Suckers are made…not born

Laser Weapon Firm Targeted


The feds have given the company $12 million to chase these ray gun dreams. But good luck finding anyone in the Defense or Energy departments who will publicly endorse Ionatron's ray gun work. Or even say they're passingly familiar with it.

[Snip]

Shares in a high-flying penny stock called Ionatron Inc. had been climbing for months… [when] suddenly, on March 18, with Ionatron's shares having climbed to a high of $10.41, the company's stock was hit with an avalanche of insider selling, as more than 50 Wall Streeters privy to Ionatron's innermost secrets bailed out of nearly every share of stock they held, knocking more than 30 percent off the price in the days that followed.

Another cautionary tale from the pump-and-dump annals of the penny stock market? In fact, it's a lot more than that, for… nearly every one of the more than four dozen insiders who dumped their Ionatron shares on March 18 have now been identified by The Post as employees of a secretive, Arlington, Va., investment group that is owned, operated and financed out of the black box budget of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

(My Comments)

I wanted to post this article to highlight the fact that the Pentagon is saturated with deal makers spending money that is earmarked for one thing or another, but never gets where it is supposed to go, and in many cases, no one ever becomes the wiser.
I keep being drawn, however, to the part about the high-flying penny stock that is manipulated, and then dumped to the profitable delight of about four dozen insiders. I have long tried to understand why an average individual would even consider putting hard earned money into (what seems to me) the most obvious scam in existence. We have been shown time and again that the stock market is merely a tool to gather massive amounts of collective funds at the input, and funnel them straight up to the fat cats at the top of the heap. The stock market has been foisted on Americans (and now the world) through advertising campaigns that target our egos and emotions much like any other worthless product is relentlessly pushed. I honestly believe that the only time the stock market will EVER work for average Americans is when we all get real and put our money back into savings accounts (credit unions, not banks) and divest ourselves of the worthless paper we are led to believe drives the economy. Ask any Enron employee whether they have more faith in a two percent gain from savings or their killer Enron portfolio.