28 Mar 2013

Keiser the Klairvoyant to Light Up Big Screen in Bailout 2

By John Titus: A significant part of pre-production for Bailout 2 has been researching potential talking heads to explain schemes and frauds that parasite bankers use to steal money from the rest of us (i.e., the productive economy) with a special focus on Europe, where Max Keiser will be cut loose on camera amid the financial ruination. (We know: it's an ambitious project.)
That effort has been aided in large part by John Lewell, a Keiser Report viewer who in August 2012 went through 300+ episodes (then) of the Keiser Report and compiled brief summaries of each, including the names of the guests. Thank you, John. Your fine work has spared us the time of wading through each episode serially on youtube.
Having been through roughly 20 episodes thus far, I’m struck by the many staggering revelations on the show that I'd somehow forgotten, only to be reminded of them later. For that the Keiser Report may be deemed a victim of its own prescience.
A case in point is the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder’s jaw-dropping admission that certain banks are too big to prosecute, quite aside from its grave legal and constitutional ramifications (which will draw a separate post soon), was actually foreshadowed on the Keiser Report, though I had no way of knowing it at the time.
In Episode 313, Max interviewed Ian Fraser, who set forth a brief history of criminal financial prosecutions in the UK.
Two separate events discussed by Fraser starting at the 15:06 mark were essentially replicated in the U.S. shortly after Fraser discussed them in the Keiser Report:


And on the day [in July 1992] of the quashing of [certain bankers'] sentences, a friend of mine was phoned by a contact of his in the SFO, Serious Fraud Office, and the contact in the Serious Fraud Office basically said, the message has come down from on high: there will never again be a prosecution of a high-level banker or a mainstream City institution.” So it would appear from that moment on, there was a kind of new agenda had been set, whereby people in the City and bankers in particular were given carte blanche to do as they chose. This could include, you know, false accounting, this could include defrauding their clients. It could include money laundering. And it seems a dangerous precedent was set at that moment.

But the situation, if anything, got worse under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when, in 2000, they passed an act, called the Financial Services Markets Act of 2000, which basically included a clause which said that the competitiveness of the City was more important than the rule of law. It said that regulators must consider the international mobility of financial businesses before taking enforcement action, and they must avoid damaging the UK’s competitiveness.
Briefly, the elevation of banks above the law in the UK occurred in two stages: first, the UK adopted a de facto stance of not prosecuting any financial crimes, however outrageous or damaging, and second codified this criminal insanity by statute in 2000.
That two-step process is a very close approximation of what happened in the U.S. shortly after Episode 313 aired in July 2012—albeit on much tighter schedule than the 8-year legal coup in the UK.
In September 2012, the head of criminal enforcement at the DOJ, Lanny Breuer, gave a speech to the New York City Bar Association stating that he would forego prosecution (though "not always") in response to “compelling” presentations made to him by defense counsel that explained all the supposedly nightmarish economic consequences that a TBTF prosecution would occasion.
Now, in March 2013, Eric Holder has essentially ratified Breuer’s shocking disclosure by flatly stating before the Senate Judiciary Committee—without any objection from members, mind you—that certain banks are too big to prosecute.
And with that, the formal repudiation of the Rule of Law in the U.S. was complete, ensuring that this once-great nation's fate will be most miserable. Among other horrifying realities is this one: the $20 trillion Americans believe themselves to have in store for their retirements is now resting in a branch of MF Global, ready to be plucked like low-hanging fruit to prop up Eric Holder's bankster bosses.
We look forward to unearthing other nuggets from the Keiser Report in the weeks ahead, particularly as we work backward in time.
Incidentally, with nearly 425 episodes of Max and Stacy’s show now online, each having about 15 minutes of interview time, the ground covered here is about 6000 minutes. At roughly 165 words per minute (the rate we experienced Bailout), that’s around 1,050,000 words, or 4200 book pages. Fully indexed, a small encyclopedia like that would make a rather potent research tool. Just in case any publishers are reading…

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