Recovered history
News items from the Review

INDEX

REESE, FLORENCE

DEANA MARTIN - Born April 12, 1900, in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, Florence Reece, a social activist, poet and songwriter, grew up in a coal camp at Fork Ridge, Tenn. Florence met her husband-to-be, Sam Reece, at the young age of fifteen. . . Reece is perhaps best known for her song "Which Side are You On?," which soon became the anthem for the labor movement. The song was written in 1931 during a strike by the United Mine Workers of America. . . During this strike, the sheriff, J.H. Blair, led his gang of thugs on a violent rampage, beating and murdering union leaders. They found themselves at the Reece's home, where Reece was alone with the children. She held her ground, asking the sheriff, "What are you here for? You know there's nothing but a lot of little hungry children here." Then she somehow got word to her husband not to come home, while the sheriff and his thugs kept watch at he door. The men ransacked the house in search of Sam, to no avail. While Florence waited inside for her husband, she wrote the song on an old wall calendar, to the tune of "Lay the Lily Low".

About 1940, Pete Seeger, an "eager young college dropout wanting to learn union songs," learned the song from Tillman Cadle, a coal miner. In 1941 it was recorded by the Almanac Singers. This version made the song famous. The song continues to be sung at gatherings for labor workers and many other social causes throughout the world.

PARIS 1968 GRAFFITI

- Alcohol kills. Take LSD.
- Unbutton your mind as often as your fly.
- Drive the cop out of your head.
- Commute, work, commute, sleep . . .
- Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can and many say, "We will breathe later." And most of them don't die because they are already dead.
- Boredom is counterrevolutionary.
- No replastering, the structure is rotten.
- Masochism today takes the form of reformism.
- Reform my ass.
- Already ten days of happiness.
- Don't liberate me - I'll take care of that.
- Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as "progressives."
- We refuse to be highrised, diplomaed, licensed, inventoried, registered, indoctrinated, suburbanized, sermonized, beaten, telemanipulated, gassed, booked.
- The forest precedes man, the desert follows him.
- Concrete breeds apathy.
- Coming soon to this location: charming ruins.
- Live without dead time.
- Down with the abstract, long live the ephemeral.
- Practice wishful thinking.
- Be realistic, demand the impossible.
- Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking.
- Exaggeration is the beginning of invention.
- Forget everything you've been taught. Start by dreaming.
- Form dream committees.
- Arise, ye wretched of the university.
- Professors, you make us grow old.
- If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.
- I suspect God of being a leftist intellectual.
- Going through the motions kills the emotions.
- Commodities are the opium of the people.
- Are you a consumer or a participant?
- I participate. You participate. He participates. We participate. They profit.
- Abolish alienation.
- I have something to say but I don't know what.
- Comrades, stop applauding, the spectacle is everywhere.

BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS

CHILE

NIXON OKAYED ACTION AGAINST ALLENDE, TAPES SHOW

NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVES - President Richard Nixon acknowledged that he had given instructions to "do anything short of a Dominican-type action" to keep the democratically elected president of Chile from assuming office, according to a White House audio tape posted by the National Security Archive today. A phone conversation captured by his secret Oval Office taping system reveals Nixon telling his press secretary, Ron Zeigler, that he had given such instructions to then U.S. Ambassador Edward Korry, "but he just failed, the son of a bitch... He should have kept Allende from getting in."

A transcript of the president's comments on March 23, 1972, made after the leak of corporate papers revealing collaboration between ITT and the CIA to rollback the election of socialist leader Salvador Allende, was recently published in the National Security Archive book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability by Peter Kornbluh; the tape marks the first time Nixon can be heard discussing his orders to undermine Chilean democracy. The conversation took place as Zeigler briefed the President on a State Department press conference to contain the growing ITT/CIA scandal which included one ITT document stating that Korry had been "given the green light to move in the name of President Nixon...to do all possible short of a Dominican Republic-type action to keep Allende from taking power."

Other declassified records show that Nixon secretly ordered maximum CIA covert operations to "prevent Allende from coming to power or unseat him" in the fall of 1970 but that Ambassador Korry was deliberately not informed of covert efforts to instigate a military coup.

When the White House-ordered covert operations failed to prevent Allende's November 3, 1970, inauguration, Nixon's national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, lobbied vigorously for a hard-line U.S. policy "to prevent [Allende] from consolidating himself now when we know he is weaker than he will ever be and when he obviously fears our pressure and hostility," according to a previously unknown eight-page briefing paper prepared for the President on November 5, 1970.

In the secret/sensitive "memorandum for the president" Kissinger claimed that Allende's election posed "one of the most serious challenges ever faced in the hemisphere" and that Nixon's "decision as to what to do about it may be the most historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will have to make this year."

ISABEL HILTON, THE GUARDIAN, LONDON: The "revelation" that the US helped to bring Augusto Pinochet to power by destabilizing the government of President Salvador Allende can have come as a surprise only to those who have spent the last 27 years in a state of acute denial . . . But still, the documents confirm that, in addition to the well-known dirty tricks against Allende, between 1971 and 1973 the US government gave $4 million to opposition political parties, mostly to the Christian Democrats; that the CIA spent $2.6 million supporting the Christian Democrats in the 1964 election in Chile; and that the US went on paying political parties into the 1980s. The newspaper El Mercurio received about $1.6 million in covert support from US agents. El Mercurio was a leading critic of the government of Allende . . . A CIA memo prepared three years before the 1973 coup states: "If civil disorders were to follow from a military action, the USG [US government] would promptly deliver necessary support and material, (but not personnel)." - GUARDIAN

NY TIMES: A month before the assassination of a Chilean diplomat and an American colleague in downtown Washington in 1976, the United States government ordered its envoys in Latin America to try to avert a plot to murder leftist opponents of the region's governments, documents released today show. But the American ambassador in Chile, David Popper, refused to convey what Washington had learned of the plot or even the government's concerns to the leader of Chile's military junta, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, saying he did not want to offend the general by associating him with the plot, known as Operation Condor, the documents show. "He might well take as an insult any inference that he was connected with such assassination plots," Mr. Popper said in a cable to Washington. General Pinochet's secret police chief, Gen. Manuel Contreras, was later convicted in Chile of ordering what was, up to that time, the worst act of foreign-sponsored terrorism on American soil: the bombing on Sept. 21, 1976, of the car in which Orlando Letelier, a former confidant of the deposed Chilean president, Salvador Allende, was traveling to his job at a Washington research institute along with two colleagues. He and Ronni K. Moffitt were killed; her husband, Michael Moffitt, survived the blast. NY TIMES

[According to Narco News, the current US Ambassador to Mexico, Jeffrey Davidow, was Popper's political counsel during the coup years in Santiago]

The Cradle Will Rock

A remarkable film -- both good viewing and good history -- depicts three well hidden stories from 1930s America. First, movie centers on the New Deal's Federal Theater Project and attempts by a right-wing House committee to shut it down. Specifically it is the tale of "The Cradle Will Rock," written by Marc Blitzstein [Hank Azaria] and starring a 21-year-old Orson Welles [Angus Macfadyen]. A joyfully leftist musical funded by the federal project, it eventually ran afoul of congressional opponents and a subsequent budget cutback that effectively canceled the play's opening night. As one account describes it, "Welles, however, refused to postpone: high irony, because none of his previous theatrical projects had opened on time, due to his impossibly elaborate technical requirements. Cradle was hardly ready either, but no matter: when the over-sold audience gathered outside the Maxine Elliot Theater, they found it padlocked and guarded by WPA 'Cossacks' (John Houseman's term) to make certain that no 'government property' (that is, sets, props, or costumes) were removed. The actors mingled with the audience, entertaining them with songs and scenes, while Welles furiously phoned around town to find a vacant theater. Stage manager Jeannie Rosenthal was circling the city in a truck, carrying a rented piano, destination unknown . . . Just when no theater seemed to be available, a little man in the audience spoke to Welles . . . He had a theater, the Venice, and it was both empty and available, as well as cheap. The show had a theater! Rosenthal delivered the piano, and Welles began leading the opening night throng to the Venice, on foot," where the musical was performed if with considerable theatrical anarchy.

Second, the movie tells of the sometimes warm relationship between Mussolini and members of the American establishment, notably William Randolph Hearst. For example, in 1939, Hearst's Cosmopolitan published an article in which psychiatrist Carl Jung called Mussolini "warm and human." Of Hitler, Jung said, "There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man. As somebody commented about him at the last Nuremberg party congress, since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world. This markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler's is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical, inexplicable, curious and unreasonable ... So you see, Hitler is a medicine man, a form of a spiritual vessel, a demi-deity or, even better, a myth."

In the Nation, Dana Frank has written, "From 1927 through the mid-thirties, Hearst solicited and ran regular columns from Benito Mussolini and then Adolf Hitler. After years of courtship, Hearst finally got to meet Hitler in 1934 in a carefully arranged rendezvous. Hearst flattered (and protected) himself by reporting that he had used the occasion to pressure Hitler to back off on the persecution of Jews." In Friendly Fascism, Bertram Gross notes that Mussolini also won "the friendship, support or qualified approval" of the American ambassador, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Thomas Lamont, many newspapers and magazine publishers, the majority of business journals, and quite a sprinkling of liberals, including some associated with both the Nation and The New Republic." In the film a Mussolini emissary [Susan Sarandon] sells Da Vincis to New York luninaries while partying with the likes of Rockefeller.

Finally, 'Cradle' recounts one of the great incidents of art censorship, the destruction of Diego Rivera's [Ruben Blades] Rockefeller Center mural that had been commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller [John Cusack]. Rivera's demise was caused by the inclusion in the 17' x 63' mural, a depiction of Lenin clasping the hands of a black and a Russian solider. The Encyclopedia of Censorship Description of the Art Work reports that, "On May 22, 1933, Rivera was called down from his scaffold where he was still working on the unfinished mural. He was handed a check for $14,000, the balance of his fee, and informed that he had been dismissed. Within 30 minutes the mural had been covered by tarpaper and a wooden screen. Seeking a compromise, Rockefeller suggested that Rivera should replace Lenin with some unknown face; the artist offered to add Lincoln but refused to expunge Lenin. Charged with willful propagandizing, he declared only that 'All art is propaganda.' Since he had accepted his payment, Rivera was unable to force the Rockefellers to exhibit or even keep his work. The mural was subsequently removed from the wall..." The following year, Rivera began a smaller version of the mural on a wall at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

Although some of the dates have been compressed to fit the plot, the underlying story is true, and one that those in charge of the past don't care for you to know.

The Wizard of Oz

LAWRENCE KS JOURNAL-WORLD: L. Frank Baum's fairy tale about a Kansas girl swept by a tornado to a magical world of munchkins and witches made both author and state synonymous with Oz . . . But one slice of the story is largely ignored . . . Step back in time to Aberdeen, SD, in late 1890. Conflict among white settlers and American Indians was intense. It was a decade before "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" became a bestseller. Salesman, typesetter, press operator and editor L. Frank Baum was the publisher of The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. It was in the pages of his weekly newspaper that Baum left his mark as a racist who repeatedly called for the mass murder of American Indians. Baum's first appeal for genocide was printed immediately after the slaying of Sitting Bull and 10 days before US Army troops, supported by Indian mercenaries, killed about 300 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee Creek, SD Here is what Baum wrote: "The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies, inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With this fall the nobility of the redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs. The whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians."

LAWRENCE JOURNAL-WORLD

Palestinian Time-Line

[Based on an article by Con Coughlin in the London Sunday Telegraph]

EARLY 19TH CENTURY: Jewish pioneers escaping Russia begin arriving in area. Dr. Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president, would write later that the Jews did not want to violate the legitimate interests of the Arabs: "Not a hair of their heads shall be touched." Jewish settlers depend upon local Palestinians to learn how to farm the land and survive in their new territory.

1916: Arab leaders agree to help Britain in its war against the Ottoman Empire. In return, the British promise that they were "prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs", including those in Palestine.

1917: The British conquer the Holy Land, marching into Jerusalem. Earlier Lord Balfour, the British foreign secretary, had announced his country's commitment to the "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," seen by Palestinians and others -- including Lawrence of Arabia -- as a sign of British duplicity.

1930s: As Jews flee Nazism, immigration to Palestine grows from 4,000 a year to 62,000 just in 1935. Palestinians see this as more evidence of British betrayal.

1936: An Arab rebellion erupts against the British.

1939: The British seek to calm the Arabs with a promised of an "independent Arab state within ten years." There is no mention of an independent Jewish state. 28,000 Palestinian Jews sign up to fight with the British anyway. Among them: Moshe Dayan.

LATE 1940s: With the end of the war, British have an official policy preventing further Jewish immigration even in the face of a mass exodus of Jewish survivors of concentration camps. Ships full of immigrants are turned away.

1946: Zionists, led by Menachem Begin, bomb the King David Hotel, used for British offices. 91 people die.

1947: UN votes for the partition of Palestine with Jerusalem under international peace-keepers.

1948: British withdraw from Palestine. Independent Israeli state declared, followed by first Arab-Israel war with lasted six months and ended with a partition along the lines proposed by the UN. While the Zionists, with reservations, accept the plan, because it grants them their long-held goal of creating an independent state, the Arabs bitterly opposed it. Writes Couglhlin: "One of the most significant results of the war was that Jerusalem was divided between Israeli and Arab control, with the Arabs controlling access to the all-important holy sites, including the Wailing Wall, the holiest shrine in Judaism. On the Arab side, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes, and became refugees in camps set up in Lebanon and Jordan. The areas of Palestine under Arab control were quickly annexed by neighboring Jordan, and became known as that country's West Bank. A heavily fortified 'Green Line' was established, separating the Arab and Jewish communities. To the enduring humiliation of the new Israeli state, religious Jews were prevented from praying at the Wailing Wall."

1967: Six-Day War reunites Jerusalem, and leaves Israel in control of Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza and the Sinai desert. Disputes over these territories will mark subsequent negotiations. The Palestinian Liberation Organization is formed and commences actions against the Israelis.

1973: Syria and Egypt attack the Israelis during the Jewish Yom Kippur religious holiday but are beaten back.

1979: Egypt reaches an accord with Israel with the help of Jimmy Carter. Not long after, Sadat is assassinated.

1987: Palestinians commence a violent uprising.

1993: After secret meetings, an accord is achieved in Oslo under which the Palestinians are to get control over the West Bank and Gaza in return for peace.

1995: Israeli prime minister Rabin is murdered.

1999: Ehud Barak, a former Israeli chief of staff, is elected prime minister and a new peace effort begins with the help of Bill Clinton

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Third parties that mattered

A short of history of presidential races in which third party candidates exercised significant influence:

1824: With only 15 electoral votes dividing leader Andrew Jackson from John Q. Adams, William Crawford's 41 and Henry Clay's 37 helped throw the issue into the House where Speaker Clay helped tip the election to Adams.

1848: Slavery foes in the Free Soil Party, led by Martin Van Buren, gave the election to Whig Zachary Taylor.

1856: The Republicans, a new anti-slavery party, came in second, bringing to an end the third-place Whigs.

1860: Abraham Lincoln of the new Republican Party won with only 40% of the vote against three other candidates, including two from a Democratic Party split north and south.

1880: Garfield won the electoral vote but he and Winfield Hancock got 48% each, with the Greenbacks -- who favored an expanded money supply -- pulling 3%.

1884: Again, the Democrat (Cleveland) and the Republican (Blaine) came within one point of each other, enough to make the Greenbacks and the Prohibitionists players in the race.

1888: The same one point divided the Democrats(Cleveland) and the Republicans (Harrison) with the Prohibitionists and Union Labor getting 2% and 1% respectively.

1892: With only 3 points dividing Cleveland from Harrison, the Populists' 9 points became critical.

1912: Once again a new third party (Progressives under Teddy Roosevelt) came in second in a race that elected Woodrow Wilson.

1916: Wilson won again but only by 3 points and 23 electoral votes. The Socialists got 3 points.

1948: Harry Truman's 5-point win was complicated by the presence of a States Rights Party under Strom Thurmond and a Progressive Party under Henry Wallace. They each got a little over two points.

1968: With Nixon and Humphrey each getting 43%, George Wallace's American Independent Party with its 14% became a key factor in the race.

1992: Ross Perot got 19% in a race in which the front-runners -- Clinton and Bush -- were divided by only 6 points.

MORAL: In 13 presidential elections, third parties have been a significant factor. Talking heads who tell you otherwise don't know their history.

The BCCI affair

CARTER, REAGAN, BUSH,
CLINTON, BUSH, AND BCCI

THE GREATEST FINANCIAL scandal in history -- the BCCI affair -- left American participants virtually untouched. The media covered the scandal poorly even though, according to one investigative journalist, up to a hundred Washington politicians and lawyers might have been criminally liable.

As a result -- much like Clinton and the Dixie Mafia -- Americans have but the vaguest notion of what happened. In fact, the two stories overlap. And like many contemporary sagas of corruption, the two stories reached deep into both the major parties. In fact, if George W. Bush is elected, we will be entering our fifth consecutive presidential administration (two Democratic and three Republican) with direct ties to leading figures in the biggest financial scandal of all time.

This time line suggests some of the interplay of individuals and parties:

1975
National Bank of Georgia president Bert Lance, whom former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter described as being like a brother and was Carter's chosen but defeated successor, meets with Jackson Stephens, a Naval Academy classmate of Carter. Stephens Inc. arranges public offering of NBG stock. Stephens would later be described by the New York Post as the man who was to "Clinton what Bert Lance was to candidate Jimmy Carter."

1976
Both Stephens and Lance help Carter in his race for the White House. Carter uses the NBG corporate plane without disclosing it. Campaign is later fined.

Two Indonesian billionaires come to Arkansas. Mochtar Riady and Liem Sioe Liong are close to Suharto. Riady is looking for an American bank to buy. Riady's agent is Jackson Stephens.

1977
Lance comes to Washington as director of the Office of Management and Budget. He quickly comes under investigation for his past financial dealings and in September resigns. His lawyer is Clark Clifford, later embroiled in the BCCI case.

1978
Hillary Clinton, the Arkansas governor's wife, is getting considerable business from Stephens Inc.

George W. Bush begins operations of his oil firm, Arbusto Energy. He assembles several dozen investors in a limited partnership including Dorothy Bush (a friend of BCCI figure Robert Altman), Lewis Lehrman, William Draper, and James Bath, a Houston aircraft broker who bought several planes from Air America, a CIA front. Bath's firm appears to be owned by Saudi investors. He also was a part-owner of a Houston's Main Bank, along with a couple of BCCI figures.

Stephens brokers the arrival of BCCI to this country, and steers BCCI's founder, Hassan Abedi to Bert Lance.

Stephens Inc tries to sell Riady stock in the National Bank of Georgia. The Washington Post quotes a US banker suggesting that Riady is working for Suharto, who is trying to butter up Carter: "They think of this country like a 'regime' similar to their own and they just don't realize that such a ploy wouldn't work." There's no deal. Lance's bank will eventually be taken over by a BCCI front man -- Ghaith Pharaon. Pharaon later sells his bank to First American. Pharaon will be fined $37 million by the Federal Reserve Board and become a fugitive.

Abedi moves to secretly take over First American Bankshares -- later the subject of the only BCCI-connected scandal to be prosecuted in the US.

1979
Mochtar Riady and Stephens Inc set up Stephens Finance Ltd. In Hong Kong.

Lance is indicted on charges of violating federal banking laws. Clifford's partner, Robert Altman, represents Lance who eventually achieves a hung jury.

During this same period, Stephens is, according to Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin in "False Profits," playing "a crucial role in BCCI's penetration of the US market."

1984
Mochtar Riady buys a stake in the Worthen holding company whose assets include the Stephens-controlled Worthen Bank. Price: $16 million. Other Worthen co-owners will eventually include BCCI investor Abdullah Taha Bakhish. Deal handled by C. Joseph Giroir II. Giroir is the Rose law firm chair who hired Hillary Clinton. Giroir will continue to be a deal-maker for the Riadys.

1985
Arkansas state pension funds -- deposited in Worthen by Governor Bill Clinton -- suddenly lose 15% of their value because of the failure of high risk, short-term investments and the brokerage firm that bought them. The $52 million loss is covered by a Worthen check written by Jack Stephens in the middle of the night, an insurance policy, and the subsequent purchase over the next few months of 40% of the bank by Mochtar Riady. Clinton and Worthen escape a major scandal. Mochtar's son James comes back to Arkansas to manage Worthen as president.

Worthen is investigated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for improper loans to companies owned by the Riadys and Stephenses.

1986
George W. Bush and partners receive more than $2 million of Harken Energy stock in exchange for a failing oil well operation, which has lost $400,000 in the prior six months. After Bush joins Harken, the largest stock position and a seat on its board is acquired by Harvard Management Company. The Harken board gives Bush $600,000 worth of the company's publicly traded stock, plus a seat on the board plus a consultancy that pays him up to $120,000 a year. When Harken runs short of cash it hooks up with Jackson Stephens, who arranges a $25 million stock purchase by Union Bank of Switzerland. Sheik Abdullah Bakhsh, who joins the board as a part of the deal, is connected to BCCI.

1988
Stephens' wife Mary Ann runs George Bush's campaign in Arkansas. He is a member of Team 100 -- individuals who have given $100,000 to the Republican party.

A few days before the supposedly surprise arrest of five BCCI officials, some of the world's most powerful drug dealers quietly withdraw millions of dollars from the bank. Some government investigators believe the dealers were tipped off by sources within the Reagan administration.

1989
Bahrain officials suddenly break off offshore drilling negotiations with Amoco and decide to deal with Harken Energy, George W. Bush's firm. Harken has had a series of failed ventures and no cash, so the Bass brothers are brought in to finance Harken's efforts at a cost of $50 million. Harken's investment banker is the same firm that helped in BCCI's acquisition of First American. Among the other BCCI-connected figures that help the deal: Bahrain's prime minister.

1990
Bush's attorney general, Richard Thornberg, is warned about BCCI but does nothing.

1991
Stephens Inc gives $100,000 to a Bush dinner committee.

With Stephens, Mochtar Riady buys BCCI's former Hong Kong subsidiary from its liquidators.

A former top aide to White House Chief of Staff John Sununu goes to work for a prominent figure in the BCCI scandal less than a month after leaving the Bush administration. Edward Rogers Jr. signs a $600,000 contract to give legal advice to Sheik Kamal Adham, an ex-Saudi intelligence officer who is being investigated for his role in BCCI's takeover of First American Bankshares.

The Miami acting US Attorney is reportedly rebuffed by the Justice Department in his efforts to indict BCCI and some of its principal officers on tax fraud charges. Justice Department later denies this occurred.

1992
Ronald Reagan is introduced at the GOP convention by former senator Paul Laxalt, whose law firm represented BCCI in a drug money case. The chair of the convention, Craig Fuller, has been the number two official of Hill & Knowlton which was involved in the BCCI-First American case. Bush's campaign press representatives has done PR for a Saudi sheik accused of involvement in the BCCI affair, earning $200,000 in fees in just two months.

Employees of Stephens Inc. give more money to the Clinton campaign than those of any other firm except Goldman, Sachs and the NY law firm of Wilke, Farr & Gallagher.

Stephens' Worthen Bank gives Clinton a $3.5 million line of credit allowing the cash-strapped candidate to finish the primaries. Little Rock Worldwide Travel provides Clinton with $1 million in deferred billing for his campaign trips. Without the Worthen and Worldwide largess, it is unlikely that the cash-strapped candidate could have survived through the later primaries.

1995
Webster Hubbell, a former Rose law firm partner -- although not known for skill in Asian trade matters -- goes to work for a Lippo Group affiliate after being forced out of the Clinton administration and before going to jail. Hubbell represented both Worthen and James Riady during the 1980s.

1998
With the settlement of civil fraud charges against Clark Clifford and Robert Altman, the puny and often diverted investigation into the American branch of the BCCI scandal effectively comes to an end. Under the deal, the pair will have to surrender $5 million in stock in First American Bankshares, which had been illegally controlled by BCCI. They will, however, get to keep $10-15 million in proceeds obtained during their tenure as First American attorneys.

*****

The BCCI scandal cheated depositors out of over $10 billion worldwide. Many of these were lower income people now being paid off at 15 and 25 cents on the dollar for damage done by a illegal operation willingly used not only by hundreds of drug dealers and other criminals from various countries but by the intelligence services of five nations (including the CIA) and at least one government, Pakistan, seeking to finance its nuclear weapons development.
Things always moved a little too smoothly in the BCCI investigation, leaving scores of unanswered questions and, so far as can be determined, hardly anyone to blame. One exception, Swaleh Naqvi, BCCI's number two man, was given a mild sentence -- over the objections of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. He later told prosecutors that he had never explained to Altman and Clifford who really owned First American.

Naqvi's plea bargain with Justice appeared to have been what the Wall Street Journal called "sweetheart justice." Said the Journal: "When drugs and money laundering arrive, political corruption cannot be far behind. If we had an explanation of how BCCI got away with its illegal purchase of First American, we could afford to dismiss such ambiguous connections as lawyer-client relationships. But we have no such answer, and are left to speculate why, in the Naqvi plea-bargain, the Justice Department does not seem to be pressing for one."

The American media has studiously downplayed the story to the end. The New York Times, for example, put the Altman-Clifford settlement on its business page.

But while the story has disappeared not all the characters connected to this saga have. One, for example, is still president and another is ahead in the polls.

[The best book on the BCCI scandal is False Profits]

Kennedy and the mob

CBS: Legendary crooner Frank Sinatra served as a liaison between John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign for president and mobster Sam Giancana in a scheme to use Mafia muscle to deliver union votes, Sinatra's daughter tells 60 Minutes in an interview. Tina Sinatra, the late singer's youngest daughter, also describes her father's final years and his work for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Tina, 52, says her father told her that Kennedy patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy wanted the Mafia's help in delivering the union vote in the 1960 West Virginia primary, in which John Kennedy, then a US senator, faced Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. The elder Kennedy asked Frank Sinatra to make a request to then-Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana. Sinatra was approached "because (Kennedy) knew dad had access to Sam Giancana," Tina said. "It would be in Jack Kennedy's best interest if his father did not make the contact directly. Dad was on an errand."

Giancana told Frank Sinatra he would do it, telling the singer, according to his daughter, "It's a couple of phone calls." Soon after Kennedy won the tight race for president, the deal brokered by Sinatra came back to haunt him when the Kennedy administration cracked down on the Mafia, an effort led by Robert Kennedy, the president's brother and attorney general. Tina says her father told her how he assuaged an angry Giancana. "Sam was saying, 'That's not right. You know he owes me.,' he meaning Joe Kennedy, and dad, I think, said, 'No, I owe you. I asked for the favor,'" recalls Tina.

To repay the favor, Tina says, Frank Sinatra "went to Chicago and played in (Giancana's) club, the Villa Venice." Sinatra brought "Rat Packers" Sammy Davis, Jr. and Dean Martin with him and played two shows for eight straight nights.

Tina says her father also claimed to have served as a courier for the CIA.
"Because (he) controlled his own air travel, the CIA would ask him and many others with that capacity to courier a body -- a living person, you know, not a corpse, but a diplomat or papers." Sinatra never revealed who or what he was transporting.

The digger archives

The Digger Archives is project to preserve and present the history of the anarchist guerrilla street theater group that was one of the legendary groups in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. Shrouded in a mystique of anonymity, the Diggers took their name from the original English Diggers (1649-50) who had promulgated a vision of society free from private property, and all forms of buying and selling. The San Francisco Diggers evolved out of two radical traditions that thrived in the SF Bay Area in the mid-1960s: the bohemian/underground art/theater scene, and the new left/civil rights/peace movement.

The Diggers combined street theater, anarcho-direct action, and art happenings in their social agenda of creating a free city. Their most famous activities included distributing free food every day, and distributing "surplus energy" at a series of free stores (where everything was free for the taking.) The Diggers coined various slogans that worked their way into the counterculture and even into the larger society - "Do your own thing" and "Today is the first day of the rest of your life" being the most recognizable. The Diggers, at the nexus of the emerging underground, were the progenitors of many new (or newly discovered) ideas such as baking whole wheat bread (made famous through the popular Free Digger Bread that was baked in one- and two-pound coffee cans at the Free Bakery); the first free medical clinic, which inspired the founding of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic; tie-dyed clothing; and, communal celebrations of natural planetary events.

DIGGER MANIFESTOS

1. Money Is An Unnecessary Evil

It is addicting.

It is a temptation to the weak (most of the violent crimes of our city in some way involve money).

It can be hoarded, blocking the free flow of energy and the giant energy-hoards of Montgomery Street will soon give rise to a sudden and thus explosive release of this trapped energy, causing much pain and chaos.

As part of the city's campaign to stem the causes of violence the San Francisco Diggers announce a 30 day period beginning now during which all responsible citizens are asked to turn in their money. No questions will be asked.

Bring money to your local Digger for free distribution to all. The Diggers will then liberate it's energy according to the style of whoever receives it

2. A-Political Or, Criminal Or Victim Or Or Or Or Or Or Or

. . . You're born a citizen of a nation. A citizen of a nation with rulers who legislate rules commanding you to be free. Free to be conditioned in school until you're sixteen. Free to be a compulsory soldier. Free to pay sixty percent of your taxes to the military budget. Free to get legally married. Free to work for a minimum wage. Free to vote when you're twenty-one. Free to vote for the democratic or republican party of your choice. Free to buy clothes, food, and property from the 200 corporations which account for 45% of the total US manufacturing in 1966. Free to obey arbitrary curfews. Free to have your freedom regulated by officers who are your friends and who protect you.

PROTECT you from obscenity.
PROTECT you from loitering.
PROTECT you from nudity.
PROTECT you from sedition and subversion.
PROTECT you from marijuana, LSD, DRUGS.
PROTECT you from gambling.
PROTECT you from homosexuality.
PROTECT you from statutory rape.
PROTECT you from common-law marriage.
PROTECT you from abortion.
PROTECT you from lonely you.
PROTECT you from demonstrations against your protectors . . .

DIGGERS