The House of Mellon Part III

Welcome to the third and final installment in my series chronicling the exploits of the infamous Mellon family of Pittsburgh. In part one of this series I briefly considered the origins of the Mellon family in America before focusing in on Andrew Mellon, the long-serving US Secretary of Treasury who led the nation into the Great Depression and by far the most well known member of the family. In part two I examined the Mellon's family's rather extensive involvement with the US Intelligence community from practically its inception.

I also considered the life and times of Richard 'Mr. Billy' Mellon Hitchcock, one of the more mysterious members of the Mellon family who would appear in the strangest places throughout the 1960s. He was there in the U.K. in the early 1960s meeting with Dr. Stephen Ward, the man widely believed to have been running the sex ring that would bring down the British government in the notorious Profumo affair, for some unknown reason. A year later he would become the chief patron of Dr. Timothy Leary, the legendary LSD guru, and would even set him up at his family estate in Millbrook, New York. By 1967 Mr. Billy had relocated to the Bay area where he would set up shop as the banker for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the largest hashish and LSD distribution outfit in the world by the late 1960s. Mr. Billy would also establish indirect links with the Hell's Angels via chemist Nick Sand, who Mr. Billy bank rolled. He also had ties to Ronald Stark, the US intelligence asset who has been linked to Charles Manson and some of the more radical theories surrounding the Process Church of Final Judgement. Needless to say, Mr. Billy had a rather extensive and largely unknown influence on the 1960s counterculture, especially the psychedelic revolution.

William 'Mr. Billy' Mellon Hitchcock (right)

At the same time as Mr. Billy was spreading his own peculiar revolution a cousin of his was also becoming involved in a revolutionary movement, but one of a seemingly different nature. Richard Mellon Scaife supposedly first became politically active in 1964 when he threw his weight behind the Goldwater campaign for the presidency. Scaife's experiences with Goldwater would have an enormous influence on his future strategies. The Washington Post notes:

"The events of 1964 were a turning point for Scaife, and for American conservatives. Scaife was an alternate to the Republican Convention that chose Arizona Sen. Barry M. Goldwater as the party's presidential nominee, and he became an active contributor and supporter. He escorted Goldwater on the Scaife family airplane to California in July 1964 to attend the Bohemian Grove retreat, a boozy and confidential gathering of conservative, mostly wealthy men.  

"Confounded by Goldwater's devastating defeat that November, many conservatives concluded that they could only win an election in the future by matching their enemy's firepower. It was time, as a Scaife associate of that era put it, to wage 'the war of ideas.' Scaife enthusiastically adopted this view."

Scaife

This is a rather mild description of what the Bohemian Grover would set out to do over the next five decades. Scaife would launch a full out propaganda blitz that would dramatically reshape the political and philosophical views of the United States, laying the groundwork for the conservative revolution that would begin to dominate American politics in the early 1980s and continues to hold sway up till this very day. Continuing with the Post:

"His money has established or sustained activist think tanks that have created and marketed conservative ideas from welfare reform to enhanced missile defense; public interest law firms that have won important court cases on affirmative action, property rights and how to conduct the national census; organizations and publications that have nurtured conservatism on American campuses; academic institutions that have employed and promoted the work of conservative intellectuals; watchdog groups that have critiqued and harassed media organizations, and many more.  

"Together these groups constitute a conservative intellectual infrastructure that provided ideas and human talent that helped Ronald Reagan initiate a new Republican era in 1980, and helped Newt Gingrich initiate another one in 1994. Conservative ideas once dismissed as flaky or extreme moved into the mainstream, and as the liberal National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy concluded in a recent report, 'The long-standing conservative crusade to discredit government as a vehicle for societal progress has come to fruition as never before.'"

This was not an easy feat to accomplish, even with virtually unlimited sums of money to throw at the problem. As noted in part one of this series, America's rich had been forced to make concessions to the working class in the wake of the Great Depression. While the rich remained rich, just not quite as obscenely so as in the pre-Great Depression days, America's working class experienced a massive rise in their standard of living in the post war years. This had been accomplished in part due to a progressive tax code, increased financial regulation, and the rise of labor unions in political activism.

This was in stark contrast to the policies favored by Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon in the years leading up to the Great Depression. The Mellons, as noted in part one, despised labor unions and favored what would become known as 'trickle-down economics: tax cuts for the wealthy which in theory led to the creation of more jobs. Mellon also believed low wages were conductive to a strong economy. When the Harding administration (the first of three administrations for whom Mellon would serve as Secretary of Treasury) faced a recession in 1920 cutting wages were supposedly a big part of the recovery that followed. Of this era R. Buckminster Fuller, the legendary futurist who grew up in it, comments:

" 'The rich get richer and the poor get children' was a popular song of the early 1920s. Wages were incredibly low, and the rich could get their buildings built for a song and people them with many servants for another song."
(The Critical Path, pg. 80)

Amity Shlaes, a former member of the Council on Foreign Relations who did not experience this era, unsurprisingly takes a much rosier view of Mellonomics in action.

"During the Harding administration, recession had hit, and the downturn had been hard: one in ten men lost his job. But struggling firms had cut costs by reducing wages, and the country bounced back fast. By 1923, it was hard to find an unemployed man. Left alone, the majority's impression was, the economy would usually bounce back. That same year... Justice George Sutherland had led the Supreme Court in a sweeping rejection of the minimum wage in the District of Columbia."
(The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, pg. 19)

Andrew Mrllon

The 'recovery' was also fueled by the easy money policy of the Federal Reserve, which Mellon strongly endorsed, as was noted in part one. The theory was that by making loans cheaper businesses would be encouraged to grow. Instead, a wave of rampant stock market speculation ensued.

"To prevent the resulting outflow of gold from having a deflationary effect which might injure business, the New York Federal Reserve Bank dropped its discount rate from 4 percent to 3 1/2 percent...

"As a result there was no reduction in money in the United States. This money, however, was going increasingly into stock-market speculation rather than into production of real wealth...

"The stock-market boom in the United States was really much more drastic... The boom began as far back as 1924, s can be seen, and reached its peak in the fall of 1929. By the spring of 1929 it had become a frenzy and was having profound effects on business activity, on domestic and international finance, on the domestic affairs of foreign countries, and on the psychology and modes of life of Americans.

"Among the financial results of the stock-market boom were the following: In the United States credit was diverted from production to speculation, and increasing amounts of funds were being drained from the economic system into the stock market, where they circulated around and around, building up the prices of securities."
(Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley, pgs. 342-343)

Mellon would champion the rising stock market throughout the decade, as was noted in part one. When the market crashed in 1929, many of the tenants of "Mellonomics" --anti-unionism, tax cuts for the rich, curtailing government regulation, low interest rates and stock speculation, were by and large totally discredited in the eyes of millions of Americans. This led to the rise of the working class as a political and economic power bloc in the wake of the Great Depression.

This was a bitter pill to swallow for many of the old guard rich and they eventually set out to reverse this trend. Beginning in the 1950s, at the peak of American anti-Communism, the wealthy would attempt to form a grassroots movement to undo the progressive economic policies that had dominated the American political landscape since the 1930s. The most well known of these attempts was the John Birch Society, an institution co-founded by Fred C. Koch, the patriarch of the notorious Koch family who would also play a major role in the conservative revolution hat began in 1980.

Fred C. Koch

By 1964 the radical right had managed to field a candidate in Barry Goldwater who embraced much of the Mellon economic philosophy. The Birchers put their weight behind Goldwater's presidential bid as did more fringe conservative groups such as the Nazi-revering Liberty Lobby and the results were disastrous. LBJ won by a landslide, making one thing abundantly clear to the wealthy backers of Goldwater: the American right wing had no true grassroots movement. While many Americans were fervently anti-Communist in this era the radical economic policies of the John Birch Society and their ilk had no appeal to working class Americans who had benefited tremendously from the progressive economic policies that then dominated the political landscape.

A part of the elite was fine with these economic concessions so long as they were free to dictate other aspects of the political landscape, such as foreign policy. From the end of World War II till the early 1960s there had been much debate in the nation as to how to manage the Cold War but few disputed its necessity or the need for the American Empire that was emerging as a result of it. But as opposition to the Vietnam conflict grew throughout the 1960s among students, the nation's future professional/managerial and intellectual classes, even that elite domination of foreign policy fell into jeopardy. The elite did not take this state of affairs laying down and set out to discredit the anti-War movement and the counterculture emerging around it through a scheme of infiltration.

"The use of informants and provocateurs was part of a massive sub rosa campaign to subvert the forces of dissent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Joining the FBI in this effort was an alphabet soup of federal agencies: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), the intelligence divisions of all military services, and numerous local police forces. Over a quarter of a million Americans were under 'active surveillance' during this period, and dossiers were kept on the lawful political activities and personal lives of millions more.

"During the Nixon presidency the CIA stepped u its domestic operations even though such activity was outlawed by the Agency's charter... In addition to monitoring a wide range of liberal and left-wing organizations, the CIA provided training, technical assistance, exotic equipment, and intelligence data to local police departments."
(Acid Dreams, Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain, pgs. 224-225)

It was around this time that Richard Mellon Hitchcock moved to the Bay area, the capital of the budding counterculture. Was Hitchcock, hailing from a family with longstanding ties to the US intelligence community, involved in such activities? Was he keeping tabs on the acid scene for the Company, or maybe even setting up an operation that was eventually launched by Ronald Stark?

Ronald Stark

We shall probably never no but what can be stated with a degree of certainty is that this subversion campaign was no especially successful. By the early 1970s the US was forced to abandon Vietnam once and for all and serious questions were being raised about the nation's imperialism. Even the CIA, which had operated with virtually no Congressional or public over sight since its very inception, found parts of its dirty laundry being aired.

What was seemingly far more successful was a counteroffensive launched by the US intelligence community and their wealthy patrons to create a counter-revolution to check the rise of the 'radical' left.

"But there was also a new emerging consensus within the overworld, uniting both old and new wealth, that America's rich needed to go on a counteroffensive to take the country away from the radical left...

"...From the mid-1970s funding for this right-wing ideological offensive 'was provided by a small sewing circle of rich philanthropists --Richard Mellon Scaife in Pittsburgh, Lynde and Harry Bradley in Milwaukee, Jofn Olin in New York City, the Smith Richardson family in North Carolina, Joseph Coors in Denver, David and Charles Koch in Wichita.' By the end of the 1970s total estimated corporate spending on advocacy advertising and grassroots lobbying ran to $1 billion annually."
(The Road to 9/11, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 97-98)
 

Several of the organizations Scaife and Co backed

Sciafe was very much at the forefront of this revolution. Like all Mellons, he had strong ties to the US intelligence community. His father, Alan Sciafe, had served in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, as had numerous other members of the extended Mellon clan. Scaife would provide financial backing for several of the Company's projects.

"Scaife's ties to the intelligence community span many years --he owned and operated Forum World Features, an international CIA news outlet that supplied over 300 newspapers until its exposure in 1975 --and he has been one of the most generous sugar daddies of the New Right, providing the seed money for the Heritage Foundation and for the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress..."
(Spiritual Warfare, Sara Diamond, pg. 194)

Scaife's CIA-backed activities would also have a profound effect on the politics of Europe as well.

"Scaife meanwhile, with CIA encouragement, was funding $100,000 a year to a joint CIA-British intelligence psychological operation, the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC), and its controversial chief Brain Crozier. The ISC, created in 1970, was driven by a paranoia about left-wing subversion... Crozier in turn was a member of the Pinay Circle, a European cabal of intelligence personnel and veterans and their overworld backers... The Pinay Circle in the 1970s was actively engaged in trying to elect right-wing governments (most notoriously Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom). Crozier himself appeared to claim credit for Thatcher's election at a meeting of the Pinay Circle."
(The Road to 9/11, Peter Dale Scott, pg. 98)

Brian Crozier

While Scaife was covertly backing various projects for the CIA he was also investing hundreds of millions of dollars into conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Judicial Watch, the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, among others, that would dramatically reshape the worldviews of millions of Americans as well as providing the New Right with their own intelligentsia. But it was still not enough for these think tanks largely appealed to business owners and professionals. What the New Right sill needed was a true grassroots movement to maintain them not unlike the coalition of labor unions, farmers, and students that had traditionally backed the Democrats. Fortunately (for some, at least) something began to happen in the late 1960s that would provide the New Right with their long desired grassroots movement: the working class would begin to reject social liberalism.

"The growing tolerance of profanity, sexual display, pornography, drugs, and homosexuality seemed to indicate a general collapse of decency. American workers did not regard themselves as models of rectitude, nor did they adhere to a rigid morality that condemned every from of sexual self-expression. What they condemned was the public display of sex and pornography, especially their deviant forms --the repeal of reticence... Right-wing criticism of the media struck a sympathetic chord in workers troubled by the publicity accorded to socially disruptive conduct. Their attack on 'permissiveness,' however, grew out of a sense of decorum, not out of an inflexible moral standard that left no room for tolerance or free speech..."
(The True and Only Heaven, Christopher Lasch, pg. 495)

No single issue would prove to be more alienating to working class Americans than that of abortion. And the members of the working class most opposed to abortion were the growing masses of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. And it was upon this rock that the elite would launch their counteroffensive. Richard Mellon Scaife would be at the forefront.

"Through his client Paul Weyrich, Scaife, along with the Coors family and Viguerie, also helped in 1979 to launch the top-down Moral Majority. The organizers' motives were political as well as religious --to use abortion as an election issue to split the Democratic Catholic voting block and elect Reagen."
(The Road to 9/11, Peter Dale Scott, pg. 98)

Jerry Falwell, thep ublic head of the Moral Majority

The Moral Majority would also be used to galvanize fundamentalist Christians to get out and vote. The results would be highly effective.

"Prior to 1980, Republican Party strategists estimated that only 55 percent of all fundamentalist Christians were registered to vote, compared with 72 percent of the general population. That changed in 1980 when the combined efforts of Christian Voice, Moral Majority and the New Right political action committees yielded at least two million new fundamentalist voters, a significant 'moral minority' given that Ronald Reagen was elected by only 26 percent of the electorate. Pollster Louis Harris estimated that white fundamentalist voters accounted for two thirds of Reagen's 10 point margin over Jimmy Carter. An ABC poll showed that 17 percent fewer white Protestants voted for Carter in 1980 than in 1976; traditional Democratic southern and border states swung to the Republicans; and for the second time in U.S. history... a plurality of Catholics voted Republican."
(Spiritual Warfare, Sara Diamond, pg. 63)

That Scaife would use abortion to sell far right policies to working class Christians was highly ironic considering Scaife himself was a longstanding supporter of abortion. The Washington Post reports:

"Scaife has long favored abortion rights, to the chagrin of many of those he has supported. In the first years of his philanthropy he stuck to a pattern set by his mother and sister and gave millions to Planned Parenthood and other population control groups, though most such giving stopped in the 1970s."

another organization the Mellon family has heavily donated to

The implications of Scaife, a man with ample intelligence ties, as a major backer of the grassroots, right-wing Christian movement that began to emerge in the middle of the 1970s and arrived as a political force to be reckoned with in 1980, are profound. It is now known that the CIA and other branches of the US intelligence community had looked to Christian missionaries as a component of their Cold War strategy, at least overseas.

"'Total warfare' relies, to a large degree, on the concept of 'humanitarian aid' which itself is a major component of 'psychological operations.' 'Humanitarian aid' is a euphemism frequently used to describe the millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars channelled to corrupt military regimes. The term 'psychological operations' (PSYOPs) had been used to describe the practice of dropping propaganda leaflets from helicopters or campaigns in which smiling, 'humanitarian' soldiers give candy to peasant children. But PSYOPs is much more than that.

"'Humanitarian aid' and 'psychological operations' are two areas of 'total war' where the Christian Right serves U.S. foreign policy objectives best. Acting either as 'private' benefactors or as agents of the U.S. government, Christian Right 'humanitarian' suppliers and promoters of anticommunist ideology use religion to mask the aggressive, cynical nature of 'humanitarian' projects. Cloaked as missionary evangelism, the 'spirual warfare' component of counterinsurgency escapes serious attention by anti-intervention activists who are justifiably preoccupied with stopping massive, direct forms of U.S. militarism.

"It is doubtful, however, that counterinsurgency could be effective without the use of religion. Because the conduct of 'psychological operations' relies on the successful interpretation and manipulation of a target population's deeply held beliefs and cultural practices, the functional use of religion simply must be addressed by anyone intending to understand and put an end to 'total warfare.'
(Spiritual Warfare, Sara Diamond, pg. 162)

The above section is of course in relation to the US intelligence community's use of missionaries as a tool of PSYOPs in foreign countries. But would the US intelligence community and their wealthy backers stop beyond our borders, or did certain strands of fringe fundamentalism that have had a major influence on the Christian Right provide appealing cover for domestic agendas that would not have otherwise have had popular support in this nation? Consider, for instance, the shocking influence Christian Reconstructionist and Dominionists have had on mainstream congregations.

"You may not have heard of Reconstructionists such as R.J. Rushdoony or David Chilton or Gary North. But individually and together they have influenced more contemporary American minds than Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, and Howard Zinn combined. Christian Reconstructionism and Dominionism are by no means the dominant strains of fundamentalism these days, nor have they ever been. But since the 1970s, through hundreds of books and college classes, the doctrine of Reconstructionism has come to permeate not only the religious right but mainstream churches as well, through demonstrative Charismatic movements such as Pentecostalism... Pentecostals lined up behind Christian media mogul Pat Robertson in the 1970s and 1980s, making him rich and powerful. In return, he gave them the power and confidence to launch emotionally and politically charged movements such as the effort to overturn Roe v. Wade...

"This push toward a theocracy and the infiltration of mainstream Protestantism by religious extremists was one of the biggest underreported political stories of the second half of the twentieth century. Religious reporters all but ran from it, partly because they must please all the churches they cover. But many of them didn't even see it happening. Yet thousands of mainstream Methodist, Presbyterian, and other Protestant churches were pushed inexorably rightward, often without even realizing it."
(Deer Hunting With Jesus, Joe Bageant, pgs. 167-168)

The effects of these ideologies on the US populace has been great. On the one hand, they have provided a ready justification for US imperialism: It is the duty of America, as a Christian nation, to combat the forces of godless communism and Islam the world over, and to protect Christian communities abroad. What's more, various 'End Times' sects are obsessed with backing the nation of Israel, which they see as essential to fulfilling Biblical prophecy. On the other hand, these ideologies have also provided a justification for the growing gap between rich and poor, most notably the 'Prosperity movement.' The wealthy are wealthy because God has deemed it so while the poor are poor because they are riddled with sin. To combat social injustice is pointless with the End Times upon us... What matters is salvation, not higher standards of living. That the poor are poor and the rich are rich is due to vast corruption in our economic and political systems never really enters into the equation.

Needless to say, such ideologies have proved to be extremely useful to Scaife and his ilk. It then begs the question, was the rise of the Christian Right in the 1970s a natural phenomenon or was it carefully managed by the US intelligence community?  Daniel Hopsicker, the author Barry and the Boys (widely considered to be the best account of CIA drug smuggler Barry Seal), has alleged that this is very much the case and the Scaife was at the forefront. In an article that first appeared in Drug Money Times, and which is reprinted here, Hopsicker recounted a meeting he had with a human known as Pat Matrisciana, who produced and directed the notorious Clinton Chronicles (more on this in just a moment) in 1994 with the financial assistance of Scaife. During this meeting Hopsicker alleges that Matrisciana revealed to him that he was a CIA asset and that he had been working to infiltrate grassroots Christan movements since the mid-1960s. Specifically, Hopsicker quotes Matrisciana as saying:

"I was 'detailed' to Berkley in 1965, to establish a countervailing force to Mario Savio's Free Speech Movement. While there I founded the Campus Crusade for Christ... I invented Jesus freaks."

Matrisciana

Matrisciana's alleged statement is a bit problematic. For one, Campus Crusade for Christ was not founded in 1965. In fact, it had already been operating since 1951, 14 years earlier than the date Matrisciana gives. Further, Bill Bright is widely credited as the founder and it does not seem as though Campus Crusade was widely active at Berkley until 1967 when Bright launched "Revolution Now," which was intended as a counter to the anti-Vietnam movement on the campus. On the flip side of the coin, Campus Crusade has employed tactics with much overlap in the intelligence world, most notably its use of 'revolutionary cells' to control followers.

"...Bright developed the concept of 'spiritual multiplication' using 'Christian cells.' The idea was based on the symbol of the triangle: two Christian students write their names on two sides of a triangle and on the third side they write the name of an unsaved friend for whom they pray and witness. Once the new person joins the triangle, the 'cell' splits into two more triangles in search of a third side. It was an organizational strategy intended to mimic (and defeat) Bright's concept of how communists organize."
(Spiritual Warfare, Sara Diamond, pg. 51)

Bill Bright, Campus Crusade for Christ founder

This technique would be taken to even more draconian lengths by the Shepherding movement in the 1970s and 1980s. As for Matrisciana, while I've found nothing to confirm his claims, he would hardly be the first member of Campus Crusade with alleged ties to the CIA. Consider Jimmy Hassan, the former director of Campus Crusade in Nicaragua:

"Jimmy Hassan, former director of Campus Crusade for Christ in Nicaragua from 1982 until 1985, is the archetype of the persecuted Nicaraguan Christian. He and a number of his staff were arrested on October 31, 1985, following a meeting with IRD representatives in Managua. Long suspected of working with the CIA, he was accused of fomenting resistance to Nicaragua's war-time draft, operating an illegal printing press and entering the country numerous times with large, undeclared sums of cash from the United States. Hassan was detained for several hours and, following his release, fled to the United States."
(ibid, pg. 154)

So, while Matrisciana's alleged claims are a bit suspect, it would hardly be a surprise if Campus Crusade had been recruited/infiltrated by the CIA. It would provide the Agency with effective cover to deploy their own into zones of interest (i.e. Nicaragua in the mid-1980s). And of course the possibilities for domestic operations are endless.

Before leaving Matrisciana I simply must address his major claim to fame, the after mentioned Clinton expose' dubbed The Clinton Chronicles. It was from this infamous film that Richard Mellon Scaife would briefly come to public light before slithering back into the shadows. Perhaps he wanted to be sure he received credit for one of the most striking public displays of PSYOPs in recent years.

"In the first case, the anti-Clinton lobby had worked itself into a frenzy with something called 'The Clinton Chronicles.' Financed by Scaife, this was an 'expose' of the Clinton mafia and its evil machinations --including murder --over the years. As mentioned before, the source material for the Chronicles was rather flimsy, largely based as it was on the 'revelations' of a 'disgruntled former employee,' Larry Nichols. Nichols had been fired from his state government post in Arkansas because he had been using the office facilities to raise funds for... the Contras. Embittered over what he perceived as his cavalier treatment by the governor --Bill Clinton --he became an easy mark for the intrepid private investigators hired by Richard Scaife...

"Nichols began spinning tales of drug-running in Arkansas, of womanizing politicians, gun deals, and assorted Contra-related derring-do. He became the George Adamski of the Clinton administration: claiming he had been aboard the spacecraft and had seen evil aliens at work, and was only to happy to go public with what he knew (or could invent).

"In a bizarre twist, however, the core of the Arkansas revelations is the infamous Mena episode. A small town in Arkansas with an airstrip, it was used by the CIA to transport guns and drugs between Latin America and the United States as part of the Contra operation. In other words, it was the legacy of the Reagen-Bush administrations and had nothing to do with Governor Clinton; indeed, as a 'black op,' it was probably completely unknown to the Governor in the first place."
(Sinister Forces Book II, Peter Levenda, pg. 325)

Levenda's liberal bias shines through clearly in the above paragraphs. Both Hopsicker and Terry Reed, a pilot and friend of Barry Seal who claims to have been involved in the Mena operation, have both asserted the Clinton was well aware of the activities taking place in Mena and there ties to the Iran-Contra affair.

Terry Reed's book on Mena

The implications of this are startling. It confirms that not only was the CIA involved in foreign military adventures without authorization from Congress but that the Company had become major drug traffickers in the process. It also reveals that every US President from 1980 --Ronald Reagen, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton --were aware of this state of affairs if not actively involved. And it was all revealed by Richard Mellon Scaife, a man with numerous ties to the US intelligence community and who had spent vast sums of money to spur the Reagen revolution. And then, just as suddenly as these revelations were made, they disappeared from the national debate only to be replaced by one faux sex scandal involving Clinton after the other. In an after mentioned article Hopsicker writes:

"Take the controversy swirling for years around Mena, Arkansas, for example: reporter Murray Waas detailed the Scaife connection to this oldest and darkest Clinton conspiracy theory of them all, about an airport in Arkansas from which clandestine flights carried -- according to investigators -- guns to the Contras and cocaine back into the United States. 

"The rap on Clinton is that he turned 'a blind eye' to this illegal, CIA-linked operation. Don’t you love it? A 'blind eye,' a metaphor churned out, no doubt, by the same press flack for the elite deviant home team who wrote the line about our boys having just been 'looking the other way.'

"The truth is, ‘our boys’ were and are knee-deep in cash. Narco-cash. DrugMoney.

"And among this number can be included William Jefferson Clinton, his friend Dan Lasater, Barry Seal, as well as such Republican luminaries as Oliver North, Donald Gregg, and George Herbert Walker Bush.

"The only explanation that explains the abrupt Republican course change last December is a desire to protect their own. And, quite possibly, to keep the drug money rolling into the coffers."

Actually, there's another explanation, one with far more unsettling implications. When the Clinton scandals began to break in the early 1990s the American public was confronted with some of the darkest secrets in our recent national history... Secrets that led all the way up to the President of the United States. Then, just as suddenly as these secrets were revealed, the national debate shifted to the Clinton's fondness for oral sex.

And the American public was not the least bit concerned with this shift. Indeed, the Clinton sex scandals seemed to galvanize the right far more than drug smuggling allegations had managed to. Despite compelling evidence that the nation had been run by men knee deep in narco-terorrism for years few Americans seem to have been able to accept the implications of Mena. But they were absolutely outraged at the prospect of the President receiving a blow job from someone other than his wife in the oval office. If this is not a sign of the effects of CIA PSYOPs in fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity, then I don't know what is.

Taken in this context, I can't help but wonder if the various Clinton scandals that played out in the national press in the 1990s were not some kind of PSYOP to gage the public's reaction to criminal allegations versus moral transgressions. Given the total unwillingness of the vast majority of Americans to demand answers for what transpired in Mena and other areas associated with Iran-Contra perhaps then the public response to 9/11 and the blatant criminal regime that was Bush II's presidency should not come as much of a surprise. Our leaders all but rubbed their criminality in our collective face and yet we, as a nation, displayed no real outrage. If ever there was a sign that the public was ready to be sheared, this was certainly it.

The New Left, and liberalism in general, had been widely discredited in the public consciousness due to the violence and radicalism that emerged in the late 1960s. Of course, these developments were likely aided by the infiltration efforts of various US intelligence agency. Indeed, Scaife's cousin, William 'Mr. Billy' Mellon Hitchcock, may well have been involved in such an operation.

With liberal grassroots movements in decline, Scaife set out to create a conservative counterpart. Using fundamentalist Christianity, he was able to condition the American working class to lower their standards --both economic and moral --so that the feudalistic economic policies of his ancestor, Andrew Mellon, could be implemented under the guise of 'Reagenomics,' which were nothing but Mellonomics in all but name. Further, Christian propaganda was used to rationalize US imperialism and focus the efforts of right wing grassroots movements on pseudo-scandals while unrestrained corruption at the highest levels of power was barely hidden. Indeed, the public is increasingly unable to even believe that such corruption is possible among elected officials.

Thus, the revolution Richard Mellon Scaife and his family had begun in the 1960s has come full circle.