The headline today in the Toronto Star business section reads "Hostile bid faces many hurdles". The article ought to have been placed in the Local Criminal News section. Again I want to puke.

But this time, I'm going to pass. I have more important things to do than to point a crooked judicial, police and political system to these backroom phoneys. Everybody knows who they are, and how powerful they are, and why the system of backroom payoffs is going to continue.

Obviously I proved in the Stelco case, as rotten to the core that one was, that there is nothing I can do about it.

I won't bore you with details, but simply point you to the two sides. You figure it out.

On the one side are the erstwhile suitors in white hats, Xstrata PLC of Switzerland and Teck-Cominco of Vancouver BC. Excellent base metal companies run by outstanding managers.

On the other side are base metal companies of dubious merit, called Inco and Falconbridge. The problem isn't the assets these companies control " those are first rate. The problems are in the boardroom, and in the backroom meetings of the people who pull their chain, notably the Brascan/Brookfield Boys, and their friends in the governments of Ottawa and Ontario and their lobbyists, and at the Ontario Securities Commission, and in the steelworker union offices run by Wayne Fraser.

You see, the Inco-Falconbridge merger was all set up many months ago by these backroom players just like Stelco was set up as an engineered fraud on the rest of us.

Somehow the media is missing the point to all this. Are they too cowardly to enter the fray? Don't they see that shareholders' rights and expectations are being trampled.

It is clear to me that the world's biggest joke is that capital markets are based on transparency.

If the rest of the world could see what I do, there would be an awful load of puke in the streets.

The facts are this: shareholders put their capital on the line. The owners of capital put their capital at great risk, which permits these companies to exist, to build their economic models without undue interference from government or labor. There is supposed to be a partnership at work.

Government has no mandate to be in the boardroom. Labor has a contract of employment, not to direct the affairs of the corporations they work for.

But what has happened, and I place the blame entirely at the feet of ruthless insurgents calling themselves "private equity" who stoop to the lowest tactics possible in their passion to win. Not only do I see some of these people as unethical in the extreme, I see them as criminals. But, once the political, regulatory and judicial system has been compromised, how can the Little People owners of capital, who are the losers, prove it.

The problem today is that private capital interests are exploiting the lack of transparency that exists in capital markets. They know the system is broken, and they want it kept that way. How else would we allow these travesties in trading markets continue?

I'm afraid I have other commitments today or else I might continue. Then again, I think you understand my point.

You know there was once a time when the directors of a company went to their shareholders and bankers for the means to carry on. Today there are increasing numbers of companies that are in the control of gangsters who turn instead to judges, politicians and labor leaders.

I see this situation as organized crime and I'm not going to fogettaboutit. It's got to be cleaned up by people like Eliot Spitzer.