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Investing 101 - Nov 8, 2005 - Printable Version
- Start Spreading the News: Stockgate Goes Nationwide
by Mark Faulk
After years of ignoring the stock market naked short selling scandal, the major media continues its scramble to catch up to the few internet advocates who have been warning Americans about this financial house of cards for years. In an article released in this weeks Time Magazine, entitled "Watch Out, They Bite! HOW HEDGE FUNDS TIED TO EMBATTLED BROKER REFCO USED 'NAKED SHORT SELLING' TO PLUNDER SMALL COMPANIES", the subject of naked short selling, or more appropriately, stock counterfeiting, finally reached a nationwide audience, in a well-written and accurate article by Daniel Kadlec that quoted the same sources that the Faulking Truth, Financial Wire, and Investigatethesec.com have been utilizing for years.
Up to now, with the notable exception of a series of articles that appeared overseas in Euromoney Magazine and a few articles in the New York Post, most the major media has been conspicuously missing in action. In many instances, national coverage of this financial time bomb has been tepid and watered down, as in the case of the by now infamous Dateline fiasco....which the Faulking Truth described as "the most irrelevant piece of fluff ever aired in the history of television....the equivalent of spending a year putting together a documentary on the Watergate scandal, and then editing it down to a ten minute piece about Nixon's dog Checkers." Other major media sources, such as the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, and CNBC, at times seem to have joined the ranks of the criminals themselves. Considering the steady stream of.....uh, "reporters" and "commentators," like hedge fund manager and CNBC lowlife Jeff Matthews, who have found their way from www.thestreet.com, a seedy hedge fund connected website, to many of the so-called "major publications", it's no wonder that they present a decidedly slanted version of "the facts".
I think it's worth taking a look back at just how long this scandal has been ignored...ignored by the SEC, ignored by Congress, ignored by the Bush Administration, and, up until now, ignored by the media as well. Let's go waaaaaaay back to June of 2004, when we first broke the story of the Dateline expose', that was so watered down by the time it finally aired, a full year and a half after it was originally scheduled, that it was barely recognizable. This is how the Faulking Truth put it then:
It's been called the biggest financial scandal in the history of the world, with incurred losses estimated by some experts at well over $1 trillion dollars. It's a scandal that involves over 1,200 offshore hedge funds, over 150 US brokers, and has already bankrupted over 7,000 US companies in the past six years. According to many of the lawsuits filed to date, the crooks include terrorist groups and organized crime syndicates. Sources say that this scandal, which involves an intricate system of selling electronic counterfeit shares of stock in an effort to destroy the market value of small publically traded companies by utilizing a method known as "naked short selling", will eventually implicate almost every major broker in America, all of the governing bodies that oversee trading, and will extend into Canada and Europe. Amazingly, the SEC has admitted it had been "observing" naked short selling for six years, but up to now has done absolutely nothing to put a halt to it.
As The Faulking Truth has written about and followed this story over the past few months, one nagging question has remained: where is the national press coverage on this issue? Aside from a few recent articles in national newspapers, which have barely scratched the surface of this worldwide scandal, why has this been largely ignored by the mainstream media? Why hasn't one of the major network investigative shows put together an in depth expose' to blow this scandal wide open?
Puts it into perspective, doesn't it? We were warning the country about this disaster, exposing the role of hedge funds, the damage to American companies and our economy, implicating the entire brokerage system, and literally begging for major media coverage on the issue a year and a half ago, but they were asleep at the wheel while America was being raped and pillaged from without....and within.
Until now. Just as it took a hurricane of catastrophic proportions to expose the weaknesses and corruption in FEMA, it took a similar financial disaster to wake up the major media to this scandal. The multi-billion dollar bankruptcy of Refco, and their connections to Thomas Badian, a notorious hedge fund operator who was convicted of massive fraud involving naked short selling, seems to have finally lit a fire under the corporate media.
While Time Magazine finally gets it right, Congress continues to sit on their hands and do absolutely nothing to protect our country's economy. A Senate Banking Subcommittee Hearing originally scheduled for February of this year was postponed time and again, and then finally shelved altogether by Banking Committee Chairman Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL). Shelby sold every American, at least every American who isn't a millionaire, down the river.
If the money lost to Americans was over a trillion dollars a year and a half ago, how much of our country's wealth has been lost to foreign interests since then? How much of that has fallen into the hands of terrorist organizations and used to fund attacks against our own soldiers in Iraq and around the world? How much has financed organized crime activities? How many companies could have been saved since then, and how many more investors have been robbed of their retirement, and in many cases, their entire life savings?
What could we have done with the lost revenues, both in taxes and job creation? Were those the tax dollars that could have paid for repairing the flood and levee system whose failure destroyed New Orleans and half of the Gulf coast along with it? How much could have been put into education, or used to help eliminate cuts to programs that assist our children, our poor, and our elderly? How much could we have paid on our out of control national debt?
We applaud writer Daniel Kadlec and Time Magazine for finally picking up the torch that we and others like us have carried for so long, but that's not the real issue here. The real issue is this: Why did it take the major media so damn long to cover this story, and how much longer do we have to wait before our elected officials in Congress join them, and finally, at long last, do the right thing for America?
And that's the Faulking Truth.
Read the Time magazine article "Watch Out, They Bite! HOW HEDGE FUNDS TIED TO EMBATTLED BROKER REFCO USED 'NAKED SHORT SELLING' TO PLUNDER SMALL COMPANIES" at:
http://www.time.com/time/insidebiz/article/0,9171,1126706-1,00.html
THIS NEEDS TO BE A NATIONWIDE CAMPAIGN!:
It's time to bury Senator Richard Shelby, who sold America down the river when he cancelled a pending Senate Banking Subcommittee hearing on naked short selling and stock counterfeiting. Email him or call him, and tell everyone you know to do the same. Post this information EVERYWHERE:
Call Senator Shelby at (202) 224-5744, or email him at senator@shelby.senate.gov.
Tell him how simple this issue really is....you pay for your stock, your broker goes out and buys it, and delivers it to you. The end.
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