Earlier this year at LRC, I reflected upon the undisclosed effects laundered drug money to major banks and financial institutions from the global narcotics trade had on the economic meltdown and toxic asset crisis. I said that it was time to quit ignoring the Narcosaurus in the bankster board room (and the network newsroom) and come clean with the truth. Pieces of the story are starting to emerge from Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, in this brief article, “Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor.”
Besides the vast illegal proceeds from international drug trafficking and money-laundering, one of the important covert sources of financing the syndicates’ Las Vegas Strip was from the Eccles brothers banking empire. George Stoddard Eccles was the heir of the largest Mormon fortune in Salt Lake City and one of the richest men in the Rocky Mountain West, while his brother Marriner Eccles was chairman of the Federal Reserve and key architect of the New Deal’s central banking system. Somehow it seems reassuring that along with gangsters Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Moe Dalitz, the head of the Fed was an important player in the building of this oasis of crime. What’s past is prologue. When will today’s unsavory truth finally come out about those Teflon Dons, Greenspan and Bernanke, and their roles in this mess? AUDIT (then END) THE FED!
6:48 pm on December 13, 2009
