by Dave Fryett
19 November, 2008
Countercurrents.org
The economic mess that has been unfolding the last few months is not, as the right fear and the left hope, an organic collapse of the global capitalist system But rather it is, as so many so-called financial crises before it, a scam perpetrated by what Lincoln used to call the "money power." The goals are to capture other lucrative businesses, reduce government and its ability to constrain its hegemony over capital, and to reduce union membership by creating such dire economic circumstances as to make unions powerless to save their members from hardship.
What we are experiencing is not the fall of the bourgeoisie, but its ascendancy to dictatorship. It is a charade, it's class war waged by a confidant, victorious bourgeoisie, not one on the verge of imminent ruin. In fact, the economic failure of the bourgeoisie, as things are currently constituted in the West, is an impossibility.
How is it that the money power can create havoc in their own markets and be assured that the summoned tempest will never come to blow their own ships aground? They control the issuance, cost, value and availability of money and credit.
What most in the West fail to recognize is that from Jerusalem west to the Pacific, the so-called national banks are private corporations owned by the international banking cartel. It is these institutions, not the governments which they putatively serve, which determine monetary policy. They do so as suits their own interests and not those of the respective nations involved. The central banks determine interest rates; are allowed to create deposits out of thin air on a data-entry basis thus bringing new money into existence; and they control how much money is in circulation. This they do by either loosening their loan requirements, which stimulates the economy and creates a boon, or by tightening which creates an insufficiency of money and a "credit crisis" such as we have now.
In his testimony before Congress, the then CEO of Bear Stearns, Alan Schwartz, said that the run on Bear's stock had been "induced." He went on to say that his company, while saddled with a substantial amount of bad paper in the form of these worthless MBS (mortgage backed securities), was not in such bad shape that it could not have recovered had not there been a "whisper" campaign insisting that Bear's collapse was inevitable. It was this which doomed Bear Stearns, Schwartz told Congress, otherwise they would have recovered in a year or two without the need of governmental intervention.
Instead what happened was that J. P. Morgan Chase (the Rothschild banking empire, prominent members of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank and other national banks), after the sell-off, came forward to "rescue" Bear by successfully offering pennies on the dollar of the pre-fall value of the company. JPMC also got the government to indemnify against potential losses from Bear's bad paper to the tune of thirty billion dollars. This sum to be borrowed from the Fed.
Crisis? Not for the Rothschilds. As Fed members they and other cartel members had their chairman and servant, Alan Greenspan, not only sanction these new mortgage-based derivatives but advocate for them as well. These MBS led to a general decline in the housing and credit markets which, in turn, accompanied by whispers, led to an investor confidence crisis and a large reduction in the share prices of investment banks. Then JPMC, like the cavalry of olde, rode in to offer help by buying Bear for next to nothing and infusing it with much needed capital. How magnanimous!
Then the government indemnifies the transaction for thirty billion which they borrow from the Fed. The cartel, which includes the Rothschilds, doesn't actually fork over any cash, they simply add a few zeroes to JPM's account. Zeroes which the Amerrican taxpayer will have to repay with money from the real economy thus exascerbating the insufficiency of funds in circulation.
The Rothschilds and the others Fedsters, the High Lords of Capital, are not collapsing. One might opine that they are the beneficiaries of an genuine intrinsic financial calamity and that all the assets they acquired are attributable to the vagaries of market economics. Perhaps so, but first let's look at another Fed-induced holocaust, the Crash of 1929.
In the 19th Century, the American government fought heroically against the international bankers but, tragically, in the following century, with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the cartel regained the commanding heights of our economic life which they had lost under President Andrew Jackson.
At first they lent freely stabilizing the economy they had sabotaged in 1907. The boon that followed was so great that it could be heard to roar its way through the 1920s. Meanwhile, beneath the din of jazz bands, money was moving rapidly up the economic ladder and the gulf between rich and poor grew great, just as it has recently. And due to the great availability of money and credit made possible by the Fed and a concurrent loosening of regulation on the financial markets, people borrowed money to invest in the stock market. This had the effect of hyper-inflating share prices with fictive capital in a hyper-leveraged equities market. When the banks made their margin calls (a call by brokers to produce the money for the stocks which they'd bought on credit). Many shareholders had to sell some or all of their stock to make their margins. This sent the market tumbling down. Smaller banks were forced to foreclose on loans to meet capital requirements. As a result, homeowners and farmers lost their properties and the banks that issued these mortgages often couldn't raise enough money and went out of business. The Fed then raised interest rates thereby shutting off the flow of much needed capital into the economy. This deepened recession into depression by setting it in stone. The government was left to solve a problem which required an ever increasing bankroll in an economy of ever dwindling money supply. This, remarkably, it did when "class traitor" FDR, in what is known to economists as the Great Compression, taxed the rich to fund work programs for the indigent.
Through leaked documents and defector testimony it came to light that this crash was planned by the Fed. Memos show them discussing just how many thousands of banks and farms they thought they could acquire by creating the crash. The Crash of '29 was an economic coup plotted by the people at the top of the economy in order to seize more wealth for themselves and to undermine emerging worker movements and political parties which arose from the gross divergence in incomes between the working and ownership classes. It was a ruse. Eventually, they had to suffer FDR and his New Deal but the gains they made were irreversible. Where before they only controlled a majority of the banks in the Northeast, after the Scam of '29 they dominated American capital from sea to shining sea.
It is often heard that the CIA controls all the largest insurance firms. One hears this said most frequently about AIG (American International Group). If this is a myth, our intelligence community has been in no hurry to debunk it these last few decades. Indeed the connection between the American intelligence community and the insurance industry finds its origins in another bogus, bank-induced, crisis, the Panic of 1837.
More recently however, after returning from Versailles in June of 1919, President Wilson, having spent all his political capital unsuccessfully on his Points, was unable to secure funding for a permanent, intelligence-gathering agency from his uncooperative Congress. Thereupon, so the story goes, he surreptitiously produced one million dollars which he handed over to his then Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, uncle of the Dulles brothers. He then told Lansing that this funding was finite and that those involved in intelligence and clandestine operations were going to have to find ways to make this seed money grow without the aid of Congress or the executive branch. Indeed, Wilson added, the very existence of this fund and the activities it will finance must remain a secret.
The rest, as they say, is history. The founders of modern, American intelligence invested this money in Air America and other successful commercial/intelligence ventures including businesses which normally gather information such as insurance companies. To this day, how the CIA receives it funding and how much remains a state secret.
When of late AIG, this massive information-gathering institution, fell upon hard times, they were given $80 billion by that private corporation we Americans call the Federal Reserve Bank. Massive amounts of tax-payer money flowed into the troubled insurance company long before Paulson started pimping his bailout.
According to Reuters
(http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
/article21219.htm), below are the top eight beneficiaries to date of the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program). Originally this $700 billion "bailout" fund was supposed to be used for the purchase of MBS and CDO (collateralized debt obligations), or at least that is what the redoubtable Mr Paulson told our credulous Congress, a plan which would help some homeowners stay in their homes. Baiting and switching, Paulson now informs us that things have changed and he will use the money to buy equity stakes in troubled firms thus dashing the hopes of struggling homeowners nationwide. Nothing for them. Let them eat cake.
And who is on the dole instead? Number one is AIG. This is a company which had already received tax-payer money from the Fed.
Number two is our friends the Rothschilds again. Remember it was they who, with the help of our government, bought Bear Stearns for a pennies on the dollar; and bought billions of dollars worth of assets from Washington Mutual at or near book value.
Coming in at number three is another company in the insurance game, Citigroup. They were among the first to complain about MBS and cry for help, but they soon gave up their pretense of imminent financial collapse and made a serious offer to buy Wachovia. The repo man was banging at their door but somehow they managed to offer billions to purchase another bank.
At number four is the bank which did buy Wachovia.
At number five is Bank of America. They are in such distress that they have only been able to buy Countrywide Mortgage, MBNA (Maryland Bank, National Association), and investment banking giant Merrill Lynch since midyear. Countrywide, as you may recall, was called ground zero for predatory lending by angry Congressional regulators. So laden, we were told time and again, was Countrywide with bad paper that nothing could save it. Was it corporate altruism that led BoA to purchase the depressed company? Not according to their CEO who told CNBC that he thought the company could be turned around in a year or two. He added that he thought this bad paper was not as worthless as the public had been led to believe.
Numbers six, seven, and eight are, or were, investment banking collossi who were purchased by commercial banks.
AIG $40 billion
JPMorgan $25 billion
Citigroup $25 billion
Wells Fargo $25 billion
Bank of America $15 billion
Merrill Lynch $10 billion
Goldman Sachs $10 billion
Morgan Stanley $10 billion
Still not convinced this is a scam? Paulson, without the consent of our supine Congress, changed the corporate tax code. Hitherto it was not possible to buy a distressed company and claim their losses against the buyer's profits thus reducing or even reversing tax liability. Now you can, thanks to the scam's front man. The estimated loss in revenue for our government is $140 billion. Not only will the acquirers not owe any tax thanks to this change, but in some cases the Treasury will have to pay out money in tax rebates. The chief beneficiary of this alteration in the tax code? JPMC, our friends the Rothschilds again. They are set to receive billions in rebates.
Still not convinced? In a statement as telling as it was stunning, Paulson recently said that he was looking into ways to get credit for U.S. businesses and consumers from sources other than banks. He wasn't very specific as to what he meant but nevertheless it is unmistakably clear that the banks are following a policy of monetary contraction and that the monies they have received thus far have not been used for the purpose they were intended. Instead, as has been reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, these "troubled" institutions are using this windfall to make acquisitions, and doing so with impunity.
One must conclude that Paulson is unwilling or unable to make these banks act in accordance with the conditions of this Congressional bailout. Unable? He has the power of the state; the support, at least in this particular, of Congress, President Bush, incoming President-Elect Obama, and the American people; and he's the paymaster of a 700 billion dollar slush fund. He has the power to force these renegade Wall Street firms to comply with the terms Congress has set. Yet instead of using this muscle for the national good he continues to give away public money without strings attached. What's more he is looking for new ways to find liquid credit outside the banking system. It's farcical on its face.
None of the companies listed above need a penny! The top five have feasted on the demise of the bottom three in an orgy of bold maneuovres. Are we to believe that the SEC allowed insolvent commercial banks to purchase other financial institutions with the mere promise of capital infusion? One can imagine the avalanche of shareholder lawsuits which would have ensued. These banks met the capital requirements to make these offers to buy. They are solvent.
At this point the initial purpose of this year's money-power scam rounds into view. Intelligence gathering entities like AIG and Citigroup have received massive infusions of capital which they clearly didn't need. And commercial banks, specifically the money-power banks, have greedily scooped up large investment banks for next to nothing and with the help of tax-payer dollars. This much is now clear.
This is no accident. This "crisis" was planned and engineered by the High Lords of Capital. We are not the victims of the business cycle or insufficient regulatory oversight: We are getting raped. Again. We are not watching their demise unfold but rather their latest subterfuge to move an ever greater percentage of wealth up the food chain into their coffers. We are not observing the last days of capital but rather its consolidation and calcification. This does not mean that there will not be genuine misery for most of the people on our planet, of course there will be. That's the plan. But so long as the Rockefellers and Harrimans and Rothschilds and Warburgs and Dresdners have control over our money supply they cannot fail. No matter what travails they loose upon us, such will never reach their doors so long as they can print money and create ersatz deposits for themselves at their pleasure. However bad it gets for us, they are immune. They own our money. They own our governments. They own us.
Whatever vision of justice you cherish, it cannot happen without the right of the people to control their money supply. Without this the money power can make our markets rise or fall or scamper sideways like a crab. They can create gluts and shortages and manipulate the prices of the most essential things we need. We are at their mercy, as we are once again seeing in this recent crisis. The power to create money must rest with a person directly elected by the voters, and subject to instant recall by them. Without this power, we will remain the currency-slaves of the money power.
And they will not go away. They must be removed:
Lincoln wrote: "As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
And lastly, in the spirit of the holiday season, we've decided to pass the hat for the Rothschilds. Please send your tax-deductible contribution to High Street, London. They are down to their last trillions and they desperately need your help...--MORE--"
