eastwind journals are the personal journalistic writings of Bernie Lopez, and are not part of the healing ministry. Any views or comments are his own and does not reflect those of the ministry.
_____________________________________________ WHAT REALLY HAPPENED AT WALL STREET part 1 Excerpts from a banned film This is part 1 of an article series on the financial crimes of Wall Street as dramatically portrayed in the movie “Inside Job”, which was never shown in commercial theaters. It reveals the blatant and raw crimes of investment banks against small investors and tax payers.
This scary story is not Hollywood fiction. It is a reality staring us in the face today. Our own banks can do it. The small criminals have been caught and jailed but the people on top are still around with their powerful Washington lobby. It seems no one can stop them, not the US Federal regulators, not the courts, not the White House. In most cases, they become partners in crime. Wall Street simply buys or hires any opposition into submission. Once caught, they simply ‘pay’ a settlement fee for their crimes, which is often a drop in the bucket compared to their trillions in profits. They can write them off as petty expenses. continued This is the reason for the ‘Occupy Movement’ sweeping like wildfire across continental America right this moment. At first, Wall Street and the White House were tolerant, but now the growing menace and crisis forced them to strengthen their partnership. They are beginning to use the armed forces to suppress the common people who now see the grime and are rising in anger. At the end of the alley, if the situation worsens, there may be a cataclysmic revolution in America streets never before seen, which will dwarf the Arab Spring riots.
The crimes of the giant investment banks are felt worldwide. The increase in Philippine unemployment is partly caused by their financial tsunami. They have affected the prices of food on our dinner table. Their impact is omnipresent, in every nook and corner of our country, down to the lowly peasant farmers producing rice.
You can download the movie and see for yourself. Google ‘Inside Job’. The file is about 700mb and will take about 8 hours to download. Start downloarding in the evening before you sleep, and when you wake up in the morning and view this, you will really wake up. It is stronger than brewed coffee.
The curtain rises in Iceland, a tiny pristine wealthy nation with a population of 320,000. Its GDP was a sound $13 billion. Its per capita GDP was one of the highest in the world. The volcano rumblings began in 2002 when a deregulation policy was adopted by a government under the prodding of Wall Street ‘friends’, the future loan givers. As a result, three of the largest banks were privatized and in five short years, they borrowed a galactic $100 billion, ten times the national economy. The Wall Street ‘friends’ of the bank executives had to thoroughly wine and dine them with regular luxury junkets to convince them to make new loans under the new deregulation policy.
Most of the loans were pocketed by millionaires who borrowed billions, creating a bubble that doubled prices of basic goods. They bought private jets, yachts and lived in utter luxury. On top of this, with the advice of Wall Street ‘friends’, the three banks went public, and launched a massive campaign to tell bank clients to invest their savings in the money market funds, where the banks could dip their fingers for easy-profit but risky investments. The bank losses of $100 billion went to the millionaires and to risky investments which failed.
To suppress growing protests, the US auditing firms controlled by Wall Street gave a rosy picture in spite of the impending eruption. KPMG said there was nothing to worry about. The US rating agencies upgraded the banks to the highest level at triple A. This involved deceit and misinformation from the most prestigious and respected American rating agencies.
When the banks collapsed at the end of 2008 in five short years, the billions of dollars in loans they got from Wall Street fizzled. Unemployment trebled in six months. Many ordinary people lost their treasured savings. Wall Street, in one ingenious strategy, stole the money of Icelanders, rich and poor, and transformed Iceland’s resilient economy into a financial disaster. A government rescue was installed so that the banks could pay the Wall Street octupuses, who made the primary killing in the end at the expense of the Iceland government.
Government regulators did nothing. In fact, a third of them resigned and were hired by the banks. When government regulators came to one particular bank for a showdown, they saw 17 SUVs in the parking lot outside before they faced 17 lawyers inside, the best in the land who could wiggle out of a blade-thin crack.
The story of Iceland is the tip of the financial iceberg. Before that, the Wall Street rogues did the same thing in their own beloved nation, only on a much bigger scale. They talked not billions but hundreds of trillions. Their bravado in Iceland was triggered by their sheer overconfidence in the US caper which started in back in the 80s under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood darling turned President. (See Part 2). They wanted to globalize their greed.
Andrew Sheng, Chief Adviser for China Bank Regulatory Commission calls the Wall Street heist, “Massive private gains at massive public losses” (Inside Job, the movie). The movie further states that there were neighter confessions nor remorse from financial criminals. Asked if there should be legal controls on executive pay, their reply was a resounding “No!”, without explaining why. A financial expert, speaking about ‘Wall Street’s excessive income’, wondered how they could go to office early in the morning after snorting cocaine the night before.
bernie lopez eastwind journals Opinyon Magazine, feb 13 2012 redgate77@gmail.com
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