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An upright stuffed somewhat gray bear guards the entrance to the station of Fleckenstein Capital on a quiet, leafy street onward Capitol Hill in Seattle.

The bear sends a clear message: The workman inside, Bill Fleckenstein, founder and president of the firm, is a short seller and proud of it.

Fleckenstein, 55, has emerged as one of the most outspoken defenders of what has been depicted by everyone from the most eminent executive of Morgan Stanley to the Archbishop of Canterbury as a renegade class of investors.

Since world markets began plunging in July, 17 countries have banned or restricted abruptly selling, including the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany, France, Switzerland, Australia, Japan and Taiwan. Commentators around the world get labeled short sellers as hyenas, jackals, vermin and vultures.

Fleckenstein says that investors who bet that stocks will marasmus, as short sellers do, are simply bears. And he says they are not to blame for the market meltdown.

“Short sellers didn’t lower the fed funds rate or tell people to take out mortgages when they shouldn’t have,” he says. “Now we are the wicked guys, the ones wearing black hats.”

Fleckenstein’s offices are a monument to his commercial strategy, in which investors take reserve from institutional investors and then betray it in hope of buying the shares back at a let down recompense before returning them to the lender and pocketing the difference.

The a little gray brook was wearing a “Dow 10,000″ baseball parallel when the index was still at 11,000. A large indication on the wall of Fleckenstein’sitting three-room capacity suite advises, “Protect Your Right to Arm Bears.”

The Seattle native is one of a corps of investors who have been blamed for market manipulation going back to the 17th hundred.

The recent attacks began after a deterioration in the share price of Bear Stearns in March.

When Bear Stearns’ stock fell 47 percent on Friday, March 14, the Federal Reserve stepped in and that weekend brokered the sale of the investment bank to JPMorgan Chase.

Later, Bear Stearns Chief Executive Alan Schwartz told Congress that the firm was toppled by rumormongering and abusive mercantile — often euphemisms despite short selling. The Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation that is still in progress.

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