How the US Government is Screwing the Consumer Over and Over Again.

PhD, an author, explorer, electronics engineer and physicist, is one of the most successful pioneers with ground probing radar technology, in the world. This technology is currently utilized in the Mars Express program. Agnew holds a Bachelors in Chemistry. Masters in Statistics and a Doctorate in Physics. Author of thousands of technical papers, booklets, and video documentaries Dr. Agnew has joined with veteran archaeologist EJ Clark to produce THE ARK OF MILLIONS OF YEARS, which Foreword Magazine and thousands of readers call one of the most comprehensive books ever written on Intelligent Design and The Greatest Story written on the creation of the Earth.

Brooks Agnew was born in 1955 in Southern California as the son of a NASA contract engineer. He is the descendant of the Agnew and Ross clans of ancient Scotland. Sir Andrew Agnew and Edward the Bruce were best friends and shared the defense of Rosslyn and the region of Galloway in Scotland. Their families married one another for centuries, from which comes the host of this program, X-Squared Radio.

Brooks is the product of numerous public and private schools, became a published author at age 13 and assisting with lab research at UCLA's Brain Research Institute at age 16. He was an instructor of Mathematics at Gaston College, professorial assistant with Evironmental Chemistry at Tennessee Technological University, and instructed graduate students at Western Kentucky University in the field of Instrumental Analysis. He graduated with honors in the top 0.1% of graduating seniors from Tennessee Technological University in Chemistry and Mathematics, continuing his studies to achieve a Masters Degree in Quality (statistics) and a PhD in Physics. He began contracting in 1998 for numerous Fortune 100 companies. He retired from full-time employment as an engineer for the automotive industry at age 43 and led numerous billon-dollar coporations through TS-16949 and ISO-9000 certifications making possible more than $400 million in new earnings and providing more than 500 jobs in the United States. His projects and more than 1 thousand technical publications earned him US patents and the rank of SixSigma Black Belt with more than $500 million recovered or earned from his process improvements.

In 2004, with his co-author EJ Clark, he wrote and self-published Volume One of The Ark of Millions of Years that discussed the origin and destiny of the Earth. It quickly became a national best seller. Volume Two was published in 2006, and Volume Three was published in 2008. All three Volumes remain in the top 1% of books for sale on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. He keeps a busy lecture schedule and hosts X-Squared Radio each week live between 5-8PM Pacific Time. In 2006, he became the expedition leader for The North Pole Inner Earth Expedition, heralded by many as the greatest expedition in history. He has filmed, or been featured in, a half-dozen scientific documentaries awakening millions to the mysteries of the universe and of the Earth. Hence, he became an Earth explorer.

X-Squared Radio came online in September 2005, after Brooks had appeared on numerous radio programs promoting his new book. He was offered a one-hour spot on Wednesday evenings, which quickly blossomed into three hours every Sunday evening between 8-11 PM Eastern time. It has grown at a rate of 50% per quarter and is currently the largest drawing Webcast radio progam in North America with more than 10 million listeners.

He is currently the President of Sirius Energies Corporation. Their mission statement is to displace as many gasoline-powered vehicles as possible with plug-in electric vehicles. The first all-electric pickup truck rolled off the Kentucky assembly line on Monday, December 28th, 2009. Look for the pilot plant to produce 300 pickup trucks per month by next year's end and the new plant to produce more than 30,000 electric pickup trucks annually by 2012. Are you ready for the change?

www.x2-radio.com
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http://www.themistsofavalon.net/t593p540-up-at-the-ranch#59867

This sounds like yet another case of the big-guy screwing the little-guy...

This just came in my email.


What's next before the Muslims take over?

HB 1388 PASSED

You just spent $20,000,000 to move members/supporters of Hamas,
a terrorist organization, to the United States ; housing, food, transportation, the whole enchilada.

HB 1388 PASSED

Whether you are an Obama fan, or not,
EVERYONE IN THE U.S. Needs to know....

H.R. 1388 was passed, behind our backs.
You may want to read about it...

It wasn't mentioned on the news...
Just went by on the ticker tape at the bottom of the CNN screen.

Obama funds $20M in tax payer dollars to immigrate
Hamas Refugees to the USA .

This is the news that did not, and will not, make the headlines.

By executive order, President Barack Obama has ordered the expenditure of $20.3 million in "migration assistance"
to the Palestinian refugees and "conflict victims" in Gaza ..

The "presidential determination" which allows hundreds of thousands of Palestinians
with ties to Hamas to resettle in the United States, was signed and appears in the Federal Register.

Few on Capitol Hill, or in the media, took note that the order provides a free ticket replete with housing, transportation and food allowances to individuals who have displayed their overwhelming support to the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in the parliamentary election of January 2006.

Now we learn that he is allowing thousands of Palestinian refuges to move to, and live in, the US at American taxpayer expense.

These important, and insightful, issues are being "lost" in the blinding bail-outs and "stimulation" packages.

Doubtful? To verify this for yourself:

www.thefederalregister.com/d.p/2009-02-04-E9-2488 <http://www.thefederalregister.com/d.p/2009-02-04-E9-2488>

AMERICA NEEDS TO KNOW...

Friends, WE are losing this country at a rapid pace.

There is no 'muslim take over' taking place.

Obama funds $20M in tax payer dollars to immigrate
Hamas Refugees to the USA .

What are 'Hamas Refugees'?

Now we learn that he is allowing thousands of Palestinian refuges to move to, and live in, the US at American taxpayer expense.

So what?
If those bloody Israelians wouldn't tread these people like dirt, they had no reason to leave their homeland in the first place.

I've supported Israel for most of my life, but lately their politics make me sick!

This is the issue for me. We can't even take care of our own legal citizens and are spending millions taking care of illegals and moving others into this country when we don't even have jobs for the ones who are here. This is economic implosion. When more resources are going out then coming in the economy collapses. Having grown up in California I watched what happened to the economy there and couldn't wait to get out of that state due to the burdensome taxation on those who could afford to pay. I'm sorry TRANCOSO but Switzerland and other countries have a much better immigration policy into their countries then the US. I'm of the mind that our military belongs back at home guarding our own boarders and all of the interlopers need to be deported back to where they came from. I advocate legal immigration and not these sneaky bills that get squeezed through without scrutiny of the US citizens. In fact, it is clear that the US government has failed this nation. Getting rid of the IRS and the EPA would be a good start in setting things right. Actually, starting from scratch with just the constitution would be adequate and dump the rest.

Financial Fraud:

In the first half of C2C Sunday's show, Associate Professor of Economics and Law, William Black, joined George Knapp for a discussion on how our economic crisis has been brought about by deliberate fraud on the part of banks involved in real estate loans. The household losses in this crisis are estimated at a staggering 11 trillion dollars, he reported (by comparison, the S & L crisis of the 1980s was contained at $150 billion, he noted). Accounting fraud was carried out by mortgage bankers and affiliates of banks that weren't subject to governmental regulation. They issued what he called "liar's loans" that were guaranteed to provide huge bonuses for executives, while setting up home owners to certain failure when the real estate bubble burst, he detailed.

Many predatory mortgage brokers targeted poor people and minorities, inflating appraisals, and debt-to-income ratios in order to qualify them for the loans, he continued. By 2006, there were over two million cases of this type of fraud a year, and banks were selling their problematic loans to Wall St. under false pretenses, said Black, who added that we could be looking at an even more intensified financial crisis down the road because the way government has responded to the crisis (such as the bank bailout) has made matters worse. For more, see Black's paper: The Virgin Crisis: Systematically Ignoring Fraud as a Systemic Risk.
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2011/11/20
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/black.htm

The Virgin Crisis: Systematically Ignoring Fraud as a Systemic Risk
By William K. Black
(Cross-posted from Benzinga)


One of the most revealing things about this crisis is the unwillingness to investigate whether “accounting control fraud” was a major contributor to the crisis. The refusal to even consider a major role for fraud is facially bizarre. The banking expert James Pierce found that fraud by senior insiders was, historically, the leading cause of major bank failures in the United States. The national commission that investigated the cause of the S&L debacle found:

“The typical large failure [grew] at an extremely rapid rate, achieving high concentrations of assets in risky ventures…. [E]very accounting trick available was used…. Evidence of fraud was invariably present as was the ability of the operators to “milk” the organization” (NCFIRRE 1993)

Two of the nation’s top economists’ study of the S&L debacle led them to conclude that the S&L regulators were correct – financial deregulation could be dangerously criminogenic. That understanding would allow us to avoid similar future crises.

“Neither the public nor economists foresaw that [S&L deregulation was] bound to produce looting. Nor, unaware of the concept, could they have known how serious it would be. Thus the regulators in the field who understood what was happening from the beginning found lukewarm support, at best, for their cause. Now we know better. If we learn from experience, history need not repeat itself” (George Akerlof & Paul Romer. “Looting: the Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” 1993: 60).

The epidemic of accounting control fraud that drove the second phase of the S&L debacle (the first phase was caused by interest rate risk) was followed by an epidemic of accounting control fraud that produced the Enron era frauds.

The FBI warned in September 2004 that there was an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud and predicted that it would cause a financial “crisis” if it were not contained. The mortgage banking industry’s own anti-fraud experts reported in writing to nearly every mortgage lender in 2006 that:

“Stated income and reduced documentation loans speed up the approval process, but they are open invitations to fraudsters.” “When the stated incomes were compared to the IRS figures: [90%] of the stated incomes were exaggerated by 5% or more. [A]lmost 60% were exaggerated by more than 50%. [T]he stated income loan deserves the nickname used by many in the industry, the ‘liar’s loan’” (MARI 2006).

We know that accounting control fraud is itself criminogenic – fraud begets fraud. The fraudulent CEOs deliberately create the perverse incentives that that suborn inside and outside employees and professionals. We have known for four decades how these perverse incentives produce endemic fraud by generating a “Gresham’s” dynamic in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the marketplace.

“[D]ishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market. The cost of dishonesty, therefore, lies not only in the amount by which the purchaser is cheated; the cost also must include the loss incurred from driving legitimate business out of existence.” George Akerlof (1970).

Akerlof noted this dynamic in his seminal article on markets for “lemons,” which led to the award of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001. It is the giants of economics who have confirmed what the S&L regulators and criminologists observed when we systematically “autopsied” each S&L failure to investigate its causes. Modern executive compensation has made accounting control fraud vastly more criminogenic than it once was as investigators of the current crisis have confirmed.

“Over the last several years, the subprime market has created a race to the bottom in which unethical actors have been handsomely rewarded for their misdeeds and ethical actors have lost market share…. The market incentives rewarded irresponsible lending and made it more difficult for responsible lenders to compete.” Miller, T. J. (August 14, 2007). Iowa AG.

Liar’s loans offer what we call a superb “natural experiment.” No honest mortgage lender would make a liar’s loan because such loans have a sharply negative expected value. Not underwriting creates intense “adverse selection.” We know that it was overwhelmingly the lenders and their agents that put the lies in liar’s loans and the lenders created the perverse compensation incentives that led their agents to lie about the borrowers’ income and to inflate appraisals. We know that appraisal fraud was endemic and only agents and their lenders can commit widespread appraisal fraud. Iowa Attorney General Miller’s investigations found:

“[Many originators invent] non-existent occupations or income sources, or simply inflat[e] income totals to support loan applications. Importantly, our investigations have found that most stated income fraud occurs at the suggestion and direction of the loan originator, not the consumer.”

New York Attorney General (now Governor) Cuomo’s investigations revealed that Washington Mutual (one of the leaders in making liar’s loans) developed a blacklist of appraisers – who refused to inflate appraisals. No honest mortgage lender would ever inflate an appraisal or permit widespread appraisal inflation by its agents. Surveys of appraisers confirm that there was widespread pressure by nonprime lenders and their agents to inflate appraisals.

We also know that the firms that made and purchased liar’s loans followed the respective accounting control fraud “recipes” that maximize fictional short-term reported income, executive compensation, and (real) losses. Those recipes have four ingredients:
Grow like crazy
By making (or purchasing) poor quality loans at a premium yield
While employing extreme leverage, and
Providing only grossly inadequate allowances for loan and lease losses (ALLL) against the losses inherent in making or purchasing liars loans


Firms that follow these recipes are not “gamblers” and they are not taking “risks.” Akerlof & Romer, the S&L regulators, and criminologists recognize that this recipe provides a “sure thing.” The exceptional (albeit fictional) income, real bonuses, and real losses are all sure things for accounting control frauds.

Liar’s loans are superb “ammunition” for accounting control frauds because they (and appraisal fraud) allow the fraudulent mortgage lenders and their agents to attain the unholy fraud trinity: (1) the lender can charge a substantial premium yield, (2) on a loan that appears to relatively lower risk because the lender has inflated the borrowers’ income and the appraisal, while (3) eliminating the incriminating evidence of fraud that real underwriting of the borrowers’ income and salary would normally place in the loan files. The government did not require any entity to make or purchase liar’s loans (and that includes Fannie and Freddie). The states and the federal government frequently criticized liar’s loans. Fannie and Freddie purchased liar’s loans for the same reasons that Merrill, Lehman, Bear Stearns, etc. acquired liar’s loans – they were accounting control frauds and liar’s loans (and CDOs backed by liar’s loans) were the best available ammunition for maximizing their fictional reported income and real bonuses.

Liar’s loans were large enough to hyper-inflate the bubble and drive the crisis. They increased massively from 2003-2007.

“[B]etween 2003 and 2006 … subprime and Alt-A [loans grew] 94 and 340 percent, respectively.

The higher levels of originations after 2003 were largely sustained by the growth of the nonprime (both the subprime and Alt-A) segment of the mortgage market.” “Alt-A: The Forgotten Segment of the Mortgage Market” (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 2010).

read more at http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2011/11/virgin-crisis-systematically-ignoring.html