XVII :: ECONOMIC DEATH SQUAD
A report entitled, “Grapes of Wrath – 2011,” presents a challenge to us:
“The American people have a choice…. The current path, forged by a minority of privileged wealthy elite, will lead to the destruction of this country and misery on an unprecedented scale…. Are you prepared to incur the wrath of the vested interests and meet their lies and propaganda with the fury of your own wrath in search for the truth? These men are sure you don’t have the courage, fortitude and wrath to defeat them.”
In an article and video entitled, “The Wall Street Economic Death Squad,” as I reported back in October, 2009:
“We need to focus our strategy on the small group of men who carried out the financial coup. These 13 men played leading roles in first crashing the economy, and then stealing trillions in taxpayer funds. Some of them are now calling the shots and running the government to insure that their obscene profits keep pouring into their coffers.
Know Our Enemies, EHMs – Meet The Wall Street Economic Death Squad:
Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, John Mack, Vikram Pandit, John Thain, Hank Greenberg, Ken Lewis.
These men ‘presided over the largest transfer of wealth in history, from the working class to the flamboyant super rich.’ What these men have done is obscene. After crashing the economy, trillions, literally trillions of dollars have been funneled into the pockets of a select few, in secrecy, while billions of people suffer in poverty, billions suffer to survive. This small tight-knit Wall Street cadre has committed a crime against humanity.”
Ralph J. Dolan, writing on Dissident Voice, declares, “Bring the Tyrants Down!”
“… while we’re observing these historic events in Egypt we might take a lesson in justice. We might come to our senses and freeze the assets of Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase and John Strumpf of Wells Fargo – for starters. Then we could go after the other major players in orchestrating the financial meltdown – Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, etc.
These guys who waltz away with billions in profits while they create misery and dislocation for many millions of struggling working people are beneath contempt….
We seem ready to kneel at the feet and kiss the hands of those who would rob us blind.
Enough! Let us bring these tyrants down!”
If Egyptians can seize the assets of a dictator like Mubarak, why can’t we seize the assets of Jamie Dimon and Llyod Blankfein?
A new report from Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone harshly sums up Banana Republic USA:
“A former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. ‘Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,’ he said. ‘That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.’ I put down my notebook. ‘Just that?’ ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.’
Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft.”
Once again, veteran financial journalist Paul B. Farrell hits the nail on the head. Writing for Market Watch, Farrell doesn’t pull any punches in summing up what needs to be done, and it can’t be said enough:
Fed Dictator Bernanke Needs To Be Toppled
“Fed boss Ben Bernanke is the most dangerous human on earth, far more dangerous than Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s 30-year dictator, ever was. Bernanke rules a monetary dictatorship… But this reign of economic terror will end. Just as Mubarak was blind to the economic needs of the masses and democratic reforms, Bernanke is blind to the easy-money legacy that’s set the stage for revolution, turning the rich into super rich while the middle class stagnates and peanuts trickle down to the poor.”
You can’t sentence the overwhelming majority of the population to slow death through economic policy and expect to get away with it.
While one-tenth of one percent of the population rolls around in obscene wealth, they may want to take a look outside of their groupthink short-sighted delusional perspective and notice the outside world. You cannot ignore the suffering of the masses. They will show up at your doorstep next.
I hear footsteps…
XVIII :: 99.9% Vs. 0.1%
Egypt exposed the power that the people have. One million Egyptians proved that you can shut down a powerful regime through a mass demonstration of non-violent force. Here in the US, according to public opinion polls, 75-80% of the population believes the government doesn’t have the consent of the governed.
The mainstream media leaves Americans feeling isolated and powerless to create change, but in reality, average Americans have all the power that they need to end the economic suffering and injustices that they endure. The overwhelming majority of people feel powerless to create change, if they would just realize that they are the overwhelming majority, we would have the change we so desperately need.
As I’ve written in the past:
“To those Americans who feel powerless to change things, I say that your feelings are only a result of your induced delusion. You have become so propagandized that you do not even understand the significant position that you are in…. We are still a mass of people who have the power to change the course of history…. we are 99.9% of the US population, and they are only 0.1%.
If we fight, we win!”
The people of Tunisia and Egypt has shown us the way. People are rising up throughout the world against the exact same people who looted America. The economic central planners that have launched an economic war on Americans, are also plundering the rest of the global economy with devastating consequences for 99.9 percent of the global population.
As John Pilger points out:
The Egyptian Revolt Is Coming Home
“The uprising in Egypt is our theatre of the possible. It is what people across the world have struggled for and their thought controllers have feared…. Across the world, public awareness is rising and bypassing them. In Washington and London, the regimes are fragile and barely democratic. Having long burned down societies abroad, they are now doing something similar at home, with lies and without a mandate. To their victims, the resistance in Cairo’s Liberation Square must seem an inspiration.”
We are, as fate has it, the most power group of people on the planet. The sooner a critical mass can understand this, and the urgency of the moment, the better chance we have of solving this crisis through non-violent means. When the aware but passive realize that they too will face increasingly harsh consequences, that’s when we will have a chance to fix things. Until then, the hole gets deeper by the day.
As nations continue to fall to internal revolt, the more covert and militaristic elements of power will move to the fore. In a world of collapsing economies, limited resources and extreme weather, it appears we are on a road to worldwide war. As the people of Egypt have demonstrated, the non-violent movement has to assert itself before the situation gets so dire that outbreaks of violence will be commonplace, thus insuring a further, much harsher crackdown, police state and Neo-Feudal economic order.
As Chris Hedges makes clear:
“The longer we believe in the fiction that we are included in the corporate power structure, the more easily corporations pillage the country without the threat of rebellion….
No system of total control, including corporate control, exhibits its extreme forms at the beginning. These forms expand as they fail to encounter resistance….
All centralized power, once restraints and regulations are abolished, once it is no longer accountable to citizens, knows no limit to internal and external plunder. The corporate state, which has emasculated our government, is creating a new form of feudalism, a world of masters and serfs.”
If we do not stand and rebel now, devastating consequences are sure to drastically lower our living standards within the near future. If we rise, people across the globe will continue to rise.
“We must conclude that a changeover is imminent and ineluctable in the co-opted cast who serve the interests of domination, and above all manage the protection of that domination. In such an affair, innovation will surely not be displayed [in the mainstream media]. It appears instead like lightening, which we only know when it strikes.”
– Guy DeBord
When revolution returns to America, the point won’t be to take down a figure head puppet politician like Mubarak or Obama, mere public relations moves will not suffice. We will take down the system behind them. We will take down the global banks, break them up, end the campaign finance racket, end closed-door lobbying, end the system of political bribery, end the two-party oligarchy, remove puppet judges who voted for unlimited spending by private economic elites, end corporate welfare and the various financial rackets which loot national wealth at the expense of the people.
“All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time,
in fact they are all artificial and temporary.”
– Strobe Talbott
We must enact common sense polices to deter organized corruption. The devil is always in the details, so rain RICO laws down upon them.
They shall reap what they sow.
Their day of reckoning is fast approaching.
Thomas Jefferson was correct when he said, “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”
As Jefferson rightfully declared, “Every generation needs a new revolution.”
Great ready… here it comes.
As a wise man once said,
“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains
to earth like dew
Which in sleep
had fallen on you
Ye are many
they are few”
We will not let our families continue their descent into debt slavery.
We will not leave our children to toil in a Neo-Feudal society.
We will not be on the wrong side of history.
A global uprising has begun.
Join the Movement.
NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION:
IS THERE AN ALTERNATIVE TO PLUNDERING THE EARTH?
Excerpt from "The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century"
Prof. Claudia von Werlhof
Global Research, April 20, 2011
Is there an alternative to plundering the earth?
Is there an alternative to making war?
Is there an alternative to destroying the planet?
No one asks these questions because they seem absurd. Yet, no one can escape them either. Until the onslaught of the global economic crisis, the motto of so-called "neoliberalism" was TINA: "There Is No Alternative!"
No alternative to "neoliberal globalization"?
No alternative to the unfettered "free market" economy?
What Is "Neoliberal Globalization"?
Let us first clarify what globalization and neoliberalism are, where they come from, who they are directed by, what they claim, what they do, why their effects are so fatal, why they will fail and why people nonetheless cling to them. Then, let us look at the responses of those who are not – or will not – be able to live with the consequences they cause.
This is where the difficulties begin. For a good twenty years now we have been told that there is no alternative to neoliberal globalization, and that, in fact, no such alternative is needed either. Over and over again, we have been confronted with the TINA-concept: "There Is No Alternative!" The "iron lady", Margaret Thatcher, was one of those who reiterated this belief without end.
The TINA-concept prohibits all thought. It follows the rationale that there is no point in analyzing and discussing neoliberalism and so-called globalization because they are inevitable. Whether we condone what is happening or not does not matter, it is happening anyway. There is no point in trying to understand. Hence: Go with it! Kill or be killed!
Some go as far as suggesting that globalization – meaning, an economic system which developed under specific social and historical conditions – is nothing less but a law of nature. In turn, "human nature" is supposedly reflected by the character of the system’s economic subjects: egotistical, ruthless, greedy and cold. This, we are told, works towards everyone’s benefit.
The question remains: why has Adam Smith’s "invisible hand" become a "visible fist"? While a tiny minority reaps enormous benefits from today’s neoliberalism (none of which will remain, of course), the vast majority of the earth’s population suffers hardship to the extent that their very survival is at stake. The damage done seems irreversible.
All over the world media outlets – especially television stations – avoid addressing the problem. A common excuse is that it cannot be explained.[1] The true reason is, of course, the media’s corporate control.
What Is Neoliberalism?
Neoliberalism as an economic policy agenda which began in Chile in 1973. Its inauguration consisted of a U.S.-organized coup against a democratically elected socialist president and the installment of a bloody military dictatorship notorious for systematic torture. This was the only way to turn the neoliberal model of the so-called "Chicago Boys" under the leadership of Milton Friedman – a student of Friedrich von Hayek – into reality.
The predecessor of the neoliberal model is the economic liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries and its notion of "free trade". Goethe’s assessment at the time was: "Free trade, piracy, war – an inseparable three!"[2]
At the center of both old and new economic liberalism lies:
Self-interest and individualism; segregation of ethical principles and economic affairs, in other words: a process of ‘de-bedding’ economy from society; economic rationality as a mere cost-benefit calculation and profit maximization; competition as the essential driving force for growth and progress; specialization and the replacement of a subsistence economy with profit-oriented foreign trade (‘comparative cost advantage’); and the proscription of public (state) interference with market forces.[3]
Where the new economic liberalism outdoes the old is in its global claim. Today’s economic liberalism functions as a model for each and everyone: all parts of the economy, all sectors of society, of life/nature itself. As a consequence, the once "de-bedded" economy now claims to "im-bed" everything, including political power. Furthermore, a new twisted "economic ethics" (and with it a certain idea of "human nature") emerges that mocks everything from so-called do-gooders to altruism to selfless help to care for others to a notion of responsibility.[4]
This goes as far as claiming that the common good depends entirely on the uncontrolled egoism of the individual and, especially, on the prosperity of transnational corporations. The allegedly necessary "freedom" of the economy – which, paradoxically, only means the freedom of corporations – hence consists of a freedom from responsibility and commitment to society.
The maximization of profit itself must occur within the shortest possible time; this means, preferably, through speculation and "shareholder value". It must meet as few obstacles as possible. Today, global economic interests outweigh not only extra-economic concerns but also national economic considerations since corporations today see themselves beyond both community and nation.[5] A "level playing field" is created that offers the global players the best possible conditions. This playing field knows of no legal, social, ecological, cultural or national "barriers".[6] As a result, economic competition plays out on a market that is free of all non-market, extra-economic or protectionist influences – unless they serve the interests of the big players (the corporations), of course. The corporations’ interests – their maximal growth and progress – take on complete priority. This is rationalized by alleging that their well-being means the well-being of small enterprises and workshops as well.
The difference between the new and the old economic liberalism can first be articulated in quantitative terms: after capitalism went through a series of ruptures and challenges – caused by the "competing economic system", the crisis of capitalism, post-war "Keynesianism" with its social and welfare state tendencies, internal mass consumer demand (so-called Fordism), and the objective of full employment in the North. The liberal economic goals of the past are now not only euphorically resurrected but they are also "globalized". The main reason is indeed that the competition between alternative economic systems is gone. However, to conclude that this confirms the victory of capitalism and the "golden West" over "dark socialism" is only one possible interpretation. Another – opposing – interpretation is to see the "modern world system" (which contains both capitalism and socialism) as having hit a general crisis which causes total and merciless competition over global resources while leveling the way for investment opportunities, i.e. the valorization of capital.[7]
The ongoing globalization of neoliberalism demonstrates which interpretation is right. Not least, because the differences between the old and the new economic liberalism can not only be articulated in quantitative terms but in qualitative ones too. What we are witnessing are completely new phenomena: instead of a democratic "complete competition" between many small enterprises enjoying the freedom of the market, only the big corporations win. In turn, they create new market oligopolies and monopolies of previously unknown dimensions. The market hence only remains free for them, while it is rendered unfree for all others who are condemned to an existence of dependency (as enforced producers, workers and consumers) or excluded from the market altogether (if they have neither anything to sell or buy). About fifty percent of the world’s population fall into this group today, and the percentage is rising.[8]
Anti-trust laws have lost all power since the transnational corporations set the norms. It is the corporations – not "the market" as an anonymous mechanism or "invisible hand" – that determine today’s rules of trade, for example prices and legal regulations. This happens outside any political control. Speculation with an average twenty percent profit margin edges out honest producers who become "unprofitable".[9] Money becomes too precious for comparatively non-profitable, long-term projects,
or projects that only – how audacious! – serve a good life. Money instead "travels upwards" and disappears. Financial capital determines more and more what the markets are and do.[10] By delinking the dollar from the price of gold, money creation no longer bears a direct relationship to production".[11] Moreover, these days most of us are – exactly like all governments – in debt. It is financial capital that has all the money – we have none.[12]
Small, medium, even some bigger enterprises are pushed out of the market, forced to fold or swallowed by transnational corporations because their performances are below average in comparison to speculation – rather: spookulation – wins. The public sector, which has historically been defined as a sector of not-for-profit economy and administration, is "slimmed" and its "profitable" parts ("gems") handed to corporations (privatized). As a consequence, social services that are necessary for our existence disappear. Small and medium private businesses – which, until recently, employed eighty percent of the workforce and provided normal working conditions – are affected by these developments as well. The alleged correlation between economic growth and secure employment is false. When economic growth is accompanied by the mergers of businesses, jobs are lost.[13]
If there are any new jobs, most are precarious, meaning that they are only available temporarily and badly paid. One job is usually not enough to make a living.[14] This means that the working conditions in the North become akin to those in the South, and the working conditions of men akin to those of women – a trend diametrically opposed to what we have always been told. Corporations now leave for the South (or East) to use cheap – and particularly female – labor without union affiliation. This has already been happening since the 1970s in the "Export Processing Zones" (EPZs, "world market factories" or "maquiladoras"), where most of the world’s computer chips, sneakers, clothes and electronic goods are produced.[15] The EPZs lie in areas where century-old colonial-capitalist and authoritarian-patriarchal conditions guarantee the availability of cheap labor.[16] The recent shift of business opportunities from consumer goods to armaments is a particularly troubling development.[17]
It is not only commodity production that is "outsourced" and located in the EPZs, but service industries as well. This is a result of the so-called Third Industrial Revolution, meaning the development of new information and communication technologies. Many jobs have disappeared entirely due to computerization, also in administrative fields.[18] The combination of the principles of "high tech" and "low wage"/"no wage" (always denied by "progress" enthusiasts) guarantees a "comparative cost advantage" in foreign trade. This will eventually lead to "Chinese wages" in the West. A potential loss of Western consumers is not seen as a threat. A corporate economy does not care whether consumers are European, Chinese or Indian.
The means of production become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, especially since finance capital – rendered precarious itself – controls asset values ever more aggressively. New forms of private property are created, not least through the "clearance" of public property and the transformation of formerly public and small-scale private services and industries to a corporate business sector. This concerns primarily fields that have long been (at least partly) excluded from the logic of profit – e.g. education, health, energy or water supply/disposal. New forms of so-called enclosures emerge from today’s total commercialization of formerly small-scale private or public industries and services, of the "commons", and of natural resources like oceans, rain forests, regions of genetic diversity or geopolitical interest (e.g. potential pipeline routes), etc.[19] As far as the new virtual spaces and communication networks go, we are witnessing frantic efforts to bring these under private control as well.[20]
All these new forms of private property are essentially created by (more or less) predatory forms of appropriation. In this sense, they are a continuation of the history of so-called original accumulation which has expanded globally, in accordance with to the motto: "Growth through expropriation!"[21]
Most people have less and less access to the means of production, and so the dependence on scarce and underpaid work increases. The destruction of the welfare state also destroys the notion that individuals can rely on the community to provide for them in times of need. Our existence relies exclusively on private, i.e. expensive, services that are often of much worse quality and much less reliable than public services. (It is a myth that the private always outdoes the public.) What we are experiencing is undersupply formerly only known by the colonial South. The old claim that the South will eventually develop into the North is proven wrong. It is the North that increasingly develops into the South. We are witnessing the latest form of "development", namely, a world system of underdevelopment.[22] Development and underdevelopment go hand in hand.[23] This might even dawn on "development aid" workers soon.
It is usually women who are called upon to counterbalance underdevelopment through increased work ("service provisions") in the household. As a result, the workload and underpay of women takes on horrendous dimensions: they do unpaid work inside their homes and poorly paid "housewifized" work outside.[24] Yet, commercialization does not stop in front of the home’s doors either. Even housework becomes commercially co-opted ("new maid question"), with hardly any financial benefits for the women who do the work.[25]
Not least because of this, women are increasingly coerced into prostitution, one of today’s biggest global industries.[26] This illustrates two things: a) how little the "emancipation" of women actually leads to "equal terms" with men; and b) that "capitalist development" does not imply increased "freedom" in wage labor relations, as the Left has claimed for a long time.[27] If the latter were the case, then neoliberalism would mean the voluntary end of capitalism once it reaches its furthest extension. This, however, does not appear likely.
Today, hundreds of millions of quasi-slaves, more than ever before, exist in the "world system."[28] The authoritarian model of the "Export Processing Zones" is conquering the East and threatening the North. The redistribution of wealth runs ever more – and with ever accelerated speed – from the bottom to the top. The gap between the rich and the poor has never been wider. The middle classes disappear. This is the situation we are facing.
It becomes obvious that neoliberalism marks not the end of colonialism but, to the contrary, the colonization of the North. This new "colonization of the world"[29] points back to the beginnings of the "modern world system" in the "long 16th century", when the conquering of the Americas, their exploitation and colonial transformation allowed for the rise and "development" of Europe.[30] The so-called "children’s diseases" of modernity keep on haunting it, even in old age. They are, in fact, the main feature of modernity’s latest stage. They are expanding instead of disappearing.
Where there is no South, there is no North; where there is no periphery, there is no center; where there is no colony, there is no – in any case no "Western" – civilization.[31]
Austria is part of the world system too. It is increasingly becoming a corporate colony (particularly of German corporations). This, however, does not keep it from being an active colonizer itself, especially in the East.[32]
Social, cultural, traditional and ecological considerations are abandoned and give way to a mentality of plundering. All global resources that we still have – natural resources, forests, water, genetic pools – have turned into objects of utilization. Rapid ecological destruction through depletion is the consequence. If one makes more profit by cutting down trees than by planting them, then there is no reason not to cut them.[33] Neither the public nor the state interferes, despite global warming and the obvious fact that the clearing of the few remaining rain forests will irreversibly destroy the earth’s climate – not to mention the many other negative effects of such actions.[34] Climate, animal, plants, human and general ecological rights are worth nothing compared to the interests of the corporations – no matter that the rain forest is not a renewable resource and that the entire earth’s ecosystem depends on it. If greed, and the rationalism with which it is economically enforced, really was an inherent anthropological trait, we would have never even reached this day.
The commander of the Space Shuttle that circled the earth in 2005 remarked that "the center of Africa was burning". She meant the Congo, in which the last great rain forest of the continent is located. Without it there will be no more rain clouds above the sources of the Nile. However, it needs to disappear in order for corporations to gain free access to the Congo’s natural resources that are the reason for the wars that plague the region today. After all, one needs diamonds and coltan for mobile phones.
Today, everything on earth is turned into commodities, i.e. everything becomes an object of "trade" and commercialization (which truly means liquidation, the transformation of all into liquid money). In its neoliberal stage it is not enough for capitalism to globally pursue less cost-intensive and preferably "wageless" commodity production. The objective is to transform everyone and everything into commodities, including life itself.[35] We are racing blindly towards the violent and absolute conclusion of this "mode of production", namely total capitalization/liquidation by "monetarization".[36]
We are not only witnessing perpetual praise of the market – we are witnessing what can be described as "market fundamentalism". People believe in the market as if it was a god. There seems to be a sense that nothing could ever happen without it. Total global maximized accumulation of money/capital as abstract wealth becomes the sole purpose of economic activity. A "free" world market for everything has to be established – a world market that functions according to the interests of the corporations and capitalist money. The installment of such a market proceeds with dazzling speed. It creates new profit possibilities where they have not existed before, e.g. in Iraq, Eastern Europe or China.
One thing remains generally overlooked: the abstract wealth created for accumulation implies the destruction of nature as concrete wealth. The result is a "hole in the ground" and next to it a garbage dump with used commodities, outdated machinery and money without value.[37] However, once all concrete wealth (which today consists mainly of the last natural resources) will be gone, abstract wealth will disappear as well. It will, in Marx’s words, "evaporate". The fact that abstract wealth is not real wealth will become obvious, and so will the answer to the question of which wealth modern economic activity has really created. In the end it is nothing but monetary wealth (and even this mainly exists virtually or on accounts) that constitutes a monoculture controlled by a tiny minority. Diversity is suffocated and millions of people are left wondering how to survive. And really: how do you survive with neither resources nor means of production nor money?
The nihilism of our economic system is evident. The whole world will be transformed into money – and then it will disappear. After all, money cannot be eaten. What no one seems to consider is the fact that it is impossible to re-transform commodities, money, capital and machinery into nature or concrete wealth. It seems that underlying all "economic development" is the assumption that "resources", the "sources of wealth",[38] are renewable and everlasting – just like the "growth" they create.[39]
The notion that capitalism and democracy are one is proven a myth by neoliberalism and its "monetary totalitarianism".[40]
The primacy of politics over economy has been lost. Politicians of all parties have abandoned it. It is the corporations that dictate politics. Where corporate interests are concerned, there is no place for democratic convention or community control. Public space disappears. The res publica turns into a res privata, or – as we could say today – a res privata transnationale (in its original Latin meaning, privare means "to deprive"). Only those in power still have rights. They give themselves the licenses they need, from the "license to plunder" to the "license to kill".[41] Those who get in their way or challenge their "rights" are vilified, criminalized and to an increasing degree defined as "terrorists" or, in the case of defiant governments, as "rogue states" – a label that usually implies threatened or actual military attack, as we can see in the cases of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and maybe Syria and Iran in the near future. U.S. President Bush had even spoken of the possibility of "preemptive" nuclear strikes should the U.S. feel endangered by weapons of mass destruction.[42] The European Union did not object.[43]
Neoliberalism and war are two sides of the same coin.[44] Free trade, piracy and war are still "an inseparable three" – today maybe more so than ever. War is not only "good for the economy" but is indeed its driving force and can be understood as the "continuation of economy with other means".[45] War and economy have become almost indistinguishable.[46] Wars about resources – especially oil and water – have already begun.[47] The Gulf Wars are the most obvious examples. Militarism once again appears as the "executor of capital accumulation" – potentially everywhere and enduringly.[48]
Human rights and rights of sovereignty have been transferred from people, communities and governments to corporations.[49] The notion of the people as a sovereign body has practically been abolished. We have witnessed a coup of sorts. The political systems of the West and the nation state as guarantees for and expression of the international division of labor in the modern world system are increasingly dissolving.[50] Nation states are developing into "periphery states" according to the inferior role they play in the proto-despotic "New World Order".[51] Democracy appears outdated. After all, it "hinders business".[52]
The "New World Order" implies a new division of labor that does no longer distinguish between North and South, East and West – today, everywhere is South. An according International Law is established which effectively functions from top to bottom ("top-down") and eliminates all local and regional communal rights. And not only that: many such rights are rendered invalid both retroactively and for the future.[53]
The logic of neoliberalism as a sort of totalitarian neo-mercantilism is that all resources, all markets, all money, all profits, all means of production, all "investment opportunities", all rights and all power belong to the corporations only. To paraphrase Richard Sennett: "Everything to the Corporations!"[54] One might add: "Now!"
The corporations are free to do whatever they please with what they get. Nobody is allowed to interfere. Ironically, we are expected to rely on them to find a way out of the crisis we are in. This puts the entire globe at risk since responsibility is something the corporations do not have or know. The times of social contracts are gone.[55] In fact, pointing out the crisis alone has become a crime and all critique will soon be defined as "terror" and persecuted as such.[56]
IMF Economic Medicine
Since the 1980s, it is mainly the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF that act as the enforcers of neoliberalism. These programs are levied against the countries of the South which can be extorted due to their debts. Meanwhile, numerous military interventions and wars help to take possession of the assets that still remain, secure resources, install neoliberalism as the global economic politics, crush resistance movements (which are cynically labeled as "IMF uprisings"), and facilitate the lucrative business of reconstruction.[57]
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher introduced neoliberalism in Anglo-America. In 1989, the so-called "Washington Consensus" was formulated. It claimed to lead to global freedom, prosperity and economic growth through "deregulation, liberalization and privatization". This has become the credo and promise of all neoliberals. Today we know that the promise has come true for the corporations only – not for anybody else.
In the Middle East, the Western support for Saddam Hussein in the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, and the Gulf War of the early 1990s, announced the permanent U.S. presence in the world’s most contested oil region.
In continental Europe, neoliberalism began with the crisis in Yugoslavia caused by the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF. The country was heavily exploited, fell apart and finally beset by a civil war over its last remaining resources.[58] Since the NATO war in 1999, the Balkans are fragmented, occupied and geopolitically under neoliberal control.[59] The region is of main strategic interest for future oil and gas transport from the Caucasus to the West (for example the "Nabucco" gas pipeline that is supposed to start operating from the Caspian Sea through Turkey and the Balkans by 2011.[60] The reconstruction of the Balkans is exclusively in the hands of Western corporations.
All governments, whether left, right, liberal or green, accept this. There is no analysis of the connection between the politics of neoliberalism, its history, its background and its effects on Europe and other parts of the world. Likewise, there is no analysis of its connection to the new militarism.
NAMING NAMES : YOUR REAL GOVERNMENT
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/0...nment.html
When dark deeds unfold, point the finger in this direction.
Tony Cartalucci
This is your real government; they transcend elected administrations, they permeate every political party, and they are responsible for nearly every aspect of the average American and European's way of life. When the "left" is carrying the torch for two "Neo-Con" wars, starting yet another based on the same lies, peddled by the same media outlets that told of Iraqi WMD's, the world has no choice, beyond profound cognitive dissonance, but to realize something is wrong.
What's wrong is a system completely controlled by a corporate-financier oligarchy with financial, media, and industrial empires that span the globe. If we do not change the fact that we are helplessly dependent on these corporations that regulate every aspect of our nation politically, and every aspect of our lives personally, nothing else will ever change.
The following list, however extensive, is by far not all-inclusive. However after these examples, a pattern should become self-evident with the same names and corporations being listed again and again. It should be self-evident to readers of how dangerously pervasive these corporations have become in our daily lives. Finally, it should be self-evident as to how necessary it is to excise these corporations from our lives, our communities, and ultimately our nations, with the utmost expediency.
International Crisis Group
www.crisisgroup.org
Background: While the International Crisis Group (ICG) claims to be "committed to preventing and resolving deadly conflict," the reality is that they are committed to offering solutions crafted well in advance to problems they themselves have created in order to perpetuate their own corporate agenda.
Nowhere can this be better illustrated than in Thailand and more recently in Egypt. ICG member Kenneth Adelman had been backing Thailand's Prime Minster Thaksin Shinwatra, a former Carlyle Group adviser who was was literally standing in front of the CFR in NYC on the eve of his ousting from power in a 2006 military coup. Since 2006, Thaksin's meddling in Thailand has been propped up by fellow Carlyle man James Baker and his Baker Botts law firm, Belfer Center adviser Robert Blackwill of Barbour Griffith & Rogers, and now Robert Amsterdam's Amsterdam & Peroff, a major corporate member of the globalist Chatham House.
With Thailand now mired in political turmoil led by Thaksin Shinwatra and his "red shirt" color revolution, the ICG is ready with "solutions" in hand. These solutions generally involve tying the Thai government's hands with arguments that stopping Thaksin's subversive activities amounts to human rights abuses, in hopes of allowing the globalist-backed revolution to swell beyond control.
The unrest in Egypt, of course, was led entirely by ICG member Mohamed ElBaradei and his US State Department recruited, funded, and supported April 6 Youth Movement coordinated by Google's Wael Ghonim. While the unrest was portrayed as being spontaneous, fueled by the earlier Tunisian uprising, ICG's ElBaradei, Ghonim, and their youth movement had been in Egypt since 2010 assembling their "National Front for Change" and laying the groundwork for the January 25th 2011 uprising.
ICG's George Soros would then go on to fund Egyptian NGOs working to rewrite the Egyptian constitution after front-man ElBaradei succeeded in removing Hosni Mubarak. This Soros-funded constitution and the resulting servile stooge government it would create represents the ICG "resolving" the crisis their own ElBaradei helped create.
Notable ICG Board Members:
George Soros
Kenneth Adelman
Samuel Berger
Wesley Clark
Mohamed ElBaradei
Carla Hills
Notable ICG Advisers:
Richard Armitage
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Stanley Fischer
Shimon Peres
Surin Pitsuwan
Fidel V. Ramos
Notable ICG Foundation & Corporate Supporters:
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Hunt Alternatives Fund
Open Society Institute
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Morgan Stanley
Deutsche Bank Group
Soros Fund Management LLC
McKinsey & Company
Chevron
Shell
Brookings Institute
www.brookings.edu
Background: Within the library of the Brookings Institute you will find the blueprints for nearly every conflict the West has been involved with in recent memory. What's more is that while the public seems to think these crises spring up like wildfires, those following the Brookings' corporate funded studies and publications see these crises coming years in advance. These are premeditated, meticulously planned conflicts that are triggered to usher in premeditated, meticulously planned solutions to advance Brookings' corporate supporters, who are numerous.
The ongoing operations against Iran, including US-backed color revolutions, US-trained and backed terrorists inside Iran, and crippling sanctions were all spelled out in excruciating detail in the Brookings Institute report, "Which Path to Persia?" The more recent UN Security Council resolution 1973 regarding Libya uncannily resembles Kenneth Pollack's March 9, 2011 Brookings report titled "The Real Military Options in Libya."
Notable Brookings Board Members:
Dominic Barton: McKinsey & Company, Inc.
Alan R. Batkin: Eton Park Capital Management
Richard C. Blum: Blum Capital Partners, LP
Abby Joseph Cohen: Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Suzanne Nora Johnson: Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
Richard A. Kimball Jr.: Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Tracy R. Wolstencroft: Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Paul Desmarais Jr.: Power Corporation of Canada
Kenneth M. Duberstein: The Duberstein Group, Inc.
Benjamin R. Jacobs: The JBG Companies
Nemir Kirdar: Investcorp
Klaus Kleinfeld: Alcoa, Inc.
Philip H. Knight: Nike, Inc.
David M. Rubenstein: Co-Founder of The Carlyle Group
Sheryl K. Sandberg: Facebook
Larry D. Thompson: PepsiCo, Inc.
Michael L. Tipsord: State Farm Insurance Companies
Andrew H. Tisch: Loews Corporation
Some Brookings Experts:
(click on names to see a list of recent writings.)
Kenneth Pollack
Daniel L. Byman
Martin Indyk
Suzanne Maloney
Michael E. O'Hanlon
Bruce Riedel
Shadi Hamid
Notable Brookings Foundation & Corporate Support:
Foundations & Governments
Ford Foundation
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation
Government of the United Arab Emirates
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Banking & Finance
Bank of America
Citi
Goldman Sachs
H&R Block
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
Jacob Rothschild
Nathaniel Rothschild
Standard Chartered Bank
Temasek Holdings Limited
Visa Inc.
Big Oil
Exxon Mobil Corporation
Chevron
Shell Oil Company
Military Industrial Complex & Industry
Daimler
General Dynamics Corporation
Lockheed Martin Corporation
Northrop Grumman Corporation
Siemens Corporation
The Boeing Company
General Electric Company
Westinghouse Electric Corporation
Raytheon Co.
Hitachi, Ltd.
Toyota
Telecommunications & Technology
AT&T
Google Corporation
Hewlett-Packard
Microsoft Corporation
Panasonic Corporation
Verizon Communications
Xerox Corporation
Skype
Media & Perception Management
McKinsey & Company, Inc.
News Corporation (Fox News)
Consumer Goods & Pharmaceutical
GlaxoSmithKline
Target
PepsiCo, Inc.
The Coca-Cola Company
Council on Foreign Relations
www.cfr.org
Background & Notable Membership: A better question would be, who isn't in the Council on Foreign Relations? Nearly every self-serving career politician, their advisers, and those populating the boards of the Fortune 500 are CFR members. Many of the books, magazine articles, and newspaper columns we read are written by CFR members, along with reports, similar to Brookings Institute that dictate, verbatim, the legislation that ends up before the West's lawmakers.
A good sampling of the most active wings of the CFR can be illustrated best in last year's "Ground Zero Mosque" hoax, where CFR members from both America's political right and left feigned a heated debate over New York City's so-called Cordoba House near the 3 felled World Trade Center buildings. In reality, the Cordoba House was established by fellow CFR member Feisal Abdul Rauf, who in turn was funded by CFR financing arms including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, chaired by 9/11 Commission head Thomas Kean, and various Rockefeller foundations.
Notable CFR Corporate Support:
Banking & Finance
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
JPMorgan Chase & Co
American Express
Barclays Capital
Citi
Morgan Stanley
Blackstone Group L.P.
Deutsche Bank AG
New York Life International, Inc.
Prudential Financial
Standard & Poor's
Rothschild North America, Inc.
Visa Inc.
Soros Fund Management
Standard Chartered Bank
Bank of New York Mellon Corporation
Veritas Capital LLC
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
Moody's Investors Service
Big Oil
Chevron Corporation
Exxon Mobil Corporation
BP p.l.c.
Shell Oil Company
Hess Corporation
ConocoPhillips Company
TOTAL S.A.
Marathon Oil Company
Aramco Services Company
Military Industrial Complex & Industry
Lockheed Martin Corporation
Airbus Americas, Inc.
Boeing Company,
DynCorp International
General Electric Company
Northrop Grumman
Raytheon Company
Hitachi, Ltd.
Caterpillar
BASF Corporation
Alcoa, Inc.
Public Relations, Lobbyists & Legal Firms
McKinsey & Company, Inc.
Omnicom Group Inc.
BGR Group
Corporate Media & Publishing
Bloomberg
Economist Intelligence Unit
News Corporation (Fox News)
Thomson Reuters
Time Warner Inc.
McGraw-Hill Companies
Consumer Goods
Walmart
Nike, Inc.
Coca-Cola Company
PepsiCo, Inc.
HP
Toyota Motor North America, Inc.
Volkswagen Group of America, Inc.
De Beers
Telecommunications & Technology
AT&T
Google, Inc.
IBM Corporation
Microsoft Corporation
Sony Corporation of America
Xerox Corporation
Verizon Communications
Pharmaceutical Industry
GlaxoSmithKline
Merck & Co., Inc.
Pfizer Inc.
The Chatham House
www.chathamhouse.org.uk
Background & Membership: The UK's Chatham House, like the CFR and the Brookings Institute in America, has an extensive membership and is involved in coordinated planning, perception management, and the execution of its corporate membership's collective agenda.
Individual members populating its "senior panel of advisers" consist of the founders, CEOs, and chairmen of the Chatham House's corporate membership. Chatham's "experts" are generally plucked from the world of academia and their "recent publications" are generally used internally as well as published throughout Chatham's extensive list of member media corporations, as well as industry journals and medical journals. That Chatham House "experts" are submitting entries to medical journals is particularly alarming considering GlaxoSmithKline and Merck are both Chatham House corporate members.
No better example of this incredible conflict of interest can be given than the current Thai "red" color revolution being led by Chatham House's Amsterdam & Peroff with consistent support lent by other corporate members including the Economist, the Telegraph and the BBC.
In one case, the Telegraph printed, "Thai protests - analysis by Dr Gareth Price and Rosheen Kabraji," within which Price and Kabraji make a shameless attempt at defending the Western-backed, Maoist themed, violent protests. While the Telegraph mentioned that Price and Kabraji were both analysts for the Chatham House, they failed to tell readers that the Telegraph itself retains a corporate membership within the Chatham House as does the Thai protest leader's lobbyist, Robert Amsterdam and his Amsterdam & Peroff lobbying firm.
Notable Chatham House Major Corporate Members:
Amsterdam & Peroff
BBC
Bloomberg
Coca-Cola Great Britain
Economist
GlaxoSmithKline
Goldman Sachs International
HSBC Holdings plc
Lockheed Martin UK
Merck & Co Inc
Mitsubishi Corporation
Morgan Stanley
Royal Bank of Scotland
Saudi Petroleum Overseas Ltd
Standard Bank London Limited
Standard Chartered Bank
Tesco
Thomson Reuter
United States of America Embassy
Vodafone Group
Notable Chatham House Standard Corporate Members:
Amnesty International
BASF
Boeing UK
CBS News
Daily Mail and General Trust plc
De Beers Group Services UK Ltd
G3 Good Governance Group
Google
Guardian
Hess Ltd
Lloyd's of London
McGraw-Hill Companies
Prudential plc
Telegraph Media Group
Times Newspapers Ltd
World Bank Group
Notable Chatham House Corporate Partners:
British Petroleum
Chevron Ltd
Deutsche Bank
Exxon Mobil Corporation
Royal Dutch Shell
Statoil
Toshiba Corporation
Total Holdings UK Ltd
Unilever plc
Conclusion
These organizations represent the collective interests of the largest corporations on earth. They not only retain armies of policy wonks and researchers to articulate their agenda and form a consensus internally, but also use their massive accumulation of unwarranted influence in media, industry, and finance to manufacture a self-serving consensus internationally.
To believe that this corporate-financier oligarchy would subject their agenda and fate to the whims of the voting masses is naive at best. They have painstakingly ensured that no matter who gets into office, in whatever country, the guns, the oil, the wealth and the power keep flowing perpetually into their own hands. Nothing vindicates this poorly hidden reality better than a "liberal" Nobel Peace Prize wearing president, dutifully towing forward a myriad of "Neo-Con" wars, while starting yet another war in Libya.
Likewise, no matter how bloody your revolution is, if the above equation remains unchanged, and the corporate bottom lines left unscathed, nothing but the most superficial changes will have been made, and as is the case in Egypt with International Crisis Group stooge Mohamed ElBaradei worming his way into power, things may become substantially worse.
The real revolution will commence when we identify the above equation as the true brokers of power and when we begin systematically removing our dependence on them, and their influence on us from our daily lives. The global corporate-financier oligarchy needs us, we do not need them, independence from them is the key to our freedom.
For more information on alternative economics, getting self-sufficient and moving on without the parasitic, incompetent, globalist oligarchs:
ROTHSCHILD BANKERS LOOTING NATIONS THROUGH WORLD BANK/IMF
Raymond L'Heureux and Richard Salbat
Sovereign Independent
The World Bank/IMF is owned and controlled by NM Rothschild & Sons plus 30 to 40 of the wealthiest people in the world. For over 150 years they have planned to take over the planet through money. The former chief economist of the World Bank, Joe Stiglitz, was fired in 2000. He pointed out to top executives that every country the IMF/World Bank forced their way into ended up with a crashed economy, a destroyed government, and some even broke out in riots. Former President of the World Bank/IMF Sir James Wolfensohn, would not comment on his
dismissal.
Before Joe Stiglitz was fired he took a large stack of secret documents out of the World Bank. These secret documents from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund reveal that the IMF required nations:
1. To sign secret agreements containing 111 destructive items. (I'd love to get a hold of that list)
2. To agree to sell off their key assets - water, electric, gas, etc.
3. To agree to take economic steps which are devastating to the nations
involved.
If they do not agree to these steps they are cut-off from all international
Import/Export. If you can't borrow money in the international marketplace, no one can survive, whether you are people, corporations or countries. If that doesn't work they overthrow the government and rewrite history.
The Argentina Plan
Inside documents from Argentina show the top-secret Argentine plan. This was signed by Sir James Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank. Argentina has had six presidents in five weeks because their economy is completely destroyed. This happened because they started out in the end of the 1980s with orders from the IMF and World Bank to sell-off all their assets, public assets, like their water system. Then they taxed the people. They created big government and big government handed it off to the private IMF/World Bank. They pay off the politicians billions in Swiss bank accounts.
The World Bank/IMF is owned and controlled by NM Rothschild & Sons plus 30 to 40 of the wealthiest people in the world. For over 150 years they have planned to take over the planet through money. The former chief economist of the World Bank, Joe Stiglitz, was fired in 2000. He pointed out to top executives that every country the IMF/World Bank forced their way into ended up with a crashed economy, a destroyed government, and some even broke out in riots. Former President of the World Bank/IMF Sir James Wolfensohn, would not comment on his
dismissal. Before Joe Stiglitz was fired he took a large stack of secret documents out of the World Bank.
These secret documents from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund reveal that the IMF required nations:
1. To sign secret agreements containing 111 destructive items. (I'd love to get a hold of that list)
2. To agree to sell off their key assets - water, electric, gas, etc.
3. To agree to take economic steps which are devastating to the nations
involved.
If they do not agree to these steps they are cut-off from all international
Import/Export. If you can't borrow money in the international marketplace, no
one can survive, whether you are people, corporations or countries. If that
doesn't work they overthrow the government and rewrite history.
The Argentina Plan
Inside documents from Argentina show the top-secret Argentine plan. This was signed by Sir James Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank. Argentina has had six presidents in five weeks because their economy is completely destroyed. This happened because they started out in the end of the 1980s with orders from the IMF and World Bank to sell-off all their assets, public assets, like their water system. Then they taxed the people. They created big government and big government handed it off to the private IMF/World Bank. They pay off the politicians billions in Swiss bank accounts. Cronies like Citibank grabbed half the Argentine banks. British Petroleum grabbed pipelines in Ecuador. Enron grabbed water systems all over the place. The problem is that they are destroying these systems as well. You can't even get drinking water in Buenos Aires. It is not just a question of theft. It is more than someone getting rich at the public expense. And the IMF just got handed the Great Lakes. They have the sole control over the water supply now.
The IMF and the World Bank is 51% owned by the United States Treasury.
Remember What We Learned From Enron
The water system of Buenos Aires was sold off for a song to Enron. A pipeline was sold off, that runs between Argentina and Chile. The globalists then blew out Enron after transferring the assets to another dummy corporation. They come in, pay off politicians to transfer the water systems, the railways, the telephone companies, the nationalized oil companies, and gas stations, ect, ect... - The appointed or selected politicians then hand over raped assets to the IMF for nothing. The Globalists pay them off individually, billions a piece in Swiss bank accounts. Their plan is total slavery for the entire population.
IMF Planned Riots
The IMF/World Bank have been systematically tearing nations apart, whether it's Ecuador or Argentina or America and Israel. Privatization equals Pillaging and Rape. Steal from the people and hand over everything to the IMF/World Bank. The world is in flames.
They know that when they squeeze a country and destroy its economy, you'll get riots in the streets. And they admit that because you have riot, all the capital runs away from whatever country and that presents the opportunity for the IMF to move in for the serious takeover.
It really is an imperial economy war meant to implode countries and now they have started in America. They are damn greedy. Chief investigators of the State of California said that that it's not just the stockholders that get ripped off. They suck millions, billions even trillions of dollars out of the public pockets. Where are the assets? See, everybody says there are no assets left. They transfer all assets to other corporations and banks.
Rothschild - The Plague Of The Red Shield
Burrow into NM Rothschild & Sons, you'll find it all there. The IMF/World Bank implosion, four points, how they bring down a country and destroy the resources of the people. First you open up the capital markets. That is, you sell off your local banks gold to foreign buyers. Then you go to what's called market-based pricing or even silver. That's the stuff like in California where everything is free market and you end up with water bills no one can pay. Then open up your borders to trade. It's like the opium wars. This isn't free trade; this is coercion trade. This is war. They are taking apart economies through this system. China has a 50% to 60% tariff on the U.S. but the U.S. has a 2% on them. That's not free and fair trade. It's to force all industry into a state of one world order that the globalists control 100%.
"Beware of calls to return to a gold standard. Why? Simple. Because never before has so much gold been so concentrated outside of American hands. And never before has so much gold been in the hands of international governmental bodies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In fact, the IMF now holds more gold then any central bank." ~ Bill Still
SECRETIVE PLAN FOR A GLOBAL CURRENCY
Ellen Brown
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23762
By acting together to fulfill these pledges we will bring the world economy out of recession
and prevent a crisis like this from recurring in the future. We are committed to take all necessary actions to restore the normal flow of credit through the financial system and ensure the soundness of systemically important institutions, implementing our policies in line with the agreed G20 framework for restoring lending and repairing the financial sector. We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn into the world economy and increase global liquidity.– G20 Communiqué, London , April 2, 2009
Towards a New Global Currency?
Is the Group of Twenty Countries (G20) envisaging the creation of a Global Central bank? Who or what would serve as this global central bank, cloaked with the power to issue the global currency and police monetary policy for all humanity? When the world’s central bankers met in Washington in September 2008 at the height of the financial meltdown, they discussed what body might be in a position to serve in that awesome and fearful role. A former governor of the Bank of England stated:
The answer might already be staring us in the face, in the form of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS)... The IMF tends to couch its warnings about economic problems in very diplomatic language, but the BIS is more independent and much better placed to deal with this if it is given the power to do so.[1]
And if the vision of a global currency outside government control was not enough to set off conspiracy theorists, putting the BIS in charge of it surely would be. The BIS has been scandal-ridden ever since it was branded with pro-Nazi leanings in the 1930s. Founded in Basel , Switzerland , in 1930, the BIS has been called “the most exclusive, secretive, and powerful supranational club in the world.” Charles Higham wrote in his book Trading with the Enemy that by the late 1930s, the BIS had assumed an openly pro-Nazi bias, a theme that was expanded on in a BBC Timewatch film titled “Banking with Hitler” broadcast in 1998.[2] In 1944, the American government backed a resolution at the Bretton Woods Conference calling for the liquidation of the BIS, following Czech accusations that it was laundering gold stolen by the Nazis from occupied Europe; but the central bankers succeeded in quietly snuffing out the American resolution.[3]
In Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), Dr. Carroll Quigley revealed the key role played in global finance by the BIS behind the scenes. Dr. Quigley was Professor of History at Georgetown University , where he was President Bill Clinton’s mentor. He was also an insider, groomed by the powerful clique he called “the international bankers.” His credibility is heightened by the fact that he actually espoused their goals. Quigley wrote:
I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments... In general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known...
The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel , Switzerland , a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.[4]
The key to their success, said Quigley, was that the international bankers would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government.The statement echoed one made in the 18th century by the patriarch of what became the most powerful banking dynasty in the world. Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild is quoted as saying in 1791: “Allow me to issue and control a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.” Mayer’s five sons were sent to the major capitals of Europe – London , Paris , Vienna , Berlin and Naples – with the mission of establishing a banking system that would be outside government control. The economic and political systems of nations would be controlled not by citizens but by bankers, for the benefit of bankers.
Eventually, a privately-owned “central bank” was established in nearly every country. This central banking system has now gained control over the economies of the world. Central banks have the authority to print money in their respective countries, and it is from these banks that governments must borrow money to pay their debts and fund their operations. The result is a global economy in which not only industry but government itself runs on “credit” (or debt) created by a banking monopoly headed by a network of private central banks. At the top of this network is the BIS, the “central bank of central banks” in Basel .
Behind the Curtain
For many years the BIS kept a very low profile, operating behind the scenes in an abandoned hotel. It was here that decisions were reached to devalue or defend currencies, fix the price of gold, regulate offshore banking, and raise or lower short-term interest rates. In 1977, however, the BIS gave up its anonymity in exchange for more efficient headquarters. The new building has been described as “an eighteen story-high circular skyscraper that rises above the medieval city like some misplaced nuclear reactor.” It quickly became known as the “ Tower of Basel .” Today the BIS has governmental immunity, pays no taxes, and has its own private police force.[5] It is, as Mayer Rothschild envisioned, above the law.
The BIS is now composed of 55 member nations, but the club that meets regularly in Basel is a much smaller group; and even within it, there is a hierarchy. In a 1983 article in Harper’s Magazine called “Ruling the World of Money,” Edward Jay Epstein wrote that where the real business gets done is in “a sort of inner club made up of the half dozen or so powerful central bankers who find themselves more or less in the same monetary boat” – those from Germany, the United States, Switzerland, Italy, Japan and England. Epstein said:
The prime value, which also seems to demarcate the inner club from the rest of the BIS members, is the firm belief that central banks should act independently of their home governments... A second and closely related belief of the inner club is that politicians should not be trusted to decide the fate of the international monetary system.[6]
In 1974, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision was created by the central bank Governors of the Group of 10 nations (now expanded to twenty). The BIS provides the twelve-member Secretariat for the Committee. The Committee, in turn, sets the rules for banking globally, including capital requirements and reserve controls. In a 2003 article titled “The Bank for International Settlements Calls for Global Currency,” Joan Veon wrote:
The BIS is where all of the world’s central banks meet to analyze the global economy and determine what course of action they will take next to put more money in their pockets, since they control the amount of money in circulation and how much interest they are going to charge governments and banks for borrowing from them...
When you understand that the BIS pulls the strings of the world’s monetary system, you then understand that they have the ability to create a financial boom or bust in a country. If that country is not doing what the money lenders want, then all they have to do is sell its currency.[7]
The Controversial Basel Accords
The power of the BIS to make or break economies was demonstrated in 1988, when it issued a Basel Accord raising bank capital requirements from six percent to eight percent. By then, Japan had emerged as the world’s largest creditor; but Japan ’s banks were less well capitalized than other major international banks. Raising the capital requirement forced them to cut back on lending, creating a recession in Japan like that suffered in the U.S. today. Property prices fell and loans went into default as the security for them shriveled up. A downward spiral followed, ending with the total bankruptcy of the banks. The banks had to be nationalized, although that word was not used in order to avoid criticism.[8]
Among other “collateral damage” produced by the Basel Accords was a spate of suicides among Indian farmers unable to get loans. The BIS capital adequacy standards required loans to private borrowers to be “risk-weighted,” with the degree of risk determined by private rating agencies; farmers and small business owners could not afford the agencies’ fees. Banks therefore assigned one hundred percent risk to the loans, and then resisted extending credit to these “high-risk” borrowers because more capital was required to cover the loans. When the conscience of the nation was aroused by the Indian suicides, the government, lamenting the neglect of farmers by commercial banks, established a policy of ending the “financial exclusion” of the weak; but this step had little real effect on lending practices, due largely to the strictures imposed by the BIS from abroad.[9]
Economist Henry C K Liu has analyzed how the Basel Accords have forced national banking systems “to march to the same tune, designed to serve the needs of highly sophisticated global financial markets, regardless of the developmental needs of their national economies.” He wrote:
National banking systems are suddenly thrown into the rigid arms of the Basel Capital Accord sponsored by the Bank of International Settlement (BIS), or to face the penalty of usurious risk premium in securing international interbank loans... National policies suddenly are subjected to profit incentives of private financial institutions, all members of a hierarchical system controlled and directed from the money center banks in New York . The result is to force national banking systems to privatize...
BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies... The IMF and the international banks regulated by the BIS are a team: the international banks lend recklessly to borrowers in emerging economies to create a foreign currency debt crisis, the IMF arrives as a carrier of monetary virus in the name of sound monetary policy, then the international banks come as vulture investors in the name of financial rescue to acquire national banks deemed capital inadequate and insolvent by the BIS.
Ironically, noted Liu, developing countries with their own natural resources did not actually need the foreign investment that trapped them in debt to outsiders: "Applying the State Theory of Money [which assumes that a sovereign nation has the power to issue its own money], any government can fund with its own currency all its domestic developmental needs to maintain full employment without inflation."[10]
When governments fall into the trap of accepting loans in foreign currencies, however, they become “debtor nations” subject to IMF and BIS regulation. They are forced to divert their production to exports, just to earn the foreign currency necessary to pay the interest on their loans. National banks deemed “capital inadequate” have to deal with strictures comparable to the “conditionalities” imposed by the IMF on debtor nations: “escalating capital requirement, loan write-offs and liquidation, and restructuring through selloffs, layoffs, downsizing, cost-cutting and freeze on capital spending.” Liu wrote:
Reversing the logic that a sound banking system should lead to full employment and developmental growth, BIS regulations demand high unemployment and developmental degradation in national economies as the fair price for a sound global private banking system.[11]
The Last Domino to Fall
While banks in developing nations were being penalized for falling short of the BIS capital requirements, large international banks managed to skirt the rules, although they actually carried enormous risk because of their derivative exposure. The mega-banks took advantage of a loophole that allowed for lower charges against capital for “off-balance sheet activities.” The banks got loans off their balance sheets by bundling them into securities and selling them off to investors, after separating the risk of default out from the loans and selling it off to yet other investors, using a form of derivative known as “credit default swaps.”
It was evidently not in the game plan, however, that U.S. banks should escape the regulatory net indefinitely. Complaints about the loopholes in Basel I prompted a new set of rules called Basel II, which based capital requirements for market risk on a “Value-at-Risk” accounting standard. The new rules were established in 2004, but they were not levied on U.S. banks until November 2007, the month after the Dow passed 14 000 to reach its all-time high. On November 1, 2007, the Office of the Controller of the Currency “approved a final rule implementing advanced approaches of the Basel II Capital Accord.”[12] On November 15, 2007, the Financial Accounting Standards Board or FASB, a private organization that sets U.S. accounting rules for the private sector, adopted FAS 157, the rule called “mark-to-market accounting.”[13] The effect on U.S. banks was similar to that of Basel I on Japanese banks: they have been struggling to survive ever since.[14]
The mark-to-market rule requires banks to adjust the value of their marketable securities to the “market price” of the security.[15] The rule has theoretical merit, but the problem is timing: it was imposed ex post facto, after the banks already had the hard-to-market assets on their books. Lenders that had been considered sufficiently well capitalized to make new loans suddenly found they were insolvent; at least, they would have been if they had tried to sell their assets, an assumption required by the new rule. Financial analyst John Berlau complained in October 2008:
Despite the credit crunch being described as the spread of the ‘American flu,’ the mark-to-market rules that are spreading it were hatched [as] part of the Basel II international rules for financial institutions. It’s just that the U.S. jumped into the really icy water last November when our Securities and Exchange Commission and bank regulators implemented FASB’s Financial Accounting Standard 157, which makes healthy banks and financial firms take a ‘loss’ in the capital they can lend even if a loan on their books is still performing, even when the ‘market price’ [of] an illiquid asset is that of the last fire sale by a highly leveraged bank. Late last month, similar rules went into effect in the European Union, playing a similar role in accelerating financial failures...
The crisis is often called a ‘market failure,’ and the term ‘mark-to-market’ seems to reinforce that. But the mark-to-market rules are profoundly anti-market and hinder the free-market function of price discovery... In this case, the accounting rules fail to allow the market players to hold on to an asset if they don’t like what the market is currently fetching, an important market action that affects price discovery in areas from agriculture to antiques.[16]
Imposing the mark-to-market rule on U.S. banks caused an instant credit freeze, which proceeded to take down the economies not only of the U.S. but of countries worldwide. In early April 2009, the mark-to-market rule was finally softened by the FASB; but critics said the modification did not go far enough, and it was done in response to pressure from politicians and bankers, not out of any fundamental change of heart or policies by the BIS or the FASB. Indeed, the BIS was warned as early as 2001 that its Basel II proposal was “procyclical,” meaning that in a downturn it would only serve to make matters worse. In a formal response to a Request for Comments by the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision, a group of economists stated:
Value-at-Risk can destabilize an economy and induce crashes when they would not otherwise occur... Perhaps our most serious concern is that these proposals, taken altogether, will enhance both the procyclicality of regulation and the susceptibility of the financial system to systemic crises, thus negating the central purpose of the whole exercise. Reconsider before it is too late.[17]
The BIS did not reconsider, however, even after seeing the devastation its regulations had caused; and that is where the conspiracy theorists came in. Why did the BIS sit idly by, they asked, as the global economy came crashing down? Was the goal to create so much economic havoc that the world would rush with relief into the waiting arms of a global economic policeman with its privately-created global currency?
[1] Andrew Gavin Marshall, “The Financial New World Order: Towards a Global Currency and World Government”, Global Research, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13070, 6 April 2009. See also Chapter 17.
[2] Alfred Mendez, “The Network”, The World Central Bank: The Bank for International
Settlements, http://copy_bilderberg.tripod.com/bis.htm.
[3] HubPages, “BIS – Bank of International Settlement: The Mother of All Central Banks”, hubpages.com, 2009.
[4] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, 1966.
[5] HubPages, “BIS – Bank of International Settlement: The Mother of All Central Banks”, hubpages.com, 2009.
[6] Edward Jay Epstein, “Ruling the World of Money”, Harper’s Magazine, November 1983.
[7] Joan Veon, “The Bank for International Settlements Calls for Global Currency”, News with Views, 26 August 2003.
[8] Peter Myers, “The 1988 Basle Accord – Destroyer of Japan’s Finance System”, http://www.mailstar.net/basle.html, 9 September 2008.
[9] Nirmal Chandra, “Is Inclusive Growth Feasible in Neoliberal India?”, networkideas.org, September 2008.
[10] Henry C. K. Liu, “The BIS vs National Banks”, Asia Times, http://www.atimes.com/global-econ/DE14Dj01.html, 14 May 2002.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Comptroller of the Currency, “OCC Approves Basel II Capital Rule”, Comptroller of the Currency Release, 1 November 2007.
[13] Vinny Catalano, “FAS 157: Timing Is Everything”, vinnycatalano.blogspot.com, 18 March 2008.
[14] Bruce Wiseman, “The Financial Crisis: A look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain”, Canada Free Press, 19 March 2009.
[15] Ellen Brown, “Credit Where Credit Is Due”, webofdebt.com/articles/creditcrunch.php, 11 January 2009.
[16] John Berlau, “The International Mark-to-Market Contagion”, OpenMarket.org, 10 October 2008.
[17] Jon Danielsson, et al., “An Academic Response to Basel II”, LSE Financial Markets Group Special Paper Series, May 2001.
CONSOLIDATING US MONEY POWER :
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF GLOBAL BANKING
Dean Henderson
ttp://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24967
If you want to know where the true power center of the world lies, follow the money - cui bono. According to Global Finance magazine, as of 2010 the world’s five biggest banks are all based in Rothschild fiefdoms UK and France. They are the French BNP ($3 trillion in assets), Royal Bank of Scotland ($2.7 trillion), the UK-based HSBC Holdings ($2.4 trillion), the French Credit Agricole ($2.2 trillion) and the British Barclays ($2.2 trillion).
In the US, a combination of deregulation and merger-mania has left four mega-banks ruling the financial roost. According to Global Finance, as of 2010 they are Bank of America ($2.2 trillion), JP Morgan Chase ($2 trillion), Citigroup ($1.9 trillion) and Wells Fargo ($1.25 trillion). I have dubbed them the Four Horsemen of US banking.
Consolidating the US Money Power
The September 2000 marriage which created JP Morgan Chase was the grandest merger in a frenzy of bank consolidation that took place throughout the 1990’s. Merger mania was fed by a massive deregulation of the banking industry including revocation of the Glass Steagal Act of 1933, which was enacted after the Great Depression to curb the banking monopolies which had caused the 1929 stock market crash and precipitated the Great Depression.
In July 1929 Goldman Sachs launched two investment trusts called Shenandoah and Blue Ridge. Through August and September they touted these trusts to the public, selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares through the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation at $104/share. Goldman Sachs insiders were bailing out of the stock market. By the fall of 1934 the trust shares were worth $1.75 each. One director at both Shenandoah and Blue Ridge was Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer John Foster Dulles. [1]
John Merrill, founder of Merrill Lynch, exited the stock market in 1928, as did insiders at Lehman Brothers. Chase Manhattan Chairman Alfred Wiggin took his “hunch” to the next level, forming Shermar Corporation in 1929 to short the stock of his own company. Following the Crash of 1929, Citibank President Charles Mitchell was jailed for tax evasion. [2]
In February 1995 President Bill Clinton announced plans to wipe out both Glass Steagal and the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956- which barred banks from owning insurance companies and other financial entities. That day the old opium and slave trader Barings went belly up after one of its Singapore-based traders named Nicholas Gleason got caught on the wrong side of billions of dollars in derivative currency trades. [3]
The warning went unheeded. In 1991 US taxpayers, already billed over $500 billion dollars for the S&L looting, were charged another $70 billion to bail out the FDIC, then footed the bill for a secret 2 1/2-year rescue of Citibank, which was close to collapse after the Latin American debt crunch hit home. With their bill’s paid by US taxpayers and bank deregulation a done deal, the stage was set for a slew of bank mergers like none the world had ever seen.
Reagan Undersecretary of Treasury George Gould had stated that concentration of banking into five to ten giant banks was what the US economy needed. Gould’s nightmare vision was about to come true.
In 1992 Bank of America bought its biggest West Coast rival Security Pacific, then swallowed up the looted Continental Bank of Illinois for cheap. Bank of America later took a 34% stake in Black Rock (Barclays owns 20% of Black Rock) and an 11% share in China Construction Bank, making it the nation’s second largest bank holding company with assets of $214 billion. Citibank controlled $249 billion. [4] Both banks have since increase their assets to around $2 trillion each.
In 1993 Chemical Bank gobbled up Texas Commerce to become the third largest bank holding company with $170 billion in assets. Chemical Bank had already merged with Manufacturers Hanover Trust in 1990.
North Carolina National Bank and C&S Sovran merged into Nation’s Bank, then the fourth largest US bank holding company, with $169 billion in its war chest. Fleet Norstar bought Bank of New England, while Norwest bought United Banks of Colorado.
Throughout this period US bank profits were soaring, breaking records with each new quarter. The year 1995 broke all previous records for bank mergers. Deals totaling $389 billion occurred that year. [5]
The Big Five investment banks, who had just made boatloads of money steering Latin American debt negotiations, now made a killing steering the bank and industrial merger- mania of the 1980’s and 1990’s.
According to Standard & Poors the top five investment banks were Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Salomon Smith Barney and Lehman Brothers. One deal that fell through in 1995 was a proposed merger between London’s biggest investment bank S. G. Warburg and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. Warburg chose Union Bank of Switzerland as its suitor instead, creating UBS Warburg as a sixth force in investment banking.
After the 1995 feeding frenzy, the money center banks moved aggressively into the Middle East, establishing operations in Tel Aviv, Beirut and Bahrain- where the US 5th Fleet was setting up shop. Bank privatizations in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Israel opened the door to the mega-banks in those nations. Chase and Citibank borrowed money to Royal Dutch/Shell and Saudi Petrochemical, while JP Morgan advised the Qatargas consortium led by Exxon Mobil. [6]
The global insurance industry had a case of merger mania as well. By 1995 Traveler’s Group had bought Aetna, Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway had eaten up Geico, Zurich Insurance had swallowed Kemper Corporation, CNA Financial had purchased Continental Companies and General RE Corporation had sunk its teeth into Colonia Konzern AG.
In late 1998 the Citibank colossus merged with Travelers Group to become Citigroup, creating a behemoth worth $700 billion that boasted 163,000 employees in over 100 countries and included the firms of Salomon Smith Barney (a joint venture with Morgan Stanley), Commercial Credit, Primerica Financial Services, Shearson Lehman, Barclays America, Aetna and Security Pacific Financial. [7]
That same year Bankers Trust and US investment bank Alex Brown were swooped up by Deutsche Bank, which had also purchased Morgan Grenfell of London in 1989. The purchase made Deutsche Bank the world’s largest bank at the time with assets of $882 billion. In January 2002, Japanese titans Mitsubishi and Sumitomo combined operations to create Mitsubishi Sumitomo Bank, which surpassed Deutsche Bank with assets of $905 billion. [8]
By 2004 HSBC had become the world’s second largest bank. Six years later all three behemoths had been eclipsed by both BNP and Royal Bank of Scotland.
In the US, the George Gould nightmare reached its ugly nadir just in time for the new millennium when Chase Manhattan swallowed up Chemical Bank. Bechtel banker Wells Fargo bought Norwest Bank, while Bank of America absorbed Nations Bank. The coup de grace came when the reunified House of Morgan announced that it would merge with the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan/Chemical Bank/ Manufacturers Hanover machine.
Four giant banks emerged to rule the US financial roost. JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup were kings of capital on the East Coast. Together they control 52.86% of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. [9] Bank of America and Wells Fargo reigned supreme on the West Coast.
During the 2008 banking crisis these firms got much larger, receiving a nearly $1 trillion government bailout compliments of Bush Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs alumni Henry Paulsen; while quietly taking over distressed assets for pennies on the dollar.
Barclays took over Lehman Brothers. JP Morgan Chase got Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns. Bank of America was handed Merrill Lynch and Countrywide. Wells Fargo swallowed up the nation's 5th biggest bank- Wachovia.
The same Eight Families-controlled banks which for decades had galloped their Four Horsemen of oil roughshod through the Persian Gulf oil patch are now more powerful than at any time in history. They are the Four Horsemen of US banking.
[1] The Great Crash of 1929. John Kenneth Galbraith. Houghton, Mifflin Company. Boston. 1979. p.148
[2] Ibid
[3] Evening Edition. National Public Radio. 2-27-95
[4] “Bank of America will Purchase Chicago Bank”. The Register-Guard. Eugene, OR. 1-29-94
[5] “Big-time Bankers Profit from M&A Fever”. Knight-Ridder News Service. 12-30-95
[6] “US Banks find New Opportunities in the Middle East”. Amy Dockser Marcus. Wall Street Journal. 10-12-95
[7] “Making a Money Machine”. Daniel Kadlec. Time. 4-20-98. p.44
[8] BBC World News. 1-20-02
[9] Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons and the Great Pyramids”. Jim Marrs. HarperCollins Publishers. New York. 2000. p.74
THE FEDERAL RESERVE CARTEL : THE EIGHT FAMILIES
Dean Henderson
The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP
Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the
Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal
Dutch/Shell, BP and Chevron Texaco); in tandem
with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays and other
European old money behemoths. But their monopoly
over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch.
According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the
Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten
stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation.[1]
So who then are the stockholders in these money center banks?
This information is guarded much more closely. My
queries to bank regulatory agencies regarding
stock ownership in the top 25 US bank holding
companies were given Freedom of Information Act
status, before being denied on “national
security” grounds. This is rather ironic, since
many of the bank’s stockholders reside in Europe.
One important repository for the wealth of the
global oligarchy that owns these bank holding
companies is US Trust Corporation - founded in
1853 and now owned by Bank of America. A recent
US Trust Corporate Director and Honorary Trustee
was Walter Rothschild. Other directors included
Daniel Davison of JP Morgan Chase, Richard Tucker
of Exxon Mobil, Daniel Roberts of Citigroup and
Marshall Schwartz of Morgan Stanley. [2]
J. W. McCallister, an oil industry insider with
House of Saud connections, wrote in The Grim
Reaper that information he acquired from Saudi
bankers cited 80% ownership of the New York
Federal Reserve Bank- by far the most powerful
Fed branch- by just eight families, four of which
reside in the US. They are the Goldman Sachs,
Rockefellers, Lehmans and Kuhn Loebs of New York;
the Rothschilds of Paris and London; the Warburgs
of Hamburg; the Lazards of Paris; and the Israel Moses Seifs of Rome.
CPA Thomas D. Schauf corroborates McCallister’s
claims, adding that ten banks control all twelve
Federal Reserve Bank branches. He names N.M.
Rothschild of London, Rothschild Bank of Berlin,
Warburg Bank of Hamburg, Warburg Bank of
Amsterdam, Lehman Brothers of New York, Lazard
Brothers of Paris, Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York,
Israel Moses Seif Bank of Italy, Goldman Sachs of
New York and JP Morgan Chase Bank of New York.
Schauf lists William Rockefeller, Paul Warburg,
Jacob Schiff and James Stillman as individuals
who own large shares of the Fed. [3] The Schiffs
are insiders at Kuhn Loeb. The Stillmans are
Citigroup insiders, who married into the
Rockefeller clan at the turn of the century.
Eustace Mullins came to the same conclusions in
his book The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, in
which he displays charts connecting the Fed and
its member banks to the families of Rothschild,
Warburg, Rockefeller and the others. [4]
The control that these banking families exert
over the global economy cannot be overstated and
is quite intentionally shrouded in secrecy. Their
corporate media arm is quick to discredit any
information exposing this private central banking
cartel as “conspiracy theory”. Yet the facts remain.
The House of Morgan
The Federal Reserve Bank was born in 1913, the
same year US banking scion J. Pierpont Morgan
died and the Rockefeller Foundation was formed.
The House of Morgan presided over American
finance from the corner of Wall Street and Broad,
acting as quasi-US central bank since 1838, when
George Peabody founded it in London.
Peabody was a business associate of the
Rothschilds. In 1952 Fed researcher Eustace
Mullins put forth the supposition that the
Morgans were nothing more than Rothschild agents.
Mullins wrote that the Rothschilds, “…preferred
to operate anonymously in the US behind the
facade of J.P. Morgan & Company”. [5]
Author Gabriel Kolko stated, “Morgan’s activities
in 1895-1896 in selling US gold bonds in Europe
were based on an alliance with the House of Rothschild.” [6]
The Morgan financial octopus wrapped its
tentacles quickly around the globe. Morgan
Grenfell operated in London. Morgan et Ce ruled
Paris. The Rothschild's Lambert cousins set up
Drexel & Company in Philadelphia.
The House of Morgan catered to the Astors,
DuPonts, Guggenheims, Vanderbilts and
Rockefellers. It financed the launch of AT&T,
General Motors, General Electric and DuPont. Like
the London-based Rothschild and Barings banks,
Morgan became part of the power structure in many countries.
By 1890 the House of Morgan was lending to
Egypt’s central bank, financing Russian
railroads, floating Brazilian provincial
government bonds and funding Argentine public
works projects. A recession in 1893 enhanced
Morgan’s power. That year Morgan saved the US
government from a bank panic, forming a syndicate
to prop up government reserves with a shipment of
$62 million worth of Rothschild gold. [7]
Morgan was the driving force behind Western
expansion in the US, financing and controlling
West-bound railroads through voting trusts. In
1879 Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Morgan-financed New
York Central Railroad gave preferential shipping
rates to John D. Rockefeller’s budding Standard
Oil monopoly, cementing the Rockefeller/Morgan relationship.
The House of Morgan now fell under Rothschild and
Rockefeller family control. A New York Herald
headline read, “Railroad Kings Form Gigantic
Trust”. J. Pierpont Morgan, who once stated,
“Competition is a sin”, now opined gleefully,
“Think of it. All competing railroad traffic west
of St. Louis placed in the control of about thirty men.”[8]
Morgan and Edward Harriman’s banker Kuhn Loeb
held a monopoly over the railroads, while banking
dynasties Lehman, Goldman Sachs and Lazard joined
the Rockefellers in controlling the US industrial base. [9]
In 1903 Banker’s Trust was set up by the Eight
Families. Benjamin Strong of Banker’s Trust was
the first Governor of the New York Federal
Reserve Bank. The 1913 creation of the Fed fused
the power of the Eight Families to the military
and diplomatic might of the US government. If
their overseas loans went unpaid, the oligarchs
could now deploy US Marines to collect the debts.
Morgan, Chase and Citibank formed an international lending syndicate.
The House of Morgan was cozy with the British
House of Windsor and the Italian House of Savoy.
The Kuhn Loebs, Warburgs, Lehmans, Lazards,
Israel Moses Seifs and Goldman Sachs also had
close ties to European royalty. By 1895 Morgan
controlled the flow of gold in and out of the US.
The first American wave of mergers was in its
infancy and was being promoted by the bankers. In
1897 there were sixty-nine industrial mergers. By
1899 there were twelve-hundred. In 1904 John
Moody - founder of Moody’s Investor Services -
said it was impossible to talk of Rockefeller and
Morgan interests as separate. [10]
Public distrust of the combine spread. Many
considered them traitors working for European old
money. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Andrew
Carnegie’s US Steel and Edward Harriman’s
railroads were all financed by banker Jacob
Schiff at Kuhn Loeb, who worked closely with the European Rothschilds.
Several Western states banned the bankers.
Populist preacher William Jennings Bryan was
thrice the Democratic nominee for President from
1896 -1908. The central theme of his
anti-imperialist campaign was that America was
falling into a trap of “financial servitude to
British capital”. Teddy Roosevelt defeated Bryan
in 1908, but was forced by this spreading
populist wildfire to enact the Sherman Anti-Trust
Act. He then went after the Standard Oil Trust.
In 1912 the Pujo hearings were held, addressing
concentration of power on Wall Street. That same
year Mrs. Edward Harriman sold her substantial
shares in New York’s Guaranty Trust Bank to J.P.
Morgan, creating Morgan Guaranty Trust. Judge
Louis Brandeis convinced President Woodrow Wilson
to call for an end to interlocking board
directorates. In 1914 the Clayton Anti-Trust Act was passed.
Jack Morgan - J. Pierpont’s son and successor -
responded by calling on Morgan clients Remington
and Winchester to increase arms production. He
argued that the US needed to enter WWI. Goaded by
the Carnegie Foundation and other oligarchy
fronts, Wilson accommodated. As Charles Tansill
wrote in America Goes to War, “Even before the
clash of arms, the French firm of Rothschild
Freres cabled to Morgan & Company in New York
suggesting the flotation of a loan of $100
million, a substantial part of which was to be
left in the US to pay for French purchases of American goods.”
The House of Morgan financed half the US war
effort, while receiving commissions for lining up
contractors like GE, Du Pont, US Steel, Kennecott
and ASARCO. All were Morgan clients. Morgan also
financed the British Boer War in South Africa and
the Franco-Prussian War. The 1919 Paris Peace
Conference was presided over by Morgan, which led
both German and Allied reconstruction efforts. [11]
In the 1930’s populism resurfaced in America
after Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bank and others
profited from the Crash of 1929. [12] House
Banking Committee Chairman Louis McFadden (D-NY)
said of the Great Depression, “It was no
accident. It was a carefully contrived
occurrence...The international bankers sought to
bring about a condition of despair here so they
might emerge as rulers of us all”.
Sen. Gerald Nye (D-ND) chaired a munitions
investigation in 1936. Nye concluded that the
House of Morgan had plunged the US into WWI to
protect loans and create a booming arms industry.
Nye later produced a document titled The Next
War, which cynically referred to “the old goddess
of democracy trick”, through which Japan could be
used to lure the US into WWII.
In 1937 Interior Secretary Harold Ickes warned of
the influence of “America’s 60 Families”.
Historian Ferdinand Lundberg later penned a book
of the exact same title. Supreme Court Justice
William O. Douglas decried, “Morgan
influence...the most pernicious one in industry and finance today.”
Jack Morgan responded by nudging the US towards
WWII. Morgan had close relations with the Iwasaki
and Dan families - Japan’s two wealthiest clans -
who have owned Mitsubishi and Mitsui,
respectively, since the companies emerged from
17th Century shogunates. When Japan invaded
Manchuria, slaughtering Chinese peasants at
Nanking, Morgan downplayed the incident. Morgan
also had close relations with Italian fascist
Benito Mussolini, while German Nazi Dr. Hjalmer
Schacht was a Morgan Bank liaison during WWII.
After the war Morgan representatives met with
Schacht at the Bank of International Settlements
(BIS) in Basel, Switzerland. [13]
The House of Rockefeller
BIS is the most powerful bank in the world, a
global central bank for the Eight Families who
control the private central banks of almost all
Western and developing nations. The first
President of BIS was Rockefeller banker Gates
McGarrah- an official at Chase Manhattan and the
Federal Reserve. McGarrah was the grandfather of
former CIA director Richard Helms. The
Rockefellers- like the Morgans- had close ties to
London. David Icke writes in Children of the
Matrix, that the Rockefellers and Morgans were
just “gofers” for the European Rothschilds. [14]
BIS is owned by the Federal Reserve, Bank of
England, Bank of Italy, Bank of Canada, Swiss
National Bank, Nederlandsche Bank, Bundesbank and Bank of France.
Historian Carroll Quigley wrote in his epic book
Tragedy and Hope that BIS was part of a plan, “to
create a world system of financial control in
private hands able to dominate the political
system of each country and the economy of the
world as a whole...to be controlled in a
feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the
world acting in concert by secret agreements.”
The US government had a historical distrust of
BIS, lobbying unsuccessfully for its demise at
the 1944 post-WWII Bretton Woods Conference.
Instead the Eight Families’ power was
exacerbated, with the Bretton Woods creation of
the IMF and the World Bank. The US Federal
Reserve only took shares in BIS in September 1994. [15]
BIS holds at least 10% of monetary reserves for
at least 80 of the world’s central banks, the IMF
and other multilateral institutions. It serves as
financial agent for international agreements,
collects information on the global economy and
serves as lender of last resort to prevent global financial collapse.
BIS promotes an agenda of monopoly capitalist
fascism. It gave a bridge loan to Hungary in the
1990’s to ensure privatization of that country’s
economy. It served as conduit for Eight Families
funding of Adolf Hitler- led by the Warburg's J.
Henry Schroeder and Mendelsohn Bank of Amsterdam.
Many researchers assert that BIS is at the nadir
of global drug money laundering. [16]
It is no coincidence that BIS is headquartered in
Switzerland, favorite hiding place for the wealth
of the global aristocracy and headquarters for
the P-2 Italian Freemason’s Alpina Lodge and Nazi
International. Other institutions which the Eight
Families control include the World Economic
Forum, the International Monetary Conference and the World Trade Organization.
Bretton Woods was a boon to the Eight Families.
The IMF and World Bank were central to this “new
world order”. In 1944 the first World Bank bonds
were floated by Morgan Stanley and First Boston.
The French Lazard family became more involved in
House of Morgan interests. Lazard Freres-
France’s biggest investment bank- is owned by the
Lazard and David-Weill families- old Genoese
banking scions represented by Michelle Davive. A
recent Chairman and CEO of Citigroup was Sanford Weill.
In 1968 Morgan Guaranty launched Euro-Clear, a
Brussels-based bank clearing system for
Eurodollar securities. It was the first such
automated endeavor. Some took to calling
Euro-Clear “The Beast”. Brussels serves as
headquarters for the new European Central Bank
and for NATO. In 1973 Morgan officials met
secretly in Bermuda to illegally resurrect the
old House of Morgan, twenty years before Glass
Steagal Act was repealed. Morgan and the
Rockefellers provided the financial backing for
Merrill Lynch, boosting it into the Big 5 of US
investment banking. Merrill is now part of Bank of America.
John D. Rockefeller used his oil wealth to
acquire Equitable Trust, which had gobbled up
several large banks and corporations by the
1920’s. The Great Depression helped consolidate
Rockefeller’s power. His Chase Bank merged with
Kuhn Loeb’s Manhattan Bank to form Chase
Manhattan, cementing a long-time family
relationship. The Kuhn-Loeb’s had financed -
along with Rothschilds - Rockefeller's quest to
become king of the oil patch. National City Bank
of Cleveland provided John D. with the money
needed to embark upon his monopolization of the
US oil industry. The bank was identified in
Congressional hearings as being one of three
Rothschild-owned banks in the US during the
1870’s, when Rockefeller first incorporated as Standard Oil of Ohio. [17]
One Rockefeller Standard Oil partner was Edward
Harkness, whose family came to control Chemical
Bank. Another was James Stillman, whose family
controlled Manufacturers Hanover Trust. Both
banks have merged under the JP Morgan Chase
umbrella. Two of James Stillman’s daughters
married two of William Rockefeller’s sons. The
two families control a big chunk of Citigroup as well. [18]
In the insurance business, the Rockefellers
control Metropolitan Life, Equitable Life,
Prudential and New York Life. Rockefeller banks
control 25% of all assets of the 50 largest US
commercial banks and 30% of all assets of the 50
largest insurance companies. [19] Insurance
companies- the first in the US was launched by
Freemasons through their Woodman’s of America-
play a key role in the Bermuda drug money shuffle.
Companies under Rockefeller control include Exxon
Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco, Marathon Oil,
Freeport McMoran, Quaker Oats, ASARCO, United,
Delta, Northwest, ITT, International Harvester,
Xerox, Boeing, Westinghouse, Hewlett-Packard,
Honeywell, International Paper, Pfizer, Motorola,
Monsanto, Union Carbide and General Foods.
The Rockefeller Foundation has close financial
ties to both Ford and Carnegie Foundations. Other
family philanthropic endeavors include
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Institute
for Medical Research, General Education Board,
Rockefeller University and the University of
Chicago- which churns out a steady stream of far
right economists as apologists for international
capital, including Milton Friedman.
The family owns 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where the
national Christmas tree is lighted every year,
and Rockefeller Center. David Rockefeller was
instrumental in the construction of the World
Trade Center towers. The main Rockefeller family
home is a hulking complex in upstate New York
known as Pocantico Hills. They also own a 32-room
5th Avenue duplex in Manhattan, a mansion in
Washington, DC, Monte Sacro Ranch in Venezuela,
coffee plantations in Ecuador, several farms in
Brazil, an estate at Seal Harbor, Maine and
resorts in the Caribbean, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. [20]
The Dulles and Rockefeller families are cousins.
Allen Dulles created the CIA, assisted the Nazis,
covered up the Kennedy hit from his Warren
Commission perch and struck a deal with the
Muslim Brotherhood to create mind-controlled assassins. [21]
Brother John Foster Dulles presided over the
phony Goldman Sachs trusts before the 1929 stock
market crash and helped his brother overthrow
governments in Iran and Guatemala. Both were
Skull & Bones, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
insiders and 33rd Degree Masons. [22]
The Rockefellers were instrumental in forming the
depopulation-oriented Club of Rome at their
family estate in Bellagio, Italy. Their Pocantico
Hills estate gave birth to the Trilateral
Commission. The family is a major funder of the
eugenics movement which spawned Hitler, human
cloning and the current DNA obsession in US scientific circles.
John Rockefeller Jr. headed the Population
Council until his death. [23] His namesake son is
a Senator from West Virginia. Brother Winthrop
Rockefeller was Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas
and remains the most powerful man in that state.
In an October 1975 interview with Playboy
magazine, Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller- who
was also Governor of New York- articulated his
family's patronizing worldview, “I am a great
believer in planning- economic, social,
political, military, total world planning.”
But of all the Rockefeller brothers, it is
Trilateral Commission (TC) founder and Chase
Manhattan Chairman David who has spearheaded the
family’s fascist agenda on a global scale. He
defended the Shah of Iran, the South African
apartheid regime and the Chilean Pinochet junta.
He was the biggest financier of the CFR, the TC
and (during the Vietnam War) the Committee for an
Effective and Durable Peace in Asia- a contract
bonanza for those who made their living off the conflict.
Nixon asked him to be Secretary of Treasury, but
Rockefeller declined the job, knowing his power
was much greater at the helm of the Chase. Author
Gary Allen writes in The Rockefeller File that in
1973, “David Rockefeller met with twenty-seven
heads of state, including the rulers of Russia and Red China.”
Following the 1975 Nugan Hand Bank/CIA coup
against Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam,
his British Crown-appointed successor Malcolm
Fraser sped to the US, where he met with
President Gerald Ford after conferring with David Rockefeller. [24]
Next Week: Part II: Freemasons & The Bank of the United States
Notes
[1] 10K Filings of Fortune 500 Corporations to SEC. 3-91
[2] 10K Filing of US Trust Corporation to SEC. 6-28-95
[3] “The Federal Reserve ‘Fed Up’. Thomas Schauf. www.davidicke.com 1-02
[4] The Secrets of the Federal Reserve. Eustace
Mullins. Bankers Research Institute. Staunton, VA. 1983. p.179
[5] Ibid. p.53
[6] The Triumph of Conservatism. Gabriel Kolko.
MacMillan and Company New York. 1963. p.142
[7] Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History that
Connects the Trilateral Commission, the
Freemasons and the Great Pyramids. Jim Marrs.
HarperCollins Publishers. New York. 2000. p.57
[8] The House of Morgan. Ron Chernow. Atlantic Monthly Press NewYork 1990
[9] Marrs. p.57
[10] Democracy for the Few. Michael Parenti. St.
Martin’s Press. New York. 1977. p.178
[11] Chernow
[12] The Great Crash of 1929. John Kenneth
Galbraith. Houghton, Mifflin Company. Boston. 1979. p.148
[13] Chernow
[14] Children of the Matrix. David Icke. Bridge of Love. Scottsdale, AZ. 2000
[15] The Confidence Game: How Un-Elected Central
Bankers are Governing the Changed World Economy.
Steven Solomon. Simon & Schuster. New York. 1995. p.112
[16] Marrs. p.180
[17] Ibid. p.45
[18] The Money Lenders: The People and Politics
of the World Banking Crisis. Anthony Sampson. Penguin Books. New York. 1981
[19] The Rockefeller File. Gary Allen. ’76 Press. Seal Beach, CA. 1977
[20] Ibid
[21] Dope Inc.: The Book That Drove Kissinger
Crazy. Editors of Executive Intelligence Review. Washington, DC. 1992
[22] Marrs.
[23] The Rockefeller Syndrome. Ferdinand
Lundberg. Lyle Stuart Inc. Secaucus, NJ. 1975. p.296
[24] Marrs. p.53
Dean Henderson is the author of Big Oil & Their
Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight
Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics &
Terror Network and The Grateful Unrich:
Revolution in 50 Countries. His Left Hook blog is
at www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com
THE ELITE, THE GREAT GAME AND WORLD WAR 111
Prof. Mujahid Kamran
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25160
The control of the US, and of global politics, by the wealthiest families of the planet is exercised in a powerful, profound and clandestine manner. This control began in Europe and has a continuity that can be traced back to the time when the bankers discovered it was more profitable to give loans to governments than to needy individuals.
These banking families and their subservient beneficiaries have come to own most major businesses over the two centuries during which they have secretly and increasingly organised themselves as controllers of governments worldwide and as arbiters of war and peace.
Unless we understand this we will be unable to understand the real reasons for the two world wars and the impending Third World War, a war that is almost certain to begin as a consequence of the US attempt to seize and control Central Asia. The only way out is for the
US to back off – something the people of the US and the world want, but the elite does not.
The US is a country controlled through the privately owned Federal Reserve, which in turn is controlled by the handful of banking families that established it by deception in the first place.
In his interesting book The Secret Team, Col. Fletcher Prouty, briefing officer of the US President from 1955-63, narrates a remarkable incident in which Winston Churchill made a most revealing utterance during World War II: “On this particular night there had been a heavy raid on Rotterdam. He sat there, meditating, and then, as if to himself, he said, ‘Unrestricted submarine warfare, unrestricted air bombing – this is total war.’ He continued sitting there, gazing at a large map, and then said, ‘Time and the Ocean and some guiding star and High Cabal have made us what we are’.”
Prouty further states: “This was a most memorable scene and a revelation of reality that is infrequent, at best. If for the great Winston Churchill, there is a ‘High Cabal’ that has made us what we are, our definition is complete. Who could know better than Churchill himself during the darkest days of World War II, that there exists, beyond doubt, an international High Cabal? This was true then. It is true today, especially in these times of the One World Order. This all-powerful group has remained superior because it had learned the value of anonymity.” This “High Cabal” is the “One World Cabal” of today, also called the elite by various writers.
The High Cabal and What They Control
The elite owns the media, banks, defence and oil industry. In his book Who’s Who of the Elite Robert Gaylon Ross Sr. states: “It is my opinion that they own the US military, NATO, the Secret Service, the CIA, the Supreme Court, and many of the lower courts. They appear to control, either directly or indirectly, most of the state, county, and local law enforcement agencies.”
The elite is intent on conquering the world through the use of the abilities of the people of the United States. It was as far back as 1774 that Amschel Mayer Rothschild stated at a gathering of the twelve richest men of Prussia in Frankfurt: “Wars should be directed so that the nations on both sides should be further in our debt.” He further enunciated at the same meeting: “Panics and financial depressions would ultimately result in World Government, a new order of one world government.”
The elite owns numerous “think tanks” that work for expanding, consolidating and perpetuating its hold on the globe. The Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and many other similar organisations are all funded by the elite and work for it. These think tanks publish journals, such as Foreign Affairs, in which these imperialist and anti-mankind ideas are edified as publications, and then, if need be, expanded in the form of books that are given wide publicity.
Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger et al, as well as the neo-con “thinkers,” owe their positions and good living standards to the largesse of the elite. This is an important point that must be kept in full view at all times. These thinkers and writers are on the payroll of the elite and work for them. In case someone has any doubts about such a statement, it might help to read the following quotes from Professor Peter Dale Scott’s comprehensively researched book The Road to 9/11 – Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (University of California Press, 2007):
...Bundy’s Harvard protégé Kissinger was named to be national security adviser after having chaired an important “study group” at the Council on Foreign Relations. As a former assistant to Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger had been paid by Rockefeller to write a book on limited warfare for the CFR. He had also campaigned hard in Rockefeller’s losing campaign for the Presidential nomination in 1968. Thus Rockefeller and the CFR might have been excluded from control of the Republican Party, but not from the Republican White House. (Page 22)
The following quote from page 38 of the book is also very revealing:
The Kissinger-Rockefeller relationship was complex and certainly intense. As investigative reporter Jim Hougan wrote: “Kissinger, married to a former Rockefeller aide, owner of a Georgetown mansion whose purchase was enabled only by Rockefeller gifts and loans, was always a protégé of his patron Nelson Rockefeller, even when he wasn’t directly employed by him.”
Professor Scott adds:
Nixon’s and Kissinger’s arrival in the White House in 1969 coincided with David Rockefeller’s becoming CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank. The Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy of detente was highly congruous with Rockefeller’s push to internationalise Chase Manhattan banking operations. Thus in 1973 Chase Manhattan became the first American bank to open an office in Moscow. A few months later, thanks to an invitation arranged by Kissinger, Rockefeller became the first US banker to talk with Chinese Communist leaders in Beijing.
How They Manipulate Public Opinion
In addition to these strategic “think tanks” the elite has set up a chain of research institutes devoted to manipulating public opinion in a manner the elite desires. As pointed out by John Coleman in his eye opening book The Tavistock Institute on Human Relations – Shaping the Moral, Spiritual, Cultural, Political and Economic Decline of the United States of America, it was in 1913 that an institute was established at Wellington House, London for manipulation of public opinion. According to Coleman:
The modern science of mass manipulation was born at Wellington House London, the lusty infant being midwifed by Lord Northcliffe and Lord Rothmere. The British monarchy, Lord Rothschild, and the Rockefellers were responsible for funding the venture... the purpose of those at Wellington House was to effect a change in the opinions of British people who were adamantly opposed to war with Germany, a formidable task that was accomplished by “opinion making” through polling. The staff consisted of Arnold Toynbee, a future director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), Lord Northcliffe, and the Americans, Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays. Lord Northcliffe was related to the Rothschilds through marriage.
Bernays was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, a fact never mentioned, and developed the technique of “engineering consent.” When Sigmund Freud moved to Britain he also, secretly, became associated with this institute through the Tavistock Institute. According to Coleman, Bernays “pioneered the use of psychology and other social sciences to shape and form public opinion so that the public thought such manufactured opinions were their own.”
The Tavistock Institute has a 6 billion dollar fund and 400 subsidiary organisations are under its control along with 3,000 think tanks, mostly in the USA. The Stanford Research Institute, the Hoover Institute, the Aspen Institute of Colorado, and many others, devoted to manipulation of US as well as global public opinion, are Tavistock offshoots. This helps explain why the US public, by and large, is so mesmerised as to be unable to see things clearly and to react.
Bilderberg researcher Daniel Estulin quotes from Mary Scobey’s book To Nurture Humanness a statement attributed to Professor Raymond Houghton, that the CFR has been clear for a very long time that “absolute behaviour control is imminent… without mankind’s self realisation that a crisis is at hand.”
Also keep in mind that currently 80% of US electronic and print media is owned by only six large corporations. This development has taken place in the past two decades. These corporations are elite owned. It is almost impossible for anyone who is acquainted with what is going on at the global level to watch, even for a few minutes, the distortions, lies and fabrications, incessantly pouring out of this media, a propaganda and brainwashing organ of the elite.
Once your picture is clear it is also easy to notice the criminal silence of the media on crimes being perpetrated against humanity at the behest of the elite. How many people know that the cancer rates in Fallujah, Iraq are higher than those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of the use of depleted uranium, and maybe other secret nuclear devices, by US forces? Fallujah was punished for its heroic resistance against the American forces.
The Importance of Eurasia
Why is the US in Central Asia? In order to understand this, one has to look at the writings of the stooges of the elite – Brzezinski, Kissinger, Samuel P Huntington, and their likes. It is important to note that members of these elite paid think tanks publish books as part of a strategy to give respectability to subsequent illegal, immoral and predatory actions that are to be taken at the behest of the elite. The views are not necessarily their own – they are the views of the think tanks. These stooges formulate and pronounce policies and plans at the behest of their masters, through bodies like the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg Group, etc.
In his infinitely arrogant book The Grand Chessboard, published in 1997, Brzezinski spelled out the philosophy behind the current US military eruption. He starts by quoting the well-known views of the British geographer Sir Halford J Mackinder (1861–1947), another worker for the elite. Mackinder was a member of the ‘Coefficients Dining Club’ established by members of the Fabian Society in 1902. The continuity of the policies of the elite is indicated by the fact Brzezinski starts from Mackinder’s thesis first propounded in 1904: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: who commands the World-Island commands the world.”
Brzezinski argues that for the first time in human history a non-Eurasian power has become preeminent and it must hold sway over the Eurasian continent if it is to remain the preeminent global power: “For America the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… About 75 percent of the world’s people live in Eurasia… Eurasia accounts for about 60 percent of the world’s GNP and about three fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”
It is not just the geostrategic location of this region – it is also its wealth, “both in its enterprises and beneath its soil,” that holds such attraction for the elite whose greed for money, and lust for power, remain insatiable, as if there was a sickness afflicting it.
Brzezinski writes: “But it is on the globe’s most important playing field – Eurasia – that a potential rival to America might at some point arise. This focusing on the key players and properly assessing the terrain has to be a point of departure for the formulation of American geostrategy for the long-term management of America’s Eurasian geopolitical interests.”
These lines were published in 1997. Millions of people have died in the past two decades and millions have been rendered homeless in this region but it remains a “playing” field for Brzezinski and his likes! In his book Brzezinski has drawn two very interesting maps – one of these has the caption The Global Zone of Percolating Violence (page 53) and the other (page 124) is captioned The Eurasian Balkans. The first of these encircles a region which includes the following countries: Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, all Central Asian states, Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of Russia as well as India. The second one has two circles, an inner circle and a wider circle – the outer circle encloses the same countries as in the first map but the inner circle covers Iran, Afghanistan, eastern Turkey and the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia.
“This huge region, torn by volatile hatreds and surrounded by competing powerful neighbours, is likely to be a major battlefield…” writes Brzezinski. He further writes: “A possible challenge to American primacy from Islamic fundamentalism could be part of the problem of this unstable region.” These lines were written at a time when this kind of fundamentalism was not a problem – subsequently the US manipulated things and chose to make it one by its provocative and deceptive tactics. According to its strategic thinkers, the US might face a serious challenge from a coalition of China, Russia and Iran and must do whatever it can to prevent such a coalition from forming.
For Brzezinski, “terrorism” – a Tavistock-type concept – is just a well planned and well thought out strategy, a lie and a deception, to provide cover for a military presence in the Central Eurasian region and elsewhere. It is being used to keep the US public in a state of fear, to keep Russia in a state of insecurity about further breakup (the US has trained and supported Chechen fighters, “terrorists,” throughout) and to justify presence of US troops in and around Central Asia.
The Concocted War on Terrorism
Terrorism provides justification for transforming the United States into a police state. According to the Washington Post of 20 & 21 December 2010, the US now has 4,058 anti-terrorism organisations! These are certainly not meant for those so-called terrorists who operate in Central Asia – the number far exceeds the number of so-called terrorists in the entire world. Unbridled domestic spying by US agencies is now a fact of life and the US public, as always, has accepted this because of the collusion of media and Tavistock type institutes owned by the elite.
The US historian Howard Zinn puts it very well: “The so-called war on terrorism is not only a war against innocent people in other countries, but also a war on the people of the United States: a war on our liberties, a war on our standard of living. The wealth of the country is being stolen from the people and handed over to the superrich. The lives of our young are being stolen. And the thieves are in the White House.” Actually the thieves control the White House and have been doing so for a very long time.
In his outstanding book Crossing the Rubicon, Michael Ruppert points out that much of the violence in the Central Asian region as well as in Pakistan, which has been encircled in two maps in Brzezinski’s book, was “initiated by the US proxies.” “Given that these maps were published a full four years before the first plane hit the World Trade Centre, they would fall in a category of evidence I learned about at LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department]. We called them ‘clues’.” This means that the eruption of US militarism after 9/11, and the event itself, were part of a pre-planned and coherent strategy of global domination in which the people of the US were also “conquered” through totalitarian legislation carried out in the wake of 9/11.
As Brzezinski puts it:
America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a popular democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being… The economic self-denial (that is, defence spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation.
Certainly post 9/11 legislation, the extraordinary expansion of agencies and surveillance of the US public is a cause of great satisfaction for the elite – the US can hardly be called a democracy now. As reported by the Washington Post, the National Security Agency intercepts over 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other communications every day and stores them. No wonder Bush called 9/11 “a great opportunity” and Rumsfeld saw it analogous to World War II to “refashion the world.”
In order to achieve the objectives of the elite, the US destroyed Yugoslavia while Russia stood by mesmerised and impotent, carried out regime changes in Central Asia, set up military bases in East Europe and Central Asia, and staged highly provocative military exercises testing Russia’s and China’s will. It set up a military base in Kyrgyzstan that has a 500 mile or so border with China. When the Chinese protested recent naval exercises with South Korea were too close to Chinese territory, a US spokesman responded: “Those determinations are made by us, and us alone… Where we exercise, when we exercise, with whom and how, with what assets and so forth are determinations that are made by the United States Navy, by the Department of Defence, by the United States government.” As journalist Rick Rozoff notes: “There is no way such confrontational, arrogant and vulgar language was not understood at its proper value in Beijing.”
The US has acquired bases in Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and the Czech Republic – and set up the largest military base ever built in the region, Camp Bondsteel, in Kosovo. According to a report in the Russian Kommersant newspaper on 3 March 2011, a four-phase plan for deployment of a US missile system in Europe is to be fully implemented by the end of 2020. The US is also busy setting up bilateral military ties in Russia’s backyard with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and is pursuing the goal of a “Greater Central Asia” from Afghanistan right up to the Middle East, a great corridor from where the oil, gas, and great mineral wealth of this region will flow to the coffers of the US elite, at bloody expense to the local people.
As remarked by the Indian career diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar: “The time is not far off before they begin to sense that ‘the war on terror’ is providing a convenient rubric under which the US is incrementally securing for itself a permanent abode in the highlands of Hindu Kush, the Pamirs, Central Asian steppes and the Caucasus that form the strategic hub overlooking Russia, China, India and Iran.” The scene for a great war involving the great powers of the time – US, Russia and China – is now set, by design of the elite. It is just a matter of time.
Time and again the US elite has taken its good people into great wars through documented and proven deceptions – the sinking of the Lusitania during World War I, Pearl Harbour in World War II, and so on. The elite considers us “human garbage” – a term first used by the French in Indo-China. It is also generating a good deal of “human garbage” in the US. A World Bank report points out that in 2005, 28 million Americans were “insecure” – in 2007 the number had risen to 46 million! One in every five Americans is faced with the possibility of becoming “destitute” – 38 million people receive food coupons!
Michael Ruppert laments:
My country is dead. Its people have surrendered to tyranny and in so doing, they have become tyranny’s primary support group; its base; its defender. Every day they offer their endorsement of tyranny by banking in its banks and spending their borrowed money with the corporations that run it. The great Neocon strategy of George H.W. Bush has triumphed. Convince the America people that they can’t live without the ‘good things’, then sit back and watch as they endorse the progressively more outrageous crimes you commit as you throw them bones with ever less meat on them. All the while lock them into debt. Destroy the middle class, the only political base that need be feared. Make them accept, because of their shared guilt, ever-more repressive police state measures. Do whatever you want.
A global economic system erected on inhuman and predatory values, where a few possess more wealth than the billions of hungry put together, will end, but the end will be painful and bloody. It is a system in which the elite thrives on war and widespread human misery, on death and destruction by design. As Einstein said, “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth – sticks and stones!”
Prof. Mujahid Kamran is Vice Chancellor, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan, and his book The Grand Deception – Corporate America and Perpetual War has just been published (April 2011) by Sang e Meel Publications, Lahore, Pakistan.
REVEALED –
THE CAPITALIST NETWORK THAT RUNS THE WORLD
Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21...world.html
As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).
"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."
Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.
The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.
The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.
Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."
"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.
Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.
Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Bar-Yam says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.
One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.
Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."
So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies
1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company
THE GOLDMAN SACHS GOODFELLAS
Dave Hodges
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hodges/dave115.htm
The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries. David Rockefeller, Memoirs
It is no secret that Goldman Sachs runs Wall Street. Even Ray Charles could see that that Goldman Sachs runs our government as evidenced by the former Goldman Sachs gangsters who have run our economy into the ground (e.g., Clintons Secretary of Treasury Goldman Sachs Rubin, Bushs Secretary of Treasury Goldman Sachs too big to fail Paulson, Goldman Sachs and Tiny Tim Geithner presently serves as Obamas Secretary of Treasury, etc.)
Goldman Sachs dominates the Federal Reserve. Goldman Sachs dominates the World Bank. Goldman Sachs dominates the IMF. Goldman Sachs dominates the New York Stock Exchange. And now Goldman Sachs is running the European financial system into the ground as another Goldman Sachs boy, super Mario Monti, who has taken over Italy to finish off what is left of the Italian financial system. Monti is also the head of the European Trilateral Commission as well as a Bilderberger. And yet another Goldman Sachs boy is finishing off the job in Greece .
Todays events parallel the imperialists of the early 20thcentury which resulted in World War I. The Wall Street led depression of the 1930s led to the rise of political extremism and ultimately to World War II. Today, Goldman Sachs and their fellow Wall Street cronies are currently running, or dare I say ruining the global economy and the consequences are going to result in the culmination of World War III from which these same gangster banksters will profit from the buildup, the death and destruction of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of innocent people as well as the lucrative clean up which follows every war. However, the ultimate prize for the coming war will be the ruination of the planet in order to reconstruct civilization in a true fascist model that Hitler and Mussolini could only dream about. Remember, as the globalists like to say in reference to their favorite Hegelian Dialectic quote, Out of chaos comes order. Mind you, it wont be Goldman Sachs money that pays for the destruction of humanity in the coming war. This wars blood money will be your money and my money. Mind you, it wont be Goldman Sachs children who are pressed into military service and will be sacrificed in the coming conflict. It will be your children and my children who will be sacrificed in the name of furthering the bottom line of the Goldman Sachs Mafia and the rest of the Wall Street gangsters. Meanwhile, the Goldman Sachs children will be safely tucked away attending private schools on your nickel and on the blood of your children as the devastation begins to unfold.
When that Wall Street sock puppet, Barack Hussein Obama, gave Israel permission to attack Iran , the dominoes leading to the next world war have begun to topple as Russia will surely come to the aid of its trading partner, Iran . And Russia has already moved warships into place to protect Syria from attack by NATO. Germany , except for Merkel, is taking a stand against this international banking cartels planned economic destruction of Europe , courtesy of Wall Streets derivative debt.
A growing number of experts feel that Germany may leave the EU and will join forces with Russia as evidenced by the recent series of trade and manufacturing agreements between the two countries. This could mark the breakup of NATO and leave American and British forces on their own, to fight the coming war. This is exactly what these banksters desire, which is the destruction of America and her military might. America will prove to be the last man standing on this corrupt march toward a bankster dominated New World Order and we Americans must be taken down, and taken down with a vengeance, in order to achieve this end.
This swath of international destruction being promulgated by Goldman Sachs is also being visited upon the daily lives of the American public here at home. Courtesy of the Goldman Sachs gangsters, there are no more safe financial havens for American citizens. Your bank account, your pension fund, your investment accounts and your home mortgages are no longer safe. These collective funds are not at risk because of the risk of falling victim to the failing economy as much as these funds are subject to confiscation by Goldman Sachs and its shell corporations along with the complicit support of the federal government. A clear case in point lies in the recent happenings in MF Global.
MF Global, a shell corporation beholding to Goldman Sachs, was led to the slaughter by the former Goldman Sachs executive and former New Jersey Governor and senator, John Corzine.
Corzines criminal actions have directly victimized 35,000 Americans by stealing an estimated $900 million dollars of his clients money from their supposedly secure private account. There is also another $600 million missing dollars from MF Global. Meanwhile, Corzine avoids sharing a prison cell with Bernie Madoff by purchasing a get-out-of-jail card through the sponsorship of a $35,000 per plate fundraiser for that great Wall Street puppet, Barack Hussein Obama. And what are the government watch dogs doing to protect our money from this new generation of robber barons? The short answer is that the feds are partners with Goldman Sachs in this monumental violation of the public trust.
TRILATERAL COMMISSION INFLUENCE IN THE EUROZONE
Patrick Wood
http://www.augustforecast.com/2011/11/11...-eurozone/
Speaking of his Trilateral Commission’s influence in the original creation of the European Union, David Rockefeller wrote in 1998,
“Back in the early Seventies, the hope for a more united EUROPE was already full-blown?–?thanks in many ways to the individual energies previously spent by so many of the Trilateral Commission’s earliest members.” [Capitals in original] (Rockefeller, David; In the Beginning; The Trilateral Commission at 25, 1998, p.11)
Some argued that “that was then and this is now,” and that the Commission’s influence had waned with the passing of the older generation.
Nonsense. It was Trilateral Commissioner Vallery d’Estaing who authored the EU’s Constitution in 2002?–?2003 when he was President of the Convention on the Future of Europe.
On November 10, 2011, Robert Wenzel, Editor & Publisher of the Economic Policy Journal, wrote the following short report:
And the Big Time Banksters Come Marching In
“Here’s what you need to know about the current crisis in the Eurozone. The big time banksters are getting direct hands on control:
“Mario Drgahi has become president of the European Central Bank as of November 1. He was vice chairman and managing director of Goldman Sachs International and a member of the firm-wide management committee. He was the Italian Executive Director at the World Bank. He has been a Fellow of the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
“Lucas Papademos takes over today as Prime Minister of Greece. He was an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He was a visiting professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. And, he was previously a vice president of the European Central Bank. He has been a member of the Trilateral Commission since 1998.
“Indications are that Mario Monti will succeed Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister of Italy, within in days. Monti completed graduate studies at Yale University, where he studied under James Tobin (see the Tobin Tax). He is a member of the European Commission. He is European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission and and member of the Bilderberg Group.
“If you get the sense that the elitist banksters are going to take this financial crisis and push it in whatever direction they want, you are probably very right.”
As you can see, little has changed since 1973, and the same Trilateral Commission membership keeps popping up in the most hallowed positions of power and influence. The Commission’s defense is that it was simply coincidental for their members to be picked for various high-level positions because of their superior talents and abilities. This is not hearsay: I have had this spoken directly to me by members of the Commission.
Considering that the membership hovers around 300?–?350 at any given time, it is statistically impossible that they could have been randomly picked at such a high frequency over such a long period of time. In the U.S. alone since 1973, Commission members held
8 out of 10 U.S. Trade Representative appointments
6 our of 8 World Bank presidencies
6 out of 7 President/Vice President elections
Could any sane person think that they Trilaterals just stumbled into all of these positions? Of course not.
The historical evidence declares that the Trilateral Commission hijacked the global political system for the exact purposes it stated in 1973. That is, to “foster a New International Economic Order.”
Just who rules the world economy?
When Antony Sutton and myself studied the Trilateral Commission in 1978, one analytical technique we used was a derivative of sociology called “network topology.” We assembled names of directors, executives and major shareholders of companies associated with the Trilaterals and then diagrammed them to show overlaps and other non-obvious associations. Our results were stunning. We found a tight interlocking network that was far stronger than a bunch of independent companies. In graphical form, the network was clearly visible. (See Trilaterals Over Washington, Volume I)
Recently, three researchers in Switzerland (S. Vitali, J.B. Glattfelder, and S. Battiston) have released a similar and modern study called “The network of global corporate control.” In the abstract they state,
“We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.”
This is an understatement. In Table S1 buried in the appendix, they list the “top 50 control-holders,” where shareholders are ranked according to their level of network control. These are the companies who comprise the inner-core of global control.
Of the 50 companies, 45 are banks, insurance or other financial institutions. From the U.S. we see the usual: State Street, JP Morgan Chase, B of A, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and others.
In short, this core of banks/financials are the real rulers of the world economy. There is no speculation here: This is hard and compelling evidence.
This is also the exact same conclusion that Sutton and I reached in 1978 with more rudimentary, non-computerized analysis.
The report concludes,
“This is the first time a ranking of economic actors by global control is presented. Notice that many actors belong to the financial sector (NACE codes starting with 65,66,67) and many of the names are well-known global players. The interest of this ranking is not that it exposes unsuspected powerful players. Instead, it shows that many of the top actors belong to the core. This means that they do not carry out their business in isolation but, on the contrary, they are tied together in an extremely entangled web of control. This finding is extremely important since there was no prior economic theory or empirical evidence regarding whether and how top players are connected. Finally, it should be noted that governments and natural persons are only featured further down in the list.” [emphasis added]
Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller in 1973, summed up the “network” in his 1970 Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era:
“The nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.” [emphasis added]
Unfortunately, this is the reality of the matter. With international banks at the center and various multinational companies in the periphery, the network continues to dominate and control the course of world events. The citizens of the respective countries are little more than objects to be taxed and manipulated.
In Europe, the financial demise of Italy and Greece threatens to melt down the European region, if not the entire global economy. That Trilateral bankers Papademos and Monti, respectively, would take the helm as Prime Minister of their own nation-state should be likened to be a receivership move designed to protect the assets of the banks (the “Network”) they represent. If nothing else, it certainly shows that the Trilateral hegemony over Europe is alive and well.
Until this hegemony is somehow dissolved, the game of national political elections (In the U.S. or Europe) is largely an exercise in futility. Electors are simply deceived when they fail to recognize and address the real power behind the political/economic system.
HOW GOLDMAN SACHS PUMPED AND DUMPED THE US ECONOMY
http://nikkialexander.wordpress.com/goldman-sachs
Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone magazine
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent, financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush’s last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup – which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There’s John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain’s sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There’s Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman – not to mention … But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything.
What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain – an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy. The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere – high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth – pure profit for rich individuals. They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s – and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet. If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went – and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long – including last year’s strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn’t one of them.
Bubble #1: The Great Depression GOLDMAN WASN’T ALWAYS A TOO-BIG-TO-FAIL Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids – just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to small-time vendors in downtown Manhattan. You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman’s first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrant-led investment bank beats the odds, pulls itself up by its bootstraps, makes shitloads of money. In that ancient history there’s really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events: Goldman’s disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre-crash Wall Street in the late 1920s. This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Back then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an “investment trust.” Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and (theoretically, at least) invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest $10 or $100 in a trust and feel like he was a big player. Much as in the 1990s, when new vehicles like day trading and e-trading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new generation of regular-guy investors into the speculation game. Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investment trust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hog-wild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund – which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Blue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah – which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading. The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line. The basic idea isn’t hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred. In a chapter from The Great Crash, 1929 titled “In Goldman Sachs We Trust,” the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith held up the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of the insanity of leverage-based investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a major cause of the market’s historic crash; in today’s dollars, the losses the bank suffered totaled $475 billion. “It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity,” Galbraith observed, sounding like Keith Olbermann in an ascot. “If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale.”
Bubble #2: Tech Stocks Fast-forward about 65 years. Goldman not only survived the crash that wiped out so many of the investors it duped, it went on to become the chief underwriter to the country’s wealthiest and most powerful corporations. Thanks to Sidney Weinberg, who rose from the rank of janitor’s assistant to head the firm, Goldman became the pioneer of the initial public offering, one of the principal and most lucrative means by which companies raise money. During the 1970s and 1980s, Goldman may not have been the planet-eating Death Star of political influence it is today, but it was a top-drawer firm that had a reputation for attracting the very smartest talent on the Street. It also, oddly enough, had a reputation for relatively solid ethics and a patient approach to investment that shunned the fast buck; its executives were trained to adopt the firm’s mantra, “long-term greedy.” One former Goldman banker who left the firm in the early Nineties recalls seeing his superiors give up a very profitable deal on the grounds that it was a long-term loser. “We gave back money to ‘grownup’ corporate clients who had made bad deals with us,” he says. “Everything we did was legal and fair – but ‘long-term greedy’ said we didn’t want to make such a profit at the clients’ collective expense that we spoiled the marketplace.” But then, something happened. It’s hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman’s co-chairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind. Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national cliché that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy – a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline THE COMMITTEE TO SAVE THE WORLD. And “what Rubin thought,” mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy – beginning with Rubin’s complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits. The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren’t much more than pot-fueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong smokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement. It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn’t know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system – one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman’s later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry’s standards of quality control. “Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting guidelines that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public,” says one prominent hedge-fund manager. “The company had to be in business for a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took these guidelines and threw them in the trash.” Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: “Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share.” The problem was, nobody told investors that the rules had changed. “Everyone on the inside knew,” the manager says. “Bob Rubin sure as hell knew what the underwriting standards were. They’d been intact since the 1930s.” Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida who specializes in IPOs, says banks like Goldman knew full well that many of the public offerings they were touting would never make a dime. “In the early Eighties, the major underwriters insisted on three years of profitability. Then it was one year, then it was a quarter. By the time of the Internet bubble, they were not even requiring profitability in the foreseeable future.” Goldman has denied that it changed its underwriting standards during the Internet years, but its own statistics belie the claim. Just as it did with the investment trust in the 1920s, Goldman started slow and finished crazy in the Internet years. After it took a little-known company with weak financials called Yahoo! public in 1996, once the tech boom had already begun, Goldman quickly became the IPO king of the Internet era. Of the 24 companies it took public in 1997, a third were losing money at the time of the IPO. In 1999, at the height of the boom, it took 47 companies public, including stillborns like Webvan and eToys, investment offerings that were in many ways the modern equivalents of Blue Ridge and Shenandoah. The following year, it underwrote 18 companies in the first four months, 14 of which were money losers at the time. As a leading underwriter of Internet stocks during the boom, Goldman provided profits far more volatile than those of its competitors: In 1999, the average Goldman IPO leapt 281 percent above its offering price, compared to the Wall Street average of 181 percent. How did Goldman achieve such extraordinary results? One answer is that they used a practice called “laddering,” which is just a fancy way of saying they manipulated the share price of new offerings. Here’s how it works: Say you’re Goldman Sachs, and Bullshit.com comes to you and asks you to take their company public. You agree on the usual terms: You’ll price the stock, determine how many shares should be released and take the Bullshit.com CEO on a “road show” to schmooze investors, all in exchange for a substantial fee (typically six to seven percent of the amount raised). You then promise your best clients the right to buy big chunks of the IPO at the low offering price – let’s say Bullshit.com’s starting share price is $15 – in exchange for a promise that they will buy more shares later on the open market. That seemingly simple demand gives you inside knowledge of the IPO’s future, knowledge that wasn’t disclosed to the day-trader schmucks who only had the prospectus to go by: You know that certain of your clients who bought X amount of shares at $15 are also going to buy Y more shares at $20 or $25, virtually guaranteeing that the price is going to go to $25 and beyond. In this way, Goldman could artificially jack up the new company’s price, which of course was to the bank’s benefit – a six percent fee of a $500 million IPO is serious money. Goldman was repeatedly sued by shareholders for engaging in laddering in a variety of Internet IPOs, including Webvan and NetZero. The deceptive practices also caught the attention of Nicholas Maier, the syndicate manager overcame & Co., the hedge fund run at the time by the now-famous chattering television asshole Jim Cramer, himself a Goldman alum. Maier told the SEC that while working for Cramer between 1996 and 1998, he was repeatedly forced to engage in laddering practices during IPO deals with Goldman. “Goldman, from what I witnessed, they were the worst perpetrator,” Maier said. “They totally fueled the bubble. And it’s specifically that kind of behavior that has caused the market crash. They built these stocks upon an illegal foundation – manipulated up and ultimately, it really was the small person who ended up buying in.” In 2005, Goldman agreed to pay $40 million for its laddering violations – a puny penalty relative to the enormous profits it made. (Goldman, which has denied wrongdoing in all of the cases it has settled, refused to respond to questions for this story.) Another practice Goldman engaged in during the Internet boom was “spinning,” better known as bribery. Here the investment bank would offer the executives of the newly public company shares at extra-low prices, in exchange for future underwriting business. Banks that engaged in spinning would then undervalue the initial offering price – ensuring that those “hot” opening price shares it had handed out to insiders would be more likely to rise quickly, supplying bigger first-day rewards for the chosen few. So instead of Bullshit.com opening at $20, the bank would approach the Bullshit.com CEO and offer him a million shares of his own company at $18 in exchange for future business effectively robbing all of Bullshit’s new shareholders by diverting cash that should have gone to the company’s bottom line into the private bank account of the company’s CEO. In one case, Goldman allegedly gave a multimillion-dollar special offering to eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who later joined Goldman’s board, in exchange for future i-banking business. According to a report by the House Financial Services Committee in 2002, Goldman gave special stock offerings to executives in 21 companies that it took public, including Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and two of the great slithering villains of the financial-scandal age – ‘!Yeo’s Dennis Kozlowski and Enron’s Ken Lay. Goldman angrily denounced the report as “an egregious distortion of the facts” – shortly before paying $110 million to settle an investigation into spinning and other manipulations launched by New York state regulators. “The spinning of hot IPO shares was not a harmless corporate perk,” then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer said at the time. “Instead, it was an integral part of a fraudulent scheme to win new investment-banking business.” Such practices conspired to turn the Internet bubble into one of the greatest financial disasters in world history: Some $5 trillion of wealth was wiped out on the NASDAQ alone. But the real problem wasn’t the money that was lost by shareholders, it was the money gained by investment bankers, who received hefty bonuses for tampering with the market. Instead of teaching Wall Street a lesson that bubbles always deflate, the Internet years demonstrated to bankers that in the age of freely flowing capital and publicly owned financial companies, bubbles are incredibly easy to inflate, and individual bonuses are actually bigger when the mania and the irrationality are greater. Nowhere was this truer than at Goldman. Between 1999 and 2002, the firm paid out $28.5 billion in compensation and benefits – an average of roughly $350,000 a year per employee. Those numbers are important because the key legacy of the Internet boom is that the economy is now driven in large part by the pursuit of the enormous salaries and bonuses that such bubbles make possible. Goldman’s mantra of “long-term greedy” vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement. The market was no longer a rationally managed place to grow real, profitable businesses: It was a huge ocean of Someone Else’s Money where bankers hauled in vast sums through whatever means necessary and tried to convert that money into bonuses and payouts as quickly as possible. If you laddered and spun 50 Internet IPOs that went bust within a year, so what? By the time the Securities and Exchange Commission got around to fining your firm $110 million, the yacht you bought with your IPO bonuses was already six years old. Besides, you were probably out of Goldman by then, running the U.S. Treasury or maybe the state offenders. (One of the truly comic moments in the history of America’s recent financial collapse came when Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who ran Goldman from 1994 to 1999 and left with $320 million in IPO-fattened stock, insisted in 2002 that “I’ve never even heard the term ‘laddering’ before.”) For a bank that paid out $7 billion a year in salaries, $110 million fines issued half a decade late were something far less than a deterrent – they were a joke. Once the Internet bubble burst, Goldman had no incentive to reassess its new, profit-driven strategy; it just searched around for another bubble to inflate. As it turns out, it had one ready, thanks in large part to Rubin.
Bubble #3: The Housing Craze Goldman’s role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren’t in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of’10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar. None of that would have been possible without investment bankers like Goldman, who created vehicles to package those shitty mortgages and sell them en masse to unsuspecting insurance companies and pension funds. This created a mass market for toxic debt that would never have existed before; in the old days, no bank would have wanted to keep some addict ex-con’s mortgage on its books, knowing how likely it was to fail. You can’t write these mortgages, in other words, unless you can sell them to someone who doesn’t know what they are. Goldman used two methods to hide the mess they were selling. First, they bundled hundreds of different mortgages into instruments called Collateralized Debt Obligations. Then they sold investors on the idea that, because a bunch of those mortgages would turn out to be OK, there was no reason to worry so much about the shitty ones: The CDO, as a whole, was sound. Thus, junk-rated mortgages were turned into AAA-rated investments. Second, to hedge its own bets, Goldman got companies like AIG to provide insurance – known as credit-default swaps – on the CDOs. The swaps were essentially a racetrack bet between AIG and Goldman: Goldman is betting the ex-cons will default, AIG is betting they won’t. There was only one problem with the deals: All of the wheeling and dealing represented exactly the kind of dangerous speculation that federal regulators are supposed to rein in. Derivatives like CDOs and credit swaps had already caused a series of serious financial calamities: Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings both lost fortunes, and Orange County, California, was forced to default in 1994. A report that year by the Government Accountability Office recommended that such financial instruments be tightly regulated – and in 1998, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a woman named Brooksley Born, agreed. That May, she circulated a letter to business leaders and the Clinton administration suggesting that banks be required to provide greater disclosure in derivatives trades, and maintain reserves to cushion against losses. More regulation wasn’t exactly what Goldman had in mind. “The banks go crazy – they want it stopped,” says Michael Greenberger, who worked for Born as director of trading and markets at the CFTC and is now a law professor at the University of Maryland. “Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and [SEC chief Arthur] Levitt want it stopped.” Clinton’s reigning economic foursome – “especially Rubin,” according to Greenberger – called Born in for a meeting and pleaded their case. She refused to back down, however, and continued to push for more regulation of the derivatives. Then, in June 1998, Rubin went public to denounce her move, eventually recommending that Congress strip the CFTC of its regulatory authority. In 2000, on its last day in session, Congress passed the now-notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had been inserted into an 11,000-page spending bill at the last minute, with almost no debate on the floor of the Senate. Banks were now free to trade default swaps with impunity. But the story didn’t end there. AIG, a major purveyor of default swaps, approached the New York State Insurance Department in 2000 and asked whether default swaps would be regulated as insurance. At the time, the office was run by one Neil Levin, a former Goldman vice president, who decided against regulating the swaps. Now freed to underwrite as many housing-based securities and buy as much credit-default protection as it wanted, Goldman went berserk with lending lust. By the peak of the housing boom in 2006, Goldman was underwriting $76.5 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities – a third of which were subprime – much of it to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies. And in these massive issues of real estate were vast swamps of crap. Take one $494 million issue that year, GSAMP Trust 2006-S3. Many of the mortgages belonged to second-mortgage borrowers, and the average equity they had in their homes was 0.71 percent. Moreover, 58 percent of the loans included little or no documentation – no names of the borrowers, no addresses of the homes, just zip codes. Yet both of the major ratings agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, rated 93 percent of the issue as investment grade. Moody’s projected that less than 10 percent of the loans would default. In reality, 18 percent of the mortgages were in default within 18 months. Not that Goldman was personally at any risk. The bank might be taking all these hideous, completely irresponsible mortgages from beneath-gangster-status firms like Countrywide and selling them off to municipalities and pensioners – old people, for God’s sake – pretending the whole time that it wasn’t grade-D horseshit. But even as it was doing so, it was taking short positions in the same market, in essence betting against the same crap it was selling. Even worse, Goldman bragged about it in public. “The mortgage sector continues to be challenged,” David Viniar, the bank’s chief financial officer, boasted in 2007. ”As a result, we took significant markdowns on our long inventory positions…. However, our risk bias in that market was to be short, and that net short position was profitable.” In other words, the mortgages it was selling were for chumps. The real money was in betting against those same mortgages. “That’s how audacious these assholes are,” says one hedge-fund manager. ”At least with other banks, you could say that they were just dumb – they believed what they were selling, and it blew them up. Goldman knew what it was doing.” I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you’re actually betting against – particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer – doesn’t amount to securities fraud. “It’s exactly securities fraud,” he says. “It’s the heart of securities fraud.” Eventually, lots of aggrieved investors agreed. In a virtual repeat of the Internet IPO craze, Goldman was hit with a wave of lawsuits after the collapse of the housing bubble, many of which accused the bank of withholding pertinent information about the quality of the mortgages it issued. New York state regulators are suing Goldman and 25 other underwriters for selling bundles of crappy Countrywide mortgages to city and state pension funds, which lost as much as $100 million in the investments. Massachusetts also investigated Goldman for similar misdeeds, acting on behalf of 714 mortgage holders who got stuck holding predatory loans. But once again, Goldman got off virtually scot-free, staving off prosecution by agreeing to pay a paltry $60 million – about what the bank’s CDO division made in a day and a half during the real estate boom. The effects of the housing bubble are well known – it led more or less directly to the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG, whose toxic portfolio of credit swaps was in significant part composed of the insurance that banks like Goldman bought against their own housing portfolios. In fact, at least $13 billion of the taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning that the bank made out on the housing bubble twice: It fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him payoff those same bets. And once again, while the world was crashing down all around the bank, Goldman made sure it was doing just fine in the compensation department. In 2006, the firm’s payroll jumped to $16.5 billion – an average of $622,000 per employee. As a Goldman spokesman explained, “We work very hard here.” But the best was yet to come. While the collapse of the housing bubble sent most of the financial world fleeing for the exits, or to jail, Goldman boldly doubled down – and almost single-handedly created yet another bubble, one the world still barely knows the firm had anything to do with.
Bubble #4: $4 a Gallon By the beginning of 2008, the financial world was in turmoil. Wall Street had spent the past two and a half decades producing one scandal after another, which didn’t leave much to sell that wasn’t tainted. The terms junk bond, IPG, subprime mortgage and other once-hot financial fare were now firmly associated in the public’s mind with scams; the terms credit swaps and CDGs were about to join them. The credit markets were in crisis, and the mantra that had sustained the fantasy economy throughout the Bush years – the notion that housing prices never go down – was now a fully exploded myth, leaving the Street clamoring for a new bullshit paradigm to sling. Where to go? With the public reluctant to put money in anything that felt like a paper investment, the Street quietly moved the casino to the physical-commodities market – stuff you could touch: corn, coffee, cocoa, wheat and, above all, energy commodities, especially oil. In conjunction with a decline in the dollar, the credit crunch and the housing crash caused a “flight to commodities.” Oil futures in particular skyrocketed, as the price of a single barrel went from around $60 in the middle of2007 to a high of $147 in the summer of 2008. That summer, as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply. In a classic example of how Republicans and Democrats respond to crises by engaging in fierce exchanges of moronic irrelevancies, John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be “very helpful in the short term,” while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arts yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out. But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the short-term flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short-term supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling – which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down. So what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help – there were other players in the physical-commodities market – but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures – agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed. As is so often the case, there had been a Depression-era law in place designed specifically to prevent this sort of thing. The commodities market was designed in large part to help farmers: A grower concerned about future price drops could enter into a contract to sell his corn at a certain price for delivery later on, which made him worry less about building up stores of his crop. When no one was buying corn, the farmer could sell to a middleman known as a “traditional speculator,” who would store the grain and sell it later, when demand returned. That way, someone was always there to buy from the farmer, even when the market temporarily had no need for his crops. In 1936, however, Congress recognized that there should never be more speculators in the market than real producers and consumers. If that happened, prices would be affected by something other than supply and demand, and price manipulations would ensue. A new law empowered the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – the very same body that would later try and fail to regulate credit swaps – to place limits on speculative trades in commodities. As a result of the CFTC’s oversight, peace and harmony reigned in the commodities markets for more than 50 years. All that changed in 1991 when, unbeknownst to almost everyone in the world, a Goldman-owned commodities-trading subsidiary called J. Aron wrote to the CFTC and made an unusual argument. Farmers with big stores of corn, Goldman argued, weren’t the only ones who needed to hedge their risk against future price drops – Wall Street dealers who made big bets on oil prices also needed to hedge their risk, because, well, they stood to lose a lot too. This was complete and utter crap – the 1936 law, remember, was specifically designed to maintain distinctions between people who were buying and selling real tangible stuff and people who were trading in paper alone. But the CFTC, amazingly, bought Goldman’s argument. It issued the bank a free pass, called the “Bona Fide Hedging” exemption, allowing Goldman’s subsidiary to call itself a physical hedger and escape virtually all limits placed on speculators. In the years that followed, the commission would quietly issue 14 similar exemptions to other companies. Now Goldman and other banks were free to drive more investors into the commodities markets, enabling speculators to place increasingly big bets. That 1991 letter from Goldman more or less directly led to the oil bubble in 2008, when the number of speculators in the market – driven there by fear of the falling dollar and the housing crash – finally overwhelmed the real physical suppliers and consumers. By 2008, at least three quarters of the activity on the commodity exchanges was speculative, according to a congressional staffer who studied the numbers – and that’s likely a conservative estimate. By the middle of last summer, despite rising supply and a drop in demand, we were paying $4 a gallon every time we pulled up to the pump. What is even more amazing is that the letter to Goldman, along with most of the other trading exemptions, was handed out more or less in secret. “I was the head of the division of trading and markets, and Brooksley Born was the chair of the CFTC,” says Greenberger, “and neither of us knew this letter was out there.” In fact, the letters only came to light by accident. Last year, a staffer for the House Energy and Commerce Committee just happened to be at a briefing when officials from the CFTC made an offhand reference to the exemptions. “I had been invited to a briefing the commission was holding on energy,” the staffer recounts. And suddenly in the middle of it, they start saying, ‘Yeah, we’ve been issuing these letters for years now.’ I raised my hand and said, ‘Really? You issued a letter? Can I see it?’ And they were like, ‘Duh, duh.’ So we went back and forth, and finally they said, ‘We have to clear it with Goldman Sachs.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean, you have to clear it with Goldman Sachs?’” The CFTC cited a rule that prohibited it from releasing any information about a company’s current position in the market. But the staffer’s request was about a letter that had been issued 17 years earlier. It no longer had anything to do with Goldman’s current position. What’s more, Section 7 of the 1936 commodities law gives Congress the right to any information it wants from the commission. Still, in a classic example of how complete Goldman’s capture of government is, the CFTC waited until it got clearance from the bank before it turned the letter over. Armed with the semi-secret government exemption, Goldman had become the chief designer of a giant commodities betting parlor. Its Goldman Sachs Commodities Index –which tracks the prices of 24 major commodities but is overwhelmingly weighted toward oil – became the place where pension funds and insurance companies and other institutional investors could make massive long-term bets on commodity prices. Which was all well and good, except for a couple of things. One was that index speculators are mostly “long only” bettors, who seldom if ever take short positions – meaning they only bet on prices to rise. While this kind of behavior is good for a stock market, it’s terrible for commodities, because it continually forces prices upward. “If index speculators took short positions as well as long ones, you’d see them pushing prices both up and down,” says Michael Masters, a hedge-fund manager who has helped expose the role of investment banks in the manipulation of oil prices. “But they only push prices in one direction: up.” Complicating matters even further was the fact that Goldman itself was cheerleading with all its might for an increase in oil prices. In the beginning of 2008, Arjun Murti, a Goldman analyst, hailed as an “oracle of oil” by The New York Times, predicted a “super spike” in oil prices, forecasting a rise to $200 a barrel. At the time Goldman was heavily invested in oil through its commodities- trading subsidiary, J. Aron; it also owned a stake in a major oil refinery in Kansas, where it warehoused the crude it bought and sold. Even though the supply of oil was keeping pace with demand, Murti continually warned of disruptions to the world oil supply, going so far as to broadcast the fact that he owned two hybrid cars. High prices, the bank insisted, were somehow the fault of the piggish American consumer; in 2005, Goldman analysts insisted that we wouldn’t know when oil prices would fall until we knew “when American consumers will stop buying gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and instead seek fuel-efficient alternatives.” But it wasn’t the consumption of real oil that was driving up prices – it was the trade in paper oil. By the summer of2008, in fact, commodities speculators had bought and stockpiled enough oil futures to fill 1.1 billion barrels of crude, which meant that speculators owned more future oil on paper than there was real, physical oil stored in all of the country’s commercial storage tanks and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve combined. It was a repeat of both the Internet craze and the housing bubble, when Wall Street jacked up present-day profits by selling suckers shares of a fictional fantasy future of endlessly rising prices. In what was by now a painfully familiar pattern, the oil-commodities melon hit the pavement hard in the summer of 2008, causing a massive loss of wealth; crude prices plunged from $147 to $33. Once again the big losers were ordinary people. The pensioners whose funds invested in this crap got massacred: CalPERS, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, had $1.1 billion in commodities when the crash came. And the damage didn’t just come from oil. Soaring food prices driven by the commodities bubble led to catastrophes across the planet, forcing an estimated 100 million people into hunger and sparking food riots throughout the Third World. Now oil prices are rising again: They shot up 20 percent in the month of May and have nearly doubled so far this year. Once again, the problem is not supply or demand. “The highest supply of oil in the last 20 years is now,” says Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan who serves on the House energy committee. “Demand is at a 10-year low. And yet prices are up.” Asked why politicians continue to harp on things like drilling or hybrid cars, when supply and demand have nothing to do with the high prices, Stupak shakes his head. “I think they just don’t understand the problem very well,” he says. ”You can’t explain it in 30 seconds, so politicians ignore it.”
Bubble #5: Rigging the Bailout After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming – this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle. It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bailout quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers – one of Goldman’s last real competitors – collapse without intervention. (“Goldman’s superhero status was left intact,” says market analyst Eric Salzman, “and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.”) The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed. Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding – most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs – and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret. Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman’s primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman – New York Fed president William Dudley- is yet another former Goldmanite. The collective message of all this – the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds – is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn’t a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege.
“In the past it was an implicit advantage,” says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. “Now it’s more of an explicit advantage.” Once the bailouts were in place, Goldman went right back to business as usual, dreaming up impossibly convoluted schemes to pick the American carcass clean of its loose capital. One of its first moves in the post-bailout era was to quietly push forward the calendar it uses to report its earnings, essentially wiping December 2008 – with its $1.3 billion in pretax losses – off the books. At the same time, the bank announced a highly suspicious $1.8 billion profit for the first quarter of 2009 – which apparently included a large chunk of money funneled to it by taxpayers via the AIG bailout. “They cooked those first-quarter results six ways from Sunday,” says one hedge-fund manager. “They hid the losses in the orphan month and called the bailout money profit.” Two more numbers stand out from that stunning first-quarter turnaround. The bank paid out an astonishing $4.7 billion in bonuses and compensation in the first three months of this year, an 18 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008. It also raised $5 billion by issuing new shares almost immediately after releasing its first-quarter results. Taken together, the numbers show that Goldman essentially borrowed a $5 billion salary payout for its executives in the middle of the global economic crisis it helped cause, using half-baked accounting to reel in investors, just months after receiving billions in a taxpayer bailout. Even more amazing, Goldman did it all right before the government announced the results of its new “stress test” for banks seeking to repay TARP money – suggesting that Goldman knew exactly what was coming. The government was trying to carefully orchestrate the repayments in an effort to prevent further trouble at banks that couldn’t pay back the money right away. But Goldman blew off those concerns, brazenly flaunting its insider status. “They seemed to know everything that they needed to do before the stress test came out, unlike everyone else, who had to wait until after,” says Michael Hecht, a managing director of JMP Securities. “The government came out and said, ‘To pay back TARP, you have to issue debt of at least five years that is not insured by FDIC – which Goldman Sachs had already done, a week or two before.” And here’s the real punch line. After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ” after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas up to $4 a gallon and to push 100 million people around the world into hunger, after securing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman-Sachs give back to the people of the United States in 2008? Fourteen million dollars. That is what the firm paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 billion – yet it paid the Treasury less than a third of what it forked over to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million last year. How is this possible? According to Goldman’s annual report, the low taxes are due in large part to changes in the bank’s “geographic earnings mix.” In other words, the bank moved its money around so that most of its earnings took place in foreign countries with low tax rates. Thanks to our completely fucked corporate tax system, companies like Goldman can ship their revenues offshore and defer taxes on those revenues indefinitely, even while they claim deductions upfront on that same untaxed income. This is why any corporation with an at least occasionally sober accountant can usually find a way to zero out its taxes. A GAO report, in fact, found that between 1998 and 2005, roughly two-thirds of all corporations operating in the U.S. paid no taxes at all. This should be a pitchfork-level outrage – but somehow, when Goldman released its post-bailout tax profile, hardly anyone said a word. One of the few to remark on the obscenity was Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee. “With the right hand out begging for bailout money,” he said, “the left is hiding it offshore.”
Bubble #6: Global Warming Fast-forward to today. It’s early June in Washington DC. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs – its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign – sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs. Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm’s co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits – a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an “environmental plan,” called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance. Here’s how it works: If the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy “allocations” or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon offsets will be auctioned in the first seventy years – one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount. The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the “cap” on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price overtime. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion. Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they’re the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank’s environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson’s report argued that “voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate-change problem”. A few years later, the bank’s carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won’t be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, “We’re not making those investments to lose money.” The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There’s also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in green-tech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energy-futures market? “Oh, it’ll dwarf it,” says a former staffer on the House energy committee. Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won’t we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it’s even collected. “If it’s going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it,” says Michael Masters, the hedge fund director who spoke out against oil-futures speculation. “But we’re saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That’s the last thing in the world I want. It’s just asinine.” Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn’t, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees – while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it. It’s not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there’s a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can’t really register the fact that you’re no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you’re no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there. But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It’s a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can’t be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can’t stop it, but we should at least know where it’s all going.
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