The richest man in the world's family

I'm just going to throw this out there. I haven't found any CT articles about it yet, but it's gotta be coming. And CTheorizing is fun. :)

So...

http://leaaschkenas.com/operation-peter-pan

Quote:

Operation Peter Pan, as it was named by the U.S. government, is the story of 14,000 Cuban children who, between 1960 and 1962, were brought to the United States by Catholic organizations funded by the U.S. State Department. They were helped by oil companies and other U.S. corporations that were kicked out of Cuba following the 1959 revolution

This counterpunch article describes the kids as children of the "elites", and explains/makes claims as to how it went down:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12...ion-peter-pan/

Quote:

NPR staff might have discovered a more complex and sinister story – had they looked. The CIA refuses to release Peter Pan documents, but abundant testimony shows the Agency forging documents and spreading lies, with Father Walsh and the regional Catholic hierarchy. Their goal: separate elite children from parents (a Cuban brain drain) and generate political instability.

Enter Jeff's dad:
http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet...1&excerpt=true

Quote:

Once the unaccompanied children arrived, they were placed into foster care through the Cuban Children's Program, another humanitarian project created by Fr. Walsh and financed by influential south Florida businessmen.

Quote:

One of the oldest of the group was 17-year-old Miguel Bezos, whom everyone called Mike.

About Jeff's mom's side of the family:

Quote:

Lawrence Preston Gise (whom everyone called Preston) had just been appointed by the Congress of the United States to be manager of the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) western region. Operating out of headquarters in Albuquerque, he supervised the region's 26,000 employees at the Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore laboratories. Before joining the AEC, Gise (rhymes with dice), who hailed from Valley Wells, Texas, had worked on space technology and missile defense systems for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development arm of the Department of Defense that was created in 1958 as the first response by the U.S. government to the Soviet launching of the Sputnik I satellite in 1957. Intended to be a creative counterbalance to conventional military thinking in research and development, DARPA was formed, according to its official mission statement, “to assure that the United Statesmaintains a lead in applying state-of-the-art technology for military capabilities and to prevent technological surprise from her adversaries.” In 1970, DARPA's engineers created a model for a powerful communications network for the U.S. military that could still function even if a nuclear attack demolished conventional lines of communication. The system, dubbed ARPAnet, was the foundation of what would eventually become the Internet.

More about Miguel, in his own words:

http://americanhistory.si.edu/family...s/miguel-bezos

Quote:

I looked for colleges and universities that gave scholarships to Cuban refugees, and I ended up being accepted to the University of Albuquerque in New Mexico. I wanted to go into mechanical engineering. I was taking a lot of math and physics courses and a few engineering courses. After being there for four years, I found out that I could finish my mechanical engineering, but it would take another year. However I could graduate in math and computer science right away. By this time, I had gotten married, and had adopted my wife’s son, Jeff. So I said, “I'm a mathematician,” because I needed to get a job. I graduated at the end of the fall semester of 1968 and went to my interview with Exxon. They offered me a job in Houston, Texas. Soon we had two other kids to complete the family and we began our nomadic life. We moved from place to place with Exxon.

Miguel says his dad just owned a lumber company in Cuba, but I (genuinely) suspect he had friends who were in with Big Oil in Cuba and/or the US. Maybe, or maybe not, but I'd be very curious to know what became of Miguel's parents, at least. I can't find anything about them online.

The...errrm... potential "dots" I'm connecting here don't indicate anything sinister or even terribly interesting above and beyond well-known facts and aspects of basic cold war history. I just think it's interesting how Big Energy, The US gov, and the anti-communist "free market" all came together and sort of manifested itself as Amazon.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2MA4ca8