Stops where we need to start: USG and US Bank Complicity, June 9, 2009
Gretchen Peters
The ultimate cold call was made by the head of the SEC who went to Colombia to meet the FARC leadership and urge them to invest their drug money with Wall Street.
The Los Angeles crack cocaine plague was fueled by Blandon, a Nicaraguan contra drug dealer protected by CIA and DEA while Ricky Ross paid for being the street-level entrepreneur.
OF COURSE the top leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan are major drug dealers–their political US Government counterparts are in on the deal and the bureaucrats go along.
This is a GREAT book and the kind of investigative journalism melded with academic research that we no longer do as a Nation, so kudos for that. However meritorious, it joins other similar books from the past and does not address the core brackets: the money provided by the US Government to Pakistan in the 1980's, and the money laundering and cash liquidity that Wall Street enjoyed in the 1990's in large part because of its close alliance with global drug dealers, arms merchants, and traders in women and children as well as 40+ dictators happy to loot their commonwealths while pretending to support our “war on terror” with rendition and torture.
Until the US Government itself has integrity, and imposes integrity on Wall Street, this book is a superb account that will go absolutely nowhere in terms of impacting on the problem. WE are the problem in so far as we persist in lying to the American people about all that we do, and do not do, in their name.
See also–I am limited to ten links:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier
Club Fed Power, Money, Sex, and Violence on Capitol Hill
The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters
Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography)
Note: the annotated bibliography in the latter book, free online, covers 500+ non-fiction books, each with a link to my summary review. The URL is http://www.oss.net/BOOKS
