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
Proving Criminal intent is the process of
returning stolen property to their rightful owners in the wake of
fraud... http://tinyurl.com/25flpjh
Bonnie Faulkner's interview of Max Keiser _
this is a game stopper
http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20101229-Wed1300.mp3
Revealed
80% Of Foreclosures Involve Bankster Fraud
http://tinyurl.com/yzcqx32
at FCIC Hearings says Glen Theobald Miami Dade Mortgage Fraud Task
force police at the the Bankster hearings aka Financial Crisis
Inquiry Group Pedora hearings.
Snip....
Transcript found on Miami Dade servers

Transcript
found on Miami Dade servers
http://www.miamidade.gov/mayor/library/theobald_financial_crisis_inquiry_commiss.pdf
The
hearings server gives error hmmm?
http://www.fcic.gov/hearings/pdfs/2010-0114-Theobald.pdf
Mirror
site if it disappears again...
http://raenergy.igc.org/theobaldtranscript.pdf
What
Clayton Knew The most shocking discovery yet about how the banks
hid their toxic mortgages. These documents, from Clayton
Holdings, a due diligence company retained by the banks,
reveal that Clayton, after analyzing more than 900,000 mortgages,
told the banks that about 30 percent of the loans being packaged
into securitized products did not satisfy the banks' own
underwriting standards. This meant that the securitized products
were almost bound to blow up. By Eliot Spitzer
http://www.slate.com/id/2271647/
Proving criminal intent has been
accomplished...
Before MERS (Mortgage
Electronic Registration System) , it would not have been
possible for mortgages with no market value . . . to be sold at a
profit or collateralized and sold as mortgage-backed securities.
Before MERS, it would not have been possible for the Defendant banks
and AIG to conceal from government regulators the extent of risk of
financial losses those entities faced from the predatory origination
of residential loans and the fraudulent re-sale and securitization of
those otherwise non-marketable loans...
After MERS (Mortgage Electronic
Registration System) , . . . the servicing rights were transferred
after the origination of the loan to an entity so large that
communication with the servicer became difficult if not impossible
.... The servicer was interested in only one thing - making a profit
from the foreclosure of the borrower's residence - so that the entire
predatory cycle of fraudulent origination, resale, and securitization
of yet another predatory loan could occur again. This is the legacy
of MERS, and the entire scheme was predicated upon the fraudulent
designation of MERS as the 'beneficiary' under millions of deeds of
trust in Nevada and other states.
http://tinyurl.com/25yrce9
|
Despite
all the evidence against it, Moody's is still treated as a
credible player that can send a warning shot across the bow
of the U.S. government. That's the kind of rigged game we're
facing: One of the biggest sources of the government's debt
is the economic collapse, which was enabled in large measure
by the bad ratings issuing by rating franchises like
Moody's. Now Moody's wants to hamstring the government's
ability to repair the damage it helped create. And it might.
It's that
powerful,
and the system is that
rigged
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/wall-street-noir-moodys-d_b_741364.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=092810&utm_medium=email&utm_content=FeatureMore
Slate's
Eliot Spitzer reveals the most shocking secret about how the
banks hid their toxic mortgages:
"... I encouraged all the investigators with whom I
spoke to begin by demanding access to the documents that the
credit departments of the banks examined. Some of these
documents have emerged ... These documents, from Clayton
Holdings, a due diligence company retained by the banks,
reveal that Clayton, after analyzing more than 900,000
mortgages, told the banks that about 30 percent of the loans
being packaged into securitized products did not satisfy the
banks' own underwriting standards ... It is not too late to
use the Clayton information to claw back bonuses and hold
the banks, rating agencies, and government enforcement
agencies accountable."http://www.slate.com/id/2271647/
|
|
|
The experience of the
Savings and Loan crisis in the Reaganhood era, was of businesses
taken over for the explicit purpose of stripping them, of bleeding
them dry. This was established in court: there were over one thousand
felony convictions in the wake of that debacle.
http://www.alternet.org/economy/146883/james_k._galbraith:_why_the_%27experts%27_failed_to_see_how_financial_fraud_collapsed_the_economy
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
How Goldman Sachs Ripped Its Clientsメ
Faces Off 51,500 hits by
4/23/10
http://tinyurl.com/2a2x7ml
William black on Fraud... Obama needs to adress
fraud ... http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04232010/profile.html
Revealed
80% Of Foreclosures Involve Bankster Fraud
http://tinyurl.com/yzcqx32
at FCIC Hearings says Glen Theobald Miami Dade Mortgage Fraud Task
force police at the the Bankster hearings aka Financial Crisis
Inquiry Group Pedora hearings.
Snip....
Transcript found on Miami Dade servers

Transcript
found on Miami Dade servers
http://www.miamidade.gov/mayor/library/theobald_financial_crisis_inquiry_commiss.pdf
The
hearings server gives error hmmm?
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
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
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/single
How about Paulson betting on the housing crash
while Treasury Secretary under Bush...
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
Bankster USA... http://www.banksterusa.org/
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/
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
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
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
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
$2.63 billion in the
United States, 70 percent of that attributable to
government agencies,
mostly Medicaid. Zyprexa cost approximately twice as
much
as similar drugs, and state Medicaid
programs, going in the red in
part because of
Zyprexa, were attempting to exclude it in favor of similar,
less expensive
drugs. When Kentucky's Medicaid program attempted to exclude
Zyprexa -- its
single largest drug expense -- from its list of preferred
medications, NAMI
bused protesters to hearings, placed full-page ads in
newspapers, and sent
faxes to state officials. What NAMI did not say at the
time was that the
buses, ads, and faxes were paid for by Lilly.
The Case for
Giving Eli Lilly the Corporate Death Penalty
http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/129709/the_case_for_giving_eli_lilly_the_corporate_death_penalty/?page=entire
On Job flight and
minimum wage Bushscists are king…
Poverty level goal
of 2$ 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
Missouri–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

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Worksheet bio
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Op
Eds more of the latest going back decades
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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
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