"The Fraud of our Legal System"
"The Fraud of our Legal System"by smartknowledgeu
"The first phase of the Enronization of America occurred through our legal system. Most of us make the grave mistake of equating our legal system with morality, but law and morality are creatures that often reside at opposite ends of the spectrum under our current legal system. Since those that make our laws are also the same immoral people that control our financial system, often our laws have very little concern with governing morality and much more focus on ensuring that the very elements that hold power maintain or expand their power. Most Americans automatically equate a behavior as right or wrong depending on whether a law defines such behavior as legal or illegal without any critical thought, and this is a mistake. The fact is that today, many laws have nothing to do with morality. In fact, our legal system is laden with such hypocrisy at times that it allows for the very same behavior to be defined as legal if a financial elite is engaging in the behavior but illegal if a “regular Joe” is engaging in it.
Consider that Richard Strong, CEO of the former Strong Mutual Funds, admitted to skimming $1.8 million from his clients’ accounts that essentially was the equivalent of stealing, yet under the auspices of our current legal system, Mr. Strong was not sentenced to spend a single day in jail (Source: Washington Post, 23 June 2004). Yet there is little question that if a hungry, unemployed man steals food equivalent to a fraction of the money Richard Strong stole, he will go to jail if caught. How is this possible? It is possible because very little honor is left in our legal system. Stealing $1.8 million may be legal under our current legal system, but it certainly is not moral. In 2005 and 2006, CEOs from the 11 largest firms in America paid themselves $865,000,000 in salary even though their “leadership” caused a loss of $64,000,000,000 of market capitalization in their firms during the same equivalent time period (Source: BBC News, 22 June 2006). Yet, if an employee of this firm performed as miserably as did their CEOs, their reward would almost certainly be a pink slip, not millions upon millions in bonuses, salaries and perks. Paying oneself hundreds of millions in salaries and hundreds of millions more in bonuses despite contributing to unemployment and the substantial loss of shareholder wealth is certainly unethical, yet it will always remain 100% legal. All you have to do is review the financial payouts from last year to know that not a single iota of decency has been injected into our financial system. When firms like Merrill Lynch went bankrupt and then took money from US taxpayers to pay their executives more than $4 billion of bonuses, this only added insult to the injury their bankruptcy inflicted upon many American families.
Were our legal system truly to regulate morality, the executive suites of America’s largest financial corporations would transform into ghost towns as a great percentage of these executives would be jailed. There are numerous actions that are considered “legal” today that would be illegal if moral and righteous men were making our laws, and even a handful of “illegal” behaviors that would be re-categorized as legal. Suffice it to say, if our legal system has been Enronized, our regulatory agencies by default, have also been Enronized.
The Enronization of our Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was never more apparent in their failure to shut down Bernard Madoff and protect American families even though hedge fund manager Harry Markopoulos informed the SEC both in writing and by phone of the fraudulent nature of Madoff’s fund for nine years. During Congressional testimony regarding this matter, Mr. Markopoulos testified that when the SEC repeatedly ignored his warnings about the fraudulent nature of Madoff’s practices, that he feared for his, as well as his family’s safety, a damning indictment of not only the SEC’s abject failure to regulate, but also of their propensity to protect powerful men in the financial industry whether they are breaking the law or not. The lesson here is this – if you are a small player, the regulatory agencies will still prosecute criminal activity, but if your rank is among the financial elites, they will do nothing."
Were our legal system truly to regulate morality, the executive suites of America’s largest financial corporations would transform into ghost towns as a great percentage of these executives would be jailed. There are numerous actions that are considered “legal” today that would be illegal if moral and righteous men were making our laws, and even a handful of “illegal” behaviors that would be re-categorized as legal. Suffice it to say, if our legal system has been Enronized, our regulatory agencies by default, have also been Enronized.
The Enronization of our Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was never more apparent in their failure to shut down Bernard Madoff and protect American families even though hedge fund manager Harry Markopoulos informed the SEC both in writing and by phone of the fraudulent nature of Madoff’s fund for nine years. During Congressional testimony regarding this matter, Mr. Markopoulos testified that when the SEC repeatedly ignored his warnings about the fraudulent nature of Madoff’s practices, that he feared for his, as well as his family’s safety, a damning indictment of not only the SEC’s abject failure to regulate, but also of their propensity to protect powerful men in the financial industry whether they are breaking the law or not. The lesson here is this – if you are a small player, the regulatory agencies will still prosecute criminal activity, but if your rank is among the financial elites, they will do nothing."
Like Richard Pryor said, "If you go down to the Justice Center, that's what you'll see- just us..."
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