American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [100]
“Hank” Greenberg had been appointed as director of AIG’s North American operations in 1962. After Starr died six years later, Greenberg became chairman of AIG, C.V. Starr & Company, and today’s Starr International, which is an offshore company, incorporated in Panama with a Bermuda headquarters, and still the biggest shareholder in AIG.8 Seems rather incestuous, but that’s the way it is. AIG became the biggest foreign insurance company in Japan, and more than one third of its $40 billion in revenues in 1999 “came from the Far East Theatre Starr helped carpet bomb and liberate.”9 Greenberg let AIG be used by the CIA for placing many of its Asian officers, and continued to keep tabs for “the company” on places like China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The company’s massive database in San Francisco was also made available to the CIA. In 1995, Greenberg was one of the candidates to become the next CIA director.10
It’s a small, tight-knit world, and they don’t call AIG’s favorite trading partner “Government Sachs” for nothing. Treasury secretaries under the two previous presidents—Robert Rubin with Clinton and Hank Paulson with Bush-II—went from running Goldman Sachs into the most powerful financial position in the administrations. That’s just for openers. The company pretty much had a lock on high-level jobs at the treasury. Neel Kashkari—pronounced Cash-Carry—started out as a low-level Goldman investment banker, and now runs the bailout under the government Office of Financial Stability. Are we surprised that AIG and Goldman became the biggest beneficiaries in the bailout?
Goldman Sachs’s history has some intrigue in it, too. This company was founded back in 1869 by Marcus Goldman, a German immigrant who slowly built it up with his son-in-law, Samuel Sachs. They made a killing off the 1929 stock market crash, and applied that knowledge later to the dot-com and housing booms. The formula of the most influential investment bank on the planet has been described like this: “Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased.”11
To get a grasp on what’s lately been going on, we also need to take a look at our central bank, otherwise known as the Federal Reserve. The Fed controls our monetary policy. By changing the supply of dollars in circulation, they have influence over interest rates, mortgage payments, whether the financial markets boom or collapse, and basically whether our economy expands or stumbles. But the Fed is only partly an institution of government. The stockholders in a dozen different Federal Reserve banks in different regions of the country are the big private banks.
The Federal Reserve was created by Congress in 1913, after a financial panic that led to a secret meeting at banker J.P. Morgan’s private resort, off the coast of Georgia at a place called Jekyll Island. (I’m not sure if Hyde was present). “Those who attended represented the great financial institutions of Wall Street, and, indirectly, Europe as well. The reason for secrecy was simple. Had it been known that rival factions of the banking community had joined together,