Reply #24: Thanks for these links. Although Simon Romero is a notoriously unreliable [View All]

[Peace Patriot]

anti-Chavez 'reporter' for the NYT (i.e., Judith Miller type)--check out BoRev.net's hilarious riffs on Romero--he does supply me with a tidbit I didn't know (--if true; hard to say with Romero), that the raid on 10/31/08 by Venezuelan authorities had to do with opposition leader Manuel Rosales. I believe Rosales was one of the opposition leaders whom the indy reporter caught returning from Puerto Rico, after a meeting with a (Bushwhack) U.S. diplomat concerning $3 million that the opposition were seeking, to defeat the term limits referendum. The Puerto Rico meeting was early this year. (The referendum was Feb. 15.) Probably that money--and other Bushwhack black budget money to the Venezuelan fascists--was laundered through the Stanford Bank. (It is illegal in Venezuela to take foreign money for political campaigns.) The Venezuelan military prosecutor specifically mentioned the C.I.A. (according to the first article (of your links).

Romero, like other corpo/fascist 'news' floggers, is also useful for ferreting out Bushwhack/CIA plots and strategies in Venezuela, if you learn to read between the lines a bit. For instance:

"By 2007, the group, run by the Texas financier Robert Allen Stanford, had moved into a glittering new headquarters building in the heart of El Rosal, the city's financial district, in a rare display of confidence in the Venezuelan economy at a time when companies in an array of industries were cutting their exposure there." --Romero (emphasis added)

The theme of the article is that Venezuela is unstable, that investors are fleeing Venezuela, and that Chavez is scary to investors. I won't get into how many ways this is a screwed up, distorted, unreliable narrative--the Venezuelan economy is one of the healthiest in the world right now, due to excellent Chavez management, and has attracted all kinds of investment (France's Total, Norway's Statoil, British BP, Chevron and others in the oil sector; Brazilian, Chinese, Russian projects, among others; the UNASUR projects--South American 'common market'--ALBA and Mercosur trade groups, and on and on)--but if you re-read Romero as a CIA narrative, laying out a strategy the purpose of which is to try to destabilize Venezuela, suddenly enlightenment dawns. Ah, they set up this bank in Caracas with "the glittering new headquarters" in order to induce a run on the bank, and try to create a cascade effect, as they have done here, as a matter of fact, in our own Bushwhack-induced Financial 9/11 in September of last year.

The Chavez government outsmarted them, though. They got onto Stanford early--before anybody, I believe--tracking the illegal opposition money--already had raided the bank's offices and had documentation on what they were doing, and when the run on the bank was precipitated, were able to quickly shut it down, before local savers/investors were hurt (and before the run on the bank could cascade into the general economy). That's the local Stanford bank, which they are going to sell. Articles I've read indicate that they can't help the Venezuelans who were stashing millions in the off-shore Stanford banks, who were, in any case, doing it to evade currency regulations and taxes. The Chavez government can't seize those banks, but may go after the Venezuelan investors who are scofflaws. (I would guess that the off-shore banks were also laundering drug money and other rightwing criminal enterprises--and possibly CIA drug/weapons trafficking money.)

I am not sure if this is the case--that the Stanford local bank was an all-out CIA front, set up to induce a financial panic, when the time was ripe--but Romero's propagandistic narrative, and some remarks of Leon Panetta the other day, reinforce this possibility. Panetta said that Venezuela, Ecuador and Argentina--three of the four main Bushwhack-CIA targets in South America (the fourth is Bolivia)--are "unstable," and this is very worrisome, he said. (He-he.) I think Panetta is both trying to benefit from Bushwhack-CIA operations in these countries over the last several years, and also trying to clean up after the Bushwhacks, as to their dirtier, bloodier and most outrageously criminal operations. We can figure that the Bushwhacks were running the "war on drugs" in South America just as they ran the war on Iraq--unfrigging-believable corruption. They create the appearance of incompetence, but that's not what it is. It is hand over fist, mind-boggling theft.

As with everything else, the CIA will now go back to the "status quo"--normal criminality on behalf of multinational corporations. The Bushwhacks endangered everybody (the super-rich and their U.S. government). That's why they're out. But the putrid, bubbling corpse of our democracy will continue to be kept out of sight. Or, to put it another way, Panetta will seal the lid back over the Pandora's box of our secret government, that the Bushwhacks had uncorked, with their openly hateful, ugly, murderous, thieving activities. The Stanford bank in South America may be a microcosm (or even the central swirl) of the whole. It was a tool or project whose real purpose will now be covered up, by the "old school" CIA. (That's who I think Panetta is--one of the engineers--maybe the chief engineer--of the counter-coup to get the Bushwhacks out. He is "old school" CIA--high up in the organization--"the Company"--that Cheney and Rumsfeld were trying to both circumvent and destroy.)

I wonder if the fascists in South America that were on the receiving end of Bushwhack largesse, for a time, realize what throwaway pawns they are to the Bushwhacks. For instance, the rich Venezuelan investors who got lured into Stanford's ponzi scheme, possibly in order to induce them into a panic--their losses are immaterial to the Bushwhacks; or the white separatists in Bolivia who were stirred up by the Bushwhacks to try to secede from Bolivia, in the eastern provinces, and take Bolivia's main gas/oil reserves with them, whose 'movement' descended into rioting and mayhem, and the slaughter of some 30 unarmed peasants, when Morales threw the U.S. ambassador and the DEA (the organizers/funders of the white separatists) out of the country. Now they have to eat crow. Morales got the backing of all of South America--in the UNASUR resolution and actions--and then won the vote on the new Constitution. No way was the new leadership in South America going to allow the split-up of Bolivia, and the creation of a fascist mini-state in control of the resources.

In fact, I suspect that the whole Bushwhack scheme in Bolivia may have been merely a test run for a larger plan to do the same in Venezuela's and Ecuador's northern oil provinces (as Ecuador's Rafael Correa has publicly discussed). The Bushwhacks ran up against tremendous resistance, even by the more U.S.-friendly, centrist government of Chile. (And even by Colombia--a great surprise--which voted with the majority on the UNASUR actions on Bolivia, making it unanimous.) The Bolivian fascists were just expendable idiots in the Bushwhack game. The Bushwhacks may have been using them merely to find out what the reaction would be. When the "old school" CIA takes over these operations--in Bolivia, Venezuela and other countries--they may find some very bitter and uncooperative people on their hands--the 'victims' of a grand Bushwhack geopolitical robbery scheme that they were mere bagboys for. And this may be another reason why the Bushwhacks were ousted. Latin America is littered with the debris of Bushwhack 'incompetence' (i.e., grand theft).