`Let The Big Banks Fail'

(chorus)
Let the Big Banks fail
And put the bankers in jail
It’s time to right the wrong
And not save those who committed fraud

(verse)
Wall Street ripped off investors
And made billions from sub-prime loans
Yet when their housing boom turned to bust
To Washington, the bankers did go.
The big bankers they purchased
The Congress and the White House
So Democrats and Republicans
Are eager to bail them out.

(bridge)
They say they have no money to give welfare for the poor
Yet "Lehman-Goldman Sachs" get $700 billion more
They say they have no money to provide jobs and free health care
Yet AIG and Merrill Lynch are given Corporate Welfare. (chorus)

(additional verses)
If a tenant can’t pay his rent
A landlord will evict
But if a Big Bank can’t pay its debt
Its government will give it cash.
If a worker can’t do her job
She’ll get fired for incompetence
But if a banker wrecks his bank
His government gives him a blank check.(chorus)

If a homeowner can’t pay his mortgage
He’ll lose his home and get foreclosed
But if Wall Street can’t pay off its creditors
It gets another big government loan.
If a store loses its customers
It will soon be forced to close
But if Big Banks steal from consumers
They’re given billions in loans. (bridge) (chorus)

They’re all for a free market
When their profits are rolling in
But once they start losing money
The free market ain’t for them.
If you can’t pay your student debts
You’ll get harassed by their government
Yet when Wall Street banks owe people money
The government lets them off the hook. (chorus)

So if you don’t think it’s democratic
For Wall Street’s government to rule over you
Then just take over CNN
With the help of your labor union.
The bankers’ names might be Pritzker
Or Rubin or J.P. Morgan
Yet they all don’t want regulation
So they can rip off the people again. (chorus)

The "Let The Big Banks Fail" folk song was written in recent months.

To listen to "Let The Big Banks Fail" and other protest folk songs, you might want to check out the Columbia Songs for a Democratic Society music site link at:

http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music )

and at

http://www.mp3.com/artist/bobafeldman/summary/

Treasury Secretary Designate Geithner's Kissinger Associates Connection--Part 1

Between 1986 and 1989, U.S. Treasury Secretary Designate Timothy Geithner was employed at Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger’s Kissinger Associates influence-peddling firm, which also employed George W. Bush’s former special envoy to Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, during the early 1990s. A leading candidate for Commerce Secretary, Bill Richardson, also is a former employee of Kissinger Associates.

An expose, titled “The `Kissinger Affair’: A Look At Henry Kissinger’s Kuwaiti Connection,” which appeared in the March 27, 1991 issue of a Lower East alternative newsweekly Downtown, began with the following quotation from the April 20, 1986 issue of the New York Times Magazine about Kissinger Associates during the years that Treasury Secretary Designate Geithner worked there:

“It is very difficult to pin down what Mr. Kissinger and the others are really doing in the business end of their lives. None will say for attribution who their clients are or discuss the specifics of what they do, although they do talk about their work with the understanding that they not be identified…Kissinger Associates requires a clause in its contracts stating that neither the firm nor its clients will divulge a business connection…”

In 1991, T. Jefferson Cunningham III, according to Moody’s International Manual, was on the board of directors of Treasury Secretary Designate Geithner’s former employer. That same year Kissinger Associates Director Cunningham was also a director of the Midland Bank of Britain and 10.5 percent of Midland Bank’s stock was owned by the government of Kuwait. And coincidentally, Geithner’s former boss at Kissinger Associates, Henry Kissinger, was not reluctant to use his special influence on behalf of his Midland Bank/Kuwaiti government business associates after August 1990 to push for the January 1991 Pentagon high-technology military attack on Iraq that led to thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties.

In the April 20, 1986 New York Times Magazine article, titled “Kissinger Means Business: Corporate America is eagerly seeking Henry Kissinger’s insight and celebrity,” the Times then-national security correspondent, Leslie Gelb, reported that the Midland Bank of Britain was also one of the special influence-purchasing clients of Kissinger Associates that paid Treasury Secretary-Designate Geithner’s former employer “slightly more than $150,000 yearly for varying services.” Gelb also noted that “The other top members of the firm” were “Lieut. General Brent Scowcroft, President Ford’s National Security adviser, and Lawrence S. Eagleburger, who was an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration.”

In the early 1990s, Treasury Secretary-Designate Geithner’s Kissinger Associates colleagues, Scowcroft and Eagleburger, were both high officials in the Bush I Administration. Scowcroft, a former Santa Fe International director who received personal payments from the Kuwaiti government-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) subsidiary in 1984, 1985 and 1986, was Bush I’s national security affairs adviser. And Eagleburger was Bush’s Deputy Secretary of State.

According to a profile of Scowcroft that appeared in the Times on Feb. 21, 1991, it was the presentation of Geithner’s former Kissinger Associates colleague at a National Security Council meeting on Aug. 3, 1990 “that made clear what the stakes were, crystallized people’s thinking and galvanized support for a strong response” to the Iraqi military occupation of Kuwait, which had led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians from either Pentagon military operations or U.S. economic sanctions since January 1991.

Kissinger Associates was established in 1982, four years before Treasury Secretary-Designate Geithner joined the firm, after Henry Kissinger secured a loan from EM Warburg, Pincus & Company, an investment banking firm and when Treasury Secretary-Designate Geithner worked for Kissinger in the late 1980s the Kissinger Associates Manhattan office was located at 350 Park Avenue on the corner of 52nd Street—in the same building as Chase Manhattan Bank’s Commercial Bank of Kuwait subsidiary local office.

The building’s lobby at that time contained a computerized building directory of all the building’s tenants. But, according to New York Times then-national security correspondent Gelb’s April 20, 1986 “Kissinger Means Business” article, “Punch `K’ and you will not find Kissinger Associates, for Henry A. Kissinger still receives threats, so, for security reasons, you have to be invited to learn what floor his firm is on.”

Kissinger Associates also had an office in Washington, D.C. of three researchers and four clerks which was headed by Scowcroft when Treasury Secretary-Designate Geithner worked for the firm. According to Times correspondent Gelb, only about 25 people then worked in both the Manhattan and Washington, D.C. offices of Kissinger Associates, “including Mr. Kissinger’s bodyguards” and Geithner.

In 1991 a Kissinger Associates spokesperson told me in a telephone interview that Geithner’s 1980s employer was “an international consulting firm.” But, according to the April 20,1986 New York Times Magazine article, “Kissinger Means Business,” although “these consultants are not lobbyists in the strict sense of the word,” some of them “are involved in selling their influence at home and almost all do so abroad.” (end of part 1)

Oswald-CIA Connection?

In Chapter 1 of the Report of the President’s Commission On The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, titled “Summary and Conclusions,” the Warren Commission stated that “All of the evidence before the Commission established that there was nothing to support the speculation that Oswald was an agent, employee, or informant of the FBI, the CIA, or any other government agency.”

Yet in a 1990 book Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence, a Southeastern Massachusetts University Professor of Political Science, Philip Melanson, stated the following:

“Lee Harvey Oswald spent nearly all of his adult life working for U.S. intelligence—most likely for the CIA—as agent-provocateur. He did so in both the domestic and international arenas, right up to his involvement in the assassination.

“Oswald is enigmatic partly because he spent so much of his life in the shadowy, compartmentalized world of U.S. intelligence…He maintained a façade of leftism…In contrast, his associations and contacts were decidedly right-wing and anti-communist…False information was purposely created about Oswald…

“This analysis will reach a conclusion about a conspiracy in John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It will demonstrate that Oswald’s movements were still being choreographed by his handlers in U.S. intelligence—however fringe or renegade they may have been—at the time of the assassination…Persons who knew his background were fabricating…evidence of his guilt in the assassination. Such activity…constitutes conspiracy…

“In Oswald’s case, the conclusion that he was a U.S. intelligence agent is not a footnote to the crime of the century but rather a window onto the conspiracy behind President John F. Kennedy’s assassination…”

Professor Melanson also asserted in 1990 that “The CIA has continuously obstructed pursuit of the truth about Oswald” and “The mainstream media remains captive to decades of secrecy and disinformation regarding Oswald; much of it emanating from the CIA.” Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence noted that “Intimations by CIA officers that the only missing piece of the Oswald puzzle and the only valid question of conspiracy related to the Soviet Union was endorsed on Jan. 7 1990 by the New York Times..”

(Downtown 6/23/93)

U.S. Attorney-General Designate Holder's Law Firm & "The Superior Bank Scandal"

U.S. Attorney-General Designate and Columbia University Trustee Eric Holder became a law partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm of Covington & Burling after serving as a Deputy Attorney General in the Democratic Clinton Administration until 2001. (See the following link: http://www.cov.com/eholder/ )

But as the Covington & Burling web site at http://www.cov.com/practice/white_collar_and_investigations/financial_insitutions_investigations/notes, Holder's law firm "represented Coast-to-Coast Financial Corporation in government inquiries and civil litigation regarding the failure of its subsidiary, Superior Bank, fsb, the largest bank failure in recent years."

Coincidentally, the 2008 Obama presidential campaign's national finance Chair, Penny Pritzker, sat on the board of the Coast-to-Coast Financial Corporation whose special corporate interests U.S. Attorney-General Designate Holder's law firm represented before U.S. government regulators and in federal court.

As the Feb. 6, 2002 Office of Inspector General's report noted:

"Superior was orginally established in 1988 when the Pritzker and Dworman interests acquired Lyons Savings Bank...The corporate structure consisted of Superior being wholly-owned by Coast-to-Coast Financial Corporation (CCFC), the holding company, with the Pritzker and Dworman interests each owning 50 percent of the holding company..."

Yet the Office of Inspector General's Feb. 6, 2002 report also observed:

"Oftentimes the line between poor business judgment and fraud and abuse is difficult to draw. Nevertheless, based on our review of the failure of Superior Bank it appears that some of the decisions made by Superior management rise to the level of insider abuse...

"As early as 1996, Superior submitted Thrift Financial Reports that were inaccurate...

"Questionable management practices were evident at Superior for many years...

"...Examiners discovered that during the fourth calendar quarter of 2000 Superior sold loans at fixed prices to Coast-to-Coast Financial Corporation. This transaction violates various federal regulations by selling assets to an affiliate at a price less than fair market value..."

Bank Failures And Presidential Transitions

During periods of U.S. Establishment presidential transitions in the past, U.S. commercial banks have sometimes failed. Presidential Transitions by Laurin Henry described what happened after the 1932 presidential election:

“In the final months of President Hoover’s term, the nation reached the bottom of the depression. Financial panic swept the country and paralyzed most of the banking system…

“In January 1933…a new wave of closings began. Failures led to runs and more failures. As fear spread, people stopped putting money in banks…

“In early February 1933, the situation became acute in Michigan, where about 200 banks had failed in the previous month. Two of the largest institutions in Detroit were in serious trouble…On February 14 the governor of Michigan declared a `banking holiday’…The Michigan closing shocked the business world, and panic ensued elsewhere, leading to more closings. By March 2, banking holidays had been declared in several more states…But as the reports of the day’s banking transactions began to come in during the afternoon, it became clear that the downward slide was out of control. The big New York and Chicago banks were about at the end of their rope.”

(Downtown 11/18/92)

Repressing Journalists In Africa Historically

Since events in much of Africa usually haven’t gotten much Big Media coverage, historically, many people in the U.S.A. may not be too familiar with the way some African journalists were treated in the 1990s by some governments in Africa. But in an article titled “The Press Versus The Law In Africa,” which appeared in the May 1993 issue of its Censorship News publication, the London-based Article 19 human rights organization reported the following:

“As the world marks Press Freedom Day on May 3, governments throughout Africa continue to employ direct repression to censor their independent critics…Janvier Africa, a Rwandese journalist, has been detained since September 1992, apparently for identifying security officials responsible for political killings. Another journalist, Stration Byabagambe, was murdered by a para-military death squad in October 1992.

“In March 1993 more than 30 security agents invaded the offices of a Nigerian magazine, The News, and seized 30,000 copies which were due for sale the following day…Earlier the same month security officials closed down the Kaduna-based newspaper, The Reporter, and detained its editor, Mallam Hayatu…

“A journalist in Siera Leone, Roy Stevens, the former editor of The Chronicle, has been detained without charge since July 1992…

“Since presidential elections in September 1992, eleven independent publications in Cameroon have been suspended…

“Thirteen journalists currently face charges of sedition in Kenya. They include Pius Nyamora, editor of Society magazine, which has been repeatedly seized, Njehu Gatabaki, editor of Finance, who was held for 23 days in February 1993, and two editors of The Watchman charged in February with inciting `hate, contempt and dissatisfaction’ towards the President. On April 8, 1993 a group of more than 20 men identifying themselves as police raided the offices of Finance, armed with pistols, swords, knives, whips, axes, chisels and ropes. They seriously injured the computer operator, destroyed the computer and stole documents and cash.

“On April 15, 1993, members of the Togolese presidential escort raided the printing planat of the independent newspaper, La Tribune des Democrates, beating one of the printers who was later taken away by the police. Earlier the same day members of the presidential escort had stopped the paper’s main distributor from collecting his copies and abducted five vendors. In February, opposition journalist Leopold Ayiui was shot by unidentified assailants and went into a coma…

“…In Angola, South Africa, Liberaia, Somalia, Chad and elsewhere journalists continue to operate under the most extreme conditions of physical danger.”

(Downtown 6/23/93)

Next: Bank Failures And Presidential Transitions

Secrecy And The U.S. Super-Rich

Many super-rich individuals are careful to keep a low-profile in the United States. As The Founding Fortunes book noted:

“Many wealthy individuals have chosen to lead lives of deliberate obscurity. They attempt to conceal their family ties and the extent of their wealth from everyone except other family members, close friends, and a few trusted business associates. With only a few exceptions, most of the members of the richest families in America are entirely unknown to the public at large…The scholar and the layman alike are often misled by news accounts that fail to disclose the true extent of inheritance within wealthy families…The major cause of such journalistic omissions is the financial secrecy maintained by almost all corporate rich families…Very little is known with certainty about most corporate rich families or their fortunes. The reason of course, is that the members of these families want all the advantages of being rich without any of the disadvantages of being famous. As a rule, the members of wealthy capitalist families refuse to divulge even the most rudimentary details of their wealth. In order to maintain their anonymity, the members of corporate rich families typically refuse to disclose even basic biographical information about themselves. Many of the richest Americans are not listed in Who’s Who In America, simply because they refuse to provide the editors of this directory with any biographical information. Some of the wealthiest families in America have achieved almost complete anonymity, despite the fact that they exercise enormous power.”

(Downtown 3/17/93)

Next: Repressing Journalists In Africa Historically