http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/
Brooks Born, head of the Chicago Futures Exchange warned us that these new derivatives are very dangerous for our financial system. She was removed! Shows clearly how ideology trumps clear thinking and analysis. Greenspan's Ayn Rand "Atlas Shrugged" mind was the leader of the financial meltdown and both Rubin (Goldman Sachs) and Larry Summers (Sec of Treasury) who are brilliant followed him. It shows clearly that very smart people such as McNamara can make horrendous errors in logic based on selecting information that sports their beliefs and rejecting all other good information and analysis. The Current Republican Party members and leaders are superb examples.
A friend recommended the book "Republican Gomorrah," authored by Max Blumenthal who did extensive research how our current radical Republican Party developed. Believe it or not it started in Geneva, Switzerland and was largely based on the New Christianity developed in the 19th century to justify Greed and accumulation of large amounts of wealth. Instead of the New Testament, it selected one of the many versions depicted in the Old Testament. Most Jewish Rabbis in Israel who are almost unanimously skeptical of the contradictory stories in the Old Testament consider they myths, but do realize that it still provides valuable lessons on how to lead our lives. Note which passages radical Republicans favor verses the rest of Americans.
Instead of being amusing as my friend found the book, I found the information horrifying. I read only four chapters so far, but I found the book is well written, very revealing, and easy to read. It shows how they were funded and how the Christian Evangelical movement developed. Falwell based his church on racism and was reluctant to take up abortion pushed by the radical Catholics such as the Justice Scalia type and now essentially dominating the Supreme Court including Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. But what I found interesting is that the major tenets of the Christian Evangelical movement was largely conceived by Francis Schaeffer and Rushdoony from Geneva. Schaeffer later in his life largely condemned most of the leaders of the Christian Right as either stupid or wrong headed.
But what launched the abortion movement was the decision by the Supreme Court to make abortion legal. Although Schaeffer was considered liberal about homosexuals and his hippie like complex in Geneva attracted some more liberal celebrities such as Bono. But when abortion which he did not comment much on in the past became legal something in his brain went Kaboom! He went crazy. Most of the Christian Right think of Schaeffer's book and writings as the Bible and even attracted Doctor killers we are well acquainted with now.
What was most revealing about the leaders of the Christian Evangelical movement is that many including the major initial funders who inherited their money had been diagnosed Schizophrenic and spent time in the Mental Hospitals. Many of the founders of new religions as we all have seen in modern times have been a little on the crazy side. Brain studies have shown that the control of behavior by many who founded religions had parietal epilepsy or a head injury which results in a loss of pre-frontal cortical judgement to go out the window. That is why the radical Evangelicals commit fraud, adultery, and even murder in much higher numbers than the Northeast Liberals.
This loss of control is well illustrated by what happened to a supervisor in the railroad building across the US in the 19th century. An explosion put a spike through the pre-frontal cortex of his brain, but he survived. He lost all forms of control and started swearing a lot, stealing money, could not control his temper, and committed adultery, a complete change of character. Research done at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at San Diego confirmed what happens when pre-frontal cortical control is lost due to parietal epilepsy or injury.
Many who established new religions such as Smith and many others were strongly suspected of either head injuries or parietal epilepsy according to their behavior recorded in historical accounts. At the University of California, San Diego, a patient with Parietal Epilepsy which he gets in 8 hour stretches believed he was God or was speaking to God depending on the day.
Most people who are religious at least one time in their life are not in this category including myself. It is a comfort and provides the glue to keep people from acting only on instinct and function more as a community than a selfish loner which seems to thrive in our current society where real friends seem to be very scarce.
Jim Kawakami, October 20, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
... Greenspan, Rubin and Summers ultimately prevailed on Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation of derivatives. "Born faced a formidable struggle pushing for regulation at a time when the stock market was booming," Kirk says. "Alan Greenspan was the maestro, and both parties in Washington were united in a belief that the markets would take care of themselves."
Now, with many of the same men who shut down Born in key positions in the Obama administration, The Warning reveals the complicated politics that led to this crisis and what it may say about current attempts to prevent the next one. ...
FRONTLINE INVESTIGATES THE ROOTS OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
FRONTLINE Presents
The Warning
Tuesday, October 20, 2009, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS
www.pbs.org/frontline/warning
"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"
In The Warning, airing Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk (Inside the Meltdown,Breaking the Bank) unearths the hidden history of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.
"I didn't know Brooksley Born," says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton's powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. "I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable." Levitt explains how the other principals of the Working Group -- former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin -- convinced him that Born's attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was "clearly a mistake." ...
Fight the Big Boys on Wall Street at www.BanksterUSA.org
The Banksters have pulled off the biggest heist of all time. They have crashed the global economy, throwing 7.5 million Americans out of work, emptying retirement and college funds and forcing many into hardship and homelessness. Yet they continue to be rewarded with trillions of taxpayer dollars that underwrite their Bankster bonuses, they prey upon the vulnerable with ballooning bank fees and macabre investment schemes such as "death bonds" and their taxpayer-subsidized lobbyists swarm Capitol Hill to prevent the passage of any meaningful reform of the financial system. ...
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