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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.
[Ot] Detroit took a no-hitter into the 9th, struck out 17 Sox, won 1-0. Good/great pitching usually trumps good/great hitting.
Who really runs things in America?
By Jon Rappoport
October 11, 2013
The infamous Trilateral Commission still exists.
Many people think the TC, created in 1973 by David Rockefeller, is a relic of an older time.
Think again.
Patrick Wood, author of Trilaterals Over Washington, points out there are only 87 members of the Trilateral Commission who live in America. Obama appointed eleven of them to posts in his administration.
Keep in mind that the original stated goal of the TC was to create “a new international economic order.” Knowing that you have to break eggs to make an omelette, consider how the following TC members, in key Obama posts, can help engender further national chaos; erase our sovereign national borders; and install binding international agreements that will envelop our economy and money in a deeper global collective: a new world order:
Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary;
James Jones, National Security Advisor;
Paul Volker, Chairman, Economic Recovery Committee;
Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence.
All Trilateralists.
In the run-up to his inauguration after the 2008 presidential election, Obama was tutored by the co-founder of the Trilateral Commission, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
In Europe, the financially embattled nations of Greece and Italy brought in Lucas Papademos and Mario Monti as prime ministers. Both men are Trilateral members, and Monti is the former European chairman of the Trilateral Commission.
In the US, since 1973, author Wood counts eight out of 10 US Trade Representative appointments, and six out of eight World Bank presidencies, as American Trilateral members.
Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote, four years before birthing the TC with his godfather, David Rockefeller: “[The] nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force. International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation state.”
Several other noteworthy Trilateral members: George HW Bush; Bill Clinton; Dick Cheney; Al Gore. The first three men helped sink the US further into debt by fomenting wars abroad; and Gore’s cap and trade blueprint would destroy industrial economies, while vastly increasing the numbers of people in Third World countries who have no access to modern sources of energy.
Does all this offer a clue as to why the US economy has failed to recover from the Wall Street debacle of 2008, why the federal bailout was a handout to super-rich criminals, and why Obama took actions which prevented a recovery?
A closer look at Tim Geithner’s circle of economic advisers reveals the chilling Trilateral effect: Paul Volker; Alan Greenspan; E. Gerald Corrigan (director, Goldman Sachs); and Peter G Peterson (former CEO, Lehman Brothers, former chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations). These men are all Trilateral members.
How many foxes in the hen house do we need, before we realize their Trilateral agenda is controlling the direction of our economy?
The TC has no interest in building up the American economy. They want to torpedo it, as part of the end-game of creating a new international currency, ushering in a de facto Globalist management system for the whole planet.
Any doubt on the question of TC goals is answered by David Rockefeller himself, the founder of the TC, in his Memoirs (2003)
“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
Even in what many people mistakenly think of as the TC’s heyday, the 1970s, there were few who realized its overarching power.
Here is a close-up snap shot of a remarkable moment from out of the past. It’s a through-the-looking-glass secret—in the form of a conversation between a reporter, Jeremiah Novak, and two Trilateral Commission members, Karl Kaiser and Richard Cooper. The interview took place in 1978. It concerned the issue of who exactly, during President Carter’s administration, was formulating US economic and political policy.
The careless and off-hand attitude of Trilateralists Kaiser and Cooper is astonishing. It’s as if they’re saying, “What we’re revealing is already out in the open, it’s too late to do anything about it, why are you so worked up, we’ve already won…”
NOVAK (the reporter): Is it true that a private [Trilateral committee] led by Henry Owen of the US and made up of [Trilateral] representatives of the US, UK, West Germany, Japan, France and the EEC is coordinating the economic and political policies of the Trilateral countries [which would include the US]?
COOPER: Yes, they have met three times.
NOVAK: Yet, in your recent paper you state that this committee should remain informal because to formalize ‘this function might well prove offensive to some of the Trilateral and other countries which do not take part.’ Who are you afraid of?
KAISER: Many countries in Europe would resent the dominant role that West Germany plays at these [Trilateral] meetings.
COOPER: Many people still live in a world of separate nations, and they would resent such coordination [of policy].
NOVAK: But this [Trilateral] committee is essential to your whole policy. How can you keep it a secret or fail to try to get popular support [for its decisions on how Trilateral member nations will conduct their economic and political policies]?
COOPER: Well, I guess it’s the press’ job to publicize it.
NOVAK: Yes, but why doesn’t President Carter come out with it and tell the American people that [US] economic and political power is being coordinated by a [Trilateral] committee made up of Henry Owen and six others?After all, if [US] policy is being made on a multinational level, the people should know.
COOPER: President Carter and Secretary of State Vance have constantly alluded to this in their speeches.
KAISER: It just hasn’t become an issue.
Source: “Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management,” ed. by Holly Sklar, 1980. South End Press, Boston. Pages 192-3.
Of course, although Kaiser and Cooper claimed everything being manipulated by the Trilateral Commission committee was already out in the open, it wasn’t.
Their interview slipped under the mainstream media radar, which is to say, it was ignored and buried. It didn’t become a scandal on the level of, say, Watergate, although its essence was far larger than Watergate.
US economic and political policy run by a committee of the Trilateral Commission—the Commission had been been created in 1973 as an “informal discussion group” by David Rockefeller and his sidekick, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would become Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor.
When Carter won the presidential election, his aide, Hamilton Jordan, said that if after the inauguration, Cy Vance and Brzezinski came on board as secretary of state and national security adviser, “We’ve lost. And I’ll quit.” Lost—because both men were powerful members of the Trilateral Commission and their appointment to key positions would signal a surrender of White House control to the Commission.
Vance and Brzezinski were appointed secretary of state and national security adviser, as Jordan feared. But he didn’t quit. He became Carter’s chief of staff.
Now consider the vast propaganda efforts of the past 40 years, on so many levels, to install the idea that all nations and peoples of the world are a single Collective.
From a very high level of political and economic power, this propaganda op has had the objective of grooming the population for a planet that is one coagulated mass, run and managed by one force. A central engine of that force is the Trilateral Commission.
Source: Patrick Wood, “Trilateral Commission Endgame,” http://www.newswithviews.com/Wood/patrick133.htm
Jon Rappoport
http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/who-really-runs-things-in-america/
Nice to see some upsets in College Football, seems like Georgia lost today, considering they have been playing teams like North Texas, and Tennessee and could barely beat them, but managed to keep their high National Ranking.
This time they should drop, but then this is the SEC, and they have always used extra money to keep their schools at the fore font of the National Rankings.
Gee, it sounds like an expose for the Civil War all over again. It is history repeating itself again, the South discriminating against the sick and helpless. Since these states that are not adhering to an injustice like slavery was back then, this time its the killing of Americans by allowing Health Insurance Companies to deny them medical care, until their only outlet is an emergency room treatment when they are near death.
This one is for Lee....
Peanut butter sniff test confirms Alzheimer’s
by editor@futurity.org
on October 8, 2013
A dollop of peanut butter and a ruler might be a way to confirm a diagnosis of early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.
Jennifer Stamps, a graduate student in the McKnight Brain Institute Center for Smell and Taste and the University of Florida, came up with the idea of using peanut butter to test for smell sensitivity when she was working with Kenneth Heilman, a professor of neurology at the University of Florida.
Continued at:
http://www.futurity.org/can-peanut-butter-smell-test-confirm-alzheimers/
Americans "Ready To Kill" Over Obamacare (Must See Video)
By Money Morning Staff Reports
Obamacare doesn't officially kick off until January 1st, yet millions of Americans are already at each other's throats over it.
Research from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that the country is now more divided than any other time in history since the Civil War era.
In fact, 20 states including Texas, Georgia and Louisiana have threatened to secede.
And despite a recent Supreme Court ruling making Obamacare the law of the land, only 24 states are moving forward with a key aspect of Obamacare- the expansion of Medicaid. Of the rest, 21 are opposed and five are deadlocked in debate.
Editor's Note: Millions of Americans are enraged over government imposed Obamacare. Watch this shocking video ( http://tinyurl.com/l3nxgk5 ) to see how one group of furious citizens is getting revenge.
So far, every single southern state from Texas to Virginia has refused to widen Medicaid, a key provision of the Obamacare program.
This will leave millions of Americans without coverage.
That's because they make too much money to qualify for Medicaid as it now stands, but not enough to get the subsidies to buy insurance in the new exchanges.
The South isn't alone in rejecting Obamacare. Liberal states such as Maine have opposed the bill.
Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio have yet to move forward with the expansion.
Even legendary investor Warren Buffett, a one-time Obamacare supporter, said in 2010 he would scrap the healthcare bill and start over.
One of the main architects of the bill, Democratic Senator Max Baucus from Montana said Obamacare is heading for a "train wreck" if it's not implemented properly.
Obamacare Tax Hikes Stoke The Most Outrage
While even Obamacare detractors applaud the requirement that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions and put a stop to lifetime caps on benefits, they say these laudable benefits don't compensate for the bills high cost - especially in new taxes.
According to most experts, Obamacare will create no fewer than twenty new taxes or tax hikes on the American people.
In fact, the Obama administration has already given the IRS an extra $500 million to enforce the rules and regulations of Obamacare.
The new taxes don't bode well for millions of middle-class Americans. Incomes for the rich have soared this decade but middle class workers have seen their wages stagnate and even drop since the 2008 Great Recession.
Many fear Obamacare with its high insurance costs and new taxes, could provide the middle class a fatal blow.
http://moneymorning.com/ob-article/obamacare-war.php?code=dis-oc-war
Thanks, I could of sworn I posted something after I read that piece of crap.
I think that is why I get so angry every once in awhile.
I read almost anything, and everything, and I really try my best to find companies and stocks that will benefit from this ever changing economy. You have to admit business might be good in some sectors, but for many the squeezed margins, and profitability makes it very hard for many companies to grow sales and earnings at a robust rate.
All we ever hear is about Obamacare is going to kill the economy, well it hasn't, and it probably never will, if anything it will makes Insurance Companies even richer, after all it was really writing by them for them and all about them.
Besides Insurance Companies might have actually spend money on healthcare, now wouldn't that be a novel idea.
Then we get this article that was so full of crapola, and we are not allowed to comment against it, amazing.
Oats futures down from 400 to 317.60 in the past 6 weeks. Looks to be forming a cup and handle bottom. A buy-stop at 325 or so might bring a trader in at a good point. Just an idea.
My Antidote to the Dirty Obamacare Pill
By Don_Miller
Oct 11, 2013 - 08:54 PM GMT
(Special thanks to investor15)
I wish I never had to write this article, but I cannot put it off any longer. There are life-threatening secrets you need to know today.
In the fall of 2009, my wife Jo and I went to a town hall meeting in Illinois. The guest speaker was a member of the House of Representatives who served on the committee putting together the law now known as Obamacare. The Congressman stood next to a draft of the bill and answered our questions by reading straight from the text. Most of us left terrified, hoping the bill would never pass.
Jo and I were so aghast that we attended several International Living conferences and even traveled to Costa Rica and Panama to investigate international healthcare options. The thought of going to a hospital where we didn't even speak the language was unnerving, but we needed to know our options.
We spent time with the president of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Panama—a real world-class facility with mostly US-trained and board-certified physicians. He laid out the details of international medicine for us: "We are gearing up for an onslaught of Americans coming here for health care which they will find denied or delayed in the United States." Much like Canada, eventually Americans will have to leave the country to get quality, timely health care.
Like most countries, in Panama you either have insurance from a carrier the hospital does business with, you pay out of pocket in advance, or you don't get treated.
So, we looked into obtaining international insurance and discovered two things. First, the policies are expensive: over $12,000 for the two of us, who are both currently covered by Medicare. Second, if you want a policy, you need to be under 75 years of age; 75-plus trips around the sun renders you uninsurable.
At the time, Jo and I decided to put it off. Health care in that part of the world is currently less expensive than in the United States, so we took our chances and self-insured. If we needed treatment, we would pay for it ourselves.
Obamacare is now the law of the land. We can't put it off dealing with it any longer. Disagree? Here's a frank look at the law's dirty secrets, courtesy of a few friendly experts.
During our webinar last month ( http://tinyurl.com/lobsw5v ), David Galland asked FOX Business reporter John Stossel about his recent book:
"You write that, 'Where governments control health care, but want to limit the costs, everyone has to get in line.' … and then you go on to say, 'Once you accept the idea that taxpayers should pay, then individual choice dies. Someone else decides what treatment you get, and when.' …
"It sounds to me like the end result (is) the government basically decides who lives and who dies. Could that really happen?"
Stossel replied:
"Sure. I imagine it already happens under Medicaid; they won't pay for every experimental treatment. And in some cases that means who gets it lives and somebody who doesn't dies. But when somebody else is going to pay, there is going to be a limit on that. And the question is: who's going to set the limit? If you pay, you get to set the limit. … It should be an individual choice that you weigh based on the cost, but right now with no cost, nobody even thinks about it.
"The people at FOX are fond of saying … there's going to be this unelected committee of bureaucrats that's going to decide what you get, and they'll decide whether you live or die. … Would elected bureaucrats deciding for you be any better? No. It's the idea that others will decide for us, and that's what happens when it's a third-party payment."
That exchange jogged my memory back to an article Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet wrote in July: 10 Reasons Why Obamacare Is Going to Ruin Your Medical Care… and Your Life ( http://tinyurl.com/my4nlkt ). Dr. Vliet is an acclaimed expert on the enigmatic law, and one of our featured speakers at this week's Casey Summit in Tucson. She wrote (all emphasis in original):
"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 (IPAB): 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.
"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."
Huh. So my cash won't be good enough for US doctors or US hospitals. Good thing I was gearing up to interview Nick Giambruno, editor of International Man, for the August issue of Money Forever, when I first read those frightening statements. It's strange how Nick's comments on currency controls wound up speaking to my healthcare worries. Here's what he had to say:
"Currency or capital controls are a favorite option in the tool box of a desperate government and are fairly common in the world today. Though they come in many shapes and sizes, capital controls are government regulations that prevent you from taking your money in and out of a country. The imposition of capital controls usually precedes some form of wealth confiscation (a currency devaluation or deposit confiscation among other measures) and always comes as a surprise to the average person. By their nature, capital controls have to come as a surprise in order to be effective. …
"There were many… (Cypriots) who saw the writing on the wall and had previously moved to diversify a portion of their savings internationally—most commonly with a Swiss or other European bank account. …
"This concept of diversifying your sovereign risk through internationalization is universal and applies to everyone in the world. It is especially urgent for those who live under a government whose fiscal health is in bad and deteriorating shape. Of course it is only an effective strategy if you act before the capital controls and other restrictive measures are imposed."
It's clear how currency controls can cause one to lose a lot of money, but there can be far worse consequences, too.
As seniors, Jo and I will likely find our care denied or delayed under the new law. What happens if one of us needs a knee replacement or a quadruple bypass and care is denied? We won't have the option to pay cash here at home, so that leaves two choices: go offshore, or go without treatment. I know what my choice would be.
Nevertheless, what if I had the means to pay out of pocket offshore, but I couldn't take my money out of the country? How sad would it be to need a quadruple bypass, be denied care, and still be unable to pay for the procedure offshore because of currency controls?
Here's where things get really sinister: Our government would have no incentive to allow a medical loophole in its currency controls. If we die, we are off the Social Security payroll, and maybe it can even snatch some of our wealth through the estate tax.
While I am not qualified to discuss the pros and cons of health care in individual foreign countries, I can say that you will need money to pay for it. That means money you can easily access offshore. Remember, if IPAB denies treatment, there is no appeal process. You are simply up a creek without a paddle, so to speak.
Moving money offshore—now—could be the most important medical decision you make for yourself and your family. International investments make sense for a lot of reasons; protecting your life is sure one of them.
If you want to learn more, Nick and his team have published an inexpensive special report, Going Global 2013 ( http://tinyurl.com/n5hoqpx ). While it does not outline healthcare options, it is the best, most comprehensive report on internationalization I have ever read. First things first: we need a safety net with money offshore. Then we can determine the best countries for health care and hope we never have to go there for treatment. Better safe than waiting penniless in a foreign ER.
Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article42656.html
To me that was a an example of a great Baseball Game, and the fans in St' Louis are probably some of the best in America. Been to Busch Stadium back in the 1970s, right after a bunch of my buddies went through the Tour of the Anheuser-Busch Brewery Tour, you even could get free samples of the product.
[Ot] Dodgers-Cardinals 2-2 in the 6th.
Red Sox favored to take Detroit in 1st game tomorrow at Fenway. Lines vary a bit but $140 will get you $100 if the Sox win.
http://xfinity.comcast.net/articles/news-general/20131011/US--Budget.Battle/
What I found are all of the small things that are shut down because of this Government shutdown. Of course they are small when people think Government is too big, but they mean a lot if you are Fisherman in the Bering Sea, and you have 1 Month to get in your Crab Harvest, because the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has not assigned the quotas to the number of boats that will be used this year.
I had a friend who did this once, and the stories he came back with made me appreciate the Crab we all take for granted. Maybe that's why I always enjoyed my lobster.
It is nice to see them still talking, maybe by Monday morning America can get back to work, and our politicians will quit screwing with this fragile economy.
"CANV, this stock trades by appointment only."
Terrific phrase, may take the Award.
Is the market closed Monday for Columbus Day? Columbus didn't discover America. He got to the Hudson River, hooked a left and wound up in Puerto Rico. You could look it up.
CANV this stock trades by appointment only, and most of it is held by Insiders. Just the spread between the bid and ask is large enough to drive a train through.
http://www.barchart.com/charts/stocks/CANV&style=technical
Its just one to put on a screen and wait it out, another medical marijuana stock, but I keep coming across it in my readings.
I was referring to the futures. I should have made that clear.
gold and silver down moderately.
Gold will probably take out the lows if this continues. NUGT has dropped from 72 to 39 in only 3 weeks..........called a route!
Futures indices still strong; gold and silver down moderately.
GWPH slowly turning itself around from this morning's sell-off.
MPAA still moving higher.
GDP good stock, IMHO, that sold off but seems to want to bounce back.
LOL No I've never been there.
Mary and I were suppose to go to the Biltmore, and I saw it on your other message. I have always believed it was one of the most beautiful estates in America, and a glimpse on how the truly wealthiest family lived during the 1800s'
Besides he was a Railroad Baron, and because my family worked for the New York Central for almost 70 years I have always had a soft spot for the history of them.
I take it you have been there, or is just another source of advertising from SI.
I looked at the funeral stocks, and even mentioned them a few times, but that was a few years ago. I thought even back then that the Baby Boomers would be utilization them at a higher rate, it seems that this segment of the population have always been a trend setter.
So why couldn't they lead in the death scenario, after all most us are in our sixties, and all we have to loo forward to is maybe another decade or so before we all kick the bucket.
GSAT a small one seems to be moving again, its interesting, and has been trading well with all of these ups and downs.
MY is another one that has a chart that begs to move higher, it just needs some more news.
RVLT is another one that just needs a good story.
EDN and PAM I have missed entirely, and am afraid of them because a negative story could kill them.
END, EOX, REN, TPLM, KOG, and MTDR are some oil plays that have been doing better.
PVA and PZZI have interesting charts.
BWEN just will not stop moving higher.
FOE finally breaking $ 10.00
IQNT another interesting one.
MPAA I have mentioned a few times.
XLRN is interesting.
FB could challenge its old highs, but would need some news or Washington saying something positive.
Seems to me if that's the case why do they hate all Americans with all their crazy stupid ideas? LOL
op-ed, the educational operations arm of some group. We can't know who are individually ultimately bankroll it and in some cases the group is hidden. Dan might know, but I doubt it.
MPAA, REN, MTDR making some movement, interesting charts.
America has enough pipelines, and with all of this Fracking occurring all around the country we are risking things that are unforeseen.
I spent four years in Iowa, they were very protective of their land and ground water, Nebraska too, why anyone would want to continue risking the bread basket of this country, and the world is crazy. But then just like the government shutdown by those same crazies Americans have to stand up and vote them out.
I heard a piece on how the American Farmer is really getting hurt during this government shutdown because all of the agricultural numbers are not being done each day. Worse than that, this is harvest time in the Midwest. But then a Crazy never cared about those people, there just farmers of the land.
Can't wait for the Keystone pipeline! STUPID so the boys can ship it out of the states!
http://news.yahoo.com/nd-farmer-finds-oil-spill-while-harvesting-wheat-050659313.html
BWEN- a chart that is really nice to look at, occasionally there are a few that just keep going up.
HIIQ a play on Obamacare.
EHTH another play on Obamacare.
GTN, MEG LIN, NXST, and SBGI if you believe political advertising will be going up next year due to the 2014 elections.
GWPH is you believe Marijuana for medical purposes is here to stay.
How nice. After decades of a rigged game the boys are gonna make it right. Maybe.
FEDS DISCUSS DATA RELEASES
WSJ’s Brody Mullins and Coleen McCain Nelson: “Federal officials are discussing changes to how the government releases sensitive economic data, seeking to bring the system in line with fast-moving financial markets. While the talks are preliminary, officials are driven by their growing concern about leaks and their unease that high-speed trading firms can trade on market-moving numbers. … The talks have covered a number of options, including eliminating the current system, which releases data via embargoed news releases to the media; building a single, technologically secure facility for all government agencies to use to distribute data; and publishing economic data directly on the Internet.
“The discussions are among the first steps toward what could be the most comprehensive change in a generation to how the federal government sends data, such as the unemployment rate, productivity numbers and other indicators of the economy's performance to the public and Wall Street. …The deliberations have included senior White House economic advisers and officials from several government departments.
Questions about how to release economic data will continue to receive attention in the administration, said Jason Furman , chairman of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers.”
http://on.wsj.com/1bKyU8P
Very nice to see IHUB come to their senses and do away with that new format which SUCKED!
It is a prelude to a New Order. A more heartless and repressive Order.
He like all your copy and pastes are completely DELUSIONAL!
How does one person ever find all these crazies?
Get used to it, what some of us might think is an invasion of privacy, is actually some companies idea of getting better with their service.
Like many of the issues of the day, including trading, everything is evolving thanks to technology and social media. Just look at Facebook, Twitter and all of the other current accepted ways of communication.
I know some on this board come here with an agenda, like Fox news does each day, but many companies are trying to stay current in their offerings. Staying ahead of the competition, before the competition comes in and takes market share away from them.
SI has been around for many years, and in some ways it hasn't changed much over the years. We might not like certain aspects of this change, but without change, we would never know how far we have all come.
Some would like to return to an easier time, where things stayed the same for years. I doubt very much that can happen, look at Ameritrade, I have lost my old streamer, and some days I hate, but I do like the individual stock charts I get, so I use my back up streamer from E-Trade. I do not use E-Trade except for the streamer, but then I only have two computers on my desk.
Today will be a long day of playing chicken, some of us will be looking for news out of Washington for news that at least gives everyone some assurances that a deal will be agreed upon. Obama wants the government open as a condition of a deal, while Republicans still want it closed, I just wonder how the Republicans will spin it. In the meantime only certain stocks really were strong yesterday so many others did not participate at all. A very narrow rally in my opinion.
SWY seems to of had another nice bump this morning.
Suit Revives Goldman Conflict Issue
By SUSANNE CRAIG and JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG
October 10, 2013, 2:43 pm
Carmen Segarra worked at the New York Federal Reserve Bank after a career on Wall Street that included jobs at Citigroup and Bank of America.
At a March 2012 meeting, a group of examiners at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York agreed that Goldman Sachs had inadequate procedures to guard against conflicts of interest — guidelines aimed at stopping firms from putting their pursuit of profit ahead of their clients’ best interests.
The examiners voted to downgrade a confidential rating assigned by the New York Fed that could have spurred costly enforcement actions and other regulatory penalties. It is not known whether the vote in fact led to a rating change. The former examiner who pushed for a downgrade, Carmen M. Segarra, now contends in a lawsuit filed on Thursday that just weeks after the vote, her superiors asked her to change her findings on Goldman and fired her after she refused.
The vote to downgrade, which has not been previously reported, could have been a big blow for Goldman.
“Goldman Sachs does not have a conflicts-of-interest policy, not firmwide, and not for any divisions,” Ms. Segarra wrote to Michael F. Silva, a senior executive at the New York Fed. “I would go so far as to say they have never had a policy on conflicts.”
The lawsuit, along with a review by The New York Times of confidential government documents and internal e-mails, raises questions about the success of Goldman’s efforts to police potential conflicts.
The bank has been buffeted by accusations that it has put its own interests ahead of its clients, a contention it denies. Goldman, for instance, faced accusations that in the run-up to the financial crisis that it sold billions of dollars in souring real estate assets to unsuspecting clients. Just weeks before the examiners’ vote last year, the bank was publicly excoriated by a federal judge who found that Goldman had conflicts in a huge energy deal.
The lawsuit also provides a look into the often-opaque relationship between federal regulators and Wall Street. After the financial crisis, banking regulators faced criticism that they were too cozy with the banks that they were overseeing — a familiarity that failed to thwart some of the risky behavior precipitating the housing crisis and ensuing recession.
Even now, banks have sway over their regulators, especially those stationed at a bank’s headquarters, according to two former regulators who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The banks, for example, can work behind the scenes to avert a vote like the one to downgrade Goldman. The people said, however, that once a vote to downgrade has taken place, it is difficult to reverse.
In the lawsuit, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Ms. Segarra contends she was wrongfully terminated in violation of a federal law that affords protections to bank examiners who find wrongdoing in the course of doing their jobs. Mr. Silva, who is chief of staff for the executive group at the New York Fed, is among the defendants named in the suit.
Jack Gutt, a New York Fed spokesman, declined to comment on Ms. Segarra’s case, citing rules that restrict what the regulator can discuss. “Personnel decisions at the New York Fed are based exclusively on individual job performance and are subject to thorough review. We categorically reject any suggestions to the contrary,” he said in a statement.
Mr. Silva declined to comment through the Fed spokesman.
A Goldman spokesman, Michael DuVally, said his company had no knowledge of internal New York Fed discussions or matters related to Ms. Segarra. “As we have described publicly in our Business Standards Committee report, Goldman Sachs has a comprehensive approach to addressing conflicts through firmwide and divisional policies and infrastructure.”
In an interview, Ms. Segarra said that when she was fired, her bosses told her they had lost confidence in her judgment. Within the Fed, some people who worked with Ms. Segarra echoed those concerns, according to people with knowledge of her time at the agency. Ms. Segarra, these people said, sometimes developed “conspiracy theories.”
Ms. Segarra landed the job at the New York Fed in October 2011 after a career on Wall Street that included jobs at Citigroup and Bank of America.
She was assigned to assess Goldman’s conflict-of-interest program to determine whether it complied with Fed standards.
Banks are required to have detailed policies in place to deal with conflict of interests. Ms. Segarra said these policies typically defined what constituted various conflicts, how the bank might penalize employees who violated those rules and also how the firm made sure that it did not inadvertently promote questionable behavior.
Under the New York Fed’s guidelines, banks are required to have “processes established to manage compliance risk across an entire organization, both within and across business lines, support units, legal entities, and jurisdictions of operation.”
These guidelines are aimed at ensuring that banks have reviewed business transactions to make sure that relationships with one client do not conflict with other clients or with the bank itself.
After Ms. Segarra joined the New York Fed, she said she examined several potentially controversial Goldman deals. For instance, in 2012 Goldman advised El Paso, an energy company, on its decision to sell itself to Kinder Morgan. Goldman owned a big stake in Kinder Morgan, which angered a number of El Paso shareholders, who argued this gave Goldman an incentive to undervalue El Paso. Goldman maintained that it had properly managed the conflicts but was later admonished by a judge, who noted the “disturbing behavior” that led to the deal.
As the deal was coming together, the lawsuit said, Ms. Segarra urged Goldman to provide her with its firmwide conflict-of-interest policy. But Goldman, the lawsuit said, told her that it had no such policy.
While Goldman lacked a broad conflict-of-interest policy, the lawsuit says, individual business units did have some procedures in place. For Ms. Segarra, the absence of a firmwide policy was alarming because it signaled that Goldman lacked the procedures to spot and police conflicts, according to the suit.
Such concerns, the lawsuit said, prompted Ms. Segarra to raise the issue with Mr. Silva, her boss, in a meeting in early December 2011. He seemed to agree. Mr. Silva “expressed concern that Goldman would suffer significant financial harm if consumers and clients learned the extent of Goldman’s noncompliance with the rules on conflict of interest,” according to the lawsuit.
Soon, though, Ms. Segarra was looking at another deal, involving Banco Santander, the largest bank in Spain, and Qatar Holding. As part of her review, Ms. Segarra asked Goldman to provide documentation that it had performed an anti-money-laundering analysis.
According to the lawsuit, Goldman executives told Ms. Segarra that it had done the analysis, but the bank later backpedaled, admitting that no such work had been performed.
Ms. Segarra took her concerns about the transaction to her bosses, who confronted Goldman. She contends that Michael S. Koh, another senior staff member at the New York Fed and a defendant in the lawsuit, told her that Goldman admitted to the misconduct but then he dismissed her concerns. Further efforts to raise the issue were also stymied and her bosses prohibited her from asking Goldman more questions about the deal — a decision that prevented her from finishing her report.
Mr. Koh, through the Fed spokesman, also declined to comment.
In March 2012, Ms. Segarra got her chance to voice her concerns to the New York Fed’s legal and compliance risk team. At the meeting, the group, roughly 20 people, agreed that the issues with Goldman’s conflict-of-interest procedures warranted a warning, known-as a “matter requiring attention,” or M.R.A., according to the lawsuit. As a result, the team approved a downgrade of Goldman’s annual rating from a 2, indicating satisfactory to a 3, indicating fair, according to a confidential document reviewed by The Times. The rating involving policies and procedures is one of several measurements that make up Goldman’s overall score, which is confidential.
In the weeks after the vote, Ms. Segarra’s supervisors began to question her findings about Goldman, according to a review of e-mails. Mr. Silva said her conclusions “are debatable at best, or alternatively, plainly incorrect,” according to a late-night e-mail sent on May 13, 2012. Mr. Silva explained that a “cursory review” of Goldman’s Web site showed that the bank had a conflict-of-interest section within its code of conduct that “seems to me to define” conflict of interest.
Days after this contentious exchange, Ms. Segarra said in the lawsuit, Mr. Silva and Mr. Koh pressed her to excise her negative findings on Goldman from her examination.
The men, Ms. Segarra said, told her that they did not find her position “credible.” Ms. Segarra said she refused to modify her findings — a position she said she reiterated in an e-mail. On May 23, 2012, Ms. Segarra was terminated and escorted from the building.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/bank-examiner-was-told-to-back-off-goldman-suit-says/?_r=1&
Obamacare sign-up crash: what’s really behind it?
By Jon Rappoport
October 10, 2013
It’s easy to say the government always screws things up and, therefore, the crash of its Obamacare sign-up system is merely another example of gross incompetence.
But this is shortsighted. White House officials knew, months ago, the online site was an unmitigated disaster, and yet they let the train continue speeding down the track to its inevitable crackup.
To understand this, we need to go back to the opening salvo in the Obamacare drama.
To his advisors’ shock and surprise, Obama, taking office in 2009, announced that his first big move was going to be national health insurance.
His people assumed jobs would be the top priority. The nation was clamoring for a solution. People were out of work. Banks were foreclosing on homes. Families were in peril.
How could the President misread the national mood so badly? National health insurance? Now? Where the hell did that come from?
The 1993 track record of earlier efforts, headed by Hillary Clinton and her buffoon of a consultant, Ira Magaziner, had run aground, failed miserably, and stirred up considerable animosity.
Obama was going to lead with this again? Bring on a storm of contentious clashes in the Congress, the press, and the nation at large?
What was he thinking?
He wasn’t. A super-ambitious campaign on this issue had to come from somewhere else. Obama’s high-flying humanitarian rhetoric notwithstanding, the man was acting as an agent of change. An agent.
He was taking dictation.
And sure enough, he sank the country in a hostile grinding debate that persists to this day. Meanwhile, the economy and jobs went begging.
When the Obamacare bill finally passed, without anyone reading it, and when subsequent arm-twisting led the Supreme Court to call the individual mandate a tax (a transparently preposterous strategy), thus clearing the way for implementation, amid loud cries of fraud, there remained another opportunity for promoting disaster:
A system for enrollment that wouldn’t work, that would crash, that would look like a bevy of drunken idiots ($634 million richer) had put it together with scotch tape and a random number generator.
At a much high level of op, Obamacare was always invented chaos.
It was intended to be.
The target was America itself. As in destabilization.
This is a strategy as old as the hills.
In this case, the people in charge, behind the scenes, are Globalists (think Rockefeller, for starters). For over a hundred years, their objective has been the takedown of the United States, one of the strongest holdouts against a planetary management system, in which, ultimately, national borders are erased and individual countries cease to exist.
In 1971, David Rockefeller’s intellectual consigliere, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: “…[the] nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.”
Achieving such a goal, however, is not simply a matter of standing back and watching evolution take it course. It involves torpedoing major institutions, regardless of how well or poorly they are serving the public interest.
In other words: promote chaos at every possible opportunity.
The extreme oddness of choosing national health insurance as the first planned shot out of the White House, in 2009, was, at the most important level, an exercise in stirring the national pot with a multi-blade fan engine.
Chaos has several aims; among them: raising the level of frustration; dividing the populace; engendering heating conflicts; demoralizing citizens; producing a sense of helplessness; and rendering large numbers of people into a state of surrender and passivity.
It is a prelude to a New Order. A more heartless and repressive Order.
Obamacare is just one example among hundreds.
Operation Chaos has been targeting the United States for well over a hundred years.
Of the dozen or so possible first steps of a Presidency, Obama chose the one that would produce the most discord.
Because US presidents rarely mention Globalism and its tentacles and plans and organizations, it is assumed the issue isn’t of high importance.
But since the closing days of World War 2, (and, actually, much earlier), when members of the Rockefeller Council on Foreign Relations were tapped to write the blueprint for the United Nations, when the outline of the Marshall Plan was drafted, when the first serious meetings of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) were set in stone, every American President has looked the other way, when Globalism has reared its head.
That’s FDR all the way through to Obama.
And during that 70-year period, ops small, medium, and large have been launched to weaken the United States and entangle it in the Globalist framework.
For the two terms of Obama’s Presidency, national health insurance was chosen as a bare electric wire, to shock, stimulate, and magnify dormant hostilities throughout the country.
To the Globalists, the respective merits and flaws in a national healthcare system are of absolutely no concern. It is simply one more opportunity to “crash the system” and produce a hole in the fabric of national life.
For these men, the issue of Obamacare “has legs.” They will squeeze more out of it, for their own purposes, in the months and years ahead.
Mired in the quite serious and real pros and cons of a national health plan, people will miss the bigger picture and pass by it without a glance of recognition.
The manipulators don’t pick trivial issues. Distraction requires presenting people with forceful conflicts.
It requires the belief that events are what they seem and the motives behind them are clear and on the surface.
Jon Rappoport
http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/obamacare-sign-up-crash-whats-really-behind-it/
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