The only thing less transparent that Mary Shapiro could do to announce her future plans for compensation reduction in the industry is to take out a billboard in every city in the country that says:

“Hi, I’m Mary Shapiro and I’m going to screw you and your business like your first after prom experience. I’m going to do that by making the mutual fund vendors Low Ball their expenses to be able to market to the general consumer. I’m going to increase the costs of compliance for you both in time and money by 20% each and every year until Jesus comes. Finally, I’m going to phase out all commission compensation over the next five years.”

Now, if you don’t believe this is happening, go back and look at the last four months of Investment News for the little articles that predict this. Understand that ENGLAND, just put a plan in place to outlaw all commissions on financial services products by 2012. The Financial Services Authority (their version of the SEC) made that announcement in a position paper early this summer.

The recent articles about fees raising to individual reps from FINRA ( a doubling as a matter of fact) is a perfect example of increasing costs without value added.  Of course Mary will approve this since it makes FINRA more self sufficient.  The rationale is that FINRA is down 37% due to market fluctuations and they need more money.  No kidding.  If only the reps could double their fees when the market went down because they need more money.

These clowns are the relatives to Mary and the SEC. If the FSA were part of my family in West Virginia, they would be the second cousin you slept with on your mother’s side. Every idea Mary and the Morons have had has comes from Great Britain or Russia. In fact, Mary’s most creative idea for the industry was the awakening that perhaps they needed to upgrade their technology at the SEC because the new products were becoming more sophisticated. That’s an understatement. The SEC's current took kit is something like the blade of grass the chimps use on Discovery to pull ants out of the mounds.

Part of the SEC’s problem is that it is running a manual count inventory business in an RFID world. Not only do these people do not KNOW what is going on, they don’t know how to THINK about the products they are looking at. That’s because they are focused on the regulations and not the products that the regulations affect. It’s sort of like being warden at Chino in California and making sure the cells are clean but leaving them unlocked.

Here’s what I would consider doing if I were an advisor and gave a flip about the industry and your future: Band together with your fellow advisors using YOUTUBE or FACEBOOK creating a social networking site devoted to suing and replacing the SEC with something . One hundred thousand advisors paying $10,000 into a legal fund can create lots of paperwork for Mary to respond to.

My personal feeling is that Mary and her Morons and the SEC could be liable under the Federal Torts Claim Act for their breech of duty in both the mortgage meltdown and Maddoff. Missing Bernie’s little scam, despite dozens of warnings, is like a High School Principal hiring a pedophile as a night janitor and then not noticing that home room has fewer children each day.

If you use the video technology that’s available, social networking sites, and technology aggregation platforms, you as an advisor or group of advisors have more power than you ever imagined.

There’s no platform for courage though. You have to bring that yourself.