[Peace-discuss] Fw: [CentralILJwJ] palast

Sun Aug 25 03:59:12 UTC 2013

"too big to Jail"

Aside from Justice or Penalty or Retribution,
The World needs to stop these people from
continuing their crimes.

On 08/25/13 9:41, David Johnson wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Astrid Berkson <mailto:astridjb at comcast.net>
> *To:* undisclosed-recipients: <mailto:undisclosed-recipients:>
> *Sent:* Saturday, August 24, 2013 11:06 AM
> *Subject:* [CentralILJwJ] palast
>
>
>   Confidential Memo at the Heart of the Global Financial Crisis
>
> By Greg Palast, Vice Magazine
>
> 24 August 13
>
> 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.
>
> 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 *26.3 percent* unemployment in Spain, desperation 
> and hunger in *Greece*, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, 
> go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.
>
> The Treasury official playing the bankers' secret End Game was *Larry 
> Summers*. Today, Summers is Barack Obama's leading choice for Chairman 
> of the US Federal Reserve, the world's central bank. If *the 
> confidential memo* 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.
>
> The memo is authentic.
>
> I had to fly to Geneva to get confirmation and wangle a meeting with 
> the Secretary General of the World Trade Organisation, *Pascal Lamy*. 
> Lamy, the Generalissimo of Globalisation, told me,
>
>     /"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."/
>
> Then I showed him the memo.
>
>     /It begins with Larry Summers' flunky, *Timothy Geithner*,
>     reminding his boss to call the Bank bigshots to order their
>     lobbyist armies to march:/
>
> "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…"
>
> 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:
>
> Goldman Sachs: *John Corzine* (212)902-8281
>
> Merrill Lynch: *David Kamanski* (212)449-6868
>
> Bank of America: *David Coulter* (415)622-2255
>
> Citibank: *John Reed* (212)559-2732
>
> Chase Manhattan: *Walter Shipley* (212)270-1380
>
> 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.)
>
> 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.
>
> Let me explain:
>
> The year was 1997. US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was pushing hard 
> to *de-regulate banks*. That required, first, repeal of the 
> *Glass-Steagall Act* to dismantle the barrier between commercial banks 
> and investment banks. It was like replacing bank vaults with roulette 
> wheels.
>
> Second, the banks wanted the right to play a new high-risk game: 
> "*derivatives trading*". JP Morgan alone would soon carry $88 trillion 
> of these pseudo-securities on its books as "assets".
>
> Deputy Treasury Secretary Summers (soon to replace Rubin as Secretary) 
> body-blocked any attempt to control derivatives.
>
> But what was the use of turning US banks into derivatives casinos if 
> money would flee to nations with safer banking laws?
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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".
>
> 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.
>
> The job of turning the FSA into the bankers' battering ram was given 
> to Geithner, who was named Ambassador to the World Trade Organisation.
>
> *Bankers Go Bananas *
>
> Why in the world would any nation agree to let its banking system be 
> boarded and seized by financial pirates like JP Morgan?
>
> 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.
>
> And so on - with every single nation bullied into signing.
>
> 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 *another confidential 
> memo* 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.
>
> 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.)
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> And the memo reveals a lot about Summers and Obama.
>
> 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 *$126 million*.
>
> 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 *raised Summers' net worth by $31 million* since 
> the "end-game" memo.
>
> 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.
>
> -- 
> Life is like a roll of toilet paper.
> The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.
>    
>
>
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>    

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