JFK, Wall Street, Neocolonialism, and Peace
Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2014 9:39 am
I just finished reading Donald Gibson's Battling Wall Street (1994) yesterday. I found some extended excerpts (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/02/1 ... ncy-Part-1 and http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/02/1 ... ncy-Part-2) after listening to an interview with Webster Tarpley (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ropqyzCx9sA), which lead me to getting the book through an inter-library loan. (The book is long out of print, though I think a new edition will be out soon.) Rather than focus on the assassination, Gibson restricts his book to the subject of Kennedy's national and international policies for economic development, and the opposition he encountered from Wall Street financial interests, followed by how his efforts to encourage long-term industrial investments and tax breaks in the U.S. and for aid to underdeveloped nations were canceled--especially by IMF-style mandated austerity to support interest payments to Western finance.
Combining this book with the revelations in James Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He died and Why it Matters (talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srstQVfVNEM and review: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/01/1 ... NSPEAKABLE), which details some of Kennedy's back-channel dialogs with Khrushchev (circumventing his own administration by using the Pope) to end the nuclear arms race and achieve peace, has deepened my appreciation of JFK and contemplation of what sort of world might exist had his ideas (e.g., Alliance for Progress) been carried forth over the last 50 years. (BTW, one can ignore the assassination half of this book and still be impressed with the information uncovered through recently declassified government documents.)
I do not believe we will ever have a definitive answer for JFK's assassination--pick Oswald alone, Mob, CIA, LBJ, Cubans, etc., etc. After 50 years of investigation and speculation about the assassination, it seems more important to me to understand how "everything changed" and how the world got to where we are now. I guess I should now put on my flame-retardant suit.
Combining this book with the revelations in James Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He died and Why it Matters (talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srstQVfVNEM and review: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/01/1 ... NSPEAKABLE), which details some of Kennedy's back-channel dialogs with Khrushchev (circumventing his own administration by using the Pope) to end the nuclear arms race and achieve peace, has deepened my appreciation of JFK and contemplation of what sort of world might exist had his ideas (e.g., Alliance for Progress) been carried forth over the last 50 years. (BTW, one can ignore the assassination half of this book and still be impressed with the information uncovered through recently declassified government documents.)
I do not believe we will ever have a definitive answer for JFK's assassination--pick Oswald alone, Mob, CIA, LBJ, Cubans, etc., etc. After 50 years of investigation and speculation about the assassination, it seems more important to me to understand how "everything changed" and how the world got to where we are now. I guess I should now put on my flame-retardant suit.