From the February 2009 Idaho Observer:
The economic 9/11
Whatever you are doing (or not doing) as an activist, it is with the strongest possible emphasis that we urge you to meet with your neighbors at this time (see committees of safety articles this month). Our nation and, indeed, the world, is under economic attack by the international global banking elite. What we thought was another case of Congress simply selling out to Wall Street was, instead, a deliberate show of fiscal force. In essence, Congress was "told" that an electronic run on the banks beginning on Sept. 11, 2008, would have crashed the entire world economy and destroyed the political system as we know it within a few hours had the Federal Reserve not stepped in to stop the attack (from as yet unnamed entities). Congress then gave "experts" nearly carte blanche authority to rescue and stabilize the economy. The result was the "bailout" last October and now the new "stimulus." As this sinister scenario plays out, we can expect federal, state, county and city governments to be rendered ineffectual as they slide deeper into debt and neither tax revenues nor additional loans are available to them. A martial authority will slide into place and, when that happens, the American people will only have each other to rely upon.
Speaking as a guest on the Washington, DC-based television program Washington Journal aired Jan. 27, 2009, on CSPAN, obscure 13-term incumbent Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) was verbally accosted by an angry and frustrated female caller who felt the economic stimulus package currently up for debate in the Congress (as well as the previous $700 billion bank-bailout) was passed to benefit Wall Street at the expense of the American people. With barely-concealed panic in his voice, Kanjorski tried to explain the severity of the current financial emergency faced by the Congress:
"Why did we do that? We did that because...Look, I was there when the Secretary of the Treasury and Chairman of the Federal Reserve came and talked with members of Congress about what was going on, it was about September the 15th…Here’s the facts and we don’t even talk about these things…
Before getting into the meat of Kanjorski’s admissions, we should introduce the "bailout bomb-dropping" rep. from PA: Kanjorski has sat on the House Financial Services Committee since 1985. In the 110th Congress, he was the chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and Government-Sponsored Enterprises (which has jurisdiction over securities exchanges and non-health related insurance matters). Kanjorski is also a member of the House Committee on the Government Oversight and Reform and sits on Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and National Archives. Considering Kanjorski’s relative obscurity and committee placement—and an additional fact that the events to which he is referring have yet to be verified as ever actually taking place as described—makes him ideally suited to be a "message boy" for the bankers.
In response to the caller and questions from the show’s host, Kanjorski explained how Treasury Secretary Paulson suggested that he be given the authority to buy up "dirty assets" so they can be taken off the balance sheets of banks and invest in banks so they could resume functioning normally. Kanjorski admitted that Congress did not have the expertise to address the situation and gave the treasury secretary "great flexibility" and "authority to act."
Kanjorski went onto explain that, "On Thursday [Sept. 11, 2008] at about 11 am the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous drawdown of money market accounts in the United States to the tune of 550 billion dollars, being drawn out in the matter of about an hour or 2. The Treasury opened up its window to help, pumped 105 billion dollars in the system and quickly realized they could not stem the tide…We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn’t be further panic out there. If they had not done this, their estimation was that by 2 o’clock that afternoon, 5.5 trillion dollars would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed…
"We talked about what would happen–it would have been the end of our economic and political system as we know it, and that’s why we had to act and do things quickly. Why? Because if you don’t have a banking system you don’t have an economy, and although we did that it wasn’t enough. The economy has been falling and we’re really no better off today than we were 3 months ago, as other assets are going sour by the moment…Somebody threw us in the middle of the Atlantic ocean without a life raft and we’re trying to determine which is the closest shore and whether there’s any chance in the world to swim that far. We don’t know."
Again, Kanjorski did not identify who or what triggered the $550 billion run that Treasury Secretary Paulson described. So, either Paulson did not say and Congress did not ask or Kanjorski knows the answer and chose not to tell us—an indication that the identity of those responsible is being protected at the highest levels.
American Free Press correspondent Mark Glenn, who reported this story at length (September 11th, 2008—America’s Economic 911 at http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com) explained that, "...on September 15, Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Shalom Bernanke testified before Congress that on the previous Thursday, September 11th, an ‘electronic run’ on the U.S. banking system took place between the hours of 9 a.m. and 11 and that, had stop-gaps not been executed, by 2 pm that afternoon (again, on September 11th) the hemorrhaging of ‘5.5 trillion dollars’ would have taken place, resulting in the collapse of, not only ‘the entire economy’ of the United States, but the world as well—within just ‘24 hours,’ leading to ‘the end of our economic and political system as we know it.’"