Stephanie
Have we discussed the Barrick gold heist? And what about Rev. Moon?
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=207&row=4 <excerpt>
Some of the loot for the Republican effort in the 1997-2000 election cycles came from an outfit called Barrick Corporation. The sum, while over $100,000, is comparatively small change for the GOP, yet it seemed quite a gesture for a corporation based in Canada. Technically, the funds came from those associated with the Canadian’s U.S. unit, Barrick Gold Strike.
They could well afford it. In the final days of the Bush (Senior) administration, the Interior Department made an extraordinary but little noticed change in procedures under the 1872 Mining Law, the gold rush-era act that permitted those whiskered small-time prospectors with their tin pans and mules to stake claims on their tiny plots. The department initiated an expedited procedure for mining companies that allowed Barrick to swiftly lay claim to the largest gold find in America. In the terminology of the law, Barrick could “perfect its patent” on the estimated $10 billion in ore—for which Barrick paid the U.S. Treasury a little under $ 10,000. Eureka!
<snip>
Barrick says it had no contact whatsoever with the president at the time of the rules change.<1> There was always a place in Barrick’s heart for the older Bush—and a place on its payroll. In 1995, Barrick hired the former president as Honorary Senior Advisor to the Toronto company’s International Advisory Board. Bush joined at the suggestion of former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who, like Bush, had been ignominiously booted from office. I was a bit surprised that the president had signed on. When Bush was voted out of the White House, he vowed never to lobby or join a corporate board. The chairman of Barrick openly boasts that granting the title “Senior Advisor” was a sly maneuver to help Bush tiptoe around this promise.
<more
Octafish
BFEE are a slippery bunch...especially KHASHOGGI.
Edited on Fri Dec-12-03 07:58 AM by Octafish
Thanks, Stephanie, for bringing up the important mineral and public property thievery departments of the BFEE. Funny how those the Bush regime helps while in government help the Bushes when they return to the private sector. Adnan Khashoggi is one of those lucky people who seem to get all the Big Money "breaks" from the House of Bush. — Octafish
Bush the Elder’s Scheme to Sell Pardons and Get a Payoff –
Where is the Outrage Over a 10 Billion Dollar Taxpayer Ripoff?
February 26, 2001
By Jock Gill for Democrats.com
Bill Clinton wasn’t being either bold or creative in his use of the presidential pardon power. Compared to George Bush Senior’s incredible pardon fiasco, Clinton’s pardon scandal is boring.
In his last days as President, Bush Sr. sold U.S. government asset worth $10 billion to a friend for a mere $10 thousand dollars, pardoned his business colleagues, and then went on the company’s payroll for seven years.
At the very end of his presidency Papa Bush gave a sweetheart deal to the Canadian company Barrick Goldstrike. They got the rights to US land worth $10 billion in return for a nominal payment to the treasury of $10,000. But that does not seem to be all they got, or all they paid for either.
The money behind Barrick is from Saudi arms dealer and Bush family friend Adnan Khashoggi, who was identified as conduit in the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986 he was arrested and charged with fraud but failed to be convicted. In one of his last acts as president Bush pardoned Khashoggi's alleged co-conspirators, who were key members of Bush's own cabinet. As a result, no case could be made against Khashoggi – or against Bush himself.
CONTINUED...
http://www.penfield-gill.com/presentations/bush_the_elder.ht seemslikeadream
Another big player in the eastern Congo is Barrick Gold Corp., headquatered in Canada. It is the world's second-largest gold producer after Anglo-American of South Africa.
This company was able in 1996 to get the Mobutu regime's Gold Office of Kilomoto, a government monopoly, to transfer mining rights over almost all its 82,000 square kilometers of land to Barrick. The land is estimated to have 100 tons of gold in reserve.
George Bush Sr. sat on the board of directors of Barrick, according to Baracyetse.
www.minesandcommunities.org/Company/kabilal.htm
The war on Iraq is not the only war in the world and it is not the only war being fought for our material benefit. Western consumers' seemingly insatiable demand for mobile phones, laptops, games consoles and other luxury electronic goods has been fueling violent conflict and killing millions in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is possibily the most minerial place on earth - though this has proved a curse to the people of the Congo. The Congo holds millions of tons of diamonds, copper, colbalt, zinc, manganasa, uranium (the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were built using Congolese uranium), and coltan. Coltan, a substance made up of columbium and tantalum, is a particularly valuable resourse - used to make mobile phones, night vision goggles, fiber optics, and micro-capacitors.
The human costs of this conflict have been horrific. According to the UN, up until last September, in the five Eastern provinces of DRC alone, between 3 and 3.5 million people had died directly because of the war. Many were killed and tortured but most died of starvation and disease. The destruction of farms has resulted in malnutrition and starvation.
http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/newsletter/issue13/issue13_part3.htm War in Congo has claimed over three million lives since 1998 alone. Innocent civilians have been brutalized, massacred, raped, and tortured by all parties to the conflict. It began with the U.S. sponsored invasion of Rwanda in 1994, and followed with two subsequent U.S. sponsored invasions of Congo (in 1996 and 1998). These are not the simple "civil wars" declared by the western press. Even the Rwanda "genocide" (in 1994) has to some extent been manufactured in the American mind to serve the mythology of tribalism. Meanwhile, American green berets and military advisors and Pentagon officals have participated from blackboard to battlefield.
Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, Rwanda and Congo are wars where factions are armed with U.S. made weapons (M16s, SAMs, tanks); where U.S. covert forces undertake brutal secret missions and psychological operations accountable to no one. They are wars where the CIA us deeply and maliciously entrenched as such by our dubious media. At the roots, however, these are wars like any other war.
******Essential to the superalloys and weaponry of the global economy of war are Congo's cobalt, uranium and columbium tantalite (coltan). Colbalt is elemental to nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons, tank armor, industrial furnaces and aerospace, and for 50 years the CIA has insured the free flow of cobalt out of Congo.
http://www.audarya-fellowship.com/showflat/cat/WorldNews/48471/3/colla... Minstrel Boy
Canada's former PM, the justly reviled Brian Mulroney,
is also on the Barrick board. Mulroney invited his great friend Bush Sr to join.
Good stuff about Bush and Barrick in Palast's "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy."
seemslikeadream
Yes and so is Edward Neys
former U.S. Ambassador to Canada and chairman of Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest and most secretive public relation firms.
Burson-Marsteller is a billion dollar company that covers for organized crime. They are in the business of "perception management".
They covered for the Nigerian oil barons and Shell Oil during the Biafran War. The covered for Babcock & Wilcox and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission as the Three Mile Island nuclear rector melted down and irradiated the American landscape. They massaged the public and managed their perceptions as the Exxon Valdez supertanker greased the Alaskan wilderness with black crude. Burson-Marsteller covered for Union Carbide after the gas massacre in Bhopal in 1984. They have run public relations campaigns to shield extensive, state-orchestrated terror by the "governments of Argentina, Indonesia, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Singapore. They also are running Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress PR, hired in 1999.
Greg Palast writings are like the bible to me.
Democracy for sale
think twice archives 2002
Cambridge 23 March 2002
http://www.think-twice.org.uk/2002/palast seemslikeadream
The man who financed Bush's power-play in Ibero-America
is the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church, with documented ties to gun-and drug-trafficking, money-laundering, and other nefarious activities. Thus, it is no surprise that Bush used his Ibero-American jaunt to champion the British colonial doctrine of free trade, and attack, as he did in Peru, the Clinton administration's anti-drug policy.
Everywhere he went, Bush tried to promote his image as a still-powerful former President and policymaker. But he didn't have an easy time of it, not least because of his ties to the filthy Moon empire, but also because he is under investigation back home for his role in directing the crack-cocaine flow into the United States in the 1980's to fund the Contras' war in Nicaragua. In every country, he was greeted by advertisements and press articles denouncing him and Moon for their crimes. Some of the coverage was taken straight from (EIR). In Peru, Bush became so unhinged by this publicity, that he had Peruvian police arrest three organizers of the Ibero-American Solicarity Movement (MSIA) who used (EIR) materials to leaflet against his presence.
His trip to Peru was arranged by Interbank, whose managing director, Ismael Benavides, led the campaign against a new banking law. Interbank is partly owned by Nicholas Brady, Bush's former treasury secretary and good friend who accompanied him in Lima.
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-ontario-stories/2001-November... Stephanie
Bush Sr. sells his soul (if he has one) to Rev. Moon for $10 million
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/101100a.html October 11, 2000
Rev. Moon, North Korea & the Bushes
By Robert Parry
<excerpt>
One well-placed former leader of Moon’s Unification Church told me that the total earmarked for former President Bush was $10 million. The father of the Republican nominee has declined to say how much Moon’s organization actually paid him for speeches and other services in Asia, the United States and South America.
At one Moon-sponsored speech in Argentina in 1996, Bush declared, “I want to salute Reverend Moon,” whom Bush praised as “the man with the vision.”
Bush made these speeches at a time when Moon was expressing intensely anti-American views. In his own speeches, Moon termed the United States “Satan’s harvest” and claimed that American women descended from a “line of prostitutes.”
During this year’s presidential campaign, Moon’s Washington Times has attacked the Clinton-Gore administration for failing to take more aggressive steps to defend against North Korea’s missile program. The newspaper called the administration’s decisions an “abdication of responsibility for national security.”
A Helping Hand
Yet, in the 1990s when North Korea was scrambling for the resources to develop missiles and other advanced weaponry, Moon was among a small group of outside businessmen quietly investing in North Korea.
Octafish
Rev. Moon sure is the guy with the "Vision Thing."
Thanks, Stephanie! Very important to get in writing this part of the story. Besides building the giant jungle redoubt in Paraguay where the BFEE members expect to ride out the Apocalypse watching reruns of "Walker, Texas Ranger," Rev. Sun Myung Moon helped develop the PTL ("Pass The Loot") model for ripping off followers. He invested the plunder well in ultra-conservative American politicians and commie hunters, paying millions to support the Bush regimes, including the time Bush was ostensibly the veep calling the shots for Geritol-soaked Ronald Witless Reagan. Remember, Pruneface called the Washington Times his favorite newspaper, boosting circulation and propaganda consumption. Well, I guess that's better than Smirk who doesn't read or understand. Otherwise Junior might ask why Moon uses his largesse to help arm the North Koreans and maintain the perpetual state of global war. Then again, that's the idea, a grand vision of big death and big money. — Octafish
Rev. Moon and Rev. Falwell co-pioneers of PTL business model.
BUSH , REV. MOON & Washington Times
By Carla Binion
11/09/99
In the 1970s, the Fraser Senate Investigating Committee looked into the "Koreagate" scandal. . . Then-U.S. Representative Donald Fraser said the senate committee discovered that Moonie leaders were told Moon wanted to start political work in the U.S. The Moonies were told that objection to Moon's goals would equal objection to God. (Fraser Committee Report, page 320.)
President George Bush was head of the CIA when Koreagate broke in 1976 and knew the above details. Despite that, Bush (1) Did nothing to oppose the Unification Church's deceptive, coercive, brainwashing tactics or designs on our political system, and (2) In 1995 spoke at a series of Moon rallies in the U.S. and Japan. The rallies were hosted by Mrs. Moon's front group Women's Federation for World Peace (WFWP). (Jolen Chang, "Asian Fortune," March 1995.) Bush received one million pounds for payment according to the "British Daily Mail." ("Bush and '1M from Moonies,' "Daily Mail," September 5, 1995.)
George Bush claimed innocence and gave his only interview on the subject to the Moonie owned paper, "The Washington Times." Bush praised the WFPF's "great emphasis on family" and told the "Times:" "Until I see something about the Women's Federation that troubles me, I will continue to encourage them." (Peter McGill, et al, "Ed Schreyer and the Moonies," "Maclean's," October 23, 1995; Andrew Pollack, "Bush Host In Japan Tied To Rev. Moon," "The New York Times," September 4, 1995.)
Because Bush headed the CIA during Koreagate, he knew that when the Moonies talk of "family" they mean the "True Family" of the Unification Church. As former head of the CIA, he also knew of The Washington Times Moonie connections.
CONTINUED...
http://liberalslikechrist.org/about/bushmoon.html http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=875102#887926 Billions of Dollars at Stake
American Mineral Fields (AMFI), a consortium based originally in Hope, Ark.--yes, Bill Clinton's hometown--is a big player in exploiting Congo's mineral wealth. In 1997, just a month before Mobutu fell, it signed contracts with the Kabila-Rwanda-Uganda alliance forces for almost a billion dollars investment in copper, cobalt and zinc mines and processing plants in Kolwezi and Kipushi.
The industrial enterprises that set up AMFI, according to Baracyetse, "are interested in the contract for the construction of the orbital platform around the world that is destined to replace the Russian station MIR."
This project is part of the $60-billion so-called National Missile Defense system that George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Richard Cheney are pushing so vigorously. Building the space station will require many of the rare metals found in eastern Congo.
Another big player in the eastern Congo is Barrick Gold Corp., headquartered in Canada. It is the world's second- largest gold producer after Anglo-American of South Africa.
This company was able in 1996 to get the Mobutu regime's Gold Office of Kilomoto, a government monopoly, to transfer mining rights over almost all its 82,000 square kilometers of land to Barrick. The land is estimated to have 100 tons of gold in reserve.
George Bush Sr. sat on the board of directors of Barrick, according to Baracyetse.
http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Company/kabila1.htm