For those of you that know me, you know I have played a MMO called EVE Online for the last nine years or so, though I have taken breaks. That isn't what this post is about, but it is relevant nonetheless. In EVE Online there is a sub-set of players that are almost purely social and use that part of the game to enrich themselves in in-game terms.
They are many times genial, friendly and seemingly open, but in reality a pack of glib sociopath assholes. They are the meta-game players. They climb a social ladder in an organization just high enough to get some form of privileged access so that they can through betrayal or subversion obtain more influence and power or get more money. We all know someone like this in real life and that is what this article is about.
In reaction to this article I felt it necessary to point out that another way of describing insider trading, political intelligence gathering or any other sort of related activity is meta-gaming. It covers a whole host of situations if you just frame it all as a game. Stock picking is a game just as much as EVE Online is and is vastly more lucrative. There is nothing honest about what goes on in Wall St. company fundamentals have little to do with stock price. Rather is is how people feel about the stock. If you meet your earnings projections...that doesn't mean you did a good job, rather people feel you are adequate. If you beat projections you are stellar and if you fail to meet them you are trashed and no one cares that you still made a profit. You are being gamed. If some person gains access to the information ahead of time and uses it to leverage one position or another or several at the same time ( a gambit ) they are not just hedging but finding a way to profit based on non-public information.
This is illegal in the United States. Now WHO do you think has the most inside of insiders information? Why Those who write the rules that everyone will have to follow. That would be the United States Congress and the executive branch that enforces those laws...who also has input into how those laws are 'shaped'. They seem distinctly pyramid shaped to me.
And all one has to do is look at what former congressmen are doing now.
Tom Daschle and Trent Lott
That is just one example. Those two always appeared to be on opposite sides but in reality were simply conspiring against their respective constituents for their own enrichment. One man, William Binney, described this process in the just the NSA alone as a feeding cycle between private and public where a department would get more funding so that a dept head could later leave government and get a job at the firm he had given contracts to. And the cycle of always getting a bigger budget would perpetuate itself. This happens across all sectors of the government and when it happens in purely private industries people usually end up going to jail because it is corruption, a violation of their oaths of office and might as well be a form of mafia. But those in power act like it is just a part of doing business. So if that conspiracy is true...just follow the money.
No comments:
Post a Comment