FCIC We Already Know This Much _ Cut the Bull
Raleigh Myers
Ra Energy Fdn,
Founded in 1973
Ra-Chi is our agenda http://ra-chi.org/ought.html
FCIC We Already Know This Much _ Cut the Bull
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is back in session. The videos and presentations are ready for your perusal. http://fcic.gov/hearings/04-08-2010.php
Before they end we should present what we know of the banking fraud just so they will keep to the script lets have a look see at what we have already found out on our own...
web version... http://raenergy.igc.org/bankingfraud.html
Raleigh Myers
Ra Energy Fdn.
Ra-Chi is our agenda http://ra-chi.org
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of our currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing of power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." Thomas Jefferson
Mark Twain. "The money powers prey upon
the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity.
Its all about WeThePeopleIsm vs. Mussolini's Corporatism
When we talk of getting out the pitchforks _ there is a tradition and a vision... http://tinyurl.com/yljva2z
The court of last resort is no longer the Supreme Court. It's "Nightline
NOW Video: On Credit and Creditability tells it all
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/446/video.html
Revealed 80% Of Foreclosures Involve Bankster Fraud http://tinyurl.com/yzcqx32 at FCIG Hearings says Glen Theobald Miami Dade Mortgage Fraud Task force police at the the Bankster hearings aka Financial Crisis Inquiry Group Pedora hearings. transcript http://www.fcic.gov/hearings/pdfs/2010-0114-Theobald.pdf
Video 60 Minutes: Banker talks of unlawful practices in predatory lending http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4803928n
Video: Eight million people are at risk of losing their homes because Wall Street abandoned responsible lending practices to gain short-term profits. http://fightingforourhomes.com/?utm_source=rgemail
Video: Credit Crunch 101 http://crisisofcredit.com/
Planet Money a PBS effort to document the big picture... http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/
Video: Senator Harkin on the whole nine yards
http :// www.takebackthefed.com/
Video: For some solutions Keith Olbermann's "Special Comment" on Bank Bailout
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22266.htm
Video: William K. Black on the econo-crash on Moyers journal The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/watch.html
Video: Eliot Spitzer telling it like it is
http ://video.google.com/videosearch?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GWYE_enUS246US247&q=Eliot+Spitzer +#
Question for the Fed and G-20: Why Are Our Banks Running Commodity Casinos?
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/question-for-the-fed-and_b_299782.html
One champion of this market fundamentalism was Alan
Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve. Last
October before a House Committee, Greenspan admitted he
was mistaken and expressed astonishment at how
corporations could not even safeguard their own
self-interest from going over steep speculative cliffs.
http://www.counterpunch.org/nader02022009.html
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Hey with this kind of preplanning how could we take it for any thing short of criminal intent...
How Goldman Secretly Bet on the US Housing Crash
Greg Gordon, McClatchy Newspapers: "In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in US housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting."
Read the Article
In 2007 a group of state attorneys general formed the State Foreclosure Prevention Working Group (SFPWG), which tried to gather information from major banks about what kinds of loans were causing problems and what the banks were doing to solve them. The banks turned to Dugan, who instructed them not to work with the state officials. Federal pre-emption was so sweeping, according to Dugan, that banks couldn't cooperate with state regulators on gathering data. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100104/carter/singleGreg Gordon, McClatchy Newspapers: "In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in US housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting."
Read the Article
How about Paulson betting on the housing crash while Treasury Secretary under Bush...
In a nutshell, Paulson made the killing of a lifetime by figuring out how to bet against the housing bubble. The trade was extremely complex and extremely tough to implement after all, you can't just go out and short real estate. The Greatest Trade Ever unfolds like a movie plot, beginning with details of Paulson's life and background and then slowly building to climax. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS339US339&q=Taipan+Daily%3a+A+Closer+Look+at+the+Biggest+Trade+of+All+Time
The Scope Of The MONEY CHANGER PROBLEM _ A Who Done It is No Mystery
Criminal Intent Op Eds turning booty to stolen goods that can be taken back by We The People ...
How the Bush Administration Protected Predatory Lending and Let the Financial Crisis Grow
What to do about it Talking Points: http://groups.google.com/groups?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2006-24,GGLG:en&q=Criminal+Intent++raenergy
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A former Goldman Sachs analyst pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and insider trading, We The People find the defendant, Goldman Sachs ..Guilty http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GWYE_enUS246US247&ei=ItUKSrekDJTitQPt-ZnUCA&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=Goldman+sachs+Guilty&spell=1
Criminal fraud may be the most underreported aspect of our current financial crisis. In this "Road to Ruin" report, former subprime lenders from Ameriquest, once the country's largest lender, describe a system rife with fraud. They describe how a "by-any-means-necessary" policy pushed employees to cut corners and falsify documents on bad mortgages and then sell the toxic assets to Wall Street banks eager to make fast profits... http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/139972/road_to_ruin%3A_mortgage_fraud_scandal_brewing/
Eliot Spitzer telling it like it is... http://news.google.com/news?sourceid=navclient&rlz=1T4GGLG_enUS311US311&q=Eliot+Spitzer+AIG&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&ei=MrTHSbO_JqbpnQe9s6F4&sa=X&oi=news_group&resnum=1&ct=title
Bushscists Interfered With States Regulating Predatory Lenders
Let us now consider the financial crisis and the panic bailout. No one should think that the crisis was unforeseen. Back in February 08, Eliot Spitzer, in one of his last acts as governor of New York, warned about the impending crisis created by predatory lending, and reveled that the Bush Administration was blocking state efforts to deal with it. His
extraordinary warning, in the Washington Post, is worth quoting at some length:
In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC ( Comptroller of the Currency ) invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions
preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks.
The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.
Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11681
How many left behind nice job Brownies are still hacking the figures and hindering the regulation of existing laws?
This is outright fraud _ criminal intent:
snip: Eliot Spitzer: Their fundamental accounting structure was wrong, and when we prosecuted them we brought a case that they had allegedly manufactured fictitious reinsurance contracts designed to create the appearance of capital on the books which was not there and this was was a structure that had been designed and orchestrated at the very top of the company.
Fareed Zakaria: So they were basically fudging the numbers to make it look like they had a stronger balance sheet than they actually had?
Spitzer : Precisely. That is exactly right. The underlying effort was to create the illusion of financial strength that was not actually there. And as we dug more deeply into the underlying structure and organization and accounting that was ongoing at the company we knew there was a problem. Four people have been convicted in this and the former CEO was called an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal courtroom by the federal prosecutor. So, this was a fundamental effort to alter the facts and lie to the public."
It's a Bird It's a Plane No, it's Spitzer to the Rescue by Mike Whitney / April 2nd, 2009
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/its-a-birdits-a-plane-no-its-spitzer-to-the-rescue/
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snip: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/397690_fbiweb28.html?source=mypi
FBI saw mortgage fraud early
The FBI was aware for years of "pervasive and growing" fraud in the
mortgage industry that eventually contributed to America's financial
meltdown, but did not take definitive action to stop it.
"It is clear that we had good intelligence on the mortgage-fraud schemes,
the corrupt attorneys, the corrupt appraisers, the insider schemes," said a
recently retired, high FBI official. Another retired top FBI official
confirmed that such intelligence went back to 2002.
Swecker went on to describe the scenario that ultimately wrecked financial
havoc around the world: "Often mortgage loans sold in secondary markets are
used by financial institutions as collateral for other investments. ...
When loans sold in the secondary market default and have fraudulent or
material misrepresentation ... these loans become a nonperforming asset,
and in extreme fraud cases, the mortgage-backed security is worthless.
Mortgage fraud losses adversely affect loan-loss reserves, profits,
liquidity levels and capitalization ratios, ultimately affecting the
soundness of the financial institution itself."
The Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the
Currency "and the bank regulators are really the first line of defense,"
the first official said. "The investigative agencies (like the FBI) are the
second line of defense. We all caught the mortgage fraud aspect. But none
of us caught the corporate fraud aspect."
But even if the regulatory agencies had come to the FBI with the tips, the
resources necessary to pull off such an inquiry simply did not exist.
"It was a sleight of hand because the public thought the administration was
resourcing counterterrorism when in fact they were forcing cannibalization
of the criminal program," the retired FBI official said. "Now the chickens
have come home to roost."
More http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/397690_fbiweb28.html?source=mypi
Snip: When Spitzer was attorney general of New York, he prosecuted AIG and other Wall Street banks, and Maddow asked him if he saw a connection between those prosecutions and what led to the current crisis.
Spitzer said "Absolutely," and while the specific instruments and
mechanisms, derivatives and credit default swaps, may have changed, the
"fundamental accounting fraud... the desperate desire to cook the books,"
is present in the current collapse.
More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/12/rachel-maddow-eliot-spitz_n_202725.html
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The desired results is restructuring with worker owned industries and renter owned homes .. http://raenergy.igc.org/restructuring.html
GOP(Group Of Predators) suing democrats for instigating the bank fraud is a moot point
Senior Federal Banking Regulator Removed
http://www.truthout.org/122308O
Binyamin Appelbaum, The Washington Post: "A senior federal banking regulator has been removed from his job after government investigators concluded that he knowingly permitted IndyMac Bancorp to present a misleading picture of its financial health in a federal filing only months before the California thrift was seized by regulators. The Office of Thrift Supervision removed Darrel Dochow as director of its western region, where he was responsible for regulating several of the largest banks that failed or were sold in the past year, including Washington Mutual, Countrywide Financial, IndyMac and Downey Savings and Loan."
Madoff ... May be quite different from what we think.... And look further on the net and you will see that these "victims" have also
been told by the US tax authorities that they will probably also be entitled
to claim back some taxes on these defrauded sums.
Rather than saying this hedge fund has gone bust, due to its choice of
investment assets and investment mythologies, a scenario which is highly
probable in the current financial paradigm, since all the professionals are
predicting that at least 30% of all hedge funds are about to fail, more than
700 of them, the CEO chooses to fess up to fraud. If the CEO admits the fund
has gone bust, then all those wealthy members of the Jewish community get
nothing, but if the CEO admits to fraud they get their money back as
compensation from the US tax payer, just as they are also drawing money back
from the tax payers with the other hand.
http://www.rense.com/general84/madoff.htm
also: http://www.rense.com/general84/mado.htm
Let's Not Conceal the Criminal Dimension of the Financial Crisis
Practically everyone seems to have obscured the fact that the Western
world has already lived through two big crises with a strong "criminal
smell" during the 1980-1990 period, also in a context of careless real
estate lending and market deregulation.
http://groups.google.com/group/misc.activism.progressive/browse_thread/thread/2cf512db3ee3f201?hl=en#
Conservatives' Crazy Conspiracy Theories About the Econapocalypse
For a while, before the presidential campaign, conservatives on Fox News and talk radio had an idea: the economy wasn't that bad, but Americans had been led to believe it was, thanks to an elaborate conspiracy involving the media and Democrats.
After the election, high-profile conservatives, including Bill O'Reilly
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/114915/
Higher Wages or Bubblenomics:
What's it gonna be?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21520.htm
By Mike Whitney
The investor class has rejiggered the system to meet their particular
needs. Financial wizardry has replaced factories, capital formation and
hard assets while real wealth has been replaced by chopped up bits of
mortgage paper, stitched together by Ivy League MBAs, and sold to investors
as priceless gemstones. This is the system that Bernanke is trying to
resuscitate with his multi-trillion dollar injections; a system that shifts
a larger and larger amount of the nation's wealth to a smaller and smaller
group of elites.
From Bernanke and Greenspan's perspective, any small gain by workers is
tantamount to communism. They will continue to do everything in their power
to preserve the current labor-debasing system which keeps workers just one
paycheck away from the homeless shelter.
More http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21520.htm
Financial Meltdown 101
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/102672/financial_meltdown_101/?page=entire
By Arun Gupta, Independent. Posted October 13, 2008.
Were Oil Prices Manipulated by Enron-Style Scheme?
60 Minutes: "About the only economic break most Americans have gotten in the last six months has been the drastic drop in the price of oil, which has fallen even more precipitously than it rose. In a year's time, a commodity that was theoretically priced according to supply and demand doubled from $69 a barrel to nearly $150, and then, in a period of just three months, crashed along with the stock market. So what happened? It's a complicated question, and there are lots of theories." http://www.truthout.org/011209K
Paul Krugman has some thoughts .. http://www.truthout.org/011709Z
Man made by 25 people Road to Ruin: Twenty-Five People at the Heart of the Meltdown
http://www.truthout.org/012609S
Fiscal Therapy Getting the economy back on its feet, giving taxpayers a break, saving your retirement fund and your kid's college tuition? Done. And it won't cost you a penny. http :// www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2009/01/fiscal-therapy.html
The Real Truth behind the Citigroup Bank Nationalization
By F. William Engdahl, 24 November 2008 The measures are without precedent in
US financial history. It is by no means certain they will salvage the
dollar system.
http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Financial_Tsunami/Citigroup_Abyss/citi group_abyss.html
Soros sees no bottom for world financial "collapse"
http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-CreditCrisis/idUSTRE51K0A920090221
How The Republican Party Has
Conned America for Thirty Years
by Thom Hartmann
Published on Monday, January 26, 2009 by
CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/26-0
Hoover enthusiastically followed the advice of his
Treasury Secretary, multimillionaire Andrew Mellon, who
said in 1931: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks,
liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the
rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and
high living will come down... enterprising people will
pick up the wrecks from less competent people."
Thus, the Republican mantra was: "Lower taxes, reduce
the size of government, and balance the budget."
At the same time, Arthur Laffer was taking that
equation a step further. Not only was supply-side a
rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went
down, revenue to the government would go up!
Neither concept made any sense - and time has proven
both to be colossal idiocies - but together they
offered the Republican Party a way out of the
wilderness
But David Stockman came up with a great new theory about what was going on - they were "starving the beast" of government by running up such huge deficits that Democrats would never, ever in the future be able to talk again about national health care or improving Social Security - and this so pleased Alan Greenspan, the Fed Chairman, that he opened the spigots of the Fed, dropping interest rates and buying government bonds, producing a nice, healthy goose to the economy. Greenspan further counseled Reagan to dramatically increase taxes on people earning under $37,800 a year by increasing the Social Security (FICA/payroll) tax, and then let the government borrow those newfound hundreds of billions of dollars off-the-books to make the deficit look better than it was.
And it all seemed to be going so well, just as it did in the early 1920s when a series of three consecutive Republican presidents cut income taxes on the uber-rich from over 70 percent to under 30 percent. In 1929, pretty much everybody realized that instead of building factories with all that extra money, the rich had been pouring it into the stock market, inflating a bubble that - like an inexorable law of nature - would have to burst.
But the people who remembered that lesson were
Wanniski decided to turn the classical world of
economics - which had operated on this simple
demand-driven equation for seven thousand years - on
its head. In 1974 he invented a new phrase - "supply
side economics" - and suggested that the reason
economies grew wasn't because people had money and
wanted to buy things with it but, instead, because
things were available for sale, thus tantalizing people
to part with their money. The more things there were,
the faster the economy would grow.
Everything you ever wanted to know about the biggest economic meltdown
since the Great Depression but were afraid to ask.
Snip: George Soros A Plan for Economic Recovery
February 12, 2009 | 05:08 PM (EST)
The size of the problem is even larger than it was in the 1930s. This can
be seen from a simple calculation. Total credit outstanding was 160 percent
of GDP in 1929, and it rose to 260 percent in 1932 due to the accumulation
of debt and the decline of GDP. We entered into the Crash of 2008 at 365
percent, which is bound to rise to 500 % or more by the time the full
effect is felt. And this calculation does not take into account the
pervasive use of derivatives, which was absent in the 1930s but immensely
complicates the current situation. The situation has been further
aggravated by the haphazard and arbitrary way in which it was handled by
the Bush administration. The public and the business community suffered a
shock in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers default, and the economy has
fallen off a cliff. The next two quarters will show rapid deterioration.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-soros/a-plan-for-economic-recov_b_166518.html
12 Deregulatory Steps to Financial Meltdown
Wall Street's Best Investment What can $5 billion buy in Washington?
Quite a lot.
Over the 1998-2008 period, the financial sector spent more than $5 billion
on U.S. federal campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.
by Robert Weissman
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/07-3
Published on Saturday, March 7, 2009
Snip: The Case for Giving Eli Lilly the Corporate Death Penalty GHW Bush was on the board
The same group of predators, who are withering medicare on the vine, wer promoting drugs that were bankrupting medicare . Lilly-Zyprexa scandals didn't just start in 2006. A 2003 Lilly-Zyprexa
scandal involved Medicaid and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill
(NAMI), ostensibly a consumer organization. That year, Zyprexa grossed
$2.63 billion in the United States, 70 percent of that attributable to
government agencies, mostly Medicaid. Zyprexa cost approximately twice as
much as similar drugs, and state Medicaid programs, going in the red in
part because of Zyprexa, were attempting to exclude it in favor of similar,
less expensive drugs. When Kentucky's Medicaid program attempted to exclude
Zyprexa -- its single largest drug expense -- from its list of preferred
medications, NAMI bused protesters to hearings, placed full-page ads in
newspapers, and sent faxes to state officials. What NAMI did not say at the
time was that the buses, ads, and faxes were paid for by Lilly.
The Case for Giving Eli Lilly the Corporate Death Penalty
http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/129709/the_case_for_giving_eli_lilly_the_corporate_death_penalty/?page=enti re
On Job flight and minimum wage Bushscists are king
Poverty level goal of 2$ a day justifying job flight is Fascist agenda?
http://raenergy.igc.org/jobflight.pdf
By James Lieber
The Village Voice
January 28, 2009
http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-01-28/news/what-cooked-the-world-s-economy
James Lieber is a lawyer whose books on business and
politics include Friendly Takeover (Penguin) and Rats
in the Grain (Basic Books). This is his fifth article
for the Voice.
It's 2009. You're laid off, furloughed, foreclosed on,
or you know someone who is. You wonder where you'll fit
into the grim new semi-socialistic post-post-industrial
economy colloquially known as "this mess."
You're astonished and possibly ashamed that mutant
financial instruments dreamed up in your great country
have spawned worldwide misery. You can't comprehend,
much less trim, the amount of bailout money parachuting
into the laps of incompetents, hoarders, and
miscreants. It's been a tough century so far: 9/11,
Iraq, and now this. At least we have a bright new
president. He'll give you a job painting a bridge. You
may need it to keep body and soul together.
The basic story line so far is that we are all to
blame, including homeowners who bit off more than they
could chew, lenders who wrote absurd adjustable-rate
mortgages, and greedy investment bankers.
Credit derivatives also figure heavily in the plot.
Apologists say that these became so complicated that
even Wall Street couldn't understand them and that they
created "an unacceptable level of risk." Then these
blowhards tell us that the bailout will pump hundreds
of billions of dollars into the credit arteries and
save the patient, which is the world's financial
system. It will take time-maybe a year or so-but if
everyone hangs in there, we'll be all right. No
structural damage has been done, and all's well that
ends well.
Sorry, but that's drivel. In fact, what we are living
through is the worst financial scandal in history. It
dwarfs 1929, Ponzi's scheme, Teapot Dome, the South Sea
Bubble, tulip bulbs, you name it. Bernie Madoff? He's
peanuts.
Credit derivatives-those securities that few have ever
seen-are one reason why this crisis is so different
from 1929.
Last year, the Bank for International
Settlements, a consortium of the world's central banks
based in Basel (the Fed chair, Ben Bernanke, sits on
its board), reported the gross value of these
commitments at $596 trillion. Some are due, and some
will mature soon. Typically, they involve contracts of
five years or less.
Obviously, the $600 trillion includes not
only many unseemly replicated death bets, but also some
benign derivatives that creditors bought to hedge risky
loans. Instead of sorting them out, the Bush
administration tried to protect them all, while keeping
the counterparties happy and anonymous.
Paulson has taken flack for spending little to bring
mortgages in line with falling home values. Sheila
Bair, the FDIC chief who often scrapped with Paulson,
said this would cost a measly $25 billion and that
without it, 10 million Americans could lose their homes
over the next five years.
During the Bush years, white-
collar law enforcement actually dropped as FBI agents
were transferred to anti-terrorism. Even so, according
to William Black, an effective federal litigator and
regulator during the 1980s savings-and-loan scandal, by
2004, the FBI perceived an epidemic of fraud. Now a
professor of law and finance at the University of
Missouriâ"Kansas City, Black has testified to Congress
about the current crisis and paints it as "control
fraud" at every level. Such fraud flows from the top
tiers of corporations-typically CEOs and CFOs, who
control perverse compensation systems that reward
cheating and volume rather than quality, and circumvent
standard due diligence such as underwriting and
accounting. For instance, AIGFP's Cassano reportedly
rebuffed AIG's internal auditor.
Black suggests that derivatives should be "unwound" and
that the payouts cease: "Close out the positions-most
of them have no social utility." And where there has
been fraud, he adds, "clawback makes perfect sense."
That would include taking back the ludicrously large
bonuses and other forms of compensation given to CEOs
at bailed-out companies.
Mike Whitney writes:
The global economy is decelerating at the fastest pace on record. Forty
percent of global wealth has been wiped out. The banking system is
insolvent, unemployment is soaring, tax revenues are falling, the markets
are in shock, housing is crashing, deficits are soaring and consumer
confidence is at its lowest point in history.
When you look at some of the numbers, you can see the time bombs that are
ticking away. According to Ed Bonawitz, many countries are in deep shock:
"Ireland's external debt, at $1.8 trillion, equals 900 percent of the
country's $200 billion GDP. The United Kingdom's external debt of $10.5
trillion equals 456 percent of its $2.3 trillion GDP. Switzerland's
external debt of $1.3 trillion equals 433 percent of its $300 billion GDP.
Now that the credit markets are locked tight, renegotiating the terms of
these loans is virtually impossible." U.S. banks are said to have a loan
ratio of around 26-to-1, and European Banks have one that is around
60-to-1.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/130957/the_financial_crisis_pushes_europe_ to_the_brink_of_disaster/
Eliot Spitzer | The Real AIG Scandal
http://www.truthout.org/031809R
Eliot Spitzer, Slate Magazine: "Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?"
Is There an Antidote to the Republican Amnesia?
Rep. Barney Frank
Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts
Posted March 18, 2009 | 04:45 PM (EST)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-barney-frank/is-there-an-antidote-to-t_b_176538.html
Memory eventually fails us all, but apparently the decline strikes one
party far more than the other.
In recent weeks, my friends across the aisle have expended a lot of breath
proclaiming that the Democrats caused the present financial crisis by
failing to pass legislation to regulate financial services companies in the
years 1995 through 2006.
There is only small one problem with this story -- throughout this entire
period the Republicans were in complete charge of the House and for the
most critical years they controlled the House, the Senate, and the
Presidency.
Snip:
The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward
deregulation that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European Union
was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of
America's big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own
oversight. So the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of
that year and with the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs chief
and future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson made a pitch to George
Bush's SEC chief at the time, William Donaldson, himself a former
investment banker. The banks generously volunteered to submit to new rules
restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity. In exchange,
they asked to be released from any lending restrictions. The discussion
about the new rules lasted just 55 minutes, and there was not a single
representative of a major media outlet there to record the fateful
decision.
Donaldson OK'd the proposal, and the new rules were enough to get the EU to
drop its threat to regulate the five firms. The only catch was, neither
Donaldson nor his successor, Christopher Cox, actually did any regulating
of the banks. They named a commission of seven people to oversee the five
companies, whose combined assets came to total more than $4 trillion. But
in the last year and a half of Cox's tenure, the group had no director and
did not complete a single inspection. Great deal for the banks, which
originally complained about being regulated by both Europe and the SEC, and
ended up being regulated by no one.
The real story of AIG morphed from AIC all the way back to funding the Bolsheviks
http://vincentgioiasblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/real-story-of-aig.html
The Big Takeover
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover Rollingstone.com
Freeze the 1.5 Quadrillion Derivatives Bubble as a First Step Towards World Economic Recovery
The Underlying Cause of the Financial Meltdown Derivatives were illegal in the United States between 1936 and 1983. In 1933, an attempt was made to corner the wheat futures market using options, and the resulting outcry led to a 1936 federal law banning such options on farm commodity markets. This ban was repealed by the Futures Trading Act of 1982, signed by President Reagan in January 1983. http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12947
The Commodity Exchange Act of 1936 more info http://raenergy.igc.org/commodityexchange.html
On pension guarantees by the U.S. government were Bushwhacked Pension insurer shifted to stocks Belt said in an interview that he operated under "a more prudent risk
management" style and said he "would have maintained the investment
strategy we had in place." Belt left in 2006 and Millard arrived in 2007.
Under Millard's strategy, the pension agency was directed to invest 55
percent of its funds in stocks and real estate. That included 20 percent in
US stocks, 19 percent in foreign stocks, 6 percent in what the agency's
records term "emerging market" stocks, 5 percent in private real estate and
5 percent in private equity firms
The Government Accountability Office is preparing a new review of the
investment policy, but in the meantime it continues to place the agency on
its list of federal programs at "high risk."
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/03/30/pension_insurer_shifted_to_stocks/?page=full
Does US Face G20 Mutiny?
The U.S. media are silent about the most important topic policy makers are discussing here (and I suspect in Asia too): how to protect their countries from three inter-related dynamics:
(1) the surplus dollars pouring into the rest of the world for yet further financial speculation and corporate takeovers;
(2) the fact that central banks are obliged to recycle these dollar inflows to buy U.S. Treasury bonds to finance the federal U.S. budget deficit; and most important (but most suppressed in the U.S. media,
(3) the military character of the U.S. payments deficit and the domestic federal budget deficit.
The problem of speculative capital movements goes beyond drawing up a set of specific regulations. It concerns the scope of national government power. The International Monetary Fund's Articles of Agreement prevent countries from restoring the "dual exchange rate" systems that many retained down through the 1950s and even into the '60s. It was widespread practice for countries to have one exchange rate for goods and services (sometimes various exchange rates for different import and export categories) and another for "capital movements." Under American pressure, the IMF enforced the pretence that there is an "equilibrium" rate that just happens to be the same for goods and services as it is for capital movements. Governments that did not buy into this ideology were excluded from membership in the IMF and World Bank or were overthrown http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson03302009.html
The Next Financial Crisis Hits Wall Street, as Judges Start Nixing Foreclosures
Today's Wall Street, it turns out, is just another straw man for a rigged wealth transfer system... Now we see the aftermath of that inefficient allocation of capital: a massive glut of condos and homes pulling down asset prices in neighborhoods as well as in those ill-conceived securitizations whose
triple-A ratings have been downgraded to junk.
http://www.counterpunch.org/martens10212009.html
The result of the foreclosure solutions is bank tanking, What Obama needs to say and do... http://raenergy.igc.org/Options.html
Video: For some solutions Keith Olbermann's "Special Comment" on Bank Bailout
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22266.htm
Video: Can't make it here any more http://www.bullnotbull.com/bull/node/40
Video: Jim Cramer Attacks NY Attorney General Cuomo a year ago for attempting to stop predatory lending http://tinyurl.com/cj5qnp
http://raenergy.igc.org/moneycollapse.jpg
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Ra Energy Fdn.
Ra-Chi is our agenda http://ra-chi.org
Raleigh Myers
Worksheet bio
http://raenergy.igc.org/bio.html
Op Eds more of the latest going back decades http://tinyurl.com/6de9aa
Videos Ought 2010 A Transcendence Odyssey a movie where ALL the worlds' a stage Everyone is in it _ See Currency The Redistribution of TIME and Digging Slavery's Grave the secular version.
http://ra-chi.org/ought.html
It is time for a look at the solution from a 'more for the most' Lowest Common Denominator POV _ Getting back to the hard wired knowledge LCD Talking points http://raenergy.igc.org/lcdn.html#game
Let us experiment with laws and customs, with money systems and governments, until we chart the one true course - until we find the majesty of our proper orbit as the planets above have found theirs& And then at last we shall move all together in the harmony of our sphere under the great impulse of a single creation - one unity, one system, one design.
Roger Bacon
FAIR USE NOTICE: This may contain copyrighted (C ) material the use of which
has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such
material is made available for educational purposes, to advance
understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and
social justice issues, etc. It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair
use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C.
section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/faq-ip.php
Ought 2010 by Raleigh Myers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
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Much of what we do, is to give talking points to focus the conversation on lowest common denominator solutions and thinking. Many have seen some of these points before, how about those you might share this with... Creative Commons encourages you to share and enhance...
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40 Trillion Saved In Ten Years _ Medicare For All, FICA (Federal INSURANCE Collection Act) All Transaction
All Pay... listening to the Dick Armey Heritage foundation mantras is a moot point.
Insurance is not considered a tax when collected outside We The People's government... http://tinyurl.com/nk8aoz
Health in a handbasket puts it together as they take it apart... Racheal Madow 3/8/10 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#35771844
VIDEO | Keith Olberman: Legislators for Sale
http://www.truthout.org/080409B?n
Keith Olbermann, MSNBC Countdown: "Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on Health Care Reform in this country, and in particular, the 'public insurance option.'"
WE need to rattle the cage a bit here with a global consciousness uptick, or put another way, a mass realization that the waking of the Collective Consciousness are destined to become WeThePeopleIsm 1775... http://tinyurl.com/yzqkepg
On the solution side above and beyond nations and parties... Before we have a revolution, lets have a global election of We The People by We The People for We The people as a bill of rights voted with We The People. This land is Your Land, This Land is My Land, This Land (Spaceship Earth) Is Made for You and ME as we have been singing around the world in a hundred or so languages for the last fifty years _ we have already voted....
We have a way out with the global vote _ a covenant between ourselves _ WeThePeopleIsm 1775 planet wide...
Lowest Common Denominator in human equality is a covenant between ourselves to go where no one has ever gone before...
http://raenergy.igc.org/globalvote.html
Raleigh Myershttp://www.truthout.org/080409B?n
Keith Olbermann, MSNBC Countdown: "Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on Health Care Reform in this country, and in particular, the 'public insurance option.'"
WE need to rattle the cage a bit here with a global consciousness uptick, or put another way, a mass realization that the waking of the Collective Consciousness are destined to become WeThePeopleIsm 1775... http://tinyurl.com/yzqkepg
On the solution side above and beyond nations and parties... Before we have a revolution, lets have a global election of We The People by We The People for We The people as a bill of rights voted with We The People. This land is Your Land, This Land is My Land, This Land (Spaceship Earth) Is Made for You and ME as we have been singing around the world in a hundred or so languages for the last fifty years _ we have already voted....
We have a way out with the global vote _ a covenant between ourselves _ WeThePeopleIsm 1775 planet wide...
Lowest Common Denominator in human equality is a covenant between ourselves to go where no one has ever gone before...
http://raenergy.igc.org/globalvote.html
Ra Energy Fdn.
Founded in 1973
Ra-Chi is our agenda http://ra-chi.org/ought.html
Op Eds more of the latest going back decades http://groups.google.com/groups?ie=UTF-8&q=raenergy
http://tinyurl.com/ygwmpvv
more http://tinyurl.com/yjegljf more... http://tinyurl.com/yjoeev2
Videos Ought 2010 A Transcendence Odyssey a movie where ALL the worlds' a stage Everyone is in it _ See Currency The Redistribution of TIME and Digging Slavery's Grave, the secular version.
http://ra-chi.org/ought.html
Let us experiment with laws and customs, with money systems and governments, until we chart the one true course - until we find the majesty of our proper orbit as the planets above have found theirs. And then at last we shall move all together in the harmony of our sphere under the great impulse of a single creation - one unity, one system, one design.
Roger Bacon
Let WE The People vote on a covenant between ourselves... http://raenergy.igc.org/globalvote.html
FAIR USE NOTICE: This may contain copyrighted (C ) material the use of which
has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such
material is made available for educational purposes, to advance
understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and
social justice issues, etc. It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair
use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C.
section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/faq-ip.php
Ought 2010 by Raleigh Myers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.