The Hunt for Red September begins...
Admin Moderator: Can this thread be moved to Breaking News? The story did legitimately break this morning on Rush's program, even though the incident occurred four days ago. During an appearance on the C-SPAN morning call-in program on 2/6/09, Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), Capital Markets Subcommittee Chairman, bluntly told the truth about the economic crisis that hit last fall.
To paraphrase him, our nation's economic system was under attack, and the actions by President Bush, Fed Chairman Bernanke and SecTres Paulson were a temporary solution to battle it back. What Kanjorski has to say is critical, and this story needs the widest possible distribution.
Here is a link to the C-SPAN video on YouTube.Here is a verbatim transcript of Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), Capital Markets Subcommittee Chairman, speaking on C-SPAN, February 6, 2009.
On Thursday [9/11/08*], at about 11:00 o'clock in the morning, the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous drawdown of money market accounts in the United States, to the tune of $550 billion...was being drawn out in a matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up its window to help. They pumped $105 billion into the system, and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts, and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn't be further panic out there. And that's what actually happened. If they had not done that their estimation was that by two o'clock that afternoon, five-and-a-half trillion dollars would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed.
Now we talked at that time about what would happen if that happened. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it, and that's why, when they made the point we've got to act and do things quickly, we did.
You know, we're not any geniuses in economics or finances on the Hill, we're representatives of the people. We ought to take our time, but let the people know this is a very difficult struggle. Somebody threw us into the middle of the Atlantic ocean without a life raft, and we're trying to determine what's the closest shore, and whether there's any chance in the world to swim that far. We don't know.
*NOTE: In the video, Kanjorski says this occurred "about September 15th," and then says that the beginning of the problem occurred on "Thursday." The 15th was a Monday, but the previous Thursday was September 11, 2008.
After reading many articles here about this “October Surprise,” I’ve always felt that President Bush was not complicit in it. He was genuinely shook up when he was working out the TARP program. The meeting where McCain and Obama had to run back to Washington off the campaign trail — well, it was shown then that Paulsen was no friend of President Bush. I think Paulsen had him believing that the entire world economy would crash, and there would be anarchy and rioting in the streets if he didn’t do this. Ta-da! Obama is then elected President.
Lehman Brothers was aloud to fail, rather than being folded into another bank, on Sept 15th to stress test the system.
This was the result.
