* The War Against Ourselves *
* [col. writ. 12/1/07] (c) '07 Mumia Abu-Jamal *
We often think, when we dare to do so, of the Iraq War as a war over there, against 'those' people - folks other than Us.
Depending on our political perspective, it is either a good war, or an evil war. But, no matter our political, ideological perspective, time will determine whether it isn't a war against us all, as well.
That's because for those tens of thousands who survive, who are neither killed nor maimed, they will return to the U.S., with their minds twisted by an orgy of violence that will not easily be left 'over there.'
It is worthless to listen to any major political figures who speak of this war, for they are speaking with flowery words about unreality, with buzz phrases like, 'support our troops', 'they're fighting for our freedoms', and other such nonsense.
Several recent books, written not by brass but by low level non commissioned officers, tells a story that will never make it to CNN, to the networks, or to the daily press.
That's because these reports, written by line soldiers, are striking in their absence of political jargon, and the illusions usually presented as war reporting.
Do you remember reports about the notorious Iraqi house raids, ostensibly as searches for weapons? Paul Rieckhoff, a platoon leader of National Guardsmen describes how he and his men broke down doors, tied up all the men, and ransacked people's homes. Of these raids, Rieckhoff wrote, in his book, Chasing Ghosts: Failures and Facades in Iraq: A Soldier's Perspective (NAL Caliber: 2007) these "were nasty business. Anybody who enjoyed them was sick. /*Sometimes I felt like I was a member of the Brown shirts in Nazi Germany."*/
Rieckhoff writes about men in his platoon stealing money from these Iraqi families, something he describes as not uncommon.
In the corporate media's reflexive war promotion, and its overt message of 'support the troops', who knows what they are supporting?
These books, written from the soldier's viewpoint, tell of the gratuitous killing of unarmed civilians, both by high level bombings, artillery, and ground level shootings. Men, women, and children are shot with an abandon that would make a terrorist blush. One Texan, Marine lance corporal Jeffrey Carazales said, */"Do you think people at home are going to see this -- all these women and children we're killing? F - -k no./ Back home they're glorifying this mo ----f----r,*
I guarantee you."*
No politician, right or left, will describe them as modern day Nazis, riding roughshod over the Iraqi people, and indeed, creating a resistance that didn't exist at the time of the US invasion.
That's how far politics is from the truth, a truth dripping out from soldiers, who are unafraid of self-description.
In the years to come, when people trickle home, they will carry these nightmares into their work lives, and also into their personal lives.
They will be cops, prison guards, politicians, merchants, teachers, and journalists.
Within them will be these silent demons who will not rest in Iraq.
American society was deeply impacted by the return of Vietnam veterans, and not for the better.
We have yet to see the ripples from the war wash against the shores of this land.
We will find that the blood of war, and the perversities of occupation will splash against us all.
--(c) '07 maj
{Sources: *Massing, Michael, "Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs, " The New York Review of Books . (12/20/07), pp.82 -7; Fick, Nathaniel, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer , (Mariner: 2007); Wright, Evan, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War (Berkley Caliber:2007.}
Monday, December 17, 2007
Omaha Night By Mumia Abu-Jamal
** Omaha Night **
{col. writ. 12/6/07}
(c) '07 Mumia Abu-Jamal
A young man strolled into a shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska, the navel of the United States, and opens up at stunned passersby.
He has a rifle, but what arms him is a deep, abiding sense of worthlessness, depression and despair. He lost his job at a local McDonald's; and he was recently dumped by his girlfriend.
Before the night was over, eight people, 9 including this young man, would be dead.
Robert Hawkins reportedly shot himself to death to end his killing sprees. He was 19.
In a suicide note left at the place he was staying, he reportedly wrote that he wanted to be famous.
What does that say about this American life that one feels so hopeless, and so empty, at 19?
What does it say about the American fascination with fame? And how do you get fired, /from McDonald's?/ What do you think this young man had to look forward to? Unemployed, with few serious prospects. Feeling unloved -- worthless.
The U.S. economy (for working people) has been in virtual free fall since the ravages of globalization have left a smattering of service jobs in the place of missing manufacturing jobs.
The U.S. Army, in a time when they are, quite frankly, desperate for recruits, wouldn't accept this.
Imagine, if you will, what it must be like to be a 19 year old Black youth in present day America? The product of an educational system that can barely qualify for the name.
What do you think /that/ young man has to look forward to?
Both of these young men, the mall-sprayer and the imaginary one, had their educational experiences under something cynically called /No Child Left Behind/.
One wonders -- how could they be /more/ left behind?
One youth walks into a sprawling mall, its floors and shops chock full of shoppers trying to snag a post Black Friday bargain, knowing full well that he'll never leave it alive.
Another gambles his life in a mindless gang banging, or the urban drug trade, willing to kill or die for a brief glimpse of a life long denied him.
It has often been observed that youth think themselves invulnerable and immortal.
In generations past, perhaps this may've been the case.
But as these events show, some youth are so alienated, so lost, that they look to death with longing, as an escape from a life they find intolerable.
What does that say about us?
--(c) '07 maj
{col. writ. 12/6/07}
(c) '07 Mumia Abu-Jamal
A young man strolled into a shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska, the navel of the United States, and opens up at stunned passersby.
He has a rifle, but what arms him is a deep, abiding sense of worthlessness, depression and despair. He lost his job at a local McDonald's; and he was recently dumped by his girlfriend.
Before the night was over, eight people, 9 including this young man, would be dead.
Robert Hawkins reportedly shot himself to death to end his killing sprees. He was 19.
In a suicide note left at the place he was staying, he reportedly wrote that he wanted to be famous.
What does that say about this American life that one feels so hopeless, and so empty, at 19?
What does it say about the American fascination with fame? And how do you get fired, /from McDonald's?/ What do you think this young man had to look forward to? Unemployed, with few serious prospects. Feeling unloved -- worthless.
The U.S. economy (for working people) has been in virtual free fall since the ravages of globalization have left a smattering of service jobs in the place of missing manufacturing jobs.
The U.S. Army, in a time when they are, quite frankly, desperate for recruits, wouldn't accept this.
Imagine, if you will, what it must be like to be a 19 year old Black youth in present day America? The product of an educational system that can barely qualify for the name.
What do you think /that/ young man has to look forward to?
Both of these young men, the mall-sprayer and the imaginary one, had their educational experiences under something cynically called /No Child Left Behind/.
One wonders -- how could they be /more/ left behind?
One youth walks into a sprawling mall, its floors and shops chock full of shoppers trying to snag a post Black Friday bargain, knowing full well that he'll never leave it alive.
Another gambles his life in a mindless gang banging, or the urban drug trade, willing to kill or die for a brief glimpse of a life long denied him.
It has often been observed that youth think themselves invulnerable and immortal.
In generations past, perhaps this may've been the case.
But as these events show, some youth are so alienated, so lost, that they look to death with longing, as an escape from a life they find intolerable.
What does that say about us?
--(c) '07 maj
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Government Redefining Privacy?
Government seeks to redefine privacy
By PAMELA HESS,
Associated Press Writer 56 minutes ago
A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.
Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, a deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information.
Kerr's comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act.
Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.
The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans' privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering.
The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people's private e-mails and phone calls without a court order between 2001 and 2007.
Some lawmakers, including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appear reluctant to grant immunity. Suits might be the only way to determine how far the government has burrowed into people's privacy without court permission.
The committee is expected to decide this week whether its version of the bill will protect telecommunications companies.
The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco.
Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.
By PAMELA HESS,
Associated Press Writer 56 minutes ago
A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.
Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, a deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information.
Kerr's comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act.
Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.
The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans' privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering.
The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people's private e-mails and phone calls without a court order between 2001 and 2007.
Some lawmakers, including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appear reluctant to grant immunity. Suits might be the only way to determine how far the government has burrowed into people's privacy without court permission.
The committee is expected to decide this week whether its version of the bill will protect telecommunications companies.
The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco.
Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Not Another "Stop Snitching" Report!
The whole so-called "Stop Snitching Campaign" has been so over blown and over reported in the main stream media that people who had never heard of it before a few years ago when Rayco Saunders had a case dismissed as he wore a Stop Snitching T-Shirt into court, are wearing it like a badge of honor. I myself have reservations about cooperation with the authorities but it is related to the use of Snitches to set up Jesus, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luthor King Jr., Chairman Fred Hampton, Mumia Abu-Jamal and the like, my reservations are not related to protecting petty street criminals and drug dealers who are loyal to no one.
Minister Jasiri X and I were both interviewed for a story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently: 'Stop Snitching' code has become a guide for everyone http://www.postgazette.com/pg/07238/812225-391.stm (by Mustafa Ayad) but neither of our quotes made the final story. I guess that either they couldn't handle the truth, or we did not say what they wanted to hear so that they could spin the story the way they wanted.
Where does the lie that the black community does not cooperate wth the police really come from? Criminals and drug dealers snitch and cooperate with the police everyday! (1*) "Informers are a necessary evil, says Cmdr. Maurita Bryant, a 29-year veteran of the Pittsburgh Police Department. "We have to deal with who we have to deal with. ... If a dealer needs to make a deal, he'll tell on his mother. It may not be right, but it's all we have."
(2*) "Omerta" the Italian blood code that has been in effect since long before the "Mafia" has been broken time after time, including infamous "made men" such as Underboss Salvatore "Sammy The Bull" Gravano who testified for the state against John Gotti.
Absent in most stories about "Stop Snitiching are references to (3*) "The Blue Code Of Silence" aka "Blue Wall Of Silence". In fact eveyone seems to get quiet or change the subject whenever we bring it up. Which is probably why Minister Jasiri's nor my words showed up in the previously mentioned article on Snitching in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It is very difficult to cooperate with the authorities when they do not have the trust of the community and they are extremely reluctant to cooperate themselves when an officer makes a mistake or consciously commits a crime against someone in our community.
(4*) "In many communities the police are involved in the drug trade. They either turn a blind eye or actually get a payoff from the drug dealers themselves. If you decide to turn somebody in because of his illegal activity that cop is likely to turn you in to the folks who are committing terror" - Davey D
Does Dick Cheney Snitch? Carl Rove, Alberto Gonzalez? Does George Bush? The biggest proponent of Stop snitching is the U.S. government. This is the most secretive White House in the history of this country, which is mind boggling being that George Bush Sr. was the director of the CIA. stop snitching is not Hip-hop culture it's American Culture. Even deeper, was Judas a Snitch when he cooperated with the authorities against Jesus? Who was later executed on the charges. - Minister Jasiri X
A few weeks ago a young man in the community showed me a piece of paper that his younger brother had brought home. It featured a drawing of a cartoon rat nibbling on a piece of cheese and a "Snitch List" containing the names of 126 people. Because I did not know the origin of the list, my "Media Literacy" training kicked in and I dismissed it as a hoax. I couldn't help but think as I noticed the names of a few people that I knew on the list, how dangerous this list could be on the streets even though no one has a clue to where this information originated from nor who the author of the list was.
In today's dangerous, post 911 paranoid climate, both on the streets and in the government. Rumors and Urban Legends can be enough to place innocent persons in harm's way especially in communities of color (where many people share the same names and nick-names).Gabrille Banks just wrote a story about the "Snitch List" in the PittsburghPost-Gazette: Flyer naming snitches alarms police - http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07238/812256-391.stm
If you ask me it sounds like a "COINTELPRO" styled "disruptive-disinformation operation". First they send around a list of so-called informants of unknown origin, the people in the streets react and respond to it because it has a rumors of validity. What's next once a network of disinformation has been created? Do they target community leaders, black politicians or clergy? everyone is vulnerable to these well plotted attacks, once you get the streets to trust in the validity of miscellaneous propaganda, you can easily spread rumors and distrust in our community.
This is an example of how it works (from "FBI" documents):
(5*) Counterintelligence and Special Operations (1970)
TECHNICAL SERVICES, Forged Documents
Xerox copies of true documents, documents subtly incorporating false information, and entirely fabricated documents would be periodically anonymously mailed to the residence of a key Panther leader. These documents would be on the stationery and in the form used by the police department or by the FBI in disseminating information to the police. FBI documents, when used, would contain police routing or date received notations, clearly indicating they had been pilfered from police files. An attempt would be made to give the Panther recipient the impression the documents were stolen from police files by a disgruntled police employee sympathetic to the Panthers. Director to SAC, San Francisco, May 11, 1970.
ReBulet 5/11/70, concerning a possible disruptive-disinformation operation to be targeted against the National Office of the Black Panther Party (BPP). At this time, San Francisco would hesitate to recommend the furnishing of any fabricated documents originating with the Oakland Police Department or any supposed LHMs from this office. During the last year the BPP was able to obtain what were alleged to have been detailed plans of the Berkeley Police Department for a possible raid on National Headquarters. These plans were published in "The Black Panther" to some embarrassment of the police department.
Attached is a partially completed FD-306. RAY "MASAI" HEWITT, Minister of Education, is based in Los Angeles but often visits National Headquarters. San Francisco proposed the preparation of a "dog eared" and crumpled FD-306 as attached and the placing of the FD-306 in a BPP car that has recently been used by HEWITT or was utilized to transport him. Through [ ] agents would know in advance of HEWITT's arrival at the San Francisco Airport for departure and they will attempt to obtain access to the car and leave the FD-306 in the interior where it might logically be decided that it had been dropped by HEWITT. SAC, San Francisco to Director, June 17, 1970
The Bureau concurs with your view that the BPP would rush to publicize any alleged police or FBI document it received, if such action served its propaganda purposes. However, if the "leaked" material were in itself embarrassing or discrediting to the BPP leadership, such as true exposures of immorality, egotistical or self-serving conduct, or misappropriation of funds, it is unlikely it would be publicized. As envisioned by the Bureau, material initially "leaked" would be of a low-key character consisting of brief items relating to the BPP organization. It would be in the form of crudely typed anonymous letters not identified with a law enforcement agency, but worded in a manner to lead the recipient to believe it was prepared by a sympathetic individual in a police agency. After low-key letters had been mailed over an extended period, portions of carefully selected alleged police documents or reports might be included. Hopefully, the BPP at this point would believe the material was authentic or at least of interest and that it originated with a sympathetic police source. Thus, as outlined in Bulet 5/11/70, a productive disinformation channel would be established whereby we could cause continuing disruption within the Panther national leadership. The Bureau believes the alternate proposal outlined in reSFlet has merit and could very likely be successful. However, as indicated in your letter, this technique cannot be approved because it could result in a Panther murder of one of their leaders. Director to SAC, San Francisco, June 26, 1970 - SAC, Los Angeles to Director, July 29, 1970
Even the use of the crudely drawn Cartoon Rat reminds me of COINTELPRO tactics: (6*) (The FBI created and circulated a coloring book and said it was created by The Black Panthers).
Media Literacy 101:
We really have to be carefull to question the sources of all information that we consume. From TV, Print, Music, Videos, Movies, Video Games, the Internet and word of mouth on the streets.
Learn to critically analyze all messages to detect propaganda, censorship and bias.
When you receive information you have to ask yourself:
What/who is the source of this information?
Is the source credible?
Who is funding the source?
Is the information correct?
Is the information being manipulated or misrepresented?
What am I being asked to do?
Garbage in = Garbage out. It's our lives and the lives of our children that are at stake.Yes, It's that serious!
(1*) Anti-snitch campaign riles police, prosecutors By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-28-stop-snitching_x.htm
(2*) Omerta' is based partly on fear and partly on idealism
(3*) "The Blue Code Of Silence" aka "Blue Wall Of Silence"
(4*) Snitching is big business by Davey D
(5*) Counterintelligence and Special Operationshttp://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/specialops.htm
(6*) The Sabotage Of Legitimate Dissent (The FBI fakes Black Panther Coloring Book) http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COINTELPRO/coloring.html
Paradise GrayOne HOOD
http://www.myspace.com/paradisegray
http://www.myspace.com/onehoodorg
Minister Jasiri X and I were both interviewed for a story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently: 'Stop Snitching' code has become a guide for everyone http://www.postgazette.com/pg/07238/812225-391.stm (by Mustafa Ayad) but neither of our quotes made the final story. I guess that either they couldn't handle the truth, or we did not say what they wanted to hear so that they could spin the story the way they wanted.
Where does the lie that the black community does not cooperate wth the police really come from? Criminals and drug dealers snitch and cooperate with the police everyday! (1*) "Informers are a necessary evil, says Cmdr. Maurita Bryant, a 29-year veteran of the Pittsburgh Police Department. "We have to deal with who we have to deal with. ... If a dealer needs to make a deal, he'll tell on his mother. It may not be right, but it's all we have."
(2*) "Omerta" the Italian blood code that has been in effect since long before the "Mafia" has been broken time after time, including infamous "made men" such as Underboss Salvatore "Sammy The Bull" Gravano who testified for the state against John Gotti.
Absent in most stories about "Stop Snitiching are references to (3*) "The Blue Code Of Silence" aka "Blue Wall Of Silence". In fact eveyone seems to get quiet or change the subject whenever we bring it up. Which is probably why Minister Jasiri's nor my words showed up in the previously mentioned article on Snitching in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It is very difficult to cooperate with the authorities when they do not have the trust of the community and they are extremely reluctant to cooperate themselves when an officer makes a mistake or consciously commits a crime against someone in our community.
(4*) "In many communities the police are involved in the drug trade. They either turn a blind eye or actually get a payoff from the drug dealers themselves. If you decide to turn somebody in because of his illegal activity that cop is likely to turn you in to the folks who are committing terror" - Davey D
Does Dick Cheney Snitch? Carl Rove, Alberto Gonzalez? Does George Bush? The biggest proponent of Stop snitching is the U.S. government. This is the most secretive White House in the history of this country, which is mind boggling being that George Bush Sr. was the director of the CIA. stop snitching is not Hip-hop culture it's American Culture. Even deeper, was Judas a Snitch when he cooperated with the authorities against Jesus? Who was later executed on the charges. - Minister Jasiri X
A few weeks ago a young man in the community showed me a piece of paper that his younger brother had brought home. It featured a drawing of a cartoon rat nibbling on a piece of cheese and a "Snitch List" containing the names of 126 people. Because I did not know the origin of the list, my "Media Literacy" training kicked in and I dismissed it as a hoax. I couldn't help but think as I noticed the names of a few people that I knew on the list, how dangerous this list could be on the streets even though no one has a clue to where this information originated from nor who the author of the list was.
In today's dangerous, post 911 paranoid climate, both on the streets and in the government. Rumors and Urban Legends can be enough to place innocent persons in harm's way especially in communities of color (where many people share the same names and nick-names).Gabrille Banks just wrote a story about the "Snitch List" in the PittsburghPost-Gazette: Flyer naming snitches alarms police - http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07238/812256-391.stm
If you ask me it sounds like a "COINTELPRO" styled "disruptive-disinformation operation". First they send around a list of so-called informants of unknown origin, the people in the streets react and respond to it because it has a rumors of validity. What's next once a network of disinformation has been created? Do they target community leaders, black politicians or clergy? everyone is vulnerable to these well plotted attacks, once you get the streets to trust in the validity of miscellaneous propaganda, you can easily spread rumors and distrust in our community.
This is an example of how it works (from "FBI" documents):
(5*) Counterintelligence and Special Operations (1970)
TECHNICAL SERVICES, Forged Documents
Xerox copies of true documents, documents subtly incorporating false information, and entirely fabricated documents would be periodically anonymously mailed to the residence of a key Panther leader. These documents would be on the stationery and in the form used by the police department or by the FBI in disseminating information to the police. FBI documents, when used, would contain police routing or date received notations, clearly indicating they had been pilfered from police files. An attempt would be made to give the Panther recipient the impression the documents were stolen from police files by a disgruntled police employee sympathetic to the Panthers. Director to SAC, San Francisco, May 11, 1970.
ReBulet 5/11/70, concerning a possible disruptive-disinformation operation to be targeted against the National Office of the Black Panther Party (BPP). At this time, San Francisco would hesitate to recommend the furnishing of any fabricated documents originating with the Oakland Police Department or any supposed LHMs from this office. During the last year the BPP was able to obtain what were alleged to have been detailed plans of the Berkeley Police Department for a possible raid on National Headquarters. These plans were published in "The Black Panther" to some embarrassment of the police department.
Attached is a partially completed FD-306. RAY "MASAI" HEWITT, Minister of Education, is based in Los Angeles but often visits National Headquarters. San Francisco proposed the preparation of a "dog eared" and crumpled FD-306 as attached and the placing of the FD-306 in a BPP car that has recently been used by HEWITT or was utilized to transport him. Through [ ] agents would know in advance of HEWITT's arrival at the San Francisco Airport for departure and they will attempt to obtain access to the car and leave the FD-306 in the interior where it might logically be decided that it had been dropped by HEWITT. SAC, San Francisco to Director, June 17, 1970
The Bureau concurs with your view that the BPP would rush to publicize any alleged police or FBI document it received, if such action served its propaganda purposes. However, if the "leaked" material were in itself embarrassing or discrediting to the BPP leadership, such as true exposures of immorality, egotistical or self-serving conduct, or misappropriation of funds, it is unlikely it would be publicized. As envisioned by the Bureau, material initially "leaked" would be of a low-key character consisting of brief items relating to the BPP organization. It would be in the form of crudely typed anonymous letters not identified with a law enforcement agency, but worded in a manner to lead the recipient to believe it was prepared by a sympathetic individual in a police agency. After low-key letters had been mailed over an extended period, portions of carefully selected alleged police documents or reports might be included. Hopefully, the BPP at this point would believe the material was authentic or at least of interest and that it originated with a sympathetic police source. Thus, as outlined in Bulet 5/11/70, a productive disinformation channel would be established whereby we could cause continuing disruption within the Panther national leadership. The Bureau believes the alternate proposal outlined in reSFlet has merit and could very likely be successful. However, as indicated in your letter, this technique cannot be approved because it could result in a Panther murder of one of their leaders. Director to SAC, San Francisco, June 26, 1970 - SAC, Los Angeles to Director, July 29, 1970
Even the use of the crudely drawn Cartoon Rat reminds me of COINTELPRO tactics: (6*) (The FBI created and circulated a coloring book and said it was created by The Black Panthers).
Media Literacy 101:
We really have to be carefull to question the sources of all information that we consume. From TV, Print, Music, Videos, Movies, Video Games, the Internet and word of mouth on the streets.
Learn to critically analyze all messages to detect propaganda, censorship and bias.
When you receive information you have to ask yourself:
What/who is the source of this information?
Is the source credible?
Who is funding the source?
Is the information correct?
Is the information being manipulated or misrepresented?
What am I being asked to do?
Garbage in = Garbage out. It's our lives and the lives of our children that are at stake.Yes, It's that serious!
(1*) Anti-snitch campaign riles police, prosecutors By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-28-stop-snitching_x.htm
(2*) Omerta' is based partly on fear and partly on idealism
(3*) "The Blue Code Of Silence" aka "Blue Wall Of Silence"
(4*) Snitching is big business by Davey D
(5*) Counterintelligence and Special Operationshttp://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/specialops.htm
(6*) The Sabotage Of Legitimate Dissent (The FBI fakes Black Panther Coloring Book) http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COINTELPRO/coloring.html
Paradise GrayOne HOOD
http://www.myspace.com/paradisegray
http://www.myspace.com/onehoodorg
FDA Allows Irradiation for Meat
Labels Required
In December, the US Department of Agriculture gave the go ahead to allow the food industry to irradiate meat, including such products as ground beef, steaks, and pork chops. All irradiated packaged meat and meat products will have to be labeled with the radura international symbol for irradiation, and a statement that the product was "treated by irradiation." Irradiated meat used in other products such as sausages and bologna also must be labeled.
For unpackaged meat products that do not have labels, the statement and logo must be displayed at the point of sale to consumers.
The labeling requirements do not apply to meat bought through foodservice operations, such as restaurants, school cafeterias or hospitals. This is a major loophole, because fast-food restaurants are expected to be major purchasers of irradiated meat. The US Food and Drug Administration approved the use of irradiation technology for red meat in December 1997, but the USDA took nearly two years to develop the new regulations.
The new irradiation rules for meat will go into effect on February 22. Last year, the USDA received thousands of comments from consumers, including many OCA members, demanding that labeling be required and prominently displayed for irradiated foods.
Irradiation has been approved for poultry products since 1992, but the industry has been slow to adopt the technology because of the cost, and consistent polls indicating that consumers don't want irradiated food. Meat packers such as IBP Inc. are expected to start test marketing irradiated ground beef to probe consumer response.
Immediately after the USDA announcement the Grocery Manufacturers of America announced that they would jumpstart a public education campaign on the benefits of irradiation. There have been no long-term studies on the effects of eating irradiated food.
However, a number of studies have found that eating irradiated food can have detrimental effects. Mice and rats have been found to have a greater incidence of kidney disease after eating irradiated food. Another study found testicular damage in rats fed irradiated food. Yet another study in India found that malnourished children eating irradiated wheat may develop an increase in abnormal white blood cells, a condition known as polyploidy.
Unfortunately, irradiation is seen as shortcut by the meat industry to avoid addressing dirty slaughterhouses, rampant bacterial contamination, and other impacts of industrial agriculture. Certified organic meat cannot be irradiated.
For more on the potential hazards of irradiated foods, go to: http://www.purefood.org/irradlink.html
Organic View - An e-mail publication of the Organic Consumers Association v.2 n.1 January 23, 2000
In December, the US Department of Agriculture gave the go ahead to allow the food industry to irradiate meat, including such products as ground beef, steaks, and pork chops. All irradiated packaged meat and meat products will have to be labeled with the radura international symbol for irradiation, and a statement that the product was "treated by irradiation." Irradiated meat used in other products such as sausages and bologna also must be labeled.
For unpackaged meat products that do not have labels, the statement and logo must be displayed at the point of sale to consumers.
The labeling requirements do not apply to meat bought through foodservice operations, such as restaurants, school cafeterias or hospitals. This is a major loophole, because fast-food restaurants are expected to be major purchasers of irradiated meat. The US Food and Drug Administration approved the use of irradiation technology for red meat in December 1997, but the USDA took nearly two years to develop the new regulations.
The new irradiation rules for meat will go into effect on February 22. Last year, the USDA received thousands of comments from consumers, including many OCA members, demanding that labeling be required and prominently displayed for irradiated foods.
Irradiation has been approved for poultry products since 1992, but the industry has been slow to adopt the technology because of the cost, and consistent polls indicating that consumers don't want irradiated food. Meat packers such as IBP Inc. are expected to start test marketing irradiated ground beef to probe consumer response.
Immediately after the USDA announcement the Grocery Manufacturers of America announced that they would jumpstart a public education campaign on the benefits of irradiation. There have been no long-term studies on the effects of eating irradiated food.
However, a number of studies have found that eating irradiated food can have detrimental effects. Mice and rats have been found to have a greater incidence of kidney disease after eating irradiated food. Another study found testicular damage in rats fed irradiated food. Yet another study in India found that malnourished children eating irradiated wheat may develop an increase in abnormal white blood cells, a condition known as polyploidy.
Unfortunately, irradiation is seen as shortcut by the meat industry to avoid addressing dirty slaughterhouses, rampant bacterial contamination, and other impacts of industrial agriculture. Certified organic meat cannot be irradiated.
For more on the potential hazards of irradiated foods, go to: http://www.purefood.org/irradlink.html
Organic View - An e-mail publication of the Organic Consumers Association v.2 n.1 January 23, 2000
Food Irradiation Q&As
Question: Is irradiated food safe to eat?
Answer: No.
Irradiated food has caused a myriad of health problems in laboratory animals (and people in a few studies), including chromosomal damage, immune and reproductive problems, kidney damage, tumors, internal bleeding, low birth weight, and nutritional muscular dystrophy.
Irradiation leads to the formation of Unique Radiolytic Products, mysterious chemical compounds that have not been identified or studied for their potential harm to humans. These products are free radicals, which set off chain reactions in the body that destroy antioxidants, tear apart cell membranes, and make the body more susceptible to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, liver damage, muscular breakdown, and other serious health problems.
Irradiation does nothing to remove the feces, urine, pus, vomit and tumors often left on beef, chicken, and lamb as the result of filthy and inhumane slaughterhouse conditions. These conditions have worsened as conveyer belts have speeded up (400 cow carcasses are processed per hour nowadays) and public oversight of slaughterhouses has been reduced.
Irradiation can spawn mutant forms of E. coli, Salmonella and other harmful bacteria, making them more difficult to kill.
Irradiation destroys vitamins, nutrients and essential fatty acids, including up to 95 percent of vitamin A in chicken and 86 percent of vitamin B in oats. In some foods, irradiation can actually intensify the vitamin and nutrient loss caused by cooking.
Irradiation can lead to the formation of carcinogens and other toxic chemicals such as benzene, formaldehyde, octane, butane and methyl propane in certain foods.
Irradiation can corrupt the flavor, texture and other physical properties of certain foods, leading to meat that smells like a wet dog and onions that turn brown.
Irradiation kills beneficial microorganisms, such as the yeasts and molds that help keep botulism at bay, as well as the microorganisms that create the aromas that tell us when food has gone bad.
Question: Are irradiation facilities safe?
Answer: Not always.
According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 45 accidents at U.S. (food and medical-supply) irradiation plants were recorded from 1974-89, at least two of which were covered up by irradiation company executives, some of whom were criminally charged in federal court and given prison time.
Irradiation plant workers are exposed to dangerous radiation hazards. Several have died or been exposed to near-fatal doses of radiation at facilities throughout the world.
Irradiation plants emit smog-forming, ground-level ozone into the environment.
Neighbors and the environment are endangered by plants that use radioactive cobalt-60 or cesium-137, which must be replenished after several years of use. Most of the cobalt-60 comes from a facility in Canada, creating transportation hazards when "fresh" material is driven to and waste driven from the plants.
Irradiation encourages the proliferation of nuclear technology at a point in history when a vast majority of Americans and people throughout the world are demanding that we back away from the use of nuclear material. A facility in Florida is owned by a company associated with a Canadian outfit that has sold nuclear technology to China, India and Pakistan.
Question: Did U.S. officials thoroughly study irradiation before legalizing it?
Answer: No.
The FDA relied on only 5 of more than 400 scientific studies to determine that irradiated food is safe to eat. Of those five, only three have been published in peer-reviewed journals. In two of the studies, researchers used doses of radiation at or far below those approved by the FDA, rendering the studies virtually if not completely useless.
The agency has rejected every study that has drawn into question the safety of irradiation.
The FDA used 38 studies that agency scientists once declared "deficient" to support the safety of irradiated food.
The FDA has not followed its own rules that require elaborate toxicological experiments be conducted before legalizing irradiation, including a requirement that the Unique Radiolytic Products generated by the process be subjected to in-depth testing.
The FDA has begun to conduct and approve expedited reviews of food irradiation applications from industry, admitting-in at least one-that certain packaging materials may not be safe when exposed to radiation.
No long-term studies have been done on the consumption of irradiated food, a problem the FDA admits but has done nothing to correct.
Question: Can the research into food irradiation be trusted?
Answer: Not all of it.
Research conducted at public universities is increasingly industry-funded. A prominent Iowa State University professor who's been researching food irradiation for many years was just hired by Titan Corporation, a leading irradiation company (and erstwhile defense contractor). And, Titan recently entered a research contract with Texas A&M University.
Much of the early research into food irradiation, done during the 1960s and 1970s, was conducted by an Army-hired firm that was eventually convicted of fraud for fabricating the results of its work.
Very little toxicological testing has been done on irradiated food during the past 20 years. New, updated tests should be performed with the benefit of improved scientific methods.
Question: Is food irradiation good for the economy?
Answer: No.
Food irradiation encourages the further consolidation of the food production, processing, distribution, marketing and retailing industries by giving the advantage to giant companies that can afford this prohibitively expensive technology. In the process, the food product marketplace is further homogenized and family farmers are put at a greater disadvantage.
If the U.S. government allows imported food to be irradiated-as it may do in the near future-more of our fruit, vegetables and meat will come from other countries, resulting in the closure of farms and the loss of agricultural jobs here at home. Plus, this imported food will be older, more bland and less nutritious than food grown in the U.S.
Food irradiation adds unnecessarily to the cost of food when less expensive alternatives are available. A recent survey by Consumers for Science in the Public Interest showed that irradiated ground beef being sold in the Midwest cost up to 75 cents more per pound-more than 40 percent higher than non-irradiated beef-and that the irradiated beef contained 25 percent fat.
Question: Are consumers receiving credible information about food irradiation?
Answer: No.
Many "unbiased" supporters of food irradiation in reality work on behalf of the food industry. The corporate-funded American Council on Science and Health, for instance, is chaired by A. Alan Moghissi, whose anti-environment and anti-consumer positions include fighting the removal of asbestos from schools and proclaiming that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a good thing for the agriculture industry.
Food irradiation companies have been increasingly successful in getting the media to call irradiation "pasteurization," which is an entirely different process by which microorganisms are killed by quickly heating and cooling food.
Companies that irradiate with "e-beam" technology such as the Titan Corporation are seeking to distinguish themselves from companies that irradiate with gamma rays from radioactive sources. This is highly misleading, as both e-beam (electrons fired from a linear accelerator at nearly the speed of light) and gamma rays (high-frequency electromagnetic waves) are forms of ionizing radiation-meaning that they obliterate the bonds that hold atoms and molecules together and create new chemical compounds.
Furthermore, Titan and other irradiation companies are comparing irradiating food with cooking food in a microwave oven. This comparison is bogus. The radiation used to irradiate food is ionizing, meaning that it drastically changes the chemical composition of food (see above).
Microwave radiation is non-ionizing, meaning that the chemical structure of food is largely left intact.
Question: Should vegetarians care about irradiation?
Answer: Yes.
Food processing companies aren't irradiating just meat. Fruit and vegetables are being irradiated, too-all of which suffer nutrient destruction as bad or worse than in meat. Spices such as garlic powder and paprika are being irradiated as well, and can be added to processed foods without being labeled.
Everybody should be concerned about E. coli contamination. Irradiation does nothing to prevent this and other harmful bacteria from winding up in drinking water supplies. Just last may, E. coli-tainted drinking water killed at least seven people and sickened more than 2,000 others in Ontario, Canada.
Public Citizen's Critical Mass and Energy Project
Answer: No.
Irradiated food has caused a myriad of health problems in laboratory animals (and people in a few studies), including chromosomal damage, immune and reproductive problems, kidney damage, tumors, internal bleeding, low birth weight, and nutritional muscular dystrophy.
Irradiation leads to the formation of Unique Radiolytic Products, mysterious chemical compounds that have not been identified or studied for their potential harm to humans. These products are free radicals, which set off chain reactions in the body that destroy antioxidants, tear apart cell membranes, and make the body more susceptible to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, liver damage, muscular breakdown, and other serious health problems.
Irradiation does nothing to remove the feces, urine, pus, vomit and tumors often left on beef, chicken, and lamb as the result of filthy and inhumane slaughterhouse conditions. These conditions have worsened as conveyer belts have speeded up (400 cow carcasses are processed per hour nowadays) and public oversight of slaughterhouses has been reduced.
Irradiation can spawn mutant forms of E. coli, Salmonella and other harmful bacteria, making them more difficult to kill.
Irradiation destroys vitamins, nutrients and essential fatty acids, including up to 95 percent of vitamin A in chicken and 86 percent of vitamin B in oats. In some foods, irradiation can actually intensify the vitamin and nutrient loss caused by cooking.
Irradiation can lead to the formation of carcinogens and other toxic chemicals such as benzene, formaldehyde, octane, butane and methyl propane in certain foods.
Irradiation can corrupt the flavor, texture and other physical properties of certain foods, leading to meat that smells like a wet dog and onions that turn brown.
Irradiation kills beneficial microorganisms, such as the yeasts and molds that help keep botulism at bay, as well as the microorganisms that create the aromas that tell us when food has gone bad.
Question: Are irradiation facilities safe?
Answer: Not always.
According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 45 accidents at U.S. (food and medical-supply) irradiation plants were recorded from 1974-89, at least two of which were covered up by irradiation company executives, some of whom were criminally charged in federal court and given prison time.
Irradiation plant workers are exposed to dangerous radiation hazards. Several have died or been exposed to near-fatal doses of radiation at facilities throughout the world.
Irradiation plants emit smog-forming, ground-level ozone into the environment.
Neighbors and the environment are endangered by plants that use radioactive cobalt-60 or cesium-137, which must be replenished after several years of use. Most of the cobalt-60 comes from a facility in Canada, creating transportation hazards when "fresh" material is driven to and waste driven from the plants.
Irradiation encourages the proliferation of nuclear technology at a point in history when a vast majority of Americans and people throughout the world are demanding that we back away from the use of nuclear material. A facility in Florida is owned by a company associated with a Canadian outfit that has sold nuclear technology to China, India and Pakistan.
Question: Did U.S. officials thoroughly study irradiation before legalizing it?
Answer: No.
The FDA relied on only 5 of more than 400 scientific studies to determine that irradiated food is safe to eat. Of those five, only three have been published in peer-reviewed journals. In two of the studies, researchers used doses of radiation at or far below those approved by the FDA, rendering the studies virtually if not completely useless.
The agency has rejected every study that has drawn into question the safety of irradiation.
The FDA used 38 studies that agency scientists once declared "deficient" to support the safety of irradiated food.
The FDA has not followed its own rules that require elaborate toxicological experiments be conducted before legalizing irradiation, including a requirement that the Unique Radiolytic Products generated by the process be subjected to in-depth testing.
The FDA has begun to conduct and approve expedited reviews of food irradiation applications from industry, admitting-in at least one-that certain packaging materials may not be safe when exposed to radiation.
No long-term studies have been done on the consumption of irradiated food, a problem the FDA admits but has done nothing to correct.
Question: Can the research into food irradiation be trusted?
Answer: Not all of it.
Research conducted at public universities is increasingly industry-funded. A prominent Iowa State University professor who's been researching food irradiation for many years was just hired by Titan Corporation, a leading irradiation company (and erstwhile defense contractor). And, Titan recently entered a research contract with Texas A&M University.
Much of the early research into food irradiation, done during the 1960s and 1970s, was conducted by an Army-hired firm that was eventually convicted of fraud for fabricating the results of its work.
Very little toxicological testing has been done on irradiated food during the past 20 years. New, updated tests should be performed with the benefit of improved scientific methods.
Question: Is food irradiation good for the economy?
Answer: No.
Food irradiation encourages the further consolidation of the food production, processing, distribution, marketing and retailing industries by giving the advantage to giant companies that can afford this prohibitively expensive technology. In the process, the food product marketplace is further homogenized and family farmers are put at a greater disadvantage.
If the U.S. government allows imported food to be irradiated-as it may do in the near future-more of our fruit, vegetables and meat will come from other countries, resulting in the closure of farms and the loss of agricultural jobs here at home. Plus, this imported food will be older, more bland and less nutritious than food grown in the U.S.
Food irradiation adds unnecessarily to the cost of food when less expensive alternatives are available. A recent survey by Consumers for Science in the Public Interest showed that irradiated ground beef being sold in the Midwest cost up to 75 cents more per pound-more than 40 percent higher than non-irradiated beef-and that the irradiated beef contained 25 percent fat.
Question: Are consumers receiving credible information about food irradiation?
Answer: No.
Many "unbiased" supporters of food irradiation in reality work on behalf of the food industry. The corporate-funded American Council on Science and Health, for instance, is chaired by A. Alan Moghissi, whose anti-environment and anti-consumer positions include fighting the removal of asbestos from schools and proclaiming that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a good thing for the agriculture industry.
Food irradiation companies have been increasingly successful in getting the media to call irradiation "pasteurization," which is an entirely different process by which microorganisms are killed by quickly heating and cooling food.
Companies that irradiate with "e-beam" technology such as the Titan Corporation are seeking to distinguish themselves from companies that irradiate with gamma rays from radioactive sources. This is highly misleading, as both e-beam (electrons fired from a linear accelerator at nearly the speed of light) and gamma rays (high-frequency electromagnetic waves) are forms of ionizing radiation-meaning that they obliterate the bonds that hold atoms and molecules together and create new chemical compounds.
Furthermore, Titan and other irradiation companies are comparing irradiating food with cooking food in a microwave oven. This comparison is bogus. The radiation used to irradiate food is ionizing, meaning that it drastically changes the chemical composition of food (see above).
Microwave radiation is non-ionizing, meaning that the chemical structure of food is largely left intact.
Question: Should vegetarians care about irradiation?
Answer: Yes.
Food processing companies aren't irradiating just meat. Fruit and vegetables are being irradiated, too-all of which suffer nutrient destruction as bad or worse than in meat. Spices such as garlic powder and paprika are being irradiated as well, and can be added to processed foods without being labeled.
Everybody should be concerned about E. coli contamination. Irradiation does nothing to prevent this and other harmful bacteria from winding up in drinking water supplies. Just last may, E. coli-tainted drinking water killed at least seven people and sickened more than 2,000 others in Ontario, Canada.
Public Citizen's Critical Mass and Energy Project
The Dangers of Irradiation Facilities
A Legacy of Deaths, Injuries, Accidents and Cover-ups
Supporters of food irradiation often say that irradiation facilities are safe. They say accidents rarely happen. They say injuries and deaths are infrequent. They say the public is in no danger.
The historical record says otherwise.
Since the 1960s, dozens of accidents -- as well as numerous acts of wrongdoing -- have been reported at irradiation facilities throughout the United States and the world.
Radioactive water has been flushed down toilets into the public sewer system. Radioactive waste has been thrown into the garbage. Radiation has leaked. Facilities have caught fire. Equipment has malfunctioned.
Workers have lost fingers, hands, legs and, in several cases, their lives. Company executives have been charged with cover-ups and, in one case, sentenced to federal prison.
The debate over food irradiation would not be complete without an understanding of the risks associated with the technology itself.
Here are some examples of what can go wrong.
Accidents at Gamma-Ray Facilities:
Decatur, Georgia
In June 1988, a capsule of radioactive cesium-137 -- a waste product from nuclear weapons production -- sprung a leak at a Radiation Sterilizers plant near Atlanta. Though the leak was contained to the site, two of the three exposed workers spread radioactivity to their cars and homes.
And an estimated 70,000 milk cartons, contact lens solution boxes and other containers were shipped out after they were splashed with radioactive water. Only about 900 of the contaminated containers were recalled. The ensuing taxpayer-funded cleanup cost more than $30 million, after which a government report concluded that "the public health and safety could have been compromised."
Dover, New Jersey
In June 1986, two senior executives of Palo Alto, CA-based International Neutronics were indicted on federal charges of conspiracy, mail fraud and wire fraud in connection with an October 1982 spill of 600 gallons of water contaminated by radioactive cobalt-60.
After a pump malfunctioned, workers were instructed to pour the radioactive water down a shower drain that emptied into the public sewer system.
Workers were also ordered to wear their radiation-detection "badges" in such a way to falsify radiation levels. In the words of a federal prosecutor, company executives "bamboozled" Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) inspectors by delaying an inspection of the facility, where food, gems, chemicals and medical supplies were irradiated.
A $2 million cleanup included the cost to dispose of radioactive material at a nuclear waste dump in South Carolina. Company vice president Eugene O'Sullivan, a former member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, was convicted of conspiracy and fraud in October 1986.
Honolulu, Hawaii
In 1979, decontamination began at the state-run Hawaiian Developmental Irradiator at Fort Armstrong where, years earlier, radioactive water leaked onto the roof and the front lawn. Nearly 100,000 pounds of steel, 250 cubic feet of concrete and 1,100 cubic feet of soil were removed and taken to the nuclear waste dump in Hanford, Wash. The plant was shut down in 1980 and the remaining cobalt-60 was shipped to the University of Hawaii. Hawaii taxpayers paid most of the $500,000 cleanup.
Parsippany, New Jersey
In June 1974, William McKimm, the radiation director at an Isomedix cobalt-60 facility, was exposed to a near-fatal dose of 400 rems while irradiating medical supplies. McKimm was critically injured and hospitalized for a month. Two years later, a fire near the cobalt storage pool released chemicals into the pool that caused the cobalt rods to corrode and leak. Radioactive water was then flushed down the toilet into the public sewer system.
Eventually, concrete around the cobalt-60 pool, as well as the toilet and bathroom plumbing, was found to be radioactive and taken to a nuclear waste dump. The amount of radiation released into the public sewer system was never determined.
Rockaway, New Jersey
In 1977, Michael Pierson was exposed to a near-fatal dose of 150-300 rems at a Radiation Technology facility when a system designed to protect workers from radioactive cobalt-60 failed. In 1986, the NRC cited company executives for intentionally disabling the system.
In 1988 -- after more than 30 NRC violations, including one for throwing out radioactive garbage with the trash -- company president Martin Welt and nuclear engineer William Jouris were charged in federal court with 11 counts of conspiracy to defraud the NRC, making false statements and violating the Atomic Energy Act. Welt, who threatened to fire workers who didn't lie to NRC investigators, was also charged with obstruction of justice. Both men were convicted. Jouris was sentenced to probation; Welt was sentenced to two years in prison, placed on three years probation and fined $50,000.
Accidents at Electron-Beam Facilities
In 1991, a Maryland worker ignored safety warnings and received a 5,000-rad dose from a 3 million electron-volt linear accelerator. He lost four fingers.
In 1992, a mishap at a 15 million electron-volt linear accelerator in Hanoi cost the facility's research director a hand and several fingers.
Fatal Accidents in Other Countries
In February 1989, three El Salvadoran workers suffered serious burns and radiation sickness when they were exposed to cobalt-60. None had received formal training to operate the equipment, which was made by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. Eventually, one worker died and the others had their legs amputated.
In 1975, an Italian worker was exposed to cobalt-60 when he bypassed all safety controls, climbed onto a conveyor belt and entered the irradiation chamber. He died 12 days later.
In 1982, a Norwegian worker received a 1,000-rem cobalt-60 dose while trying fix a jammed conveyor belt. He died 13 days later.
In 1990, an Israeli worker was exposed to cobalt-60 after an alarm failed. He died 36 days later.
In 1991, a worker in Belarus was exposed to cobalt-60 after several safety features were circumvented. He died 113 days later.
Public Citizen
Supporters of food irradiation often say that irradiation facilities are safe. They say accidents rarely happen. They say injuries and deaths are infrequent. They say the public is in no danger.
The historical record says otherwise.
Since the 1960s, dozens of accidents -- as well as numerous acts of wrongdoing -- have been reported at irradiation facilities throughout the United States and the world.
Radioactive water has been flushed down toilets into the public sewer system. Radioactive waste has been thrown into the garbage. Radiation has leaked. Facilities have caught fire. Equipment has malfunctioned.
Workers have lost fingers, hands, legs and, in several cases, their lives. Company executives have been charged with cover-ups and, in one case, sentenced to federal prison.
The debate over food irradiation would not be complete without an understanding of the risks associated with the technology itself.
Here are some examples of what can go wrong.
Accidents at Gamma-Ray Facilities:
Decatur, Georgia
In June 1988, a capsule of radioactive cesium-137 -- a waste product from nuclear weapons production -- sprung a leak at a Radiation Sterilizers plant near Atlanta. Though the leak was contained to the site, two of the three exposed workers spread radioactivity to their cars and homes.
And an estimated 70,000 milk cartons, contact lens solution boxes and other containers were shipped out after they were splashed with radioactive water. Only about 900 of the contaminated containers were recalled. The ensuing taxpayer-funded cleanup cost more than $30 million, after which a government report concluded that "the public health and safety could have been compromised."
Dover, New Jersey
In June 1986, two senior executives of Palo Alto, CA-based International Neutronics were indicted on federal charges of conspiracy, mail fraud and wire fraud in connection with an October 1982 spill of 600 gallons of water contaminated by radioactive cobalt-60.
After a pump malfunctioned, workers were instructed to pour the radioactive water down a shower drain that emptied into the public sewer system.
Workers were also ordered to wear their radiation-detection "badges" in such a way to falsify radiation levels. In the words of a federal prosecutor, company executives "bamboozled" Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) inspectors by delaying an inspection of the facility, where food, gems, chemicals and medical supplies were irradiated.
A $2 million cleanup included the cost to dispose of radioactive material at a nuclear waste dump in South Carolina. Company vice president Eugene O'Sullivan, a former member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, was convicted of conspiracy and fraud in October 1986.
Honolulu, Hawaii
In 1979, decontamination began at the state-run Hawaiian Developmental Irradiator at Fort Armstrong where, years earlier, radioactive water leaked onto the roof and the front lawn. Nearly 100,000 pounds of steel, 250 cubic feet of concrete and 1,100 cubic feet of soil were removed and taken to the nuclear waste dump in Hanford, Wash. The plant was shut down in 1980 and the remaining cobalt-60 was shipped to the University of Hawaii. Hawaii taxpayers paid most of the $500,000 cleanup.
Parsippany, New Jersey
In June 1974, William McKimm, the radiation director at an Isomedix cobalt-60 facility, was exposed to a near-fatal dose of 400 rems while irradiating medical supplies. McKimm was critically injured and hospitalized for a month. Two years later, a fire near the cobalt storage pool released chemicals into the pool that caused the cobalt rods to corrode and leak. Radioactive water was then flushed down the toilet into the public sewer system.
Eventually, concrete around the cobalt-60 pool, as well as the toilet and bathroom plumbing, was found to be radioactive and taken to a nuclear waste dump. The amount of radiation released into the public sewer system was never determined.
Rockaway, New Jersey
In 1977, Michael Pierson was exposed to a near-fatal dose of 150-300 rems at a Radiation Technology facility when a system designed to protect workers from radioactive cobalt-60 failed. In 1986, the NRC cited company executives for intentionally disabling the system.
In 1988 -- after more than 30 NRC violations, including one for throwing out radioactive garbage with the trash -- company president Martin Welt and nuclear engineer William Jouris were charged in federal court with 11 counts of conspiracy to defraud the NRC, making false statements and violating the Atomic Energy Act. Welt, who threatened to fire workers who didn't lie to NRC investigators, was also charged with obstruction of justice. Both men were convicted. Jouris was sentenced to probation; Welt was sentenced to two years in prison, placed on three years probation and fined $50,000.
Accidents at Electron-Beam Facilities
In 1991, a Maryland worker ignored safety warnings and received a 5,000-rad dose from a 3 million electron-volt linear accelerator. He lost four fingers.
In 1992, a mishap at a 15 million electron-volt linear accelerator in Hanoi cost the facility's research director a hand and several fingers.
Fatal Accidents in Other Countries
In February 1989, three El Salvadoran workers suffered serious burns and radiation sickness when they were exposed to cobalt-60. None had received formal training to operate the equipment, which was made by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. Eventually, one worker died and the others had their legs amputated.
In 1975, an Italian worker was exposed to cobalt-60 when he bypassed all safety controls, climbed onto a conveyor belt and entered the irradiation chamber. He died 12 days later.
In 1982, a Norwegian worker received a 1,000-rem cobalt-60 dose while trying fix a jammed conveyor belt. He died 13 days later.
In 1990, an Israeli worker was exposed to cobalt-60 after an alarm failed. He died 36 days later.
In 1991, a worker in Belarus was exposed to cobalt-60 after several safety features were circumvented. He died 113 days later.
Public Citizen
The Dangers of Irradiation Facilities
The Dangers of Irradiation Facilities
A Legacy of Deaths, Injuries, Accidents and Cover-ups
Supporters of food irradiation often say that irradiation facilities are safe. They say accidents rarely happen. They say injuries and deaths are infrequent. They say the public is in no danger.
The historical record says otherwise.
Since the 1960s, dozens of accidents -- as well as numerous acts of wrongdoing -- have been reported at irradiation facilities throughout the United States and the world.
Radioactive water has been flushed down toilets into the public sewer system. Radioactive waste has been thrown into the garbage. Radiation has leaked. Facilities have caught fire. Equipment has malfunctioned. Workers have lost fingers, hands, legs and, in several cases, their lives.
Company executives have been charged with cover-ups and, in one case, sentenced to federal prison.
The debate over food irradiation would not be complete without an understanding of the risks associated with the technology itself.
Here are some examples of what can go wrong.
Accidents at Gamma-Ray Facilities:
Decatur, Georgia
In June 1988, a capsule of radioactive cesium-137 -- a waste product from nuclear weapons production -- sprung a leak at a Radiation Sterilizers plant near Atlanta. Though the leak was contained to the site, two of the three exposed workers spread radioactivity to their cars and homes.
And an estimated 70,000 milk cartons, contact lens solution boxes and other containers were shipped out after they were splashed with radioactive water. Only about 900 of the contaminated containers were recalled. The ensuing taxpayer-funded cleanup cost more than $30 million, after which a government report concluded that "the public health and safety could have been compromised."
Dover, New Jersey
In June 1986, two senior executives of Palo Alto, CA-based International Neutronics were indicted on federal charges of conspiracy, mail fraud and wire fraud in connection with an October 1982 spill of 600 gallons of water contaminated by radioactive cobalt-60.
After a pump malfunctioned, workers were instructed to pour the radioactive water down a shower drain that emptied into the public sewer system.
Workers were also ordered to wear their radiation-detection "badges" in such a way to falsify radiation levels. In the words of a federal prosecutor, company executives "bamboozled" Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) inspectors by delaying an inspection of the facility, where food, gems, chemicals and medical supplies were irradiated.
A $2 million cleanup included the cost to dispose of radioactive material at a nuclear waste dump in South Carolina. Company vice president Eugene O'Sullivan, a former member of the U.S.
Atomic Energy Commission, was convicted of conspiracy and fraud in October 1986.
Honolulu, Hawaii
In 1979, decontamination began at the state-run Hawaiian Developmental Irradiator at Fort Armstrong where, years earlier, radioactive water leaked onto the roof and the front lawn. Nearly 100,000 pounds of steel, 250 cubic feet of concrete and 1,100 cubic feet of soil were removed and taken to the nuclear waste dump in Hanford, Wash. The plant was shut down in 1980 and the remaining cobalt-60 was shipped to the University of Hawaii. Hawaii taxpayers paid most of the $500,000 cleanup.
Parsippany, New Jersey
In June 1974, William McKimm, the radiation director at an Isomedix cobalt-60 facility, was exposed to a near-fatal dose of 400 rems while irradiating medical supplies. McKimm was critically injured and hospitalized for a month. Two years later, a fire near the cobalt storage pool released chemicals into the pool that caused the cobalt rods to corrode and leak.
Radioactive water was then flushed down the toilet into the public sewer system.
Eventually, concrete around the cobalt-60 pool, as well as the toilet and bathroom plumbing, was found to be radioactive and taken to a nuclear waste dump. The amount of radiation released into the public sewer system was never determined.
Rockaway, New Jersey
In 1977, Michael Pierson was exposed to a near-fatal dose of 150-300 rems at a Radiation Technology facility when a system designed to protect workers from radioactive cobalt-60 failed. In 1986, the NRC cited company executives for intentionally disabling the system.
In 1988 -- after more than 30 NRC violations, including one for throwing out radioactive garbage with the trash -- company president Martin Welt and nuclear engineer William Jouris were charged in federal court with 11 counts of conspiracy to defraud the NRC, making false statements and violating the Atomic Energy Act. Welt, who threatened to fire workers who didn't lie to NRC investigators, was also charged with obstruction of justice. Both men were convicted. Jouris was sentenced to probation; Welt was sentenced to two years in prison, placed on three years probation and fined $50,000.
Accidents at Electron-Beam Facilities
In 1991, a Maryland worker ignored safety warnings and received a 5,000-rad dose from a 3 million electron-volt linear accelerator. He lost four fingers.
In 1992, a mishap at a 15 million electron-volt linear accelerator in Hanoi cost the facility's research director a hand and several fingers.
Fatal Accidents in Other Countries
In February 1989, three El Salvadoran workers suffered serious burns and radiation sickness when they were exposed to cobalt-60.
None had received formal training to operate the equipment, which was made by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. Eventually, one worker died and the others had their legs amputated.
In 1975, an Italian worker was exposed to cobalt-60 when he bypassed all safety controls, climbed onto a conveyor belt and entered the irradiation chamber. He died 12 days later.
In 1982, a Norwegian worker received a 1,000-rem cobalt-60 dose while trying fix a jammed conveyor belt. He died 13 days later.
In 1990, an Israeli worker was exposed to cobalt-60 after an alarm failed. He died 36 days later.
In 1991, a worker in Belarus was exposed to cobalt-60 after several safety features were circumvented. He died 113 days later.
Public Citizen
A Legacy of Deaths, Injuries, Accidents and Cover-ups
Supporters of food irradiation often say that irradiation facilities are safe. They say accidents rarely happen. They say injuries and deaths are infrequent. They say the public is in no danger.
The historical record says otherwise.
Since the 1960s, dozens of accidents -- as well as numerous acts of wrongdoing -- have been reported at irradiation facilities throughout the United States and the world.
Radioactive water has been flushed down toilets into the public sewer system. Radioactive waste has been thrown into the garbage. Radiation has leaked. Facilities have caught fire. Equipment has malfunctioned. Workers have lost fingers, hands, legs and, in several cases, their lives.
Company executives have been charged with cover-ups and, in one case, sentenced to federal prison.
The debate over food irradiation would not be complete without an understanding of the risks associated with the technology itself.
Here are some examples of what can go wrong.
Accidents at Gamma-Ray Facilities:
Decatur, Georgia
In June 1988, a capsule of radioactive cesium-137 -- a waste product from nuclear weapons production -- sprung a leak at a Radiation Sterilizers plant near Atlanta. Though the leak was contained to the site, two of the three exposed workers spread radioactivity to their cars and homes.
And an estimated 70,000 milk cartons, contact lens solution boxes and other containers were shipped out after they were splashed with radioactive water. Only about 900 of the contaminated containers were recalled. The ensuing taxpayer-funded cleanup cost more than $30 million, after which a government report concluded that "the public health and safety could have been compromised."
Dover, New Jersey
In June 1986, two senior executives of Palo Alto, CA-based International Neutronics were indicted on federal charges of conspiracy, mail fraud and wire fraud in connection with an October 1982 spill of 600 gallons of water contaminated by radioactive cobalt-60.
After a pump malfunctioned, workers were instructed to pour the radioactive water down a shower drain that emptied into the public sewer system.
Workers were also ordered to wear their radiation-detection "badges" in such a way to falsify radiation levels. In the words of a federal prosecutor, company executives "bamboozled" Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) inspectors by delaying an inspection of the facility, where food, gems, chemicals and medical supplies were irradiated.
A $2 million cleanup included the cost to dispose of radioactive material at a nuclear waste dump in South Carolina. Company vice president Eugene O'Sullivan, a former member of the U.S.
Atomic Energy Commission, was convicted of conspiracy and fraud in October 1986.
Honolulu, Hawaii
In 1979, decontamination began at the state-run Hawaiian Developmental Irradiator at Fort Armstrong where, years earlier, radioactive water leaked onto the roof and the front lawn. Nearly 100,000 pounds of steel, 250 cubic feet of concrete and 1,100 cubic feet of soil were removed and taken to the nuclear waste dump in Hanford, Wash. The plant was shut down in 1980 and the remaining cobalt-60 was shipped to the University of Hawaii. Hawaii taxpayers paid most of the $500,000 cleanup.
Parsippany, New Jersey
In June 1974, William McKimm, the radiation director at an Isomedix cobalt-60 facility, was exposed to a near-fatal dose of 400 rems while irradiating medical supplies. McKimm was critically injured and hospitalized for a month. Two years later, a fire near the cobalt storage pool released chemicals into the pool that caused the cobalt rods to corrode and leak.
Radioactive water was then flushed down the toilet into the public sewer system.
Eventually, concrete around the cobalt-60 pool, as well as the toilet and bathroom plumbing, was found to be radioactive and taken to a nuclear waste dump. The amount of radiation released into the public sewer system was never determined.
Rockaway, New Jersey
In 1977, Michael Pierson was exposed to a near-fatal dose of 150-300 rems at a Radiation Technology facility when a system designed to protect workers from radioactive cobalt-60 failed. In 1986, the NRC cited company executives for intentionally disabling the system.
In 1988 -- after more than 30 NRC violations, including one for throwing out radioactive garbage with the trash -- company president Martin Welt and nuclear engineer William Jouris were charged in federal court with 11 counts of conspiracy to defraud the NRC, making false statements and violating the Atomic Energy Act. Welt, who threatened to fire workers who didn't lie to NRC investigators, was also charged with obstruction of justice. Both men were convicted. Jouris was sentenced to probation; Welt was sentenced to two years in prison, placed on three years probation and fined $50,000.
Accidents at Electron-Beam Facilities
In 1991, a Maryland worker ignored safety warnings and received a 5,000-rad dose from a 3 million electron-volt linear accelerator. He lost four fingers.
In 1992, a mishap at a 15 million electron-volt linear accelerator in Hanoi cost the facility's research director a hand and several fingers.
Fatal Accidents in Other Countries
In February 1989, three El Salvadoran workers suffered serious burns and radiation sickness when they were exposed to cobalt-60.
None had received formal training to operate the equipment, which was made by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. Eventually, one worker died and the others had their legs amputated.
In 1975, an Italian worker was exposed to cobalt-60 when he bypassed all safety controls, climbed onto a conveyor belt and entered the irradiation chamber. He died 12 days later.
In 1982, a Norwegian worker received a 1,000-rem cobalt-60 dose while trying fix a jammed conveyor belt. He died 13 days later.
In 1990, an Israeli worker was exposed to cobalt-60 after an alarm failed. He died 36 days later.
In 1991, a worker in Belarus was exposed to cobalt-60 after several safety features were circumvented. He died 113 days later.
Public Citizen
Food Irradiation Will Be Used To Mask Filthy Slaughtering and Food Processing Practices
Food irradiation dose limit would be removed, health and safety regulations discarded under new plan, substandard food could be "treated" with high-dose radiation in unlicensed and dirty facilities.
A proposed international food irradiation standard winding its way through legal channels in Europe could jeopardize the quality and safety of food sold to United States consumers.
Under an international plan endorsed March 16, virtually every assurance that irradiated food will be of good quality, be handled by trained workers, and be processed under safe and clean conditions in government-inspected facilities would disappear. The proposal also would remove the international dose limit for food irradiation.
The proposal was endorsed in The Hague, Netherlands, by the Codex Committee on Food Additives and Contaminants (CCFAC), which advises the Codex Alimentarius ("Food Code") Commission. Operating under the auspices of the United Nations and World Health Organization (WHO), the Codex sets global food safety standards for more than 160 nations, representing about 97 percent of the world's population. The United States is one of the 160 nations. "This proposal confirms that irradiation will be used to mask filthy slaughtering and food processing practices," said Wenonah Hauter, director of the Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. "These antiquated ideas set back food safety more than 100 years, to a time when people routinely died from eating contaminated food. It is an outrage to the highest order. People throughout the world have cause for great worry."
Under international trade rules, countries that are members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) can challenge the standards of other countries by claiming the standards are trade barriers. If the WTO agrees, countries whose standards are challenged must amend the standard or face trade sanctions.
U.S. standards governing irradiated food are much stricter than what Codex is proposing. That means that if the Codex measure is approved, other countries could challenge US standards through the WTO.
A successful challenge could pressure the US to weaken its standards.
The proposal would amend the Codex's 22-year-old food irradiation standard by stating that food companies "should" rather than "shall" comply with the standards. Many of the changes were proposed without any advance notice and approved at meetings that were closed to the public.
Under the looser standards, irradiated food would no longer have to be "of suitable quality," in "acceptable hygienic condition," or "handled ... according to good manufacturing practices."
Additionally, food irradiation facilities would no longer have to comply with "safety" and "good hygiene practices," or be staffed by "adequate, trained and competent personnel." Nor would they have to be licensed or inspected by government officials, or maintain certain records on radioactive activities.
Also, food irradiation would no longer have to be carried out "commensurate with ... technological and public health purposes" or conducted "in accordance with good radiation processing practice."
The changes could place numerous US food and nuclear safety regulations at risk.
Among them are Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules requiring all irradiation facilities using radioactive material to be licensed and regularly inspected; Department of Agriculture rules requiring beef, pork and poultry products to meet certain quality standards; and USDA and Food and Drug Administration rules requiring food to be processed under hygienic conditions.
CCFAC also endorsed removing the current irradiation Codex dose limit of 10 kiloGray, which is the equivalent of about 330 million chest X-rays. When food is exposed to such doses of ionizing radiation, the flavor, texture, odor, nutritional integrity and chemical composition of food can change significantly. Very few of the new chemicals that are formed in irradiated food have been studied for toxicity. Most US foods are dosed with between 1 and 7.5 kiloGray.
One chemical that is a byproduct of the irradiation process, called 2-DCB, was found in 1998 to cause cellular and genetic damage in human and rat cells.
The WHO is continuing to research the potential toxicity and mutagenicity of the chemical, which is a radiation byproduct of a certain fatty acid found in beef, chicken, pork, lamb, duck, eggs, mangoes, papayas, peanuts, seafood and many other foods.
The 2-DCB studies were conducted in Germany, one of several European Union countries that is skeptical of the purported benefits of irradiation. At the recent meeting in The Hague, the German delegation objected to the CCFAC proposal.
The proposal is about halfway through the approval process. It next will be debated by the full Codex Commission, which meets July 2-7 in Geneva.
Public Citizen has been vigorously opposing efforts to weaken international food irradiation standards by organizing nongovernmental organizations and writing letters to Codex delegates. In February, Public Citizen sent letters of concern to all US delegates to CCFAC, all international delegates to the full Codex Commission, and to CCFAC Chair S.P.J. Hagenstein.
Public Citizen also has challenged the WHO's assertion that irradiated food is safe to eat by sending letters to top officials within the organization.
For more information on this issue from Public Citizen, visit www.citizen.org/cmep
A proposed international food irradiation standard winding its way through legal channels in Europe could jeopardize the quality and safety of food sold to United States consumers.
Under an international plan endorsed March 16, virtually every assurance that irradiated food will be of good quality, be handled by trained workers, and be processed under safe and clean conditions in government-inspected facilities would disappear. The proposal also would remove the international dose limit for food irradiation.
The proposal was endorsed in The Hague, Netherlands, by the Codex Committee on Food Additives and Contaminants (CCFAC), which advises the Codex Alimentarius ("Food Code") Commission. Operating under the auspices of the United Nations and World Health Organization (WHO), the Codex sets global food safety standards for more than 160 nations, representing about 97 percent of the world's population. The United States is one of the 160 nations. "This proposal confirms that irradiation will be used to mask filthy slaughtering and food processing practices," said Wenonah Hauter, director of the Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. "These antiquated ideas set back food safety more than 100 years, to a time when people routinely died from eating contaminated food. It is an outrage to the highest order. People throughout the world have cause for great worry."
Under international trade rules, countries that are members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) can challenge the standards of other countries by claiming the standards are trade barriers. If the WTO agrees, countries whose standards are challenged must amend the standard or face trade sanctions.
U.S. standards governing irradiated food are much stricter than what Codex is proposing. That means that if the Codex measure is approved, other countries could challenge US standards through the WTO.
A successful challenge could pressure the US to weaken its standards.
The proposal would amend the Codex's 22-year-old food irradiation standard by stating that food companies "should" rather than "shall" comply with the standards. Many of the changes were proposed without any advance notice and approved at meetings that were closed to the public.
Under the looser standards, irradiated food would no longer have to be "of suitable quality," in "acceptable hygienic condition," or "handled ... according to good manufacturing practices."
Additionally, food irradiation facilities would no longer have to comply with "safety" and "good hygiene practices," or be staffed by "adequate, trained and competent personnel." Nor would they have to be licensed or inspected by government officials, or maintain certain records on radioactive activities.
Also, food irradiation would no longer have to be carried out "commensurate with ... technological and public health purposes" or conducted "in accordance with good radiation processing practice."
The changes could place numerous US food and nuclear safety regulations at risk.
Among them are Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules requiring all irradiation facilities using radioactive material to be licensed and regularly inspected; Department of Agriculture rules requiring beef, pork and poultry products to meet certain quality standards; and USDA and Food and Drug Administration rules requiring food to be processed under hygienic conditions.
CCFAC also endorsed removing the current irradiation Codex dose limit of 10 kiloGray, which is the equivalent of about 330 million chest X-rays. When food is exposed to such doses of ionizing radiation, the flavor, texture, odor, nutritional integrity and chemical composition of food can change significantly. Very few of the new chemicals that are formed in irradiated food have been studied for toxicity. Most US foods are dosed with between 1 and 7.5 kiloGray.
One chemical that is a byproduct of the irradiation process, called 2-DCB, was found in 1998 to cause cellular and genetic damage in human and rat cells.
The WHO is continuing to research the potential toxicity and mutagenicity of the chemical, which is a radiation byproduct of a certain fatty acid found in beef, chicken, pork, lamb, duck, eggs, mangoes, papayas, peanuts, seafood and many other foods.
The 2-DCB studies were conducted in Germany, one of several European Union countries that is skeptical of the purported benefits of irradiation. At the recent meeting in The Hague, the German delegation objected to the CCFAC proposal.
The proposal is about halfway through the approval process. It next will be debated by the full Codex Commission, which meets July 2-7 in Geneva.
Public Citizen has been vigorously opposing efforts to weaken international food irradiation standards by organizing nongovernmental organizations and writing letters to Codex delegates. In February, Public Citizen sent letters of concern to all US delegates to CCFAC, all international delegates to the full Codex Commission, and to CCFAC Chair S.P.J. Hagenstein.
Public Citizen also has challenged the WHO's assertion that irradiated food is safe to eat by sending letters to top officials within the organization.
For more information on this issue from Public Citizen, visit www.citizen.org/cmep
Friday, July 20, 2007
The Beating of Black Lawyers by Mumia Abu-Jamal
The Beating of Black Lawyers by Mumia Abu Jamal
1) 2:24 Short Radio Essay Mp3prisonradio.org/audio/mum...rrensA.mp3
2) 2:46 Long Radio Essay Mp3prisonradio.org/audio/mum...rrensB.mp3
The Beating of Black Lawyers
[col. writ. 7/5/07] (c) '07 Mumia Abu-Jamal
No matter who we are, or where we live, folks in Black America have grown up with the lesson of the importance of education as a tool of social mobility.
That's why lawyers are generally so highly regarded in many Black communities, as people who have undergone years of legal education.
But that respect doesn't go far beyond the community. Cops in Brooklyn, New York recently showed what they thought of lawyers by beating them up! Well-known human rights attorney Michael Tarif Warren, and his wife, Evelyn (also a lawyer), were driving down Brooklyn's Vanderbilt Avenue, when they spotted a Black youth being chased by cops across a McDonald's parking lot.
The youngster was tackled to the ground and handcuffed, when the Warrens saw a Sgt. Talvy begin kicking him in the head, the ribs, and stomping on his neck.
The 2 attorneys stopped their car, walked within 10 feet of the beating, identified themselves (as lawyers), and told the cops to stop beating the youth, and simply take him to the nearest precinct.
The Sergeant's response was to shout, "I don't give a f**k who you are, get the f**k back in your car!" The Warrens returned to the car, where Michael began to write down notes of what he saw, and the license plate numbers of the cop cars present.
Before he could finish his notes Sgt, Talvy walks up to the car, and began to repeatedly punch him through the window, shouting "Get out of the car!"
Warren was then dragged out of his car, his clothes ripped in the process. His wife, obviously upset at these events, demanded to know why he was attacked, and was promptly punched in the face by this same cop! Both Warrens were arrested and driven to the 77th precinct and charged with obstruction, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. Within hours hundreds of Brooklynites converged on the precinct, demanding the release of the Warrens. People came from all walks of life, for Tarif has a long history, almost 30 years, of representing people who have been victims of police or prosecutorial misconduct in the city. Groups like the December 12th Movement, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the International Action Center, and many others quickly mobilized support for the Warrens.
In an interview in the New York Daily Challenge, Evelyn Warren spoke for many people when she said, "We are professionals, if they do this to us in broad daylight on a crowded street, what do they do in the dark when no one is around? That's what I'm concerned about." She and others called not only for the removal of Talvy, but of Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly as well. When Black lawyers are beaten in the streets, what about average folks? What about you?
(c) '07 maj
[Sourcce: Ajamu, Amadi, "Civil Rights Attorney Assaulted", Daily Challenge (N.Y.), Mon., June 25, 2007, p.3.}
1) 2:24 Short Radio Essay Mp3prisonradio.org/audio/mum...rrensA.mp3
2) 2:46 Long Radio Essay Mp3prisonradio.org/audio/mum...rrensB.mp3
The Beating of Black Lawyers
[col. writ. 7/5/07] (c) '07 Mumia Abu-Jamal
No matter who we are, or where we live, folks in Black America have grown up with the lesson of the importance of education as a tool of social mobility.
That's why lawyers are generally so highly regarded in many Black communities, as people who have undergone years of legal education.
But that respect doesn't go far beyond the community. Cops in Brooklyn, New York recently showed what they thought of lawyers by beating them up! Well-known human rights attorney Michael Tarif Warren, and his wife, Evelyn (also a lawyer), were driving down Brooklyn's Vanderbilt Avenue, when they spotted a Black youth being chased by cops across a McDonald's parking lot.
The youngster was tackled to the ground and handcuffed, when the Warrens saw a Sgt. Talvy begin kicking him in the head, the ribs, and stomping on his neck.
The 2 attorneys stopped their car, walked within 10 feet of the beating, identified themselves (as lawyers), and told the cops to stop beating the youth, and simply take him to the nearest precinct.
The Sergeant's response was to shout, "I don't give a f**k who you are, get the f**k back in your car!" The Warrens returned to the car, where Michael began to write down notes of what he saw, and the license plate numbers of the cop cars present.
Before he could finish his notes Sgt, Talvy walks up to the car, and began to repeatedly punch him through the window, shouting "Get out of the car!"
Warren was then dragged out of his car, his clothes ripped in the process. His wife, obviously upset at these events, demanded to know why he was attacked, and was promptly punched in the face by this same cop! Both Warrens were arrested and driven to the 77th precinct and charged with obstruction, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. Within hours hundreds of Brooklynites converged on the precinct, demanding the release of the Warrens. People came from all walks of life, for Tarif has a long history, almost 30 years, of representing people who have been victims of police or prosecutorial misconduct in the city. Groups like the December 12th Movement, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the International Action Center, and many others quickly mobilized support for the Warrens.
In an interview in the New York Daily Challenge, Evelyn Warren spoke for many people when she said, "We are professionals, if they do this to us in broad daylight on a crowded street, what do they do in the dark when no one is around? That's what I'm concerned about." She and others called not only for the removal of Talvy, but of Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly as well. When Black lawyers are beaten in the streets, what about average folks? What about you?
(c) '07 maj
[Sourcce: Ajamu, Amadi, "Civil Rights Attorney Assaulted", Daily Challenge (N.Y.), Mon., June 25, 2007, p.3.}
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Santa's Iniquity
The front of Santa's pants had stiffened and bulged,
In filth and indecency, the people indulged.
He is a demon, a brute that is hellish,
In spreading out lies, Santa danced and embellished.
Prate iniquity made Santa Claus a popular fellow,
At Black people he taunted and bellowed.
His smile reveals teeth that are nasty and yellow,
Santa was frontin' like he was cool and mellow.
Santa told Muslims, he is not a disbeliever,
He was making mockery, being a crooked deceiver.
Of himself, Santa Claus wanted all to resemble,
The chastisement of Allah made Santa Claus tremble.
Despite his acrimonious behavior, Santa's time was lengthened,
But Santa's power base was weakened, not strengthened.
Santa used Black people and had them marooned,
Santa Claus was livid when he was impugned.
Intemperate and ignoble, the truth made Santa squeamish,
Astute and odious, the righteous know he is schemish.
For the world's wealth, Santa Devil is rapacious,
Santa Claus corrupted the righteous and the sagacious.
Voraciously profiting off the poor, Santa paid them cheap,
It was easy to do, for the masses were asleep.
Santa fed the people bad food and gelatin,
Within his guilded closet, lie hidden his skeletons.
Copyright © 1999 Aquil Aziz. All Rights Reserved.
In filth and indecency, the people indulged.
He is a demon, a brute that is hellish,
In spreading out lies, Santa danced and embellished.
Prate iniquity made Santa Claus a popular fellow,
At Black people he taunted and bellowed.
His smile reveals teeth that are nasty and yellow,
Santa was frontin' like he was cool and mellow.
Santa told Muslims, he is not a disbeliever,
He was making mockery, being a crooked deceiver.
Of himself, Santa Claus wanted all to resemble,
The chastisement of Allah made Santa Claus tremble.
Despite his acrimonious behavior, Santa's time was lengthened,
But Santa's power base was weakened, not strengthened.
Santa used Black people and had them marooned,
Santa Claus was livid when he was impugned.
Intemperate and ignoble, the truth made Santa squeamish,
Astute and odious, the righteous know he is schemish.
For the world's wealth, Santa Devil is rapacious,
Santa Claus corrupted the righteous and the sagacious.
Voraciously profiting off the poor, Santa paid them cheap,
It was easy to do, for the masses were asleep.
Santa fed the people bad food and gelatin,
Within his guilded closet, lie hidden his skeletons.
Copyright © 1999 Aquil Aziz. All Rights Reserved.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Bush Property Seized--Trading with the Enemy
Chapter - II - The Hitler Project
Bush Property Seized--Trading with the Enemy
In October 1942, ten months after entering World War II, America was preparing its first assault against Nazi military forces. Prescott Bush was managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman. His 18-year-old son George, the future U.S. President, had just begun training to become a naval pilot. On Oct. 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City which were being conducted by Prescott Bush.
Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over the Union Banking Corporation, in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.'s stock shares, all of which were owned by Prescott Bush, E. Roland `` Bunny '' Harriman, three Nazi executives, and two other associates of Bush.@s1
The order seizing the bank `` vests '' (seizes) `` all of the capital stock of Union Banking Corporation, a New York corporation, '' and names the holders of its shares as:
`` E. Roland Harriman--3991 shares ''[chairman and director of Union Banking Corp. (UBC); this is `` Bunny '' Harriman, described by Prescott Bush as a place holder who didn't get much into banking affairs; Prescott managed his personal investments]
`` Cornelis Lievense--4 shares ''[president and director of UBC; New York resident banking functionary for the Nazis]
`` Harold D. Pennington--1 share ''[treasurer and director of UBC; an office manager employed by Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman]
`` Ray Morris--1 share ''
[director of UBC; partner of Bush and the Harrimans]
`` Prescott S. Bush--1 share ''[director of UBC, which was co-founded and sponsored by his father-in-law George Walker; senior managing partner for E. Roland Harriman and Averell Harriman]
`` H.J. Kouwenhoven--1 share ''[director of UBC; organized UBC as the emissary of Fritz Thyssen in negotiations with George Walker and Averell Harriman; managing director of UBC's Netherlands affiliate under Nazi occupation; industrial executive in Nazi Germany; director and chief foreign financial executive of the German Steel Trust]
`` Johann G. Groeninger--1 share ''[director of UBC and of its Netherlands affiliate; industrial executive in Nazi Germany]
`` all of which shares are held for the benefit of ... members of the Thyssen family, [and] is property of nationals ... of a designated enemy country.... ''
By Oct. 26, 1942, U.S. troops were under way for North Africa. On Oct. 28, the government issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation.@s2
U.S. forces landed under fire near Algiers on Nov. 8, 1942; heavy combat raged throughout November. Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation, long managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on Nov. 17, 1942. In this action, the government announced that it was seizing only the Nazi interests, leaving the Nazis' U.S. partners to carry on the business.@s3
These and other actions taken by the U.S. government in wartime were, tragically, too little and too late. President Bush's family had already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany; in financing and managing the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the development of Nazi genocide theories and racial propaganda, with their well-known results.
The facts presented here must be known, and their implications reflected upon, for a proper understanding of President George Herbert Walker Bush and of the danger to mankind that he represents. The President's family fortune was largely a result of the Hitler project. The powerful Anglo-American family associations, which later boosted him into the Central Intelligence Agency and up to the White House, were his father's partners in the Hitler project.
President Franklin Roosevelt's Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news,@s4 explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the Union Banking Corporation was run for the `` Thyssen family '' of `` Germany and/or Hungary ''--`` nationals ... of a designated enemy country. ''
By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union Banking Corp. were legally front men for the Nazis, the government avoided the more important historical issue: In what way were Hitler's Nazis themselves hired, armed and instructed by the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush was an executive manager? Let us examine the Harriman-Bush Hitler project from the 1920s until it was partially broken up, to seek an answer for that question.
Origin and Extent of the Project
Fritz Thyssen and his business partners are universally recognized as the most important German financiers of Adolf Hitler's takeover of Germany. At the time of the order seizing the Thyssen family's Union Banking Corp., Mr. Fritz Thyssen had already published his famous book, I Paid Hitler,@s5 admitting that he had financed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement since October 1923. Thyssen's role as the leading early backer of Hitler's grab for power in Germany had been noted by U.S. diplomats in Berlin in 1932.@s6 The order seizing the Bush-Thyssen bank was curiously quiet and modest about the identity of the perpetrators who had been nailed.
But two weeks before the official order, government investigators had reported secretly that `` W. Averell Harriman was in Europe sometime prior to 1924 and at that time became acquainted with Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist. '' Harriman and Thyssen agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York. `` [C]ertain of [Harriman's] associates would serve as directors.... '' Thyssen agent `` H. J. Kouwenhoven ... came to the United States ... prior to 1924 for conferences with the Harriman Company in this connection.... ''@s7
When exactly was `` Harriman in Europe sometime prior to 1924 ''? In fact, he was in Berlin in 1922 to set up the Berlin branch of W.A. Harriman & Co. under George Walker's presidency.
The Union Banking Corporation was established formally in 1924, as a unit in the Manhattan offices of W.A. Harriman & Co., interlocking with the Thyssen-owned Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS) in the Netherlands. The investigators concluded that `` the Union Banking Corporation has since its inception handled funds chiefly supplied to it through the Dutch bank by the Thyssen interests for American investment. ''
Thus by personal agreement between Averell Harriman and Fritz Thyssen in 1922, W.A. Harriman & Co. (alias Union Banking Corporation) would be transferring funds back and forth between New York and the `` Thyssen interests '' in Germany. By putting up about $400,000, the Harriman organization would be joint owner and manager of Thyssen's banking operations outside of Germany.
How important was the Nazi enterprise for which President Bush's father was the New York banker?
The 1942 U.S. government investigative report said that Bush's Nazi-front bank was an interlocking concern with the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works Corporation or German Steel Trust) led by Fritz Thyssen and his two brothers. After the war, Congressional investigators probed the Thyssen interests, Union Banking Corp. and related Nazi units. The investigation showed that the Vereinigte Stahlwerke had produced the following approximate proportions of total German national output:
50.8% of Nazi Germany's pig iron41.4% of Nazi Germany's universal plate36.0% of Nazi Germany's heavy plate38.5% of Nazi Germany's galvanized sheet45.5% of Nazi Germany's pipes and tubes22.1% of Nazi Germany's wire35.0% of Nazi Germany's explosives.@s8
Prescott Bush became vice president of W.A. Harriman & Co. in 1926. That same year, a friend of Harriman and Bush set up a giant new organization for their client Fritz Thyssen, prime sponsor of politician Adolf Hitler. The new German Steel Trust, Germany's largest industrial corporation, was organized in 1926 by Wall Street banker Clarence Dillon. Dillon was the old comrade of Prescott Bush's father Sam Bush from the `` Merchants of Death '' bureau in World War I.
In return for putting up $70 million to create his organization, majority owner Thyssen gave the Dillon Read company two or more representatives on the board of the new Steel Trust.@s9
Thus there is a division of labor: Thyssen's own confidential accounts, for political and related purposes, were run through the Walker-Bush organization; the German Steel Trust did its corporate banking through Dillon Read.
The Walker-Bush firm's banking activities were not just politically neutral money-making ventures which happened to coincide with the aims of German Nazis. All of the firm's European business in those days was organized around anti-democratic political forces.
In 1927, criticism of their support for totalitarianism drew this retort from Bert Walker, written from Kennebunkport to Averell Harriman: `` It seems to me that the suggestion in connection with Lord Bearsted's views that we withdraw from Russia smacks somewhat of the impertinent.... I think that we have drawn our line and should hew to it. ''@s1@s0
Averell Harriman met with Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. A representative of the firm subsequently telegraphed good news back to his chief executive Bert Walker: `` ... During these last days ... Mussolini ... has examined and approved our c[o]ntract 15 June. ''@s1@s1
The great financial collapse of 1929-31 shook America, Germany and Britain, weakening all governments. It also made the hard-pressed Prescott Bush even more willing to do whatever was necessary to retain his new place in the world. It was in this crisis that certain Anglo-Americans determined on the installation of a Hitler regime in Germany.
W.A. Harriman & Co., well-positioned for this enterprise and rich in assets from their German and Russian business, merged with the British-American investment house, Brown Brothers, on January 1, 1931. Bert Walker retired to his own G.H. Walker & Co. This left the Harriman brothers, Prescott Bush and Thatcher M. Brown as the senior partners of the new Brown Brothers Harriman firm. (The London, England branch of the Brown family firm continued operating under its historic name--Brown, Shipley.)
Robert A. Lovett also came over as a partner from Brown Brothers. His father, E.H. Harriman's lawyer and railroad chief, had been on the War Industries Board with Prescott's father. Though he remained a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, the junior Lovett soon replaced his father as chief executive of Union Pacific Railroad.
Brown Brothers had a racial tradition that fitted it well for the Hitler project! American patriots had cursed its name back in U.S. Civil War days. Brown Brothers, with offices in the U.S.A. and in England, had carried on their ships fully 75 percent of the slave cotton from the American South over to British mill owners. Now in 1931, the virtual dictator of world finance, Bank of England Governor Montagu Collet Norman, was a former Brown Brothers partner, whose grandfather had been boss of Brown Brothers during the U.S. Civil War. Montagu Norman was known as the most avid of Hitler's supporters within British ruling circles, and Norman's intimacy with this firm was essential to his management of the Hitler project.
In 1931, while Prescott Bush ran the New York office of Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott's partner was Montagu Norman's intimate friend Thatcher Brown. The Bank of England chief always stayed at the home of Prescott's partner on his hush-hush trips to New York. Prescott Bush concentrated on the firm's German activities, and Thatcher Brown saw to their business in old England, under the guidance of his mentor Montagu Norman.@s1@s2
Hitler's Ladder to Power
Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany January 30, 1933, and absolute dictator in March 1933, after two years of expensive and violent lobbying and electioneering. Two affiliates of the Bush-Harriman organization played great parts in this criminal undertaking: Thyssen's German Steel Trust; and the Hamburg-Amerika Line and several of its executives.@s1@s3
Let us look more closely at the Bush family's German partners.
Fritz Thyssen told Allied interrogators after the war about some of his financial support for the Nazi Party: `` In 1930 or 1931 ... I told [Hitler's deputy Rudolph] Hess ... I would arrange a credit for him with a Dutch bank in Rotterdam, the Bank fu@aur Handel und Schiff [i.e. Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS), the Harriman-Bush affiliate]. I arranged the credit ... he would pay it back in three years.... I chose a Dutch bank because I did not want to be mixed up with German banks in my position, and because I thought it was better to do business with a Dutch bank, and I thought I would have the Nazis a little more in my hands... .
`` The credit was about 250-300,000 [gold] marks--about the sum I had given before. The loan has been repaid in part to the Dutch bank, but I think some money is still owing on it.... ''@s1@s4
The overall total of Thyssen's political donations and loans to the Nazis was well over a million dollars, including funds he raised from others--in a period of terrible money shortage in Germany.
Friedrich Flick was the major co-owner of the German Steel Trust with Fritz Thyssen, Thyssen's long-time collaborator and occasional competitor. In preparation for the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, the U.S. government said that Flick was `` one of leading financiers and industrialists who from 1932 contributed large sums to the Nazi Party ... member of `Circle of Friends' of Himmler who contributed large sums to the SS. ''@s1@s5
Flick, like Thyssen, financed the Nazis to maintain their private armies called Schutzstaffel (S.S. or Black Shirts) and Sturmabteilung (S.A., storm troops or Brown Shirts).
The Flick-Harriman partnership was directly supervised by Prescott Bush, President Bush's father, and by George Walker, President Bush's grandfather.
The Harriman-Walker Union Banking Corp. arrangements for the German Steel Trust had made them bankers for Flick and his vast operations in Germany by no later than 1926.
The Harriman Fifteen Corporation (George Walker, president, Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman, sole directors) held a substantial stake in the Silesian Holding Co. at the time of the merger with Brown Brothers, Jan. 1, 1931. This holding correlated to Averell Harriman's chairmanship of the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, the American group owning one-third of a complex of steel-making, coal-mining and zinc-mining activities in Germany and Poland, in which Friedrich Flick owned two-thirds.@s1@s6
The Nuremberg prosecutor characterized Flick as follows:
`` Proprietor and head of a large group of industrial enterprises (coal and iron mines, steel producing and fabricating plants) ... `Wehrwirtschaftsfuh@aurer', 1938 [title awarded to prominent industrialists for merit in armaments drive--`Military Economy Leader'].... ''@s1@s7
For this buildup of the Hitler war machine with coal, steel and arms production, using slave laborers, the Nazi Flick was condemned to seven years in prison at the Nuremberg trials; he served three years. With friends in New York and London, however, Flick lived into the 1970s and died a billionaire.
On March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush--then director of the German Steel Trust's Union Banking Corporation--initiated an alert to the absent Averell Harriman about a problem which had developed in the Flick partnership.@s1@s8 Bush sent Harriman a clipping from the New York Times of that day, which reported that the Polish government was fighting back against American and German stockholders who controlled `` Poland's largest industrial unit, the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company.... ''
The Times article continued: `` The company has long been accused of mismanagement, excessive borrowing, fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in securities. Warrants were issued in December for several directors accused of tax evasions. They were German citizens and they fled. They were replaced by Poles. Herr Flick, regarding this as an attempt to make the company's board entirely Polish, retaliated by restricting credits until the new Polish directors were unable to pay the workmen regularly. ''
The Times noted that the company's mines and mills `` employ 25,000 men and account for 45 percent of Poland's total steel output and 12 percent of her coal production. Two-thirds of the company's stock is owned by Friedrich Flick, a leading German steel industrialist, and the remainder is owned by interests in the United States. ''
In view of the fact that a great deal of Polish output was being exported to Hitler Germany under depression conditions, the Polish government thought that Prescott Bush, Harriman and their Nazi partners should at least pay full taxes on their Polish holdings. The U.S. and Nazi owners responded with a lockout. The letter to Harriman in Washington reported a cable from their European representative: `` Have undertaken new steps London Berlin ... please establish friendly relations with Polish Ambassador [in Washington]. ''
A 1935 Harriman Fifteen Corporation memo from George Walker announced an agreement had been made `` in Berlin '' to sell an 8,000 block of their shares in Consolidated Silesian Steel.@s1@s9 But the dispute with Poland did not deter the Bush family from continuing its partnership with Flick.
Nazi tanks and bombs `` settled '' this dispute in September, 1939 with the invasion of Poland, beginning World War II. The Nazi army had been equipped by Flick, Harriman, Walker and Bush, with materials essentially stolen from Poland.
There were probably few people at the time who could appreciate the irony, that when the Soviets also attacked and invaded Poland from the East, their vehicles were fueled by oil pumped from Baku wells revived by the Harriman/Walker/Bush enterprise.
Three years later, nearly a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of the Nazis' share in the Silesian-American Corporation under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Enemy nationals were said to own 49 percent of the common stock and 41.67 percent of the preferred stock of the company.
The order characterized the company as a `` business enterprise within the United States, owned by [a front company in] Zurich, Switzerland, and held for the benefit of Bergwerksgesellschaft George von Giesche's Erben, a German corporation.... ''@s2@s0
Bert Walker was still the senior director of the company, which he had founded back in 1926 simultaneously with the creation of the German Steel Trust. Ray Morris, Prescott's partner from Union Banking Corp. and Brown Brothers Harriman, was also a director.
The investigative report prior to the government crackdown explained the `` NATURE OF BUSINESS: The subject corporation is an American holding company for German and Polish subsidiaries, which own large and valuable coal and zinc mines in Silesia, Poland and Germany. Since September 1939, these properties have been in the possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country in its war effort. ''@s2@s1
The report noted that the American stockholders hoped to regain control of the European properties after the war.
Control of Nazi Commerce
Bert Walker had arranged the credits Harriman needed to take control of the Hamburg-Amerika Line back in 1920. Walker had organized the American Ship and Commerce Corp. as a unit of the W.A. Harriman & Co., with contractual power over Hamburg-Amerika's affairs.
As the Hitler project went into high gear, Harriman-Bush shares in American Ship and Commerce Corp. were held by the Harriman Fifteen Corp., run by Prescott Bush and Bert Walker.@s2@s2
It was a convenient stroll for the well-tanned, athletic, handsome Prescott Bush: From the Brown Brothers Harriman skyscraper at 59 Wall Street--where he was senior managing partner, confidential investments manager and adviser to Averell and his brother `` Bunny ''--he walked across to the Harriman Fifteen Corporation at One Wall Street, otherwise known as G.H. Walker & Co.--and around the corner to his subsidiary offices at 39 Broadway, former home of the old W.A. Harriman & Co., and still the offices for American Ship and Commerce Corp., and of the Union Banking Corporation.
In many ways, Bush's Hamburg-Amerika Line was the pivot for the entire Hitler project.
Averell Harriman and Bert Walker had gained control over the steamship company in 1920 in negotiations with its post-World War I chief executive, Wilhelm Cuno, and with the line's bankers, M.M. Warburg. Cuno was thereafter completely dependent on the Anglo-Americans, and became a member of the Anglo-German Friendship Society. In the 1930-32 drive for a Hitler dictatorship, Wilhelm Cuno contributed important sums to the Nazi Party.@s2@s3
Albert Voegler was chief executive of the Thyssen-Flick German Steel Trust for which Bush's Union Banking Corp. was the New York office. He was a director of the Bush-affiliate BHS Bank in Rotterdam, and a director of the Harriman-Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line. Voegler joined Thyssen and Flick in their heavy 1930-33 Nazi contributions, and helped organize the final Nazi leap into national power.@s2@s4
The Schroeder family of bankers was a linchpin for the Nazi activities of Harriman and Prescott Bush, closely tied to their lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles.
Baron Kurt von Schroeder was co-director of the massive Thyssen-Hu@autte foundry along with Johann Groeninger, Prescott Bush's New York bank partner. Kurt von Schroeder was treasurer of the support organization for the Nazi Party's private armies, to which Friedrich Flick contributed. Kurt von Schroeder and Montagu Norman's prote@aage@aa Hjalmar Schacht together made the final arrangements for Hitler to enter the government.@s2@s5
Baron Rudolph von Schroeder was vice president and director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Long an intimate contact of Averell Harriman's in Germany, Baron Rudolph sent his grandson Baron Johann Rudolph for a tour of Prescott Bush's Brown Brothers Harriman offices in New York City in December 1932--on the eve of their Hitler-triumph.@s2@s6
Certain actions taken directly by the Harriman-Bush shipping line in 1932 must be ranked among the gravest acts of treason in this century.
The U.S. embassy in Berlin reported back to Washington that the `` costly election campaigns '' and `` the cost of maintaining a private army of 300,000 to 400,000 men '' had raised questions as to the Nazis' financial backers. The constitutional government of the German republic moved to defend national freedom by ordering the Nazi Party private armies disbanded. The U.S. embassy reported that the Hamburg-Amerika Line was purchasing and distributing propaganda attacks against the German government, for attempting this last-minute crackdown on Hitler's forces.@s2@s7
Thousands of German opponents of Hitlerism were shot or intimidated by privately armed Nazi Brown Shirts. In this connection we note that the original `` Merchant of Death, '' Samuel Pryor, was a founding director of both the Union Banking Corp. and the American Ship and Commerce Corp. Since Mr. Pryor was executive committee chairman of Remington Arms and a central figure in the world's private arms traffic, his use to the Hitler project was enhanced as the Bush family's partner in Nazi Party banking and trans-Atlantic shipping.
The U.S. Senate arms-traffic investigators probed Remington after it was joined in a cartel agreement on explosives to the Nazi firm I.G. Farben. Looking at the period leading up to Hitler's seizure of power, the Senators found that `` German political associations, like the Nazi and others, are nearly all armed with American ... guns.... Arms of all kinds coming from America are transshipped in the Scheldt to river barges before the vessels arrive in Antwerp. They then can be carried through Holland without police inspection or interference. The Hitlerists and Communists are presumed to get arms in this manner. The principal arms coming from America are Thompson submachine guns and revolvers. The number is great. ''@s2@s8
The beginning of the Hitler regime brought some bizarre changes to the Hamburg-Amerika Line--and more betrayals.
Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. notified Max Warburg of Hamburg, Germany, on March 7, 1933, that Warburg was to be the corporation's official, designated representative on the board of Hamburg-Amerika.@s2@s9
Max Warburg replied on March 27, 1933, assuring his American sponsors that the Hitler government was good for Germany: `` For the last few years business was considerably better than we had anticipated, but a reaction is making itself felt for some months. We are actually suffering also under the very active propaganda against Germany, caused by some unpleasant circumstances. These occurrences were the natural consequence of the very excited election campaign, but were extraordinarily exaggerated in the foreign press. The Government is firmly resolved to maintain public peace and order in Germany, and I feel perfectly convinced in this respect that there is no cause for any alarm whatsoever. ''@s3@s0
This seal of approval for Hitler, coming from a famous Jew, was just what Harriman and Bush required, for they anticipated rather serious `` alarm '' inside the U.S.A. against their Nazi operations.
On March 29, 1933, two days after Max's letter to Harriman, Max's son, Erich Warburg, sent a cable to his cousin Frederick M. Warburg, a director of the Harriman railroad system. He asked Frederick to `` use all your influence '' to stop all anti-Nazi activity in America, including `` atrocity news and unfriendly propaganda in foreign press, mass meetings, etc. '' Frederick cabled back to Erich: `` No responsible groups here [are] urging [a] boycott [of] German goods[,] merely excited individuals. '' Two days after that, On March 31, 1933, the American-Jewish Committee, controlled by the Warburgs, and the B'nai B'rith, heavily influenced by the Sulzbergers (New York Times), issued a formal, official joint statement of the two organizations, counseling `` that no American boycott against Germany be encouraged, '' and advising `` that no further mass meetings be held or similar forms of agitation be employed. ''@s3@s1
The American Jewish Committee and the B'nai B'rith (mother of the `` Anti-Defamation League '') continued with this hardline, no-attack-on-Hitler stance all through the 1930s, blunting the fight mounted by many Jews and other anti-fascists.
Thus the decisive interchange reproduced above, taking place entirely within the orbit of the Harriman/Bush firm, may explain something of the relationship of George Bush to American Jewish and Zionist leaders. Some of them, in close cooperation with his family, played an ugly part in the drama of Naziism. Is this why `` professional Nazi-hunters '' have never discovered how the Bush family made its money?
The executive board of the Hamburg Amerika Line (Hapag) met jointly with the North German Lloyd Company board in Hamburg on Sept. 5, 1933. Under official Nazi supervision, the two firms were merged. Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. installed Christian J. Beck, a long-time Harriman executive, as manager of freight and operations in North America for the new joint Nazi shipping lines (Hapag-Lloyd) on Nov. 4, 1933.
According to testimony of officials of the companies before Congress in 1934, a supervisor from the Nazi Labor Front rode with every ship of the Harriman-Bush line; employees of the New York offices were directly organized into the Nazi Labor Front organization; Hamburg-Amerika provided free passage to individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda purposes; and the line subsidized pro-Nazi newspapers in the U.S.A., as it had done in Germany against the constitutional German government.@s3@s2
In mid-1936, Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. cabled M.M. Warburg, asking Warburg to represent the company's heavy share interest at the forthcoming Hamburg-Amerika stockholders meeting. The Warburg office replied with the information that `` we represented you '' at the stockholders meeting and `` exercised on your behalf your voting power for Rm [gold marks] 3,509,600 Hapag stock deposited with us. ''
The Warburgs transmitted a letter received from Emil Helfferich, German chief executive of both Hapag-Lloyd and of the Standard Oil subsidiary in Nazi Germany: `` It is the intention to continue the relations with Mr. Harriman on the same basis as heretofore.... '' In a colorful gesture, Hapag's Nazi chairman Helfferich sent the line's president across the Atlantic on a Zeppelin to confer with their New York string-pullers.
After the meeting with the Zeppelin passenger, the Harriman-Bush office replied: `` I am glad to learn that Mr. Hellferich [sic] has stated that relations between the Hamburg American Line and ourselves will be continued on the same basis as heretofore. ''@s3@s3
Two months before moving against Prescott Bush's Union Banking Corporation, the U. S. government ordered the seizure of all property of the Hamburg-Amerika Line and North German Lloyd, under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The investigators noted in the pre-seizure report that Christian J. Beck was still acting as an attorney representing the Nazi firm.@s3@s4
In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated, an agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The Harriman International Co., led by Averell Harriman's first cousin Oliver, was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct all exports from Hitler Germany to the United States.@s3@s5
This pact had been negotiated in Berlin between Hitler's economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and John Foster Dulles, international attorney for dozens of Nazi enterprises, with the counsel of Max Warburg and Kurt von Schroeder.
John Foster Dulles would later be U.S. Secretary of State, and the great power in the Republican Party of the 1950s. Foster's friendship and that of his brother Allen (head of the Central Intelligence Agency), greatly aided Prescott Bush to become the Republican U.S. Senator from Connecticut. And it was to be of inestimable value to George Bush, in his ascent to the heights of `` covert action government, '' that both of these Dulles brothers were the lawyers for the Bush family's far-flung enterprise.
Throughout the 1930s, John Foster Dulles arranged debt restructuring for German firms under a series of decrees issued by Adolf Hitler. In these deals, Dulles struck a balance between the interest owed to selected, larger investors, and the needs of the growing Nazi war-making apparatus for producing tanks, poison gas, etc.
Dulles wrote to Prescott Bush in 1937 concerning one such arrangement. The German-Atlantic Cable Company, owning Nazi Germany's only telegraph channel to the United States, had made debt and management agreements with the Walker-Harriman bank during the 1920s. A new decree would now void those agreements, which had originally been reached with non-Nazi corporate officials. Dulles asked Bush, who managed these affairs for Averell Harriman, to get Averell's signature on a letter to Nazi officials, agreeing to the changes. Dulles wrote:
Sept. 22, 1937
Mr. Prescott S. Bush
59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y.
Dear Press,
I have looked over the letter of the German-American [sic] Cable Company to Averell Harriman.... It would appear that the only rights in the matter are those which inure in the bankers and that no legal embarrassment would result, so far as the bondholders are concerned, by your acquiescence in the modification of the bankers' agreement.
Sincerely yours,
John Foster Dulles
Dulles enclosed a proposed draft reply, Bush got Harriman's signature, and the changes went through.@s3@s6
In conjunction with these arrangements, the German Atlantic Cable Company attempted to stop payment on its debts to smaller American bondholders. The money was to be used instead for arming the Nazi state, under a decree of the Hitler government.
Despite the busy efforts of Bush and Dulles, a New York court decided that this particular Hitler `` law '' was invalid in the United States; small bondholders, not parties to deals between the bankers and the Nazis, were entitled to get paid.@s3@s7
In this and a few other of the attempted swindles, the intended victims came out with their money. But the Nazi financial and political reorganization went ahead to its tragic climax.
For his part in the Hitler revolution, Prescott Bush was paid a fortune.
This is the legacy he left to his son, President George Bush.
An Important Historical Note:
How the Harrimans Hired Hitler
It was not inevitable that millions would be slaughtered under fascism and in World War II. At certain moments of crisis, crucial pro-Nazi decisions were made outside of Germany. These decisions for pro-Nazi actions were more aggressive than the mere `` appeasement '' which Anglo-American historians later preferred to discuss.
Private armies of 300,000 to 400,000 terrorists aided the Nazis' rise to power. W.A. Harriman's Hamburg-Amerika Line intervened against Germany's 1932 attempt to break them up.
The 1929-31 economic collapse bankrupted the Wall-Street-backed German Steel Trust. When the German government took over the Trust's stock shares, interests associated with Konrad Adenauer and the anti-Nazi Catholic Center Party attempted to acquire the shares. But the Anglo-Americans--Montagu Norman, and the Harriman-Bush bank--made sure that their Nazi puppet Fritz Thyssen regained control over the shares and the Trust. Thyssen's bankrolling of Hitler could then continue unhindered.
Unpayable debts crushed Germany in the 1920s, reparations required by the Versailles agreements. Germany was looted by the London-New York banking system, and Hitler's propaganda exploited this German debt burden.
But immediately after Germany came under Hitler's dictatorship, the Anglo-American financiers granted debt relief, which freed funds to be used for arming the Nazi state.
The North German Lloyd steamship line, which was merged with Hamburg-Amerika Line, was one of the companies which stopped debt payments under a Hitler decree arranged by John Foster Dulles and Hjalmar Schacht.
Kuhn Loeb and Co.'s Felix Warburg carried out the Hitler finance plan in New York. Kuhn Loeb asked North German Lloyd bondholders to accept new lower interest steamship bonds, issued by Kuhn Loeb, in place of the better pre-Hitler bonds.
The Opposition
New York attorney Jacob Chaitkin, father of coauthor Anton Chaitkin, took the cases of many different bondholders who rejected the swindle by Harriman, Bush, Warburg, and Hitler. Representing a women who was owed $30 on an old steamship bond--and opposing John Foster Dulles in New York municipal court--Chaitkin threatened a writ from the sheriff, tying up the 30,000 ton transatlantic liner Europa until the client received her $30. (New York Times, January 10, 1934, p. 31 col. 3).
The American Jewish Congress hired Jacob Chaitkin as the legal director of the boycott against Nazi Germany. The American Federation of Labor cooperated with Jewish and other groups in the anti-import boycott. On the other side, virtually all the Nazi trade with the United States was under the supervision of the Harriman interests and functionaries such as Prescott Bush, father of President George Bush.
Meanwhile, the Warburgs demanded that American Jews not `` agitate '' against the Hitler government, or join the organized boycott. The Warburgs' decision was carried out by the American Jewish Committee and the B'nai B'rith, who opposed the boycott as the Nazi military state grew increasingly powerful.
The historical coverup on these events is so tight that virtually the only expose@aa of the Warburgs came in journalist John L. Spivak's `` Wall Street's Fascist Conspiracy, '' in the pro-communist New Masses periodical (Jan. 29 and Feb. 5, 1934). Spivak pointed out that the Warburgs controlled the American Jewish Committee, which opposed the anti-Nazi boycott, while their Kuhn Loeb and Co. had underwritten Nazi shipping; and he exposed the financing of pro-fascist political activities by the Warburgs and their partners and allies, many of whom were bigwigs in the American Jewish Committee and B'nai B'rith.
Given where the Spivak piece appeared, it is not surprising that Spivak called Warburg an ally of the Morgan Bank, but made no mention of Averell Harriman. Mr. Harriman, after all, was a permanent hero of the Soviet Union.
John L. Spivak later underwent a curious transformation, himself joining the coverup. In 1967, he wrote an autobiography (A Man in His Time, New York: Horizon Press), which praises the American Jewish Committee. The pro-fascism of the Warburgs does not appear in the book. The former `` rebel '' Spivak also praises the action arm of the B'nai B'rith, the Anti-Defamation League. Pathetically, he comments favorably that the League has spy files on the American populace which it shares with government agencies.
Thus is history erased; and those decisions, which direct history into one course or another, are lost to the knowledge of the current generation.
Return to the Table of Contents
NOTES:
1. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order No. 248. The order was signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed October 20, 1942; F.R. Doc. 42-11568; Filed, November 6, 1942, 11:31 A.M.; 7 Fed. Reg. 9097 (Nov. 7, 1942). See also the New York City Directory of Directors (available at the Library of Congress). The volumes for the 1930s and 1940s list Prescott Bush as a director of Union Banking Corporation for the years 1934 through 1943.
2. Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 259: Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation; Vesting Order No. 261: Holland-American Trading Corp.
3. Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp.
4. The New York Times on December 16, 1944, ran a five-paragraph page 25 article on actions of the New York State Banking Department. Only the last sentence refers to the Nazi bank, as follows: `` The Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway. ''
The Times omitted the fact that the Union Banking Corporation had been seized by the government for trading with the enemy, and even the fact that 120 Broadway was the address of the government's Alien Property Custodian.
5. Fritz Thyssen, I Paid Hitler, 1941, reprinted in (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972), p. 133. Thyssen says his contributions began with 100,000 marks given in October 1923, for Hitler's attempted `` putsch '' against the constitutional government.
6. Confidential memorandum from U.S. embassy, Berlin, to the U.S. Secretary of State, April 20, 1932, on microfilm in Confidential Reports of U.S. State Dept., 1930s, Germany, at major U.S. libraries.
7. Oct. 5, 1942, Memorandum to the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order No. 248.
8. Elimination of German Resources for War: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs, United States Senate, Seventy-Ninth Congress; Part 5, Testimony of [the United States] Treasury Department, July 2, 1945. P. 507: Table of Vereinigte Stahlwerke output, figures are percent of German total as of 1938; Thyssen organization including Union Banking Corporation pp. 727-31.
9. Robert Sobel, The Life and Times of Dillon Read (New York: Dutton-Penguin, 1991), pp. 92-111. The Dillon Read firm cooperated in the development of Sobel's book.
10. George Walker to Averell Harriman, Aug. 11, 1927, in the W. Averell Harriman papers at the Library of Congress (designated hereafter WAH papers).
11. `` Iaccarino '' to G. H. Walker, RCA Radiogram Sept. 12, 1927. The specific nature of their business with Mussolini is not explained in correspondence available for public access.
12. Andrew Boyle, Montagu Norman (London: Cassell, 1967).
Sir Henry Clay, Lord Norman (London, MacMillan & Co., 1957), pp. 18, 57, 70-71.
John A. Kouwenhouven, Partners in Banking ... Brown Brothers Harriman (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1969).
13. Coordination of much of the Hitler project took place at a single New York address. The Union Banking Corporation had been set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway. Management of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, carried out through Harriman's American Ship and Commerce Corp., was also set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway.
14. Interrogation of Fritz Thyssen, EF/Me/1 of Sept. 4, 1945 in U.S. Control Council records, photostat on page 167 in Anthony Sutton, An Introduction to The Order (Billings, Mt.: Liberty House Press, 1986).
15. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B, by the Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, United States Government Printing Office, (Washington: 1948), pp. 1597, 1686.
16. `` Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation - [minutes of the] Meeting of Board of Directors, '' Oct. 31, 1930 (Harriman papers, Library of Congress), shows Averell Harriman as Chairman of the Board.
Prescott Bush to W.A. Harriman, Memorandum Dec. 19, 1930 on their Harriman Fifteen Corp.
Annual Report of United Konigs and Laura Steel and Iron Works for the year 1930 (Harriman papers, Library of Congress) lists `` Dr. Friedrich Flick ... Berlin '' and `` William Averell Harriman ... New York '' on the Board of Directors.
`` Harriman Fifteen Corporation Securities Position February 28, 1931, '' Harriman papers, Library of Congress. This report shows Harriman Fifteen Corporation holding 32,576 shares in Silesian Holding Co. V.T.C. worth (in scarce depression dollars) $1,628,800, just over half the value of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation's total holdings.
The New York City Directory of Directors volumes for the 1930s (available at the Library of Congress) show Prescott Sheldon Bush and W. Averell Harriman as the directors of Harriman Fifteen Corp.
`` Appointments, '' (three typed pages) marked `` Noted May 18 1931 W.A.H., '' (among the papers from Prescott Bush's New York Office of Brown Brothers Harriman, Harriman papers, Library of Congress), lists a meeting between Averell Harriman and Friedrich Flick in Berlin at 4:00 P.M., Wednesday April 22, 1931. This was followed immediately by a meeting with Wilhelm Cuno, chief executive of the Hamburg-Amerika Line.
The `` Report To the Stockholders of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, '' Oct. 19, 1933 (in the Harriman papers, Library of Congress) names G.H. Walker as president of the corporation. It shows the Harriman Fifteen Corporation's address as 1 Wall Street--the location of G.H. Walker and Co.
17. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B, op. cit., p. 1686.
18. Jim Flaherty (a BBH manager, Prescott Bush's employee), March 19, 1934 to W.A. Harriman.
`` Dear Averell:
In Roland's absence Pres[cott] thought it advisable for me to let you know that we received the following cable from [our European representative] Rossi dated March 17th [relating to conflict with the Polish government]....''
19. Harriman Fifteen Corporation notice to stockholders Jan. 7, 1935, under the name of George Walker, President.
20. Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp. Executed Nov. 17, 1942. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian. F.R. Doc. 42-14183; Filed Dec. 31, 1942, 11:28 A.M.; 8 Fed. Reg. 33 (Jan. 1, 1943). The order confiscated the Nazis' holdings of 98,000 shares of common and 50,000 shares of preferred stock in Silesian-American. The Nazi parent company in Breslau, Germany wrote directly to Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St. on Aug. 5, 1940, with `` an invitation to take part in the regular meeting of the members of the Bergwerksgesellsc[h]aft Georg von Giesche's Erben.... '' WAH papers.
21. Sept. 25, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order No. 370.
22. George Walker was a director of American Ship and Commerce from its organization through 1928. Consult New York City Directory of Directors.
`` Harriman Fifteen Corporation Securities Position February 28, 1931, '' op. cit. The report lists 46,861 shares in the American Ship & Commerce Corp.
See `` Message from Mr. Bullfin, '' Aug. 30, 1934 (Harriman Fifteen section, Harriman papers, Library of Congress) for the joint supervision of Bush and Walker, respectively director and president of the corporation.
23. Cuno was later exposed by Walter Funk, Third Reich Press Chief and Under Secretary of Propaganda, in Funk's postwar jail cell at Nuremberg; but Cuno had died just as Hitler was taking power. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 144. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B, op. cit., p. 1688.
24. See `` Elimination of German Resources for War, '' op. cit., pp. 881-82 on Voegler.
See Annual Report of the (Hamburg-Amerikanische-Packetfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (Hapag or Hamburg-Amerika Line), March 1931, for the board of directors. A copy is in the New York Public Library Annex at 11th Avenue, Manhattan.
25. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B, op. cit., pp. 1178, 1453-54, 1597, 1599.
See `` Elimination of German Resources for War, '' op. cit., pp. 870-72 on Schroeder; p. 730 on Groeninger.
26. Annual Report of Hamburg-Amerika, op. cit.
Baron Rudolph Schroeder, Sr. to Averell Harriman, Nov. 14, 1932. K[night] W[ooley] handwritten note and draft reply letter, Dec. 9, 1932.
In his letter, Baron Rudolph refers to the family's American affiliate, J. Henry Schroder [name anglicized], of which Allen Dulles was a director, and his brother John Foster Dulles was the principal attorney.
Baron Bruno Schroder of the British branch was adviser to Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman, and Baron Bruno's partner Frank Cyril Tiarks was Norman's co-director of the Bank of England throughout Norman's career. Kurt von Schroeder was Hjalmar Schacht's delegate to the Bank for International Settlements in Geneva, where many of the financial arrangements for the Nazi regime were made by Montagu Norman, Schacht and the Schroeders for several years of the Hitler regime right up to the outbreak of World War II.
27. Confidential memorandum from U.S. embassy, Berlin, op. cit.
28. U.S. Senate `` Nye Committee '' hearings, Sept. 14, 1934, pp. 1197-98, extracts from letters of Col. William N. Taylor, dated June 27, 1932 and Jan. 9, 1933.
29. American Ship and Commerce Corporation to Dr. Max Warburg, March 7, 1933.
Max Warburg had brokered the sale of Hamburg-Amerika to Harriman and Walker in 1920. Max's brothers controlled the Kuhn Loeb investment banking house in New York, the firm which had staked old E.H. Harriman to his 1890s buyout of the giant Union Pacific Railroad.
Max Warburg had long worked with Lord Milner and others of the racialist British Round Table concerning joint projects in Africa and Eastern Europe. He was an advisor to Hjalmar Schacht for several decades and was a top executive of Hitler's Reichsbank. The reader may consult David Farrer, The Warburgs: The Story of A Family (New York: Stein and Day, 1975).
30. Max Warburg, at M.M. Warburg and Co., Hamburg, to Averill [sic] Harriman, c/o Messrs. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y., March 27, 1933.
31. This correspondence, and the joint statement of the Jewish organizations, are reproduced in Moshe R. Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933-41: An Historical Analysis (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1982).
32. Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities: Public Hearings before A Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, United States House of Representatives, Seventy Third Congress, New York City, July 9-12, 1934--Hearings No. 73-NY-7 (Washington: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1934). See testimony of Capt. Frederick C. Mensing, John Schroeder, Paul von Lilienfeld-Toal, and summaries by Committee members.
See New York Times, July 16, 1933, p. 12, for organizing of Nazi Labor Front at North German Lloyd, leading to Hamburg-Amerika after merger.
33. American Ship and Commerce Corporation telegram to Rudolph Brinckmann at M.M. Warburg, June 12, 1936.
Rudolph Brinckmann to Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St., June 20, 1936, with enclosed note transmitting Helfferich's letter.
Reply to Dr. Rudolph Brinckmann c/o M.M. Warburg and Co, July 6, 1936, in the Harriman papers at the Library of Congress. The file copy of this letter carries no signature, but is presumably from Averell Harriman.
34. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order No. 126. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed August 28, 1942. F.R. Doc. 42-8774; Filed September 4, 1942, 10:55 A.M.; 7 F.R. 7061 (No. 176, Sept. 5, 1942.) July 18, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order No. 126.
35. New York Times, May 20, 1933. Leading up to this agreement is a telegram which somehow escaped the shredder and may be seen in the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress. It is addressed to Nazi official Hjalmar Schacht at the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, dated May 11, 1933: `` Much disappointed to have missed seeing you Tuesday afternoon.... I hope to see you either in Washington or New York before you sail.
with my regards W.A. Harriman ''
36. Dulles to Bush letter and draft reply in WAH papers.
37. New York Times, Jan. 19, 1938.
Bush Property Seized--Trading with the Enemy
In October 1942, ten months after entering World War II, America was preparing its first assault against Nazi military forces. Prescott Bush was managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman. His 18-year-old son George, the future U.S. President, had just begun training to become a naval pilot. On Oct. 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City which were being conducted by Prescott Bush.
Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over the Union Banking Corporation, in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.'s stock shares, all of which were owned by Prescott Bush, E. Roland `` Bunny '' Harriman, three Nazi executives, and two other associates of Bush.@s1
The order seizing the bank `` vests '' (seizes) `` all of the capital stock of Union Banking Corporation, a New York corporation, '' and names the holders of its shares as:
`` E. Roland Harriman--3991 shares ''[chairman and director of Union Banking Corp. (UBC); this is `` Bunny '' Harriman, described by Prescott Bush as a place holder who didn't get much into banking affairs; Prescott managed his personal investments]
`` Cornelis Lievense--4 shares ''[president and director of UBC; New York resident banking functionary for the Nazis]
`` Harold D. Pennington--1 share ''[treasurer and director of UBC; an office manager employed by Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman]
`` Ray Morris--1 share ''
[director of UBC; partner of Bush and the Harrimans]
`` Prescott S. Bush--1 share ''[director of UBC, which was co-founded and sponsored by his father-in-law George Walker; senior managing partner for E. Roland Harriman and Averell Harriman]
`` H.J. Kouwenhoven--1 share ''[director of UBC; organized UBC as the emissary of Fritz Thyssen in negotiations with George Walker and Averell Harriman; managing director of UBC's Netherlands affiliate under Nazi occupation; industrial executive in Nazi Germany; director and chief foreign financial executive of the German Steel Trust]
`` Johann G. Groeninger--1 share ''[director of UBC and of its Netherlands affiliate; industrial executive in Nazi Germany]
`` all of which shares are held for the benefit of ... members of the Thyssen family, [and] is property of nationals ... of a designated enemy country.... ''
By Oct. 26, 1942, U.S. troops were under way for North Africa. On Oct. 28, the government issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation.@s2
U.S. forces landed under fire near Algiers on Nov. 8, 1942; heavy combat raged throughout November. Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation, long managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on Nov. 17, 1942. In this action, the government announced that it was seizing only the Nazi interests, leaving the Nazis' U.S. partners to carry on the business.@s3
These and other actions taken by the U.S. government in wartime were, tragically, too little and too late. President Bush's family had already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany; in financing and managing the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the development of Nazi genocide theories and racial propaganda, with their well-known results.
The facts presented here must be known, and their implications reflected upon, for a proper understanding of President George Herbert Walker Bush and of the danger to mankind that he represents. The President's family fortune was largely a result of the Hitler project. The powerful Anglo-American family associations, which later boosted him into the Central Intelligence Agency and up to the White House, were his father's partners in the Hitler project.
President Franklin Roosevelt's Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news,@s4 explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the Union Banking Corporation was run for the `` Thyssen family '' of `` Germany and/or Hungary ''--`` nationals ... of a designated enemy country. ''
By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union Banking Corp. were legally front men for the Nazis, the government avoided the more important historical issue: In what way were Hitler's Nazis themselves hired, armed and instructed by the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush was an executive manager? Let us examine the Harriman-Bush Hitler project from the 1920s until it was partially broken up, to seek an answer for that question.
Origin and Extent of the Project
Fritz Thyssen and his business partners are universally recognized as the most important German financiers of Adolf Hitler's takeover of Germany. At the time of the order seizing the Thyssen family's Union Banking Corp., Mr. Fritz Thyssen had already published his famous book, I Paid Hitler,@s5 admitting that he had financed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement since October 1923. Thyssen's role as the leading early backer of Hitler's grab for power in Germany had been noted by U.S. diplomats in Berlin in 1932.@s6 The order seizing the Bush-Thyssen bank was curiously quiet and modest about the identity of the perpetrators who had been nailed.
But two weeks before the official order, government investigators had reported secretly that `` W. Averell Harriman was in Europe sometime prior to 1924 and at that time became acquainted with Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist. '' Harriman and Thyssen agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York. `` [C]ertain of [Harriman's] associates would serve as directors.... '' Thyssen agent `` H. J. Kouwenhoven ... came to the United States ... prior to 1924 for conferences with the Harriman Company in this connection.... ''@s7
When exactly was `` Harriman in Europe sometime prior to 1924 ''? In fact, he was in Berlin in 1922 to set up the Berlin branch of W.A. Harriman & Co. under George Walker's presidency.
The Union Banking Corporation was established formally in 1924, as a unit in the Manhattan offices of W.A. Harriman & Co., interlocking with the Thyssen-owned Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS) in the Netherlands. The investigators concluded that `` the Union Banking Corporation has since its inception handled funds chiefly supplied to it through the Dutch bank by the Thyssen interests for American investment. ''
Thus by personal agreement between Averell Harriman and Fritz Thyssen in 1922, W.A. Harriman & Co. (alias Union Banking Corporation) would be transferring funds back and forth between New York and the `` Thyssen interests '' in Germany. By putting up about $400,000, the Harriman organization would be joint owner and manager of Thyssen's banking operations outside of Germany.
How important was the Nazi enterprise for which President Bush's father was the New York banker?
The 1942 U.S. government investigative report said that Bush's Nazi-front bank was an interlocking concern with the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works Corporation or German Steel Trust) led by Fritz Thyssen and his two brothers. After the war, Congressional investigators probed the Thyssen interests, Union Banking Corp. and related Nazi units. The investigation showed that the Vereinigte Stahlwerke had produced the following approximate proportions of total German national output:
50.8% of Nazi Germany's pig iron41.4% of Nazi Germany's universal plate36.0% of Nazi Germany's heavy plate38.5% of Nazi Germany's galvanized sheet45.5% of Nazi Germany's pipes and tubes22.1% of Nazi Germany's wire35.0% of Nazi Germany's explosives.@s8
Prescott Bush became vice president of W.A. Harriman & Co. in 1926. That same year, a friend of Harriman and Bush set up a giant new organization for their client Fritz Thyssen, prime sponsor of politician Adolf Hitler. The new German Steel Trust, Germany's largest industrial corporation, was organized in 1926 by Wall Street banker Clarence Dillon. Dillon was the old comrade of Prescott Bush's father Sam Bush from the `` Merchants of Death '' bureau in World War I.
In return for putting up $70 million to create his organization, majority owner Thyssen gave the Dillon Read company two or more representatives on the board of the new Steel Trust.@s9
Thus there is a division of labor: Thyssen's own confidential accounts, for political and related purposes, were run through the Walker-Bush organization; the German Steel Trust did its corporate banking through Dillon Read.
The Walker-Bush firm's banking activities were not just politically neutral money-making ventures which happened to coincide with the aims of German Nazis. All of the firm's European business in those days was organized around anti-democratic political forces.
In 1927, criticism of their support for totalitarianism drew this retort from Bert Walker, written from Kennebunkport to Averell Harriman: `` It seems to me that the suggestion in connection with Lord Bearsted's views that we withdraw from Russia smacks somewhat of the impertinent.... I think that we have drawn our line and should hew to it. ''@s1@s0
Averell Harriman met with Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. A representative of the firm subsequently telegraphed good news back to his chief executive Bert Walker: `` ... During these last days ... Mussolini ... has examined and approved our c[o]ntract 15 June. ''@s1@s1
The great financial collapse of 1929-31 shook America, Germany and Britain, weakening all governments. It also made the hard-pressed Prescott Bush even more willing to do whatever was necessary to retain his new place in the world. It was in this crisis that certain Anglo-Americans determined on the installation of a Hitler regime in Germany.
W.A. Harriman & Co., well-positioned for this enterprise and rich in assets from their German and Russian business, merged with the British-American investment house, Brown Brothers, on January 1, 1931. Bert Walker retired to his own G.H. Walker & Co. This left the Harriman brothers, Prescott Bush and Thatcher M. Brown as the senior partners of the new Brown Brothers Harriman firm. (The London, England branch of the Brown family firm continued operating under its historic name--Brown, Shipley.)
Robert A. Lovett also came over as a partner from Brown Brothers. His father, E.H. Harriman's lawyer and railroad chief, had been on the War Industries Board with Prescott's father. Though he remained a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, the junior Lovett soon replaced his father as chief executive of Union Pacific Railroad.
Brown Brothers had a racial tradition that fitted it well for the Hitler project! American patriots had cursed its name back in U.S. Civil War days. Brown Brothers, with offices in the U.S.A. and in England, had carried on their ships fully 75 percent of the slave cotton from the American South over to British mill owners. Now in 1931, the virtual dictator of world finance, Bank of England Governor Montagu Collet Norman, was a former Brown Brothers partner, whose grandfather had been boss of Brown Brothers during the U.S. Civil War. Montagu Norman was known as the most avid of Hitler's supporters within British ruling circles, and Norman's intimacy with this firm was essential to his management of the Hitler project.
In 1931, while Prescott Bush ran the New York office of Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott's partner was Montagu Norman's intimate friend Thatcher Brown. The Bank of England chief always stayed at the home of Prescott's partner on his hush-hush trips to New York. Prescott Bush concentrated on the firm's German activities, and Thatcher Brown saw to their business in old England, under the guidance of his mentor Montagu Norman.@s1@s2
Hitler's Ladder to Power
Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany January 30, 1933, and absolute dictator in March 1933, after two years of expensive and violent lobbying and electioneering. Two affiliates of the Bush-Harriman organization played great parts in this criminal undertaking: Thyssen's German Steel Trust; and the Hamburg-Amerika Line and several of its executives.@s1@s3
Let us look more closely at the Bush family's German partners.
Fritz Thyssen told Allied interrogators after the war about some of his financial support for the Nazi Party: `` In 1930 or 1931 ... I told [Hitler's deputy Rudolph] Hess ... I would arrange a credit for him with a Dutch bank in Rotterdam, the Bank fu@aur Handel und Schiff [i.e. Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS), the Harriman-Bush affiliate]. I arranged the credit ... he would pay it back in three years.... I chose a Dutch bank because I did not want to be mixed up with German banks in my position, and because I thought it was better to do business with a Dutch bank, and I thought I would have the Nazis a little more in my hands... .
`` The credit was about 250-300,000 [gold] marks--about the sum I had given before. The loan has been repaid in part to the Dutch bank, but I think some money is still owing on it.... ''@s1@s4
The overall total of Thyssen's political donations and loans to the Nazis was well over a million dollars, including funds he raised from others--in a period of terrible money shortage in Germany.
Friedrich Flick was the major co-owner of the German Steel Trust with Fritz Thyssen, Thyssen's long-time collaborator and occasional competitor. In preparation for the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, the U.S. government said that Flick was `` one of leading financiers and industrialists who from 1932 contributed large sums to the Nazi Party ... member of `Circle of Friends' of Himmler who contributed large sums to the SS. ''@s1@s5
Flick, like Thyssen, financed the Nazis to maintain their private armies called Schutzstaffel (S.S. or Black Shirts) and Sturmabteilung (S.A., storm troops or Brown Shirts).
The Flick-Harriman partnership was directly supervised by Prescott Bush, President Bush's father, and by George Walker, President Bush's grandfather.
The Harriman-Walker Union Banking Corp. arrangements for the German Steel Trust had made them bankers for Flick and his vast operations in Germany by no later than 1926.
The Harriman Fifteen Corporation (George Walker, president, Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman, sole directors) held a substantial stake in the Silesian Holding Co. at the time of the merger with Brown Brothers, Jan. 1, 1931. This holding correlated to Averell Harriman's chairmanship of the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, the American group owning one-third of a complex of steel-making, coal-mining and zinc-mining activities in Germany and Poland, in which Friedrich Flick owned two-thirds.@s1@s6
The Nuremberg prosecutor characterized Flick as follows:
`` Proprietor and head of a large group of industrial enterprises (coal and iron mines, steel producing and fabricating plants) ... `Wehrwirtschaftsfuh@aurer', 1938 [title awarded to prominent industrialists for merit in armaments drive--`Military Economy Leader'].... ''@s1@s7
For this buildup of the Hitler war machine with coal, steel and arms production, using slave laborers, the Nazi Flick was condemned to seven years in prison at the Nuremberg trials; he served three years. With friends in New York and London, however, Flick lived into the 1970s and died a billionaire.
On March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush--then director of the German Steel Trust's Union Banking Corporation--initiated an alert to the absent Averell Harriman about a problem which had developed in the Flick partnership.@s1@s8 Bush sent Harriman a clipping from the New York Times of that day, which reported that the Polish government was fighting back against American and German stockholders who controlled `` Poland's largest industrial unit, the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company.... ''
The Times article continued: `` The company has long been accused of mismanagement, excessive borrowing, fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in securities. Warrants were issued in December for several directors accused of tax evasions. They were German citizens and they fled. They were replaced by Poles. Herr Flick, regarding this as an attempt to make the company's board entirely Polish, retaliated by restricting credits until the new Polish directors were unable to pay the workmen regularly. ''
The Times noted that the company's mines and mills `` employ 25,000 men and account for 45 percent of Poland's total steel output and 12 percent of her coal production. Two-thirds of the company's stock is owned by Friedrich Flick, a leading German steel industrialist, and the remainder is owned by interests in the United States. ''
In view of the fact that a great deal of Polish output was being exported to Hitler Germany under depression conditions, the Polish government thought that Prescott Bush, Harriman and their Nazi partners should at least pay full taxes on their Polish holdings. The U.S. and Nazi owners responded with a lockout. The letter to Harriman in Washington reported a cable from their European representative: `` Have undertaken new steps London Berlin ... please establish friendly relations with Polish Ambassador [in Washington]. ''
A 1935 Harriman Fifteen Corporation memo from George Walker announced an agreement had been made `` in Berlin '' to sell an 8,000 block of their shares in Consolidated Silesian Steel.@s1@s9 But the dispute with Poland did not deter the Bush family from continuing its partnership with Flick.
Nazi tanks and bombs `` settled '' this dispute in September, 1939 with the invasion of Poland, beginning World War II. The Nazi army had been equipped by Flick, Harriman, Walker and Bush, with materials essentially stolen from Poland.
There were probably few people at the time who could appreciate the irony, that when the Soviets also attacked and invaded Poland from the East, their vehicles were fueled by oil pumped from Baku wells revived by the Harriman/Walker/Bush enterprise.
Three years later, nearly a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of the Nazis' share in the Silesian-American Corporation under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Enemy nationals were said to own 49 percent of the common stock and 41.67 percent of the preferred stock of the company.
The order characterized the company as a `` business enterprise within the United States, owned by [a front company in] Zurich, Switzerland, and held for the benefit of Bergwerksgesellschaft George von Giesche's Erben, a German corporation.... ''@s2@s0
Bert Walker was still the senior director of the company, which he had founded back in 1926 simultaneously with the creation of the German Steel Trust. Ray Morris, Prescott's partner from Union Banking Corp. and Brown Brothers Harriman, was also a director.
The investigative report prior to the government crackdown explained the `` NATURE OF BUSINESS: The subject corporation is an American holding company for German and Polish subsidiaries, which own large and valuable coal and zinc mines in Silesia, Poland and Germany. Since September 1939, these properties have been in the possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country in its war effort. ''@s2@s1
The report noted that the American stockholders hoped to regain control of the European properties after the war.
Control of Nazi Commerce
Bert Walker had arranged the credits Harriman needed to take control of the Hamburg-Amerika Line back in 1920. Walker had organized the American Ship and Commerce Corp. as a unit of the W.A. Harriman & Co., with contractual power over Hamburg-Amerika's affairs.
As the Hitler project went into high gear, Harriman-Bush shares in American Ship and Commerce Corp. were held by the Harriman Fifteen Corp., run by Prescott Bush and Bert Walker.@s2@s2
It was a convenient stroll for the well-tanned, athletic, handsome Prescott Bush: From the Brown Brothers Harriman skyscraper at 59 Wall Street--where he was senior managing partner, confidential investments manager and adviser to Averell and his brother `` Bunny ''--he walked across to the Harriman Fifteen Corporation at One Wall Street, otherwise known as G.H. Walker & Co.--and around the corner to his subsidiary offices at 39 Broadway, former home of the old W.A. Harriman & Co., and still the offices for American Ship and Commerce Corp., and of the Union Banking Corporation.
In many ways, Bush's Hamburg-Amerika Line was the pivot for the entire Hitler project.
Averell Harriman and Bert Walker had gained control over the steamship company in 1920 in negotiations with its post-World War I chief executive, Wilhelm Cuno, and with the line's bankers, M.M. Warburg. Cuno was thereafter completely dependent on the Anglo-Americans, and became a member of the Anglo-German Friendship Society. In the 1930-32 drive for a Hitler dictatorship, Wilhelm Cuno contributed important sums to the Nazi Party.@s2@s3
Albert Voegler was chief executive of the Thyssen-Flick German Steel Trust for which Bush's Union Banking Corp. was the New York office. He was a director of the Bush-affiliate BHS Bank in Rotterdam, and a director of the Harriman-Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line. Voegler joined Thyssen and Flick in their heavy 1930-33 Nazi contributions, and helped organize the final Nazi leap into national power.@s2@s4
The Schroeder family of bankers was a linchpin for the Nazi activities of Harriman and Prescott Bush, closely tied to their lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles.
Baron Kurt von Schroeder was co-director of the massive Thyssen-Hu@autte foundry along with Johann Groeninger, Prescott Bush's New York bank partner. Kurt von Schroeder was treasurer of the support organization for the Nazi Party's private armies, to which Friedrich Flick contributed. Kurt von Schroeder and Montagu Norman's prote@aage@aa Hjalmar Schacht together made the final arrangements for Hitler to enter the government.@s2@s5
Baron Rudolph von Schroeder was vice president and director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Long an intimate contact of Averell Harriman's in Germany, Baron Rudolph sent his grandson Baron Johann Rudolph for a tour of Prescott Bush's Brown Brothers Harriman offices in New York City in December 1932--on the eve of their Hitler-triumph.@s2@s6
Certain actions taken directly by the Harriman-Bush shipping line in 1932 must be ranked among the gravest acts of treason in this century.
The U.S. embassy in Berlin reported back to Washington that the `` costly election campaigns '' and `` the cost of maintaining a private army of 300,000 to 400,000 men '' had raised questions as to the Nazis' financial backers. The constitutional government of the German republic moved to defend national freedom by ordering the Nazi Party private armies disbanded. The U.S. embassy reported that the Hamburg-Amerika Line was purchasing and distributing propaganda attacks against the German government, for attempting this last-minute crackdown on Hitler's forces.@s2@s7
Thousands of German opponents of Hitlerism were shot or intimidated by privately armed Nazi Brown Shirts. In this connection we note that the original `` Merchant of Death, '' Samuel Pryor, was a founding director of both the Union Banking Corp. and the American Ship and Commerce Corp. Since Mr. Pryor was executive committee chairman of Remington Arms and a central figure in the world's private arms traffic, his use to the Hitler project was enhanced as the Bush family's partner in Nazi Party banking and trans-Atlantic shipping.
The U.S. Senate arms-traffic investigators probed Remington after it was joined in a cartel agreement on explosives to the Nazi firm I.G. Farben. Looking at the period leading up to Hitler's seizure of power, the Senators found that `` German political associations, like the Nazi and others, are nearly all armed with American ... guns.... Arms of all kinds coming from America are transshipped in the Scheldt to river barges before the vessels arrive in Antwerp. They then can be carried through Holland without police inspection or interference. The Hitlerists and Communists are presumed to get arms in this manner. The principal arms coming from America are Thompson submachine guns and revolvers. The number is great. ''@s2@s8
The beginning of the Hitler regime brought some bizarre changes to the Hamburg-Amerika Line--and more betrayals.
Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. notified Max Warburg of Hamburg, Germany, on March 7, 1933, that Warburg was to be the corporation's official, designated representative on the board of Hamburg-Amerika.@s2@s9
Max Warburg replied on March 27, 1933, assuring his American sponsors that the Hitler government was good for Germany: `` For the last few years business was considerably better than we had anticipated, but a reaction is making itself felt for some months. We are actually suffering also under the very active propaganda against Germany, caused by some unpleasant circumstances. These occurrences were the natural consequence of the very excited election campaign, but were extraordinarily exaggerated in the foreign press. The Government is firmly resolved to maintain public peace and order in Germany, and I feel perfectly convinced in this respect that there is no cause for any alarm whatsoever. ''@s3@s0
This seal of approval for Hitler, coming from a famous Jew, was just what Harriman and Bush required, for they anticipated rather serious `` alarm '' inside the U.S.A. against their Nazi operations.
On March 29, 1933, two days after Max's letter to Harriman, Max's son, Erich Warburg, sent a cable to his cousin Frederick M. Warburg, a director of the Harriman railroad system. He asked Frederick to `` use all your influence '' to stop all anti-Nazi activity in America, including `` atrocity news and unfriendly propaganda in foreign press, mass meetings, etc. '' Frederick cabled back to Erich: `` No responsible groups here [are] urging [a] boycott [of] German goods[,] merely excited individuals. '' Two days after that, On March 31, 1933, the American-Jewish Committee, controlled by the Warburgs, and the B'nai B'rith, heavily influenced by the Sulzbergers (New York Times), issued a formal, official joint statement of the two organizations, counseling `` that no American boycott against Germany be encouraged, '' and advising `` that no further mass meetings be held or similar forms of agitation be employed. ''@s3@s1
The American Jewish Committee and the B'nai B'rith (mother of the `` Anti-Defamation League '') continued with this hardline, no-attack-on-Hitler stance all through the 1930s, blunting the fight mounted by many Jews and other anti-fascists.
Thus the decisive interchange reproduced above, taking place entirely within the orbit of the Harriman/Bush firm, may explain something of the relationship of George Bush to American Jewish and Zionist leaders. Some of them, in close cooperation with his family, played an ugly part in the drama of Naziism. Is this why `` professional Nazi-hunters '' have never discovered how the Bush family made its money?
The executive board of the Hamburg Amerika Line (Hapag) met jointly with the North German Lloyd Company board in Hamburg on Sept. 5, 1933. Under official Nazi supervision, the two firms were merged. Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. installed Christian J. Beck, a long-time Harriman executive, as manager of freight and operations in North America for the new joint Nazi shipping lines (Hapag-Lloyd) on Nov. 4, 1933.
According to testimony of officials of the companies before Congress in 1934, a supervisor from the Nazi Labor Front rode with every ship of the Harriman-Bush line; employees of the New York offices were directly organized into the Nazi Labor Front organization; Hamburg-Amerika provided free passage to individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda purposes; and the line subsidized pro-Nazi newspapers in the U.S.A., as it had done in Germany against the constitutional German government.@s3@s2
In mid-1936, Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. cabled M.M. Warburg, asking Warburg to represent the company's heavy share interest at the forthcoming Hamburg-Amerika stockholders meeting. The Warburg office replied with the information that `` we represented you '' at the stockholders meeting and `` exercised on your behalf your voting power for Rm [gold marks] 3,509,600 Hapag stock deposited with us. ''
The Warburgs transmitted a letter received from Emil Helfferich, German chief executive of both Hapag-Lloyd and of the Standard Oil subsidiary in Nazi Germany: `` It is the intention to continue the relations with Mr. Harriman on the same basis as heretofore.... '' In a colorful gesture, Hapag's Nazi chairman Helfferich sent the line's president across the Atlantic on a Zeppelin to confer with their New York string-pullers.
After the meeting with the Zeppelin passenger, the Harriman-Bush office replied: `` I am glad to learn that Mr. Hellferich [sic] has stated that relations between the Hamburg American Line and ourselves will be continued on the same basis as heretofore. ''@s3@s3
Two months before moving against Prescott Bush's Union Banking Corporation, the U. S. government ordered the seizure of all property of the Hamburg-Amerika Line and North German Lloyd, under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The investigators noted in the pre-seizure report that Christian J. Beck was still acting as an attorney representing the Nazi firm.@s3@s4
In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated, an agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The Harriman International Co., led by Averell Harriman's first cousin Oliver, was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct all exports from Hitler Germany to the United States.@s3@s5
This pact had been negotiated in Berlin between Hitler's economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and John Foster Dulles, international attorney for dozens of Nazi enterprises, with the counsel of Max Warburg and Kurt von Schroeder.
John Foster Dulles would later be U.S. Secretary of State, and the great power in the Republican Party of the 1950s. Foster's friendship and that of his brother Allen (head of the Central Intelligence Agency), greatly aided Prescott Bush to become the Republican U.S. Senator from Connecticut. And it was to be of inestimable value to George Bush, in his ascent to the heights of `` covert action government, '' that both of these Dulles brothers were the lawyers for the Bush family's far-flung enterprise.
Throughout the 1930s, John Foster Dulles arranged debt restructuring for German firms under a series of decrees issued by Adolf Hitler. In these deals, Dulles struck a balance between the interest owed to selected, larger investors, and the needs of the growing Nazi war-making apparatus for producing tanks, poison gas, etc.
Dulles wrote to Prescott Bush in 1937 concerning one such arrangement. The German-Atlantic Cable Company, owning Nazi Germany's only telegraph channel to the United States, had made debt and management agreements with the Walker-Harriman bank during the 1920s. A new decree would now void those agreements, which had originally been reached with non-Nazi corporate officials. Dulles asked Bush, who managed these affairs for Averell Harriman, to get Averell's signature on a letter to Nazi officials, agreeing to the changes. Dulles wrote:
Sept. 22, 1937
Mr. Prescott S. Bush
59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y.
Dear Press,
I have looked over the letter of the German-American [sic] Cable Company to Averell Harriman.... It would appear that the only rights in the matter are those which inure in the bankers and that no legal embarrassment would result, so far as the bondholders are concerned, by your acquiescence in the modification of the bankers' agreement.
Sincerely yours,
John Foster Dulles
Dulles enclosed a proposed draft reply, Bush got Harriman's signature, and the changes went through.@s3@s6
In conjunction with these arrangements, the German Atlantic Cable Company attempted to stop payment on its debts to smaller American bondholders. The money was to be used instead for arming the Nazi state, under a decree of the Hitler government.
Despite the busy efforts of Bush and Dulles, a New York court decided that this particular Hitler `` law '' was invalid in the United States; small bondholders, not parties to deals between the bankers and the Nazis, were entitled to get paid.@s3@s7
In this and a few other of the attempted swindles, the intended victims came out with their money. But the Nazi financial and political reorganization went ahead to its tragic climax.
For his part in the Hitler revolution, Prescott Bush was paid a fortune.
This is the legacy he left to his son, President George Bush.
An Important Historical Note:
How the Harrimans Hired Hitler
It was not inevitable that millions would be slaughtered under fascism and in World War II. At certain moments of crisis, crucial pro-Nazi decisions were made outside of Germany. These decisions for pro-Nazi actions were more aggressive than the mere `` appeasement '' which Anglo-American historians later preferred to discuss.
Private armies of 300,000 to 400,000 terrorists aided the Nazis' rise to power. W.A. Harriman's Hamburg-Amerika Line intervened against Germany's 1932 attempt to break them up.
The 1929-31 economic collapse bankrupted the Wall-Street-backed German Steel Trust. When the German government took over the Trust's stock shares, interests associated with Konrad Adenauer and the anti-Nazi Catholic Center Party attempted to acquire the shares. But the Anglo-Americans--Montagu Norman, and the Harriman-Bush bank--made sure that their Nazi puppet Fritz Thyssen regained control over the shares and the Trust. Thyssen's bankrolling of Hitler could then continue unhindered.
Unpayable debts crushed Germany in the 1920s, reparations required by the Versailles agreements. Germany was looted by the London-New York banking system, and Hitler's propaganda exploited this German debt burden.
But immediately after Germany came under Hitler's dictatorship, the Anglo-American financiers granted debt relief, which freed funds to be used for arming the Nazi state.
The North German Lloyd steamship line, which was merged with Hamburg-Amerika Line, was one of the companies which stopped debt payments under a Hitler decree arranged by John Foster Dulles and Hjalmar Schacht.
Kuhn Loeb and Co.'s Felix Warburg carried out the Hitler finance plan in New York. Kuhn Loeb asked North German Lloyd bondholders to accept new lower interest steamship bonds, issued by Kuhn Loeb, in place of the better pre-Hitler bonds.
The Opposition
New York attorney Jacob Chaitkin, father of coauthor Anton Chaitkin, took the cases of many different bondholders who rejected the swindle by Harriman, Bush, Warburg, and Hitler. Representing a women who was owed $30 on an old steamship bond--and opposing John Foster Dulles in New York municipal court--Chaitkin threatened a writ from the sheriff, tying up the 30,000 ton transatlantic liner Europa until the client received her $30. (New York Times, January 10, 1934, p. 31 col. 3).
The American Jewish Congress hired Jacob Chaitkin as the legal director of the boycott against Nazi Germany. The American Federation of Labor cooperated with Jewish and other groups in the anti-import boycott. On the other side, virtually all the Nazi trade with the United States was under the supervision of the Harriman interests and functionaries such as Prescott Bush, father of President George Bush.
Meanwhile, the Warburgs demanded that American Jews not `` agitate '' against the Hitler government, or join the organized boycott. The Warburgs' decision was carried out by the American Jewish Committee and the B'nai B'rith, who opposed the boycott as the Nazi military state grew increasingly powerful.
The historical coverup on these events is so tight that virtually the only expose@aa of the Warburgs came in journalist John L. Spivak's `` Wall Street's Fascist Conspiracy, '' in the pro-communist New Masses periodical (Jan. 29 and Feb. 5, 1934). Spivak pointed out that the Warburgs controlled the American Jewish Committee, which opposed the anti-Nazi boycott, while their Kuhn Loeb and Co. had underwritten Nazi shipping; and he exposed the financing of pro-fascist political activities by the Warburgs and their partners and allies, many of whom were bigwigs in the American Jewish Committee and B'nai B'rith.
Given where the Spivak piece appeared, it is not surprising that Spivak called Warburg an ally of the Morgan Bank, but made no mention of Averell Harriman. Mr. Harriman, after all, was a permanent hero of the Soviet Union.
John L. Spivak later underwent a curious transformation, himself joining the coverup. In 1967, he wrote an autobiography (A Man in His Time, New York: Horizon Press), which praises the American Jewish Committee. The pro-fascism of the Warburgs does not appear in the book. The former `` rebel '' Spivak also praises the action arm of the B'nai B'rith, the Anti-Defamation League. Pathetically, he comments favorably that the League has spy files on the American populace which it shares with government agencies.
Thus is history erased; and those decisions, which direct history into one course or another, are lost to the knowledge of the current generation.
Return to the Table of Contents
NOTES:
1. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order No. 248. The order was signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed October 20, 1942; F.R. Doc. 42-11568; Filed, November 6, 1942, 11:31 A.M.; 7 Fed. Reg. 9097 (Nov. 7, 1942). See also the New York City Directory of Directors (available at the Library of Congress). The volumes for the 1930s and 1940s list Prescott Bush as a director of Union Banking Corporation for the years 1934 through 1943.
2. Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 259: Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation; Vesting Order No. 261: Holland-American Trading Corp.
3. Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp.
4. The New York Times on December 16, 1944, ran a five-paragraph page 25 article on actions of the New York State Banking Department. Only the last sentence refers to the Nazi bank, as follows: `` The Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway. ''
The Times omitted the fact that the Union Banking Corporation had been seized by the government for trading with the enemy, and even the fact that 120 Broadway was the address of the government's Alien Property Custodian.
5. Fritz Thyssen, I Paid Hitler, 1941, reprinted in (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972), p. 133. Thyssen says his contributions began with 100,000 marks given in October 1923, for Hitler's attempted `` putsch '' against the constitutional government.
6. Confidential memorandum from U.S. embassy, Berlin, to the U.S. Secretary of State, April 20, 1932, on microfilm in Confidential Reports of U.S. State Dept., 1930s, Germany, at major U.S. libraries.
7. Oct. 5, 1942, Memorandum to the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order No. 248.
8. Elimination of German Resources for War: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs, United States Senate, Seventy-Ninth Congress; Part 5, Testimony of [the United States] Treasury Department, July 2, 1945. P. 507: Table of Vereinigte Stahlwerke output, figures are percent of German total as of 1938; Thyssen organization including Union Banking Corporation pp. 727-31.
9. Robert Sobel, The Life and Times of Dillon Read (New York: Dutton-Penguin, 1991), pp. 92-111. The Dillon Read firm cooperated in the development of Sobel's book.
10. George Walker to Averell Harriman, Aug. 11, 1927, in the W. Averell Harriman papers at the Library of Congress (designated hereafter WAH papers).
11. `` Iaccarino '' to G. H. Walker, RCA Radiogram Sept. 12, 1927. The specific nature of their business with Mussolini is not explained in correspondence available for public access.
12. Andrew Boyle, Montagu Norman (London: Cassell, 1967).
Sir Henry Clay, Lord Norman (London, MacMillan & Co., 1957), pp. 18, 57, 70-71.
John A. Kouwenhouven, Partners in Banking ... Brown Brothers Harriman (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1969).
13. Coordination of much of the Hitler project took place at a single New York address. The Union Banking Corporation had been set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway. Management of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, carried out through Harriman's American Ship and Commerce Corp., was also set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway.
14. Interrogation of Fritz Thyssen, EF/Me/1 of Sept. 4, 1945 in U.S. Control Council records, photostat on page 167 in Anthony Sutton, An Introduction to The Order (Billings, Mt.: Liberty House Press, 1986).
15. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B, by the Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, United States Government Printing Office, (Washington: 1948), pp. 1597, 1686.
16. `` Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation - [minutes of the] Meeting of Board of Directors, '' Oct. 31, 1930 (Harriman papers, Library of Congress), shows Averell Harriman as Chairman of the Board.
Prescott Bush to W.A. Harriman, Memorandum Dec. 19, 1930 on their Harriman Fifteen Corp.
Annual Report of United Konigs and Laura Steel and Iron Works for the year 1930 (Harriman papers, Library of Congress) lists `` Dr. Friedrich Flick ... Berlin '' and `` William Averell Harriman ... New York '' on the Board of Directors.
`` Harriman Fifteen Corporation Securities Position February 28, 1931, '' Harriman papers, Library of Congress. This report shows Harriman Fifteen Corporation holding 32,576 shares in Silesian Holding Co. V.T.C. worth (in scarce depression dollars) $1,628,800, just over half the value of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation's total holdings.
The New York City Directory of Directors volumes for the 1930s (available at the Library of Congress) show Prescott Sheldon Bush and W. Averell Harriman as the directors of Harriman Fifteen Corp.
`` Appointments, '' (three typed pages) marked `` Noted May 18 1931 W.A.H., '' (among the papers from Prescott Bush's New York Office of Brown Brothers Harriman, Harriman papers, Library of Congress), lists a meeting between Averell Harriman and Friedrich Flick in Berlin at 4:00 P.M., Wednesday April 22, 1931. This was followed immediately by a meeting with Wilhelm Cuno, chief executive of the Hamburg-Amerika Line.
The `` Report To the Stockholders of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, '' Oct. 19, 1933 (in the Harriman papers, Library of Congress) names G.H. Walker as president of the corporation. It shows the Harriman Fifteen Corporation's address as 1 Wall Street--the location of G.H. Walker and Co.
17. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B, op. cit., p. 1686.
18. Jim Flaherty (a BBH manager, Prescott Bush's employee), March 19, 1934 to W.A. Harriman.
`` Dear Averell:
In Roland's absence Pres[cott] thought it advisable for me to let you know that we received the following cable from [our European representative] Rossi dated March 17th [relating to conflict with the Polish government]....''
19. Harriman Fifteen Corporation notice to stockholders Jan. 7, 1935, under the name of George Walker, President.
20. Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp. Executed Nov. 17, 1942. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian. F.R. Doc. 42-14183; Filed Dec. 31, 1942, 11:28 A.M.; 8 Fed. Reg. 33 (Jan. 1, 1943). The order confiscated the Nazis' holdings of 98,000 shares of common and 50,000 shares of preferred stock in Silesian-American. The Nazi parent company in Breslau, Germany wrote directly to Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St. on Aug. 5, 1940, with `` an invitation to take part in the regular meeting of the members of the Bergwerksgesellsc[h]aft Georg von Giesche's Erben.... '' WAH papers.
21. Sept. 25, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order No. 370.
22. George Walker was a director of American Ship and Commerce from its organization through 1928. Consult New York City Directory of Directors.
`` Harriman Fifteen Corporation Securities Position February 28, 1931, '' op. cit. The report lists 46,861 shares in the American Ship & Commerce Corp.
See `` Message from Mr. Bullfin, '' Aug. 30, 1934 (Harriman Fifteen section, Harriman papers, Library of Congress) for the joint supervision of Bush and Walker, respectively director and president of the corporation.
23. Cuno was later exposed by Walter Funk, Third Reich Press Chief and Under Secretary of Propaganda, in Funk's postwar jail cell at Nuremberg; but Cuno had died just as Hitler was taking power. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 144. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B, op. cit., p. 1688.
24. See `` Elimination of German Resources for War, '' op. cit., pp. 881-82 on Voegler.
See Annual Report of the (Hamburg-Amerikanische-Packetfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (Hapag or Hamburg-Amerika Line), March 1931, for the board of directors. A copy is in the New York Public Library Annex at 11th Avenue, Manhattan.
25. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B, op. cit., pp. 1178, 1453-54, 1597, 1599.
See `` Elimination of German Resources for War, '' op. cit., pp. 870-72 on Schroeder; p. 730 on Groeninger.
26. Annual Report of Hamburg-Amerika, op. cit.
Baron Rudolph Schroeder, Sr. to Averell Harriman, Nov. 14, 1932. K[night] W[ooley] handwritten note and draft reply letter, Dec. 9, 1932.
In his letter, Baron Rudolph refers to the family's American affiliate, J. Henry Schroder [name anglicized], of which Allen Dulles was a director, and his brother John Foster Dulles was the principal attorney.
Baron Bruno Schroder of the British branch was adviser to Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman, and Baron Bruno's partner Frank Cyril Tiarks was Norman's co-director of the Bank of England throughout Norman's career. Kurt von Schroeder was Hjalmar Schacht's delegate to the Bank for International Settlements in Geneva, where many of the financial arrangements for the Nazi regime were made by Montagu Norman, Schacht and the Schroeders for several years of the Hitler regime right up to the outbreak of World War II.
27. Confidential memorandum from U.S. embassy, Berlin, op. cit.
28. U.S. Senate `` Nye Committee '' hearings, Sept. 14, 1934, pp. 1197-98, extracts from letters of Col. William N. Taylor, dated June 27, 1932 and Jan. 9, 1933.
29. American Ship and Commerce Corporation to Dr. Max Warburg, March 7, 1933.
Max Warburg had brokered the sale of Hamburg-Amerika to Harriman and Walker in 1920. Max's brothers controlled the Kuhn Loeb investment banking house in New York, the firm which had staked old E.H. Harriman to his 1890s buyout of the giant Union Pacific Railroad.
Max Warburg had long worked with Lord Milner and others of the racialist British Round Table concerning joint projects in Africa and Eastern Europe. He was an advisor to Hjalmar Schacht for several decades and was a top executive of Hitler's Reichsbank. The reader may consult David Farrer, The Warburgs: The Story of A Family (New York: Stein and Day, 1975).
30. Max Warburg, at M.M. Warburg and Co., Hamburg, to Averill [sic] Harriman, c/o Messrs. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y., March 27, 1933.
31. This correspondence, and the joint statement of the Jewish organizations, are reproduced in Moshe R. Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933-41: An Historical Analysis (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1982).
32. Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities: Public Hearings before A Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, United States House of Representatives, Seventy Third Congress, New York City, July 9-12, 1934--Hearings No. 73-NY-7 (Washington: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1934). See testimony of Capt. Frederick C. Mensing, John Schroeder, Paul von Lilienfeld-Toal, and summaries by Committee members.
See New York Times, July 16, 1933, p. 12, for organizing of Nazi Labor Front at North German Lloyd, leading to Hamburg-Amerika after merger.
33. American Ship and Commerce Corporation telegram to Rudolph Brinckmann at M.M. Warburg, June 12, 1936.
Rudolph Brinckmann to Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St., June 20, 1936, with enclosed note transmitting Helfferich's letter.
Reply to Dr. Rudolph Brinckmann c/o M.M. Warburg and Co, July 6, 1936, in the Harriman papers at the Library of Congress. The file copy of this letter carries no signature, but is presumably from Averell Harriman.
34. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order No. 126. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed August 28, 1942. F.R. Doc. 42-8774; Filed September 4, 1942, 10:55 A.M.; 7 F.R. 7061 (No. 176, Sept. 5, 1942.) July 18, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order No. 126.
35. New York Times, May 20, 1933. Leading up to this agreement is a telegram which somehow escaped the shredder and may be seen in the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress. It is addressed to Nazi official Hjalmar Schacht at the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, dated May 11, 1933: `` Much disappointed to have missed seeing you Tuesday afternoon.... I hope to see you either in Washington or New York before you sail.
with my regards W.A. Harriman ''
36. Dulles to Bush letter and draft reply in WAH papers.
37. New York Times, Jan. 19, 1938.
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