NO QUARTER FOR CORRUPTION (Focussing on The Fed./FRBS)

[Telephonics]

The Circle of Greed: The Cloak of Invisibility
By Mark Faulk
May 25, 2006


While just today, Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeffery Skilling have been convicted of conspiracy, fraud, insider trading and making false statements in deceiving their shareholders and employees, and while advocates for stock market reform continue to call for more transparency in our financial system, the federal government continued to opt instead for invisibility, granting intelligence czar John Negroponte the authority to “exempt companies from certain critical legal obligations. These obligations include keeping accurate ‘books, records, and accounts’ and maintaining ‘a system of internal accounting controls sufficient’ to ensure the propriety of financial transactions and the preparation of financial statements in compliance with ‘generally accepted accounting principles.’"


President Bush, and in fact, every president since Carter, has had the authority to allow publicly-traded companies to be exempt from the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, purportedly to hide information about top-secret defense contracts. How many times has the exemption been used? Who knows? The administration isn’t telling, and since the companies who are exempt don’t have to “keep accurate books, records, and accounts,” there is no way to know whether any…or whether all…defense contractors, or even companies who are loosely-related to defense spending, are playing by the rules. It is effectively a corporate cloak of invisibility.


Read the rest of this article at:
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/Investing101/1057.html


This commentary, along with a great forum for posting your comments as well, is also posted at: http://www.thesanitycheck.com/Blogs/MarkFaulksBlog/tabid/86/EntryID/299/Default.aspx