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Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission: Summoning the Ghost of Ferdinand Pecora
Ferdinand Pecora, the tough New York prosecutor who took on Wall Street following the collapse of the Great Depression, wrote in his 1936 memoirs:
"Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker's stoutest allies."
The ghost of Ferdinand Pecora -- and indeed, of Franklin D. Roosevelt himself -- can be sensed in Washington, D.C. this week as Congress names the members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission - the modern-day version of the Roosevelt era "Pecora Commission." Tasked with uncovering "all causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States," the newly named commissioners have an historic opportunity to pave the way for meaningful reform.
To encourage the inquiry to live up to the experience of the 1930s, and to the expectations of the millions of Americans who continue to suffer under the weight of the currently broken and imbalanced economy, the Roosevelt Institute has launched an open letter and petition drive at www.whatcausedthecrisis.com, directed at the newly formed commission.
By taking lessons from the original Pecora Commission in its design and execution, the FCIC can ensure that its inquiry provides the insights needed to understand what caused the crisis and in so doing to protect the nation from future collapses.
Working with historians, law professors, economists and other scholars, we've developed three guidelines that we are asking the commission to follow. Without these measures, there is a danger the commission won't have enough "teeth" to truly get to the bottom of what and who caused the most recent crisis. From the open letter:
- Appoint a single investigator. This individual must have a proven record of exposing fraudulent elites and institutions, and must provide a professional, non-political spirit to the investigation.
- Afford no special treatment. No one is off-limits or gets special protection in the investigation.
- Provide the tools to do the job. The investigator must be given ample budget and time, full subpoena authority, and the ability to hire and fire staff.
The history of the Pecora Commission teaches us that a single investigator with the drive and freedom to find the truth -- reaching to the highest levels of Wall Street and the financial sector without impunity -- can uncover the conflicts of interest and fraud that brought down the nation's economy. It is clear that the same bright light of day needs to be shone on the people, institutions and practices that led to the most recent collapse.
We hope that these opportunities are afforded the new commission.
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6 Comments so far
Show AllI'd just like to point out that the first guideline sounds quite a bit like a particular known cognitive bias;
Moral credential effect: the tendency of a track record of non-prejudice to increase subsequent prejudice.
Perhaps Ralph Nader is free!
William K. Black - Is there anyone more qualified? If he is not part of this Inquiry, it will be just another waste of Tax Payer money.
THE PROBLEM IS that alot of these things are not crimes
because of our good friends clinton gramm and rubin.
derivatives and other instruments of financial destruction
aren't illegal.the bad guys win another one!
"- Appoint a single investigator. This individual must have a proven record of exposing fraudulent elites and institutions, and must provide a professional, non-political spirit to the investigation.
- Afford no special treatment. No one is off-limits or gets special protection in the investigation.
- Provide the tools to do the job. The investigator must be given ample budget and time, full subpoena authority, and the ability to hire and fire staff."
It will be a cold day in hell before the lawmakers in DC agree to these stipulations! For some, it would be like signing their own death warrant.
Regarding the causes of the current financial, economic crisis, the documentary film, "The Money Masters", www.themoneymasters.com, or view at Google, f.e., should be good history to review. What it says is definitely relevant for understanding or considerably understanding the current crisis, and the Federal Reserve being privately owned by banksters is a major part of the problem. That's if it, the Federal Reserve being privately owned by racket bankers, is not the crux of the problem or crisis.
As I understand the situation after having viewed "The Money Masters", as well as having read some good analytical articles at www.globalresearch.ca by a number of different writers, including Ellen Brown of www.WebOfDebt.com, if the government is to make corrections for the current crisis and aims to prevent future ones, then the Federal Reserve must either be eliminated or, else, made part of the actual government, that is, nationalised. The control over the creation, ... of money should only be in the hands of the government; [never] private parties.
Making that sort of correction can get presidents, ... assassinated, but the correction needs to be made and it's up to the president to make sure to have adequate personal security, and to never let his guard down, once this kind of correction is mandated; or even when not yet mandated, but the president has told the public that this change will be made. "The Money Masters" would have a lot to lose, for with this correction in place they would not be able to get increasingly filthy rich off of other peoples' money, and the brats don't want this situation again. They're racketeers and get rich not from using their own money, but the money of other people, and make economies go through critical swings, sometimes good, but also major crashes. When the latter is what's happening, then the racket bankers move in for "the kill", repossessing peoples' properties, assets, anything that had significant value before the crashes, buying these up at extremely low or virtually no cost and later selling them with or at major profit.
The Federal Reserve, as it is and has long been, now, is a racket, a scam, a major one. And given that many countries depend on the U.S. currency as reserve, then I guess that not only does the scam FR represent extreme avarice nationally, for the USA, but it also does on the international level.
I definitely recommend viewing the documentary. It's a little over three and a half hours and all of it is worth viewing and carefully listening to, as well as carefully reading, since it presents quotes from historical figures who had important words to say about how the monetary systems (includes European countries and Russia, instead of solely presenting U.S. history, but while that's the eventual focus, the U.S.) were very vulnerable to predatory brats who were rich; and that if they, these predatory people, got ahold of the reins of control of the monetary system, then they'd be very, very powerful brats, monsters. They're of a breed of human that only cares about itself, which is a rather oxymoronic or simply moronic way of living, since we all have interdependencies.
We should be symbiotic, instead of malignant sociopaths.
The film says something like for every dollar from a depositor, the person gets a few percent in interest, while the bankster makes 80%. I'd have to view the film again to be precisely sure of this, but we can be certain of one thing and it's that the banksters make a heck of a lot more money doing nothing other than investing other peoples' money, loaning out many times more than their depositors have in their accounts, creating money "out of thin air", and making huge profits; all based on initial deposits from other people and businesses.
Control over the monetary system must be removed from private ownership. This is an absolute, definite, inarguable must.
"theleosman July 16th, 2009 3:05 pm
William K. Black - Is there anyone more qualified? If he is not part of this Inquiry, it will be just another waste of Tax Payer money."
Based on the Wikipedia page about him, your recommendation seems like a certainly good or very good one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_K._Black
QUOTE:
William Kurt Black (born 6 September 1951) is an American lawyer, academic, author, and a former bank regulator.[1] Black's expertise is in white-collar crime, public finance, regulation, and other topics in law and economics. He developed the concept of "control fraud", in which a business or national executive uses the entity he or she controls as a "weapon" to commit fraud.
...
Bill Moyers Journal appearance
On April 3, 2009 Black appeared on "Bill Moyers Journal" on PBS and provided critical commentary on the U.S. banking crisis.[3] In the interview with Bill Moyers,[4] Black asserted that the banking crisis in the United States that started in late 2008 is essentially a big Ponzi scheme; that the "liar loans" and other financial tricks were essentially illegal frauds; and that the triple-A ratings given to these loans was part of a criminal cover-up. He said that the "Prompt Corrective Action Law" passed after the Savings and Loan crisis mandated that ailing banks should be put into receivership. Black also stated that trying to hide how bad the situation is will simply prolong the problem, as happened in Japan's lost decade. Black stated that Timothy Geithner is engaged in a cover-up, and that the administration does not want people to understand what went wrong or how bad the banking situation is today.
END QUOTE
The PBS interview link is the following one.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/watch.html
QUOTE:
April 3, 2009
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.
For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." In fact, the man you're about to meet wrote a book with just that title. It was based upon his experience as a tough regulator during one of the darkest chapters in our financial history: the savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: These numbers as large as they are, vastly understate the problem of fraud.
END QUOTE
Again, "The Money Masters" documentary will surely be very complementary education. It will help to more thoroughly understand the present situation and what William K. Black says. I haven't viewed that PBS interview with him yet, but based on what I've read about it, so far, "The Money Masters" will definitely provide a lot of strongly or wholly (or both) related background history.