- Causing $64 trillion of liquidity to vanish from the
world financial system and then manipulating the US government to reward
the perpetrators with bailout money requires the presence of the "right
people" in government, academia, and finance industries.
-
-
- In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein argues that Milton
Friedman or Chicago School influenced policy makers routinely used catastrophes
to facilitate rewriting of national economic rules to benefit a select
subset of the world's hyperwealthy.
-
- President Obama, whose economic background is all Chicago
School, brought the Friedmanites including National Economic Council Director
Larry Summers back into government.
-
- Summers came under recent public scrutiny because 2008
White House financial disclosure reports reveal he collected favours from
the very financial institutions that received huge taxpayer bailouts. "The
document provided for Summers, who serves as one of the president's closest
confidants, underscores just how close some of these officials are to the
industry over which they now have oversight," writes Sam Stein in
the Huffington Post.
-
- J.P. Morgan Chase, which received $25 billion in government
bailout funds, had paid Summers $67,500 for a single speaking engagement.
Citigroup, which received $50 billion in "emergency" taxpayer
aid, had paid Summers $99,000. Goldman Sachs, which received a $12 billion
bailout, had paid Summers $202,500.
-
- Glenn Greenwald of Salon explains that people like Summers
and friends "shuffle back and forth from the public to the private
sector and back again, repeatedly switching places with their GOP counterparts
in this endless public/private sector looting."
-
- During the Clinton administration, as Secretaries of
the Treasury, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers deregulated derivative trading.
After leaving government service, Rubin became a Citigroup director and
used deregulation to ruin that Bank by recommending investments in derivatives
like
- CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations). For eight years
of service Rubin received approximately $126 million in cash and stock.
-
- Investors from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and UAE were effectively
swindled out of billions as Citigroup value crashed because of the CDO
meltdown during the Bush administration. Larry Summers became president
of Harvard University in 2001. Rubin was Summers' main booster at the Harvard
Corporation, which chooses the president.
-
- Summer's Harvard presidency erupted into scandal when
the US government accused Summers' associate, economics professor Andrei
Shleifer of financial improprieties during work on a Harvard USAID grant
to create a Russian stock market. The government suspected Shleifer's wife
Nancy Zimmerman of insider stock trading.
-
- Because Shleifer put Harvard in breach of Federal regulations
regarding grant money, Harvard had to pay $27 million to the US government
while Summers protected Shleifer and his job. Additional questions arose
over the management of the Harvard endowment, employee compensation, and
suspected middle market restraint of trade involving university real
- estate acquisitions.
-
- During this turbulent period in his career, Summers worked
hard to improve his Jewish credentials. He badmouthed anti-Israel divestment
activists on campus but supported Darfur-related divestment.. He dumped
his Christian wife Victoria Perry for Holocaust Literature professor Elisa
New, a close friend of Jewish Studies professor Ruth Wisse, whose husband
is chairman of board of directors of CAMERA, a professional Israel advocacy
organisation.In a disastrous blow to Harvard's academic stature, Summers
rejected former UAE president Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan's $2 million
donation for an Islamic Studies chair at the Harvard Divinity School under
pressure from Rachel Fish of the David Project, which is another Israel
advocacy group with connections to CAMERA.
-
- The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences twice voted
"no confidence" in Summers, who resigned as Harvard president
in 2006 amidst rumours of refusal to testify in an internal investigation
of financial fraud. Shortly thereafter the D.E. Shaw hedge fund hired Summers
with Rubin's recommendation and paid Summers $5.2 million for approximately
50 working days.
-
- Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel trod a similar career
path perhaps more quickly because of superior Jewish Zionist credentials
resulting from an Irgunist father and civilian IDF service during Iraq
War I.
-
- Boutique investment bank Wasserstein Perella, whose founder
Bruce Wasserstein is heavily involved in Zionist politics, hired Emanuel
in 1999 and paid him $16 million for two years of work, despite his having
zero background in economics or finance.
-
- Now this corrupt network is pushing through Congress
another huge gift for their friends: the Summers-Geithner Plan, which enables
banks to make their own valuation of toxic assets and then buy them with
taxpayer money without restoring the lost liquidity.
-
- Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times, "In effect,
Treasury will be creating - deliberately! - the functional equivalent of
Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital
but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities."
-
- Dean Baker of Truthout points out: "Some hedge and
equity fund managers could make hundreds of millions or even billions off
the Geithner plan." This Plan looks like a premeditated attempt to
loot and destroy the US
- financial system.
-
- Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on the Middle
East affairs and US politics
-
- http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=
- data/opinion/2009/April/opinion_April66.xml§ion=opinion&col=
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