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Webster G. Tarpley Today’s Senate hearings, carried on CNBC, Bloomberg, and C-SPAN, represent the first major exposure of the American people to the scandalous frauds of the derivatives casino, including synthetic collateralized debt obligations (synthetic CDOs or CDO²). These are things most people have heard very little about. They begin to open up the shocking reality behind such shopworn euphemisms like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and “troubled assets.” Reactionaries in general and Republicans in particular have done everything possible to hide the role of derivatives, which must be considered the main cause of the financial panic of September 2008 which brought down Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG, after felling Bear Stearns in March of the same year. The reactionary legend, repeated yesterday on the Senate floor by financier minion GOP Sen. Gregg of New Hampshire, is that the crisis was caused by poor people taking out subprime mortgages and then defaulting, bringing down the entire Anglo-American banking system and triggering the bailouts. Either that, or too much government spending was too blame. A mass of kited derivatives blew up in September 2008This Big Lie has come from such propaganda sources as the Limbaugh Institute of Retarded Reactionary Ranting. But the $1.5 trillion in subprime mortgages were dwarfed by the $15 trillion US residential real estate market, to say nothing of the $1.5 thousand trillion world derivatives bubble. But, starting with Bush-Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the talk has been of a “housing correction,” not a derivatives panic. It must be pointed out that derivatives are nothing but wagers, bets placed from a distance on securities which themselves are often not mortgages, but rather other derivatives. The bettor buying a synthetic CDO or CDO² does not own the underlying mortgages or mortgage-backed securities, any more than someone who bets on a racehorse owns part of the horse. Blankfein and others tried to portray derivatives as a service to hedgers and end-users, but it’s clear that the vast majority of derivatives involve neither hedgers nor users, but only bettors on both side of the transaction. It is in any case this mass of kited derivatives which blew up in 2008, bringing on the present world economic depression. Goldman Sachs executives are babbling cretinsThe mystique of Goldman Sachs is based in large part on their reputation as the smartest financiers on Wall Street. After today’s hearings, this mystique has permanently dissipated. The Goldman executives babbled. They sounded dumb. They stalled and stammered and went into contortions to avoid giving straight answers to simple questions. They were mendacious and evasive when they did speak. Financial powers around the world will note carefully the refusal of three out of four Goldman executives on one panel to state that they had a duty to defend the interests of their clients. Who will want to do business with such a gang? Goldman Sachs got $10 billion of taxpayer money in low-interest loans under the Bush-Paulson TARP. Part of that money went to pay for obscene bonuses for Goldman executives like the ones on display today. The argument for bonuses is that they must be paid to retain the highly talented personnel, virtual geniuses, who are indispensable for Wall Street speculative success. But these are no geniuses, they are imbeciles. No more bonuses should be paid by banks saved through public money. Continue reading Seize and Liquidate Goldman Sachs Webster G. Tarpley The Obama administration has been posturing this week about the life and death issue of Wall Street reform. Obama’s predicament is that of a Wall Street puppet who has been put into the White House thanks among other things to almost $1 million of contributions from the infamous Goldman Sachs – but who now needs to make a show of fighting his own Wall Street patrons for political reasons. Of course, Obama’s health-care reform was largely a bailout of insurance companies, which are themselves a key part of Wall Street. But Obama is now pretending to quarrel with Wall Street to shore up his waning credibility, partly because many House Democrats are desperately seeking anti-banker, economic populist street creds in order to avoid defeat in November. So far, the results have been largely feckless and inadequate. The urgent problem raised by all this is the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble. The financial crisis which struck the United States and the world in September and October 2008 was in fact a world a derivatives panic. This panic marked the first phase of a world economic depression caused by derivatives speculation. The second phase of this depression, which is now beginning, can also be attributed in large part to derivatives, since derivatives are the main tool being used in the speculative attacks on Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and other nations, building up towards a chaotic collapse of the euro. Derivatives are the Cause of the World Depression of Our TimeFar from being some arcane or marginal activity, financial derivatives have come to represent the principal business of the financier oligarchy in Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt, and other money centers. A concerted effort has been made by politicians and the news media to hide and camouflage the central role played by derivative speculation in the economic disasters of recent years. Journalists and public relations types have done everything possible to avoid even mentioning derivatives, coining phrases like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and – most notably – “troubled assets,” as in Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP, aka the monstrous $800 billion bailout of Wall Street speculators which was enacted in October 2008 with the support of Bush, Henry Paulson, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Obama Democrats. Continue reading Fight the Derivatives Cancer with a Wall Street Sales Tax, Plus Bans on Hedge Funds, Credit Default Swaps, and Synthetic CDOs Webster G. Tarpley Treasury Secretary Geithner is on his way to Beijing, where he will meet with Chinese Vice Prime Minister Wang. The trip is in relation to US demands for a massive up valuation of the Chinese currency, the renminbi or yuan. This announcement has unleashed much gloating at the Associated Press and other pro-Wall Street news outlets, so it is important to issue a caveat at the very beginning: trips do not equal agreements. Obama made a personal visit to Afghanistan last month, and bilateral US relations with that country have been deteriorating in an alarming way ever since. The question of the Chinese currency is this: for about 20 months, since about the beginning of the world economic depression in the late summer of 2008, China has been maintaining a peg or approximately fixed parity in relation to the dollar at a rate of about 6.8 renminbi per US greenback. Before that, the renminbi had been allowed to rise by about 21% between 2005 and 2008, largely in response to US pressure. The relatively fixed parity between the dollar and the renminbi has been an element of stability in a generally chaotic panorama of floating rates which characterizes the wreckage of the Bretton Woods system, which was demolished by Nixon and Kissinger almost four decades ago. Fixed parities among currencies promote world trade, because they allow exporters and importers to accurately anticipate the value of trade deals that take 6, 12 or 24 months to come to fruition. A rational US policy would be to maintain a negotiated fixed parity with China, and then invite the Japanese yen, the Russian ruble, the euro, and the Latin American regional currency to join such a system of fixed parities. This would amount to restoring one of the positive features of the 1944-1971 Bretton Woods system, which produced the highest rates of economic growth in human history before or since. Instead, the Wall Street puppets of the Obama administration are determined to destroy one of the few areas of stability which still persist. The policy which Obama and Geithner are attempting to pursue is one of competitive devaluation of the US dollar. This is the policy of exporting the world economic depression towards China, which has been less hard hit so far than the Anglo-Saxon derivatives paradises of the US and the UK. This is a beggar my neighbor policy broadly similar to the one pursued by the British between 1931 and the outbreak of World War II. The US is demanding an upvaluation of the renminbi by something between 20 and 40%. This is another way of saying that the US wants to devalue or n value the US dollar by the same 20 to 40%. The idea is that Chinese products will then become more expensive on the US market, helping to reduce the astronomical merchandise trade deficit and balance of payments deficit which the US is suffering. It is a crackpot scheme. The US Treasury under Geithner has been threatening to Continue reading Geithner In Beijing: The Dangers of Exporting The Depression Webster G. Tarpley 
The Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax is rapidly gathering momentum worldwide, thanks above all to a bid by British Labour Party MPs to save themselves from all but certain defeat at the hands of the Tories by playing this great economic populist card, which they have dubbed the Robin Hood Tax. If the Labour Party left succeeds with this gambit, it will tend to transform the situation in the US as well, with desperate House and Senate Democrats following the Labour Party example and embracing the Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax as a means of getting some populist credibility and viability for November. The Republicans, by contrast, will be forced to line up in defense of their Wall Street backers, stripping away all their demagogic Tea Party camouflage. The Obama-Summers-Geithner gang will also be put into a bind: will they oppose a measure demanded by their own Congressional Democrats? I have been campaigning for the Tobin tax for a number of years, and it is an idea whose time has now come. If a sales tax on financial transactions (Tobin tax, trading tax, securities transfer tax, Robin Hood tax) can bring New Labour back from the dead, it can also defeat Geithner, Summers, Bernanke, Wall Street, and Continue reading Tobin Tax, Wall Street Sales Tax, Robin Hood Tax – Britain and Europe Demand that Bankers Pay for the Depression They Have Created! Webster G. Tarpley Google is now preparing to leave China as a result of this company’s stubborn refusal to obey Chinese laws. Google is in effect demanding extraterritoriality and immunity to the legal norms of the host nation, a claim which goes back to the unequal treaties imposed by foreign imperialists, notably the British, on China starting in the 19th century. It is not surprising that the Chinese response to this arrogant interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state has been stern. We must also recall that Google was founded with the help of the US intelligence community, and is now acting as a virtual arm of the US National Security Agency, the electronic espionage department of the US government. Google-NSA’s arrogance and hypocrisy are unbearable, especially when we bear in mind the countless times that Google search engines have been used to suppress exposés of the US governments false flag operations, most notably 9/11, and other sensitive topics. There are two sides to the conflict between Google-NSA and China. One is the Great Cyberwall erected by the Chinese government against attempts by the US-UK to capitalize on ethnic and social tensions inside China to launch a color revolution, CIA people power coup, or postmodern putsch. The other aspect is Google’s claim that hackers working for the Chinese government raided Google’s e-mail servers. The second charge has been formally denied by the Chinese. Even as Google prepares to shut down its Chinese operations, something larger and more sinister is looming. The US Wall Street-controlled media are gearing up to educate the public about imminent cyberwarfare and cyber-conflict. We can sense that Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon’s infamous octogenarian Yoda of the Office of Net Assessment, is playing a key role behind the scenes. This effort was formally launched in May 2009 by none other than Obama, who announced a buildup of US cyberwar assets, illustrating his project with the claim that his own campaign websites had been hacked during the 2008 campaign, prompting him to seek the assistance of FBI, CIA, NSA and the rest. One highlight of this US propaganda campaign has been a two-hour docudrama special recently repeated several times on CNN on Feb. 20-21, simulating a massive cyber attack on the United States, starting with cell phones and then taking over into computers.[1] The impact of this attack is to shut down telephone communications, followed by airports and rail services, and finally to knock out most of the US electrical power grid, causing panic and chaos. The simulation is presented in the form of a meeting of the National Security Council while the US is under attack. Several protagonists of the 9/11 cover-up were among the starring players, including Jamie Gorelick (playing the US Attorney General), John Negroponte (playing the Secretary of State), and Continue reading US Readies Cyberwar, Virtual Flag Terrorism Webster G. Tarpley Dear Congressman Van Hollen: I urge you to reject the Obama health care bill. This is not reform; it is a bailout of bankrupt insurance companies at the expense of average working people, obtained through coercion and extortion. Forcing Americans to buy insurance from private, for-profit, deregulated companies is clearly unconstitutional. The idea of a mandate to purchase insurance is a reactionary Republican invention, and we want no part of it. Furthermore, this bill’s $500 billion in Medicare cuts are a direct attack on the economic rights of Americans implemented under the New Deal and the Great Society, and will cause incalculable suffering and human tragedy. These colossal Medicare cuts will inevitably result in rationing, delay, and the denial of care, causing patients to die needlessly. The spirit of this bill is that of OMB Director Peter Orszag, the sinister Malthusian bureaucrat who is behind recent attempts to deny Americans Pap smears, mammograms, and PSA tests – as cost-cutting measures. Instead, we should set a national goal of extending US life expectancy by five years over the coming two decades. Funding for Medicare must be increased by making Wall Street pay their fair share with a 1% Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax on derivatives and other speculative transactions, by clawing back the TARP bailout from the zombie banks, and by ending the Iraq and Afghan wars. Give every person the voluntary option to join Medicare For All at any age for $100 per person per month, with generous allowances and fee waivers for families, the unemployed, students, the working poor, and the destitute. Further savings can come through a fully funded national and international crash program of biomedical research to find cures for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other dread diseases. In addition, health care requires more than insurance. We need to build 1,000 modern, state of the art hospitals with 500 beds each just to reach the minimum of targets set by the Hill-Burton Act of 1946. We need to train 250,000 doctors over the next ten years. These goals require serious investments, not subsidies to predatory insurance companies who are going broke because of their reckless derivatives bets. Your role in the Democratic leadership suggests that you are severely out of touch, paying far more attention to the needs of Obama and Pelosi than to the needs of your district. Stop armtwisting for this wretched sellout and listen to your constituents. Vote no on this bill. Webster G. Tarpley Webster G. Tarpley It has been evident for some time that the ongoing speculative attack on Greece, along with such other countries as Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Italy, was not primarily a reflection of their economic fundamentals, nor yet a spontaneous movement of “the market,” but rather an orchestrated action of economic warfare. The dollar had been relentlessly falling through the late summer and autumn of 2009. It obviously occurred to various Anglo-American financiers that a diversionary attack on the euro, starting with some of the weaker Mediterranean or Southern European economies, would be an ideal means of relieving pressure on the battered US greenback. Since these degenerate elites are incapable of directly solving the problem of the dollar through increased production, full employment, and economic recovery, one of the few alternatives remaining to them is to create a situation in which the euro is collapsing faster, leaving the dollar as the beneficiary of some residual flight to quality or safe haven reflex. This is what emerged during the first week of December with a speculative assault or bear raid against Greek and Spanish government bonds as well as the euro itself, accompanied by a scurrilous press campaign targeting the “PIIGS,” an acronym for the countries just named, coming from inside the bowels of Goldman Sachs. I have discussed this phenomenon several times over the last two to three weeks on my radio program on GCN. Continue reading Financial Warfare Exposed: Soros, Goldman Sachs, Hedge Funds Attack Greece to Smash Euro Webster G. Tarpley Is the United States now inexorably fated to follow the Soviet Union on the path leading to social breakdown, internal collapse, secessionism, and general chaos? This question is objectively now on the agenda. And not surprisingly, a gaggle of foundation-funded professors and other experts, led by that notorious British reactionary Niall Ferguson, are gloating in Schadenfreude and jubilation that the United States is now irrevocably doomed to imperial implosion, based largely on Paul Kennedy’s dangerous half-truth about imperial overstretch. And not only that: Niall Ferguson appears to be preparing the ground for some kind of massive bear raid against the US dollar emanating from London, some kind of a speculative thunderbolt capable of bringing the US breakdown crisis to a fast-track culmination. The answer presented here to the question posed in the title is that, while the gravity of the US crisis is undeniable, it would be criminal stupidity to assert that we are dealing with some kind of irresistible cycle of US national decline. Quite the contrary: the historical experience of the New Deal, if properly evaluated, reliably indicates a broad array of economic reform measures which are immediately available to lead the US and the world out of the current crisis. The challenge to all serious American thinkers is to specify the needed components of a general US return to a regulated and dirigistic New Deal economic model, and to make these measures intelligible to the vast majority of the US population, and to agitate effectively for their implementation. (Need we point out that both Obama’s corporatist Democratic Party and the right-wing radical Republican Party are hysterically hostile to the New Deal?) Analysts who imagine that their role is to produce ever more dazzling or bombastic rhetorical invectives against the Wall Street collapse we see all around us are simply irrelevant at this point. Every real intellectual leader needs to Continue reading Must the US Follow The USSR on the Path to Collapse? Webster G. Tarpley On Tuesday Feb. 23, Iran announced the capture of Abdulmalek Rigi, the boss of the terror organization Jundullah, which works for NATO. The capture of Rigi represents a serious setback for the US-UK strategy of using false flag state-sponsored terrorism against Iran and Pakistan, and ultimately to sabotage China’s geopolitics of oil. The Iranians claim to have captured Rigi all by themselves, but the Pakistani ambassador to Teheran is quoted in The Dawn as claiming an important role for Pakistan. The Iranians say that Rigi was attempting to fly from Dubai to Kyrgystan, and that his plane was forced to land in Iran by Iranian interceptors. This exploit recalls Oliver North’s 1985 intercept of the accused Achille Lauro perpetrators, including Abu Abbas, forcing their Egyptian plane to land at Sigonella, Sicily. But other and perhaps more realistic versions suggest that Iran was tipped off by the Pakistanis, or even that Rigi was captured by Pakistan and delivered to the Iranians. Jundullah, otherwise known as the Rigi organization, is a clan-based Mafia organization that has long infested the Iran-Pakistan border. The Rigis are traditionally smugglers and drug pushers of royalist persuasion, and now they have branched out into terrorism. Jundullah is mounting a Sunni rebellion against the Shiite Iranian regime in Iranian Baluchistan. They have blown up a Shiite mosque, killing 25, and managed to kill 50 in a bombing in Pishin last October, where their victims included some top commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, against which Mrs. Clinton has now declared war. There is no doubt that Jundullah is on the US payroll. This fact has been confirmed by Brian Ross of ABC News, the London Daily Telegraph, and by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Hersh noted that Jundullah has received some of the $400 million appropriated by the US Congress in the most recent Bush-era regime change legislation targeting Iran. Jundullah is a key part of the US-UK strategy of fomenting ethnic and religious civil war in both Iran and Pakistan. Jundullah is a twofer in this context, since it can help destabilize both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border. Baluchistan has special importance because any oil pipeline linking Iran with China must go straight across Baluchistan. Jundullah’s false flag jihad is a means to make sure that strategic pipeline, which would help solve China’s energy problem, is never built. There is also no doubt that Jundullah functions as an arm of NATO, a kind of irregular warfare asset similar in some ways to the KLA of Kosovo. Rigi is reported by the Iranians to have met with Jop de Hoop Scheffer when he was NATO Secretary General. Rigi has also met with various NATO generals operating in Afghanistan. Who knows — he may have met with McChrystal himself, a covert ops veteran from Iraq. This capture comes at a moment when Baluchistan is the object of intense US-UK exertions. The current US-NATO offensive in southern Afghanistan targets Marjah and the rest of Helmand province, which directly faces Baluchistan. Many observers were puzzled when the US and NATO publicized the Marjah offensive in advance. Militarist talking heads like General Barry McCaffrey responded that the main goal of the Marjah offensive was not to destroy the Taliban, but to drive them out of the province. It was thus clear from the beginning that the real goal was to drive the Helmand Taliban fighters into Pakistani Baluchistan. Why? A statement from the Afghan Taliban covered on the RIA Novosti web site suggests that the real goal of the US-NATO offensive in Marjah-Helmand is to attack Chinese economic interests in Pakistani Baluchistan, and especially the port of Gwadar, one of China’s largest overseas projects. If the US can push the Taliban into Pakistani Baluchistan and into the area around Gwadar, they will have a pretext for militarization – perhaps through Blackwater mercenaries, who are already operating massively in Pakistan, or perhaps through direct US military involvement in the zone. US jackboots on the ground in Baluchistan would interfere mightily with Chinese economic development plans. They would also allow the US to commandeer Gwadar as the home port of a new NATO supply line into southern Afghanistan, allowing the avoidance of the Khyber Pass bottleneck. The US could also use Baluchistan as a springboard for bigger and better terror ops into Iran, electronic surveillance of Iranian activities, and so forth. The US and NATO had evidently planned a double envelopment of Baluchistan, with Taliban fighters from Helmand arriving from the north, while the Jundullah escalated their own activity on the ground. Now that Rigi has joined his brother in Iranian jails, Jundullah has been decapitated, and the NATO strategy has consequently been undermined. Iran has bagged a dangerous terrorist foe. Another winner is Pakistan, where The Dawn celebrated the capture of Rigi as “a godsend” and “a lucky break” for Pakistan. By helping Rigi to fall into Iranian hands, Pakistan may have finally found an effective way to counter the US-UK strategy, which notoriously aims at the breakup and partition of Pakistan. The coming Iranian trial of Rigi may go far towards exposing the real mechanism of terrorism in today’s world, with the CIA sitting in the dock next to Rigi. |
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