Regulatory capture. That is the term the Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne uses to describe the reality that Wall Street now controls the regulatory bodies set up over the last one hundred years to regulate Wall Street.
Regulatory capture is a term used to refer to situations in which a government regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead acts in favor of the commercial or special interests that dominate in the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.Source: en.wikipedia.org
Ever wonder how it could be that executives at Stanford Secuirities could blow the whistle on what was going on there and yet nothing got done until the situation was completely untenable financially? And then to find that there was another Stanford Whistle Blower, former Stanford employee Layla Wydler, who spilled the proverbial beans to the SEC six years ago...?
How to account for such complacency in the regulatory agencies?
Did you know that several major Wall Street companies blew the whistle on Bernie Madoff years ago as well? One, in particular, has a story worth repeating here.
The fraud investigator who tried for a decade to convince the SEC to investigate Bernie Madoff will deride the board's "financial illiteracy" before a Congressional panel today, according to prepared testimony obtained by the Wall Street Journal.
Whistleblower Harry Markopolos will also testify that investigating Madoff "posed great danger" to investigators, reports the New York Times, and that he feared for his life. In 2005 Markopolos submitted a huge dossier to the SEC concerning Madoff's Ponzi scheme, to no effect.
The SEC "is nonfunctional and, as witnessed by the Madoff scandal, is harmful to our capital markets and harmful to our nation’s reputation as a financial leader,” Markopolos' testimony reads.—Jason Farag Source: newser.com
This week, Patrick Byrne, founder and CEO of the successful Internet company Overstock.com, appeared on the Glenn Beck show to say that Goldman Sachs was a criminal organization, which he compared to the infamous Corleone Crime Family of "The Godfather". This interview appears in the video after Beck's enlightening explanation of the web of financial interests that demonstrate Goldman Sax's control of the very regulatory agencies that should be monitoring, investigating and prosecuting evil-doers on Wall Street and the US financial markets.
For Byrne, the corruption extends into the financial press which supports Wall Street and which refuses to conduct their own independent investigations and has become an arm of propaganda, as it were, of Wall Street.
For Byrne, the corruption extends into the financial press which supports Wall Street and which refuses to conduct their own independent investigations and has become an arm of propaganda, as it were, of Wall Street. This was followed by an interview with Ron Paul on the fed.
One of the most important points made was that around the world such financial crises have been met with the election of some reform-minded national leader who promises change and reform, only to have it dissolve into "happy talk" with no real clean-up of the financial sectors and their corruption.
The questions we, as citizens, have to ask ourselves are the following: who are the people, institutions whose practices have taken us to the brink of total financial meltdown?
What people are now in charge in Washington? What practices, such as no money-down mortgages or AAA ratings on junk bonds of non-performing assets from Moody's, have been curtailed?
Looking at Beck's tangled web on Wall Street and Washington, and hearing Byrne and Ron Paul, do you get the feeling that President Obama stands functionally for change in this area?
____________________ "The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
I get the feeling Obama is free to do whatever he is told. There is a great wall around the interests of Goldman Sachs over which no meaningful change or investigation will be permitted by the executive or legislative branches of government. If Obama wants to avoid becoming a caricature of the sincere, well-meaning, but entirely ineffectual sort of president that Jimmy Carter set the standard for, he needs to get real about what's important, and fast.
____________________ Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
