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["Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>]

An interesting perspective.

Lynda



Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 01:24:20 -0400
Subject: Brasscheck TV: The financial meltdown explained

This is a long story, but if you have any interest in what's going on in the 
financial markets, I think you'll find it a more useful analysis than you're 
likely to find anywhere else. 

Also, it's an important set-up for today's video. 

Without this article, you'll still get value from the video, but with it, 
you'll REALLY know what's going on better than most people on 
earth...including financial news reporters. 

I encourage you to invest the five minutes it will take to read this. If not, 
you can skip to the link at the bottom. 

Brasscheck

=========================================

A short explanation of how we got to where we are

Today's banking crisis is the THIRD trillion dollar plus US-caused financial 
meltdown in the last twenty years.

Each one of these crises came into being through the same basic 
mechanism...the fraudulent over-valuing of financial assets by Wall Street - 
with a 'wink and a nod' (and sometimes a lot more) from the White House and 
Congress. 

The fraudulently valued assets stimulate the economy, impart the illusion of 
health and then, inevitably, the fraud goes too far and the whole house of 
card comes painfully crashing back to earth. 

The three trillion dollar plus frauds were: 

Fraud #1: The so-called 'Savings and Loan Crisis' of the late 80s

Fraud #2: The so-called 'Tech Bubble' of the late 90s

Fraud #3: The so-called 'Credit Crisis' of today

 *** How the scam works

The mechanism of these frauds is simplicity itself...

...Take a shaky financial asset and blow up its value and then sell as much 
of it as you can. 

In the 'Savings and Loan Crisis,' the instrument was junk bonds.

In the 'Tech Bubble' it was Internet stocks. 

In the 'Credit Crisis' it was individual mortgages collected into pools and 
then re-sold to investors. 

In each case, normal, well established 'bread and butter' financial 
principles were consciously thrown away by Wall Street with no hint of 
protest from federal regulators.

***The 'Savings and Loan Crisis' dissected

Junk bonds caused the Saving and Loan crisis which resulted in the US taking 
over the assets of hundreds of
banks and selling them back over time to the marketplace at fire sale prices. 

Junk bonds, which caused the 'Savings and Loan Crisis' were shaky bonds that 
were pumped up by deliberate misrepresentation and what I call 'staged 
dealing.' 

Bonds get their value from two things: the amount of interest they pay and 
how safe they are. 

'Junk' bonds have to pay higher interest because they are less safe. 
Therefore, until the 'Savings and Loan Crisis,' savings and loan banks banks 
were not allowed by law to buy them and call them assets. 

Reagan/Bush changed all this and then a group of Wall Street fraudsters used 
the new loophole to kick off an orgy of junk bond creation and junk bond 
selling to banks and insurance companies. 

The crooks would deal the junk bonds back and forth amongst themselves 
thereby establishing their 'value'
and then they'd sell them to outsiders. The bonds then became 'assets' which 
could be borrowed against and leveraged to buy even more bonds. 

When the bonds failed, the banks failed and in stepped the US government to 
'fix' the problem that it created at the cost of at least one trillion 
dollars to US tax payers.

Deja vu, eh? 

***The 'Tech Bubble' dissected

The instrument of fraud in the 'Tech Bubble' was Internet stocks, start ups 
in particular. 

A stock gets its value from the underlying company's sales, its growth and 
its overall prospects for the future. 

Pre-tech bubble, companies used to have to prove themselves by being in 
existence for several years before they could be sold on major exchanges. 
That standard was thrown away during the tech bubble. 

To pump of their values, the companies engaged in 'staged dealing' just like 
the junk bond crooks. 

Company #1 would 'sell' 20 million dollars in banner ads to Company #2 which 
would in turn 'sell' 20 million
in banner ads to Company #1. 

In fact, nobody sold anybody anything. Company #2 ran ads for Company #1 and 
billed it for them. Company #1 ran ads for Company #2 and billed for an equal 
amount.

These should have been called media trades not sales, but Wall Street was 
happy to claim them as legitimate cash sales and then use the sales numbers 
to fraudulently value these companies - many of them totally worthless - in 
the hundreds of millions and sometimes even the billions. 

***The 'Credit Crisis' dissected

By now, you see how the scheme works.

It's not complicated at all. 

You take near worthless pieces of paper (junk bonds, stock of start up 
Internet companies, etc.) and declare them to be good as gold. 

Then you create as many junk bonds and Internet start up stocks as you get 
and sell them as fast as you can. 
In the case of our current crisis, the instrument of fraud was so-called 
sub-prime mortgages.

Previously, sub-prime mortgages had very little trading value. Only people in 
the sub-prime industry itself dealt in them and for good reason. They're 
tricky to value and packed with financial peril.

But Wall Street changed all that. 

Wall Street said: 'If we take LOTS of these mortgages and assemble them into 
large pools and then slice and dice the pools in various ways, we can sell 
the slices to banks and other investors as AAA paper.'

It sounds crazy, doesn't it?

If the underlying pieces of paper are garbage, how does assembling a whole 
bunch of garbage into one place make it 'better?'

It doesn't, of course, and this is a principle even a three year old child 
can understand.

But greed and the need to pump up a shaky economy for propaganda purposes are 
two very strong motivators.

Banks created these mortgage pools, sold them to each other, and they by 
virtue of these 'staged sales' declared them valuable.

Do you recognize the pattern now? 

If you do, then you are now smarter than all the assembled j@ck@sses who do 
financial reporting because they apparently can't - or won't. 

This is the THIRD trillion-dollar plus fraud driven financial meltdown in 
twenty years and apparently no one in the financial news media can see how it 
happened. 

***But there's more...

Junk bonds were mass manufactured as fast as the crooks could invent them. 
Ditto for Internet stocks.

But how did hundreds of billions of dollars worth of 'toxic' mortgages 
suddenly come into being? 

Why did the mortgage industry change its lending standards so radically and 
so suddenly to make their creation possible?

And why did real estate lending regulators in all 50 states - because real 
estate lending is a STATE-level issue not a federal  - go along with it? 

Here's where it gets very interesting...

The fact is state-level lending regulators were VERY concerned about what was 
going on. They have been for years. 

And they not only expressed their concern clearly, they also took SERIOUS 
concerted legal action to stop lenders from making bad real estate loans to 
their citizens. 

(Most of the sub-prime loans in the news so much today were designed to screw 
the people who borrowed the money and can rightly be called 'predatory' 
loans.)

Guess who stopped the states from enforcing their own time-proven real estate 
lending laws and thus created the raw material that made the current 'Credit 
Crisis' possible?

*** The trillion dollar plus question

If you're a US taxpayer, you're going to pay for this fraud so you might as 
well know who did it to you. 

His initials are GB.

You know him well. 

But perhaps more interesting is the name of the person who single-handedly 
rallied first state attorneys general and then fellow governors to fight the 
creation of these loans and who in the process became Public Enemy #1 to the 
Bush Administration...

 His initials are ES.

If you follow 'silly' US political scandals, you'll recognize his name 
instantly when you hear it. 

And you will *finally* understand why he was quickly and permanently 
assassinated politically earlier this year.

Had ES been allowed to 'live,' he would have been in position to remind 
everyone every day of who made the current meltdown possible.

Instead, he was silenced very effectively. Not with a bullet in the back of 
the head, but the net effect was just the same.

So effective was his assassination that no one can even mention his name in 
connection with today's crisis without risking ridicule, or worse. 

Last note: 

The crisis this fraud has created is *exponentially* bigger than the S & L 
and Tech Bubble combined. 

It's not going to be resolved by a quick 'patch up' and will likely have the 
same impact on the current generation that the depression of the 1930s had on 
its parents, grandparents and great grandparents. 

On that cheerful note, here's the big story everyone missed this year and now 
you'll finally know what REALLY happened and why: 
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/291.html 

- Brasscheck

P.S. If you find Brasscheck TV valuable, please share our e-mail and videos 
with friends and colleagues.

That's how we grow. Thanks. 

- Brasscheck

P.S. Please share Brasscheck TV e-mails and videos with friends and 
colleagues. 

That's how we grow. Thanks. 

 ==============================

 Brasscheck TV
2380 California St.
San Francisco, CA 94115

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>From bobford79 AT yahoo.com  Mon Sep 22 02:28:28 2008
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Subject: Re: [Homestead] medical safety in this country
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patients do lie, but docs should order labs and read the results.  That would 
solve many problems related to the stories that patients tell.  Iatrogenic 
lists do have value, given the proper interpretation of data. 
 
you say :"BTW, ALL med errors are reported, period!  Monthly, by all 
hospitals. 
Doesn't matter whether or not they result in a death."
 
oh really, I have heard straight from the mouths of Docs and RNs of  med 
errors that were not reported.  A  couple would have no license now, if they 
had reported honestly.  With modern tracking systems, it is much harder to 
cover a med error, I would imagine; but not impossible.
 
And, most med errors occur outpatient..., especially with prescribers writing 
scrips outside of their scope of practice.  Generally with PCPs. bobf

 
 



----- Original Message ----
From: Lynda <lurine AT softcom.net>
To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2008 12:09:44 AM
Subject: Re: [Homestead] medical safety in this country

The problem with using "iatrogenic" is what is part of the problem with 
medical care in the U.S., the patient.  Not to defend doctors but their job 
is kind of hard when so many of their patients, to put it bluntly, are 
liars!  Yup, just flat out liars.

Well, Mr. X, please fill out this questionaire.  Do you drink alcohol? 
Yes/No, if yes, how often.  Doctors get the same blooming answer that cops 
get "oh, I just had a couple of beers."  So the doc gives him some 
medication which is contra-indicted if someone drinks.  Blam, liver 
problems.  Doc gets marked on the iatrogenic list.

Patient comes in and is going to have oral surgery.  Long questionaire.  One 
of the questions is "have you ever used ANY drugs, legal or otherwise. 
Patient lists some antibiotics and the Soma they took way back when for a 
back injury.  Patient doesn't note that patient used meth as a recreational 
weekend drug.  Patient gets anesthesia and it takes enough to knock out a 
horse and patient goes into pulmonary shutdown and dies.  Doc gets marked on 
the iatrogenic list.

Both are the direct responsibility of the patient!

So, isatrogenic lists are worthless!

BTW, ALL med errors are reported, period!  Monthly, by all hospitals. 
Doesn't matter whether or not they result in a death.

Lynda
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "SJC" <indexer AT localnet.com>


>I went looking just now for current figures on iatrogenic deaths in this
> country, but as usual, they are not easy to come by.  Not really
> something any of us want to think too hard about, I guess.
>
> I no longer have mine (burned in house fire) but I remembered this
> article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is
> only available on the net for $$, although some libraries carry it and a
> lot of hospital libraries will let the public in (another closely-held
> fact) but someone has copied it to a blog at
> http://digg.com/health/Doctors_May_Be_Third_Leading_Cause_of_Death
>
> Those are of course, not current figures and no matter what, are 'way
> low.  I have seen many deaths go unmarked so far as causative factors.
> For instance, had I had the good grace to croak this spring before my
> diagnosis and subsequent treatment, my death certificate would
> undoubtedly have read simply "pulmonary thrombosis" with no note as to
> neglect/lack of dx/treatment or anything else, for that matter.  I've
> seen estimates that reporting of iatrogenic death ranges from 5% to 20%
> of actual cases.....pretty scary when you do the numbers.
>
> And these are only deaths.  They don't count the incidents that involve
> a less-than-dead patient, such as medication errors that don't result in
> death, surgeries done on the wrong limb, etc....

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