(Article changed on September 6, 2013 at 06:04)
(Article changed on September 5, 2013 at 14:28)
Iraq and Libya have been taken out, and Iran has been heavily boycotted. Syria is now in the cross-hairs. Why? Here is one overlooked scenario.
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. S ome 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."
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