May 17, 1999

TO: FRONTLINE, Proposal for a Series

SUBJECT : ECONOMIC SMART BOMBING

FROM : richard manning

Dear Frontline,

Now that you've attempted to explain how America handles perceived threats by bombing wherever the then current 'devil' lives or works - whether Milosevic, Hussein, bin Laden, Noriega, or those other 'enemies' we periodically make use of - maybe now is the time to enlighten the US public into a substantial understanding of the major cause creating these enemies who so hate US. While, concurrently, teaching the public about the various types of smart bombs we use both to create enemies in the first place and, later, to discipline when as often happens that enemy evolves into an American bashing monster.

That above noted major cause : the American government's long-term monetary and trade policies using delayed action economic Smart Bombs exploiting foreign peoples and resources.

To clarify and exemplify these policies, I attach an article concerning a current major case wherein our policies have created a nation of people coming to disrespect, often actually detesting, the United States (not only the elite politicians on stage for us) more and more each day : Korea.

Frontline may help to explore Korea, or a number of other tinder boxes (of violence), where US may well be soon bombing or invading. Attacking, of course, only once finding a necessity, for example : to stop an external 'aggressors', or to offer 'humanitarian' help in a civil war, or to 'protect' from an internal communist 'plot' (as in Vietnam, Indonesia and Nicaragua), or to 'save' from threat against our version of 'democracy' or Free Market capitalism. Or, most likely in the current Korean implosion, to 'help' rescue the dictatorship from internal attacks by revolting "leftist" workers, or from fears of North Korea's superiority.

Starting with the Korea example, I recommend the following :

First Step : read the attached article, carefully; first the words and then once more between the historical lines of the military dictatorship (NOT democracy) we long ago installed and ever since supported in South Korea.

Second Step : recall the growth conditions the IMF, WB, US Treasury - all run by the same corporate elite oligarchs - years ago facilitated for the corrupt Korean military corporate rulers to push upon the people so to create a rabid bubbling economy. Extreme growth conditions which shortly caused the bubble to burst, allowing these US monetary agencies to then impose strict bailout conditions; which then allowed them to create bargain basement sale's conditions for corporate assets.

Third Step : Now extrapolate that same Korean scenario with those very same conditions onto the post World War II history of a number of other countries who have also been debilitated down to fiscal bankruptcy by those same economic and monetary policies the US corruptly promoted and stuffed into its Korean baby.

Results : will be numerous examples of Third World countries now invariably in dire straits. Here and now, I shall offer you only the three most blatant and flagrant examples where these policies had the same effects as in Korea : Mexico, Indonesia and Brazil. Three countries where the US cooperated with, and actively promoted, the corrupt local Mafia type commercial 'families' in order to create bubble economies. Economies, not surprisingly, going, or gone, down a similar debilitated fiscal and degraded social path as did Korea.

But, let's ask, what actually happened in these three cases?

All three countries were maneuvered by US into maintaining feudal labor policies, while at the same time Offshore US controlled corporations macromanage local conglomerates asset stripping rich natural resources - egregiously so in Indonesia and Brazil. When these robberies of cheapened labor and natural resources continued long enough to create internal social and monetary conditions so negative to become public scandals - when the hyped up national 'books' could no longer be further cooked, never mind balanced - Western financial speculators then, a) raped the currencies, b) further exploded the purposefully inflated debt, and c) promoted vast capital flight to Offshore locations, and into the US. These actions shortly drove down company stocks to such deflated levels against the US dollar that they were easily bought up by merchant banking interests, or taken under control through mergers, in "dime on the dollar" type deals.

Thus, America came to exert commanding control over the finances and markets of all three of the above countries, plus the Korean model as summarized in the attached article. In all four countries, indigenous labor and natural resources are now sold at bargain basement prices, via debased foreign exchange rates, merely to begin paying back the hundreds of billions of inflated $$$,$$$,$$$ denominated long-term debt owed US. This process, bottom line, is what keeps US transnationals in rich Offshore profiteering pleasures. Simultaneously keeping the US public fat-ally happy, satiated from real politics with cheap consumer toys. All the while wondering and surprised at why Americans, quite uniquely, have so many foreign enemies.

Ramifications : What is so well hidden from the US public is the final extrapolation : that eventually the above four countries, and other smaller ones, must explode, one way or another, in anger against these US economic Smart Bomb policies. We shall, then, once more have to step in militarily to 'protect' our economic interests, by sending aggressive 'help' to our corrupt client regimes. We traditionally try to avoid such explosions by first selling our friends the police and military training and equipment meant to suppress their people's developing economic desperation and anger. But if that does not work and the peoples' anger turns really serious, as it variously did in most of Central America and the Caribbean, US corporate interests can be severely threatened.

The resulting People Explosions then may warrant not another PR form of "Freedom Fighters", or "Vietnamization", but rather our latest form of violent intimidation : State-of-the-Art Murder from Heaven. America's fast food equivalent of 'soldier safe' Smart Bombs, which produces, like Vietnamization, the "Civilianization" of foreign body bags. Since Vietnam foreign dead are far better received by silent majority Americans than home grown body bags : still the same, though, is that the violence is perpetrated strictly to achieve the same old ends, power game economic hegemony.

Media Interest : Our newest interventions have been managed, since Vietnam, as exemplified by the Panama, Grenada and Gulf War invasions : wherein no media was permitted the freedom to interview, roam around, talk or report on the true immediate causes and actual victims of our non-declared wars (in the Gulf where, for shameful example, we had to smart bomb to death well over 200,000 Arab soldiers, as they killed slightly over 100 American soldiers). The Oligarchs running Washington quite obviously learned the negative economic lesson from freedom of the press in Vietnam, where the billion dollar a week war became unpopular with the public because a few honest Journalists reported the bloody truths resulting from our massive, un-smart and greedy, invasions and bombing.

Suggestion : FRONTLINE could be truly prescient, while educating the public. In exploring and reporting on the above examples, and perhaps similar tinder boxes, Frontline will have the story behind the causes BEFORE the violence begins. As violence must whenever people become sufficiently frustrated from being degraded and bullied so long. Equally so whether the victims are individuals in high school or a people suffering under foreign imposed conditions debasing their country and their family, degradation causes explosions, either emotionally or rationally based. History shows that when an oppressor uses economic smart bombs causing fiscal and then moral corruption, or high explosive smart bombs causing physical corruption, the victims invariably revolt against the perceived oppressor.

The American people truly NEED to be informed - as originally noted in my previous comments you appreciated - of the economic facts behind the presence of our intelligence and military forces in over one hundred and forty overseas locations. As we now seek to expand this shadowy presence throughout the Balkans, further enveloping our Free Market degraded Russia, said 'presence' now regularly causes violence and aggression in more and more regions. Although in Yugoslavia the economic smart bomb policies will be targeted after the present War, the violence and aggression we ferment are usually preceded by the above described, uniquely post-modern, monetary penetration and economic exploitation policies. As the USA leads its allies perpetrating economic hegemony over weaker peoples.

Cordially yours.

richard manning

NB: 1. The above aspect of US economic foreign policy is a major theme within a historical novel, memoir, centering on the US Indochina invasions, 1945 to 1985, which I now have in penultimate rewriting.

2. I have worked overseas for more than 25 years on assignments directly related to this subject matter, including assignments for the International Herald Tribune, Paris, and Central Television, ITV, London.

3. If you are interested, I have contacts with reputable former BBC and ITV reporters who could cooperate with me in an offer to produce a series based on the above history - centering, probably, from the Korea paradigm.

4. Attaching my only CV since early 1970s - written 1994 at request of a Japanese University seeking languages instructor. Accurate but droll.