Max Keiser's latest video connects the dots, and puts all the pieces together:
(note: Just as Iran-Contra breaking reporter Robert Parry was EXILED from the NY/DC U.S. corporate "mainstream media" for the past 2 decades for outing New York & Washington's propensity for fomenting and running death squads and ILLEGAL WARS of muderous, slow-burn genocide in South & Central America (along with outing the illegal selling of weapons to Iran, Iraq, and every other two-bit dictator fiefdom that American gun merchants could make a bloody dime from); so too has Mr. Keiser forced himself to exile in Paris... where this particular video was produced on a trip to Russia, with the cooperation of RT, Russia Today tv.)
The Neo-Con COUP in America, which started in earnest in the mid 1990s
(when the Neo-Con New York Times and Washington Post JOINED Right-Wing Republicans in trying to make the "Whitewater" scandal - a routine real-estate flop in which the Clintons had LOST money while Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas - look like THE BIGGEST SCANDAL of the massive Savings & Loan catastrophe, a truly disgraceful BROWN-SHIRT media smear-mongering campaign that eventually saw hapless Jim McDougal DIE, IN SOLITARY confinement, in MAX SECURITY PRISON, denied his heart medication, despite his advanced and despite his abject cooperation with Ken Starr's FBI investigators...
A massive Republican/NYT/WashPost MEDIA SMEAR MOB which served PERFECTLY to DRAW America's attention AWAY from THE REAL Savings & Loan scandals, and INSTITUTIONALIZED CRIMINALITY saturated throughout the NY/DC/Chicago & West Coast "establishment" & financial elites. For more on the DISGRACEFUL reporting of the NY Times and Washington Post during their infamous "Whitewater" jihad, see Lyons & Conason's 25 pages, Twenty-Five pages of mostly single-line citations to their book on the horrendous reporting of the Times & Post during that era, "The Hunting of the President.")
....when the serially treacherous and chronically lying Washington Post, New York Times, and Republican Party SUCCEEDED in creating a RELNTLESS "Whitewater" drumbeat, they laid a huge WHITEWASH blanket over the real folly of financial __DEREGULATION__ which actually caused the S&L debacle.
By WHITEWASHING the REAL causes of the S&L scandals & 1990s Bush-1 Recession, the Times, Post and other NY/Washington autocrats were THEREBY CREATING AN ENVIRONMENT, that WOULD INVITE NEW ROUNDS of _DEREGULATION_ insanity,
which would CREATE VAST NEW INVITATIONS TO FRAUD by the largest financial players - including those INTIMATELY CONNECTED WITH THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, of whom DICK CHENEY and HALLIBURTON were/are the POSTER CHILD.
(A process well illustrated by Pete Lawton's 1992, S&L crisis era book,
"The Mafia, the CIA, and George Bush"
(George H.W. Bush, i.e. President Bush Sr. /41)
We aplogize: our command of words fail us, for although sounding like a long, drawn-out rant or diatribe, the above is actually only the most cursory of outlines...
....because to anyone with even a passing understanding of the role that PHIL GRAMM...
(everything you need to know about Phil Gramm is revealed by the fact that his wife, WENDY LEE GRAMM, after working as a Cabinent level "Deregulation" autocrat in the Bush Sr. administration, departed government work to take a place on... the Board of Directors of ENRON corporation which continued to build on and collapse from sheer accounting fraud)
...and Deregulation had played leading up to the SAVINGS & LOAN economy gutting debacle, you could tell __BY 1995__ that the NY & DC "establishment" autocrats and oligarchs - paging FRED HIATT, ARTHUR SULZBERGER, and ALL their LYING whores, editors (with all due respect to the honest "ladies of the night" who earn an honest living, delivering exactly what they promise to their customers) and writers at the NY Times, W.Post, Newsweek, Time, CNN, the major TV "news" networks, & etc. - were RECREATING THE CONDITIONS that WOULD LEAD TO _ANOTHER_ American economic collapse....
Before the United States had even fully emerged from the late 1980s - early 1990s Savings & Loan crisis and Bush-1 Recession, the NY, Wall Street, and Washington establishment autocrats WERE ALREADY TRYING to RECREATE the conditions that would lead directly to _ANOTHER_ economic nightmare!!!!!
(The much despised Timmy McVeigh provides a perfect marker or time-line between the Bush-1 recession of the late 1980s-early 1990s, and the Bush-2 era starting with the stolen election of November 2000, for McVeigh, who could not find a job in upstate New York due to the Bush-1 Recession, after his involuntary but meritorious discharge from the US Army as a decorated combat veteran after US-Iraq Gulf War-1, blew up the Oklahoma City Murrah federal building in April 1995.. two full years into President Bill Clinton's first term of office, but before the economy had fully picked up steam to get out of the Bush-1 Recession. McVeigh was as much a victim of the Neo-Con "establishment" "main stream" corporate media's COLLABERATION with RADICAL RIGHT-WING "deregulation" and "hate social spending" insanity (which led to that recession), as his bombing victims and their families were. Today's Democrats have been so cowed by the Neo-Con press and Right-Wing Republicans, that no Democrats could use the terms "Bush-1 Recession" and "Bush-2 Recessions" if their paychecks depended on it.)
Sure enough, by 1999 and 2000, Bill Clintons Treasury Secretary - and FORMER GOLDMAN SACHS CHAIRMAN ROBERT RUBIN (and his protege and successor as Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers) WERE HELPING RADICAL RIGHT-WING REPUBLICANS such as Dick Armey and Senator Phil Gramm PASS ANOTHER ROUND of __DEREGULATION__ insanity, including the 1999 Gramm Leach Bliley Act, and the 2000 Commodity Futures 'Modernization' Act;
The first of which GUTTED the 1930s Depression era (New Deal Democratic) GLASS-STEAGALL Act, which tried to make retail (regular consumer and household) banks SAFE, BORING, and RELIABLE; and the second of which, the CMFA of 2000, GUTTED 100+ YEARS of insurance regulations, by DEMOLISHING the need for companies to pass strict insurance guidelines when writing insurance contracts;
Now, under the tender mercies of Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Ben Bernanke, and other "leaders" of the American Treasury & Fed Reserve system, any (well connected) company on Wall Street could go into the INSURANCE business, simply by writing a "DERIVATIVES" contract, that would, instead of guaranteeing the value of a building, factory, or underlying asset, would instead attempt to guarantee the value of a given company's STOCK PRICE.
These "DERIVATIVES," "CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS ("CDS"), "Credit DEFAULT OBLIGATIONS" (CDO's) and other "bundled," "securitized" nightmare inventions of the greed-heads in Wall Street executive offices were AN INVITATION TO FRAUD, because the writer of a contract could INSERT HIS FRAUD PROVISIONS, at ANY step in what could be a dozen pages of fine-print derivatives contract writing!
Instead of merely insuring the price of an easily tracked company (say, IBM, GM, or even a basket of companies like a Spyder or Diamond), the DERIVATIVE CDS papers could be insuring the price of A DOZEN "SECURITIZED," bundled option contracts - the failure of any one of which would trigger a DEFAULT payment by the company writing the CDO.. or, as Les Leopold explained in his book, "The LOOTING of America," it was PUBLIC SCHOOL PENSION FUNDS, who were SOLD these GARBAGE, TOXIC "derivative" DEFAULT SWAPS as "Grade-A safe & relieable securities" who NOW BECAME Liable for Wall Streets' greed and insanity when the "DEFAULT" provisions in their toxic concoctions were triggered!!!!
The above is merely the prelude to This Week's INSANITY coming out of the Barack Obama administration and "Democratic" Congress and Senate:
Because the American government has NOTHING to sell the world by TOXIC, GARBAGE 'securities' that no sane investor (much less responsible government of a foreign country) would touch, America is headed for a new round of FINANCIAL CRISIS:
and to MASK the UNRAVELLING of their own economic crimes, the Neo-Cons who OWN the U.S. Congress, have gotten government "leaders," whether Nobel "Peace" prize recipient president Barack Obama, or his State Department Secretary Hillary Clinton, to STOMP AROUND THE WORLD THREATENING WAR or economic conflict, whether (as Max Keiser points out) against RUSSIA, Iran... or even China!
In the second part of his video, Mr. Keiser interviews John Perkins, author of one of the ultimate Wall Street, Washington, and banking insider exposes, "Confessions of An Economic Hit Man."
As Mr. Perkins explains, the ECONOMIC CRISIS - TRILLIONS of dollars of U.S. and private citizen budget DEFICITS; and the EXTORTION of American taxpayers to FILL THE FRAUDULENT coffers and bank vaults of Goldman-Sachs, JP Morgan-Chase, Citi, and other criminally run banks - is the price that the American public must pay, for TOLERATING the Neo-Con genocidal "ECONOMIC HIT MAN" agenda against smaller, "undeveloped countries" back during the boom-and-glory days of the late 1990s and all the way to the October 2007 market highs.
Yes, the Neo-Cons were RESTRAINED from running their GENOCIDAL Iran-Contra wars in Central & South America all through the 1980s by the U.S. Congress and courageous independent reporting.... today, with the Neo-Cons OWNING the "Democratic" (not!) Congress and most of the "major media," there is NO POLITICAL FORCE on the horizon to restrain the genocidal, treasonous, and relentlessly destructive impulses of the Wall Street Neo-Cons (Rahm Emanuel, Robt. Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson, JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, and their allies in financial fraud and "deregulation" crimes) and their partners in the hijacking of America, the Neo-Con Likudnik warmongering Neo-Cons (The NY Times, the Washington Post, Joe Lieberman, Rahm Emanuel, Paul Wolfowitz, Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, etc. etc. etc. ad naseum, ad infinitum....),
So hold on to your hats, America, with the Obama/Emanuel/Lieberman/Goddamn-Sachs "Democrats" and Bush/Cheney/Paulson/Wolfowitz/Chertoff/Mukasey/Bolton/Bolent/Libby Republicans having WRECKED the U.S. Economy and treasury with their wars and tax-cuts for wealthy, THERE WILL BE HELL TO PAY, as America's murderous (if not genocidal) autocrats look for NEW DIVERSIONS, distractions, and wars to divert America's outrage from the premeditated economic larceny and economic destruction on a titanic scale - 2x the entire annual U.S. GDP in DEFICITS, and SKYROCKETING through the roof as President Obama continues to hand trillions to his bankers, in exchange for a few lousy (tens of) millions in campaign donations.
NOTE: An important point over Obama's skyrocketing deficit and his "of, by and for" bankers written-budget:
Over at Mish's Global Economic analysis page on
"The sudden resurgence of Keynesian policy," blog host Mike Shedlock bashes what he calls the "Undeniable Shift to Keynes[ian economics] even though every such attempt in history has failed"
(i.e. attempts to blame the skyrocketing deficits, and economic crisis, on "liberal" ideas, and social spending programs like Social Security, Medicare, and all the other New Deal programs that made America resistant to major economic downturns for most of the 50 years after WWII.)
Mr. Shedlock is apparently forgetting the ultimate example of Keynsian "government spending to stimulate the economy" success... a little incident in history called WORLD WAR II and America's response, which took a Depression economy and turned it around (almost literally, "overnight" after December 7, 1941) into the "arsenal of democracy" pouring out fountains of massive production AND GOOD PAYING JOBS in an economic climate of privation, HIGH TAXES, STRICT RATIONING, and mandatory government price controls at that.
Mr. Shedlock tries to label Obama's (so called "Democratic") (not!) "economics team" as KEYNSIANS, but NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH: Obama's "economics" team are RADICAL RIGHT-WING GODDAMN-SACHS 'free market' "extort the peons" ROBBER BARON ideologues and financial cartel MONOPOLISTS, POSING as establishment "Democrats," much less as genuine Keynsians.
To be a Keynsian, you first have to GIVE A DAMN about the economy, and for the people harmed in economic downturns.
Whereas the GoldmanSachs/JPM/rothschilds/citi/BoA (et al) big finance goal & agenda, IS, and historically has been, to PURPOSELY inflate & deflate the economy (in the same way that hedge funds "PUMP and DUMP" individual stocks), so those with deep pockets can scoop up valuable assets (e.g. $400,000 homes, other valuable assets) for pennies on the dollar.
John Maynard Keynes RESIGNED his position as British Finance Minister ("Chancellor of the Exchequer") after successfully guiding Britain's nearly broken financial system through the vast devastation of the WWI years, in protest of the Versailles Treaty that ended WWI and which Keynes PREDICTED would lead to vast social instability in Europe.. and that would trigger a NEW GERMAN WAR in a decade or two from 1919. On both counts, Keynes was proven correct.
To imply or state that the EMANUEL/summers/RUBIN/giethner/Bernanke (et al) GoddamnSachs toadies who infest the Obama administration are "KEYNSIAN, is as DELUSIONAL, as to believe that giving Trillions of taxpayer extorted dollars to failed, bankrupt, and insanely corrupt bankers would restore the American economy to vitality, even as those bankers use their extorted taxpayer loot, and OTHER GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES, to DISMANTLE American jobs, and ship entire U.S. industries, wholesale, overseas.
(note 2: http://www.solari.com/ puts the total Wall Street and financial sector"investment" in (campaign donations to) the Obama & Democratic coffers, in a "back of envelope" calculation, at a total of around one billion dollars in the months leading to election 2008; but only after those Wall Street & big finance donations to Republicans, who had enacted the big finance wish-lists to the last measure, had tanked the economy and forced the American public to demand some kind of "change".
.... "change" that was never delivered. Even so, according to Solari, the corrupt, "campaign donation" "investment" in Barack Obama has been the greatest "payback" (ROI) ratio in history, some TWENTY+ TRILLION dollars of taxpayer extorted "bailouts" in exchange for a billion dollars or so of campaign grease.)
