Friday, February 27, 2009

Tim Geithner's dad, Barack Obama's mom and the CIA

Cinie has uncovered a lovely bit of conspiratology. I'm not sure what it all means; maybe nothing, or maybe much. Ponder:
Did you know that Turbo Tax Timothy Geithner, tax cheat (TTTG, tc) is the son of Peter Geithner, former Ford Foundation head of the Indonesian region’s microfinance program, which formerly employed one S. Ann Sutoro, Program Director, and Mother of the Obamessiah? Betcha didn’t.
No, Cinie, I didn't. Here's what I did know. Forgive the self-quotation, but these key paragraphs should help newcomers get up to speed on an important, but neglected, aspect of history:
Ann spent most of her time in Indonesia, where she was married to an executive with the American Mobil corporation. The CIA had, of course, played a key role in Indonesia's history. At least one Agency veteran of the time has said that "the CIA took it upon themselves to make, not just to enact, policy in this area." (Also see here and here.)

To make a long and very gruesome story far too short: Back in the 1960s, two oil companies linked with the Rockefeller dynasty -- Stanvac and Caltex -- felt that their investments in Indonesia were threatened by President Sukarno, who was considered soft on Communism. Stanvac, for our purposes, is simply another name for Mobil.

To protect American business interests, the CIA engineered a coup in Indonesia in the 1965-67 period, which led to one of the most appalling episodes of mass murder in history. Over 500,000 people died in the resultant bloodbath, which ended with the installation of a CIA puppet named Suharto.

Lolo Sotero, Barack Obama's stepfather, was the key liaison between Mobil/Stanvac and the Suharto regime.

These events may now seem "long ago and far away" to many modern Democratic voters. But the situation was quite different in 1967, when Ann Dunham married Lolo Soetoro. An active leftist -- which Ann Dunham supposedly was -- with an interest in international affairs would have known all about the bloodbath. It was in the newspapers. Any true student radical would have refused to eat lunch with a Suharto/Mobil functionary.

And yet she married the man.
How does the Ford Foundation fit in? Well, if you fire up Google -- or better still, head into a university library -- you'll see plenty of evidence that the CIA and the FF were likethis during the period when Timmy's dad and Barry's mom took such a keen interest in Indonesia. Given the wealth of available material, I hate to cite Wikipedia -- but if you want a quick summary, you can do worse than to run your eyeballs over the following:
The former Binghamton University professor of sociology, James Petras, and other critics accuse the Foundation of being a front organization for the CIA. Petras names the exchange of high-ranking personnel between the CIA and the Foundation, Ford Foundation's big donations to the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom, the former Foundation president Richard Bissell's relationship with DCI Allen Dulles and involvement with the Marshall Plan during the 1950s, among other things. According to Petras, the Ford Foundation funds "anti-leftist human rights groups which focus on attacking human rights violations of U.S. adversaries".

Another American academic, Joan Roelofs, in Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (State University of New York Press, 2003) argues that Ford and similar foundations play a key role in co-opting opposition movements: "While dissent from ruling class ideas is labeled 'extremism' and is isolated, individual dissenters may be welcomed and transformed. Indeed, ruling class hegemony is more durable if it is not rigid and narrow, but is able dynamically to incorporate emergent trends." She reports that John J. McCloy, while chairman of the Foundation's board of trustees from 1958 to 1965, "...thought of the Foundation as a quasi-extension of the U.S. government. It was his habit, for instance, to drop by the National Security Council (NSC) in Washington every couple of months and casually ask whether there were any overseas projects the NSC would like to see funded." Roelofs also charges that the Ford Foundation financed counter-insurgency programs in Indonesia and other countries.
Now, instead of bitching about the inclusion of a quote from Wikipedia, why don't you do something useful -- like, y'know, double-checking the information? While you're at it, consider looking into the very interesting backgrounds of John J. McCloy and Richard Bissell...

If you want a much more extensive history of the Ford Foundation, the CIA and the ghastly Indonesian coup, read David Ransom's piece here. Bottom line:
But it is the foreign-investment plan that is the payoff of Ford's twenty-year strategy in Indonesia and the pot of gold that the Ford modernizers -- both American and Indonesian -- are paid to protect. The nineteenth-century Colonial Dutch strategy built an agricultural export economy. The Americans are interested primarily in resources, mainly mineral.
But the real prize is oil...
Isn't it always...?

You may also want to visit here, where you'll learn why many left-leaning journals rarely discuss the relationship between the FF and the CIA. The Ford Foundation has tossed a fair chunk of money at the left-wing media. That loot may explain why the old left media (Z magazine, The Nation, and so forth) tended to avoid CIA stories.

Let's get back to Cinie's piece. She quotes from a resume for Timmy's dad.
Peter F. Geithner is an advisor to the Asia Center at Harvard University and a consultant to the Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium, Rockefeller Foundation, Sasakawa Peace Foundation, and other organizations...
The last-mentioned Foundation is not without interest. Homework assignment: Look up Roichi Sasakawa and his links to fascism, the Yakuza and Reverend Moon.
Prior to joining The Ford Foundation, Mr. Geithner served with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Washington, D.C.
AID...? The very mention of those initials is enough to make any old spook-watcher break into fits of Heath-Ledger-as-the-Joker laughter: Ha. Ha. HA. Heh. Heh. Ha ha ha. Ha.

Did Papa Giethner know the Mother of the Blessed One during their time together in Indonesia? Did little Barry and little Timmy play together? This has yet to be established, although the likelihood seems high, considering the natures of Lolo's job, her job, and Peter's job. Still, you may want to heed these words from Cinie...
Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Dunham met her second husband, Lolo Sotoero, at the East West Center on the University of Hawaii Campus. Ann Dunham had met her son’s father, Barack Obama, Sr., on the same campus years earlier, that time in a Russian language class. She seems to have had a thing for men who work for oil companies, too, since ObaOne worked for Shell and Lolo worked for Mobil.
By the way, Cinie links to this earlier post on Cannonfire (referenced above), of which I'm rather proud: Spies, lies, Barry and his mom. That piece probably would have received a great deal of attention in lefty circles if Barack Obama were a white Republican. But he's neither, which means that the evidence I present will never be considered sufficient, and the questions I raise will always be ignored.

Nevertheless, if you have a bold streak and an open mind, check it out. And if you know what Barry and his mom were getting up to in Pakistan, please share the information with the rest of the class.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bill Clinton was said by three biographers to have been recruited by the Agency while at Georgetown. At least one of them referred to having an eyewitness to his '201' (government personnel) file.

Others have claimed something similar about Hillary Clinton (but no mainstream biographers, to my knowledge, and without the claim of anyone having seen documentary evidence).

Assuming readers here liked the job President Clinton did, perhaps such a suggested pedigree for Obama is not necessarily a bad thing.

One thing it might explain would be the meteoric rise of Obama from junior senator to president status, just as it appears Clinton had powerful patrons boosting his youthful rise to national prominence and the Oval Office.

While I and others may decry the Agency and its work, there is an argument that at least it represents the old school power structure, as opposed to the modern heist of government many think the neo-con faction performed. So it might represent a return to normalcy, relative to the monstrous policies of the previous 8 years.

Somehow, I imagine you disagree (haha!)

If, on the other hand, this would be a reason we have the current SecTreasury Geithner in place, then perhaps it's indeed a bad thing.

XI

Anonymous said...

Who the heck knows what it all means? The whole point is to investigate a given issue and try to answer the relevant questions that arise. I'm not an investigative reporter, by any means, but when things that, to my mind, deserve a little scrutiny, go completely under the radar, I want to know why. If it's nothing, report it, and tell me it's nothing, and why and how you caqme to that conclusion. But when information that seems far more relevant and interesting than whether or not the Obamas get a dog is swept under the rug without mention, I tend to take it upon myself to look into it. And I appreciate other bloggers who feel the same way, and do the same thing, whether we reach the same conclusions, or even investigate the same issues, or not.

Anne said...

Karl Rove's and Scooter's postion about their outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame is it was " no big deal since everyone knew " That seems to sugest that after a certain level up, everyone is CIA and everyone knows it.

Of course in typical Bush apparatus fashion, the 70 people world wide who worked for Plame, getting outed and probably killed, wasn't considered a big deal either.

Prem said...

Wow! What a great "connect the dots" theory/story. All of these so-called "dots" perhaps contribute to the confusion that is BHO and his so-called policies. When I've read about his Communist/socialist affiliations, it seems like he would like to take our country more toward socialism, but then with all these CIA/AID/Wall Street affiliations, is he taking us more toward more mega international corporate control. And then throw in his Muslim/Pakistani connections, he seems like he politically idealogically confused? Thanks for this---calls for more research, eh?

Anne said...

I want to thank Cinie and Joe for looking into this .

The fact Obama's step father was an oil man should have set off bells in my head and it didn't...and I look with a cynical eye on this crowd.

But you know what Lily Tomlin says, "no matter how cynical I get, I can't keep up"....so thanks for the help! No one person can keep an eye on all the tenticles.

Anonymous said...

Cryptome has an Obama/CIA post up from Daniel Brandt. He essentially covers what you do but adds a bit about Business International which has been identified as a cover organization for the CIA (he has a link to a pdf of a New York Times article where the founder's son admits they provided cover to four CIA employees between 1955 and 1960.) He points out that after graduating from Columbia Obama got a job with that outfit.

Anonymous said...

Yes, Cennie, I did know about this, but you couldn't get a word in edgewise during the election. And not that the other "choices" were any better.

We just barely survived 8 years of our country being used for people's ambitions overseas, and now we've got a new set. Or maybe not so new. You know, I've been reading about Kissinger's WH and am convinced that he was actually president. He did all the behind the scenes negotiating with the Chinese via Pakistan. Now I find out AIG was also CIA and in Asia before here - well, not here really. They just take money from us and do a nice business helping corporations take money offshore. Now we're bailing THEM out. And Obama show up to help. Nice. Wrap me in tinfoil. I wish I was nuts. Unfortunately all the CTs have a lot of explanatory value.

rmstock said...

The FF Ford Foundation is a socialist wacko foundation, which are basicly hard-core communists in sheeps clothing. The CIA has not much todo with these types :

http://crashrecovery.org/fagan/the-kgb-and-the-united-states-1s.jpg

The shit really started to hit the fan when the NSA was started. It turns out that the NSA was a KGB run operation from the day of its inception. Checkout NORDEX Corp and findout how James Forrestal, United States Secretary of the Navy and the first United States Secretary of Defense died.

Anonymous said...

To perhaps see more about how infiltrated the MSM is, check out Minnesota's James A Johnson, power broker to the DNC elite and Obama supporter for President BEFORE the man was even a Junior Senator. Johnson is all over the place with Fannie Mae and diversion of 200 million, Countrywide Savings and VIP loans....he is an Exec. with Gannett, one of the largest news agencies in the country.

Also check out the most recent plan for biotech - which has Ag Advisors with Perseus-Soros, which is good old George Soros, Richard Holbrooke, James A. Johnson, Tom Daschle...behind the scenes while frontman G. Steven Burrill convinces Minnesotan's that he's willing to invest 1 billion dollars in the venture without having any notion as to what it is they are building and who will be inhabiting the space. (Uh-huh) This connects to Tower Investments, which has Rose Law Firm as a Strategic Partner. In 2001 we found a money laundering operation with organized crime/CIA links in the region. Same MO. DOJ cleaned up the small timers and gave the big boys a pass. USAID, IMF, World Bank connecto's in spades with this new "biotech onion" set to lay the groundwork for the worlds largest biotech research corridor. Russia meets Wouter Basson and Porton Down via U of M's Friends of Bilderberger connections.

All pals of President Obama. Close pals....Johnson was vetting VP candidates.

Al said...

Interesting post and follow up comments too. It's becoming more apparent that Obama didn't simply rise up out of seemingly nowhere to become "the most powerful man in the world". Wouldn't find it surprising if he is/has been an intelligence community asset all along.

Clifford Shack said...

TAPI

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this post. What Obamas mother was doing in Indonesia as the -practically cannibalistic right wing fascist - Suharto regime was mopping up its left-populist adversaries has always been troubling. Those who insist on believing Obama is "a socialist" or "a communist" are frankly, not paying attention to reality. Obama is the dark lord of globalism, that neoliberal plot to rule the world (and all of us in it) with an iron hand on behalf of American based finance capital and a few of its crony/captive industries. Obama has no other motivations or goals, including any affinity at all for religion -any religion - that has been fictitiously attributed to him.

Phil Ebersole said...

Here's an up-to-date link for the David Ransom article on Indonesia

http://www.namebase.org/campus/indo.html