Lies of a Century

THE GOLDMAN SACHS CONSPIRACY

„The real menace of our republic is the invisible government, which, like a giant octopus, sprawls its slimy length over our city, state and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses generally referred to as 'international bankers.' This little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually runs our government for their own selfish ends.”

John Francis Hylan (1868 – 1936)

An interview by the BBC in the autumn of 2011 was the cause of much upheaval and outrage in the world of banking and politics.[55]

The TV station questioned the stock trader Alessio Rastani about the economic crisis in Europe. He, amongst other things, said: “Governments cannot solve this crisis.” And then he went on to say something ‘monstrous’: “Not governments, but Goldman Sachs rules the world.” With this statement he breached the unwritten laws of the banking world. Immediately afterwards a campaign of vicious backbiting and slander ensued via the established media, in which the Daily Telegraph particularly excelled. The paper accused him of being an “attention seeker” who only deals in stocks as a hobby.[56]

Goldman Sachs is more than a bank. It is an invisible empire with assets under management of 700 billion, which is more than twice the budget of the nation of France.

The dubious Goldman Sachs activities attracted public attention for the first time during the Abacus scandal in 2007. Abacus was a risky mortgage loans that Goldman Sachs was bundling and selling on to their clients. This maximum risk product was given an AAA rating, as the safest investment product.[57] The scandal was that Goldman Sachs itself speculated on the decline of these papers, thereby betting against their own clients. Half a year later it ended in mass insolvencies of the American property owners and Abacus dropped in value. This resulted in Goldman Sachs losing its investments.

Even worse, in the same year Goldman Sachs was so audacious as to engage in highly speculative trades betting on the insolvency of American households.[58]

In autumn 2008 the situation changed dramatically and it appeared as if the entire system of financial capitalism threatened to collapse. Especially grave was that the strongest competitor of Goldman Sachs, the Lehman Brothers bank, was nearly facing bankruptcy. The American finance minister Hank Paulson refused to help, citing his unwillingness to spend taxpayer money on the rescue of Lehman Brothers as the reason for his decision.

On September 19^th, 2008 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had imposed a ban on naked sales of about 800 financial titles. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were ruined by naked sales, but the SEC did not view this as a cause to react. Unlike than with Goldman; after their own share price came under the same kind of pressures and sank by 20 percent in only three days, the ban on naked sales was lifted by SEC boss Christopher Cox, a former Goldman Sachs employee.

The Goldman Sachs competitors Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were liquidated and Goldman Sachs along with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. left the insolvency massacre on Wall Street victoriously in the autumn of 2008. Unlike its competitors, Goldman Sachs was able to enjoy billions in rescue packages by the Bush administration.

At the same time the largest US insurance company AIG was facing bankruptcy as well. The explosive part is that if AIG had collapsed, Goldman Sachs would have lost about 10 billion Euros.

This sum represents no less than the exact sum of the loan that was granted to the AIG by the former Goldman Sachs boss Hank Paulson himself. He, in his role as finance minister, led secret talks with his former right hand at Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein. Blankfein, by now himself chairman of Goldman Sachs and Finance Minister Hank Paulson made the decision to rescue AIG.

The government, in reality the taxpayer, now accepted the debt as its own and paid for it. Without any losses incurred, Goldman Sachs was returned its 10 billion Euros.[59]

At the end of 2008, just as the banking world found itself in its worst crisis, Goldman Sachs made a profit of 1.5 billion Euros and was able to profit brilliantly from the demise of its main rivals.

When Greece’s entry to the Euro Zone was being discussed during the year 2000 and 2001, the New Yorker banks were immediately at hand. They supported the left of center government of Konstantinos Simitis with the required reduction of his budget deficit. They further re-organized their credit accounting in the dimensions of 15 billion Euros as well as employed a variety of financial sleight of hand trickery to conceal the additional loans from Brussels. In other words they helped Greece to fake their balance sheet.

In doing so, they misled the European Office of Statistics Eurostat in order to hide the real budget deficit only to make it re-appear once Greece was accepted into the Euro Zone.

In well-informed circles it is assumed that Goldman Sachs not only helped Greece, but also Italy to hide parts of its national debt in order to comply with the admission requirements of the Euro Zone. It is alleged to have been Draghi, the current head of the European Central Bank, and in the case of Greece, its Prime Minister Papadimos. In this time frame, the President of the Bilderberger Conference of 2011, EU Commissioner and head of the CFR, Mario Monti, succeeded the former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi in his office.

There is one thing connecting the three men, the common former employment for the investment bank Goldman Sachs and the common goal of an EU fiscal union in which national sovereignty no longer exists.

Mario Draghi for example was at Goldman Sachs (Europe), Vice President and Head of the department that shortly before he was heading it, helped Greece sugarcoat its balance sheet with a financial instrument called Swap[60], in order to conceal its national debt.

In order to reach their goals, Goldman Sachs continued to place its own people in high offices time and time again.

Romano Prodi for example was a consultant at Goldman Sachs, prime minister of Italy and later president of the European Commission.

In that time of cover-up maneuvers by Goldman Sachs, the man who was presented as a beacon of hope for the Greeks by the lobby, Loukas Papadimos, was the governor of the Greek national bank.

The fact that Mario Draghi got the blessing of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) was appointed as Head of the European Central Bank could be seen as the greatest coup of Goldman Sachs in Europe. The entanglement of their interests with politics is quite obvious. Bush’s Finance Minister Hank Paulson as well as Clinton’s Finance Minister Robert Rubin both came from Goldman Sachs. Obama’s Finance Minister Timothy Geithner and his Secretary of Commerce Robert Hormats also belong to the chosen few who at one point used to work for Goldman Sachs. Not to forget that Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank was once a Director at Goldman Sachs.

The former leaders of Goldman Sachs, who are partly to blame for the worst excess in the world of finance, are now appointed to solve the financial crisis. They impose austerity measures on their population that are supposed to be inevitable. One should be allowed to wonder whether they really are the right people to solve the crisis or whether we appointed the arsonists to act as the fire department.

Critics accuse the European lobby network of the US bank Goldman Sachs that it operates like a type of free mason lodge. To varying degrees the new president of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi, Italy’s head of state Mario Monti and Greek’s head of the transitional government Loukas Papadimos are figureheads of this tightly knit network.[61]

Since the establishment of the FED in 1913 governments came and went, Goldman Sachs as one of the co-founders of the FED remained and stands for the best money making machine that has ever come out of global capitalism.

Goldman Sachs is a financial empire on the sunny side that through their limitless greed for profits has turned the world into a giant casino. This even happens in the name of god, as Goldman Sachs head Blankfein phrased it: “I am merely a banker doing god’s work? [62]

Their god seems to be after more and more money. Driven by their insatiable greed for profit, they do business with anyone, no matter whether it is friend or foe.

THE FINANCING OF THE NAZIS

„Profit rules the world”

Aristophanes (some time between 450 and 444 B.C. – 380 B.C.)

When it comes to dealing with one’s own past, Germany is not a contender for first place. In the last ten years you were able to witness that not one day has passed where the media did not in one form or another were talking about the time between 1933 and 1945. One could easily get the impression that the whole of German history took place in those 12 years alone.

It is interesting to note that even the smallest details are reported, but not about how Hitler rose to power and Germany’s arms build-up was financed at the time. The names that we hear in the media are usually limited to German companies like Thyssen, Krupp, Flick, etc. Was the Nazi economic miracle between 1933 and 1939 even possible? In other words the surface is treated to a high gloss polish, but the core of the issue is never ever discussed. In any case it should be obvious that no indebted nation in the world is in the financial position to continue a path of war for very long. Any country intending to go to war needs to turn to international bankers in order to obtain the funds required for such undertakings. This was no less true back then than it is at present.

Due to the Treaty of Versailles and the associated terms imposed on Germany, it was highly indebted and had to pay enormous sums in reparations to its neighbors. In the end this led to the collapse of the German currency and in its last consequence to the chronic inflation in the year 1923. The international bankers fell over themselves to help out by implementing the DAWES Plan[63] and the YOUNG Plan[64] and transferring huge amounts of money to Germany in 1924. Without these loans it would have been impossible for Germany to build up a war machine of such gigantic proportions. Professor Carroll Quigley, historian at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. reported:

„It is notable that this system (The Daves and Young Plans) were implemented by the international bankers and that the lending of these funds to Germany has been extremely profitable.”

In the year 1929 three large corporations on Wall Street took hold of some of the key positions in the German economy. General Motors Corp. bought up German car manufacturer Opel (also known as Vauxhall) in Rüsselsheim, International Telephone & Telegraph Corp. (ITT) bought the German telephone network and General Electrics, which had already made an agreement with AEG in 1922, intensified its activities.

Des Griffin wrote in his book[65]: The highest diplomatic US representative in Hitler Germany after 1933 was ambassador Dodd. On August 15^th, 1936, more than three and a half years after Hitler’s power grab, Dodd reported to US president Roosevelt: “we currently have more than 100 US companies, subsidiaries or co-operation agreements.”

These companies were directly involved in the build-up of the German war machine. In fact, the German subsidiaries Ford and Opel supported Hitler’s war effort with full knowledge and support of their American parent companies and profited from it significantly.[66]

Shortly before the beginning of the war for example, Opel which is a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors, built a new factory in Brandenburg at the Havel river which manufactured the best truck in the world at the time. Without the “Opel-Blitz” the invasions into the East and into Africa would not have been possible. The profits were diverted to their parent company via Switzerland, Portugal and Turkey in the form of foreign currencies, precious metals. During this time the Allied Forces had spared that particular factory.

„When, after landing in Normandy in 1944, American soldiers started to move forward towards the Rhine River, they were astonished to see that the German forces were using the same type of trucks and military vehicles as they did themselves.“[67]

This model of co-operation only lasted up to the point where it became obvious in Jalta that the location would be in the soon to be Soviet-occupied zone. The manufacturing plant was taken out with a very exact targeted air strike.[68]

The well-documented evidence of the fact that American banking and industrial circles played a major role in the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich are not accessible to the public.

One name is inseparably linked to the business activities of the Nazi time – I.G. Farben. It is a corporation that controlled the entire world of chemistry and pharmaceuticals. It was operating in 93 countries. In late 1929 it came to a merger between Standard Oil (Rockefeller’s corporation) and I.G. Farben. Standard Oil signed over 546,000 of his shares to I.G. Farben.

I.G. Farben soon became the largest industrial corporation of Europe and the largest chemical company in the world. Its international connections were quite obvious when taking a look at its board members. There were Max and Paul Warburg[69], who owned large banks in Germany and the USA.

Also on the board was C.E. Mitchell, who became chairman of the ‘Federal Reserve Bank’ and of ‘National City Bank’ as well as H.A. Metz from ‘Bank of Manhattan’. Hermann Schmitz, president of I.G. Farben, at the same time was on the board of Deutsche Bank as well as the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), which was founded in 1930 by Hjalmar Schacht and could be viewed as the central bank of central banks.

Represented at the BIS were mostly eminent Wall Street institutions, among them Rockefeller’s investment bank Chase Manhattan Bank, J.P. Morgan’s investment bank JP Morgan & Co., Clarence Lapowski’s investment bank Dillon, Read & Co. which were united by one thing, a strong interest in dealing with Germany.

The Air Force would not have been able to fly their planes without certain chemical products (e.g. tetraethyl lead) that were only produced by Standard Oil, General Motors and DuPont before then being sold to I.G. Farben.[70]

It was the same with oil. The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on February 11^th, 1999 in its article “Oil for the Führer” that Hitler’s troops could not have been able to occupy France without continuing oil deliveries from America.[71]

As can be seen in the mineral oil statistics of the high command of the Wehrmacht, the US delivered more than a million tonnes of oil to Hitler in 1937, a quarter of Germany’s entire oil imports of during that year alone. How immensely important these deliveries were is revealed by a letter of the Supreme Commander of the German navy Grand Admiral Raeder from June 27^th, 1940: “Without these oil imports neither the navy nor the economy would be in possession of the required oil right now.”[72]

One would have thought that the American oil deliveries had been stopped as soon as the war began, but that was not the case.

In the long classified import overviews of the Third Reich’s authority for oil we do not only see single shipments, but rather a detailed list proving that Germany imported a range of urgently required oil products between September 1939 and the summer of 1949, among them regular gasoline, diesel, heating oil, engine lubricating oil and motor oils.

In May of 1940 of all points in time, while German tanks crossed the border to France, the urgently required motor oil and engine lubricating oil was imported from the United States. As files from the Third Reich’s authority for oil document, 100 percent of the German demand was covered in this way.[73]

The oil deals of the American industry made up part of a cabinet meeting in Washington, in the presence of President Roosevelt and Foreign Minister Hull in 1940.

This is where the then current undersecretary Summer Wells stated that “oil from Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela was being distributed via Spain to Germany” and that “we should not lose our stake in this deal” In September of 1941 the American share of German motor oil imports was at a staggering 94 percent.[74]

This is one factor in how the German war effort was being allowed to literally run like a well-oiled machine for the involved American companies.

A name that comes up in this context, besides Rockefeller, Harriman and the I.G. Farben directors, the bankers Paul and Max Warburg, was that of Senator Prescott Bush, the father of former president George Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush.

Prescott Bush was in business with the German Luftwaffe (Air Force) and continued financial transactions via Union Banking Corporation. In doing so, he violated a law that makes trading with the enemy illegal. He was never charged for this crime. The German industrials Fritz Thyssen and Friedrich Flick conducted their bank transactions through Bush’s Union Bank.[75]

With the support of Prescott Bush and Felix Warburg (banking house Kuhn Loeb and Co.) the later Foreign Minister John Foster Dulles organized the debt reorganization for German companies. That way he made possible the transition to arms manufacturing, for which Bush and Warburg earned enormous sums of money.

As previously mentioned, I.G. Farben was the lynchpin of the business deals that were made with Germany. It is interesting to note that the main manufacturing plants of German defense companies, under the leadership of I.G. Farben, remained intact by almost 80 percent until after the war. It is however very likely that the Allied Forces knew where precisely these manufacturing plants were located. If this has really been the case, the war could have been ended many years earlier by the destruction of these factories through the Allied Forces. This in turn would mean that the profiteers of the war had no interest in a quick end to the war.

Charles Higham, former reporter at the New York Times, in his book “Trading with the enemy” points out the fact that the US government had attempted to cover up the involvement of Prescott Bush and other leading American heads of finance and industry in the support of Hitler.

The government feared that a persecution of these persons “would have made for a public scandal” and “would have demoralized as well as have provoked strikes and perhaps even mutiny among the armed forces”.

Furthermore, the government according to Higham believed that “the prosecution and conviction would have made it impossible for the board members of these companies to support America’s war efforts”[76]

The profits from WWII were not the only thing profitable from the viewpoint of the victorious powers. There was something else, which has long remained in the dark, something that has mesmerized people and put them under a spell through its mystical sheen since the dawn of time: GOLD!