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In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.

—Spencer Bachus, chairman, House Financial Services Committee

In democracy, you would want to think that your president, elected by the peo-ple, who is the commander in chief, is in charge. One of the great revelations for me has been how every president, one way or another, has been played by or manipulated by or fooled by their national security officials. And that goes back to Eisenhower… that was the beginning of what many scholars now call the deep state. [The deep state] is essentially an alternative net-work of power that runs the country no matter who is in the White House

—David Talbot, author, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dull-

es, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

You have to hand it to Charles de Gaulle. He knew how to rally the troops. In April 1961 – fully 16 years after the last gun of World War II had

blasted its last shell, and he had hung his gold braid and epaulets in the closet – he put on his old uniform and went on national television.

He told the people of France that their beloved Republic was in grave danger. A coup d’état was under way. He called on them to help him stop it.

“Help me,” he said. And they did. The coup was stopped. The leaders were arrested. The country went on with its business.

A friend of mine was involved per-sonally in that coup attempt:

“I really didn’t know what I was doing. I just got caught up in right-wing politics. I thought de Gaulle was

ruining the country.“My job was to take control of the

airport. I drove out in the night, with a small group. It was a small airport. We expected to take out our guns, wave them around, and announce that the airport was now under the control of the new government, which would be formed in the next few days, after de Gaulle resigned.

“I wasn’t even 20 years old. It was all very exciting. De Gaulle had agreed to give independence to Alge-ria. But Algeria was a part of France. We were just protecting the nation.

“And I was very lucky. The leaders were arrested and given prison sen-

How Deep Is the State?Deeper than you think; Darker than you imagined

VOLUME 2, ISSUE 11 DECEMBER 2015

tences. I was never identified. We just sat in the car listening to the radio, waiting for the signal to take action. When we heard that [army units that were supposed to be on the side of the putschists] had surrendered, we just quietly drove home.”

De Gaulle was no stranger to in-surrection, insubordination, and treason. He had rebelled against the lawful government of France in June 1940. He fled to England, deserting his post. Had he been caught and tried, he would have gotten the firing squad. Two months later he was con-demned to death by a court martial.

Now, the shoe was on the other foot… and the old general knew what to do with it: kick.

His television address includ-ed the most remarkable announce-ment… one that concerned not only the French… but Americans, too.

He said that the CIA was behind the coup attempt… and that the no-torious intelligence agency was not under then President John F. Ken-nedy’s control. In effect, the CIA had gone rogue… and was targeting the elected government of France.

Was that true? I don’t know. But later, Charles de

Gaulle said something even more re-markable. He attended JFK’s funeral and came back and told aides that he believed the CIA had gunned down Kennedy. This comment was not re-ported in the U.S. press.

Was that true?I have no way of knowing. A new

book by David Talbot – The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Govern-ment – suggests that it is.

Eisenhower warned the nation that the “military industrial complex” was getting too big for its britches. According to Talbot, JFK was trying to bring it under control.

Most people will say that this is a “conspiracy” theory… as if conspir-acies never occurred in fact. Raise the possibility of “coup” against JFK at a cocktail party, and people begin edging away from you. The Warren Commission said it wasn’t so. But the Warren Commission was dominated by John Foster Dulles who, says Tal-bot, was the very person who wanted JFK out of the way.

Making Sense of What Doesn’t Make Sense

I am not taking up conspiracy tales in this month’s letter. Not that I don’t believe conspiracies happen. People conspire all the time. I am sure there are plenty of conspiracies involving political leaders, assassinations, cor-ruption, and treachery. But we can rarely know what actually happens and what motives lay behind the sto-ry. Besides, it is hard enough to pull off a complex and controversial op-eration with the full knowledge and straightforward cooperation of all the participants. Imagine what hap-pens when most people don’t know what is going on and of those who do, you’re not sure which are really with you and which are not. Conspiracies are difficult and often take unexpect-ed (nonconspiratorial) directions.

And why bother with conspiracy anyway? Why bother with assassi-nation? Killing people seems like an unnecessary provocation. The Deep

State doesn’t need to kill anyone. And it doesn’t need to conspire, at least not in the usual way.

When people think of the Deep State, they are generally referring to the permanent government run as a collusion between the elite of corpo-rate America and the national secu-rity industry. They think of the “mili-tary industrial complex” that General Eisenhower said we “must guard against,” in his farewell address of 1961.

Today, Eisenhower seems like an antique, a character from a much ear-lier, much more innocent age. But he was alive in our era. And he was not warning about things from ancient history. He was sounding the alarm on things he saw happening with his own eyes and things he heard with his own ears, right here, in the United States of America.

We often say of our government that it is doing things that don’t make sense.

This month, I try to make sense of what doesn’t make sense by under-standing how the government actu-ally works.

I actually came face to face with the aging General Eisenhower one day in the mid-’60s. My father had taken me to the old Walter Reed mil-itary hospital in Washington, D.C. We were going to visit a friend and we were walking down the corridor when suddenly a frail figure appeared from around the corner.

At the sight of his former Supreme Allied Commander, my father – an old master sergeant from World War II – suddenly jerked himself to atten-tion, a reflex picked up over 10 years in the army. Like de Gaulle, my father had been out of uniform for many years, but old habits die hard.

Eisenhower knew how the mod-ern army and the modern state func-

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We have a government that

responds, clumsily but eventually, to the

will of the people.

tioned. Over time, the real front-line soldiers and citizen politicians were replaced by backroom operators, bu-reaucrats, and opportunists. Cincin-natus, the Roman-era farmer who took up arms to defend his country and then returned to the plow when the conflict was over, gave way to men who made their careers in “pub-lic service.” Chiselers, anglers, and cronies accompany every army and infest every government; sometimes they take command of it.

Two of those people Ike warned us about were in the graduating class of 1974 at West Point.

David Petraeus is one. According to the popular press, he

was the hero of “The Surge” in Iraq. According to famed tank commander Colonel David MacGregor, the hero-ics were “a remarkable piece of fic-tion.”

Petraeus was awarded the Bronze Star for combat valor, but, says Mac-Gregor, “[He’s] never pulled a trigger and killed the enemy in combat and has never been in direct fire com-bat…”

In fact, one of the toughest scrapes in his life was probably with his own mistress, to whom he divulged na-tional security secrets so she would have something juicy to put in her book. As director of the CIA, you’d think he would be more careful with his secrets, his alliances, and espe-cially his secret alliances.

Asked to resign by Barack Obama, he moved on in 2012. In addition to academic posts, he took the route that has become routine with retiring (even disgraced) generals. He went to Wall Street. In 2013, he joined private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, where he heads its “Global Institute.” Wall Street has become a stop, usu-ally the last one, on today’s cursus honorum.

Eisenhower left the White House, and he and Mamie went back to live on the family farm, near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, only a few miles from where his father was born. There is no record of his ever lifting the tele-phone to urge or cajole a senator for any purpose… much less to lobby on behalf of a defense contractor. There is no record of his ever even visiting Wall Street, let alone taking up em-ployment there or arguing the cause of manna in the halls of power.

In Eisenhower’s era, power and money were separate. The cronies and the capitalists worked in differ-ent cities for different goals. Now, they worship the same gods and are united in the service of a single mas-ter: the Deep State.

The other person Ike warned us about is Keith Alexander.

Like Petraeus, Alexander went to West Point to do good… and he has done very well. He spent his mili-tary career in various “intelligence” roles. By 2010 he was head of the NSA, pushing the “all-the-informa-tion-about-everyone” doctrine that has become the substitute for real intelligence in the security industry.

But in 2013, while compiling a zil-lion true facts, Alexander frequently appears to have found not a single one that would suit his purposes. Asked what he was up to, none of the facts on hand really was what he wanted, so he invented new ones.

No, the NSA did not collect data on U.S. residents, he told Congress, a fact that we now know was untrue.

In addition to apparently lying

to his overseers in Congress, he was also where the buck stopped when the biggest breach of security in U.S. history occurred. One of his own em-ployees made off with enough real facts to show that Alexander was giv-ing out phony ones. And when the fibs were revealed by the aforemen-tioned leaker, Edward Snowden, Al-exander resigned.

Again, you might wonder about the value of such a man on the open market. Over 60... Untrustworthy... Arguably incompetent... Even when he wasn’t lying, he was speaking blah-blah…

As our dependence on information networks increases, it will take a team to eliminate vulnerabilities and counter the ever-growing threats to the network. We can succeed in securing it by building strong partnerships between and within the private and public sectors, encouraging information sharing and collaboration, and creating and leveraging the technology that affords us the opportunity to secure cyberspace…

And what hath he wrought? The NSA’s budget is classified. But ac-cording to documents leaked by Ed-ward Snowden, the agency spends $10.5 billion a year. Head count is also classified, but reports estimate it employs 40,000 intelligent men and women. And yet… there is no record of any useful “intelligence” coming out of the NSA. For all the money and all the invasions of privacy, the na-tion doesn’t seem to have been made any safer.

But the Deep State doesn’t care about the nation’s safety. It cares only about its own safety. That is why it is so important for us to understand

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3

All government is half brute force and

half pixie dust.

how it works. In the popular myth, we have a government that responds, clumsily but eventually, to the will of the people.

It is supposed to be “by, for, and of” the people. So, we are tempted to believe that what it does, ultimately, is for our own good. We can trust it, in other words, to look out for us. We do not have to fear it. After all, as Hillary Clinton said, “The government is all of us.”

But the Deep State is not all of us. It is only some of us. And some who are not us at all. It is a curious group; some of its main components are not even American citizens. A foreign government, Israel, occupies a dom-inant position in the Deep State.

Through its billionaire political donors – Haim Saban, Paul Singer, and Sheldon Adelson – and its lobby-ists at AIPAC and other well-funded organizations, it exerts more influ-ence on U.S. foreign policy than 200 million voters.

Many international corporations, global organizations, and supra-gov-ernment agencies are also part of the Deep State. And overseas banks, with foreign owners, are major beneficia-ries.

Together, they – along with do-mestic favored industries, the bu-reaucracy itself, special interests, and cronies of various stripes and persua-sions – run the U.S. government and control the police, the armed forces, the financial industry, the medical industry, the education industry, and other major parts of the economy.

You may object that the govern-ment today is not really any larger or different from what it was when Ei-senhower gave his farewell address. On paper, federal spending was 17% of GDP in 1960. On paper, it is 20% today.

But if everything in real life were

like it is supposed to be “on paper,” we would be living in a much differ-ent world.

Half Brute Force and Half Pixie Dust

I am reading a new book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which is one of the most original and in-teresting books I’ve come across in a long time. The author, Yuval Ha-rari, believes that we humans create “myths” that allow us to associate in large numbers to achieve large-scale projects. Such as pyramids. Govern-ments. Religions. And so forth.

Once a myth is in place, we try to protect it… because, from it, people gain their status, their wealth, their pride, and their sense of purpose.

That is why an event such as the Bataclan Massacre in Paris can have such powerful reverberations. People die all the time. More people proba-bly die from peanut butter allergies than from terrorist attacks. But when people are killed by terrorists, it oc-cupies a big and sensitive spot in the collective imagination.

All government is half brute force and half pixie dust. You can force your will on people by violence. But you can’t maintain a govern-ment on brute force alone. You need “trustees”… you need collabora-tors, flunkeys, useful idiots, stooges. Without cooperation… or at least acceptance… it is impossible to rule

over millions of people. In the history of the Soviet Union,

for example, you will find many people sent to gulag concentration camps in Siberia who still believed in the class struggle. Some thought that, in their case, a mistake had been made… or that if the authorities only knew what was going on, they’d stop it immediately!

You cannot run a religion, a gov-ernment, a popular movement, a fashion trend, or a large company on force. Policing is too expensive. That’s the real reason slave labor hardly exists anymore; it can’t com-pete with free labor. And the heavier the hand of government (that is, the more it treats us like slaves), the less able it is to compete with free societ-ies and free markets. That’s why the Soviet Union no longer exists.

But whatever you call the system, you need believers to make it work. You need some magic that you can’t see… a collective myth… a shared un-derstanding… a belief system… You need volunteers and voters!

Pharaoh could not physical-ly force a whole population to drag huge stones across the desert. Nor could a handful of hard-boiled Bol-sheviks turn 100 million people into quasi-slaves, across 11 time zones, with hundreds of different cultures, nations, and languages. They all had to believe something extraordinary.

But systems are not static. Beliefs are not permanent.

The forms can remain the same while the reality changes.

As time goes by, more and more people – usually in loosely organized groups – find ways to “game the sys-tem.” They exploit the “government” to gain an advantage or privilege. As this happens, the system retains its outward appearance, but it is cor-rupted from the inside out so that it

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The U.S. government actually functions

more like an oligarchy than a

democracy.

gradually ceases to serve the common interest that made it so successful in the first place and begins to serve, primarily, the interests of those who actually control it.

Mancur Olson, a professor at the University of Maryland, explained how “distributional coalitions” grad-ually capture the machinery of poli-tics and use it for their own advan-tage. His Rise and Decline of Nations refines the insight of Adam Smith from The Wealth of Nations two cen-turies before:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspira-cy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

The cronies, wrote Olson, “obtain policies that favor themselves and work in different ways against the interests of the larger unorganized groups in the society, thereby making the distribution of income far more unequal.”

This process shifts wealth from those who earn it to those who con-trol the government. It also reduc-es output overall, since it interferes with the capital formation, decision making, and investment. As Olson put it, it creates a “perverse policy syndrome… [that] promotes ineffi-ciency and stagnation as well as in-equality.”

Inefficiency and stagnation re-duce wealth and lead to dissatisfac-tion… which leads to a loss of faith. The magic fades. Those who control the system find they have to come down harder and harder on the lemon to get out the same amount of juice.

Today, we still have the same ap-parent structure of government in the U.S. that we had 200 years ago.

G.W. Bush said it was the “world’s oldest” functioning democracy. And maybe it is. But it’s not what it used to be.

The words are the same. The form is the same. The myth has been pre-served. The country is still called a constitutional republic. People be-lieve in it and use the writings of the Founding Fathers to help them make their arguments.

But, under the hood, the motor is completely different. As my friend Jim Davidson says, it is now a “pimpocra-cy” (the feds offer favors… someone else is forced to provide them).

People still go to the polls and imagine that they are deciding the fate of the nation. But it isn’t true.

An analysis done by Prince-ton and Northwestern universities showed that “while average citizens and mass-based [i.e., pluralist] in-terest groups have little or no influ-ence... economic elites and organized groups representing business inter-ests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy.” In other words, the U.S. government actually functions more like an oli-garchy than a democracy.

In a study of 1,779 proposed pol-icy changes between 1981 and 2002, the researchers found that even when 80% of the population favored a par-ticular policy change, the desired change occurred only 43% of the time. Hence their conclusion: “When

a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with orga-nized interests, they generally lose.”

By contrast, economic elites, representing extremely narrow seg-ments of the population, were able to push through the policy changes they wanted as much as 30% of the time.

“He who pays the piper calls the tune” is the old expression. But it costs remarkably little for the Deep State to call the tune of U.S. govern-ment policy. A research project by the Sunlight Foundation probed the darkness between 2007 and 2012, tracking 200 of America’s most “po-litically active corporations”:

After examining 14 million records, including data on cam-paign contributions, lobbying expenditures, federal budget allocations and spending, we found that, on average, for every dollar spent on influencing poli-tics, the nation’s most politically active corporations received $760 from the government. The $4.4 trillion total represents two-thirds of the $6.5 trillion that individual taxpayers paid into the federal treasury.

On these numbers, no other in-vestment comes close; the best thing a corporation can do with its money is not build new factories, not un-dertake research, not add employees, nor develop new products and mar-kets. The best thing it can do is to join the Deep State and further corrode the political process.

“Government” Is More than Just Government

I lived in France for 20 years and still own a house there. In France, the size of government is notoriously about 60% of GDP, compared to about

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5

All Deep State activities are

designed to serve the insiders and fail the

public.

20% for the U.S. This made me sus-picious, because it always seems as though the feds have about the same reach in both countries.

For example, I went to the hospi-tal in Poitiers for an emergency pro-cedure. As near I could tell, it func-tioned just like hospitals in the U.S., with the same protocols established by the medical industry and the gov-ernment, and similar third-party, mixed private/public payment sys-tems. It even looked and smelled like a hospital in the U.S., despite the fact that medical care in France is a gov-ernment activity, and in the U.S. it is private.

Intrigued by the comparison be-tween French and American health care systems, I asked one of our re-searchers, Nick Rokke, to have a look. Nick’s research notes can be found in Appendix A.

The gist of it is simple enough: There ain’t much difference.

Both are mixtures of medical care industry, insurance business, poli-tics, and bureaucracy. Neither can be said to be “private,” although both have elements that are more or less heavily regulated. In both countries, medical care should be considered a quasi-government activity.

In both countries health care is expensive. In the U.S., it is outra-geous. Costa Rica, for example, has higher life expectancy than the U.S. Yet, its costs for medical care average only about $1,000 a year per person. That is only about one-ninth as much as the average in the U.S. And many American families pay that much ev-ery month – not including the new taxes levied by the Obamacare re-forms.

Since the result is about the same level of health, we can assume that the difference – about $8,000 per year per person – goes not to any genuine

increase in service but as a payoff to the Deep State and its cronies in the insurance and medical industries, both of which are still regarded as part of the “private sector.”

Our children also went to “pri-vate” schools in France. Like those in America, there was heavy govern-ment involvement in the curriculum and the school finances.

I found the education industry worthy of extra study, too. So I turned to Nick again and asked him to in-vestigate. His research notes can be found in Appendix B.

His conclusion: Education is an extension of the government.

You can also find researcher Chad Champion’s notes on the farming industry in Appendix C. No surprise, the implications are similar.

The Mises Institute gives us the bottom line. In the chart above, you can see that if you add up all the pay-offs, bribes, subsidies, and transfers required by law, the U.S. actually has nearly three times more “govern-ment” than France.

Regulations, generally, represent a significant part of the economy, which is nothing more than disguised

government. According to a study by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, regulations cost Americans $1.88 trillion per year. When you are filling out papers required by the feds, you are not doing your own work, you are doing government work. That should properly be included in government’s portion of the economy.

In 2014 alone, 224 new laws were enacted by Congress. But 3,554 new rules were issued by unelected offi-cials, bringing the total over the last 20 years to more than 90,000. Each of these new rules required some mea-sure of action or forbearance that ought to be included on the govern-ment side of the ledger rather than as a part of private enterprise.

The Competitive Enterprise Insti-tute has the report:

If one assumed that all costs of federal regulation and inter-vention flowed all the way down to households, U.S. households would “pay” $14,976 annually on average in regulatory hidden tax. That payment amounts to 23% of the average income of $63,784 and 29% of the expen-

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www.bonnerandpartners.com Source: The Mises Organization

diture budget of $51,100. The “tax” exceeds every item in the budget except housing. More is “spent” on embedded regulation than on health care, food, trans-portation, entertainment, apparel and services, and savings.

Medical care. Education. Pharma-ceuticals. Chemicals. Mining. Farm-ing. Finance. These industries are so heavily regulated, controlled, and protected that they cannot be said to be “private.” They may not be fully “government” either, in that indi-vidual enterprises, colleges, farms, and so forth can still make their own decisions – within the tight bounds imposed on them by the government. And they can still fail – often because of government-imposed costs.

Also, any specific person in these industries – a doctor, a mining firm, or a hedge fund – could be a victim of the Deep State as well as a bene-ficiary of it. So, it is not easy to say where the Deep State begins and where it ends – especially in activi-ties that would happen (though more efficiently) even without government intervention. That is probably why most people who bother to think about the Deep State at all focus on its most sinister aspect: the “securi-ty” industry.

Inefficiency in mining, farming, or pharmaceuticals raises the cost of living. We are worse off, but we can still go about our lives free from fear and largely free from want. We can be as happy as a turkey in a poultry yard.

But then, along comes Thanksgiv-ing…

The Deep State’s interests, like the “distributional coalitions” men-tioned by Professor Olson or like Adam Smith’s business lunches, are more aligned with those of the diners than those of the turkey.

The security industry offers pro-tection. Since military and police ac-tions are easily wrapped in the flag and covered by our instinct to shield family, hearth, and homeland, we are inclined to give the armed forces the benefit of the doubt.

We don’t know who’s a terrorist and who’s not. We may suspect that there is a lot of waste involved in fighting them, but at least our boys are standing between us and them.

That view is probably more wrong than right.

All Deep State activities are de-signed to serve the insiders and fail the public. The last thing the drug warriors want is for people to stop using illegal drugs. Their industry would be out of business. The last thing the prison industry would want is for criminals to go straight. (Part of the reason we have so many new laws is to keep the prison industry fed.) The education industry benefits from failed schools. The anti-poverty industry benefits from failed welfare programs. So, too, does the security industry gain wealth and power by failing to provide real security.

A Funny Empire“The squeaky wheel gets the

grease,” they say.If you are a wagon master, how

do you make your wheels squeak? By failing to lubricate them.

Terrorists are a boon to the Deep State. They help to scare citizens into transferring more of their money to the security industry. Individual sol-diers risk their lives, but the Deep State wants to see terrorists flourish, not eliminated. This can be seen in the charts below and on the following page. Again Nick gives us the report:

The State Department’s numbers on terrorism are a bit convoluted, so we turned to the RAND Corporation, a leading re-search organization. RAND has been tracking the rise of Salafi jihadism – a collective term for terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda that are focused on attacking the U.S. And as you can see in the chart below, the number of groups in this move-ment has grown steadily and significantly for nearly 30 years.

Not only did U.S. efforts in the

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Middle East apparently increase the number of terrorists, but they also seem to have given rise to much bet-ter organized and sophisticated ene-mies.

It is now well-known that the U.S. funds – directly or indirectly – most of the leading combatants on all sides. The U.S. provides military and economic aid to its “friends” in the region; they, in turn, pass that aid along to its “enemies.”

It is also well-documented that the CIA and other U.S. and foreign Deep State agencies greatly aided the incubation and development of Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda, and ISIS. Chad gives us some further research on that, too. His notes can be found in Appendix D.

It is worth pausing a moment to wonder whether we can properly assign an intention based on the re-sults. Just because we got more and better terrorists, does that mean the security industry wanted them?

Over the last seven years, the Fed, as I keep pointing out, has added about $12 trillion to stockholders’ wealth with its twin ZIRP and QE programs. Is it wrong to assume that that, too, was the intention all along?

This is beginning to sound like a conspiracy itself. And it is, in a sense. But not the sort on which you could get a conviction. It is just the natural evolution of a political system, as de-scribed by Professor Olson.

The Deep State faced its biggest challenge in 1989. The Soviet Union renounced its goal of world domina-tion. The Cold War was over. This left the security industry with nothing to provide security against. Huge bud-get cuts loomed. Early retirements beckoned.

But by then, the Deep State was already largely in control of the fed-eral budget. After a pause, “defense”

spending began to rise again.The Deep State is not monolithic.

It has no single brain. There can be conflicting aims within a single in-dustry… or even within a single indi-vidual.

This comes out, for example, when the Pentagon wants to stop the M1 Abrams tank or the C27J Spartan cargo plane and Congress insists on funding it. The politicians are lobbied hard by the defense contractors who stand to gain billions from the weap-onry. But the Pentagon may prefer

a different type of hardware, or may be genuinely concerned about being unable to fight a real war while lad-en with archaic, complicated, acci-dent-prone weapons systems.

That is the beauty… or perhaps the ferocious power… of the Deep State system. It doesn’t require a plan or a brain. It doesn’t need a smoke-filled room or a meeting of the minds. It just develops on its own as people are able to use the government for their own purposes.

There is nothing particularly

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Number of Salafi-Jihadists by Year, 1988-2013 Num

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High estimate

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shocking or novel about this either. All governments benefit, more or less, those who control them. Small, local governments benefit the insid-ers a little. Big governments bene-fit them a lot. Modest governments throw off modest emoluments. Em-pires toss off big ones.

The exact moment when the U.S. became an empire is hard to say. The Rubicon was perhaps the Atlantic. And in 1917 Woodrow Wilson crossed it in order to throw his weight around, entering a war in which the U.S. had no particular interest, 4,000 miles away and on the side that was least compatible with the stated aim.

“To make the world safe for de-mocracy” was the advertised pur-pose. But Britain, to whose aid Amer-ica came, with its vast colonies in India, Asia, and Africa, was the big-gest, most undemocratic empire in the history of the world.

The reason for America’s entry into the war probably had more to do with the need to protect J.P. Morgan’s investments in British debt than to save democracy from being ravished by the Huns. But the effect of it was to put the U.S. clearly on the side of one empire… and in line for the next.

There was nothing unusual about this, either. Most of human history has been passed in thrall to one im-perial standard or another. The U.S. is merely the latest in a long line.

Americans were at first reluctant to take up the burden. They rightly saw that there was nothing in it for them. But World War II – and relent-less propaganda from the incipient Deep State – brought them around.

Still not sure what the benefit was, they nevertheless went along with a program of expensive, worldwide interventions, viewing the whole spectacle rather like a football game in which there was nothing more at

stake than winning.As I tried to understand in my

book Empire of Debt (written with Addison Wiggin), America’s new empire was a funny one. The financial modus operandi of an empire is very similar to the mafia. You provide protection… in return for protection money. But the U.S. never got the hang of it. As far as I can determine, the only beneficiary of the imperial program is the Deep State itself.

Squeeze the PeopleThe story of one of the world’s

most successful empires – Rome – is well-known. Its foreign adventures paid off as long as the empire expanded. New kingdoms and dominions were conquered. Loot and slaves were captured. Empire was a paying proposition.

Then, around the end of the first century A.D., the limits were reached. Rome then had the cost of its own Deep State to support, particularly, the military itself, but no longer had the flow of wealth to maintain it. What could the insiders do? Renounce their privileges and go back to a more modest republic, living on honest trade and their own resources? Or squeeze their own people… Roman citizens… to keep the doors open and the lights on?

Joseph Tainter tells us what Rome had become:

[It was] a government that was larger, more complex, more highly organized, and that com-manded larger and more pow-erful military forces. It taxed its citizens more heavily, conscript-ed their labor, and regulated their lives and their occupations. It was a coercive, omnipresent, all-powerful organization that subdued individual interests and levied all resources toward one overarching goal: the survival of the State.

And The Cambridge Ancient History captures the next phase:

The full rigor of the law was let loose on the population. Soldiers acted as bailiffs or wan-dered as secret police through the land. Those who suffered most were, of course, the prop-ertied class…

In connection with all this, compulsion and state-socialist regulation had established them-selves more firmly…

Arrest, confiscation, and exe-cution hung over their heads like a sword of Damocles…

If the propertied classes buried their money, or sacrificed two-thirds of their estate to escape from a magistracy, or went so far as to give up their whole property in order to get free of the domains rent, and the non-propertied class ran away, the state replied by increasing the pressure.…

The Associated Press in 2013 may have given us a disturbing look into the future when it reported that the Department of Homeland Security

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The Deep State doesn’t care what

you want or who you voted for. It doesn’t care how absurd its economic program

turns out to be.

bought 1.6 billion rounds of ammuni-tion, including ammo specifically de-signed for snipers. What was it going to do with all that firepower? Forbes comments:

[A]t the height of the Iraq War, the Army was expending less than 6 million rounds a month. Therefore 1.6 billion rounds would be enough to sustain a hot war for 20+ years.

Add to this perplexing outré purchase of ammo, DHS now is showing off its acquisition of heavily armored personnel carriers, repatriated from the Iraqi and Afghani theaters of operation.

The Deep State doesn’t care what you want or who you voted for. It doesn’t care how absurd its econom-ic program turns out to be. It doesn’t give a damn about the Bill of Rights or the Rights of Man, red states or blue states. It is a law unto itself… an unbalanced power, an unbridled force… out of order and out of con-trol. Surprisingly, it owes no loyalty to the United States of America, the U.S. Constitution, or even to the peo-ple of the U.S. Just as Romans were eventually ruled by emperors from Spain, the Balkans, and Asia Minor, so may the U.S. empire be actually run by people with their roots in Chi-na or Israel or California.

The unique feature of America’s empire is that it is neither funded by conquest nor by tribute; it is funded by debt.

Debt has proven to be Miracle-Gro for the Deep State. A government needs money to function. And it is the ability to withhold funding that, in theory and in fact, allows people to control their local governments. The Magna Carta Libertatum, for ex-

ample, was grudgingly accepted by King John largely because he needed money. His son, Henry III, reaffirmed it twice – the second time, clearly in exchange for new taxes. And his son, Edward I, did so again, this time mak-ing it part of England’s “law of the land.”

It was access to money that led France’s Louis XVI to convene his parliament, too. He needed the as-sembly to consent to levy taxes. This assembly ran away from him, assert-ing its own authority and ultimately costing Louis his head.

The American Revolution began as a tax revolt. Then, the U.S. Con-stitution put the power of the purse clearly in the hands of the people’s representatives. Congress approves the budget. Congress raises mon-ey. Congress can cut off funding for whatever project it chooses.

The founders were well-versed in Greek and Roman history. They knew how democracies degraded into dic-tatorships. They counted on “checks and balances” to keep power under control. They admired the Roman Re-public. They saw the empire, on the other hand, as despotic, evil, and ulti-mately, ruinous.

There was no “military industrial complex” at the end of the 18th cen-tury. But powerful, charismatic gen-erals were always a threat to civilian government. That was why Caesar was forbidden to lead his troops across the Rubicon. He could come to Rome himself, but not at the head of his army.

In the American Constitution, the power to make war was taken away from the chief executive. Only Con-gress had the power to declare war. And then, it and only it, had to find the troops to fight and the money to pay for it. There should be no ques-tion of “forever wars” and open mil-itary budgets. The security industry – government and private – should always be under the congressional heel.

But since the Korean War, the armed forces have been used to en-tering into action without a formal declaration of war. As for funding… a “paper” currency… with reserve status… meant never having to say “please” or “thank you.” And includ-ing Wall Street as an integral part of the Deep State effectively put the military industrial complex beyond the reach of civilian control.

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$250

$200

$150

$100

$50

01

16

56

87

222

A Comprehensive Look at US Debt (FY 2012)

Trillion

www.bonnerandpartners.com Source: Office of Management and Budget; Treasury Department; Real Clear Policy; Wall Street Journal.

Official Estimates Alternative Debt Estimates

Deficit Official Gross Debt

Unfunded Liabilities

Cox and Archer (2012)

Kotlikoff’s Fiscal Gap (2012)

Bankers, or more broadly, mon-ey men, have always been drawn to government. Regardless of how they make their money, they typi-cally turn to the police power of the state to protect it… and enhance it. Often, they finance wars, too. This is always a risky thing to do. Lenders are sometimes repaid and sometimes not. Wars are lost as well as won. And sometimes it is easier for a king to ex-tinguish a creditor than a debt.

But the post-1971 system is some-thing new. No more did the lenders have to worry about getting their money back; it wasn’t their money in the first place.

21st-Century Assassination

Millions of words have been writ-ten about the role of Wall Street in the booms and bubbles of the last 35 years. I’ve probably written a million of them myself.

Typically, these words explain how the money men have been ben-eficiaries of the easy money system. Financial intermediaries, Wall Street firms peddle debt to an empire that lives on it.

This is not the old-fashioned, gold-standard debt… the kind of debt you get from borrowing some-one else’s savings. This is new debt… which doesn’t need a saver. It is not your grandfather’s capitalism either.

It is a new system based on credit that arises from the central banks and the financial industry itself. Since it requires no savers, neither does it re-quire any earners. Nor does it require any additional tax on earnings. Con-gress need not raise taxes in order to finance a war in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Nor does Congress need to call up additional troops (though it may). The Deep State has both money available and a permanent, standing

army. Congress gets all the benefit of a war – military contracts, lobbying, flag-waving, campaign contributions, post-congressional sinecures – with none of the costs.

Tax revenues, too, are a feature of easy-money financing. Over the last 30 years, stimulus policies – other-wise described as “financialization,” aka shifting wealth from Main Street to Wall Street – have added about $70 trillion to U.S. asset prices. The Deep State has been a major beneficiary. Cronies, contractors, and government hacks have enjoyed increased tax rev-enues, bonuses, and capital gains as well as low financing costs.

In the crisis of 2008-2009, tax revenues collapsed, along with the stock market and GDP. The central bank swung into action, for whom? Who gained? We have been saying it was Wall Street. Or “the 1%.” Or “the rich.” But the real winner was the Deep State.

AIG stock dropped 60% on Sep-tember 16, 2008. As analyst Daniel Amerman put it, “Absent quantitative easing, it was game over for the finan-cial system.”

It could have been game over for Goldman Sachs had it not realized the importance of remaining well-rep-resented in the global Deep State. Bloomberg has the details:

Former Goldman bankers head four of the 12 district Fed banks. It’s not just the Fed in which Goldman has former em-ployees stationed. The Bank of

England Governor and European Central Bank President both worked at Goldman.

And you can see that by looking at a list of Goldman employees and their connections to “the public sector.” (See Appendix E.)

These connections paid off as AIG headed down. Goldman was the insur-ance firm’s biggest counterparty, with about $20 billion in transactions. But when AIG was bailed out with pub-lic money, its owners, investors, and counterparties suffered not a penny of loss on their losing gambles.

In the crisis of ’08-’09, the feds – and the Fed – flew to the rescue. But it was not a rescue of the United States of America or its government or its industries or its people. The U.S. could have easily survived a correc-tion and would have been better off for it; excess debt would have been washed away.

Ordinary Americans would proba-bly have been better off too, though we can’t know exactly what would have happened. And those who think the country would have suffered an-other “Great Depression,” lack faith in the recuperative powers of a free economy. It is not by the grace or intelligence of PhDs on the federal payroll that an economy works but in spite of them.

It is not even correct to say that the Fed rescued Wall Street itself… for some of the major beneficiaries were actually overseas. An audit in 2010 showed that more than a third of the money spent on QE1 went to foreign banks. And by QE3, the for-eign banks had gotten themselves into the pole position, receiving $700 billion of the Fed’s $1.3 trillion of new money.

Why? Because they are part of the Deep State. And because the

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Terrorists pose no dangers to

this system; they strengthen it.

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Deep State recognizes no national allegiances. No borders. No loyalties. And no interests beyond its own.

Empires are more common in history than democracies. They are controlled by (often fluid) combina-tions of insiders – aka, the Deep State – which desires nothing more than to see the source of its power, sta-tus, and wealth remain in business. And today’s Deep State needs easy money. As long as the system works, more and more money and power shift from the private economy to the Deep State, just as Professor Olson observed.

Terrorists pose no dangers to this system; they strengthen it. But you or I might threaten it.

It is unlikely, but a strong candi-date may still be able to revive enough of the old atrophied organs and dust off enough of Americans’ old sense of pride, independence, and solvency – so as to menace the Deep State.

There might be enough kindred spirits appalled by the theft, disgust-ed by endless senseless wars, and shocked by the debts to make possible a march on Washington, and may-be even a real insurrection. Like the Spartacus slave uprising in 72 B.C., an “end the Fed” chant coming from the Capitol Mall… a “stop the wars” banner flying over the Lincoln Memo-rial… might be enough to deeply un-settle the Deep State.

Would the authorities remain in-active, ready to accept the will of the majority? Or is that when all those quazillion phone taps made by Keith Alexander will prove useful?

Bill Binney worked for the NSA for 32 years. It was he who “created the agency’s mass surveillance program.” Now, that program collects 100 billion emails per day… and 20 trillion com-munications all together. The Wash-ingtonBlog:

If anyone gets on the gov-ernment’s “enemies lists,” then the stored information will be used to target them. Specifically, he notes that if the government decides it doesn’t like someone, it analyzes all of the data it has collected on that person and his or her associates over the last 10 years to build a case against him.

All of the information gained by the NSA through spying is then shared with federal, state and local agencies, and they are using that information to prosecute petty crimes such as drugs and taxes. The agencies are instructed to intentionally “launder” the information gained through spying, i.e., to pretend that they got the information in a more legitimate way… And to hide that from defense attorneys and judges.

Lavrenti Beria headed Stalin’s se-cret police. He had no access to an NSA-style database. Still, even with his limited resources, “Show me the man, and I will find the crime,” he said. Today, the secret police never had it so good.

And it could get a lot better. With the coming of a “cashless” economy, all transactions, no matter how small, may have to pass through the Deep State’s information technologies. With the flip of a switch, your secrets could be revealed and your money could be turned off – a 21st-century assassination.

Keith Alexander, the geeky “in-tel” officer put in charge of the NSA in 2005, naturally wanted to put into service bigger, faster, better informa-tion collection systems. It was expen-sive, but these investments height-ened his own power and prestige. Not

only that, it made him very useful to the Info-Tech industry and the Deep State.

“Old soldiers never die,” said Douglas MacArthur in his farewell ad-dress. “They just fade away.” MacAr-thur had been in three major wars. He had been shot at close range at least a half dozen times. He had been stabbed by a bayonet and gassed. He survived the Veracruz expedition and World War I. In World War II, he led U.S. forces against Japan to a success-ful conclusion, with relatively few ca-sualties on the American side.

Keith Alexander was a soldier, too, or so it says on his résumé. There is no record of Alexander ever coming into contact with live ammunition, but he had plenty of contact with live money. So, it seemed natural that af-ter presiding over the biggest securi-ty breach in U.S. history and after ly-ing to Congress, he didn’t fade away.

Like Petraeus, he went to Wall Street. “Thank you for your service,” said the Street. The Securities In-dustry and Financial Markets Asso-ciation now pays his firm, IronNet, $600,000 a month for advice.

Everybody’s a TargetThe new Bluffdale data center in

Utah will cost as much as $2 billion to build, plus another $2 billion for elec-tronic components. It will consume about $40 million worth of electricity each year and use 1.7 million gallons of water each day.

You don’t put that kind of hard-ware in place just to snoop on a hand-ful of terrorists. Instead, the idea is to keep records on everyone so that at any time, the Deep State can find out what it needs to know about anyone.

Wired magazine:

“[T]his is more than just a data center,” says one senior

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intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluff-dale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle – financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential per-sonal communications – will be heavily encrypted.

According to another top of-ficial also involved with the pro-gram, the NSA made an enor-mous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the U.S. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

Alexander said so himself in Sep-tember 2013:

Yes, I believe it is in the na-tion’s best interest to put all the phone records into a lockbox that we could search.

Who’s “we”? If Generals de Gaulle

and Eisenhower were right, “we” means the people with a dull profes-sional interest in protecting the na-tion… and a keen personal interest in protecting themselves.

Keith Alexander is probably the biggest single figure in the Deep State machinery. But there are thousands more whose names and faces are not known.

The Washington Post carried an article in July 2010, called “Top Se-cret America: A hidden world, grow-ing beyond control” by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin. The reporters found some 1,271 different govern-ment organizations and 1,931 private companies working on terrorist-relat-ed projects. They were installed in as many as 10,000 locations across the U.S., with 854,000 people – nearly twice the population of Baltimore – holding security clearances.

Who are these people? What are they doing that is useful or worth-while? Does anyone know? Apparent-ly not. The reporters could find no one in any agency or organization who was aware of what the other groups were up to:

The top-secret world the gov-ernment created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it em-ploys, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

This is the heart of the Deep State. It is a combination of government

and private businesses, working arm in arm to take advantage of the pub-lic. But what is the significance of it? How does the Deep State really affect us?

There is no way to know for sure. But what we have found is that it is not at all bound by the rules, goals, or financial restrictions that limit the rest of the society.

The Deep State functions accord-ing to the codes of the security indus-try, not the securities industry. It is no stranger to conspiracies… secrets… assassinations… manipulating pub-lic opinion… blackmail… or double dealing. It is bolder and more power-ful every year. And it has the will and the way to control public policy.

We have also seen that it depends on the easy-money system as admin-istered by the Fed and other central banks. And we can guess that since it controls the U.S. government, it will make sure that the easy money sys-tem continues… until it finally blows up completely.

Regards,Bill Bonner

Baltimore, MarylandNovember 25, 2015

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France U.S.

Payroll Taxes – 0.75% paid by employee, 13.1% paid by employer.

High income-tax regime in France.

Costs Payroll taxes – 1.45% paid for Medicare by employee, 1.45% paid by employer.

Average premiums for a family of four are $16,800.

Total health premium expense is 20.7% of an average family income.

Combined income going to health care: 20.7% + 2.9% = 23.6%

Doctor must be part of a national network.

You can choose to see a doctor outside of this network, but you must pay privately.

Doctor Selection Doctor must be part of your insurance company’s network of doctors.

You can choose to see a doctor outside of this network, but you must pay privately.

Covered by national insurance if you go to the specialist recom-mended by your doctor.

You can see your own specialist or get a second opinion, but you have to pay privately.

Specialist Visit You either make a co-payment or pay for the entire visit your-self.

Specialist must be “in-network.”

You can see your own specialist or get a second opinion – you only pay extra if the doctor is NOT “in-network.”

Reimbursement rates for medicines are 100%, 65% (normal rate), 35%, and 0%.

Set by government.

Generics reimbursed at a higher rate.

Prescriptions Varies by insurance plan.

Generally, generics have higher reimbursement rates.

Doctors must be approved by a national agency Doctor Certification Doctors must be approved by the state they practice in.

Depending on the practice, they may also need certification from a national board.

The same government agency that certifies doctors also provides guidelines for practicing medicine.

Doctors must follow these if they want to stay in the government system.

Practice Guidelines While no government agency officially sets rules for doctors, there are organizations fully funded by the government that issue rules.

For example, the American College of Physicians (ACP) sets practice guidelines for clinics. In 2010, the ACP covered 63% of general medical practitioners.

And the Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality (funded by the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services) has practice guidelines for just about everything. http://www.guideline.gov/browse/by-topic.aspx

Doctor malpractice insurance strongly encourages using these guidelines.

Set by the government.

Same price for everyone.

Prices Set by the insurance companies.

Many different fee structures.

Return to Bill's Letter

Appendix A

Comparison of the American and French Healthcare SystemsHere we outline the key differences between the American and French health care systems.

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The U.S. education system is just an extension of the Deep State. Here are some examples of government inter-ference in the education system that demonstrate a high level of Deep State control:

1. The Deep State Controls How Our Kids Are Taught

The Department of Education (which is made up of unelected offi-cials) has over 2,000 pages of mandates. It releases amendments and clarifica-tions at a pace of over one per day.

Here are some examples of previous Department of Education mandates that extended the Deep State reach into the education system, and, by ex-tension, into our daily lives:• New Math: a style of teaching math

introduced in the 1950 -1960s that focused on the logical explanations of math procedures instead of ac-tually teaching how to perform the calculations.

• The Open Classroom: A 1970s fad, in which a group of students of varying skill levels were in one large classroom with several teach-ers overseeing them. This format focused on learning by doing and also allowed students decide what they wanted to learn that day.

• Values Clarification: A 1980s teaching method in which teachers focused on making students aware of their own personally held values and those of others around them in society.

• Cooperative Learning: A form or learning in which students worked together in groups to complete tasks.

• Outcome-Based Education: Ad-opted by the U.S. in 1994, out-come-based education sets goals at the federal level for students to meet. States must report math and reading test scores for disadvan-taged demographic groups.

• No Child Left Behind: A set of rules introduced in 2001 designed to close the gap between low- and high-performing schools. The NCLB program instituted assess-ments for all children in basic skills, with school districts and teachers rated on results and penalties im-posed on schools that do not show adequate annual progress.

• Common Core: Federal standards introduced in 2010 regarding what students should know by the end of each grade in math, language, and arts. Forty-two states and D.C. have adopted these standards.

• Race to the Top: A 2009 initiative to give more than $4 billion to states that create plans to address key areas of K–12 education re-form. These four areas are vague. According to whitehouse.gov they are: • Development of rigorous

standards and better assess-ments

• Adoption of better data sys-tems to provide schools, teachers, and parents with information about student progress

• Support for teachers and school leaders to become more effective

• Increased emphasis and re-sources for the rigorous in-

terventions needed to turn around the lowest-perform-ing schools

In our opinion, Race to the Top sounds like a way to hand out kick-backs. It may be a coincidence, but twice as much money went to states that voted Democrat in the last elec-tion...

Click here to read more…

2. Even Private Schools & Homeschoolers Must Comply with Federal Laws

Any private school that accepts funds from the Federal Government must comply with Federal laws and regulations. Figures from 2013 show that 90% of private colleges receive funding through financial aid pro-grams. And although 44% of private K–12 (primary- and secondary-level) schools participate in federal govern-ment programs, over half of private schools choose not to take federal funding. Of course, this should mean that they do not need to comply with Federal regulations.

However, some states heavily regulate private schools. These reg-ulations cover areas such as accredi-tation, registration, licensing, report-ing, and the curriculum itself. Even homeschooling (which, typically, re-ceives no public funding) is under the control of the state in many cases. Twenty-six states require standard-ized testing to make sure kids are keeping up with the “appropriate” curriculum.

Click here to read more...

Appendix B

The Education System and the Deep StateBy Nick Rokke

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3. New Health Rules Cut 1 Million Lunches per Year

In 2011, $10.1 billion was spent on the National School Lunch program providing nutritionally balanced, low-cost or free lunches to chil-dren in public and nonprofit private schools each school day.

But since the new nutrition stan-dards for school meals were signed into law in 2012, 1 million fewer lunches are being bought each year. These new rules force students to take at least one fruit or vegetable as part of their meal. Since kids often don’t eat their vegetables, it is esti-mated that around 40% of the fruit and 60% of the vegetables served end up in the wastebasket. According to a study by Cornell University and Brigham Young University, $4 million a day is wasted as a result.

Other requirements such as how to prepare chicken and using whole grains are said to have added to costs. On top of that, it is reported that stu-dents found some of the school meals bland.

Some school districts are dropping the program and forgoing the feder-al funds in order to avoid complying with the new health rules – just an-other example of how Deep State in-volvement is impeding services pro-vided in education.

Click here and here to read more…

4. Taxpayers Unwittingly Picking Up the Bill for Outstanding Student Loans

Total student loan debt currently stands at $1.3 trillion. The Obamacare Act made the federal Department of Education the lender for most future student loans, meaning the U.S. tax-payer now essentially backs all these student loans.

As with all loans, student loans come with a risk of nonpayment. The

2016 budget figure includes a $21.8 billion write-off of expected future loan repayments. This was achieved by an executive action to expand the pay-as-you-earn program of student loan repayments – basically an ac-counting rule used by federal govern-ment that states that future expected nonpayments are counted against the deficit today. This change was brought about without any congres-sional consultation at all, and essen-tially means the taxpayer must now carry the costs of any unpaid stu-dent loan debts, without ever having agreed to do so.

Click here to read more…

5. The Deep State Controls Hiring at Colleges

Although not as obvious, Deep State control is evident in the hiring practices prevalent across all of our top colleges.

Professors typically hire those with similar beliefs and backgrounds. This leads to a certain amount of control over the ideology students hear from their educators.

Here are a few examples of these hiring practices:

• Of the 430 full-time faculty em-ployed by the top-20 sociology departments, only seven (less than 2 percent) received their PhDs from a non-top-20 depart-ment.

• In law departments, a third of all new teachers hired between 1996 and 2000 graduated from either Harvard or Yale. Another third graduated from other top-12 schools. Another 20% graduated from other top-25 law schools. In total, over 85% of new law pro-fessors hired during that time came from top-25 schools.

• According to a 2011 UCLA study,

63% of professors nationwide identify as either liberal or far-left. Twelve percent identify as conservative or far-right.

With these hiring practices,

changes in attitude toward and thinking about government policies are less likely. Or they will certain-ly take much longer to take hold in the world of academia. Given the in-volvement of our most eminent and qualified academics in the running of the country, we see no reason to hope for any broad-sweeping changes for the better anytime soon.

Click here and here to read more…

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The Deep State has a firm grasp on one of our country’s oldest and most important industries. Here is some information to show just how firm that grasp is:1. The Government Can ConfiscateLandandProducein the Name of National Defense Executive Order – National De-fense Resources Preparedness

The Executive Order – National Defense Resources Preparedness was signed by President Obama in 2012. It allows the U.S. government to con-fiscate anything agriculture-related in the name of national defense.

PART II - PRIORITIES AND ALLOCATIONS

Sec. 201. Priorities and Alloca-tions Authorities. (a) The authority of the President conferred by section 101 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2071, to require acceptance and priority per-formance of contracts or orders (oth-er than contracts of employment) to promote the national defense over performance of any other contracts or orders, and to allocate materials, services, and facilities as deemed nec-essary or appropriate to promote the national defense, is delegated to the following agency heads:

(1) the Secretary of Agriculture with respect to food resources, food resource facilities, livestock resourc-es, veterinary resources, plant health resources, and the domestic distribu-tion of farm equipment and commer-cial fertilizer;

(2) the Secretary of Energy with

respect to all forms of energy;

(3) the Secretary of Health and Human Services with respect to health resources;

(4) the Secretary of Transporta-tion with respect to all forms of civil transportation;

(5) the Secretary of Defense with respect to water resources; and

(6) the Secretary of Commerce with respect to all other materials, services, and facilities, including con-struction materials.

Click here to read more…

2. EPA Bows to Agribusiness with Endorsement of Cancer- Causing Herbicide

This article is from the Organ-ic Consumers Association. The EPA uses research funded by the agri-chemical industry, some of it large-ly outdated, to refute the findings of the World Health Organization relat-ed to the possible health risks of the chemical Glyphosate, which is used in the production of herbicides:

Extract: “Glyphosate has had a tough year. In March, the In-ternational Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, stunned Big Agribusiness by declaring that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen. So the agrichemical giants were no doubt thrilled when the EPA announced a few months later that it had found “no convincing evidence that glyphosate is an endocrine dis-ruptor.”

Click here to read more…3. New Trade Deal Threatens Safety of Our Food

Another article from the Organic Consumers Association. There was a firestorm over how the TPP was signed in secrecy. This article ex-plains why the TPP food safety and labeling provisions weaken food im-port oversight and, ultimately, con-sumer protection.

Extract: “The TPP is a give-away to big agribusiness and food companies that want to use trade deals to attack sen-sible food safety rules, weaken the inspection of imported food and block efforts to strengthen U.S. food safety standards. The food and agribusiness industries inserted language into the text of the TPP that will undermine U.S. food safety oversight and expose consumers to risky imported foods.”Click here to read more…

4. Big Food, Special Interests, and Academia Are Misinforming Us About the Food We Consume

This is an article from the non-profit organization U.S. Right to Know. It points out the connection between academics, special interest groups, and the agrichemical and food industries. Right to Know as-serts that the three groups are col-luding to hide the truth about the safety of the food we consume.

Extract: “U.S. Right to Know is conducting an investigation

Appendix C

Farming and the Deep StateBy Chad Champion

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into the collusion between Big Food, its front groups, and university faculty and staff to deliver industry PR to the public. That investigation is ongoing. Thus far, it has been fruitful, as today’s New York Times article shows.”Click here to read more…

5. Corporate Farming Endangers Food Supply

This article from Natural News references an article from the UK’s Guardian newspaper about the trend in corporate farming that is putting the food supply at risk.

Extract: “As self-sufficien-cy is surrendered away to the demands of corporate mono-culture, the people not only lose touch with their food but become dependent on a select agricultural science that dictates the DNA of what is grown, while controlling the volatile markets.”

Click here to read more…

6. Multinationals Dominate Food Trade

This piece from The Guardian reports on the concentration of the global food market:

Extract: “By mid-morning snack you will certainly have en-countered their products several times already wherever you are in the world, whether it is the corn in your flakes, the wheat in your bread, the orange in your juice, the sugar in your jam, the chocolate on your biscuit, the coffee in your cup. By the end of the day, if you've eaten beef, chicken or pork, consumed anything containing salt, gums, starches, gluten, sweeteners,

or fats, or bought a ready meal or a takeaway, they will have shaped your consumption even further.”

Click here to read more…

7. The Deep State Decides Who Can and Can’t Farm

This is an interesting piece from the Farm-to-Consumer Legal De-fense Fund, a nonprofit organization protecting the rights of farmers and consumers to engage in direct com-merce. It tells the story of the visit of an overzealous regulator to a farm dinner, with two surprising results – good food being destroyed for no reason and a community standing together against the Deep State.

Extract: “When an over-zealous regulator shows up at a farm dinner demanding that food be destroyed as hungry guests await, who do you call? Here’s Laura’s account written as a letter to her guests who had come to Quail Hollow Farm expecting a meal of foods har-vested from local small family farms.”

Click here to read more…

8. Farmers and Ranchers Now Subject to EPA Regulations

This article from Growing Produce, a top information source for special-ty crop growers, details how new Wa-ters of the United States regulations will affect landowners.

Extract: “As of Aug. 28, farmers, ranchers, and growers in 37 states are now subject to additional EPA enforcement under the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) final rule. The

intent of the clean water rule, which stretches EPA’s authority beyond navigable waterways, was to clarify EPA’s jurisdiction in regulating the Clean Water Act.”

Click here to read more…

9. The U.S. Sugar Program Weakens the Economy

This 2012 Heritage Foundation article explains how, contrary to the propaganda put out by its propo-nents, the U.S. Sugar Program drives up the price of sugar, reduces com-petitiveness in the sugar industry, threatens exports, and weakens the U.S. economy.

Extract: “Government interference in the sugar mar-ket hurts consumers and food manufacturers by driving up the price of sugar, threatening com-petitive farmers and ranchers by jeopardizing export growth, and weakening the U.S. economy by diverting resources from more competitive uses. This Depres-sion-era program, which was supposed to end in 1940, has outlived its intended lifespan by 72 years.”

Click here to read more…

10. Sugar Subsidies Cost Consumers Billions Every Year

Another report from The Heritage Foundation explaining why the Sug-ar Program leads to higher consumer prices:

Extract: “The sugar program is a classic government-created cartel, enforced by government coercion rather than by con-

The Bill Bonner Letter

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spiracy among cartel members, that forces American families to pay higher prices for a smaller supply of sugar. According to a study by John Beghin and Ama-ni Elobeid of Iowa State Univer-

sity, the sugar program costs consumers about $3.5 billion each year and has reduced em-ployment by more than 127,000 jobs since 1997.”

Click here to read more…

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The current events in Iraq, Syria, and Paris trace their roots back sever-al decades, some as far back as World War II.

The readings below come from a wide range of news sources, inter-views, insiders, and opinions. They cross the spectrum of viewpoints. These are intended purely as a start-ing point for further historical re-search.1. Middle East Oil Security Goes Back to World War II

During World War II, the Mo-sul-Haifa pipeline, which runs 942 KM from Kirkuk in northern Iraq to Haifa, in Palestine, now in the terri-tory of Israel, provided oil access to the Mediterranean. The British con-sidered it a national security priori-ty as it could power British and U.S. forces.

After World War II, it became a target. And Iraq cut off access to the pipeline after the Arab-Israeli war of 1948.

Fifty-five years later, it was a bar-gaining chip in the second Iraq war. This article comes from Haaretz News in Israel.

Extract: “The United States has asked Israel to check the possibility of pumping oil from Iraq to the oil refineries in Haifa. The request came in a telegram last week from a senior Penta-gon official to a top Foreign Min-istry official in Jerusalem. The Prime Minister's Office, which views the pipeline to Haifa as a "bonus" the U.S. could give to Israel in return for its unequivo-cal support for the American-led

campaign in Iraq, had asked the Americans for the official telegram.”

Click here to read more…

2. The Deep State’s Support of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party Began in the 1960s

This article from the New York Times summarizes the events in Iraq in the 1960s. There was an assassina-tion attempt on Iraqi Prime Minis-ter Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1960. He was eventually killed during a coup three years later. And the Ba’ath Par-ty seized control, paving the way for Saddam Hussein.

Extract: “This history is known to many in the Middle East and Europe, though few Americans are acquainted with it, much less understand it. Yet these interventions help ex-plain why United States policy is viewed with some cynicism abroad. George W. Bush is not the first American president to seek regime change in Iraq. Mr. Bush and his advisers are following a familiar pattern.”

Click here to read more…

3. Relations with Saddam Strengthened in the Late 1970s and Peaked in the 1980s

This report is from the History News Network, part of George Mason University. Robert Buzzanco – Asso-ciate Professor History – reports on the American obsession with Iraq. He gives background on Saddam’s ac-

tions leading up to invading Kuwait.

Extract: “The U.S., though initially supportive of Ba’athist Iraq, turned quickly and began to support separatist Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq in the early 1970s. In 1975, however, the U.S. reached an agreement to seal the border between Iraq and Turkey, the site of Kurdish resistance, and Saddam imme-diately slaughtered thousands of Kurds, prompting Henry Kissing-er’s famous explanation that “covert operations should not be confused with missionary work.”

Just a few years later, Iraqi-American relations reached their high point. As Ayotallah Khomenei’s Islamic Revolution took hold in Iran, the United States saw Teheran as its main adversary in the Middle East, as did Iraq. Consequently, with huge levels of American sup-port–over $40 billion in weapons and technology through the 1980s, with many transactions “off book”–Iraq fought against Iran for nearly a decade.”

Click here to read more…

4. Bin Laden and the Mujahadeen in the 1980s: The Creation of Terror and Foreign Fighters

There was a lot of involvement in Iraq. The Soviet invasion of Afghan-istan changed things. What are now termed “foreign fighters” joined the battlefield. And after defeating the Soviets, they took their agendas to other parts of the world.

Appendix D

Further Reading on ISIS and the Deep StateBy Chad Champion

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Bin Laden formed Al Qaeda in the late 1980s after the war. And what happened is termed by the CIA as “Blowback” – “an agent, an opera-tive, or an operation that has turned on its creators.”

Extract: “As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscow’s invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar – the MAK – which funneled money, arms and fight-ers from the outside world into the Afghan war.

What the CIA bio convenient-ly fails to specify – in its unclas-sified form, at least – is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the In-ter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation.”

Click here and here to read more…

5. The Second Gulf War Planning Began Right After the First Ended

General Wesley Clark, referring to a meeting he had with Paul Wolfow-itz in 1991. At the time, Wolfowitz was the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy – third in command at the Pentagon.

In the video of his speech below, he also cites a memo from the Secre-tary of Defense’s office about plans to attack seven countries in five years - a in the Middle East and North Africa…. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.

Extract: “And I said, Mr. Secretary, you must be pretty happy with the performance of

the troops in Desert Storm.” And he said: “Yeah, but not really, because the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and we didn’t … But one thing we did learn [from the Persian Gulf War] is that we can use our military in the region – in the Middle East – and the Sovi-ets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes – Syria, Iran, Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.”

You can watch his speech here… Click here for more insight from

the general...

6. Coups, Kurds, and Sanctions in Iraq Filled the 1990s

Iraq faded out of the public spot-light after the first Gulf War ended. But behind the scenes things were just getting started:

Extract: “Two coup attempts exemplify the U.S.'s failure. In late March 1991, shortly after the Gulf War, Iraqis were in open revolt. Fighting erupted in all but three of Iraq's provinces, and Saddam's army was left with two days' worth of ammunition. A desperate Saddam sent one of his highest-ranking officers as a "defector" with information that Iraq's senior military lead-ers were on the verge of a coup but hesitated as long as they faced the threat of a revolution. Accordingly, the U.S. signaled to Saddam that he could use his air power, grounded under the terms of the cease-fire, to crush the revolt. No coup followed.”

Saddam was given a pass by the U.S. then. But that didn’t last long.

Extract: “The U.S. moved in 1996 to support a group under the command of Gen. Ayad Alawi, himself a defector from Saddam's regime.”

Read more here, here, and here…

7. War Drums for the Second Invasion Started Five Months Before 9/11

This Council on Foreign Relations report was commissioned by for-mer Secretary of State James Baker (under President George H.W. Bush) and co-sponsored by the Council of Foreign Relations. It builds the case against Iraq. It was given to Vice-Pres-ident Dick Cheney five months before 9/11…

The task force members and ob-servers in the Appendix are a Who’s Who in government, media, and oil. The report provides a picture of ener-gy security policy prior to the second Gulf War.

Extract: “Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to U.S. allies in the Middle East, as well as to regional and global order, and to the flow of oil to interna-tional markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export pro-gram to manipulate oil markets…The United States should con-duct an immediate policy review toward Iraq, including military, energy, economic, and political/diplomatic assessments…Over the past year, Iraq has effective-ly become a swing producer, turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest to do so.”Click here to read more…

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8. Why We Invaded Iraq a Second Time: An Insider’s Perspective

a) Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) is a “Think Tank Without Walls” connecting the research and action of more than 600 scholars, ad-vocates, and activists seeking to make the United States a more responsible global partner. It is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Extracts: “Alan Greenspan, former chair of the Federal Reserve, has declared that “…the Iraq war is largely about oil” in his recently released memoirs. “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are,” said the Republican senator from Nebraska Chuck Hagel… “They talk about America’s national in-terest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re not there for figs.”

Click here to read more…b) Four-Star General John Abi-

zaid – the former commander of Cen-tral Command with responsibility for Iraq – said, “Of course it’s about oil, it’s very much about oil, and we can’t really deny that.”

Click here to read more…c) Former President George W.

Bush said, “If Zarqawi and [Osama] bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks… They'd seize oil fields to fund their ambi-tions. They could recruit more terror-ists by claiming a historic victory over the United States and our coalition.”

Click here to read more…

d) John Bolton – former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations – on Fox News.

You can watch the video here…e) Former Treasury Secretary

under President George W. Bush said that his administration was planning to get rid of Saddam in Iraq from the start.

Extract: "From the very be-ginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill told CBS, according to excerpts released Saturday by the network. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap."Click here to read more…f) And, in the final days of his

administration, President Bush ad-mits al-qaeda wasn’t in Iraq until af-ter the U.S. invaded.

You can watch his interview here…g) Earlier this year, President

Obama admitted ISIS grew out of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

You can watch the interview here…

9. All Doors to ISIS Were Opened in Second Iraq War

a) Bin Laden – Saudi National – and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – Jor-danian National – were the infamous faces of al-qaeda. Both have since been killed. In reality, they lead two very different groups, and had very divergent leadership styles and goals. And according to the Washington Institute, Zarqawi’s “extreme views on takfir (accusing another Muslim of heresy and thereby justifying his killing) created major friction and distrust with Bin Laden when the two first met in Afghanistan in 1999.”

According to a report by Bloomberg, Zarqawi wanted to start an Islamic State. He started a sub-

sidiary group of Sunnis led by his al-qaeda in Iraq group. The current leader of ISIS – Abu Bakr Al-Baghda-di– joined him soon after.

Al-Baghadi became the leader through a process of elimination. Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike. An Egyptian – Abu Ayoub al-Masri – then took over and declared an Is-lamic State of Iraq.

In 2010, he was killed in a joint U.S.-Iraqi raid. Al-Baghadi took over after that. This transition was a sig-nificant event in ISIS leadership. Now ISIS is led by an Iraqi – al-Baghadi – and not run by foreign fighters.

According to the Daily Mail in the U.K., “ISIS leadership is dominated by former members of Hussein's Iraqi Army… Many joined the terror group in the insurgency after the fall of the dictator.”

Click here to read more…b) According to a report from

the Huffington Post,

Extract: “Hundreds of thou-sands of Iraqis who had pre-viously been among the most privileged in their desperate country were suddenly unem-ployed, though they retained all the ingenuity and discipline they had gained working for the dictator.

Veteran New Yorker corre-spondent Dexter Filkins called the move probably the single most catastrophic decision of the American venture in Iraq." Click here to read more…c) A former FBI translator – and

whistle-blower – says the CIA and NATO started the basis of ISIS. She reports they were training units to create terror within Syria against As-sad.

You can read her story here…d) Lt. General Michael Flynn

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– former head of the Defense Intel-ligence Agency and U.S. Intelligence JSOC – said the West, Gulf Allies, and Turkey wanted an Islamic caliphate to challenge Assad in Syria.

Veterans Today quoted Flynn: “I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision [to allow ISIS to evolve].”

Click here to read more…And you can watch his interview

here [Minute mark 8:14 if you want a short clip to watch.]

10.Al-Qaeda,Libya,Gaddafi,and the Benghazi Embassy Attack Comes Full Circle

NATO intervened in Libya on what was termed “crimes against humani-ty.” At the time, Gaddafi was prepar-ing to invade the town of Benghazi. This was during the Arab Spring throughout the Middle East. Gaddafi blamed the rebel uprising on al-Qae-da, which then led to his army killing protesters in Benghazi. The National Transition Council based in Benghazi took over after Gaddafi was killed in 2011.

Many analysts believe this had something to do with the terror at-tack in Benghazi as well. The U.S. House of Representatives set up a committee to investigate what hap-pened.

The Daily Mail reports, “The Cit-izens Commission on Benghazi, a self-selected group of former top military officers, CIA insiders and think-tankers, declared Tuesday in Washington that a seven-month review of the deadly 2012 terrorist attack has determined that it could have been prevented – if the U.S. hadn't been helping to arm al-Qaeda militias throughout Libya a year ear-lier.”

Click here to read more…

11. After al-Qaeda, Iraq, and the Creation of ISIS, the Deep State Turned Its Attention to Syria

a) According to reports, there was a game plan for Iraq and Syr-ia… to break them up into pieces and multiple regions. But the locals – for example, Egyptian President Mubarak – knew what would happen.

Extract: “In a televised speech last week, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt predict-ed devastating consequences for the Middle East if Iraq is attacked. We fear a state of disorder and chaos may prevail in the region,” he said.

The report continues, “With Saddam out of the way and Iraq thus brought under Jordanian Hashemite influence, Jordan and Turkey would form an axis along with Israel to weaken and 'roll back' Syria.”Click here to read more…b) “Reports coming out of east-

ern Syria Monday revealed that sev-eral factions within the Syrian oppo-sition force known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have pledged services to the Islamic State, the group former-ly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).”

Click here to read more…c) “The U.S. State Department

acknowledged Monday it has been funding opponents of Syrian Presi-dent Bashar Assad, following the re-lease of secret diplomatic cables ob-tained by WikiLeaks that document the funding.”

Click here to read more…d) Like Iraq, the meddling in

Syria goes back several decades. Coups and regime-change tactics were happening in the late 1940s. Like Iraq, there are concerns about

the security of the Arab Gas Pipeline extension goes through Syria.

Extract: “Nearly 50 years before the war in Iraq, Britain and America sought a secretive 'regime change' in another Arab country they accused of spread-ing terror and threatening the West's oil supplies, by planning the invasion of Syria and the assassination of leading figures.

“Newly discovered docu-ments show how in 1957 Harold Macmillan and President Dwight Eisenhower approved a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion by Syria's pro-Western neighbours, and then to 'elimi-nate' the most influential triumvi-rate in Damascus.”This report is from The Guardian. Click here to read more…

12. The U.S. Gives Syrian Rebels Air Cover and the Ability to Call in Airstrikes

a) “Syrian rebels backed by the United States will now have air cover if they come under attack after Presi-dent Barack Obama signed off on the decision, a senior administration of-ficial confirms to CNN on Sunday.”

Click here to read more…b) “Case in point an absolute

stunner reported… by the WSJ, ac-cording to which the White House has decided to provide pickup trucks equipped with mounted machine guns and radios for calling in U.S. air-strikes to some moderate Syrian reb-els aided by American B-1B bomb-ers!”

Click here to read more…

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This list of former employees of Goldman Sachs catalogs notable alumni of the New York City-based investment bank in different fields.

• Bradley Abelow – Former Chief of Staff and Treasurer of New Jersey under Jon Corzine, and President of MF Global, Inc.

• Guy Adami – CNBC's Fast Money• Olusegun Olutoyin Aganga –

Former Nigerian Finance Minister, current Nigerian Minister for Trade and Investments

• Claudio Aguirre – Led most of the privatization of Spanish government assets in the 1990s, including Telefónica, Repsol and Endesa

• Sergey Aleynikov – Goldman Sachs computer programmer convicted of stealing Goldman's code[1][2]

• Ziad Bahaa-Eldin – Deputy Prime Minister of Egypt (2013–)

• Chetan Bhagat – Author• Fischer Black – Co–author of the

Black–Scholes equation and the Black-Derman-Toy model

• Joshua Bolten – Former White House Chief of Staff

• António Borges –Portuguese economist and banker

• Diethart Breipohl – Head of Group Finance at Allianz

• Willem Buiter – Chief Economist of Citigroup (2010–)

• Erin Burnett – CNN host• Mark Carney – Governor of the

Bank of England (2013–) and former Governor of the Bank of Canada (2008–2013)[3]

• Efthymios Christodoulou – Governor of the Bank of Greece (1991–1993)

• Petros Christodoulou – General Manager of the Public Debt Management Agency of Greece (2010–2012) and Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the National Bank of Greece (2012–)

• Michael Cohrs – Member of Court and the Financial Policy Committee at the Bank of England

• Jon Corzine – Former CEO of MF Global, Inc., former Democratic Governor (2006–2010) and U.S. Senator (2001–2006), New Jersey

• Jim Cramer – Founder of TheStreet.com, bestselling author, and host of Mad Money on CNBC

• Charles de Croisset – Generel Treasurer of Société des Amis du Louvre

• Guillermo de la Dehesa – Secretary of State of Economy and Finance of Spain (1986–1988)

• Keki Dadiseth• Emanuel Derman – Co-developer

of the Black-Derman-Toy model• Vladimír Dlouhý – Minister of

Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic (1992–1997)

• Mario Draghi – President of the European Central Bank (2011-)

• William C. Dudley – President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York

• Rahm Emanuel – Mayor of Chicago (2011–)[4]

• Kazuo Inamori – Chairman of Japan Airlines (2010–)

• Óscar Fanjul – Founding Chairman and CEO of Repsol

• Michael D. Fascitelli – President & Trustee of Vornado Realty Trust

• Henry H. Fowler – Former United States Secretary of the Treasury (1965–1969)

• Gary Gensler – Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (2009– )

• Judd Gregg – Governor of New Hampshire (1989–1993) and United States Senator from New Hampshire (1993–2011)

• Chris Grigg – CEO of British Land (2009– )

• Charlie Haas – Wrestler, who is working for World Wrestling Entertainment

• Victor Halbertstadt – Professor of Public Sector Finance at the University of Leiden

• Guy Hands – CEO of Terra Firma Capital Partners

• Jim Himes – member of the House of Representatives (2009–present), representing Connecticut

• Reuben Jeffery III – Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs (2007– )

• Neel Kashkari – Former Interim Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability (2008–2009)

• Edward Lampert – Hedge Fund Manager of ESL Investments. Brought K-Mart out of Bankruptcy in 2003

• Gianni Letta – Secretary to the Council of Ministers of Italy under the governments of Silvio Berlusconi

• Arthur Levitt – Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (1993–2001)[5]

• Klaus Luft – German businessman and Honorary Consul of Estonia to Bavaria

• Ian Macfarlane – Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia (1996–2006)

• Tito Mboweni – Governor of the

Appendix E

The Long Reach of Goldman Sachs

The Bill Bonner Letter

Reserve Bank of South Africa (1999–2009)

• Scott Mead – Photographer and an Investment Banker

• Karel Van Miert – European Commissioner for Transport and Consumer Protection (1989–1993) and European Commissioner for Competition (1993–1999)

• Carlos Moedas – European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation

• R. Scott Morris – Former CEO of Boston Options Exchange

• Dambisa Moyo – Zambian economist and author of Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa

• Ashwin Navin – President and co-founder of BitTorrent, Inc.

• Prince Friso of Orange-Nassau – Younger brother of Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands

• Lucas Papademos Greek Economist• Mark Patterson – Chief of Staff to

the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States (2009–)

• Henry Paulson – Former United States Secretary of the Treasury (2006–2009)

• Romano Prodi – Prime Minister of Italy (1996–1998, 2006–2008) and President of the European Commission (1999–2004)[6]

• Robert Rubin – Former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, ex–Chairman of Citigroup

• Robert Steel – Former Chairman and President, Wachovia

• Gene Sperling – Director of the National Economic Council (2011–)[7]

• Lawrence Summers – Secretary of the Treasury of the United States (1999–2001)[8]

• John Thain – Former Chairman

and CEO, Merrill Lynch, and former chairman of the NYSE

• Massimo Tononi – Treasury Undersecretary of the Ministry Of Economy and Finance of Italy (2006–2008)[6]

• Malcolm Turnbull – Prime Minister of Australia (2015- )

• George Herbert Walker IV – Managing director at Neuberger Berman and member of the Bush family

• Robert Zoellick – United States Trade Representative (2001–2005), Deputy Secretary of State (2005–2006), World Bank President (2007–2012)

• Erik Åsbrink – Minister for Finance of Sweden (1996–1999)

Source: Wikipedia

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The Bill Bonner Letter

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26

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