Max
Keiser: 'Barack Obama is clueless. Mitt Romney will bankrupt the
country'
Some
call Max Keiser a 'traitor' but America's most outrageous political
pundit is about to become the most widely watched newscaster on the
planet. Here, he explains why he won't be voting in Tuesday's US
election.
26
April, 2012
A
serf in the days of King John, Max Keiser argues, was in many ways
better off than some US voters in 2012.
"Because
in the age of Robin Hood," Keiser says, "at least the
process of theft was transparent. The barons came to your house. They
whacked you over the head then they took all your money." Even
if the poor didn't exactly empathise with their oppressors, Keiser
adds, they could at least comprehend their methods. "And the
serfs," he continues, "did enjoy a modicum of stability.
They got something in return for their enslavement. A small plot of
land. Shelter. A relationship with the lord of the manor." In
the modern age of "financial tyranny" orchestrated by what
Keiser refers to as "the banksters" in charge of the major
financial institutions in the US and Europe, he believes, "We
have reverted to a more pernicious kind of neo-feudalism. The
instruments of larceny have changed; that's all."
What
better time, you might ask, to have the opportunity to vote in a
presidential election? But the real forces which shape the destiny of
his homeland, Keiser says, have long been impervious to democratic
pressure.
"Barack
Obama," he maintains, "has been a huge disappointment. He
reneged on every one of his campaign promises except one: he did buy
his kids a dog. Of course he could be replaced in this election, but
if that happens we will simply inherit a different version of the
same thing, just as we have done in the US for the past 30 years. The
guy in the White House," he believes, "is really taking his
orders from finance."
You
may never have heard the name Max Keiser, even though, once he begins
to broadcast across China in the New Year, he will have confirmed his
status as the most widely watched news commentator on the planet.
Assisted by his producer, co-presenter and fiancée Stacy Herbert,
Keiser, 52, mercilessly castigates rogue financiers and the
politicians notionally required to oversee them, on programmes
already transmitted by international networks including France 24, Al
Jazeera and Iran's Press TV. No channel in the United States will
carry his broadcasts, which go well beyond the benign impudence of
The Daily Show.
His
most popular outlet is The Keiser Report, on Russia Today (RT), and
its international viewing figures, as Keiser (not a man plagued by
self-doubt) isn't slow to point out, are huge. What has fascinated
me, I tell him, when we meet in his London television studio, is that
in Britain, in recent months, I've begun to hear his mischievously
seditious RT show mentioned, with admiration, by taxi drivers,
patrons in the Haringey Arms, and my window cleaner. This may not, I
admit, constitute a statistically significant sample, but Keiser is
clearly attracting people you wouldn't necessarily expect to view a
rolling news channel on a foreign network.
The
presenter isn't surprised. "There is a fury against this global
banking fraud that is building every day," he says. "People
from all kinds of backgrounds, all over the world, have had enough."
The
Keiser Report, first aired in September 2009, is produced here three
times a week. One episode, shown in September 2011, contained the
interview with Roseanne Barr during which she famously observed that
her solution to banking malpractice would be to "bring back the
guillotine".
While
his sardonic, quick-fire delivery would allow him to shine in a
debate at the Oxford Union or a Hampstead dinner party just as
effectively as, say, David Dimbleby, Keiser's utterings on the less
laudable activities of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and other
financial institutions also manage (unlike Dimbleby's) to resonate
with the kind of people who might fantasise about fire-bombing their
local branch of NatWest. To illustrate a point, he will occasionally
produce a plastic chicken, a stuffed rat, or a small explosive
device. On one recent show, he advised David Cameron to, "Go
back to Eton and get some of that back-stall shower pleasure."
I
tell Keiser how, the first time I saw him presenting the show with
Stacy Herbert (his partner's name, somewhat unfortunately, may be
familiar from her appearance in 2002 red-top headlines concerning the
"three in a bed sex sessions" whose pivot was Angus
Deayton), I'd assumed his performance to be fuelled by amphetamines.
"I
wave my arms," he says. "I shout. Of course I do. Because
this is a global insurrection. Against banker occupation."
He
folded balloon animals on one show.
"Well,
you have to make an impression quickly. Most people first see The
Keiser Report at an airport or hotel. RT has 450 million viewers. It
goes into more hotel rooms than the BBC and it has more YouTube
views. Everywhere I go, people stop me in the street. And remember
I'm broadcasting about global financial corruption; not so long ago,
everyone used to say, who could be interested in that?"
is
histrionic style, combined with the forthright nature of his views
(Keiser recently derided the Eurozone as an entity "which poses
as this prestigious club, but is actually a leper colony where
everyone is checking who still has the most fingers left") have
led some to dismiss him as a marginal, whacked-out conspiracy
theorist.
This
perception is some way removed from the truth. Raised in an affluent
New York suburb, Keiser was a highly successful Wall Street
stockbroker and the creator and former chief executive of HSX
Holdings, a company which, using his own software system, allowed
traders to deal in virtual securities. Put simply, this allowed you
to gamble on the success – and, more disturbingly to the studios,
on the failure – of a Hollywood film before its release. The
practice was halted by the industry, but not before Keiser had sold
his shares at the top of the market, adding to his already
substantial fortune.
He
founded the hedge fund Karmabanque, which has sought (with limited
success) to profit from any decline in the equity value of companies
criticised by environmental groups, such as Coca-Cola and McDonald's.
And in 2007, in an Al Jazeera film called Extraordinary Antics, he
travelled to Milan to examine how CIA agent Robert Seldon Lady and
others had illegally abducted then deported an Egyptian imam, Hassan
Mustafa Osama Nasr, who later faced torture in Cairo. (In 2009 Lady,
also known as "Mister Bob", was sentenced to eight years in
absentia by an Italian court, though the US refuses to extradite him
to Italy.)
"I
imagine," I tell Keiser, "that some Americans, seeing your
work carried by RT, Arabic and Iranian stations, view you as a
modern-day Lord Haw-Haw." (William Joyce, the Irish-American who
broadcast Nazi propaganda to the UK during the Second World War, and
was hanged in London in 1946.)
"Some
might. But all around the world, working people love the show. We
make The Keiser Report at Associated Press. That, as you know, is an
American company. The people who feel challenged are the banksters.
What I'm saying is that you can fight back: by fighting fire with
fire."
Keiser
is among the most outspoken of a group of American commentators
(Texas-based broadcaster Alex Jones being another) who argue that
national sovereignty and democracy in the US and elsewhere have been
eroded by the power of global corporations. Keiser maintains that the
most effective form of resistance is through individual financial
activism. "If the Karmabanque hasn't worked," Keiser says,
"it's because there isn't yet a critical mass of people who are
prepared to fight back, and who instead prefer to be victims."
The
presenter lived in France for a decade, toying with screenplays
including one near-miss based on the life of Houdini, which would
have starred his close friend Alec Baldwin. (He currently runs a
highly successful crowdfunding site, piratemyfilm.com.) Keiser was
based in Villefranche-sur-Mer, near Nice, when he met Herbert, who is
eight years his junior, in 2003.
Herbert's
apparently subordinate role as co-presenter of The Keiser Report, in
which her main task is to prompt, and then revel in her partner's
hyperbole, belies her acute instincts as a producer and editor.
Before collaborating with Keiser, Herbert, the daughter of a NYPD
officer who died in tragic circumstances when she was six, began her
career working with Michael Phillips (who co-produced Taxi Driver and
The Sting). She was later associate producer on the acclaimed but
highly controversial animated 2005 series Popetown. A cartoon sitcom
featuring the voices of Mackenzie Crook, Ruby Wax, Matt Lucas, Jerry
Hall and Ben Miller, it was once described as Father Ted meets South
Park. Originally commissioned for BBC Three, Popetown was dropped
from its schedule after protests from the Catholic Church, though it
is available on DVD.
Herbert
and Keiser moved to London a year ago. "Because this is the
world capital of banking fraud. Pretty much every financial scandal
of the past 20 years has had its main component in London, because it
has the least regulated banking environment. This is very important
for the US, because America outsources its own fraud to London, just
as it outsources its labour to China." The JP Morgan and UBS
traders who lost billions, he points out, were both London-based.
"And Lehman Brothers went through the UK. As did AIG." (The
latter, a multinational insurance corporation, has been troubled by
many controversies including its 2008 government bailout, subsequent
executive bonus payments estimated at between $165m and $450m –
some say more – and charges relating to accounting fraud, settled
out of court in 2006.)
Tony
Blair, Keiser adds, "was the first prime minister in this
country's history who knew that going into Downing Street would act
more as a resumé builder than a way of serving the public. He has
become fabulously wealthy with the contacts he made as prime
minister." Blair, he continues, "personifies the move, in
the UK and the US, away from representational democracy and towards
control by bankers. It is since New Labour that you have the rise of
these incredible scandals: so you have HSBC involved in
multimillion-dollar Mexican drug-laundering. [In July of this year,
the bank publicly apologised for its "lapses".] And
Barclays involved in rigging Libor [the estimated interest rate for
inter-bank loans]."
I
tell Keiser I can feel many readers wondering exactly what relevance
such activities might have to their lives. "Well, the policy of
the banks has been to keep interest rates as low as possible, so as
to fuel financial speculation, no matter how oppressive the effect of
that would be. Low interest rates wipe out savers and devastate
middle-class workers. The banksters have orchestrated this wealth
transference of trillions, from the poor to the very wealthy. At the
expense of everybody who isn't at the top."
In
a recent televised discussion chaired by Andrew Neil, Keiser recalls,
"We agreed that the country suffers from economic and financial
illiteracy. Which makes it amazing that George Osborne has a
programme whereby people will exchange their rights as workers for
shares. Why is he proposing this, if not to exploit that knowledge
gap? Shouldn't the Chancellor be ashamed of himself?"
"But
hang on – you're not an anti-capitalist."
"No.
I am pro-capitalism and I am pro-free market. But what you have now
is not capitalism. It is a state- controlled, command and control,
centralised politburo. Both in Britain and the United States. The
States is run by the Federal Reserve, an institution that answers
only to itself and to a few large banks. It's modelled on the Bank of
England. Ben Franklin said that one of the main reasons America
revolted was to get away from the Bank of England, the mother of all
central banks; the most pernicious and insidious of all."
"You
said you were disappointed by Obama. What should he have done?"
"When
Franklin D Roosevelt came into office, he started putting bankers in
jail. The foremost reason that America got out of the Depression was
not World War Two, or because of the Keynesian stimulus. It was
because of the legislation introduced to regulate markets [many such
clauses in FDR's Emergency Banking Act of 1933 were dismantled under
Clinton] and the banksters that Roosevelt sent to jail."
"Don't
you think Obama came in with the best of intentions? Surely he's not
just another avaricious politician?"
"Barack
Obama had to face up to people like Larry Summers [Clinton's former
Treasury Secretary, and director of the US National Economic Council
until two years ago, Summers had a key role in lifting safeguards in
the derivatives market, a move generally considered to have
precipitated the 2007/8 crash]. There were others he failed to remove
from office, who were guilty of orchestrating this economic
collapse."
"Are
you accusing Obama of malicious complicity?"
"I
think that Obama is, like many people, financially and economically
illiterate. He is a lawyer. But in Wall Street there is no law."
Is
the implication that the situation will change if Obama is defeated?
"It's not difficult to envision what a Romney presidency would
be like. He's already made it clear that he believes Wall Street to
be over-regulated, which of course is the opposite of the truth."
Romney's
background, Keiser adds, is in private equity, "which is the
crystallisation of the worst elements of capitalism".
(Private-equity firms tend to specialise in leveraged buyouts: a
practice whose potential consequences have become familiar to many
non-economists in Britain, not least to supporters of Manchester
United since the club's purchase by the Glazer family in 2005.) "So
then you would have a pure cacistocracy: rule by the worst, the most
ignorant, and the most corrupt."
On
Mitt Romney's first day in office, Keiser adds, "I would imagine
that, rather as Emperor Caligula appointed his horse to the senate,
he will issue proclamations and edicts that will shock people. But if
he does release the genie of even more deregulation, bankrupting the
country, he would do so in the full knowledge of the crime he was
committing. I believe that Obama was less consciously aware of the
stupidity he was engaged in."
ax
Keiser grew up in Westchester County, a New York suburb so steeped in
Ivy League privilege that Loudon Wainwright III wrote a song about it
("We were richer than most/ I don't mean to boast/ But I swam in
the country club pool"). It's not hard to imagine his robust
intelligence being applied in other fields, such as teaching or law.
While his name may evoke images of some prosperous chancer in a James
Bond film, he doesn't come across as your average money man. So how
did he wind up prospering on Wall Street?
"I'd
been to New York University," Keiser recalls, "where I
studied theatre. That's where I first met Alec Baldwin. I did a lot
of radio, and stand-up comedy. I spent my time watching punk and rap
bands at CBGB and Max's Kansas City. My biggest fear in 1983 was that
the party would end. I'd done various jobs." These included
working as a street magician on Broadway.
"Then
I got a part-time job at Paine Webber, a brokerage firm on Wall
Street, just to support myself. I remember walking in and seeing the
brokers all looking up at the ticker tape on the wall. They were in
very expensive suits and smoking cigars. I could see that, by this
means, the party could continue. So I became a stockbroker. And the
party not only continued, but intensified."
"It
must have been a bit of a culture shock."
"Not
so much as you might imagine, because stockbroking had sort of a punk
aesthetic. It was a DIY revolution. I had no background in it
whatsoever. But in the early 1980s suddenly there was the start of
this bull market: a tsunami of cash was arriving every day on Wall
Street. It required no talent whatsoever to make gobsmacking amounts
of money. A rhesus monkey could have done it."
"And
socially?" "We took the party into the office. We're making
calls to customers during the day. At the same time we're getting
calls from hookers and drug dealers. I remember I woke up on a plane
one day; k I was coming out of a blackout. I asked my buddy, who I'd
started the outing with, who knows when, 'Where are we going?' He
said, [the Caribbean island of] 'St Thomas.' I don't remember a whole
lot after that. Anyhow, we ended up back in the office. Then I heard
my friend, shouting: 'Shit… Oh my God, shit…' I asked what
happened. He said, 'Max... when we were down there in St Thomas…
did I buy a house?' He had done, and he had absolutely no memory of
it. After the crash in 1987 the party ended."
"What
were people taking: drink and cocaine?"
"Yes.
There was cocaine on everyone's desk, more or less. At that time you
could take a shoeshine guy – and they did – and with the systems
they had, which allowed swift calls, and using sales scripts, he
could make hundreds of thousands of dollars in months."
Of
the many themes that Keiser returns to in his shows, one of the most
interesting and incendiary is the relationship between big business
and Congress. He has openly accused senior politicians of using
investigations into financial malpractice as a way of acquiring
market information so as to benefit themselves.
"Democracy
is not well served by the current political configuration in
America," he maintains. "The entire political establishment
is designed around enriching a minority of people who have access to
both information and capital. Take the CIA. They have recently opened
up their services to hedge funds. Hedge-fund managers can now hire
CIA agents to do research on pharmaceutical companies, defence
contractors, or oil contracts."
I
can imagine some of his compatriots regarding such talk, especially
his accusations of endemic insider trading in Congress, as
treasonable. "Treason is a strong word. My family arrived in
America in the 1700s and was active in the constitutional process
that led to the Declaration of Independence. I would answer that
charge by saying, as they do down south, 'That dog don't hunt.'
"Nobody
has a greater affinity for the founding principles of America than I
do. But what the people with power are doing now is not remotely
connected to the ideals of the founding fathers."
Any
talk about treason, Keiser argues, would be more suitably aimed in
the direction of men such as his principal bête noir, Hank Paulson,
a former CEO of Goldman Sachs who served as the US Treasury Secretary
from 2006 to 2009. "There is a revolving door for Goldman Sachs
guys into and out of US government. And they are working against the
sovereign interest of the United States. What's happening is that all
these bankers in Europe are consolidating into one major bank that's
going to be running Europe, from Brussels. All of that debt will be
re-priced in some new European-wide currency. And that bad debt will
be joined with all the American bad debt, in some new global reserve
bank. And every single step of the way guys like Hank Paulson – who
really is a traitor – will put a gun to the head of the American
people and say, either you accept this new banking deal or we are
going to crash this market."
Among
Keiser's fans, Paulson more than anybody has come to personify the
culture of greed and flagrant conflict of interest that the
broadcaster satirises.
"You
don't like Hank Paulson very much, do you?"
"The
fact that that man is even breathing and walking… the last time I
was on Al Jazeera live," Keiser adds, "was when I declared
a fatwa against Hank Paulson."
"Fatwa
defined in what way?"
"The
word has certain resonances, after the Salman Rushdie affair. That's
not what I was saying. Under Bush and Obama, the office of president
has acquired enormous power: to pretty much arrest anybody in the
world. With no due process. No habeas corpus. If you have the ability
to arrest a man on a mere suspicion, and detain them without
reference to judge or jury, then that man's name is Hank Paulson. Go
after the really bad guys."
Fear,
Keiser believes, is what stops such opinions being transmitted in his
homeland. "Look at these clowns who present shows. Like
[arch-conservatives] Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly. These people
are not Americans. They are the subversives. They are the ones
tearing American society apart by belittling everything that, at its
heart, could be construed as the lifeblood of democracy.
"Those
guys," Keiser adds, warming to his subject, "are shameless.
They are despicable. My merely pointing out where crimes are being
committed is not treason against the country. It is an act in support
of reform to get the country back from the clutches of these foreign
bankers."
"So
who would you like to see elected?" "The only politician
that I like is [former independent presidential candidate] Ralph
Nader. Because he talks about corporations. And corpocracy. He isn't
running. So I won't be voting."
Listening
to Keiser, I tell him, I'm left with feelings of little else but
imminent doom. He has few words of comfort. "The global
derivatives market, which is a quadrillion or more in size, is a very
complicated, highly unstable system which is becoming more unstable
with every hour," he says. "It is similar to the side of a
mountain before the last snowflake arrives to trigger the avalanche.
Or, like Mr Creosote [who explodes at the dinner table in the Monty
Python film The Meaning of Life] is just waiting for that final
after-dinner mint."
Any
hope of recovery, he argues, will come not through the ballot box but
financial initiatives on the part of individuals; notably a mass
campaign to ignore governmental advice to trust in bonds and paper
money – investments in which, Keiser insists, confidence has
rightly evaporated.
"People
have to take action for themselves. That means buying not bonds or
dollars or euros, but gold and silver. Gordon Brown sold Britain's
gold at the historic low of $250 an ounce. Gold is now $1,700 an
ounce. My argument – I can categorically state – is winning the
global propaganda war. China is aggressively buying gold. Russia is
buying gold like a maniac. Iran has been buying as much as it can.
All of these countries, where my show is popular, are buying gold and
silver, and God bless them for it."
Purchasing
such commodities, he believes, will offer the owner true security and
accelerate the demise of "the banksters", who speculate
only in notional wealth, and paper money.
renetic
and controversial as he may be, Keiser has a decent record on
prediction. He was in Reykjavik, issuing bleak warnings, months
before Iceland's catastrophic economic collapse. He was talking about
Athens years ago, predicting civil unrest and what now appears to be
an inevitable Greek default.
"I
came to London," he says, "because being here gives you a
front-row seat on the imminent collapse of an entire city. I think
that the Eurozone is over-rated as a disaster area. They are not yet
in as bad shape as Britain. The UK pound," he continues, "is
about to collapse. And the collapse of the British economy will be
one of the biggest in modern economic history. Of course you will
take the American dollar and the euro down with you, for sure. But
this place – London – is about to go belly up. It's … how can I
put this?" Keiser pauses. "If you see me walking the
streets of your town," he adds, "then you're probably
fucked."
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