Blackout Media Corp (BKMP)

[fugeguy]

IMHO, I think the issues lie mostly with the Naked Short Sellers:

"StockGate, the term coined by FinancialWire December 29, 2003, to describe the growing illegal naked short selling scandal, has reached critical mass, with lawsuits and subpoenas flying, journalists implicated, and state and federal regulators investigating, making page one news from the New York Times to small town papers everywhere in just one week of frantic developments, including a public admission ...

,,, by a former Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. board member that “fails to deliver are endemic.”

Biovail (NYSE: BVF) has now joined Overstock (NASDAQ: OSTK) in suing Gradient Analytics and alleged co-conspiring hedge funds for stock manipulation, TradeStation (NASDAQ: TRAD) and Bear Stearns (NYSE: BSC) are implicated in an investigation by the NASD of naked shorting, and two journalists from Dow Jones have been subpoenaed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, although the news organization has stated the SEC may not immediately act on its subpoenas.

FinancialWire covered the scandal almost exclusively for over three years, posting more than 300 articles, despite acknowledged interference from the now-investigated DTCC which told news distributors that because of its coverage, “FinancialWire is not a legitimate news source.”

StockGate has been described variously as a massive pandemic that may bring down the entire financial system as occurred in the Great Crash when similar non-deliveries of certificates were so extensive the SEC and laws against non-settlement came into being, or as simply a “blip,” and in some instances, outrightly the figment of the imaginations of a small group of alarmists.

The key law to come out of the Crash meant to help prevent another one has been SEC Regulation 17A(a)(1)(A), which states: “The prompt and accurate clearance and settlement of securities transactions, including the transfer of record ownership and the safeguarding of securities and funds related thereto, are necessary for the protection of investors and persons facilitating transactions by and acting on behalf of investors.”

It is this law that critics say the DTCC has set up a work-around, its controversial “Stock Borrow” program, to circumvent. Also at issue is the recently-disclosed fact that certificates in street name are routinely diluted and aggregated to circumvent the one-share-one-vote provisos. The DTCC has fought furiously to convert all holdings to “electronic” so there will be no accountability to individual shareholders.

The DTCC admission, by Bradley Abelow in confirmation hearings for the former Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) executive to join his former colleague and new New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine as New Jersey’s State Treasurer, in fact flies in the face of the DTCC’s public claims that fails to deliver are insignificant, and virtually non-existent. His comments may be heard at http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/media/archive_audio2.asp?KEY=SJU&SESSION=2006 The pertinent comments are at the beginning of the audio and after the 1:23:00 period.

Said Abelow on the issue of settlement fails: “No one likes them, no one wants to have them, but they occur with great regularity.”

According to Susanne Tribath, an economist and former DTCC official, Abelow and the DTCC has been “lax” in not preventing stock manipulation. “The board members see the data, they know what is going on, but they have done nothing.”

A DTCC spokesperson, Steven Letzler, rebutted, “We have no clue about naked shorting. Buys and sells – that’s all we see.”

The DTCC has a convoluted ownership chart but is jointly owned and controlled by the New York Stock Exchange and the NASD, both self-regulatory organizations operating under Congressional mandate amid oversight by the SEC. "

Rest of the story available at the blog listed below.