What Then Is Your Point, Mr. Potter?

"The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too."

Stephen Covey, The Speed of Trust

"The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality... And they do not ask questions."

Chris Hedges, The Careerists

 

If, as Jamie Galbraith has put it, economics is 'a disgraced profession,' what does it matter, when almost all the professions from medicine to law to finance have also given themselves over to the darkness of this world in high places?

 

Can they be so aloof that they do not see it, see what they are becoming?  See what they serve?

Are they such bystanders that they can no longer even see themselves and where they stand?

Can such a lack of self-awareness be attributed to the blindness of egoism? Or some more profound denial of conscience that rips the very fabric of their reality and its consequences?

Have we finally approached the tipping point of corrosive indifference in our leadership and the careless few, again?

Have the wages of supreme narcissism and exceptionalism finally come to be paid with a third financial crisis, and then another?  And finally the unleashing of madness?

 

It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for a stipend?

 

And when the hard winds of nemesis start howling across the land, where do they think it will end, and who and what do they think will remain standing?

 

Taibbi: A Whistleblower's Horror Story

"Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind."

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

"Flagrant evils cure themselves by being flagrant."

John Henry Newman

If a whistleblower reveals benign 'secrets' of government actions to a domestic reporter in the time honored tradition, they may be prosecuted as 'enemies of the state' under the abusive misuse of the Espionage Act.

 

It was Winston's contention that six week's after refusing to lie in his report to Moody's, Angelo Mozilo personally contacted Winston's supervisor and demanded his termination based on a personal website Winston maintained for his work as a motivational speaker and expert in leadership.

What I find particularly odious in the judgement is that not only will Winston NOT be able to obtain the reward from the jury verdict, which is a legal matter which I understand can be contended.  Although it seems that the appeals court took a fairly aggressive stance in this appeal, to the point of nullifying the jury not on the legal process but on their judgment about the evidence itself.  A copy of that first appeal is downloadable here.

 

The subsequent judgement against plaintiff to pay the costs filed by Bank of America seems excessive if not vindictive to say the least, given that the case itself was a 'close call' at worst.  And then there is the matter of his speaking to Frontline, and engaging in behavior in describing the ongoing frauds at Countrywide that were very embarrassing to Bank of America, and the DOJ itself.  It smells of vindictiveness.

I don't think it is this case alone that is so infuriating, but the context of Wall Street friendly judicial policy in the Obama Administration, and the hypocritical and harsh treatment of whistleblowers in general.   And Taibbi does a fairly good job of bringing these things forwards in his article linked below which I suggest that you read.

Deceit and theft by the privileged is excused and protected, while honesty and innocence are severely punished.    And the great mass of official journalists are silent, so we hear the news about this in a rock 'n roll magazine. 

 

Rolling Stone

A Whistleblower's Horror Story

By Matt Taibbi

18 February 2015

Two years ago this month, Winston was being celebrated in the news as a hero. He'd blown the whistle on Countrywide Financial, the bent mortgage lender that one could plausibly argue nearly blew up the global economy in the last decade with its reckless subprime lending practices.

He described Countrywide's crazy plan to give anyone who could breathe a mortgage in a memorable January, 2013 episode of Frontline called "The Untouchables," a show that caught the eyes of several influential politicians in Washington. The documentary inspired Senate hearings and even the crafting of new legislation to combat too-big-to-jail corruption in the financial world.

Winston was later featured in the New York Times as the man who "conquered Countrywide." David Dayen of Salon described Winston as "Wall Street's greatest enemy."

But today, Winston is tasting the sometimes-extreme downside of being a whistleblower in modern America.

He says he's spent over a million dollars fighting Countrywide (and the firm that acquired it, Bank of America) in court. At first, that fight proved a good gamble, as a jury granted him a multi-million-dollar award for retaliation and wrongful termination.

But after Winston won that case, an appellate judge not only wiped out that jury verdict, but allowed Bank of America to counterattack him with a vengeance.

Last summer, the bank vindictively put a lien on Winston's house (one he'd bought, ironically, with a Countrywide mortgage). The bank eventually beat him for nearly $98,000 in court costs.

That single transaction means a good guy in the crisis drama, Winston, had by the end of 2014 paid a larger individual penalty than virtually every wrongdoer connected with the financial collapse of 2008.

When Winston protested his preposterous punishment on the grounds that a trillion-dollar company recouping legal fees from an unemployed whistleblower was unreasonable and unnecessary, a California Superior Court judge denied his argument — get this — on the grounds that Winston failed to prove a disparity in resources between himself and Bank of America!

This is from the court's ruling:

Plaintiff argues that the disparity in the resources between the individual plaintiff and the defendant Bank of America make it unfair to place the cost of the premium on plaintiff. Plaintiff offered no evidence in support of this argument; it is rejected...

Read the entire story in Rolling Stone here.

Pictures From a Currency War, With Narrative

I have noticed lately that the spinmeisters are now latching on to the term 'currency war,' but are trying to deflect it merely to an intensification of the beggar thy neighbor strategy of devaluing your currency to subsidize exports and penalize imports.

This has been going on for a long time, most notably by the Asian Tigers, led by Japan and then perfected by China.  But make no mistake, the real heart of this process is in an Anglo-American banking/industrial cartel that intends to beggar everybody.

The multinational corporations went along with it.  They were its great lobbyists, and their wealthy scions the founders of think tanks to provide it a rationale and respectability. 

 

Walmart wrote a chapter in the new gospel of greed as a means of undermining wages and the American working class by insisting, as far back as the 1990's and the Clinton era, that suppliers start offshoring to China. And servile politicians opened the doors wide, and turned a blind eye to abuses that are still coming home to roost.

Part of the arrangement was a quid pro quo. The multinationals, who successfully staged a financial coup d'état in the States and Western Europe, were to extend the reach of their strong dollar policy and europression via foreign direct investments in resources rich overseas nations and foreign markets in order to consolidate their power into the non-democratic world.

But China and Russia balked at their end of the presumed bargain. They realized that opening their own doors to dollar exploitation, and allowing the economic hitmen to come in and pick up assets on the cheap, would lead to eventual political unrest, encirclement, and their own loss of power.

'Color revolutions' were becoming popular, as one country after another was falling into chaos, the kind that produces fire sales in productive assets and the elimination of inconvenient local rivals to power.  And in Europe, the powers that be created a Eurozone structure that any decent economist would know was unsustainable, and destined to create an unstable situation of few winners and many big losers.

And so a consortium of nations began to resist.  Some called them the BRICS.   They became alarmed, and then convinced, that allowing a single nation or group of multinationals to control the world's reserve currency was like a Ponzi scheme that could only continue on until its acquired the whip hand of power everywhere.

They started to speak up in international monetary organizations, long dominated by the Anglo-American banking and industrial cartels. They demanded the establishment of a new monetary standard for international trade that was broadly based, to replace the failed Bretton Woods Agreement that had continuing on as the ad hoc dollar hegemony known as Bretton Woods II after Nixon arbitrarily broke the formal agreement with the closing of the gold window in 1971.

And so we see a new phenomenon today, in which the long term selling of gold to control its price, resulting in the post-Bretton Woods bear market that lasted over twenty years, has given way to net gold buying by the world's central banks, and in increasing size.  And the creation of a paper gold market in parallel, through which the West seeks to control the price and supply of gold, to maintain their financial operation while they more aggressively pursue nation recycling and repurposing, draconian trade deals that supplant domestic governance, and when that fails, through internal insurgencies and at times, overt military action.

Simultaneously, there are a proliferation of bilateral trade deals in which currency arrangements are being made between countries, and even among small regional groups of nations, to conduct their business outside of the US Dollar system.  They are even building up their own financial networks and infrastructure in response to increasingly aggressive use of sanctions and other forms of economic pressure.

The US and UK, like China and Russia, are not immune to concerns about domestic unrest. A strong dollar policy and the support for a policy of offshoring to increase corporate profits are wreaking havoc on one of the world's greatest popular economic achievements: the US middle class.

 

Increasingly concerned, the governments are cracking down on any sparks of domestic dissent, targeting leaders, vilifying and suppressing minorities, and increasing the surveillance of its own people.  They are weaponizing the domestic police forces, and establishing the 'legal means' by which control can be maintained in the face of increasing misery and discontent at home.

It is not a pretty picture. It is an old story of greed and deceit, of empire and world conquest, of the desolating sacrilege of betraying those who have fought for freedom and civil rights to cash in for their own selfish gains. 

 

Will this end in a new gold standard, as this article A New Gold Standard in the Making, which is the source of these graphs suggests?  I surely do not know, and still do not think so.  

 

If you have been following the thought process here, going back before even the establishment of this blog to 2000, I have felt that the most likely course will be the establishment of a new unit of international currency, similar to but not the same as the SDR, with a far broader composition of currencies and commodities included, so that no single group would be able to control it for their own purposes.

 

Stagflation is no natural phenomenon.  It is the act of man in a policy intervention or policy error par excellence.  Until OPEC was able to trigger a stagflation through their use of an oil embargo and price cartel in the 1970's in the favorable conditions created by economic rot introduced by years of discretionary, aggressive war in Southeast Asia and the ensuing debts, most economists thought it to be impossible, and certainly not a 'natural' outcome.

 

I think that domestic reform will be coming, and this is necessary because no new monetary standard is going to repair a system that has failed from within due to corruption and systemic injustice.  

 

Old systems, even when they finally turn to visible abuse as they decline, can fail for a very long time, seemingly unbeatable, until they finally collapse from within.  This is how it was for the fall of the old Soviet Union, and this is how it may be for the Anglo-American cartel and their attendant nations like Germany and Japan.

 

It is still possible that Russia and China could make a deal with the Anglo-Americans and establish a tri-partite world government, with their own spheres of control and interest.  As you may recall this was the way George Orwell saw it in 1984.  I have been watching for that possible development based on my own research on the growth of international capital markets and flows since 1990 at least. 

 

People bring this up and so I wish to address it now, once and for all.  I am aware of the possible deeper significance of these developments from an eschatological perspective.  But recall that even the great apostle, who was 'lifted up to the third heaven,' was mistaken in his estimation of it, thinking it a phenomenon of his own time.  It is a mistake of vanity to go too far in such arcane and difficult subjects, in pursuit of sick thrills that only serve to distract us from our call to the work of the day, and the practical task of finding sanctity and salvation in the world. 

 

How we will react to this individually is critical for our own long term survival as spiritual beings regardless, since we all face our own ends individually.  Of this we can be sure.   We are told that most will give in, despairing at the increase in wickedness, and seek for power and riches of their own beyond all reason and grace.   And it requires no end time to see this happening through all ages. 

 

Change is coming.  It may be a new arrangement that brings with it the blessing of reform, transparency and justice through peaceful evolution.  It may be delayed and more difficult.  What cannot be sustained will not continue. 

 

This will end.  But perhaps not very well.  To a great extent that is up to us, unless we stand by and do nothing.  "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."  But what shall I to do?   Begin with yourself, despising only the fear and the evil in you.  Do as you have been instructed by the two great commandments, which have been implanted as a seed in your heart. 

 

You are called.  You choose the answer.

 

 

Wall Street As a Negative Economic Force: Looting Will Continue Until Exhaustion or Collapse

“My hunch is that no one talks about the birth and death rates of American business because Wall Street and the White House, no matter which party occupies the latter, are two gigantic institutions of persuasion. The White House needs to keep you in the game because their political party needs your vote. Wall Street needs the stock market to boom, even if that boom is fueled by illusion.”

Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, American Entrepreneurship, Dead or Alive?

As Pam and Russ Martens note in their recent article below, "Wall Street’s overarching function today is that of an institutionalized wealth transfer mechanism, propped up by compromised regulators and a dysfunctional Congress."

This is a terrific article, right on point, getting the bigger picture that almost all economic writers are missing, or failing to state in a clear and direct manner without mincing words.    The moneyed interests are not beneficent wealth creators doing God's work and creating jobs and value.  These are more like white collar criminals who are able to bend the law to their will, acting like parasites on the real economy.

THEY are 'too big to fail,' and you are 'too little to matter,' except as a convenient source of their income.

The financial sector is a utility function in a healthy, sustainable, and productive economy.   But in our misdirected mania to establish and maintain the global dollar supremacy in our pride and power, we have turned a utility function into a top priority and the central focus of the economy, to our own ultimate misfortune. 

Our society is out of balance and distorted as a result.  Corporations take precedence over people, and money directs the course of public policy and foreign entanglements, to its own ends.  And the people are left to suffer.

And you need to read it here.  A short excerpt is below.

The decline and stagnation of America coincides with the rise of an outsized and increasingly corrupt financial sector, that is misdirecting resources and gaming the savings and efforts of the great mass of the people, reallocating money to it own wasteful purposes.

As such, the Fed is not only being wasteful with their QE programs, they are actually being counterproductive by propping up a corrupt and harmful financial system that is a major impediment to economic recovery and progress.   This is the lesson of the lost decades of Japan, and we are not only repeating them here, but are strongly influencing and urging their adoption in Europe.

 

And shame on the liberal economists, who will promote stimulus of any sort in their ideological fervor, and cheerlead the results along with the White House, without being mindful that stimulus in itself is not a good thing, if it stimulates the wrong things.   QE is not an effective means of stimulus for the real economy, but it is a windfall and a sinecure for the financial sector and the one percent.

 

People and the real economy need jobs and higher real wages, but not increasingly powerful Banks for which they are prey.  Aggregate demand will stimulate jobs and wages, but not government handouts to the wealthy, who will chase hot money scams and monopolies before sharing their wealth with employees and productive investments.

The privileged and fortunate have an age old model of feudalism in mind:  lords and serfs.  And if the financial elite have their way, the looting, surveillance, and repression will continue, until exhaustion or collapse. 

 

Their greed knows no bounds, and is never satisfied.   Power and pride have their own imperatives: better to be a lord in a kind of hell, than just another servant, even in heaven.

 

History has shown, again and again, how pernicious the corruption can become once the abuse of power takes root in a system.  And how hard it finally falls.

People cannot work harder and save faster than the financiers and their politicians can steal their capital, misdirecting it into scams, frivolous 'innovations,'  unjust taxes and subsidies, and ultimately into their own financial machine where it enables even more scams, corruption, and malinvestments.

And reform cannot happen in a system where the moneyed interests vet the presidential candidates in advance, for whom they will allow you the privilege of voting, whipped up into an enthusiasm by the emotional directed messages of their corporate media.  Vote for Red!  No, you fool, vote for Blue!

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.

Evidence Grows Showing Wall Street as a Negative Economic Force

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

January 27, 2015

Wall Street’s overarching function today is that of an institutionalized wealth transfer mechanism, propped up by compromised regulators and a dysfunctional Congress. As the PBS program Frontline reported in 2013, if your work career spans 50 years and you receive the historic return of 7 percent on stocks in your 401(k) plan, the 2 percent typical fee charged by Wall Street mutual funds will gobble up almost two-thirds of your account.

The Frontline program was called The Retirement Gamble. Wall Street On Parade checked the math and found this was not a gamble but a certainty: 'under a 2 percent 401(k) fee structure, almost two-thirds of your working life will go toward paying obscene compensation to Wall Street; a little over one-third will benefit your family – and that’s before paying taxes on withdrawals to Uncle Sam.'"

This is a very short excerpt from a larger and more data packed article you may read for free here.

Related: Wall Street's Threat to the Middle Class - Reich

US Dollar Very Long Term Chart for Year End 2014

The US dollar has ended this year on a high note not seen in some time, not since the time of the financial crisis and collapse in 2008.

Dollar strength, at least in this index, is largely a reciprocal function of weakness in the euro, and to a lesser extent the yen, the pound, and the loon.

I have not worked the data yet, and may not do so for some time, but I would imagine that this spike in dollar strength will see the same sort of demand coming out of Europe as we saw in the two prior instances labeled Eurodollar Squeeze I & II.

This time it is most likely helped by the ongoing crisis in the yen and the ruble, the first being the objective of Abenomics, and the latter being the target of the West, through the actions of their sanctions and the currency action of their Banks, in this phase of the ongoing currency war.

In general, a stronger currency helps the financial and foreign investment sectors of a nation, and is much less helpful for the manufacturing and producing sectors.  It tends to make exports more expensive, and imports more affordable. And it gives purchasing power for those of a mind to acquire and privatize major foreign assets.

This is not a prescription for a recovery in a real producing economy, but it is a boost to the moneyed class of financiers.  This is in keeping with the financialization of the economy that came to fruition during the 1990's, and has continued to dominate the economy and the political process ever since.

Let's see how things develop in 2015.

 

 

 

 

 

Moyers: Democrats Bow Down To Wall Street

The Clintons are the founders of the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party.

The Republicans are even more servile in pandering to Big Money, but that is little comfort for the cause of genuine reform.

 

And similarly, Elizabeth Warren calls out the Democratic and Republican leadership for putting the public back at risk for the Banks gambling on derivatives.

 

Related:  Democrats Who Voted For Cromnibus Had On the Financial Contributions Feed Bag

               Senate Passes Spending Bill Including the Wall St Derivatives Package

 

Democrats Bow Down to Wall Street

Reprise: The Quiet Coup d'Etat in the Anglo-American Financial System

 

“The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions.   Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?”

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

 

This is a reprise of an interview with MIT economist Simon Johnson which I first wrote about in February, 2009.

 

I think I ought to republish this as a reminder every few years, until reform has been achieved, or until the Internet as we know it goes dark.

 

Have we heeded Simon Johnson's warning? Has he proven to be prescient? Is crony capitalism and the kleptocracy becoming bolder, more aggressive, ever more demanding?

"I think I'm signaling something a little bit shocking to Americans, and to myself, actually. Which is the situation we find ourselves in at this moment, this week, is very strongly reminiscent of the situations we've seen many times in other places.

But they're places we don't like to think of ourselves as being similar to. They're emerging markets. It's Russia or Indonesia or a Thailand type situation, or Korea. That's not comfortable. America is different. America is special. America is rich. And, yet, we've somehow find ourselves in the grip of the same sort of crisis and the same sort of oligarchs...

But, exactly what you said, it's a small group with a lot of power. A lot of wealth. They don't necessarily - they're not necessarily always the names, the household names that spring to mind, in this kind of context. But they are the people who could pull the strings. Who have the influence. Who call the shots...

...the signs that I see this week, the body language, the words, the op-eds, the testimony, the way they're treated by certain Congressional committees, it makes me feel very worried.

I have this feeling in my stomach that I felt in other countries, much poorer countries, countries that were headed into really difficult economic situation. When there's a small group of people who got you into a disaster, and who were still powerful. Disaster even made them more powerful. And you know you need to come in and break that power. And you can't. You're stuck....

The powerful people are the insiders. They're the CEOs of these banks. They're the people who run these banks. They're the people who pay themselves the massive bonuses at the end of the last year. Now, those bonuses are not the essence of the problem, but they are a symptom of an arrogance, and a feeling of invincibility, that tells you a lot about the culture of those organizations, and the attitudes of the people who lead them...

But it really shows you the arrogance, and I think these people think that they've won. They think it's over. They think it's won. They think that we're going to pay out ten or 20 percent of GDP to basically make them whole. It's astonishing....

...these people are throughout the system of government. They are very much at the forefront of the Treasury. The Treasury is apparently calling the shots on their economic policies.

This is a decisive moment. Either you break the power or we're stuck for a long time with this arrangement."

Bill Moyer's Journal - Interview with Simon Johnson, February, 2009.

Johnson also wrote a piece in the Atlantic Magazine titled The Quiet Coup. It may be worth re-reading.

"I am not so optimistic that this reform is possible, because there has in fact been a soft coup d'etat in the US, which now exists in a state of crony corporatism that wields enormous influence over the media and within the government.

Let's be clear about this, the oligarchs are flush with victory, and feel that they are firmly in control, able to subvert and direct any popular movement to the support of their own fascist ends and unslakable will to power.

This is the contempt in which they hold the majority of American people and the political process: the common people are easily led fools, and everyone else who is smart enough to know better has their price. And they would beggar every middle class voter in the US before they will voluntarily give up one dime of their ill gotten gains.

But my model says that the oligarchs will continue to press their advantages, being flushed with victory, until they provoke a strong reaction that frightens everyone, like a wake up call, and the tide then turns to genuine reform."

As far as I can tell, we are right on track for a very bad time of it. And you might be surprised at how far a belief in exceptionalism and arrogant superiority can go before it finally ends, or more likely, fails.

“Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.”

Mary Midgley

European Sovereign Debt Levels to GDP Before and After the Bank Bailouts

What is even more clever than lining your pockets by ballooning the financial system into a great bubble by fraud and bad governance?

Getting the victims and bystanders to pay the price of your perfidy, and shifting the anger of the people to some unfortunates,  while 'reforming' the system to make it even more efficient at looting so that you can do it all over again.

No wonder that any movement that threatens the status quo in the least bit gets these white collared reivers and their pampered princes in such a lather.  It is important to make people think that no one else cares, and that they are alone.

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.

"The sudden explosion of European sovereign debt is the direct and indisputable result of all our political parties deciding they would safeguard their mates’ and their own personal wealth (it is the top 10% who hold the bulk of their wealth in the financial products which would be destroyed in a bank collapse. NOT the rest of us!) by bailing out the private banks and piling their unpaid debts on to the public purse.

So whatever the trigger of the next crisis may be, they know any solution which saves the wealth and power of the over-class will have to involve piling new, private-bank bad-debts on to already indebted sovereigns and that, our leaders must be keenly aware, will not be easy to force on an already angry public. They know a whole range of the assurances they might like to give us about what must be done when the next crisis hits and how those things will undoubtably save us, will not be so easy to shove down people’s throats...

I think one of the cleverest things the 1% have done over the last few years is the way they have created a relentless public discourse, via their paid political front-men and women and their media empires, to insist on the need to ‘fix’ and protect the system, and the extreme danger to us all should the system not be ‘saved’. This has served as a perfect cover for making sure that not enough people have noticed that the system is, in fact, being gutted and replaced by something that better serves the interests of the 1%. We have not been fixing the banks, we have been feeding them."

Golem XIV, The Next Crisis Part One

“Why do you think we have a winner?,” President Snow asks while cutting a white rose.
"What do you mean?,” Seneca asks.
“I mean, why do we have a winner?,” Snow repeats, before pausing. “Hope.”
“Hope?,” Seneca replies slightly bewildered.
“Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective, a lot of hope is dangerous,” Snow declares. “A spark is fine, as long as it’s contained. So, contain it.”

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

A Broken Economic System In One Picture

A truly bipartisan effort.

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.

h/t Neil Irwin, You Can't Feed a Family GDP

A Tale of Two Markets: One for Wealthy Insiders, And Another For the Rest of Us

"We run carelessly to the precipice after we have put up a façade to prevent ourselves from seeing it.”

Blaise Pascal
 

Here is a brief excerpt from an article today by the amazing team of Pam and Russ Martens at Wall Street On Parade titled, Are U.S. Markets Liquid and Deep or Rigged and Broken? I suggest you read the entire article when you have the opportunity as this is just a snippet.

"...the SEC which oversees stock exchanges has allowed both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to create a bifurcated market. The unsophisticated investor is given trading data on which to base trading decisions on a slow data feed called the Securities Information Processor or SIP. The SIP is not only slow in getting the data to the technology-challenged investor, but it has limited data.

For the rich and powerful on Wall Street who can afford massive fees, there is another data feed offered by the exchanges called the Direct Feed. The Direct Feed data, which has far more useful information, arrives in the hands of High Frequency Traders and Wall Street’s proprietary traders ahead of the arrival of the SIP data. This allows the Direct Feed users to buy a stock on the cheap and sell the stock back to the SIP user at a higher price...

The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, which also have a mandated regulatory role to ensure that their markets are fair and non-discriminatory, have allowed the two-tiered market to exist because they are collecting hundreds of millions of dollars a year selling the SIP to the dumb money and the Direct Feed to the smart money..."

For someone that is not drinking the daily dose of electronic kool aid from the mainstream media, this is a systemic, institutionalized control fraud that inevitably leads to a financial crisis.   And a close survey of the markets today might lead one to observe, 'My God.  These lunatics are going to do it again.'

That is what it is in plain words.   That is what the price discovery of the US, which controls the reserve currency of the world and sets many of its key prices, is based upon.   This is not some rogue trader, or anomalous abuse.  This is fraud that is deeply woven into the very fabric of the system, and is widely tolerated with a self-serving wink and a nod.

For example, the privately held London Metals Exchange was dismissed as a defendant in the aluminum price fixing case today because it is immune from US prosecution as 'an organ of the UK government.'  That is quite an admission, and some organ.   Droit du seigneur.  Reminds one of the motive for dismissal insinuated by the Barrick motion in the Blanchard gold manipulation suit.

What is it going to take to wake people up?  What markets are left that have not been exposed as deeply rigged at their core?

A big part of the rest of the world isn't buying it anymore. And that is taking us into some very deep, dark, and uncharted waters.