Excerpt 1
In July 1972, Rockefeller called his first meeting, which was held at Rockefeller's Pocantico compound in New York's Hudson Valley. It was attended by about 250 individuals who were carefully selected and screened by Rockefeller and represented the very elite of finance and industry.
Its first executive committee meeting was held in Tokyo in October 1973. The Trilateral Commission was officially initiated, holding biannual meetings.
A Trilateral Commission Task Force Report, presented at the 1975 meeting in Kyoto, Japan, called An Outline for Remaking World Trade and Finance, said: "Close Trilateral cooperation in keeping the peace, in managing the world economy, and in fostering economic development and in alleviating world poverty, will improve the chances of a smooth and peaceful evolution of the global system." Another Commission document read:
"The overriding goal is to make the world safe for interdependence by protecting the benefits which it provides for each country against external and internal threats which will constantly emerge from those willing to pay a price for more national autonomy. This may sometimes require slowing the pace at which interdependence proceeds, and checking some aspects of it. More frequently however, it will call for checking the intrusion of national government into the international exchange of both economic and non-economic goods."
...
In his book Radical Priorities, Noam Chomsky said this:
| “ | Perhaps the most striking feature of the new Administration is the role played in it by the Trilateral Commission. The mass media had little to say about this matter during the Presidential campaign -- in fact, the connection of the Carter group to the Commission was recently selected as "the best censored news story of 1976" -- and it has not received the attention that it might have since the Administration took office. All of the top positions in the government -- the office of President, Vice-President, Secretary of State, Defense and Treasury -- are held by members of the Trilateral Commission, and the National Security Advisor was its director. Many lesser officials also came from this group. It is rare for such an easily identified private group to play such a prominent role in an American Administration. | ” |
| —The Carter Administration: Myth and Reality, Excerpted from Radical Priorities, 1981 Noam Chomsky[ | ||
Anthony M. Solomon: former President, Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Ted Sorensen: former special adviser to President Kennedy
Robert Zoellick: President of the World Bank, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, former U.S. Trade Representative
Paul H. O'Neill: former Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush and former chairman of Alcoa
Walter Mondale: former Vice President of the U.S. under Carter
Henry Kissinger: U.S. diplomat, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations; former Chairman of the International Advisory Committee of JP Morgan Chase.
Hank Greenberg: Former chairman and CEO of American International Group (AIG), the world's largest insurance and financial services corporation.
Alan Greenspan: Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve[33]
John Gutfreund: Former CEO of Salomon Brothers
Martin Feldstein: Professor of economics at Harvard University; president and CEO of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984; former director of the Council on Foreign Relations; member of the Bilderberg Group and of the World Economic Forum.
Bill Clinton: Former President of the U.S.
Hillary Rodham Clinton: 67th United States Secretary of State
Dick Cheney: Former Vice President of the U.S.[33]
Warren Christopher: former Secretary of State under Clinton and Deputy Secretary of State under Carter
Jimmy Carter: Former President of the U.S.
George H.W. Bush: Former President of the U.S
Lloyd Bentsen: former US Senator and Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton
- Thomas S. Foley (2001-2008)[20]
- Paul A. Volcker (1991-2001) Honorary and former North American Chairman;[21] Chairman of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board;[22] former Chairman, Board of Governors, U.S. Federal Reserve System [8] from 1979 to 1987; Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Group of Thirty; former Chairman, Wolfensohn & Co., Inc., New York; Frederick H. Schultz Professor Emeritus, International Economic Policy, Princeton University;
- David Rockefeller (1977-91) Founder of the Trilateral Commission and Honorary North American Chairman; Chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank board from 1969 to 1981; Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1970 to 1985, now honorary Chairman; a life member of the Bilderberg Group.[23]
Excerpt 2
How the Bankers Stole Christmas
I hate bankers and so should you. Why? Because bankers steal a little bit of Christmas cheer every year. For the past several
years, bankers have stolen a lot of Christmas cheer. Like the Grinch from Dr. Seuss’s famous children’s tale, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, bankers have hearts two sizes too small, and by means of burglary, they do their best to deprive everyone of Christmas every year. Only unlike the Grinch, despite stealing from people every year, bankers never learn and never reform, they never return to the people the vast amounts of money they stole from them, and they are cold-hearted and arrogant enough to claim that they are doing “God’s work” (as stated by Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein, when in reality, they do much more harm to society as a whole than good. And this makes the majority of bankers worse than the even the loathed Grinch himself.
Since the institution of banking was founded, bankers have been guilty of deceit, fraud and theft. During Biblical times, “Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers [bankers]..And he taught, saying unto them, Is it not written, my house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? But ye have made it a den of thieves.” (Mark 11:15-17)
Fast forward almost a couple thousand years later, and bankers were still committing the same theft. In fact, over a period of eighteen hundred years, bankers learned nothing from being cast out by Jesus from the temples, and they continued to commit such questionable acts of morality that even a man of very questionable character himself showed nothing but contempt for them. Though historians noted that former US President Jackson committed numerous hateful acts against Choctaw, Chikasaw, and Cherokee American Indians, Jackson despised bankers so much, that in front of a delegation of bankers, he stated the following:
“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 breadstuffs 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, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.”
Fast forward another one hundred and eighty years, and we discover that bankers have failed to evolve even a tiny iota from their deceitful nature. When ex-CEO and former US Secretary Henry Paulson lied to the American people and to US Congress by asking for more than $800 billion of funds for the purposes of helping American home owners and then committed the ultimate bait-and-switch fraud by handing this money to his banking friends, he epitomized the very warning Andrew Jackson levied against bankers in the 1800’s: “When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank.” In this case, Paulson acted beyond the normal level of immorality of bankers, and charged the banks’ losses to every single American citizen. Unlike the Grinch, who repented from the error of his ways over a period of a few days, bankers have refused to repent for the unsound monetary system they have created for more than two thousand years!
To understand why Jesus threw bankers out of the temple, why a former governor of the Bank of England stated that banking “was born in sin”, and why Andrew Jackson, a focus of much hatred and contempt among American Indians, viewed bankers as so immoral, that despite his own immense character flaws, he made it his own personal crusade to throw out all bankers from US government, one must understand how bankers continually rob all citizens of their wealth every day. To state that bankers lie, deceive, rob and steal from all citizens every day is not an exaggeration. The means by which they do so today has drastically changed from the means they employed centuries ago, so this is why so few people understand that bankers continually rob them. Most people don’t understand that bankers ensure the continual devaluation of the purchasing power of all money in the system by not only literally creating money out of nothing but also by creating money as debt.
This process, to which they cleverly assign the word “inflation” is in reality a tax that constitutes a direct theft of your savings, and no different than the tax British monarch King George imposed upon the American colonists that triggered the American Revolution. The bankers have only changed the mechanism by which they collect this tax, and the word that they use to describe this mechanism. In America, this hidden tax of inflation, which is a euphemism for the devaluation of the currency that sits in your savings account, is directly responsible for the following situation that Eric Schlosser described in his national bestseller, Fast Food Nation:
“It used to be, even in low income families, that the father worked and the mother stayed home to raise the children. Now it seems that no one’s home and that both parents work just to make ends meet, often holding down two or three jobs. Parents increasingly turn to the school for help, asking teachers to supply discipline and direction.”
The above paragraph described the family life of many families that lived in Middle America almost a decade ago. Due to an unsound monetary system that has led to relentless devaluation of the US dollar, the situation described above will explode in intensity and magnitude over the next five years, and affect everyone in America, no matter your income level and socio-economic status. As the US dollar continues to lose purchasing power, despite a current possible extended rally against the pound and Euro, middle-class America will sink into the ranks of the poor. If the world operated on a sound monetary system, even in low-income families, the mother could still stay home to raise the children. Today, even in middle-class families, thanks to bankers, the mother does not have the option to stay home and raise the children. When the situation of both parents working two or three jobs and their kids attending high school while working 20+ hours a week is still not enough to make ends meet, crime will explode in America during the next five years. It is the critical problems of these very families that the bankers are creating through their monetary policies that will come home to roost in America.
In reality, I don’t hold hatred in my heart for anyone. Christmas is a time for forgiveness and none among us are infallible and none among us are without sin. Yet, to be forgiven, those that continually do wrong must repent, and bankers have yet to do anything that demonstrates that they have even the slightest amount of regret and remorse for the economic upheaval and chaos that they have created throughout the world in recent years. The rich, though they may not care to understand the tale of How the Bankers Stole Christmas now, should make it their prerogative to understand this as soon as possible. Why? The current course the bankers have set us on has ensured that the rich will soon become victims of desperate masses of people in their country that will see a huge degradation in their quality of life due to the recent monetary policies bankers have elected to impose upon their citizens. When large portions of the middle class are destroyed, masses of people that never considered stealing before, will steal and loot due to the simple instinct of survival, and a great battle between “the haves” and the “have nots” will ensue in future years in many developed countries, as crazy as this concept sounds today. Should the people choose to understand "How the Bankers Stole Christmas", the inevitable massive increase in crime that will accompany the sinking of the middle class into poverty can be avoided.
If instead, everyone chooses to buy into the propaganda of the bankers, then this same scenario, as crazy as it sounds today, will come true in the future just as the “crazy” stock market crashes I predicted in 2006 eventually materialized in 2008. And the biggest culprit of this shameful scenario, should it materialize, will embarrassingly be our own refusal to see the truth about how bankers have commandeered today’s “modern” monetary system for their own benefit, and their own benefit only, to the detriment of every single citizen they claim to be helping. If one doubts the enormous reach of banker’s tentacles into governments, then perhaps now is a good time to review former IMF Chief Economist’s Simon Johnson’s brilliant article, “The Quiet Coup”.
Excerpt 3
On September 25th, I wrote:
Paul Volcker and senior Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron both testified to Congress this week that the government is trying to make bailouts for the giant banks permanent.
Writing Wednesday in The Hill, Congressman Brad Sherman pointed out that :
In my opinion, Geithner’s proposal is “TARP on steroids.” Section 1204 of the proposal [the proposal being the "Resolution Authority for Large, Interconnected Financial Companies Act of 2009"] allows the executive branch to use taxpayer money to make loans to, or invest in, the largest financial institutions to avoid a systemic risk to the economy.
Geithner’s proposal reminds me of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the $700 billion Wall Street bailout adopted last year, but the TARP was limited to two years, and to a maximum of $700 billion. Section 1204 is unlimited in dollar amount and is a permanent grant of power to the executive branch. TARP contained some limits on executive compensation and an array of special oversight authorities. Section 1204 contains absolutely no limits on executive compensation and no special oversight.
When I asked Geithner whether he would accept a $1 trillion limit on the new bailout authority (if the executive branch wanted to spend more, it would have to come back to Congress), he rejected a $1 trillion limit, insisting that the executive branch be able to respond without coming back to Congress.
Both TARP and the Treasury proposal have vague provisions under which taxpayers might possibly recover any money lost through a special tax on the financial services industry. Under the Treasury proposal, only the very largest institutions could benefit from a bailout, but the special tax, if ever collected, would fall chiefly on medium-sized institutions.
Thus, the medium-sized institutions will be at a competitive disadvantage for two reasons. First, the largest institutions will be able to borrow money more cheaply because their creditors will believe that if the institution is unable to pay, the taxpayers will. Second, if there ever is a bailout benefitting a very large financial institution, the tax will be imposed on the medium-sized institutions.Sherman is a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee and a certified public accountant, so he has a good nose for analyzing proposed financial regulations.
Last week, Sherman made the following comments to the Washington Independent regarding Congress' proposed bill on the too big to fails:
That is a huge gravy train to the top 20 [financial institutions] because it allows them to borrow money at a lower rate. Think of what this does to moral hazard.
I’m not looking for a TARP on steroids with oversight. I’m looking for an end of TARP.
The House Committee on Financial Services will hold a hearing on the bill tomorrow, with Tim Geithner, Sheila Bair, John C. Dugan (Comptroller of the Currency), Daniel K. Tarullo (Governor, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System), John E. Bowman (Acting Director, Office of Thrift Supervision), Richard Trumka (President, AFLCIO), and others as witnesses.
As the Washington Independent points out, Sherman is going to try to take Tarp off of steroids:
Sherman said he intends to offer a series of amendments addressing the issue during the Financial Services panel’s markup of the bill, which has yet to be scheduled. Included will be a provision to cap the president’s bailout authority at $1 trillion, and another to strip out the resolution authority language entirely. A potential third proposal — to create an oversight panel like that monitoring TARP funds — is one he’s leaning against.
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