Today an article appeared on Bloomberg entitled “Federal Reserve Seeks to Protect U.S. Bailout Secrets”. The article details that the Fed has asked an appeals court to stop a ruling that is currently attempting to force the revelation of what financial firms that were tittering on the verge of collapse until the bailouts. For a country that prides itself on the idea that markets and capitalism are the cornerstones of patriotism, this is certainly unprecedented; in fact this is part of the most blatant example of lemon socialism in American history. While the corporate fat cats get the sweat wiped from their brow by the government, the rest of us are spoon fed propaganda that capitalism and free markets are the end-all-be-all, the only surefire way to achieve the God-given freedom that the Founding Fathers bestowed upon us. So we wallow contently in the shit-storm known as the rat race and complain about the “Dems” and the “Repubs” bending us over, not questioning the ideology we’ve been raised to believe in like a religion. Right-wing pundits assault the Obama administration, labeling the President elect and his cronies with the new fear-mongering term of “progressives”, which is actually code word for “Communists in American political clothing”. But they don’t look at the facts. They don’t look at who actually profits from this presidency, and when they do, they ignore the implications unless they can be worked into the tapestry of a supposed century old commie plot whose goal is to turn America into a two-class feudal society. I wonder, of course, if these pundits (and you know of who I’m speaking) have ever cracked open Marx’s dusty ol’ Manifesto before peddling this nonsense.
It’s not to be unexpected, though. The New Amerikan Way of Privatizing the Wins and Socializing the Losses (read – socialism for The Rich, capitalism for the poor) benefits exactly the companies and corporate shareholders those run all the mainstream media providers. Wall Street is an incestuous beast, a tangled web of subsidiaries and overlapping board membership and easily circumvented anti-trust laws that would topple like dominos if their cornerstones suddenly disappeared. So logically, the Obama administration is actually a friend to the corporate machine, utilizing what appears at a glance to be underhanded left wing tactics to destroy the capitalist powerbase, but is actually radically different when the curtains are pulled away. To pull the curtain away, we must examine the man who engineered the bailouts under Obama – the Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner.
Timothy Geithner and Barack Obama’s ties go back further than this administration: according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Peter Geithner, the father or Timothy, and Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, met once in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. Dunham had been developing microfinance programs for the Ford Foundation, a project overseen by Peter Geithner, but this might not be anything more important than a curious historical side note. What is important, however, is that at this time a young Timothy Geither, recently graduated from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in 1985, was working at Kissinger Associates, a consulting firm dedicated to providing “strategic advisory and advocacy services to a select group of U.S. and multinational companies.” Kissinger Associates was founded by – you guessed it – former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The firm’s establishment was funded in 1982 by – no surprise here – Goldman Sachs.
Kissinger Associates is an extremely secretive group, rumored to have been involved in both the BCCI scandal and “Iraqgate” scandals, but also has multiple ties to American International Group – a fact that makes it most interesting in this investigation. The chairman and CEO of AIG at the time was Maurice Greenberg, a friend so close of Kissinger that the two conducted business years later with Iran-Contra arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi over UnoCal oil pipelines in Uzbekistan… but best to save that for another article. Maurice Greenberg would hire Kissinger Associates to be the main consultant for AIG. At the same time the Blackstone Group, a private investment banking firm, would also be in business with Kissinger Associates; according to SourceWatch, at some point in the companies’ history AIG acquired a 7% non-voting interest in the company in 1998 for $150 million "and committed to invest $1.2 billion in future Blackstone-sponsored funds".). In 1987 Greenberg appointed Henry Kissinger to the International Advisory Board of AIG.
In 1988 Timothy Geithner joined the U.S. Treasury Department’s International Affairs Division, working at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo before working various Treasury jobs, such as deputy assistant secretary for international monetary and financial policy, and assistant secretary for international affairs before ‘catching his big break’ by becoming Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs under the two men who would later be known as his mentors: former Goldman Sachs chairman/CitiGroup chairman/Clinton National Economic Council director Robert Rubin and future Obama National Economic Council member Lawrence Summers. Geithner would work at the Treasury until 2002, when he became the Senior Fellow in the International Economics department of the Council on the Foreign Relations, while simultaneously working at the International Monetary Fund. At some point he would also join the Trilateral Commission.
If Kissinger Associates is any indication that Timothy Geithner is big on joining secretive organizations, the Trilateral Commission seals the deal. Essentially an off-shoot and counterpart of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission was founded at the behest of then-CFR director David Rockefeller, who wished to establish closer economic cooperation between the United States, Japan and Europe. Joining Rockefeller in this Ford Foundation funded endeavor was Zbigniew Brzezinski (briefly mentioned in the earlier blog post "Profiles in Military Contracting"), who would later be the National Security Advisor for Jimmy Carter and strong Obama supporter. Other founding Trilateralists included Paul Volcker (head of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board) and Alan Greenspan, both of whom were past chairmen of the Federal Reserve.
Since its inception, the Trilateral Commission has counted in its rosters a virtual who’s who of government and business figures, including Carla Hills (briefly mentioned in the previous blog post), who serves on the board of AIG, former President George H.W. Bush, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci of Iran-Contra, Wackenhut and the Carlyle Group, former Vice President Dick Cheney, former President Bill Clinton, as well as Hillary Clinton, Maurice Greenberg and Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor under George H.W. Bush and Vice Chairman of Kissinger Associates Brent Scowcroft, Bush Secretary of Defense and former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz and former Bush Deputy Secretary of Defense and U.S. Trade Representative – and current World Bank president – Robert Zoellick. The Trilateralists played a large role in the Carter administration – Carter himself was a Trilateralist, Carter’s VP Walter Mondale was a Trilateralist, Carter’s White House Advisor on Domestic and Foreign Policy Hedley Donovan was a founding member, Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi was a founding member and Carter’s Deputy Secretary of State (as well as Clinton’s Secretary of State) Warren Christopher was a member.
The same holds true for the Obama administration. A Project Censored article entitled “Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team” points out that “Obama’s appointments [of key players in his administration] encompassed more than 12 percent of Commission’s entire US membership.” Indeed, as noted earlier Timothy Geithner is a member, as is Paul Volcker. But so is UN Ambassador Susan Rice, State Department Envoy and AIG board member Richard Holbrooke (mentioned in previous blog post. There sure is a lot of Trilateralists in the Partnership for a Secure America.), National Security Advisor James L. Jones, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair and Dennis Ross, the special advisor to Hillary Clinton (also a Trilateralist) for the Persian Gulf (read: Iran). Mr. Ross has a most interest set of credentials: he worked under Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon when Wolfowitz was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Carter administration and was accused as being a member of the Israeli lobby by John Mearsheimer in the book The Israel Lobby and the U.S. Foreign Policy. In 1985 he worked with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to create the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which seeks to "to advance a balanced and realistic understanding of American interests in the Middle East." The membership of WINEP reads exactly as you would expect it: Warren Christopher (mentioned above, Trilateralist), Lawrence Eagleburger (assistant to Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration, Trilateralist), Alexander Haig (Reagan Secretary of State, Trilateralist) Henry Kissinger, Max Kampelman (Trilateralist) and Robert MacFarlane (mentioned in previous blog post. Jeez.) Given the heightened state of tension between Israel and Iran right now, I would say that Dennis Ross might not be the best choice of “special advisor” relating to the Middle East.
So let us recap:
- Timothy Geithner worked at Kissinger Associates, a firm founded on a loan from Goldman Sachs that also had numerous ties to American International Group.
- At the Treasury Geithner would be the protégé of two men – one of whom was a former Goldman Sachs employee that worked in the Clinton administration and another than would work in the Obama administration.
- Timothy Geithner is a member of the Trilateral Commission, a quasi-secretive financial organization that lumps a large part of the Obama administration, and ultimately a huge part of the U.S. government, into one group.
Professor Carrol Quigley’s 1966 book Tragedy and Hope claimed to reveal information on a secret organization of arch-capitalists that sought to create a global financial system that would be controlled by few whose ultimate goal would be to completely dominate the political system. While this may sound like a crazy conspiracy theory at first glance, stop and consider the idea of globalization. Capitalism is now an instantaneous process, where fortunes are made and are broken in the blink of an eye – or the click of a mouse. Goods are manufactured by the oppressed and exploited in Third World countries while an ever pervasive ad machine screams to us to buy, buy and buy… all the while a handful get richer, and richer and richer. A handful like American International Group, a handful like Goldman Sachs. They are tittering on the brink, needing to compromise their sacred Free Market by perverting ideas that were designed to destroy them – all the while keeping the American populace subdued with the ideas that Consumption and Hierarchies are the Laws By Which We Must Follow. This is done largely at the expense of the Third World, and all that it has gained is power in both the financial and political realms; realms that in fact are now rapidly one and the same.
Next time we’ll continue looking at Timothy Geithner and then get into the bail out itself.
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