Posted on 10/18/2009 6:32:59 AM PDT by FromLori
The PBS news program Frontline is about to launch an "expose" of the financial crisis and blame it on free markets. The program is titled, The Warning, and is to be first aired on October 20. It will blame the current financial crisis on supposed free market advocates (and this, I guess, is not a PBS joke), Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.
Greenspan, at the time, was the head of the Federal Reserve, which is responsible through monetary manipulations for the distortions that do cause the business cycle. Rubin is a former Goldman Sachs CEO, who like all Goldman players used his government position to benefit Goldman and other elite insider banks. He left his position as Treasury Secretary to become a senior adviser to Citigroup (Many believe he was awarded the Citi position for his directing, while Treasury Secretary, regulations in a way that would significantly benefit Citi). Summers is now lead economic adviser to President Obama and sings the praises of the administration's interventions in the economy, from the intervention of shoveling money in the banking and auto sector to federal control of healthcare.
If these people can be considered free market advocates, well then just consider me President Obama's birth mother.
But Frontline sets up the absurdity of these three as free market advocates so they can attack free markets and trot out their heroine, Brooksley Born. Born, a friend of Hillary Clinton was named a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in the Clinton Administration. The CFTC during Born's era buried the major illegal trading that resulted in Hillary Clinton trading $6,300 into $100,000. In short, Born was just the political operative that the Clintons needed at the CFTC. She got the job done, ah, make that got the job buried.
Now, she is being trotted out as foreseeing the financial crisis, because she wanted to regulate derivatives. In truth, her aggressive demand to have the CFTC regulate derivatives was a turf war. Even before she was made head of the CFTC, it was clear the CFTC would be a battler for oversight of derivatives.
A May 3. 1994 NYT article by Robert Hershey Jr, discussed this turf war, just days after Born became a member and Mary Schapiro was about to be named CFTC chair: One big topic for the next C.F.T.C. chairman will no doubt be the regulation of financial derivatives. Thus, Born's fight for regulation of derivatives was a long term agenda of the CFTC, and she was the political tool used to fight in the turf battle. She was not some prescient derivatives genius who with blank slate walked into the CFTC and saw the dangers of derivatives. The course was set for her and she was simply spun around to face the direction she was supposed to march in, and march she did (probably with boots on).
Yet, because, as a political hack, she called for regulation of derivatives by the CFTC, Frontline is promoting her as someone who saw the dangers of derivatives. Yes, this same hack, who couldn't spot anything wrong with Hillary's commodities trading, though a Washington Post reporter, could rattle off violation after violation, is now Frontlines tool to be used to promote the idea that the financial sector needs to be more heavily regulated, curiously just in time for Obama to launch its campaign to add piles and piles of more regulations on the financial sector.
The mass media, and other first line spreaders of programmed nonsense, will use this "expose" as their outline to spread a call for more regulation. Because gosh jolly, if the regulation advocate Born had her way, house prices would have never gone up and the politically charged CFTC would suddenly not be politically charged if they got their hands on derivatives. As the 6 year old non-balloon boy might say, "Excuse me while I puke".
The fact that business cycle crises have existed long before derivatives even existed, and that business cycle crises are first and foremost a monetary phenomena will be lost on these unthinking sponges who absorb nonsense and then drip it out.
Hard to believe... Liberal journalists blaming economic problems on capitalism. You must be joking.
Proof that these clowns think we’re stupid. If it quacks and waddles and has a yellow bill and looks like a duck—it is. When you see boarded up businesses and talk to people that are out of work, any idiot knows where the economy is and is headed. RATs are brainless, insulting, in-your-face, arrogant sewage.
It is frightening to think how many people will believe this because it will be on pbs.
I don’t want my tax dollars being used to support liberal propaganda. Where does it say they can do that in the Constitution?
At least not many people will see it.
PBS circling the wagons for their communist masters.
Does anybody even watch PBS anymore much less “Frontline”?
I hope they go down big time ASAP....and take Rubin and Geithner with them!
Mrs. Prince of Space
The left within Congress force the govt to relax "regulations" re: loans to poor people and vote the govt into relaxing spending standards and convince GWB to relax "capitalism" itself to "save" capitalism which caused all (or most) of the current problems.
Then they follow up by blaming the "relaxation" of regulations for the problem.
Heads they win, tails we lose. Grrrrr.....
Well when liberals practice a capitalist system they by their nature pervert that system into an ism...
What a friggin joke look at this!
U.S. must learn to live within its means: Geithner
You call and tell them you do NOT accept the changes and they are by law required to keep your interest rate at what is was (9.99%). This process will automatically cancel your card (so you wont be able to put additional charges on it) BUT you will not have to pay the 29.99% interest rate, and can pay out your current balance the same as before until it is paid off.
They’re gonna go down like Krankor.
I think that if this is exposed before it airs, and the reasons why, people will watch with a grain of salt. Send it to Beck of Fox...maybe they can diffuse this.
Talking about raising card rates. I had a card for 18 years at 8.99%, clean payment history, recently jumped to 27.99% I’m gonna call them on that, if they are going to be stinky about it, I’m gonna close the account when I have it paid off next month. Seems like the banks are getting ready for the coming inflation, and jacking up the credit rates ahead of the game...
One thing most people don’t realize is that the monetary system of America is corrupt and eventually will become unstable.
PBS will attract the same viewers it always attracts. Therefore, anything it produces and airs dealing with economy will be viewed by the same people. In other words, it’ll be preaching to the choir.
The only thing I watch on PBS, and I’m very selective, are its entertainment programs. Other than that I get my news from Fox or Free Republic.
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