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Yeah!
Ya know what else would be great? Anti-gravity boots.
Guess which one we're more likely to see first?
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=795065904...
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=794250312
here's an interesting observation about this Madoff mess and all its tentacles...
http://ragingbull.quote.com/mboard/boards.cgi?b...
Here's a far fetched thought, but then again maybe not. A good old boy's club yes. But what if there is a bigger, badder club that just hides in the shadows waiting for the other club to screw up and then take over so as to begin a new game? me thinks for some time, other powers in our little world have been waiting and watching for just such a moment. A moment to finally pull the plug on the whole sordid operation so as to bring snaity back to a world gone mad.
Just a thought..
Judge signs order to protect Madoff investors
NEW YORK – A federal judge on Monday threw a lifesaver to investors who may have been duped in one of Wall Street's biggest alleged frauds, saying they need the protection of a special government reserve fund set up to help investors at failed brokerage firms.
The law doth punish man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But lets the greater felon loose
That steals the common from the goose
-Anon.
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:ldSXXM417l0...
...Bernard L. Madoff has been a major figure in the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), the major self-regulatory organization for US broker/dealer firms...
what kind of bad could happen when you can self-regulate ??
Having vowed to restrict lawsuits in the Contract with America - pushed through a bill making it much harder to sue companies for misleading their investors, and threatening to gut the SEC's budget if Levitt's bill went forward. The lobbyist who spearheaded the accounting industry's campaign against the Levitt proposal - was none other than Harvey Pitt. After his election, President Bush the appointed Pitt to head a "kinder and gentler" SEC – the organization he was paid to destroy. Pitt was serious about doing just that. His first SEC budget proposed eliminating 57 staff positions, including 13 in the office of full DISCLOSURE, and 12 in the office charged with preventing FRAUD. Bush's Treasury secretary immediately shut down intergovernmental efforts to monitor the offshore corporate tax havens at the heart of Enron's financial maneuvers.
Americans lost billions of dollars.
Pitt nominated Wm. Webster in 2002 to the Securities & Exchange Commission’s Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, but Pitt never divulged that Webster had, as head of the audit committee of U.S. Technologies, voted to dismiss its outside auditors in the summer of 2001, after those auditors raised federal concerns about internal financial controls. So, Pitt nominated a guy that was under federal investigation for cheating investors! Perfect!
In the wake of a resulting shareholder stampede, Pitt topped off his oh-so-short politically tone-deaf career when he demanded a promotion to Bush's Cabinet and a pay raise so he could - fight fraud.
My opinion - the current economic crisis began with Phil Graham, and Newt Gingrich, and Harvey Pitt.
I think you are totally wrong on that. Smart people throughout history have been fooled, by greed. Greed is the con mans tool. Some con men say the smarter the mark, as long as greedy, the easier to fool. Dumb people often at least suspect they are dumb, smart people think they are invinceable.
All they saw was the return, and who wants to look TOO hard at a gift horse, even if it is your job to?
It's just like the Bush administration....the "checks and balances" only work when dealing with something inside the "normal framework", as we have seen. When some mutant, rabid, dog comes into the picture, one that doesn't recognize any of the rules, it turns out the checks and balances are useless (unless they REALLY used the tools congress has). Same here, there have always been cheats, and ponzi schemes, but what the hell...the housing bubble was one (just not centralized, more all inclusive), and the sub-prime, etc. So...
Our institutions are all playing the "what? How could we have known" card. The insiders some knew, some ignored, and others just didn't want to dig too deep.