Boomerang: Michael Lewis, Kyle Bass, Meredith Whitney and Charlie's Fading Rose

BIG SHORT IS BIG BULL

 By Winsip Custer CPW News Service

     Appearing on the Charlie Rose Show  this week was author of The Big Short, Michael Lewis, whose other book has been made into a movie with Brad Pitt…. Moneyball.  Lewis would follow-up with an appearance on NPR on Tuesday October 4th, explaining the premise of his newest book Boomerang: Travels In The New Third World.  Lewis argues that the poor Irish shot themselves  in the foot just like the ignorant masses in America who led the nation into the S&L scandal and housing bubble.  No mention was made of the power of Madison Avenue and Wall Street to use the hottest powers of mind science to sell cancer causing tobacco, diabetes causing processed foods or credit cards bearing 29% interest nor of who actually led the S&L Scandal through placement of Mafia connected shills working for what General Smedley Butler called the "National City Bank Boys" in using the S&L's to plunder the U.S. taxpayer. 

     Charlie Rose would not challenge Michael Lewis on the glaring error in Moneyball's premise.  That the Oakland A's had the longest winning streak in big league baseball with 20 wins.  That record went to the 1916 Phillies when manager John McGraw won the National League championship with 26 consecutive wins (several of these were replayed ties, but if you're going to make statistics count make them count).  Even so, the 1935 Chicago Cubs had a 21 game, no tie, winning streak between September 4th and 27th.  Nor does Rose wonder at all why Lewis doesn't mention the history of the A's owner, Steve Schott, who had succeeded the former CEO of Levi Strauss Co., Walter Haas as owner of the A's.  Strauss, the Jewish industrialist blue jean mogul had gotten out of Nazi Germany with the help of his friends on Wall Street, many of whom courted Nazi German leaders like an ugly sister needing a date to the prom only to find out too late, in the locked car speeding 80 mph down the road, that the last minute invitation had came from a serial rapist.  When Levi Strauss shipped thousands of jobs to cheaper labor markets in South America, American workers saw the handwriting on the Wall Street walls. When those same factories were dismantled and shipped in 1991 to the Marianas Islands' sweat shops with the help of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay or to Communist China, the South Americans protested as Wall Street barons took record bonuses and pensions in an economy headed to somewhere south of Antarctica. 
      Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, would later lament that his business model was flawed and that Adam Smith's Invisible Hand had Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, but that the crap and corruption would not go away.  Ever. That American capitalism with all of its flaws still provides the best hope of raising peoples' standard of living....in a way similar to the old Roman Empire.  That empire, of course, did go away and Kyle Bass is banking on the  inevitability of the same here today as what he calls a "Darwinian clean sweep".  That sweep is in all probabilities a brisk brooming back to a new Dark Ages where gold and guns are the new monetary standard.  Or so Bass is hedging and hoping.

     If the application of Moneyball's young Yale economist's ratcheting "Sabermetrics"  led to the Oakland A's "unprecedented" winning streak as Lewis claims, then a type of holy grail for Wall Street Capitalist's or Boston's Bain Capital had been found....providing a justification for gutting companies, cutting out the middle ground and increasing the top fat cats' take-home.  
     But what do you do with the 1980 Soviet National hockey team that won 27 straight games on ice....wearing skates? Were Sabermetrics used to choose the 1980 U.S. hockey team that beat this killer Soviet megalith to win the gold medal? Answer: No. "That U.S.A. team was like a little trade union going up against big-brother-business-as-usual-son-of-a-bitch," said one outspoken and slightly eccentric economist. Frederick M. Mellon. 
     "But if you were looking for additional connections between Lewis' promotion of the sword slashing 'Sabermetrics' used by moneyball-technocrats mixed with his love of Kyle Bass from the Fort Worth, Arlington and Dallas area look only to the first statistician to be called a 'Sabermetrician', Craig R. Wright, who worked for George W. Bush's Texas Rangers.   That really fits when you think about it, infused as it is with the Bush's legacy through Ranger partner and Bush appointed UTIMCO's CEO, Tom Hicks," said one baseball historian who wished anonymity.
    This same historian when told that Brad Pitt upon reading Moneyball said that he had to produce the movie thought for a moment.  "Sabermetrics was used to identify undervalued players?  That must mean that Pitt will soon be seeking to reunite with Jennifer Anniston and dumping Angelina!"

     With Boomerang, Lewis explained to a giddy Charlie Rose just how he had come to meet Kyle Bass through an introduction by Meredith Whitney.  According to Lewis who would go on to talk about the fragility of Ireland, Ice Land, Greece, Spain and Portugal’s precarious economic circumstances, Kyle Bass was nearly psychic during the lead-up to the U.S. economic melt-down. Lewis explained how in 2007 Bass had, apart from everyone else, doubled his money in a troubled economy by short selling….betting against U.S. business.

      When discussing with Rose the  issue of where to invest in this economy Lewis said that Bass advised his mother....“in guns and gold.”

     According to Fritz Von Flukenreitzen, chief economist for the Dutch financial newsletter, Geld Begrip, “Michael Lewis is an apologist for the semi-psychotic-heavy-metal control freaks from Fort Worth, Texas, Sid, Lee and Edward Bass.”

     Aware that the molecular biology building at Yale is named for Sid, Lee and Edward's father, Mr. Von Flukenreitzen is also well aware of Texas’ reputation for influencing markets....especially precious metals.  “Have those amnesiac Americans forgotten J.R. Ewing in Dallas?  I lost a small fortune when the other Texas brothers, Lamar and Nelson Bunker Hunt tried to corner the silver market by saying that the U.S. economy sucks,” said Von Flukenreitzen.  “You’d think that a nation that watches Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life at Christmas every year, would have some innate sense of just how the old Mr. Potters, and now young Mr. Bass, work the system.  It wasn't Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey whose father had founded the old S&L who was pushing insanely large homes on people who couldn't afford them.  It wasn't the George Baileys who were reversing, as in Texas,  the illegality of home equity loans.  How many secure manufacturing jobs were lost to China, India and elsewhere with the displaced American workers finding alternative employment in the home building business just as Wall Street was hiding the inevitable bubble burst?  The S&L Scandal was actually another case of the National City Bank Boys at work invading the S&L market, putting their thugs in place and using them to steal America blind.  They killed George Bailey's S&L, called it the S&L Scandal thus empowering the "too big to fail" banks for the raping of the U.S. Treasury and stealing the 'soverign money'.  Your money. You will find that behind Mr. Bass’ hedging his bets against his own country, that old Mr. Potter is his role model.  Then consider that Kyle Bass is on the Board of UTIMCO, appointed by Governor Rick Perry along with Ardon E. Moore, president of Lee M. Bass CO. of Fort Worth.  UTIMCO, with billions of dollars to invest privately for the public University of Texas.  UTIMCO was 'privatized' in 1995 during the George W. Bush governorship when Bush put his close friend, Thomas O. Hicks, in charge of the University’s money,” said Von Flukenreitzen whose two daughters and a five year old son attend public school.  "It was part of the kinder and gentler means of using war production to dismantle public education in the same way that Bush's deregulation fueled the 'expansion' of the free market so that Enron could rape California with the help of Governor Gray Davis whose grandfather was, according to the book by Dale Harrington, Mystery Man: William Rhodes Davis, Nazi Agent of Influence, Hitler's petroleum agent in the U.S.," said Von Flukenreitzen whose father was machined gunned to death during Germany's invasion of Holland.

      From the days of the Vietnam War when the University of Texas Board of Regents president was Frank Erwin, the University’s endowment fund has been heavily invested in military production supporting the Vietnam War and now wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Von Flukenreitzen believes that though he denies it, Kyle Bass is part of the Bass brothers treasonous constellation of dark stars.

     “Follow the incorporation records, addresses and business histories and ask why it is that Kyle Bass talked his UTIMCO board into putting $1 billion into gold in a Wall Street Bank.  Because the economy is just bad?  On its own? Or with a little help?  Then follow Kyle Bass to Fort Worth through Redgap Gp LLC at 504 Main Street….a building owned by Sundance Square Inc., managed by the Bass brother’s close associate, Thomas W. White.  White and the Bass Brothers are on the incorporation records for Barbnet Investments, another Ft. Worth investment firm,” said the Dutch investment analyst.

"Kyle Bass....no relation to the Bass Brothers"  -M. Lewis

     “To understand Meredith Whitney and Kyle Bass’ connections you have to travel back in time even beyond their work at Bear Stearns.  The name Stearns goes all the way back to George Luther Stearns  Get it?” asked Von Flukenreitzen.  “War is a racket!” he said, “and nobody profited more from war than the progeny of George Luther Stearns, a secret backer of abolitionist John Brown,” said Von Flukenreitzen who noted that Meredith Whitney was a Brown University graduate.  John Brown's connection to Alexander Brown of Baltimore and to Brown Brothers Harriman then to Brown & Root and KBR, is one of the best kept secrets in America and  it was Eli Whitney who introduced Texan Samuel Hamilton Walker to Samuel Colt who made the Walker Colt pistol.  Guns.  Gold and guns.   From the Brown's Merchants Shot Tower in Baltimore, the first fugitive slave law was tested on a run away slave named James Hamlet.....Hamlet.....my God.....how  serendipitously dramatic in fueling a war....a Madison Avenue ad man's dream.....'to be or not to be, James'....I can hear John Wilks Booth on stage now and his churning stomach....oh, but it was a given name....Hamlet was an African slave.  Well chosen! Guns and gold….good for their pocket books, bad for yours," said Von Fluekenreitzen.

Brown's Merchants shot tower
where fugitive slave test case, U.S. vs.
James Hamlet, began with Hamlet's
escape.  Used to make musket
balls and bullets from dropping
molten lead into water, Hamlet was
returned to work here after his capture.

     Von Flukenreitzen went on to say that investors turned story tellers, like Michael Lewis, who become experts in spinning the mythology of Wall Street, are rewarded with lucrative publication and film deals that are also controlled by the very same people who control Wall Street’s investments houses. "You mean like David Brown's backing of Stephen Speilberg in the filming of his first movie?" I asked.  "You see what I mean?" asked Von Flukenreitzen, "and don't forget that UTIMCO bought Regal Cinemas which promoted Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ.   Then they tried to cheat Gibson out of $40 million in royalties," said Von Flukenreitzen.  "Need I remind you of the power of the cinema as a tool for influencing the masses?  David Brown and Speilberg's Jaws effected travel to beach side resorts and Gibson's Braveheart was credited with the creation of Scotland's own Parliament," said Von Flukenreitzen.  I asked Von Flukenreitzen about Lewis' book The Blind Side?  "What about it?  The point is that blacks in the inner city are surrounded by cocaine and other drugs, did anyone ask where those came from?  Gary Webb, author of Dark Alliance did and look what happened to him.   So some in the upper class have heart for those who will work hard for it, even giving you a room in their house so that you can become a professional football star, win big bucks, rack the body playing in a modern coliseum that the mega-wealthy build with tax payer's 'soverign' dollars, encourage a big scrum for preparing a nation of little warriors to serve a system that our best of warriors, General Smedley Butler, said had gone berserk, all while charging those same tax payers ticket prices they can't afford.  Meanwhile, if he decides like Pat Tillman to fight for his country and goes to war in Afghanistan, has an epiphany about the insanity of it all, gets killed by friendly fire, his memory is high-jacked for the cause he grew to abhor.  Wow!  Give 'em an Academy Award!" said Von Flukenreitzen who charged that Lewis' publisher Simon and Schuster had been sold at one point to derail a book on the S&L Scandal that would have outed the key players... Texas Tech journalism professor and former Houston Post investigative reporter Peter Brewton's The Mafia, CIA and George Bush.

   “Kyle Bass didn’t just ride into town in 2007 without knowing just how the market was being manipulated by the termites that were eating the economy away from the inside out.   For Michael Lewis to paint it that way is to miss the Saving & Loan scandal which gave an unprecedented washing and ringing of taxpayers with the shift toward what Lewis calls “sovereign money”….money backed by the U.S. taxpayers who provide the piggy bank for the greed that is dismissed as ambition. Meanwhile, they ship jobs to Communist China and sell the American people more gold and guns out of fear mongering.   Bass and Whitney are bearish on the market and bullish on themselves?  You bet they are!  They learned it from their ancestors. Their hedge funds invest in the very mining companies that supply, like Cecil Rhodes had done with diamonds in the 1800’s, to give you a safe harbor on their fantasy island.  Then as now, diamonds and gold are sold as a remedy to people’s fears.  Go and eat that,” said Von Flukenreitzen.
     Von Flukenreitzen quoted from Lewis' latest book...."'Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom.....They’d been conditioned to grab as much as they could without thinking about the long-term consequences. Afterward, the people on Wall Street would privately bemoan the low morals of the American people who walked away from their sub prime loans, and the American people would express outrage at the Wall Street people who paid themselves a fortune to design the bad loans.'   In a republic the people elect leaders who will lead with the people's best interests in mind.  Mr. Lewis spreads around the blame like peanut butter, but leaves the bulk of the culpability  in the jar with the poor and middle class schmucks who have no where near the power elites' resources for netting the lucrative waters of the American masses.  How do I know?  Because of his hero worship of Kyle Bass.  That's how," said Von Flukenreitzen.

     Von Flukenreitzen noted that Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal in his January 21, 2010 article repeats Forbes Magazines’ report on Kyle Bass….. “The Dallas hedge fund manager (no relation to the famous Bass family of Fort Worth) is so convinced…..”.  It is an assumption that none of Wall Street's reporting venues want to explore, including author Michael Lewis, who nowhere disputes the lack of connections.  The Business Insider, however, has been cited before with fencing off the public from the truth about Wall Street.

      The Business Insider’s editor and CEO, Henry Blodget, was outed in 2002 by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who published Merrill  Lynch e-mails in which Blodget’s fraudulent Wall Street assessments came to light.  Merrill Lynch paid a $200 million fine. Was this fact dropped from public notice when Spitzer was caught with his own pants down?  Having headed the global Internet research team at Merrill Lynch, Blodget, a Yale graduate, provided analysis that conflicted with widely held public knowledge of specific stocks and of the market in general and in 2003 the SEC charged Blodget with securities fraud.  He paid a $2 million dollar fine and a $2 million disgorgement payment.  Michael Lewis does not disassociate with the Business Insider, but uses it to promote his latest book, an action that could boomerang on the popular author.

     Von Flukenreitzen noted that historically, Merrill Lynch Inc., formerly Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith, is associated with the President Franklin Pierce family….President Franklin Pierce being filibusterer William Walker’s biggest supporter….also related to Barbara Pierce Bush.  It was Merrill Lynch’s former CEO who became Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Staff, Don Regan, who was heard telling the President to “speed it up” as Reagan was addressing the New York Stock Exchange.  Don Regan's interest in returning the U.S. to the gold standard has been meticulously chronicled by authors Sterling and Peggy Seagraves in The Gold Warriors. 

Bank of America's CEO, Ken Lewis,
who learned that bail out would
force his bank to purchase
Merrill Lynch.  No relation to
Michael Lewis?

     Merrill Lynch would also figure into Henry Paulson's 'Too Big To Fail' plot which forced Bank of America, the only bank that categorically rejected a government bailout citing its own financial health, to buy Merrill Lynch, an action that looks suspiciously like a William Walker filibustering tactic.

     "So Mr. Bass is wrong?  The place to invest is not in gold and guns?" I asked.

      "Even that other Texas hick, LBJ, knew it had to be at least guns and butter.  Meredith Whitney has said that the market is emotional.  Right now there are demonstrations going on down on Wall Street.  The President of Goldman Sachs and other firms haven't been lynched yet, but when enough people figure this out, you won't have to worry about gold and guns for all the pitchforks and Molotov cocktails," said Mr. Von Flukenreitzen.  "Problem is that this exposes an internal conflict, probably staged judging from the length of the Afghanistan war which is now the longest war in U.S. history.  If 911 was an 'inside job' perhaps it was that Al Qaeda, which had been recruited to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan alongside the Mujaheddin, knew of the National City Bank Boys' plans to replace the Russians there.  So their fight wasn't with the America people, but with the same group that Smedley Butler, Pat Tillman and Theodore Westhusing knew instinctively were leading America down a path significantly different from that envisioned by the Founding Fathers in throwing off tyranny.  So whether we are still in Afghanistan for the opium or copper, gold, oil or uranium, whatever, there's a reason we are still there and it has less and less to do with the threat of terrorism.  There is another  war, the internal one, that is going on between two upper levels of equally distasteful American options. The Dems and Reps are like Siamese twins and hop when the National City Bank Boys beckon.  Like James Hamlet's place in history, this battle is staged for profits.  Theirs," said Von Flukenreitzen.

     I asked him when this shift occurred from the vision of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and the rest.   "I'd put it at 1833, and that you can tell by it's proximity to those who influenced within 30 years the Civil War, the short Reconstruction period that roughly equated with the completion of the Trans-Continental Railroad and by the burial site of 40 Union Army generals who are interred in Cincinnati in the same cemetery with Alphonso Taft," said Von Flukenreitzen who noted that since then their roots run ever deeper and their tenacity is like a Jack Russell Terrier after a bone."

     "Remember that Michelle Obama worked at the Springfield, Illinois law firm that handled the affairs of Mary Todd Lincoln... Republican not Democrat... and which merged with the New York law firm of Brown & Wood which Al Qaeda may  well have known was domiciled in the World Trade Center on 911.  Springfield, Illinois was just listed as one of the top five most dangerous cities in the U.S.. The American people aren't apt to settle for the same old options.  Whatever rises will converge as we see in the Republican and Democratic leadership and the Wall Street Bankers, Madison Avenue hucksters and media spin-meisters joining forces, but I think the American people will ask for a lot more out of their leadership in the future than the slop they have gotten in the past.   Unless you count those on the side of Butler, Tillman and Westhusing.  I call them 'Butlerian Warriors'....saying 'yes but...but....but...but.'  It's the uniquely American way," said Von Flukenreitzen, "like Lt. John Dunbar in Costner's Dances With Wolves or the real life Lt. Gatewood, saddled with the capture of Geronomo.  Country singer Johnny Cash identified with the 'Butlerian Warriors' or he wouldn't have recorded the memoires of Private John G. Burnett. "

     "Or like the 'Butlerian Jihadists?" I asked.

     "From Samuel Butler's Erewhon?" asked Von Flukenreitzen.

     "Humanity warring against the machines?  Samuel Butler had no idea there would be predator drones flying overhead.  Ipad's promising freedom, but made in Communist China by what are essentially slave laborers under tyrannical rule.  When you consider that Samuel Butler, Smedley, too, probably received their names from a family of real life butlers. It is fitting.   One of the first jobs science fiction stories replace with a robot is the family butler.  They know too much, I suppose," said Von Flukenreitzen.  "Like James Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro's Remain of the Day.  Smedley was surely like James Stevens as a younger Marine and then like the aging Stevens and like Westhusing and Tillman his eyes were opened, too. There's a good reason why Butler's Erewhon so heavily influenced Aldous Huxley's Brave New World...but, but, but...the true bravery always rests with the Butlerians...whose hearts are still of flesh and blood," said Von Flukenreitzen..."however much metal ore their employers pull out of the ground for either gold bars or gun barrels."

Law firm of Michelle Obama, Sidley & Austin, merges with Brown & Wood in 2001 months before World Trade Center attack.  Earlier proposed merger with Alexander Brown's investment lawyers, White & Case shows connection to "National City Bank Boys".  Brown & Wood employed 600, but lost only one on 911.