go to a bank and we take in $10,001 in cash, the ference to me whether there's a Gambino or a Genovese sticking a bank has to fill out a currency transaction report because you gun in my face and taking the money out of my pocket. We ratio- might be laundering money. GE can accept a check for 100 mil- nalise this by saying, "Well, they keep the economy good, etc., lion dollars from the biggest drug etc." That's the blind spot. lord in the world, and there is no But no one in the American polit- requirement in the world that GE ical system is allowed to rise to the report that to anybody. But with a ... NO one in the American political level where they can seriously com- thing called the "price-to-earnings pete for the White House unless ratio" on their shares, a hundred system is allowed to rise to the they are already compromised. million dollars in net profit for GE . Period. I know; I've been there. I in South Ametica-—which was level where they can seriously was the press spokesman for the very easily done last year—equates compete for the White House Perot presidential campaign in Los to, at a price-to-earnings ratio of Angeles County in 1992. I had thirty to one, an increase in GE's unless they are already known Ross Perot before—we had stock value of three billion dollars. compromised. Period. spoken on issues of the POWs, the So we're living in a hugely CIA and drugs—and what I found inflated bubble, and not one of the out is that I have yet to meet a mil- major media outlets in this coun- lionaire who has my best interests try—all of which are publicly traded at heart. And what I saw done was corporations afraid of takeover, trying to maximise profits—can Ross had no intention of winning; it was all fixed even as far back afford to tell the truth. That's why we see these great opportuni- as '92. I don't think we've had a fair election in this country since ties for little organisations like From The Wilderness, and you John Kennedy, even if that was fair, so... guys, and everybody else that's coming up now—because what we're peddling is the truth, and what we find is that the truth sells! Can you explain some of the political adventures or misadven- eae ht tha OTA ta tha nuhlin ven avnaund dena But the other way that I look at it is that we have to hit a bot- tom. Something is going to have to break. Something's gonna have to fall out—something's gonna have to destabilise the equi- librium here before people will even begin to look at what's going on. Yes, we've made some enormous progress over the last five years because there's a real hunger for good information, but as far as reaching the vast majority of the American people goes, something's gonna have to knock 'em off their barstool! Can you explain some of the political adventures or misadven- tures that brought the CIA to the public eye around drug dealing? Well, if you go back historically, the Agency has been real active in Central America since the Second World War. I mean, the Agency was down there, even before it was CIA, with United Fruit and all the major landowners in Central America. In 1979, Anastasio Samosa, the dictator of Nicaragua, was overthrown by the Sandino movement—the Sandinistas. They were a "Marxist" movement, and Ronald Reagan mobilised the country to stave off this alleged threat of communist imperialism on America's doorstep. It was a whole lot of rubric and Congress didn't really want to get involved in it deeply. Congress passed some amend- ments to the Military Appropriations Act. They were known as the Boland Amendments, and were passed first I think in 198 and again in 1984; they were Boland | and 2, which limited direct military aid to the Contras, the people fighting the Sandinistas. And so the CIA and Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey and George Bush (Vice President George Bush) were running the whole oper- ation; we know that now. They circumvented the will of Congress and there was this explosion of drug trafficking al throughout Central America, coordinated by the CIA. And we now have the CIA's own documents, and I can show you one Very well said. So now the second part of the question is this: what do you think the reaction of the American people will be when a critical mass of people actually digests this informa- tion in a rational way? Denial is not a river in Egypt! There's gonna be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. There are several ways that I describe this. America is hopelessly addicted to its consumerism and blinded by the fact that the good things that we enjoy in our lives are at the rice of slave labour in Indonesia, East Timor and all over the world. But we're blind to that—the same way that a drunk on a arstool is blind to the fact that he's drunk. Alcoholics don't stop cause they don't know when to stop, they don't know how. One is too many and ten thousand not enough. There are two models that I use to describe what happens in the American culture. One of them is we're like a family in which the father is molesting the youngest daughter, and everybody in the amily conspires in a conspiracy of silence to scapegoat the youngest daughter because they're afraid of what's going to hap- en to the family if they speak out or, worse yet, they think "Oh my God, he's going to come after me". America very much works that way. NEXUS = 39 OCTOBER — NOVEMBER 2001 www.nexusmagazine.com