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"too big to Jail"<br>
<br>
Aside from Justice or Penalty or Retribution,<br>
The World needs to stop these people from<br>
continuing their crimes.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
On 08/25/13 9:41, David Johnson wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:ED4F74B3E92344A4BEA642E43F72BC36@owneryr3fp4mcb"
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Original Message -----
<div
style="background: rgb(228, 228, 228) none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-inline-policy: continuous;"><b>From:</b>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" title="astridjb@comcast.net"
href="mailto:astridjb@comcast.net">Astrid Berkson</a> </div>
<div><b>To:</b> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
title="undisclosed-recipients:" href="mailto:undisclosed-recipients:">undisclosed-recipients:</a>
</div>
<div><b>Sent:</b> Saturday, August 24, 2013 11:06 AM</div>
<div><b>Subject:</b> [CentralILJwJ] palast</div>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div class="txtimg"><br>
<h1 class="txttitle">Confidential Memo at the Heart of the Global
Financial Crisis</h1>
<p class="txtauthor">By Greg Palast, Vice Magazine</p>
<p class="date">24 August 13</p>
<p> </p>
<p><img src="cid:part1.01030503.09000205@pigsqq.org" border="0">hen a
little birdie dropped the End Game memo through my window, its content
was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn't believe it.</p>
<p class="indent">The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak's
fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly
conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial
regulation across the planet. When you see <strong>26.3 percent</strong>
unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in <strong>Greece</strong>,
riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game
memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.</p>
<p class="indent">The Treasury official playing the bankers' secret
End Game was <strong>Larry Summers</strong>. Today, Summers is Barack
Obama's leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the
world's central bank. If <strong>the confidential memo</strong> is
authentic, then Summers shouldn't be serving on the Fed, he should be
serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of
the finance world.</p>
<p class="indent">The memo is authentic.</p>
<p class="indent">I had to fly to Geneva to get confirmation and
wangle a meeting with the Secretary General of the World Trade
Organisation, <strong>Pascal Lamy</strong>. Lamy, the Generalissimo of
Globalisation, told me,</p>
<blockquote><em>"The WTO was not created as some dark cabal of
multinationals secretly cooking plots against the people... We don't
have cigar-smoking, rich, crazy bankers negotiating."</em></blockquote>
<p class="indent">Then I showed him the memo.</p>
<blockquote><em>It begins with Larry Summers' flunky, <strong>Timothy
Geithner</strong>, reminding his boss to call the Bank bigshots to
order their lobbyist armies to march:</em></blockquote>
<p class="indent">"As we enter the end-game of the WTO financial
services negotiations, I believe it would be a good idea for you to
touch base with the CEOs…"</p>
<p class="indent">To avoid Summers having to call his office to get
the phone numbers (which, under US law, would have to appear on public
logs), Geithner listed the private lines of what were then the five
most powerful CEOs on the planet. And here they are:</p>
<p class="indent">Goldman Sachs: <strong>John Corzine</strong>
(212)902-8281</p>
<p class="indent">Merrill Lynch: <strong>David Kamanski</strong>
(212)449-6868</p>
<p class="indent">Bank of America: <strong>David Coulter</strong>
(415)622-2255</p>
<p class="indent">Citibank: <strong>John Reed</strong> (212)559-2732</p>
<p class="indent">Chase Manhattan: <strong>Walter Shipley</strong>
(212)270-1380</p>
<p class="indent">Lamy was right: They don't smoke cigars. Go ahead
and dial them. I did, and sure enough, got a cheery personal hello from
Reed - cheery until I revealed I wasn't Larry Summers. (Note: The other
numbers were swiftly disconnected. And Corzine can't be reached while
he faces criminal charges.)</p>
<p class="indent">It's not the little cabal of confabs held by
Summers and the banksters that's so troubling. The horror is in the
purpose of the "end game" itself.</p>
<p class="indent">Let me explain:</p>
<p class="indent">The year was 1997. US Treasury Secretary Robert
Rubin was pushing hard to <strong>de-regulate banks</strong>. That
required, first, repeal of the <strong>Glass-Steagall Act</strong> to
dismantle the barrier between commercial banks and investment banks. It
was like replacing bank vaults with roulette wheels.</p>
<p class="indent">Second, the banks wanted the right to play a new
high-risk game: "<strong>derivatives trading</strong>". JP Morgan alone
would soon carry $88 trillion of these pseudo-securities on its books
as "assets".</p>
<p class="indent">Deputy Treasury Secretary Summers (soon to replace
Rubin as Secretary) body-blocked any attempt to control derivatives.</p>
<p class="indent">But what was the use of turning US banks into
derivatives casinos if money would flee to nations with safer banking
laws?</p>
<p class="indent">The answer conceived by the Big Bank Five:
eliminate controls on banks in every nation on the planet - in one
single move. It was as brilliant as it was insanely dangerous.</p>
<p class="indent">How could they pull off this mad caper? The
bankers' and Summers' game was to use the Financial Services Agreement
(or FSA), an abstruse and benign addendum to the international trade
agreements policed by the World Trade Organisation.</p>
<p class="indent">Until the bankers began their play, the WTO
agreements dealt simply with trade in goods - that is, my cars for your
bananas. The new rules devised by Summers and the banks would force all
nations to accept trade in "bads" - toxic assets like financial
derivatives.</p>
<p class="indent">Until the bankers' re-draft of the FSA, each nation
controlled and chartered the banks within their own borders. The new
rules of the game would force every nation to open their markets to
Citibank, JP Morgan and their derivatives "products".</p>
<p class="indent">And all 156 nations in the WTO would have to smash
down their own Glass-Steagall divisions between commercial savings
banks and the investment banks that gamble with derivatives.</p>
<p class="indent">The job of turning the FSA into the bankers'
battering ram was given to Geithner, who was named Ambassador to the
World Trade Organisation.</p>
<p class="indent"><strong>Bankers Go Bananas </strong></p>
<p class="indent">Why in the world would any nation agree to let its
banking system be boarded and seized by financial pirates like JP
Morgan?</p>
<p class="indent">The answer, in the case of Ecuador, was bananas.
Ecuador was truly a banana republic. The yellow fruit was that nation's
life-and-death source of hard currency. If it refused to sign the new
FSA, Ecuador could feed its bananas to the monkeys and go back into
bankruptcy. Ecuador signed.</p>
<p class="indent">And so on - with every single nation bullied into
signing.</p>
<p class="indent">Every nation but one, I should say. Brazil's new
President, Inacio Lula da Silva, refused. In retaliation, Brazil was
threatened with a virtual embargo of its products by the European
Union's Trade Commissioner, one Peter Mandelson, according to <strong>another
confidential memo</strong> I got my hands on. But Lula's refusenik
stance paid off for Brazil which, alone among Western nations, survived
and thrived during the 2007-9 bank crisis.</p>
<p class="indent">China signed - but got its pound of flesh in
return. It opened its banking sector a crack in return for access and
control of the US auto parts and other markets. (Swiftly, two million
US jobs shifted to China.)</p>
<p class="indent">The new FSA pulled the lid off the Pandora's box of
worldwide derivatives trade. Among the notorious transactions
legalised: Goldman Sachs (where Treasury Secretary Rubin had been
co-chairman) worked a secret euro-derivatives swap with Greece which,
ultimately, destroyed that nation. Ecuador, its own banking sector
de-regulated and demolished, exploded into riots. Argentina had to sell
off its oil companies (to the Spanish) and water systems (to Enron)
while its teachers hunted for food in garbage cans. Then, Bankers Gone
Wild in the Eurozone dove head-first into derivatives pools without
knowing how to swim - and the continent is now being sold off in tiny,
cheap pieces to Germany.</p>
<p class="indent">Of course, it was not just threats that sold the
FSA, but temptation as well. After all, every evil starts with one bite
of an apple offered by a snake. The apple: the gleaming piles of lucre
hidden in the FSA for local elites. The snake was named Larry.</p>
<p class="indent">Does all this evil and pain flow from a single
memo? Of course not: the evil was The Game itself, as played by the
banker clique. The memo only revealed their game-plan for checkmate.</p>
<p class="indent">And the memo reveals a lot about Summers and Obama.</p>
<p class="indent">While billions of sorry souls are still hurting
from worldwide banker-made disaster, Rubin and Summers didn't do too
badly. Rubin's deregulation of banks had permitted the creation of a
financial monstrosity called "Citigroup". Within weeks of leaving
office, Rubin was named director, then Chairman of Citigroup - which
went bankrupt while managing to pay Rubin a total of <strong>$126
million</strong>.</p>
<p class="indent">Then Rubin took on another post: as key campaign
benefactor to a young State Senator, Barack Obama. Only days after his
election as President, Obama, at Rubin's insistence, gave Summers the
odd post of US "Economics Tsar" and made Geithner his Tsarina (that is,
Secretary of Treasury). In 2010, Summers gave up his royalist robes to
return to "consulting" for Citibank and other creatures of bank
deregulation whose payments have <strong>raised Summers' net worth by
$31 million</strong> since the "end-game" memo.</p>
<p class="indent">That Obama would, at Robert Rubin's demand, now
choose Summers to run the Federal Reserve Board means that,
unfortunately, we are far from the end of the game.</p>
</div>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Life is like a roll of toilet paper.
The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.
</pre>
<pre wrap="">
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