Comment Text:
B BARNDT
159-00 Riverside Drive
New York, NY 10032-1004
November 22, 2010
Gary Gensler
Commodity Futures Trading Commission
Three Lafayette Centre
1155 21st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20581
Dear Chairman Gensler:
I am deeply concerned that the whistleblower rules the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are currently drafting will not fulfill the Congressional intent of Dodd-Frank. I am concerned that the corporate lobby will have undue influence on the final rules to protect whistleblowers.
I am particularly concerned with admissions by the SEC that their proposed rules would 'limit the pool of eligible whistleblowers,' 'reduce the number of possibly useful informants,' 'discourage some whistleblowers,'
cause 'persons not to come forward,' and result in 'forgone opportunities for effective enforcement action.' These are not the rules that Congress intended. These rules violate the law, undermine the public interest, and unequally protect property rights of Wall Street shareholders at the expense of everybody else.
The SEC proposed rules completely undermine efforts to protect employees who risk their careers to expose fraud. They also undermine property rights for the majority who cannot pay lobbyists or make manipulative campaign finance contributions and therefore cannot ensure their interests are protected by elected and appointed officials in all three branches.
Incredibly, not only does the SEC admit that their rules undermine the legal protections in Dodd-Frank, but the SEC failed to adopt recommendations of their own Inspector General on how to improve their whistleblower reward program. The SEC proposed rules are so flawed that they must be discarded in their entirety and should be replaced with rules that conform to the recommendations of the SEC Inspector General.
The CFTC should not blindly follow any of the SEC's recommendations and should instead write rules will encourage whistleblowers to report commodities fraud.
Wall Street has been a mean street for any employee who has the guts to step forward to report securities and/or commodities fraud. As a result, every American has suffered from the financial meltdown. The SEC and the CFTC must write rules that will prevent another financial disaster, ensure compliance with the law and encourage employees to risk their careers by becoming whistleblowers.
The SEC's proposed rules will have the opposite effect. You must do everything in your power to ensure that the SEC withdraws its current proposal and approves final rules that protect the public, or face the outcomes linking your name to further degeneration of the US economy and Republic. We cannot afford to have the SEC fail to detect the next Bernie Madoff, costing innocent Americans billions of dollars, or all the tools working under the next Jamie Dimon, Vikram Pandit, Henry Paulson, and Lloyd Blankfein under whose tutelage these banks created this crisis for the nation and even wiped out their own shareholders' equity, with the complicity of Federal Judges including Judge David O Carter who reversed jury judgments that would have raised the punitive risk and cost-of-doing this non-business as early as 2003!
Congress, SEC, CFTC, Justice, SCOTUS must start to do what the law now
requires: protect whistleblowers that risk their jobs to report fraud that violates property rights for millions of Americans! Or face the music when your grandfathers' surnames get dragged into history along with Nero!
Sincerely,
B BARNDT
9175174726
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