Gawker.com outs Wall St genius "conspiracy" theorist

[Nordic]

http://gawker.com/the-astounding-conspi ... 1561427624

The Astounding Conspiracy Theories of Wall Street Genius Mark Gorton

Hamilton Nolan



Mark Gorton is a prominent financier and a respected entrepreneur. He founded the music sharing site Limewire, and he runs Tower Research, a famed high-frequency trading firm. Gorton also believes that the "ruthless" secret cabal that assassinated JFK and planned 9/11 could be coming to kill his family.

Mark Gorton does not have a reputation as a crackpot. Quite the opposite. He's been favorably profiled in the New York Times for his business acumen and charitable deeds. His experience as the head of Limewire—which disrupted the music industry and then lost a $100 million lawsuit as a result—was closely followed by the press. And when Michael Lewis's blockbuster new book about high frequency trading was published recently, prominent media outlets turned to Gorton to learn what HFT firms are really like. The Huffington Post even dubbed him "the new face of Wall Street." He is a very respected and very wealthy man.

This week, we were forwarded documents that Gorton was sending out to employees at Tower Research. These documents—embedded at the bottom of this post—are essays by Mark Gorton, laying out his theories on the secret high-level murderous criminal "Cabal" that is responsible for, among other things, the JFK and RFK assassinations, the presidential careers of the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 plot, and the murder of countless witnesses, politicians, and journalists who sought to expose them, including Sen. Paul Wellstone and even Hunter S. Thompson. Everything, according to Gorton, has been an inside job.

It is really something.

The longest and most complete of Gorton's essays is titled "Fifty Years of the Deep State." To give you a taste of what he believes, a few brief excerpts. On the JFK assassination:

The assassination of JFK was part of a full scale Coup d'état, the violent takeover of our government by a group of criminals. I have not the slightest doubt in my mind that JFK's assassination was the work of a network of criminals embedded within the political system and power structure of the United States. Key among the players in the Coup of '63 were LBJ; Allen Dulles and the CIA; J Edgar Hoover and the FBI; right wing Texas oil executives including Clint Murchison Sr., H.L. Hunt and D.H. Byrd; the East Coast business establishment centered around Rockefeller interests and the Council on Foreign Relations; Curtis Le May (chairman of the joint chief of staff), other right wing leaders of the military and elements of military intelligence; and the Bush family (both Prescott and George H.W. Bush)...

LBJ planned to kill JFK from the moment he considered becoming vice president.
And Gorton believes that the plotters of the assassination were ready to literally start a nuclear war as part of the coverup:

The contingencies beyond how to blame Oswald were much more serious. If it were superficially obvious that JFK's killing was the result of a conspiracy, Castro was to be blamed, and an invasion of Cuba was to quickly follow. Many anti-Castro Cubans who participated in the Coup were deeply disappointed that the invasion of Cuba never materialized. My studies of the Coup of '63 have led me to believe that even graver fall back strategies were embedded in the plot. If JFK's killing was obviously perceived as being part of large conspiracy, and the US public was not buying the Castro did it angle, the Coup plotters were in truly dire straits. These desperate men who ran the military, the FBI, some of largest companies in the world, and the US government faced the prospect of being hung for treason. I believe that the darkest scenarios envisioned by the Coup plotters involved declaring martial law and blaming the Russians and taking the country to (and possibly over) the brink of nuclear war with Russia...
The coverup, Gorton writes, has been deadly:

Over the years, certainly 50 and more likely more than 100 people have been killed to preserve the secrets of the Coup of '63. Many witnesses, reporters, people who knew too much, plot members at risk of being exposed, overzealous law enforcement officials have all been killed. Some of these deaths were clearly violent. Many were made to look like something else.
Another of Gorton's writings, "The Political Dominance of the Cabal" is a point-by-point primer on the Cabal's alleged members and murderous conspiracies.(Example: President Bill Clinton was a "Senior Member of the Dixie Mafia... Associated with dozens of suspicious deaths"; George HW Bush masterminded the savings and loan crisis, Reagan's shooting, and "domestic death squads.") The third document, "The Coup of '63, Part 1" is a JFK assassination-centric shorter version of "Fifty Years of the Deep State."

Yesterday, we called Mark Gorton to ask him about the authenticity of these documents. After a long pause, he said that he was mulling over the "consequences for me" if these documents came to light. Like what? "People killing me and my children," he said. "This has the potential to change my life."

Gorton did confirm that he wrote the essays, though, which he described as works in progress. He even agreed to send us the most recent versions of the documents, which are the versions we've embedded below. In his email to us yesterday, Gorton described his fears:

I am concerned because the criminal syndicate that I describe in these documents has a long history of harassing and killing people who describe what they do. They not only kill the people that speak up, on occasion, they also kill their family members. I have a good life and four great kids, and I would prefer not to bring the wrath of a criminal government down upon my head.

I would ask that you completely read all three documents and think about what they have to say. Having these documents suddenly appear on a blog like Gawker changes my risk profile in life.

That being said, I do think that the truth needs to be told about what has happened to our democracy. I have written these documents and I have sent them out to a limited audience. If you are interested in publishing this material, I ask that you talk to me and that this be done in a thoughtful manner. I would prefer that my life not be put in jeopardy by a casual, quick, one off, blog post.


We have decided to publish the material. We trust that any shadowy forces will be kept at bay by the public attention we are drawing to this topic.

So there you go.

This guy seems to be on the same track as most of us, who have studied the same things.

Will we hear more about this guy? Will he be ignored? Is his paranoia justified?

On edit: I have to say I am extremely disappointed in the Gawker commenters on this story. The comments at Gawker are usually the best comments on the Internet, often brilliantly funny, but here they mostly sound like a bunch of dailykos dickwad morons. It's frustrating to have studied this subject matter for years and come to basically the same conclusion as the subject of the story, and see this response from otherwise intelligent people. Emotions aside, it's perversely fascinating to see how deeply conditioned most people are.

[Jerky]

Oh, his paranoia is justified alright. Although I suspect TPTB will now opt for a slander vilify and public humiliation tack. Either that, or a pat on the head and a "come now dear boy", which in its own Satanic way can be just as fucking awful.

I look forward to reviewing his work.

Jerky

[Luther Blissett]

Oh, his paranoia is justified alright. Although I suspect TPTB will now opt for a slander vilify and public humiliation tack. Either that, or a pat on the head and a "come now dear boy", which in its own Satanic way can be just as fucking awful.

I look forward to reviewing his work.

Jerky

I agree. I think the public will be doing the work of slandering him without the media needing to put much effort in at all.

[seemslikeadream]

This is great

Thanks for posting this in a new thread ....it's in the Conspiracy thread....can you put Mark's name in the title?


and yeah here comes the trashing.......and I say BRING IT ON

and THANK YOU Mark Gorton...THANK YOU


Hamilton Nolan's piece
62,877 views as of this morning

Levine on Wall Street: The Political Dominance of the Cabal
13 APR 11, 2014 7:43 AM EDT
By Matt Levine
High-frequency trader has a hobby.

You know who thinks that George H.W. Bush masterminded 9/11 and that the CIA shot John F. Kennedy and a bunch of other stuff? Tower Research's Mark Gorton, that's who, says Hamilton Nolan at Gawker, based on an eleven-billionty-page unfinished dossier that Gorton ... apparently wrote and then sent to Gawker? Everything is nuts.

It's posted at Golden Age OF Gaia
The Astounding ‘Conspiracy Theories’ of Wall Street Genius Mark Gorton – JFK’s Death, The Cabal, 9/11

They are quoting Mark in the

Wall Street Journal not about the Conspiracy but ...

"There shouldn't be secret deals," said Mark Gorton, chief executive of Tower Research Capital, a U.S. high-frequency trading firm. "The big players shouldn't have better rates than the little players."

Peer-to-Peer Pioneer Sees New York Bicycles Pier-to-Pier


Mark Gorton is perhaps best known for founding the peer-to-peer service LimeWire. But his real passion is transportation — specifically bicycles, and making cities friendlier to them.

Gorton makes no bones about his disdain for the automobile and its impact on cities, and he’s used his passion, and money, to promote more-equitable transportation policies. He founded OpenPlans, a nonprofit focused on promoting transparent government and civic engagement, and he’s tried to bring an open source approach to urban planning. He also launched Streetsblog.

He believes the automobile plays an unnecessarily large role in urban transportation and says it does more harm than good. He stops short of calling for the outright eradication of cars in our cities, but wants to see policies that aggressively discourage them.

Many will consider his views radical, but his call to rethink the car’s place in our urban landscape is moving into the mainstream. A growing number of urban planners favor the “complete streets” model of multimodal transit that embraces walking, cycling and transit alongside automobiles.

The Obama administration has been promoting a similar approach through the federal Transportation, Housing and Health departments. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood essentially codified the idea when he said the needs of pedestrians and cyclists must be considered with those of motorists.

Gorton’s views are sure to inflame, but that’s the point. He wants to start a discussion and get people thinking …



Mark Gorton, founder of Lime Wire and bike transit advocate. Photo: Nicholas Whitaker

Wired.com: How did you become a bike activist?

Mark Gorton: It started about 10 years ago. I just started riding my bike to work. After going through [New York's] Central Park and almost getting hit, you start to think about how roads work and you realize how screwed up they are.

At some point I had the insight that our streets could function way better then they do today. Once you have a vision of a much better city and better world, it is hard to sit back and not do anything about it. A large part of what we’re doing is communication, just getting the idea out that there is a better way.

‘We should be rationing the ability for people to drive because it has so many negative social consequences.’
Wired.com: How so?

Gorton: About five years ago we started the NYC Streets Renaissance campaign. We focused on showing there are better policies out there in terms of how streets are being managed.

The ideas were set around bus rapid transit, congestion pricing, and bicycling. We made great progress, and now people can see these ideas being implemented. Now we are reaching a point in New York where there is a broad public debate about how we manage our streets. Some people are pushing back on the reforms we have been making, so now I am trying to articulate why the automobile is bad transportation technology in a dense city.

Wired.com: What are you advocating?

Gorton: A complete change of policy in terms of our society, particularly in how a big city deals with the automobile.

For the last 100 years the automobile was the favored technology, it was given dominance over the streets and preferred over light rail. New York City used to have 1,300 miles of light-rail track. It was the greatest streetcar network the world has ever known. It was completely ripped out because of this infatuation with the automobile. It killed an enormous amount of transportation capacity, making it harder to move around today than it was 50 to 70 years ago.

The fundamental problem with the automobile, beyond the social aspect, is that it does not fit in a city as dense as New York. It is physically impossible for all the people to drive who want to. The ultimate constraint is the amount of road space. That is not going to change in New York City.

Wired.com: How do you get a society that is inherently connected to the automobile to utilize something else?

Gorton: Step 1 is educate people that the automobile is a technology that should be discouraged. We should stop subsidizing it through things like free parking and priority road space. We should be promoting mass transit. We should be creating a safe bicycle network that makes cycling a viable option. In Amsterdam, you have 40 percent of the people making their daily trips by bicycle. The bicycle can be a serious transportation tool in a city.

Basically, the litmus test is this: If a policy makes it harder and more expensive to drive, chances are it’s a good policy. If it makes it easier to drive it is a bad policy.

Wired.com: People will argue that roads are designed for cars and more people drive than ride, so we shouldn’t yield space to bicycles.

Gorton: That has essentially been the policy for the last 100 years and it has worked out horribly. You can look at the places that have done the opposite of that and see if those places are happy. The places that have encouraged bicycling, which tend to be Northern European cities, are really happy with what they have and are trying to continue it. Look that the places that are the most auto-oriented, places like Atlanta and L.A. They know they have big problems. They are trying to deal with a disaster they have brought about themselves.

‘It doesn’t cost a lot to have a pleasant livable world.’
Wired.com: What about bike lanes? Good? Bad?

Gorton: I think it goes on a street-by-street basis. When you are in a big city and you want people to ride bikes, you cannot mix them with cars. It is unsafe. If you look at the cities with the most biking, they have a completely safe and dedicated bike network. Every street is safe for biking. Every major street has separated bike paths where bikes are separated from cars.

If we look at what other cities are doing around the world we can really do a lot without ever coming up with a new idea by just copying what has been successful.

Wired.com: So what are the major issues to work on?

Gorton: What I am trying to get people to understand is cars should be a disfavored technology. We should be consciously trying to minimize them and we should be making it harder — more expensive and more inconvenient — for people to drive. We should be rationing the ability for people to drive because it has so many negative social consequences. Most people don’t get that. Most people believe that driving is something that is protected in the Constitution and fundamental to being an American.

Wired.com: What is the world you envision?

Gorton: One with radically reduced automobile usage. I think you could have it done in a matter of a few years, if you just had a real dedicated effort. If there was a lot of societal consensus you could have automobile usage down by 50 percent, and with that you could make great strides in a making a city more livable. It is mostly policy changes, not a lot of expensive infrastructure. It doesn’t cost a lot to have a pleasant livable world.

Mark Gorton


Mark Gorton, the founder of a series of innovative financial and technology companies, is a leading advocate for alternative transportation and livable streets.

He is the founder of Tower Research Capital LLC, a money management firm specializing in quantitative trading and investment strategies, as well as the founder of Lime Brokerage LLC, Lime Wire LLC, Lime Labs LLC, and OpenPlans.

Prior to creating these companies, Mark pursued a career in electrical engineering followed by a career in finance. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University, a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a MBA from Harvard University.

A serial entrepreneur, Gorton is known as something of a creative genius who just happens to run one of the most sophisticated trading outfits in the U.S. – CNBC

Mark’s involvement with urban issues began officially when he founded OpenPlans in 1999. OpenPlans is a non-profit technology organization focused on open government and livable streets. Mark founded OpenPlans after realizing the incredible potential of the open source movement to create tools that catalyze civic engagement. OpenPlans approaches its mission with two primary initiatives: open source software development and journalism.

Through ongoing projects such as OpenTripPlanner and OpenGeo as well as custom built solutions and advocacy, the software team at OpenPlans is helping cities to share their data and engage citizens in the civic process. OpenPlans also houses three important news outlets that focus on urban issues: Streetsblog, Sreetfilms, and Gotham Schools.

Gorton wants citizens to question the role of automobiles in the world and to recognize how inefficient and inappropriate they are for an urban environment. – Utne Reader: 50 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World

In 2005 Mark founded the New York City Streets Renaissance campaign in partnership with the Project for Public Spaces and Transportation Alternatives. The campaign launched with a public exhibition, “Livable Streets: A New Vision for New York,” at the Municipal Arts Society. The exhibition highlighted the potential of public plazas, pedestrian areas, and bike lanes to transform dangerous and traffic clogged streets into safer, more dynamic public spaces.

The impact of the NYCSR campaign on New York streets has been truly impressive. The exhibition, subsequent demonstration projects, and reporting on Streetsblog and Streetfilms, created a demand for innovation that eventually led to the appointment of a new commissioner at DOT in 2007 and the implementation of livable streets initiatives throughout the city.

Through his philanthropy, his leadership at OpenPlans, and his public and media appearances, Mark Gorton continues to advocate for alternative transportation, livable streets, and open government. He lives on the Upper West Side and bikes regularly to his offices in Lower Manhattan.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I read the first PDF on gawker at 2 am last night and it was remarkably cogent stuff, he is no dummy.

The commentary @ Gawker was also very instructive, but the lesson is sadly nothing new to anyone here.

I once worked for a few months as a temp receptionist at a mental health hospital. Many of the patients (all low risk and generally speaking very friendly) sounded exactly like this guy. Since my time there, which was years ago, I came to the conclusion that there are two types of people into conspiracy theories: the lazy ones who forward the emails that someone else wrote (or who repeat said ideas in conversations) and the ones who actually write/ create them. Obviously this is a misinformed generalization but I do wonder how many of these people do have mental health issues and the elaborate "theories" that they create are just manifestations of it.

mmmmmmkay?

I suspect there will be some very interesting developments here and applaud giving this a separate thread.

[zangtang]

oh boy oh boy!.....am i ever looking forward to this - all the ingredients for what I believe y'all call a 'humdinger'

early days obviously, but if he's stuck his head too far above the parapet for a discreet suiciding, and he's too smart for lickspittle bloviators to ridicule, perhaps they'll go after his money?

....'algorithmic software glitch @ tower research causes catastrophic losses............?

[Project Willow]

I think the incident will be quietly ignored, with the exception of derisive quips appended to a mention of his name.

[seemslikeadream]

the only thing is Marc seems to be a person who will not let people ignore him

"Fixing the Great Mistake"


Mark Gorton : Center for Architecture : July 13th
American Planning Association - NY Metro Chapter - Transportation Committee
Wednesday, July 13, 2011 from 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM (EDT)
New York, NY

gawker views - 65,099

Is Speed Trader Mark Gorton Killing Wall Street?
Posted: 04/18/2012 8:15 am Updated: 04/19/2012 5:10 pm


Mark Gorton is sitting in the Zen garden on the roof of his office in downtown Manhattan, squinting into the sunlight and telling me he's not evil.

"If you listen to some of the rhetoric in the press recently, you'd think we were killing babies," Gorton says, in between sips of organic blood-orange soda as he leans forward in a wicker chair. He's upset that his business is being "tarred" by the bad publicity plaguing the rest of Wall Street. "What we're doing is a net positive for the world."

This is an interesting complaint because in many ways Mark Gorton is the new face of Wall Street. Gorton is a high-frequency trader. His company, Tower Research Capital LLC, with its 275-person global staff of engineers and computer science and physics majors, is part of an industry that today is responsible for more than half of all stock trading in the United States, according to the Tabb Group, a financial markets research and strategic advisory firm. Gorton's is an industry under scrutiny.

People like Gorton are increasingly replacing the traders in traditional stock exchange pits -- those nervous-looking people in vests, furiously hand signaling buy and sell orders in a sort of rapid-fire sign language. But instead of huddling on the floor of an exchange, high-frequency traders sit at their computers tweaking and retweaking algorithms that do the buying and selling electronically far faster than any human can.

The idea behind high-frequency trading (HFT, as it is known) is that if you can buy and sell stocks, bonds and derivatives at the speed of a supercomputer -- literally executing trades by the millisecond -- you can make money off each of the tiny little movements in price. Taken individually, each trade nets only a few pennies. But some high-frequency trading firms can trade as many as 100 million shares in a single day, according to Manoj Narang, who runs such a firm in New Jersey called Tradeworx. Those pennies add up.

Gorton's job then is not to buy and sell stock, but rather to oversee a business filled with programmers who devise the algorithms to automatically trade those stocks, bonds and futures far faster than his competitors. "What we do is try to identify patterns and trading strategies that might work in the market, and if we find something that works, we deploy it," Gorton says matter-of-factly. "We're really an engineering company. We have a lot more in common with Google than we do with one of the big banks."

But try as Gorton might to distance his firm from the rest of the finance industry, high-frequency trading has attracted unwelcome attention. In recent weeks, critics and regulators have been scrutinizing Gorton's company about as closely as they might Goldman Sachs. In February, for example, Mary L. Schapiro, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, told reporters that high-frequency trading "worried" her and floated the idea of implementing new curbs on the practice -- such as charging a fee every time a high-frequency trader cancels a trade.

That was followed by news that the SEC had reportedly launched a formal investigation into the relationship between some major high-frequency trading firms and the electronic exchanges that host their trades. Gorton says he is not involved in that SEC inquiry. (The SEC declined to comment on the matter.) At the same time, Gary Gensler, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has said that his agency might begin monitoring high-frequency trades much more closely than it has before and could start considering new rules by July.

Critics of Gorton's industry have taken the newfound regulatory interest as an opportunity to slam his business, arguing that high-frequency trading firms -- which range in size from relatively small shops like Tower to major hedge funds -- can cause mayhem in the markets and put average mom-and-pop investments at risk.

"We call them parasites," Joseph Saluzzi, a founder and a partner at institutional stock and bond brokerage firm Themis Trading, says about high-frequency traders. "They've "turned Wall Street into a hyper-speed casino." Saluzzi complains that people like Gorton -- computer people -- are taking all the humanity out of what used to be a very human business. "There's no accountability," he complains. "No one knows who they are ... There's no faces; they're just machines."

***
Gorton, 45, is trim with dark curly hair and rimless glasses. He favors rubber-soled shoes that he can wear on a bicycle (Gorton is an avid cyclist whose passion outside of business is advocating for more bike lanes in New York) and seems to prefer slacks and buttoned-down shirts to suits.

He speaks with the thoughtful skepticism of a young Ivy League professor, and when he is unconvinced of an idea or a criticism, he wrinkles his brow -- squints, really -- and shrugs. In recent weeks, Gorton has had a lot of opportunity to squint and shrug. "I feel like there are a lot of criticisms [of what we do] and most of them are invalid," Gorton insists. "I'm not saying high-frequency trading is perfect, but I feel like … this whole idea that everything is a disaster is just not true."

Gorton thinks a lot of the recent anger directed at his industry stems from the fact that high-speed trading represents something new and different from the way trading used to be done. And new can be threatening. Modern stock trading has been transformed by people who might identify more with, say, Egon, the laconic inventor in "Ghostbusters," than Gordon Gekko of "Wall Street" fame.

And yes, the computers -- programmed by folks like Gorton -- are taking jobs away from traditional traders. "There are some people in the market structure whose jobs are being automated, and people are speaking up," Gorton says. "A lot of those people are claiming that the public is being harmed when really what's happening is it's costing a lot less to trade stock. And some highly paid guys on Wall Street are not collecting the giant checks that they used to."

Bryan Harkins, chief operating officer of DirectEdge, an electronic stock exchange, puts it this way: "The floor of the New York Stock Exchange is basically a television studio right now," he says, meaning that most trading today is done by computer, making the floor of the NYSE somewhat like a CNBC soundstage.

Harkins, who certainly has a business interest in writing the epitaph for traditional stock exchanges, says that much of the ire directed at high-frequency traders results from a lack of understanding of what they do exactly and from a resistance to new competition and a change in the business model. "What became unprofitable for a human became profitable for a computer," Harkin says. "If you go over a bridge and they have E-ZPass now, people complain you're eliminating jobs of toll takers. That's true, but what about the people making those E-ZPass machines?"

***
Gorton was the captain of his math team in high school. He has a bachelor's in electrical engineering from Yale University and a master's degree in the subject from Stanford. For a time after graduate school in California, Gorton worked as an engineer at an aeronautics company.

But Gorton has a background in finance, too. His first job in the industry was at the proprietary trading desk of First Boston (which later became Credit Suisse), where he worked in a back room using advanced math to devise new investment strategies. But even in the booming 1990s, Gorton was never part of the finance culture there, he says. "We didn't interact with customers; we didn't interact with the rest of the bank. We were just sort of sitting there doing our own thing," he recalls.

"When we were at First Boston, we saw some of that," says a former First Boston colleague of Gorton, Robert Heine, about the Wall Street culture. "It's not that appetizing."

Now a trader of government bonds, Heine says Gorton "is an engineer. He likes figuring things out. He likes to be around smart people. He's intrigued to see how things work."

In 1998 Gorton left First Boston and two years later launched LimeWire, an electronic peer-to-peer music service. An eventual successor to Napster, LimeWire allowed people to trade files -- including copyrighted media like music albums -- for free over the Internet. After a recording industry lawsuit all but shut down Napster in 2001, LimeWire’s popularity exploded. By the mid-2000s, the service was bringing in an estimated $20 million, according to reports.

LimeWire brought Gorton his first brush with vilification. In 2006, the Recording Industry Association of America sued Gorton and LimeWire. People called him evil. "He's the Bernie Madoff of Internet crime," the association's CEO, Mitch Bainwol, told The New York Times in a rhetorical flourish after a federal judge ordered LimeWire to pay $450 million for violating copyright law. "He was thumbing his nose at the rule of law to profiteer enormously."

As he also says about the founding of Tower, Gorton says that his motivation in launching LimeWire was to develop an interesting computer system -- not necessarily to challenge the fundamentals of the way an industry had been doing business for the last 50 years. "When I started LimeWire," he says, "it would always shock me that we got any press for anything. We were a bunch of guys sitting around doing neat things with computers."

Push Gorton on the subject long enough and one can begin to catch fleeting glimpses of some sort of unifying philosophy in his work -- although Gorton takes great pains to argue that there really isn't one.

Of his battle with the recording industry, Gorton complains that copyright laws were preventing "a lot of the natural market efficiencies from taking place." He adds, "You had people doing a nice cushy thing collecting nice paychecks for maintaining the status quo, and they reacted very strongly when someone was upsetting that status quo."

He uses similar rhetoric to describe the net effect of high-frequency trading."This is what happens when markets get efficient," he says. "This is the creative destruction of capitalism."

Superior technology, in other words, makes things more efficient. And even if people don't like it in the short run, efficiency often makes the world a better place.

***
The question at the heart of the current debate about high-frequency trading is whether the automation of trading -- and in Tower's case, the ability to maximize profits by executing trades faster than anyone else -- really does make the world better.

On May 6, 2010, the Dow Jones industrial average suddenly tumbled 1,000 points in a matter of minutes in an event later dubbed the "flash crash." By the end of the day, those losses had been recovered -- but the crash shook the markets and left a lot of experts scratching their heads. A joint SEC-Commodity Futures Trading Commission postmortem determined there wasn't much evidence to suggest that high-speed traders like Gorton caused the event that day. That dubious distinction went to a computer at a Midwestern mutual fund that dumped a massive amount of derivatives all at once, flooding the markets. But high-speed traders seem to have helped magnify the problem, turning one computer's software flaw into a stock-market-wide tailspin.

Gorton insists that high-frequency traders weren't to blame. "What the flash crash showed us was the need to have limits on fat fingers, limits on robot execution algorithms" like the one used by the mutual fund, he says. And in any event, Gorton says the high-frequency industry "doesn't have the muscle to push a market one way or another."

But critics of the industry, use the flash crash of 2010 as a cautionary tale -- evidence of the havoc high-frequency trading can wreak on the rest of the stock market if not properly regulated. "What was most disturbing about May 6 was we went down in 15 minutes and rallied back in 15. And everyone shook their head and said, 'What the heck was that?'" says Themis Trading's Saluzzi. The flash crash, he says, was "all about high-frequency traders. There was no human intervention to slow [the tanking market] down."

After the May crash, stock exchanges put certain protections in place, including "circuit breakers" to shut down trading in the event of market instability. The aim, according to the SEC, was to to stave off another massive automated sell-off.

For some, those changes don't go far enough. "People are afraid to put money into the market because they're worried their life savings is going to fall by 30 percent in a day and they won't understand why," says Marc Pado, a markets strategist at the investment advisory firm Dow Bull.

"The problem is computers don't think," he says.

***
A few weeks after our rooftop chat, we’re sitting in a small meeting room-cum-library, surrounded by books ranging in subject from C++ coding to Rupert Murdoch, on the main floor of his tomb-silent downtown offices -- quarters that he says he has never referred to as a trading floor.

"Markets have been getting more efficient and there's less volatility," Gorton says, when asked if high-frequency traders can cause mayhem. "Empirically it seems that way to me … in the last few months volatility has been very low."

The conversation switches to how he fits into the rest of the finance world. What about the loss of trust -- for both the general public and some traditional traders? Or that some people think firms like Gorton's are capable of wreaking havoc? And that some traders think people like Gorton are turning the stock market into a swarming hive of automatons?

Mark Gorton is squinting again. He insists he doesn't think he represents anything new. The difference between high-frequency trading and traditional Wall Street is not much more than "a difference in skills," Gorton says. "It used to be that firms would want to hire economics majors and now you hire computer science majors." That much is different, he allows.

But, he says, for all the faceless computers and soulless algorithms that companies like his employ, it's still a human business. "You look at high-frequency trading firms, there are some that are run by super great people that you'd trust," he says. "And there are others you wouldn't want to shake hands with."

[Elvis]

I'm not sure how high-speed trading is a public good, but I at least like that Yale, Stanford and Harvard combined couldn't stop this guy from thinking for himself.

I agree with Willow that, aside from a few facile MSM articles, he'll just be ignored.

[Nordic]

I see him somehow ending up in jail.

I hope I'm wrong.

People who actually name names when it comes to the truth of the PTB, usually don't fare well.

Often they get cancer at a very young age.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Often they get cancer at a very young age.

And the funniest part is, so does everyone else these days!

[stickdog99]

Heard anything from this guy lately?

[Nordic]

Looks like he's still walking around.

Gawker, however, has had a rough time of it. Do they still exist?

Just saw this quote from Gorton's "Fifty Years of the Deep a State":

“The 1993 WTC bombing created the necessary pretext for a massive engineering upgrade of the WTC complex. The purpose of the 1993 WTC bombing was not to bring down the WTC. A truck bomb could not bring down a structure as large as the WTC. The purpose of the 1993 WTC bombing was to create a rationale for a “security upgrade” of the WTC complex. And for this purpose, the 1993 WTC bombing succeeded perfectly. According to Alan Reiss, the PANYNJ’s World Trade Center Director, “After the 1993 bombing, we implemented a ten-year redevelopment program. We were spending a half a billion dollars on upgrades. It was an engineer’s dream”. After the 1993 bombing, the PANYNJ brought in Kroll Associates to do a “complete security analysis”. The executive director of the Port Authority emphasized the importance of Kroll’s work at the WTC by saying, “We have such confidence in [Kroll] that I have followed every one of their recommendations. The person who led Kroll’s work on the WTC was Brian Michael Jenkins.”

[stickdog99]

I am asking because of the "Scrubbed" thread.

Here is the original link:

https://gawker.com/the-astounding-consp ... 1561427624

First, google chrome warns me against going to the link. Then this guy's original documents are nowhere to be found at the link, at least not on my chrome browser.

[JackRiddler]

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ON EDIT: I'm adding a new "first of all" to note that the most sober and correct reaction on this thread came, predictably, from Project Willow. Most of the rest of you either made out Gorton to be a messiah or predicted his imminent martyrdom.

First of all, hooray for Gorton's activity for bikes and against automotive society. I guess. I'm not sure what it's achieved, but it's god's work.

Second, people, this is the Internet! You can always find the actual source you are talking about, once it's uploaded. Links to that should have been posted here promptly, already back then. That would be the "rigorous" part. Yeah?

Here it is, one of the first search results, surprise surprise:
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Fi ... Deep_State

Not "scrubbed," obviously. (From now on every time someone doesn't bother to renew a domain name it will be attributed to "scrubbing.")

I remember seeing this, from whenever. It would make a typical set of posts here. Most of you will find most or all of it familiar and uncontroversial. (I'd have some disagreements, which after all is my thing, right?)

You're welcome. Now to the discussion:

We, believe it or not, are as important or more important than Gawker. Which is to say: not very important. And I mean, that was true before the magazine was destroyed by Peter Thiel's outrageous campaign. Take their total impact, take RI's, divide both by REAL, LASTING influence. How far above zero is either product?

Impact is impact only if it is sustained over time. Think of that as a factor in the numerator. The fact that this story appeared more than two years ago should give you all perspective:

Who cares what some writer named Hamilton Nolan had to say about Gorton? Who cares what anonymous commenters at Gawker may have said? In April 2014?! 62,000 hits then, so what? Who remembered it a week later?

Who the fuck is Hamilton Nolan? Did you remember hearing this author's name before, or since? Can you think of anything else this guy wrote that interested you? What makes whatever contentless snark he brought two years ago interesting now?

More importantly: What puts him or Gawker in a position of being the "media" more than Gorton, or YOU? Because he's not. Because this thread was bumped up, six or a dozen people are skimming through Gorton's essay, perhaps, and also some bullshit this Nolan wrote two years ago, and we may be the first other than Nolan to have given any thought to his thoughts since the week it was published.

What was true in ur-Internet was still true today: your site is as open to the world as anyone else's. Certain corporations have taken over the majority of click behavior, but so far they haven't blocked anyone form clicking elsewhere.

The perspective of two years should also tell you what Gorton's own posting is not, was not, was very unlikely ever to have been: dangerous to its author.

People don't get killed for writing and publishing compilations of stuff that has already been written and published many times before, which is exactly what Gorton did.

I'd say a very large swathe of the population, including within the ruling class, would find much of Gorton's essay uncontroversial, in particular the JFK coup and the fact that those who did it did not simply disappear.

There is little or no danger in distributing e-mail circulars, which is what he did. There is no danger in posting such material here, or on Wikispooks, or sending it to Gawker. Especially not for an indpendently wealthy guy who isn't depending on a job or reputation that would be at risk from doing so.

There wouldn't be danger for him if he put out 100,000 free books of this compilation, or bought some hours of TV time to promote it. He'd have to achieve a reach at least 100 times that, and sustain it for years, and actually move people to make trouble, to come even within sniffing range of generating danger for himself via the route of simply repeating stuff that's already out there (and never mind the quality or some of the dubious choices made in the compilation, that's only my opinion, etc. etc.)

I'm saying this because it's so counterproductive to constantly think he (or you) are in danger because you are reading or posting material that's already out there. Bullshit!

The greatest potential danger is for people who actually discover new and actionable material that threatens bad people directly. That is to say: real journalists, that vanishing breed. Rehash is not danger. Actual discovery might be.

This should be clear to everyone. Gorton would have to go way beyond a mass e-mail of his collection of thoughts on well-worn subjects and hire some investigative staff and get them digging and publishing, if he wanted danger.

Of course, you can always piss some bad person off for minor or irrational reasons. Gorton might get into trouble for his actual, highly dubious business. He might get cancer at random or have it beamed into him by a competitor in the multi-billion-transaction business he plays within (just saying, no idea what's really possible technically).

But his compilation or the holding of such widespread views is very unlikely to put him in danger, just as it won't put any of you in danger. The first disinfectant for reflexive "anti-conspiracist" bullshit is to stop acting like the paranoid cliche, for example to stop being afraid of your own posts here.

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