From oneb!cs.ubc.ca!utcsri!torn!cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!uunet!ccs!covici Thu Jan 28 09:53:06 PST 1993 The following series is taken from Executive Intelligence Review V20, #5 and is the cover story of that issue. For further information on EIR, please contact me by Email. LaRouche defines a science of Christian economy against usury {Lyndon LaRouche's 1991 book, }The Science of Christian Economy,{ develops the principled basis for the compatibility of Christian teachings and economic science. We reprint excerpts from the preface here, so as to highlight the distance from the anti-Christian doctrines of Michael Novak and company:} During the course of these next several pages, we shall come to the point at which we shall turn the attention of our ecumenical readership to numbered section 72, of the famous 1891 encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, {Rerum Novarum.} We shall then focus upon the concluding sentence of that section, and also upon the passage from Thomas Aquinas's {Summa Theologica} which the author of the encyclical has footnoted there. The referenced sentence of the encyclical's text reads thus: ``For laws are to be obeyed only insofar as they conform with right reason and thus with the eternal law of God.'' The footnoted passage from St. Thomas Aquinas's {Summa Theologica} reads: ``Human law is law only in virtue of its accordance with right reason; and, thus it is manifest that it flows from the eternal law. And insofar as it [man-made law--LHL] deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is not law at all, but rather a species of violence.'' A hundred years ago, {Rerum Novarum} treated the remedying of the evil then being run by a ``devouring usury,'' which, ``although often condemned by the Church, but practiced nevertheless under another form by avaricious and grasping men, has increased the evil'' effected by the handing over of workers, ``each alone and defenseless, to the inhumanity of employers and the unbridled greed of competitors.'' At the time of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy at the end of 1963, approximately three-quarters of a century had passed. It appeared to most observers then, that the pleas for economic justice in {Rerum Novarum,} if not yet successful, were assuredly on the way to becoming so. In the so-called ``industrialized capitalist'' sectors of this planet, the trade-union movement and other meliorist agencies had won, and were continuing to win cumulatively invaluable, and putatively permanent gains in human rights for most strata of the populations. Although a vicious form of neo-colonialism had been established at the end of the 1939-45 World War, the spirit of the United Nations Organization's First Development Decade Project, and the U.S. Kennedy administration's Alliance For Progress, suggested a commitment to global justice paralleling, and perhaps echoing the rise of the civil rights movement inside the U.S.A. itself. During the middle of the 1960s, that hopeful direction of development was reversed. During the recent quarter-century, social conditions in most parts of the world are far worse, on the average, than during the 1960s, and threaten to become soon far worse than one hundred years ago. The impulses for evil which have caused this recent calamity are not altogether new. A conspicuously leading cause of the greatly increased immiseration and endangerment of the human species, during the past quarter-century, has been the willful murderousness with which such forms of the old ``devouring usury'' as so-called ``International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities'' have been so widely, so murderously, so shamelessly applied to the precalculable effect of rapid and large-scale increases of death rates by means of malnutrition, disease, and related mechanisms. The most striking of the various included features of the new evil, is the dominant influence of the so-called ``New Age.'' This feature includes such presently pandemic expressions of this as the ``rock-drug-sex counterculture,'' and increasingly irrationalist mass-murderous expressions of self-styled ``ecologism,'' or ``neo-malthusianism.'' The ``New Age'' is not itself an entirely new form of evil. It is as old an evil as the pagan roots of gnosticism. Prior to the 1963 launching of the ``New Age'' as a mass movement within the United States, this form of New Age satanism was an endemic cancer in such forms as the theosophical existentialism of the followers of the proto-Nazi Friedrich Nietzsche, and the pro-freemasonic satanists of Aleister Crowley's networks. What is notable on these accounts is the increasingly emboldened way in which the two evils, the ``New Age'' and usury, have exhibited their natural affinities for one another, combining their forces in even the highest places of Anglo-American power, to demand, in the misused name of ``freedom'' and ``ecology,'' the rapid extermination and global outlawing of every scientific and moral barrier which has hitherto existed as impediments to rampaging immiseration and dictatorial oppression of mankind. Such are the leading characteristic distinctions between the problems immediately addressed one hundred years ago, and today. The former hegemony of scientific and technological progress, upon whose continuation the existence of our populations depends, is being suppressed by both the loss of simple rationality in the education of the young, and by the spread of the paganist cults of anti-science, irrationalist ``ecologism.'' As a concomitant of such specific, catastrophic effects as this one, those European and American forces which are committed to calculated mass-murder of populations of all developing nations, and which are committed to the extermination of the Christian faith and conscience, have come plainly into the ascendancy in the policy-making processes of most of the governing international and national governmental institutions which have gained leadership and dominance over this planet today. - The ecumenical standpoint - We propose that it is necessary, but not sufficient to view the referenced state of affairs from a Christian standpoint; for practical reasons, it is essential that even the Christian standpoint itself be presented here from an ecumenical standpoint as {ecumenical} is typified by Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa's dialogue, {De Pace Fidei.}... Faith may read those writings it deems sacred, or authoritative commentaries on such writings. Or, faith may ``read the bare book of universal nature,'' a book which plainly has been written directly by none other than the Creator himself. It is certain to all men and women of ecumenical good will, that the two kinds of books--the written ones, and the book of nature--cannot contradict one another, on condition that the written one be true, and that both the written and the natural one be read by means of the inner eye of true reason. So, where doctrinal writings differ, we may turn the eye of ecumenical reason to the common book of nature. Let us argue the point in the following, twofold way. We emphasize, on the one side, the ecumenical notion of {intelligible representation} of a principle of knowledge of cause-effect in our universe, a means by which all men and women, despite differences in profession of monotheistic faith, may be brought by their own powers of reason to agreement upon a common principle of law. Second, we emphasize the importance of stressing {Christian} principles of Christian civilization as {Christian,} even within the framework of a monotheistic ecumenicism.... - Physical Economy - By the nature of the case, there is no field of inquiry which unites all subjects of human reason--law, science, art--as directly, as immediately, as the science of Physical Economy which was founded by Gottfried Leibniz. That is a special standpoint of the work we preface here. As is to be seen in summary in the appended document, {Physical Economy} is the science of {successful change,} a study of the dependency of the continued existence of a society upon {successful} forms of successive generation, transmission, and efficient assimilation of fundamental scientific progress. The measure of that effective progress is an increase in what Physical Economy defines as the rate of increase of the potential population-density of that society as a whole. That thus serves as an efficient empirical measurement of both the appropriateness of the society's way of changing its method of reasoning, and, therefore, the appropriateness of the principle of change adopted for that practice. Any society which defies those considerations, is threatening its own continued existence, and, a society implicitly becoming an abomination in God's eye, a society which is not only losing the moral fitness to survive, but which, by God's clock, will not long survive in its present form. Historically, to date, the closest approximation of a form of political economy consistent with Christian principles is the so-called {mercantilist} form growing out of {Colbertisme} in France, and the far-reaching influence of Leibniz. This outgrowth came to be known by the name given to it officially by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, ``the American System of Political Economy.'' This name came to be associated with the work of the U.S. economists Mathew and Henry Carey and of Germany's Friedrich List. The deadly adversaries of the so-called ``mercantilist,'' or ``American'' system, were the Anglo-French-Swiss known in the early eighteenth century as the ``Venetian Party.'' This was the political faction allied against Leibniz and his friends, and allied with the first Duke of Marlborough, allied with the networks of Voltaire, with the Physiocrats, and with so-called eighteenth century ``British liberalism'' of Hugh Walpole, David Hume, Shelburne, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Thomas Malthus generally. These Physiocrats and liberals were the chief guise for the pro-usury faction of that century. That issue of the eighteenth century is more efficiently understood by emphasizing that the liberals and {illuminati} of Voltaire's eighteenth century were committed to a return to the model of a pagan imperial Rome. Hence we call them ``romantics.'' These romantics were dedicated to the overthrow of Christianity for the purpose of advancing their {romantic imperial utopianism.} That is the root of the structures of sin in Western European and North American civilization today. These were then, and are still today both the pro-usury faction, and the utopian cultural form from which the present-day satanic ``New Age'' utopianisms have sprung.... ---- John Covici covici@ccs.covici.com From oneb!cs.ubc.ca!utcsri!torn!cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!olivea!uunet!ccs!covici Thu Jan 28 09:53:08 PST 1993 The following series is taken from Executive Intelligence Review V20, #5 and is the cover story of that issue. For further information on EIR, please contact me by Email. Neuhaus: doing evil and calling it good by William F. Wertz, Jr. Doing Well and Doing Good, The Challenge to the Christian Capitalist by Richard John Neuhaus Doubleday, New York, 1992 312 pages, hardbound, $22. {This review will also appear in the Feb. 1, 1993 issue of }New Federalist{ newspaper. Because of its exceptional importance to the subject of our report, the newspaper and author have granted us permission to reprint it here in full.} On May 2, 1991, the day after Pope John Paul II's encyclical {Centesimus Annus} celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical {Rerum Novarum} was officially released, an article by Richard John Neuhaus, entitled ``The Pope Affirms the `New Capitalism,'|'' appeared in the {Wall Street Journal}. {Doing Well and Doing Good, The Challenge to the Christian Capitalist} is a book-length elaboration of the thesis proclaimed in that article, i.e., that {Centesimus Annus} was ``very likely'' shaped by the work of Neuhaus's fellow liberal capitalist Catholic, Michael Novak, and as such is an endorsement of Novak's concept of ``democratic capitalism.'' Neuhaus, a former Lutheran minister who converted to Catholicism and was then ordained as a Catholic priest, bases his argument not only on an erroneous history of capitalism, but more disconcertingly, on an unconscionably selective reading of both this encyclical and other encyclicals written by Pope John Paul II. His self-serving interpretation is further bolstered by the inclusion at the end of his book of a ``condensation'' of {Centesimus Annus}, which when compared to the original text reveals a thoroughly dishonest censorship of Pope John Paul II's words. To most succinctly indicate the fraud which underlies Neuhaus's book, one must merely point to the fact that not once does Neuhaus mention the problem of Third World foreign debt in the entirety of the text of his book, although he does include an abridged four sentences on this subject from the pope's text in his attached condensation. This omission of what the pope has repeatedly identified as one of the primary causes of both poverty and war in the world today, is related to Neuhaus's attempt both to portray {Centesimus Annus} as a significant break from Pope Paul VI's {Populorum Progressio} and to isolate it from the pope's other encyclicals, such as {Sollicitudo Rei Socialis}, which was written in 1987 on the 20th anniversary of {Populorum Progressio}. - `Structures of sin' - What Neuhaus and Novak want us to ignore from {Sollicitudo Rei Socialis} is the pope's explicit denunciation of the existence of the ``evil mechanisms'' and ``structures of sin'' which are thwarting the development of the less developed countries. The pope argues that ``In the West there exists a system which is historically inspired by the principles of the liberal capitalism which developed with industrialization during the last century.'' Neuhaus correctly points out the pope's opposition to socialism, but he would have us believe that after 1989 the pope has literally endorsed Adam Smith, the father of liberal capitalism in the West. In {Sollicitudo Rei Socialis} the pope says that both liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism are ``in need of radical correction.'' He says, ``Each of the two blocs harbors in its own way a tendency towards imperialism, as it is usually called, or towards forms of new-colonialism.'' He argues that ``misguided mechanisms'' or ``structures of sin'' arise from the ``all-consuming desire for profit'' and from the ``thirst for power.'' Therefore, certain forms of modern ``imperialism'' are ``real forms of idolatry.'' He explicitly calls for reform of the international trade system and reform of the world monetary and financial system which are the very ``structures of sin'' which he has identified. A comparison of Neuhaus's condensation of {Centesimus Annus} with the pope's text shows that he has systematically eliminated all those statements by the pope which, as in {Sollicitudo Rei Socialis}, call for intervention on an international level. For example, the pope writes: ``In the developing countries, tragic crises loom on the horizon unless internationally coordinated measures are taken before it is too late.'' Neuhaus's condensation reads: ``In the developing counties, tragic crises loom on the horizon.'' There is not even an ellipsis! The sentences in section 58 which call for reform of the international monetary system are all omitted. Therefore, in Neuhaus's condensation we do not read that development ``requires above all a change of lifestyles, of models of production and consumption and of the established structures of power which today govern societies.'' We do not read that ``There is a growing feeling, however, that this increasing internationalization of the economy ought to be accompanied by effective international agencies which will oversee and direct the economy to the common good, something that an individual state, even if it were the most powerful on earth, would not be in a position to do.'' We do not read in section 52 that ``Just as within individual societies it is possible and right to organize a solid economy which will direct the functioning of the market to the common good, so too there is a similar need for adequate interventions on the international level.'' In section 34 we do not read that ``In Third World contexts, certain objectives stated in {Rerum Novarum} remain valid, and, in some cases, still constitute a goal yet to be reached, if a person's work and very being are not to be reduced to the level of a mere commodity. These objectives include a sufficient wage for the support of the family, social insurance for old age and unemployment, and adequate protection for the conditions of employment.'' Neuhaus goes so far in his whitewash of the ``structures of sin'' as to suggest that the nations of the Third World are primarily responsible for their own misery, and that their problems would be solved over time if they were merely integrated into the ``new capitalism.'' Thus Neuhaus writes: ``It simply will not do for them to blame their plight on colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, and the such. While foreign states and corporations have taken and do take unjust advantage, Third World leaders are firmly told to put their own houses in order.'' - The pope does not endorse junk bonds - One of the most outrageous arguments in Neuhaus's book is his defense of ``junk bonds'' and Michael Milken. Neuhaus has the audacity to suggest that only the ``more ideologically minded'' have no doubt that a Michael Milken is engaged in ``illicit speculation.'' Neuhaus argues that the ``defenders of the trade in high-risk bonds claim that they make available billions of dollars to capitalize entrepreneurial ventures that would otherwise languish. While many criticize the corporate takeovers financed by junk bonds, others contend that such takeovers typically improve management and make corporations more accountable to stockholders.'' Then he writes, ``Is what such people do an instance of `illicit speculation'? It would appear that the only answer {in principle} proposed by John Paul is that property and economic activity `is just and legitimate if it serves useful work.'|'' Does the pope really endorse junk bonds? Then why does Neuhaus omit the following statement by the pope in section 48: ``The absence of stability, together with the corruption of public officials and the spread of improper sources of growing rich and of easy profits deriving from illegal or purely speculative activities, constitutes one of the chief obstacles to development and to the economic order.'' - Economics apart from God - The source of Neuhaus's fraudulent representation of the arguments of {Centesimus Annus} stems from his severing economics from Christian theology. The book starts by stating that ``The Latin word {oeconomicus} refers to divine dispensations or the general arrangement of everything that is. Christian theologians, for example, refer to the `divine economy,' meaning both the internal life of God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--and the external way in which God has arranged the whole creation.'' However, Neuhaus rejects this theological definition of economics and instead follows Adam Smith in reducing economics to the ``considerably more modest'' concept of household ``stewardship.'' Moreover, he is not unaware of what he is doing. Therefore, he adds parenthetically for the benefit of his Christian readership: ``(Although, to be sure, Christians would insist that what we are discussing cannot be understood fully apart from the life and purposes of God.)'' In so doing, Neuhaus rejects the rooting of economics either in natural law or in the Trinitarian concept of equality. He then argues unashamedly that the pope agrees with this approach to economics: ``The almost complete absence of any explicit reference to natural law in {Centesimus}, and its very limited place in the pope's other writings, is noteworthy.'' Moreover, after falsely arguing that the Christian concept of equality is derived from the {Egalite@aa} of the French Revolution, he insists that equality ``is the name of the dog that does not bark in {Centesimus}.'' The Christian concept of equality is derived by St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Nicolaus of Cusa from the concept of Christ, the second person of the Trinity. As St. Augustine wrote in {On Christian Doctrine}: ``Unity is in the Father, equality in the Son, and in the Holy Spirit is the concord of equality and unity.'' As Pope John Paul II writes in {Sollicitudo Rei Socialis}: ``One's neighbor is then not only a human being with his or her own rights and a fundamental equality with everyone else, but becomes the living image of God the Father, redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ and placed under the permanent action of the Holy Spirit.'' He further writes: ``Surmounting every type of {imperialism} and determination to preserve their {own hegemony}, the stronger and richer nations must have a sense of more {responsibility} for the other nations, so that a {real international system} may be established, which will rest on the foundation of the {equality} of all peoples and on the necessary respect for their legitimate differences.'' In {Centesimus} itself, where John Paul argues that a free economy ``presumes a certain equality between the parties, such that one party would not be so powerful as practically to reduce the other to subservience,'' Neuhaus says ``here we encounter a rare reference to equality''--as if this were not an essential principle of the pope's message. The brotherhood of all in Christ, ``children in the Son,'' is the essence of the principle of Solidarity espoused by the pope. In denying the Christian concept of equality, Neuhaus is literally denying Christ. Instead of Christ being the Lord of economics, Neuhaus would transform Christ be into Adam Smith's ``Invisible Hand'' of the marketplace. This is no exaggeration. Neuhaus literally claims that Pope John Paul II has come around to the thinking of the father of liberal capitalism, Adam Smith. Neuhaus writes: ``When we speak of property and ownership, John Paul says, we must give our attention to `the possession of know-how, technology, and skill.' And then this: `The wealth of the industrialized nations is based much more on this kind of ownership than on natural resources.' Fans of Adam Smith are no doubt warranted in drawing some satisfaction from the implied reference in that sentence to {The Wealth of Nations.} (It seems unlikely that it is an accident.) At the very time the American Founders were launching this experiment in political and cultural freedom, Smith was laying out the rationale for a free economy that could benefit all. As becomes evident in John Paul's treatment of global poverty, his hope, like Smith's, is that `the wealth of the industrialized nations' will indeed become, through expanding the circle of exchange and productivity, the wealth of all nations.'' In another location Neuhaus argues that Adam Smith ``was first of all a moral philosopher and he insisted adamantly that the free economy depends upon the cultivation of virtue and the `moral sentiments' of a free people.'' Now you may ask, how is it that Neuhaus can honestly maintain that he and Novak are not advocating the very liberal capitalism which is denounced by every pope since Leo XIII, including John Paul in this encyclical? Honestly they can't. Therefore, they must rely both on a false history of the development of capitalism and of the American System of political economy in particular and construct a false notion of liberal capitalism in order to counterpose it to their own liberalism, which they disguise as the free economy espoused by the pope. The way the latter is accomplished is to define liberal capitalism as libertarianism. Then, by definition, any form of capitalism which is not absolutely libertarian, can be represented as the other, non-liberal form of capitalism. This is precisely what Neuhaus does in order to say that Novak's democratic capitalism based on Adam Smith is the alternative form of capitalism advocated by the pope. Neuhaus is correct in maintaining that there are two forms of capitalism. However, either out of ignorance or design, he and Novak have explicitly adopted the Calvinistic, liberal version of capitalism correctly rejected by the Catholic Church. Therefore they maintain that Max Weber was right when he argued that capitalism arose based upon Calvinism and the Protestant work ethic: ``There is little doubt that what we now call democratic capitalism was shaped in a Protestant, and usually Calvinist, milieu.'' He makes this argument without a single critical reference to British imperialism, let alone any reference to the fact that the American Revolution was fought against Great Britain and against the imperialist economic policies which are the core of Neuhaus and Novak's dearly beloved ``moral philosopher,'' Adam Smith. - Adam Smith and the British System - Adam Smith's ``moral philosophy'' has nothing to do with Christian love for one's fellow man and has everything to do with ``moral indifference.'' That is clear from the following quote from his 1759 {Theory of Moral Sentiments}: ``The administration of the great system of the universe ... the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man.... Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, the love of pleasure, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them.'' So much for the principle of Solidarity! The economic policy which flows from this reduction of man to an animal dominated by ``original and immediate instincts'' is the colonial policy of enforced backwardness against which the American colonies revolted. The policy advocated by Adam Smith in {The Wealth of Nations} under the guise of free trade was that the American colonies not develop their own manufacturing capability and that they not impose any restriction on the importation of British goods. The colonies were to be maintained as an agrarian protectorate. Their produce, from timber to tobacco, was to be taxed so as to pay the British national debt. This is in essence the same imperialist system which insists today upon ``free trade'' as the means by which Third World nations are denied the right to develop their manufacturing capability, maintained in a state of being raw materials producers, and taxed to death in the form of foreign debt payments. Neuhaus and Novak would have us believe that the pope, who has raised his voice precisely against these ``evil mechanisms,'' has joined with them in bowing down in worship of Adam Smith's ``Invisible Hand.'' This is the message which they are currently peddling throughout Latin America to gain support from the Catholic Church for the ``adjustment'' programs of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). - The American System of economics - What then was the American Revolution about in terms of philosophy and economic policy? First of all, it was definitely not what Neuhaus asserts it to have been, i.e., ``a Puritan-Lockean Synthesis.'' Although it is commonplace among liberal ideologues to assert that the American Revolution was inspired by John Locke, who certainly had influence and advocates in America, anyone who looks for the positive kernel of the American Revolution will not find it there, but rather in the Christian philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and ultimately in the Renaissance tradition of Nicolaus of Cusa, who first espoused the idea that government must be based upon the consent of the governed in his work {On Catholic Concordance}. Secondly, in respect to economic policy, it is irrefutable that the United States based its economic policy not on Adam Smith, but rather upon mercantilism. Beginning with the establishment of the First National Bank of the United States by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, U.S. economic policy was what later became known as the American System of political economy. After Alexander Hamilton, the economists of this school included Mathew Carey, Henry C. Carey, who was the adviser of Abraham Lincoln, and Friedrich List. It is this American System of political economy, conveniently ignored by Neuhaus and Novak, which represents the real capitalist alternative to the British imperial system of liberal capitalism. Unfortunately this form of Christian economy, which opposed the British System slave trade and opium wars, is no longer the economic policy of the United States. Rather the United States has adopted the British system, which Neuhaus and Novak now recommend the Catholic Church adopt as its own. Even though Neuhaus knows very well that the pope opposed the Gulf war, which President Bush and Margaret Thatcher spearheaded in the name of a ``new world order,'' he cannot refrain from suggesting that ``something like a new world order is afoot'' and from arguing that the ``free economy,'' as he and Novak define it, ``is apparently the order of the future in this post-socialist world.'' Therefore, even though the pope criticizes both ``national security'' states and ``the affluent society or consumer society,'' Neuhaus advises that it is ``unseemly for Americans to be excessively defensive.'' According to Neuhaus, even though the pope writes ``that it is unacceptable to say that the defeat of `real socialism' leaves capitalism as the only model of economic organization ... in the real world to which the pope directs our attention, it would seem that despite his disclaimer, capitalism is `the only model of economic organization.'|'' And of course that means Adam Smith's ``Invisible Hand'' of the marketplace reincarnated as Michael Novak's ``democratic capitalism.'' Neuhaus ends his book by saying that ``God loveth adverbs.'' This is a reference to the title of the book: ``Doing Well and Doing Good.'' As he says earlier in the book, ``The only thing some people know how to do really well is to make money. It is not an unworthy thing to offer up.'' But to whom? While it is absolutely true that profit is not in itself illegitimate, but rather a positive good insofar as it is earned morally and reinvested productively, in equating making money well with doing good Neuhaus contradicts Christ's teaching that one cannot worship both God and mammon. As Pope John Paul II writes in {Sollicitudo Rei Socialis}, solidarity is ``a {firm and persevering determination} to commit oneself to the {common good}; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are {all} really responsible {for all}. This determination is based on the {solid} conviction that what is hindering full development is that desire for profit and that thirst for power already mentioned. These attitudes and `structures of sin' are only conquered--presupposing the help of divine grace--by a {diametrically opposed attitude}: a commitment to the good of one's neighbor with the readiness, in the gospel sense, to `lose oneself' for the sake of the other instead of exploiting him, and to `serve him' instead of oppressing him for one's own advantage.'' Neuhaus's attitude is just the opposite--to portray the pope as endorsing the very ``structures of sin'' he in fact denounces, in order to render the nations of the Third World and the former Soviet sector, especially the Catholic nations of Ibero-America and eastern Europe, defenseless before the genocidal policies of the International Monetary Fund. He is doing evil and calling it good. ---- John Covici covici@ccs.covici.com From oneb!cs.ubc.ca!destroyer!gatech!concert!uvaarpa!murdoch!hopper!jad Thu Jan 28 09:53:09 PST 1993 I made the following transcript from a tape recording of a broadcast by Pacifica Radio Network station WBAI-FM (99.5) 505 Eighth Ave., 19th Fl. New York, NY 10018 (212) 279-0707 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * (continuation) PAUL DeRIENZO: How did you wind up doing these foreign operations? MICHAEL LEVINE: Well, I began working undercover in Southeast Asia in 1970 and `71. Just being really good at what I do, I was asked to do different assignments. PAUL DeRIENZO: I spoke to Alfred McCoy, and he mentioned that he talked to you afterwards and told you about his book, and that that book influenced the way you thought about the work you were doing in Southeast Asia. [JD: "THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA", by Alfred McCoy, has been the bible on U.S. drug trafficking. However, I understand that its sequel, "THE POLITICS OF HEROIN: C.I.A. COMPLICITY IN THE GLOBAL DRUG TRADE" is even better.] MICHAEL LEVINE: Well, what happened was, the first time that I ran into CIA and other U.S. influences in this "War on Drugs" was on an undercover case that I did into Bangkok, Thailand in 1971, going into 1972. There's no way I can tell you the whole story, but let it end with this: I successfully conned the hell out of Chinese drug dealers who were also the source of an investigation of drug dealers on a case titled, "the Herman Jackson Organization." In essence, Herman Jackson and a bunch of G.I.s from Vietnam were buying heroin in Thailand and putting the heroin into dead bodies of G.I.s killed in Vietnam, and the bodies were being funneled through Thailand and then home to the United States. And they were using the bodies of our 19- and 20-year-old young men, killed in that "holy war", as conduits for heroin. Now, at that time, young Michael Levine, young undercover agent -- I'm dealing with the same people who are supplying that [Herman Jackson] group. The Chinese drug dealers, who really bought my act, wanted to invite me to a laboratory in Chang Mai where they were producing hundreds of kilos. Now, this was at a time in our history when the biggest heroin seizure was "the French Connection", sixty-five or sixty-seven kilos of heroin. Now here are people inviting me to a factory that produces hundreds of kilos of heroin A WEEK! Mysteriously -- strangely, I was instructed that: "You're not going!" The case was ended right at the point I had gone to; that is, at the Chinese dealers in Bangkok itself. Arrests were made. A lot of publicity. The United States Government told the American Public: "Another great Drug War victory." I was told: "There are a lot of things you don't understand. You see, there are priorities." And, of course, I accepted that because I was, again, the "GOOD soldier". Now, Al McCoy's book came out around the same time. Now -- when I look back, when I talk about Al McCoy's book and my experience, what I point out is that even if I had Al McCoy's book in my hands in 1971 and `72 -- a book that pointed out CLEARLY why I was not allowed to go to Chang Mai .... WHAT an incredible thing that is to accept! That my OWN government could protect people who were using our DEAD G.I.s -- dead young Americans as heroin conduits! HOW could I accept that?! It was just too MUCH! What can I give you as a comparison? It's a man who's been married to a wife who doted on him for twenty years (well, at that point in my career it was seven or eight years) whose fidelity he never questioned; and then suddenly coming in and finding her in bed with, not just the postman, but the postman, the butcher, the dogcatcher, ..... It's just too much for you to accept as real. Had I had Al McCoy's book in my hands, I would've considered it an Un-AMERICAN thing to read. That's why I can UNDERSTAND what happens to young men who are in law enforcement -- why they refuse to look at the reality of this situation. It's just TOO MUCH for Americans to accept. It's too much for young narcotics agents to accept. You don't TAKE a job like this for civil service security. You take it because you BELIEVE in it! And most of these guys DO. And then, when these events happen, and they're told: "This is a priority that you don't understand. You just go ahead about your business" .... and when they see, around them, things like Oliver North, who ..... It's really funny; he's got a book out. I don't even want to say the title -- but I looked in the index and he's got three pages devoted to drug trafficking; yet, in his OWN notebooks (he's got twenty-six-hundred-page notebooks) he's got FIVE HUNDRED pages of NOTATIONS about drug trafficking. There's something he's not TELLING us. You know? So, when young agents see things like this .... when young agents see that people like Oliver North and Lewis Tams were banned from Costa Rica for DRUG running, it's HARD for them to accept. They consider this like: "Well this is a plot. We don't want to believe this." Because, to accept it and to believe it is to accept that your career is a LIE! Your chosen goal in life is a total lie. (to be continued) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * As you can see, this story is one of the most appalling, infuriating, explosive and vital expose`s that could ever be brought before the eyes of the American People. Don't let these episodes go by the boards without saving them, because we have a patriotic duty to disseminate, circulate, deliver, pass on this information in the cause of millions of people on the American Continent, including those in the United States, who are or who will become victims of the CIA-sponsored War FOR Drugs which is resulting in wholesale, continent-wide murder, torture, imprisonment, street crime, life-destroying addiction, and even the takeover of governments by fascist drug barons, further intensifying the poverty, misery and suffering that is rampant among entire national populations. Please post the episodes of this series to computer bulletin boards, and post hardcopies in public places, both on and off campus. The dial-in numbers of many BBSs can be found in the Usenet newsgroup "alt.bbs.lists". John DiNardo