The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

commerce.

President James Garfield

It used to be called usury. These days it’s called “charging interest on loans” and is the raison d’etre of those ubiquitous institutions, banks. Since the 17th century banks have loaned money to nations and companies as well as to individuals, and accordingly they have been charged with manipulation of national and international affairs. According to the True Conspiracies website the following, among other sins, can be laid at the reinforced doors of “the banks” (punctuation, spelling, capitalization, etc., sic):

Boom and bust cycles along with the depressions, stock market crashes and wars are deliberately caused to make people lose money to the conspirators. They also weaken the people and tame governments into accepting the conspirators’ solutions.

The history books controlled by the conspiracy do not tell the full truth on why many events happen. For example the conspirators blame slavery for the American civil war but the real reason was to establish a central bank in the USA and to force a war to enable them to lend money at interest. […]

The conspirators bribed members of the government by paying them and having them work for the bank. Intense deceptive media publicity convinced the public and politicians of the benefit of the Federal Reserve Act. It was done in ways such as by lying and saying that the banks will reduce boom and bust cycles. The Federal Reserve Act was passed near Christmas when few people were present to vote against it.

Hitler was funded by the USA and Britain to create a bigger war. The U. S. government controlled by the bankers conspiracy, wanted Hitler to invade America but he declined due to the risk of the number of Americans with guns. The U. S. government also encouraged Japan to invade Pearl Harbor to get America into the war.

The bankers funded Arab and Japanese companies to buy up property around the world so the bankers could gain more control of it.

Manipulation of agriculture has and will be used to force the population to accept the conspirators’ demands such as having to surrender guns to get food.

The U. S. deliberately tried to lose the Korean and Vietnam wars so the communists would remain with territory. […]

Although involved with the conspiracy since his initial rise to power, President Kennedy was killed by an agent of the conspiracy for wanting to pull out of Vietnam and printing silver currency.

Many countries now with conflicts had peace until the influence of International Bankers Conspiracy.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was a hoax to fool the world into a false sense of security and also to slowly cause the world to accept communism. The bankers funded the Soviet Union to create an arms race, which cost time and money. Also it caused the nations to gladly surrender their arms in the name of peace so that the goal of a one-world army could be formed under the control of the United Nations.

In World War 2 the US and British governments controlled by the bankers succeeded in getting the Soviet Union to control much of Eastern Europe.

They can control the weather for Biological warfare. They are deliberately ruining the environment to gain more control.

Phew. And there’s plenty more where that came from! In the fevered minds of some conspiracy theorists, the banks are run by a cabal of families—principally the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, Loebs and the Rockefellers— who hammer out their joint policy in the Bilderberg Group and implement said policy via various front organizations. The Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank all hold a special chill place in the hearts of the conspiracy theorists as the business end of the international banking conspiracy. And the end goal of that conspiracy? A New World Order, naturally.

A distinct flaw in the international banking conspiracy theory is that the national banks continue to operate with patriotic bias. The Bank of England still promotes British interests above all others; the Bundesbank acts resolutely in favour of German strategy (which, according to some on the British left, is a conspiracy to run Europe from Berlin, a sort of soft-glove Third Reich), and so on and so forth. Then there’s that nasty sheen of anti- Semitism over much of the banking conspiracy theory, just as it had in the 1930s when Adolf Hitler blamed “Jew financiers” for the world’s woes, principally Bolshevism. Sixty years later it’s still the Jews who “destroyed Christian old line companies… who want Islamic owned companies excluded from Dow Jones… [who] live on the labour of others” according to the internet site Jew Watch. It’s not difficult to debunk the anti- Semitic fantasy: It takes just one name, the name of J. P. Morgan. The superbanker was a white Christian.

Take out the anti-Semitism and the puppet-and-string notion of politics, however, and the conspiracists raise legitimate concerns about the most powerful of financial institutions. Banks are one of the globalizing forces seeking to enervate the nation state, and banks do discuss mutual interests in elite forums such as Bilderberg, Le Cercle and the Trilateral Commission. The International Monetary Fund does operate in the worldwide capitalist interest (as numerous left-wing regimes have discovered when obliged to alter their internal economies in return for aid). Sometimes banks are immoral: the Vatican Bank allegedly laundered money for the Mafia (see Roberto Calvi), the Banco Nationale del Lavoro funded illegal arms purchases, Barclays underpinned the apartheid regime of South Africa before, with breathtaking hypocrisy, funding the black dictatorship of Mugabe in Zimbabwe…

For sheer criminality, however, the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) remains unsurpassed. The sorry tale of the BCCI is also one which ties in some of the biggest names of late 20th-century history, among them George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger and Osama bin Laden.

The BCCI was founded in 1972 by the Pakistani banker Agha Hasan Abedi, with an initial chest of ?2.5 million. In an astute piece of marketing it proclaimed itself the “Third World Bank”, with a mission to promote prosperity in the corners of the globe that Western banks ignored. Within a decade it had a million depositors and was working its way to a paper value of $25 billion. Despite its “Third World Bank” tag, BCCI was keen to break into North America, where in 1977 it bought four banks, including the First American Bank.

BCCI’s vigorous asset-buying hid the bank’s true financial status: it was verging on insolvency. And much of whatever money BCCI was making was coming from illegal activities. By the mid-1980s the CIA, the Internal Revenue Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency were respectively informing the US State, Treasury and Justice departments that BCCI was laundering drugs money. These alarms were all ignored— possibly because some branches of the CIA itself were using BCCI for clandestine purposes—until 1987, when president Manuel Noriega of Panama was discovered to be among those using BCCI to launder drugs money. The lid could no longer be kept on. The US Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations launched an investigation into BCCI under Senator John Kerry. When Kerry eventually delivered his report on “The BCCI Affair” to the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, in December 1992, he recorded a catalogue of larceny by BCCI that ranged from narcotics trafficking to money-laundering.

Such a catalogue of criminality would, one might presume, have the US administration champing at the bit to close BCCI down. Not a bit of it. Which is where the allegation of “conspiracy” enters stage right. One of the companies which borrowed money from BCCI, Harken Energy, had on its board of directors one George W. Bush, the US president’s scion. BCCI lobbyists and advisers included Henry Kissinger’s consultancy, Kissinger Associates. The CIA, while denouncing BCCI on the one hand, was “float[ing] in and out of BCCI” (Kerry) on the other, was possibly using the bank to run funds to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, and was definitely working to some unspecified end through BCCI’s affiliate, Capcom. Even smiling Jimmy Carter and rainbow coalition leader Jesse Jackson were receivers of BCCI’s largesse. In other words, a vast number of US luminaries had a vested interest in halting Kerry’s work—which is exactly what happened in 1989, when the Justice Department stalled his investigation. According to Washington Monthly, personal pressure from no less than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was put on Kerry to desist. To Kerry’s credit he refused to give up completely, and approached New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau with irrefutable evidence that BCCI was handling the accounts of the Colombian Medellin drugs cartel and diverting funds to the terrorist Abu Nidal. In 1990 the Bush administration gave BCCI a rap over the knuckles, but refused to close the bank down. That task fell eventually to the Bank of England in July 1991, although the publication of Kerry’s report (now co-authored by Senator Hank Brown) in the following year administered the coup de grace. BCCI was indicted for money-laundering, bribery and grand larceny.