Banamex-Citicorpse

Clinton's Mexican Narco-Pals

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The untold story behind February's Yucatan summit redefines the enemy in the war on drugs

By Al Giordano

MAY 17, 1999:  If the facts of the story were made of cocaine powder, the entire White House press corps would have sneezed; the news was right under their noses. Any one of them could have written:

MÉRIDA, MEXICO, FEBRUARY 15, 1999: U.S. President William Clinton met today with Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo to negotiate better cooperation between their nations in the fight against drugs. Incredibly, the anti-narcotics summit was hosted by powerful Mexican banker Roberto Hernández Ramírez, a man publicly accused of trafficking cocaine and laundering illicit drug money....

But that story wasn't reported in the States, despite a controversy over Hernández's alleged involvement in the drug trade that's raged on the Yucatán peninsula for two years.

The heart-shaped box appeared on Air Force One. It was Valentine's Day 1999, and the Comeback Kid was getting out of Dodge. Bill Clinton had, just two days prior, escaped vanquishment by the U.S. Senate in Washington, DC. The presidential jet roared out of the February chill toward the tropical city of Mérida.

Clinton, in a video image broadcast across the globe that evening, stepped into the press cabin of the plane wielding a big pink heart-shaped box and doled out valentine chocolates to the reporters and photographers covering this trip. And to underscore with levity that the subject would now be changed -- from impeachment and Monica to "drugs" -- the White House press handlers regaled the journalists with bottles of hemp beer. The marijuana in the brew's recipe was reportedly non-intoxicating. Still, they were high, on laughter if not impunity, on Air Force One.

Awaiting the presidential entourage in Mérida was the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Jeffrey Davidow. In the weeks before, while most of the White House staff was busy steering the president through domestic political crisis, Davidow had been in Mexico, laying the groundwork for the presidential visit. Davidow is no novice. He cut his diplomatic teeth at the U.S. embassy in Santiago, Chile, from 1971 to '73, the period when the U.S. and General Augusto Pinochet were plotting to destabilize the elected government of president Salvador Allende. By the time Air Force One landed in Mérida, everything on the ground was under control.

The city's central streets were deserted. Nine square blocks had been sealed by Mexican state and federal police. Hundreds of U.S. Secret Service agents had blanketed the region days in advance. They peered through their sunglasses from rooftops. Their network of cell phones fell like a web over the ancient Mayan capital. The city's annual Carnaval -- with its wild nightly parades, when seemingly every one of Mérida's 750,000 residents emerges onto the streets and dances in plumed costumes to Caribbean rhythms -- had been disappeared for the evening. The Dry Law was imposed.

Mérida on a normal day or night is an unusually tranquil city. Not even the police are armed. The response of the citizenry to the evening's invasion-of-state was to ignore the presidential summit almost completely. In the previous night's parades, throughout the city not a single banner was hung; nothing to welcome or to protest the arrival of Clinton and Zedillo. About 300 people did show up in City Square to cheer the gringos' arrival. They were supporters of Mexico's ruling political party who had received tickets to pass through the police lines, or they were folk dancers hired to provide a festive view from the second-floor dining hall where the dignitaries would nosh.

Davidow was in the first mini-bus to arrive at Mérida's City Square from the airport. Behind him came the presidents and their wives, cabinet members, congressional supporters, and the international working press. A few pool photographers and reporters would be escorted inside a historic building to snap some photos of the dignitaries and scribble reports over dinner. The rest of the journalists were herded by bus to five-star hotels to enjoy an early exemption from the Dry Law. The luxury-hotel district, too, was sealed off by police and the Secret Service.

Upstairs in the Hotel Fiesta Americana, the suites were equipped with phone and computer jacks for the visiting press. Pool reports of the diplomatic dinner and schedules of tomorrow's itinerary were ready and waiting. The two presidents would be flown by helicopter the next morning, February 15, a short distance to the Temozon Sur plantation -- the luxurious refurbished ranch owned by Roberto Hernández Ramírez, president-owner of BANAMEX (the National Bank of Mexico before Hernández bought it from the government a decade ago).Forbes magazine lists Hernández as number 289 among the wealthiest men on earth.

President Zedillo had been staying at the Hernández estate since February 12, though Hernández himself was not present at the summit meeting. That two presidents would enjoy the hospitality of a powerful businessman would not, by itself, raise many eyebrows.

But had just one of the White House correspondents holed up in the Fiesta Americana, the Hyatt, or the Holiday Inn wandered downtown or even downstairs to a newsstand, the official history of the summit might have been very different. Even a reporter who did not read Spanish might have comprehended the banner headline in the Mérida daily Por Esto!: ROBERTO HERNÁNDEZ RAMÎREZ: NARCOTRAFICANTE. (Part I, Part II, Part III.)

That same Valentine's Day, Por Esto! published the first installment of a three-part series about the banker, his rise to wealth and power, his political clout, and his alleged involvement with drugs and drug money. The series -- including 350 column-inches of text documented by 45 photographs (31 in color), plus three maps tracing the route of Colombian cocaine through the banker's properties -- ran over three consecutive days.

According to the newspaper and its sources, coastal marshlands purchased by Hernández in the late '80s and early '90s were the port of entry for massive volumes of cocaine delivered in small Colombian speedboats. From there, tons of the drug were loaded onto small planes and flown north from Hernández's private airfield. Hernández, the newspaper charged, was hiding behind empty "eco-tourism" resorts to wash drug profits.

The series was a journalistic tour de force, the culmination of a 26-month investigation into the 43 kilometers of beachfront property owned by Hernández -- a region known by the locals as the "Coca Triangle."

The newspaper went even further: it filed federal criminal complaints against Hernández for drug trafficking, for the robbery of national archeological treasures (his properties include the ancient Mayan ruins of Chac Mool and others), and for the environmental destruction caused by the cocaine-trafficking operations to the Sian Ka'an nature preserve.

Not a word about this controversy would appear in the U.S. news media before or after the Clinton-Zedillo summit. One could search the Internet, Lexis-Nexis, the major dailies, the wire services, the entire English-speaking world; the story was neither published, promoted, criticized, nor rebutted.

And yet the story has raged in Yucatán and the eastern Yucatán coastal state of Quintana Roo, where the property in question is located, since December 16, 1996, when a fishermen's cooperative blew the whistle on Hernández's cocaine port and airfield to Por Esto! and pointed the newspaper to the evidence. Por Esto! published the fishermen's accounts of threats and harassment by Hernández, who, they said, wanted to drive them off their lands to eliminate witnesses to his drug-smuggling operation. Hernández returned fire in 1997, filing charges of trespassing and defamation against reporter Renán Castro Madera, regional editor Santos Gabriel Us Aké, and editor and publisher Mario Menéndez Rodríguez. Public opinion has not favored Hernández's complaints. Since 1996, more than 100 town councils, unions, and civic organizations throughout the Yucatán Peninsula have passed resolutions supporting the newspaper in its fight to expose the man they call a narco-banker.

The story got new legs on March 28, when the powerful governor of Quintana Roo, Mario Villanueva Madrid, disappeared during his last week of office, fleeing from drug-trafficking charges. An often crude but always media-savvy politician, Villanueva has issued videotaped communiqués and even bought newspaper ads from his hidden locations claiming that the prosecution against him is an act of political vengeance. The now ex-governor of the Caribbean state that's home to the world-class Cancún tourist resorts is not going down quietly. He may drag others down with him, including Clinton's pal Roberto Hernández Ramírez.

"I have a lot of information," Villanueva told the Mexican national daily Reforma on March 23, a few days before his disappearance. "A lot. It can involve more people. In the event that this is not resolved I will make it known."

The story is migrating north, and there's not a border patrol that can stop it.

Until now, international media accounts of rampant drug-war corruption on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula have for the most part been managed and controlled by official U.S. and Mexican sources. The investigation and prosecution of Villanueva -- a joint venture of the U.S. and Mexican governments and, now, the 176 nations of the international police agency Interpol that have joined the manhunt -- was supposed to reinforce the party line that narco-corruption at the highest levels will no longer be tolerated.

But the takedown of Villanueva -- surely a crook, deeply involved in protecting the illicit drug trade and in other criminal and anti-democratic ventures -- merely diverts attention from the wheel of institutionalized corruption in which he was a cog. By profiting from drug traffic, Villanueva was simply enjoying the fruits that all governors of the ruling party have been granted for decades. The same institutions that chase him today protected him for almost six years in office. Villanueva's mysterious escape, and his promise to spill the secrets of the Mexican narco-state, have already begun to shake the comfy worlds of powerful people -- among them BANAMEX owner Hernández and his presidential houseguests.

Hernández blamed Villanueva, at the time Quintana Roo's governor, for Por Esto!'s 1996 reports about his alleged drug crimes. The banker addressed the problem the way most public-relations disasters are managed in Mexico. "Hernández complained to President Zedillo," reported the Mexico City daily El Universal on April 5, "who at his turn had spoken with Villanueva, but the attacks did not cease."

This was the first time El Universal or any national newspaper had mentioned Hernández in connection with narco-news. And even then, it was included almost as an aside in a colorful profile, by writer Mario Lara Klahr, on governor-turned-fugitive Villanueva. The spin of the profile was that the governor and Hernández were at war because Villanueva was "interested" in the bank owner's coastal properties.

That same day, El Universal, one of Mexico's two major establishment broadsheets, published an almost full-page interview with Hernández about the banking industry -- a puff piece complete with flattering photo portraits. The daily did not ask Hernández about the drug charges or, even generically, about the Mexican banking industry's current drug-money-laundering crisis -- even though, just five days before, three major Mexican banks (including BANAMEX's top competitor, Bancomer) had pled guilty in U.S. federal court to hiding hundreds of millions of dollars for the giant cocaine cartels.

Lara's piece, meanwhile, also included the unsubstantiated supposition that Villanueva was an owner of Por Esto! In fact, Villanueva's government had harassed and threatened Por Esto! repeatedly -- withholding payment for government advertising, failing to provide police response to a payroll robbery at the newspaper's Cancún offices, and excluding the paper's reporters and photographers from official functions.

Por Esto! is published by Mario Menéndez Rodríguez, a well-known and combative veteran journalist whose political activism dates back to Mexico City's 1968 student movement. Menéndez publishes dailies in both Mérida and Cancún and has been imprisoned several times for his anti-government reports.

"The governor of Quintana Roo is not an owner of Por Esto! That's ridiculous," says Menéndez. "Look at the printing machinery we use. It's always breaking. The people of this region know how I live and how this newspaper works. If El Universal has some documentation or proof that he has anything to do with this newspaper, I challenge them to show it. Of course, I am preparing a response."

(A week after the El Universal story, the national magazine Proceso reported that Hernández himself had orchestrated the leak of documents upon which Mexico's national press had based the report.)

On April 12, Por Esto! resumed publishing the results of its investigations into Hernández's affairs, vowing: "Loyal to the truth, Por Esto!will not fold in the fight. . . . The federal executive branch is the major accomplice of the drug barons in Mexico."

The accompanying story linked a BANAMEX legal-department director -- the Republic's former first assistant attorney general, who was fired, according to Por Esto!, for his illegal activities related to drug trafficking -- to three known drug traffickers, one a witness under the protection of U.S. anti-drug prosecutors, and charged that the U.S. government has "wide and deep knowledge" of Hernández's drug-trafficking activities. The newspaper also identified the state delegate of the Mexican federal prosecutor's office as a former BANAMEX employee and reported that the Mexican armed forces responsible for drug enforcement on the peninsula have received orders not to enter Hernández's coastal properties, which, according to Por Esto!, are still being used as a major cocaine-trafficking port.

That Menéndez continues with the investigation is no surprise. What is new is that, for the first time, other journalists are taking on the story.

Carlos Ramírez, editor of the feisty national political magazine La Crisis, publishes a daily column in both El Universal and Por Esto! In an April 6 column analyzing the Villanueva case, he blamed the ex-governor's fall from grace on his antagonism with Hernández, "the all-powerful owner of BANAMEX," over tourist-development sites in and around Cancún.

"Villanueva lost due to the weight of the power relations of BANAMEX," Ramírez wrote, going on to describe a strong personal and social relationship between BANAMEX's Hernández and Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, who, Ramírez reported, has vacationed at the banker's Cancún haciendas and at a Hernández-owned Caribbean island that's been linked to the late Colombian narco-trafficker Pablo Escobar Gaviria.

The April 11 edition of Proceso, the most respected newsweekly in Mexico, ended the Mexican national media's long reluctance to repeatPor Esto!'s drug-trafficking charges against Hernández. Under the headline WITH THE FLIGHT OF VILLANUEVA, ROBERTO HERNANDEZ ESCAPES AN ENEMY, Proceso recounted a private September 1998 meeting between then-governor Villanueva and journalists during which Villanueva confided, "Behind this smear campaign that has been unleashed against me I see the hand of Roberto Hernández." The piece went on to describe Por Esto!'s campaign to portray Hernández as a drug trafficker, relaying the paper's reports that almost 30 percent of the nearly 30 tons of cocaine intercepted by the Mexican prosecutor general's agents had been seized on property owned by the BANAMEX chief. It noted Hernández's 1997 suits against the paper and reported that, the previous week, Quintana Roo judge Marco Antonio Traconis Varguez had issued arrest warrants against three of the paper's journalists.

The gamble taken by the White House and the U.S. Embassy in Mexico -- that the drug story on Clinton's host would never get out -- has already been lost.

Jorge Madrazo Cuéllar, Prosecutor General of the Republic -- Mexico's equivalent of the attorney general -- is understandably nervous about Villanueva's escape and its mounting consequences for his own job. Opposition leaders have already called Madrazo before the federal House of Deputies to answer charges that he intentionally let Villanueva slip away. (At that meeting, Madrazo divulged that many of his former prosecutors and officers have gone to work as cocaine traffickers -- an admission by the chief federal prosecutor that his office has functioned as a narco-school.)

The defendant ex-governor remains at large -- and looms large -- buying full-page ads in national dailies and issuing video communiqués that may soon begin to implicate his nemesis Hernández directly in the narco-trade.

And so in a bizarre act of prosecution-by-publicity, the prosecutor general is defending his behavior by taking out ads of his own.

The opening advertisement for the prosecution, published on April 9 in all of Mexico's major national newspapers, enumerated five major denials that were surreal in their capacity to suggest the opposite of their intent. The ad stated:

·  that the drug charges against Villanueva were not politically motivated;

·  that no United States agency had pressured Mexican prosecutors to jail Villanueva;

·  that the Villanueva prosecution was unrelated to the fifth anniversary of the homicide of 1994 presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio and was not an attempt to divert public attention from that case;

·  that the Villanueva prosecution was not motivated by "personal obsession by the Prosecutor General of the Republic";

·  that the Villanueva investigation had nothing to do with Roberto Hernández Ramírez's legal action against Por Esto!

All of the above are plausible in their inverse; the case could be motivated by a confluence of political factors. If we heed the journalistic principle "follow the money," the weightiest of them -- reaching to the White House in Washington -- involves presidential pal Hernández and his vast power as the BANAMEX owner.

Por Esto! reported the story, and the result was that three of its journalists are today being persecuted with live arrest warrants. But the escape of Governor Villanueva has forced Mexico's national press to accept that there is indeed a story here. Whether U.S. media organizations that cover Mexico will do their job remains to be seen. But when Bill Clinton agreed to hold his anti-drug summit with the Mexican president on Hernández's plantation, he inadvertently invited their scrutiny. The invitation came with the heart-shaped box.

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Copyright © 1999 by Al Giordano

Al Giordano is a former political reporter for the Boston Phoenix. He can be reached atagiordano99@hotmail.com.

Goldman Sachs

domingo 18 de septiembre de 2011

EUROPA ASOMBRADA AL DECIRLE QUE "OBAMA NO ES EL QUE MANDA"

Septiembre 18, 2011.

Un nuevo informe redactado por la Ministra Delegada Rusa de Finanzas, Tatyana Nesterenko sobre la reunión del Eurogroup del Consejo de Asuntos Económicos y Financieros (ECOFIN) en Vroclavia, Polonia sobre la creciente crisis de deuda Europea señala que se dejó “pasmados” a los Ministros de Finanzas de la Unión Europea el pasado viernes después de que el Secretario del Tesoro Estadounidense, Timothy Geithner, les dijera que el Presidente Obama “no es el que manda”.

Según ese informe, el “no invitado” Secretario del Tesoro de EE.UU. se hizo presente en la conferencia del ECOFIN y se enfrascó en lo que solo se puede describir como una “rabieta” al reprocharles a los elaboradores de las políticas económicas de Europa su intransigencia en facilitar más rescates financieros a Grecia y cuando el Jefe de la Banca Central Europea (ECB) Jean-Claude Trichet le preguntó si esa era “también la posición de Obama”, Geithner le dijo “Él (Obama) no manda, mando yo”.

Trichet, jefe de la ECB, según otros nuevos informes, increpó a Geithner y expresó que la posición financiera de la Eurozona con 17 miembros se encuentra mejor que la de las otras economías principales, especialmente la de los Estados Unidos.

Esta impactante revelación en cuanto a quién es el que manda en los Estados Unidos llega inmediatamente después de más alegatos de que Geithner, deliberadamente, ignoró las órdenes de Obama para que preparara un plan para desinflar al gigantesco grupo banquero internacional Citigroup, Inc., con el fin de ayudar a salvar la economía Estadounidense, y como lo podemos leer, en parte, como lo publicó el San Francisco Chronicle

“El Secretario del Tesoro Estadounidense, Timothy F. Geithner ignoró una orden del Presidente Obama en 2009 para que preparara un plan para desinflar al Citigroup, Inc., otrora el banco más grande del mundo, según un libro que saldrá a la luz la próxima semana.

Geithner no procedió con la orden de Obama para desarrollar un plan para disolver al Citigroup con sede en Nueva York en marzo de 2009, varios meses después de que el banco había recibido un rescate de $ 45 Billones pagados con el dinero de los contribuyentes, según el libro: “Hombres de Confianza: Wall Street, Washington y la Educación de un Presidente” escrito por Ron Suskind, ex reportero del Wall Street Journal".

Aún más impactante, continua ese reporte, son las revelaciones que fueron sacadas a la luz por la revista New York Times Magazine de que Geithner, junto con el Director del Consejo Económico Nacional de la Casa Blanca, Larry Summers, formaron una “troika profana” con el titán banquero Goldman Sachs, para robarle, literalmente, a Obama y al pueblo todo el sistema económico con el único propósito de saquearlo para el beneficio de unos pocos pertenecientes a la élite de los banqueros, políticos y otros parásitos parecidos.

El vacío de poder creado en la Casa Blanca que está permitiendo que estos ladrones banqueros tomen el mando, fue exacerbado por Summers que al unirse al equipo de Obama declaró “no hay ningún adulto al mando” permitiendo, así, que él y Geithner se le “insubordinaran” a Obama y secuestraran la economía para sí mismos y sus camaradas.

En cuanto al daño causado a la economía Estadounidense por parte de Geithner y sus “aliados” no se le puede decir menos que “catastrófico” pues decenas de millones han sido lanzados de sus hogares, decenas de millones se encuentran desempleados y el nivel de pobreza ha llegado a alturas nunca vistas desde los días de la Gran Depresión durante la década de 1930.

Todo alivio que se divise para el pueblo Estadounidense antes de que su nación quede destruida totalmente por parte de esos monstruos, se ve improbable pues el velo de opresión que los mantiene a raya no da señales de aflojarse y como lo describimos en nuestra pieza del 2 de junio “Rusia Advierte que el Estado Policía Estadounidense Rivaliza con la SS Nazi”.

Y todo sigue empeorando pues llegan nuevos e impactantes informes de los Estados Unidos que previenen que bajo lo que se conoce como las leyes del “Obamacare”, los pacientes en los hospitales de los Estados Unidos están siendo declarados “incompetentes” en grandes cantidades permitiendo así que los mismos hospitales se atribuyan para sí la “tutoría” de esas personas y luego vendan todos sus bienes reduciéndolas, de este modo, a la pobreza.

Es triste señalar que unas leyes como esas que permiten que los gobiernos comiencen a efectuar embargos masivos de los bienes privados de sus ciudadanos, como las que efectuaron los regímenes del Imperio Alemán Nazi y el Ruso Soviético, siempre presagiaron disturbios civiles multitudinarios, revolución y la guerra abierta.

De hecho, la semana que acaba de pasar, el alcalde de la ciudad de Nueva York, Michael Bloomberg advirtió a Washington que si las cosas no cambian, podrían estallar revueltas. Como lo citó el New York Daily, Bloomberg dijo: “Tenemos a muchos jóvenes graduándose de las universidades, no pueden encontrar empleo. Eso fue lo que sucedió en El Cairo. Eso es lo que pasó en Madrid. No es bueno tener ese tipo de revueltas aquí”.

La profética advertencia de Bloomberg de disturbios parece estar cerca, pues al momento de escribir estas palabras, las fuerzas policíacas han “encerrado bajo llave” a la capital financiera de los Estados Unidos en Wall Street después de que miles de manifestantes se le fueron encima en un “Día de Ira” evocando las revueltas del Medio Oriente y exigiendo poner fin a la codicia corporativa que favorece a los ricos por encima de los pobres.

Nosotros no sabemos si este tipo de revueltas de protesta, si no es que una franca revolución, se extenderá por todos los Estados Unidos, pero sí podemos decir que nunca en la historia del mundo, un pueblo que ha sido tan “destruido” por sus “líderes” no se defendió.

Skolnick Chicago

"BIGGEST BRIBERY CARTEL EVER"
by Sherman H. Skolnick 12/17/05

Henry Crown Family, Jenner & Block, General Electric. and their criminal combine

In the beginning, it was a woman. She said that she was the major owner of what became in 1919, Material Service Corporation. Henry Crown was just a very young man. He stopped by her house, she later said, for sandwiches and cookies..

Yes, Crown later had ways of getting very lucrative street paviing contracts from "the city fathers" in Chicago City Hall. Simple. The City Officials were "for sale". So, he "bought them".[She told about in in a very lengthy recorded discussion.]

He ran her business in an integrated method. From sand-dump to the streets. He knew how to exert "muscle". Many decades later we chatted with a sand-pile owner.

"I understand Crown's people were here during the night. I presume they parked a few bodies. I don't look. I don't ask." He ended the talk with a worldly chuckle.

Some Europeans let over from World War Two were visiting Du Page County, just west of Cook County and Chicago. They stopped to look at the old red brick clock tower, Du Page County Courthouse.

Puzzled, they remarked, "So you have the Gestapo here now, huh? This is the color and style of building they liked for their local headquarters at the time of Hitler."

To do their "civic duty", Material Service donated an abandoned toxic dump as the site of the new Du Page Courthouse. After a few years, courthouse workers began suffering an epidemic of strange debilitating ailments. The Liars and Whores of the Press took the easy way out, proclaiming the cause as supposedly the reputed "mafia contractors" having put in a cheapo ventllation system. Press fakers know it is personally unprofitable if not also unhealthy to point an accusing finger at the Crowns.

In the 1960s, the woman claiming she was the true majority owner of Material Service Corporation sued them in Cook County Cicuit Court, to force the firm to correct their records. The Judge seemed to be siding with her and her daughter who kept track of Henry Crown as his Secretary.

Mysterious forces worked to remove the Judge, or make him disappear, or make him blotted out [take your pick of demise].   By the 1970s, the Crown Family had a 89% stake in General Dynamics, the major war-monger, maker of submarines, tanks, and many other weapons. Lester Crown became a top official of General Dynamics. But back in the Windy City, Lester had a problem. The Chief Federal Hangman said Lester was facing federal criminal indictment for his part in a bribery/extortion conspiracy involving road paving contractors.  

[We knew a lot about it. One of our secret team put together the evidence forcing the Crowns to face the music.]

Lester had two choices (1) he could wait, get indicted and prosecuted and most likely end up with a long prison term or (2) he could work an unholy deal with the Chicago Chief Federal Prosecutor, in the past always concerned about a future career in private lawyering as a "bagman" and "fixer".

[The current U.S. District Attorney in Chicago was brought in from New York. Many are ready to believe Patrick J. Fitzgerald is different! than the Chicago-types that held that job before him, that typically, historically, and politically were sooner or later "for sale".]

The Chicago-based law firm octopus, that most always got their way with the different levels of government in the past, was Jenner & Block, reputed super "bagmen". In their opinion, one event in particular is, for them, very "positive"; as to the other, they would have to accept, it was extremely "negative".

Jenner & Block senior partner/manager, Albert Jenner, Jr., sat on the Warren Commission, and helped proclaim that a lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, assassi nated President John F. Kennedy. Even though 85% of Americans do not accept the finding, Jenner considered the Warren Commission conclusion as "positive" as for Jenner.

In 1969, a Special Tribunal was empaneled to consider this writer's accusations that several of the judges on the Illinois Supreme Court received bribes. Albert Jenner, Jr., defended the Chief Justice who was found guilty of impropriety and removed. It was about the only case Chief Crook Jenner ever "lost". Cynically, perhaps, maybe the massive publicity caused the Special Tribunal's panel to be "honest".

TRAIN ROBBER PROTECTED

The Henry Crown Family, by dirty tricks, seized control of the Rock Island Railroad, not to run the railroad for the public good but to liquidate it for its asset value. As with other bloody work for the Crowns, super-crooks Jenner & Block did not give a hoot about damage to the public. Thousands became unemployed and many private businesses went under. Aren't there laws against protecting train robbers? 

THE BILDERBERG SYNDROME, Part One
by Sherman H. Skolnick 7/1/02

Every year, for almost half a century, they meet in a different country. Their first meeting was in Holland, in 1954. It was arranged by the Dutch Monarchy. It took place in the Bilderberg Hotel, which became the name of this secret society, one of several, forbidden to be discussed by the oil-soaked, spy-riddled monopoly press.

Mutually pledged to sealed lips are those invited to the annual meeting. Members of the aristocracies attend of various nations, consisting of the elites of high finance, politics, espionage, academia, media, and other titles.

I once interviewed, on tape, the wire desk editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. "Why does your paper censor stories about the secret society, the Bilderberg?" Most media honchos pretend never to have heard of this gang of plotters. But he responded candidly, a rarity, "Well, if we went and then told about it, we couldn't go anymore. What should we do? Go and talk about it, or not be able to go?"

The meetings of the Bilderberg Group are about the only place that competing financial forces sit with one another. The Rockefellers, for example, are always there. So are their apparent enemy, the French Rothschilds. Sitting as a sort of neutral intermediary always is a top official of the Wallenberg banking monopoly of Sweden and northern Europe.

[In 1978, when John D. Rockefeller 3rd was assassinated on the road to their upstate New York fortress, we were the ONLY journalists (unpaid, free lance journalists, at that), who dared inquire. He was the father of John D. Rockfeller 4th, who to be cute, calls himself "Jay", a supposed Democrat, U.S. Senator from West Virginia. The Rockefellers like to dominate states with sizeable geography and minerals, but a small population, such as also Arkansas. In a pinch, to dominate the state it would not cost that much to buy most every voter and most every media propaganda instrument in the state.Returning the "favor" of political murder was eighteen years later when the top member of the French Rothschild Family was murdered in Paris. The American monopoly press was ordered not to mention in detail, if at all, the death of Rothschild. Or, just run an innocent little item that the French International baron died of a "heart attack". Presslord/swindler Rupert Murdoch ordered his print and electronic media outlets to avoid, if at all, mentioning the death.

The hotel in different countries where they meet each year, are announced as "closed", for "remodeling", or a "wedding party". One year they picked a resort hotel on top of a Swiss mountain, difficult to reach except by air. The host nation agrees to supply a huge, almost secret security force prepared to brutalize intruders, follow any hardy reporters who may be encamped nearby, and by various brutality and trickery stop any public knowledge. Hotel employees are likewise pledged to secrecy, which if they violated it, would be severely dealt with. Such as never to be able to work again in that nation.

When the Bilderberg met in 1991, in Baden-Baden, Germany, a purported health resort, invited was a then obscure Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. They anointed him as the next President of the United States. The election would be a mere set up. The pressfakers present agreed not to mention, if at all possible, what they all knew. That Clinton was a walking, talking scandal. Not every American voter can bring themselves to know or believe reality. Namely, every candidate for high office is selected because they are blackmailable. The Establishment has to reserve the right to pull on the chain, any time they felt like it, to shut down such a candidate if somehow elected to high office. This, anytime the "powers that be" deemed it necessary, to shut him or her up, to remove them, or, scare them into silence with weird violence directed against the candidate/president's circle.

Groomed since a teen-ager by the American CIA, Clinton in the1992 Presidential election shadow-boxed with his mentor, George Herbert Walker Bush, former head of the secret political police. Daddy Bush has been with the espionage cartel since 1959, when they helped set him up with six hundred worldwide affiliates for "his" petroleum drilling empire, Zapata Oil, later, Zapata Offshore, later Pennzoil, still later, Pennzoil/Texaco.

Earlier, as Arkansas Governor, Clinton participated in the hundreds of millions of dollars involved in the dope traffic through the southern states, run by the American CIA, in part through the espionage airport at Mena, Arkansas. Clinton's partners were Daddy Bush, Ollie North, and Congressman Henry Hyde (R., Ill.), who was also head of the CIA "black budget", funds for covert operations including domestic and overseas political assassinations. Return shipments of air-shipped weapons, went to unlawfully aid the Contras in Nicaragua.

Clinton, as known to his handlers and partners, was clearly subject to blackmail and being terrorized.

He was selected to be an Oxford College, Great Britain student by the Rhodes Trust. As not widely known, but nevertheless true, the Rhodes fortune is pledged to overthrow the American Republic, to return this continent to puppet colonies, and the American inhabitants to be subjects of the British Monarch in London. [Visit our website series, "The Overthrow of the American Republic".]

While in England, Clinton, a sexual predator, suffering from having his flag up too often, priapism, raped a British woman. He was forced to terminate his studies at Oxford and abruptly leave Great Britain, with the proviso that he would not be criminally prosecuted as long as he never returned. In the 1992 Presidential Election, Daddy Bush and Clinton agreed not to bring up each other's dirty laundry. Clinton would not mention the treasonous deal done by the Elder Bush in Paris, October, 1980, to arrange weapons shipments to Iran, in return, Iran would refuse to return the 52 U.S. hostages from the Teheran Embassy, until the Reagan/Bush ticket was safely inaugurated in January, 1981. If incumbent President Jimmy Carter could have avoided seeming to be a wimp and get the return of the hostages right before the election, it would, to Bush, be the dreaded "October Surprise". And Clinton agreed not to mention Daddy Bush's treason in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Over and above the blackmailable items known as to both Clinton and Bush, was Clinton's position with the aristocracy that gathers each year as the Bilderberg Group. The person using the name "Clinton" should rightfully be called William ROCKEFELLER Clinton. Our interviews with middle-level members of the Rockefeller Family, convinces us of the validity of our position. Namely, that "Clinton" is the illegitimate great grandson of old John D. Rockefeller, founder of the infamous petroleum monopoly, Standard Oil.[Other such details, see our website series on Wal-Mart, headquartered in Arkansas.]

Several terms prior to "Clinton", Winthrop Rockefeller was Arkansas Governor. He was known to have fathered, throughout the U.S., at least five illegitimate children. [The legitimate great grandson of John D., is "Jay" Rockefeller whose wife, Sharon Percy Rockefeller, is a top mogul of public tv and radio. We call it National Petroleum Radio.]

Throughout his career as Governor and President, "Clinton" was kept on a chain, by among other things, terror-tactics. A strange one-motor airplane with an already dead pilot, somehow eluded all the measures to protect the White House, and came within a few feet of crashing right through President Clinton's White House bedroom window. The White House rooftop battery of missiles was somehow turned off that night. The plane had to be guided, that is vectored, from accomplices on the ground, to steer around all the obstructions and buildings in its path. Remote controlled? Perhaps. During his Presidency, more than a hundred of his confidants, friends, circle of friends, and such were murdered. His Little Rock campaign chief, Jerry Parks, was murdered, mobster-style. Various of his U.S. Marine and other guards, who knew a lot about him, were one by one, snuffed out in strange, so-called "accidents". His pal, Vincent W. Foster, Jr., was murdered and explained away as a "suicide". Other websites have compiled a lengthy list of these happenings. In simple terms, those who meet at the Bilderberg Group, are aristocrats, the handlers of their retainers, stooges, spy chiefs, bank bosses, and such. Seemingly little understood is the basic premise of aristocracy. When one nation's aristocracy, Establishment, whatever you want to call them, has a falling out with that of another nation, that is grounds for war. If bad enough, it becomes a World War. One group plans to have more power, consolidate their territorial position, and silence the grumbling of unemployed ordinary people, through the drums of war, to the destruction and detriment of the opposing aristocracy. Used to foment bloody conflict are a massive media campaign of hate against the Establishment of the opposing Ruling Class, now designated as an Enemy, previously having been business partners. To get the ordinary populace into the right mode, they become bombarded around the clock with martial music, and appeals to flag, God, and such terms as Fatherland and Mother Russia.. In plain terms, the aristocracy goaded, pumped up, poorly informed workers to murder, for flag and country, the counterpart workers of the opposing aristocracv. In some instances, one aristocracy still does business with the other, in the midst of the War. [See, "Trading With the Enemy", by Charles Higham.]

Depressions, on the other hand, are a combination of an orchestrated event combined with the cycles of circumstance. The aristocracy plans to grab up the real estate, commercial and residential, the collapsed bank funds written off, the bloated pie in the sky stock ownership, and other assets of the powerless suckers, for a few pennies on the dollar. All the while, the ultra rich, through their press whores, falsely proclaim that the return of prosperity is just around the corner. [It may take fifteen years and another instigated war to do that.]

What is plotted and agreed upon, as shown by the circumstances of a secret society like the Bilderberg Group should NOT be described or labeled as merely a "conspiracy". And we are NOT "conspiracy theorists" [You do not succeed in putting bribe-taking judges in jail, as we have, for decades, by foolishness and "conspiracy theories".] These are the known ways of the Establishment, the Ultra Rich, the Aristocracy, by whatever label. Bred into them from birth is this mindset for power and enrichment little-understood by generally good-hearted, ordinary people who would not instigate a bloody war for profit.

So, sooner or later, the way the plutocrats conduct their horrors of bloodshed and financial smash-ups, leads to Revolution. Europe, to their credit, have had more or less genuine upheavals, Revolutions. America never has had such.

[A useful primer is Ferdinand Lundberg's great documented work, "The Rich and the Super Rich", first published in 1968, but timely even now. His earlier work has a lot of even more revealing details, published in 1937, still on hand in some large lirbraries, "America's Sixty Families".]

To understand the ways of the Bilderberg Group, you have to have a sharp eye for calendar events and circumstances. You have to carefully notice what happens usually in the month or so AFTER their annual secret meeting. Note these happenings within thirty days of the Bilderberg Group meeting, May 30 to June 2, 2002 (they actually adjourned a day earlier), at a hotel at Chantilly, Virginia.

===Suddenly the monopoly press, headed by those presslords who attended the meeting, such as Donald Graham, head of the Washington Post, Conrad Black, Canadian/U..S. press empire, and others, on behalf of the Ultra Rich started a series of scandal disclosures. Such as that the second largest long distance service in the U.S., WorldCom, parent of MCI, had concealed book-cooking of almost four billion dollars. And thus, WorldCom stock plummeted from about sixty dollars per share to eight pennies per share, and faces bankruptcy.. Such as, Xerox, the original copy machine empire, to apparently falsely show a profit instead of huge losses, cooked their books to the tune of six billion dollars. Such as Clear Channel Communications, owner of 1200 U.S. radio stations, had reportedly likewise cooked their books. "Clear Channel Says No Accounting Issues", Business-Reuters, Los Angeles, June 27, 2002. Another sudden revelation within the thirty days after the Bilderberg meeting in 2002, the advertising giant, OMNICOM, had reportedly likewise cooked their books by way of gobbling up other advertising and marketing agencies. "Omnicom gutted on debt review", CBS.MarketWatch.com, June 27, 2002.[OMNICOM are the parent of DDB Chicago, which represented the advertising and marketing, at the same time apparently, of supposedly competing soda pop companies, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola. See the details, many in the court record, but little known, in our website series, "Coca-Cola, CIA, and the Courts.]

===The British-owned newspaper now gaining large circulation as well in the U.S. is Financial Times of London. On a Chicago dateline story, by their correspondent Jeremy Grant, they opened up the reputed scandal that mammoth General Motors had cooked their books. For a while, General Motors stock was suspended in trading on the Big Board. "GM denies accounting problems", Financial Times, June 27, 2002.

===A few weeks BEFORE the Bilderberg 2002 meeting, the New York Times suddenly attacked a previous sacred cow, General Electric, implying G.E. engages in book-cooking. New York Times bigshots often attend Bilderberg meetings. "Wait a Second What Devils Lurk in the Details?", by Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times, April 14, 2002.

===And then there was the story that bigshots of Apple Computer sold millions of dollars of their shares in the company just before really bad news was disclosed.

These scandalous details, pave the way for foreign aristocracies to get an armlock on American business. These details were apparently long-known to the accounting firms, but not revealed until Bilderberg Group gave the signal, "Wreck them now! Get them!" Little known, most of the big accounting firms have as their parent firm, a foreign enterprise. Such as Arthur Andersen is owned by a Swiss outfit. Deloitte & Touche is actually owned by a Japanese firm, Tohmatsu. As we have detailed, Great Britain, at least since the war of 1812 when they burned down our Capitol, has planned to grab this continent back. And for that purpose, they were involved in the political assassination of three U.S. Presidents. [Visit our extensive website series, "The Overthrow of the American Republic".]

Of course, the Liars and Whores of the press will not link up these happenings. Remember, if good witnesses or documents are hard to get, circumstances alone, on occasion, are even sufficient to send a criminal defendant to the electric chair.

Wars, Depressions, vast theft of properties and assets, and political murders are not merely purely accidental. They are not a conspiracy. Just the day to day, month to month, year to year, and decade to decade way of conducting matters of the Establishment and their meeting clubs, their secret societies, of which Bilderberg is just one.

More coming. Stay tuned.
The Gold Gamecocks, Part One
by Sherman H. Skolnick 6/17/02

For many years the Chicago Gold Conference met in the Windy City. In years past, I used to go to their annual meeting in my home town. Funny thing. I was the only reporter that showed up. And I am only an unpaid, freelance reporter that heads a court reform group investigating and researching banks and such. We coined the term Banker-Judge to label the way the corrupt Bench and Bar operates.

I learned a lot interviewing gold mining engineers from all over, top officials of the World Gold Council, sellers of shares in smaller mines, and an audience of gold bugs.

In the 20th Century, gold had a sorry history in the U.S. In the 1932 Presidential Election, candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt pledged that he was going to keep gold as the backing of the U.S. Currency. At the time, gold was pegged at twenty dollars per ounce. Workers, like my elders, enjoyed having gold coins in their pockets as payment for their labors.

Considered a patrician, Roosevelt seemed to oppose the very aristocracy of his origin. But not really. Right after being inaugurated in 1933, Roosevelt declared a Bank Holiday. Many smaller, community banks did not survive the closing down of the banking system. Ordinary folks seemed to like FDR. Yet, he rescued the big banks, the J.P. Morgans and such, at the expense of the small fry.

[At the time of the Great Depression, there was a large foreign-born element in the U.S. and they were satisfied to sleep under bridges when it rains. As long as they were the bridges in America. So there was no basis for a revolution.]

A proper study of the 1930s would inevitably show Roosevelt was one of the leading counter-revolutionaries in American if not world history. He saved the ass of the Ruling Class. The Chicago Tribune, long a backward, reactionary apologist for the rich and their mistreatment of minorities and workers, used to rail against Roosevelt as "That rotten cripple in the White House!"

The Tribune got their newsprint from Canada, by a 19th Century Charter signed by the King of England with the blessings of the Jesuits, in Canada.

Up to the time when the Tribune Company stock went public in the early 1980s, the media giant was openly anti-Black and anti-Jew. We call them the "Queen's Newspaper", since a large amount of their stock is owned by the British Royals. The Tribune remains viciously anti-Irish, forever panning Irish public figures in Chicago.

About twelve years before becoming President, Roosevelt, as an adult, was stricken with infantile paralysis, polio. The U.S. Secret Service, when he was President, saw to it that no photographer dared make a picture of him sitting with his braces in his wheelchair. Such photographers knew their cameras, if not their heads, would be broken by Roosevelt's guards. When I got polio as a child, my impoverished parents successfully appealed by letter directly to President Roosevelt, to open the doors of hospitals closed to us as poor people and Jews. For a while Roosevelt was my hero.

Now, years later, since 1991 I do a taped weekly public access Cable TV Show in Chicago. Our specialty? Fingering local media skunks as being a foul smoke-screen of the secret political police, the FBI and the American CIA. I get feedback of what the media s.o.b.'s among themselves hollar about me. "That paranoid Jew cripple on the tv!" is their favorite put-down of our long-time popular non-commercial show, "Broadsides".

[Although many of those who manage the network media outlets have Jewish surnames, they are merely the stooges, NOT the owners. In the U.S., on the television, there are few actual Jews reading the news or commenting on current events. And, few, if any, senior citizens. And almost no one who sits in a wheelchair or walks with crutches or a walking device. A good reference is the book, "The New Crowd The Changing of the Jewish Guard on Wall Street", by Judith Ramsey Ehrlich and Barry J. Rehfeld, Little Brown & Co., 1989. The book documents how the big Wall Street investment bankers with Jewish surnames have not been actual practicing Jews for more than three generations, having converted to other religions.]

Returning to the timeline, in 1934, less than a year after Roosevelt was installed as President, in violation of his pre-election pledge, he ordered that the possession of gold by Americans is illegal. He devalued the paper money to a little over 35 dollars per ounce of gold. Roosevelt's big money pals, however, were not effected. More than a month before he was inaugurated, they had shipped THEIR GOLD to Switzerland and elsewhere out of the U.S. The aristocracy had a bonanza through their offshore connections and their out-of-the-U.S. gold.

As a child I used to ask my elders, "You had a few gold coins. Why did you surrender them?" Their answer was, "We liked Roosevelt. He ordered it. Besides, the Secret Service would grab us if they found out we had gold after 1934." The Federal law outlawing gold for Americans stayed in effect until 1975. A gold promoter was silenced, in Indianapolis, when he was murdered by being thrown out of a high building window.

One crusader for the truth was Tom Valentine. He ran in Chicago a national magazine, the National Tattler, demanding that there be an audit of Fort Knox, supposedly the repository of U.S. gold. After much todo, one vault of Fort Knox was opened. Guess what? The only stuff found were some very impure, orangish colored metal substances. Apparently melted down coin metal from what was seized in 1934. No actual gold bars. So where was the gold horde?

A U.S. General, at a later date, stated off the record to some, that he headed a military convey of trucks that took the Fort Knox gold to the East Coast, where it was shipped to England in the 1960s, to stem a run on the Bank of England. The British had a lot of trouble caught repeatedly denying they were going to devalue the Pound Sterling. Amid their bank panic, some other countries apparently ended up with the U.S. Fort Knox gold.

As the bankers for the Vatican, the French Rothschilds have always influenced the gold markets. In the early 1980s, amid a liquidity crisis in the U.S., gold briefly reached over 800 dollars per ounce. By the late 1990s, the French Rothschilds together with other European bankers started a campaign to assist the greedy investment bankers of Wall Street, the bullion bankers. Such as Goldman Sachs & Co. (we call them Goldman Sucks), and J.P. Morgan, bullion banker for the British Monarchy. For a while the scheme worked. The private central banks, as a cabal, supposedly were selling portions of their gold treasury. The price of gold by 1999, was driven down to 252 dollars per ounce. The liars and whores of the press, the paper money crowd, kept circulating stories that the price of gold was going down to at least 200 dollars per ounce.

Actually, the private central banks, as a cartel, leased out their gold at rates as low as one per cent, enabling the investment fakers to falsely pump up the stock market to catch in suckers and amateurs. The Bank of England, as an example, drove down the price of gold falsely offering gold that did not belong to them. About 1990, with the downfall of the Soviet government in Moscow, thousands of tons of THEIR gold were stolen and conveyed OUT OF THE COUNTRY by the corrupt bureaucrats in Moscow. Having custody of the purloined gold were bankers in Holland who permitted the Bank of England to fake up gold auctions, offering this stolen gold. Was the gold ever turned over to those who supposedly bought it at auction?

At the time gold was driven down to 252 dollars per ounce, the American pressfakers propagandized with stories, like "Gold has no purpose", "Gold is a barbaric metal. There is no need for any modern country to have it.." Contrary viewpoints, of course, were not allowed.

Notice what happened in 1987. Somehow, I predicted, six months ahead of time, the exact October Monday date of the Stock Crash. I told acquaintances and friends who I believed where in the markets, with a blunt statement, "You better get your hind quarter ouf of Wall Street, sucker!" With a sneer, most of them simply insulted me, "Who the hell are you, Sherman? You are not a college graduate, have no MBA. Your main thing is you run after what you claim are crooked judges. You don't know nothing about business." (They disregarded our investigations of Banker-Judges. That is, those who often own and operate, for corrupt purposes, the bank across the street or across the alley from the courthouse. Such as shown by the biggest judicial bribery scandal in U.S. history, touched off by us, detailed in the book "Illinois Justice", by Kenneth Manaster, published in the fall of 2001. The scandal caused the downfall of Illinois' highest tribunal, the Illinois Supreme Court.)

The Saturday after Black Monday, the October, 1987 Crash, was a family get together. I guess I sometimes cannot hide my sarcastic streak.

"So, did you get your ass out of the market like I predicted?" They did not bother to hurl an insult. They simply picked up their plate of food and moved away from me. As they walked away, I added my cynical remark, "I guess you lost big, sucker, huh?"

In the weeks after the 1987 Crash, the business press fakers, like the Wall Street Journal, said nothing about the fact that the Federal Reserve, a private central bank masquerading as tied to the U.S. government, intervened in the six weeks after the debacle, to keep gold from topping 500 dollars per ounce. Then the price subsided. From having gone over the years to the Chicago Gold Conference, I learned that most of the savvy sorts there believed that there was a secret financial trip-wire. That is, that the Federal Reserve would create a false emergency to absolutely stop gold from topping 410 dollars per ounce.

In the fight between the gold bugs and the paper money crowd, those who like gold gloat, "Hey, sucker, we are in with the killer yellow metal. Who are YOU in with?" The bottom line is that gold is independent money, beholden to neither dictators or presidents or prime ministers. Simply put, if gold goes up, paper money goes to Hell. More about gold.

Stay tuned.