Letters to Congress

Below are some letters you can use to send to your congressmen.  Feel free to add your own thoughts before sending it out.  Simply copy and paste the text into the body of your email or to your text editor (Word) if you want to print out and mail the letter.  To find your congressmen's contact information click here.

1st letter:

YOUR NAME

YOUR ADDRESS

YOUR CITY, STATE ZIP

REPRESENTATIVE’S  NAME

ADDRESS

CITY, STATE ZIP

DATE

Dear Senator/Representative CONGRESSMANS NAME;

Thank you for the wonderful work you’ve done and continue to do for our district.

I am writing to you with a concern about our economy, the Justice Department and the big brokerage firms.  All over the news I see and read about brokerage firms either committing fraud (or stopping just short of doing so) and the penalties they face are ridiculously ineffective and no deterrent at all.  The Justice Department holds the publics trust in prosecuting these violations and putting a stop to these acts.  I don’t think the Justice Department is up to the task!  In fact, the Justice Department doesn’t even have a Securities Division.  How are they supposed to prosecute people in securities if they don’t have attorneys that know what they are doing?  It seems to me that a brokerage or hedge fund firm has no fear about committing an egregious violation as they so obviously have the Justice Department out-gunned.

I am urging you to please give this matter your consideration and help us step up and change the system.  I think we all agree that there have got to be consequences when people do bad things.  If there aren’t any consequences, or if the consequences are so minor as to be nothing more than a slap on the wrist, then we have given our unspoken approval to the people who commit these frauds!

The current penalties for these frauds are so minor that they seem to barely even register with the perpetrators.  The penalties must be strong enough to give a would-be-perpetrator pause and to deter others from committing the same acts.

Again, thank you for all your good work and I hope to hear your thoughts on this matter.

Sincerely,

YOUR NAME

2nd letter:

YOUR NAME

YOUR ADDRESS

YOUR CITY, STATE ZIP

REPRESENTATIVE’S  NAME

ADDRESS

CITY, STATE ZIP

DATE

Dear Senator/Representative CONGRESSMANS NAME;

Thank you for the incredible work you have done for our state. I am writing to you with concerns about our economy, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the big brokerage firms.

The Securities and Exchange Commissions track record with the big brokerage firms is appalling. There seems to be a lot of fraud committed by the big brokerage firms which the SEC allows to go unpunished. One example of this is Merrill Lynch and their internal emails which Elliott Spitzer released to the media. It was written in these emails that a certain stock was a “piece of garbage” while at the very same time they promoted that stock to the public. This type of behavior is fraudulent and it lowers my confidence in the stock market.

The problems are pretty straight forward:

• We must close the revolving door between the SEC and the big brokerage firms. One of the many popular career paths in this industry is to work for the SEC for 5 years and then jump to either a big brokerage firm or one of the law firms representing the big brokerage firms. This must not be allowed. This corrupts the entire system and has completely co-opted the SEC so that they are ineffectual. This practice is harmful to our economy and allows the big brokerage firms get away with almost anything.

• The SEC needs additional resources in order to get the job done. They need to be able to go out into the market place and retain attorney’s that have represented the big brokerage firms in the past. They must be allowed to go out and hire high power independent accounting firms that understand what these exotic products are and how they work. This is a method that would be the cheapest force without creating additional bureaucracy and yet could be effective.

• You could create a committee of the best accountants, attorneys, consultants and people at the justice department that would investigate suspect firms and determine the truth.

I am urging you to please give this matter your consideration and help us step up and change the system. If we allow things to go on as they have then it is inevitable that the American people will continue to lose faith in their economy and their government. The big brokerage firms almost destroyed our economy. Let’s stop them from ever getting that chance again.

Thank you again for all of your good work over the years. I know you are the person to help us turn this around.

Sincerely,

YOUR NAME