Brad, you are ALL OVER THESE FUCKERS!

That is ILLEGAL!!! Slammer-time!!!

...and anyone who doesn't think insiders are in the process of doing the same thing with all stocks in general, during this economy crash they're not reporting on in the CMSM, well...just look at THIS article!

Make $$$ going up & down!!! Only insiders can do that, remember the 9/11 "put options" on airlines? Nothing to see THERE!!! Right??? Lucky guess on the airlines!!!

These insiders should be fully prosecuted like Martha Stewart, although they are probably WHITE MEN...so it won't happen.

My congratulations and gratitude on some excellent investigative journalism. Let us keep the pressure on these abusive and irresponsible manufacturers to the greatest extent possible.

Has anyone brought up the matter of this fishy sell-off with the SEC? The best way to get the SEC acting on something like this is to get one of your senators to ask them to pay attention. Otherwise, stuff brought up by members of the general public is very slow to be addressed. (Say, six months from now you get a form response to your initial letter and then nothing at all unless you give them another letter to take six months to respond to.) This isn't just something to write about, report on. It is something to make certain does not escape the notice of authorities. Just the fact of analysts and journalists having the story usually does not prove to be enough, and the ones in the business are, of course, loath to move on this sort of thing. Right here is a means for activists to act. Saying, writing, commenting doesn't get it done.

I have entirely too much experience with precisely this. If you want the government to work on this sort of thing, you have to be a relentless presence. They're too busy avoiding everything they don't absolutely have to address, for fear of actual accomplishment, which is THE danger zone for all bureaucrats and politicians. So you need as much information and documentation as possible, and you have to be someone they cannot safely ignore. A senator is ideal.

Doesn't matter that they're already under investigation for other stuff either. If you want them investigated for this, you have to sit on the SEC. They will not be sat on by peons without sponsorship by someone on whom they can blame such actual fulfillment of their job responsibilities. Horrifying, I know, but this is how it goes.

Of course, any Diebold shareholders have standing to get their attention in court....

Hurricane Dean Projected path

Sounds like Harken Oil to me...

Nothing happened at your link for me, Flo, so here is another link for the projected path as against historical hurricane trajectories, and I'm really wondering what makes them think Dean will just continue on through Mexico, with all that history that says the contrary....

[Oh, just tried it on Firefox and it's a Howard Dean joke... very cute....]

Now might be a good time to point out the following article by Dawn Kopecki in Business Week Online on May 23rd,2006:

INTELLIGENCE CZAR CAN WAIVE SEC RULES
Now, the White House's top spymaster can cite national security to exempt businesses from reporting requirements
May 23, 2006, By Dawn Kopecki, Business Week Online & MSNBC

President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye.

Unbeknownst to almost all of Washington and the financial world, Bush and every other President since Jimmy Carter have had the authority to exempt companies working on certain top-secret defense projects from portions of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. Administration officials told BusinessWeek that they believe this is the first time a President has ever delegated the authority to someone outside the Oval Office. It couldn't be immediately determined whether any company has received a waiver under this provision.

The timing of Bush's move is intriguing. On the same day the President signed the memo, Porter Goss resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency amid criticism of ineffectiveness and poor morale at the agency. Only six days later, on May 11, USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had obtained millions of calling records of ordinary citizens provided by three major U.S. phone companies. Negroponte oversees both the CIA and NSA in his role as the administration's top intelligence official.
FEW ANSWERS. White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino said the timing of the May 5 Presidential memo had no significance. "There was nothing specific that prompted this memo," Perino said.

In addition to refusing to explain why Bush decided to delegate this authority to Negroponte, the White House declined to say whether Bush or any other President has ever exercised the authority and allowed a company to avoid standard securities disclosure and accounting requirements. The White House wouldn't comment on whether Negroponte has granted such a waiver, and BusinessWeek so far hasn't identified any companies affected by the provision. Negroponte's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Securities-law experts said they were unfamiliar with the May 5 memo and the underlying Presidential authority at issue. John C. Coffee, a securities-law professor at Columbia University, speculated that defense contractors might want to use such an exemption to mask secret assignments for the Pentagon or CIA. "What you might hide is investments: You've spent umpteen million dollars that comes out of your working capital to build a plant in Iraq," which the government wants to keep secret. "That's the kind of scenario that would be plausible," Coffee said.

AUTHORITY GRANTED. William McLucas, the Securities & Exchange Commission's former enforcement chief, suggested that the ability to conceal financial information in the name of national security could lead some companies "to play fast and loose with their numbers." McLucas, a partner at the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr in Washington, added: "It could be that you have a bunch of books and records out there that no one knows about."

The memo Bush signed on May 5, which was published seven days later in the Federal Register, had the unrevealing title "Assignment of Function Relating to Granting of Authority for Issuance of Certain Directives: Memorandum for the Director of National Intelligence." In the document, Bush addressed Negroponte, saying: "I hereby assign to you the function of the President under section 13(b)(3)(A) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended."

A trip to the statute books showed that the amended version of the 1934 act states that "with respect to matters concerning the national security of the United States," the President or the head of an Executive Branch agency may exempt companies from certain critical legal obligations. These obligations include keeping accurate "books, records, and accounts" and maintaining "a system of internal accounting controls sufficient" to ensure the propriety of financial transactions and the preparation of financial statements in compliance with "generally accepted accounting principles."

So, given the broad definition of "national security", umpteen corporations, including Diebold, can get away with not reporting accurately to their shareholders!

Now the question is, does Negroponte still hold this power, or did it pass on to the new Intelligence Director?

Or will Bush's SEC just drop it, like they did for him when he dumped his Harken shares?

Barbara

Interesting questions, but I don't think the reporting bears on whether or not anyone can be held accountable for inside trading.... And, in general, agencies will indeed just drop what isn't popular with their bosses unless a great deal of pressure is applied to prevent that. It really does come down to a raw battle of wills most of the time, and criminals always seem to have more will than the rest of us. They never are stopped until we get the will and keep it.

I've got the will --- I just keep writing and posting and commenting and calling and pointing and informing --- to rally the will of more people!

There's always value in rallying the people!

But, I meant for each thing you/we want them to address, to investigate, to get prosecuted, someone/s has/have to be sitting on the actual people inside the actual agency and not letting up until you/we get satisfaction. Otherwise we end up being sound and fury signifying nothing. It took me a long time to grok this point, that for all my calling and petitioning and stumping, nothing was gonna go my way until I was right in the middle of the actual battle, with the actual authorities. My whole county was up in arms, in flames, with indignation over the matter I ended up making the authorities address, and they absolutely would not have dealt with it had I not dropped everything and fought the fraudsters at every bureaucratic turn with the actual SEC lawyers in charge of that gig.

I was appalled down to my toenails, but there it is. All we're doing is making a lot of satisfying noise unless we get down to that kind of work. And that is what these criminals are relying on when they undertake this in-yer-face criminal activity. They know we will bellow our fool heads off, but they also can bank on us not getting down to that level to fight them. It's mostly because very few of us yet believe we actually have to go in and do our legislators' and government officals' jobs for them. We so seriously actually do, Barbara.

It'll be interesting to see if this will even be a blip on the radar, considering how their extremist attacks against democracy hardly registered with the Overwhelmingly Fascist Media of the mainstream.

Well, that's what I'm talking about, Adam. If someone doesn't personally take enough offense at this possible insider trading, say, to get the information and evidence to the SEC, and the FBI/USA axis, to insist and keep insisting that it be investigated and prosecuted, it doesn't even matter if the fascist media has made a peep about it. They could be hollering to the rafters about it too and nothing would happen unless SOMEONE actually went in and made sure of it. We keep thinking that all it takes is enough people to know about this stuff for them to redress the wrongs. Not so. It actually boils down to someone sitting on the proper authority till it happens, and they won't even let you be the one sitting unless you've gotten someone important to tell them to let you.

I had to make my case to Dianne Feinstein, who called the appropriate supervisory person at the SEC and told them to deal with me. I had to take my files in to the FBI to get some prosecution for banking fraud, and it turned out I needed her to have interceded with the USA's office too because they found a flimsy excuse not to prosecute, even though I had prevailed at the SEC and had given ironclad proof of banking fraud to the FBI. They always outlast you unless you go outright postal on them and do not let up, even after you think you've done everything.

In fact, the statute on banking fraud is, I think, ten years... so maybe I have another year to get Feinstein or Boxer to take this up with the USA. But most people think the perps have suffered enough from years of civil litigation because of it. I don't.

Anyway, I guess I'm screaming to Brad, and to everyone, that this is where activists have to actually take action, actually act, or it's not activism anymore; it's something else.

Wow, I can't help but wonder if therealrobp, aka Diebold's Robert Pelletier (Wally O'Diebold here at Bradblog), sold stock!?!?!

PLEASE DO NOT GO HERE and leave him a comment asking him if he sold his stock or not. We don't even know if he still has a job with Diebold...OOPS, Premiere, or not.

Again, just to make sure I was absolutely clear, please don't go HERE (furiosity.com) and leave a comment asking him things. Clearly, since he deleted all his older stuff last June and started the site over, he must be really depressed or something.

Yes, seriously, PLEASE DO NOT GO THERE. The world is ugly enough already. That guy is a severe bummer. The last thing we need is to incite more crap from him. Really bad idea.

Plunger!

Glad to see you've branched out into the visual arts! I think you should make a playlist of the videos so you can make a comment with one link in it. That way the software won't hold up your posts, and blog administrators won't be alerted to approve or delete your comment.

Rats scurrying from a sinking ship, yelling "Die boldly" as they go.

I can't imagine anybody in the Bush DoJ punishing them.

At least we've gotten rid of some. Now, let's get rid of the rest.

Back in the early months of 2004, when CA Sec of State McPherson was getting the sales spiel from these companies to buy buy buy, I wrote his office, Gov. Schwarzenegger's office, and the San Fran Chron with my concerns about our then roll-over-and fork-out-the-money Sec of State's decision-making around this. I never got a single reply, ever, from McPherson's staff, Schwarzenegger's staff wrote back to say it wasn't their problem so take it to the Sec of State's ofc, and the SFChron's editorial board was acting as if this was a non-issue, by not really reporting on it and not including letters to the ed about it.

I then wrote Woolsey and complained to her about this "who's on first" runaround. She at least wrote back to say that elections fell under the jurisdiction of the states, but that she would be keeping an eye on it. So I wrote her back and said that while elections may be the states' business, the decision to allocate all this money via HAVA was a national legislative decision, and I encouraged her to make this more of a national issue. I also wrote to Feinstein and Boxer to let them know what had occurred around my citizen inquiries, and that I felt that our national level legislators needed to take a better interest in how the HAVA money they had allocated was being spent.

In my letters to everyone, inc. the Sec of State, I compared what I saw happening with these electronic voting machine companies to what had happened to Californians in the Enron debacle, and shame on them to sit back and let the same ruse happen all over again, before even a blink of an eye had transpired.

Well, Brad. All of my hunches are coming true. You rock!

Add 1" thick sisal, a tall tree, and a horse ready to gallop to a Diebold manager and what do you get?

A hanging chad.

Its not clear whether these were last minute "oh shit" trades, or whether these were trades planned 6 months ahead of time as part of a normal insider trading 'planned transation'.

Information about insider trading (both legal and illegal).
http://www.money-zine.co...der-Trading-Information/

Just because they sold a lot of stock several days before a big blow to the company doesn't mean they did it illegally or even unethically. They might have reported 6 months ago that they planned to sell X shares on that date... which would be hard to argue they did it illegally.

Disillusioned

I don't even think they could duck it that way, since they appear to have prepared this spinoff company last September. Pretty flimsy to try to say in court that they hadn't been planning this for when things would go south since they clearly were, and they were in charge of when they did the spinoff. They knew Debra Bowen was likely to win back then, and they also knew exactly what her deadlines would be for fulfilling her campaign promises then too. So maybe even especially if they placed the orders that long ago these would still be suspect trades.

Get word out before the corporate controlled madia out-lets can ignore our right to VOTE.W/O proper oversight
by the very people we elected,this misuse of our voting rights and our election process will occur again
if we let it.Forgive me,but is this not government of
the people by the people for people ? Or is it instead,
government of the corporations by the corporations for
the corporations special interests ? It is,if enough
American voters do nothing ...about it.