21,000 Sign Petition For SEC Chair to Resign – Trustnodes

21,000 American citizens have signed a petition on Change.org for the chairman of the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC), Gary Gensler, to resign.

The petition accuses Gensler of being “complicit in criminal activities perpetrated by Citadel Securities, Citadel the Market Maker, in naked short selling and dark pool abuse.”

The petition claims “Gensler is guilty of obstruction of justice due to his lack of enforcement of the laws pertaining to naked short selling and lack of competent oversight of market maker activities.”

The petition therefore seems to have come from the WallStreetBets crowd, in particular GME and AMC investors who claim far more stocks were short than there are stocks in circulation.

To potentially uncover any fraud, GME investors have began using the Direct Registration System by ComputerShare whereby the share is directly held, rather than through a broker.

However, the registered share is still not quite a bearer asset, like bitcoin, because you still have to trust the intermediary of ComputerShare, but at least you won’t need to trust something like JP Morgan in addition.

There have been instances where through Direct Registration, investors have uncovered there are far more shares in circulation than there are meant to be.

But just 10%, or 8.9 million GME shares, are directly held. So apes have a very long way to go.

In the meantime they want a proper investigation, but Gensler has pretty much ignored them during his tenure, with SEC instead focusing on increasing its power and budget by extending its jurisdiction to lay claim to the crypto space through their own interpretation of the law.

That’s brought them into a fairly direct confrontation with a fairly hot court battle raging between SEC and XRP, once the third biggest crypto.

Grayscale in addition sued SEC last month for refusing to approve a spot bitcoin ETF after approving numerous future bitcoin ETFs.

Coinbase might also take to the court if SEC pushes on opining through enforcement on just what cryptos are and are not securities, fermenting a huge constitutional issue as many see SEC acting as judge, jury and executioner.

Their disingenuous approach further extends to SEC apparently claiming in court that a public statement by SEC’s Director of Corporate Finance William Hinman that ethereum is not a security at the peak of a debate on the matter, was not SEC policy but just Hinman’s opinion.

Further arbitrariness on the rule of law is added by the fact that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) also claims crypto jurisdiction, with its chairman Rostin Behnam re-iterating that stance just last month.

Yet years after they both claimed jurisdiction, neither has put up a list of just what cryptos, at least out of the top 100, they consider to be commodities and which securities.

The most likely reason for that is because bureaucratic greed has led SEC to claim all cryptos are securities, something that would double their budget and more if anyone gave it any credence.

Gensler himself would not mention any other crypto, besides bitcoin, that is not a security just a few weeks ago.

Obviously if bitcoin is not a security, then neither is litecoin, you’d think, or monero, or dogecoin, or many, many other cryptos.

Yet in these 2020s we’re still left to that Kafkasian bureaucracy where you can’t quite know just what the law is until SEC bothers to intimidate you.

Or at least that was the case as long as the crypto space was happy to engage with SEC to arrive at an amicable solution.

That has clearly failed as SEC appears to have no intention at all to arrive at a solution, primarily because there is a basic conflict of interest in as far as they want more and more activity under their umbrella, to get more and more fees.

Therefore the battle has now moved to court where we get to see whether we still have an independent judiciary, as well as to gimmicks like this petition with it quite unclear currently whether US President Joe Biden can be bothered at all to address what is a fairly big task during a busy time for him.

That is structural reforms of the bureaucracy and civil service, which has become far too arrogant for the needs of this generation.