Wilson — Bailey Island, ME
When the sounds of the lobstermen woke Wilson and Emily before dawn, the first thing they did was turn on the TV. Nothing. They watched patiently. Then, at exactly forty-eight minutes past six o’clock, it finally happened. The event his father had spent the best years of his life trying to accomplish. Disclosure: full and complete disclosure to the American public of an eight-year-long conspiracy to manipulate the price of company stocks traded on the New York and Nasdaq Stock Exchanges. The breadth and depth of the conspiracy’s impact was apparent on Anderson Cooper’s solemn face as he reported.
“CNN has just learned that a massive stock market manipulation conspiracy involving the nation’s largest corporations, over the past eight years, has been uncovered by the FBI. More than three hundred arrests have been made in the past twenty-four hours, with more expected today. CNN’s financial expert, Lou Dobbs, is here to help us understand what all of this means,” Anderson Cooper said as he looked over to Dobbs. “Lou, how could something like this go on for so long without being detected by the SEC, the Justice Department, boards of directors, company employees or shareholders?”
“That’s a question we’ll all be wrestling with in the weeks and months to come, Anderson, but one thing we’re certain of; the enormity of this crisis makes the recent mortgage credit debacle look like a misdemeanor,” Dobbs said, and then faced the camera. “Based on what we now know, the manipulations were orchestrated through what appeared to be normal business practices such as the hiring and firing of senior executives, company reorganizations, mergers and acquisitions, the spin-off of a company division to create a new publicly traded corporation, new product introductions, and the involvement of high-profile management consulting firms, all of them legitimate business activities.”
“So why all the arrests?” Cooper asked.
“For two reasons: first, the FBI claims it has obtained sufficient evidence to prove that the CEOs and some senior executives, from more than three hundred of America’s largest corporations, secretly organized themselves with the express purpose of systematically causing their own companies’ stock prices to rise and fall. Second, these same CEOs and senior executives shared information with their secret partners from other corporations regarding the orchestrated ups and downs of their companies’ stock prices. Trading on so-called insider information is not legal. So, as I understand it, they’re being arrested on multiple counts of conspiracy to defraud the United States. The charges could carry mandatory life sentences.”
“Financial markets in Europe and Asia are already predicting major declines in anticipation of Wall Street’s response,” Cooper stated. “What are the domestic and international ramifications of this conspiracy?”
“Domestically, the fact that this could happen on such a large, widespread scale, involving the nation’s most respected corporations, without government agencies, industry analysts, or the news media knowing about it, simply means that America’s stock exchanges, our economic and financial systems, and the nation’s practice of capitalism, in general, will have to change. The war against the middle class has now escalated into open warfare. We now have documented proof of what some of us have long known-the privileged class has been widening the gap between rich and poor by manipulating the system while our government turns a blind eye.
“Internationally, the implications are staggering. The United States with its long record of economic success has been the main impetus behind the globalization of free market capitalism and the democratic rule of law. Every country in the world will be thinking if this can happen in the U.S., it can happen anywhere. And worse, it will most certainly erode confidence in our capital markets, giving some countries reason to question the future of global capitalism and others the justification to wage war against it. Much of what happens either domestically or internationally, however, will depend on how our government responds to this crisis, Anderson.”
“We’ll have more from Lou Dobbs and a panel of Wall Street experts later, but now, let’s go to Wolf Blitzer, outside FBI Headquarters in the nation’s capital, to see how the government is dealing with this economic crisis. Wolf?”
“Anderson, here at FBI Headquarters everyone is being very tight-lipped about the arrests that are still going on in various parts of the country. We have been told that more than thirty FBI agents have been killed, and several others wounded while making these arrests. Currently, there are more than three hundred corporate CEOs and their accomplices in custody and we’ve heard numbers ranging from one hundred to five hundred in additional arrests expected before this is all over. FBI Director John Bainbridge has called a press conference for eleven a.m., Eastern Time, at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. We will be here to provide live coverage. Anderson?”
Emily looked at Wilson with eyes like saucers.
“Hard to believe isn’t it. Even when we knew it was coming,” Wilson said, feeling a mix of relief and anxiety. Part of him hoped that what his father had set in motion eight years earlier would reap positive benefits, but the other part of him kept questioning whether any lasting improvement would come from the disclosure. He and Emily had already been through so much, it was hard to take on a fresh perspective. Had it really been worth it?
“I’m going to the marina store to get the morning papers,” Wilson said, getting up from the bed and walking to the cabin door.
Emily got up to join him. As they ascended the steps and climbed off the yacht, she said, “Tell me what you really think.”
“I think it’s all happening just as my father and Carter planned, but with more bloodshed than either one of them anticipated.”
“Will the country survive it?”
“I honestly don’t know, Em. I hope so,” Wilson said, opening the screen door to the marina store for Emily.
“Good morning. Checking out?” Jaclyn said, still behind the counter and looking as if she’d never left.
“I think we’ll be staying another night,” Emily said, looking at Wilson questioningly.
He nodded.
“Fine. I’ll have someone bring you a change of linens and fresh towels,” Jaclyn said.
Wilson looked around the store. Everything seemed normal. The world hadn’t come to an end or stopped dead in its tracks. “What newspapers do you carry?” Wilson asked.
She pointed to the stacks on the floor behind him as she turned to another customer. “Take what you want, you can pay me later.”
Surprisingly, the stacks included several major newspapers. He quickly unpacked the bundles and brought one from each stack back to the loft. The front-page headlines told the story:
FBI UNCOVERS MASSIVE STOCK MARKET MANIPULATIONS
CONSULTING FIRM FRONTS FOR WEB OF DECEPTION
CORPORATE CONSPIRACY SHOCKS NATION
SCHEME THREATENS FUTURE OF CAPITAL MARKETS
SECRET SOCIETY CORRUPTS AMERICAN INDUSTRY
For the next three hours they read and reread the detailed newspaper accounts while watching updates on CNN, The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Early Show, and Fox Headline News. They were so engrossed in the media frenzy that they didn’t notice, and wouldn’t learn until later, about the cleanup that was underway on the mossy rocks across the cove.
Carter was frequently quoted in the newspaper accounts and so was Wilson. David Quinn received occasional mention as the first whistleblower, but it was the independent analyses from Ernst amp; Young and Booz Allen and the ongoing SEC and FBI investigations that captured the harrowing reality. The patterns of corporate manipulation, the sleazy enticement schemes, the murders and attempted murders-it was all there in black and white. And it was a hundred times uglier than Wilson and Emily ever imagined it would be. The New York Times article alone ran for three columns on the front page and continued for four full pages inside.
By half past ten in the morning, all four networks and CNN were providing live coverage from FBI Headquarters. The usual reporters, political commentators, and financial experts were predicting everything from a constitutional meltdown to global calamity, as they waited for the FBI Director’s news conference. CNN’s red, white, and blue banner for the story read, “American Capitalism on Trial,” NBC’s was, “Capitalism in Crisis,” ABC called it, “The Corruption of Corporate America,” CBS simply dubbed it, “The American Illusion,” and Fox christened it, “Wall Street Exposed.”
When the press conference began at eleven o’clock, Director Bainbridge read a ten-minute statement and distributed excerpts from Carter’s eight-volume history with the promise that all eight volumes in their entirety would be available on the Internet by Monday morning, and in book form by Friday. Then he opened it up for questions.
Wilson was actually shocked by how clearly they presented the facts and discussed the implications. Nothing was being whitewashed, sugar-coated, or covered up. Carter’s demand to include the five reporters from the Times, the Journal, the Post, the Globe, and the Associated Press in his debriefing of the FBI and other government agencies had worked. The nation’s attention was being galvanized on the largest-scale corruption of its financial market system in history, just as his father had planned.
The press conference went on for about two hours, followed by mostly doomsday commentaries and expert interviews throughout the rest of the day. The most intellectually definitive interview was with Eli Dennison, distinguished professor of economics and former dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He summarized the situation this way: “The long simmering conflict between the equality promised by democracy and the inequality produced by capitalism has finally boiled over. An era has ended. We now enter a period of profound metamorphosis in which a new form of capitalism must be invented.”
Dennison articulated the problem, just as his father and Carter would have. Maybe lasting change was possible.