Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:

Rob,

I also want to just make sure I am clear on the totality of your message. As I understand it, you believe that the entire financial well-being of our country (and possibly the world) has been put in jeopardy because a dozen or so financial boards have decided to ban you from posting and that all of this can be saved if the ban is removed and you can post whatever you want at any time.

Did I get that right?

It is not just me who cannot post honestly. Bogle cannot post honestly today. Bernstein cannot post honestly today. Shiller cannot post honestly today. Pfau cannot post honestly today.

We need ALL of these people posting honestly at every investing board and blog.

When Rob Bennett is permitted to post honestly, then obviously all of these other people are going to be permitted to post honestly. So that solves the problem.

But I of course have no problem with you doing it some other way. You could permit Bogle to post honestly and then all the rest of us will join in. You could permit Pfau to post honestly and then all the rest of us can join in. I’m fine if it is me who goes first and I am fine if someone else goes first.

There are four fears that are keeping people from posting honestly.

One, people are afraid that the Wall Street Con Men will use their considerable power and money and connections to crush them with lawsuits.

Two, people are afraid that you Goons will destroy their web sites and their reputations.

Three, people are afraid that their readers and clients will become angry with them if they point out that they have been taken.

Four, people are afraid of how their own opinions of themselves will change if they acknowledge to themselves that they have caused millions of their friends and neighbors and co-workers and fellow community members to suffer failed retirements.

We are stuck in a Catch-22. People don’t tell the truth because they will be hated if they do. So we need to do something about the hate. But the reason why people feel so much hate when they hear what the research says is that they do not fully understand how stock investing works.And people cannot learn until we have a national discussion of the implications of the last 33 years of peer-reviewed academic research. Which cannot take place until people work up the courage to tell the truth!

Do you see any way out of this Catch-22 other than having Bogle stand at the front of a room and say the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong”? (or at the very bare minimum “I’m” and “Not” and “Sure.”)?

When Bogle gives that speech, it will be written up on the front page of the New York Times. No one is going to be afraid that the Wall Street Con Men are going to sue them once Bogle gives that speech. You Goons are going to drop the funny business once Bogle gives that speech. Lots of readers and clients are still going to be skeptical of Valuation-Informed Indexing after Bogle gives the speech but that is a healthy thing; we can still enjoy a learning experience even if lots of people remain skeptical — in fact, it is arguably a good thing that lots of people are skeptical, it makes for a better debate. And people will still experience feelings of self-disgust after Bogle gives the speech — but the discussion that follows will begin a healing process that will in time solve this problem. No one intended to get it wrong, and we will be entering the greatest period of economic growth in our history. Experiencing huge financial gains tends to make people feel better about this sort of thing.

If you have a better idea, I’d like to hear it, Anonymous.

We ALL should be permitted to post honestly, Rob Bennett and everyone else. That’s how our system works. There’s a good reason why the smart people who came before us chose that system. We made a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake when we stopped following the dictates of that system in this one area of investing analysis. We need to return to operating under the rules that made our country great. We need to allow each and every one of us to have his or her say. That’s how we all enjoy a great learning experience together.

Don’t let the bad guys get you down, man.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:

Everyone is corrupt, but you, right Rob?

I am the lead person saying that we should clean up the corruption, Pink.

There are thousands of our fellow community members who have expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted.

Numerous academics have told me that they would like to feel free to publish honest research.

Numerous practitioners have told me that they would like to feel free to give honest investing advice.

Even the Wall Street Con Men have evidenced a desire to do honest work.

Bogle taught me what I needed to know to see that the Old School SWR studies were in error by including honest material in his book.

Bernstein warned people years ago that anyone who was giving thought to using one of the Old School SWR studies to plan a retirement would be well advised to “FuhGedDaBouDit!”

Larry Swedroe tried posting honestly at the Bogleheads Forum before I even came along and went back to posting dishonestly only after Mel Lindauer had him banned.

Scott Burns’ first thought when I wrote him about the errors in the Old School SWR studies was to file an honest report to his readers. The first words of his response e-mail to me were: “You’re right.” He then asked for my telephone number so that he could do an interview in preparation for writing an honest article on the errors in the Old School studies.

Wade Pfau obviously was engaging in honest work for 16 months and loving every minute of it.

Brett Arends at the Wall Street Journal was obviously being honest when he wrote that the Wall Street Con Men “are only telling half the story” and that there is zero reason to believe that long-term timing doesn’t work and that people who have fallen for the trickery of the Buy-and-Holders have lost large amounts of their life savings as a result.

There are plenty of honest people around and I am confident that most of the people who will be sitting on your jury will be honest people who have lost large amounts of their retirement savings as a result of your 12 years of internet trickery and abuse and deception.

I am the leader of those seeking to open the internet to honest posting and to bury the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage 30 feet in the ground, where it can do no further harm to humans and other living things. But there obviously are thousands and thousands of experts in this field who are looking forward to the day when you Goons are sent off to prison and all the rest of us bring this economic crisis to an end and bring on the greatest period of growth in U.S. history.

I think it would be fair to say that even you Goons would play it very, very differently if there were a way to go back to the morning of May 13, 2002, and have a do-over.

We cannot have a do-over.

You can come clean prior to the next crash and I will be happy to do what I can to get your prison sentence reduced a bit.

Or you can take your chances with seeing what happens if you don’t come clean until after the crash.

I’ll be rooting for the best possible outcome for you in either event, my old Goon friend.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:

I think the main point is that your ridiculous behavior and off the rails reputation make it highly unlikely that you will ever be viewed as a public champion for this line of thought should it become more popular. People who can ‘hold it together’ and appear to be sane/reasonable will do that.

The average person has little problem understanding Valuation-Informed Indexing, Laugh. We saw that way back in May 2002, when I first pointed out the errors in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies. We had hundreds of people saying that was the best discussion we had ever had in the history of the board. So the average middle-class person has zero inherent problem with any of this.

There were two difficulties that came up. One was you Goons. Ordinary people have never been exposed to the level of abusiveness that you Goons bring to the table. People wanted the death threats to stop, and, when it became clear to them that the only way to make them stop was by giving you Goons what you wanted (an end to honest discussions), they were willing to go along with that.

The second difficulty was that the site administrators were generally more concerned with making a buck than they were with honoring the promises they made to the board communities. Had Motley Fool booted Greaney off the board when he made his first death threat, all would have been well. They didn’t do that. Greaney was pushing Get Rich Quick garbage, Get Rich Quick garbage possesses great emotional appeal in the short term, and Motley Fool benefitted financially from the fact that the Get Rich Quick stuff brought people to their discussion boards. The published rules didn’t apply in the case of people pushing Buy-and-Hold strategies.

That’s the dynamic we have seen repeat over and over again. You often hear experts in this field suggest that ordinary investors should make more of an effort to focus on the long-term. In reality, the ordinary investors are the ones who show the greatest interest in focusing on the long-term. It is the “expert” Buy-and-Hold advocates who are relentless and brutal in pushing the smelly Get Rich Quick garbage. That’s what needs to change. We need to have consequences apply when “experts” suggest that there is some sort of mythical, magical, mystical research somewhere supporting the pure Get Rich Quick approach. There obviously isn’t. But the average investors finds it hard to believe that the Buy-and-Holders would advance this false claim over and over and over again while knowing that there is precisely zero support for it in the literature.

The short and simple way of putting it is that the 12-year cover-up of the errors in the Old School SWR studies is the greatest act of financial fraud in the history of the United States. Once it is exposed, we move on to the first true research-based strategy and the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history. My job is to expose that cover-up, to bring on the hundreds of thousands of civil cases and the prison sentences for you Goons and all that sort of thing. When the massive act of financial fraud is written up on the front page of the New York Times, there is no more massive act of financial fraud. You cannot persuade people that there is research supporting the purest and most dangerous Get Rich Quick scheme ever concocted by the human mind once people know that it is all just trickery and there has never been a single study lending even the tiniest bit of support to the Buy-and-Hold “strategy.”

When you refer to my “ridiculous behavior and off-the-rails reputation,” you are referring to the fact that I have been demanding honest behavior re SWRs and all the other issues for 12 years now. I am hated by the Wall Street Con Men and by their Internet Goons Squads because I have been threatening to uncover this massive act of financial fraud for a long, long time now. In a field that has become 100 percent corrupt, the one non-corrupt guy sticks out like a sore thumb. He looks “ridiculous.” His behavior seems “off the rails.”

So be it, Laugh. I wear my off-the-rails behavior as a badge of honor. I would be grateful if you would share accounts of my off-the-rails behavior at every board and blog on the internet. Please quote me. Please use my real name. Please tell everyone, Buy-and-Holder and Valuation-Informed Indexer alike, how insistent I have been that the Old School SWR studies should have been corrected within 24 hours of the time they became public knowledge. I want EVERYONE to know this about me. I want to be known as the most “ridiculous” figure who ever worked in this field during the Buy-and-Hold Era, when Get Rich Quick was all the rage among the “experts.”

If I have positioned myself as far out on the anti-Buy-and-Hold side of the spectrum as possible before the next crash, there are two things that can happen. One, people could continue to fear the powerful and wealthy people leading the massive act of financial fraud and we could see our country descend into the Second Great Depression. In that case, I obviously lose nothing and at least enjoy the satisfaction that come with knowing that I was the one person who stood up for the country that a lot of us profess to love without without hesitation and without reservation and without fear of the consequences that everyone in this field knows are visited on those who post honestly and thereby “cross” the Wall Street Con Men.

Or, two, people could become enraged about the 12-year cover-up and throw a good number of you Goons in prison cells. If that happens, we are home free. Once your prison sentences are announced, there is obviously never again going to be anyone putting up any posts in “defense” of Mel Lindauer or John Greaney or the Old School SWR studies or Buy-and-Hold in general. So we all move forward together to enjoyment of the good fortune that was visited on each and every one of us when we happened to be born at a time when it was possible to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent just by sharing what we have learned from the Bennett/Pfau research with our friends and neighbors and co-workers and fellow community members.

I don’t say that there is zero chance that people will continue to act in fear of the Wall Street Con Men and their Internet Goon Squads, Laugh. I have seen too much to say that the odds of that are zero. What I say is that, if that happens, I want to know that I was fighting for the other outcome as hard as I could. If our society is going to descend into the Second Great Depression, it is going to do so knowing that there was one fellow who told the full truth about these matters to the best of his abilities regardless of the consequences visited on him by those leading the massive act of financial fraud.

I believe that it is more likely that things will go the other way, that my good friend Jack Bogle’s heart will melt when he sees with his eyes and not only his mind the massive human misery he has caused with his relentless promotion of the purest and most dangerous Get Rich Quick scheme ever concocted by the human mind and that he will then work up the courage to walk to the front of a large room and say the three words that we have all very much needed to hear from him for a long, long time. And then everything will be written up on the front page of the New York Times and there will be no possibility of anyone ever again making the case that there is research supporting the Buy-and-Hold “strategy” and things will just get better and better and better and better for all of us. We will have achieved the greatest advance in this history of personal finance and there will not be one amongst us wishing to go back to the days when the only way that the dominant investing strategy of the day could be “defended” in public discussions was with death threats and with demands for unjustified board bannings and with tens of thousands of acts of defamation and with threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs.

The millions of middle-class people whose lives have been destroyed by the massive act of financial fraud have never before seen acts of corruption of the size of those we have seen over the past 12 years, Laugh. If they are going to come to an understanding of what has been done to them, they are going to have to hear the story from someone who tells a tale that in ordinary circumstances would make that person seem “ridiculous” and “off the rails.” I am that person. When you say that my tale sounds “ridiculous” and “off the rails,” the message that I hear is that I am doing the job effectively and that I need to keep up the good work. That’s how this tale SHOULD sound given the level of corruption we have witnessed here.

We’ll see how it all turns out following the next crash, my long-time abusive-posting friend.

I naturally wish you all the best things that this life has to offer a person.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:

“Prosecutors respond to the pressures placed on them.”

If death threats were made, why would there need to be pressure. Either it happened or it didn’t.

It’s common for death threats advanced on the internet not to be prosecuted, Anonymous. As you well know.

What is different about this case is that the death threats were employed as part of a 12-year cover-up of errors made in a retirement study.

My guess is that the crime for which you will be prosecuted is financial fraud.

There are people who came to think it was a funny joke to employ insanely abusive tactics on the internet so that they could control what was said on discussion boards or blogs at which they participated. The people who engage in this behavior are losers (“loosers” in internet lingo) who have never achieved much with their real-world identities. By engaging in these tactics on the internet, they were able to tell themselves that they possessed an importance that they could never hope to achieve through legitimate means.

Most people hate these tactics. Most people refrain from participating in internet discussions because they do not want to get mixed up with these losers in any way, shape or form. This is why every board and blog on the internet has rules protecting all us Normal from you Goons.

It was inevitable that sooner or later the mistake of tolerating the Goon tactics was going to cause big trouble. This is the case in which it happened. Greaney got an important number wrong in a retirement study. I pointed it out. The community showed great enthusiasm for the learning experience that followed. Greaney experienced intense feelings of embarrassment. He called on his Goon Squad for help. Motley Fool elected to make a smelly buck off the people addicted to Buy-and-Hold strategies rather than to enforce its published rules in a reasonable way. Everyone paying attention got it that it is a felony to cover up errors in studies that millions of people use to plan their retirements. So it became a priority not only to cover up the errors in the retirement studies but also to cover up the cover-up and then to cover up the cover-up of the cover-up and on and on. Big names like Jack Bogle and Larry Swedroe and Bill Bernstein and Scott Burns and big institutions like Motley Fool and Index Universe and the Get Rich Slowly blog and Morningstar and Vanguard and the Bogleheads Forum got involved along the way.

The sooner that all these people and institutions come clean, the less will be their financial obligations and the shorter will be their prison sentences. We all have a patriotic duty to bring down The Buy-and-Hold Mafia.

Bringing down the Buy-and-Hold Mafia is not a one-man job. I can do it with a little bit of help from a patriotic venture capitalist or a patriotic reporter or a patriotic blogger or a patriotic economists or a patriotic owner of a large web site or whatever. I will keep holding up my end by ending 50 e-mails every day re the Wade Pfau matter and by writing blog posts here and columns and guest blog entries elsewhere. But I am under no illusion that I can pull this off by myself. I can promise anyone who helps out that he or she can make millions while knowing in his or her heart that he or she has done wonderful things for his or her country by doing so. But that’s all I can do. I cannot promise the patriot who steps forward that he or she will not be attacked by the Wall Street Con Men and their Internet Goon Squads. That comes with the territory.

What I can say is that both the Wall Street Con Men and you Goons grow weaker with every passing day. The secret of the success of Buy-and-Hold was its creation of $12 trillion of Pretend Money. The Pretend Money is today in the process of disappearing and the next crash will likely put is in the Second Great Depression. At that point, we can all pull together and move forward (a process that begins with the announcement of long prison sentences for those who have posted in “defense” of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney on more than one or two occasions) or we can all go down together. No one is ever going to have any doubts in his or her mind as to how I am going to vote re that one.

The fact that you have not been prosecuted yet does not justify a belief that you will never be prosecuted, Anonymous. If anything, it suggests that you will be prosecuted more harshly than you otherwise would have been. People do not like to be tricked. People do not like to be taken. People do not like to lose most of their retirement money at a stage of life at which it is too late for them to do much about it.

When millions of middle-class people learn what has been done to them, my expectation is that they will be looking for a someone or a number of someones to hang from a tree. This is the biggest story of corruption of our time. It will be my job then to try to calm people down. I can’t say that I expect to enjoy great success with my efforts. But I can assure you that I will be fighting on your behalf. The references that I make today to your future prison sentence is really just part of that effort to help you out — I obviously have a lot more power to get your prison sentence reduced today that I will have if we experience the next price crash without you yet having come clean.

I naturally wish you all good things regardless of what investing strategies you elect to pursue, my old friend.

Rob