Robert Parry allows his work to be posted at DU in full w/credit and link. This is long, but it is not the full article.


http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/050110.html
>>>>>
It has long been amazing that Official Washington has been so blasé about the curious case of the Washington Times, where a Korean theocrat – known for brainwashing his followers and for maintaining close ties with international drug cartels and foreign intelligence agencies – has been allowed to spend billions of unregulated dollars to influence U.S. political decision-making.

The fact that Moon wrapped himself in “conservative” political garb – and was quick to denounce any investigations of his organization as “religious bigotry” – helped fend off inquiries into exactly where his money was coming from.

But what proved most important was how Moon made himself useful to Ronald Reagan, the Bush Family and other Republican heavy-hitters – often by putting into play propaganda smearing their political enemies. These Republicans, in turn, helped protect Moon, at least since the late 1970s.

During the Carter administration, the congressional “Korea-gate” probe into South Korean influence-buying in Washington revealed Moon’s foreign intelligence ties and some of his criminal activities, leading to his conviction on tax fraud charges in 1982.

In that same year, however, Moon took steps to insulate himself from further inquiries, most notably by launching the Washington Times. Since then, Moon’s empire – from its local fundraising scams to its international money-laundering – has escaped any serious government examination.

It didn’t even matter when Church insiders, including Moon’s former daughter-in-law Nansook Hong, provided first-hand evidence of systematic criminality. In an era dominated by Republican control of the federal government, U.S. authorities never seemed to put two and two together.

Though Moon’s operations in both Asia and South America were linked to major crime syndicates including the Japanese yakuza and Latin American cocaine cartels, federal prosecutors and congressional committees chose to look the other way.

That way Moon was allowed to continue pouring an estimated $100 million a year into his newspaper and other pro-Republican media outlets. Additional millions went to fund right-wing political conferences; to pay speaking fees to world leaders, including George H.W. Bush; and to bail other Republican political allies out of financial troubles.

When I was investigating Moon’s activities in the mid-1990s, I interviewed former church insiders who explained how Moon’s U.S. business operations, such as restaurants and real estate deals, served to launder overseas money that his followers would first sneak past U.S. Customs, a practice confirmed by Moon’s ex-daughter-in-law.

In her 1998 memoir, In the Shadow of the Moons, Nansook Hong alleged that Moon’s organization had engaged in a long-running conspiracy to smuggle cash into the United States and to deceive U.S. Customs agents.

“The Unification Church was a cash operation,” Nansook Hong wrote. “I watched Japanese church leaders arrive at regular intervals at East Garden [the Moon compound north of New York City] with paper bags full of money, which the Reverend Moon would either pocket or distribute to the heads of various church-owned business enterprises at his breakfast table.

“The Japanese had no trouble bringing the cash into the United States; they would tell customs agents that they were in America to gamble at Atlantic City. In addition, many businesses run by the church were cash operations, including several Japanese restaurants in New York City. I saw deliveries of cash from church headquarters that went directly into the wall safe in Mrs. Moon’s closet.”

Personal Confession

Mrs. Moon even pressed her daughter-in-law into one cash-smuggling incident after a trip to Japan in 1992, Nansook Hong wrote.

Mrs. Moon had received “stacks of money” and divvied it up among her entourage for the return trip through Seattle, Nansook Hong wrote.

“I was given $20,000 in two packs of crisp new bills,” she recalled. “I hid them beneath the tray in my makeup case. ... I knew that smuggling was illegal, but I believed the followers of Sun Myung Moon answered to higher laws.”

U.S. currency laws require that cash amounts above $10,000 be declared at Customs when the money enters or leaves the country. It is also illegal to conspire with couriers to bring in lesser amounts when the total exceeds the $10,000 figure.

Moon “demonstrated contempt for U.S. law every time he accepted a paper bag full of untraceable, undeclared cash collected from true believers” who smuggled the money in from overseas, Nansook Hong wrote.

Despite Nansook Hong’s revelations, which corroborated longstanding claims by other Moon insiders, no known criminal investigation ensued.

There is also the question of where the mysterious money originated. Some Moon watchers believe much of the cash came from scams of superstitious Japanese widows who were sold miniature pagodas and other ornaments dedicated to their dead husbands.

Yet, while the Japanese scams might explain part of Moon’s fortune, others who have looked into Moon’s operation suspect that a major source of money derived from Moon’s close relationships with underworld figures in Asia and South America.

Those ties date back several decades to negotiations conducted by one of Moon’s early South Korean supporters, Kim Jong-Pil, who founded the Korean CIA and headed up sensitive negotiations on improving bilateral relations between Tokyo and Seoul.

The negotiations put Kim Jong-Pil in touch with two important figures in the Far East, Japanese rightists Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, who had been jailed as fascist war criminals at the end of World War II. A few years later, however, both Kodama and Sasakawa were freed by U.S. military intelligence officials.

The U.S. government turned to Kodama and Sasakawa for help in combating communist labor unions and student strikes, much as the CIA protected German Nazi war criminals who supplied intelligence and performed other services in Cold War battles with European communists.

Kodama and Sasakawa also allegedly grew rich from their association with the yakuza, a shadowy organized crime syndicate that profited off drug smuggling, gambling and prostitution in Japan and Korea. Behind the scenes, Kodama and Sasakawa became power-brokers in Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

Far-Right Extremism

Kim Jong-Pil's contacts with these right-wing leaders proved invaluable to Moon, who had made only a few converts in Japan by the early 1960s. Immediately after Kim Jong-Pil opened the door to Kodama and Sasakawa in late 1962, 50 leaders of an ultra-nationalist Japanese Buddhist sect converted en masse to the Unification Church, according to Yakuza, a book by David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro.

"Sasakawa became an advisor to Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Japanese branch of the Unification Church" and collaborated with Moon in building far-right anti-communist organizations in Asia, Kaplan and Dubro wrote.

Moon's church was active in the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, a fiercely right-wing group founded by the governments of South Korea and Taiwan. In 1966, the group expanded into the World Anti-Communist League, an international alliance that brought together traditional conservatives with ex-Nazis, overt racialists and Latin American “death squads.”

Authors Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson wrote in their 1986 book, Inside the League, that Sun Myung Moon was one of five indispensable Asian leaders who made the World Anti-Communist League possible.

The five were Taiwan’s dictator Chiang Kai-shek, South Korea’s dictator Park Chung Hee, yakuza gangsters Sasakawa and Kodama, and Moon, “an evangelist who planned to take over the world through the doctrine of ‘Heavenly Deception,’” the Andersons wrote.

WACL became a well-financed worldwide organization after a secret meeting between Sasakawa and Moon, along with two Kodama representatives, on a lake in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, according to the Andersons.

The purpose of the meeting was to create an anti-communist organization that “would further Moon’s global crusade and lend the Japanese yakuza leaders a respectable new façade,” the Andersons wrote.

Mixing organized crime and political extremism, of course, has a long tradition throughout the world. Violent political movements often have blended with criminal operations as a way to arrange covert funding, move operatives or acquire weapons.

Drug smuggling has proven to be a particularly effective way to fill the coffers of extremist movements, especially those that find ways to insinuate themselves within more legitimate operations of sympathetic governments or intelligence services.

In the quarter century after World War II, remnants of fascist movements managed to do just that. Shattered by the Allies, the surviving fascists got a new lease on political life with the start of the Cold War. They helped both Western democracies and right-wing dictatorships battle international communism.

Though some Nazi leaders faced war-crimes tribunals after World War II, others managed to make their escapes along “rat lines” to Spain or South America or they finagled intelligence relationships with the victorious powers, especially the United States.

Argentina became a natural haven given the pre-war alliance that existed between the European fascists and prominent Argentine military leaders, such as Juan Peron. The fleeing Nazis also found like-minded right-wing politicians and military officers across Latin America who already used repression to keep down the indigenous populations and the legions of the poor.

In the post-World War II years, some Nazi war criminals chose reclusive lives, but others, such as former SS officer Klaus Barbie, sold their intelligence skills to less-sophisticated security services in countries like Bolivia or Paraguay.
Other Nazis on the lam trafficked in narcotics. Often the lines crossed between intelligence operations and criminal conspiracies.
>>>>>

The Constitution is a progress prevention plan.

The separation of the executive branch from congress, the two co-equal houses of congress...the federal system with some power national but some state and local.
Also the difficulty in ammending the constitution. These features make it impossible to get anything done. It might have been designed that way on purpose, to protect the wealth of the people who designed it.

Add on top of those some other features of our system that are not in the Constitution but are traditional and entrenched. Like the two-party system. Winner-take-all electoral vote allocation. Gerrymandering. The filabuster. Corporate controlled media.

Then add in unlimited corporate money in politics.

That's a recipe for shitty government.

...from bringing radical and permanent change.

If it holds back progress, it also holds back radical change by those who seek anti-equal marriage laws, anti-Muslim laws, laws further integrating church and state, repeal/modification of amendments the Right and the Tea Party don't like, anti-immigrant laws, and much more.

Apart from the Civil War, our country has been spared the civil uprisings and revolutions we've seen elsewhere. I credit our Constitution for that.

Robert Parry is excellent at laying it all out, but, he's such amazing investigative reporter, he unearths so much and there is still always more to read.

That is the precise reason things are getting so hot in this handbasket.

Somehow after we won WWll we were infiltrated with NAZI's and the race to facism began. McCarthy and his goons. Republican party is filled with them. But they do not know history so they just make up some nonsense and believe in it like it is a religous belief instead of looking at facts. The Tea party has no clue what the teaparty really was. They just like the no taxation part. Bush said it all when he said being a dictator would be easier. Some replublicans I know would buy it since they think God knows more than them and that we should NOT choose are leaders, God should do it for us. Scary isnt it.

FDR both saved the nation from and doomed it to fascism. He knew this and was working very hard to head it off, but he died to soon.

We've been embroiled in a class war for almost two centuries here. The monied ruling class has steadily worked toward fascism, or something like it, since before the ink was dry on the Constitution. The People OTOH have become less and less aware of this goal and the move toward it as time passed.

Rumored that he was going to sign bill of rights for people. The move to fascism probably came with the germans who came to the US during the time nationalism was growing in Germany. But the dividing of the people by racism was to keep real change from occurring. A history lesson from FDR the economy is not going to recover until middle and lower class debt is forgiven and we can start buying again. Which by the way creates jobs.

It's all their fault, dammit!

One could also argue that so are most other nations- particularly large ones. Humans are pretty lousy in general when in comes to governing themselves en masse. The nostalgia for the purported good old days is always a bit perplexing to me.

But I think things came to the front when the New Deal Coalition splintered apart in the 1960s. Prior to the Civil Rights Act, the New Deal Coalition included voters from the South as well as the North in terms of supporting left-wing New Deal policies. FDR and his cohorts in the House and Senate constructed this coalition in the 1930s.

The support in the South essentially evaporated following the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They switched parties, and with their departure into the Republican Party, the Democrats lost the ability to hold commanding leads in the House or Senate that they were once able to garner under Franklin Roosevelt or even under Truman and Eisenhower and as late as LBJ. Reagan essentially solidified into place that part of the working class vote that was once Democratic but had gone Republican.

I agree with you. We are very messed up. Health care & the sheer size of prison population are national embarrassments. Here's my long-winded response. You may disagree on some of it, but I hope you read it. I'm naturally missing a lot of stuff, so I welcome more of your thoughts.

At our founding, intolerant puritans from the northeast teamed with racist slaveholders from the southeast to defeat the British. We didn't resolve the problem of slavery until long after most other countries. As we moved westward, we destroyed native american lands & committed near-genocide against the people who lived here first.

We got together for spells of communality. The New Deal. World war two to help defeat fascism. The civil rights movement. None of the battles were easy. There was much dissension within our own ranks too. Then we turned toward wasteful shitty wars against yellow and brown people. The strains of intolerance, racism and imperialist aggression or misunderstanding of other peoples has mildly receded. Primarily through integration, immigration, the better parts of the internet, and continually struggling to live up to our stated ideals.

We don't take over and remain controlling other countries the way previous lumbering empires did. Not many other countries have much better histories, either. Compared to other industrialized nations we're relatively young and evolving. Right now I'd say we're kind of like a late teenager, or someone in his 20's who keeps drinking & partying & doing stupid reckless stuff long after it's cool.

The election of President Obama and hopefully his reelection tells me we haven't gone off the rails. We need to keep building toward sober long-term disciplined grass roots organizations, more cooperative living and better local representation. We'll always have the strange competing strains of sexually repressed do-gooder puritans, ignorant hate filled racists, and the cynical powerful who manipulate them for their advantage. Hopefully they'll all recede in power over our lives.

Going forward, our major challenges include improving tolerance and education, reducing wasteful military spending, & turning younger people into good citizens instead of lazy self-absorbed slobs who just tweet & twit & text all day long, not giving a crap about anything or anyone else. There's hope for the future. Younger folks now don't hate their elders as explicitly as the baby boomers hated their. Also, parents now are spending better quality time with their kids.

I'm still hopeful we'll produce fewer Kardashians & Romneys and more Obamas, Jobs & meaningful jobs. At the least, we'll have some fun laughing together. Here at DU and away from our computers in our personal & family lives. While remaining serious about our shared purpose in creating better lives for ourselves & others, and distributing our vast resources more fairly & effectively. We must keep striving to produce more healthy happy book readers who exercise regularly & spend their time wisely. We also must continue laughing at human beings' difficulties in building strong consensus that actually improves the world around us.

Racism

That's a very "glass half empty" outlook. From another perspective, you could ask how did the US get to be so awesome. There are a lot of great things about this country. There is a reason why the downtrodden of the world want to come here more than anyplace else.

Also, there is not single "American" ethnic group. Even among white Americans one can see clear ethnic divisions, the communitarian "Yankees" of the North-East and Great Lakes region (including myself), the aristocratic Deep-Southers, the anarchical "Scots-Irish" of the Inland South and Lower Midwest, etc.