Larry Summers and the Secret "End-Game" Memo - By Greg Palast [View all]

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Larry Summers
and the Secret "End-Game" Memo

Thursday, August 22, 2013
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine


When a little birdie dropped the End Game memo through my window, its content was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn't believe it.

The Memo http://www.gregpalast.com//vulturespicnic/pages/filecabinet/chapter12/Geithner_Summers%20Memo.pdf confirmed every conspiracy freak's fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3% unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.


The Treasury official playing the bankers' secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama's leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world's central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn't be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world.

The memo is authentic.

http://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo/

To get that confirmation, I would have to fly to Geneva and wangle a meeting with the Secretary General of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy. I did. Lamy, the Generalissimo of Globalization, told me,

"The WTO was not created as some dark cabal of multinationals secretly cooking plots against the people…. We don't have cigar-smoking, rich, crazy bankers negotiating."

Then I showed him the memo.


It begins with Summers’ flunky, Timothy Geithner, reminding his boss to call the then most powerful CEOs on the planet and get them to order their lobbyist armies to march:

"As we enter the end-game of the WTO financial services negotiations, I believe it would be a good idea for you to touch base with the CEOs…."

To avoid Summers having to call his office to get the phone numbers (which, under US law, would have to appear on public logs), Geithner listed their private lines. And here they are:

Goldman Sachs: John Corzine [phone]
Merrill Lynch: David Kamanski [phone]
Bank of America, David Coulter [phone]
Citibank: John Reed [phone]
Chase Manhattan: Walter Shipley [phone]

Lamy was right: They don't smoke cigars. Go ahead and dial them. I did, and sure enough, got a cheery personal hello from Reed–cheery until I revealed I wasn't Larry Summers. (Note: The other numbers were swiftly disconnected. And Corzine can't be reached while he faces criminal charges.)

It's not the little cabal of confabs held by Summers and the banksters that's so troubling. The horror is in the purpose of the "end game" itself.

more:
http://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo/