Coordinated Attacks on Anti-War Journalists: De-Platforming, Financial Accounts Frozen

“Weaponization of western financial services…”

Film Biz Plan

Minimalist Guide To Writing A Film Business Plan

How not to get screwed by Hollywood

 

HOW TO LEGALLY AVOID AN EVIL NET PROFITS DEFINITION IN A MOTION PICTURE CONTRACT

Skip Hamilton / Read Burr

Skip “Hamilton” and Read Gore Vidal’s “Burr”

On Amazon.

Greg Palast: Fed Reserve Corruption

 

BANKSTER PARADISE

More:
Larry Summers 
and the Secret “End-Game” Memo

Bankster Role in War

Making the World Safe for Banksters:

Syria in the Cross-hairs

 

Ellen Brown

http://WebofDebt.wordpress.com

September 3, 2013

 

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. 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 22^nd 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.

Jekyll Island (2013)

“It is the cause of most of the world’s hunger, poverty, misery and disease.”

-Bill Still (Official Website)

by Scott Baker

Last night I watched Bill Still’s newest film “Jekyll Island.” For those who’ve seen “The Money Masters,” and especially the more recent “The Secret of OZ” (2009), they won’t find too much new here, although a lot has happened in the last 4 years, and Still takes us all  the way into early 2013.  The overall point though is that the Money Masters have been controlling the money supply, creating booms and busts deliberately, for hundreds of years.  This goes beyond Georgist theory which says the Land Cycle is ultimately the cause of booms and busts – unfortunately I’ve been unable to persuade Still in my few discussions with him that there is a Land Cycle underlying the “Business Cycle” though both of us recognize the latter is a false explanation.  But in this movie, Still has presented good evidence that at least some busts like the 1871 and 1891 depressions, were deliberately induced as a way for the banking elites to gain both control of the money supply, and to possess hard assets like housing, and that this kind of action goes back to the Rothschilds, who bet correctly against France during the Napoleonic wars (also successfully countering Napoleon’s attempt to essentially create a Public Central Bank, independent of the Rothschilds).  This changes the conclusion from the inevitable Land Cycle (Henry George, Mason Gaffney, Homer Hoyt,  etc.), to the inevitable Conspiracy Cycle of the banking elites, but I am still  unconvinced at least some, or even most, of the booms and busts were not caused by money power ignorance of the Land Cycle and greed over-riding common sense.  As many of the experts in the movie attest, the average economist, with his obfuscating charts and theories, often knows less about what actually goes on than the man on the street.  Furthermore, why push your firm to the edge of bankruptcy, and sometimes over it (Lehman Brothers, AIG, Countrywide Financial), when you are so smart you can avoid it?   So then, who are the experts who saw it coming, again and again?  The Rothschilds and Rockefellers, perhaps, but this narrow band of profiteering rascals is not quite enough evidence to construct a theory of a continuous worldwide historical conspiracy.

Still shows that dreams of international monetary systems, including the failing Euro – which Monetary Reformer Stephen Zarlenga backed and which he has yet to apologize for, or explain the current failure of – would lead to further nightmares, making it even harder to achieve monetary sovereignty and escape the clutches of the trans-national banking elites.   This is the clear lesson from the Euro experiment, now unraveling.

I do wish Still had delved into Lincoln’s assassination more,  finding the connection to bankers backing John Wilkes Booth and his dozen or so co-conspirators, documented in Gerry McGeer’s book, “ The Conquest of Poverty ” but he DID tie the attempt on president Andrew Jackson’s life, after he closed the Second National Bank of the U.S., to the banking elites.   Still also documents their support of bank-friendly  William McKinley  against populist William Jennings Bryan who wanted to end the dearth of money by bringing back the bank-squashed silver certificate (Kennedy would fare even worse in the effort to re-institute  Silver Certificates , with many people believing  this effort was behind his assassination  in 1963, possibly including his then-hysterical V.P. Lyndon Johnson).

I do take issue with Still’s poorly defined explanation of fractional reserve banking.  Although he traces the history of it well – beginning from the goldsmith’s issuance of 10X the value of their gold holdings because they realized that only 1/10th of the people holding gold in their vaults ever came to collect their gold at any one time (this led to the more modern 10% fractional reserve requirement, nevertheless now obsolete) and ending with the 2008 crisis where leverage of 50X or even 300X occurred  – he fails to deal with the large number of banks, including the State Bank of North Dakota (BND), who never loan out even as much as they have on deposit (though the actual funds are not from the same source here either).  If all banks loaned just the same amount they had on deposit, or actually less in the case of regular banks like the BND and its partner small banks, which typically have loan to asset ratios of 75%, or less, we would have had a manageable crisis.  It was the massive leveragers like Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers (40:1) and AIG (with counterparty Goldman betting at up to 300:1 leverage), which caused the panic and near collapse.  Still could have made this important distinction, but didn’t, thereby letting all banks be tarred with the same brush and losing an opportunity to link forces with the growing public banking movement (in the 2012 election, Bill Still ran for president on the Libertarian ticket and asked Public Banking Institute founder Ellen Brown to be his V.P. running mate).

I bring this up to show – unsurprisingly to many readers here, I’m sure – how long and how completely the financial elites have been screwing the ordinary citizens, and even government, which as many know – including countless experts like the Positive Money people in this new film, but, tellingly, NOT Stephen Zarlenga, who once dismissed Still as a “salesman” in conversations with me (this is the reason, perhaps, that Zarlenga is not quoted or interviewed as an expert in this film, despite his big yellow tome “ The Lost Science of Money ” appearing on so many academics’ bookshelves) could simply retake the sovereign right to “coin Money” anytime it wanted to if it wasn’t for the  massive disinformation campaign since the 1970s.   In part this is caused by the thousands of Federal Reserve Bank-aid agents, documented in the film, working in the economic realm of academia, the media, and politics.  That they sell interest rate Put Options to confused buyers when they CANNOT default on money they create autonomously, as shown in FRAUD: Federal Reserve Is Selling Put Options On Treasury Bonds To Drive Down Yields , should not surprise us either.  This  video claims this is fraud, but if so, it is Baby Fraud.  The Parent Fraud is that we are told we need to borrow what we could simply create , under Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution and as affirmed by SCOTUS in the 1884 8-1 decision in Julliard v. Greenman — also insufficiently covered in Jekyll Island .

However, as Still’s experts point out, it is to the elites’ advantage to make us think the system is so horrendously complex that mere mortals cannot hope to understand it, and must, therefore, trust the experts.  More modern layers like Put Options and other forms of morally hazardous insurance may indeed be too complicated to understand, by anyone, but the concept of charging unsustainable interest on money issued by wealthy monopoly elites is not.   Government borrowing, as Still shows, is  both unnecessary and injurious to the Republic.  Government is not over-printing money, it is over-borrowing it.  This is the first time, I believe, that Still has identified in his movies that taxes are unnecessary, as Greenbacking – the act of government producing debt-free money – could simply fund all its needs, with inflationary over-production being handled by taxes – the Modern Monetary Theory position as well as Positive Money’s.

So, what both videos show is that the banking elites at the FRB are getting desperate, relying more and more on obscure leveraging tools to hide the fact that there is little backing the full faith and credit of the U.S. now that our productive capacity has been off-shored, or at least become far to little to support the inflated financial edifice of the derivatives mother-of-all-bubbles.  Solution: more derivatives!  This madness can only end one of two ways – either with a spectacular crash unlike anything the world has ever seen, where virtually the entire banking establishment collapses and money disappears (this nearly happened in Jackson’s time as well as during the Greenback reduction era, post Lincoln), OR with the creation of alternative money systems, most especially sovereign money produced by government.

Unlike in the past, the traditional approach to simply invading other lands and stealing their resources – and having the loser’s debts absorbed, often along with the country, into the victor’s country – won’t work much longer. Now, everyone is in debt, unless they have a public central bank like China or India etc., and America is the leading debtor nation.   No amount of invasion of Libya/Iraq/Afghanistan and possibly upcoming Syria and Iran, etc. will change that, because they are not the source of the problem, though bankers DO love such militarism, going back to the Rothschilds.

Since government is institutionally captive to the banking elites, only a popular revolt against this system will bring about the needed change – IF people are not so disenfranchised and marginalized by the non-choices offered up by the elites that they cannot effectively demand change.  That is certainly the case today, but there are cracks, as these recent movies and videos show. Are they enough?  I don’t know.  Stay tuned.

Scott Baker is a Senior Editor and Writer at Opednews, and a blogger for Huffington Post.  Scott is also President of Common Ground-NYC (http://commongroundnyc.org/), a Geoist/Georgist group.

PS:

Interview with Bill Still

Broken Film Industry #film #filmmakers

 

Ted Hope’s 17 Things to Know about the Broken Film Industry

International territorial licensing of American independent feature films has dropped by approximately 60% over the last decade. Major territories no longer buy product. Most have given up on “American Indies.”

 

As have I. I’ll only watch the cream of the crop with festival approval stamped on them.  America is a vapid, bloated, ignorant culture and so are most of its artisitc efforts.  Foreign indies are a much safer bet for my precious time.

 

Tax the Rich (Short)

Ed Asner still kicking ass in an animated history of the modern financial world…

The House I Live In (2012)

The Drug War: the never-ending war on you.

 

Official website: www.thehouseilivein.org

The director: An Interview With Eugene Jarecki

LEAP: Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

 

Wikileaks Spoofs Mastercard

This is outsranding.