The greatest theft in human history (part 1)

by Darby Jones

Naked shorting is killing America.

I stacked this one against the 10 largest thefts in human history as my measuring stick.¹ At a trillion dollars, it sits around #7, just above Nazi looting of occupied Europe and below Soviet collectivization.

Big claims, so here’s the simple version.

If naked shorting were baseball bets

Imagine a betting ring. Legal bookies exist, they take bets, they pay out, everybody plays by the rules. A criminal syndicate called the Network figures out they can print fake betting slips and flood the market. Suddenly, there are way more bets against your team (the Reds) than real bettors ever placed. The odds crater. Investors panic. The Network buys your team for pennies, installs coaches to throw games, then sells the insider info to other gamblers who bet against the franchise. The Reds bleed out in broad daylight.

That’s naked short selling. Print, dump, profit, except the Network is real. It’s your government and their banker friends. They’re all addicted to the same game. Nobody’s robbing the bank. The bank is robbing you.

Our criminal overlords consist of U.S. and European governments, along with their financial regulators, plus their federal banking cronies (Citi, Lynch, Wells, JP, TD, BoA, BNP, etc.).

The legal version

Shorting a stock is a bet that a company will fail. Speculators borrow shares, sell them at today’s price, wait for the drop, buy them back cheap, return the shares, and pocket the difference. Sounds shady, but it’s pretty healthy (if we lived in a free market). Smart analysts basically spot garbage companies, then send the above signals to all of us lowly retail investor noobs, so that we don’t throw our life savings away – so we don’t lose our shorts (half-pants in this analogy).

The catch is you have to actually borrow the shares first. If you’re already lost, push through. You don’t have to understand it to get the big picture.

The criminal version

Naked short selling skips the borrowing. Shady bankers are selling shares that they don’t have. See “sources” at the bottom for a visual explanation.²

Naked shorts are essentially fake betting slips or “phantom” stocks xeroxed out of thin air and dumped on the market, making it look like smart money is abandoning ship. Stock tanks. Panic spreads. The company can’t raise capital. And the Network is already waiting at the bottom to buy the org up at an incredible discount.

For 20+ years, JP Morgan, Chase, and a roster of major global banks have been accused of running this scheme against U.S. companies, siphoning what litigators estimate at over $1 trillion from American investors, businesses, and Uncle Sam. (Harrington Global v. CIBC, S.D.N.Y. 2022).³ Researchers put the real global number at multiple trillions. Nobody knows exactly, and that’s by design. The data that would settle it sits locked inside the DTCC. They’re a clearinghouse that settles U.S. stock deals … which is owned by the banks running the scheme.

Convenient.

Why doesn’t the SEC Stop It?

The “cop” assigned to bust the criminal bookies wrote the gambling laws himself, full of holes.

Market makers (the banks’ trading tentacles) get a special exemption from borrowing shares before shorting. Official reason: liquidity. It’s supposed to help speed up complex transactions. Actual result: a get-out-of-jail-free card for industrial-scale counterfeiting. They partially closed the loophole in 2008.

Partially, but an army of lawyers can easily get around it.

The other trick is geography. When a fake position (betting slip) is about to get flagged for not existing, the bank ships the contract overseas to a European sister bank before the clock runs out. Crossing the Atlantic can reset the timer, so phantom shares stay in circulation. Now repeat the process until you’re stupid rich.

Europe technically bans naked shorting of their own stocks, but there’s NO tracking and NO reporting for American stocks. Nothing. This loophole means Europe is perfectly fine bleeding American companies dry.

Europe is killing America, and the incentives continue.

The SEC and Europe’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) didn’t technically “legalize” naked shorting. They just wrote the rules full of holes and developed a profound interest in looking the other way.

Cronyism + Capitalism = CRAPitalism.

Hollywood accidentally wrote the Network’s confession in 1976. Nobody listened.

“There are no nations. There are no peoples. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet.” ~ Arthur Jensen, Network (1976)

We didn’t know it at the time, but Network turned out to be a documentary.

How naked shorting kills U.S. companies

Once naked short sellers tank the stock, they buy a controlling stake for pennies. Then they buy board seats, fire competent executives, and install moles to make terrible decisions. Remember when Toys R Us decided in the ‘90s that it was a bad idea to invest in the internet? That was new management.

Naked as jaybirds.

Then the moles sell their insider info to other short sellers who make billions off the slow death of American companies. Employees get laid off. Families are wrecked.

Joe puts a gun to his head, so Tarquin can put another house in the Hamptons.

Tarquin /ˈtɑːrkwɪn/: A man who’s never created anything of value, but owns everything anyway.

When the little guys fight back

GameStop and AMC are the exceptions that proved the rule. We found out, held our shares, bought more stock, and forced the banks to cover fake bets at full price. They lost billions. It was glorious.

Occasionally, they get caught with their shorts around their ankles and settle out of court for tens of millions – pocket change for banks. Overstock.com squeezed a few pennies back from Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.

So we slap them on the wrist, elect their friends into regulatory positions, and the Network keeps spreading its tentacles into your wallet. The same banks that own the Fed are also running the scheme. More government won’t fix this – they’re already in bed together. More regulation gives them more moles, more blanket immunity.

Politicians don’t care because:

1. It’s above their IQ.
2. They’re in on it.
3. Whistleblowing is dangerous.

This may not be safe for me, but I’ve had a good life, so what the hell. Truth is more important than safety. If I have a mysterious “weightlifting accident,” the truth will live on in the revolution.

We’ll never be free until we end the Federal Reserve. End the cartel. Return sound money and sovereignty to the people. It doesn’t have to be bloody. There are simple solutions.

What actually works

Reduce power. Increase punishment at the individual level. Kill corporate law that lets executives commit crimes without personal consequences. Fines for illegal profit shouldn’t be slaps on the wrist.

South Korea enforced 100% clawback (full payment for stolen funds) plus prison for individuals. Fraud dropped because evil individuals finally had skin in the game. Funny how that works.

Blockchain for the derivatives market eliminates the overseas shell game. You can’t reset a timer on a public immutable ledger. Overstock.com has already proven that blockchain prevents naked shorting. This is why the future loves crypto. Better get some Bitcoin now. #GoodTechSaves

Vote with your wallet

Boycott the glafia (global mafia)

JP Morgan Chase / Citi / Citadel Securities / Goldman Sachs / Merrill Lynch / Wells Fargo / Bank of America / TD Bank / UBS / BNP Paribas / HSBC / Credit Suisse … and Robinhood, which halted trading during the GameStop squeeze to protect glafia banks from retail investors who were sucking them dry. They named themselves after the guy who robbed the rich to give to the poor.

The audacity.

Political culprits: The Federal Reserve / SEC / FCA / DTCC and every politician who isn’t screaming at the top of their lungs.

My primary source is dense enough to make your eyes bleed. It’s a two-hour read with 215 sources.⁴ Proves everything … if you can stomach the banking jargon or death by a 1,000 acronyms. This is the Reader’s Digest version.

The biggest theft in human history

Next week, we’ll tackle #1: Quantitative Easing (QE) a.k.a. “printing” money out of thin air. Since printing is expensive, they literally add zeroes to their ledger — much easier. Americans have lost $350 Trillion to this bad boy. The average worker making $60,000 per year has lost $3.5MM over their 40-year career.

If each of us had that cool $3.5MM in our pockets, we wouldn’t be screaming at the Left or Right about whatever distraction the Network feeds us. It’s not that Left and Right issues don’t matter. They do. It’s just that our supposed saviors are ripping us off, bought by the real villains, and will never fix the root of the problem … themselves.

Take a look at the list below. We have wars, empires, gulags – but the fractional reserve banking system, running continuously since 1913, beats everything else on the list by nearly 8 times. Our government “saviors” did this.

The naked shorts are #7. The guys running #7 are the same guys running #1.

Same Network. Bigger racket. Looting our moms since 1913.

Etienne de la Boetie2 at the Art of Liberty Foundation, did the forensic accounting on #1. If this piece made your blood boil, his will make you scream. You’ve gotta get mad, before hope can happen.

“I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!!!”

The classic 1976 film, Network, poetically captures the culture war. But we’re not divided because we disagree. We’re divided because division is profitable for the people at the top of that list. Your neighbor didn’t steal your purchasing power. Your brother-in-law didn’t rig the derivatives market, so stop squabbling with each other.

This is my silver lining. I’m including this essay in my Headlines of Hope newsletter, so that we can all unite, so we can come TOGETHER and defeat the beast. It starts with a revolution of the mind, with flawed ideas that we put through the gauntlet of public debate. Ideas manifest into action, into peaceful protest. We then A/B test different ideas on small portions of the population. Rinse. Repeat. Refine. Scale. This is how progress works.

Stop looking to the right or left. Look up at the enemy pulling the strings.

And please don’t kill me. I love life.

I’m not dead. I feel happy!

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