![\"endgame\"](\"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/endgame.jpg\")
<\/a>The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak\u2019s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3 percent<\/a> unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece<\/a>, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.<\/p>\nThe Treasury official playing the bankers\u2019 secret End Game was Larry Summers<\/a>. Today, Summers is Barack Obama\u2019s leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world\u2019s central bank. If the confidential memo<\/a> is authentic, then Summers shouldn\u2019t be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world.<\/p>\n The memo is authentic.<\/p>\n I had to fly to Geneva to get confirmation and wangle a meeting with the Secretary General of the World Trade Organisation, Pascal Lamy<\/a>. Lamy, the Generalissimo of Globalisation, told me,<\/p>\n \u201cThe WTO was not created as some dark cabal of multinationals secretly cooking plots against the people… We don\u2019t have cigar-smoking, rich, crazy bankers negotiating.\u201d<\/p>\n Then I showed him the memo.<\/p>\n It begins with Larry Summers\u2019 flunky, Timothy Geithner<\/a>, reminding his boss to call the Bank bigshots to order their lobbyist armies to march:<\/p>\n \u201cAs we enter the end-game of the WTO financial services negotiations, I believe it would be a good idea for you to touch base with the CEOs\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n To avoid Summers having to call his office to get the phone numbers (which, under US law, would have to appear on public logs), Geithner listed the private lines of what were then the five most powerful CEOs on the planet. And here they are:<\/p>\n Goldman Sachs: John Corzine<\/a> (212)902-8281<\/p>\n Merrill Lynch: David Kamanski<\/b> (212)449-6868<\/p>\n Bank of America: David Coulter<\/a> (415)622-2255<\/p>\n Citibank: John Reed<\/a> (212)559-2732<\/p>\n Chase Manhattan: Walter Shipley<\/a> (212)270-1380<\/p>\n Lamy was right: They don\u2019t smoke cigars. Go ahead and dial them. I did, and sure enough, got a cheery personal hello from Reed \u2013 cheery until I revealed I wasn’t Larry Summers. (Note: The other numbers were swiftly disconnected. And Corzine can\u2019t be reached while he faces criminal charges.)<\/p>\n It’s not the little cabal of confabs held by Summers and the banksters that\u2019s so troubling. The horror is in the purpose of the “end game\u201d itself.<\/p>\n Let me explain:<\/p>\n The year was 1997. US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was pushing hard to de-regulate banks<\/a>. That required, first, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act<\/a> to dismantle the barrier between commercial banks and investment banks. It was like replacing bank vaults with roulette wheels.<\/p>\n Second, the banks wanted the right to play a new high-risk game: \u201cderivatives trading\u201d<\/a>. JP Morgan alone would soon carry $88 trillion of these pseudo-securities on its books as \u201cassets\u201d.<\/p>\n Deputy Treasury Secretary Summers (soon to replace Rubin as Secretary) body-blocked any attempt to control derivatives.<\/p>\n But what was the use of turning US banks into derivatives casinos if money would flee to nations with safer banking laws?<\/p>\n The answer conceived by the Big Bank Five: eliminate controls on banks in every nation on the planet — in one single move. <\/i>It was as brilliant as it was insanely dangerous.<\/p>\n How could they pull off this mad caper? The bankers’ and Summers’ game was to use the Financial Services Agreement (or FSA), an abstruse and benign addendum to the international trade agreements policed by the World Trade Organisation.<\/p>\n Until the bankers began their play, the WTO agreements dealt simply with trade in goods \u2013 that is, my cars for your bananas. The new rules devised by Summers and the banks would force all nations to accept trade in “bads” \u2013 toxic assets like financial derivatives.<\/p>\n Until the bankers\u2019 re-draft of the FSA, each nation controlled and chartered the banks within their own borders. The new rules of the game would force every nation to open their markets to Citibank, JP Morgan and their derivatives \u201cproducts\u201d.<\/p>\n And all 156 nations in the WTO would have to smash down their own Glass-Steagall divisions between commercial savings banks and the investment banks that gamble with derivatives.<\/p>\n The job of turning the FSA into the bankers\u2019 battering ram was given to Geithner, who was named Ambassador to the World Trade Organisation.<\/p>\n Bankers Go Bananas<\/b><\/p>\n Why in the world would any nation agree to let its banking system be boarded and seized by financial pirates like JP Morgan?<\/p>\n The answer, in the case of Ecuador, was bananas<\/i>. Ecuador was truly a banana republic. The yellow fruit was that nation\u2019s life-and-death source of hard currency. If it refused to sign the new FSA, Ecuador could feed its bananas to the monkeys and go back into bankruptcy. Ecuador signed.<\/p>\n And so on \u2013 with every single nation bullied into signing.<\/i><\/p>\n Every nation but one, I should say. Brazil\u2019s new President, Inacio Lula da Silva, refused. In retaliation, Brazil was threatened with a virtual embargo of its products by the European Union’s Trade Commissioner, one Peter Mandelson, according to another confidential memo<\/a> I got my hands on. But Lula\u2019s refusenik<\/i> stance paid off for Brazil which, alone among Western nations, survived and thrived during the 2007-9 bank crisis.<\/p>\n China signed \u2013 but got its pound of flesh in return. It opened its banking sector a crack in return for access and control of the US auto parts and other markets. (Swiftly, two million US jobs shifted to China.)<\/p>\n The new FSA pulled the lid off the Pandora\u2019s box of worldwide derivatives trade. Among the notorious transactions legalised: Goldman Sachs (where Treasury Secretary Rubin had been co-chairman) worked a secret euro-derivatives swap with Greece which, ultimately, destroyed that nation. Ecuador, its own banking sector de-regulated and demolished, exploded into riots. Argentina had to sell off its oil companies (to the Spanish) and water systems (to Enron) while its teachers hunted for food in garbage cans. Then, Bankers Gone Wild in the Eurozone dove head-first into derivatives pools without knowing how to swim \u2013 and the continent is now being sold off in tiny, cheap pieces to Germany.<\/p>\n Of course, it was not just threats that sold the FSA, but temptation as well. After all, every evil starts with one bite of an apple offered by a snake. The apple: the gleaming piles of lucre hidden in the FSA for local elites. The snake was named Larry.<\/p>\n Does all this evil and pain flow from a single memo? Of course not: the evil was The Game itself, as played by the banker clique. The memo only revealed their game-plan for checkmate.<\/p>\n And the memo reveals a lot about Summers and Obama.<\/p>\n While billions of sorry souls are still hurting from worldwide banker-made disaster, Rubin and Summers didn\u2019t do too badly. Rubin\u2019s deregulation of banks had permitted the creation of a financial monstrosity called \u201cCitigroup\u201d. Within weeks of leaving office, Rubin was named director, then Chairman of Citigroup \u2013 which went bankrupt while managing to pay Rubin a total of $126 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n Then Rubin took on another post: as key campaign benefactor to a young State Senator, Barack Obama. Only days after his election as President, Obama, at Rubin\u2019s insistence, gave Summers the odd post of US \u201cEconomics Tsar\u201d and made Geithner his Tsarina (that is, Secretary of Treasury). In 2010, Summers gave up his royalist robes to return to \u201cconsulting\u201d for Citibank and other creatures of bank deregulation whose payments have raised Summers\u2019 net worth by $31 million<\/a> since the \u201cend-game\u201d memo.<\/p>\n That Obama would, at Robert Rubin\u2019s demand, now choose Summers to run the Federal Reserve Board means that, unfortunately, we are far from the end of the game.<\/p>\n Special thanks to expert Mary Bottari of Bankster USA www.BanksterUSA.org without whom our investigation could not have begun.<\/i><\/p>\n The film of my meeting with WTO chief Lamy<\/a> was originally created for Ring of Fire, hosted by Mike Papantonio and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.<\/i><\/p>\n Further discussion of the documents I laid before Lamy can be found in \u201cThe Generalissimo of Globalization,\u201d Chapter 12 of Vultures\u2019 Picnic<\/a> by Greg Palast (Constable Robinson 2012).<\/i><\/p>\n Follow Greg on Twitter: @Greg_Palast<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n Previously \u2013 ‘The Con’ Is Leaving a Trail of Blood Across the Planet<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n More from VICE:<\/i><\/p>\n Calling Bullshit On the Government’s Claim That Spies Could Target the Guardian with Lasers<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n Some Credible Scientists Believe Humanity Is Verrrrrry Close to Destruction<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n The Man Who Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again is Probably Going to be a Billionaire Soon<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n Psytrance Rave in a Forest<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n Private Landlords Taught Me How to Get Rich Exploiting the Poor<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n