Tag Archives: Hidden History

How to Improve Society

Jeffrey Tucker covers a lot in this video. History, books, anti-capitalism. Interesting commentary on Upton Singclair’s The Jungle.

He talks about America’s gilded age 1870-1900ish, and a free-market aristocracy in Rhode Island that, from what it sounds like, consciously compared itself to the government enforced European aristocracy.

His principles for great entrepreneurs:
1- don’t let school take you out of the real world
2- don’t worry about money
3- fanatical focus on task at hand
4- surround themselves with good, smart people
5- don’t plan & act now
6- compete, but don’t seek to destroy
7- look to give others what they want
8- stay away from politics & the state! Find a realm of freedom and create within it!

Three Great Criticisms of Marx

From the Mises Institute.

The Conflict of Ideologies: Marxism vs. the Majority
– Marxism denies consciousness by attributing all thought to class affiliation.
– Marx considered all dissent treason, and developed anti-democratic ideas where majorities failed to endorse his views.

***

The Critics of Marxism
– Materialism denies consciousness and contradicts itself by attempting to attribute all human decisions and civilization to material conditions.
– Marx hated Prussia’s Hohenzollern’s socialism, because it wasn’t *his* socialism.
– Marxism became decidedly anti-Christian.
– Dialectic materialism falls apart in trying to explain simplest historical events.
– Marxians never ascribe positive trends to class machinations, only negative ones.
– Marxism sharply contrasts Freud. The former denies consciousness, the latter relies on it. Even Marx critics ignore this.
– Christian Marxists ignore Marx’s decidedly anti-Christian views. Marxism, for example, teaches religious ideas are the “super structure” of material production.

***

The Ideological Impregnation of Thought
– Thoughts are always & inevitably attributed to one’s class, and they serve the interest of that class.
(Marx never reconciles this w/ his undeniably bourgeois background. Nor does he define “class.” Nor does he address the possibility that a correct theory might be more useful to a person than a false one.)
– Marx’s motive was the adoption of socialism. Instead of addressing the devastating criticism of economists, he dismissed their whole work as the machinations of a rival “class,” and ridiculed them. They are wrong, because they are bourgeois, and there is no reason for careful analysis.
– They made exception to their own thoughts and theories, which they assumed were true and pure.

The 13 Most Evil U.S. Government Experiments on Humans

Let me start by admitting that I haven’t been able to independently confirm all of these. My intent is to remind everyone that government is not your friend. This is from ranker.com.

1) Mind Control, Child Abuse – Project MKULTRA, Subproject 68 — The CIA-ran Project MKULTRA paid Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron for Subproject 68, which would be experiments involving mind-altering substances. The entire goal of the project was to probe examination into methods of influencing and controlling the mind and being able to extract information from resisting minds.

So in order to accomplish this, the doctor took patients admitted to his Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal and conducted “therapy” on them. The patients were mostly taken in for issues like bi-polar depression and anxiety disorders. The treatment they received was life-altering and scarring.

To ensure that the project remained funded, Cameron, in one scheme, took his experiments upon admitted children and in one situation had the child engage in sex with high-ranking government officials and film it.

2) Mustard Gas Tested on Soldiers via Involuntary Gas Chambers — As bio-weapon research intensified in the 1940’s, officials also began testing its repercussions and defenses on the Army itself.

In order to test the effectiveness of various bio-weapons, officials were known to have sprayed mustard gas and other skin-burning, lung-ruining chemicals, like Lewisite, on soldiers without their consent or knowledge of the experiment happening to them.

3) U.S. Grants Immunity to Involuntary-Surgery Monster — As head of Japan’s infamous Unit 731 (a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II), Dr. Shiro Ishii (head of medicine) carried out violent human experimentation of tens of thousands during the Second Sino-Japenses War and World War II.

Ishii was responsible for testing vivisection techniques without any anesthesia on human prisoners. For the uninitiated, vivisection is the act of conducting experimental surgery on living creatures (with central nervousness) and examining their insides for scientific purposes.

So basically, he was giving unnecessary surgery to prisoners by opening them all the way up, keeping them alive and not using any anesthetic.

Following imminent defeat in 1945, Japan blew up the Unity 731 complex and Ishii ordered all the remaining “logs” to be executed. Not soon after, Ishii was arrested. And then, the respected General Douglas McArthur allegedly struck a deal with Ishii. If the U.S. granted Ishii immunity from his crimes, he must exchange all germ warfare data based on human experimentation.

4) Deadly Chemical Sprays on American Cities — Showing once again that the U.S. always tends to test out worse-case scenarios by getting to them first and with the advent of biochemical warfare in the mid 20th century, the Army, CIA and government conducted a series of warfare simulations upon American cities to see how the effects would play out in the event of an actual chemical attack.

They conducted the following air strikes/naval attacks:

– The CIA released a whooping cough virus on Tampa Bay, using boats, and so caused a whooping cough epidemic. 12 people died.

– The Navy sprayed San Francisco with bacterial pathogens and in consequence many citizens developed pneumonia.

– Upon Savannah, GA and Avon Park, FL, the army released millions of mosquitoes in the hopes they would spread yellow fever and dengue fever. The swarm left Americans struggling with fevers, typhoid, respiratory problems, and the worst, stillborn children.

5) US Infects Guatemalans With STDs — In the 1940’s, with penicillin as an established cure for syphilis, the US decided to test out its effectiveness on Guatemalan citizens.

To do this, they used infected prostitutes and let them loose on unknowing prison inmates, insane asylum patients and soldiers. When spreading the disease through prostitution didn’t work as well as they’d hoped, they instead went for the inoculation route.

6) Secret Human Experiments to Test the Effects of The Atomic Bomb — While testing out and trying to harness the power of the atomic bomb, U.S. scientists also secretly tested the bomb’s effects on humans.

During the Manhattan Project, which gave way to the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. scientists resorted to secret human testing via plutonium injection on 18 unsuspecting, non-consenting patients.

This included injecting soldiers with micrograms of plutonium for Project Oak Ridge along with later injecting three patients at a Chicago hospital. Imagine you’re an admitted patient, helpless in a hospital bed, assuming that nothing is wrong when the government suddenly appears and puts weapons-grade plutonium in your blood.

Out of the 18 patients, who were known only by their code-names and numbers at the time, only 5 lived longer than 20 years after injection.

Along with plutonium, researchers also had fun with uranium. At a Massachusetts hospital, between 1946 and 1947, Dr. William Sweet injected 11 patients with uranium. He was funded by the Manhattan Project.

7) Injected Prisoners with Agent Orange — Kligman, though, injected dioxidin (a main component of Agent Orange) into the prisoners to study its effects.

What did happen was that the prisoners developed an eruption of chloracne (all that stuff from high school combined with blackheads and cysts and pustules that looked like the picture shown to the left) that develop on the cheeks, behind the ears, armpits, and the groin — yes, the groin.

Kligman was rumored to have injected 468 times the amount he was authorized to. Documentation of that effect has, wisely, not been distributed.

The Army oversaw while Kligman continued to test out skin-burning chemicals to (in their words) “learn how the skin protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process” and test out many products whose effects were unknown at the time, but with the intent of figuring that out.

During these proceedings, Kligman was reported to have said, “All I saw before me were acres of skin … It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.”

8) Operation Paperclip — While the Nuremberg trials were being conducted and the ethics and rights of humanity were under investigation, the U.S. was secretly taking in Nazi scientists and giving them American identities.

Under Operation Paperclip, named so because of the paperclips used to attach the scientists’ new profiles to their US personnel pages, Nazis who had worked for in the infamous human experiments (which included surgically grafting twins to each other and making then conjoined, removing nerves from people’s bodies without anesthetic, and testing explosion-effects on them) in Germany brought over their talents to work on a number of top secret projects for the US.

9) Infecting Puerto Rico With Cancer — In 1931, Dr. Cornelius (that’s right, Cornelius) Rhoads was sponsored by the Rockefeller Institute to conduct experiments in Puerto Rico. He infected Puerto Rican citizens with cancer cells, presumably to study the effects. Thirteen of them died.

What’s most striking is that the accusations stem from a note he allegedly wrote:

“The Porto Ricans (sic) are the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever to inhabit this sphere… I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off eight and transplanting cancer into several more… All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.”

A man that seems to be hell-bent on killing Puerto Rico through a cancer infestation would not seem a suitable candidate to be elected by the US to be in charge of chemical warfare projects and receive a seat on the United States Atomic Energy Commission, right?

But that’s exactly what happened. He also became vice-president of the American Cancer Society.

10) Pentagon Treats Black Cancer Patients with Extreme Radiation — In the 60’s, the Department of Defense performed a series of irradiation experiments on non-consenting, poor, African-American cancer patients. They were told they would be receiving treatment, but they weren’t told it would be the “Pentagon” type of treatment: meaning to study the effects of high level radiation on the human body.

11) Operation Midnight Climax –Operation Midnight Climax involved safe houses in New York and San Fransisco, built for the sole purpose to study LSD effects on non-consenting individuals.

But in order to lure the individuals there, the CIA made these safe houses out to be, wait for it, Brothels.

Prostitutes on the CIA payroll (yes, there was such a thing) lured “clients” back the houses.

Instead of having sex with them, though, they dosed them with a number of substances, most famously LSD. This also involved extensive use of marijuana.

The experiments were monitored behind a two-way mirror, kind of like a sick, twisted peep show.

Furthermore, it’s alleged that the officials who ran the experiments described them as…” it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and bidding of the All-highest?”

The most horrifying part was the idea of dosing non-consenting adults with drugs they couldn’t possibly know the effects of.

12) Fallout Radiation on Unsuspecting Pacific Territories — After unleashing hell upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States embarked on numerous thermonuclear bomb tests in the Pacific in response to increased Soviet bomb activity. They were intended to be a secret affair. However, this secrecy would fail.

Detonated in 1954 over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, Castle Bravo was the most powerful nuclear device the US ever set off. What they didn’t expect was for the fallout from the blast to inadvertently be blown upwind onto nearby residents of other islands. The suffering included birth defects and radiation sickness. The effects were greater felt in later years when many children whose parents were exposed to the fallout developed thyroid cancer and neoplasms.

13) Tuskegee — The recent uncovering of the US exposing Guatemalans to syphilis brings back to mind this infamous study. In between 1932 and 1972, researchers recruited 400 black share-croppers in Tuskegee, Alabama to study the natural progression of syphilis.

But the scientists never told the men they had syphilis. Instead, they went around believing that they were being treated for “bad blood” disease as researchers used them to find out the extent of syphilis symptoms and effects.

In 1947, penicillin became the standard cure for syphilis. But along with withholding information about the disease, scientists also “forgot” to tell their subjects that what they were being treated for had a cure. And so the study continued for nearly 30 years more.

(Read more from ranker.com)

US infected Guatemalans with syphilis in 1940s, Wellesley professor finds

open quoteA Wellesley College professor has discovered that the US government in the 1940s infected Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases in an experiment conducted without the knowledge of the 1,500 men and women — some of them patients in a mental hospital.

Professor Susan M. Reverby, who has written extensively about the infamous Tuskegee Study in the United States, uncovered documents detailing the Guatemalan experiments while researching the Tuskegee episode and shared her discovery with US government officials.

During a news briefing early this afternoon, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said President Barack Obama plans to call the Guatemalan leader personally today and apologize.close quote (Read more from boston.com)

Tom Woods on the Delusion of Good Government

@ 11:00 – methods of military procurement.

@ 16:30 – list of Blue Ribbon commissions and other attempts at reforming military procurement.

@ 19:20 – The welfare industry supports over 700,000 social workers, 420 schools of social work, thousands of special interest groups, and 43,000,000 beneficiaries.

@ 20:45 – he turns his analysis to the Drug War.

@ 26:00 – Unical convinces California to pass regulations requiring use of its product.

@ 28:20 – 35:00 How the government killed traveling salesmen to protect wholesaler interests. Laws against retailers selling below the manufacturer’s recommended retail price & Life Magazine’s anti-discount house propaganda.

@ 28:20 – he dismisses myths about the Industrial Revolution.

@ 46:10 – From 1950-68 poverty in the U.S. drop 1% a year with very modest anti-poverty laws. Since the 1968 introduction of massive anti-poverty legislation, it stagnated. And remained stagnated despite a quadrupling of the welfare budget.

Traveling Down the Road to Serfdom: History of Socialism from Marx to Obama

@ 6:15 — Some of Marx’s writing was so horrific that even commie mass murderers like Lenin hid some of his work. It was recently declassified.

In 1848 in a Bonn newspaper editorial, Marx wrote that we have have a lot of racial trash in Europe — Highland Scots, Basques, Poles, Serbs, and other dirty Slavs who would not see the obvious benefits of progressive teaching. They should be destroyed. Violence is the midwife of history.

In an 1856 letter to Engles, he encouraged Engles to ignore his concern that they will be considered mass murderers.

@ 9:15 – the story of the KGB admitting to 42 million dead people.

Better Off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse

Wonderful essay about Somalia with and without its government by Peter Leeson.

You can download it here: Better_Off_Stateless.pdf

Excerpt:
open quoteWhen most people think of Somalia they think of chaos and deterioration. Some may even think of violence and mayhem. No one, however, thinks of progress when they hear about Somalia, let alone of the possibility that anarchy has been good for its development. Maybe they should.

Indicators of Somali welfare remain low in absolute terms, but compared to their status under government show a marked advance. Under statelessness life expectancy in Somalia has grown, access to health facilities has increased, infant mortality has dropped, civil liberties have expanded, and extreme poverty (less than $1 PPP/day) has plummeted. In many parts of the country even security has improved. In these areas citizens are safer than they’ve been in three decades (UNDP 2001). Somalia is far from prosperous, but it has made considerable strides since its government collapsed 15 years ago.

Despite this progress, there has been much hand-wringing over what to do about the situation of anarchy that has characterized the country since 1991. To be sure, this concern is not without cause. In the year following the state’s collapse, civil war, exacerbated by severe drought, devastated the Sub-Saharan territory killing 300,000 Somalis (Prendergast 1997). For a time it seemed that Somali statelessness would mean endless bloody conflict, starvation, and an eventual descent into total annihilation of the Somali people.

Though largely unrecognized by economists, the widespread violence that ravaged Somalia in its first year without government vanished considerably by 1994. By the mid-1990s peace prevailed over most of the country (Menkhaus 1998, 2004). Since 1997 most indicators of Somali development show slow but steady progress and today are above their pre-stateless levels. Nevertheless, conventional wisdom sees Somalia as a land of chaos, deterioration and war, and is certain that statelessness has been detrimental to Somali development.

The reason for this belief is two-fold. On the one hand, popular opinion sees government as universally superior to anarchy. Government is considered necessary to prevent violent conflicts like those that erupted when Somalia’s state first crumbled, which disrupt economic activity. Government is also considered critical to supplying public goods such as roads, schools, and law and order, which are important to the process of development. From this perspective it is easy to conclude that Somalia, which has no central government, must have been better off when it did.close quote

Down with Legal Tender

This Mises Daily article is excerpted from chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Denationalisation of Money: the Argument Refined, by F.A. Hayek.

It tells some of the history of the world in terms of inflation:

open quoteHistorians have again and again attempted to justify inflation by claiming that it made possible the great periods of rapid economic progress. They have even produced a series of inflationist theories of history,[2] which have, however, been clearly refuted by the evidence: prices in England and the United States were at the end of the period of their most rapid development almost exactly at the same level as 200 years earlier. But their recurring rediscoverers are usually ignorant of the earlier discussions.close quote

open quoteFrom Marco Polo we learn that, in the 13th century, Chinese law made the rejection of imperial paper money punishable by death, and twenty years in chains or, in some cases death, was the penalty provided for the refusal to accept French assignats. Early English law punished repudiation as lese-majesty. At the time of the American revolution, non-acceptance of Continental notes was treated as an enemy act and sometimes worked a forfeiture of the debt.[3]close quote

open quoteOnly a few of the great powers preserved for a time tolerable monetary stability, and they brought it also to their colonial empires. But Eastern Europe and South America never knew a prolonged period of monetary stability.close quote

I was struck by the clarification to Gresham’s Law given at the end. Something I’d noticed when I encountered the law in my studies:

open quoteIt is a misunderstanding of what is called Gresham’s law to believe that the tendency for bad money to drive out good money makes a government monopoly necessary. . . . What Jevons, as so many others, seems to have overlooked, or regarded as irrelevant, is that Gresham’s law will apply only to different kinds of money between which a fixed rate of exchange is enforced by law. . . . Indeed, whenever inflation got really rapid, all sorts of objects of a more stable value, from potatoes to cigarettes and bottles of brandy to eggs and foreign currencies like dollar bills, have come to be increasingly used as money, so that at the end of the great German inflation it was contended that Gresham’s law was false and the opposite true.[20] It is not false, but it applies only if a fixed rate of exchange between the different forms of money is enforced.close quote

To restate Gresham’s Law another way, bad money drives out good, IF IT FORCIBLY KEPT AT THE SAME PRICE.

Stateless in Somalia

open quoteWere there such a category, Somalia would hold a place in Guinness World Records as the country with the longest absence of a functioning central government. When the Somalis dismantled their government in 1991 and returned to their precolonial political status, the expectation was that chaos would result — and that, of course, would be the politically correct thing to expect.

Imagine if it were otherwise. Imagine any part of the globe not being dominated by a central government and the people there surviving, even prospering. If such were to happen and the idea spread to other parts of Africa or other parts of the world, the mystique of the necessity of the state might be irreparably damaged, and many politicians and bureaucrats might find themselves walking about looking for work.

If the expectation was that Somalia would plunge into an abyss of chaos, what is the reality? A number of recent studies address this question, including one by economist Peter Leeson drawing on statistical data from the United Nations Development Project, World Bank, CIA, and World Health Organization. Comparing the last five years under the central government (1985–1990) with the most recent five years of anarchy (2000–2005), Leeson finds these welfare changes:

* Life expectancy increased from 46 to 48.5 years. This is a poor expectancy as compared with developed countries. But in any measurement of welfare, what is important to observe is not where a population stands at a given time, but what is the trend. Is the trend positive, or is it the reverse?
* Number of one-year-olds fully immunized against measles rose from 30 to 40 percent.
* Number of physicians per 100,000 population rose from 3.4 to 4.
* Number of infants with low birth weight fell from 16 per thousand to 0.3 — almost none.
* Infant mortality per 1,000 births fell from 152 to 114.9.
* Maternal mortality per 100,000 births fell from 1,600 to 1,100.
* Percent of population with access to sanitation rose from 18 to 26.
* Percent of population with access to at least one health facility rose from 28 to 54.8.
* Percent of population in extreme poverty (i.e., less than $1 per day) fell from 60 to 43.2.
* Radios per thousand population rose from 4 to 98.5.
* Telephones per thousand population rose from 1.9 to 14.9.
* TVs per 1,000 population rose from 1.2 to 3.7.
* Fatalities due to measles fell from 8,000 to 5,600.

Another even more comprehensive study published last year by Benjamin Powell of the Independent Institute, concludes: “We find that Somalia’s living standards have improved generally … not just in absolute terms, but also relative to other African countries since the collapse of the Somali central government.”

Somalia’s pastoral economy is now stronger than that of either neighboring Kenya or Ethiopia. It is the largest exporter of livestock of any East African country. Telecommunications have burgeoned in Somalia; a call from a mobile phone is cheaper in Somalia than anywhere else in Africa. A small number of international investors are finding that the level of security of property and contract in Somalia warrants doing business there. Among these companies are Dole, BBC, the courier DHL, British Airways, General Motors, and Coca Cola, which recently opened a large bottling plant in Mogadishu. A 5-star Ambassador Hotel is operating in Hargeisa, and three new universities are fully functional: Amoud University (1997) in Borama, and Mogadishu University (1997), and University of Benadir (2002) in Mogadishu.

The Call to “Establish Democracy”

All of this is terribly politically incorrect for the reason I suggested. Consequently, the United Nations has by now spent well over two billion dollars attempting to re-establish a central government in Somalia.close quote (Read more from mises.org)

***

open quoteSomalia is in the news again. Rival gangs are shooting each other, and why? The reason is always the same: the prospect that the weak-to-invisible transitional government in Mogadishu will become a real government with actual power.

The media invariably describe this prospect as a “hope.” But it’s a strange hope that is accompanied by violence and dread throughout the country. Somalia has done very well for itself in the 15 years since its government was eliminated. The future of peace and prosperity there depends in part on keeping one from forming.

As even the CIA factbook admits:

“Despite the seeming anarchy, Somalia’s service sector has managed to survive and grow. Telecommunication firms provide wireless services in most major cities and offer the lowest international call rates on the continent. In the absence of a formal banking sector, money exchange services have sprouted throughout the country, handling between $500 million and $1 billion in remittances annually. Mogadishu’s main market offers a variety of goods from food to the newest electronic gadgets. Hotels continue to operate, and militias provide security.”

To understand more about the country without a government, turn to The Law of the Somalis, written by Michael van Notten (1933-2002) and edited by Spencer Heath MacCallum, sheds light on the little known Somali law, culture and economic situation. Somalia is often cited as an example of a stateless society where chaos is the “rule” and warlords are aplenty.

The BBC’s country profile of Somalia sums up this view as widely publicized by the mainstream media: “Somalia has been without an effective central government since President Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991. Fighting between rival warlords and an inability to deal with famine and disease led to the deaths of up to one million people.”

The first sentence is indeed true: when the president was driven out by opposing clans in 1991, the government disintegrated. The second sentence, however, depicts Somalia as a lawless country in disorder. As for disorder, Van Notten quotes authorities to the effect that Somalia’s telecommunications are the best in Africa, its herding economy is stronger than that of either of its neighbors, Kenya or Ethiopia, and that since the demise of the central government, the Somali shilling has become far more stable in world currency markets, while exports have quintupled.

As for Somalia being lawless, Van Notten, a Dutch lawyer who married into the Samaron Clan and lived the last dozen years of his life with them, specifically challenges that portrayal. He explains that Somalia is a country based on customary law. The traditional Somali system of law and politics, he contends, is capable of maintaining a peaceful society and guiding the Somalis to prosperity. Moreover, efforts to re-establish a central government or impose democracy on the people are incompatible with the customary law.

Van Notten distinguishes between the four meanings of the word “law” — statutory, contractual, customary, and natural law. The common misunderstanding is that legitimate rules only come from formally established entities and that therefore a country without a legislature is lawless. Refuting that misunderstanding, van Notten explains that a perfectly orderly and peaceful country can exist when people respect property rights and honor their contracts. While natural laws denote peace, liberty, and friendly relations, statutory laws represent commands. Statutory laws reflect the preferences of legislators, who impose “morality” on those they govern and regulate their ability to voluntarily enter into contracts. This, according to van Notten, is wrong from the standpoint of both morality and law.close quote (Read more from mises.org)

33 Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out To Be True

For details on each of these, please visit newworldorderreport.com

1.The Dreyfus Affair: In the late 1800s in France, Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully convicted of treason based on false government documents, and sentenced to life in prison.

2.The Mafia: This secret crime society was virtually unknown until the 1960s, when member Joe Valachi first revealed the society’s secrets to law enforcement officials.

3.MK-ULTRA: In the 1950s to the 1970s, the CIA ran a mind-control project aimed at finding a “truth serum” to use on communist spies. Test subjects were given LSD and other drugs, often without consent, and some were tortured.

4.Operation Mockingbird: Also in the 1950s to ’70s, the CIA paid a number of well-known domestic and foreign journalists (from big-name media outlets like Time, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS and others) to publish CIA propaganda. The CIA also reportedly funded at least one movie, the animated “Animal Farm,” by George Orwell. The Church Committee finally exposed the activities in 1975.

5.Manhattan Project:The Manhattan Project was the codename for a project conducted during World War II to develop the first atomic bomb. The project was led by the United States, and included participation from the United Kingdom and Canada.

6.Asbestos: Between 1930 and 1960, manufacturers did all they could to prevent the link between asbestos and respiratory diseases, including cancer, becoming known, so they could avoid prosecution. American workers had in fact sued the Johns Manville company as far back as 1932, but it was not until 1962 that epidemiologists finally established beyond any doubt what company bosses had known for a long time – asbestos causes cancer.

7.Watergate: Republican officials spied on the Democratic National Headquarters from the Watergate Hotel in 1972.

8.The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The United States Public Health Service carried out this clinical study on 400 poor, African-American men with syphilis from 1932 to 1972. During the study the men were given false and sometimes dangerous treatments, and adequate treatment was intentionally withheld so the agency could learn more about the disease.

9.Operation Northwoods: In the early 1960s, American military leaders drafted plans to create public support for a war against Cuba, to oust Fidel Castro from power. The plans included committing acts of terrorism in U.S. cities, killing innocent people and U.S. soldiers, blowing up a U.S. ship, assassinating Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees, and hijacking planes. The plans were all approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but were reportedly rejected by the civilian leadership, then kept secret for nearly 40 years.

Author James Bamford, “A Pretext For War”, discusses the declassified “Operation Northwoods” documents revealing that in 1962 the CIA was planning to stage phony terrorist attacks on the US and blame it on Cuba to start a war.

10.1990 Testimony of Nayirah:A 15-year-old girl named “Nayirah” testified before the U.S. Congress that she had seen Iraqi soldiers pulling Kuwaiti babies from incubators, causing them to die. The testimony helped gain major public support for the 1991 Gulf War, but — despite protests that the dispute of this story was itself a conspiracy theory — it was later discovered that the testimony was false.

11.Counter Intelligence Programs Against Activists in the 60s:COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. The FBI used covert operations from its inception, however formal COINTELPRO operations took place between 1956 and 1971. The FBI’s stated motivation at the time was “protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order.”

12.The Iran-Contra Affair: In 1985 and ’86, the White House authorized government officials to secretly trade weapons with the Israeli government that were then secretly traded with Iran in exchange for the release of U.S. hostages held in Iran. The funds from the trades were then used to help finance the illegal war in Nicaragua. The plot was uncovered by Congress in 1987.

13.The BCCI Scandal: The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a major international bank founded in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani financier. The Bank was registered in Luxembourg. Within a decade BCCI touched its peak, it operated in 78 countries, had over 400 branches, and had assets in excess of US$ 20 billion making it the 7th largest private bank in the world by assets. In the late 1980’s BCCI became the target of a two year undercover operation conducted by the US Customs Service. This operation concluded with a fake wedding that was attended by BCCI officers and drug dealers from around the world who had established a personal friendship and working relationship with undercover Special Agent Robert Mazur. After a six month trial in Tampa, key bank officers were convicted and received lengthy prison sentences. Bank officers began cooperating with law enforcement authorities and that cooperation caused BCCI’s many crimes to be revealed.

14.CIA Drug Running in LA: Pulitzer Prize Award winning journalist Gary Webb exposed this alongside LAPD Narcotics Officer turned whislteblower and author Michael Ruppert, CIA Contract Pilot Terry Reed, and many others. In August 1996 the San Jose Mercury News published Webb’s “Dark Alliance”, a 20,000 word, three-part investigative series which alleged that Nicaraguan drug traffickers had sold and distributed crack cocaine in Los Angeles during the 1980s, and that drug profits were used to fund the CIA-supported Nicaraguan Contras. Webb never asserted that the CIA directly aided drug dealers to raise money for the Contras, but he did document that the CIA was aware of the cocaine transactions and the large shipments of cocaine into the U.S. by the Contra personnel.

15.Gulf of Tonkin Never Happened:The Gulf of Tonkin Incident is the name given to two separate incidents involving the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin.

16.The Business Plot:In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States.

17.July 20, 1944 Conspiracy to Assassinate Hitler:Among another 20 some odd attempts, this one was one of the largest conspiracies involving hundreds of loyalists in the highest echelons of Hitler’s inner circle.

18.Operation Ajax: For years, Britain had a spiffy trade deal with Iran regarding their prodigious oil fields. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was basically a giant money machine for the Anglo half, while the Iranian half got shafted. That all changed in 1951 when Iran nationalized the AIOC and the Iranian parliament elected Mohammed Mossadegh as Prime Minister. Mossadegh was relatively secular, something that pissed of Iranian clerics, but he was also very nationalistic.He was a democratically elected, pro American figure but the West saw his nationalizing of the oil fields a communist move(something Mossadegh thought was the right of the people to profit and pay for services in the country with).Those oil fields were under the control of British Petroleum, but unfortunately Mossadegh overruled this long standing business control.The United States sent Kermit Roosevelt, FDR’s nephew and CIA coordinator in to figure out the mess.

The best he could come up with was to confront Mossadegh and have him overthrown and this was accomplished by bringing in what the agency refers to as “jackals.” The United States backed the return of the Shah of Iran, one of the most brutal dictators the country had ever seen and intentionally overthrew years before with the democratic leader, Mossadegh. Until 1979, that is, when a pissed off Iranian populace finally revolted and replaced the monarchy with an anti-West Islamic Republic.

19.Operation Snow White:Some time during the 1970s, the Church of Scientology decided that they’d had enough.Apparently, the Church of Scientology managed to perform the largest infiltration of the United States government in history. Ever.5,000 of Scientology’s crack commandos wiretapped and burglarized various agencies. They stole hundreds of documents, mainly from the IRS. No critic was spared, and in the end, 136 organizations, agencies and foreign embassies were infiltrated.

20.Operation Gladio:Gladio is a code name denoting the clandestine NATO “stay-behind” operation in Italy after World War II, intended to continue anti-communist resistance in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organizations, “Operation Gladio” is used as an informal name for all stay-behind organizations, sometimes called “Super NATO”.

The role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in sponsoring Gladio and the extent of its activities during the Cold War era, and its relationship to right-wing terrorist attacks perpetrated in Italy during the Years of Lead and other similar clandestine operations is the subject of ongoing debate and investigation.

21.The CIA Assassinates A Lot Of People (Church Committee): The Church Committee is the common term referring to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church in 1975. A precursor to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee investigated intelligence gathering for illegality by the CIA and FBI after certain activities had been revealed by the Watergate affair.The Committee uncovered, among many other things, that the CIA had violated its charter to perform only gathering of intelligence.

For example, the assassinations of Allende in Chile and Mossadegh in Iran. Assassinations against Central and South American leaders and revolutionaries, as well as Africa, Middle East and East Asia.The list was tremendous.They even declassified a “Heart Attack Gun” the Agency had made for the use of killing someone without it being detected.Cancer, car accidents, skiing accidents, suicide, boating accidents, heart attacks, and just plain being shot were common assassination methods.The hearings, although recorded in full in congressional record, the mainstream media and official policies, is still largely not taught in American schools on recent history.

22.The New World Order:This popular conspiracy theory claims that a small group of international elites controls and manipulates governments, industry and media organisations worldwide. The primary tool they use to dominate nations is the system of central banking. They are said to have funded and in some cases caused most of the major wars of the last 200 years, primarily through carrying out false flag attacks to manipulate populations into supporting them, and have a grip on the world economy, deliberately causing inflation and depressions at will. The people behind the New World Order are thought to be international bankers, in particular the owners of the private banks in the Federal Reserve System, Bank of England and other central banks, and members of the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group. Now, although this conspiracy theory was ridiculed for years, it turns out that the Bilderberg does meet and requests no media coverage.They receive no media coverage.

In 2002, Rockefeller authored his autobiography Memoirs wherein, on page 405, he wrote:

“For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents … to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

23.Kennedy Assassination – the 2nd Investigation by Congress Few People Know About, United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA): The HSCA was established in 1976 to investigate the John F. Kennedy assassination and the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination. The Committee investigated until 1978, and in 1979 issued its final report, concluding that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated by a conspiracy involving the mob, and potentially the CIA.The House Select Committee on Assassinations undertook reinvestigations of the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1979, a single Report and twelve volumes of appendices on each assassination were published by the Congress. In the JFK case, the HSCA found that there was a “probable conspiracy,” though it was unable to determine the nature of that conspiracy or its other participants (besides Oswald).

24. 1919 World Series Conspiracy:The 1919 World Series (often referred to as the Black Sox Scandal) resulted in the most famous scandal in baseball history. Eight players from the Chicago White Sox (nicknamed the Black Sox) were accused of throwing the series against the Cincinnati Reds.

25.Karen Silkwood:Karen was an American labor union activist and chemical technician at the Kerr-McGee plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, United States. Silkwood’s job was making plutonium pellets for nuclear reactor fuel rods.After being hired at Kerr-McGee, Silkwood joined the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union local and took part in a strike at the plant. After the strike ended, she was elected to the union’s bargaining committee and assigned to investigate health and safety issues. She discovered what she believed to be numerous violations of health regulations, including exposure of workers to contamination, faulty respiratory equipment and improper storage of samples. She also believed the lack of sufficient shower facilities could increase the risk of employee contamination.

26.CIA Drug Smuggling in Arkansas:August 23, 1987, in a rural community just south of Little Rock, police officers murdered two teenage boys because they witnessed a police-protected drug drop.The drop was part of a drug smuggling operation based at a small airport in Mena, Arkansas. The Mena operation was set up in the early 1980’s by the notorious drug smuggler, Barry Seal. Facing prison after a drug conviction in Florida, Seal flew to Washington, D.C., where he put together a deal that allowed him to avoid prison by becoming an informant for the government. As a government informant against drug smugglers, Seal testified he worked for the CIA and the DEA. In one federal court case, he testified that his income from March 1984 to August 1985, was between $700,000 and $800,000. This period was AFTER making his deal with the government.

27.Bohemian Grove:For years, many conspiracy theorists were saying that the rich and powerful met every year in the woods and worshiped a giant stone owl in an occult fashion.It turns out, ABC, CBS, NBC, and many other credible news agencies investigated this and found out, its true.It is said to be just all fun and games, like brotherhood style fraternity stuff.

28.Operation Paperclip: Operation Paperclip was the code name for the 1945 Office of Strategic Services, Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency recruitment of German scientists from Nazi Germany to the U.S. after VE Day.

29.The Round Table:British businessman Cecil Rhodes advocated the British Empire reannexing the United States of America and reforming itself into an “Imperial Federation” to bring about a hyperpower and lasting world peace. In his first will, of 1877, written at the age of 23, he expressed his wish to fund a secret society (known as the Society of the Elect) that would advance this goal:“To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonization by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labor and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity.”

30.The Illuminati:The Order of the Illuminati was an Enlightenment-age secret society founded on May 1st, 1776, in Ingolstadt (Upper Bavaria), by Adam Weishaupt, who was the first lay professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt. The movement consisted of freethinkers, secularists, liberals, republicans and pro-feminists, recruited in the Masonic Lodges of Germany, who sought to promote perfectionism through mystery schools. As a result, in 1785, the order was infiltrated, broken and suppressed by the government agents of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria, in his campaign to neutralize the threat of secret societies ever becoming hotbeds of conspiracies to overthrow the monarchy and state religion.In the late 18th century, reactionary conspiracy theorists, such as Scottish physicist John Robison and French Jesuit priest Augustin Barruel, began speculating that the Illuminati survived their suppression and became the masterminds behind the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.

31.The Trilateral Commission:The Trilateral Commission is a private organization, established to foster closer cooperation among the United States, Europe and Japan. It was founded in July 1973 at the initiative of David Rockefeller, who was Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations at that time. The Trilateral Commission is widely seen as a counterpart to the Council on Foreign Relations.In July 1972, Rockefeller called his first meeting, which was held at Rockefeller’s Pocantico compound in New York’s Hudson Valley. It was attended by about 250 individuals who were carefully selected and screened by Rockefeller and represented the very elite of finance and industry.

32.Big Brother or the Shadow Government:It is also called the “Deep State” by Peter Dale Scott, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. A shadow government is a “government-in-waiting” that remains in waiting with the intention of taking control of a government in response to some event.It turned out this was true on 9/11, when it was told to us by our mainstream media.For years, this was ridiculed as a silly, crazy conspiracy theory and, like the others listed here, turned out to be 100% true.It is also called the Continuity of Government.

Bill Moyers . . . . released a documetnary titled, The Secret Government, which exposed the inner workings of a secret government much more vast that most people would ever imagine. Though originally broadcast in 1987, it is even more relevant today. Interviews with respected top military, intelligence, and government insiders reveal both the history and secret objectives of powerful groups in the hidden shadows of our government.

33.The Federal Reserve Bank:.

CIA role claim in Kennedy killing

The evidence was shown in a report by Shane O’Sullivan, broadcast on BBC Newsnight.

It reveals that the operatives and four unidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles in the moments before and after the shooting on 5 June, 1968.

The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles.

Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary on an anti-War ticket and was set to challenge Nixon for the White House when he was shot in a kitchen pantry.

A 24-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, was arrested as the lone assassin and notebooks at his house seemed to incriminate him.

However, even under hypnosis, he has never been able to remember the shooting and defence psychiatrists concluded he was in a trance at the time. (Read more from news.bbc.co.uk)

Dow Chemical, Bromide and the fallacy of predatory price-cutting

One of the sacred cows of statism is the idea that government needs to protect us from predatory price-cutting. Large corporations, according to this argument, have big advantages in the marketplace. They can cut prices, drive out their competitors, then raise prices later and gouge consumers. Antitrust laws are needed, so the argument continues, to protect small businesses and consumers from those corporations with large market shares in their industries.

The story of Herbert Dow, founder of Dow Chemical Company, is an excellent case study for those who think predatory price-cutting is a real threat to society. Dow, a small producer of bromine in the early 1900s, fought a price-cutting cartel from Germany. He not only lived to tell about it; he also prospered from it.

. . . .

For Dow Chemical to become a major corporation, it had to meet the European challenge. The Germans in particular dominated world chemical markets in the 1800s. They had experience, topflight scientists, and monopolies in chemical markets throughout the world. For example, the Germans, with their vast potash deposits, had been the dominant supplier of bromine since it first was mass-marketed in the mid-1800s. Only the United States emerged as a competitor to Germany, and then only as a minor player. Dow and some small firms along the Ohio River sold bromine, but only within the country.

About 30 German firms had combined to form a cartel, Die Deutsche Bromkonvention, which fixed the world price for bromine at a lucrative 49 cents a pound. Customers either paid the 49 cents or they went without. Dow and other American companies sold bromine in the United States for 36 cents. The Bromkonvention made it clear that if the Americans tried to sell elsewhere, the Germans would flood the American market with cheap bromine and drive them all out of business. The Bromkonvention law was, “The U.S. for the U.S. and Germany for the world.”

Dow entered bromine production with these unwritten rules in effect, but he refused to follow them. Instead, he easily beat the cartel’s 49-cent price and courageously sold America’s first bromine in England. He hoped that the Germans, if they found out what he was doing, would ignore it. Throughout 1904 he merrily bid on bromine contracts throughout the world.
A Visit from the Cartel

After a few months of this, Dow encountered in his office an angry visitor from Germany—Hermann Jacobsohn of the Bromkonvention. Jacobsohn announced he had “positive evidence that [Dow] had exported bromides.” “What of it?” Dow replied. “Don’t you know that you can’t sell bromides abroad?” Jacobsohn asked. “I know nothing of the kind,” Dow retorted. Jacobsohn was indignant. He said that if Dow persisted, the Bromkonvention members would run him out of business whatever the cost. Then Jacobsohn left in a huff.

. . . .

Dow, however, was determined to compete with the Bromkonvention. He needed the sales, and he believed his electrolysis produced bromine cheaper than the Germans could. Also, Dow was stubborn and hated being bluffed by a bully. When Jacobsohn stormed out of his office, Dow continued to sell bromine, from England to Japan.

Before long, in early 1905, the Bromkonvention went on a rampage: it poured bromides into America at 15 cents a pound, well below its fixed price of 49 cents and also below Dow’s 36 cents. Jacobsohn arranged a special meeting with Dow in St. Louis and demanded that he quit exporting bromides or else the Germans would flood the American market indefinitely. The Bromkonvention had the money and the backing of its government, Jacobsohn reminded Dow, and could long continue to sell in the United States below the cost of production. Dow was not intimidated; he was angry and told Jacobsohn he would sell to whomever would buy from him. Dow left the meeting with Jacobsohn screaming threats behind him. As Dow boarded the train from St. Louis, he knew the future of his company—if it had a future—depended on how he handled the Germans.

On that train, Dow worked out a daring strategy. He had his agent in New York discreetly buy hundreds of thousands of pounds of German bromine at the 15-cent price. Then he repackaged and sold it in Europe—including Germany!—at 27 cents a pound. “When this 15-cent price was made over here,” Dow said, “instead of meeting it, we pulled out of the American market altogether and used all our production to supply the foreign demand. This, as we afterward learned, was not what they anticipated we would do.”

Dow secretly hired British and German agents to market his repackaged bromine in their countries. They had no trouble doing so because the Bromkonvention had left the world price above 30 cents a pound. The Germans were selling in the United States far below cost of production, and they hoped to offset their U.S. losses with a high world price.

Instead, the Germans were befuddled. They expected to run Dow out of business; and this they thought they were doing. But why was U.S. demand for bromine so high? And where was this flow of cheap bromine into Europe coming from? Was one of the Bromkonvention members cheating and selling bromine in Europe below the fixed price? The tension in the Bromkonvention was dramatic. According to Dow, “The German producers got into trouble among themselves as to who was to supply the goods for the American market, and the American agent [for the Germans] became embarrassed by reason of his inability to get goods that he had contracted to supply and asked us if we would take his [15-cent] contracts. This, of course, we refused to do.”

. . . .

More Price-Cutting

The confused Germans kept cutting U.S. prices—first to 12 cents and then to 10.5 cents a pound. Meanwhile, Dow kept buying cheap bromine and reselling it in Europe for 27 cents. These sales forced the Bromkonvention to drop its high world price to match Dow and that further depleted the Bromkonvention‘s resources. Dow, by contrast, improved his foreign sales force, often ran his bromine plants at top capacity, and gained business at the expense of the Bromkonvention and all other American producers, most of whom had shut down after the price-cutting. Even when the Bromkonvention finally caught on to what Dow was doing, it wasn’t sure how to respond. As Dow said, “We are absolute dictators of the situation.” He also wrote, “One result of this fight has been to give us a standing all over the world. . . . We are . . . in a much stronger position than we ever were.” He added that “the profits are not so great” because his plants had trouble matching the new 27-cent world price. He needed to buy the cheap German bromides to stay ahead, and this was harder to do once the Germans discovered and exposed his repackaging scheme.

The bromine war lasted four years (1904–08), when finally the Bromkonvention invited Dow to come to Germany and work out an agreement. Since they couldn’t crush Dow, they decided to at least work out some deal so they could make money again. The terms were as follows: the Germans agreed to quit selling bromine in the United States; Dow agreed to quit selling in Germany; and the rest of the world was open to free competition. The bromine war was over, but low-priced bromine was now a fact of life.

Dow had more capital from the bromine war to expand his business and challenge the Germans in other markets. For example, Dow entered the dye industry and began producing indigo more cheaply than the dominant German dye cartel. (Read more from thefreemanonline.org)