Wednesday, August 17, 2011

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...

15 comments:

  1. Dave, Typo in the 2nd to last paragraph...should be Charles, not Richard. Grassley is a typical piece of sh*t republican. He was for raising the debt limit in 2007 and chaired the senate banking committee for years, during the Bush presidency. He's part of the problem.

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  2. (Dave)

    There's absolute NOTHING about Mary Shapiro that's "better." A career bureaucrat who had a $3 million salary while running FINRA and got paid over $8 million when she left. She was the Chair-criminal of the CFTC when Brooksley Born tried to get derivatives regulation pushed through and Shapiro fought very hard against that along with Rubin, Greenspan and Arthur Levitt (SEC)

    Shapiro is a grada A piece of shit.

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  3. Maybe the US should sub contract out the justice department,SEC,CFTC,FINRA to the Philippines instead of just call centers?..it might help catch tbtf and reduce unnecessary high end phony regulatory jobs,,,?


    Aquino Invokes Eliot Ness in Corruption War

    Philippine President Benigno Aquino has ordered his guards to protect officials hunting tax evaders in an anti-corruption drive aimed at drawing investors to his country, which he says offers a “far greater” return than its Southeast Asian neighbors.

    “We’re going after very entrenched and very vested interests,” he said in an interview in the presidential palace in Manila. Al Capone “got caught on tax evasion, not murder, not corruption, by not paying his taxes, that amazed me,” said Aquino, who recalled being inspired by Capone’s nemesis Eliot Ness as portrayed in the 1959 series The Untouchables.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-17/aquino-invokes-eliot-ness-in-philippine-corruption-war-to-lure-investors.html


    These people at the sec in the years documents were destroyed should forfeit their pay with damages and go to jail...

    EVERYONE SHOULD CARE...

    DID YOU SEE MUCH OF THIS STORY ON THE NEWS TONIGHT?...OR WILL YOU SEE IT IN YOUR LOCAL PAPER..?

    SNAFU

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  4. What Do You Think?

    Do you think the SEC and the Government are covering up or ignoring massive Wall Street Crime?

    scroll down on right

    vote here: http://usawatchdog.com/zero-interest-rates-lock-in-inflation/

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  5. NYC and Washington DC. Sodom and Gomorrah.

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  6. Go time is coming men, and quick.

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  7. America is headed down the same road Germany walked when Hitler rose. Consider how ignorant the average American is to all this and how the media controls what they think.

    Things are going to get out of hand and desperate. Pray that you are able to escape. Luke 21:36

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  8. The guys right..its one thing to defend freedom...its another thing when you're just part of an equation to enrich the status quo!

    The Empire Strikes Out

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_OBBmc1iH4&feature=youtube_gdata

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  9. The hits keep coming...if any of these people had any honor they'd go home, perform Seppuku, and let us start over.

    Goldman Sachs VP Changed His Name, Now Advances Goldman Lobbying Interests As A Top Staffer To Darrell Issa
    Thursday 18 August 2011

    Has Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) turned the House Oversight Committee into a bank lobbying firm with the power to subpoena and pressure government regulators? ThinkProgress has found that a Goldman Sachs vice president changed his name, then quietly went to work for Issa to coordinate his effort to thwart regulations that affect Goldman Sachs’ bottom line.

    http://www.truth-out.org/goldman-sachs-vp-changed-his-name-now-advances-goldman-lobbying-interests-top-staffer-darrell-issa/1

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  10. Yeah I know...I'm paranoid...?


    The One World Company

    Daniel Estulin, noted expert on the Bilderbergers, describes that secretive globalist group as “a medium of bringing together financial institutions which are the world’s most powerful and most predatory financial interests.” Writing in June 2011, he said:

    Bilderberg isn’t a secret society. . . . It’s a meeting of people who represent a certain ideology. . . . Not OWG [One World Government] or NWO [New World Order] as too many people mistakenly believe. Rather, the ideology is of a ONE WORLD COMPANY LIMITED.

    It seems the Bilderbergers are less interested in governing the world than in owning the world. The “world company” was a term first used at a Bilderberger meeting in Canada in 1968 by George Ball, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs and a managing director of banking giants Lehman Brothers and Kuhn Loeb. The world company was to be a new form of colonialism, in which global assets would be acquired by economic rather than military coercion. The company would extend across national boundaries, aggressively engaging in mergers and acquisitions until the assets of the world were subsumed under one privately-owned corporation, with nation-states subservient to a private international central banking system.

    http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/sp-and-the-bilderbergers-all-part-of-the-plan/

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  11. http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/08/chavez-nationalizes-venezuelas-gold.html

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  12. The upcoming expansion of US bank credit

    Since the FOMC meeting, there has been a noticeable silence over the Fed’s monetary policy following QE2. But there is some evidence that the funding of government debt at low interest rates will shift to the repo market, rather than a new round of quantitative easing.

    The silence on this subject may be partly explained by the monetary focus shifting to Europe. However, it is likely that the Fed has no intention of introducing QE3, given that the expansion of narrow money so far has led only to a degree of price inflation, without much benefit to asset prices. And with the ECB still reluctant to print euros, QE3 would probably collapse the dollar/euro rate and propel gold considerably higher, putting unwelcome strains on the financial system. The Fed also finds itself having dramatically expanded the monetary base for little economic benefit: against all its expectations, the economy is sliding into recession again. Perhaps it is a case of all the people being no longer fooled all of the time with respect to what QE actually is. No, another approach is called for.

    http://www.financeandeconomics.org/Articles%20archive/2011.08.17%20Bank%20Credit%20Repo.htm

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  13. HFT Scammers Crowding Out Continues

    Investors will continue to get screwed until these abuses stop. These vipers provide no liquidity to the market - only volume - and their primary tool of "profit" is to stuff quote channels so as to be able to arbitrage price dislocations that they intentionally create.

    Any honest read of the securities laws, incidentally, leads pretty much anyone to conclude that this sort of pattern of conduct should be against the law. But when it's profitable for a financial institution it suddenly becomes "not illegal", you see, just like it wasn't really illegal to robosign foreclosure documents despite that being perjury if you or I did it.

    The fix for this is very simple, if our regulators cared to do anything about it.

    http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2675838

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  14. LOOK AT THIS...DAMAGE CONTROL..they only disposed of newspaper clippings?....that's a big FU TO THE PUBLIC AND TAIBBI!

    SEC Documents Destroyed, Employee Tells Congress

    by Carrie Johnson

    http://www.npr.org/2011/08/18/139758303/sec-documents-destroyed-employee-tells-congress?

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