WALL STREET’S MOST INFLUENTIAL CEOs HAVE OBAMA’S TREASURY SECRETARY ON SPEED DIAL, AND IT PAYS.

by Robert Scheer
from HUSTLER Magazine – January 2010

When Timothy Geithner headed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he was very good at mealtime, particularly with the Wall Street fat cats he was supposed to be governing. The details of his endless private dining with the likes of Sanford Weill, Robert Rubin and other big bankers responsible for the economic meltdown only came out after President Obama named him Treasury Secretary—and in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

“An examination of Mr. Geithner’s five years as president of the New York Fed, an era of unbridled and ultimately disastrous risk-taking by the financial industry, shows that he forged unusually close relationships with executives of Wall Street’s giant financial institutions,” the New York Times reported. “His actions, as a regulator and later a bailout king, often aligned with the industry’s interests and desires, according to interviews with financiers, regulators and analysts and a review of Federal Reserve records.”

You would have thought that the embarrassing disclosures of how tight this guy was with the banking bandits would have led him to change his social habits—and it has: Instead of private dining encounters, he now schmoozes the bankers during incessant phone calls. Of course, we only learned this when the Wall Street Journal and other news organizations forced the information public through another FOIA lawsuit.

Under the headline “Wall Street on Geithner’s Speed Dial,” the WSJ reported that “Geithner has kept frequent contact with an exclusive group of Wall Street executives since taking the helm at Treasury, speaking most often with top officials from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase Co., CitiGroup Inc. and BlackRock Inc.” And, in fact, he logged far more time talking with Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Sachs, than he did with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, the two leaders of Congress to whom he was supposed to be reporting.

The bigger concern is not the frequency of Geithner’s calls, however, but which end of the call is setting the tone. Representative Brad Sherman (D-California), who has been pushing for tougher regulation of financial institutions, complained: “I don’t mind that he’s talking to Wall Street. The problem is that he appears to be listening.”

Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs bears as much responsibility for the banking meltdown as any other firm and was one of the main beneficiaries of the government’s subsequent heaving of trillions into the gullets of culpable financial institutions that had gambled themselves to the brink of bankruptcy. Remember, it was former Goldman head Robert Rubin who, as treasury secretary in the Clinton Administration, had pushed through the radical deregulation that allowed Wall Street to spin out of control. And it was another Goldman honcho, Henry Paulson, who served as treasury secretary to George W. Bush and ignored the ballooning problem, then led the government bailout that saved the very companies, like Goldman, that deserved to fail.

Thanks to Paulson, Goldman was allowed to reconstitute itself as a commercial bank and therefore became eligible for $10 billion in TARP bailout funds, as well as massive additional support from the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. But the daisy chain doesn’t end there.

After leaving the government, Rubin became a top leader of Citigroup, a company allowed to grow too big to fail by the deregulation he had pushed through. He made over $100 million looking the other way while Citigroup sank close to the point of oblivion. It was prevented from total collapse when Geithner, a Rubin protégé in the Treasury Department who had become New York Fed chairman thanks to Rubin’s influence—joined Paulson in bailing out Citigroup. The bank was given $45 billion outright and a federal guarantee for $300 billion of its toxic assets.

Treasury Secretary Geithner, who took office in January 2009, had frequent phone conversations with the leaders of Citigroup, which might be acceptable if he had gained some concessions on its part. Instead, Citigroup was actively lobbying against any serious efforts to rein in this and other highflying banks. Even though we taxpayers are supposed to own 34% of Citigroup, there is no evidence that this has translated into making the bank’s policies more transparent or accountable.

In contrast, Geithner did not care to hear from the executives of the auto companies that were being saved, at far lower cost, from disaster. As the Wall Street Journal reported, “Mr. Geithner appears to have had no contact with officials at General Motors Co. and just one call with a Chrysler Group LLC official.” Apparently the grittier types in Detroit don’t rate solicitous calls from Wall Street CEOs’ obedient lackey, Obama appointee Timothy Geithner.

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Before serving 30 years as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Robert Scheer spent the late 1960s as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. Now editor of TruthDig.com, Scheer has written such hard-hitting books as The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America and his latest, The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them.

You may purchase the hard copy of the February 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine (with free shipping) at HustlerMagazine.com. Comes with full length DVD and free shipping!

You may purchase a digital copy of the February 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine at UnderCoverMags.com.

SIBEL EDMONDS HAS NAMED NAMES. WHY ISN’T THE MEDIA REPORTING THE STORY?

by Brad Friedman
for HUSTLER MAGAZINE – March 2010

SIBEL EDMONDS, a former FBI translator, claims that the following government officials have committed what amount to acts of treason. They are lawmakers Dennis Hastert, Bob Livingston, Dan Burton, Roy Blunt, Stephen Solarz and Tom Lantos, as well as at least three members of George W. Bush’s inner circle: Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Marc Grossman. But is Sibel Edmonds credible?

“Absolutely, she’s credible,” Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told CBS’s 60 Minutes when he was asked about her in 2002. “The reason I feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story.” Edmonds’s remarkable allegations of bribery, blackmail, infiltration of the U.S. government and the theft of nuclear secrets by foreign allies and enemies alike rocked the Bush Administration. In fact, Bush and company actually prevented Edmonds from telling the American people what she knew—up until now.

John M. Cole, an 18-year veteran of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Counterespionage departments, revealed the panic of upper-echelon officials when Edmonds originally started talking back in 2002. “Well, the Bureau is gonna have to try to work something out with Sibel,” Cole said an FBI executive assistant told him at the time, “because they don’t want this to go out and become public.”

But they couldn’t “work something out with Sibel” because, it seems, she wasn’t looking to make a deal. Edmonds says she was looking to expose what she believed to be the ugly truth about the infiltration of the U.S. government by foreign spies. They were enabled, Edmonds claimed, by high-ranking U.S. officials and insider moles planted at nuclear weapons facilities around the nation.

“Everybody at headquarters level at the Bureau knew what she was saying was extremely accurate,” Cole said recently. “They were trying to figure out ways of keeping this whole thing quiet because they didn’t want Sibel to come out.”

Her under-oath testimony for the Ohio Election Commission, given in a recent videotaped deposition, is both shocking and horrifying. (Edmonds was the star witness for Congressional candidate David Krikorian in connection with a formal complaint initiated by Representative Jean Schmidt [R-Ohio]. Challenging her in 2008, a Krikorian flyer had accused Schmidt of accepting “blood money” from Turkish interests to help block a House bill recognizing Turkey’s genocide of Armenians in 1915.) The deposition was allowed to proceed by the Obama Administration, which chose not to invoke the draconian and little-known “State Secrets Privilege” to gag her, as the previous administration had done, twice.

Edmonds testified that Congressman Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois), a former Speaker of the House, was involved in “several categories” of corruption on behalf of Turkish agents, according to information she claims to have heard while translating and analyzing FBI counterintelligence wiretaps recorded from 1996 through 2002. She mentioned his “acceptance of large sums of bribery in forms of cash or laundered cash” coupled with the ability “to do certain favors…make certain things happen for… [the] Turkish government’s interest.”

Edmonds also alleged, on the public record, Hastert’s use of a “townhouse that was not his residence for certain not very morally accepted activities” and said that “foreign entities knew about this. In fact, they sometimes participated in some of those…activities in that particular townhouse.”

The allegations against Hastert include accepting some half-million dollars in bribes. While several FBI sources have corroborated Edmonds’s account, the best Hastert’s attorneys could do was offer a nondenial denial to the charges. But the proof, as they say, may be in the post-Congressional pudding. As Edmonds had predicted years earlier, Hastert—who left Congress in 2007—now makes $35,000 a month lobbying his old colleagues as a registered foreign agent for the Turkish government.

Former Congressman Bob Livingston (RLouisiana), who was set to become Speaker prior to Hastert until evidence of a sexual affair was revealed by Larry Flynt, was described in Edmonds’s deposition as having participated in “not very legal activities on behalf of foreign interests” before leaving office in 1999. Afterward, she said, Livingston acted “as a conduit to…further foreign interests, both overtly and covertly,” and also became both a lobbyist and “an operative” representing Turkish interests.

According to Edmonds, Representative Roy Blunt (R-Missouri)—likely to run for a U.S. Senate seat in 2010—was “the recipient of both legally and illegally raised…campaign donations from…Turkish entities.” Edmonds also claimed that hard-right Representative Dan Burton (R-Indiana), who was instrumental in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, carried out “extremely illegal activities” and covert operations that were “against the United States citizens” and “against the United States’ interests.”

Edmonds named allegedly traitorous Democrats too. She said that former New York Congressman Stephen Solarz, now also a lobbyist, “acted as conduit to deliver or launder contributions and other bribe[s, including blackmail] to certain members of Congress.” And, according to Edmonds, the late Congressman Tom Lantos (D-California) was said to have been involved in “not only…bribe[ry], but also…disclosing [the] highest level protected U.S. intelligence and weapons technology information both to Israel and to Turkey [and] other very serious criminal conduct.”

The most overtly salacious of the allegations involved Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois), who is “married with…grown children, but she is bisexual,” according to Edmonds. The FBI whistleblower described how Schakowsky was “hooked” by Turkish agents into having a lesbian “sexual relationship with one of their spies,” and “the entire episodes of their sexual conduct was being filmed because the entire house…was bugged…to be used for certain things that they wanted to request.”

Edmonds noted, however, that she didn’t “know if she [Schakowsky] did anything illegal afterwards” since Edmonds was fired by the FBI before learning what came of that particular setup. The Turks, she said, intended to get at Schakowsky’s husband, lobbyist Robert Creamer, who in April 2006 began serving five months in prison (and 11 months of house arrest) for check-kiting and failing to collect withholding tax.

Schakowsky’s office has vehemently denied the allegations. As head of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, Schakowsky might be expected to hold hearings on any of the former FBI employee’s revelations but she has not. She has also refused Edmonds’s challenge to take a polygraph test and has not yet sued her for libel, as the whistleblower has challenged her to do.

Edmonds’s most disturbing allegations, however, may be against high-ranking appointed officials in the Bush Administration. Elaborating on testimony she laid out in her sworn deposition, Edmonds told American Conservative magazine’s Phil Giraldi—a 17-year CIA counterterrorism officer—very specific details of alleged traitorous schemes perpetrated by top State and Defense Department officials. As already noted, these included Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and, perhaps most notably, former Deputy Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, the third-highest-ranking official in the Bush State Department.

Edmonds said that Feith and Wolfowitz were involved in plans to break Iraq into U.S. and British protectorates months prior to 9/11. She also claimed that the duo shared information with Grossman on how to blackmail various officials and that Grossman had accepted cash to help procure and sell nuclear weapons technology to Israel and Turkey—and, from there, on to the foreign black market. There the technology would be purchased by the highest bidder, such as Pakistan, Iran, Libya, North Korea or possibly even al-Qaeda.

Additionally, Edmonds claimed that Grossman, the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey before taking his State Department post, had tipped off Turkish diplomats to the true identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson’s front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, a full three years prior to their being publicly outed by columnist Robert Novak. That in itself, according to George H.W. Bush, would be an act of treason carried out by “the most insidious of traitors.”

Former CIA counterterrorism officer Giraldi summed up Edmonds’s disclosures to me in blunt terms: “This was a massive coordinated espionage effort directed against United States nuclear secrets engineered by foreign agents who successfully corrupted senior government officials and legislators in our Congress. It’s that simple.”

According to a declassified version of a 2005 Department of Justice Inspector General’s report, Sibel Edmonds’s allegations are “credible,” “serious” and “warrant a thorough and careful review by the FBI.”
Perhaps more damningly, the FBI’s John Cole recently confirmed a key element of Edmonds’s claims when he revealed the existence of “the FBI’s decade-long investigation” of the State Department’s Grossman. Edmonds claimed that Grossman was perhaps the top U.S. ringleader for the entire foreign espionage scheme. The probe, Cole added, “ultimately was buried and covered up.”

Cole, who now works as an intelligence contractor for the Air Force, not only finds Edmonds “very credible,” but also confirms the “ongoing and detailed effort by Turkey to develop influence in the United States” through a number of illegal means.

“Turkish individuals would ask for favors—ya know, ‘You help me out, and I’ll help you out’—and basically what would happen is the elected official would either receive money or some kind of gift,” Cole explained. “Or, if it was a government employee, I’ve seen it where after they retired, they get these very lucrative positions with a Turkish company, or whatever the country may be.”

As noted, Hastert now works for Turkey, and Grossman now works for a Turkish company and as a lobbyist—no doubt raking in a pretty penny from both. Hastert and Grossman repeatedly ignored requests to comment on these charges.

The mainstream U.S. media, however, apparently remain uninterested in investigating any of it. Not even after Cole himself called for a “Special Counsel” to investigate and prosecute. So what the hell is going on here?
Giraldi believes that, as with companies such as AIG and GM becoming “too big to fail,” the size and success of this massive national security espionage scandal has simply become too big to bust.

He told me, “You have to look at Marc Grossman being part of a much bigger operation in terms of the Israelis and the Turks obtaining influence over our legislators and over a number of senior government officials at the Pentagon and State Department. Because this thing was so big, and it affected both Democrats and Republicans, I think the U.S. government is terrified of opening up this Pandora’s box.”

Giraldi added, “The people in Congress and in the Justice Department who should be investigating this…and also in the media—because the media is tied hand and foot to government—this is all part of one big, you know, conspiracy, if you want to look at it this way. And, essentially, this is a story that they don’t want to get out.”

So why, exactly, isn’t the media covering Sibel Edmonds, whom the ACLU once described as “the most gagged person in the history of the U.S.,” now that she is finally able to tell her story? It’s a story, after all, that the legendary 1970s whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has deemed “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers.”

“If we had an effective mainstream media that was going after this story, that would make it come out,” Giraldi noted. “But we don’t have an effective media.” He then pointed out one more reason for the media’s reluctance to dig into this story: “According to Sibel, Grossman actually bragged that he would get from the Turks the information that they wanted to appear in an article. He would write it up, and he would fax it over to the New York Times, and they would print it just as he had written it under somebody else’s byline.”

Guess we won’t expect any coverage of this scandal from the New York Times, “the paper of record,” any time soon. And if a story isn’t covered by the Times, and thereafter picked up by everybody else, did it really happen? Given the complicity of the media with regard to Sibel Edmonds, it would appear the government never even needed to invoke the “State Secrets Privilege” in the first place.

As of this writing, HUSTLER stands to be the largest, most “corporate” U.S. outlet in which these startling, now-public, on-the-record disclosures have been reported. The moral: Pull off a large enough crime, and it becomes too big to do anything about.

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You may purchase the hard copy of the March 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine (with free shipping) at HustlerMagazine.com. Comes with full length DVD and free shipping!

You may purchase a digital copy of the March 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine at UnderCoverMags.com.

MORE AND MORE AMERICANS NOW QUESTION HOW OBAMA IS DEALING WITH HEALTHCARE REFORM, PERSONAL PRIVACY AND OTHER KEY ISSUES.

by Nat Hentoff
for HUSTLER MAGAZINE – JANUARY 2010

As Barack Obama approached his second year in the White House, the jubilant campaign shouts of “Change we can believe in!” and “Yes, we can!” were hardly ever heard during his public appearances across the nation. In August 2009, as the President was in New Hampshire defending his incendiary healthcare reforms, a protester shouted, “Keep your change, and I’ll keep my freedom!” Other demonstrators carried signs that, quoting James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, decried the government’s overreaching into personal liberties.

And in Pennsylvania, where newly minted Democrat Arlen Specter was a surrogate for Obamacare, an insistent citizen reminded the state’s senior senator, “This isn’t just about healthcare,” while another proclaimed, “You are trampling on our Constitution!”

Indeed it isn’t just about healthcare, but whatever bill is signed by Obama, the mutinous state of much of the nation may well impact the 2010 elections nationwide.

As I have detailed in previous HUSTLER columns, Obama has not only channeled Bush and Cheney in his assaults on the Constitution but has also gone further. Even skeptical me expected that the new President would act to get the Democratic Congress to revoke the Bush Administration’s startling rush in December 2008 to expand the FBI’s reach to start an investigation—without any evidence or judicial supervision—of any of us who might somehow have endangered national security.

But President Obama has not said a word about this resurrection of J. Edgar Hoover. In August ’09 I was startled to find out that Obama’s Office of Management and Budget is planning to collect the personal information of every user of federal government Web sites.

Like many Americans, I click onto the White House Web site, as well as those of the Supreme Court, the Congress and a range of government agencies and also those providing information on medical and educational issues.

We’re all familiar with the “cookies” that all kinds of commercial operations can later track as we click on sites that reveal our tastes, buying habits and other patterns of our lives. But never before has the federal government collected our computer cookies when we visit its Web sites.

“No American,” says Christopher Calabrese, counsel for the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project, “should have to sacrifice privacy— or risk surveillance—in order to access free government information.”

Why would the Obama Administration want these cookies? To put us into another of their interconnected databases. Will the government let us know how our cookies are being used? But, of course, they’re classified!

One of my daughters, Jessica Hentoff— known in St. Louis and elsewhere as “The Circus Lady” for running and performing in Circus Harmony, whose troupe travels widely— is a constitutionalist. In reaction to the continually overreaching Obama Administration, she recently sent me a button: “No, you can’t have my rights—I’m still using them.”

Wholly unintentionally, both this and the previous imperious administration have viscerally awakened a considerable number of Americans—but not enough yet—to why and how this constitutional republic has lasted longer than any other such attempts anywhere.

But for the rest of Obama’s first term, not only he will be challenged to remember and act on the Constitution he used to teach at the University of Chicago. In demanding a national independent commission on torture, commentator Carla Seaquist (Seattle Times, August 7, 2009) cited questions that We the People should ask of such a commission—and of ourselves—if we’re to move Congress to set up the commission: “Churchgoers approve torture in greater percentages than nonchurchgoers, by 54 to 42 percent, according to a recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. For the love of God, how could this be possible?

“Lawyers for the Bush Administration concocted legal justifications for torture. How did the Department of Justice become the Department of Expediency [as it continues to be under Obama]? Some lawyers working in national security [under Bush and Obama] assert a Commission on Torture would have a ‘chilling effect’ on their actions. … Good. Any notions of bending the law to immoral ends should be chilled.”

So the sometimes-shouting disquiet around the country is not just about healthcare. And it also needs to be about us if we are not to have other such administrations as Bush-Cheney and Obama. It took too many of us too long to remain silently complicit as U.S. and international laws were cruelly broken in our name. Why did it take us so long?

Now, under President Obama, there is an awakening—embodying the spirit of Founding Father Samuel Adams, the Sons of Liberty and the Committees of Correspondence, who precipitated the still-unfinished American Revolution.

In the spirit of their resistance to King George III, hip humorist Dave Barry cautions: “As Americans, we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.”

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You may purchase the hard copy of the January 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine (with free shipping) at HustlerMagazine.com.

You may purchase a digital copy of the January 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine at UnderCoverMags.com.

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This America?