American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [6]
Now, thanks to those same Bush people, our economy has gone into a free fall and we’re in the biggest crisis of that sort since the Great Depression. Is it a stretch to include how this came about in a book on conspiracies? I don’t think so. Something definitely smells about how Bush Treasury secretary Henry Paulson ended up making Goldman Sachs—the company he served as CEO until 2006—the dominant player among investment bankers through the bailout. Then there’s the role of the New York Fed under Timothy Geithner (now Obama’s treasury secretary) when it came to loaning AIG billions to pay back certain “special” creditors. The company deemed “too big to fail” is, if truth be known, rotten to the core—and with longstanding ties to the CIA.
The simple fact is, for 20 years Wall Street was run by shady dealers who pushed the laws to their limits and then flouted them openly until they became blurred beyond any possibility of enforcement. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the government agency set up to regulate our capital markets, ended up totally captured by the financial elites. And the Federal Reserve that’s supposed to safeguard our currency? Nothing but accomplices in the biggest swindle of all time! This is, to my thinking, about as big a conspiracy as you can imagine—and one with deep historical roots that need to be dug up and exposed.
We’ve got a Clean Air Act, how about a Clear-the-Air Act that gives us a fighting chance to restore the republic and the ideals we once stood for? In the concluding chapter of this book, I want to talk about my biggest fear—that certain people may be just waiting in the wings for enough disgruntled hungry citizens to rise up, so the real crackdown can begin. I’m sure that’s not what President Obama wants to do, and I hope he’s able to set us back on course, but the legal groundwork was laid under Bush for a whole new ball game. In fact, ten months before 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld approved an updated version of the army’s so-called Continuity of Government plan—with ways and means to suspend the Constitution in the event of civil unrest. Secret memos drafted by Bush’s team would allow a president to send the military to wage war against American citizens; to drag people from their homes and, without trial, hold them at some Guantánamo-type facility indefinitely. Basically, to kiss the Bill of Rights goodbye.
So brace yourselves, folks. Even with a change of administration for the better, we’re not out of the woods. Like the poet Robert Frost once wrote, “The woods are dreary, dark and deep.” And we’d better be prepared for a rough ride through the wilderness that’s been closing in around us. That’s why I’m putting together this book. We need to understand where we’ve been—and it’s not a pretty picture—in order to know where we need to go.
When some people refer to me as a conspiracy theorist, I respond laughingly and say, “Well, the government is, too.” For the most part, they’ve never proven any of their “theories.” Right now I’m a skeptic about anything I read officially from the government. They don’t tell the whole truth. They often seem to have an entirely different agenda. That’s disheartening, to realize that what you read in the newspapers and the history books may not be accurate. I think the other side of the story needs to be published somewhere. And whether or not people believe it, at least