Seeing A Bigger Picture, What you have been deconstructing at Wikipedia Review... Options

[Patrick Byrne]

Congratulations on the great progress you have made defrocking some high clergy of Wikipedia since I last visited.

Full disclosure: My name is Patrick Byrne. I work at Overstock.com, which for about one year has employed a former journalist named Judd Bagley to oversee the creation of our car tab and a Wiki called "Omuse," handle relations with the press, and design a new tab (in the works). Long before Judd joined our company, and as a hobby since, he was analyzing techniques employed by a small group of people to hijack social media. Using the handle "Wordbomb" he posted the results of his analysis on this site and on a site he created called "antisocialmedia.net" (for the record, he did not tell me about antisocialmedia.net before he did it, nor for some time after its creation would he confirm that it was he who was behind it). In your admirable endeavors to unscramble what is going on behind the scenes at Wikipedia, Judd/Wordbomb has done his share of work. By a strange coincidence (?), one of the people whose pefidy this community has uncloaked, Slim Virgin, turned out to be a woman from my own past, and I posted elsewhere on this site such information as I thought might be helpful to you (which Mr. Brandt seemed to appreciate). I say this all in full disclosure because the financial press labors to find any incompleteness in my posts on the Internet, apparently finding something unholy in my exercise of first amendment rights without availing myself of (or recognizing the need for) their services.

Now to my point: Nothing is more irritating, I know, than to have someone suggest to you that your own cause is really part of a bigger struggle. One always suspects an attempt to divert one's energies into whichever other cause that speaker favors. So I insist that I seek no diversion from your own current, noble, efforts, when I suggest to you that the threads you are pulling here lead deeply into the heart of a financial scandal that has been percolating into the headlines for six months, and may swamp any financial scandal of our lifetime.

On another message board within Overstock.com I have begun synthesizing information about that scandal, starting by creating one concise, cohesive overview post. Rather than gum up this board with information about that other financial scandal, I will give a link to that overview post: HOW THE SYSTEM REALLY WORKS: INTRO

After you have read that you will wonder if there is independent confirmation of what I wrote there. There is a great deal, and organizing it will be the subject of my subsequent posts. In the meantime, however, consider taking 25 minutes to watch a Bloomberg Special Report, "Phantom Shares". Bloomberg has the most "elite" viewership of any news organization in the world (which may count against it in the eyes of some radicals, I know). Consider what it means when a news service at the pinnacle of the Establishment reports that our capitalist model is powered by a reactor that almost no one has heard of, and that this reactor that has a crack in it (and why it is that only such an elite news service could run that story).

Given my earlier involvement on the Slim Virgin issue, I hope that Daniel Brandt and you will forgive what may seem like a commercial interruption. I simply wish you to understand how what your are confronting here really is part of a larger puzzle, so that you may know the stakes riding on your efforts.

Warm regards,
Patrick M. Byrne
CEO, Overstock.com

[Pwok]

I don't like it when web arguments go 'round and 'round. Also, I'm sensitive to what a couple of the administrators wrote about this site really not being the appropriate forum to hash out non-Wikipedia issues. I think they're right about that; not everything ought to be discussed everywhere. This isn't an issue of point of view, but of efficiency. Without demarcations, everything becomes one big blob. Therefore, rather than reformulate my answer, I'll paste what I had written earlier. You might want to go back and read it, along with some other thoughts I expressed on what I see as the critical issues facing this country's economic and financial systems.

If someone is short-selling shares that haven't been borrowed, then I agree with CEO Byrne that there's a legitimate complaint. It's a fraud on the market, and like other frauds it ought to be pursued and the perpetrators punished. That said, I'm skeptical that this is a system-threatening problem. I think there are far more important problems out there than this one. And, once more, if Overstock wasn't doing so badly, attacks by short sellers wouldn't particularly matter.

This post has been edited by Pwok: Mon 3rd September 2007, 12:58am