Elite Endgames: A Possible X-Ray of the Financial "Crisis"

Of course it would be wise (and adroit) of us to keep the in-process positive transformation of the planet and and ourselves in mind as we navigate the shell-scarred terrain of these latter days of the Empire.  We may be hurting because of this and all other crises, but I'm trying to see the whole thing as the
last showing ever of the Follies of Self Run Amok and enjoy it as much as
possible.  But we're not just the audience; we're involved.  After all, these high-rollers are
acting out shadowy parts of ourselves as well as their own delusions.  If we're One, we're One.

So, with the Large Perspective as backdrop and antidote, here's more mundane stuff if you care to look: the offer of a X-ray of the financial "crisis" and why it may be another "9/11."

Today I received the below article by William Engdahl (author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation), explaining why he believes the current financial crisis has been, over time, engineered by the biggest US bankers in order to consolidate financial power globally, at the expense of the European bankers, who got wise at the last minute, as well as the Common Folk -- and what the implications of this are for the world.  Interestingly, this may be a window into the alleged hidden warfare between the Rockefeller and the Rothschild branches of the NWO elite who, it is said, are stuggling for the throne of Chief Global Megalomaniac (I believe both David Wilcock and Benjamin Fulford have alluded to this warfare).  These folks just can't seem to enjoy simply being alive.  Possibly their mothers didn't give them enough love and orange juice.  As the twig is bent...

To accomany the below article, here's the link to an Alex Jones radio interview of Richard C. Cook (former NASA analyst turned author-analyst) on the same subject:

http://www.radiodujour.com/people/cook_richard_c/

Finally, here's the link to Engdahl's article as well as the text pasted below:

http://www.lemetropolecafe.com/hemingway_table.cfm?pid=7275

Behind the panic:
Financial Warfare over future of global bank power

By F. William Engdahl* 10 October 2008

What’s
clear from the behavior of European financial markets over the past two
weeks is that the dramatic stories of financial meltdown and panic are
deliberately being used by certain influential factions in and outside
the EU to shape the future face of global banking in the wake of the US
sub-prime and Asset-Backed Security (ABS) debacle. The most interesting
development in recent days has been the unified and strong position of
the German Chancellor, Finance Minister, Bundesbank and coalition
Government, all opposing an American-style EU Superfund bank bailout.
Meanwhile Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pursues his Crony Capitalism
to the detriment of the nation and benefit of his cronies in the
financial world. It’s an explosive cocktail that need not have been.

Stock
market falls of 7 to 10% a day make for dramatic news headlines and
serve to foster a broad sense of unease bordering on panic among
ordinary citizens. The events of the last two weeks among EU banks
since the dramatic state rescues of Hypo Real Estate, Dexia and Fortis
banks, and the announcement by UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair
Darling of a radical shift in policy in dealing with troubled UK banks,
have begun to reveal the outline of a distinctly different European
response to what in effect is a crisis ‘Made in USA.’

There
is serious ground to believe that US Goldman Sachs ex CEO Henry
Paulson, as Treasury Secretary, is not stupid. There is also serious
ground to believe that he is actually moving according to a
well-thought-out long-term strategy. Events as they are now unfolding
in the EU tend to confirm that. As one senior European banker put it to
me in private discussion, ‘There is an all-out war going on between the
United States and the EU to define the future face of European
banking.’

In this banker’s view, the ongoing attempt of
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and France’s Nicholas Sarkosy
to get an EU common ‘fund’, with perhaps upwards of $300 billion to
rescue troubled banks, would de facto play directly into Paulson and
the US establishment’s long-term strategy, by in effect weakening the
banks and repaying US-originated Asset Backed Securities held by EU
banks.

Using panic to centralize power

As I document in my forthcoming book, Power of Money: The Rise and Decline of the American Century, in every major US financial panic since at least the Panic of 1835, the
titans of Wall Street—most especially until 1929, the House of JP
Morgan—have deliberately triggered bank panics behind the scenes in
order to consolidate their grip on US banking. The private banks used
the panics to control Washington policy including the exact definition
of the private ownership of the new Federal Reserve in 1913, and to
consolidate their control over industry such as US Steel, Caterpillar,
Westinghouse and the like. They are, in short, old hands at such
financial warfare to increase their power.

Now they must
do something similar on a global scale to be able to continue to
dominate global finance, the heart of the power of the American
Century.

That process of using panics to centralize
their private power created an extremely powerful, concentration of
financial and economic power in a few private hands, the same hands
which created the influential US foreign policy think-tank, the New
York Council on Foreign Relations in 1919 to guide the ascent of the
American Century, as Time founder Henry Luce called it in a pivotal
1941 essay.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that
people like Henry Paulson, who by the way was one of the most
aggressive practitioners of the ABS revolution on Wall Street before
becoming Treasury Secretary, are operating on motives beyond their
over-proportional sense of greed. Paulson’s own background is
interesting in that context. Back in the early 1970’s Paulson started
his career working for a rather notorious man named John Erlichman,
Nixon’s ruthless adviser who created the Plumbers’ Unit during the
Watergate era to silence opponents of the President, and was left by
Nixon to ‘twist in the wind’ for it in prison.

Paulson
seems to have learned from his White House mentor. As co-chairman of
Goldman Sachs according to a New York Times account, in 1998 he forced
out his co-chairman, Jon Corzine ‘in what amounted to a coup’ according
to the Times.

Paulson, and his friends at Citigroup and JP
Morgan Chase, had a strategy it is becoming clear, as did the Godfather
of Asset Backed Securitization and deregulated banking, former Fed
Chairman Alan Greenspan, as I have detailed in my earlier series here,
Financial Tsunami, Parts I-V.

Knowing that at a certain
juncture the pyramid of trillions of dollars of dubious sub-prime and
other high risk home mortgage-based securities would come falling down,
they apparently determined to spread the so-called ‘toxic waste’ ABS
securities as globally as possible, in order to seduce the big global
banks of the world, most especially of the EU, into their honey trap.

They
had help. In recent testimony under oath by Eric Dinallo, the
Superintendent of the New York Insurance Department at the AIG Bailout
Oversight Hearing, into the AIG rescue by Paulson, Dinallo testified
that funding cutbacks in recent years directed by the Bush-Cheney
Administration had reduced the responsible department that should
regulate or watch over the $80 trillions in Asset Backed Securities
(ABS), which included the toxic sub-prime and Alt-A mortgage securities
and much more. The Bush Administration took the staff from more than
one hundred people down to one---yes that was not a typo. One as in
‘uno.’

Was that just ideological budget cutting fervor,
or was it deliberate? Was former Goldman Sachs man, the man who
convinced the President to hire Paulson, Bush’s former Director of the
Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Joshua Bolten, now the
President’s Chief of Staff, responsible for insuring there was no
effective government oversight on the exploding securitization of
mortgage assets?

These are perhaps some questions which
the good Congressmen ought to be asking people like Henry Paulson and
Josh Bolten, and not such red herring questions as how large Richard
Fuld’s bonus pay at Lehman was. Are Mr Bolten’s fingerprints on the
corpse here? And why is no one questioning the role of Paulson as CEO
of Goldman Sachs, then the most aggressive promoter of exotic and other
Asset Backed Securitization products on Wall Street?

It
now would appear that the Paulson strategy was to use a crisis—a crisis
that was pre-programmed and predictable as far back as 2003 when Josh
Bolten became head of OMB—when it exploded, to panic the more
conservative European Union governments into rushing to the rescue of
US toxic waste assets.

Were that to have happened, it
would in the process destroy what was left of sound EU banking and
financial institutions, bringing the world one step closer to a global
money market controlled by Paulson’s cronies—US-style Crony Capitalism.
Crony Capitalism is certainly appropriate here. Paulson’s predecessor
at both Goldman Sachs and at Treasury, Robert Rubin, liked to accuse
the Asian bankers of Thailand, Indonesia and other lands hit with the
speculative attacks of US-financed hedge funds in 1997 of ‘crony
capitalism,’ leaving the impression the crisis was home grown in Asia
and not the result of a deliberate executed attack by US-financed
financial institutions to eliminate the Asia Tiger model among other
goals, and turn Asia into the funder of US debt.

Interesting
to note is that Rubin is now a Director of Citigroup, obviously one of
Paulson’s crony bank ‘survivors,’ and the bank which to date has had to
write off the largest sum in toxic waste securitized assets.

If
the allegation of pre-planned panic, a la the Panic of 1907 is
accurate, and it is a big if, then the plan worked…up to a point. That
point came over the weekend of October 3, coincidentally the national
unification holiday of Germany.

Germany breaks with US model

In
closed door talks well into the evening of Sunday October 5, Alex Weber
the hard-nosed head of the Bundesbank, BaFin head Jochen Sanio and
representatives of the Berlin coalition Government of Chancellor Merkel
came up with a rescue package for Hypo Real Estate of a nominal €50
billion. However, behind the dramatic headline number, as Weber pointed
out in a September 29 letter to Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück that
has been made public, not only did the private German banks have to
come up with 60% of that figure, the state with 40%. But also, given
the careful manner in which the Government in cooperation with the
Bundesbank and BaFin, structured the rescue credit agreement, the
maximum possible loss, in a worst case scenario, to the state would be
limited to €5.7 billion, not €30 billion as many believed. It’s still
real money but not the blank check for $700 billion that a US Congress
under duress and a few days of falling stock market prices agreed to
give Paulson.

The swift action by Finance Minister
Steinbrück to fire the head of HRE, in stark contrast to Wall Street
where the same criminal fraudsters remain at their desks reaping huge
bonuses, indicates as well a different approach. But that does not cut
to the heart of the issue. The situation of HRE arose as noted
previously, from excesses in a wholly-owned daughter bank of HRE
subsidiary DEPFA in Ireland, an EU country known for its liberal loose
regulation and low tax regime.

A British policy shift

In
the UK, after the costly and foolish bailout of Northern Rock earlier
in the year, the Government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just
announced a dramatic change in policy in the direction of Germany’s
position. Britain's banks will get an unprecedented 50 billion-pound
(€64 billion) government lifeline and emergency loans from the Bank of
England.

The government will buy preference shares from
Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, Barclays Plc and at least six other
banks, and provide about 250 billion pounds of loan guarantees to
refinance debt, the Treasury said. The Bank of England will make at
least 200 billion pounds available. The plan doesn't specify how much
each bank will get.

That means the UK Government will at
least partially nationalize its most important international banks,
rather than buy their bad loans as under the unworkable Paulson plan.
Under such an approach, costs to UK taxpayers once the crisis abates
and business returns to more normal conditions, the Government can sell
the state shares back to a healthy bank at perhaps a nice profit to the
Treasury. The Brown Government has apparently realized that the blanket
guarantees it gave to Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley merely
opened the floodgates of government costs without changing the problem.

The new nationalization policy is a dramatic contrast to
the Paulson ideological ‘free market’ approach of buying the worthless
bonds held by the select banks Paulson chooses to save, rather than
recapitalize those banks to allow them to continue to function.

The battle lines drawn

What
has emerged are the outlines of two opposite approaches to the
unfolding crisis. The Paulson plan is now clearly part of a project to
create three colossal global financial giants—Citigroup, JP MorganChase
and, of course, Paulson’s own Goldman Sachs, now conveniently enough a
bank. Having successfully used fear and panic to wrestle a $700 billion
bailout from the US taxpayers, now the big three will try to use their
unprecedented muscle to ravage European banks in the years ahead. So
long as the world’s largest financial credit rating agencies—Moody’s
and Standard & Poors—are untouched by the scandals and
Congressional hearings, the reorganized US financial power of Goldman
Sachs, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase could potentially regroup and
advance their global agenda over the coming several years, walking over
the ashes of a bankrupt American economy made bankrupt by their follies.

By
agreeing on a strategy of nationalizing what EU finance ministers deem
are ‘EU banks too systemically strategic to fail,’ while guaranteeing
bank deposits, the largest EU governments, Germany and the UK, in
contrast to the US, have opted for what will in the longer run allow
European banking giants to withstand the anticipated financial attacks
from the likes of Goldman or Citigroup.

The dramatic
selloff of stocks across European bourses and across Asia is in reality
a secondary and far less critical issue. According to market reports,
the selloff is being driven mainly by US hedge funds desperate to raise
cash as they realize the US economy is going into economic depression,
that they are exposed and that the Paulson Plan does nothing to address
that.

A functioning solvent banking and interbank system
is far the more strategic issue. The ABS debacle was ‘Made in New
York.’ Nonetheless, its effects have to be isolated and viable EU banks
defended in the public interest, not just the interest of Paulson’s
banking cronies as in the US. Unregulated offshore vehicles such as
hedge funds, unregulated banking, unregulated insurance all went into
building the $80 trillion ABS Tsunami as I have called it. Certain more
conservative EU hands are not about to buy the remedy being offered by
Washington.

The coordinated interest rate cut by the ECB
and other European central banks while grabbing headlines, in effect do
little to address the real problem: banks fear to lend to each other
until their solvency is assured.

By initiating state
partial nationalizations across the EU, and rejecting the
Berlusconi/Sarkozy bailout scheme, the governments of the EU,
interestingly enough this time led by the German, are laying a more
sound foundation to emerge from the crisis.

Stay tuned,
it’s far from over. This is a fight for the survival of the American
Century which has been bvuilt since 1939 on the twin pillars of
American financial dominance and American military dominance—Full
Spectrum, Dominance.

Asian banks, badly burned by Wall
Street’s manipulated 1997-98 Asia Crisis, are apparently very little
exposed to the US problem. European banks are exposed in different
ways, but none so serious as in the US banking world.

* F. William Engdahl is author of the book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press Ltd) and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca) He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

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