Lawrence Summers
Does Barack Obama Offer Hope for New Mideast Dynamic?
November 29, 2008 by Jeff Gates · Leave a Comment
Does Barack Obama Offer Hope for New Mideast Dynamic?
By Jeff Gates
Those familiar with the pro-Zionist politics of John McCain breathed a sigh of relief at his defeat. With Barack Obama there’s a possibility of change where change is most needed: in U.S.-Israeli relations. The prospects, however, are not bright for several reasons.
First, he faces major hurdles in Congress where pro-Israelis chair key committees and subcommittees. Obama hails from Chicago, a major node in the node-and network system of organized crime. His senior in the Illinois delegation is Richard Durbin, a lawyer recruited by the Israeli lobby in 1982 to oppose 11-term Rep. Paul Findley who challenged the Israelification of U.S. foreign policy. First elected to the Senate in 1996, Durbin serves as assistant majority leader.
Durbin shares a house in Washington with Charles Schumer, a pro-Israeli senator from New York and third ranking in the Senate leadership. Both men are junior to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of mobbed-up Nevada.
Reid is a Zionist-inclined Mormon (aka the Lost Tribe of Israel). His assessment of the Israel lobby: “I can’t think of a policy organization in the country as well organized and respected.”
Obama proved on the campaign trail how readily he could yield to pressure from pro-Israelis. Malcolm Hoenlein, head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, cited Obama’s promise of change as “an opening for all kind of mischief.”
To please and appease, Obama delivered a series of pro-Israel speeches. Though it was U.S. national security that was put at risk in pursuit of Israel’s agenda in the Middle East, Obama spent much of his spring campaign pledging his allegiance to Israel and portraying its security as “sacrosanct.”
Obama takes office in the midst of a perfect storm raging in a nation targeted by those skilled at waging war “by way of deception,” the Israeli Mossad’s operating motto. Those complicit are skilled at displacing facts with what people can be deceived to believe—whether a false belief in Iraqi WMD and mobile biological weapons laboratories, or a misplaced faith in the infallible wisdom of unfettered financial markets.
Though Americans know they were deceived, they do not yet know how, by whom or to what purpose. Those anticipating change need only watch who staffs an Obama administration.
When he convened his foreign advisory team, he placed pro-Israeli Madeleine Albright at the head of the table. She was secretary of state for President Bill Clinton.
When he convened his economic policy team, Lawrence Summers took
the lead. Recently forced out as president of Harvard University, former Treasury Secretary Summers handpicked the pro-Israeli advisory team that oversaw the oligarchization of Russia. The largest fraud in history, Mikhail Gorbachev estimated that the financial pillage exceeded $1 trillion. Eight of the top nine oligarchs qualify for Israeli citizenship.
Obama will be sworn in on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP was established six months after the Springfield race riot of 1908 that resulted in seven deaths in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown. From its outset, the NAACP leadership was dominated not by African-Americans but by Jewish-Americans. Not until 1975 did it have a black president.
By allying with those genuinely oppressed, the Jewish-American community enjoyed extraordinary economic and social progress, particularly when compared to blacks. Advancement in the financial arena was especially pronounced where 25 percent of the Forbes 400 richest Americans are now Jewish, compared to 1.7% of the U.S. population. Blacks, on the other hand, continue their disproportionate representation in the lower tiers of both wealth and income.
The subprime mortgage meltdown is the third financial “pump and dump” over just the past two decades. The savings and loan fraud of the late 1980s cost taxpayers $124 billion. The far more expensive “dotcom” bust of 2000 will be dwarfed by this latest financial fraud. Those who skimmed the financial cream as markets rose have routinely been well placed to buy assets at reduced prices as markets fell.
With foreign policy and economic policy the key challenges, watch who Obama picks for those areas. In this handoff from one party to another, the same pro-Israeli bias appears likely to remain intact. Unable to manipulate him with sex (as with Clinton) or beliefs (as with Bush), race may well come into play.
As the U.S. enters the most challenging period in its 232-year history, this president could determine whether freedom survives or oppression triumphs. If President Obama grasps the all-pervasive influence of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, he could become a transformational leader—by transforming that relationship. Should he continue on the course set by previous leaders of both parties, it would be wrong to charge “the fix is in” when the facts confirm that the fix never left.
Lawrence Summers
All Too Familiar
November 29, 2008 by Jeff Gates · 1 Comment
Is a multi-trillion dollar fraud being perpetrated on America by Lawrence Summers and the same transnational network that defrauded Russia of $1 trillion?
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The appointment of Lawrence Summers as Barack Obama’s top economic adviser may herald a U.S. version of the loans-for-shares fraud that financially pillaged Russia, leaving in its wake a politically powerful oligarchy.
Shielded by the credibility of a Harvard advisory team handpicked by Summers, Moscow saw a mid-1990s credit crisis used to shift the ownership of state-owned assets to a handful of Russians. At the time, Summers was serving as Under Secretary for International Affairs, the U.S. Treasury’s senior financial diplomat.
When the government of Boris Yeltsin ran low on cash, advisers urged that funds be borrowed from oligarch-controlled banks. As collateral, Moscow pledged shares in state-owned oil companies, the crown jewels of the Russian economy.
When the loans defaulted, the shares were sold to those same oligarchs in rigged auctions. Portrayed as “privatization” by Summers and Harvard’s accommodating advisers, Russians called it simply “mafia-ization.” Mikhail Gorbachev estimates that the oligarchs stripped $1 trillion from Russia’s struggling economy. With an Ashkenazi population of less than two percent, six of Russia’s seven richest oligarchs qualified for Israeli citizenship.
Summers succeeded Robert Rubin as Treasury Secretary in 1999, marking their success in repealing Depression-era laws that banned the merger of banks, brokers, insurance firms and investment banks. A former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, Rubin joined CEO Sanford Weill at Citigroup, the first financial institution to fully embrace the Rubin-led repeal.
At Rubin’s urging, Citi thrived by bundling loans as securities (mortgages, credit card loans, auto loans, student loans, etc.) and selling them as collateralized debt obligations (“CDOs”). Meanwhile Summers championed the deregulation of financial derivatives, ensuring the globalization of losses from those securities. With “assets” of $2 trillion (largely troubled loans) and operations in 100 countries, Citi is now “too big to fail.”
Rubin protégés advised Obama that taxpayers should assume responsibility for $306 billion of Citi’s junk loans–$1,000 per American. Treasury’s bailout funds will cover $5 billion and $10 billion will be paid by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (funded by banks). Additional losses will be paid by the Federal Reserve printing money as needed–with all that implies for inflation and stagnation. Summers is the leading candidate to succeed Fed chairman Ben Bernanke in 2010.
Obama picked Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary. A protégé of Henry Kissinger and then of Rubin and Summers, Geithner and Summers often vacation together. Known to wilt in the presence of Summers’ notorious arrogance, Geithner will oversee bank shares given the government in return for the bailout.
In this funds-for-shares program, what happens if, as in Russia, the funds prove insufficient? If America’s debt-laden economy continues its decline, does government become the owner? If not, to whom will those shares be sold?
Look to private equity firms adept at acquiring companies with little cash and lots of debt. Is that the political role being played by former Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman? Mehlman serves as chairman of public affairs for Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts, the nation’s leading leveraged buyout firm.
Americans have long shared a healthy aversion to concentrations of financial power. Was Mehlman hired to facilitate the bank consolidation we now see emerging? The Comptroller of the Currency announced in August that private equity firms could become banks–and acquire other banks. The bank bailout covers leveraged corporate loans, clearing their books to fund more leveraged buyouts.
If, as appears likely, today’s vast pyramids of debt continue to collapse, into whose hands will control of the financial sector shift? With banking already consolidated in four major institutions–each too big to fail–the American counterpart to the Russian oligarchs could be the senior partners in private equity firms: Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts plus Stephen Schwarzman at Blackstone Group, David Bonderman at Texas Pacific Group, David Rubenstein at Carlyle Group and Leon Black at Apollo Group.
In Russia, state-owned assets shifted into a few private hands–in response to a credit crisis–when advisers urged that Moscow assume debts it could not repay. Those assets were then sold for cents on the dollar. In America, banks may well migrate into the hands of a few private equity firms, leaving in their wake a trail of socialized debts as junk loans are upgraded to gilt-edged bonds backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S.–undermining the nation’s credit standing worldwide.
As in Russia, both the advisers and the new owners qualify for Israeli citizenship. Summers had a hand in both bailouts. As President-elect Obama scrambles to stabilize the financial system, will his pledge of clarity and transparency include an account of how–and by whom–he was advised to capitalize a transnational Ashkenazi oligarchy?
