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Sign the Market Reform Petition Now!: View it here.
To view the SIA NYSE member firm spreadsheet showing $63 billion in delivery and receipt failures as of Q2, 2006, click here.
Visit the new "SEC/Gary Aguirre Cover-Up" section of this site for a compilation of Mr. Aguirre's efforts to expose the SEC's alleged obstruction of justice and whitewashing of insider trading by some of the biggest names on Wall Street.
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The bonuses have never been bigger on Wall Street.
Proof of a massive failure to deliver crisis has never been more readily obvious.
The evidence that those taking investor money and then refusing to deliver the goods are those collecting the massive paychecks, created in large part by the theft of investor dollars, has never been more clear.
In this holiday season, I can't help but think how helpless the retirees who trusted their savings to the market must feel as they see their safety cushion dwindle away. Their faith that the government would protect them from financial terrorists and buccaneers has never been more obviously foolish.
The Aguirre hearing spotlighting the SEC's cover-up of insider trading was a milestone for our little battle, and the revelations it has exposed. The government is actually provably aiding and abetting the most powerful of the criminals. Not much has changed since the turn of the century, when police killed union activists and striking workers on behalf of the industrialists who paid them off, when Wall Street mavens could create nation-state-sized fortunes in a few years (think Joe Kennedy) via stock manipulation, and then be venerated and go on to watch their kids run the country.
That sounds alarmist, doesn't it? But then you consider the testimony at the recent Aguirre hearing, and it's obvious to one and all that our watchdog regulator is indeed running interference and cover for powerful Wall Street figures, for whom the law does not apply. By virtue of their great wealth, and resultant political clout, these figures have the insulation of warlords in less primitive countries - here, it's a bit more civilized, as they don't require their own armies to protect their interests. Taxpayers pay for an army to do so. Of course, it isn't framed that way, as the sheep would revolt if they thought that half the income they slave away to make was being siphoned off and used to pay for an apparatus whose interests were diametrically opposed to their own. No, better to keep everyone focused on gay marriage, and the latest pop starlet, and dangerous people with different colored skin and strange sounding names. For those requiring more evolved titillation, there is always stem cell research, and pro-life or pro-choice, and illegal immigration.
But if you told, point blank, the country that a small group of extremely wealthy special interests had co-opted the nation's government and regulatory structure and made it their own, and that they were methodically plundering the nation's remaining assets, even as that plundering caused obvious harm to their own market system, the average American would shake his head in disbelief.
How could that be happening, when we have a war to fight? When we are busy buying shoddily constructed wood frame and stucco dwellings for a million dollars or more, and then slaving away for 30 years to try to afford the already deteriorating materials, and paying the banks who own the market system for the privilege? When we are busily assuring one another that we live in the best and safest country in the world, ignoring the massive number of our citizens behind bars, and our astronomical violent crime statistics?
How can it be that the whole thing starts to appear to be a wealth redistribution engine, wherein the sheep toil away in their figurative fields, allowed to create a prosperous merchant class (within reason), but always at the mercy of the lord of the manor? Free, as long as the tithes keep getting paid, and nobody questions the ius primae noctis.
The silence from Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal, and the NY Times, and the Washington Post, and even the NY Post, on the topic of the SIA spreadsheet showing conclusively that the delivery failure crisis is huge ($63 billion as of the last day of Q2, 2006, for just the NYSE member firms), is stunning.
This isn't a smoking gun. This is a numerical report of a scandal that makes BCCI and the S&L crisis look like amateur night. And yet the story can't get arrested. Just as the Wall Street bigwigs responsible can't get arrested, or pay a meaningful fine, for that matter.
It's all about the Benjamins. The cheese. The cheddar.
As George Carlin says in one of his funnier bits, the country is run by a group of immensely powerful white men who don't care about you or your needs. And you aren't one of them. If you are even listening to him, you aren't, so don't get confused and think you are. You aren't.
He's pretty funny when he does that bit. Of course, the subject isn't at all funny, when it means that everything that you worked for your entire life is in jeopardy, both from the threat it poses to your personal wealth, as well as to the integrity of the currency you hold.
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Gary Weiss, the latest addition to Forbes, is skewered again by the ever-glib www.Antisocialmedia.net - this time, in a multi-part series exposing his alleged ethical breaches and what the site claims is his socio-pathology. A worthwhile read, and very entertaining, as it is further evidence that if you are sucking from the right milk tit, even the most egregious behavior will go unpunished. As if we didn't already understand that...