Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 12 Num. 38
=======================================
("Quid coniuratio est?")
A PILE OF NEWS
Important news items and reports from several sources are "flying hot and heavy" these days. Many of these stories are mentioned only briefly, as if they are minor news, in the mainstream press. Below is my attempted summarization of various reports. I hope that with some brainstorming we can together get closer to figuring out what is =really= going on.
Big stock market crashes often occur in October; for example, the 1929 crash and the 1987 crash. We have now an unprecedented situation where the U.S. president, Bill Clinton, and his harem, are crowding the front pages of supermarket tabloids. The drumbeat against Clinton is incessant: on TV, radio and in the newspapers they are pounding it into our heads that, "No. You don't like Clinton now." (For years they had been browbeating us that, "Yes. You like Clinton.") "They" -- the mainstream media -- are owned by super-wealthy individuals and corporations who, in turn, are beholden to big financial powerhouses like Citicorp, Travelers, and major banks.
The October 5, 1998 online edition of New York Times reported a major battle between U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. (One cynic has suggested, "Forget about Clinton; Rubin and Greenspan are the important ones.") In "Politics Again Leaves Banking Overhaul in Limbo," Leslie Wayne writes, in part, that a proposed banking "reform" bill is being vigorously opposed by Rubin. The bill, which would "eliminate barriers separating banks, insurance companies and brokers and allow them to merge into new financial conglomerates," is being pushed for by Greenspan. Bill Clinton has threatened to veto the proposed measure. Recall that in CN 12.07 was covered the recent illegal merger between Citicorp and Travelers Group, forming a combination called "Citigroup."
On April 6, 1998, the largest merger in history occurred: Citicorp and The Travelers Group joined to become Citigroup. (Hmmm..... Do you think there are going to be layoffs at Citigroup?) In the April 27, 1998 issue of The Nation magazine, the interesting legal strategy behind the merger is noted. It seems that the merger between Citicorp and Travelers =is illegal=. But, writes Doug Henwood, "the parties figure they can get the law changed. If you're rich enough, you can present the government with a fait accompli and have the law you'd like to violate repealed."
Clinton/Rubin appear to be fighting the giantizing of banks while Alan Greenspan seems to support same. Note also how the stock market values of major U.S. banks like Citicorp have fallen drastically these past 10 or so days.
Nonetheless, in spite of the apparent battle going on between Clinton/Rubin vs. Alan Greenspan, Sherman Skolnick is now reporting that Fed chairman Greenspan has given orders to Congress to go easy on Clinton. In "Federal Reserve Orders: Be Careful on Clinton!" Mr. Skolnick, doyen of underground journalism, writes in part that...
The world's largest bank, the Federal Reserve, has ordered the US Congress to be careful in dealing with President Clinton. An order from this financial dictator cannot be ignored...
Privately owned and operated by the Rockefeller and Rothschild families, and masquerading as America's Central Bank, the Federal Reserve does not want a change of figureheads in the White House, at a time of imminent collapse of global finance. The clandestine command of the Federal Reserve comes at a time of near collapse, or actual collapse, of a huge hedge fund interlocked with many money center banks, including those headquartered in the US, and also those like in Switzerland with branches in the US.
Amounting upwards to 200 billion dollars or more, the hedge fund disaster, based greatly on little-understood derivatives gambling, has wiped out the capital base of many supposedly "giant" banks. Most of the alleged "profits" of major bank holding companies in recent years have been just book entries resulting from this gambling casino mentality....
Among those with capital structure wipe-out are Rockefeller-owned Chase Manhattan Bank and the First National Bank of Chicago, as well as the Rothschild and Jesuit-owned Bank of America which took over the Vatican and British-royalty-owned Continental Bank Of Chicago....
Now almost forgotten, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was set up in the 1930s to underwrite accounts, up to a specified amount as maximum, primarily of smaller or mid-size banks. With the mega-mergers gobbling up the banks and their holding firms and conglomerating into huge bank chains, the deposit insurance has become a dead letter. Only a few tens of billions of dollars are in the deposit insurance reserve fund to supposedly safeguard bank monsters each with several hundred billion dollars in deposits owed to the public. The banking system has become over-run with bank monopolies, also engaging in non-bank services such as travel agencies, insurance, securities transactions, and such--enterprises supposedly part of a "bank" house too large to permit to fail.
Mr. Skolnick's report on Greenspan's alleged support of Clinton flies in the face of the above-mentioned battle between Greenspan and Clinton/Rubin regarding legislation favoring giantizing of major banks. If, as New York Times writer Leslie Wayne reports, Clinton and Greenspan are at odds over this, then why would Greenspan give such Clinton-favorable orders to Congress? The opinion of Conspiracy Nation (CN) remains that Bill Clinton is to be offered up as the scapegoat for financial disaster.
Regarding Mr. Skolnick's mention of derivatives, excellent reporting on these precarious financial instruments has long been done by the Lyndon LaRouche crowd. Though Conspiracy Nation deplores the lack of independent thinking among the "LaRouchies," who all seem to automatically agree with whatever Mr. LaRouche has to say, they still deserve some credit for their consistence in probing the shaky derivatives situation and focusing attention upon it. In "Long Term Capital Management Represents the Disintegration of the Financial System," a transcript from the LaRouche-connected radio program "EIR Talks," Tony Papert and John Hoefle discuss what's been happening in the financial markets. They say, in part, as follows....
TONY PAPERT: Welcome to ``EIR Talks.'' It's Sept. 30, 1998. My name's Tony Papert, and with me in the studio is John Hoefle, EIR's Banking columnist. John, one week ago today, last Wednesday, the Federal Reserve called a secret meeting of 16 bankers and arranged a multi-billion dollar bailout of a hedge-fund called Long Term Capital Management, and since then, this has been the talk of the world's financial press and regular, mainstream daily press. What does it mean?
JOHN HOEFLE: Well, there's good reason for all the talk, because right now the bankers are in absolute panic. What the Long Term Capital Management affair represents is the disintegration of the financial system. The reason why the bankers had to move in and bail out Long Term Capital -- and they actually didn't bail it out, they =foreclosed= on it -- what they bailed out was the derivatives market, because Long Term had in excess of $1 trillion in derivatives. Some reports say it was as high as $3 trillion, and if Long Term had gone into default, which it would have the next day, it could have triggered a chain-reaction blowout of the global derivatives market, which would have struck very hard at those same banks that participated in the foreclosure.
PAPERT: What is the bailout, or the need for the bailout mean for the whole financial system?
HOEFLE: Well, right now the global financial system is hanging by a thread. The global derivatives market has been hit very hard with losses. The banks have suffered big losses on loans and other financial instruments to Russia, to Asia, growing now in Ibero-America, and also, domestically, in the United States, a lot of this hasn't been reported yet, but there's a meltdown underway globally which is reflected in the drop in the Dow, where the bank stocks, themselves, are down 30-40%.
PAPERT: Let me ask you something that is asked on every show I'm on on the radio: Just what is a derivative?
HOEFLE: A derivative, in the textbook definition, is that it's a financial instrument or contract whose value is based upon the value of something else. Such as, you can buy a contract -- it's a bet that the Dow Jones Industrial average will go up, and it pays off if the Dow goes up, so you're betting on a index, and you're not betting on any actual stocks. So that's the textbook definition of a derivative, and supposedly these derivatives are used for risk-management. But, you have to ask yourself, if there are $140 trillion in derivatives outstanding in the world today, what kind of risk they're managing? But, the real answer to what a derivative is, is to look at it in terms of a dog and fleas. During the 1980s, you had the creation of a huge financial bubble. This was the miracle, the Reagan-Bush economic miracle. And, you could look at that as fleas who set up a trading empire on a dog. And they're trading more and more -- they build up their trading empires. They start pumping more and more blood out of the dog to support their trading, and then at a certain point, the amount of blood that they're trading exceeds what they can pump from the dog, without killing the dog. The dog begins to get very sick. So being clever little critters, what they do, is they switch to trading in blood futures. And since there's no connection -- they break the connection between the blood available and the amount you can trade, then you can have a real explosion of trading, and that's what the derivatives market represents. And so now you've had this explosion of trading in blood futures which is going right up to the point that now the dog is on the verge of dying. And that's essentially what the derivatives market is. It's the last gasp of a financial bubble.
PAPERT: Can you tell us something about the forms of financial instruments and financial speculation which preceeded derivatives, I mean, how this thing came into existence? I know it's closely connected with the progress of deregulation, which now allows banks to do more or less anything, and even to do it off-balance-sheet, without telling their stockholders, or the public as they do with derivatives.
HOEFLE: Well, the U.S. banks have $28 trillion in what the FDIC calls "off-balance-sheet" derivatives versus $5 trillion in assets on their balance sheets. So, most of what goes on in the banking world goes on off-balance-sheet now. And they've placed enormous bets which will destroy them.
Chase Manhattan Bank, for example, has more in derivatives: $8.5 trillion, as of the second quarter, more than the entire gross domestic product of the United States.
PAPERT: And I understand Japan banks are even more heavily invested, although perhaps nobody really knows for sure.
HOEFLE: Yeah, it's not quite clear. I'd say they have at least $15 trillion in derivatives, maybe more. I suspect they've been trying desperately to unwind some of their derivatives exposure, as their system melts down.
I don't have time to detail how there are several consistent corroborations to be found, amongst the various sources mentioned above, which tend to give extra credibility to what they are saying. Don't expect the mass media to spell it out for you either, since the mass media is part and parcel of the very financial system which looks to be going through an immense crisis. Your "mission," Mr. and Mrs. Conspiracy Nation Reader, should you decide to accept it, is to take a moment and do some thinking of your own. (As always, should you be caught or captured, Conspiracy Nation will disavow any knowledge of your actions.)
Finally, in a matter which may or may not be tangential to the Clinton scandals, the financial crisis, and the push to giantize major banks, "Sky News" had reported on Feb. 10, 1998 that Jonathan Pollard,
an American Jew jailed for life in the United States for spying on Israel is set for release, under the terms of a future U.S.-brokered Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. According to reports in the daily Yedioth Anronoth newspaper U.S. and Israel gave the go ahead for the release earlier this week.
Pollard seems to have been set up as the "fall guy" for passing top-secret U.S. government information to Israel. Past CN reports have indicated that one of the higher-level players in this espionage case was the late Vince Foster, the deputy White House counsel in the Clinton administration who was most likely either murdered or executed in July, 1993. Just received by CN is a report from "Ru Mills" (pseudonym), who writes, in part, as follows...
Jonathan Pollard Release Story Was a "Plant" Who Planted It and Why?
From the Offices of: Rumor Mill News Agency
The Uncensored National Rumor
E-mail Address: RuMills@aol.com
Evidently there is more behind the "release of Pollard" than meets the eye. No sooner had newspapers around the world printed the story of his release, than other articles appeared stating that the "release" story was "planted."
The question we must ask is: Why was this done? Why was the original article leaked to newspapers around the world. Why did these papers publish it without checking to see if it was true? If they did check it with their sources, and their sources said it was true, then what is the real story?
My conspiracy mind says that someone is playing hardball with someone else, and Jonathan Pollard is a pawn in the game.
If Pollard was connected to Vince Foster, as some say, then Jonathan Pollard could be the weak link in the Clinton chain fence of obfuscation and denial.
Jonathan Pollard, and his Mossad handlers know the truth about Vince Foster; was this "fake" story a message to our President? And if it was, what was Benjamin Netanyahu telling Bill Clinton?
We are entering the most dangerous times in the history of our nation. This time in our national history is more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pearl Harbor, and the Civil War combined.
Whoever controls the secrets of Jonathan Pollard, thinks or knows that they control Bill Clinton. Who are these people and what do they want our President to do?
Pieces of the puzzle. By brainstorming together we can solve it. The truth is not and never has been handed to the people "on a silver platter." But the people, if they choose, can arrive together at the truth. And with the force of Internet helping us to put our heads together, WE ARE UN-STOPPABLE..... if we so choose.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
For related stories, visit:
http://www.shout.net/~bigred/cn.html
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those
of Conspiracy Nation, nor of its Editor in Chief.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I encourage distribution of "Conspiracy Nation."