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http://www.zerohedge.com/article/karl-denninger-sees-dow-3000-next-year
Another one of his wonderful predictions, but then its Karl, not ever known for being right much of the time.
Maybe you would like the actual story of what happened.
http://www.ksla.com/story/23679489/walmart-shelves-in-springhill-mansfield-cleared-in-ebt-glitch
Always like how Denninger omits the real story and puts in his own comments as to what happened. But then its Denninger, not exactly a person who wants to tell the truth in the first place.
If you can't understand me, Basserdan might be more resonant.
It has been one I have followed and owned as an investment, traded more the last few years.
Thanks for the heads up, sometimes I just follow the FA and the TA is worth keeping track of.
No, I Will Not Help, Donate, Or Continue
by Karl Denninger
Posted 2013-10-14 11:46
We're supposed to be compassionate eh?
For whom? Looters?
Because that's what this crap with so-called "EBT" has turned into. If you doubt it, here's your proof:
Lynd explained the cards weren't showing limits and they called corporate Walmart, whose spokesman said to let the people use the cards anyway. From 7 to 9 p.m., people were loading up their carts, but when the cards began showing limits again around 9, one woman was detained because she rang up a bill of $700.00 and only had .49 on her card. She was held by police until corporate Walmart said they wouldn't press charges if she left the food.
Lynd says at 9 p.m., when the cards came back online and it was announced over the loud speaker, people just left their carts full of food in the aisles and left.
"Just about everything is gone, I've never seen it in that condition," said Mansfield Walmart customer Anthony Fuller.
In other words when the system malfunctioned WalMart tried to do the right thing and be compassionate. What they got in return was robbed by a phalanx of looters, EBT holders all, who literally pillaged the store and ran up charges they knew were bogus.
When the first person got caught as the system came back online the entire phalanx of looters walked out and left their carts, the contents of which they intended to steal, in the aisles.
**** any system, **** any program and **** any government that allows this crap to be set up, maintained, sustained or continue.
We, the producers of this nation, need to stand and in a loud, clear, unmistakable voice tell this band of looters that we are done and that they can all starve -- whether they're in Mansfield or Washington DC.
Sons and daughters of Obama in thought, mind and most-importantly, deed.
NO MORE OF THIS CRAP -- PERIOD!
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=225074
He did and he made it.
I imagine you tried to make a point in there somewhere, but I surely can't find it.
AMD thought this one was dead, chart interesting, and it has volume.
Futures coming back. Live cattle and sugar higher.
GULF STATES HIT OIL PRODUCTION RECORD
— FT’s Ajay Makan in London:
“The Gulf states are producing more oil than ever before, defying expectations that the US shale revolution would break their 40-year grip on the global oil market … Surging production in North America is expected to eat into the market for oil from Opec. But the quartet of Gulf kingdoms that dominate the cartel of oil exporters have so far emerged unscathed. Instead, they have expanded their share of the world market as political and social factors have reduced production from a number other members …
“Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar set aggregate production records in each of the last three months, according to fresh estimates from the International Energy Agency. In September they accounted for 18 per cent of global demand — a level only matched twice in IEA data stretching back to the 1980s”
http://on.ft.com/17BtQLA
Sold the MTDR, I really would like too hold something for longer than just a few days, but how can you with this uncertainty each day.
MTDR getting ready to sell this one and take the profit, I think selling anything is always difficult, but we all watch these stocks trade in such a tight range. Besides 1 point is one point.
I enjoyed that informative piece. There are many recommendations in that article that all of us should take into consideration as most of us are probably in our sixties.
This is such a long boring day, I am staying long my four positions in the hope that these Schmuckerheads in Washington come to some kind of agreement to take the pressure off of the uncertainty.
But then we are discussing politicians having a stranglehold on the American economy and trading. Sure wish they would get out of the way so my screens can do something.
SPWR is a gainer.
RVLT as moved up.
FU, VISN have done well.
FONR a thin trader but is interesting.
BWEN never stops.
OPK has finally made it over $ 10.00
MTDR is trying, one of the few I hold.
YOKU seems good longer term.
<<<I just wonder how many 10s of Millions of American have died because they were denied healthcare.>>>
New Report: Preventable Medical Mistakes Account for One-Sixth of All Annual Deaths in the United States
By Dr. Mercola
October 9, 2013
192,036 views
(please note: The underlined words are 'clickable' links when accessed via the link at the bottom of this page)
I’ve long stated that the conventional health care system is in desperate need of radical change, and the findings published in a new report clearly backs up this assertion.
You’re probably already aware that the US has the most expensive health care in the world. In fact, the US spends more on health care than the next 10 biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Australia.
If the US health care system was a country, it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet. Despite that, the US ranks last in health and mortality when compared with 17 other developed nations.
Sure, we may have one of the best systems for treating acute surgical emergencies, but the American medical system is an unmitigated failure at treating chronic illness.
I've previously posted my opinion of the so-called "Affordable Care Act". There is always free cheese in a mouse trap, and if you've paid any attention to how our federal government names their legislation - the name is typically the opposite of the results. Just look to the "Patriot Act" or "Free Trade" agreements for confirmation, the bigger the lie the more easily it is believed.
Conventional medicine, which is focused on diagnostic tests, drugs, and surgical interventions for most ills, clearly kills more people than it saves. The lethality of the system is in part due to side effects, whether “expected” or not. But preventable errors also account for an absolutely staggering number of deaths.
According to the most recent research1 into the cost of medical mistakes in terms of lives lost, 210,000 Americans are killed by preventable hospital errors each year.
When deaths related to diagnostic errors, errors of omission, and failure to follow guidelines are included, the number skyrockets to an estimated 440,000 preventable hospital deaths each year!
This is more than 4.5 times higher than 1999 estimates published by the Institute of Medicine (IOM),2 and makes medical errors the third-leading cause of death in the US, right after heart disease and cancer. As reported by the featured article in Scientific American:3
“The new estimates were developed by John T. James, a toxicologist at NASA's space center in Houston who runs an advocacy organization called Patient Safety America...
A spokesman for the American Hospital Association said the group has more confidence in the IOM's estimate of 98,000 deaths. ProPublica asked three prominent patient safety researchers to review James' study, however, and all said his methods and findings were credible.”
Avoiding Hospitals Can Be 'Good Medicine'
In all, preventable medical mistakes may account for one-sixth of all deaths that occur in the US annually. To put these numbers into even further perspective, medical mistakes in American hospitals kill four jumbo jets’ worth of people each week.4
One of the reasons why I am so passionate about sharing preventive health strategies with you -- tips like eating right, exercising and reducing stress -- is because they can help you to stay out of the hospital. As a general rule, the hospital is a place you want to avoid at all costs, except in cases of accidental trauma or surgical emergencies.
According to statistics published in a 2011 Health Grades report,5 the incidence rate of medical harm occurring in the United States is estimated to be over 40,000 harmful and/or lethal errors DAILY! As John T. James writes in the featured report:
..."Perhaps it is time for a national patient bill of rights for hospitalized patients. All evidence points to the need for much more patient involvement in identifying harmful events and participating in rigorous follow-up investigations to identify root causes."
Overtesting and Overtreatment Are Part of the Problem
Scientific American also quotes Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and author of the book, Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Healthcare. I interviewed Dr. Makary on the topic of medical errors earlier this year.
According to Dr. Makary, James’ estimate “shows that eliminating medical errors must become a national priority.” He also calls for increasing public awareness of “unintended consequences” associated with medical tests and procedures, and urges doctors to discuss such risks with their patients.
Part of the problem is linked to overtesting and overtreatment. And instead of dissuading patients from unnecessary interventions, the system rewards waste and incentivizes disease over health.
According to a report by the Institute of Medicine, an estimated 30 percent of all medical procedures, tests and medications may in fact be unnecessary6 – at a cost of at least $750 billion a year (plus the cost of emotional suffering and related complications and even death, which are impossible to put numbers on).
For the past two years, the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation, one of the largest physician organizations in the US, has released reports on the most overused tests and treatments that provide limited or no benefit to the patient, or worse, causes more harm than good. Last year’s report warned doctors against using 45 tests, procedures and treatments. This year, another 90 tests and treatments were added to the list.
To learn more, I encourage you to browse through the Choosing Wisely web site,7 as they provide informative reports on a wide variety of medical specialties, tests, and procedures that may not be in your best interest.
It’s also important to be aware that many novel medical treatments gain popularity over older standards of care due to clever marketing, more so than solid science... Recent findings by the Mayo Clinic prove this point. To determine the overall effectiveness of our medical care, researchers tracked the frequency of medical reversals over the past decade. The results were published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings in August.8
The researchers found that reversals are common across all classes of medical practice, and a significant proportion of medical treatments offer no benefit at all. In fact, they found 146 reversals of previously established practices, treatments and procedures over the past 10 years.
The most telling data in the Mayo Clinic’s report show just how many common medical treatments are not helping patients at all—or are actually harming them. Of the studies that tested an existing standard of care, 40 percent reversed the practice, compared to only 38 percent reaffirming it. The remaining 22 percent were inconclusive. This means that anywhere between 40 and 78 percent of the medical testing, treatments, and procedures you receive are of NO benefit to you—or are actually harmful—as determined by clinical studies.
Safeguarding Your Care While Hospitalized
Once you’re hospitalized, you’re immediately at risk for medical errors, so one of the best safeguards is to have someone there with you. Dr. Andrew Saul has written an entire book on the issue of safeguarding your health while hospitalized. Frequently, you’re going to be relatively debilitated, especially post-op when you’re under the influence of anesthesia, and you won’t have the opportunity to see the types of processes that are going on. This is particularly important for pediatric patients, and the elderly.
It’s important to have a personal advocate present to ask questions and take notes. For every medication given in the hospital, ask questions such as: “What is this medication? What is it for? What’s the dose?” Most people, doctors and nurses included, are more apt to go through that extra step of due diligence to make sure they’re getting it right if they know they’ll be questioned about it.
If someone you know is scheduled for surgery, you can print out the WHO surgical safety checklist and implementation manual,9 which is part of the campaign “Safe Surgery Saves Lives.” The checklist can be downloaded free of charge here. If a loved one is in the hospital, print it out and bring it with you, as this can help you protect your family member or friend from preventable errors in care.
Help for Victims of Preventable Medical Errors
If you or a loved one find yourself a victim of a preventable medical mistake, Dr. Makary suggests connecting with patient communities such as:
* Citizens for Patient Safety10
* ProPublica Patient Harm11
Besides that, he suggests:
“Ask to talk to the doctor about that mistake. If you’re not satisfied, write a letter or call the patient relations department. Every hospital is mandated to have this service. They are set up to answer your concerns. If you’re not satisfied with that, write a letter to the hospital’s lawyer, the general council. And you will see attention to the issue, because you’ve gone through the right channels. We don’t want to encourage millions of lawsuits out there. But when people voice what happened, what went wrong, and the nature of the preventable mistake, hospitals can learn from their mistakes.”
An Unacceptable Reality—a Healthcare System That Is a Leading Cause of Death
Medical errors are a large reason why the current, fatally flawed medical paradigm is in such desperate need of transformation. A majority of healthcare workers observe mistakes made by their peers yet rarely do anything to challenge them. A substantial portion of American doctors also suffer from burnout on the job, according to a 2012 study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.12
Of the nearly 7,300 doctors surveyed, nearly half had at least one symptom of burnout; 38 percent had high emotional exhaustion scores; and 30 percent had high depersonalization scores (viewing patients more like objects than human beings) – twice the rate of the general population of working adults. Clearly, this is yet another piece of the puzzle as to why US medical care is so dangerous.
So what is the solution?
From my perspective there isn't any easy one, other than to simply minimize your interactions with the conventional system, as it has very little to offer anyway when it comes to prevention or treatment of chronic disease. More often than not, conventional strategies in no way shape or form address the underlying cause of your disease.
One of the reasons I am so passionate about sharing the information on this site about healthy eating, exercise, and stress management is because it can help keep you OUT of the hospital. You can use this site to find well-proven strategies that will address most chronic health problems. Please remember you can always use the search engine at the top of every page on the site to review previous articles we have written.
If you have an acute injury, of course you need to seek immediate competent care. However, the very first step for any chronic health challenge would be to follow my Nutrition Plan as that will likely improve, if not completely eliminate, more than 80 percent of your health challenges.
In the unusual case where you are not getting better, it will be wise to seek a health coach or medical professional that can guide you through complicating factors that may be impairing your progress. Typically, the time honored local social networking strategy works well. Ask people in your local community who the best practitioners are for your problem. You can typically find many good referrals from people in independently-owned health food stores. But be sure to get a clear consensus and ask as many people as you can, as choosing a doctor is a very important step, and you want to make sure you get it right.
Basic Tenets of Optimal Health
All in all, leading a common-sense, healthy lifestyle is your best bet to achieve a healthy body and mind. And while conventional medical science may flip-flop back and forth in its recommendations, there are certain basic tenets of optimal health (and healthy weight) that do not change. Following these healthy lifestyle guidelines can go a very long way toward keeping you well and prevent chronic disease of all kinds:
1. Proper Food Choices: For a comprehensive guide on which foods to eat and which to avoid, see my nutrition plan. Generally speaking, you should be looking to focus your diet on whole, ideally organic, unprocessed foods. For the best nutrition and health benefits, you will want to eat a good portion of your food raw.
Avoid sugar, and fructose in particular. All forms of sugar have toxic effects when consumed in excess, and drive multiple disease processes in your body, not the least of which is insulin resistance, a major cause of chronic disease and accelerated aging.
I believe the two primary keys for successful weight management are severely restricting carbohydrates (sugars, fructose, and grains) in your diet, and increasing healthy fat consumption. This will optimize insulin and leptin levels, which is key for maintaining a healthy weight and optimal health.
2. Regular exercise: Even if you're eating the healthiest diet in the world, you still need to exercise to reach the highest levels of health, and you need to be exercising effectively, which means including high-intensity activities into your rotation. High-intensity interval-type training boosts human growth hormone (HGH) production, which is essential for optimal health, strength and vigor. HGH also helps boost weight loss.
So along with core-strengthening exercises, strength training, and stretching, I highly recommend that twice a week you do Peak Fitness exercises, which raise your heart rate up to your anaerobic threshold for 20 to 30 seconds, followed by a 90-second recovery period.
3. Stress Reduction: You cannot be optimally healthy if you avoid addressing the emotional component of your health and longevity, as your emotional state plays a role in nearly every physical disease -- from heart disease and depression, to arthritis and cancer.
Meditation, prayer, social support and exercise are all viable options that can help you maintain emotional and mental equilibrium. I also strongly believe in using simple tools such as the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) to address deeper, oftentimes hidden, emotional problems.
4. Drink plenty of clean water.
5. Maintain a healthy gut: About 80 percent of your immune system resides in your gut, and research is stacking up showing that probiotics—beneficial bacteria—affect your health in a myriad of ways; it can even influence your ability to lose weight. A healthy diet is the ideal way to maintain a healthy gut, and regularly consuming traditionally fermented foods is the easiest, most cost effective way to ensure optimal gut flora.
6. Optimize your vitamin D levels: Research has shown that increasing your vitamin D levels can reduce your risk of death from ALL causes. For practical guidelines on how to use natural sun exposure to optimize your vitamin D benefits, please see my previous article on how to determine if enough UVB is able to penetrate the atmosphere to allow for vitamin D production in your skin.
7. Avoid as many chemicals, toxins, and pollutants as possible: This includes tossing out your toxic household cleaners, soaps, personal hygiene products, air fresheners, bug sprays, lawn pesticides, and insecticides, just to name a few, and replacing them with non-toxic alternatives.
8. Get plenty of high-quality sleep: Regularly catching only a few hours of sleep can hinder metabolism and hormone production in a way that is similar to the effects of aging and the early stages of diabetes. Chronic sleep loss may speed the onset or increase the severity of age-related conditions such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and memory loss.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/10/09/preventable-medical-errors.aspx
Coexist with Monsanto or destroy it? Follow the organic money
By Jon Rappoport
October 13, 2013
Let’s stop screwing around and go to the heart of the matter. Whether the public campaign against Monsanto takes the form of GMO-labeling or putting millions of people in the street protesting against an evil corporation…
Depends on who has the money and what they’re willing to use it for.
I’m talking about the billion-dollar natural health industry.
If companies like Whole Foods, Stonyfield, Dr. Bronner’s, Lundberg, and the big-time nutritional-supplement outfits want to bankroll a popular and very visible uprising against Monsanto, they have the dollars to do it. And they have the PR people to ignite it.
If they decide they don’t really want to co-exist with Monsanto and GMOs, they could start funding something a lot hotter and more effective than GMO-labeling ballot measures.
But that’s not in their playbook. They don’t have the stomach and courage for it. They don’t want to get their hands dirty.
So they go for GMO labeling, the ballot measures, coexistence with Monsanto, the lite version of a campaign.
It’s a lot easier. It doesn’t risk everything that goes with taking on Monsanto directly.
“Hey, we’re all really nice people. Don’t get nasty. Monsanto is terribly misguided, so let the consumer know what he’s buying and let him make up his mind…”
Suppose, in the 1960s, we had this: “The Vietnam War isn’t really evil, we don’t want to promote a few million outraged Americans going out on the streets, so let’s just have a ballot measure…I buy Vietnam or I don’t buy Vietnam…and then people can decide whether to support the war…”
Last May, two million people in 436 cities across the world protested against Monsanto. So far this weekend, it’s 250,000 people in 50 countries. That’s a drop in the bucket.
Those demonstrations could expand by millions, with some major PR dollars behind them. Organic dollars.
Here’s a quick piece of personal history that gives you a parallel to what’s happening now with Monsanto.
Back in 1994, I took an active part in what was called the Health Freedom movement. The campaign was bankrolled by a few nutritional-supplement companies.
The objective, from their point of view, was passing a federal law that would protect them from the bad guy. The bad guy was the FDA. The FDA was going after supplements, threatening to close off consumers’ access to the full range of products.
My position was: okay, pass a law, but that isn’t going to stop the FDA. We have to attack it with the truth, from every possible angle, as a rogue federal agency committing major crimes. We have to put the Agency on the defensive, back on its heels. We have to make it scramble. We have to make this a very public war.
The nutritional companies and their toadies said no. They were the equivalent of the GMO-labeling funders of today. They wanted a nice neat solution, after which they would withdraw their dollars and go home.
And so a bill was passed into law (DSHEA), and the FDA has continued, in various ways, to go after nutritional-supplement companies, saddling them with red tape…accusing them of marketing unreliable products…harassing them.
Meanwhile, the FDA approves medical drugs for public consumption, drugs that, by conservative estimates, kill 106,000 people in the US every year. The supplements kill no one.
Sure, pass GMO-labeling measures, but that’s not the real answer. The thing is, the people who are funding these measures are basically putting all their money into the ballot campaigns—all the money they intend to contribute.
For them, it IS an either-or situation. Pass ballot measures, or launch an all-out attack on Monsanto. They’ve made their choice.
They SAY they believe they can sell GMO labeling to the public. They SAY that’s all they can sell, because the public is too ignorant to go for anything else.
http://tinyurl.com/l6rg9j2
That’s a very convenient position. It automatically excludes a real rebellion against the evil corporation, Monsanto.
“Well, you see, educating people to understand why GMOs are dangerous to health and how Monsanto is destroying the sanctity of the food supply…that’s too much. We can’t achieve that.”
I don’t buy it.
Everything looks bleak until you take action. In other words, we’re looking at a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The CEOs of these natural-health companies would turn pale at the prospect of going after Monsanto directly. It’s fear.
They opt for the ballot measures. They assure us that this is the only option. They stage their own version of reality and defend it with “rational” assertions.
It’s a con.
Take on Monsanto…directly? Take out ads exposing Monsanto? Promote a million people in Washington DC Mall on a Saturday afternoon? Reveal the names of the Congressmen who are defending Monsanto? File new lawsuits against Monsanto? Put small farmers on television who are being harassed and driven out of business by Monsanto? Show the American people the faces of the men and women who spend their lives growing food for us, and listen to what they have to say? Bring the outrage to a boil?
Expose (gasp) Obama as the number-one supporter of Monsanto in the nation? Name the people he’s appointed to protect Monsanto?
http://tinyurl.com/brgfua2
TELL THE TRUTH?
Oh my God! Run for the hills!
No no no no!
Let’s have a ballot measure. For labeling. Let’s calm down. Let’s be nice. Let’s coexist. Let’s play together in the sandbox, even if the sandbox is polluted with GMOs. Easy does it. Relax.
Take a deep breath. The cosmic glob Goo-Goo is with us, and all will be well. He instructs us thus:
“Less energy. Less action. Less outrage. Less imagination. Less truth.”
Thank you, Goo-Goo. Thank you.
Your serene bullshit will sustain us in the days to come.
Jon Rappoport
http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/10/13/coexist-with-monsanto-or-destroy-it-follow-the-organic-money/
PDO small oil play that has made a small move, some Insider buying of late, its a thin trader, but on Mornings like this who knows.
I enjoyed that, and will probably re-read it. I always believed in compromise when you were dealing with people, or groups of people.
I know I only dealt with 24 guys on a night crew, and with every new crop of associates I would always have one or two which would want to do things their way, except they didn't get anything done at all.
That meant I had to get the rest of the crew to pitch in and get those tasks done. It wasn't fair, but while a few were doing there best to make life difficult for everyone else, and in the end everyone still got paid the same. A few did less work while others did more.
Out elected politicians are the same way, I think most of them strongly believe in what they are fighting for, but are willing to compromise to get something done. Now we are being led by extremes, on both sides of the aisle, and compromise is for someone else to do, because they will not.
Again I enjoyed your common sense post, maybe you can send some notes to our politicians and they could end this, and I can get back to just worrying about the next stock I can identify for upside gains.
[Ot]Incredible day for Boston sports; Brady tosses TD to beat Saints 30-27 with five seconds to go. Ortiz grandslam ties Detroit 5-5 and Saltlamachia single wins it 6-5.
Futures: Dow -99, S&P -11.25, Naz -14.25.
Gold and Silver up very slightly.
Nope. Too many acrimonious fisticuffs, food fights among these inbreeders prompted Ihub to lock it down.
Is the Zeev's Talk Politics board still around?
Thomas Sowell: Who shut down the government?
Oct. 12, 2013 @ 07:55 PM
Even when it comes to something as basic, and apparently as simple and straightforward, as the question of who shut down the federal government, there are diametrically opposite answers, depending on whether you talk to Democrats or to Republicans.
There is really nothing complicated about the facts. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted all the money required to keep all government activities going — except for Obamacare.
This is not a matter of opinion. You can check the Congressional Record.
As for the House of Representatives’ right to grant or withhold money, that is not a matter of opinion either. You can check the Constitution of the United States. All spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, which means that congressmen there have a right to decide whether or not they want to spend money on a particular government activity.
Whether Obamacare is good, bad or indifferent is a matter of opinion. But it is a matter of fact that members of the House of Representatives have a right to make spending decisions based on their opinion.
Obamacare is indeed “the law of the land,” as its supporters keep saying, and the Supreme Court has upheld its constitutionality.
But the whole point of having a division of powers within the federal government is that each branch can decide independently what it wants to do or not do, regardless of what the other branches do, when exercising the powers specifically granted to that branch by the Constitution.
The hundreds of thousands of government workers who have been laid off are not idle because the House of Representatives did not vote enough money to pay their salaries or the other expenses of their agencies — unless they are in an agency that would administer Obamacare.
Since we cannot read minds, we cannot say who — if anybody — “wants to shut down the government.” But we do know who had the option to keep the government running and chose not to. The money voted by the House of Representatives covered everything that the government does, except for Obamacare.
The Senate chose not to vote to authorize that money to be spent, because it did not include money for Obamacare. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that he wants a “clean” bill from the House of Representatives, and some in the media keep repeating the word “clean” like a mantra. But what is unclean about not giving Harry Reid everything he wants?
If Sen. Reid and President Obama refuse to accept the money required to run the government, because it leaves out the money they want to run Obamacare, that is their right. But that is also their responsibility.
You cannot blame other people for not giving you everything you want. And it is a fraud to blame them when you refuse to use the money they did vote, even when it is ample to pay for everything else in the government.
When Barack Obama keeps claiming that it is some new outrage for those who control the money to try to change government policy by granting or withholding money, that is simply a bald-faced lie.
You can check the history of other examples of “legislation by appropriation” as it used to be called.
Whether legislation by appropriation is a good idea or a bad idea is a matter of opinion. But whether it is both legal and not unprecedented is a matter of fact.
Perhaps the biggest of the big lies is that the government will not be able to pay what it owes on the national debt, creating a danger of default. Tax money keeps coming into the Treasury during the shutdown, and it vastly exceeds the interest that has to be paid on the national debt.
Even if the debt ceiling is not lifted, that only means that government is not allowed to run up new debt. But that does not mean that it is unable to pay the interest on existing debt.
None of this is rocket science. But unless the Republicans get their side of the story out — and articulation has never been their strong suit — the lies will win. More important, the whole country will lose.
Thomas Sowell, a native of North Carolina, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com. Representations of fact and opinions are solely those of the author.
http://www.hpe.com/opinion/x559273386/Thomas-Sowell-Who-shut-down-the-government
zab, I read your comments about extremists in the Republican Party and, frankly, find little to disagree with.
I think you are only seeing a part of the picture, however. Much as I think Obamacare was architected to fail, I also think the incredible polar divisions of our elected officials also have a purpose. Not only are the politicians hell bent on destroying those "on the other side of the aisle" (regardless of which side of the aisle they are on), they have inculcated this polarization into the citizens of this fine nation.
That's why you see such vitriolic "discussion" happening on political chat boards and in general walks of life. These people aren't stupid. They know if we all are occupied fighting each other "right" versus "left", then our attention will be diverted from them slowly changing this nation from what was envisioned by our founding fathers and immortalized in our Constitution and Bill of Rights into something far different.
I believe we ALL are being played whether we call ourselves liberal or conservative.
I refuse to play. I can disagree and still be civil. I can discuss and sometimes reach a reasonable compromise. Our "leaders" seem incapable of that. For a reason. I don't trust any of them, whether they call themselves liberal or conservative. It hasn't always been like this.
For me, I am glad I brought no progeny to this earth to live a suppressed existence.
I can live with that, and in this forum and anything else in life I have no problem with anyone who disagrees with me. I also never claim to be right all of the time either.
I believe each morning you decide to wake up, and when you do, you get up, you get something to eat, and you go about getting something done. You might not get it all done that day, and that's when you call it work.
But you keep trying to do a little more each day, eventually you will accomplish whatever you are trying to do. My daughter reminds me that I have to live forever, I really love my daughter, she is just like me. She is always smiling, and no matter what she has ever dealt with she reminded me that her Dad told her she could do it, it just might take a little longer.
Some in this forum are always negative, they don't like this or they submit comments from people who represent their views of people calling for the end of something. That's really bothers me, the only person who can stop you from doing something is yourself.
Its like listening to the Tea Party type people, their idea of America scares the crap out of me, we might be all individuals, but all of us live in this great country called America, so when someone disagrees with a Tea Party person we are just as right as they are, so lets compromise and make it better. But with them there is no compromise, its there way, or they will do their very best to destroy my way of life, and that is always wrong.
I actually wanted the single payer approach, that way each American would deal with his medical problems on his own level.
This is America, we are suppose to be the "can do" country, you know where you take on a problem and solve. That's what annoys me. All I hear from the other side is that health care should a free market decision. But its not, its a Corporate decision that is made by executives who line their pockets with huge salaries and bonuses for denying healthcare to those who need it.
The free market system isn't always free, its run by Corporations whose main concern is not healthcare but the bottom line. What does the bottom line have to do with deciding if this patient needs this procedure or another one. That's should be between the Doctor and the patient.
I know from Wal-Mart's Insurance you had to seek approval from a Wal-Mart representative to find out if you were covered, you then could only see those Doctors that were under the Wal-Mart plan, and I could only go to the one hospital here in Chattanooga. When I was in Florida it was even worse.
In Florida I could not go to the hospital that we near the warehouse, or my home, I had to travel North and then west until I could get to the one that was in the Wal-Mart plan. One time my son decided he was going to do something on his skateboard and ended up hurting his arm. I took him to the emergency room that was closest. Big mistake, Wal-Mart denied the claim, then the hospital went after me. When you sign the form for any hospital to do medical care you take full responsibility for the bill. Those few hours cost me almost 20 % of my yearly pay, and the arm wasn't broke either.
The Health Companies have written Obamacare, and it was really just the old Republican Dole plan to begin with, but this is at least a start to addressing a problem that has been happening for over 70 years. I just wonder how many 10s of Millions of American have died because they were denied healthcare.
As for your diabetes, I am borderline diabetic, but I was lucky, my Doctor did a preventive test, discovered my problem early and told me what I had to do to start addressing this issue. Its been almost 16 months, I think, I have cut out all sugars, well almost all. I eat a little more fruit, and a lot more vegetables, and did many other things with my diet. I had to monitor myself daily for almost six months, but I got lucky, I caught it in time, and now there isn't a day that goes by that I don't change something to help my body dealing with it.
We all get old, all of us will have issues, but finding these things with preventive tests is cheaper than just waiting for serious illness to occur due to neglect. When you lose your medical insurance, and that's easy to do, you change jobs is the worse one, what might of been covered under your old insurance is now lost in your new one. My neighbor just experienced that one, he has health issues and he is only in his fifties, his new job at Amazon will not cover those problems, but he has gone ahead to see what the Affordable Health Care Act can do for him. He hates Obama, but come January he will be getting Health Insurance thanks to the Affordable Health Care Act, and telling Amazon to stick it.
10 Reasons Why Obamacare Is Going to Ruin Your Medical Care… and Your Life
Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D.
July 31, 2013 8:32pm
Of course you've heard of "liar loans"—in the heyday of subprime mortgages, unscrupulous lenders handed out mortgages to practically everyone with a pulse. "So you're saying you make $100,000 a year? Great, check this box titled 'McMansion.'"
We all know how this charade ended. Now Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D., an acclaimed expert on the subject of Obamacare, warns that the delay of the employer mandate by one year will force Americans into a single-payer system, raising insurance premiums and encouraging "liar subsidies" that might prove fiscally devastating. Not to mention that under the new health care system, you may well end up dead…
Dan Steinhart
Editor, Casey Research
Obamacare is a hodgepodge of new regulations, requirements, and penalties. I'd like to start by defining three terms, which, while obscure today, should begin to enter our everyday vocabulary as Obamacare continues to take effect:
Health insurance exchanges are the basket of qualified insurance policies that meet the new healthcare law requirements for expanded coverage. These may be set up by the states (many are refusing to do so, due to high cost and fear of bankrupting the state) or the federal government. The Exchanges are supposed to be fully operational by October 1, 2013, but it is questionable whether they will actually be in place by that deadline.
The individual mandate requires that individuals purchase health insurance that meets the new, expanded federal requirements. Individuals who do not comply face a financial penalty. Individuals who fall below minimum income levels will be eligible for taxpayer-funded subsidies to buy health insurance.
The employer mandate requires that businesses with more than 50 full-time employees must provide health insurance for all employees, and that insurance must meet the new standards set forth in the new law. Businesses that do not comply must pay a financial penalty for each employee, which for large companies can run into the millions of dollars annually. This is the piece of Obamacare that has been delayed by one year.
Selective Enforcement
Why delay one component of Obamacare and not the others? More specifically, why delay the employer mandate but not the individual mandate?
To answer that question, we must first understand this fact: Obama wants a single-payer healthcare system in the US.
This is not a secret:
Barack Obama, 2003: "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer healthcare system for America, but as all of you know, we may not get there immediately."
Barack Obama, 2007: "But I don't think we will be able to eliminate employer-based coverage immediately. There is potentially going to be some transition time."
These quotes are not taken out of context. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that transitioning to a single-payer system has been Obama's and his cohorts' ultimate goal all along:
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), 2009: "Next to me was a guy from the insurance company who then argued against the public option. He said it would not let private insurance companies compete. A public option would put the private insurance companies out of business and lead to single-payer. My single-payer friends, he was right. The man was right!"
Here, Rep. Schakowsky is suggesting that the "public option" will lead to their desired goal of a single-payer healthcare system. Single-payer proponents no longer use this term, since the public has clearly and consistently opposed it.
The "public option" has been renamed "Medicaid expansion," which serves the public-relations purpose of confusing the public and avoiding calling taxpayer-funded healthcare "single payer."
Jacob S. Hacker (Yale Professor), 2008: "Someone once said to me this is a Trojan Horse for single payer. It's not a Trojan Horse, right? It's right there! I am telling you. We are going to get there. Over time. Slowly. But we are going to move away from reliance on employer-based health insurance, as we should, but we will do it in a way that we are not going to frighten people into thinking they are going to lose their private insurance. We will give them a choice of public or private insurance when they are in the pool. We are going to let them keep their private insurance as long as their employer continues to provide it."
Hacker nicely sums up the underlying goals of Obamacare: not to increase competition or patient choice, but to drive people out of private insurance as a stepping stone to a government-run, single-payer system.
Stepping Stone to Single-Payer
Knowing Obama and his cohorts' goals, the purpose behind the delay of the employer mandate seems clearer: to hurry the "transition time" away from employer-based health insurance and to a single-payer system.
By forcing individuals to purchase compliant healthcare plans but not forcing employers to provide those plans, Obama is creating a swell of 10-13 million workers that must enroll in health insurance, but cannot obtain it from their employers. These workers thus have no choice but to use the government-controlled health insurance exchanges, or else pay a financial penalty.
This represents a doubling of the number of workers forced to get health insurance on the exchanges.
Importantly, the IRS has ruled that if workers have access to affordable health insurance through their employer, their dependents are not eligible for taxpayer-funded subsidies on the Obamacare health insurance exchanges.
Now that businesses will not be required to offer health insurance until 2015, workers and their dependents will be eligible for taxpayer-funded subsidies to purchase health insurance on the exchanges.
This will cost taxpayers an estimated $60 billion dollars in 2014 alone to cover the increased costs of subsidies—and the loss of revenue from employer penalties.
This $60 billion figure is before we take into account the "liar subsidies" that will invariably occur now that the administration has quietly removed eligibility verification for taxpayer-funded subsidies.
Community organizers are already being hired around the country to sign people up for the health exchanges. There are no penalties for failing to verify eligibility, and no penalties for signing up people who cannot afford to pay the monthly insurance premiums.
It is set up for disaster, much like the "liar loans" that helped topple the mortgage industry when people were not required to verify their income to qualify for a mortgage.
Remember, by enacting the dual mandates, Obamacare ostensibly was designed to ensure that its costs were borne by businesses, not taxpayers. But when the president decided to enforce only certain portions of the healthcare law and delay others, he shifted the cost of health insurance onto the backs of taxpayers.
This is all on top of the burdensome costs Obamacare has already created. Various studies have projected that private insurance premiums will rise between 20 to 60% in 2014, and some as much as 100%.
How long will the private-insurance market survive with such exploding costs? People will not be able to afford such massive premium increases. That seems to be the point: drive up costs and drive everyone into the arms of government-controlled medical care.
Jeff Smith from Seattle summed it up nicely in a Wall Street Journal letter on June 12:
"I was going to leave my job… to start a business until I shopped around for a healthcare plan: At Group Health, a health-maintenance organization in Seattle, I was given a quote of $842 per month for me and my family. But that would increase to $2,320 starting in January 2014 when Obamacare kicks in—a 276% increase. Why? Because I would be forced to carry coverage I don't want and don't need, such as maternity care. Welcome to the world of socialized medicine, courtesy of the Un-Affordable Care Act."
How Obamacare Affects You and Your Medical Care
The delay in the employer mandate is but one of dozens of negative impacts Obamacare will have on your medical services. As an independent physician, I've been discussing these issues with my patients for the past few years, helping them to prepare for what's ahead.
Here are the ten most important points that I tell my patients:
1. Your private insurance premiums will cost more and more each year.
2. You will lose the choices and flexibility in health insurance policies that we have had available up until now.
3. As reimbursements continue to drop, fewer and fewer doctors will take Medicare (for those 65 and older) or Medicaid (people younger than 65).
4. Fewer doctors accepting Medicare and Medicaid causes an increase in wait times for appointments and a decrease in the numbers and types of specialists available on these plans. Consumers would be wise to line up their doctors now.
5. Studies from various organizations and states have consistently shown that Medicaid recipients have longer waits for medical care, fewer options for specialists, poorer medical outcomes, and die sooner after surgeries than people with no health insurance at all. Yet an increasing number of Americans will be forced into this second-class medical care.
6. As more people enter the taxpayer-funded plans (Medicare and Medicaid) instead of paying for private insurance, the costs to provide this increased medical care and medications will escalate, leading to higher taxes.
7. With no eligibility verifications in place, millions of people who are in the US illegally will be able to access taxpayer-funded medical services, making longer lines, longer wait times, and less money available for medical care for American citizens… unless taxes are increased even more.
8. Higher expenditures to provide medical services lead to rationing of medical care and treatment options to reduce costs. This is the mandated function of the Independent Payment Advisory Board: to cut costs by deciding which types of medical services to allow… or disallow.
If you are denied treatment, you have no appeal of IPAB decisions; you are simply out of luck, and possibly out of life. This is a radical departure from the appeals process required for all private health insurance plans. Further, the IPAB is accountable only to President Obama, and cannot be overridden by Congress or the courts. IPAB is designed to have the final word on your health.
9. Under current regulations, if medical care is denied by Medicare, then a patient is not allowed to pay cash to a Medicare-contracted physician or hospital or other health professional. Patients who need medical care that is denied under Medicare or Medicaid will find themselves having to either: 1) look for an independent physician or hospital (quite rare these days); or 2) go outside the USA for treatment.
10. Expect a loss of medical privacy. Beginning in 2014, if you participate in government health insurance, your health records will be sent to a centralized federal database, with or without your consent.
The bottom line is that Americans are losing more and more of their medical freedom. By 2015, so many workers will be trapped in the government-run health insurance exchanges that there will be no going back to the private plans we have today. At this rate, single-payer proponents will drive private insurance companies out of business, which has been their intention all along.
Americans need to become far more proactive about taking charge of their health. The healthier you are, the less vulnerable you are to our degrading healthcare system. It's also wise to consider proactively planning for medical treatment options outside the US.
http://www.caseyresearch.com/articles/10-reasons-why-obamacare-is-going-to-ruin-your-medical-care-and-your-life
As I saiid, I hope your happiness may endure.
Oh, by the way, my wife and I are in our early 60's. I have diabetes. I am an only child and lost my Dad to small cell carcinoma and my Mom to ulcerative colitis. Please know that you and those you know do not corner the market on anecdotal medical stories.
I think Obamacare is a travesty. A travesty designed to fail so the government can ride to the rescue with a single-payer system. A system for which they could not get the votes to pass in Congress but the system they wanted all along.
I am an Objectivist so I obviously think this will turn out badly for us all.
But I am steadfast in hoping your happiness can endure.
Out.
Its not that I am happy, and in a coherent discussion with some in this forum, The Affordable Health Care Act will have lots of problems in the years ahead. But then medical care when you are sick is never an easy discussion.
When you have a loved one, or a good friend who is sick you just would like to know that he or she has the opportunity to seek medical help besides just going to an emergency room for some quick treatment.
Medical Care is Expensive, and many of us have watched those same friends and loved ones have to choose between bankruptcy or getting medical care. Most Doctors I have seen did not have all of the answers, and sometimes they would tell me that my chances were 50/50, so even getting proper medical care is no guarantee either.
But to deny any American at any hospital because you di not heave health Insurance is just wrong in the 21st century. If we can send a man into outer space, we can certainly find a way to get American Health Insurance. Again this just gets you in the door for medical treatment, it does not mean we have cured all of the diseases we all can get. All of us will get sick at some time in our lives, to ignore this issue while Millions of Americans are denied health care is wrong, period.
I have three friends who are still a little young for Medicare but they are looking forward to the AffordableHealth Care Act to start in January, they are all Conservative but they have no Medical Insurance at this time. They all have pre-existing conditions, that's what happens when you become 63 years old. They are also scared about losing their homes and everything they have built up over a lifetime, but they have seen it happen a few times. Your wife gets cancer, and you lose your insurance, or you use up your LIMITED coverage, Mary's brothers wife did that one, but he was lucky, she died, but not before he had to sell the house to pay some of the medical bills. She has been dead for five years, and he still has bills to pay off.
The NYT link has an excellent graph as to how it was supposed to work
Note that before being accepted, there are apparently about 20 agency data bases must be accessed and evaluated -- note the last one
========
Application
Consumers provide basic information to set up accounts, which allows them to compare costs and benefits of health plans. They can apply for a plan as well as for financial assistance, which can be in the form of tax credits or government assistance programs.Application
PROBLEM
Consumers had difficulty creating online accounts and were unable to compare plans
Verification
The application is sent through a data services hub, which checks the identity of the consumer through information from various federal agencies.
Social Security Administration to verify Social Security Number, citizenship and other information.
Department of Homeland Security to make sure the applicant is a citizen or legal resident.
Internal Revenue Service and a government contractor to verify applicants’ incomes if they are seeking financial assistance.
Veterans Health Administration, Defense Department, Office of Personnel Management, Medicare, Peace Corps and the applicant’s state Medicaid agency to check that they are not already enrolled in other health insurance programs.
Well, zab, judging from your posts, Obamacare has made you a very happy fellow.
Good for you.
I hope your happiness may endure.
We really do not get the NYTimes down here, you can find it on line, but until you mentioned it was the first time I even heard that bit of information. I also know that down here many citizens are getting angry about not havingur own state participating in this program.
This is one of the redish states you can find, but when you are DENIED health Insurance, and are sick with diabetes, heart disease, or cancer you just want to see a Doctor. At the moment the Health Insurance Company DENIES you coverage because of your pre-existing condition.
Until I hear that you have a better way of treating people with these type of health conditions, I will look forward to the Affordable Health Care Act. But then I was denied coverage for three years and almost died under the Republican answer to everything, which is nothing.
I also know down here in Chattanooga that Memorial Hospital just did a 350 Million addition, and that Erlanger Hospital is Hiring, and Park Ridge is about to undergo another growth expansion.
My son in law works for the:
http://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/area/or/oregon-health-and-science-university-6920570
I was lucky enough to see this place when I was visiting my daughter in June of this year. They are always hiring, and when I asked about the Affordable Health Care Act everyone in Portland was looking forward to its roll out. But then that is what happens when you work at something to make it better, it gets better.
In Tennessee our Governor is still working on the new lottery system that allows the citizens of Tennessee to win a chance to be one of the first to get a phone number that they can call to inquire about Medical Insurance. But you have to be one the lucky lottery winners to get this phone number. That is so much better for healthcare when you are suffering from something like diabetes, heart diseases, or cancer, a phone number to call someone to ask a question.
I think when Obamacare loses the NYT. it may be a sign of difficulty
>>>Uninsured Americans who are now eligible to Purchase Medical Insurance thanks to the Affordable Health Care Act<<<
and, does the fact that the main reason they are uninsured is because they cannot pay for coverage
=========
NYT
[...]
The growing national outcry has deeply embarrassed the White House, which has refused to say how many people have enrolled through the federal exchange.
Even some supporters of the Affordable Care Act worry that the flaws in the system, if not quickly fixed, could threaten the fiscal health of the insurance initiative, which depends on throngs of customers to spread the risk and keep prices low.
“These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.' ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/politics/from-the-start-signs-of-trouble-at-health-portal.html?hp&_r=0
The article includes comments which number over 1k
http://0-money.cnn.com.library.ccbcmd.edu/2013/09/30/investing/health-care-stocks-obamacare/index.html
Seems like all of those healthcare stocks are doing quite well as the Affordable Health Care Act rolls out, guess your article forgot about all of those health care companies that are doing so well in the stock market. Earnings and Sales growing thanks to Obamacare.
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/September/13/hospitals-insurance-marketplaces-exchanges-marketing.aspx
Thanks to the Affordable Health Care Act, Obamacare, one of the most prestigious institutes, Kaiser is seeing non stop growth, but then I imagine your article didn't want to include them either.
Why is it that your articles are always from people who not really in the Health Care Industry ?
http://allhealthcare.monster.com/careers/articles/2722-15-top-hospitals-that-are-hiring
Guess your article that you posted forgot to include all of these hospitals that are hiring.
http://www.statesman.com/news/business/austin-unemployment-rate-drops-in-february/nW7P5/
Even in Red state Texas hospitals are picking up the pace in hiring.
http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/healthcare-hiring-continues-increase
Your headlines from biased reporting is like Fox crapola, but when you go to the actual places that are hiring in the medical industry you discover that hiring is increasing.
Please answer as to why you keep reporting thins that are just wrong.
Ben Carson thinks that all of those generations of Americans who fought and died in the Civil War, or even WWI, and even WWII were just lucky to experience what 15 % of Uninsured Americans who are now eligible to Purchase Medical Insurance thanks to the Affordable Health Care Act.
But you have to remember he was talking to the most extreme people of America who also believe that if you get sick and don't have health Insurance you should just die.
But that was the system he did believe in, you get sick, then die. What many find amazing is that you like to post articles like that one, you must think the same way.
Why do Red states claim the most in food stamps.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/09/04/food-insecurity-may-be-high-but-states-are-still-saying-no-to-federal-food-stamp-support/
A job engine sputters as hospitals cut staff
Paul Davidson and Barbara Hansen
USA TODAY
8 a.m. EDT October 13, 2013
Hospitals are cutting thousands of jobs, undercutting a sector that was a reliable source of job growth, even through the recession.
Hospitals, a reliable source of employment growth in the recession and its aftermath, are starting to cut thousands of jobs amid falling insurance payments and in-patient visits.
The payroll cuts are surprising because the Affordable Care Act (ACA), whose implementation took a big step forward this month, is eventually expected to provide health coverage to as many as 30 million additional Americans.
"While the rest of the U.S. economy is stabilizing or improving, health care is entering into a recession," says John Howser, assistant vice chancellor of Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Health care providers announced more layoffs than any other industry last month — 8,128 — mostly because of reductions by hospitals, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. So far this year, the health care sector has announced 41,085 layoffs, the third-most behind financial and industrial companies.
Total private hospital employment is still up by 36,000 over the past 12 months, but it's down by 8,000 since April and more staff reductions are expected into next year.
This month, Indiana University Health laid off about 900 workers as part of a move to trim its budget by $1 billion over five years. Vanderbilt plans to eliminate 1,000 jobs by year-end to help shave operating costs 8% a year. And the Cleveland Clinic is offering buyouts to 3,000 employees as it shaves its annual operating costs by $330 million.
"This is a challenging time for the health care industry," says Jim Terwilliger, president of two of Indiana health's hospitals. "The pace of change is far greater than anytime in recent history."
There are myriad reasons for the cuts, which are affecting administrative staff as well as nurses and doctors:
• Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance companies are all reducing reimbursement to hospitals. The federal budget cuts known as sequestration have cut Medicare reimbursement by 2%, the American Hospital Association says.
• The health care law has further reduced the Medicare payments to hospitals that provide lower-quality service or have high readmission rates.
• The National Institutes of Health reduced funding to hospitals by 5% as part of sequestration, forcing hospitals to trim research staff.
• The number of inpatient hospital days fell 4% from 2007 to 2011, in part because of the economic downturn, the hospital association says.
• As more Baby Boomers turn 65, their services will be reimbursed at Medicare rates that are lower than those of private payers, putting further pressure on hospital revenue.
The new health care law was supposed to ease the burden on hospitals by expanding Medicaid coverage to more low-income Americans, who often use hospital services in emergencies then don't pay their bills. But 26 states, including Tennessee, rejected ACA's offer of federal funding to expand Medicaid. That decision led to about a third of the job cuts by Nashville-based Vanderbilt, Howser says.
Still, J.P. Fingado, CEO of API Healthcare, a consulting firm for hospitals, says the layoffs are shortsighted because the providers likely will have to add staff as soon as next year to handle increased patient volumes resulting from the health care law.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/10/13/hospital-job-cuts/2947929/
Ben Carson: Obamacare Is Worst Thing To Happen In America 'Since Slavery'
By Paige Lavender
The Huffington Post
10/11/2013 1:56 pm EDT
The Forest Mafia: How Scammers Steal Millions Through Carbon Markets
When the product is invisible, the cons are endless.
By Ryan Jacobs
Oct 11 2013, 9:30 AM ET
A forest village of the indigenous Matses tribe in the Amazon. (Rebecca Spooner/Survival International)
(please note: The underlined words are 'clickable' links when accessed via the link at the bottom of this page)
When the balding Australian first stepped off the riverboat and into the isolated pocket of northeastern Peru's Amazon jungle in 2010, he had what seemed like a noble, if quixotic, business plan.
An ambitious real estate developer, David Nilsson hoped to ink joint venture agreements with the regional government of Loreto province and the leaders of the indigenous Matses community to preserve vast thickets of the tribe's remote rainforest. Under a global carbon-trading program, he wished to sell shares of the forest's carbon credits to businesses that hope to mitigate, or offset, their air pollution.
Located a six-day ride from the frontier city of Iquitos, the jungle’s vegetation, soils, and looming trees store an immense amount of carbon dioxide—roughly one ton, the equivalent of one UN-backed carbon credit, per tree.
In an ideal scenario, this is how it's supposed to work: A community in a developing country works with an NGO or developer to design a plan to protect a large swathe of forest and thus prevent the release of the harmful chemical compound into the atmosphere, in accordance with the United Nations’ program called REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation). Then, it can get the emissions reductions certified by a third-party auditor and sell the resulting carbon credits to corporations in developed countries interested in reducing their own carbon footprints. (Deforestation accounts for roughly 17 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions.)
Nilsson's Hong Kong-based company, Sustainable Carbon Resources Limited, planned to help the indigenous community set up the Peruvian carbon credit project in exchange for sharing the profits once they were sold. If Nilsson’s plan worked, in theory the forest would be spared from loggers, his company would net some profit, and the indigenous community would receive millions of dollars in funding for education and medical care from investors and corporations interested in expanding sustainability and social responsibility efforts.
Nilsson recruited Dan Pantone, an Iquitos-based American ecologist with close contacts in the Matses community, as a guide to show him around the jungle, and, more importantly, introduce him to the right decision-makers.
"[Nilsson] told me, 'You're going to be a millionaire in a year,’" Pantone said of his earliest phone conversation. "He said he was going to help the indigenous people."
Early on, Nilsson didn't seem particularly interested in hammering out the details of a potential forest project. "He didn't talk about REDD; he just wanted the contact," Pantone said of Nilsson’s early conversations with Angel Dunu Maya, a Matses chief. "Once he had the contact, he had everything he wanted from me.” In meetings with Peruvian lawyers, Nilsson was also advised about the difficulty of proving the risk of emissions, as REDD requires, in such an isolated area that was already designated as a reserve by the federal government. He also faced other, more obvious challenges. "The government asked him to show his sources of income, and he was unable to do that," Pantone added. "So that was a dead-end for him."
Nilsson flew back to Australia for Christmas, but he was not deterred. In February 2011, he reappeared in the jungle wearing what would become his signature, Crockodile Dundee-style Akubra cowboy hat.
Unable to broker a deal with regional government officials, he met with Matses leadership in Iquitos in March and presented a PowerPoint that detailed the incredible profits he claimed the tribe would receive. He was granted permission for a meeting in Matses territory, where the community would decide whether or not to sign the contract he had presented. According to Indian Country Today, a news service that caters to a Native American readership, the leaders were told that the agreement had to be written in English because “the World Bank and the UN only recognize the English language.” The contract, according to the indigenous rights organization Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP), which advises the Matses and other tribes, gave "considerable control and powers to [Sustainable Carbon Resources Limited] for an indefinite period. Effectively this would reduce the Matses to the role of forest 'gatekeepers' rather than playing an active part in the administration or co-management of the Project."
By this point, Pantone’s relationship with Nilsson had soured, and his suspicions had boiled over into a full-fledged investigation into his past. In late March, Pantone was able to reach two of Nilsson's former associates, who claimed that they and indigenous communities in the Philippines had been victims of his deceit. Cecille Villanueva, who worked at an Australia-based energy consultancy company called Ienergy, sent the following to Pantone in an email:
We have known him to be deceitful, but also careful in covering himself from possible legal repercussions. But his character certainly shows a trail of … false claims to further his financial objectives, which in the past involved illegally selling land and running with the monies of vulnerable people. We hope this does not happen to the Matses.
She was referencing spurious land deals Nilsson had allegedly made with residents of the small South Pacific island nation Nauru. In the 1990s, according to transcripts of meetings in the Queensland Parliament, Nilsson had sold six rural lots in a coastal area development for $70,000 each. However, the lots did not exist and the investors in Nauru never received anything.
In addition, Nilsson's supposed carbon-credit firm began looking more and more like a shell company. It didn't have a functioning website or a physical office, according to a report from The Sydney Morning Herald.
After Pantone and the Matses shared theses details with AIDESEP and the Peruvian human rights monitor Defensoria del Pueblo, as well as the local newspaper, critics quickly labeled Nilsson a "carbon cowboy," and his plans began to unravel.
According to reporting by GlobalPost's Simeon Tegel, Defensoria del Pueblo instructed the Matses against signing a contract they couldn't read. After learning this, Nilsson stormed into the group’s office.
“He shouted. He insulted us, and we told him to leave,” Lizbeth Castro, the director of the office, told GlobalPost. “He said he was going to sue us and this would not stand. We told him, no problem, sue us. But we will keep on doing our work.”
In April, the Matses general assembly rejected the project.
But Nilsson continued to search for ways to get it off the ground, setting up meetings with another impoverished indigenous group, the Yaguas. He also dropped the Sustainable Carbon Resources Limited moniker and began operating under a new entity called Amazon Holdings.
By October 2011, he had convinced Javier Fasenando, the president of a Yagua federation, to sign a deal that would allegedly provide profits to the community "in return for rights to the 'wood' on their land."
According to GlobalPost:
Fasenando said that he understood the terms of the agreement. “Those who criticize it come from other communities,” he said. “They are envious.”
But at the end of our interview in Spanish, Fasenando struggled to confirm even the spelling of his own name. Other indigenous leaders confirmed to GlobalPost that he is unable to read or write.
Fasenando also was unable to tell me where FEPYRA’s copy of the agreement was.
Nilsson declined to provide a copy of the contract to GlobalPost, saying that he needed written permission from the Yagua communities involved in the deal.
Then, in an undercover operation led by investigative journalists with 60 Minutes Australia that aired in July 2012, Nilsson explained the real extent of his plan for the carbon deal to a producer posing as a potential investor as they sat over a huge map of the territory.
David Nilsson: It’s going to be billions.
Producer: Beg your pardon?
David Nilsson: Billions. I just, I’m scared to quote it, because it’s fucking huge, put it that way.
...
David Nilsson: My contracts are 200-year contracts, etched in stone, so when the carbon’s gone, people can come through and harvest the rainforest there. We’d have a forest management plan they can reforest, they can plant palm oil, they can cut all the timber. No one can stop them. No one can stop them.
Producer: But by doing this carbon plan, you’re stopping that happening?
David Nilsson: Yeah, but the carbon plan only goes for 25 years. The contracts still run and there’s enough timber there to supply the world down there. China will love it.
The project would profit not only from carbon credits, but also from felling the very forest it was allegedly protecting. Once the lead investigator, Liam Bartlett, revealed himself, Nilsson simply said that it wasn't a scam, and declared the interview over.
More than a year later, Nilsson refuses to discuss the details. Reached for comment by The Atlantic twice on his cell phone, he hung up after we identified ourselves. He did not respond to questions sent to his email address.
He has also attempted to smear anyone who questioned his schemes. He filed charges against Pantone for fraud in Peru (Pantone was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing) and later set up a defamatory website that accuses him of horrific crimes. Nilsson also filed criminal charges against a Matses leader for fraud.
Chris Lang, a long-time environmental advocate who was one of the first to report on Nilsson’s scams on his website redd-monitor.org, received an email from his service provider, Bluehost, in August of 2011 that forced him to delete "all images and references to the name" of Nilsson. The company “had received a ‘report of Terms of Service Violations,’” which, under its policies, includes divulging private information about third-parties without their consent.
After the 60 Minutes investigation, Nilsson attempted to impugn the credibility of the Australian journalists Stephen Rice and Liam Bartlett.
In an email to The Atlantic, Rice explained:
Nilsson is demanding that I be sent to jail for entering Peru illegally on a tourist visa. In fact, I was there on a legitimate journalist visa…
Most of [the online attacks against me and others are] just semi-literate rubbish, with laughable sources as “evidence,” but there’s no doubt Nilsson is pushing to have criminal charges laid against Liam Bartlett and I in Peru to make it difficult for us to return.
He’s lodged a 72-page complaint against me with the Australian journalists Association alleging I breached the journalist’s code of ethics and another against our television network (Channel Nine) with ACMA, the Australian broadcasting regulator. None of that is of any concern – our story was entirely accurate – but the complaints reveal the manipulation Nilsson employs.
Though there is a warrant for Nilsson’s arrest in Peru (for defamation, which is a criminal offense there), no international law enforcement organizations have yet investigated him for his alleged crimes. The Yagua have not received any money from him, according to Al Jazeera. It's unclear whether he's still peddling carbon projects to potential investors.
***
Though Nilsson's cons were extreme, international law enforcement authorities and environmental advocates say that the carbon markets are extremely vulnerable to financial fraudsters like him, especially when it comes to forest projects. Their shell games can also be hard to spot. As William Magrath, the World Bank's lead natural resource economist for rural development in Asia, once put it in a pun in a memo to his colleagues: "It's a jungle out there." In a meeting he attended with Interpol officials a few years ago, Magrath recalled, one man leaned back in his chair and called carbon "a con man's dream." The product is invisible, poorly understood, and regulation is extremely limited.
Despite the risks, carbon is the "world's fastest growing commodities market" valued at about $176 billion in 2011, according to the World Bank. The European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), the highest volume compliance market, accounts for $148 billion of that. Countries in Europe legally require top polluters to remain under certain government-issued emissions allowances, but companies who emit less can trade those credits to those who need more. Beyond those allowances, companies can purchase carbon credits, or offsets, which are linked to emissions reductions projects, like factory retrofits or other energy efficiency projects. If the U.S. decided to establish its own cap-and-trade market, the value of the trades could reach as high as $2 to $3 trillion. Credits from forest projects, like Nilsson's would have been, have not yet been approved for the compliance markets, but they are actively sold on a second kind of market for voluntary buyers interested in offsets.
Unlike the mandatory compliance credits, voluntary offsets aren't required, but they essentially allow big companies to claim they're more sustainable because they're financially supporting environmental projects, like forest conservation. Though much, much smaller, the $576 million voluntary offsets market, which includes credits from REDD projects, will likely expand as the formal compliance market grows. Many of the sales in this market are linked to corporate social responsibility efforts and are often meant to offset airline travel, large conferences and events, and manufacturing. A remote forest community, surrounded by carbon-storing trees, might offer their credits to say, a major retailer who wants an annual report that boasts a "green-friendly" initiative, or the like.
But without legally "binding targets" or formal regulatory bodies designed to verify the credits, voluntary offsets are also the area that’s ripest for exploitation. Already, many projects that don’t meet the UN’s environmental requirements end up eventually being sold on the voluntary carbon market, according to a June report from Interpol. Other projects offer carbon credits that are inflated in number based on misleading methodologies, do not exist on anything but paper, or, like Nilsson’s, may serve as a front for other illicit activities.
As the only international law enforcement agency "with a trans-boundary mandate, with designed units addressing both environmental and financial crimes," Interpol is one of the only agencies fully equipped to parse the data and identify carbon fraud at both the project and market levels. About a year ago, it began expanding and developing its intelligence on the emerging markets so that it could eventually advise and assist its 190 member countries in dismantling scams as new ones came online.
Its recent report intended to put its member countries "on notice about the potential pitfalls" of the trading systems, according to Davyth Stewart, a criminal intelligence officer with Interpol’s environmental crime unit. It highlighted the types of financial fraud the EU-ETS has already become accustomed to in hopes of forestalling similar schemes abroad. “The experience we've had with Europe was that it was often the case of chasing their tail," Stewart said. "You know, constantly on the backfoot, and having to plug holes that were being exploited. By the time they get around to discovering the fraud, a number of billions of dollars have already gone missing."
A diagram of how a typical "missing trader fraud" works (Europol)
On Tuesday, June 2, 2009, carbon traders on the Paris-based BlueNext exchange noticed “a terrifically high level of activity” on their system, according to Chris Perryman, Europol’s project manager for organized and economic crimes. A record total of 19.8 million credits swept across the market, a volume “160 percent higher than … average daily trading volume for the first five months of the year (7.4 million),” according to a recent article by Queensland University of Technology professors Peter Martin and Reece Walters in the International Journal for Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy. The next day, activity plummeted to 2.5 million trades. The brokers communicated their concerns about the transactions to the government, and French police shut down the market to investigate the possibility of fraud.
The crime that the authorities uncovered was a simple and elegant manipulation of the European value-added tax (VAT) system, called “missing trader fraud,” according to Europol. The strategy had been used in various scams since the 1990s, particularly with small, high-value products like computer chips and mobile phones, according to Perryman. In the European Union, when products and commodities are sold across borders, the buyers are not required to pay taxes to the seller, but they are when those purchases occur within one member state. In the case of the “missing trader” scheme, a seller uses shell brokers to sell the carbon credits and pocket the taxes from the buyer, and then disappears.
But the intangible quality of carbon credits dramatically simplified the process. The criminals no longer had to fake transactions by shipping empty containers or forging documents. “Just by sitting and selling goods behind your desk, on your computer, you would suddenly have these … transactions which would allow you to sell goods without VAT across a border and then sell goods with VAT in your own country. And nobody was there to verify it.”
After the BlueNext exchange investigation, authorities concluded that “up to 90% of all carbon trading in some countries was a result of these fraudulent activities. This fraud was estimated to have resulted in losses to several governments of around 5 billion euros in just over 18 months,” according to the Interpol report. The fraud also destroyed market confidence, further compounding the economic loss. According to Perryman, organized criminal syndicates have used the cash they earned from this type of carbon trading to fund other illicit activities in Europe, including cigarette smuggling, drug smuggling, and human trafficking. France and other European countries have since changed their trading rules to remove VAT from carbon transactions.
***
But VAT was only one of many financial scams.
According to Interpol, the lack of cross-checking or regulations between different international markets and exchanges has also allowed carbon credits from emissions reductions projects to be used on the same market to offset emissions more than once, eliminating the net environmental benefit the credits are supposed to provide.
Additionally, hackers have also compromised weak computer security systems to steal credits. In January 2011, Europol and Interpol thwarted an attempt by Romanian web bandits to sell $38.5 million worth of stolen carbon credits to buyers in the United Kingdom, Austria, and the Netherlands, according to the Wall Street Journal. They had hijacked foreign servers, “using them as robots to penetrate trading systems’ security and accessing member accounts through corporate systems that weren't well guarded.”
In another case, hackers broke into the Czech Republic’s electronic carbon registry, run by the state-owned energy firm OTE. A bomb threat was called into the OTE’s Prague offices as the criminals offloaded the stolen credits, $37.7 million worth, to foreign accounts on registries in Estonia and elsewhere. “Police speculate that the bomb scare provided a diversion so that employees wouldn't see phantom cursors moving across unattended screens or other telltale signs of a breach,” according to Ecosytem Marketplace’s report.
Hackers have also set up fake carbon registry websites that have successfully lured companies and brokers to provide their account login details, according to Interpol’s Stewart. This technique, known as “phishing,” poses an ongoing risk as new registries are established with unfamiliar requirements in emerging markets. “It becomes easier, particularly when you’ve got new investors investing, and markets are new, for people not to really realize that the website that looks legitimate and has the nice logos on it is not actually a legitimate one,” he said. “Because the registries and the websites don’t yet have enough of a broad reputation.”
Since the EU has introduced new VAT rules and a single unified registry, much of the fraud has been eliminated from Europe’s market. But Perryman is still monitoring the system for high-value money laundering. Because millions of credits can be traded in one transaction, they can serve as an easy front for concealing the movement of illicit cash earned from other criminal activities.
***
Assuming the credits are real, the financial schemes merely result in economic losses. But manipulations also occur on the project side, as well, and that type of fraud can undermine the very emissions savings and environmental good that companies and investors are supposedly paying for. The value of the credits can be superficially inflated, or entirely invented, as Nilsson’s case illustrates. Even when developers are required to hire outside auditors to verify the emissions reductions, some of the projects are still not doing what they advertise.
In an ideal world, developers set up efficiency projects that demonstrate clear reductions in emissions. Auditors review project claims, visit the site, verify they are real, and approve them under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism as Ceritified Emissions Reductions (CERs). Once they are approved and registered with the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, they can be traded over the compliance markets to offset the pollution of large emitters and meet legally mandated caps. In the case of forest projects, auditors are measuring something that's much more difficult to quantify. Instead of determining that a factory is no longer producing a toxic spew, auditors must evaluate whether the project is adequately protecting an at-risk forest, measure how much carbon is exactly stored within it, and then certify the emissions savings under the Voluntary Carbon Standard. That way, investors can buy offsets knowing the claims have been reviewed.
But the margin of error for determining the environmental benefits of such projects varies widely. It lies somewhere between 10 percent for cement and fertilizer projects and 100 percent for agriculture-oriented projects, according to a 2010 piece in Harper’s. Reporter Mark Schapiro also detailed the cozy relationships and revolving doors that two prominent auditors–which have verified roughly two thirds of the UN-approved emissions savings–share with carbon project developers, who provide payments to the companies that are charged with guaranteeing the veracity of their projects.
The resulting audits are not particularly reliable. When the UN conducted spot checks of carbon auditors Det Norske Veritas and SGS in 2008 and 2009, the investigation revealed that both firms certified projects without visiting them, according to the Interpol report. Both were temporarily suspended from audits. In some cases, the auditors were ill-qualified to complete the work, lacking either training or "proper technical skills" for the projects to which they were assigned. Of course, these reviews only occurred in-house and not on the ground, Interpol and Harper’s note. "With the number of projects taking place in remote areas of the world, there will continue to be limits in the United Nations [sic] ability to properly police those projects," Interpol writes. In addition, according to the 2007 estimates a UN official reported in the Interpol study, 15 to 20 percent of Clean Development Mechanism projects granted carbon credits did not adequately prove that that the emissions savings were directly linked to outside investment. Though these findings were for projects on the compliance market, the likelihood of passing off false data on the voluntary market is even greater.
Interpol's Stewart explained that even savvy investors don't really understand the process behind how the credits are generated, which makes it more difficult to detect when something is amiss. "It's not like a bag of rice or other commodities that can, at some point, be easily verified," he said. "Here, you'll have projects that are operating in very remote parts of the world, difficult to access. It becomes very difficult even for an independent auditor who goes, who can make it all the way out to that remote village or that remote town to verify that the project exists—and that they're doing what they say they're doing.” Carbon cowboys who set their sights on forest conservation can flourish quite easily because the product they sell, according to Tom Bewick, a Rainforest Foundation project manger who does work on the ground in Peru and Panama, is “an abstract commodity of nothing happening.”
In the voluntary market, it's really the investor's responsibility to make the determination whether the operators they're dealing with are legitimate or not. Because they're making a feel-good purchase, many times, it seems, they don't evaluate the sellers with much scrutiny. "Anyone can set up a project and sell voluntary carbon credits to anyone who will buy them," Chris Lang, of redd-monitor.org, wrote in an email. "The price can be whatever they can get away with. A large number of companies have been selling carbon credits as investments to members of the public -- targeting pensioners. Some people have lost their life savings to this scam."
In one such case, City of London police arrested Ian Macdonald and David Downes at London's Heathrow airport after a three-year trans-Atlantic investigation revealed that the pair had sold $9 million in fake or worthless carbon credits and shares to investors in the U.K. They had recruited cronies to use the phone lists from real companies to cold-call and convince their mostly elderly victims to sign up. "Some victims were contacted again months later and told companies they had invested in were the subjects of hostile takeovers and that they needed to buy more shares to protect their original investment. Individual losses ran as high as $600,000," a press release announcing the convictions read. The duo, which deposited the cash in American and Canadian bank accounts, lived ostentatiously. "We know they traveled the world," Detective Constable Claire Armson-Smith told British journalists. "Traveled business class. They had nice cars. Jaguars. Porsches. Nice clothes. Rolex watches.”
Another Australian, Brett Goldsworthy, who operates the company Shift2Neutral, has set up what he claimed were huge forest carbon credit projects that helped Australian PGA and the Sydney Turf Club events go carbon neutral. But, again, according to reporting by the The Sydney Morning Herald in 2011, the carbon projects, which Goldsworthy claimed were based in the Philippines, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Malaysia, were not not actually happening. Instead, Shift2Neutral, which claimed to have produced more than $1 billion worth of carbon offsets, had no employees besides Goldsworthy and was operating out of a small office in a Westleigh, Australia, shopping center. ''I realized there was something strange about Brett when we were negotiating with the tribes in the Philippines and he said he had a boatload of commandos waiting offshore in case he needed a 'hot extraction,''' Robert Hick, an investor who never received any compensation or returns from Goldsworthy, told the Herald. A website for Shift2Neutral is still active and has a list of press releases that outline its projects.
***
Predictions of future deforestation from a Conservation International project description. (Conservation International)
Even forestry projects that receive certifications through independent auditors are surprisingly easy to manipulate, according to experts. In vast thickets of jungle, like the ones Nilsson was after, maps of the land are usually either poorly labeled or inaccurate, according to Stewart. Boundaries between forest parcels can often be in dispute. When a developer claims the rights to a particular section of forest, flaws in titling records may make it very difficult to prove fraud.
Corrupt officials and tribal leaders may also claim the authority to make a deal they can't approve, according to Rainforest Foundation's Bewick, who also worked as a legitimate carbon credit developer in Colombia a few years ago. "They're just as likely to be part of the deal if they get something," he said. "The people that get screwed are the forest communities."
Even when there are clear collective titles over sparsely populated swathes of forest, there's still room for manipulation.
"For a well-intentioned developer, such as we were, the collective title implies collective management and common pool resource distribution, which I would argue lends itself to great chance of sustainability," Bewick wrote later in an email. "For a fraudster, it can be an opportunity to manipulate the executive leadership into signing over the carbon rights to a massive land area. So, yes, a lot less people to deal with or defraud."
The UN's guidelines for REDD projects are also easy to game. Developers are required to define an "imaginary" emissions baseline, or the rate at which logging and other forces would degrade the environment in the event that the proposed project didn't go into effect. "In essence, the purpose of this offset policy is to ensure that greenhouse gas reductions are 'in addition to what would have happened anyway,'" Martin and Walters wrote in the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy article. While this might be easier to prove on a factory retrofit, by, for example, using an emissions device to measure how much carbon dioxide is released before modifications, determining how nature and markets will act on a forest in the future is a guessing game subject to significant corruption. "One can imagine situations where local collusion might occur in relation to future land use and, in establishing a baseline, propose … degradation activities that may never have been undertaken in reality," the authors continue. If developers imagined a scenario where half the forest was logged, for example, the carbon credits would be worth more and the returns on the market would be much higher, even if that amount of logging was unlikely.
When Nilsson was initially considering his carbon projects, the proposed baseline was already an area he planned on fudging. In an email dated September 21, 2010, he asked Pantone:
Are there any records of deforestation aerial or satellite photos showing the deforestation logging over the last 10 to 30 years this will give us an idea when the existing timber will be deleted thus endangering the Matses land and way of life[?]
Pantone replied two days later, offering the most accurate assessment of the difficulties in proving deforestation:
There has been very little deforestation of Matses titled lands, with most being centered around the recently abandoned town of Buenas Lomas Antigua (the population moved to Buenas Lomas Nueva). I will send you links to the satellite images and other maps when I return from my trip next week.
Despite this information, Nilsson wrote back the same day:
I note that there is very little deforestation on the Matses land Dan. As long as we can demonstrate the rate of deforestation in Peru and how it can affect the Matses land in time [sic].
...we will have some work to do on this so the Matses land qualifies for a carbon credit project. Between all of us that is 1 American 2 Aussies 1 Irishwomen and team of experts I do not think it will not [sic] be a big problem.
Determining the amount of carbon actually stored in a forest may be more straightforward than predicting the future, but it, too, has several gaping holes where crooked operators can creep in. Satellite imagery, according to Stewart, does not, for instance, provide details on the different species of trees or how much carbon is stored in the soil. To do that, scientists hired by developers on the ground must survey the landscape. Due to the expense and difficulty in locating a parcel of forest in these remote areas, auditors rarely make the trip to evaluate their interpretations.
Even if an auditor manages to visit the trees, it becomes a complex and monumental undertaking, according to Stewart. The results often involve calculations with a set of assumptions that vary based on the particular methodology the ecologist employs. “It can be relatively easy for a bribe to be paid … to the auditor to choose one methodology over another,” Stewart said. “If you didn’t know about the bribe, and you were just looking at the end result, it would be very difficult to just to notice that.”
In 2010, a British company’s overestimation of the amount of carbon stored in the forests of Liberia would have exposed the country to $2.2 billion of financial risk, an amount higher than its annual GDP.
***
Many of the conmen of the voluntary carbon market can expect to run free without oversight on the ground or law enforcement follow-ups. “Because it’s not a mandatory market, there often isn’t the same regulator oversight, and so some of these carbon cowboys aren’t necessarily being pursued by the law in the way they necessarily should be,” Stewart said. And coming up with a case is difficult because it’s hard to prove much beyond a simple breach of contract, even though the ultimate damage can devastate the environment and financially ruin communities.
The isolation and lack of infrastructure on the ground in most of these far-flung REDD forest areas make them extremely vulnerable to audacious operators, who can then market the projects to unknowing investors abroad. In fact, the weak rule of law seems to be something that the cowboys depend upon. “If you’re a burglar and you’re wandering around the streets, and you’ve got every window with [a] neighborhood watch [sign],” Perryman said, “and then you go three blocks away and it doesn’t exist, that’s where you break in.”
Iquitos provided the perfect setting for Nilsson’s con. One of Nilsson’s translators there, an American who wished to remain anonymous, told The Atlantic he wasn’t going to defend his former employer, and that, given the undercover video from 60 minutes, his behavior seemed “pretty bad.” But all the lawlessness, corruption, and counter-narratives made it difficult to decipher the truth in a city where there was an “extremely fine line between a savvy businessman and a conman,” he said. In other words, it was somewhere where someone like Nilsson could thrive. “It’s the frontier,” the translator said. “A lot of [foreigners] go there because they ran out of roads somewhere else. It’s a cesspool, but it’s a beautiful place.”
According to a report from Global Witness in 2011, in Cameroon one guard "must police hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest and several well-financed European logging companies, yet he has no vehicle, no radio, and his shoes are several sizes too small." As Martin and Reece note, the typical location of a REDD project does not have the economic resources, regulations, or government to defend against scammers.
There is something especially insidious about these fake forest carbon credits. Investors and corporations who buy voluntary credits believe they are buying into something grander than, say, the efficiency improvements of a single factory in China. They believe they’re funding not only the preservation of trees, but also the wellbeing of local forest communities. Unwittingly, they might be financing the destruction of both.“Forests are not just a reservoir of carbon,” Stewart said. “They’re also ecosystems. They provide biodiversity. They provide habitat. They provide livelihoods for local people.”
Few investors would expect money designated for forest preservation to be funneled to an illegal logging operation, but in an unregulated system with fraudsters like Nilsson, it’s entirely possible. “When you retrofit out a factory or you change the smokestacks and you change the machinery and you double-glaze the windows, you know that there’s going to be long-lasting benefits,” Stewart said. “Whereas with forests, they’re constantly under pressure for being cleared and for being logged. So the level of oversight is currently inadequate, I think, and not only does it need to be improved, it needs to be … sustainable and long-term.”
The voluntary market has provided a preview of what could happen if forest carbon credits ever hit the higher-stakes compliance carbon market. Though the EU-ETS has officially put off that possibility until at least 2020, California’s fledgling cap-and-trade system could approve foreign forest credits sooner. Carbon credits sourced to forest management projects located within the lower 48 states can already be used to meet compliance emissions standards there. Village communities in the forest of Chiapas, Mexico, wrote a letter to California Governor Jerry Brown and other officials opposing a recent project that California was considering for inclusion under the program, asking that forest offsets not be approved for use on the market. They criticized the technical expert that helped set up the plan, writing that she “was more focused on approving the REDD+ scheme to assure business interests than guaranteeing the protection of biodiversity, forests, and indigenous and peasant farmers’ territories and rights.”
Both Interpol and Europol said they expect that if forest credits do become eligible for trading on the compliance market, the same swindlers who profited off tax schemes and other loopholes will find ways to manipulate the forest projects as well.
“It’s a bit of a murky world really,” Europol’s Perryman said. “It’s a shame because obviously the whole idea from the politicians and legislators was to promote a cleaner world, and that has just been completely sunk. The good ideas and good intentions have been scuppered by the activities of fraudsters.”
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/the-forest-mafia-how-scammers-steal-millions-through-carbon-markets/280419/
Yeah. That's why I think the Red Sox aren't going to resign Jacoby Ellsbury to the contract he deserves.
I heard an old adage a very long time ago, good pitching can always neutralize good hitting. These playoffs are like the old ones I remember. Classic pitching duels, with fans waiting for their respective hitters to get even a single, let alone a double.
I have fallen out of favor with the playoffs, I did enjoy them for a little while, so I have made some headway in gaining back my enjoyment of baseball.
Baseball broke my heart a few times, but the very last time was with my Marlins that my son grew up with. They were a pathetic team, just like my Mets were in the sixties. But then all of a sudden the Mets became the Miracle Mets, and the Marlins just kept on advancing in the 1997 Playoffs.
My old owner, and I think he owns your Red Sox now, sold off my Marlins two weeks after winning the World Series, and even thou they came back to win after I had moved to Tennessee. The scenario was the same, they sold off the team and went back to Triple A ball.
I wish you Boston my best, I did enjoy watching them win their first World Series, that was the fall I got sick with my cancer, and I told myself then that if I just see Boston win a World Series that I could then fade away. Well the rest is history, I still like Baseball, I just don't love Baseball Owners.
Correction: Patriots favored. I'd still take the Saints and the points.
[Ot] Saints favored by 2 1/2 over the Patriots today. I'd take the Saints, give the points.
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