We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Black 9/11: A Walk on the Dark Side, Part 3: AIG and the Linkage to the Drug Trade

Click here to access article by Mark H. Gaffney from Foreign Policy Journal. 

I have read quite a few excellent books on this general subject. (Most prominently: The Old Boys by B. Hersh, The Secret Team by L. Fletcher Prouty, The Fish is Red by Hinckle & Turner, and Dark Alliance, Gary Webb.) Hence, I found it difficult to read this and the preceding two parts of this series. It is not because his articles are not well written and documented--they are. It is just that I've "overdosed" on such material. Thus, I mostly scanned this article and Part 1. There is some new material on AIG in this segment that I haven't seen before; so I'll look it over at some future date.

This whole history and story of the interweaving of Wall Street, the various organizations of the "security" establishment, criminal gangs, drug cartels, banking, and terrorist organizations is so sordid, often shocking that most people simply refuse to believe it and avoid reading the material whenever they encounter it. The material undermines everything that people in the US have been taught to believe about how their government and corporations function. As a result, there is now a huge canyon separating what most Americans believe about their country and reality. 

But, there are cracks forming in the minds of many and, who knows, how much wider they will become in the future as adverse economic consequences continue to worsen for most people, as resource exhaustion accelerates, as climate change produces even more extreme weather than we are currently witnessing, and as the ruling class increasingly relies on more effective police state measures to control dissent.