The Republican Crime Club:FBI investigates Rep. Curt Weldon

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department is investigating whether Republican Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania traded his political influence for lucrative lobbying and consulting contracts for his daughter, according to sources with direct knowledge of the inquiry.

The FBI, which opened an investigation in recent months, has formally referred the matter to the department's Public Integrity Section for additional scrutiny. At issue are Weldon's efforts between 2002 and 2004 to aid two Russian companies and two Serbian brothers with ties to strongman Slobodan Milosevic, a federal law enforcement official said.

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Strongman Sloboan Milosevic? Wow. They must mean genocidal war criminal.

Prior to the late 1980s, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia-a nation built of six loosely affiliated republics, two autonomous provinces, 25 separate ethnic groups, and a multitude of religions-was an example of a cooperative struggle towards unity. The government of Yugoslavia shared a collective presidency composed of one representative from each of the republics, with the objective of establishing a balance between the leadership of the regional and national interests. Its economy, the system which has come to be known as "self-management," reached its most developed form in the Law of Associated Labor of 1976, under which the means of production and other major resources are not regarded as state property (as in the Soviet Union) but as social property. From this basis of democratic socialism, Yugoslavia was making a bold attempt to push diversity and progress forward.

Among its achievements were a literacy rate that had gone from 55 percent in 1953 to 90 percent in 1986, an infant mortality rate that dropped from 116.5 per 1,000 births to 27.1 per 1,000 births over the same period, free medical coverage, free education, and an ever-growing national identity that crossed traditional boundaries. According to the 1992 Encyclopedia Britannica, "Since World War II, largely in Serbo-Croatian speaking areas, there has been the gradual emergence of a sizable section of the population who prefer to describe themselves as 'Yugoslavs." It also notes, "their numbers are growing steadily, more as a result of ethnically-mixed marriages than because of high natural increase."

The quotations above describe a vastly different Yugoslavia than the one later depicted by NATO and allied leaders. As early as 1984, the Reagan Administration produced a classified National Security Decision Directive (NSDD 133), entitled "United States Policy Toward Yugoslavia," calling for a "quiet revolution" and then integration into a neoliberal free-market economy. By 1989, Yugoslavia had undergone a drastic shift. Needing to stabilize its economy, it borrowed heavily from creditors including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. A western economic recession lead to an interest-driven spiral of debt, and the IMF demanded "restructuring," including massive cuts in social spending, forced privatization, and wage freezes. In the one-year span of 1989-1990 an estimated 600,000 Yugoslavian workers were laid off due to over 1,000 company bankruptcies.

Michel Chossudovsky provides data that shows how 6.1 percent GDP growth in the 1960s and 1970s became a 7.5 percent decline by 1990, with real wages falling 41 percent. In 1991, the GDP fell 15 percent further, while industrial output shrank by 21 percent. The World Bank stated that an additional 2,435 companies were to be liquidated; "their 1.3 million workers - half the remaining industrial work force - were considered redundant," states Chossudovsky. "The IMF-induced budgetary crisis created an economic fait accompli that paved the way for Croatia's and Slovenia's formal secession in June [251 1991."8 Two days later, Bosnia and Macedonia followed. Wanting to remain a united federation, Serbia and Montenegro refused the Western ideals of capitalism and on June 27, 1991, the civil war of the Republics of Yugoslavia began.

WESTERN INTERESTS IN THE BALKANS

Western economic and military interests set the stage for the civil war that peaked with NATO air strikes on Serbian Yugoslavia. Since the weakening and collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. had been hungrily eyeing an estimated $5 trillion in vast oil reserves in the Caspian Sea. In addition Yugoslavia held valuable resources in the Trepca mines complex in the Balkans-gold, lead, silver, zinc, and coal that was worth in excess of $5 billion. After the war, NATO used trumped-up reports of mass graves and crematories at Trepca in order to take over the mines although no evidence was ever brought forward to prove NATO's accusations. The mines, which were once run by Kosovo with the revenue reinvested in its economy, continue to be controlled under NATO forces by private corporations. The profits from these resources are now denied to the people of Kosovo.

After the destruction of Yugoslavia, the U.S. gained control over the Albanian-Macedonian-Bulgarian Oil pipeline (AMBO), which has become their gateway to the Caspian Sea. AMBO Pipeline Corporation, based in New York, has exclusive rights to the development of the project and is expected to begin construction in 2005 with completion in 2008.

These assets (oil and mineral resources) made Yugoslavia a golden fleece in the eyes of the West. When the U.S. "stick-and-carrot" approach to foreign policy failed to quell the "quiet revolution" so strongly desired and instead ended in civil war, the use of force became a necessity. The problem arose of how to do it within the bounds of international law. We needed a smoke screen. And the media was very effective in providing just that.