-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Today's Lesson from Temples of Chance by David Johnston Much of [Donald] Trump's apparent wealth was illusory, the result of complex financial engineering that had come to resemble not the smooth-running money machine Trump endlessly hyped, but a Rube Goldberg contraption constantly in need of more cash to avoid collapse. It had been true almost from the start of his career. Now nothing showed this better than the Trump Princess, which added millions of dollars per year to the drain on his cash flow, plus $29 million in new debt since, as usual, he put no money down. He assumed these new obligations shortly before he was due to fulfill promises to pay down the balances on bank loans and on casino mortgage bonds--money he did not have. ===== Money Laundering Summers Says Russian Organized Crime Threatens America Therefore we should give the Russians more money, and Americans more privacy-invading laws. Lawrence Summers, US Treasury secretary, yesterday said Russian organised crime had become a threat to the integrity of the US and global financial systems. "Russian organised crime has emerged as a powerful corrupting force - a force that challenges Russia's political and economic development," he said. "It has also become a global threat, one that poses a challenge to the integrity of our financial system." However, as the first witness in a series of hearings about US policy towards Russia since the start of criminal investigations in the US and Switzerland into Russian corruption and money-laundering, Mr Summers said continued economic aid to Russia was vital to the US national interest. In a lengthy but restrained session of the House banking committee yesterday, Mr Summers stressed that economic aid to Russia by the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral lenders was important to the US but conceded that the administration was often faced with difficult choices in its efforts to combat corruption and money-laundering. "We have supported continued IMF engagement with Russia. . . not because we expected that Russia would be rapidly transformed into a market economy or that corruption would be eliminated overnight, but rather on the view that to quarantine, contain or write off Russia as too corrupt would ill serve our national interest," he said. Responding to suggestions that the government viewed Russia as "too big to fail", Mr Summers said that the administration had aimed to strike a balance between "what would be economically best and what would be politically realistic. You have to choose, if you like, between different degrees of unsatisfactoriness." Mr Summers told the committee that Treasury policymakers first heard in April of allegations that billions of dollars in suspect Russian funds were laundered through accounts at the Bank of New York. He said the reports reinforced the Treasury's already serious concerns about the use of official finance by the Russian government. Mr Summers said the administration plans to unveil this week new proposed legislation aimed at clamping down on money-laundering. James Leach, the chairman of the banking committee, said he also planned to introduce legislation that appeared to have bipartisan support. Mr Leach said that Congress had been concerned about co-operation between the various US agencies in combating money-laundering. "The Congress does expect to have substantially greater co-ordination within the executive branch," he said. The Financial Times, Sept. 22, 1999 Digital Society Paul Krassner Retires The Realist What was that again about Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy's throat wound? The man credited with being the father of the American underground press is to close the paper that smashed taboos and helped start the hippie movement more than 40 years ago. Paul Krassner, once described by the FBI as a "raving, unconfined nut", says that social change and the arrival of the internet means the Realist is no longer needed. He has decided that his newspaper, which covered and exposed scandals from the Kennedy assassination to the Monica Lewinsky case with a mixture of muckraking and satire, will cease publication by the end of the year. It marks the end of an era for the man who took LSD with Groucho Marx, edited Lenny Bruce's autobiography, helped form the Yippies with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and attracted the ire of everyone from the FBI to the Church of Scientology. The Realist has achieved its function, he says. "Irreverence has become an industry and there are two novels I want to write." Many of the subjects previously only covered in the underground press now appear in the mainstream media and the growth of the internet means that subversive ideas can be swiftly communicated. "The internet is pure democracy because little Mabel down the street is able to get as much attention as General Motors," he said. The inspiration for the creation of the Realist in the 50s came from an unlikely source. "I read an article by Malcolm Muggeridge (the former editor of the British humerous magazine Punch) in Esquire called America Needs a Punch," Mr Krassner said. "That was my marching orders." At the time he was working for Lyle Stuarts's anti-censorship paper The Independent and as a gag writer for the Steve Allen show, and was freelancing for Mad magazine. When Mad told him that some of the jokes he was coming up with were "too adult" he decided to launch his own paper. The first edition carried a dialogue on atomic testing with Bertrand Russell, an article on the laws preventing mixed marriages in Israel, and a swipe at telethons. He distributed it himself by hand to New York bookshops and newstands until a small distributor took it on. Within the decade the Realist, which has never carried advertising, was selling 100,000 copies. It achieved perhaps its greatest notoriety for its coverage of the Kennedy assassination, both in the detailed research by the mother of all conspiracy theorists, Mae Brussell, and Mr Krassner's own satire. The latest edition of the Realist takes in censorship of the television programme The Simpsons, and quotes Jesus as saying: "Fan is short for fanatic, hype is short for hyperbole and Mel Gibson is short for a leading man". Never wealthy, and dependant sometimes for publication on Krassner's salary from Playboy, for whom he conducted interviews, and on the largess of everyone from Yoko Ono to anonymous drug dealers, the Realist had periods in the 70s when it "rested". "I had run out of money and taboos," Mr Krassner said. The paper was often threatened with writs, most notably when the Church of Scientology objected to a satirical and entirely fictional suggestion that Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy's assassin, had been a member of its hierarchy. The Scientologists sued for $750,000 until someone told them that they would look foolish if they followed it up. Now Mr Krassner will be devoting his time to his novel about a modern Lenny Bruce and his stand-up comedy act, which will feature on a new CD to be released next month. Sydney Morning Herald, Sept. 22, 1999 Year 2000 Y2K Muddies Federal Reserve Policy Those naughty consumers. Consumer worries about the millennium bug are complicating the Federal Reserve's task of steering US monetary policy through a period of rapid growth - and reducing the chances that the central bank will raise interest rates again this year. Fed insiders and economists outside the central bank say the distorting effect of Y2K - the potential computer problems arising from the millennium date change - are making it much more difficult for monetary policymakers to figure out what is happening to demand and prices. "The approach of the year-end is sharply increasing the degree of uncertainty about what's really going on in the US economy and is forcing the Fed to the sidelines," said William Dudley, chief economist at Goldman Sachs, the US investment bank. Strong precautionary demand for certain types of goods, and large-scale building of inventories by companies to prepare for possible dislocations in January, have begun to lift growth in the final few months of the year. Preliminary evidence from manufacturing surveys suggests that unusual inventory building alone could add more than 1 percentage point to the growth of gross domestic product in the final three months of 1999. There are already signs that the Y2K effect may be showing up in the economic statistics. Yesterday, for example, the Commerce department reported another record US trade deficit for July of $25.18bn, reflecting a surge in imports which some economists attribute in part to Y2K precautions by US companies. The stronger demand is expected to result in temporary price increases that could distort the underlying inflation performance. On the other hand, the approach of the Y2K problem is expected to slow other types of spending. For example, business spending on computer services and equipment to protect against disruption, which has added tens of billions of dollars to US demand in the last few years, is expected to slow in the final three months of the year. All these unusual patterns will continue, or shift into reverse, with similarly distorting effects, in the first few months of 2000, economists and policymakers believe. The result is that the underlying performance of the US economy in the next six months may be lost in what one former Fed official describes as a statistical "fog". The central bank has three more meetings of its policy-making open market committee scheduled before the end of the year, the first on October 5. The committee raised short term interest rates at its last two meetings to stifle nascent inflationary pressures. Though the Fed will not refrain from raising rates again if it sees the need to, policymakers acknowledge that the distortions of Y2K significantly increase the risk of misreading the economic auguries. The Fed has already taken action to minimise disruption in financial markets from the Y2K problem. Last week Alan Greenspan, the central bank chairman, said the Fed sees no reason for serious disruption in US markets, and Fed officials seem confident that banks and other companies have taken sufficient precautionary action to prevent direct effects from the century date change. But there is lingering concern that some market participants will still be nervous, perhaps even refusing to enter into contracts that expire beyond the end of the year. Earlier this month it announced it stood ready to lend funds on an emergency basis to the financial system, increasing the types of securities it accepts as collateral. The Financial Times, Sept. 22, 1999 Fin-de-Siecle Evil Ex-White House Intern Visits Coffeshop Caffeine-crazed Harpy looks at George Stephanopoulos. A FORMER White House trainee has been arrested after being accused of stalking George Stephanopoulos, President Clinton's former aide, by following him into coffee bars and tracking him down after he moved flats to escape her. Police re-arrested Tangela Burkhart, 32, a former White House intern. She has been arrested twice before for stalking Mr Stephanopoulos, who rose to national attention as the spokesman during Mr Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992. He became the campaign's pin-up, receiving scores of fan letters and being chased by screaming girls. Miss Burkhart's attentions have gone well beyond that. After leaving the White House following the 1996 presidential campaign, Mr Stephanopoulos moved to New York where he took a flat decorated by Ralph Lauren, an American designer. He received a huge book advance, became a television pundit and looked forward to a much less stressful life than he had in Washington. In the first six months of last year Miss Burkhart bombarded him with twice-weekly letters and turned up at his door. She attended his lectures at Columbia University and followed him on public and private engagements. She was arrested and convicted of harassing Mr Stephanopoulos and ordered by a court to have no further contact. A month later she was arrested for breaking the order by following him into coffee shops and around Columbia. Myron Bedlock, her lawyer, said that because she lived two blocks from Mr Stephanopoulos, some contact was inevitable. In his recent autobiography, All Too Human, Mr Stephanopoulos describes "a troubled young woman", who he says is "my stalker". Mr Stephanopoulos left his flat in June for another in the area, "in part to escape the pattern of harassment", say the police. On Sept 5, it is alleged, he saw a familiar face smiling at him in the French Roast coffee bar near his new home. He ran for a telephone and called the police. Miss Burkhart left hurriedly. The same thing allegedly happened six days later and again two days after that. Mr Bedlock said: "Smiling at a coffee house is hardly a criminal act." Miss Burkhart faces a court hearing today. The prosecution wants her jailed. The London Telegraph, Sept. 22, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
