by Jim Marrs
“Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets—especially financial markets—that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.”
Conspiracy theorists have long been ridiculed for their claims that the Great Depression was manufactured by globalist bankers. Krugman added much weight to that argument with a narrative involving a statement by the current chairman of the Fed’s board of governors, Ben Bernanke: “At a 90th birthday celebration for Milton Friedman, Ben Bernanke declared of the Great Depression: ‘You’re right. We did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, it won’t happen again.’ The clear message was that all you need to avoid depressions is a smarter Fed.”
So we see that a plan is in play to debase the U.S. economy and impose a socialist system—whether Obama’s Marxist Socialism or Bush’s National Socialism apparently makes no difference to those wealthy or powerful enough to control the central bureaucracy of the state.
These globalists, who have manipulated world history for decades, if not centuries, are working a plan to turn the once-free and prosperous Republic of the United States into a socialist state populated by dumbed-down and destitute zombies by draining dry the nation’s money supply.
It is truly a trillion-dollar conspiracy.
PART II
HOW TO CREATE ZOMBIES
All Socialism involves slavery.
—HERBERT SPENCER, British Author, Economist, and Philosopher, 1884
FREE PEOPLE CAN TRAVEL anywhere at any time they like. They can start a business or a new profession, or even take a vacation for as long as they wish. One sure way to create a slave is to ensure a person is indebted. After all, anyone who cannot do any of the things a free person can do because he or she has a mortgage, bills of all sorts, and the need for a monthly paycheck should be considered a slave of sorts—a debt slave.
POLITICAL HACKING
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
—GEORGE WASHINGTON
We shall consider politics the representative head of a zombie nation. Politics is a necessary partner in any widespread and high-level conspiracy. There is an inseparable blend of political and financial control in modern America. This powerful combination can be found within the Federal Reserve System, in the corridors of Washington and Wall Street, and even in corporate news stories dealing with both politics and finance.
Americans do not need an economics degree to figure out that the nation is past bankruptcy. Using the most conservative estimates, there is more than $70 trillion of American debt compared with about $13 trillion in gross domestic production. This does not include the $300 trillion or more in toxic derivative debt.
FOREIGN TRADE AND BONDS
INTERNATIONAL TRADE DEFICITS HAVE been draining the nation’s reserves by $30 billion to $150 billion each year and have been for the past twenty years. Furthermore, our industrial, mining, and agricultural institutions have not only been weakened, but in many ways decimated by the movement toward globalization. No new steel foundries have been built in the United States since World War II.
The issue of debt is fundamental to understanding the machinations that formed the current economic crisis. By 2008, industry, banking, government, households, and individuals were smothered in debt. Eliminating debt will result in a society that looks far different from the one we have experienced in the past. The New York Times noted in a May 9, 2009, front-page report, “[T]he forces that enabled and even egged on consumers to save less and spend more—easy credit and skyrocketing asset values—could be permanently altered by the financial crisis that spun the economy into recession.”
The “forces” mentioned in the Times article means bloated salaries, one of the few remaining options to corporations for cutting expenses and balancing the budget.
What is seen then is the culmination of a restructuring process that has taken place for more than two decades. Whereas the living standard has increased in many former dictatorships such as Russia and China, it has decreased in the United States thanks to these “forces,” controlled by the New World Order plutocrats.
Given the consistent transfer of money between nations, is it possible that the economic meltdown was not accidental? Some people claim the so-called bailout is nothing but the largest transfer of wealth in Western history, a panicked effort to shore up the U.S. dollar. Additionally, not only was the U.S. dollar in danger, but its bonds were too. Dollar-based Grand Net bonds’ net inflow dropped from an early 2007 high of about $950 billion to a 2009 low of nearly $200 billion, indicating a lack of faith in U.S. money. “The foreign creditors are moving away from the United States, plain and simple,” wrote statistical analyst Jim Willie.
Willie went on to say, “The US dollar stewards are NOT [original emphasis] demonstrating control, discipline, or even anything remotely resembling honesty or integrity…. If not for the US Fed buying most of the US Treasury [bonds] issued, the long-term interest rates would be rising rapidly and with alarm [hyperinflation]…. They put the US dollar at grave risk. The Weimar territory lies directly ahead!…The Chinese financial market is actually leading the US market on directional turns. Sadly and tragically, the US dollar is stuck in mud, running out of time, awaiting a meat cleaver by foreign creditors.”
Both China, the world’s largest holder of foreign-currency reserves, and Russia wield that cleaver; and both have called for a new global currency to replace the dollar as the dominant place to store reserves.
One little-known and also one of the most unsettling aspects of the 2008 financial tsunami was the 2009 report that China’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) might support large enterprises in defaulting on the derivatives contracts that they purchased in 2008 from international banks. The Chinese business had purchased the contracts to protect themselves from rising commodity prices, and if they default on these contracts, it would deal a serious blow to investment banks hoping to sell more derivative hedges in China, which is the world’s fastest-expanding major economy and top commodities consumer.
Another side to the problem is simply that any money China spends on bonds and derivatives is money they cannot loan to us. “[I]f China really wanted to spur domestic consumption, the best way to do so would be to stop buying our debt. Even better, they could sell Treasuries they already own and distribute the proceeds to their citizens to spend,” wrote Peter Schiff, author and president of Euro Pacific Capital. “However, the Obama administration is heavily lobbying the Chinese to get them to step up to the plate and buy record amounts of new Treasury debt. Obama cannot have it both ways. He cannot claim he wants the Chinese to spend more, but then beg the Chinese government to take money away from Chinese consumers and loan it to the United States Treasury. In the end, Obama will get precisely what he publicly claims to desire but privately dreads. The Chinese government will come to its senses and stop buying Treasuries. This will cause the U.S. dollar to collapse, but it will also allow Chinese citizens to fully enjoy the fruits of their labor.”
Yet, as the Chinese people begin to buy more of their own products, it will mean fewer products available for export to America. And, as they spend more money on goods and services, there will be less money to loan to America. This could only lead to a deeper economic crisis.
The situation the United States finds itself in today is in many ways worse than that of the 1930s. More banks have failed than during the Great Depression, and unemployment is reaching levels of that time. But unlike the individuals of the 1930s—many of whom had come from an agricultural background and knew how to fend for themselves—the
people in modern America can only look to government for their basic necessities. Could this push to government-regulated socialism be the real agenda behind the contrived financial meltdown of recent years?
The difference between today and the Great Depression is primarily about the worth of money. The 1930s experienced a monetary depression. Money retained its value because it was simply hard to come by and prices were depressed to reflect its scarcity. Today, America is experiencing an inflationary depression. Prices continue to rise because of an inflated money supply. The more money that’s in circulation, the less it is worth.
LIARS’ LOANS
WILLIAM K. BLACK, a professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri School of Law in Kansas City, suggested that more than simple greed and incompetence brought about the economic crisis of 2008. In the 1980s, Black lead the prosecution against miscreants in the savings and loan scandal. According to Black, the mortgage debacle was centered on the creation of triple-A-rated bonds that did not use verified incomes, assets, or employment. These were known as “liars’ loans.” Black pointed out that the liars’ loans were deceitful and fraudulent, and the banks involved knew it.
“Fraud is deceit. And the essence of fraud is, ‘I create trust in you, and then I betray that trust, and get you to give me something of value.’ And as a result, there’s no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that’s what we have,” Black told PBS commentator Bill Moyers in April 2009. “The Bush Administration essentially got rid of regulation, so if nobody was looking, you were able to do this with impunity and that’s exactly what happened. Where would you look? You’d look at the specialty lenders. The lenders that did almost all of their work in the sub-prime and what’s called Alt-A [risky Alternative A-paper loans], liars’ loans…. They knew that they were frauds.”
Black said liars’ loans were accomplished by failing to check the information provided by those seeking the loan. He said that often loan applicants were even told they could get a better deal if they inflated their income, job history, and assets. “We know that they said that to borrowers,” said Black.
He pointed out that IndyMac, the Federal Savings Bank that failed on July 11, 2008, specialized in liars’ loans—in 2006 it sold $80 billion worth of them—thus producing more losses than the entire savings and loan debacle of the 1980s.
And it was all based on fraud. Black explained, “Liars’ loans…were known to be extraordinarily bad. And now it was getting triple-A ratings. Now a triple-A rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk. So you take something that not only has crushing risk…and you create this fiction that it has zero risk. That itself…is a fraudulent exercise. And again, there was nobody looking during the Bush years…. When they finally did look, after the markets had completely collapsed, they found…the appearance of fraud in nearly every file….”
Black and others have compared the bad loans to the Ponzi scheme charged against Wall Street investment consultant Bernie Madoff. “Everybody was buying a pig in the poke with a pretty pink ribbon, and the pink ribbon said, ‘Triple-A,’” said Black.
Although there is no specific law against liars’ loans, Black argued that the bankers involved knew they had been made under false representation and that they would never be repaid. The loans were based on deceit, which lies at the heart of the legal definition of criminal fraud. Why was no one prosecuted for these acts of fraud? According to Black, federal investigators did not begin to scrutinize the major lenders until the market had actually collapsed, despite early warnings.
“The FBI publicly warned, in September 2004, that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud, that if it was allowed to continue it would produce a crisis at least as large as the Savings and Loan debacle,” said Black.
But the investigation didn’t happen. Due to the war on terrorism, the Bush Justice Department transferred five hundred white-collar specialists in the FBI to national terrorism and refused to replace them. Today, Black noted, “There are one-fifth as many FBI agents [detailed to investigating mortgage fraud] as worked the Savings and Loan crisis.”
GRAMM AND DEREGULATION
ONE OF THE PROTECTIONS against “banksters” (a derogatory term combining “bankers” with “gangsters”) was the Glass-Steagall Act, which went into effect in 1934 following government hearings revealing how big banks of that day had looted customers for the benefit of a small group of insiders. The act separated normal banking activities (checking and savings accounts and commercial loans) from speculative investment banking (hedge funds, derivatives, and Wall Street investments) in the eyes of the law and allowed for regulation of the latter type of activity.
According to former U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chairperson Brooksley Born, beginning in the Clinton years, almost all such protective regulation was stripped away. In a 2003 interview with Washington Lawyer, she stated, “One major issue was the enormous growth of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. OTC derivatives had been legally permitted for the first time in 1993 by a regulatory exemption that Wendy [Lee] Gramm had adopted as virtually her last act as CFTC chair. This allowed the growth of a business that is now estimated at over a hundred trillion dollars annually in terms of the notional value of contracts worldwide. Alan Greenspan had said that the growth of this market was the most significant development in the financial markets of the 1990s. The market was virtually unregulated and many, many times as big as the trading on the futures exchanges. The commission had kept some nominal authority over this market, but there were no mechanisms for enforcing the rules. For example, anti-fraud rules were retained, but no reporting was required. The market was completely opaque. Neither the commission nor any other federal regulator knew what was going on in that market!”
While Mrs. Gramm was chairing the CFTC, from 1988 to 1993, that body exempted Enron from regulation in trading of energy derivatives. Gramm later resigned from the CFTC and took a seat on the Enron board of directors where she served on its Audit Committee. Enron, the giant energy corporation whose bankruptcy in late 2001 was the largest in U.S. history to that date, drained more than $10 billion from shareholders and resulted in new regulations and legislation to enhance the reliability of financial reporting for public companies. Due to the massive fraud involved, several Enron executives, including founder Kenneth Lay and President Jeffrey Skilling, were sentenced to prison terms. The accounting firm of Arthur Andersen was found guilty of shredding Enron documents and eventually dissolved, putting eighty-five thousand persons out of work.
It should be noted that Wendy Lee Gramm is the wife of former Texas Republican senator Phil Gramm, who was forced to resign as senior economic adviser in John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign after describing Americans protesting the economic losses due to malfeasance as “a nation of whiners.” As a senator, Gramm was the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs during the Clinton administration, and he led efforts to pass banking deregulation laws such as the landmark Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999. The act removed Depression-era laws that prevented banks from engaging in insurance and brokerage activities and was passed by an overwhelming majority of the House and by the Senate unanimously and was signed into law by President Clinton. Supporters of the bill used an old trick that was used to pass the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Like the Federal Reserve Act, the Gramm-Leach-Blilely Act was introduced on the last day before the Christmas holiday and was never debated by either congressional body. This bill, fully initiated by and supported by Republicans and passed with the support of Democrats during a Democratic administration, clearly demonstrates the collusion of the two political parties when it comes to corporate business.
Many economists claim the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act’s undermining of the Glass-Steagall Act was a significant cause of the 2007 sub-prime mortgage crisis and the 2008 global economic crisis. Economist Paul Krugman has described Phil Gramm as “the high priest of deregulation
” and named Gramm and Fed chairman Alan Greenspan as the top two culprits responsible for the economic crisis. Gramm’s culpability was echoed by CNN, Time, and Britain’s the Guardian.
Brooksley Born described how, during the Clinton years, her commission questioned the bailout of large OTC derivatives dealers because they held $1.25 trillion worth of contracts yet held a mere $4 billion in supporting capital, which meant the dealers had far overextended themselves, leaving the market vulnerable to the very meltdown that occurred in 2008–09: “I became enormously concerned about OTC derivatives and thought the market was a nightmare waiting to happen,” recalled Born. “I was particularly concerned that there was no transparency. No federal regulator knew what kind of position firms like Long-Term Capital Management and Enron had in the derivatives markets.” Warren Buffett later called OTC derivatives the financial weapons of mass destruction.
Born said the Fed and Congress rebuffed the CFTC’s efforts to reinstate some public protection over the financial field. “It wasn’t a regulatory effort. We were just asking questions! The concept release didn’t propose any rules. Alan Greenspan, Arthur Levitt, and Robert Rubin all said that these questions should not be asked and urged Congress to pass a bill that would forbid the commission from taking any regulatory steps on over-the-counter derivatives. There were no hearings on that bill, but during a congressional conference committee meeting on an appropriations bill, an amendment was added preventing the commission from taking any action on over-the-counter derivatives for six months. This occurred within a month after Long-Term Capital Management’s collapse!”