From a variety of sources, such as Whitney Webb (Unlimited Hangout), David Livingstone (Ordo ab Chao ) ,Russ Baker (Family of Secrets) , Sterling Seagrave (Gold Warrior) Cheri Seymour (The Last Circle), Heidner (Collateral Damage) etc. ,Question Everything.
2002-February Silverstein Properties won $861 million from Industrial Risk Insurers to rebuild on the site of WTC 7. Silverstein Properties' estimated investment in WTC 7 was $386 million. So: This building's collapse resulted in a profit of about $500 million.
Construction of a new building began in May. Larry Silverstein allegedly made plans to demolish WTC 7 in 2000 and had designs prepared for the new building before WTC 7 unfortunate collapse (saved a ton on demolition costs )
Silverstein also maintained “close ties with Netanyahu,” according to Haaretz (November 21, 2001). “The two have been on friendly terms since Netanyahu’s stint as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. For years they kept in close touch.
2002- Enron - an energy trading company - had created a gold bullion and gold derivatives trading operation. After Enron went bankrupt, Enron On-Line was bought by UBS. There is the possibility that this asset was being jettisoned because it contained trails of the transfer of assets abroad.
The former Chairman of Enron’s disgraced accounting firm Arthur Anderson became a board member of the Swiss UBS bank. Enron’s financial affiliates were also accused of manipulating the gold market by GATA. Enron had become a major distribution channel for gold derivatives such as those sold by Barrick Gold.
Questions were being asked about whether or not there were real gold mining operations to back the derivatives. The FBI led an investigation into gold price-fixing, and the records of this investigation were kept in the FBI office on the 23rd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. 9/11 helped prevent these records from becoming public knowledge.
Note that this was the same FBI office where the FBI’s Bin Laden investigator John Patrick O’Neill met his death on 9/11.
The Securities and Exchange Commission held an office in World Trade Center 7, adjacent to the twin towers. Although other neighboring buildings suffered minimal damage from the collapse of the towers, this building was literally vapourized.
On September 17th 2001, we came to know that the Securities and Exchange Commission had lost many files in the collapse of World Trade Center 7.
Why wasn’t Enron bailed out? When Enron went belly-up, the losses were vast, perhaps as much as $60 billion, but the losses were widely distributed among a lot of different institutions.
The company's two largest creditors, Citi and JPMorgan/Chase, well aware of the dodgy state of the company, had packaged up their Enron debt as "credit derivatives" and sold them on to pension funds.
So Enron's crash was not going to bring down the big banks or even damage their profits (which have remained good).
Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and a past Managing Director of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon Read noted that Enron's trading patterns, internet money movements and [other activities] were consistent with a large-scale money laundering operation.
“The fact that subpoenas were not issued months ago to obtain all Enron Online off shore and onshore digital and paper trading records and corresponding bank records defies logic, unless one presumes that Enron's generous donations have bought them time for a shredding party that protects all the beneficiaries of the real dollars that flowed through the Enron money pipeline. ......
I will bet every last dollar I have that Enron was the largest laundromat of stolen and tax evading dollars in American history and that the Department of Justice's primary goal is cover-up --- to make sure that the money trail disappears forever."
2002-The Houston office building that housed both Enron and Halliburton corporate headquarters was owned by Trizec Hahn. Trizec Hahn was a merger of Peter Munk's (Barrick Gold) and the Canadian Bronfman family:
Barrick was controlled by Peter Munk, who was set up as chairman, he claimed, by Adnan Khashoggi who owned the company stock.
CEO's of both companies (Kenneth Lay and Dick Cheney ) are close associates of the Bush family, whose relationship to the founder of Barrick– Adnan Khashoggi – are extensive and stretched over at least two decades.
Barrick is also directly linked to UBS and the German bank cartel, through use of it's subsidiary gold refinery: Argor-Heraeus S.A.
Owership of this refinery was transferred from UBS to Commerzbank, also part of the German bank cartel in 1999.
Barrick's gold is refined to market delivery standards by MKS Finance S.A. in Switzerland and Argor-Heraeus S.A. also in Switzerland
Also on the Barrick Board was former Canadian Deutschebank executive Tye W. Burt - the former Chairman of Deutsche Bank Canada and Deutsche Bank Alex Brown Securities Canada, and Managing Director and Head of Deutsche Bank's Global Metals and Mining Group.
Burt was involved when the Canadian Deutschebank backed Khashoggi in the 2001 MJK Securities fraud. Burt left the bank shortly after the fraud was discovered.
Note also, two of the initial big investors in Barrick – Khashoggi and Bronfman – used the same personal financial advisor: Mayo Shattuck of the Deutschebank Alex Brown. Mayo Shattuck was the chief assistant to Buzzy Krongard when he worked at Deutschebank Alex Brown.
Both, through their executive roles at Deutschebank Alex Brown were in a position to be familiar with the Khashoggi/Marcos gold deposits at that Bank.
Krongard managed the merger between Bankers Trust and Deutschebank Alex Brown, and that Banker's Trust is the bank that received significant amounts of the Marcos gold with the assistance of Khashoggi.
The Deutsche Bank was identified as a major gold trading partner with Barrick in both the Blanchard and Howe law suits.
Enron - an energy trading company - had created a gold bullion and gold derivatives trading operation. When Enron went bankrupt, Enron On-Line was bought by UBS.
A competitive market for trading energy and gold bullion was set-up by former Deutschebank executive Mayo Shattuck as new CEO at Constellation Energy, using former Enron employees.
UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland or Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft, formerly Banque Federale or Federal Bank of Switzerland) is the long time banker to the Marcos family, Adnan Khashoggi and the Saudi Royal family, and assorted international criminals.
After the war, the Swiss banks took elaborate measures to 'hide' the Nazi gold and prevent confiscation by the Allies.
The 'undiscovered' gold in the banks would be the gold pursued in 1990s in international courts and world public opinion by the Jewish World Congress and Edgar Bronfman.
Another great gold bonanza to get channeled to the Swiss banks was the Marcos gold in the 1980’s
UBS and other Swiss banks reversed their position on 'not returning' holocaust gold to family survivors in August of 1998, after several months of negotiations with Edgar Bronfman, a co-investor of Adnan Khashoggi in Barrick Gold and President of the World Jewish Congress.
Surprising, the release of the holocaust gold may play a key role in understanding why the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11
Pressure was brought by investigators and lawmakers on three separate fronts, and by Swiss lawmakers on a fourth front:
There were claims by the Philippine government that the Marcos family had secreted away $13.4 billion of the Philippine treasury.
In 1991 there were a number of reports that Marcos had secreted away in UBS, large quantities of the Philippine national treasury. There was "a lot" of illegal gold and money moved to Switzerland by Marcos, with the assistance of Adnan Khashoggi.
A number of human rights groups took on the Marcos family in US courts for violation of human rights, and won a major, billion dollar settlement against the Marcos family.
Ferdinand Marcos had died in 1989, but the judgment was levied on his estate. After losing the suit, the Marcos family claimed it did not have the resources to settle the claim.
That is when the Department of Justice was brought in to investigate the accounts identified in the Swiss banks as Marcos accounts. When the possibility of the estate being hidden in UBS was exposed by the efforts of the Philippine government, the Department of Justice began an investigation.
The search for holocaust gold was re-activated in 1996 when newly declassified documents of the Swiss government inadvertently suggested the banks were still holding on to financial assets that belonged to holocaust victims and their families.
The final front was new anti-money laundering regulations which took hold in Switzerland in late 1998. This new legislation put criminal penalties on bankers who knowingly supported money-laundering activities.
Edgar Bronfman, as a significant owner of Barrick, which was the primary beneficiary of the Khashoggi - conceived gold laundering operation and connections to the German bank cartel, went to Switzerland to establish a settlement that would stop the investigation, and prevent further disclosure of the true assets being held in accounts at UBS.
Further investigation would have resulted in having the Department of Justice pursuing assets into accounts that moved gold into or through Barrick for laundering. With the exposure of more that one laundering operation, the entire operation would come undone.
There was another complicating factor in bringing closure to the "bullion" issues..
An article in Saturday's Financial Times of London cited a report prepared by Fitch IBCA, an international credit rating agency, that estimated a total of $136 billion was taken out of all of Russia between 1993 and 1998.
Another estimate, provided in Lloyd's article for the Times, puts the total in the neighborhood of $200-500 billion. Though the exact figure has not been determined, this vast sum not only lined the pockets of the new Russian kleptocracy, but also flowed into the coffers of US and European financial institutions.
Credit Suisse, Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), Dresdner Bank, Westdeutsche Landesbank and Banque Internacionale of Luxembourg were all being scrutinized for their role in the matter.
It is of significant note that two primary owner-investors in two of the key banks involved in the Russian money laundering scandal were Bruce Rappaport, a Swiss- Israeli banker who was involved with Khashoggi and George Bush Sr. in the Iran- Contra, October Surprise and BCCI scandals, and Dr. Alfred Hartmann.
Dr. Alfred Hartmann, was the managing director of the BCCI Swiss subsidiary, Banque de Commerce et de Placement SA; at the same time, he ran the Zurich Rothschild Bank AG, and sat in London as a member of the board of N.M. Rothschild and Sons, Hartmann was also a business partner of Helmut Raiser, friend of de Picciotto, and linked to Nordex.
Hartmann was also chairman of the Swiss affiliate of the Italian BNL bank, which was implicated in the Bush administration illegal transfers to Iraq prior to the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
The Atlanta branch of BNL, with the knowledge of George Bush when he was vice president, conduited funds to Helmut Raiser's Zug, Switzerland company, Consen, for development of the CondorII missile program by Iraq, Egypt, and Argentina, during the Iran-Iraq War.
Hartmann was vice-chairman of another secretive private Geneva bank, the Bank of NY-Inter-Maritime Bank, a bank whose chairman, Bruce Rappaport, was one of the illegal financial conduits for Col. Oliver North's Contra drugs-for-weapons network during the late 1980.
In the aftermath of 9/11, there would be a plethora of criticism of Carlyle and its ability to channel the profits from the Iraq War and the Homeland Security Act to individuals with the ‘inside track’.
2002-In June the National Science Foundation published a major 482-page report called, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance.
It called for the integration of four branches of physical science for the sole purpose of enhancing the human condition. Specifically, the converging disciplines are Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science, and they have given rise to the acronym NBIC.
November 2002: University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) researcher Ralph Baric publishes a “breakthrough work” in gain-of-function research (studies that alter pathogens to make them more transmissible or deadly, see Notes above), describing the creation of a synthetic clone of a natural mouse coronavirus.
November 2002: China’s Guangdong province reports the first case of “atypical pneumonia” (later labeled as SARS).
2002, DARPA has acknowledged its efforts to create a “Brain-Machine Interface(BMI).” Though first aimed at creating “a wireless brain modem for a freely moving rat,” which would allow the animal’s movements to be remotely controlled, DARPA wasn’t shy about the eventual goal of applying such brain “enhancement” to humans.
Work began in 2011 on developing “brain implants” for use in humans, and such implants have been tested on human volunteers in DARPA-funded experiments since at least 2015.
2002-Trump was first introduced to Bayrock by the late Tamir Sapir, the penniless Soviet émigré turned billionaire who became, in Trump’s words, “great friends” with Trump himself, and who introduced Trump to Tevfik Arif, the founder of Bayrock, aka Tofik Arifov.
In court records from a lawsuit by former employees, it is alleged Bayrock was “covertly mob-owned and operated,” “backed by oligarchs and money [the oligarchs] stole from the Russian people,” and “engaged in the businesses of financial institution fraud, tax fraud, partnership fraud, human trafficking, child prostitution, statutory rape, and, on occasion, real estate money fraud
In 2010, he was arrested in a Turkish prostitution sting. Authorities busted him aboard the world’s largest luxury yacht and accused him of linking up wealthy businessman with Russian and Ukrainian hookers, some of them underage. Charges against Arif were later dropped.
On paper, at least, Arif’s story was another stirring rags-to-riches saga. In 2002, after becoming a successful real estate developer in Brooklyn, he moved Bayrock’s offices to Trump Tower, where he and his staff of mostly Russian émigrés set up shop on the twenty-fourth floor.
When Arif and Sater helped put together several prospective Trump Tower licensing deals for sites including Moscow, Warsaw, Istanbul, and Kiev, Trump was ecstatic. Thanks to Bayrock, he could bring franchising to high-end condos. He could be the Colonel Sanders of luxury high-rises. “It was almost like mass production of a car,” Trump crowed. For some projects, he boasted, he would get up to a 25 percent stake, plus management fees and a possible percentage of the gross—without having to invest a dime.
Trump worked closely with Bayrock on real estate ventures in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. When it came to financing them, however, he was still so toxic after Atlantic City that he left matters of funding to his new partners. “Bayrock knew the investors,” he later testified. Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with [Trump].”
Altogether, Bayrock’s leadership, as portrayed in its presentation materials, was a cozy family of billionaire oligarchs from the former Soviet Union.
In fact, the extent to which various Bayrock partners actually came through with financing is unclear, but according to Bayrock’s promotional literature, Arif turned to fellow Kazakh billionaire Alexander Mashkevich and his Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (or Eurasian Group, as it is called in Bayrock’s promotional literature), which he controls with Patokh Chodiev and Alijan Ibragimov, among others, to finance Bayrock. (Even though he was referred to on Bayrock’s website, Patokh Chodiev has denied any connection to Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, or Bayrock Group. Similarly, a person close to Mashkevich told Bloomberg that Mashkevich never invested in Bayrock.)
Together, the three men—known as “the Trio”—are major stockholders in the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation and control chromium, alumina, and gas operations in Kazakhstan, which adds up to about 12 percent of the industrial production in the entire country.
Felix Sater become managing director of a New York–based real estate development company called the Bayrock Group.
Sater’s biggest project at Bayrock was the troubled Trump SoHo, the forty-six-story, $ 450 million hotel-condominium in downtown Manhattan that was beset by one lawsuit after another.*
From the start, the mere fact that Sater was a principal in Bayrock created a very serious quandary as it was trying to raise $ 1 billion for Trump SoHo and other projects. Sater was a twice-convicted felon; no banks would lend to Bayrock if they knew about Sater’s convictions.
In fact, when Trump SoHo got under way, Sater began spelling his name “Satter,” as he told the Times, to “distance himself from a past” and to throw off anyone searching his name on Google.
Another complication was the fact that Sater was also a “cooperator” with the FBI and other federal agencies. As a result, he had an immunity deal and, he later asserted, was still carrying out various daring missions for the CIA, the DIA, and the FBI, such as helping the FBI investigate scams run by the Italian Mafia on Wall Street. For his help, Sater was given extraordinary leeway.
2002, Trump described Epstein as a “terrific guy and said he had known Epstein “for 15 years,” which would date their friendship as beginning around 1987.
2002- Senator Wellstone killed in plane crash 11 days before election. A longtime nemesis of Poppy and W the liberal Democrat was a well-publicized opponent of the war resolution, the only Senator in a tight election race to vote against it.
2002- Thiel not only founded Paypal and the CIA-backed Palantir but sits on Facebook’s board.
According to Newton Lee, author of Facebook Nation, platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube are leading the way towards Total Information Awareness (TIA), a mass detection program by the United States Information Awareness Office established by DARPA in 2002.
Based on the concept of predictive policing, TIA aimed to digitally collect detailed information about individuals in order to anticipate and prevent crimes before they were committed. TIA was the aim of the Information Awareness Office (IAO) established by DARPA in 2002.
Shortly after 9/11, Brian Sharkey, chief technology officer at SAIC and deputy director of the Information Systems Office (ISO) at DARPA, teamed up with John Poindexter to propose the Total Information Awareness (TIA) surveillance program.
The IAO was headed by Admiral John Poindexter, former United States National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan. Poindexter was convicted in April 1990 of multiple felonies as a result of his actions in the Iran–Contra affair, but his convictions were reversed on appeal in 1991.
According to David Teacher, besides the channels to Reagan via CIA director William Casey, Le Cercle and Brian Crozier’s 6I also liaised directly with Reagan’s successive National Security Advisors, Dick Allen, William P. Clark, Bud McFarlane and Poindexter
Following public criticism that this technology could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003. However, several IAO projects continued to be funded and merely run under different names, as revealed by Edward Snowden during the course of the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures.
TIA was purportedly shut down in 2003 due to public opposition after the program was exposed in the media, but the following year Poindexter participated in the Pentagons Highlands Group. Although the TIA program was formally suspended, its data mining software was later adopted by other government agencies, with only superficial changes being made.
Companies that were contracted to work on TIA included the Science Applications International, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Schafer Corporation, SRS Technologies, Adroit Systems, CACI Dynamic Systems, ASI Systems International, and Syntek Technologies
Facial recognition, location tracking, ambient social apps on GPS-enabled devices, Google Street View, digital footprints, and data mining are some key elements in information awareness.”
May 16, 2002
Congress presses the Bush administration for further information about warnings of the September 11, 2001, attacks. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice holds a briefing, maintaining,
“I don’t think that anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon.”
She insists that there was no lapse in intelligence.
2002-The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States was established on November 27, by President George W. Bush and the United States Congress, with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger initially appointed to head the commission.
However, Kissinger resigned only weeks after being appointed, to avoid conflicts of interest.
Former U.S. Senator George Mitchell was originally appointed as the vice chairman, but he stepped down on December 10, 2002, not wanting to sever ties to his law firm.
On December 15, 2002, Bush appointed former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean to head the commission.
The members of The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
By the spring of 2003, the commission was off to a slow start, needing additional funding to help it meet its target day for the final report, of May 27, 2004.
In late March, the Bush administration agreed to provide an additional $9 million for the commission, though this was $2 million short of what the commission requested.The first hearings were held from March 31 to April 1, 2003, in New York City. The report was completed in 2004
The commission was criticized for alleged conflicts of interest on the part of commissioners and staff (e.g., Philip D. Zelikow, 9/11 Commission Executive Director/Chair in 1995 co-authored a book with Condoleezza Rice. Further, the commission's report has been the subject of criticism by both commissioners themselves and by others
John Farmer, Jr., senior counsel to the Commission stated that the Commission "discovered that...what government and military officials had told Congress, the Commission, the media, and the public about who knew what when — was almost entirely, and inexplicably, untrue."
Farmer continues: "At some level of the government, at some point in time … there was a decision not to tell the truth about what happened...The [NORAD] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public."
Thomas Kean, the head of the 9/11 Commission, concurred: "We to this day don’t know why NORAD told us what they told us, it was just so far from the truth."
Director of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) George Tenet misled the Commission and was "obviously not forthcoming" in his testimony to the Commission, according to Commission Co-chair Thomas
2002-January 19, President Bush announced a $15 billion package to combat AIDS, including a $500 million program to purchase millions of doses of Nevirapine for distribution to African mothers and children.
Dr. Fauci told the President that Nevirapine would save millions of lives by preventing maternal transmission of HIV to unborn children.
President Bush would later repeat this promise in his 2003 State of the Union address. Dr. Fauci’s artful 1988 achievement of winning FDA approvals for AZT had launched the AIDS drug gold rush.
Nevirapine was German pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim’s beachhead in the race. Boehringer had apparently lifted Nevirapine from the same toxic junk pile from which Burroughs Wellcome had retrieved AZT.
Canadian regulators rejected Nevirapine—in 1996 and 1998—due to its potent toxicity and dubious efficacy.
Dr. Fauci apparently neglected to tell President Bush that Nevirapine had never won FDA approval as a safe and effective drug. “Dr. Fauci had to know all about the safety problems, but he must have either omitted or whitewashed them when he sold the program to Bush,”
2002 March , Boehringer Ingelheim consequently pulled its supplemental FDA application for Nevirapine’s approval, and the Johns Hopkins/NIAID team closed the scandal-ridden Uganda study site.
Dr. Fauci had persuaded the president to make the abolishment of African AIDS his moonshot project, his career legacy, and Nevirapine was the foundation stone of that project.
The severe embarrassment to the president and to the NIH would also engulf Uganda’s Makerere University, Boehringer, the investigators and their employers (Johns Hopkins University), and Family Health International (FHI)—the organization responsible for monitoring the trial.
It would antagonize the South African government, whose drug regulatory agency, the Medicines Control Council (MCC), permitted the distribution of Nevirapine under duress based solely on the fraudulent results of the Uganda study published in Lancet in 1999.
But Nevirapine was Tony Fauci’s baby. He had staked his credibility with the president on the success of this trial. Like AZT, Nevirapine was therefore too big to fail. Such desperate circumstances summoned Teflon Tony to perform his greatest magic act: resurrect the dead.
September 4, 2002
Seeking support for action against Iraq, President Bush addresses Congress, identifying Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein as “a serious threat.” Bush mentions the concept of a regime change and announces the visit of British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the days to come. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-TX) calls action in Iraq “inevitable.”
September 12, 2002
President Bush addresses the United Nations’ Security Council, making his case for military action to enforce UN resolutions in Iraq. Additionally, he warns that the United States will move alone if the Council does not act.
2003 (February) JASON group (scientific think tank) issues DARPA funded study report on Biotetection Architectures stating “It is essential to conduct realistic exercises of a biodetection architecture in order to assess technical capabilities and refine operational procedures .... useful exercise(s) should entail pre-defined tests of the system through a series of staged events.”
2003, Google had begun customizing its search engine under special contract with the CIA for its Intelink Management Office, “overseeing top-secret, secret and sensitive but unclassified intranets for CIA and other IC agencies,” according to Homeland Security Today. That year, CIA funding was also being funneled through the NSF to projects that might help create “new capabilities to combat terrorism through advanced technology.”
2003-A year after Trump World Tower opened in 2002, Trump had agreed to let Miami father-and-son developers Gil and Michael Dezer use his name on the condominium towers, which attracted Russians moneny. “Russians love the Trump brand,” Dezer told Bloomberg.
Trump Tower in New York as well has received press attention for including among its many residents, tax-dodgers, bribers, arms dealers, convicted cocaine traffickers, and corrupt former FIFA officials.
A typical example involves an illegal gambling operation that reportedly took up the entire 51st floor, run by the alleged Russian mobster Anatoly Golubchik, and Vadim Trincher, a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, as well as Trincher’s son Illya, and Hillel Nahmad, the son of a billionaire art dealer and heir of a descendant of a Jewish Lebanese art family, and another follower of Chabad-Lubavitch.
“This is the top of the top of the top in organized crime in Russia,” according to the prosecutor. The ring answered to Russian mob boss Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, whose organization the Interpol believes to be tied to Semion Mogilevich. Tokhtakhounov, who holds both Russian and Israeli citizenship, is one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, known as “Little Taiwanese.”
In 2008, Forbes named him the world’s third most wanted, after Osama bin Laden and el Chapo. He is accused of the bribing of judges in the 2002 Winter Olympics, in which a Canadian figure-skating team were denied their gold medal.
Seven months after he was busted in 2013, he appeared near Trump in the VIP section of the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.
Tokhtakhounov operated out of Trump Tower, just three floors down from Trump’s penthouse, what prosecutors called “an international gambling business that catered to oligarchs residing in the former Soviet Union and throughout the world.”
2003: Epstein provides Harvard with $30 million for its Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. According to Epstein friend Alan Dershowitz, Lynn Forester de Rothschild introduces Epstein and Dershowitz to each other, although the two have already known each other since at least 1997.
January 7, 2003
Bush reveals a tax-cut plan of $674 billion over ten years. He suggests that the plan will stimulate the U.S. economy, end the recession, and create jobs. Democrats dismiss the plan as financially irresponsible and favorable to the rich.
February 1, 2003
The seven-member crew of the shuttle Columbia dies in an explosion in space. Debris falls in Texas.
March 16, 2003
Taking military action in Iraq
After months of debate in the United Nations Security Council, President Bush announces the U.S. intention to move against Iraq with its coalition of allies. Bush issues an ultimatum for military action, giving Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his sons forty-eight hours to leave Iraq.
March 19, 2003
The 8:00 p.m. deadline for Hussein to leave Iraq passes. At 10:15 p.m., Bush addresses the nation and informs the American people that the United States is at war with Iraq.
March 25, 2003
Citing costs of the Iraq War, the Senate approves the reduction of Bush’s tax cut plan to $350 billion, less than half of the original amount.
May 1, 2003
In a nationally televised address aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, Bush stands in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner and declares that major combat operations in Iraq are over. He links the Iraq War to the War on Terror and vows to continue searching for banned weapons in Iraq.
May 22, 2003
The UN Security Council votes to lift sanctions on Iraq imposed since the 1991 Gulf War. The resolution gives the United States and United Kingdom control of Iraq until it establishes a legitimate government and authority to use Iraqi oil revenues for humanitarian aid and reconstruction.
May 28, 2003
Bush signs into law his $350 billion tax-cut package, the third-largest in history, in an effort to strengthen the U.S. economy and reverse a trend of increasing unemployment. Congressional Democrats who opposed the bill argued it is skewed towards the wealthy.
July 11, 2003
CIA Director George Tenet accepts full responsibility for the statement in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address regarding Iraq’s alleged effort to obtain uranium from Africa, saying its inclusion should not have been approved by the CIA because the intelligence was unsubstantiated and the claim had been discredited.
July 24, 2003
The joint Congressional Committee on Intelligence releases an 800-page document on the findings of its inquiry into intelligence failures leading up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, which concludes that intelligence agencies failed to respond to alerts about potential targets and methods.
The report faults the NSA, CIA, and the FBI for a breakdown in communications and advocates the creation of a cabinet-level “intelligence czar” to remove obstacles between agencies.
September 30, 2003
The Justice Department announces a full criminal investigation into allegations that Bush administration officials had leaked the name of a covert CIA operative to the media in July. Bush urges full cooperation with the probe.
October 2, 2003
Chief U.S. Weapons Inspector David Kay reports that his 1,400 member team, the Iraq Survey Group, failed to find any biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons in Iraq. Kay acknowledged that they did find evidence that Iraq sought the capacity to create those weapons in the future. Bush used these findings as validation of his prewar claims that Iraq posed a significant security threat to the United States.
2003- Anthony Fauci personally owned patents to IL-2 and stood to make millions in royalties if the treatment won FDA approval.
Dr. Fishbein was shocked: “Dr. Fauci had a personal financial interest in the drug being tested! He was listed as a co-owner on the patent for Proleukin, and stood to earn royalties from it!”
According to little-known HHS rules at that time, NIH employees could collect unlimited royalty payments from drugs they worked on during their agency tenures.
Dr. Fishbein found it stunning that Dr. Fauci stood to personally gain significant revenues, providing HHS green-lighted Proleukin.
Contemporaneous records obtained by the AP found that some fifty-one NIH scientists were then involved in testing products for which they secretly receive royalties; Dr. Fauci and his trusty longtime sidekick, Dr. H. Clifford Lane, “have received tens of thousands of dollars in royalties for an experimental AIDS treatment they invented [interleukin-2].
At the same time, their office has spent millions in tax dollars to test the treatment on patients across the globe.”
2004-After 9/11 and the ensuing anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001, Dr. Fauci’s NIAID published, in February 2002, a 15-page document for the agency he oversaw at NIH. It was titled “NIAID Strategic Plan for Biodefense Research” and would kick start the NIAID efforts over the next 19 years to try and keep the country safe from bioterrorism.
On December 15, 2004, Dr. Fauci’s increased workload was recognized by a permanent pay adjustment (68% increase). To this day, Fauci’s portfolio still includes overseeing NIAID’s biodefense research, a portfolio that recently has grown by billions of dollars.
2004-George W. Bush’s administration offered his corporate friends a 5 percent tax rate instead of the normal 35 percent for companies repatriating cash.
Over $360 billion whooshed back to the country through this Bush loophole, under a claim that this would “provide jobs” as the capital returned home. Instead, however, much of it went into share buy-backs, boosting executive bonuses.
Corporations could continue to keep their money offshore, and it would mostly remain untaxed and outside of these controls unless they repatriated it. In the tax world, this is a concept known as deferral:
Every now and then they were allowed to bring this un-taxed offshore money back home through amnesties.
2004- Thiel and his business partner Alex Karp met with John Poindexter in 2004, at the home of Richard Perle, another Andrew Marshall acolyte. “I told them I thought they had an interesting idea,” says Poindexter.
After 9/11, co-founder Alex Karp had reconnected with Thiel, who had the idea that Silicon Valley should do something to improve national security and secure civil liberties.
Thiel and Karp then founded the CIA-backed Palantir Technologies, headquartered in Palo Alto, which specializes in big data analysis for the intelligence community, and which supposedly helped to locate Osama bin Laden.
Thiel named the company after the crystal ball used by evil lord Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. Thiel saw Palantir as a “mission-oriented company” which could apply software similar to PayPal’s fraud recognition systems to “reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties.”
Karp counts former CIA director George Tenet as a friend, as well as Tenet’s employer, Herb Allen, who runs Allen & Co, a Palantir investor. Thiel had also met with Gilman Louie of In-Q-Tel, securing the backing of the CIA.
Poindexter also helped Palantir open doors, and to assemble “a legion of advocates from the most influential strata of government.”
Palantir’s clients included at least twelve groups within the U.S. government, including the CIA, DHS, NSA, FBI, CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force and Special Operations Command.
Although the company denies the connection, the majority of security analysts are convinced that Palantir is the principal company behind the design of software used for the NSA’s PRISM program.
PRISM’s existence was revealed when The Washington Post and The Guardian published leaked documents by Edward Snowden, which exposed the involvement of Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, AOL, Skype and Apple. A source told the Post that with PRISM, the NSA can “quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”
2004 Feb 4, The Pentagon canceled its so-called LifeLog project,an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person's entire existence.
Run by Darpa, the Defense Department's research arm, LifeLogaimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received.
Out of this seemingly endless ocean of information, computer scientists would plot distinctive routes in the data, mapping relationships, memories, events and experiences.
LifeLog's backers said the all-encompassing diary could have turned into a near-perfect digital memory, giving its users computerized assistants with an almost flawless recall of what they had done in the past.
But civil libertarians immediately pounced on the project when it debuted last spring, arguing that LifeLog could become the ultimate tool for profiling potential enemies of the state.
On the same day Zuckerberg at Harvard set up Facebook. In June former Napster and Plaxo employee Sean Parker, who assumed himself as the “President” of Facebook was seeking investors for Facebook. He approached Reid Hoffma, CEO of LinkedIn who declined to invest in the social media platform “because of the potential for conflict of interest with his duties as LinkedIn CEO.”
He redirected Parker to Peter Thiel who he knew from the days of PayPal (both are considered as the members of PayPal Mafia). Parker and Mark really got along and Thiel agreed to back Facebook.
Thiels’ Founders Fund was one of the earliest investors in Facebook. Facebook’s second round of funding came from venture capital firm Accel Partners.
Accel’s manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel. One of the Accel Partners’ key areas of expertise are in “data mining technologies.”
Breyer and Louie also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet. In-Q-Tel’s board member Dr. Anita Jones also joined the firm.
2004- Tor Project had come out of Pentagon research and became a private nonprofit , but still relied almost entirely on federal and Pentagon contracts.
Tor grudgingly conceded that they accepted government funding, but they remained adamant that they ran an independent organization that took orders from no one, especially not the dreaded federal government, which their anonymity tool was supposed to oppose.
They repeatedly stressed that they would never put backdoors in the Tor network and told stories of how the US government had tried but failed to get Tor to tap its own network. They pointed to Tor’s open source code; if I was really worried about a backdoor, I was free to inspect the code for myself.
Tor, as well as the larger app-obsessed privacy movement that rallied around it after Snowden’s NSA leaks, does not thwart the power of the US government. It enhances it.
American spies and soldiers needed a way to use the Internet while hiding their tracks and cloaking their identity. It was a problem that researchers at the US Navy, which has historically been at the forefront of communications technology research and signals intelligence, were determined to solve.
They came up with a solution: called “the onion router” or Tor. It was a clever system: the navy set up a bunch of servers and linked them together in a parallel network that sat atop the normal Internet. All covert traffic was redirected through this parallel network; once inside it was bounced around and scrambled in such a way as to obfuscate where it was going and from where it came.
It used the same principle as money laundering: shifting information packets from one shell Tor node to another until it is impossible to figure out where the data came from.
To truly hide spies and soldiers, Tor needed to distance itself from its Pentagon roots and include as many different users as possible. Activists, students, corporate researchers, soccer moms, journalists, drug dealers, hackers, child pornographers, agents of foreign intelligence services, terrorists.
Tor was like a public square—the bigger and more diverse the group assembled there, the better spies could hide in the crowd.
In 2004, Dingledine struck out on his own, spinning the military onion routing project into a nonprofit corporation called the Tor Project and, while still funded by DARPA and the navy, began scratching around for private funding.
He got help from an unexpected ally: the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which gave Tor almost a quarter million dollars to keep it going while Dingledine looked for other private sponsors.
The EFF even hosted Tor’s website. To download the app, users had to browse to tor.eff.org, where they’d see a reassuring message from the EFF: “Your traffic is safer when you use Tor.”
Despite Tor’s public insistence it would never put in any backdoors that gave the US government secret privileged access to Tor’s network, the correspondence shows that in at least one instance in 2007, Tor revealed a security vulnerability to its federal backer before alerting the public, potentially giving the government an opportunity to exploit the weakness to unmask Tor users before it was fixed.The funding record tells the story even more precisely.
Aside from Google paying a handful of college students to work at Tor via the company’s Summer of Code program, Tor was subsisting almost exclusively on government contracts.
By 2008, that included contracts with DARPA, the navy, the BBG, and the State Department as well as Stanford Research Institute’s Cyber-Threat Analytics program.
Run by the US Army, this initiative had come out of the NSA’s Advanced Research and Development Activity division—a “sort of national laboratory for eavesdropping and other spycraft” is how James Bamford describes it in The Shadow Factory.
Another red flag was its Silicon Valley support. Privacy groups funded by companies like Google and Facebook, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future, were some of Tor’s biggest and most dedicated backers.
Google had directly bankrolled its development, paying out generous grants to college students who worked at Tor during their summer vacations.
Why would an Internet company whose entire business rested on tracking people online promote and help develop a powerful privacy tool? Something didn’t add up.
The Tor Project offers no protection against the private tracking and profiling Internet companies carry out. Tor works only if people are dedicated to maintaining a strict anonymous Internet routine: using only dummy email addresses and bogus accounts, carrying out all financial transactions in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and never mentioning their real name in emails or messages.
For the vast majority of people on the Internet—those who use Gmail, interact with Facebook friends, and shop on Amazon—Tor does nothing. The moment you log into your personal account—whether on Google, Facebook, eBay, Apple, or Amazon—you reveal your identity.
These companies know who you are. They know your name, your shipping address, your credit card information. They continue to scan your emails, map your social networks, and compile dossiers.
Tor or not, once you enter your account name and password, Tor’s anonymity technology becomes useless. Tor’s ineffectiveness against Silicon Valley surveillance made it an odd program for Snowden and other privacy activists to embrace.
After all, Snowden’s leaked documents revealed that anything Internet companies had, the NSA had as well. Tor offered a false sense of privacy, while not posing a threat to the industry’s underlying surveillance business model.
2004- Bush Junior signed another Executive Order that paved the way for more defined Intelligence Community authority.
EO 13355 insures that all intelligence goes through one man, the Director of National Intelligence, before it gets to the President. Today, as a result, the Intelligence Community is basically running the United States Government.
This would be called a revolution away from our Constitution. The people who have made these changes are, by Constitutional definition, domestic enemies.
2004-December 11, Gary Webb died from two gunshot wounds to the head, shots described in media reports as self-inflicted, an unprecedented feat.
In 1996, prize-winning investigative journalist Gary Webb wrote a series for the San Jose Mercury News that linked North’s project to the CIA and further to the distribution of crack cocaine in the 1980s into Los Angeles, the profits having been funneled to the Contras.
Webb found that the influx of Nicaraguan-supplied cocaine had fueled the widespread crack epidemic that swept through urban areas.
In 1998, CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz confirmed much of what Webb had alleged, reporting that Contra-related entities involved in the drug trade had been protected from law enforcement by the Reagan-Bush administration.
2004- George Zoley makes no secret of what he wants from Bush: big-dollar contracts for his security firm, the GEO Group, to guard federal prisons. "We don't want to provide guards at the local shopping center," he says. "We are looking at a single government payer for our services."
Zoley's company, formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections, is the world's largest operator of private prisons, earning more than $600 million a year incarcerating inmates.
2004-The Project Bioshield Act was an act passed by the United States Congress calling for $5 billion for purchasing vaccines that would be used in the event of a bioterrorist attack.
This was a ten-year program to acquire medical countermeasures to biological, chemical, radiological, and nuclear agents for civilian use. A key element of the Act was to allow stockpiling and distribution of vaccines which had not been tested for safety or efficacy in humans, due to ethical concerns
April 28, 2004
CBS broadcasts photographs of U.S. Army abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, a facility on the outskirts of Baghdad. Bush and other senior administration officials voice deep disapproval over these abuses.
June 8, 2004
Attorney General John Ashcroft appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions regarding two leaked government memoranda that contained legal arguments for circumventing U.S. and international bans on torture, specifically for the questioning of terrorist suspects.
2004-BUSH wins another election
How Bush-Cheney stole the 2000 election was a matter of obvious historical fact, confirmed by post-facto mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous investigators such as Greg Palastin his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Voters complained about old machines and paper ballots.
Then came the “black box voting” machines.
In 2004 The American vote count was controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and a fourth, SAIC, Science Applications International. All four are hard-wired into the Bush power structure, the Bush crime family.
They were given millions of dollars by the Bush administration to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were just used in the 2004 election.
The technology involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term elections. Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called an “amazing” 16 percent swing.
Diebold’s Walden O’Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio’s votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob’s brother, Todd, is a top executive at “rival” ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers.
The four companies are interconnected; they are not four “competitors”. Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes, and his victory was considered “an amazing upset”.
Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, Madison Dearborn, which is partner in the Carlyle Group. (Also see here.)
Meanwhile, SAIC is referred to a “shadowy defense contractor”.
They have gotten into the vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates.
SAIC’s history of fraud charges and security “lapses” haven’t prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance into the vote counting business.
The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by Bush! The chief lobbying group pushing for the act (while we dumb asses sat out here and thought, ‘That sounds like a good idea!’) was a consortium of arms dealers including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
February 17, 2005
Bush names former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte Director of National Intelligence, a newly created position of “intelligence czar” created in the wake of Congressional investigations into intelligence failures leading up to September 11.
June 5, 2005
Iraqi government announces that a war crimes trial for Saddam Hussein is likely to begin within the next two months and prosecutors would seek the death penalty.
August 28, 2005
Hurricane Katrina strikes the Gulf coast of the United States with devastating effects. The storm breaches the levee system in New Orleans, causing massive flooding and destruction of property. The Bush administration is harshly criticized for an inadequate response by the federal government to the storm’s destruction.
2005,, june Arif celebrated his fifty-second birthday at the grand opening of the “seven-star” Rixos hotel in Belek on the Turkish Riviera near Antalya. Guests came from all over the world—St. Petersburg, the Côte d’Azur, Ukraine, Latvia, Israel, and Moscow, traveling by yacht and private jet..
Among the honored guests was then–prime minister of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who later became president.
Among them was Tamir Sapir, who arrived on the Mystère, his 160-foot yacht, which has been described as the most beautiful private vessel in the world.
Not all the Bayrock billionaires could make it, but one extremely high-profile tycoon in New York who couldn’t attend made sure that his presence was felt anyway.
So on Tevfik Arif’s birthday, the familiar image of Donald Trump suddenly appeared on a big-screen videoconference call for the entire party to see.
2005- Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005 (S. 1873) The bill createsa new federal agency, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency(BARDA), that would act "as the single point of authority" to promote advanced research and development of drugs and vaccines in response to bioterrorism and natural disease outbreaks, while shielding the agency from public Freedom of Information Act(FOIA) requests.
BARDA would be exempt from long-standing open records and meetings laws that apply to most government departments.
2005-The Public Readiness and Emergency Pr eparedness Act (PREPA),signed into law by George W. Bushin December, 2005, is a tortliability shield intended to protect vaccine manufacturers from financial risk in the event of a declared public health emergency.
PREPA provides $3.8 billion for pandemicinfluenzapreparedness to protect public healthin the case of a pandemicdiseaseoutbreak
2005/CRMPG II led by Mr. Henry M. Paulson, Jr.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Goldman, Sachs & Co
On January 15, 2005, the organizational meeting of the Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group II (CRMPG II) was held in New York. CRMPG II is comprised of senior officials from major financial institutions and is chaired by E. Gerald Corrigan, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs.
The members of CRMPG II, including its Vice Chairmen (David Bushnell, Senior Risk Officer, Citigroup, and Don M. Wilson III, Chief Risk Officer, JPMorgan Chase)
The primary purpose of CRMPG II — building on the 1999 report of CRMPG I — is to examine what additional steps should be taken by the private sector to promote the efficiency, effectiveness and stability of the global financial system.
As practitioners, the members of CRMPG II recognize that periodic financial disruptions and shocks are inevitable. However, the Policy Group also believes that it is possible to take steps that would be capable of reducing the frequency of such shocks and, especially, to reduce the risk that such shocks would take on the contagion features that can produce systemic damage to the financial system and the real economy.
In approaching its task, the Policy Group shared a broad consensus that the already low statistical probabilities of the occurrence of truly systemic financial shocks had further declined over time. The belief that the risk of systemic financial shocks had fallen was based on a number of considerations including: (1) the strength of the key financial institutions at the core of the financial system; (2) improved risk management techniques; (3) improved official supervision; (4) more effective disclosure and greater transparency; (5) strengthened financial infrastructure; and (6) more effective techniques to hedge and widely distribute financial risks.
Indeed, members took some collective comfort from the fact that following the first CRPMG in 1999 the financial markets had absorbed with remarkable resiliency the effects of multiple disturbances, including but not limited to: (1) the bursting of the technology bubble (Dot.com) ; (2) a mild recession; (3) September 11; (4) two wars; (5) an oil shock; and (6) a wave of corporate scandals (including a handful of major bankruptcies).
[it helps when you know whats coming]
2005-Bird Flu scare. U.S. government spends $1.5 billion on Rumsfelds Gilead Sciences Tamiflu and stockpiling it as part of the nation’s pandemic preparedness plan
2005- The Central Intelligence Agency was a big and early fan of what it called “open source intelligence”—information that it could grab from the public Web: videos, personal blogs, photos, and posts on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google+.
In 2005, the CIA partnered with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to launch the Open Source Center, dedicated to building open-source collection tools and sharing them with other federal intelligence agencies.
Through its In-Q-Tel venture capital fund, the CIA invested in all sorts of companies that mined the Internet for open-source intelligence.
It invested in Dataminr, which bought access to Twitter data and analyzed people’s tweets to spot potential threats.
It backed “a social media intelligence” company called PATHARthat monitored Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts for signs of Islamic radicalization.
And it supported a popular product called Geofeedia, which allowed its clients to display social media posts from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram from specific geographic locations, down to the size of a city block. Users could watch in real time or wind the clock back to earlier times.
All these CIA-backed companies paid Facebook, Google, and Twitter for special access to social media data—adding another lucrative revenue stream to Silicon Valley.
Government is the biggest customer for this data
2005- Jacob Appelbaum and Julian Assange had met in Berlin sometime in 2005, just as the mysterious Australian hacker was getting ready to set WikiLeaks in motion.
Assange’s idea for WikiLeaks was simple: government tyranny can only survive in an ecosystem of secrecy. Take away the ability of the powerful to keep secrets, and the whole facade will come crashing down around them.
With Julian Assange endorsing Tor, reporters assumed that the US government saw the anonymity nonprofit as a threat. But internal documents obtained through FOIA from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, as well as an analysis of Tor’s government contracts, paint a different picture.
They reveal that Appelbaum and Dingledine worked with Assange on securing WikiLeaks with Tor since late 2008 and that they kept their handlers at the BBG informed about their relationship and even provided information about the inner workings of WikiLeaks’s secure submissions system.
Perhaps most telling was that support from the BBG continued even after WikiLeaks began publishing classified government information and Appelbaum became the target of a larger Department of Justice investigation into WikiLeaks.
The idea that social media could be weaponized against countries and governments deemed hostile to US interests wasn’t a surprise.
For years the State Department, in partnership with the Broadcasting Board of Governors and companies like Facebook and Google, had worked to train activists from around the world on how to use Internet tools and social media to organize opposition political movements.
2005-Israel is second only to China in stealing U.S. business secrets.
The 2005 FBI report states, for example, “Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States. These collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizable armaments industry.” A key Israeli method, warns the FBI report, is computer intrusion.
2006-On May 30th George W. Bush nominated Henry Paulson to succeed John Snow as the 74th Secretary of the Treasury for the United States. The nomination alone was quite an honor for Paulson, but there were two catches: First, Paulson had to step down from his position as CEO of Goldman Sachs and be confirmed by the United States Senate.
Next, assuming he was confirmed, Paulson would be required by law to liquidate his entire portfolio of stocks prior to officially taking office.
For the average person, this second catch probably wouldn't be a huge deal. For Henry Paulson however, that meant he would be forced to sell off his entire 1% stake in Goldman Sachs in the middle of one of the hottest stock market rallies in recent history.
He also would have to be willing to take a paycut from $40 million per year to around $183 thousand. Why on earth would he agree to do all this?
While serving as CEO, Paulson's annual salary typically ranged from a low of $16 million to an all time high of $40 million. He was also given extremely generous stock option grants every year. As Treasury Secretary, Henry would be entitled to an annual salary of $183,500 and obviously the US government doesn't offer stock options.
In 1989 with Poppy as President, the government created a one-time loophole for a handful of high level positions that would help attract highly talented professionals away from the private sector.
This loophole gives the candidate the ability to liquidate his or her entire portfolio without paying a dime in capital gains taxes. For someone like Henry Paulson, whose entire $500 million portfolio would have otherwise been subject to full taxation, that represented a very attractive opportunity.
In July 2006, Henry Paulson liquidated 3.23 million shares of Goldman, roughly 1% of the entire company, in a one time public sale. Goldman's $152 share price left Paulson with a tax free gain of $491 million. Without this loophole, had Henry sold his shares at the exact same price and time, he would have been liable for more than $200 million worth of state and Federal capital gains taxes.
2006 - Washington Post: "FBI Shows Off Counterterrorism Database... The FBI has built a database with more than 659 million records... culled from more than 50 FBI and other government agency sources... It is one of the most powerful data analysis tools available to law enforcement and counterterrorism agents... The FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse was launched in 2004. The system [was] designed by Chiliad Inc. of Amherst, Mass."
Chiliad was founded by Robert Maxwells daughter and Ghislaine Maxwells sister
2006-IARPA is a program authorized by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) , and modeled after DARPA, but focused on national intelligence needs, rather than military needs.
IARPA was a consolidation of the NSA’s Disruptive Technology Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s National Technology Alliance, and the CIA’s Intelligence Technology Innovation Center. IARPA’s quantum computing research was named Science magazine's Breakthrough of the Year in 2010.
2006-The Trumps began spending more and more time in Russia. Donald Jr., executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, made about half a dozen trips to Russia over the course of a year and a half.
“In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” he later told a Manhattan real estate conference. “. . . We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
2006- Google Federal went online as, the Pentagon was spending the bulk of its budget on private contractors. That year, of the $60 billion US intelligence budget, 70 percent, or $42 billion, went to corporations.
That means that, although the government pays the bill, the actual work is done by Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Bechtel, Booz Allen Hamilton, and other powerful contractors. And this isn’t just in the defense sector.
By 2017, the federal government was spending $90 billion a year on information technology. It’s a huge market—one in which Google seeks to maintain a strong presence. And its success has been all but guaranteed. Its products are the best in the business.
2006- U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta violated the law in granting Epstein a sweetheart plea deal without notifying Epstein's many underage victims. They numbered scores and perhaps in the vicinity of one hundred, with two claiming at one time in a withdrawn lawsuit that they had been raped by both Epstein and Trump.
The two, "Katie" and "Maria," have alleged that Epstein and Trump raped them at ages 12 and 13. But the lawsuits have been withdrawn, purportedly after death threats.
Acosta, later to be Trump's Labor Secretary in charge of federal efforts to fight sex trafficking nationwide, bagged the federal-state Epstein case when he was a Bush U.S. attorney in Miami, thereby benefiting the wealthy Epstein and his powerful friends, who have included Prince Andrewof the United Kingdom's royal family, Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz.
2006, DARPA announced its Predicting Health and Disease (PHD) program, which sought to determine “whether an individual will develop an infectious disease prior to the onset of symptoms.”
The PHD program planned to accomplish this by “identifying changes in the baseline state of human health through frequent surveillance” with a specific focus on “viral, upper respiratory pathogens.”
2006, DARPA commissioned a four-year study of memetics by Dr. Robert Finkelstein, founder of Robotic Technology Incorporated.
The term “meme” as later appropriated by cultural critics such as Douglas Rushkoff—a leading cyberpunk, friend of Timothy Leary and a teacher at Esalen—who claimed memes were a type of media virus.
Activists count on the use of a meme to disrupt the unconscious thought process that takes place when most consumers view a popular advertising and bring about a détournement in the Situationist sense.
The reactions that most cultural jammers are hoping to evoke are behavioral change and political action. There are four emotions that activists often want viewers to feel. These emotions – shock, shame, fear, and anger – are believed to be the catalysts for social change
March 21, 2006
In a White House news conference, President Bush admits for the first time that the complete removal of U.S. troops from Iraq during the remainder of his term is improbable. He continues to assert the fact that progress is being made in the establishment of Iraqi democracy.
May 3, 2006
After several cases of avian influenza are reported in Central and Southeast Asia, the Bush administration proposes a plan to minimize losses in the case of a deadly pandemic. The plan includes coordination with the World Health Organization, reorganization of international travel, and the authorization of military assistance in the case of public unrest.
.October 26, 2006
President Bush signs a bill providing for the construction of a 700-mile fence along the United States-Mexico border, in an effort to increase border security and stem illegal immigration.
December 30, 2006
Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is hanged in Baghdad, Iraq, after being convicted of crimes against humanity dating back to 1982.
January 11, 2007
Bush announces what would be termed a “troop surge” in Iraq in an attempt to increase security in the capital of Baghdad and smother insurgency centers throughout the country.
March 6, 2007
Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff, is convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the case of CIA operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, whose covert identity was exposed. Bush later commutes Libby’s sentence.
May 1, 2007
Bush vetoes a war spending bill passed by Congress, which set a timetable for troop withdrawal from Iraq. Within days Bush reaches a record low approval rating.
2007-Exactly how much Trump knew about Sater and the inner workings of Bayrock was unclear—which is exactly the way he seemed to want it. But on December 19, Trump gave a deposition in a lawsuit he filed against author Timothy O’Brien.
Two days earlier, New York Times reporter Charles Bagli had revealed that Felix Sater had a hidden past, and now that Trump was under oath it was possible to determine the extent of his knowledge.
When asked about Sater’s criminal history, Trump testified, “[ I’m] looking into it because I wasn’t happy with the story. So I’m looking into it.”
In other words, under oath, Trump had admitted that he knew about Sater’s run-ins with the law. Because the deposition was marked “Confidential” and kept under seal, Trump may not have expected it to become public.
Regardless, Trump’s knowledge of Sater’s past was now a matter of court record. According to Jonathan Winer, the former money-laundering czar in the Clinton administration, if someone in Trump’s situation failed to investigate such allegations he would be “open to charges of ‘willful blindness’ in terms of the knowledge he had.” “
The responsible course of action would have been to have Sater resign and disclose Sater’s past to interested parties,” says Richard Lerner, who, with Frederick Oberlander, filed a qui tam lawsuit against Bayrock in 2015—that is, a civil suit that rewards private entities working to recover funds for the government.
In this case, they charged Bayrock with laundering $ 250 million in profits from Trump SoHo and other projects, and setting up elaborate mechanisms to evade more than $ 100 million in state and federal taxes.
Sater’s attorney, Robert Wolf, characterized the allegations of “their extortionate litigations” as “baseless and highly defamatory.” But rather than extricate himself from the deal with Bayrock and a partnership with a convicted felon, Trump kept silent about Felix, continued working with Bayrock, and ultimately profited from the arrangement.
Indeed, according to Bayrock’s internal emails, rather than disclose the truth, Trump even saw the predicament as an occasion to renegotiate his fees—upward, of course. “Donald . . . saw an opportunity to try and get development fees for himself,” Sater emailed investors a few days after the deposition.
A lawsuit alleged Bayrock’s projected profits were “to be laundered, untaxed through a sham Delaware entity” to the FL Group, Iceland’s largest private investment fund, the first major firm to collapse in 2008 when Iceland’s financial bubble burst, and a favored financial instrument for loans to Russia-connected oligarchs who were, court papers claim, in favor with Vladimir Putin. (The Kremlin has denied that Putin has any connection to the FL Group or Bayrock.)
According to Bloomberg, Eva Joly, who assisted Iceland’s special prosecutor in the investigation of the financial collapse, said, “There was a huge amount of money that came into these banks that wasn’t entirely explained by central bank lending. Only Mafia-like groups fill a gap like that.”
Another significant Bayrock partner, the Sapir Organization, had, through its principal, Tamir Sapir, a long business relationship with Semyon Kislin, the commodities trader who was tied to the Chernoy brothers and, according to the FBI, to Vyacheslav Ivankov’s gang in Brighton Beach.
A generous donor to former New York mayor and future Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, Kislin happened to have considerable political capital after Giuliani appointed him to be a member of the New York City Economic Development Corporation.
In addition to being wired into the Kremlin, Sapir’s son-in-law, Rotem Rosen, was a supporter of Chabad along with Sater, Sapir, and others at Bayrock, and, as a result, was part of an extraordinarily powerful channel between Trump and Putin.
After all, the ascent of Chabad in Russia had been part of Putin’s plan to replace older Jewish institutions in Russia with corresponding organizations that were loyal to him.
The biggest contributor to Chabad in the world was Leviev, the billionaire “King of Diamonds” who had a direct line to Rabbi Berel Lazar, aka “Putin’s rabbi,” to Donald Trump, and to Putin himself dating back to the Russian leader’s early days in St. Petersburg.
Leviev would make major real estate transactions with Jared Kushner, including selling the retail space in the former New York Times Building to Kushner for $ 295 million.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Jared had been active at the campus Chabad House at Harvard. Jared later married Ivanka Trump and became a senior adviser to her father in the White House. Jared and Ivanka were also close to Chabad donor Roman Abramovich and his wife, Dasha Zhukova.
Another major contributor was Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, an American real estate developer who was eventually jailed for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. But that is just the beginning of Chabad’s ties to Trump.
Indeed, one of the biggest contributors to Chabad of Port Washington, Long Island, was Bayrock founder Tevfik Arif, a Kazakh-born Turk with a Muslim name who was not Jewish, but nonetheless won entry into its Chai Circle as a top donor.
2007- Perhaps the most scandalous NSA program revealed by Snowden’s disclosures is called PRISM, which involves a sophisticated on-demand data tap housed within the datacenters of the biggest and most respected names in Silicon Valley: Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.
These devices allow the NSA to siphon off whatever the agency requires, including emails, attachments, chats, address books, files, photographs, audio files, search activity, and mobile phone location history.
According to the Washington Post, these companies knew about PRISM and helped the NSA build the special access to their network systems that PRISM requires, all without raising public alarm or notifying their users. “The engineering problems are so immense, in systems of such complexity and frequent change, that the FBI and NSA would be hard pressed to build in back doors without active help from each company.”
The Washington Post revealed that PRISM is administered for the NSA by the FBI’s secretive Data Intercept Technology Unit, which also handles wiretaps on the Internet and telephone traffic flowing through major telecommunications companies like AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon.
PRISM resembles traditional taps that the FBI maintained throughout the domestic telecommunications system. It works like this: using a specialized interface, an NSA analyst creates a data request, called a “tasking,” for a specific user of a partnering company. “A tasking for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and other providers is routed to equipment [“interception units”] installed at each company.
This equipment, maintained by the FBI, passes the NSA request to a private company’s system.”The tasking creates a digital wiretap that then forwards intelligence to the NSA in real time, all without any input from the company itself. Analysts could even opt-in for alerts for when a particular target logs in to an account.
“Depending on the company, a tasking may return e-mails, attachments, address books, calendars, files stored in the cloud, text or audio or video chats and ‘metadata’ that identify the locations, devices used and other information about a target.”
The program, which began in 2007 under President George W. Bush and which was expanded under President Barack Obama, became a gold mine for American spies.
Microsoft was the first to join in 2007. Yahoo! came online a year later, and Facebook and Google plugged in to PRISM in 2009. Skype and AOL both joined in 2011. Apple, the laggard of the bunch, joined the surveillance system in 2012.
Intelligence officials described PRISM as a key feeder system for foreign intelligence. In 2013, PRISM was used to spy on over a hundred thousand people—“targets,” in the parlance of the NSA. James R. Clapper, director of National Intelligence, described the products of PRISM as “among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect.”
2007-Dark smoke billowed out of the abandoned Bankers Trust headquarters in downtown Manhattan.It was a Saturday afternoon in August 2007, and the dark tower, cloaked in black mesh ever since 9/11, had caught fire after a construction worker dropped a lit cigarette. Hundreds of firefighters rushed to the scene, desperate to prevent the blaze from spreading and the poisons inside the structure from contaminating the surrounding area. The conflagration soon engulfed thirteen floors of the building. It took seven hours to extinguish.Two firemen perished.
A bad omen signaling what was in store for the economy
2007-It was the day after Lehman failed, and the Federal Reserve was trying to decide what to do.
It had been fighting a credit crunch for over a year, and now the worst-case scenario was playing out. A too-big-to-fail bank had just failed, and the rest of the financial system was ready to get knocked over like dominos. The Fed didn't have much room left to cut interest rates, but it still should have. The risk was just too great. That risk was what Fed Chair Ben Bernanke calls the "financial accelerator," and what everyone else calls a depression: a weak economy and weak financial system making each other weaker in a never-ending doom loop.
But the Fed was blinded. It had been all summer. That's when high oil prices started distracting it from the slow-burning financial crisis. They kept distracting it in September, even though oil had fallen far below its July highs. And they're the reason that the Fed decided to do nothing on September 16th. It kept interest rates at 2 percent, and intoned that "the downside risks to growth and the upside risks to inflation are both significant concerns."
In other words, the Fed was just as worried about an inflation scare that was already passing as it was about a once-in-three-generations crisis.
It brought to mind what economist R. G. Hawtrey had said about the Great Depression. Back then, central bankers had worried more about the possibility of inflation than the grim reality of deflation. It was, Hawtrey said, like "crying Fire! Fire! in Noah's flood."
The world changed on August 9, 2007. That's when French bank BNP Paribas announced that it wouldn't let investors withdraw money from its subprime funds anymore. It couldn't value them, because nobody wanted to buy them. The effect was immediate. Banks stopped trusting, and lending to, each other. They all had their own subprime problems, but none of them knew whose was the worst—or who had insured whom.
2007-Former Fed Chairman Jerome Powell was a partner at the Carlyle Group from 1997 to 2005. In November 2017, Stephen Gandel, writing for Bloomberg News, calculated that Powell’s wealth could be as much as $112 million.
Many Americans will recall that the iconic Wall Street investment bank, Bear Stearns, collapsed on March 16, 2008 under the weight of toxic bets gone awry. But few Americans are likely to remember that three days before the demise of Bear Stearns, an insanely leveraged creation of Carlyle Group, Carlyle Capital Corp., also collapsed and was liquidated.
In 2007, in the midst of what would become the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression, Carlyle Capital Corp. filed a stock offering in Amsterdam. Notably, among the bookrunners on the deal were Citigroup, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns – the same banks that were loaning Carlyle Capital money through repo loans to make its wild leveraged bets. (Lehman and Bear would blow themselves up and disappear as a result of the same toxic investments as Carlyle Capital. Citigroup also blew itself up with those investments but was secretly propped up by the Fed with $2.5 trillion in cheap revolving loans over more than two years according to a subsequent audit performed by the Government Accountability Office.)
The Offering Memorandum for the deal said Carlyle Capital would be investing in the following: RMBS (residential mortgage-backed securities]; junk bonds (high yield bonds); bank loans; mezzanine debt; distressed debt; debtor-in-possession and non-performing loans; derivatives of these asset classes, including credit derivatives. In addition to selecting the worst possible investments at the worst possible moment in history, the Offering Memorandum explained how the investments would be leveraged, writing as follows:
“Once the net proceeds from the global offering are fully deployed in the various asset classes in which we intend to invest, we expect our leverage ratio to be approximately 29 times….”
The stock went public in Amsterdam for $20. By the spring of the following year it was trading at 35 cents. Carlyle Capital defaulted on $16 billion in debt at the time of its collapse in March of 2008.
Carlyle Capital is not all that dissimilar to the $4.54 trillion bailout fund that Powell and Quarles are now rolling out for Wall Street. It is highly leveraged (by a factor of 10 to 1); it is buying up toxic waste from Wall Street; it has secured dumb money to eat the losses. The U.S. Treasury Department somehow convinced Congress to commit $454 billion of taxpayers’ money from the recent stimulus bill known as the CARES Act to absorb losses in this Wall Street bailout fund.
On December 2007 to November 10, 2011, the Federal Reserve, secretly and without the awareness of Congress, funneled $19.6 trillion in cumulative loans to bail out the trading houses on Wall Street. Just 14 global financial institutions received 83.9 percent of those loans or $16.41 trillion. (See chart above.)
A number of those banks were insolvent at the time and did not, under the law, qualify for these Fed loans. Significant amounts of these loans were collateralized with junk bonds and stocks, at a time when both markets were in freefall. Under the law, the Fed is only allowed to make loans against “good” collateral.
Six of the institutions receiving massive loans from the Fed were not even U.S. banks but global foreign banks that had to be saved because they were heavily interconnected to the Wall Street banks through unregulated derivatives. If one financial institution in this daisy chain of derivativesfailed, it would set off a domino effect.
Another $10 trillion was spent by the Fed providing dollar swaps to foreign central banks, bringing the final tally of the bailout to $29 trillion.
The Levy Economics Institute used the data that the Federal Reserve was forced to release through an amendment attached to the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation in 2010 to compile the $29 trillion tab.
Its figures are in line with the audit done by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), also mandated by the same amendment. The GAO auditincluded most, but not all, of the Fed programs, so its figures fall short of the comprehensive job done by the Levy Economics Institute.
2007-An important role for London has concerned a seemingly arcane practice known as “rehypothecation,”a way of shifting assets off banks’ balance sheets. The U.S. has firm rules to curb the abuses, but London does not—so ahead of the latest crisis, Wall Street investment banks simply went off to London where they could do it without limit.
A little-noticed IMF paper in July 2010 estimated that by 2007 the seven largest players in the market—Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Merrill/BoA, Citigroup, and JPMorgan—had shifted $4.5 trillion off their balance sheets in this way.
So this London-based practice injected trillions more debt into the financial system than would otherwise have been the case. The City of London and Wall Street banks got rich off this—and ordinary Americans will pay for it for years to come.
2007-Two hedge funds run by the investment bank Bear Stearns had just collapsed in July, 2007-early tremors in what would become a global financial earthquake.
The talk was all about how to avoid the oncoming train,” a Deutsche executive would recount.
Symbolically Dark smoke billowed out of the abandoned Bankers Trust headquarters in downtown Manhattan.It was a Saturday afternoon in August 2007, and the dark tower, cloaked in black mesh ever since 9/11, had caught fire after a construction worker dropped a lit cigarette.
Hundreds of firefighters rushed to the scene, desperate to prevent the blaze from spreading and the poisons inside the structure from contaminating the surrounding area. The conflagration soon engulfed thirteen floors of the building. It took seven hours to extinguish.Two firemen perished.
A bad omen signaling what was in store for the economy
The rest is history
Curiously, some traders at Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs had bet against the sub-primes using CDO’s and made a killing
Deutsche Bank AG was accused of misleading investors about loans backing $1.4 billion in securities issued in 2007, leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for investors and gains for Deutsche Bank.
Justin Kennedy the son of Supreme Court Justice Kennedy left the company in 2009. He was responsible for hundreds of millions in loans to Trump and was the global head of the real-estate capital markets division of Deutsche Bank.
A decade later his father would mysteriously resign from the Supreme Court under Trump as more Deutsche Bank investigations were underway
2008-The unit that blew up the insurance company American International Group (AIG), putting the U.S. taxpayer on the hook for $182.5 billion, was its four hundred–strong AIG Financial Products unit, based in London.
The court-appointed examiner looking into the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 found it had used a trick called Repo 105 to shift $50 billion in assets off its balance sheet, and that while no U.S. law firm would sign off on the transactions, a major law firm in London was delighted to oblige, without breaking the rules.
When the United States introduced the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations to protect Americans against the likes of Enron or Worldcom, the City of London did not follow, and more U.S. financial business flowed to London.
2008-World oil markets are also affected by the London loophole. In June , as world oil prices soared amid uproar about market manipulation, former regulator Michael Greenberger noted in testimony to a U.S. Senate Committee that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Committee (CFTC), the regulator for energy derivatives, had been pursuing a “continuous charade that a U.S. owned exchange (ICE) located in Atlanta and trading critically important U.S. delivered energy products should be regulated by the United Kingdom, whose regulation of these markets is self evidently lacking.”
Almost every Russian firm listing overseas chooses London, not New York, partly because of Britain’s permissive governance standards. The list of London loopholes goes on.
2008- As the financial crisis reached full throttle in the fall , Donald Trump owed $334 million on Deutsche’s 2005 loan for his Chicago skyscraper.
The Trump loan had been diced into mortgage-backed bonds that Deutsche had sold to investors, while also keeping a portion for itself. The loan had been due in May 2008, but Deutsche, acting on behalf of itself and the bondholders, agreed to grant Trump a 6 -month extension.With the November due date approaching, Trump sought another extension.This time the bank said no.
Trump,however,had no intention of repaying the loan on time. He asked his lawyers to figure out a work-around. One of them dissected each of the loan documents and,on a conference call with his colleagues to brainstorm how their client could wriggle out of his obligations, mentioned the existence of a so- called force majeure—act of God—provision in the loan agreement. That meant that in the event of an unanticipatable catastrophe, like a natural disaster, the contract wasn’t enforceable.
A lawyer on the call piped up that Alan Greenspan had just called the financial crisis a “credit tsunami”—and what was a tsunami if not a natural disaster, an act of God? One lawyer, Steve Schlesinger,presented the idea to Trump.“It’s brilliant!” he declared, and Schlesinger and his colleagues basked in the warmth of Trump’s pleasure. He instructed his lawyers to execute the plan.
Three days before the loan was due, the lawyers wrote to Deutsche that Trump considered the financial crisis to represent a force majeure that allowed him to stop paying back his loan. Days later, Trump filed a lawsuit citing the provision and accusing Deutsche of engaging in “predatory lending practices”— toward him!—and of helping ignite the financial crisis.
“Deutsche Bank is one of the banks primarily responsible for the economic dysfunction we are currently facing,” Trump asserted. In an extraordinary act of chutzpah, he sought damages of $3 billion.
Deutsche filed its own suit, seeking the $40 million Trump had personally guaranteed back in 2005. The bank pointed out that the same day Trump had notified Deutsche that the financial crisis constituted a contract-voiding act of godly devastation, he was quoted in two newspapers boasting about how he was unscathed by that very crisis. One of his deputies was quoted bragging that Trump’s company had nearly $2 billion, ready to be deployed on a moment’s notice.
In trying to get Trump to pay back the money he owed, the bank made a persuasive argument for why it should never have loaned him that money in the first place. Deutsche’s lawsuit quoted from Trump’s book, Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life, in which the future president explained how he had handled banks during a real estate downturn in the 1990s. “I turned it back on the banks and let them accept some of the blame,”
Deutsche argued in the suit: “The fact that he is now resorting to the same tactics he has consistently employed throughout his career as a real estate magnate should surprise no one.” Indeed.
Shortly after the suit was filed, Trump bumped into Justin Kennedy who had approved the loan. “Nothing personal,” Trump said. Kennedy replied that there were no hard feelings: Business was business. But when senior Deutsche executives learned about Trump’s litigation, they were irate.“
Justin Kennedy, having made a killing off the financial crisis by betting against the market with CDO’s and now seeing an important client fall by the wayside, decided to leave the bank at the end of 2009.
2008-Delaware, where, “an office at 1209 North Orange Street, Wilmington, houses 217,000 companies.” After Travers said that, I had to see the world’s biggest building. This, as it happens, is the office for the Corporation Trust, a subsidiary of the Dutch firm Wolters Kluwer.
It is just at the edge of Wilmington’s small financial center: a forgettable yellowish brick low-rise with a modest maroon awning: the kind you’d find outside a pizza restaurant.
It sits between the scruffy little parking lot behind it and the unsightly six-story parking garage across Orange Street, and it is, legally speaking, the corporate home of Ford, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Intel Corp., Google Inc., Hewlett Packard, Texas Instruments, and many more global corporate giants, including many of the specialized trusts and Special Purpose Entities (SPEs) that underlay the latest financial crisis. These corporations are not here for secrecy but for the corporate governance.
The Corporation Trust will, as part of the service, also help your company serve and receive notices, subpoenas, summons, and the like. Delaware’s government website lists 110 registered agents—these, by the way, are not regulated.
In 2008 Delaware hosted 882,000 active business entities: one for every man, woman, child, and baby in the state.
2008-London hosts more foreign banks than any other financial center. In 2008 the city accounted for half of all international trade in equities, nearly 45 percent of over-the-counter derivatives turnover, 70 percent of Eurobond turnover, 35 percent of global currency trading, and 55 percent of all international public offerings.
New York is bigger in areas like securitization, insurance, mergers and acquisitions, and asset management, but much of its business is domestic, making London easily the world’s biggest international—and offshore—financial hub.
The head of the Corporation of London is the Lord Mayor of London—not to be confused with the mayor of London, who runs the much larger greater London municipality that contains the City, geographically speaking, but has no jurisdiction over its nonmunicipal affairs. And this separation of powers matters.
The City’s nine thousand–odd human residents have one vote each in municipal elections here. But businesses in the City vote too, as if they were human, with thirty-two thousand corporate votes.
In effect, Goldman Sachs, the Bank of China, Moscow Narodny Bank, and KPMG can vote in a hugely important British election. The strangeness goes deeper and deeper. In fact the Corporation is so ancient and mystifying that barely any outsiders understand it.
January 18, 2008
President Bush proposes a $145 billion stimulus package in response to a housing crisis and rapidly increasing oil prices. The package gives individuals several hundred dollars to facilitate spending, as well as rebates for families with children and tax deductions for businesses in order to jump-start the slowing economy.
February 1, 2008
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the U.S. economy lost more than 15,000 jobs during the previous month. Such an elimination of jobs from the economy had not occurred for more than four years.
February 7, 2008
The Senate passes a $170-billion stimulus package to give many Americans tax rebates as large as $600 or more, and to implement tax breaks for certain businesses in an effort to head-off impending economic slowdown.
June 5, 2008
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence finds, after a five-year study, that President Bush and other officials greatly exaggerated the evidence showing that Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction.
September 7, 2008
The U.S. government places federal mortgage lenders Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association) and Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) under control of the U.S. Treasury to prevent the institutions from going under and endangering more than half of the country’s mortgages.
October 3, 2008
At the onset of financial crisis, President Bush signs a $700 billion bailout plan for failing bank assets, the largest in U.S. history.
November 25, 2008
The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve agree to provide another $800 billion in lending programs to buy debt insured by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and to provide more small loans to consumers.
December 16, 2008
Federal Reserve cuts interest rates to an all-time low of zero percent, down from 1 percent and 0.25 percent earlier in the year as part of a plan to stimulate the economy.
December 19, 2008
President Bush issues a $17.4-billion auto bailout to General Motors and Chrysler to keep the two American automotive giants from going bankrupt.
2008-the FBI released a raft of documents to buttress its case against Bruce Ivins, whom the government says bears “sole responsibility” for the 2001 anthrax attacks. The FBI says Ivins, the late military scientist, is the man who mailed anthrax-laced letters to news organizations and two Senate offices, killing five people and infecting 17 others.
Bruce E. Ivins, committed suicide in 2008 before he could be tried for the crimes. The FBI officially named Ivins the killer in 2010
Meryl Nass, a researcher who knew Ivins, offers a point-by-point rebuttal to each of the government’s claims against her former colleague. There isn’t any physical evidence implicating Ivins, she notes.
The government claimed the anthrax came from a vial in Ivins’ lab, but as many as 100 people could have worked with that vial, the FBI has admitted.
What’s more, the government has offered no evidence to place Ivins in Princeton, N.J.—where the anthrax letters were postmarked—at the time of the mailing
Just after the 9/11 attacks—and weeks before the anthrax letters were found—the White House distributed the antibiotic Cipro to staffers, including those traveling with Vice President Dick Cheney.
This has drawn the attention of many on the conspiracy fringe. Why would the White House have handed out an antibiotic used to treat exposure to anthrax—unless, maybe, possibly, our government knew something that we didn’t?
Also interesting is that on October 12, 2001 - just one week after the attacks had claimed their first victim, the FBI called the University of Iowa and demanded that they destroy their entire database on the Ames strain of anthrax, the strain that would later be revealed to have been the very strain used in the attacks
When the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) did release its review of the FBI's scientific findings a year later in 2011, it found that the Bureau's "smoking gun" scientific evidence against Ivins was actually very inconclusive and they also identified several still, unresolved issues with the FBI's analyses for which the Bureau could not provide an explanation.
The NAS study was not the only independent report that challenged the FBI's case against Ivins after his apparent suicide. In 2014, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its own analysis of the FBI investigation and concluded that the FBI's approach lacked consistency, adequate standards and precision.
The GAO report ultimately supported the NAS' conclusion that the scientific evidence did not definitely prove Ivins to be the culprit.
2003-2008, Little noticed in the aftermath of 9/11 was the beginning of Carlyle’s Asset Management Group ‘second” private equity fund, managed by David Kupperman who was brought in from Goldman Sachs for this task.
This fund would seek opportunities in new “areas of alternative asset management” also known as the “secondary, or resale, private equity original fund was begun in 2001.
By 2003, the ‘Asset Management Group’ was being spun-off in an employee buyout, with Carlyle maintaining a 40% interest. While the investments of the fund were not publicized, their direction should have been clear.
The Carlyle fund was renamed Rock Creek Potomac. One of the General Partners of Rock Creek, John Sites (who previously created the mortgage department at Bears Stearns), was named to the Fannie Mae Board of Directors.
Carlyle Capital Corporation (CCC) was Carlyle’s second effort to facilitate the sub prime mortgage market. This effort was unique in the history of the firm, and was created as a publicly owned corporation. Its specialty was mortgage financing.
CCC was well positioned with relationships with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A long time Carlyle advisor – Robert Zoellick had been Executive Vice President at Fannie Mae between 1993 and 1997.
David Moffet, who had been CEO at Freddie Mac joined Carlyle as well. The Carlyle Group’s total exposure when CCC declared bankruptcy in 2007 was $150 million, although the Carlyle Group loaned the company an additional $200 million in efforts to save it (or the reputation of the Group)– for naught.
In this situation “The naughty Capital Corporation told shareholders it had no subprime exposure. But it did. It said all the exposure was Triple A rated. But it wasn’t. It said liquidity was ample. But it wasnt.”
In the aftermath of September 11 , the Carlyle Group made two quiet efforts to facilitate the subprime mortgage market. In both cases they limited in unprecedented ways their exposure to the risk. Their company misrepresented the investments.
These types of actions suggest that those in control of Carlyle had the inside track on the future of the subprime market, and did not want their personal fortunes tied up with the subprime market.
Once again, individuals close to the original September 1991 bond deal seem to be immune to the meltdown of 2008.
Consider this insider recolection about Frank Carlucci, the executive who headed up the dark side of the Carlyle Group.
“In the late 1980s Iran-Contra whistleblower Gene Wheaton expanded on what General Walters and his associates had been doing since the 1960s. Wheaton had been a former police officer, military criminal investigator, and security contractor. He also used to be a counter-terrorism consultant for the Rockwell Corporation, the Saudi Royal Family, and the Shah of Iran, among other things. All this was before he was brought into the "inner circle", which turned out to consist of people he didn't want anything to do with.
2017-Deutsche Bank has an estimated $320 million in loans on 3 properties: data from Trump's June 2017 financial disclosure form and estimate based on full loan amounts reported in the news .
After Trumps bankruptcies few banks would do business with Trump by Deutsche Bank came to the rescue time and time against despite defaults on loans with Deutsche Bank
Besides Deutsche Bank , a company named Ladder Capital Finance issued $282 million in loans to Trump on 4 properties. In Feb 2017 the Related Companies bought $80 million in Ladder stock. Stephen Ross, chairman & founder of Related Companies, has been a client of Rosemary Vrablic a senior banker at Deutsche Bank, who counts Trump and Jared Kushner as customers
Deutsche's Rosemary Vrablic arranged loans for Trump & prior to election, Deutsche funded $285 million for Jared Kushner to refinance loan on part of former NYT building bought from Putins fav oligarch Lev Leviev whose company AFI was involved in Prevezon $ laundering case
Rosemary Vrablic started in banking in the mid 80’s with Israeli Bank Leumi where the Kushners were customers. Her boss at Deutsche Bank handled Epsteins account which he had brought over from JP morgan after they stopped doing business with Epstein.
Deutsche Bank is being sued by investors over their questionable loans to wealthy and suspect clients. The Judge hearing the case had her husband and son shot by a former member of Kroll Associates who was based in Moscow in the late 90’s.
Many don’t recall but Deutsche Bank handled the Puts that were placed shortly before 9/11 with a former Kroll Associate working for the CIA, and Kroll in charge of WTC security
Deutsche Bank has allegedly been a huge money launderer for Russian and FSU oligarchs. The recent FinCEN leaks involve more than $2 trillion USD worth of flagged transactions from 1999 to 2017.
Much of that laundered money was ploughed into luxury real estate
The majority of the transactions come from Deutsche Bank which had more than half the $2 Trillion-dollar sum of the FinCEN Files. The main focus is on Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs.
2019-A painting showing former President George W. Bush in the Oval Office playing with paper airplanes in front of two collapsed Jenga Towers was found in Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion after his “suicide”.