Washington Is Oligarchs' Next
Target for Genoa Treatment
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Following last month's two days of street violence outside the Group of Eight summit in Genoa, Italy, protesters are now targetting the late-September annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, D.C. The protests, also directed against the Bush Administration, promise to be bigger and more violent than any of the previous Jacobin actions, including the December 1999 riots in Seattle, during the World Trade Organization conference, and the Genoa action. The Genoa toll itself was stark: one dead, 400 injured (including 108 police); 34 banks, 14 shops, and 16 gas stations destroyed; 83 cars burned.
Like the Genoa operation, which sought to destabilize and bring down the Berlusconi government of Italy, the planned assault on Washington is part of a bigger "strategy of tensions" destabilization of the United States and other leading nations, being directed by desperate factions within the international financial oligarchy. They are incubating a new generation of international terrorists, who, like the "1968 Generation" and the terrorists of the 1980s, can be deployed as a battering ram against the nation-state system.
This is not a matter of speculation. Prominent ideologues of "the new terrorism" like Italy's Antonio Negri, openly declare that their primary target is the nation-state, which, they say, is an arcane and destructive institution, which should be replaced by a new imperialism. In fact, Negri argues that globalization is fine, so long as "anti-authoritarian" non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are given a piece of the action. In recent weeks, both the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune have enthusiastically promoted Negri's radical arguments for a new imperialism, to replace the nation-state system. Negri's latest book, Empire, co-authored by Michael Hardt, has been a New York Times bestseller, and is about to be republished as a paperback by Harvard University Press next month. (The original edition was published by Oxford University Press.)
In a July 30, 2001 interview with the Italian daily newspaper of record, Corierre della Sera, promoting his book, Negri bluntly declared, "The nation-state has always been an enemy.... The Fatherland is abhorred in our book; millions of people have died in its name; workers' struggles have luckily freed us from the Fatherland and the Nation. Therefore the [global] Empire is welcome."
Back in the late 1970s, Negri was one of the controllers of the Italian Red Brigades, who destabilized Italy, through the 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, a leading advocate of greater East-West economic and political cooperation, to solve the problems of developing-sector poverty, and counter the growing tyranny of the private financial oligarchy. Negri and his Red Brigades terrorists were exposed at the time of the Moro kidnapping-murder as assets of the London-centered financial oligarchy; and members of Moro's family later accused former U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger of threatening Moro's life just prior to his disappearance.
Today, again, the top-down architects of the new terrorism are the same Kissinger-allied circles advocating a "Clash of Civilizations" global conflict, to prevent Eurasian-centered economic cooperation. They are now also promoting Ariel Sharon's Israel as a marcher lord for a Middle East-centered global religious conflict.
A National Security Threat to the U.S.A.
The assault on Washington will certainly coincide with the next ratchet-phase collapse of the international financial system, and the deployment of the terrorist legions will also aim to blunt any potential discussion of a solution to the systemic crash, along the lines of Lyndon LaRouche's New Bretton Woods and Eurasian Land-Bridge proposals. In fact, these genuine solutions to the rapidly accelerating global crash are the primary targets of the oligarchy's new terror.
Already, for example, the terrorist violence in Genoa has blunted years of efforts, by leading Vatican circles around Pope John Paul II, and others, to promote a global debt moratorium. The violence outside the G-8 meeting was a media "happening" that diverted attention from any substantive criticism of the "see no evil" attitudes of the leaders inside the conference hall, who refused, collectively, to take any action to avert the already ongoing global financial crash. The street clashes gave cover to the G-8 leaders, particularly the G-7 advanced-sector heads of state, allowing them to lament the violence and dodge reality for a few weeks more. Indeed, their failure to act has given further impetus to the next planned terrorist extravaganza.
The planned late-September terrorist onslaught in Washington, D.C. represents a serious national security threat to the United States, a threat that must be handled properly, on the basis of an effective intelligence profile of the terrorist flotsam and jetsam as well as the above-suspicion forces pulling their strings. With this "alert" report, EIR begins a series of exposés of the new global terrorism. In forthcoming issues, we will provide our readers with in-depth profiles of the major groups behind this new Jacobin offensive.
Cochabamba and the PGA
From Sept. 16-24, a major gathering of international terrorists is scheduled to take place in Cochabamba, Bolivia, according to security sources and documents obtained by EIR. The meeting, a final planning session for the scheduled assault on Washington from Sept. 28-Oct. 4, 2001, is the third international conference of Peoples Global Action (PGA). Founded Feb. 23-26, 1998 in Geneva, Switzerland, PGA advertises itself as "a worldwide network of peasant, indigenous, workers, women's, ecological and other organizations struggling against globalization in a radical, anticapitalist perspective." In fact, PGA is the umbrella under which the hardcore narco-terrorist gangs of Ibero-America and South Asia have been fused with the eco-terrorists and "Black Bloc" anarchists of the advanced sector, and every indigenous and separatist group out to destroy the nation-state system.
The PGA's own communiqué, preparing the Cochabamba meeting, declared, "The Convenors committee of PGA met in Prague last September and decided to convene its next conference from the 16th to the 24th of September this year in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The conference will be hosted by local popular organizations, in particular by the Cinco Federaciones del Tropico, a peasant organization famous for its extraordinary history of resistance. The choice is deliberate. The popular orgnaizations of Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia have been among the most successful in the resistance to globalizing capital. For this they are the targets of an ever more violent war, called 'Plan Colombia,' the 'war on drugs,' etc. The imperialists want to make an example there, so the future of the Andes is essential for us all."
The so-called "popular organizations," referred to in the PGA call, are among the most deadly narcoterrorist gangs in the world, including Colombia's FARC and ELN, which are hardly engaged in "resistance to globalizing capital." They constitute one of the biggest drug-trafficking cartels in the world, with global drugs-for-weapons smuggling and money-laundering alliances, stretching from Wall Street and London, to Mexico, Spain, the Middle East, and Asia. The recent destabilization of Ecuador, which led that country to surrender its entire economic sovereignty through "dollarization," was carried out by the "peasant organizations" and indigenist groups operating now under the PGA banner.
The Cochabamba session will also bring together the Mexican Zapatistas (EZLN) and their European support networks, including other PGA "convenor groups" such as Italy's Ya Basta! and White Overall anarchist groups, and the London-based Reclaim the Streets.
The very first PGA "direct action" took place in the City of London on June 18, 1999, when over 10,000 anarchists stormed the streets of the financial district and battled police for 24 hours. In fact, the London-based Reclaim the Streets is the lead organization, planning and coordinating the Cochabamba operation, and the assault on Washington that will follow days later.
Reflecting the heavy narcoterrorist focus of the Cochabamba session, the kickoff actions in Washington, on Sept. 29-30 will be demonstrations and street actions against Plan Colombia and the U.S. government-led war on drugs.
An 'Inside-Outside' Assault
As the IMF/World Bank session convenes in Washington, behind the now-familiar barricades of chain-linked fences and police checkpoints, one of the celebrity figures inside the events will be mega-speculator George Soros. Soros' Open Society Institute will also be a major presence outside the session—in the streets. OSI and its subsidiary Lindesmith Center/Drug Policy Foundation is one of the world's leading sponsors of the drug legalization drive, that proposes to legitimize the narco-terrorist insurgents of the FARC, the ELN, etc. Soros's Human Rights Watch has been one of the leading NGOs promoting these terrorist gangs, now planning to take to the streets of Washington under the PGA banner.
On Feb. 12, 2001, in a typical Soros "inside-outside" profiled operation, the Lindesmith Center/Drug Policy Foundation issued a press release promoting the Zapatista march on Mexico City as a major "human rights" event. The release defended the fact that many of indigenist peasants lured into the EZLN are, in fact, involved in drug production and smuggling, noting, "Suffering from hunger, with poor-quality lands, without resources to plant and forgotten by development, the indigenous either accept or are obligated to transport drugs. They have to survive somehow." The Soros solution? Empty the prisons of the "victims" of the drug trade, and legalize drugs—precisely the message that the FARC, ETA, EZLN terrorists will be bringing to the streets of Washington in late September.
Just as George Soros represents one prime example of the role of the international financial oligarchy, in bankrolling and promoting the new terrorism, an even more stunning case of the top-down control is seen in the role of Edward "Teddy" Goldsmith, in the unfolding street destablizations.
Goldsmith is the the heir to his late brother Sir James Goldsmith's junk-bond and speculative fortune, a fortune he has plowed into the buildup of the hardcore European eco-terrorist and anarchist movement. This Anglo-French branch of the extended Rothschild family is at the center of the buildup of the new terrorism, with the open backing of the highest echelons of the British Crown apparatus.
While Soros will be hosting million-dollar cocktail parties inside the barricades of Washington in late September, Teddy Goldsmith will likely be lurking in the shadows of the terrorist legions. In a recent interview, Goldsmith acknowleged that he spent the months leading up to the Genoa street battles at his chalet in Siena, Italy, and then was in Genoa, "lecturing" the eco-terrorists and anarchists, in between their battles with the police. He has earlier admitted that he provided financing to bring European "Black Bloc" anarchist to North America for the Seattle and Quebec City confrontations.
Goldsmith's International Forum on Globalization and his The Ecologist bring together a combination of radical environmentalists and naive anti-globalization activists, along with some of the sophisticated behind-the-scenes controllers of the hardcore Jacobin mobs. Among the groups formally affiliated with the Goldsmith fronts are: Prince Philip's World Wildlife Fund, the Sierra Club, the Rainforest Action Network, the Institute for Policy Studies, Project Underground, the Indigenous Peoples Network, Friends of the Earth, Survival International, Greenpeace, and the Green Party UK (which Goldsmith, himself, founded).
The ability of the Goldsmith apparatus to provide a more "liberal" cover to the mislabelled "anti-globalization" mobilization is crucial to the development and deployment of the terrorist hardcore.
Nowhere were the intimate links between the globalizers, the radical chic, and the hardcore terrorists more evident than during the January 2001 simultaneous "Davos" and "anti-Davos" events. The annual World Economic Forum, bringing together the leading figures within the international financial establishment at Davos, Switzerland, was paralleled by the Teddy Goldsmith-founded World Social Forum, which occurred, simultaneously from Jan. 25-30, in Pôrto Alegre, Brazil. Not only did the Pôrto Alegre event lure in some well-known and legitimate critics of globalization. The core of the Goldsmith event was the hardcore terrorists, including leading figures from the Colombian FARC, and the Brazilian MST (landless movement). The original plan to focus the protests in Washington against Plan Colombia and the war on drugs was put forward at Pôrto Alegre by the FARC's Javier Cifuentes, and enthusiastically endorsed by the majority of delegates, including leading representatives of the Fidel Castro-allied São Paolo Forum.
During the Pôrto Alegre session, one of the leading Anglo-French operatives, Bernard Cassen, of the Association for Taxation of Financial Transactions and Aid to Citizenry (ATTAC), staged a closed-circuit debate with George Soros, who was in Davos. Soros candidly admitted that "Davos and anti-Davos" were "the two faces of globalization."