Seagrams

lethal but legal

gets your girl ready quicker, gets your jimmy thicker?!

malt liq can = 6 pack alc; owend record label for a while: gangsta booze plus guns, plus take risk kpfa 3/12/14 10 am

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AN 7 25 PROSECUTED HUMAN TRAFFIC AND EPSTEIN PAL gISANE

Firing of 'high-profile' prosecutor shows Trump 'is not thinking clearly': analysis

https://gregolear.substack.com/p/deconstructing-the-epstein-myth-what

...SK

Well, was looking at all of the criminals around Donald, and I had a head start with a piece of information that I had gotten in 2005—before there was even an imagination that this man would run for president. I think to the layman’s understanding, if you knew who Trump was, which people did, that he was political in any way, just maybe he had been and we learned that he had been.

In 2005, Trump had this new reality show with Mark Burnett. And so I had a circle of people that I knew. I’m a writer, screenwriter. So I knew folks in that circle with that man.

Okay. Meaning Burnett.

Yes, Burnett. And I had learned that Donald was in a tremendous amount of debt to some Russians. And it was threatening this new thing—this idea of him as this self-made, you know, billionaire, whatever, whatever the thing was, a successful businessman, because it was all about to crumble. And there’s been a tremendous amount of reporting since I learned that. Verifying all of that. So I had that information at the time, back in the day.

And so when he came down that escalator, I knew, I was like, “Oh no, that’s the guy that’s in debt to a bunch of Russian gangsters!” And so I started trying to figure out who those Russians may be. And then in doing that, I came across Jeffrey Epstein.

Okay, interesting. So Trump to the Russians to Epstein.

## Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Trump

Greg Olear

March 31, 2020

Yeah, well, organized crime—specifically Russian organized crime. And then trying to understand Donald and Fred, Fred’s empire, his father’s empire, which was built with the Genovese crime family. And then the building of Trump Tower in Manhattan that moved in—they had different territory as Fred would call it, as Donald has said on the record—that Manhattan wasn’t. According to his father, “That’s not our territory,” because it wasn’t, it was Gambino territory. For Donald Trump specifically to be able to build in Manhattan, develop in Manhattan, Fred arranged for, and Roy Cohn arranged for, the two crime families, the Gambinos and the Genovese to form what became known as a concrete cartel—all the five families were in there. And this was the bid-rigging over concrete contacts to develop in Manhattan. And it was called “the Donald Trump deal.” And so that was in the middle of it, for those U.S. crime families and the racket they were running, which is this very racket that Giuliani used to prosecute the five families. So…

Four of the five families.

Four of the five families. Castellanos was a holdout and then was killed, shot dead in the street. So that’s the history.

There’s way more than that. During that time, before the Russian mafia had really taken over New York—which it did; it rolled in in the late 80s, some of it even back to the 70s, but very specifically in the 80s and the 90s and just sort of rolled up a lot of the territories as their own. And they did it by laundering money through Donald’s casinos. There was a lot of ways that they did all of that. There was a very prominent Russian gangster named Ivankov, who had actually an office in Trump Tower in Manhattan, but he was ultimately caught, tipped off and caught by Andy McCabe’s team.

Like when you start learning about these characters, of what they were doing back in the day, both on the law enforcement side pursuing Russian organized crime and from the Russian organized crime side—the bosses and the key figures there were all in business in some fashion with Donald Trump.

Then in the mid early 2000s to like 2005, 2006, right around when I was hearing this stuff about him, what was happening was the Russians were wanting to keep using Trump to go internationally. So the properties: Trump Panama developing and Trump Toronto developing and Trump Georgia developing and all of these foreign developments, which we were watching. If you watch “The Apprentice,” it unfolds on “The Apprentice” as well. This sort of expansion of the Trump thing where he was just licensing his name to be put on these things, because he was really over-leveraged.

Like the one in Georgia, the country Georgia—the Trump Tower there, all they did was just stick a shovel in the ground, and a whole bunch of money was laundered. There’s Trump Baku, which, you know, there was quite a bit of reporting how that was probably a front for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Again, Iran and their corruption very closely tied in with Russian organized crime as well.

Right. Adam Davidson in the New Yorker.

So that’s the background. That’s why the Trump/Russia thing is not a hoax. Donald is the hoax. You know, he did. And there’s so much reporting and Trump, the company, Allen Weisselberg, all those people, they affirm this, they said, “Yeah, yeah, we took that money.” The problem with it is some of it was illegal, but a lot of it’s not illegal, right?

He couldn’t get a casino license in Australia, infamously. They would not give him a casino license because of his ties to organized crime, both U.S. organized crime and Russian organized crime.

So a major Five Eyes power decided that Trump couldn’t have a casino license because of his ties to organized crime—and specifically Russian organized crime. Let’s just underline that because it seems important. Australia is, as they say, a real country, you know—that is one of our strongest allies.

Right. Right.

So how you get to Jeffrey is, there was a time in the 80s where Donald was really having issues, and he was sort of over-leveraging himself. He was building in Atlantic City. He was doing these things and couldn’t get them funded. He always had a problem getting the money because legitimate banks would stop lending to him, which was the crisis he was facing in the early 2000s, mid-2000s. There was Deutsche Bank, but even Deutsche Bank was turning him down, so he had to go for this Russian money. You could get Russian money, you could get Chinese money, and the Chinese money hadn’t quite showed up yet. But the gangsters will invest in you. So the banks were difficult.

Now part of the stuff that made it hard to get finding from U.S. banks is because of what happened with him in the 80s with Bear Stearns. So there’s a guy that ran Bear Stearns.

(This is all the reporting done by Wayne Barrett. And I recommend everybody go read Wayne Barrett’s work on Donald and Fred Trump and that sort of “Trump Inc.” He did extraordinary work on that. He also did great work on Giuliani and showing what sort of a criminal and a fraud Giuliani was. And it still is, I guess.)

So Ace Greenberg ran Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns is the company that infamously went down in 2008 with all the credit-default swaps, all that kind of stuff that just crashed—you know, the Big Shorttype of thing.

But before that, they were a real player—Bear and Lehman and these other entities. Goldman Sachs. And so Donald had a very close relationship with Ace Greenberg. Ace Greenberg is the man whose daughter was Jeffrey Epstein’s student when Jeffrey Epstein was at the Dalton School. And Epstein did whatever he did at the Dalton School to leverage his just being a math teacher and tutor at this private school into working directly for Ace Greenberg.

So he went into the financial industry at Bear Stearns. And he didn’t come in as a low-level person and work his way up. He came in at a very senior level, and it caused a great sort of upset at Bear Stearns. Who is this guy? Where is he coming from? And why is Ace giving him this plum spot?

And he was handling private wealth management. And his big client that he had, that Ace gave him, was Edgar Bronfman, who’s Sam Bronfman’s son. Sam Bronfman, he established Seagrams, and he was Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano’s business partner during the bootlegging days. And Edgar Bronfman has a lot of ties to Russia as well, quite frankly. And it’s his daughters that were part of that NXIVM thing. That’s how people recognize that name, Bronfman.

He’s Canadian though, right? Sam Bronfman?

Yes, he was Canadian. So that was part of the bootlegging thing. Yeah.

But that was Jeffrey’s client, and he got into difficulties and troubles there at Bear Stearns with that particular client managing, you know, and he basically had to be fired. And Ace really resisted firing Jeffrey. And what I uncovered and discovered was that he didn’t fire him. He just moved him into Offshores. Jeffrey went into establishing offshore accounts and offshore money, sort of tax havens for Bear Stearns clients.

If you go into the Offshore Leaks database—which is where I found Jeffrey’s offshore accounts, some of them—you can see there are old Bear Stearns officers. In fact, Ace Greenberg’s partner at Bear Stearns is still connected and linked into those offshore accounts. So Epstein was very much doing that business, and he was doing that business for Bear Stearns right at the time that Bear Stearns was doing these wild, risky, money-backing things for Donald, for Donald developing his casino.

:{:{So thatis where I found him. And I’m like, “Who’s this Jeffrey Epstein, and what is this?” And then I started looking into Jeffrey Epstein, and I’m like, “My God, everybody’s some kind of sex-trafficking criminal.” He’s not the only one that was tied in with Donald’s business or his financial backing in some way that also was convicted for sex trafficking.}:

There’s another guy named Tevfik Arif, who was a big partner with Donald, who had that yacht with all the underage prostitutes and the trafficking that went on there. There’s a yacht, I think off of Turkey where they were finally caught, he was finally caught. So there’s the folks in Panama: his business partners in Panama were nailed for sex trafficking, international sex trafficking. And the people in Canada: there’s ties in there for his business partners in Trump Toronto and Canada, who were also Russian. The main partner there was the son-in-law of Semion Mogilevich’s business partner and consigliere—Semion Mogilevich being a great big Russian gangster.}:

And then there’s all the Craig Unger reporting on Mogilevich, that Donald was in fact laundering Mogilevich’s money himself. And that’s the man who originally compromised him. So that’s the money. It’s full of sex traffickers and it’s full of Russian gangsters.

So let’s underline again Semion Mogilevich. That’s an important connection because Semion Mogilevich, if I remember correctly, was at one point directly working with Robert Maxwell. That was in one of those books, right?

Correct. In Maxwell’s biography, Mogilevich is named several times. I believe the source for that was Ari Ben-Manashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer who also worked for the Kremlin. But that Robert Maxwell biography—this is Ghislaine Maxwell’s father—outlines Robert Maxwell as a Mossad and a KGB spy. That means that he was an intelligence officer. It looks like he also did—there’s quite an FBI file on him. He probably worked with U.S. intelligence at times, and it looks like he definitely worked for the Queen. He was very close with, very close with the Queen. He touched the Queen. There’s video of him, footage of him touching her, like walking alongside her and touching her like.

He was friends with the Queen. Yeah.

That’s very rare and weird and very strange.

It’s very strange. Robert Maxwell also, when he died in 1991, in November of 1991, by falling off a yacht off the coast of the Canary Islands—as happens, I guess, all the time, so no foul play at all, none suspected; it’s weird how that thread keeps going up—but remember, he had defrauded the pensions of the company, the publishing company that he bought. So he was about to collapse before he died, like his entire...

That’s right.

…financial empire was a house of cards, and it was all bullshit. So that’s an important thing to keep in mind.

That’s right. And he knew Donald. Donald knew him directly. There’s a lot of images and photographs. They were on the yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, that he named after his daughter. So yeah.

They were on the yacht, in Page Six. With Ivana, which is interesting because Robert Maxwell is born Jan Hoch and is from Czechia. And Ivana Trump is also Czech. So I envision a scenario where the two of them are on the yacht talking in Czech, and Trump is just standing there like an idiot.

I’m sure, yeah. Junior, I believe, is fluent in Czech. People underestimate Don Jr.

Yeah, and Baron is fluent in Slovenian, yes.

But you know, another character that was in that world with them, with Robert Maxwell—and it’s important because his money shows up in Jeffrey Epstein’s next big financial scam after the Bear Stearns moving him—is a man named Adnan Khashoggi, who is Jamal Khashoggi’s uncle. And there’s not a lot of Khashoggis, actually, by the way.

Donald knew the Khashoggis very, very, very well. Ivana called Adnan her best friend quite often. When Donald bought the one and only yacht he’s ever bought, he bought Khashoggi’s yacht. So he bought Khashoggi’s, yeah.

And Khashoggi was a known intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia, but he was at one point the wealthiest man in the world.

He was an arms dealer, right? Wasn’t he an arms dealer?

He was a big arms dealer. Yeah.

I remember that, even in the moment, people knew who he was. Like, he wasn’t some hidden figure. I remember reading about him in the 80s. I didn’t know what these people were at the time. But I knew their names.

Paul Manafort was also in this mix, Tom Barrack was in this mix. There were a lot of folks that we saw show up in Trump 1.0 as President, helping with his campaign, that were swirling around in this—what I call the underworld. But it’s where crime syndicates and intelligence services are just, you know, intertwined.

And that’s what MAGA is aware of when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. They can kind of feel that there’s something odd there. There are intelligence services there.

Now, it’s important to point out that before Robert Maxwell died—there are several people who are credible witnesses and know what they’re talking about that have identified that Robert Maxwell was taking Jeffrey Epstein around and sort of introducing him as his protégé. So this myth—this lie—that Ghislaine and Jeffrey told that he showed up after Ghislaine’s dad died, that she moved to New York and that’s where she met Jeffrey? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They knew each other before her father died or was killed or whatever happened off the side of that yacht. So that’s kind of key.

And then Jeffrey went from there to creating one of the biggest Ponzi schemes, the biggest Ponzi scheme ever before Bernie Madoff. He almost kind of invented it. That was called Towers Financial. And I talked a lot with Steve Hoffenberg; you talked with him as well. He was a tricky character. He’s passed away now, but he went to prison for quite a long time, and he got out of prison right at the beginning of Trump’s first term. The first person to call him when he was out of prison actually was Roger Stone, he told me.

But Hoffenberg was mortified with what Jeffrey had done with the victims. That reporting had kind of just come out when he was just out of prison. And he did contact the victims, and he did want to kind of make good. Because the money from Towers Financial was never fully recovered, Hoffenberg didn’t understand why he went to prison and Jeffrey got off.

I talked to Hoffenberg a bit. I’m like, “Well, what are some of the ways that someone gets out of being prosecuted for a big crime financial crime like this?” And it looks like Jeffrey very much cooperated with prosecutors. Now, there were a lot of criminals that were part of Towers; that was a big money laundering vehicle. Quite a lot of the money from Iran-Contra, Steve Hoffenberg suspected, was pushed—that Jeffrey got his hands on—it was pushed through Towers.

That is money that Robert Maxwell was in charge of that also disappeared around the time of his pension scandal. And so there was a lot of pressure on Robert Maxwell right before his death. It wasn’t just that his empire was crumbling. There was a lot about to be exposed of the kind of places he’d had his hands in, money that disappeared that he should never have been anywhere near it. And it exposed nation-states, intelligence services, doing what maybe they shouldn’t have been doing.

So that’s the world. It’s like a private intelligence rogue operatives. Private arms dealers like Adnan Khashoggi or the guy that Nicolas Cage played in that movie, Lord of War—like those guys, that world.

There’s also: you don’t have to just deal in arms or traffic in arms. You can traffic in kompromat, right? You can traffic in other things that would have value to intelligence services of both our nation and other nations. And it does very much look like that Robert Maxwell was in that business. It looks like Ghislaine took the mantle, and Jeffrey took the mantle from him and developed their own little operation. So all of the pieces are there for Epstein to have that connection.

And Towers Financial, I think, is also a great big piece that doesn’t get talked about enough, in terms of, What kind of deal did this guy cut with those prosecutors, that he got out of facing prison? And his business partner went in for 20 years, 18 years or whatever.

And knowing the kind of money, the kind of players that Epstein ran with, just with that one fraud and scheme alone—those are very valuable names, and a lot of money that he could have turned over to prosecutors to cut himself a deal. That could very well be the key to Alex Acosta’s phrase about Jeffrey, when he says he was told Epstein “belonged to Intelligence.” Because he would have some really big names in Towers, and really powerful players that maybe were on a sanction list, quite frankly.

So just to review quickly, Towers Financial ran from 1988-1993. He’s now worked, Jeffrey has, as a math teacher at Dalton (where he got fired), at Bear Stearns in some weird capacity (where he got sort of fired). And then he went to work, if I remember correctly, Hoffenberg said Epstein went to work for Douglas Leese, who was another person in that world.

Leese, yes—who was an arms dealer for the Queen. Right.

And he, Leese, according to Hoffenberg, recommended Epstein to Hoffenberg by saying, “He’s smart and he has no moral compass.” So Hoffenberg knew he was going to do this Ponzi scheme, and he needed like a guy to help him with it. And that’s why he hired him. Like, specifically.

And that would have been while Robert Maxwell was still alive or just sort of on his way out to the next world. Yeah. Right. All right around that time.

Right. Again; so now, we’re all the way into the early 90s, and so far it’s money and offshores and arms deals and Russian mobsters and shady characters, but we haven’t even—we haven’t gotten to the sex trafficking part yet, right?

Yeah, as far as we know, it wasn’t happening then. And that’s just—we only know what’s in those court documents, with what the prosecutors brought to light. And a lot of it’s still redacted. But yeah, then he’s setting up, and he’s got Les Wexner, you know, somehow come folding him in.

Les Wexner being the guy that owns Victoria’s Secret and these other big retail chains. And that was the time when Jeffrey was walking around saying he was a model scout for Victoria’s Secret, you know, as a pickup line that he was using.

That’s correct. There is a journalist in the Ohio area, Bob Fitrakis, who’s really good, a great muckraker, and he did a lot of work on Wexner and Wexner’s ties to organized crime. And Wexner as a potential…what’s called a non-official cover, a NOC, for our own intelligence services. Wexner has an airfield there in Ohio, a private airstrip, and there were planes coming in and out of there that Fitrakis believed and tracked to our own intelligence services.

Right, and Wexner’s the guy that owns the lovely, huge mansion on the Upper East Side of New York, on East 73rd, where he’s like, “Why don’t you just live in my mansion? You know? Why don’t you Kato Kaelin this? And you just move in. I don’t need it, it’s fine, it’s good.”

Right. Yeah. To Epstein, yeah, Wexner handed over the most valuable piece of property, the most valuable private residence in Manhattan to Jeffrey—just gave it to him.

Which is, I think, I would say odd, unusual, strange, whatever word you want to use. Weird.

It’s odd.

The other odd thing, and we talked about this this past week a lot, but we kept talking about it at the time, too. We do know that that all of these homes, New York, down in Palm Beach, out in New Mexico, the island and the plane, that these properties that either Jeffrey owned or had access to or were his in some way or form, all had surveillance technology wired throughout them. That’s in the underlying evidence in the court cases against him. So we’re not just speculating about this. It’s in the evidence. And you have to understand that we’re talking about properties that he was using for the—you know, for the abuse, while he abusing these minors and raping the minors.

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AN 7 25 PROSECUTED HUMAN TRAFFIC AND EPSTEIN PAL gISANE

Firing of 'high-profile' prosecutor shows Trump 'is not thinking clearly': analysis

---

https://gregolear.substack.com/p/deconstructing-the-epstein-myth-what

...SK

In 2005, Trump had this new reality show with Mark Burnett. And so I had a circle of people that I knew. I’m a writer, screenwriter. So I knew folks in that circle with that man.

Okay. Meaning Burnett.

Okay, interesting. So Trump to the Russians to Epstein.

## Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Trump

Greg Olear

March 31, 2020

Four of the five families.

Four of the five families. Castellanos was a holdout and then was killed, shot dead in the street. So that’s the history.

Right. Adam Davidson in the New Yorker.

He couldn’t get a casino license in Australia, infamously. They would not give him a casino license because of his ties to organized crime, both U.S. organized crime and Russian organized crime.

Right. Right.

Now part of the stuff that made it hard to get finding from U.S. banks is because of what happened with him in the 80s with Bear Stearns. So there’s a guy that ran Bear Stearns.

He’s Canadian though, right? Sam Bronfman?

Yes, he was Canadian. So that was part of the bootlegging thing. Yeah.

He was friends with the Queen. Yeah.

That’s very rare and weird and very strange.

That’s right.

…financial empire was a house of cards, and it was all bullshit. So that’s an important thing to keep in mind.

That’s right. And he knew Donald. Donald knew him directly. There’s a lot of images and photographs. They were on the yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, that he named after his daughter. So yeah.

I’m sure, yeah. Junior, I believe, is fluent in Czech. People underestimate Don Jr.

Yeah, and Baron is fluent in Slovenian, yes.

And Khashoggi was a known intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia, but he was at one point the wealthiest man in the world.

He was an arms dealer, right? Wasn’t he an arms dealer?

He was a big arms dealer. Yeah.

And that’s what MAGA is aware of when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. They can kind of feel that there’s something odd there. There are intelligence services there.

Leese, yes—who was an arms dealer for the Queen. Right.

And that would have been while Robert Maxwell was still alive or just sort of on his way out to the next world. Yeah. Right. All right around that time.

Right. Yeah. To Epstein, yeah, Wexner handed over the most valuable piece of property, the most valuable private residence in Manhattan to Jeffrey—just gave it to him.

Which is, I think, I would say odd, unusual, strange, whatever word you want to use. Weird.

It’s odd.

---

This article was taken from africa2000.com

Also check out their classic article "It's the 40 Ounce, Stupid!" (by Keidi Obi Awadu)

GANGSTA RAPPERS GET PAID AND GET FRONTED BY "THE BEAST" -by Keidi Obi Awadu (9/21/01)

"Thus, for example, breaking up the ghetto culture of defiance that unfits so many black youths for peaceable participation in civil society may be eminently desirable" -- From the article "Winds of Change", Foreign Affairs, Fall issue 1990

As certain rappers get drawn into the clandestine network which is motivated by national security policies, they eventually can be made into mouthpieces for social engineering activities where propaganda (ideological communication) is the preferred weapon for what amounts to "quiet warfare." This propaganda is increasingly encouraging self-destructive behaviors as well as policies which limit fertility or draw larger numbers of youth into highly-promoted activities (which can include HIV testing and condom distribution). Some of these activities, such as consuming dangerous alcoholic concoctions, can be completely contradictory to the values and long-term self-interests of the hip hop generation. An example is promotion of the deadly 40 ounce malt liquors.

As my brilliant friend Alfred "Coach" Powell, the author of the landmark book Message in a Bottle: The 40 Ounce Conspiracy [note from Bruz: apparently they're not THAT good of friends, Powell's book is actually entitled "Message 'N A Bottle: The 40oz. Scandal"], has illustrated, certain high-profile rappers have been recruited by major corporations to deliver masses of black and brown youth as consumers of one of the most dangerous alcoholic beverages ever manufactured -- the deadly 40 ounce malt liquors. Coach Powell refers to these malt liquors, which are disproportionately marketed primarily at urban youth as "psycho-bio chemically engineered drugs" laced with substances which undermine the mental and reproductive capabilities of its consumer. How have hip hop artists been so short-sighted as to have been co-opted to promote this chemical warfare which has been linked to the deaths of so many of their fellows? When will they declare that their generation has suffered enough such exploitation?

It's painful to witness creative and talented young artists like Ice Cube, Eazy E, Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls collaborating to advertise various lethal brews from McKenzie River Corp. including the discreetly-named ST. Ides (which Coach explains to mean "Satan" Ides -- he points out that to name an alcoholic beverage after a religious symbol would violate liquor manufacturers' promotional codes). This stands contradictory to the natural instinct that the Black community is obligated to protect our reproductive-age youth from attack by hostile forces. Though all of these young men except Cube have suffered frequent high-profile encounters with the law seems to be no obstacle to their being hired as spokesmen for the breweries and their advertising agencies. To the contrary, defiance against authority is part of the attraction here, including defiance against those community and family members who would love these youth the most.

And as Coach Powell points out, these advertisements are many times loaded with eroticism and disturbing esoteric images subliminally advocating Satanism and death to members of the hip hop generation. At what point do we hold responsible those who's life of deprivation and hunger has reversed itself and now they are getting fat off the continued suffering of the larger mass of urban youth? Gangsta rappers must be made to understand that they cannot make a comfortable life for themselves while selling out the enlightened self-interests of their fellows -- hell, that makes them seem too much like run-of-the-mill African-Americans religious leaders and politicians who seemed to have ingrained a culture of selling out one's greater strategic interests for a few shekels or a pat on the head from Massuh!

This examination of the links between many of the leading artists of the rap/hip hop music culture and the anti-population conspiracy against Blacks is too detailed to be explained within the limited space of one article. I myself was little-prepared for many of the shocking revelations which appeared as this story unfolded. I sit and write as fast as my fingers will propel this computer keyboard but know that I will only be able to commit a portion of the findings which are being revealed in this investigation. And because this research project has relied on so many documents, some from government and private industry sources, to fully comprehend this would require mounds of explanation and documentation.

There is another group within the hip hop generation which has been cooperating with hostile external forces opposed to the interests of the community. This time it is blacks working within the "entertainment" media of film and television. Modern "black exploitation films" such as Boyz in the Hood, Menace II Society, Sugar Hill, Poetic Justice, Set it Off, Don't Be a Menace, Bullet, Juice, the House Party series, Phat Beach, Booty Call, etc, etc, -- these movies, which can range from irrelevant minstrel shows to how-to crime instruction, and are undermining the values and logic of the youth. In turn they are feeding a sinister form of propaganda to the world that black and brown youth within the inner cities of America are out of control and a lethal threat to a civilized society, that they are irrelevant and unnecessary -- useless eaters and excess population. These images are in the films, the made-for-urban-youth TV sitcoms, daytime talkshows, as well as in the music videos. They are not absolute, but they are pervasive.

Powerful media conglomerates with names such as Time Warner, MCA, Viacom, News Corp. and others have set up fiefdoms within the United States through which they exert a disproportionate controlling affect on various communities. These huge private corporations are led by powerful individuals such as Gerald Levin (Time Warner), Edgar Bronfman (Seagrams, Universal Music Group, MCA), Sumner Redstone (Viacom) and Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.).Their corporations operate as mini-fiefdoms which serve the interests of the U.S. national security establishment on covert operations designed to satisfy their mutual self-interests.

Within the hip hop community this devilish network has worked its hidden hand by controlling and manipulating the images of rap and hip hop artists, selectively distributing music and videos which serve to undermine the ability of urban youth to assume their rightful place in history. Ultimately this network of control can extend to assassinations of rappers -- the cases of Tupac Shakur, Biggee Smalls and others, including Eazy E who was so bold as to have tried to interrupt the powerful Sony/Columbia Corporation as it exploited hip hop artists. Eazy filed a "civil racketeering suit" against Sony on August 23, 1991, for the type of deals which pulled artists such as Ice Cube and Dr. Dre away from his (and Jerry Heller/Mike Bourbeau) Ruthless Records. This hidden hand must be exposed and its power shut down!

A 1968 FBI memo details the intent of the U.S. COINTELPRO program against black nationalists and urban youth. It contains the following quote: "The Negro wants and needs something to be proud of. The Negro youth and moderate must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries. Is it not better to be a sports hero, a well paid professional athlete or entertainer, a regularly paid white or blue collar worker, a peaceful human being with a family, or a person who at least is being accepted, than a Negro who may have got even with the establishment by burning it down, but who along with this, burned down his own home and gained for him and all his people the hatred and distrust of the whites for years to come." Could it be proven that a program such as COINTELPRO (TOPLEV) would be operational inside of hip hop music in the 1990s?

http://www.40ozmaltliquor.com/africa02.html

The early '90s was a time when some of the best hip-hop music ever was being made, and the beverage of choice was malt liquor. Before rappers glorified Cristal, Ciroc and even their own branded alcohol, there were many hip-hop-inspired malt liquor ads.

St. Ides in particular enlisted several rappers to endorse the malt liquor also known as the "Crooked I," with commercials featuring remixes of the rappers' own songs or original songs. These weren't just any rappers, either - the were some of the '90s biggest-selling and most influential artists, including Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, Ice Cube, the Geto Boyz and Wu-Tang Clan, just to name a few.

The result was some catchy rap tunes, but the message some people thought these television and radio ads were sending caused some controversy. Some of the ads could be mistaken for the artists' music videos, such Snoop and Nate Dogg's commercial that shows a dog transforming into Snoop when a box of St. Ides is dropped in front of him, a similar scene to the beginning of Snoop's "Who Am I (What's My Name)" video.

In the ad, Nate Dogg sings, "Just hit the corner store you know what I'm looking for... St. Ides." Snoop and Nate Dogg help deliver the message that if you have at least $2, you can look as cool as they do.

In Tupac and Snoop's St. Ides ad, which also looks like a music video, Pac is playing craps in a lush casino, letting you know that the flavored style of the beer is specifically for people like himself with the line "Introducing a special brew made for a chosen few."

While Snoop strolls to the liquor store in a suit to pick up a bottle, his reflection displays the gangster version of Snoop in all blue including a bandana on his head. The message is that you can keep it sophisticated and real while drinking fruity-flavored cheap malt liquor.

In 1991, Public Enemy's Chuck D made the song "One Million Bottlebags" dissing St. Ides when the company used his voice in a radio spot without his permission. Chuck D also sued St. Ides for $5 million.

Although sales increased by 25 percent, The Wall Street Journal declared the St. Ides campaign to be one of the worst ad campaigns of the year in December 1991.

Ice Cube was another spokesperson for St. Ides was responsible for the line "Get your girl in the mood quicker, make your jimmy thicker... St. Ides." Messages like this were broadcast on commercials targeted towards urban America.

Surely artists were never get in the game to intentionally become role models but it was sometimes impossible for frequent television and radio ads with stereotypical messages like St. Ides to be avoided.

If Wu-Tang was "for the children," like Ol' Dirty Bastard once said, then why would they endorse malt liquor in a television ad? Some artists, like Scarface, tossed in a line about drinking St. Ides responsibly: "Only silly people try to drink and drive, they risk their lives and some do die."

The ads were successful for a certain amount of time, but didn't last long because of the effect it had on the African-American community and its youth. Some people were outraged that artists with so much influence were collecting checks for cheap corner-store liquor that could then be picked up for less than $2.

But besides the money, how did St. Ides get away with having more than 12 major hip-hop artists with successful careers co-sign for them back then?

A 1993 St. Ides ad shows Ice Cube hopping out of a helicopter, climbing into a Porsche to rush home to his fridge for a 40 of the extremely affordable malt liquor, then returning to his chopper to fly away. Rappers have always had expensive tastes, but some still chose to endorse malt liquor.

Maybe the message was drinking malt liquor will save you enough money to own a Porsche and a helicopter. Perhaps Cube wanted us to know how important it is to never leave home without St. Ides.

Although the St. Ides campaign put out some good music in the commercials thanks to the artists who starred in them, the controversy got the best of it and it ended in 1994.

In this age the popular malt liquor is Four Loko, at least before they took the potent ingredients out. Of course there are a few nameless rappers making songs about Four Lokos (without being paid), but what impact would the drink have if there were a Four Loko ad campaign similar to the St. Ides commercials?

If there ever were a malt-liquor campaign for today's generation of rap, would major artists like Lil Wayne, Kanye West, Rick Ross and Drake endorse the drink? It might even have to take edgier artists like Das Racist or Mr. Rager himself, Kid Cudi, to sponsor a drink so cheap yet so powerful.

These men all make chart-topping songs and made lots of dough, just as the St. Ides spokesmen did, but what was the difference between what early-'90s rappers endorsed and what today's rappers will do for more money?

Perhaps malt liquor was simply a part of hip-hop culture in the '90s, and that made artists like Ice Cube and Tupac - who sometimes had pro-black lyrics - endorse St. Ides so aggressively.

Today's generation of artists are about endorsing more expensive styles of drinks. Now all we hear about is popping high-priced bottles of champagne, something you can't just go pick up at the corner store. Rappers these days are more about swag, which is doing, drinking and eating things that regular 9-5 folks can't afford.

Another familiar liquor campaign that can be tied to hip-hop is Diddy's Ciroc vodka endorsement. Although Ciroc isn't as expensive as the ever-so-popular Vueve Cliquot

or Ace of Spades champagnes that rappers talk about now, it also isn't as cheap

as St. Ides.

As hip-hop culture changes by the generation, the alcohol endorsements become more sophisticated and pricier.

Edgar M. Bronfman, Sr.

"Bronfman is president of the World Jewish Congress, an international federation of Jewish communities and organizations whose primary goal is to preserve and foster the worldwide unity of the Jewish people and to protect and nourish their spiritual, cultural and social heritage. He is also the president of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, which is devoted to ensuring the return of communal Jewish property that was stolen from Jewish communities during World War II. Bronfman also chairs the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life (Hillel), a worldwide organization uniting Jewish students on college and university campuses. His philanthropic and civic activities include serving as chairman of both The Samuel Bronfman Foundation and the United States Commission on Holocaust Era Assets.

"In 1951, Bronfman joined Distillers Corporation-Seagrams Limited (renamed The Seagram Company Ltd. in 1975). He became president of Distillers Corporation-Seagrams Limited in 1971 and chairman in 1975. In 1994, he relinquished the position of chief executive officer to his son, Edgar Bronfman, Jr. The senior Bronfman served as chairman of the Seagram Company Ltd. until its merger into Vivendi Universal in 2000.

"In 1999, President Clinton awarded Bronfman the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor. That same year, Bronfman received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters form the University of Rochester. He also has received honorary degrees from New York University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Pace University, Tulane University and Williams College. Bronfman was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion D’Honneur by the government of France, as well as the Justice Louis D. Brandeis Award of the 85th National Convention of the Zionist Organization of America." ^[1] (2003)

Carter Center: Founders and Board of Counselors ^[2]

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch

References

:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Edgar M. Bronfman Sr. Honored by UAlbany's Center for Jewish Studies, State University of New York, accessed October 10, 2007.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Annual Report 2005-06, Carter Center, accessed October 10, 2007.

"Vivendi brings together the world leader in video games (Activision Blizzard), the world leader in music (Universal Music Group), the French leader in alternative telecoms (SFR), the Moroccan leader in telecoms (Maroc Telecom Group), the leading alternative telecoms provider in Brazil (GVT) and the French leader in Pay TV (Canal+ Group)." ^[1]

[hide]

Management Board

Accessed February 2011: ^[2]

Jean-Bernard Lévy - Chairman of the Management Board; Chairman of Activision Blizzard; Chairman of the board of GVT
Abdeslam Ahizoune - Chairman of the Management Board of Maroc Telecom
Philippe Capron - Chief Financial Officer of Vivendi
Frank Esser - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of SFR
Lucian Grainge - Co-Chief Executive Officer of Universal Music Group
Bertrand Meheut - Chairman of the Executive Board of Canal+ Group