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"The chattering classes still blame desperate borrowers for not reading the fine print, but perhaps they should reserve some vitriol for Wall Street's watchdog. If there's one lesson the commission should have learned long ago, it's that booms aren't fueled by market forces alone, but also by healthy doses of fraud, deception, and unchecked opportunism. And it's invariably everyday folks who pay the price. ‘The SEC, instead of watching Wall Street, insulates it,’ notes Aguirre. ‘The subprime issue is a direct consequence of the sec's failure to act proactively to intercept fraud as it develops.'" www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2008/03/subprime-lendings-smartest-guys-in-the-roomSeveral years ago I went to the theater to see the documentary Smartest Guys in The Room. It was a film about Ken Lay and the crooks who masterminded the massive Enron scandal. While the documentary focused on Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Richard Causey, Andrew Fastow and the other key players in an elaborate corporate scheme to: bribe elected officials, conspire with Wall Street investment banks to promote and sell risky stocks, rip off their shareholders, manipulate electricity and energy rates and defraud countless people across the county; it also revealed how insiders and well connected white collar criminals use the system to get rich. In the corporate worlds of energy and finance, Skilling, Lay and the Enron upper echelon were held up as Wiz Kids, wunderkind and nicknamed “the smartest guys in the room”. Alas it turned out Lay and company were running a multi-tiered scam, which included international money laundering, securities fraud, energy price rigging and corruption. Enron was noted for the politicians on both sides of the aisle they gave donations to including George W Bu$h. Enron executives like Lay served on Dick Cheney’s super secret energy task force helping to set policy for the country and enriching themselves in the process.The Enron scandal proved to be, along with the Savings and Loan scandal of the ‘80's, the 1929 stock market crash and 1930's Great Depression models the current crooks and con artists used to facilitate the current global economic implosion. The core of the current economic collapse is not the “Subprime mortgage” crisis at all; that’s just for public consumption. At the core of the global economic meltdown is the collapse of the Shadow Financial System, with its “structured financial” transactions, Hedge Funds, derivatives, and exotic sounding entities. These entities are the creation of Ivy League MBA’s, actuarial experts and Wall Street wizards who created innovative ways to used minimal collateral and capital to leverage massive returns while taking advantage of totally unregulated and scrutinized markets. These wiz kids were called “The Smartest Guys in the world.” What they did was set up high stakes casino and Ponzi schemes that used global markets to sell what they called “securtized assets” and “asset backed securities”. These were mortgages, auto, commercial and student loans that has been pooled, bundled, repackages and sold around the world as high yield bonds. Just like the Enron scandal, the bond rating agencies: Standard and Poor, Moody’s and Fitch rated these structured financial entities triple A and vouched for their safety. And just like the Enron swindle there was massive and systemic accounting fraud by the accounting firms, the banks ,Hedge Funds and insurance companies who kept these bonds (especially when they started to unravel and go belly up) off their books so no one really knew how toxic they really were.It is the unraveling of these over-leveraged, debt based transactions that are spreading like a financial sexually transmitted disease throughout the global economy. This contagion is wrecking havoc in Asia, Europe and the US. These rigged casino and Ponzi pyramid schemes like the Madoff rip off are causing the whole economy to grind to frightening halt. The fraud, scams and corruption are so widespread, a total lack of trust and confidence has befallen the system. In a system as rigged and tainted as this one, once trust wanes, it is hard to keep the con game going. Once the suckers realize the game is thoroughly rigged, what’s the uses of playing? That is why the corporate media is busy making excuses for the system. The cable channels like CNN MSNBC and CNBC are trying to keep interest in the stock market alive and working hard to convince the suckers the game is legit. It’s not.I have a question, if these guys were so smart why is the whole system unraveling? If they were as sophisticated and innovative and they claimed; why is global capitalism on the verge of collapse? With all their insider trading, all the collusion, the deliberate deregulation and the SEC falling down on the job (just like the US military and intelligence services fell down on 9-11) one could easily conclude, this was deliberately planned. If the Wall Street Wiz Kids and actuarial experts were so smart with their algorithms and statistical probability and they knew what happened during the “Roaring Twenties”, how inflation wrecked the US economy during the Vietnam War, and they knew about the fraud which took place during the Savings and Loan fiasco and Enron, why is the US about to go belly up?But the real question is, when are the common folks going to get smart, wake up and realize we are being played for chumps and suckers. When are the US taxpayers going to say enough is enough?! When are we going to say we are not going to bail out these crooks and replace the money they’ve stolen from us out of our pockets? When are we going to demand these criminals be held accountable? When are we going to rise up and demand these rip off artists, crooks and corrupt politicians get arrested, have their day in court and go to jail?Food for thought for 2009.-30-