NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN THE CFTC SCANDAL: On September 17, 2010, CFTC Administrative Law Judge, George H Painter, issued a "Notice and Order" announcing his retirement from his position. In this notice Judge Painter wrote of a conspiracy at the highest levels of the CFTC (within the ENFORCEMENT DIVISION) where a long time judge of 20 years has been conspiring with past CFTC Chairs to RIG THE ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAW by NOT finding ANYONE guilty of market manipulation. Here are Judge Painter's own words:
"There are two administrative law judges at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission: myself and the Honorable Bruce Levine. On Judge Levine's first week on the job, nearly twenty years ago, he came into my office and stated that he had promised Wendy Gramm, then Chairwoman of the Commission, that we would never rule in a complainant's favor. A review of his rulings will confirm that he has fulfilled his vow. Judge Levine, in the cynical guise of enforcing the rules, forces pro se complaints to run a hostile procedural gauntlet until they lose hope, and either withdraw their complaint or settle for a pittance, regardless of the merits of the case"
A copy of Judge Painter's letter can be found below with a stamp proving that it was received and filed by the CFTC on October 13, 2010. – RoadtoRoota
Dominant Social Theme: Please don't look at the man behind the curtain.
Free-Market Analysis: We are well aware of the corruption that inevitably arises when regulatory democracies persist and like tumors begin to swell. The United States is perhaps the world's most powerful regulatory democracy, and likely its most icily corrupt. Nevertheless, it is absolutely startling to find a senior judge (see article excerpt above) at one of America's most important financial regulatory agencies – the Commodities Futures Trading Commission – bluntly accusing a former CFTC Chairwoman (Wendy Gramm, wife of former Senator Phil Gramm) and a fellow judge of deliberate malfeasance, apparently over decades. Sub dominant social theme: "This kind of thing doesn't happen in the US!"
OK, rewind. It has been kind of ironic to watch the US mainstream media wring its collective hands over the "corruption" in Afghanistan as if the US itself, and its deliberately corrupt system of regulatory democracy, were not worse by orders of magnitude than anything Afghanistan could summon. The three most corrupt places in the world are probably Beijing, Brussels and Washington DC in no particular order. We'll throw in London as a fourth. And Moscow as fifth. And, wait, there's India, too. We probably could go on and on. Is there a pattern here, dear reader?
The corruption of the West's regulatory democracies began after the American Civil War and grew far worse in the early 21st century once the Federal Reserve was founded. The corruption was driven by a familial elite of Western power players, mostly banking families that wanted to install one-world government. They intended to do so incrementally using regulatory democracy as a Trojan Horse. Thus the West's institutions were imperceptibly corrupted over time and almost every aspect of Western culture and commerce was tainted as well.
Once the money spigot had been turned on via the Federal Reserve, many other central banks began to form around the world. At the same time, after World War I, the first effort to create a global government was made with the League of Nations. When that collapsed, it can be seen that the elite tried again almost immediately with the United Nations after World War II. The two world wars militarized the West, especially America. Central banking began to distort the West's economies and gold was in a sense demonetized. World government was initiated with the empowerment of the IMF, the World Bank and the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, which enjoys total immunity from prosecution around the world. What a deal – a modern day Vatican! The seeds for the EU were conveniently planted as well during this time.
Much of the rest of the 20th century was subsumed by the "cold war" between the Soviet Union and the West, and thus the militarization of the West, especially the US, continued apace. The USSR was in fact midwife to the endless expanson of the Anglo-American military-industrial complex and provided a convenient justification for even the most outrageous goverenment manpulations. Anything, seemingly, could be justified on national security grounds, and the most outrageous and violent violations of public trust were apparently initiated and boldly concluded.
There is, for instance, considerable uncertainty (as we have been exploring) as to whether the NASA flights to the moon were genuine. Operation Gladio, which the CIA operated in Europe, set up violent Marxist cells with an eye toward pushing Europe rightward in response. In America, the CIA and FBI apparently facilitated the Hippie movement with a similar idea – to confuse the baby-boomers about their constitutional heritage and generally to fracture civil society via drug-taking, radical socialism and vitriolic feminism.
At the same time in both Europe and America, most major civil and industrial institutions were being corrupted by the money spigot of central banking. Every few years a boom would turn into a bust as waves of paper currency washed ruinously over national economies around the world. The results were always the same: Increased governmental involvement in private industry and the further consolidation of private industry under corporate control. Public unions were empowered, public health care became ubiquitous in the West, public education expanded with merciless incompetence and vast regulatory apparatuses were set up to compensate for the lack of market competition.
The end result of all of this is a Western "capitalist" system that has little or no marketplace governor. The entire mechanism has been reborn as a public enterprise beholden to the elite. Teacher, lawyer, educator, accountant, doctor or military person – all are entangled in a quasi-public system beholden to government at almost every level (and many are aware of their unwitting complicity, even if they can't verbalize it). For those who seek to survive outside of the system, there are various intelligence agencies and other adversarial governmental institutions manufactured to make life difficult. The graduated income tax is yet another form of entrepreneurial control.
Competition has been drained away, replaced by regulatory democracy. Yet regulation cannot substitute for competition. Regulation is merely an excuse for the powers-that-be to operate behind-the-scenes without fear of confrontation. Create a society that removes competition and substitutes government watchdogs and it is easy for the powers-that-be to engage in whatever manipulations they wish via mercantilism.
Regulators are always subject to "regulatory capture" by the biggest private players. Thus, regulation never provides "fairness" but only continually raises the barriers to entry for all but the largest firms that can afford the fines and penalties. The regulators themselves are bought off. Lucrative jobs in the private sector await those regulators who make friends with those they are supposed to regulate. Regulatory democracy enshrines corruption throughout society. It substitutes mandates of man for competitive discipline and marketplace competition.
All regulatory agencies within modern Western democracies are corrupt. Laws are written to exempt the powerful and criminalize what was previously seen as respectable business practice. At the higher levels of regulatory democracies, those who enforce the "laws" are well aware of the system's basic corruption. None of it is intended to facilitate fairness; it has been constructed to ease the path of mercantilism for the most powerful.
One could say in fact that agencies like the tremendously inept SEC and CFTC are merely gatekeepers of the status quo. They have been put in place to give the public the sense that big financial players and banks are being "watched." In fact, as we can see from the letter written by Judge Painter, the CFTC in particular (but one could substitute almost any agency) are created not to impede business-as-usual but to enhance and it and protect it. That business-as-usual, of course, has to do with facilitating the power elite's stranglehold over wealth and power.
This is the reason, in fact, for market manipulations, mostly aimed (unsuccessfully these days) at damping the value of money metals (gold and silver) in favor of paper currencies that the elite itself can control and print through central banks. Entrepreneurs attempting to build gold and silver based mining companies are often targets as well, of this we are all too aware. The "silver lining" to all of this, if there is one, is that the truth-telling of the Internet has thoroughly upset the artificial construct – the all-encompassing monetary and professional matrix – that the elite created through money power in the 21st century. As we have written before, there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
Lately, we have suggested that the West must return to private justice and common law – and in fact we expect this may be a natural process of changing times. The infinite corruption of the West's judicial processes will certainly come under scrutiny as the Internet helps reveal the dysfunction, generally, of Western regulatory democracy. Economic, political and judicial practices are part of the larger disintegration. Tug on one thread to unravel all.
