 
              Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 12  Num. 38
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                     ("Quid coniuratio est?")
 
 
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A PILE OF NEWS
==============
 
Important news items and reports from several sources are "flying
hot and heavy" these days.   Many  of these stories are mentioned
only briefly, as if they are minor news, in the mainstream press.
Below is my attempted summarization of various reports.   I  hope
that  with  some  brainstorming  we  can  together  get closer to
figuring out what is =really= going on.
 
Big stock market crashes often occur in October; for example, the
1929 crash and  the  1987  crash.   We  have now an unprecedented
situation where the U.S. president, Bill Clinton, and his  harem,
are  crowding  the  front  pages  of  supermarket  tabloids.  The
drumbeat against Clinton is incessant:   on  TV, radio and in the
newspapers they are pounding it into our  heads  that,  "No.  You
don't like Clinton now."  (For years they had been browbeating us
that, "Yes. You like Clinton.") "They" -- the mainstream media --
are  owned  by super-wealthy individuals and corporations who, in
turn, are beholden  to  big  financial powerhouses like Citicorp,
Travelers, and major banks.
 
The October 5, 1998 online edition of New York Times  reported  a
major  battle  between  U.S.  Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and
Federal  Reserve  chairman   Alan   Greenspan.   (One  cynic  has
suggested, "Forget about Clinton; Rubin  and  Greenspan  are  the
important  ones.")  In "Politics Again Leaves Banking Overhaul in
Limbo," Leslie Wayne  writes,  in  part,  that a proposed banking
"reform" bill is being vigorously opposed by  Rubin.   The  bill,
which  would  "eliminate  barriers  separating  banks,  insurance
companies  and brokers and allow them to merge into new financial
conglomerates," is being pushed  for  by Greenspan.  Bill Clinton
has threatened to veto the proposed measure.  Recall that  in  CN
12.07 was  covered the recent illegal merger between Citicorp and
Travelers Group, forming a combination called "Citigroup." 
 
  On April 6, 1998,  the  largest merger in history occurred:
  Citicorp  and  The   Travelers   Group   joined  to  become
  Citigroup.  (Hmmm.....  Do you think there are going to  be
  layoffs at Citigroup?)  In the April 27, 1998 issue of  The
  Nation magazine, the interesting  legal strategy behind the
  merger is noted.  It seems that the merger between Citicorp
  and Travelers =is illegal=.  But, writes Doug Henwood, "the
  parties figure they can get the  law  changed.   If  you're
  rich  enough,  you  can present the government with a *fait
  accompli* and have the law you'd like to violate repealed."
 
Clinton/Rubin appear to be fighting the giantizing of banks while
Alan Greenspan seems to  support  same.   Note also how the stock
market values of major  U.S.  banks  like  Citicorp  have  fallen
drastically these past 10 or so days.
 
Nonetheless, in spite  of  the  apparent  battle going on between
Clinton/Rubin  vs.   Alan  Greenspan,  Sherman  Skolnick  is  now
reporting  that  Fed  chairman  Greenspan  has  given  orders  to
Congress to go easy on Clinton.  In "Federal Reserve Orders:   Be
Careful   on   Clinton!"   Mr.  Skolnick,  doyen  of  underground
journalism, writes in part that...
 
  The world's largest bank,  the Federal Reserve, has ordered
  the US Congress  to  be  careful  in dealing with President
  Clinton.   An  order from this financial dictator cannot be
  ignored...
 
  Privately  owned  and  operated   by  the  Rockefeller  and
  Rothschild  families, and masquerading as America's Central
  Bank,  the  Federal  Reserve  does  not  want  a  change of
  figureheads in  the  White  House,  at  a  time of imminent
  collapse of global finance.  The clandestine command of the
  Federal Reserve comes at a time of near collapse, or actual
  collapse, of a huge hedge fund interlocked with many  money
  center banks, including those  headquartered in the US, and
  also those like in Switzerland with branches in the US.
 
  Amounting upwards to 200 billion dollars or more, the hedge
  fund   disaster,   based   greatly   on   little-understood
  derivatives gambling, has wiped out  the  capital  base  of
  many   supposedly  "giant"  banks.   Most  of  the  alleged
  "profits" of major bank  holding  companies in recent years
  have been just book entries resulting  from  this  gambling
  casino mentality....
 
  Among   those   with   capital   structure   wipe-out   are
  Rockefeller-owned  Chase  Manhattan  Bank  and  the   First
  National Bank of Chicago, as well  as  the  Rothschild  and
  Jesuit-owned Bank of  America  which  took over the Vatican
  and British-royalty-owned Continental Bank Of Chicago....
 
  Now  almost  forgotten,  the  Federal   Deposit   Insurance
  Corporation was set up in the 1930s to underwrite accounts,
  up to a specified amount as maximum, primarily  of  smaller
  or mid-size banks.  With the mega-mergers gobbling  up  the
  banks and their holding  firms and conglomerating into huge
  bank chains,  the  deposit  insurance  has  become  a  dead
  letter.   Only a few tens of billions of dollars are in the
  deposit insurance reserve fund to supposedly safeguard bank
  monsters  each  with  several  hundred  billion  dollars in
  deposits owed to the public.  The banking system has become
  over-run with bank  monopolies,  also  engaging in non-bank
  services  such  as  travel  agencies, insurance, securities
  transactions, and such--enterprises supposedly  part  of  a
  "bank" house too large to permit to fail.
 
Mr. Skolnick's report on  Greenspan's  alleged support of Clinton
flies in the face of the above-mentioned battle between Greenspan
and Clinton/Rubin regarding legislation  favoring  giantizing  of
major  banks.  If, as New York Times writer Leslie Wayne reports,
Clinton and Greenspan  are  at  odds  over  this,  then why would
Greenspan give such Clinton-favorable orders  to  Congress?   The
opinion of Conspiracy Nation (CN) remains that Bill Clinton is to
be offered up as the scapegoat for financial disaster.
 
Regarding   Mr.  Skolnick's  mention  of  derivatives,  excellent
reporting on these precarious financial instruments has long been
done by  the  Lyndon  LaRouche  crowd.   Though Conspiracy Nation
deplores the lack of independent thinking among the "LaRouchies,"
who all seem to automatically agree with  whatever  Mr.  LaRouche
has  to say, they still deserve some credit for their consistence
in probing the shaky derivatives situation and focusing attention
upon  it.   In  "Long  Term  Capital  Management  Represents  the
Disintegration of the  Financial  System,"  a transcript from the
LaRouche-connected radio program "EIR  Talks,"  Tony  Papert  and
John  Hoefle  discuss  what's  been  happening  in  the financial
markets. They say, in part, as follows....
 
  TONY PAPERT:  Welcome  to  ``EIR  Talks.''  It's Sept.  30,
  1998.   My name's Tony Papert, and with me in the studio is
  John Hoefle, EIR's Banking  columnist.   John, one week ago
  today, last Wednesday, the  Federal Reserve called a secret
  meeting  of  16 bankers and arranged a multi-billion dollar
  bailout  of   a   hedge-fund   called   Long  Term  Capital
  Management, and since then, this  has  been the talk of the
  world's  financial  press  and  regular,  mainstream  daily
  press.  What does it mean?
 
  JOHN  HOEFLE:   Well, there's good reason for all the talk,
  because right now the bankers are in absolute panic.   What
  the  Long  Term Capital Management affair represents is the
  disintegration of the financial system.  The reason why the
  bankers had to move in  and  bail  out Long Term Capital --
  and they actually didn't bail it out, they =foreclosed=  on
  it -- what they bailed  out  was  the  derivatives  market,
  because  Long  Term  had  in   excess  of  $1  trillion  in
  derivatives.  Some  reports  say  it  was  as  high  as  $3
  trillion, and if Long Term  had gone into default, which it
  would  have  the  next  day,  it  could  have  triggered  a
  chain-reaction blowout  of  the  global derivatives market,
  which  would have struck very hard at those same banks that
  participated in the foreclosure.
 
  PAPERT:  What is the bailout,  or  the need for the bailout
  mean for the whole financial system?
 
  HOEFLE:  Well, right now the  global  financial  system  is
  hanging by a thread.  The  global  derivatives  market  has
  been hit very hard  with  losses.   The banks have suffered
  big  losses  on  loans  and  other financial instruments to
  Russia, to Asia,  growing  now  in Ibero-America, and also,
  domestically, in the United  States,  a  lot of this hasn't
  been reported yet, but there's a meltdown underway globally
  which is reflected in the drop in the Dow, where  the  bank
  stocks, themselves, are down 30-40%.
 
  PAPERT:   Let  me  ask you something that is asked on every
  show I'm on on the radio:  Just what is a derivative?
 
  HOEFLE:  A derivative, in  the textbook definition, is that
  it's a financial instrument  or  contract  whose  value  is
  based upon the value of  something  else.  Such as, you can
  buy  a contract -- it's a bet that the Dow Jones Industrial
  average will go up, and it pays  off if the Dow goes up, so
  you're betting on a  index,  and  you're not betting on any
  actual  stocks.   So  that's  the  textbook definition of a
  derivative, and supposedly  these  derivatives are used for
  risk-management.  But, you have  to  ask yourself, if there
  are $140 trillion in derivatives outstanding in  the  world
  today, what kind of risk they're managing?  But,  the  real
  answer to what a derivative is,  is  to look at it in terms
  of a dog and fleas.  During the 1980s, you had the creation
  of a huge financial bubble.   This  was  the  miracle,  the
  Reagan-Bush  economic miracle.  And, you could look at that
  as fleas who set up a trading empire on a dog.  And they're
  trading  more  and  more  --  they  build  up their trading
  empires.  They start pumping more and more blood out of the
  dog  to support their trading, and then at a certain point,
  the amount of blood that they're trading exceeds what  they
  can  pump  from  the dog, without killing the dog.  The dog
  begins  to get very sick.  So being clever little critters,
  what they do, is they switch to trading in  blood  futures.
  And   since   there's  no  connection  --  they  break  the
  connection  between  the blood available and the amount you
  can trade, then you can have a real explosion  of  trading,
  and that's what the derivatives market represents.  And  so
  now you've had this  explosion  of trading in blood futures
  which is going right up to the point that now the dog is on
  the  verge  of  dying.   And  that's  essentially  what the
  derivatives  market  is.  It's the last gasp of a financial
  bubble.
 
  PAPERT:  Can  you  tell  us  something  about  the forms of
  financial  instruments  and   financial  speculation  which
  preceeded  derivatives,  I  mean,  how this thing came into
  existence?  I know it's closely connected with the progress
  of  deregulation, which now allows banks to do more or less
  anything, and even  to  do  it  off-balance-sheet,  without
  telling their stockholders, or  the  public as they do with
  derivatives.
 
  HOEFLE:  Well, the U.S. banks have $28 trillion in what the
  FDIC  calls   "off-balance-sheet"   derivatives  versus  $5
  trillion  in  assets  on their balance sheets.  So, most of
  what goes on in the banking world goes on off-balance-sheet
  now.  And they've placed  enormous  bets which will destroy
  them.
      Chase  Manhattan  Bank,  for  example,  has   more   in
  derivatives:  $8.5 trillion, as of the second quarter, more
  than  the  entire  gross  domestic  product  of  the United
  States.
 
  PAPERT:  And I understand Japan banks are even more heavily
  invested, although perhaps nobody really knows for sure.
 
  HOEFLE:  Yeah, it's not quite clear.  I'd say they have  at
  least $15 trillion in derivatives, maybe more.   I  suspect
  they've been trying  desperately  to  unwind  some of their
  derivatives exposure, as their system melts down.
 
I don't have time to detail  how  there  are  several  consistent
corroborations to be found, amongst the various sources mentioned
above,  which  tend  to  give  extra credibility to what they are
saying.  Don't expect the  mass  media  to  spell  it out for you
either, since the mass media is  part  and  parcel  of  the  very
financial  system  which  looks  to  be  going through an immense
crisis.  Your "mission," Mr.  and  Mrs. Conspiracy Nation Reader,
should you decide to accept it, is to take a moment and  do  some
thinking  of  your  own.   (As  always,  should  you be caught or
captured, Conspiracy Nation  will  disavow  any knowledge of your
actions.)
 
Finally, in a matter which may or may not be  tangential  to  the
Clinton  scandals, the financial crisis, and the push to giantize
major banks,  "Sky  News"  had  reported  on  Feb.  10, 1998 that
Jonathan Pollard,
 
  an American Jew jailed for life in the  United  States  for
  spying  on  Israel is set for release, under the terms of a
  future   U.S.-brokered   Israeli-Palestinian   peace  deal.
  According  to  reports  in  the  daily   Yedioth   Anronoth
  newspaper U.S. and Israel gave the go ahead for the release
  earlier this week.
 
Pollard  seems  to have been set up as the "fall guy" for passing
top-secret  U.S.  government  information  to  Israel.   Past  CN
reports have indicated that  one  of  the higher-level players in
this espionage case was the late Vince Foster, the  deputy  White
House  counsel  in the Clinton administration who was most likely
either murdered or executed in  July,  1993.  Just received by CN
is a report from "Ru Mills" (pseudonym), who writes, in part,  as
follows...
 
  Jonathan Pollard Release Story Was a "Plant" Who Planted It
  and Why?
 
  From the Offices of:  Rumor Mill News Agency 
  The Uncensored National Rumor
  E-mail Address: RuMills@aol.com
 
  Evidently there is  more  behind  the  "release of Pollard"
  than meets the eye.   No  sooner  had newspapers around the
  world printed the story of his release, than other articles
  appeared stating that the "release" story was "planted."
  
  The question we must ask is:  Why was this done?   Why  was
  the original article leaked to newspapers around the world.
  Why did these papers publish  it without checking to see if
  it  was true?  If they did check it with their sources, and
  their sources said  it  was  true,  then  what  is the real
  story?
 
  My conspiracy mind says that someone  is  playing  hardball
  with someone else, and  Jonathan  Pollard  is a pawn in the
  game.
 
  If Pollard was connected to Vince Foster, as some say, then
  Jonathan  Pollard  could  be  the  weak link in the Clinton
  chain fence of obfuscation and denial.
 
  Jonathan Pollard, and  his  Mossad  handlers know the truth
  about Vince Foster; was this  "fake" story a message to our
  President?   And  if  it  was,  what was Benjamin Netanyahu
  telling Bill Clinton?
 
  We are entering the most  dangerous times in the history of
  our nation.  This  time  in  our  national  history is more
  dangerous  than the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pearl Harbor, and
  the Civil War combined.
 
  Whoever controls the secrets of Jonathan Pollard, thinks or
  knows that they control Bill Clinton.  Who are these people
  and what do they want our President to do?
 
Pieces of the puzzle.  By brainstorming together we can solve it.
The truth is not and never  has  been  handed to the people "on a
silver platter."  But the people,  if  they  choose,  can  arrive
together at the truth.  And with the force of Internet helping us
to  put  our  heads  together,  WE ARE UN-STOPPABLE..... if we so
choose.
 
 +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +
 
For related stories, visit:
http://www.shout.net/~bigred/cn.html
 
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       of Conspiracy Nation, nor of its Editor in Chief.
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Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et 
  pauperem.                    -- Liber Proverbiorum  XXXI: 8-9 
 


