“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.” —Prof. Caroll Quigley, Georgetown University, Tragedy and Hope (1966)
Making the World Safe for Banksters: Syria in the Cross Hairs
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/making_the_world_safe_for_banksters_syria_in_the_cross-hairs_20130905
Back dated Sep 5, 2013 - In an August 2013 article titled “Larry Summers and the Secret ‘End-game’ Memo,” Greg Palast posted evidence of a secret late-1990s plan devised by Wall Street and U.S. Treasury officials to open banking to the lucrative derivatives business. To pull this off required the relaxation of banking regulations not just in the US but globally. The vehicle to be used was the Financial Services Agreement of the World Trade Organization.
The “end-game” would require not just coercing support among WTO members but taking down those countries refusing to join. Some key countries remained holdouts from the WTO, including Iraq, Libya, Iran and Syria. In these Islamic countries, banks are largely state-owned; and “usury” – charging rent for the “use” of money – is viewed as a sin, if not a crime. That puts them at odds with the Western model of rent extraction by private middlemen.
Publicly-owned banks are also a threat to the mushrooming derivatives business, since governments with their own banks don’t need interest rate swaps, credit default swaps, or investment-grade ratings by private rating agencies in order to finance their operations.
Bank deregulation proceeded according to plan, and the government-sanctioned and -nurtured derivatives business mushroomed into a $700-plus trillion pyramid scheme. Highly leveraged, completely unregulated, and dangerously unsustainable, it collapsed in 2008 when investment bank Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, taking a large segment of the global economy with it. The countries that managed to escape were those sustained by public banking models outside the international banking net.
These countries were not all Islamic.
Forty percent of banks globally are publicly-owned. They are largely in the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—which house forty percent of the global population. They also escaped the 2008 credit crisis, but they at least made a show of conforming to Western banking rules. This was not true of the “rogue” Islamic nations, where usury was forbidden by Islamic teaching.
To make the world safe for usury, these rogue states had to be silenced by other means. Having failed to succumb to economic coercion, they wound up in the crosshairs of the powerful US military.
Here is some data in support of that thesis.
The End-game Memo In his August 22nd article, Greg Palast posted a screenshot of a 1997 memo from Timothy Geithner, then Assistant Secretary of International Affairs under Robert Rubin, to Larry Summers, then Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. Geithner referred in the memo to the “end-game of WTO financial services negotiations” and urged Summers to touch base with the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Citibank, and Chase Manhattan Bank, for whom private phone numbers were provided.
The game then in play was the deregulation of banks so that they could gamble in the lucrative new field of derivatives. To pull this off required, first, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the 1933 Act that imposed a firewall between investment banking and depository banking in order to protect depositors’ funds from bank gambling. But the plan required more than just deregulating US banks. Banking controls had to be eliminated globally so that money would not flee to nations with safer banking laws. The “endgame” was to achieve this global deregulation through an obscure addendum to the international trade agreements policed by the World Trade Organization, called the Financial Services Agreement. Palast wrote:
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 ginned-up 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 Organization.
WTO members were induced to sign the agreement by threatening their access to global markets if they refused; and they all did sign, except Brazil. Brazil was then threatened with an embargo; but its resistance paid off, since it alone among Western nations survived and thrived during the 2007-2009 crisis. As for the others:
The new FSA pulled the lid off the Pandora’s box of worldwide derivatives trade.
Among the notorious transactions legalized: 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.
The Holdouts That was the fate of countries in the WTO, but Palast did not discuss those
that were not in that organization at all, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
These seven countries were named by U.S. General Wesley Clark (Ret.) in a 2007 “Democracy Now” interview as
the new “rogue states” being targeted for take down after September 11, 2001. He said that about 10 days after 9-11, he was told by a general that the decision had been made to go to war with Iraq. Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
What did these countries have in common? Besides being Islamic, they were not members either of the WTO or of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That left them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers’ central bank in Switzerland.
Other countries later identified as “rogue states” that were also not members of the BIS included North Korea, Cuba, and Afghanistan.
The body regulating banks today is called the Financial Stability Board (FSB), and it is housed in the BIS in Switzerland. In 2009, the heads of the G20 nations agreed to be bound by rules imposed by the FSB, ostensibly to prevent another global banking crisis. Its regulations are not merely advisory but are binding, and they can make or break not just banks but whole nations. This was first demonstrated in 1989, when the Basel I Accord raised capital requirements a mere 2%, from 6% to 8%. The result was to force a drastic reduction in lending by major Japanese banks, which were then the world’s largest and most powerful creditors. They were undercapitalized, however, relative to other banks.
The Japanese economy sank along with its banks and has yet to fully recover.
Among other game-changing regulations in play under the FSB are Basel III and the new bail-in rules. Basel III is slated to impose crippling capital requirements on public, cooperative and community banks, coercing their sale to large multinational banks.
The “bail-in” template was first tested in Cyprus and follows regulations imposed by the FSB in 2011. Too-big-to-fail banks are required to draft “living wills” setting forth how they will avoid insolvency in the absence of government bailouts.
The FSB solution is to “bail in” creditors – including depositors – turning deposits into bank stock, effectively confiscating them.
The Public Bank Alternative Countries laboring under the yoke of an extractive private banking system are being forced into “structural adjustment” and austerity by their unrepayable debt. But some countries have managed to escape. In the Middle East, these are the targeted “rogue nations.” Their state-owned banks can issue the credit of the state on behalf of the state, leveraging public funds for public use without paying a massive tribute to private middlemen. Generous state funding allows them to provide generously for their people.
Like Libya and Iraq before they were embroiled in war, Syria provides free education at all levels and free medical care. It also provides subsidized housing for everyone (although some of this has been compromised by adoption of an IMF structural adjustment program in 2006 and the presence of about 2 million Iraqi and Palestinian refugees).
Iran too provides nearly free higher education and primary health care.
Like Libya and Iraq before takedown, Syria and Iran have state-owned central banks that issue the national currency and are under government control. Whether these countries will succeed in maintaining their financial sovereignty in the face of enormous economic, political and military pressure remains to be seen.
As for Larry Summers, after proceeding through the revolving door to head Citigroup, he became State Senator Barack Obama’s key campaign benefactor. He played a key role in the banking deregulation that brought on the current crisis, causing millions of US citizens to lose their jobs and their homes. Yet Summers is President Obama’s first choice to replace Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve Chairman. Why? He has proven he can manipulate the system to make the world safe for Wall Street; and in an upside-down world in which bankers rule, that seems to be the name of the game.
There are no reasonable doubts about the basic history of the currently established systems of public governments enforcing frauds by private banks as described by Carroll Quigley :
"... powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching goal, 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 ... to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements. ... 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. ... It must not be felt that the heads of the world's chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up, and who were perfectly capable of throwing them down.
The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of these investment bankers who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks."
"If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way
to justify relations founded on violence,
to make such relations seem moral, than
by reframing them in the language of debt — above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s
it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong."
EVERYTHING that the central banks are ABLE to do are based upon the long history of civilization
transforming violence into the language of debt. In that context, the public faces of those central banks are mostly academics, who were picked and promoted because they were the best available professional hypocrites, who could advance the global agenda of trillionaire mass murderers ...
In general, the vast majority of people neither understand nor want to understand that MONEY IS MEASUREMENT BACKED BY MURDER. While what has happened in Syria has primarily been driven by the involvement of the CIA, the reasons for WHY the CIA would do all that manifested within the overall context of the civilization being controlled through applications of the methods of organized crime. There is an implicit DOUBLE WHAMMY there, due to the vast majority of people not understanding, and not wanting to understand, WHY civilization actually operates according to the principles and methods of organized crime, within which context the events in Syria were one of the ways that always simmering situation has boiled over ...
Chronic problems inherent in the nature of life are being resolved in the only ways that they actually could be, which are through their paths of least action, or least resistance, which in human terms amounts to the paths of least morality. At the present time it is
politically impossible to actually operate BETTER systems whereby money is backed by murder. Rather, the ONLY possible ways to do that are through the maximum possible deceits and frauds.
The article above may well be correct about the proximate causes of the Syrian War, HOWEVER, it does not include the deeper causes, such as the exponential growth of the Syrian population, running into BOTH the Syrian peak oil production, AND the prolonged Syrian drought situation. The proximate causes of the Syrian War were the CIA acting on behalf of the international banksters. However, the deeper causes were that
THERE ALWAYS MUST BE SOME DEATH CONTROL SYSTEMS, with the most extreme forms of those being the murder systems. Civilization has been the selection for the most successful murder systems to be done through the methods of the maximum possible deceits and treacheries, which overall enabled financial success to become based on public governments ENFORCING FRAUDS by private banks. It was within that context that the Syrian War was started and egged on by the CIA, who put "Syria In the Cross-hairs" in order to make "the World Safe for Banksters."
However, the deeper reasons for how and why civilization has developed in the ways that it did were always
that there MUST be some death control systems, and thus, the human murder systems were driven to develop, with the ideology of those murder systems being militarism. The oldest book on the methods of war starts off by saying
"success in war is based on deceit" and ends by saying
"spies are the most important soldiers." The "actors" in the "theatre" of the Sryian War have, once again, demonstrated the Art of War.
Overall human history has been based upon thousands of years of the development of those principles and methods of organized crime, manifesting on larger and larger scales, while the Syrian War was one of the most recent flash points in those globalized developments of Neolithic Civilization based upon being able to back up lies with violence, whereby combined money/murder systems were the symbolic ways that access to natural resources was controlled.
Syria was yet another example of the underlying problems, such as prolonged drought and peak oil production, PLUS previous exponential growth of its total population, creating the background conditions for the CIA to start the Syrian War, in order to attempt to advance the international banksters' global agenda. At the present time, it continues to be politically impossible to realistically resolve any of those real problems other than through death insanities.
