Market Stories

[mauipenny]

very interesting reading for all...

Overstock CEO offers $75,000 for Wall Street's soul

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/24/byrne_back_conspiracy_theory_with_cash/



http://www.deepcapture.com/the-story-of-deep-capture-by-mark-mitchell/

To enter our $75,000 "Crack the Cover-up!" contest read to the bottom of this (very long) story.

The Columbia School of Journalism is our nation’s finest. They grant the Pulitzer Prize, and their journal, The Columbia Journalism Review, is the profession’s gold standard. CJR reporters are high priests of a decaying temple, tending a flame in a land going dark.

In 2006 a CJR editor (a seasoned journalist formerly with Time magazine in Asia, The Wall Street Journal Europe, and The Far Eastern Economic Review) called me to discuss suspicions he was forming about the US financial media. I gave him leads but warned, “Chasing this will take you down a rabbit hole with no bottom.” For months he pursued his story against pressure and threats he once described as, “something out of a Hollywood B movie, but unlike the movies, the evil corporations fighting the journalist are not thugs burying toxic waste, they are Wall Street and the financial media itself.”

His exposé reveals a circle of corruption enclosing venerable Wall Street banks, shady offshore financiers, and suspiciously compliant reporters at The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, CNBC, and The New York Times. If you ever wonder how reporters react when a journalist investigates them (answer: like white-collar crooks they dodge interviews, lie, and hide behind lawyers), or if financial corruption interests you, then this is for you. It makes Grisham read like a book of bedtime stories, and exposes a scandal that may make Enron look like an afternoon tea.

By Patrick M. Byrne, Deep Capture Reporter



Crack the Cover-Up Contest!
You, the Community, decide who wins

1st place = $30,000
2nd place = $20,000
3rd place = $10,000
4th place = $6,000
5th place = $4,000
6th - 10th place = $1,000 each
Total = $75,000

From “The Story of DeepCapture” you understand the crime and cover-up. Now you can win up to $30,000 for thinking of a clever way to crack the cover-up. Here’s how:

1) Crack the cover-up: do something to help the public discover DeepCapture’s exposé of Wall Street and the financial journalists who “tried to be players but became pawns.”

2) Use the widget at the bottom of Mark Mitchell’s “The Story of Deep Capture” to tell us what you did. That becomes your entry.

3) The community will vote entries up and down.

4) At midnight, October 1, 2008, entries will be frozen and prizes awarded.

5) For ideas on how to crack the cover-up, here is a page of simple suggestions.

6) Multiple entries are allowed.

7) Your entry can link to blogs, videos, audio files, letters-to-editors, newspaper articles, etc., that document your efforts to crack the cover-up. (For example, suppose you parked a truck with “DeepCapture.com” on the side in front of a convention full of journalists: you could video that, post the video online, write an entry about it in the conttest widget, then link to that video. NB: that idea has already been taken, but someone else could always do it again, and better.)

8. To crack the cover-up you may find it useful to learn more about this issue. The links within Mitchell’s piece are a good starting point. More detailed pieces appear on DeepCapture. Here is a good place to start.

9) Whatever you do to crack the cover-up by bringing attention to Deep Capture’s exposé, it must be legal. Illegal acts will be disqualified.

10) This contest is scheduled to run until midnight, Utah time, October 1, 2008. However, it is an experiment and, like all experiments, runs the risk of producing unanticipated pernicious consequences. Therefore, in case some ill begins arising that we had not foreseen, we reserve the right to bring the contest to an early conclusion. If we do, we will give 7 days’ notice: when those 7 days are up, the entries will be frozen, and prizes paid based on the ranking of answers at that moment.

11) This list of rules may (and likely will) be amended. Why? Because this contest is an experiment. There may be some way to game it that we have not anticipated (”gaming” means “bending the rules in an attempt to win without doing the hard work of creating the public awareness of Mitchell’s story which the contest is supposed to measure”: for example, trying to hack the voting mechanism). Therefore, in case we discover people gaming it in some way, we reserve the right to modify the rules in midstream. We will not be capricious (e.g., amending the rules merely to handicap someone who had gotten ahead), but would do so only to protect the integrity of the contest for all participants. We’re the good guys. By entering the contest, you acknowledge this right and express your willingness to submit to our sense of fairness in these matters.

If you have questions about the contest, please post them as comments to this post. We will answer. But please review everyone else’s comments to see if your question has been answered, before you post another.

Good luck,
Patrick M. Byrne, PhD
Deep Capture Reporter




good luck to anyone who enters the contest!!!
alooooha