While there are people dancing in the streets about Madoff getting 150 years (they are now homeless, because of this cretin who stole their life savings) we haven’t yet seen one regulator nailed to the same cross.

Why not?

Herein lies the fundamental problem with our current financial system: it’s all one big con game.

Without putting some sort of restrictions on speculation, which is what 99.99% of the stock market is now, and huge amounts of volume being traded daily, there is zero connection to actual business goals and objectives.

Business is no longer about making money and paying dividends to the owners, it’s about manipulating stock prices so that paper wealth can be created, and huge sums skimmed off the top by the people running the casino, oops, I mean markets.

Madoff may be in prison, but somehow, we’re still allowing “legitimate crooks” to get paid millions per year, while running companies into the ground just like Madoff did. And, our politicians are barking up the wrong tree.

Take our esteemed crooked Congressman, Mike Turner.

His latest move-

U.S. Rep. Michael Turner, R-Centerville, has introduced a constitutional amendment that would bar the federal government from owning stock in companies, his office announced this week.

Coined “Preserving Capitalism in America” the constitutional amendment would preserve the government’s right to provide loans or to acquire equity interests in any public authority or public use corporation, as well as investments by any government pension fund.

via Turner seeks to bar government intervention – Dayton Business Journal:.

I’ll translate for those of you who are missing the point: instead of banning the use of your hard-earned tax dollars to prop up these crooks running corporations into the ground at a record pace, Turner wants to continue to give them money in the form of bailouts and “economic development” funds- corporate welfare, without taking an equity position.

Turner is all for giving your tax dollars away.

The insane part, he supposedly has 102 co-sponsors to this piece of crap legislation.

It’s time to install strict controls on stock ownership, forcing anyone with over 1% ownership, or over $100,000 in one company to hold the stock for at least a year. It’s also time to create strict limits on executive pay, clearly stating the maximum pay allowed based on average payroll, number of US-based employees, and net worth of the company. If you want to pay yourself more as CEO, take the company private. Shareholders would be paid dividends on anything above and beyond the ratio, unless they vote to reinvest in the company. Any CEO who cuts his workforce, or has a loss, gets paid zero. There has to be risk to be a CEO.

There is only one place for our current crop of legislators who aren’t calling for the arrest and prosecution of both the regulators and the thieves who have paid themselves so well while failing so fantastically. In a cell, right next to Bernie.

Then we can get started on constitutional amendments.