Is the Overstock.com Board Rousing From its Slumber?

Scam fighter Sam Antar has a detailed post in his blog this morning, detailing how the Investor Village Overstock.com message board has been turned into an extension of the Overstock P.R. department by selective enforcement of rules. But the really juicy stuff concerns the antisocialmedia.net corporate smear site.

Sam provides confirmation of what had been obvious for some time: Overstock's resident stalker Judd Bagley takes his marching orders from Overstock.com in running antisocialmedia.

Sam, you see, has been in touch by email with the Overstock board of directors concerning ASM. And as you can see from the post, one of Sam's emails quite obviously led to the deletion of some particularly vile reader comments from ASM, including a physical threat against myself from operators of Alpine Analytics that I have previously written about.


The Overstock board has apparently been aroused from its slumber. But not entirely, because the corporate smear site still exists.

No one can seriously dispute the ASM-Overstock connection. It is, after all, openly run (after his anonymous cover was blown by the New York Post) by the company's director of communications, the nauseating Judd Bagley.

But this demonstrates that Bagley takes his orders directly from the company in his Internet activities. That includes his obsessive stalking of Wikipedia editors who have curbed his efforts to put Overstock.com propaganda in the online encyclopedia (see this post and this one).


Just this past weekend, Bagley, posting under his Wikipedia pseudonym "WordBomb," posted on an anti-Wikipedia site what he described as IP addresses for two Wikipedia administrators he has stalked. "I am sneaky," said Bagley, in a rare moment of candor, in reference to the pretexting and spyware that he regularly utilizes. He was too sneaky for the anti-Wikipedia site, which later removed the IPs and threatened Bagley with expulsion if he continued.

The culpability for this hideous conduct lies, ultimately, not with Bagley but with Overstock.com and its lapdog board of directors.

Bagley, when hired by Overstock in August, was given the responsibility of operating a Wikipedia clone, using Wikipedia's software, called "Omuse."

Omuse has been a disaster, attracting few users and generally wasting corporate resources.

Yet here we have the operator of Omuse, stalking the volunteer editors of the real Wikipedia.

The board of directors of Overstock has a lot of work to do. But personally I wonder why anyone would serve on the board of an ethical train wreck such as this.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.



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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

Today's Double Dip of Irony

It's a hot day here on the East Coast, so I thought that it might be refreshing to dive into a double-dip, extra-creamy, delicious ice cream cone of irony.

It seems that Overstock.com, which employs a full-time cyberstalker as its director of communications -- who set up an anonymous astroturfing website to stalk his boss's opponents, and uses spyware to glom IP addresses -- this toilet bowl of a company is actually dedicated to Internet privacy.

That's right, folks, and we have it on the authority of that most reliable of sources, a press release from a company called Cenzic. The press release is entitled "Overstock.com Teams With Cenzic to Keep Customer Data Safe." It begins "To minimize the exposure of consumer data collected via its Web site, Overstock.com is teaming with Cenzic, the leading provider of application security assessment and risk management solutions, to optimize their Web security systems."

While I can understand why this release would say that "at Overstock.com customers are the number one priority" -- since, after all, the company loves its customers so much that it loses money on every sale -- I think that the assurances that "all Web site applications are resistant to hacker attacks and provide the highest level of data security" ring a bit hollow.


That's because the executive I mentioned earlier, the nauseating Judd Bagley, has boasted about using spyware, which he has planted in emails and in Internet postings, and even directed against his friends on an anti-Wikipedia website. He then uses the data to spin fairy tales on Overstock.com's antisocialmedia.net corporate smear site.

How can you trust a company to keep its customer data secure when its Director of Communications engages in such unethical, legally questionable tactics?

Indeed, one of the reasons that Bagley's make-work project, a Wikipedia wanna-be called "Omuse," has been a flop is that you can't contribute to it without giving the glassy-eyed person pictured above your credit card number. No wonder Omuse has, embarrassingly, become little more than an advertising vehicle for a few Overstock auction sellers. It remains languishing in "beta" despite a promise it would emerge from that state by now.

Anyway, let's put aside such questions for now, and savor the delicious, double-dip of irony this press release provides us. Yummy!

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

Another Naked Shorting Poster Child Succumbs

Another anti-naked-shorting poster child flamed out today.

It's called NovaStar Financial, and it's a doggy subprime lender that is a favorite stock of an ex-used-medical-equipment peddler named Phil Saunders. The stock is down 29% in aftermarket trading, after word of a disastrous fourth quarter. (It opened the following day down 41% in massive trading.) NovaStar said it expects to "recognize little if any taxable income" through the year 2011.

Gee, that's not what Phil Saunders had been saying! He was saying that this was a great company and that its shares had been hurt not by bad financials, but "stock counterfeiting."

Now, you may ask, "Why would anyone in his right mind care what some crackpot named Saunders thinks about a stock?" Well, believe it or not, lots of dimwitted small investors actually listened to this goofball -- because they think he is the "Easter Bunny."

Yup. According to the New York Post, Saunders is "Bob O'Brien," a/k/a "the Easter Bunny," the anonymous creep who is the leading propagandist of the anti-naked-shorting movement. Saunders runs the "sanitycheck.com" anti-naked shorting website, and also calls himself "manager" of the National Coaltion Against Naked Shortselling astroturf group.

Another Saunders favorite and naked shorting fantasy "victim," Overstock.com, has collapsed since Saunders starting talking up the company and serving as de facto investor relations man for its wack-a-doo CEO, Patrick Byrne.The site is linked on the Overstock.com website under the Orwellian "market reform" label.


Saunders pumped NovaStar mercilessly on message boards (spewing incoherent drivel like this), and operates a stock-pumping website called nfi-info.net, filled with the usual "stock counterfeiting" baloney alongside brainless touting of NovaStar and childish attacks on NovaStar critics (above). Some typical nfi-net misinformation can be found here. Saunders registers nfi-net through a shell company in an offshore domain server under his phony name. A lot of effort to thwart scrutiny, wouldn't you say?

Like its NFI-pumping sister site, Sanitycheck is a collection of incoherent rants and smears of NovaStar/Overstock critics, interspersed with the expertise of "experts" such as a dentist who babbles about "fails to deliver" when not filling cavities, and Mary Helburn, "executive director" of NCANS. She's the one who says that naked shorting, not crooked management, was the real problem at Enron. She's also a militant NovaStar- and Overstock-cheeerleader. (A typical pumper post from two weeks ago.)

Saunders was Overstock's primary smear-disseminator (one of many examples posted here) until that function was taken in-house by Judd Bagley, who runs Overstock's antisocialmedia.net corporate smear site. But Saunders has sat with Byrne in at least one meeting with the media, and his links to Byrne, Overstock and NovaStar need to be probed by regulators.

His smear-and-stalk tactics also deserve scrutiny. As Herb Greenberg recounts, in 2005 Saunders "went so far as to post the address and names of the wife and son of one prominent short-seller of NovaStar in a message board post, with the tag line, 'This is coming up on game over-time. Figure it out. Your playbook is known.' In another post he wrote, 'Anyone know Herb's wife's name, and his middle initial?'" He used similar tactics against Byrne's critics and members of the media, myself included.

Don't make the mistake of dismissing Saunders as just another Internet crackpot. The Motley Fool's Seth Jayson recently observed:

Senators have always been easily duped by people of his ilk regarding short selling. It's happened over and over again throughout our market's history. There are even examples of so-called short "victims" who've testified in front of this august body, who've then been implicated in the very frauds they were trying to cover up by whining about short sellers to their congressmen.

Still, nothing changes, when dangerous blowhards like Bobo get backing from certain multi-millionaires, and gather enough ears, our elected officials drop the steak knives and wine glasses, venture out of the Capital Grill for a few minutes, and blow smoke about how lousy the SEC is.

It's hard to feel sorry for people who lose money after listening to idiots like Saunders, Helburn and their ilk. Any non-institutionalized adult who would stuff his retirement account with this crap -- as per one sob story on a message board -- causing his retirement savings to decline 50%, is deserving of contempt, not sympathy.

The anti-naked shorting whack jobs, reacting to the decimation of their stock picks, are now telling the faithful that they should pull out of the "corrupt" U.S. markets. Again, anyone who follows the advice of these con men and psychos deserves every penny of losses that result.

I guess the good news is that hits on sanitycheck's whack-site have dribbled off to nothing in recent weeks, according to Alexa. The other good news is that Saunders has a ton of money invested in this ca-ca.

Perhaps he can redeploy his life savings into baloney futures?

UPDATE: Several days later, the New York Post had a great piece by Roddy Boyd describing how countless small investors were suckered into this stock via Saunders and other touts on the Investor Village message board.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.

Fight Over 'Astroturf Lobbying' is Looming

A little-noticed but very important piece of legislation is winding its way through Congress -- a measure that would shed light on the pernicious practice known as "astroturf lobbying."

I've touched on astroturf groups in the past, in the context of the phony "grassroots" anti-naked-shorting coalition -- the National Coalition Against Naked Shorting -- which is a front for foundering companies like Overstock.com, and even slimier penny stock operations. NCANS 's "executive director" has claimed that naked shorting was the "real problem" at Enron.

Last month, a provision of the Senate lobbying reform bill that would have required full disclosure of the backers of astroturf groups went down to defeat. Here is an NPR article on the subject, and an editorial in the Los Angeles Times that sets forth the issues succinctly.

The NCANS is a classic astroturf group -- an organization that gives the appearance of being a "grassroots" organization, while in fact representing narrow corporate interests. NCANS is so anxious to hide its backers that it won't even publish its address, and the fools who send it money do so via a lawyer.

Such sham organizations would wilt under the hot light of disclosure. Corporate interests ranging from Microsoft to oil and health care and insurance companies have used astroturf groups effectively. The naked shorting nutcases are the only Wall Street-related groups that I'm aware of that that have used astroturfing, and they have done so effectively.

An early provision of the Senate bill would have detailed reports from groups spending at least $25,000 on astroturfing. This was rejected on phony "free speech" grounds, and even a watered-down provision is running into opposition.

As the LA Times put it, "members of Congress have a right to know whether a campaign is the result not of a spontaneous sea change in public opinion but a professional operation. Such truth-in-packaging doesn't mean that lawmakers will disregard the outpouring of opinion on a given subject, only that they will put it in proper perspective."

Yes, members of Congress have a right to know. But so do regulatory agencies, which are at least as prone to campaigns by astroturf groups -- and the SEC's ongoing waste of resources over naked shorting is a good example of that.

Astroturfing disclosure will come up before the House of Representatives in the coming months. The House should show some guts on this issue and require full disclosure by corporate con men.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.

After the Bell: Overstock Sues Everybody

Graphic Courtesy of Wall Street Folly

Overstock.com just announced that it was suing every white male north of the Susquehana River, all of whom engaged in a conspiracy to drive down the company's stock. A press release can be found here.

"I have a fiduciary duty to defend the company. These manipulative activities have caused tremendous damage to Overstock," said Patrick Byrne, chairman and chief executive officer of Overstock.com. . . "The best way to address and solve the problem is to get it in front of a jury of 12 Californians."

The lawsuit names "[John] Does 1-100," so when I say that Overstock is suing everybody, I am not exaggerating.

Leading the distinguished roster of plaintiffs is Mary Helburn, "executive director" of the "National Coalition Against Naked Shorting" astroturf front group, a noted intellect who has contended that naked shorting was the "real problem" at Enron.

The company is announcing fourth quarter numbers on Monday, but that is just a coincidence. This is not an effort to steer Monday's conference call excuse-a-thon away from the numbers, and if anybody says so -- well, shame on them!

(The numbers turned out to be far worse than the most pessimistic estimates. Coincidence! Coincidence!)

This is not a desperate effort to generate imaginary future revenues by filing a junk lawsuit that has zero chance of success! Shame on Overlawyered.com for suggesting that!

Overlawyered.com said:

The suit alleges shenanigans on controversial practices of naked short selling, but the economic theory of price manipulation and damages is simply bogus: if the perpetually-money-losing Overstock were really worth billions more, investors would have every incentive to squeeze the short-sellers, who don't have the market power to manipulate the price.

How dare Overlawyered apply logic to the endeavors of Patrick Byrne!

Above all, shame on Jack Byrne for publicly spanking his offspring on Friday:

"I don't agree with all the flamboyant statements and reckless statements he has been making," Jack Byrne said of his son. "I have to admire he sees evil and he's not going to stop ... but it really has nothing do with Overstock."

Of course he's not going to stop! What else is he going to do? Run the company?

The comedy continues. Reruns set for A&E next season (if Overstock.com is still there).

P.S. As for that stuff about going before a "jury of 12" -- this may turn out to be a case of "be careful what you wish for, lest it come true."

UPDATE: Overstock lawsuit successful (and Reg FD be damned)!

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.

A Distinguished Person Joins the Baloney Brigade?

A reader brings to my attention that a familiar name to all fraud-watchers -- "Terry Ramsden" -- appears on the list of signatories of an SEC comment letter (see page 31, lower left column) by the astroturf group the "National Coalition Against Naked Short-Selling."

Is this one of them "weird coincidences" or has the famous British fraudster, gambler and ex-bond trader joined the anti-shorting conspiracy nuts (or as I call 'em, the "baloney brigade")?

If this is the Terry Ramsden and not a coinkydink or a fake (as are most of the "1100 aroused citizens" on the list, I suspect) it would just be another indication of the pedigree of the people behind the anonymous "stock counterfeiting" websites and "organizations."

Of course, I suppose the anti-shorting forces might not view the distinguished Mr. Ramsden as a fraudster at all. The executive director of the NCANS, Mary Helburn, has said that naked shorting was the "real" problem at Enron. Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne recently made similar comments in a radio interview -- sentiments that, I think, pretty well sum up the agenda of these characters.

UPDATES:

• Note the comment to this item from James Brownfield. He argues persuasively that this is the real Mr. Ramsden, based on his association with an eminent Baloney Brigadier.
  Also I should point out that a certain Texas basketball team owner and journalism-defiler has written extensively about said business associations.
• Another reader points out that a prominent penny stock promoter, Francois Goelo, spoke up in favor of the Baloney Brigade in this 1999 SEC comment letter on naked shorting restrictions. He finished his missive by saying "Keep up the good work!" The SEC, suitably encouraged, went on to enact rules that restrict the only market mechanism that restrains overpriced stocks.

© 2006 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.

Annals of Baloney (continued)

Today is the end of the "comment period" for a Securities and Exchange Commission rule proposal on "fails to deliver" securities -- the central obsession of naked shorting conspiracy nuts. (The "baloney brigade," as I called 'em in my book.)

The "National Coalition Against Naked Short Selling," an "astroturf" (phony grassroots) group pushing the agenda of penny stock promoters and CEOs of foundering companies, has been busy as the deadline approached.

As I observed the other day, the NCANS sent the Securities and Exchange Commission an anonymous comment letter on the SEC rulemaking, pushing its "stock counterfeiting scandal" crusade. As you can see from perusing the NCANS letter, the "evidence" for the "scandal" consists of a jumble of statistics but without a single instance of any actual company hurt by any such thing.

If you're going to write a 23-page letter you can site one example, I would guess. Right?

So I was looking forward to seeing that evidence when the anonymous NCANS said on its various anonymous websites it has got 1,100 actual people to send in their signatures to the SEC. I said to myself, "Surely these people are going to scribble in a note about what happened to them!"

But when I saw what the NCANS was sending in, all I saw were signatures below a statement saying that "The undersigned have been negatively affected by delivery failures of equity securities in the U.S. markets, and by the crediting of security entitlements in quantities far in excess of the issued securities they claim to represent."

Just name and address. No space for "what happened" or "what stock I owned that got counterfeited or naked shorted or stuff."

So they still haven't provided a single example of a company being hurt by "stock counterfeiting" or "naked short selling."

Don't you think that if 1,100 people were "negatively affected" by something they could say exactly how they were "negatively affected"?

© 2006 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.

Keeping His Eye on the Ball

Nobody can say that Overstock.com chief executive/conspiracy theorist/journalist-taunter/short-and-analyst-suer/"miscreant"-blamer Patrick Byrne isn't keeping his eye on the ball.

While his company limps along, Byrne has his eye keenly focused on what matters -- naked you-know-what.

He has filed a comment letter with the Securities and Exchange Commission on the evils of same, with numerous attachments. A copy can be perused here, right below "anonymous individual investor, Florida." A lot of these comments are anonymous, in keeping with the paranoia of the Baloney Brigades astroturf campaign.

© 2006 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.

Annals of Astroturf

A useful phrase has emerged in the world of political discourse -- the "astroturf" organization. Astroturf is fake grass, so the term neatly depicts fake organizations that describe themselves as "grassroots" to hide a corporate agenda. (Here's one example: an alleged front group for big telcos.)

Running a phony grassroots organization is problematic, because one must hide one's backing and corporate agenda. Wall Street's version of the astroturf organization, the NCANS ("National Coalition Against Naked Shortselling") had found a solution! This self-described "grassroots organization" discloses absolutely nada about itself, other than its name.

Take this Securities and Exchange Commission rulemaking comment letter, filed the other day by the NCANS. Interesting letterhead, isn't it? No address. No phone number. Unlike a previous NCANS comment letter, it wasn't even signed by the NCANS's paranoid minister of propaganda, the pseudonymous sicko "Bob O'Brien." And if you are unwise enough to give 'em money, you've got to send it to a lawyer's escrow account.

Why the secrecy? Since the NCANS fights the good fight for CEOs of money-losing companies and penny stock cons who want to shift blame for their failures -- well, I think it's pretty obvious. But it's not so obvious to the SEC, which has diverted its scarce resources from real fraud to pander to these anonymous screwballs. Or to the more vacuous members of Congress and state regulators who have done the same.

A good example is the SEC rulemaking in which the NCANS filed its recent missive. That involved revisions to the SEC's rules on "fails to deliver," which the NCANS has been anxious to use as a red herring to preoccupy investors in failed companies. The clueless SEC has played along.

If you browse through the comment letters on the SEC site, you will find not a single instance of a real investor being hurt by naked short-selling, not from the naked shorting movement's paid shills and, of course, not from the "small investors" posting comments (some of whom are no doubt real people). What you see is a lot of meaningless statistics and some people trying to find a scapegoat for their own poor judgment.

One thing I find interesting is how the naked-shorting goofballs describe themselves as attempting to "protect the investor." They remind me of some malware that recently infected a friend's computer, disguised as a "spyware defense." It showed up on his desktop and was hard to get rid off. Persistent, annoying and dishonest -- just like the anti-shorting nuts. It's a shame that some decent people are swallowing whole their baloney.

The SEC should take a lead role in putting an end to this nonsense, and not perpetuating it. If the good people of that agency want an idea of how ludicrous the naked shorting hysteria has become, I have a suggestion: They should read those comment letters.

Don't just write them off as crackpots, folks. If just one investor makes a bad decision because of the naked shorting campaign, that's one too many.

UPDATE: For an example of how state governments are pandering to the naked shorting astroturfers, see this SEC comment from the state of Utah -- always working hard to protect its crummier public companies at the expense of people who buy their stock.

A week after this item appeared, the embarassed baloney brigadiers sent in the letter with an actual person's signature -- but still no address. The NCANS website's "whois" information, likewise, contains no address information. Makes you wonder why an "organization" would go to such lengths to avoid people knocking on its door.

© 2006 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.

Naked Came the Hullabaloo

The latest naked shorting hullabaloo has to be the most bizarre I've seen -- a spate of postings on various Baloney Brigade websites touting a massive "stock counterfeiting" conspiracy involving an obscure OTC stock called Global Links.

The thesis is that "ten times" the number of shares outstanding in this dreadful little company were "counterfeited." The "evidence" is the usual hocus-pocus -- failed-delivery data that proves absolutely nothing and never does. In this case the data are distorted by more reverse splits than you could see at the gymastic competition in the 1960 Olympiad.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is being smeared right and left for a "cover up." My attitude is "serves 'em right."

Time and again the SEC has kowtowed to these loonies, and has failed to expose this fraudulent "market reform" movement for the fraud that it is. It's what is known in politics as an "astroturf" movement -- a phony "grass roots" campaign that actually carries water for excuse-seeking CEOs and pump-and-dump scam artists.

So the SEC is being slammed. Good. That is what I call "reaping what you sow."

© 2006 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.

The Real Mess at Enron -- Naked Shorting, Of Course!

I promised myself that I could let at least one day go by without saying anything about the wild and (literally) crazy naked-shorting cult, but .... well, I can't resist. They are fascinating in a grotesque way, and attract interest the way people crowd around a traffic accident.

Anyway, a reader brings to my attention what is actually a very typical message on a Yahoo stock message board from Mary Helburn, who is executive director of something called the National Coalition Against Naked Shorting.

After first noting a report of supposed naked shorting in UAL stock in 2002 (shortly before it went bankrupt), she went on to point out that everything you have read is wrong. Enron and other major corporate disasters of recent years were all victims of naked short-selling:

It isn't just UAL. It is any company that has bad news.. CPN, DAL, Enron...

This is the tip of the iceberg.... and it is all coming out..

They prey on small caps that they can manipulate and large caps under stress. They sell,sell, sell and make it look like it was all the company when it was really naked short selling. Wall Street, hedge funds, brokerages, do not want this out for the public to know. [Emphasis added]

Enron shareholders should be collecting from the brokerages for their losses.

M.

CPN was the stock symbol of Calpine Corp. and DAL was Delta Airlines -- both of which wound up in bankruptcy after years of well-publicized corporate woes. Or at least, that is what "they" wanted you to think. That it was the company. It wasn't! It was them! Them! Themmmmmm!

Another message board poster tried unsuccessfully to reason with Helburn. . .

Do you really think UAL could have sold some shares in a secondary at $5 to pull it out of its debt death spiral, but was prevented from doing so by abusive shorting causing its stock to go to 30 cents?

That isn't what happened. There was abusive shorting, but the stock went worthless because the business went bankrupt due to debt overcome by massive operational losses.

You are mixing 2 separate issues together, Mary, and I cannot understand why you continue to do so.

. . . but she held her ground.

Remember, this is typical -- a mainstream example of the rubbish disseminated by the Baloney Brigade.

To answer the gentleman's question, there's a simple explanation why the Baloney Brigade "continues to do so," generating this pap day after day: It is all they have.

There is no naked shorting scandal, only paranoid fantasies. Deprived of facts, all they are left with is fiction -- and it would be funny if these bozos weren't so influential with our regulators and lawmakers.

UPDATE: A reader points me toward another manifestation of this effort to slap "naked shorting" on every financial scandal of recent years, this one appearing on the "blog" of a Baloney Brigadier named Dave Patch. On Feb. 13 (a Friday, perhaps?) he posted a rambling essay devoted to explore that Enron-as-shorting victim theory.

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Wall Street Versus America will be published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.

Cox on Phony Journalists

SEC chairman Chris Cox, quoted by Reuters tonight, says that the agency is working on subpoena guidelines for journalists. He then makes the following pointed observation:

He said the commissioners had discussed the problem of defining who is and is not truly a journalist. "There are people masquerading as journalists who really aren't. That's a concern," he said. He said the guidelines would concern only the news media and no one else.

This is indeed a concern. The "sanitycheck" website, promoted by Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne on CNBC yesterday, bills itself as an "independent" website that likes to say that it engages in "journalism." But if you follow Byrne's advice and go there, you see that it is run anonymously by an individual who hides behind a phony name while he promotes several companies, Overstock among them. One of its primary functions is to slander and intimidate journalists who fall afoul of those companies.

That's not "journalism" by any stretch of the imagination. Time for the SEC to take action against this fraudulent website and its scummy operators and hidden backers.

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Wall Street Versus America will be published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.