It's such a complicated issue to describe to the public and not something that politicians, who are in bed with the banksters anyway, can get an easy applause line. Most people can barely grasp the concept of shorting, let alone naked shorting.

The only person who I think could have gotten some headway into exposing and getting the wheels turning on banning naked short selling is none other than Elliot Spitzer. Back in the early 2000's I was marketing some hedge funds that were known as "mutual fund market timers." There were many ways of executing this strategy, and the funds I worked for executed an arbitrage on the stale pricing between the European and American mutual funds. A cottage industry of selling mutual fund capacity for this strategy arose and it was making tens  of millions of dollars a year.

Unfortunately, there were some egregious rules infractions with some mutual funds allowing managers to trade before and after the bell, and also selling capacity to mutual fund traders was explicitly prohibited in many offering documents. Spitzer blew this thing apart and shut down mutual fund market timing almost overnight.

So unless we have another up and coming NYC attorney general with political and media connections who is looking to make a name for himself by exposing his own friends and acquaintances for financial misdeeds, then the sordid NSS saga will continue.