FT238

If there has been a single theme running through this column it is that mega- or meta-conspiracy theories – of the it’s-all-the-fault-of-the-Jews-Masons-aliens-lizards kind – are a distraction from real conspiracies. Sometimes, though, these two fields threaten to overlap – for example with bankers. Now, this makes many respectable commentators nervous lest it should be thought they are interested in banking conspiracy theories – which sound, of course, rather similar to Jewish banking conspiracy theor­ies, that deathless staple of the far Right.

But so obvious have been the conspiracies in the sub-prime lending fiasco in America that I think I detect a certain diminution of the hostility towards the use of the ‘c’ word among our polit­ical-media gatekeepers. This may not be entirely unconnected to the fact that the value of their houses is going to fall as a direct result of the conspiracies by some US banks to sell mortgages to poor Americans who could not afford them (what the American legal system nicely calls ‘predatory lending’), followed by the selling of dodgy bonds and securities based on said dodgy mortgages. This set of linked banking conspiracies may be the biggest set of financial frauds ever perpetrated.

Let off the leash, the bankers have screwed up, royally. But, then again, they always do. The unconstrained pursuit of their own self-interest by creating and lending money and – with the aid of computers – gambling on a scale incomprehensible to the rest of us, has undermined the world capitalist economy. So serious is this that a group of heavyweights in the European Union, including former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, former French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and former EU Commission chief Jacques Delors, have called for the creation of an EU super-regulator to help tame the financial markets. They write: “The current financial crisis is no accident. It was not, as some top people in finance and politics now claim, impossible to predict. For lucid individuals, the bell rang years ago. This crisis is a failure of poorly or unregulated markets, and shows us, once more, that the financial market is not capable of self-regulation.” [1]

This is very striking: no comparable suggest­ion has been made at this level since the Great Depression of the 1930s. On the other hand, it remains to be seen if this call-to-arms against the bankers by yesterday’s men will be taken up by today’s serving politicians. In this respect, the experience of Eliot Spitzer, the erstwhile Governor of New York, is not encouraging. Spitzer, a Democrat, was leading the attack by the civil authorities on the US banking system over the mess they’ve made. He even had the temerity to point that out that the Bush government had used an obscure 19th-century law to prevent state authorities from taking legal action against the predatory lenders who had impoverished so many of their constituents. Following a tip-off from a Republican political operative that Spitzer was using expensive call-girls, the FBI put Spitzer under blanket surveillance and duly caught him with one such. Cue Spitzer’s resignation.

Forty years ago, the mainstream radicals in the American political system who looked threatening to the powers-that-be – the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King – were simply assassinated. These days, it may not be necess­ary to go so far. Political troublemakers can be neutralised without resort to violence – assassin­ation by mass media, as it were. [2]

Nonetheless, the assassinations of the Sixties continue to haunt American politics. On 23 May, Hillary Clinton created a minor media storm by commenting that she had no intent­ion of quitting the Democratic primary race yet because her husband Bill had not won the nomination before June, and “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

Many interpreted this as a rather tasteless suggestion that she should stay in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated. Clinton denied implying any such thing, but the presence among her advisors of Sydney Blumenthal, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton, makes me wonder. Blumenthal, known among the Bill Clinton White House staff as ‘Grassy Knoll’ for his interest in political conspir­acies, was the co-author of a book in the 1970s, Government by Gunplay, on the assassinations of the 1960s.

Meanwhile, barely reported by the American mass media, a recently discovered sound recording of the assassination of Robert Kennedy shows that there was indeed a second gunman in the room. At least 13 shots were fired, while the gun of official ‘lone assassin’ Sirhan Sirhan contained only eight rounds. [3]

Were I advising Barack Obama, I’d tell him that as he continues to pursue his campaign for the Presidential election in November, he should start wearing that bullet-proof vest under his jacket, even if it should spoil the cut of the suit.

NOTES

1 Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: “EU-wide ‘super regulator’ poses threat to City of London”, Sunday Telegraph, 22 May 2008.
2 This is the thesis of Jules Boykoff’s survey of American political repression, Beyond Bullets (AK Press, 2007).
3 See www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/feb/22/kennedy.assasination