The reality of and the outward toll inflicted by greenhouse gas engendered Climate Change is clearly evident (to all but the corrupt and devoutly ignorant) e.g. increasingly destructive and deadly tornadoes and hurricanes, destruction of marine life, severe droughts and rapacious wild fires -- landscapes of death, scattered debris and shattered lives.

But what are the psychical affects of chronic denial, noxious indifference and compulsive prevarication as related to a matter as all encompassing and crucial as our relationship with the climate of our planet?

Our current catastrophe of estrangement, termed "our way of life", we experience as a denuding of resonance, meaning, and purpose, as a prevailing sense of emptiness and unease, as a craving for distraction, as an inchoate longing for change and transformation, yet a diffidence to the point of paralysis insofar as any means to expedite longing and libido into societal-altering action.

Estrangement from nature is estrangement from the landscape of the soul. The cosmos and the soul carry the same blueprint; the forces were forged in the same fires of infinity. In matters, galactic and quotidian, there is not a form that rises, waxes and wanes in nature that does not have an analog in our human physicality, faculties, and endeavors.

To turn a blind eye to the natural world, as we have done, translates into psychical ecocide. Perception is degraded. Language truncated. Life becomes dispossessed of purpose and meaning. Apropos, the rise and banal persistence of: The United States of Whatever.

Under these circumstances "whatever" translates into, inner and extant, deadly super storms, ecocide, and desertification (including and related to the desertification of language). As we decimate the earth's biodiversity, we diminish our lexicon. Our thoughts cannot take wing; our imaginings cannot take root and flower; our passions cannot flow; our putrefying pathologies cannot be composted.

Divested of an eloquence of thought, expression, and action -- devoid of a deep connection to and denied of constant dialog with earth, sky, wind and water -- we cannot retain enough humanity to remain viable as a species.

By evincing a state of mind that is indifferent to the wanton destruction of our planet's interdependent web of biodiversity, we lay waste, on a personal and collective basis, to the evolving, vital ecosystem of the psyche, thereby creating a bland, dismal, corporate monoculture, that is both manifest and internalized. The emptiness of life in the neoliberal corporate/consumer state has grown increasingly unbearable; the carnage inflicted on our planet is indefensible; and its present trajectory is tragically untenable.

Our last, best option is a top-to-bottom re-visioning. In diametric opposition, at paradigm's end, we are witness to the deranged marriage of the profligate and the parsimonious. The covert offshore bank accounts of the greed-maddened hyper-wealthy and the teeming landfill are dismal emblems of late capitalist madness.

The moribund mythos (manic in the face of its undoing) of "productivity" exists at the core of the capitalist delusion. Discussing the matter with a capitalist true believer is like talking to an obsessive lunatic about his vast collection of string and his compulsive hoarding of rubber bands and bread ties.

Behind the situation is the crackpot pragmatism of state capitalism e.g., that all things must have a practical purpose, in order that they be exploited for maximum productivity, as a means of generating obscene sums of wealth for a tiny (loose knit) cabal of global economic elite. (Yet the motives driving the mania of a system geared to perpetual growth, conveniently, are omitted from almost all mainstream discussions of the matter.)

One's humanity is restored by tears and laughter...by the marriage of eros and empathy. We must grieve for the harm we have wrought and guffaw at our egoist folly; we must shed copious tears and be seized by outright, sustained laughter. Self-awareness is tantamount to salvation, and an experience akin to rebirth is bestowed by the apprehension of the ridiculous nature of vanity and empty striving.

Then and only then, do conditions become favorable for restoration and re-visioning. Thus, grace falls as a forgiving rain.

In May of last year, my family laid my father to rest. Shortly after my return to New York City from Georgia, we received the news that my wife, Angela, was pregnant. Thus, fate fitted me with the garments of fatherhood. The clothing of the son sent to the consignment shop, I stood in awe, and with more than a little trepidation, before unfolding circumstance.

Grief and longing mingled and merged within me. At night, I dreamed of friends from my youth who have died over the passing years. With increasing frequency, during this past year, I have had reoccurring dreams involving one post-adolescent friendship, in particular, the period surrounding the dawning of our awkward and painful puberty.

Chuck was redheaded, freckled, bespectacled, bully-bedeviled -- a bright, sensitive, wounded soul, who would later succumb to the ravages of alcoholism. We shared an enthusiasm for books. We read Tolkien, of course, but also Camus, Celine, even Cervantes (having an ardor for books was a quixotic propensity in those days in the deep south, and I suspect it still is).

We collected tropical fish -- their bright, color-emblazoned markings stood in vivid contrast to the desolate, laboring class milieu that was foisted as our fate.

"You two, heads-in-the-clouds, noses-in-books losers will have to face the real world one day, and, I'll tell you what, that will be one sorry-ass sight," some figure of grim authority would bandy at us.

"Do you understand what I'm saying, boy?"

"Yes."

"Yes, what?"

"Yes, I understand."

"You, show some respect for your elders, by answering, 'Yes, sir.' Do you understand me?"

"Yes," I replied, earnestly...having grown obtuse by the anxiety inflicted by attempting to appear submissive to the demands of unreasonable power.

"Look here, smart-ass. I've about had my fill of your insolence."

Nonplussed. I would have said anything to end the encounter. But some life-bestowing daemon would stir within...most likely, it was the same inner, trickster entity responsible for occluding my ability to comprehend what this authoritarian jerk-rocket was demanding of me.

"What is your problem, boy? Just what kind of a stupid animal are you?" -- an inquiry that provided an opening for the daemon.

"I was raised by raccoons, sir."

"You...what?"

"My parents were killed by your Klansman relatives. I escaped into the woods. And I was adopted by nocturnal, fur-bearing mammals. I'm untrainable. I scurry through the darkness. I bite when cornered. My destiny has been forged by fate. I am Raccoon Boy, enemy of racists and power mad freaks. I have to confess, it is my reverence for my poor, slain parents that will not allow me to address you with deference nor grant you respect, as you have demanded. In short, I can either submit to calling you sir or I can betray my destiny. But I cannot do both. Therefore, do with me what you will. But you will never again sleep easy...for my raccoon brothers and sisters will track you down and you will wish we had never met. You will never again hear a rustling in the underbrush and not be stricken with the knowledge that you are in the presence of your doom."

These sorts of responses would often end such encounters. In the south, in those days, crazy people were given a great deal of latitude.

At present, in my nighttime dreams of the time, I often find myself in the company of Chuck at the intersection of two major streets that cut through the area near our school, North Decatur and Clairmont Road. In waking life, Chuck and I, in order to avoid confrontations with neighborhood boys who viewed us as "hippie faggots" did not venture beyond this demarcation point. The landscape beyond was fraught with peril.

Even in adult life, Chuck never ventured far from home, and when he did, he was fortified with drink. Many times, at transition points in my life, my soul summons dreams of Chuck and me, our hearts...filled with yearning -- yet we stand diffident, to the point of paralysis, at the intersection of North Decatur and Clairmont Road.

The world outside of the boundaries decreed by outward circumstance and imposed by one's fears is fraught with uncertainty to the degree that it is veiled in mystery. There are legions of authoritarian bastards and mindless bullies about. Regardless, one must venture forth. One does have allies -- the spirit of departed friends and inner daemons with quicksilver wit et al.

The future is always uncertain. But Raccoon Boy will be there to meet what comes.

Climate Change denial. Political duopoly. The corrosive effect of empire, maintained by militarism, on a foundering republic. The noxious food manufactured and consumed under corporate state oligarchy. The catastrophic consequences that the demise of the public commons has on the human personality, in combination with the societal repercussions of a populace that receives the vast majority of information from within the bubble of an enveloping media hologram attendant to a grid of authoritarianism that determines and degrades the criteria of almost all experience in the corporate state.

Yet these unhinged conventionalities do not create a catalyst to action, but inflict angst, ennui, and anomie. How can this be? By what means does passivity before and complicity in one's own debasement become normalized? By small bribes as reward for compliance and severe consequences for attempts at defiance...that is how. This state of affairs serves as the sine qua non for any reign of oppression and cultural track towards catastrophe.

If an individual is coerced into conformity by his/her livelihood being threatened, even by implicit means, angst will be experienced. As a result, one will attempt to find a means of relieving the incurred sense of unease. And this is where the small bribes, that serve as palliatives to ease angst, come in.

If challenging (seemingly) implacable power results in a termination of employment or a stint of incarceration, of which, a record will follow one through life, most will find the repercussions of defying authority unbearable. One's image of oneself would be endangered, or so it seems, by such a circumstance.

Yet what are the consequences of submission, in regard to one's sense of self? Because, in order to submit, an individual must shunt from consciousness the painful implications of one's predicament, a general diminution of perception occurs. Thus, for example, Climate Change denial is but part and parcel of a larger, enforced cosmology of deception, both personal and societal in origin.

At our present rate, the oceans and seas of the world will be dead in less than half a century. Humankind has become a mindless, devouring leviathan. Slice open our collective belly and the ill-gotten bounty of our besieged earth will be disgorged.

What is the music of the spheres? asked Schopenhauer. "Munch. Munch. Munch."

Yet, tone-deaf, and rapacious, we are devouring the world in a manner that is closer in form to a banal pop song; a pestilence of ditties, resonant of the landfill, is descending in the form of consumerist locust.

When our days are denuded of depth, meaning and inspired purpose, we gorge our bellies in an attempt to alleviate the ache of emptiness. The operatives of the corporate/commercial hologram have induced us to devour the planet like a serving of Hot Pockets. Yet the emptiness within only grows. We have been enticed to believe that remedy will be found in more of what caused our misery in the first place. Relief, even redemption, will be found in yet MORE. Thus, we come upon the insatiable leviathan that glides within. We are lodged in the monster's belly, wherein we mistake his impersonal appetite for our own. In this way, the consumer is consumed by the collective.

How does one sate a force that is insatiable? By seizing back one's unique identity. The angel whose name is Enough arrives within one's reclaimed human voice. It comes down to this: ecology or catastrophe. Because one's humanity is formed and rounded by one's limits, we must be open to the infinity of forms that is the ecosystem of the soul but not allow vanity to attempt to claim dominion over what is ungovernable. Thus, one regains one's soul by speaking in a human voice. Yes, it is tinged with universal fire, but, to we human beings, its home is the hearth of the human heart, within which empty appetite is transmuted into the yearnings of the heart; thereby, empty motion becomes emotion; passion deepens into compassion.

The matter does not involve searching for redemption nor striving for perfection; instead, it involves awakening...an awakening to the vast multiverse of the dreaming heart. Therein, the oceans are teeming with vivid life.

And where there exists the implicate order of the soul there exists the wherewithal to rise up and resist the forces that lay siege to one's innate humanity.
(c) 2013 Phil Rockstroh, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. Visit Phil's website, and at FaceBook.

YA'IR LAPID, the freshman parliamentarian and Treasury Minister, has declared that from now on he will deliver all his important speeches outside the Knesset, confining his Knesset appearances to the legal minimum.

The reason: members from the opposition interrupt him. He cannot marshal his thoughts when interrupted. Since he is used to making his speeches with the help of a teleprompter, without interruptions of any kind, this bothers him.

What does that tell us about him?

During my 10 years in the Knesset, I made about a thousand speeches from the rostrum, some sort of record. It was always my fervent hope to be interrupted. The interjections enlivened the speeches, allowed me to retort, clarified points, attracted press coverage.

I was also a very frequent interrupter myself. I thoroughly enjoyed making "Zwischenrufe," as the Germans call parliamentary interjections, saying in half a dozen words what I would otherwise have needed a whole speech to express.

This give-and-take is the essence of parliamentary debate. It tests your quickness of mind, mastery of the subject and general alertness. Without it, Knesset debates would be just a dull exercise in wordiness.

I remember one minister who would be totally derailed by interruption. It was Ariel Sharon. Interrupted in the middle of a sentence, he became flustered and had to start anew. But he was a veteran general, and generals are not accustomed to being interrupted by lesser mortals.

So here was this (relatively) young man, a journalist and TV personality, who cannot bear his thoughts - such as they are - to be interrupted.

WHAT ARE these precious thoughts that cannot stand being interrupted?

For several months now Lapid has been the center of interest in Israeli politics. And not only in Israel. Time Magazine, doggedly remaining ridiculous after anointing Binyamin Netanyahu as Israel's "King Bibi", placed Lapid among the world's 100 most influential people. So by now we should have an inkling of what Lapid really thinks.

During his extremely successful election campaign, with the help of local pollsters and American advisors, Lapid carefully selected a few themes and stuck to them.

There were three main promises:

First, to save the middle class, which, he maintained, had been downtrodden under previous governments.

Second, to achieve "equality of (bearing the) burden", that is to compel ultra-orthodox youngsters to serve in the army like everybody else. Since the founding of the state, tens of thousands of these young men and women have been exempted - as have the Arab citizens, though for quite different reasons.

Third, to restart the "political process" (the term used in Israeli parlance to avoid the awful word "peace") in order to achieve a "permanent solution" (ditto) based on two states.

As it turns out, all three promises were blatant lies.

NO ONE quite knows what the "middle class" is. But it must be assumed that they lie somewhere in the middle between the stinking rich and the abject poor. That may mean almost the entire population or at least a large part of it.

It is not easy to pin down Lapid's social-economic proposals, since he changes them all the time. The public has already grown used to the spectacle: in the morning Lapid proposes some measure to reduce the deficit (say, by the raising of tuition fees), by noon a howl of protest engulfs the government, in the evening the proposal is quietly dropped.

However, the draft budget for the current and the next year is now almost complete. The huge deficit - for which Lapid is not to blame - will be covered by - well, the middle class.

Taxes on the rich will remain minimal. Multinationals and other big companies will pay almost no taxes at all. Services for the poor will be cut. But the brunt of the burden will be borne by the middle class indirectly - value-added and other taxes will raise Israel's already very high cost-of-living even higher. Salaries for the middle class in Israel are lower than in almost all other developed countries.

It is clear by now that Lapid, though the main beneficiary of the huge social protests two years ago, is in fact, like Netanyahu, an ardent admirer of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

All this brings to mind the words of King Rehoboam, the son of Solomon: "My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions!" (Kings I, 12:14) The tycoons already love him.

THE MOST important member of Lapid's party, after himself, is Jacob Perry, a person who happens to be a very rich tycoon and former chief of the Shin-Bet. Just now the report of a commission he heads has been issued, concerning the army "burden."

Ostensibly, this is a great victory for the anti-orthodox camp. At long last, the mass exemption of the orthodox youth from army service will be abolished. Except for a few "exceptional Talmud students" - about 1800 per year - they will all serve their three years like ordinary male mortals.

But look at the report under the microscope, and a quite different picture emerges. The mass induction of orthodox youths will take place in practice only in four years or more. That, in Israeli politics, is equal to eternity - at least. By that time, after the next election, Lapid and his band may already be history.

Under the plan, orthodox men will be inducted only on reaching 21, when practically all of them are already married and have at least two children. This will make their service much too expensive for the army, which doesn't want them in the first place. All other recruits are inducted at 18.

Also, as of today, all orthodox men who are now 21 years old or older will be freed altogether from duty.

The army's lack of enthusiasm for the whole project can well be understood. It now appears that in the much-touted "orthodox battalion" of volunteers which is currently serving, there are only a tiny number of real orthodox soldiers. In reality, their ranks are filled by other kippah-wearing specimens.

The whole thing is an exercise in deception. In practice, there is no power in Israel that could possibly compel the masses of orthodox youth to serve against their and their rabbis' will and faith.

The only victor of the affair is Lapid's adopted political blood-brother, Naftali Bennett. This new Minister of Economy and Religious Service, the representative of the settlers and other "national-religious" extremists, has rejected another part of the Perry report. Pupils of the religious pre-military schools, who now serve only 16 months (less than half of the time secular soldiers serve) would be compelled to serve 20 months. These "settlement yeshivot" are known as hotbeds of racism and ultra-nationalism, but their pupils don't want to serve as long as their secular brethren. Bennett succeeded in reducing the extension to one whole month: his war-loving protegees will serve only 17 months.

This week Lapid performed a masterpiece of public relations: he threatened Netanyahu with a major cabinet crisis if his demand about a quite unimportant detail was not accepted. Netanyahu gave in and Lapid won. Hail to the victor!

SO WHAT about Lapid, the Man of Peace?

During the election campaign, he appeared to be a man of the "center-left". His whole bearing was that of "one of us", the secular, liberal center of the public, which is also identified with a vague desire for peace.

Lapid mouthed the appropriate vague phrases in favor of the two-state solution. But the suspicions of his adoring devotees should have been raised by his decision to open his campaign in - of all places - Ariel "University", the flagship of the settlers. He also proclaimed that Jerusalem would never be divided.

On the morrow of the election Lapid struck his deal of unbreakable and unshakable brotherhood with Bennett, the extreme rightist. As the classic Hebrew saying goes: "Not for nothing did the sparrow go to the raven."

This week Lapid granted an extra 50 million shekels to Ariel "University", a huge bribe to the settlers at a time when social services are being cut to the bone. His budget does not strike a shekel from the government's massive support for the settlements.

In an interview with the New York Times, Lapid disclosed his plan for peace: a Palestinian state with "temporary borders" (which means in practice less than half of the West Bank, leaving them with some 11% of historical Palestine.) Also, Jerusalem would remain united under Israeli control.

Mahmoud Abbas reacted almost at once: this is absolutely unacceptable. Even the untiring John Kerry could not bring the parties together on that basis.

ALL THIS has not helped Lapid. The public, including many (if not most) of his voters have been disillusioned by their hero. This early in his new political career, he already stands revealed as a shallow individual, good-looking but untrustworthy, well-spoken but insincere. The "new politics" which he promised look suspiciously like the tired old policies - or worse.

That is far more serious than the question of Lapid's future career, or lack of it. It is of crucial importance for Israel that a new generation of activists for peace and social justice build a new force that will be able to compete in the next elections. The searing disappointment in Lapid may, unfortunately, push young people far away from politics.

Barack Obama is a master trickster, a shape-shifter, and a methodical liar. The man who has arrogated to himself the right to kill at will, anywhere on the globe, accountable only to himself, based on secret information and classified legal rationales, now says he is determined that Washington's "perpetual war" must one day end - sometime in the misty future after he is long gone from office. He informed his global audience of potential victims that he had signed a secret agreement (with himself?) that would limit drone strikes to targets that pose "a continuing, imminent threat to Americans" and cannot be captured - a policy that his White House has always claimed (falsely) to be operative. He promises to be more merciful than before, "haunted" as he is by all the nameless deaths, although he admits to having done no wrong.

He is a man of boundless introspection, inviting us to ride with him on his wildly spinning moral compass. But, most of all, he is not George Bush - of that we can be certain, if only because he is younger and oratorically gifted and Black. "Beyond Afghanistan," he said, "we must define our effort not as a boundless 'global war on terror,' but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America." Thus, magically, he redefined the U.S. war on terror out of existence (in perpetuity) by breaking the conflict down to its daily, constituent parts, while simultaneously affirming that America will soon travel "beyond Afghanistan" despite the fact that many thousands of Special Operations troops will continue their round the clock raids in the countryside while drones rain death from the skies for the foreseeable future.

Such conflicts, we must understand, are necessitated by the "imminence" of threats posed to U.S. security, as weighed and measured by secret means. His Eminence is the sole judge of imminence. He is also the arbiter of who is to be detained in perpetuity, without trial or (public) charge, for "association" with "terrorists" as defined by himself. He has no apologies for that.

America must turn the page on the previous era, because "the threat has shifted and evolved from the one that came to our shores on 9/11." A reevaluation is in order, since "we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11." In that case, why not call for repeal of the layers of war on terror legislation that have accumulated over the last 12 years, including Obama's own NDAA preventive detention bill? Or, he could simply renounce these measures and refuse to employ them as a matter of policy. Instead, the president defended his own maximalist interpretation of the law, and claimed that the legal basis for his kill-at-will authority is firmly rooted in the Congress's 2001 Authorization of Military Force (AMUF). Although he made vague reference to changes that Congress might make in the AMUF, there was no substantive indication that he sought to impose restrictions on his own or any other president's authority to wage war precisely as he has for the last four years.

Obama's blanket interpretation of AMUF - the legal logic - had previously been considered a state secret. It was news to much of the U.S. Senate, too, until assistant secretary of defense Michael Sheehan, in charge of special operations (death squads) at the Pentagon, told lawmakers earlier this month that the AMUF allows Obama to put "boots on the ground" anywhere he chooses, including "Yemen or the Congo," if his classified logic compelled him to do so.

The senators were stunned - although it is no secret that Obama has already put U.S. Special Forces boots on the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan, and has sent a combat brigade on permanent posting on the continent. Central Africa is one part of the world in which al Qaida has found little traction. The purported "bad guy" hiding in the bush, Joseph Kony, is the Christian leader of the remnants of the Lord's Resistance Army. Obama authorized the deployment under the doctrine of Humanitarian Military Intervention, or Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a war-making notion that is, at best, ill-defined under international law and non-existent in U.S. statutes. However, if Obama is sincere (!) in wanting to phase out AMUF, as he averred last week, he's always got R2P as a backup.

Death squad honcho Sheehan is a believer in the perpetual lifespan of AMUF, which he considers operative until al Qaida has been consigned to the "ash heap of history" - an eventuality that is "at least 10 to 20 years" away. Since this is the guy who carries out Obama's kill orders (the identity of his counterpart in the CIA is, of course, a secret), one would think that Sheehan and Obama would be on the same page when it comes to al Qaida and AMUF. But then, we are told that page has turned.

Obama is very good at flipping pages, changing subjects, hiding the pea in his hand while we try to figure out which bowl it's under. His call for Congress to come up with a substitute for AMUF - without yet offering his own version - is a ploy to more explicitly codify those powers assumed by Bush and expanded upon by the Obama administration. Or, the Congress can do nothing - a very likely outcome - and Obama can pretend to be the reluctant, self-restrained global assassin, preventive detainer and regime changer for the rest of his term.

More and more embarrassing stories of keep leaking out of the SEC, which is beginning to look somehow worse than corrupt - it's hard to find the right language exactly, but "aggressively clueless" comes pretty close to summing up the atmosphere that seems to be ruling the country's top financial gendarmes.

The most recent contribution to the broadening canvas of dysfunction and incompetence surrounding the SEC is a whistleblower complaint filed by 56-year-old Kathleen Furey, a senior lawyer who worked in the New York Regional Office (NYRO), the agency outpost with direct jurisdiction over Wall Street.

Furey's complaint is full of startling revelations about the SEC, but the most amazing of them is that Furey and the other 20-odd lawyers who worked in her unit at the NYRO were actually barred by a superior from bringing cases under two of the four main securities laws governing Wall Street, the Investment Advisors Act of 1940 and the Investment Company Act of 1940.

According to Furey, her group at the SEC's New York office, from a period stretching for over half a decade through December, 2008, did not as a matter of policy pursue cases against investment managers like Bernie Madoff. Furey says she was told flatly by her boss, Assistant Regional Director George Stepaniuk, that "We do not do IM cases."

Some background is necessary to explain the significance of this tale.

There are four main laws that the SEC uses to regulate the financial sector. At least as far as numbers go, the agency has a fairly extensive record of enforcement actions with the first two, which are aimed at the securities markets.

The first of those is the Securities Act of 1933, also commonly known as the "Blue Sky laws," which among other things set down the rules mandating public disclosure of pertinent information to investors in securities. The second is the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which governs securities already issued, and includes the laws barring insider trading. Both of these laws are primarily intended to prevent fraud in the securities markets.

But the agency's record is a little spottier when it comes to the other two key pieces of legislation, the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 and theInvestment Company Act of 1940. These are the agency's main tools for prosecuting fraud and malfeasance involving people who manage other people's money - mutual funds, hedge funds, investment managers. Somebody like Bernie Madoff, who took billions from investors and simply stole the money instead of investing, would largely be regulated under the latter two acts.

Kathleen Furey joined the SEC in September of 2004, starting as a law clerk in the Enforcement Division. She steadily rose within the agency and was promoted three times over the next three years.

Then in 2007, Furey started work on a case that involved Value Line, a high-profile family of mutual funds that was being accused of charging tens of millions of dollars in bogus commissions. The company had appeared on the SEC's radar via a referral in 2004, but the agency's higher-ups had not yet approved a formal investigation, which is necessary for the issuance of subpoenas.

When she tried to take that next step in the Value Line case, Furey says she was denied. This is when she says Stepaniuk filled her in on his "We don't do IM cases" policy. Upset, and convinced that the Assistant Director of the New York office did not have the authority to unilaterally non-enforce two major portions of the SEC's regulatory mandate, Furey appealed to Stepaniuk's superior in the NYRO.

According to Furey's complaint, this official, instead of helping her and paving the way for the investigation to proceed, gave Furey two options. He said she could either recant her statement about being told not to pursue "IM cases," or she could go to the SEC Inspector General.

Incidentally, Furey in her internal arguments over this case specifically warned that the agency needed to begin enforcing section 206 of the Investment Advisers Act, which barred money managers from employing "any device, scheme, or artifice to defraud any client or prospective client." She warned that pursuing cases under that statute "may save the agency from future embarrassment." Section 206 was the exact statute that the SEC ultimately employed both in the Value Line case (many years later), and in the case against Bernie Madoff.

This background is key to understanding the timeline of the SEC's response to both the Madoff story and Investment Management cases in general.

In Furey's complaint, she cites statistics that provide unsettling evidence that there was, in fact, some kind of policy in place that prevented her group from going after investment advisers. During the period from January 1, 2002, through January 20, 2009, Stepaniuk's group did not file a single case under the Investment Advisors Act (IAA) or Investment Company Act (ICA).

During this time frame, Stepaniuk reportedly approached the SEC's Commission 60 times with requests to to file cases or to open formal investigations, which, again, is necessary to file subpoenas. Out of those 60 cases, only one, the Value Line investigation opened on April 18, 2008, was an Investment Management case.

In a not-so-amazing coincidence, April 18, 2008 happened to be the same day that the SEC's Inspector General released a report that in part addressed the office's apparent mishandling of that same Value Line case. In other words, the SEC seemed not to move on Value Line until it became a public issue.

Even more damning, however, was the reaction after the Madoff story broke, toward the tail end of 2008. The scandal was incredibly embarrassing to the SEC, which had failed to investigate Madoff despite being tipped off in extraordinarily detailed fashion by investigator Harry Markopolos over eight years before.

It came out that Madoff had not merely stolen from his clients but not conducted any trades at all, simply bilking money in the most primitive conceivable Ponzi scheme. This meant that the SEC would have been able to uncover the fraud with even the most cursory examination at any time during the fund's existence.

Unsurprisingly, by the start of 2009, the SEC was being hammered by members of Congress in both parties - institutionally a terribly troubling development, given that Congress controls the regulator's budget.

So how did the agency respond? After having conducted no "IM cases" at all for years, that NYRO group's next nine cases from January 2009 on were all IAA or ICA cases.

When I contacted the SEC, I made it clear that if they could produce any evidence that Furey's statistics were off, that Stepaniuk's unit had in fact filed IAA or ICA cases during the relevant time period, then I probably wouldn't write about her complaint.

But when I pressed the agency for specifics on that question, they responded with red herrings.

First, they sent a list of 14 IM cases pursued by the SEC's New York Office between 2006 and 2009. When I asked how many of those were pursued by Stepaniuk's group, it turned out that only one of them was - a case against Henry "Hank" Morris, a top fundraiser for New York City Comptroller Alan Hevesi. But that case was charged in March 2009, right after the Madoff story broke. This was completely consistent with what Furey had claimed, that her group had essentially not pursued IM cases until after Madoff.

When I pointed this out, they sent yet another list of cases, two of which appeared to have been filed by Stepaniuk's group prior to the Madoff case. One of those, SEC vs. Kevin Dunn, involved a stockbroker for MetLife who was accused of swindling the widow of a Port Authority policeman who died in 9/11.

While no doubt a worthy matter to pursue, this, too turned out not to be an "IM case." Dunn was exclusively charged with violations under the old-school '33 and '34 Acts. The only references to the IAA in the entire case were two totally extraneous facts.

One was that MetLife, which was not charged in the case at all and merely happened to be Dunn's employer, was a registered Investment Adviser. Two was that Dunn, as a condition of his punishment, agreed to be barred from any affiliations with any registered broker-dealer or investment adviser in the future. This is a common regulatory/punitive throw-in and had nothing to do with what kind of case it was.

Claiming that this was an IM case was not much different than sending on a case involving a stockbroker who had committed insider trading while flying over a registered Investment Company office in a hot air balloon - and claiming that was an "IM case." It was silly.

The other case I was sent was . . . SEC vs. Value Line!

The fact that the SEC would try to discredit Furey and sell its own sterling record of investigating investment management cases by citing the same troubled investigation that had caused Furey to blow the whistle in the first place should tell you a lot about how disorganized the agency now seems to be.

The SEC did note that the Inspector General, years back, could not find corroborating evidence for Furey's claim that Stepaniuk had told her there was a policy against "IM cases." But what was or wasn't said is not of primary relevance to the story.

What is highly relevant is that Furey was unquestionably on record - in emails and other complaints - complaining about the lack of action in this arena even before the Madoff story broke. And there's little doubt that this unit's actual record of pre-Madoff IM cases in the rest of the 2000s is essentially nonexistent.

This being the SEC, the story unfortunately did not end with a key unit of the agency merely failing to regulate an entire sector of the finance world until a $60 billion Ponzi scheme exploded in its face. In this incident they've also continued to show an inability to deal with whistleblowers, a problem that of course has been epidemic in the last two presidential administrations, but has been particularly acute in the SEC.

Noted author William Cohan described Furey's post-whistleblowing struggles within the SEC in great detail in a Bloomberg piece.

As Cohan explains, Furey went through all the usual nonsense after coming forward and complaining about the failure to bring "IM cases": She was shunned by superiors, kept away from sensitive work and taken off the promotion track.

Moreover, when Furey in 2010 asked then-NYRO director George Canellos if her career was being held back by her whistleblowing, he gave an interesting answer. She says he responded by saying that there were people in the New York office who were "not fans" of what she had done.

Canellos today mans one of the SEC's top jobs. Along with Andrew Ceresney, who worked with new chief Mary Jo White as a partner at her old firm Debevoise and Plimpton, he runs the SEC's enforcement division.

Furey contends that for a time, she was being compensated at a level not commensurate with her actual duties - without getting too wonky, Furey believed she was being paid as an "SK-14"-level civil servant while she was in fact handling the duties of an "SK-16." When Canellos and other officials did not respond to her complaints directly, she requested an external "desk audit," a government procedure in which an outside official assesses the duties of an agency employee.

Furey received a perfect score of 1,760 out of 1,760 from the outside auditor, who agreed that she was working at the SK-16 level and recommended that, if she remained in that position, she be promoted.

The SEC and Canellos instead stripped her of her duties, essentially demoting her and not implenting the recommendation of the desk audit, an action rare enough that the agency's human resources department apparently had to do research to see if it was legal (according to Furey's attorney, this checking was done only after the demotion).

The SEC, meanwhile, contends that Furey only temporarily held the higher position, filling a spot vacated by a promoted official, and that the agency had to demote her. "As a general matter, managers are not permitted to indefinitely assign work above an employee's grade level," says SEC spokesman John Nester. "If there is not a higher level position that has been approved for filling, managers are required to remove the higher level duties."

Beyond that, neither Stepaniuk nor Canellos has any comment on Furey's allegations.

While a lot of this will seem like a meaningless intramural squabble to outside readers, it points to a larger pattern within the agency. For years, people who come forward and try to press the SEC to pursue important cases have often been treated very poorly, if not with outright hostility.

This has been true of people outside the SEC, like Harry Markopolos or Leyla Wydler, who came forward with information about the Stanford Ponzi scheme, only to be ignored by the SEC. Both the Madoff and Stanford cases, which incidentally were both "IM cases," snowballed into far bigger disasters than was necessary because the agency identically blew off those two whistleblowers.

The agency also has a poor record with whistleblowers within the SEC, like onetime investigator Gary Aguirre, who famously won a $755,000 wrongful termination settlement against the SEC after he was fired for trying to press an insider trading case against future Morgan Stanley chief John Mack.