That was the start. The skimming extends all along the way.
In secret, of course.
My friends in the gold business say "those who handle the honey get sticky fingers"
Documents of the inefficiency (both legal and illegal) in capital-formation are not summarized somewhere, are either suppressed by various confidentiality methods and secrecy laws, or are obfuscated by the best attornies and legislators money can buy. We rely on Anderson-type auditors, Morgan-Stanley-type analysts to give us the scoop, and Harvey Pitt-type SEC chairmen to oversee this systematic looting of the American public, backed up by Bush-type administration officials. Much also happened in previous administrations, and will continue, unless changes are made to expose the people who are calling the shots behind the scenes, answerable to nobody.
Full, realtime disclosure is the only cure for both political and financial fraud. Where there's secrecy, there's criminality. That's a cardinal rule you can bank on, literally. I trust no government or business I can't inspect from top to bottom, present and historically. Without that, we're in a dictatorship, by any other name.
The responsibility for fair and open disclosure rests with the legal and political system.
Without some Arthur Levitt types in government, we're screwed, unless:
(a)the current administration is thrown out en toto and another one brought in, or
(b)Congress gets exposed, humiliated, ridiculed and forced to act in the interests of the public they have not, in the past, been answerable to.
There may be some alternative (c) where a mass exodus from the markets forces attention of the world on the seriousness of the shennanigans, causing the capital-mongers to realize future fleecing won't have a chance if they don't have a better image of fairness.
One thing they could do is convict a few high-profile players of cheating the public, force disgorgement of profits, and clap them in jail, after a very public trial, where they get a chance to turn states' evidence and implicate their partners in crime.
However, if there are any more "suicides" or "heart attacks", all bets are off for trying to finess the criminality of the situation. We'll have to have that torchlight parade in Washington... |
