Larry Buttrose - November 20, 2008

AS an exhausted world rides the downs and ups of the beast dubbed the global financial crisis, US President George W. Bush insists it does not represent the fundamental failure of the free market system.

“It would a terrible mistake to allow a few months of crisis to undermine 60 years of success,” he said before last weekend’s G20 meeting. “The crisis was not a failure of the free market system and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system.”

But if the crisis has not been caused by the failure of the system, what has caused it? Bush may have suggested “unsustainable lending practices”, but they are part and parcel of the system. He may have muttered “lack of proper regulatory oversight”, but he and his neo-con fellow travellers have pooh-poohed that since they were in their ideological nappies back at Skull and Bones, the elite secret society at Yale University. In their end-of-meeting communique, the G20 leaders did nominate causes, noting “market participants sought higher yields without an adequate appreciation of the risks and failed to exercise proper due diligence … weak underwriting standards, unsound risk management practices … Policymakers, regulators and supervisors, in some advanced countries, did not adequately appreciate and address the risks.”

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Posted by Lew Rockwell at October 15, 2008 09:41 AM

Writes Charles Burris:

Novelist and political satirist Christopher T. Buckley, Skull and Bones, Yale 1975, the son of the late William F. Buckley Jr., Skull and Bones, Yale 1950, novelist and founding editor of the Central Intelligence Agency’s political humor magazine, National Review, has endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Barack H. Obama and has subsequently left the publication his father began. Buckley cited his colleague, Cato Institute comedian P. J. O’Rourke, a founder of the National Lampoon, one-time rival publication to National Review, in explaining his reasons for the break with his family’s tradition of Republican endorsements. One wonders how this O’Rourke reference will sit with GOP comedy czars, the Koch brothers, the kings of beltway slapstick economics.

Buckley was the chief speech writer for former CIA director George H. W. Bush, Skull and Bones, Yale 1948, while Bush was vice president under Ronald W. Reagan, former TV host of Death Valley Days. He is married to Lucy S. Gregg Buckley, former State Department reports officer and daughter of thirty-one year CIA veteran Donald P. Gregg, who served as national security advisor to Bush during the Iran-Contra Scandal.

On exiting the Republican Party and the humor magazine his CIA agent father founded, Buckley paraphrased Reagan’s famous quip: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The Party left me.” The star of Brother Rat could not have said it better.

F. William Engdahl - September 30, 2008

The unexpected rejection by the US Congress of the Bush Administration financial rescue plan, TARP on September 29 has opened up the spectre for the first time of a 1931-style domino wave of worldwide bank failures. That is already underway across the US banking spectrum with the failure, nationalization or forced liquidation in the past two weeks of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, of the giant Washington Mutual mortgage lender, of the nation’s fourth largest deposit bank, Wachovia. That was on top of a wave of smaller bank failures that began with IndyMac in the spring. For some it is appealing and more simple to grasp the magnitude of these titanic events in the US-centered financial world by assuming it is all part of a pre-planned grand conspiracy by the Money Masters, what in the 1920s in the USA was termed the Money Trust, to control the entire financial world.

As the details of the present crisis reveal, there are huge ideological fault lines making for chaos and a potential meltdown of the Laissez Faire financial system. That present system, which was built on the back of Wall Street financial and banking deregulation since 1987 when Alan Greenspan, a devout follower and close friend of radical individualist Ayn Rand, became Wall Street’s man at the Federal Reserve for almost 19 years, is over now with the failure of the Henry Paulson $700 billion bailout scheme. Governments worldwide now face no alternative but to begin the painful process of putting the financial genie back in the bottle and re-regulating an out-of-control financial system. The failure of the UK Government and the US Government to address that fundamental issue is behind the present crisis of confidence.

A brief look at history

The Great Depression in Germany in 1931 began with a seemingly minor event—the collapse of a bank in Vienna, Creditanstalt, that May. For readers interested in more on the remarkable parallels between that crisis and that of today, I recommend the treatment in my earlier volume, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.

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Deanna Spingola | 2008-09-29 - The Power Elite prototype, in most nations, reveals their consistent goal of depopulating the earth (to 500 million) and seizing all resources. “Those nations who ignore history are doomed to repeat its tragedies.” Or, those U.S. citizens who ignore readily-available history are doomed to suffer the consequences of their deception and ignorance.

Conspiracy Archive: The Power Elite Playbook, Burn All, Steal All, Kill All!

Ben Goldby - Sep. 17th

In the plush grounds of the prestigious Yale University in Connecticut a grim, grey building known as “the tomb” sits amid the affluence and elegance of America’s most illustrious law school.

What lurks behind the imposing entrance to the spooky cavern is a mystery to all but the chosen few who are initiated each year into the ultra-secretive Skull & Bones society.

The fraternity, established in the early 1830s and modelled on German university sects, counts myriad Senators, CIA staff and state department diplomats amongst its membership.

It has also nurtured three US Presidents, William Taft, George Bush Snr and George W Bush, as well as the current President’s 2004 democratic opponent John Kerry.

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