"The Warning" - See It Tonight

Remember back seven years ago, when it turned out that the three biggest disasters of 2001 - Enron's collapse, WorldCom's implosion and the September 11 attacks - could all have been prevented by whistleblowers who saw them coming but whose warnings were ignored or suppressed?

Now you can add another name to 2002's Sherron Watkins, Cynthia Cooper and Colleen Rowley: Brooksley Born, who tried to prevent the economic meltdown of 2008, but who was threatened and silenced just like her prophetic sisters.

Rubin, Greenspan, Summers... and Geithner-- as much the enemies of financial regulation as any slimoid, bought-and-paid for Republican. And then there was, "buried deep in the bureaucracy," Brooksley Born, chairwoman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, who saw right through what these banksters were up to-- and blew the whistle, or at least tried to. She understood derivatives. No one would listen. Instead they shut her up. And the Fed continued to inflate an economy based on businesses too big to fail that were pre-destined for failure. When Republicans tried blaming Clinton for the inevitable crash that ended Bush's regime and doomed McCain's campaign, they weren't all wrong. There was plenty of blame to go around and it started with Reagan's policies, policies tragically embraced by Clinton and still embedded deep inside the Obama White House, where the same cast of malevolent banksters has been joined by Wall Street's very own Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Tonight at 9PM PBS is debuting The Warning by Mark Kirk. I heard him being interviewed on the radio this morning. It promises to be a blockbuster of a program and if you ever wonder how all these highly paid smart guys dragged the whole country-- if not much of the world-- into ruin, you really ought to try to watch. Kirk's goal is to open the black box and unearth "the hidden history of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression." And he's got Born, in her first TV appearance discussing her attempts to straighten out the crooked dealers inside the Administration, to help him with the daunting task.

Read the whole thing, then watch and learn.