We're the feds . . . we don't have to follow the laws, just make them.

Badges?! We don't have to show you any stinking badges!


Guest article by SAM ADAMS

Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker recently wrote about a “curious” provision in the recently signed financial regulation law. “Curious” in quotes because the provision is so starkly at odds with everything that Obama previously said about how he intended to run our [emphasis there because he is supposed to be working for us, not the other way around] government and, specifically, what he said that this particular law would do. It is about transparency or, rather, the lack thereof.

OK, what's this about, in English? Well, the law exempts the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) from disclosing records or information derived from "surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities."

Since the SEC's job is to be a regulatory agency, that covers pretty much everything it does. Meaning what? Technically, the SEC – the agency charged with regulating all of our financial markets, and which now has the power to shut down businesses of any size, for any reason without going through the inconvenience of actually, you know, charging an entity or its employees with wrongdoing in a court of law and actually, you know, proving it – is now immune from having to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests. It means that only Congress and other federal agencies can find out what the SEC is doing. We unwashed proles, including the Fourth Estate (when it chooses to actually do its job and not slavishly serve the Democrat Party) can't have access to anything that the SEC does, or doesn't, do. In other words, the SEC is now unaccountable. This isn't just theoretical, either – Fox Business Network was recently refused access to SEC documents, and the SEC cited this law as the reason it could do so.

What is the practical effect? That the SEC – a regulatory agency that has by and large acted as a well-behaved lapdog for the securities industry, in the same way that the FDA has for the drug industry – can hide its failure to look into people like Bernie Madoff and “Sir” Alan Stanford, some of which looks like it was intentional (i.e. the product of bribes from the bad actors and/or pressure from interested – bribed - Congresscritters). Also, that no one can find out why such failures occurred, that no one can find out the answers to who, what, when, where and why our entire economy almost melted down a couple of years back, meaning that the tens of thousands of people responsible for our current miserable economy, (including members of Congress like Dodd and Frank, members of two Administrations like Paulson and Geithner, regulatory agencies and the Federal Reserve) will never be brought to account. At least not with any information from the SEC, which has most of it.

Meaning that it can happen again - and we'll never know about it until the next crisis when a Treasury Secretary blackmails Congress into coughing up multiple hundreds of billions (or several trillion) of our dollars, on pain of collapsing the entire world economy. Oh, sorry, not our dollars, our children's and grandchildren's dollars – we don't have any left (but please don't tell the Chinese, they might be a bit unhappy about that).

Folks, at bottom this “curious” provision in the law is all about covering up for those well-connected people who really run things, Codevilla's Ruling Class. It is about permanently codifying their place as our masters, codifying their “right” to steal us blind (including destroying their competition and political opponents) and prevent us from ever knowing what's going on or who is responsible. It is, in short, about terminating, with extreme prejudice, the very concept of transparency, let alone its practical application … and when transparency is gone, when secrecy rules, Liberty is dead. That is what is going on here. This law is one of the strongest links in our chains.

As Denninger (somewhat too gently) said, “Mr. President, you're a lying sack of crap.”

As we approach Election Day, remember that elections have consequences. A small majority of the public was so eager to get rid of the previous bunch of Keystone Kops that they didn't think about the fact that the replacement was the Capone Family. Now we'll be lucky to get rid of them, but for the sake of ourselves and our posterity we must try.