High Crimes At The SEC: Time To Fire and Prosecute Mary Shapiro

When the subject of how many files were destroyed came up, Storch answered: "18,000 MUIs destroyed, including Madoff."

This isn't just about Rome burning burning while Nero fiddles or Obama riding a bus through Podunk, Iowa while his wife travels abroad with an entourage of friends on the Taxpayer dime.  This is about criminal liability at the SEC and those responsible for enabling corrupt Wall Street enterprises and thieves like Madoff to operate without fear of prosecution.  If Obama does not take leadership in this situation and really shake up the SEC, including getting rid of Mary Shapiro, he may well go down as the worst President in history.

As one former SEC staffer describes it, the agency is now filled with so many Wall Street hotshots from oft-investigated banks that it has been "infected with the Goldman mindset from within."

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has published an excellent report detailing how an SEC whistleblower has exposed the SEC's practice of destroying all documents connected to any investigative inquiries about possible illegal activities on Wall Street.  As it turns out, there is a long legacy of SEC officials who are hired away into lucrative positions at big Wall Street firms as a means to squash any potential investigations into fraud and corruption based on these inquiries:

In at least one case, according to Flynn, investigators at the SEC found their desire to bring a case against an influential bank thwarted by senior officials in the enforcement division – whose director turned around and accepted a lucrative job from the very same bank they had been prevented from investigating.

This SEC practice has been ongoing since 1993 and is in direct violation of a requirement that all SEC documents are to be maintained for 25 years and any disposition of this material is to be handled only by the National Archives and Records Administration.

It is clear to anyone who reads this entire article that the lack of responsible, competent and ethical oversight by the SEC over Wall Street has played a significant role in the complete corruption of our banking and securities industry, leading up to the de facto systemic collapse of 2008.  More significantly, it can now be argued that the SEC has been instrumental in the systemic failure that has cost the Taxpayers of this country trillions.

By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

 Here's the link to the article and I would urge everyone to read it in its entirety and then send it around to as many people as you think will give a shit:  LINK

Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa is leading an investigation into this mess:  LINK   Unfortunately, like every other Congressional investigation into the corruption and fraud embedded in both Wall Street and the Government, I would bet big money that this will be a tool for Grassley to achieve some selfish political goal and then it will be swept into a sewer hole and disappear without any consequences for those who are guilty.

This country is collapsing financially, economically, politically, socially and morally.  I have been saying for several years that DC and Wall Street need to be burned to ground and then we need to take the Constitution and rebuild the Governmental center of the country as far from the east coast as possible.  That not likely to be the case, just expect that it is going to get a lot worse in every respect...