S.E.C. LAWYERS’ GRADUATION CLASSES: 1999-2008

If you hired a security guard to watch your house, and it kept getting burglarized – even after someone told him countless times who the thief was – would you let him keep his job?

Stupid question, you say?  Really? 

So why do we keep the same morons on our government payroll to watch the financial markets?  Now that is a good question.  And there really is a simple answer.  The foxes make sure to instruct their under-lords to have those dumb sharecropper farmers whom they pay beggars wages to for working their land, to keep that same old deaf and blind dog guarding the chicken coop.  This metaphor should not be lost on anyone.

Bernie Madoff may be a household word – and one of Time magazines 2009 Top 100 people who affected the world.  But Harry Markopolus is just another quiet hero in a global financial market run by pimps and whores.  Markopolus has a new book coming out today called, “No One Would Listen“.  The book chronicles the story of how Markopolus doggedly pursued a fraud case against Bernie Madoff from 1999 through 2008 by trying to get the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawyers to investigate Madoff’s House of Cards.  All to no avail. 

WTF you might ask?  At least that’s what I have been saying since this story first broke in early 2009 when Markopolus testified before Congress (you can read his testimony right here), and then was interviewed by CBS’s 60 Minutes. 

 This is beyond a comedy of errors.  This is Dumb and Dumber, The Three Stooges, and Beevis and Butthead all working in concert to unwittingly thwart one another while the criminals continued to steal from us with unbridled impunity.  Now is that not a terrifying image?  Meet your S.E.C., America.  Wall Street owns these guys.

Starting in 1999, Markopolus made several attempts to give the most fundamental proof of Madoff’s fraud to numerous investigators at the S.E.C. - all of which was either willfully or woefully ignored (Markopolus calls them “idiots” – that is too kind, don’t you think, Sarah Palin? I would have called them retards).  By 2007, he was fed up with their wanton stupidity, and decided to document it by submitting a nineteen (19) page memorandum to the S.E.C. outlining the basis for his claim.  That too, was ignored.

View the complete 60 Minutes interview with Markopolos - or just watch the real BOMBSHELL from minute 7:25 to 8:18 of the interview.  That brief one minute segment is incomprehensible.   And you wonder why so many investors were “Madoffed” by Bernie?

So after all this, has anything changed?

Hell no! 

Harry Markopolus is still trying to settle his first big whistle-blower case, he has spent years living in fear, and yet he remains undeterred in his dogged pursuit of financial racketeers and corporate fraudsters.  Of course, his new book should help keep his wife and young boys fed until payday comes.  Ironically, Markopolus refers to himself as a “$50 Billion dollar failure”- because he could not get the S.E.C. to listen.  One might conclude that he is being flippant, since he all but beat them over the head with his evidence.  However, he is serious about characterizing this as his “failure” - he honestly takes it very personally that all these people were hurt by Madoff’s fraud in the face of the S.E.C.’s utter incompetence.  

You just have to love this man.  After all this, the crooks and the “police” shirk responsibility, and the hero feels guilty?  And you wonder why it seems the world has started spinning in the other direction?

Meanwhile, back at the S.E.C., they are still re-disorganizing the deck chairs on the U.S.S. Financial Titanic, and there should be smooth sailing on the calm seas of Neo-Capitalism all the way back to port.  No need to worry.  They have their securities regulation minions fast asleep on night watch while the next massive financial iceberg awaits in the darkness.  And brace yourself, because this next one’s really going to be a doozy folks. 

In the meantime, bring them some Dom Perignon, the exquisite pate’, and that rare Russian escargot they just had imported, all paid for with your financial bailouts.  And don’t forget to put that on a silver platter. 

Oh, they almost forgot to mention it.  You can ignore the water rising on the Italian marble dining room floor.  That’s just from the watered-down financial regulation reform we are about to get from Wall Street’s wholly-owned public subsidiary, Congress.  They have the S.E.C working on that minor leak down in the hull right now. 

One Final Note: please do not bother counting the number of lifeboats.  Those seats have all been reserved.

Enjoy the cruise. 

P.S.  They saved several seats in the lifeboats for the S.E.C. lawyers.  You didn’t really think the Financial Terrorists were going to row those things themselves, did you?