By PAM MARTENS   CounterPunch

As the newly appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission prioritizes its agenda to investigate how a 200-year old system conceived to establish fair pricing and trading of stocks and bonds morphed into a rigged backroom casino of craps tables piled high with triple-A rated junk that crippled the world's largest economy, they must place Wall Street's private justice system at the top of their list for subpoenas.

The rationale is as simple as this:

    (a) there is only one industry in America bringing the country to its knees;

    (b) there is only one industry in America which requires its workers to contractually relinquish their access to the courts as a condition of employment;

    (c) look under that rock first for the thousands of industry whistleblowers who walked out of these kangaroo courts with gag orders, leaving behind their documents, placed under seal by colluding lawyers.

Here's a sample of what the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission will find when it looks at how corruption was kept in a black box by mandatory employment contracts on Wall Street:

    "The Policy makes arbitration the required and exclusive forum for the resolution of all employment disputes based on legally protected rights (i.e., statutory, contractual or common law rights) that may arise between an employee or former employee and the Corporate & Investment Bank or its current and former parents, subsidiaries and affiliates and its and their current and former officers, directors, employees and agents...the arbitrator shall be bound by applicable Firm policies and procedures and shall not have the authority to alter or otherwise modify the parties `at-will' relationship or substitute his or her judgment for the lawful business judgment of Firm management."

In other words, when you work for Wall Street you enter a twilight zone where the financial elite make their own laws and run their own private justice system to carry out those laws. (Arbitrators, even outside of Wall Street, are not required to follow the nation's laws or legal precedent or write a reasoned decision based on those laws.)

Typically, Wall Street employee claims were arbitrated by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), now known as FINRA, where current or former industry personnel routinely sit as judge and jury.  (See Judicial Apartheid, CounterPunch, July 20, 2009 on how the NASD was caught rigging the selection of arbitrators.)  In the above Wall Street employment contract, the American Arbitration Association (AAA) was designated to hear claims if NASD declined.