Should YOU Care About Naked Shorts?

There has been a lot of talks about speculators shorting stocks and creating havoc among financial stocks. But shorting a stock is absolutely legal and essential to keeping markets priced at real value (stops stocks prices from running incredibly high before crashing, like the China market did this year). So, what are those naked shorts they are talking about and why are they being demonized?
Well, naked shorts have been illegal since the 1934 Securities Act, and the SEC is supposed to be monitoring Broker/Dealers to make sure that they play by the rules. So, how are Fannie May and Freddie Mac's stocks being obliterated by naked shorts? Thanks to the SEC of course. Instead of borrowing stocks before shorting them, Broker/Dealers (the JP Morgan, Lehman, and Goldman Sachs of the world) have run into an usual amount of "Failure to Deliver" stocks. These are basically IOUs issued by BDs when a party involved in a stock transaction is unable to physically deliver the paper stocks. Or, about 99% of stocks are electric, therefore physical delivery is pretty much a thing of the past, no one owns paper stock anymore, except maybe your great-grandmother, because she inherited them from her grandmother.
So now you have a hedge fund who decides they want to reduce to rumble a bank stock because thats their proprietary trading strategy. What do they need to do in order to manipulate the stock price? Simply issues a whole bunch of IOUs, then sell them to individuals (you and me), occasionally spread a rumor about the bank (like say Bear Stearn or Indymac) and then sit back, watch the stock crash, and have a few laughs while toasting champagne (the supply overwhelms the demand and prices go down hard).
I'm sure you understand the impact on the thousands of lives who loose their job, and the loss of future job creation.
This is why the SEC is pretending to make all naked shorts illegal even though they already are. The SEC is NOT doing it's job. Why? Surely because the extra cost from such methods are spread out to many customers and the profits are focused to a few organized entities with which they can corrupt SEC officials some more.
So why should you care? Well the practice of issuing IOUs is not a new one, and is not limited to the financials. In fact some estimates (official and real) puts the amount of "Failure to Deliver" or "Fake stock" to be anywhere from 1.5% (highly unlikely) to up to 50% (a little more accurate) of daily traded stock volume.
So you have a 50/50 percent chance that when you buy a stock, you are actually buying some hedge fund's IOU of a stock. What's the big deal? Well, if that hedge fund fails you are left with an IOU from someone who isn't around anymore and how are you going be compensated? You're not going to take stock from someone else who owns it. And you're not going to get your money back from the hedge fund (that money is already spent Ferraris, Porsches, or mansions).

It seems the general population is bound to surrenders their savings to wall street firms, and Wall Street is not sharing the profits.
This Washington Post article says it all if you know a little about securities regulations and how to read between the lines http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/21/AR2008072102455.html

Energy Crisis-Common Sense Anyone?

To drill or not to drill? That is not the right question! When is anyone going to understand that a finite energy resource can not be the energy of the future?
I personally could care less if Big Oil starts drilling in the only natural wildlife habitat left on the planet, I just know it won't solve our problems in the long term.
So why not just stop wasting capital and liquidity (a rare commodity) on a technology which is on the brink of extinction. Why not just invest in a long term solution to our energy problem? Why not take the budget for the Iraq War, invest it into new energy tech, pull out of Iraq (we won't need the oil anymore anyway), and watch what happens? Why not become the leader in the energy of the future? Isn't that something the leader of the "Free World" should be up to?
This is the answer you don't want to hear: There are trillions of Dollars (or Euros) of oil left in the earth, and since that is worth more than any amount of lives to a few people who control the energy market, we're not getting any new and revolutionary energy technology until we extract every single drop of oil out of the earth. And our future, the future of our children, has absolutely no impact on those few people's judgment, or maybe just the opposite. What would they want to do with us once all of our capital is exhausted and the burden of our debt insurmountable due to astronomical food and energy cost?
If we all start thinking outside the TV, pick up a book, read some Greek philosophical ideas about knowledge, maybe the cave and shadow allegory, all of us would see the true light, and not a man made light. Then maybe, we'd discuss some realistic solutions to all of our problems.