• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 747 0

mess, is a complicated, tangled tale, and I certainly don’t claim to be an expert about it. But you can learn a great deal from some thoughtful reading. Let’s face it, capitalism isn’t always fair. So if you’re looking to bring fairness to life, you have to take steps more toward socialism. Which then causes a conflict of interest, because socialism means you’re going to be even more controlled in your decisionmaking by the Establishment. Then again, is that what’s required to keep an equal balance? Do you have to go that way to ensure that the middle class survives? What I really see leaving is the American Dream. The destruction of the middle class means you’re no longer going to have that dream, which is that a young person can achieve anything if you put your mind to it because the opportunities are there. Now are they still? Yes. But are they more difficult? Yes. I see many more obstacles in the way of the American Dream today, and a great deal of it is caused by greed. It’s understood that a certain amount of wealthy people are going to control the majority of the money, but when it’s moving so drastically that you’ve got 5 percent of the people having 90 percent of the money, that can’t be healthy.

Deregulated “free market” capitalism sure hasn’t benefited the American people. We’ve had a revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, which led to a Wild West mentality on “the Street.” For awhile the whole casino seemed to be doing just fine, but really the financial sector was completely out of control—“running on a perverse set of incentives that made it incredibly profitable to essentially throw caution to the wind and take on incomprehensible amounts of risk.”2 Don’t let them fool you into thinking it was reckless borrowers and subprime loans that built the house of cards. In this chapter, I’m going to particularly zero in on the greed and excesses of two companies—banking giant Goldman Sachs and insurance behemoth American International Group, better known as AIG. They’re atop the pyramid of the “too big to let fail” crowd, and their execs are still getting richer while the home foreclosures increase and the unemployment numbers keep rising.

Until it received the largest government subsidy that any corporation ever has (about $170 billion in bailouts, the tab being picked up by us the taxpayers), AIG was the biggest private insurance company in the world. It had more than 100,000 employees globally and $1 trillion in assets.3 Their history is worth looking into. AIG started out selling insurance to the Chinese in 1919, based in Shanghai where it was then called American Asiatic Underwriters. The company was founded by Cornelius Vander Starr, the uncle of Ken Starr, future special prosecutor of Bill Clinton. Starr moved his headquarters to New York twenty years later, but kept his Asian branch going. Soon after World War II began, General “Wild Bill” Donovan of the OSS started using his contacts to create a deep-cover intel network over there. Files were finally declassified in 2000, showing how the OSS set up an ultra-secret insurance unit through Starr, which perused records on the Japanese to find blueprints of possible targets. As victory against the Nazis approached, U.S. intelligence began examining “ways the Nazis would try to use insurance to hide and launder their assets so they could be used to rebuild the war machine.... Starr sent insurance agents into Asia and Europe even before the bombs stopped falling and built what eventually became AIG, which today has its world headquarters in the same downtown New York building where the tiny OSS unit toiled in the deepest secrecy.”4

After the CIA was founded in 1947, AIG was tied into figures like Paul Helliwell, who ran air transport companies with connections to the drug trade. Helliwell was legal counsel for Starr’s insurance interests.5 Drugs come up again forty years later, when in 1987, AIG made a deal with Goldman Sachs and the Arkansas Development Financial Authority (ADFA) to found an offshore reinsurer in Barbados called Coral Re. The ADFA