Greg Palast: Potential Fed Chair Summers at Heart of Global Economic Crisis
Tuesday, 03 September 2013 09:52
Investigative journalist Greg Palast has obtained a secret memo authored by then deputy Treasury secretary Larry Summers and his protégé Timothy Geithner detailing their plans to roll back financial regulation. In the piece, titled "The Confidential Memo at the Heart of the Global Financial Crisis" for Vice, Palast writes:
"The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak's fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top U.S. Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3 percent unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears."
First, let me note: I usually stay away from conspiracy theories, but not because I think they are freakish or contemptible or anything of the sort. Almost anything is possible and we learn some pretty incredible things about our government. I am not referring only to wikileaks or Snowden, either. For example, The USG syphilis experiment on the incredible Tuskegee Airmen would have sounded insane to some--until it was confirmed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experimentDitto, the Bay of Pigs plan that Nixon put into motion during the Eisenhower administration and that was wrongly hung around around JFK's neck.
I find the persistent effort to pretend that any deviation from taking at face value everything that the USG would like us to believe is bordering on either evil or stupid at this point.
If you want to wait until long after you're dead for the truth to be confirmed (if then), fine. However, no, all conspiracy theories are not
per se evidence of a diseased mind. But, thanks ever so for carrying water for only God knows who and only God knows why. If you're paid to do that, it's one thing. (I believe it's called pimping.) If you are doing it for free, then you're just a simple tool, in more ways than one.
In particular, if this memo does exist and does say what Palast claims it says, the only skill required is reading comprehension. It has nothing to do spinning conspiracy theories.
Far from making Jaisal Noor seem to me to be ever so intelligent or sophisticated, I find her totally gratuitous comment about conspiracy theory freaks incredibly lame, at best.
Okay, that ends the message from our sponsor. Now, back to an excerpt of the interview by Noor of Greg Palast about a memo from Geithner to Summers.
Palast: It's really significant today, because the memo is written to Larry Summers, who was at the time the deputy Treasury secretary, and he was about to become Treasury secretary under Robert Rubin. It came to him from Timmy Geithner. Timmy would become Obama's secretary of the Treasury.
This is really important right now because Larry Summers is President Obama's top choice to become head of a Federal Reserve Board. This would make him the most powerful economic decision-maker in America, more powerful than the president even, and it'll last for years. He would take Ben Bernanke's place. It's quite shocking to have Summers' name come up as head of the Fed, and especially--and therefore especially now that I have this memo in hand.
And what this memo is--they call it the "end game memo". Geithner calls it the "end game". And what's the game being played? The memo asks Summers to get back to the five biggest, most powerful bankers in the United States to act on and determine what our policy should be for world governance of the banking system. Basically, there were secret calls going between Larry Summers and the head of Bank of America, the head of Goldman Sachs, the head of Citibank and Merrill, the five big boys, to find out what should happen to the world financial policing order. And the answer was: smash it. Summers was holding secret meetings with the big bankers to come up with a scheme to eliminate financial regulation across the planet.
It's quite an extraordinary process. This is one memo within the whole framework of this strange and what seems to be illegal gatherings. I can tell you that it's not against the law for the secretary of the Treasury to meet with big bankers. What you can't do is do it in secret and run secret negotiating positions past those bankers, who have a direct financial interest in the outcome. Their financial interest was to eliminate all policing of their activities, which they did.
Lots more, if you think you can stand it.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/18555-revealed-potential-fed-chair-summers-at-heart-of-global-economic-crisis