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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMaking the World Safe for Banksters: Syria in the Cross-hairs
Advocates of public banking--please take note
http://www.nationofchange.org/making-world-safe-banksters-syria-cross-hairs-1378476446
In an August 2013 article titled Larry Summers and the Secret End-game Memo, Greg Palast posted evidence of a secret late-1990s plan devised by Wall Street and U.S. Treasury officials to open banking to the lucrative derivatives business. To pull this off required the relaxation of banking regulations not just in the US but globally. The vehicle to be used was the Financial Services Agreement of the World Trade Organization.
The end-game would require not just coercing support among WTO members but taking down those countries refusing to join. Some key countries remained holdouts from the WTO, including Iraq, Libya, Iran and Syria. In these Islamic countries, banks are largely state-owned; and usury charging rent for the use of money is viewed as a sin, if not a crime. That puts them at odds with the Western model of rent extraction by private middlemen. Publicly-owned banks are also a threat to the mushrooming derivatives business, since governments with their own banks dont need interest rate swaps, credit default swaps, or investment-grade ratings by private rating agencies in order to finance their operations.
The end-game would require not just coercing support among WTO members but taking down those countries refusing to join. Some key countries remained holdouts from the WTO, including Iraq, Libya, Iran and Syria. In these Islamic countries, banks are largely state-owned; and usury charging rent for the use of money is viewed as a sin, if not a crime. That puts them at odds with the Western model of rent extraction by private middlemen. Publicly-owned banks are also a threat to the mushrooming derivatives business, since governments with their own banks dont need interest rate swaps, credit default swaps, or investment-grade ratings by private rating agencies in order to finance their operations.
Bank deregulation proceeded according to plan, and the government-sanctioned and -nurtured derivatives business mushroomed into a $700-plus trillion pyramid scheme. Highly leveraged, completely unregulated, and dangerously unsustainable, it collapsed in 2008 when investment bank Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, taking a large segment of the global economy with it. The countries that managed to escape were those sustained by public banking models outside the international banking net.
These countries were not all Islamic. Forty percent of banks globally are publicly-owned. They are largely in the BRIC countriesBrazil, Russia, India and Chinawhich house forty percent of the global population. They also escaped the 2008 credit crisis, but they at least made a show of conforming to Western banking rules. This was not true of the rogue Islamic nations, where usury was forbidden by Islamic teaching. To make the world safe for usury, these rogue states had to be silenced by other means. Having failed to succumb to economic coercion, they wound up in the crosshairs of the powerful US military.
bhikkhu
(10,715 posts)They had applied to begin the membership process in 2001. The Obama administration removed the US objection in 2010, and Syria was in the process of joining. I'm not sure how that fits in with the OP's narrative.
...and on edit, just another note: Brazil was one of the founding members, and the Brazilian ambassador is currently the president of the WTO.