Who Killed the Federal Stimulus?

The Letter




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Please observe that the above faxed letter is addressed solely to the senate majority leader and speaker of the house. This premier group, the Bretton Woods Committee, doesn't bother with the lesser people, such as individual congressional critters.

Also, please note in the second and third paragraphs how they urge congress to kill the "Buy American" clause in the federal economic stimulus plan.

They were quite successful in effectively killing it, although the media, including the Bretton Woods Committee, reported that it was simply "watered down." (More on that later.)

And who is the Bretton Woods Committee?

Officially, they are an economics group promoting widespread knowledge of the IMF and World Bank.

In actuality, they are the American-based, international lobbyist group for the ultra-rich. (Please note the emphasis on "international.")

And why are they against the "Buy American" provision? Because the majority of goods imported to America from foreign factories and production centers, are multinational products originating from China - and elsewhere - so the members of the Bretton Woods Committee don't wish anything nor anyone to interfere with their colossal profits and profit margins!

Following that faxed letter to the senate majority leader and house speaker, was seventeen pages listing the BWC's membership. These members are international in scope, and those in the USA are spread among the top financial institutions, academia, GSE's, the elite law firms, and a variety of seemingly innocuous foundations and similar organizations.

Their membership includes the likes of David Rockefeller, Peter G. Peterson, James Baker III, Madeleine Albright, Spencer Abraham (a founding member of the neocon Federalist Society and former secretary of the Department of Energy under the Bush administration), C. Fred Bergsten (director of the Peterson Institute), Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Soros.

The financial institutions their members represent range from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and A.I.G. (remember them?) to Bank De France, Central Bank of Jordan, Deutsche Bank, European Central Bank and Bank for International Settlements (BIS). They include the private equity firms of the Blackstone Group, KKR, Citadel Investment Group as well as Halliburton, McKinsey Global Institute, Sallie Mae, Freddie Mac, Pfizer and the American Banker Association.

Interestingly, the BWC's letter is dated February 11, 2009, yet in their newsletter they claim the "Buy American" provision has been watered down by February 4, 2009. (Please note the verbiage located in the boxed area below.)




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This is from their quarterly newsletter, dated Winter 2009, Volume 4, Issue 1.

Perhaps they future-dated their fax, or perhaps the "watering down" wasn't sufficient, so a further missive was required?

Admittingly, without President Obama there would be no economic stimulus, and if the republicans were in control, there would be absolutely no stimulus of any kind, and they would have stopped referring to the people as citizens, and probably begun calling them serfs and peasants.

But the Chinese targeted their stimulus program solely to their domestic market, and thusly it was far more successful than the American economic stimulus. True, it helped keep many teachers and municipal workers on the payroll; a number of infrastructure/construction projects were realized -- but still, these were temporary fixes to an ongoing problem.

And had the "Buy American" provision been fully realized, the federal stimulus program should have been at least one thousand times more successful!






The Coincidence



So an international lobbyist group for the ultra-rich is deciding congressional legislation. Now if that isn't curious enough, consider their address below:



The Bretton Woods Committee All Rights Reserved :: 1726 M Street NW Suite 200 :: Washington, DC 20036 :: (202) 331-1616 :: Fax: (202) 785-9423

Now there is another international forum of financiers, established by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1978 called the Group of Thirty, or G30.

Please note the G30's address below:



The Group of Thirty • 1726 M Street, NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20036 USA • Phone : 202-331-2472 • Fax: 202-785-9423 • E-mail: info@group30.org

Curiousier and curiousier; the Bretton Woods Committee and that group of international financiers, the G30, both have the same exact office address and same exact fax numbers!!!!

So the letter which killed the "Buy American" provision originated from the address and fax used by both the Group of Thirty and the Bretton Woods Committee.

It is interesting to also take note that some of the members of the Group of Thirty also belong to either the Bretton Woods Committee or the Peterson Institute.

Also, please take note that a number of the members of the Bretton Woods Committee are either with the Obama Administration, or the previous presidential administrations of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon.

[SIDEBAR ON THE G30: Some historical background is in order regarding the Group of Thirty and structured finance. Back in the early '90s, the G30 communicated at some length with JP Morgan Chase on the subject of credit derivatives. After some discussion, the G30 formed a Global Derivatives Study Group and issued a series of reports. In one of these reports, the G30 both urged the widespread adoption of credit derivatives as well as warned of the necessity of removing "legal risk" -- a most crucial factor.

In the ensuing years, legal risk was indeed removed. And what outcomes derived from this?

In the aftermath of the S&L meltdown back in the '80s, approximately 1,000 bankers ended up going to jail.

In the aftermath of this global economic meltdown, which was at least one thousand-fold worse, nobody has gone to jail!

(The Bernie Madoff situation, while involving some structured finance deals, was primarily a straight forward Ponzi and pyramid scheme which burned anyone and everyone. It is not even a miniscule subset of the present meltdown.)

This removal of "legal risk" coincided with the IMF's and World Bank's urging and promoting a number of countries to adopt laws allowing for public-private partnerships - which have underlying structured financing, i.e., securitizations/credit derivatives - thereby removing legal risk in that arena. Ref: Please see my previous posts on public-private partnerships.]



The Conclusion

It would appear the USA might not be a sovereign nation after all?





Political Reading Recommendation

If you have a brief moment, the post at New Economic Perspectives site is well worth reading and so very analytically intelligent in nature.



Reading Recommendation

For fans of mystery and suspense, Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest is highly recommended.

This is the final book in Stieg's internationally-acclaimed, "Millennium Trilogy" (Millennium being the investigative journalism magazine which serves as the backdrop for his three novels).

The first two suspense novels in this trilogy, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and The Girl Who Played With Fire, are also highly recommended, and the suggested process is to begin with these, but the third by itself is still excellent!

Mr. Larsson, who most unfortunately died at the age of 50 shortly after submitting this trilogy for publication, created a fictional heroine, Lisbeth Salander, of a unique personality and super-hacker skills with a Goth Punk aura, who serves as a veritable deus ex machina in this enervating mystery series.

And for those with a social conscience, Stieg Larsson wove an overall architecture of crimes and international crimes against women, aided and abetted by The State, with the third installment serving as the grand finale tying up his fictional version of justice.


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Notes

Bretton Woods Committee letter to congress, last accessed on April or May of 2009 (no longer online for some peculiar reason?):
http://www.brettonwoods.org/uploads/pages/224/Brettonwoods%20et%20al%20-...

BWC Quarterly Newsletter, Winter 2009, Volume 4, Issue 1 (Also difficult to come by, had to find a Russian site to retrieve it?)
http://www.mse-msu.ru/doc/BWC_Winter2009.pdf

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Comments

WOW!

And....Keynesian stimulus formula and multipliers fall apart when one does not have the conditions that all government spending be kept within that domestic economy from where it originates. And of course that doesn't make any sense to award government contracts to foreign corporations or ship funds offshore to China because of course all one will do is stimulate the Chinese economy, the German economy. It's insult to injury because those are our tax dollars!

Great find on the letter. Also we should note the IMF is busy demanding nations strip what is left of their social safety nets and believe this or not, the Obama administration is entertaining the idea of ....drum roll please, privatizing social security, benefit reduction (the attack of the U.S. middle class by dismantling social security has been on these same cat's radar for years)...and which age group do they plan to start with? The very age group which was denied traditional pensions and had crappy empty, depleted 401ks put in their place.

On the fiction read, well, not exactly economics, so assuredly outside the purview of this site, but on the other hand, I just watched the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on DVD and it was quite awesome (in Swedish, subtitles), for your classic sicko/mystery/violence type stuff.

Shame we cannot get a blockbuster movie which makes people realize what is going on economically is about as bad. The public will watch crime shows, we're fed crime shows out the wazoo, but we cannot even get the cable news people to report, or if report, accurately report, what is going on in the economy and it equates to economic genocide of the U.S. middle class in my view.

Thanks, but it's that last book....

...which really makes the complete trilogy worthwhile.

Stieg entertains the fantasy that there are still good people in high places; something we simply can't fathom in the USA, where only one actual democrat still exists in the US Senate (Russ Feingold, D-WI).

Imagine, back in the aftermath of the S&L meltdown in the '80s (where the term "creative accounting" first originated), 1,000 bankers went to jail.

Today, only Bradley Birkenfeld, attempted whistleblower from UBS, goes to jail for trying to do the right thing.

Unfrigging believable! And the recent Ms. Shirley Sherrod debacle, where the maligned and beleaguered Ms. Sherrod is lambasted in the American Non-Media, obscuring the more important story:

that Obama's Justice Department has dismissed that investigation into the illegal firing of those federal prosecutors, for purely political reasons, during the Bush Administration.

Bradley Birkenfeld

I know nothing about this story. I think the entire thing, the fact GS was wrist slapped, AIG has no criminal prosecution, BoA was wrist slapped..
I mean the consequences are even less than during the dot con crash, accounting scandals, Enron thing...and it's like no one notices today's stuff is directly an extension of those very accounting scandals and methods used! It's bullshit, which is why I'm writing up the post titles the way I am on those press releases as best I can...
it's clear, as long as you pay your "campaign contributions" and know a few people, you can get away with anything in this country, even causing a global financial collapse and sucking all of the money out of an entire nation, putting them in hock, not up to their asses, but buried 6 feet under in debt.

As far as the Shirley Sherrod, it's just YAD, yet another distraction to avoid the real facts and news. We get these almost every day, shoved through the MSM machine, the 24 hour "talking point" that might stretch out to 48, depending on what they do not want the American people to read about.

So, you found the real story they want no attention paid to, the refusal to investigate the political firing of prosecutors, no surprise there.

I've got one, on the "immigration" front, you'll see just pushed to the top of the headlines some crap about "racist xenophobe discrimination" whatever buzz sound byte, yet when an illegal rapes and murders a kid, was caught 5 times border hopping, lives in a "sanctuary city" and was released repeatedly....never gets even a mention in the MSM. I mean think what you will about the entire issue, but that's just where it becomes really obvious to me that the MSM is completely controlled, played, timed, monitored...

I'll bet David Axelrod stays clued to Google trends graphs, timing every damn "media story" obsessively.

From the beginning it's all talk, little walk.

On the book, I'll check it out. I just rented the DVD two days ago, not usually into fiction much, has to be the bomb for me to read it.

These are the very people

The ones listed who should be given a cart ride to people's justice, a la lanterne. though I don't see such a thing such a thing happening for two generations at least.
I'm sorry this isn't about economics, it's about anger and impotence.

Sanctuary Cities

Arizona 1070 was aimed squarely at the sanctuary cities, according to its authors. For that reason, it is constitutional in the sense of devolution of power from federal to state to city. The State would not let the open border crowd supersede State Law with cockamamy local Sanctuary Cities.

A conservative SCOTUS will also get the probable cause piece of the law designed to let cops stop somebody on a non-profiling basis (tail light, speeding, etc, etc).

My favorite side of the Arizona story on immigration is the part about the Hokam Odam native Americans who are forced to defend their tribal lands against the Mexican Cartel. Riddle me about the White Racism on the part of native Americans.

Burton Leed

this is why this topic is ridiculous

They use the race card at almost every sentence to avoid the real issue of are you going to control your work force and keep it all legal or not? If you don't, yes you're going to get wage repression, a large underground economy, overpopulation and quite the mess.

Wish it was different, but that's the way migration flows work by labor econ....but getting those facts out there is impossible.

The real agenda is to lower wages, weaken workers, destroy middle classes and commit global labor arbitrage. The answer is to raise wages around the globe and give people, around the globe, a good standard of living, develop local economies, have some social values, build up the middle classes....around the globe.

I just put up an "individual person" story that was such a prime example of what's really going on, I just titled it "this is pathetic". It's absolutely a crime to force people to move around the globe, leave their homelands, and play these games with wage differentials the way these corporations and special interests do.

these cats could care less about the real answers to these problems.

But putting U.S. workers on the sacrificial global labor arbitrage alter is simply not an acceptable answer.

Someone want to FOIA all

Someone want to FOIA all corespondence between 1726 M Street, the treasury department, the state department, and the fed. We can find out what else they are ordering.

An excellent reason against those FOIA's...

And the reason.

Bloomberg's FOIA?

As far as I'm aware, their FOIA to discover who got around $2 trillion in Federal Reserve bail out money is still being denied.

Strongly recommend this New Economic Perspectives article

I strongly urge any and everyone to peruse this short article at the New Economic Perspectives blog site.

It is an article by Prof. Galbraith, Lord Skidelsky and Paul Davidson in response to a petition by Alan Blinder, Joseph Stiglitz, Laura Tyson, et al.

Now this is exactly why I have been qualifying every comment about the likes of Blinder, Stiglitz and Tyson, etc.

They sign on to this BS misinformation and disinformation regarding the deficit and sucy pay-ahead taxes as Social Security (which would provide Wall Street with a free $1 trillion plus financial pool).

While I like what Mr. Stiglitz has been saying recently, I have always consider him to be more a "political economist" than a pure economist. A hundred-fold more so for the likes of Blinder and Tyson.

It is interesting to note that Blinder and Tyson are also members of the Bretton Woods Committee.

Whereas Prof. Galbraith has been arguing over the years as an economist with a social conscience as opposed to politicians like Blinder, Tyson, Stiglitz and Reich, who tend to follow the winds as they so see fit.

on the "deficit" spending

I disagree with both and the reason is the "policies" are ridiculous. They simply are not dealing with restructuring the economy to create jobs. That's what's needed, not just "spending" or "austerity". This is a false choice to me.

Agreed, with a caveat..

Agreed, but I wanted to point out those economists who support the "deficit mythology."

And their connections.

FTAs and Social Security

The Obama crowd is promoting KFTA and other FTAs. I am not entering conspiracy theory to suggest that the attempt to cut Social Security is done with the full knowledge of making room for new FTAs. Obama himself suggested that Tit-for-Tat on China trade in 2009 was done " so that in the future we can have Free Trade Agreements that folks will trust". He never did tit-for-tat against China trade.

Social Security is pay-as-you-go, pay for your parents.
The smaller the job pool, the worse off Social Security. A few of us have noticed the ever shrinking US Labor Force. So cut SS to allow for the current and future shrinkage of the Labor Force, right?

The Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce both claim big job gains for KFTA and more Visa Workers. So if the job gains are what they say, why cut Social Security? It's because nobody believes that BS about jobs from FTAs.

Obama refuses to retaliate on China trade and every other FTA. So to use Obama's own argument, we must mistrust every new FTA.

Burton Leed

Right, but a bit off on the Soc. Sec. situation

I think you are essentially on target, but perhaps a bit confused about the Social Security strategy.

It's not about "cutting" SS, it's about privatizing (which means handing over to Wall Street the existing SS fund, which is considerable in equity potential).

Privatization always works out to be a negative and theft from the public, while a giveaway to corporate America.

It's a lose-lose for the public commons.

Bush was unable to privatize (corporatize) Social Security, so they bring in the "demo" - Obama - to do the job (which he appears ardently in favor of by all his appointments, especially recently Erskine Bowles and Simpson).

Just as when Bush #1, George H.W. Bush, stumbled on the NAFTA passage, in comes Clinton/Gore to get the deal done.

Obama, privatize Social Security

When I wrote this piece, Obama's economic advisers, back during the primaries, if I had written this on one of our sisterly political blogs, odds are I would have been banned or cast down as a non-believer "troll".

(YARFEPTE - yet another reason for EP to exist)

That said, there are reports they are working on this, simply "re-messaging" and changing the terminology to try to get it past the American people.

Even I didn't realize how right I was when I wrote the above piece. Which also is upsetting for the political blogs frankly were not doing their job. It was all church of Obama and Hillary was the evil shrew and not a reality check on thy policy, thy economic advisers, thy campaign fund sources or thy voting record shall be uttered!

Thanks for reminding me...

...I've always recoiled in a horror, and experienced a violent rage, whenever any of these brainless twits describes that neolib/neocon tool, Goolsbee as a "progressive."

Next they'll be calling Satan a "progressive" - for cripes sake!

And naturally, that old multiplier effect (and in reverse) has always been beyond the mental range of Goolsbee and his ilk.

As with BP down on the Gulf Coast, who promises to give to the fishing people, but not too all those small business types who will go belly up due to being indirectly (but directly) affected by the destruction of the fishing and tourist industries, so too have fewer and fewer been able to pay those auto mechanics and pay for necessary dental work when they've all lost their jobs.

That old darn multiplier effect is just to darn diffictul for those University of Chicago boys.....