It's about time that our regulators stop looking the other way - and start really regulating. I hope this becomes a permanent trend.

But where were they when Bear Stearns, Lehman & Maddoff were raking in, and laundering out billions in hedge funds?

That was the time when the regulators should really regulate. Where were the regulators looking?

CEO and executive "compensation" is looting. It is done under the guise of capitalism when it is really nothing more than criminal racketeering. A CEO pays, in reality “pays-off”, the board of directors (CEOs of other companies) with large annual sums of money to sit in a few meetings and vote each other tens and hundreds of millions of dollars a year in compensation. This procedure for stealing is protected by our laws. It’s a rigged, formally documented, proceduralized process for stealing on a grand scale by the rich. The rich use their money to “support” politicians who won’t outlaw this kind of thievery. Unregulated and uncontrolled capitalism is the way rich people transfer wealth from the many to the few. The list of CEO and executive forms of stealing is only virtually unlimited and mostly hidden. Insider trading, fraudulent annual reports, fraudulent accounting practices are the tip of the iceberg.

When a common criminal robs a convenience store our police rightfully go after them. If caught, they are prosecuted and punished because that kind of stealing is against our laws. But CEOs are allowed to steal by the millions, if not billions, because we have no laws against the way they stealing.

Our political leaders need to stop worshipping business people and recognize the CEO and executive “compensation system” for what it really is: massive stealing.

Corporate governance is an oxymoron. Shareholder voting should be as anonymous and transparent as the voting for our political leaders. Shareholders don’t vote because they know their votes are known to people in power.

New laws need to be enacted that gives our government the authority to DISGORGE past ill-gotten gains from the rich. Our government should be able to go back twenty years and disgorge stolen money from these greedy thieves.

And as soon as we get through with the people at Bank Of America, let's run the people at the SEC in front of a grand jury.

All three of these posts are dead on, corporate policy is legal steeling. I vote against every company's proposals and for shareholder input on executive compensation and I never win. They have it stacked against the shareholders and we can never find out if any of our proposals are enacted. You can't even find honest vote tabulations from the companies hired by the corporations for that purpose. When the truth about what really go's on in those shareholder voting proxy's the stock market will crash and it will ruin the financial system worldwide. That is why we will never get real financial reform, they feel it is better to pay them off to keep it quiet.

FINALLY.

An honest Judge who is going to hold individuals responsible for their actions. Now, if the electorate could get this message out to the rest of Government, including the corporate pimps in Congress, we could really reform the financial system and get the crooks out of the executive suite.

What makes anyone believe the SEC will actually seek meaningful damages or convictions in the case of criminal behavior? The judge should order the case moved to the Department of Justice.

Yikes - Marine Vet you are so on target (or is it that i just agree w/ everything I have read -which i must admit is not a lot but i will read more, i promise). Have i mentioned on here to name drop a bit that i have danced w/ General Westmoreland in his son Rip's kitchen in Park Slope. The General was a most wonderful dancing partner. His wife sat at the kitchen table and cheered us on. I told my son about it about a year later and my son Jonah (who happens to be the point man for South East Asia in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and w/ whom I shared a sense of humor until most recently - wink wink here - i do wish we had the little icons from imming) said: "Mom you tell all this crap and this is really interesting!" Jonah is a progressive. He went to Cambodia and photographed waterboarding tortue in the Cambodian Museum of Torture - or something like that. It was reported by Corn in the Nation and Biden told Imus about it b4 the PC folks got Imus off the air. Oops i am so digressing even for me.

Anyway i think Marine Vet is great! You go guy! Bette Folkenflik