I spotted this in the Sacramento Bee:
“Overstock.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: OSTK), today announced that its CEO and Chairman Dr. Patrick M. Byrne, was named the Ernst & Young National Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2011 Retail and Consumer Products Award winner. He was honored at the Entrepreneur of the Year Awards gala, the culminating event of the Ernst & Young Strategic Growth Forum® held in Palm Springs, California on November 12, 2011.
Ernst & Young recognized Byrne for his ability to spot opportunity in the online retail industry, giving rise to the first online site used for inventory liquidations, and for enhancing the online shopping experience. Ernst & Young noted that Byrne was able to weather the storm of the internet bubble and to lead Overstock.com and its sister philanthropic-retail sites, Worldstock.com Fair Trade and The Main Street Revolution, to the top of the industry.”
The award is very prestigious and suggests that premature funeral orations from Byrne’s critics are greatly exaggerated. Those critics, confined to a few mainstream financial writers and their blogger side-kicks, felt vindicated by the decision of a Canadian supreme court to shut down Byrne’s controversial white-collar crime site, which named corrupt financial players and their media flacks, left and right.
Byrne’s suit against Goldman Sachs, one of many confrontations he has had with the power elites, has a long history, dating back to when Byrne decided not to go the corrupt IPO route, so lucrative for the big banks. Instead, he chose to pioneer the Dutch auction, an alternative that the big banks have long resented, since it denies them their lucrative cut.
It is time someone recognized that capitalists who claim that society can do what the government botches should put their money where their mouth is. They cannot have it both ways. They cannot claim that voluntary and private actions can outdo the government, and then, when people actually unite to take action, they go silent, because they don’t want to offend their business networks. Their silence is complicity in fraud. And fraud is coercion. Anyone who coerces another person through fraud is subverting their free will, as I’ve previously blogged.
It is completely anti-market.
Thank you for speaking up again in support of the efforts to expose rampant fraud in U. S. financial markets by the biggest players. Silence is complicity, and complicity is even more apparent among those who join in the feast on companies and shareholders victimized by the fraudulent tactics. Far too many view that as the educated way to invest in the markets. Justice demands far better. In fact, it demands justice.
Thank you Wayne.
Profiteering from a crime is not “activism”.
Having foreknowledge of a crime and allowing it to take place in order to profit is complicity.
Not hard to figure out.