American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  Look who Obama named as his chief economic adviser: Lawrence Summers, the ex-Harvard president who made $5.2 million for a one-daya-week job with a hedge fund (D.E. Shaw) in 2008 and simultaneously earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from folks like Goldman and Citigroup.62 In a “past lifetime,” Summers joined with Rubin and Greenspan in the bankers’ crusade to stop the government from regulating the same financial derivatives market that ended up causing the economic meltdown.63

  Then there’s Obama’s treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner. He’s the fellow who, while president of the New York Fed, suggested to Paulson and other economic bigwigs in June 2008 that the president should be given “broad power to guarantee all debt in the banking system.” Considered politically unfeasible at the time, as it potentially put taxpayers on the hook for trillions, the government has since come to largely embrace “his blue-sky prescription.”64 During his five years at the New York Fed, Geithner presided over “an era of unbridled and ultimately disastrous risktaking by the financial industry,” while wining-and-dining with all the titans. So are we surprised that Geithner’s calendars show the top execs of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JP Morgan being the select group he’s always on the phone with? (At least 80 contacts during Geithner’s first seven months.)65

  At the treasury, Geithner’s chief of staff is Mark Patterson, who a year earlier was a Goldman Sachs lobbyist fighting against a bill Senator Obama introduced to try and rein in compensation for execs. Patterson is now the main man administering the bailout dough.66 William Dudley, new president of the New York Fed, is another Goldman alum. Is it coincidental that, by being allowed to become a bank holding company, Goldman’s main overseer is now the New York Fed? I doubt they’ll be terribly concerned about things like the $54.7 million Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankenfein took home in compensation in ’07.67

  As for the health care debate: Insurance industry lobbyists are opposing reform at a record pace, having spent an astounding $32 million on TV ads as of October.68 Have you ever heard of the MLR? That stands for “Medical Loss Ratio”:“the fancy term used by health insurance companies for their slice, their take-out, their pound of flesh, their gross—very gross—profit. The ‘MLR’ is the difference between what you pay an insurance company and what that insurer pays out to doctors, hospitals and pharmacists for your medical care.” The MLR is about to top a quarter trillion dollars a year. AIG has “kicked up their Loss Ratio by nearly 500 percent.”69

  Are we that selfish a nation where health care can be such a divisive issue? Where is mainstream America today? To me, the doctor issue is a human right. I don’t care if you’re an illegal alien or whatever, if you’re sick you should be able to have treatment. It amazes me that we’ve got people out there holding signs and making our president look like a Nazi, because he supports a change in the system. Here’s another point: If government-run health care is so bad, does that mean we’ve been screwing over our veterans for close to a hundred years? My father would go nowhere else but to the Veterans Administration hospital. The one here in Minneapolis is state-of-the-art, brand-new, and completely government-run, and I don’t see anyone protesting about that! If it’s good enough for the veterans, shouldn’t it be the same for all of us?

  As I write this, unemployment stands at ten percent of our work force, foreclosures are still happening at around 10,000 a day, people defaulting on their credit cards has hit a record, and across the country the states are having to slice crucial services to the bone. As governor, when we had a budget that went over what we’d allocated, I gave checks back to the people. That was a true stimulus package. When people at home have more money in their pockets, they tend to spend it. Cutting taxes also stimulates the economy, as much as Democrats hate the sound of it. In this case, the taxes coming out of our pockets are just making the rich get richer. “Nine of the financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008.”70 For the fiscal year that ended in October 2008, the IRS audited only about four out of every hundred Americans who showed income of $1 million and up. IRS data also showed that the income of the 400 wealthiest individuals in the country hit an average of $263 million in 2006. Within a decade, their share of our nation’s wealth almost doubled—to more than 22 percent.71

  Meantime, the offshore tax havens haven’t gone away. Citigroup, for example, has 91 subsidiaries in Luxembourg and another 90 in the Cayman Islands (out of 427 units in 23 countries altogether).72 The Caymans are part of Great Britain, and more than 12,000 “companies” operate out of a single building there. The Caymans lay claim to being the fifth largest center of bank deposits in the world; while it’s true that the shares, bonds, and cash are technically on the islands, they’re actually headquartered back in New York. The $1.9 trillion in bank deposits, although it’s invested in the U.S. and abroad, remains invisible to the IRS. If you ever wondered why Enron paid no taxes, that’s because they created hundreds of these paper companies. Oh, and Dick Cheney’s Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, pays at least 21,000 of its employees through subsidiaries in the Caymans.73

  That’s called globalization, I guess. Just like IBM sending its laid-off American workers overseas to countries like India “where your skills are in demand.”74 Fed Chairman Bernanke is also a board member of something called the Bank for International Settlements, based in Basel, Switzerland. The BIS encouraged all the speculative investment banking that led to our current debacle. Carroll Quigley, in Tragedy and Hope, wrote that the BIS was created as the apex of “a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.” The goal being control “in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.”

  Based inside the BIS is a new agency called the Financial Stability Board. It’s proposed to “strengthen” and “institutionalize” a mandate to “promote global financial stability.” Sounds good, but some see this as the “latest sinister development in a centuries-old consolidation of power by an international financial oligarchy.” Third World countries who can’t pay off their debts would be required to sell off their national assets to private investors. The board has oversight over all “systematically important” financial institutions, instruments, and markets. (Like gold, oil, and food maybe?) Yet there’s no treaty involved, merely a private committee looking out for national sovereignty. Seems like the fulfillment of what banker Mayer Rothschild said back in 1791: “Allow me to issue and control a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.”75

  Thomas Jefferson warned the country back in 1815: “The dominion which the banking institutions have obtained over the minds of our citizens ... must be broken, or it will break us.”76 Is it naïve to think about banking returning to the austere, staid practice of simply taking deposits and making conservative loans at low interest rates to qualified borrowers, under rigid regulations administered by moderately paid federal employees? Wouldn’t that greatly reduce systemic risk? Here’s what some smart economists think we need to do:

  Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act and wall off commercial banking from investment bank gambling, and require strict leverage limits.

  Insulate the federally insured depositors from reckless investment schemes with no social utility whatsoever like these “credit default swaps” that are entered into by entities that don’t own the underlying bonds.

  Withdraw the massive handouts and taxpayer-backed guarantees given to prop up specific banks and financial institutions, and use these funds to instead support the struggling homeowners and defaulting borrowers who form the root of this crisis. This will reduce the record rate of foreclosures and put a floor under asset prices at a sustainable level, which will in turn stabilize financial institutions that are still hemorrhaging from increasing foreclosures and loan defau
lts. In other words, bottoms-up, not topdown economic support.

  Let the already-insolvent banks go bankrupt and begin removing the bad debt from the system. We need a sound banking system, but there is no reason we need the specific banks we have now. There are plenty of regional and community banks in this country which avoided exposure to risky mortgage and credit derivatives, and which would gladly replace the market share held by the too-bloated-to-fail banks for loans issued to small businesses and consumers, if they were able to compete in a truly free market against these subsidized behemoths. In short, why doesn’t the public demand a financial system that serves the people rather than enslaves us to a treadmill of debt?

  The national debt is basically what the government owes from years of borrowing money to pay off the yearly deficits (the amount by which spending exceeds revenue from taxes and the like). Back in 1791, our national debt was $75 million; today it rises by that amount every hour or so.77 During the years of Bush-II, the national debt increased by over 65 percent to nearly $10 trillion! Now there’s talk among some of our creditors (like China, which as of November 2007 held $390 billion of our debt) about replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.78 But we keep right on spending money we don’t really have, to players who don’t deserve it. A Congressional Oversight Panel report early in 2009 said the Bush Administration had overpaid the banks by tens of billions for stocks and other assets in the bailout.79 Our economy has been captured by an alien power—not the Klingons, but the Kleptos. We can’t go on like this. A much worse disaster than we faced in 2008 is in the wind, without something real being done about this mess that the government-Wall Street conspiracy created.

  Can we still heed the words of Andrew Jackson, when he said to a delegation of bankers in 1832: “Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the bread-stuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out....”

  I’m ready to see a rout that restores our Republic to the principles of Jefferson and Jackson. How about you?

  WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?

  When the average American is on the edge of losing it all, at the same time the “fat cats” are getting even fatter, it’s time to call their bluff, folks. We need to realize first that we’ve become a corporatized state, one that our government is beholden to while the majority of us are held hostage by it. We should be demanding that President Obama put people in charge who weren’t part of the problem. We should be battering at the gates of Goldman Sachs and AIG, and the Federal Reserve too, letting the pillagers take the fall they deserve.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE SECRET PLANS TO END AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

  THE INCIDENT: The two terms of George W. Bush saw passage of the Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and other similar laws in the wake of 9/11. Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded, and detention centers for terrorists established.

  THE OFFICIAL WORD: The erosion of civil liberties, including wiretapping and torture and suspending habeus corpus, is necessary in order to prevent the spread of terrorism on our shores.

  MY TAKE: The federal government, and elements of the military, have used 9/11 as an excuse to put in place the means to impose martial law and lock up dissenters in “camps” if they deem it necessary. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights have never been in greater peril than now. The technology exists to further erode our democracy, and basically make slaves of those who won’t go along with the program.

  “With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information.... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.”

  —Henry Wallace, vice president of the United States, 1944

  What transpired during the Bush-II years has been coming out in dribs and drabs, so as not to unduly alarm the populace. President Obama wants to look forward and put all that behind us, but when our own government has sanctioned torture and even murder in the name of “national security,” I don’t see how we can. We need accountability from our government, and if that means even a Cheney or Rumsfeld standing trial for war crimes, so be it.

  The Senate Armed Services Committee came out with a report in April 2009 that said: “The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”1

  I was waterboarded during my navy training at SERE (Survival, Escape, Resistance and Evasion) School, to know what it’s like in case we ever became POWs, and it is a method of torture. Cheney’s word for it is “enhanced interrogation.” Well, you give me Dick Cheney and a waterboard for an hour, and I’ll have him confessing to the Sharon Tate murders. Not too long ago, the ACLU managed to pry loose government documents including a CIA manual about what they call “extraordinary rendition.” It describes the “capture shock” that happened before a detainee got put on the flight to some overseas prison. Little techniques like being shackled, and bound up in blindfolds and hoods so you couldn’t see or hear. After which you’d get stripped down and shaved and have your picture taken. Not to mention “walling,” defined as slamming somebody’s head against the wall but with certain “protective measures” so they don’t die.2 You get the picture.

  We all remember the gruesome images of Abu Ghraib, but the CIA admits having destroyed hundreds of hours of “coercive interrogation” videotapes that took place in secret prisons.3 Don’t you find it pretty sadistic that they’d even want to make movies of all this? These are measures I’ve always associated with the KGB or the Nazis. Come to find out from a Senate Armed Services Committee report on prisoner abuse that they even created an experimental “battle lab” for the torture program at Guantánamo, in a throwback to MK-ULTRA.4

  What galls me more than anything is how they used torture in pursuit of lies to justify their actions. First of all, Bush and Cheney pressured lawyers at the Department of Justice to produce memos authorizing them do whatever they wanted and call it legal.5 Then, in the weeks just before we invaded Iraq and the first couple months of our occupation, there turned out to be major spikes in the harshest torture techniques. It was all part of an attempt to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. Major Paul Burney, who was part of the Guantánamo interrogation team, told investigators: “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link, there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”6

  After Ibn Al-Shaykh Al-Libi was captured, the CIA “rendered” him to Egypt (the term reminds me of what we do to slabs of beef). There he was tortured into making a false confession that Saddam had gotten information about use of chemical and biological weapons from a couple of al-Qaeda operatives. Al-Libi was a supposed suicide in a Libyan jail in May 2009.7 Speaking of al-Qaeda, I recently came across this point: “Should the members of the 9/11 Presidential Commission not have been informed that two of the ‘key witnesses’ upon whom their report was based had provided the information to the report’s conclusions only after being waterboarded a total of 266 times?”8

  How low would these guys stoop? We’ve learned since Bush left office of a meeting he had with
Tony Blair to talk about how the United Nations inspectors weren’t going to find any Weapons of Mass Destruction, but why not go ahead anyway? A memo written early in 2003 has Bush telling Blair of a U.S. plan “to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in U.N. colors over Iraq with fighter cover.” If Saddam fired at them, he’d be in violation of the U.N. resolutions and that would be ample justification to invade.9 Sounds like a transplant of Operation Northwoods to me.

  We may never know how many detainees died in our custody in secret prisons. We do have fresh evidence, though, of an “executive assassination ring” that was revealed by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in March 2009. Hersh spoke of an independent special wing called Joint Special Operations Command that reported directly to Cheney’s office. Word was that a three-star admiral eventually ordered it stopped because so many “collateral deaths” were happening. It pains me to say that among the unit’s trainees were young men from the Navy SEALS.10

  By the summer of ’09, word was out about a clandestine CIA program to assassinate al-Qaeda members. The private company enlisted was identified as Blackwater,11 which started out protecting our brass in Iraq. Today, even though the Iraqi government has kicked them out, they’re still under contract to our own government for “black ops.” I read a chilling book about Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill that I highly recommend. They’re in the vanguard of privatization of our armed forces. It’s astounding to consider that we have more private soldiers (74,000) than uniformed troops (57,000) in Afghanistan, as of summer 2009.12