Wall Street “secret government” outed …………

http://www.voltairenet.org/

by Les Leopold

American democracy is kidnapped by a secret government that many researchers have identified as being a powerful oligarchy that manipulates from behind the scenes the very essence of the state, controlling the financial wealth of the country beyond the reach of any State institution. Printing money indiscriminately and creating wealth out of thin air, this unscrupulous elite has ruined the economy and generated the biggest bubble in history, that of the dollar, which will ultimately knock it off its pedestal of world reserve currency.

Voltaire Network | 6 December 2011

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Timothy Geithner (left), US Secretary of the Treasury, and Ben Bernanke (right), Chairman of the Federal Reserve (Fed), photographed in April 2010 are the public figureheads a secret government that wields billions of dollars at will.

We now have concrete evidence that Wall Street and Washington are running a secret government far removed from the democratic process. Through a freedom of information request by Bloomberg News, the public now has access to over 29,000 pages of Fed documents and 21,000 additional Fed transactions that were deliberately hidden, and for good reason. [1]

These documents show how top government officials willfully concealed from Congress and the public the true extent of the 2008-’09 bailouts that enriched the few and enhanced the interests of giant Wall Streets firms. Here’s what we now know:

 The secret Wall Street bailouts totaled $7.77 trillion, 10 times more than the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in 2008.
 Knowledge of the secret bailout funds was not shared with Congress even while it was drafting and debating legislation to break up the big banks.
 The secret funding, provided at below-market rates, gave Wall Street banks an additional $13 billion in profits. (That’s enough money to hire more than 325,000 entry level teachers.)
 The secret loans financed bank mergers so that the largest banks could grow even larger. The money also allowed banks to step up their lobbying efforts.
 While Henry Paulson (Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury) was informing Congress and the public that only minor reforms were needed to protect Fannie and Freddie from collapse, he met secretly with leading Wall Street hedge fund managers — among them his former colleagues at Goldman Sachs — to alert them that he was about to nationalize the giant mortgage companies – a move that would eradicate nearly all the stock value of the companies. This information was enormously valuable because it allowed these hedge funds to short Fannie and Freddie and thereby make a fortune.
 While Timothy Geithner was head of the NY Federal Reserve, he argued against legislative efforts by Senator Ted Kaufman, D-Delaware, to limit the size of banks because the issue was “too complex for Congress and that people who know the markets should handle these decisions,” Kaufman recalls. Meanwhile, Geithner was fully aware of the enormous secret loans while Senator Kaufman was kept in the dark. Barney Frank, who was authoring key bank reform legislation was also not informed of the secret loans. No one in Congress was told.

So what does this all mean?

1. The big banks and hedge funds were in much more trouble than we were led to believe.

As many of us suspected, all the big banks were on their knees begging for help – secretly – while telling their investors, the public and Congress that all was well. They had gambled and lost. Under the rules of ideal capitalism, they should have suffered some “creative destruction,” and seen their shareholder value eliminated through bankruptcy, and their managers replaced. The entire banking system should have been reorganized from top to bottom as well. Instead, these colossal failures were secretly rewarded.

2. Wall Street’s secret government made sure the largest banks would grow even larger, aided by the secret funding.

While Congress was debating legislation to break up the large banks and reinstitute Glass Steagall (to separate risky investment banking from insured commercial banking,) the secret government was using public funds to grow even larger through mergers and acquisitions. Because Congress and the public were unaware of the secret funding and ill-health of all the banks, the legislation was easily defeated. As the chart below makes painfully clear, too-big-to-fail banks grew even bigger.

3. The bigger Wall Street becomes, the more government it can buy.

This part isn’t secret. As the top six banks grew larger, they spent more funds lobbying to make sure that they wouldn’t suffer any unprofitable impacts from banking reform legislation. So after the biggest banks received hundreds of billions in secret loans, they upped their lobbying funds to maintain their size and power. Read ‘em and weep:

4. Wall Street’s secret government protects its own.

At first, it’s not easy to understand how Treasury Secretary Paulson, the former head of Goldman Sachs, could risk attending a secret meeting with giant hedge fund managers, many of whom used to work at Goldman Sachs. How could the nation’s highest ranking financial official dare to tip off these hedge fund elites about the imminent government takeover of Fannie and Freddie before Congress and the public were informed? Well, one answer is that Paulson felt obliged to warn his old comrades of the impeding nationalization. Maybe, he wanted to get them out of harm’s way just in case they were heavily involved in those markets. Or maybe he also wanted to give them a very valuable tip to profit by. But the deeper explanation, I believe, is that Wall Street’s key government officials – Paulson, Summers, Geithner, Orszag (the former Obama OMB chief who now makes millions working for CitiGroup), etc. truly believe the following:

 Wall Street banks are the best in the world and are the cutting-edge of the American economy. They are our future.
 Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers are enormously smarter and sharper than the rest of us. They deserve our admiration.
 Helping Wall Street to grow and prosper is precisely the same thing as helping all Americans and the entire economy. They deserve our support.
 Secret meetings to provide insider information are normal on Wall Street. There’s nothing wrong with warning your friends about upcoming policy decisions that might impact their profits.
 There’s also absolutely nothing wrong with providing trillions of dollars of secret loans to the best and the brightest and not telling Congress about it.

It’s all a closed loop of self-justification and self-deception: Wall Street is brilliant. What Wall Street does is for the good of the country. Helping Wall Street profit is good for the country. Hiding the truth from democratically elected leaders is also for the good of the country because Wall Street is brilliant and knows better.

And all this is deeply believed by Wall Street and its secret government, even though Wall Street, and Wall Street alone, took down the economy and killed 8 million jobs in a matter of months. Simply brilliant!

5. Wall Street is a clear and present danger to democracy.

Usually, I am not an alarmist. In fact, I often argue against facile conspiracy theories. I want to believe that our democracy still has promise. But, the Wall Street-induced crash and the government’s response to it has me very worried. The Bloomberg News revelations suggest that Wall Street’s secret government has enormous disdain for what remains of our democracy. The financial elites obviously believe that Congress cannot be trusted to do the right thing even when it is bought and paid for by the very banks it supposedly regulates. As for the rest of us? We’re just a financially illiterate mass to be manipulated through the mass media. Our minds too can be bought and sold through careful marketing.

This financial arrogance and corruption is enormously corrosive to our democratic values. Already, many Americans, and for good reason, no longer trust their government. Already, many Americans, and for good reason, no longer vote. Already, many Americans, and for good reason, believe that democracy as we know it is a sham. Wall Street couldn’t have written a better script to maintain its domination.

6. Occupy Wall Street is fundamentally correct, but we need more.

The occupiers dramatically attacked Wall Street elites and captured the country’s imagination with their 1 percent, 99 percent framework. And the idea is sticking and spreading. But that’s only the start. To reclaim our country from Wall Street’s secret government we will need to develop an enormous movement among the 99 percent. Although we hope it just happens spontaneously through Twitter and Facebook, we all know it will require hardcore organizing involving millions of us.

At the moment, no one knows what form it will take. But we do know this: great concentrations of power and wealth do not give up their power and wealth without an enormous fight. Wall Street’s secret government is more than ready to protect itself, even if it means subverting democracy. Our occupiers have shown great courage in helping us reclaim our democratic rights. Let’s hope it spreads…and soon.

Les Leopold

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M.u.y.o.M. Special Flashback 2007 :Florida student asked Sen. J. Kerry about Skull and Bones and got tasered !

filed under :

Free speech & the american way

enjoy …………….

CIA Analyst Reveals Zionists’ Role in Planning U.S. Invasion of Iraq

http://www.americanfreepress.net

By Dave Gahary

According to a retired CIA analyst, new evidence has emerged revealing the full extent to which Israel was involved in the direct planning of America’s aggressive war on Iraq that was initiated by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

During a March 10 interview, former 27-year CIA intelligence analyst Ray McGovern broke some news with AFP concerning former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. This information on the extent of Wolfowitz’s war making agenda was derived, McGovern said, from “an unimpeachable source.”

McGovern began, “Enough distance has been created between Wolfowitz and our government that I feel free to tell this story. Since Wolfowitz was largely responsible for the Iraqi invasion, his father wrote him a note that said: ‘Paul, I’m an ardent Zionist, but first and foremost, I’m an American. What you have done for the Zionist cause is beyond the pale, and you should be ashamed of yourself.’ ”

The war happened, explained McGovern, because “son Paul put Israel before the interests of the United States.”

McGovern continued, “That’s why I say, particularly in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq, the socalled neo-conservatives—Richard Perle, Wolfowitz, [Douglas] Feith, the whole coterie of folks who were running our policy at that time—they had great difficulty distinguishing between what they considered to be the strategic interests of Israel on the one hand, and the strategic interests of the United States on the other. They tend to see them as identical, and they’re not.”

He next addressed the ramifications of these decisions. “When you look at the hatred that our policies in the Middle East have caused among 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, and when you see that a lot of their behavior is conditioned by our being joined at the hip with Israeli policy, however violent, then you can see what damage this is doing to the interests of the United States.”

In separate interviews with The Washington Post and MSNBC, along with testimony to a congressional committee, McGovern used the term “O.I.L.” to explain why the U.S went to war with Iraq: oil, Israel and logistics. War was waged, he believes, so the U.S. and Israel could dominate that part of the world. Moreover, Israel was intimately involved with war planning.

“Was Israel part of the calculation? We have empirical evidence now. Before it was largely analysis,” McGovern explained.

The evidence he’s referring to is from former Prime Minister Tony Blair testifying before the Chilcot Inquiry earlier this year. Blair admitted that while he and Bush were scheming about Iraq in April 2002 at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas near Waco, they were in constant communication with the Israelis.

As expected, McGovern’s appearance before Congress created controversy. “Within three hours of my testimony, prominent congresspersons from New York issued a collective statement calling me anti-Semitic because I said Israel and the United States wanted to dominate that part of the world.”

Unshaken by these attacks, McGovern struck a defiant tone. “If I say Israel is a major factor in our country’s decision to initiate a war of aggression, that is fact supported by evidence. People should not shy away from that.”

AFP next asked if he thought the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has too much influence on Congress.

McGovern was no-nonsense in his reply: “They should be registered as an agent of a foreign power; it’s pure and simple. I don’t know how they escaped that, but those are the rules.”

He continued, “Even when their minions are caught spying on us, purloining classified information and giving it to the Israeli Embassy, they get off, and they’re not brought to trial, whereas Bradley Manning, the presumed WikiLeaks leaker, is in solitary confinement for 10 months now at the Marine brig in Quantico, Va.”

McGovern summed up Israel’s malignant influence with some tongue-in-cheek humor: “There’s a vicious joke that goes like this: Somebody wanted Israel to consider becoming America’s 51st state. The answer came back: No, the Israelis are not interested, because then they would only have two senators.”

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US : AIPAC’s newest strategy

http://www.uruknet.info

MJ Rosenberg

AIPAC is a useful tool when you want to predict the future of any peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.  March 15, 2011     Prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu is being heavily criticised in Israel for his blatant exploitation of the murder of five members of one family (including three children) at the Itamar settlement near Nablus. Particularly egregious has been Netanyahu’s demand that president Mahmoud Abbas personally appear on Palestinian radio and television to condemn the killings, although Abbas had issued an unusually strong statement as soon as he heard of the tragedy. Forget for a minute that no one knows who committed the crime and that certainly no one believes that the killer was associated with Abbas. Also, lay aside the fact that Netanyahu has never condemned or even expressed remorse over the killing of 300 plus Palestinian children by the IDF during the Gaza war. (In fact, one would be hard pressed to find any Israeli government that ever even criticised the killing of Palestinian children by the IDF, although many hundreds have been killed over the last decade). None of that is anything new. What is new is Israel’s decision to libel the Palestinian Authority (and not just Hamas) which until very recently has been praised by Israel as its partner. That change became evident during the last month when AIPAC (Israel’s lobby in America) started attacking Abbas and the PA, returning to the style of the bad old days when the lobby viewed all Palestinians as one and the same: as enemies of Israel. There are three reasons why monitoring AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is a valuable use of time for anyone following events in the Middle East. The first is that AIPAC faithfully reflects the positions of the Netanyahu government (actually it often telegraphs them before Netanyahu does). The second is that AIPAC’s policies provide advance notice of the positions that will, not by coincidence, be taken by the United States Congress. And third, AIPAC provides a reliable indicator of future policies of the Obama administration, which gets its “guidance” both from AIPAC itself and from Dennis Ross, former head of AIPAC’s think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and now the president’s top adviser on Middle East issues. The next few months, as AIPAC prepares for its annual conference (May 22-24), will be especially fruitful for AIPAC watchers. The conference is a huge event, attended by most members of the House and Senate, the prime minister of Israel, and either by the president or vice president of the United States. It is also attended by thousands of delegates from around the country and by candidates for Congress who raise money for their campaigns at the event. This year, the leading Republican candidates for president will also be in attendance, all vying for support by promising undying loyalty to the AIPAC agenda. The conference or the egg? The conference actually begins long before it convenes at the massive Washington Convention Centre. Right now, AIPAC’s top officials are deciding which policies are the most important to be conveyed to the hundreds of officials who will be in attendance. Those policies will constitute AIPAC’s agenda not just for the conference but for the next 12 months (see last year’s AIPAC policy book here[PDF]). In recent years, AIPAC’s main message has been about Iran and its view of the dangers posed by the Iranian nuclear programme. Speaker after speaker at various AIPAC conferences over the past decade (including, most histrionically, prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu) has invoked the Holocaust when discussing the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon. These speakers laid the groundwork for AIPAC’s presentation of legislation imposing “crippling sanctions” on Iran - along with the declaration that the military option remained “on the table” if sanctions failed to end Iran’s nuclear program. Most of the sanctions legislation enacted by Congress and signed into law by the president originated at AIPAC. But this year Iran will have to compete for attention with AIPAC’s worries about the democratic revolutions that are sweeping the Arab world. For AIPAC, as for Netanyahu, those revolutions have already turned 2011 into an annus horribilis and the year is not even half over. Themes Early indications are that the main theme that will dominate the conference will be that Israel, once again, has “no partner” to negotiate with. This is an old theme, but one that receded as the Israeli right came to view the Palestinian Authority (led by Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad) as not only partners but as collaborators in maintaining the status quo. As Al Jazeera’s “Palestine Papers” demonstrated, Abbas and Fayyad rarely said “no” to the Netanyahu government - which made them the only kind of partners acceptable to the Netanyahu-Lieberman-Barak troika. But, fearing that it might be next to fall to democracy, the PA started showing some spine recently. It refused to yield to US and Israeli demands that it shelve the United Nations Security Council resolution condemning settlements. It absolutely refuses to negotiate with Israelis until Israel stops gobbling up the land they would be negotiating over. And, most disturbing of all to Netanyahu and company, it says that it intends to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state this summer. Netanyahu, who needs the illusion of movement to ensure that there isn’t any, is suddenly feeling the heat. Even Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor and a staunch Israel backer, both supported the UN resolution condemning settlements and told Netanyahu, in a well-publicised February 24 phone call, that the Europeans are sick and tired of him. Haaretz reported: Netanyahu told Merkel he was disappointed by Germany’s vote….  Merkel was furious. “How dare you,” she said….”You are the one who disappointed us. You haven’t made a single step to advance peace.” A shaken Netanyahu immediately put out the word that he is getting ready to announce his own plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He told political allies that he has to act fast to deter pressure from the so-called Quartet (composed of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia). It is due to meet later this month to set out the parameters for a final agreement. In advance of that meeting, British Foreign Minister William Hague said that the territorial basis for any agreement must be the pre-’67 borders, the last thing Netanyahu wants to hear. Reports from Israel indicate that Netanyahu’s plan rules out any withdrawal to the ’67 lines, offering instead a Palestinian state within temporary borders and only a very partial settlement freeze (no freeze in East Jerusalem at all). Knowing that the PA can no longer afford to even consider such an offer, Netanyahu has decided to preemptively label Israel’s old friends in the Palestinian Authority as extremists, with the goal of ensuring that both Congress and the Obama administration back his plan. His hope is that with the United States safely in his corner, any Quartet initiative will be blocked. As always, his goal is to maintain the status quo, which requires US acquiescence in his schemes. Thus far, the tactic has worked. Smear tactics Hence, the new AIPAC approach: smear the PA. By the time the AIPAC conference ends, the “there is no partner” mantra will have returned to its position as one of Israel’s greatest hits - a true golden oldie. Check out a few of the messages AIPAC has sent out over Twitter these past few days (the message is old but the technology is new): AIPAC: PA doesn’t want a terrorist organisation to be called a terrorist organisation, instead wants unity gov with it  AIPAC: PA seeks to isolate Israel to gain statehood; Obama admin plans to block the effort, calling it a “strategic mistake” AIPAC: Palestinian Authority to Israel: NO. By contrast, this is a typical AIPAC tweet before the Palestinian Authority started pushing back. AIPAC: Can direct talks with PA President Abbas lead to a peace agreement in a year? “Yes, I think so,” says Israeli PM Netanyahu The bottom line is this. The Europeans, the United Nations, and, it is safe to say, the entire world (except the United States) fear that the Palestinian Authority is on the verge of collapsing and, along with it, the whole notion of a peace process. These same forces are determined to re-start negotiations, which will require seeing Israel actual freeze settlements, at the very least. It seems to understand that a PA that is perceived as Israel’s lackey (which is precisely how it is perceived) will not survive. It has no faith whatsoever in the good intentions of the Netanyahu government. Deflecting the issue The Israeli government, understanding all this, is determined to put the onus back on the Palestinians to forestall any pressure. Most important of all, it is terrified that the Palestinian Authority will go ahead with its plan to unilaterally declare a state this summer, the only PA plan in years that actually has real momentum. It needs the United States to block that plan by any means necessary, including a full cut-off of US (and even international) aid to the Palestinians (this at a time when defence minister Barak is requesting another $20 billion in aid to Israel from the United States). Stopping a Palestinian unilateral declaration of independence dead in its tracks is now Netanyahu’s number one goal. And getting Obama to go along with him (which shouldn’t be too difficult with the 2012 election looming) is the way he intends to do it. That is why we are about to see a new Netanyahu plan. It is why AIPAC is busy denigrating the PA. And it is why AIPAC will soon have the United States Congress saying, practically in unison, that “there is no Palestinian partner”. That will be followed by the demand that the Obama administration support the Netanyahu plan, which will be labelled the most generous offer in history. At this rate, the Israeli government and its lobby will soon be back to its old mantra (1948-1977) that “there is no such thing as the Palestinian people” at all. All this to preserve an ugly and deadly status quo. So far, this tactic has worked every time. Don’t bet against it winning again. As so often, a winning strategy for AIPAC and Netanyahu is a losing strategy for Israel and the United States. The Palestinians, on the other hand, would do well to work on achieving some kind of unified strategy and to stick with the idea of a unilateral declaration. As David Ben-Gurion would tell them, self-determination often requires going it alone. MJ Rosenberg is a Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Media Matters Action Network. The above article first appeared in Foreign Policy Matters, a part of the Media Matters Action Network. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

:: Article nr. 75896 sent on 16-mar-2011 06:20 ECT
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Link: english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/2011314135126922189.html

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Alex Jones: The Real Pyramid of Power

http://www.infowars.com

Comment :

The”Sith Lords” exposed by Alex Jones !

 

related Post found on http://dprogram.net :

‘Wall Street behind US wars’ – Stephen Lendman

Posted by sakerfa on November 12th, 2010

(PressTV) – The Wall Street banks are behind the US government’s policies, including decisions to go on war, a senior American journalist has told Press TV.

“The Wall Street banks have a controlling interest. They decide the way the country will be run, including waging wars,” Stephen Lendman, writer and radio host from Chicago told Press TV in a Wednesday interview.

“One reason for waging wars is they are so profitable. Not just to the defense contractors, [but also] to the big banks, to technology companies, all companies that supply goods and services including private contractors that have every incentive to want America to be in war,” he added.

During his two terms in office, former US president George W. Bush ordered invasions on Afghanistan and Iraq. The two wars resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Bush and former British prime minister Tony Blair justified the Iraq war by claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which were never found.

In his recently released memoir Decision Points, Bush says he was shocked when WMDs were not found in Iraq.

“The plan to go to war with Iraq was already conceived. The blueprint was written. It was on the shelf ready to take out,” Lendman said.

Source: PressTV

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The Elite had allready planned 3 World Wars in 1871

(English with German subtitles)