("Quid coniuratio est?")
DWAYNE ANDREAS AND ARCHER-DANIELS-MIDLAND
In CN 10.10 it was noted how "...prominent GOP supporter Dwayne Andreas of Archer Daniels Midland... donated $100,000 to Bill Clinton's inaugural in 1993." It was also noted how Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) funds the ultra-boring yet oh-so-educational Jim Lehrer Newshour on PBS.
Not seen to my knowledge on the "public" television "news" program has been major coverage of what's been going on for several decades with Dwayne Andreas, Michael Andreas, ADM, and others. (If PBS won't do it, Conspiracy Nation will.)
According to several articles in the New Federalist (7/29/96), ADM and friends are quite a story. Here are excerpts from the articles:
In 1878, John W. Daniels began selling flaxseed to produce linseed oil and in 1902 formed Daniels Linseed Company in Minneapolis. George A. Archer, another experienced flaxseed crusher, joined the company in 1903. In 1923, the company bought Midland Products and adopted the name Archer Daniels Midland (ADM).
Dwayne Andreas, born in Decatur, Illinois in 1918, joined his father's R.P. Andreas firm in the mid-1930s. In 1936, the Andreas family changed the name of the firm to the Honeymead Company. In 1945, [Dwayne Andreas] sold 60 percent of the family's Honeymead to Cargill [another food giant].
From 1946 through 1952, Dwayne Andreas worked for Cargill, learning how to hedge and speculate [a.k.a. rob farmers] in commodities. In 1945, Dwayne Andreas met Hubert Humphrey. Andreas contributed $1,000 to Humphrey's first senatorial campaign in 1948. Humphrey and Andreas became intimate. Humphrey was godfather to Andreas's son. In 1977, Humphrey, then on the Senate Agriculture Committee, wrote legislation to establish government supports for sugar, which saved Andreas from huge losses. In the 1980s, Andreas funded a Hubert Humphrey Room at the Anti-Defamation League's new headquarters at U.N. Plaza in New York City. While Humphrey lived, Andreas and Humphrey took 85 trips together.
New Federalist has recently reported on the connections between 1948 GOP presidential candidate and governor of New York Tom Dewey and Republican Party judge-fixer Roy Cohn. According to a July 14, 1996 cover story in the magazine section of the Sunday Washington Post, Dewey, working during the 1950s as Andreas's lawyer, set up the Andreas Foundation, to spread Andreas's influence through charitable and political contributions. Andreas provided the funds, and Dewey decided where to distribute the foundation's largesse. "Give money to both sides [Democratic and Republican]. And give to the people your friends ask you to give to," is how the Post described the foundation's policy.
What did Andreas get in return? For one thing, when Dewey became the governor of New York, he saw to it that ADM was awarded a lucrative contract to provide soy-based food products to the state's prison system.
Over the decades, working "both sides of the fence" also netted ADM a change in the Food for Peace legislation of the 1960s to allow that federal program to sell processed food (from ADM and other cartel companies), and action by Richard Nixon to open China's wheat markets to ADM-supplied grain, to mention only a few of the good turns done for ADM.
In 1974, ADM entered into a price-fixing scheme that overcharged the U.S. government $19 million in sales of soy-fortified food to the Food for Peace program. ADM was convicted. In 1976, the company pleaded no contest to federal charges that it had systematically short-weighted and misgraded federally subsidized grain that was being shipped abroad.
In 1984, Andreas met Mikhail Gorbachov for the first time. In 1990, Andreas contributed $1 million to create a Gorbachov Institute in the United States and Russia.
Andreas was always close, as a result of his friendship with Hubert Humphrey, to the organized crime-linked Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith. During the 1980s, Andreas was persuaded by another major grain trader, Burton Joseph, of the Minneapolis-based S.I. Joseph Company, to contribute $1 million to the ADL. Andreas made the payments in amounts of $50,000 to $100,000 per year.
In 1995, the U.S. Justice Department launched an investigation into fraud and anti-competitive price-fixing in ADM's handling and marketing of corn sweeteners and lysine -- a livestock feed supplement.
Key personnel connected with ADM are: Howard Buffett, vice president of ADM and son of Warren Buffett; Robert Strauss, George Bush's ambassador to Russia, 1991-1993; Brian Mulroney, former prime minister of Canada; Michael Andreas, son of Dwayne Andreas and heir-apparent to the empire.
Dwayne Andreas sits on the Hollinger International Advisory Board, headed by Lady Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, and Lord Peter Carrington. Also on the Hollinger board are Evelyn de Rothschild, Giovanni Agnelli of FIAT, and former Fed chief Paul Volcker.
(For a related story, see CN 10.02, "The Soybean Cases and Judicial Bribery" by Sherman H. Skolnick.)
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those
of Conspiracy Nation, nor of its Editor in Chief.
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