News Notes
Zip Dobyns
Thanks to a copy sent to me by a friend, I just saw a PBS documentary, Frontline, which reported the connections between Jimmy Hoffa, the Mafia and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Thanks to the same friend, I had already seen the documentary called the “Jim Garrison Tapes” which covered Garrison’s years of work investigating the connections between the CIA and Kennedy’s death. The two films were complementary, adding to the picture presented by Dr. Charles Crenshaw whose book described his experiences in the operating room of the hospital to which both the dying Kennedy and Oswald were taken. The three together, the book and two films, show powerful evidence that there was a complicated conspiracy involved in the killings, and they make it all the more amazing that the government was able to cover up the evidence as long as they did. “Killings” is definitely a plural, because in addition to Kennedy and Oswald, many people who “knew too much” were killed or disappeared within a few months after the assassination.
I have managed to avoid seeing the Hollywood movie, JFK, but I understand that it drew heavily on Garrison’s investigation. Among many, many other items, Garrison makes a case for CIA involvement by pointing out that after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired Allan Dulles, head of the CIA which had managed the attempt to overthrow Castro in Cuba. Kennedy also fired the CIA top assistant who was the brother of the mayor of Dallas and he indicated that he planned to further “clip the wings” of the CIA covert operators who were (in the name of “anti-communism”) putting down leaders anywhere in the world who threatened to support human rights against the property rights of the “elite.” In his book, Dr. Crenshaw strongly implicates the Dallas Police Chief among other officials that he thinks were CIA. The FBI was also involved in the cover-up, if not before. Its head, J. Edgar Hoover, took over the assassination case, flouting the laws of Texas, and either CIA or FBI agents apparently helped hide the evidence of more shots than Oswald could have fired.
The Frontline film describes the concerted attack on the Mafia by both John Kennedy and his brother, Bobbie, who became U.S. Attorney General after Kennedy’s election. The Mafia were even more upset because they had previously worked with Joe Kennedy, father of John and Bobbie, and had helped to elect John Kennedy. They had run the profitable gambling and prostitution in Cuba and had been thrown out by Castro, and they were cooperating with the CIA in the attempt to overthrow Castro. A former major lawyer for the Mafia in Florida provided considerable information for the Frontline film, and his story was supplemented by many other sources. He explained why Garrison concentrated on the CIA and did not implicate the Mafia. Garrison was politically supported by the primary Mafia leader in New Orleans and they were being mutually protective of each other. He also explained what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, the head of the Teamster’s Union who had been successfully tried and jailed by Bobbie Kennedy. Hoffa was removed by the Mafia and his former “friend” who had replaced him as head of the Teamsters when Hoffa went to jail, and who was even more cooperative with the Mafia than Hoffa had been.
In one of those nice synchronicities, the December 1992 issue of the World Press devotes their cover story to the Mafia. This is an interesting magazine which is mostly made up of reprints of articles from newspapers around the world. It offers ethnocentric Americans a chance to see what the rest of the world is reading. The story is titled MAFIA INC, and it reports:
“Like any business bursting at the seams of its own success, the Mafia and its allies know no borders. Born of a transatlantic axis, the Mafia has forged alliances wherever it has needed to, sponsoring indigenous crime syndicates or helping rivals to wipe each other out. The manipulation of the Turkish heroin ‘Babas’ or the drug barons of Colombia has become its model of how to operate an empire to the conquering power’s—but also the natives’—advantage. Internationally, the Mafia is stronger than ever before, except in the U.S. And recent arrests show it to be expanding with speed in Russia and other post-communist countries, buying up chunks of the economy, laundering money, dealing with local gangsters, and preparing to create and cultivate an eager market for hard drugs. The Mafia runs the world’s drug-dealing businesses, and its wealth is inestimable. The giddy profits from South America, the U.S. and the Far East are laundered, recycled, and hidden by the best wizards in the money business across an impenetrable labyrinth of ‘legal’ commercial activities. Deposits that used to be concentrated in Switzerland are now spread in banks from the Cayman Islands to Moscow.” pp 11-12
The article continues that the clan in Corleone, Sicily is now the undisputed Mafia power in the world, having subjugated the other branches of the Mafia in the Mafia war of 1981-3. The Corleone head, Liggio, was the victor in that war even though he has actually been in jail since 1973. His right-hand man, Riina, continues to lead the Corleone clan. Salvatore Riina, who has been on the run since 1969, is described as the world’s most wanted man. The World Press article describes the recent killing of Italian officials who were fighting the Mafia as a “push for omnipotence, to be won by wiping out the effective opposition and terrorizing a rebellious populace back into submission. ...
Everyone knows that the Mafia and the establishment are entwined and that this marriage is one of the pillars of political life in Italy. The state itself is split between those who are impatient for reform and those who will do anything to maintain the status quo on which they have fed since 1946. Almost every time the judiciary peels away the covers of Italian high finance, construction, tourist development, local politics, or public-sector spending excesses, it finds the Mafia. Every illegal arms deal and, of course, every drug haul leads directly to the Mafia. The Cosa Nostra has grown from what was believed to be a band of gangsters operating out of the chaos of postwar Sicily to become, in 46 years, an unchallenged and unchallengeable global crime syndicate.” p 12
The article concludes with a brief look at the Europol, the new police agency set up at Maastricht which is to coordinate the efforts of all 12 EC countries to combat international crime. Europol is to begin operating on January 1, 1993, so the chart for the official beginning of the EC (European Community) is also the chart for Europol. Needless to say, the chart shows intense conflict. The Danes voted against the Maastricht agreement but the Germans more recently strongly endorsed it. Independent countries do not easily give up their sovereignty, but if citizens realize the need for cooperation in the face of the threat of control of the world by criminals, this knowledge might strengthen the union. I have looked at the chart for 0 A.M. on January 1, 1993 but can’t remember whether I have ever written about it in The Mutable Dilemma or Asteroid-World. Perhaps an article is in order since the time is upon us. This is being written in early December 1992 but it will be 1993 before it reaches subscribers.
The December 1992 issue of the World Press has several other interesting articles in addition to the cover story on the Mafia. One article is called “Can the Japanese Learn to Play?” It describes a routine trade mission by Japanese businessmen to Europe which came home with very non-routine awareness. “From politicians as well as from the heads of some of Europe’s biggest companies—including Philips, Fiat, and Volvo—the delegation heard a common refrain: Japan was the ‘winner’ of the global economic competition. The country’s leading industries, the Europeans conceded, were the strongest in the world. There was no jubilation in the Japanese camp. They saw that the Europeans were no longer hopeful of resolving trade problems with Japan through negotiations. Europe seemed interested only in constructing defenses against the Japanese onslaught.” p 18
A national debate is now underway in Japan questioning whether they should put less emphasis on market share and more on profit, work fewer hours and take more holidays, or find other ways to modify their business practices to permit symbiosis with the rest of the world. The threat of protectionism is apparently being considered more seriously than ever before. Some Japanese feel that other countries should modify their work practices to become more like the Japanese, including longer work hours and more loyalty to employers in exchange for “lifetime” jobs. A side article accompanying the primary one describes the current report that up to 11,000 Japanese die annually from what they call Karoshi—literally “working to death.” Ordinary workers have a great choice between the Japanese-style international business elite and the Mafia as the competition heats up over who will rule the world.
There are a few more cheerful articles in this issue of the World Press, including several on positive moves toward a more “green” world. One article describes the award-winning Codicil House designed in Toronto, Canada. It is an affordable two-bedroom home completely independent of city utilities. It takes only a cup of water to flush its composting toilet, only three quarters of a cord of wood to heat the three-story, 800-square-foot structure and it provides indoor-air quality. It covers only the space of a two-car garage on an existing, developed lot, and can be built for $99,250 or less if mass produced. The house has solar panels, a rooftop greenhouse, a collector for rainwater, and many other special features including new light weight, easily installed materials used in the blocks of which it is built. It sounds terrific!
Another item could also be classed as a move toward “green” values. As I have previously written, I took the idea for this feature in The Mutable Dilemma from a similar feature in Fate Magazine. Fate calls their regular lead-off column “I see by the Papers.” The November 1992 issue of Fate includes an interesting item called “Hens and Homeopathy.” It says that in Heidelberg Germany, the government department of food and veterinary medicine has replaced antibiotics with homeopathic remedies in treating the common diseases of chickens, respiratory ailments, diarrhea, etc. Some 800,000 laying hens managed by 140 companies have used no antibiotics since 1983. Unlike antibiotics which require a waiting period of 3 to 30 days before eggs can be sold, homeopathic remedies leave no residues so the eggs laid immediately after their use on the chickens are safe for consumers. Can you imagine the reaction of our chemical companies if farmers here tried to change to homeopathy?
The December 7, 1992 issue of Newsweek has a page on a way that President-elect Bill Clinton’s idea of a “national service” corps could be implemented fairly rapidly. Clinton is quite serious about his desire to provide college scholarships in exchange for service in a “domestic Peace Corps,” but there are potential pitfalls. Joe Klein in the Newsweek article suggests that public-employee unions are likely to fight to keep the new Peace Corps “away from jobs that might be done by their members—that is, anything remotely useful.” But Klien writes that a Police Corps is an exception to this resistance. It has already passed Congress with support ranging from the most liberal to the most conservative members of Congress and it is supported by the Fraternal Order of Police, but it died when Bush threatened to veto the 1991 crime bill. “It is a carefully thought-out idea, the product of 10 years of negotiation by Adam Walinsky, a former aide to Robert Kennedy who has made it his personal crusade.” p. 29 The plan includes training for the new police which would be more extensive than that received by most new officers. Conservatives like the plan because it would put more cops actually on the street. Liberals like it because college students might leaven the macho Blue Culture. A poll of students showed 24% at a private school and 40% at a state school ready to sign up. Klein thinks it could go through Congress by spring and that the first of 3,000 to 5,000 officers could be on the streets by winter. It seems a logical place to begin “to rebuild a national sense of community, responsibility and public altruism.” p 29
Another article in the same issue of Newsweek is less upbeat. The author, Marc Levinson, describes the uphill battle facing the U.S. to try to limit the increasing wealth inequality in the country which has grown faster in the U.S. during the 1990s than in any other country. Obviously, jobless and very low-wage people can’t buy the products which we produce.
There is also an article on the inside story of BCCI which the authors call “the world’s most corrupt financial empire.” That may be hyperbole, but a lot of money seems to have disappeared and no one knows where it went. BCCI maintained its immunity from government inspection by giving to both sides in political contests. An Arkansas investment banker named Stephens played a crucial role in BCCI’s penetration of the U.S. market by collecting First American stock. His wife ran Bush’s campaign in Arkansas in 1988, his firm donated to $100,000 to Bush in May 1991, and he donated to Clinton in his local campaigns over a period of years. A separate short article which I found even more intriguing asks how far the BCCI-CIA connection went. It lists a variety of leaders of BCCI and First American Bank (an illegal subsidiary of BCCI), all of them members of intelligence agencies in the U.S. or in other countries, and it asks at the end: “Can this all be a coincidence? Or is it possible that First American was affiliated with U.S. intelligence all along and was simply passed from one group of CIA associates to another, and then another?”
For years, I have been hearing rumors that Bush’s seventh house Uranus exactly square his Sun and widely square his Jupiter had led to what most astrologers would suspect—at least a few affairs. The July-August issue of Spy magazine has a featured story on the rumors and the magazine cover presents a picture of George with the usual lop-sided twist to his mouth and the worst, most unflattering picture I have ever seen of Barbara. The only possible mistress that I had heard identified by name was a former aide, Jennifer Fitzgerald, an interesting name-match for Clinton’s Gennifer Flowers. Unlike Clinton’s Gennifer who was paid a considerable amount of money to let a supermarket tabloid make a “doctored” tape recording, Fitzgerald publicly denies any relationship with Bush other than her work for him. Friends have said that privately in the past she has boasted of the relationship.
The Spy investigator found it harder to trace George’s private life than it had been to reveal Gary Hart’s playmates. But he did turn up some information suggesting three past mistresses, all of them high level present or past government employees “with salaries that make Gennifer Flower’s $17,000 a year look like lunch money.” p. 32 Spy author Joe Conason includes several reasons for the media’s hesitation to tackle a Bush expose, including the suggestion that a 43-point plunge of the stock market two weeks before the 1988 election was due to the report that a series on Bush about to be published in the Washington Post would describe a Bush affair. The report was wrong. The Bush expose series said nothing about any extramarital activities.
Conason writes that one of the reasons it has been possible to conceal Bush’s affairs and unwanted attentions to women was connected to social class. The women involved, unlike Gennifer, did not want money or publicity. One incident was described in Kitty Kelley’s book on Nancy Reagan. Nancy had told some of her friends about an episode when she was dining with a few others at the Lion d’OR restaurant in Washington on March 18, 1991. Attorney general William French Smith and Secretary of State Alexander Haig were called away by walkie-talkies. They returned laughing, saying that George Bush had been in a traffic accident with his girlfriend and had not wanted the incident to appear on the DC police blotter. His security men contacted Haig and Smith who took care of things for him and then came back to dinner.
Conason says that the wife of a top editor at the New York Times had been the target of unwanted attentions from Bush while in a previous marriage, but she would not talk about it to newsmen. Another case involved the wife of an entertainment figure who attended a Washington Gala. The extremely attractive wife has told friends that “moments after she encountered President Bush, he suggested that she and he go off somewhere alone. Offended, she and her husband left the event in a huff.” p 34 However, though the woman had told the story to several friends, she refused to verify it for Spy magazine. The widow of a close friend of Bush was reported to be another of his mistresses. A London newspaper carried the story of both the widow and Jennifer Fitzgerald, but the U.S. papers have remained discreetly silent. Conason describes Bush, when away from his wife and “off the record,” as a Yale jock who never grew up. He makes sexual jokes, asks younger guys “if they got any last night”, and has kept an African sculpture of a man with a huge erect penis in a bathroom near the Oval Office which he enjoyed springing on female visitors. At this point, since he is about to leave the presidency, we can let George and Barbara work out any unresolved issues in their marriage.
Volume XXV, No. 9 of the World Market Perspective, a financial newsletter which I get somewhat sporadically, has a lead-off article called “The Ozone Hoax.” The author, Rogelio A. Maduro, is a native of Panama who is challenging some of the current scientific claims about ozone depletion. He writes that according to measurements, one percent of CFCs actually break up in the stratosphere, so that 7,555 tons of chlorine are being released into the stratosphere every year. But 5 million tons are released from ocean biota (algae, plankton, etc.), 8.4 million tons from biomass burning, 36 million tons from volcanoes, and 600 million tons from seawater. And this doesn’t include a volcano like Mount Pinatubo which loaded an additional 20 million or more tons of chlorine into the atmosphere of which a significant portion went into the stratosphere. One volcano in Antarctica which erupts every day, Mount Erebus, emits 20 times more chlorine into the atmosphere than the entire amount of chlorine allegedly produced from the breakdown of CFCs. Maduro says that the CFC scare is a scam by the big chemical companies like Dupont and Dow which want to replace CFCs with their new, much more expensive substitutes. He claims that there is a clear oscillation of ozone levels from year to year with 11 and 22-year cycles matching the sunspot cycle. He says that the “scientists” who presented figures used the interval from 1969 to 1985 to get the figures they presented in a press conference designed to alarm the world. If they had used the 22-year period between 1962 and 1985, there was little change in the ozone level. Maduro also points out that only light skinned people have to worry about skin cancer, and that the 10% to 20% increase in ultraviolet radiation which is talked about is equivalent to the increase you get from moving south approximately 60 to 120 miles. If an international New World Order succeeded in banning existing refrigerators, there would be an enormous increase in spoiled food. Reaping the profits would be the big chemical companies which would provide the new refrigerants, the big companies which would make the new refrigerators, and the big agricultural businesses which could raise their prices in the face of food shortages.
The Mountain Astrologer, published in Boulder, CO, frequently has interesting articles. Their August-September 1992 issue had an article by a Vedic astrologer who claimed that Clinton had no chance to win. He felt Bush and Perot were both in the running and gave Bush an edge because his chart showed more problems during the coming years.
The November, 1992 issue had an excellent article by Ann Parker on her attempts to predict earthquakes. She examined more than 500 eclipses and 110 quakes of 6.9 + magnitude in addition to volcanic eruptions. Most of the eclipses used occurred within the 12 months preceding the event. Only one eclipse per event was considered. Ann found Pluto near a major angle (MC, IC, Ascendant, Descendant) in the event area in 84% of the eclipses preceding an earthquake or volcanic eruption. It was on the MC or IC 46% of the time; rising or setting 38% of the time. Mars was near an angle in the event area in 64% of the eclipses preceding an event, and Uranus was there in 47% of the eclipses.
Looking ahead, Ann says that the December 9, 1992 lunar eclipse has Pluto setting along the West coast of California and the November 29, 1993 lunar eclipse has Pluto at the IC right through northern California with the Sun at the IC and the Moon at the MC just to the east. These positions show the potential for quakes through 1993. Even though Ann’s article emphasizes Pluto, Mars and Uranus, I think the May 21, 1993 eclipse is important with Saturn exactly on the MC in Los Angeles square the Sun-Moon. Ann suggests that 1994 is the most likely year for an earthquake in the Midwest. The path of the solar eclipse of May 10, 1994 passes over the Midwest and northeastern U.S.
Last but certainly not least, the December 1992 issue of Share International has a fascinating interview with astronomer Gerald Hawkins. Sometime within the last year or so, I mentioned an article about Hawkins’ work with the mysterious crop circles which appeared in Science News, a very conservative science publication. This Share interview covers some of Hawkins’ work since the Science News article. Hawkins describes the early crop circles as having ratios which matched our modern music scale. He found 12 out of 19 circles which had been accurately measured fit the major diatonic scale. The odds of this happening by chance were estimated at 1 in 25,000. There is no way that they could be “natural phenomena” such as little whirlwinds. Considering that most of the circles are formed at night in total darkness, the chance that they are created by hoaxers is also extremely unlikely.
In the later, more complex circles, Hawkins found geometric patterns which fit the theorems of Euclid but which had not been discovered by Euclid. They are examples of plane geometry but not present in Euclid’s 13 books though Hawkins says there is an obvious place where they should fit in Book 13 after theorem 12. Such theorems are hard to conceive but easy to prove once they have been conceived. In the Science News article, Hawkins challenged the readers to figure out the general theorem from which all of the others could be derived and no one was able to do it. Science News has a circulation of 267,000 readers, many of them scientists. The later circles which look like pictograms, insects, etc. have Hawkins baffled. He has been unable to find any recognizable mathematical features in them though he is still searching.