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Obama Czar Wants Mandatory Government Propaganda On Political Websites

Paul Joseph Watson | Prison Planet.com | May 17, 2010

Disturbing audio has emerged of White House information czar Cass Sunstein, who in a previous white paper called for banning “conspiracy theories,” demanding that websites be mandated by law to link to opposing information or that pop ups containing government propaganda be forcibly included on political blogs.

In an audio excerpt of an interview which was posted on the Breitbart.tv website today, Sunstein discusses how conservative websites should provide links to liberal websites and vice versa or even how political blogs should be made to include pop ups that show “a quick argument for a competing view”.

Sunstein said that if this system couldn’t be implemented voluntarily, “Congress should hold hearings about mandates,” which would legally force people to dilute their own free speech. The Harvard Professor also said that blogs should be forced to list a random draw of 25 popular websites, such as CNN.com.

“The best would be for this to be done voluntarily,” said Sunstein, “But the word voluntary is a little complicated and people sometimes don’t do what’s best for our society,” he added (emphasis mine).

“The idea would be to have a legal mandate as the last resort….an ultimate weapon designed to encourage people to do better,” Sunstein concluded.

As we previously reported, in a January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” the Harvard Professor who is currently President Obama’s head of information technology in the White House called for “conspiracy theories,” that is any political opinion which didn’t concur with the establishment view, to be taxed or even banned outright.

In a set of proposals designed to counter “dangerous” ideas, Sunstein suggested that the government could, “ban conspiracy theorizing,” or “impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories”.

So-called “conspiracy theories that Sunstein said could be subject to government censorship included beliefs held by the vast majority of Americans, such as the notion that the JFK assassination occurred as part of a wider plot.

In his white paper, Sunstein also cited the belief that “global warming is a deliberate fraud” as another marginal conspiracy theory to be countered by government censorship.

Ludicrously, the Harvard Professor even characterized as “false and dangerous” the idea that exposure to sunlight is healthy, despite the fact that top medical experts agree prolonged exposure to sunlight reduces the risk of developing certain cancers.

Essentially, Sunstein wants it to be written into law that the government can dictate the very nature of reality to Americans and that their opinions can only be voiced at best when accompanied by mandatory federal propaganda or at worst that Americans can be silenced entirely by federal decree.

This callous disregard for the First Amendment represents a fundamental threat the very fabric of the country and is even more alarming considering the position of Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan with regard to free speech. During the Citizens United vs. FEC case, Kagan’s office argued that the government can ban books and political pamphlets. In separate writings, Kagan argued that the government could “disappear” free speech it deemed to be offensive.

May 17, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

Iraq, China, Turkey ink oilfield deal

Press TV – May 17, 2010

Iraq’s oil minister says that his country has signed a deal with China’s CNOOC and Turkey’s TPAO firms to develop a major southern oilfield complex.

“Today is a very important day in the history of Iraqi oil production, with the development of very important fields in Maysan province,” Hussein al-Shahristani was quoted as saying by AFP on Monday.

The two companies agreed to be paid $2.30 per barrel of oil extracted from the Maysan fields, which has proven reserves of 2.6 billion barrels of oil, the report said.

Under the deal, output is projected to be ramped up to 450,000 barrels per day (bpd), compared to current production of around 100,000 bpd.

Iraq will have a 25-percent stake in the overall project. The remaining 75 percent will be shared in a 85 to 15 percent ration between the Chinese firm and TPAO respectively.

Since last year, Iraq has signed a total of eleven agreements with international oil companies to develop its vast oil reserves.

Once competed, the projects will allow Iraq to have crude production capacity of 12 million barrels per day in six to seven years.

May 17, 2010 Posted by | Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

A force more powerful

Ewa Jasiewicz, The Electronic Intifada, 17 May 2010
The MV Rachel Corrie will carry tons of cement and other materials to Gaza. (Free Gaza)

Later this month, ships from all over the world will converge in the Mediterranean and set sail for the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip. This international coalition is called the Freedom Flotilla.

The Free Gaza Movement has sailed eight missions to Gaza in the past three years, five of them successful. The last three were violently stopped by the Israeli Navy; the boat Dignity was rammed three times and the Spirit of Humanity turned back in January 2009, then seized and all aboard arrested.

This time the Freedom Flotilla is upping the ante and instead of one- and two-vessel challenges, will be breaking Israel’s siege with an eight-boat front.

In the past, the Israel Navy could pick us off as individual boats. Now [our challenge is more substantial], including Free Gaza’s four ships, 700 passengers and some 5,000 tons of reconstruction materials and medical equipment. This includes Free Gaza’s MV Rachel Corrie, which was purchased through generous donations from Malaysia’s Perdana Global Peace Foundation.

The Israeli government has responded to the “sea intifada” coming its way with saber rattling and accusations of serving Hamas. Israel has proscribed the Turkish human rights and relief group Insani Vardim Vakafi (IHH). IHH is responsible for sending a cargo ship and passenger ship in the Freedom Flotilla. Israel has accused it and Free Gaza of “supporting terrorism.” Half the Israeli navy is set to challenge the mission, with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak at the helm commanding the operation in person. The air force is on standby and “diplomatic pressure” is being applied behind the scenes. The message is clear from Israel: “We will stop you and we will use force to stop you.”

At no point does the Freedom Flotilla enter Israeli territorial waters. The journey starts in local European or Turkish waters, courses through international waters and ends in Gaza’s territorial waters. No checkpoints interrupt us. No walls daunt our sight. We’ve proven that it’s possible to sail a clear line with no borders, as we want the world to be, until we get to Gaza.

Free Gaza is best described as a tactic but in practice, a tactic within a score of tactics active in the global solidarity movement. But it is an expensive one — and many have criticized the hundreds of thousands of dollars that have been spent on the missions for boats and finding boats, flagging, registration, legal costs, management costs, port fees, crew pay, mooring fees, repairs, renovation, GPS, warehouses for cargo, crane and forklift hire. Collectively the cost of the Flotilla runs literally into the millions of euros. Some ask: “Isn’t that money better spent on ‘aid’?”

Every Palestinian family we met in Gaza, particularly after Israel’s invasion last winter kept saying to us: “We don’t want aid, we need a political solution; we need our rights. Our issue cannot be reduced or swapped into bags of flour or food parcels. Palestine is not a humanitarian issue — it is a political one.” This reality, of the need for justice, tests the aid industry in Palestine, and the false “objectivity” and lack of political will in the face of human suffering with the claim: “We don’t take sides. We want to continue to keep giving our humanitarian aid.”

Well, we do take sides — that of direct democracy over occupation and apartheid.

This flotilla is an interruption to a discourse of power that says — governments know best, leave it to us to negotiate new “freedoms” and realities; a continuation of not even top-down but top-to-top processes of keeping power out of the hands of ordinary people. Leaders fly from continent to continent, round table discussions go round and round, elephants in the room stamp their feet and roar ignored. This flotilla puts that power back into our hands — to interrupt this ongoing Nakba.

We will not stop. From 1948 until now, history keeps repeating itself, colonies keep expanding, corporations keep reaping the rewards of reproducing repression; daily dispossession and casual killing is normalized, and alienation from the consequences of our work and actions keeps us compartmentalized. The occupation is reproduced on a daily basis in factories, classrooms, courtrooms, cinemas, art galleries, supermarkets and holiday resorts. Radical refusal, radical transgressions can make change happen. Refusing to be alienated from our brothers and sisters and recognizing our community is the essence of solidarity.

This flotilla represents radical solidarity and a force that can be realized when people from all over the world act on their conscience. It’s a force made real through stepping out onto the streets or into occupation-supporting businesses, through speaking out, through fundraising in mosques, churches, synagogues, schools; through writing, singing, sharing, relaying and promoting, and packing and driving boxes of materials and cement, and cheering on and praying for and protesting any attack.

Israel may well succeed in stopping us — but this is an unknown and there is power in that. We can affect that which hasn’t happened yet.

When Rachel Corrie stood in front of the bulldozer driver that killed her, she acted on radical trust — that the soldier would see her humanity. She lost, because the soldier had lost his humanity. Yet Rachel’s faith abides in each of us. Because if our oppressors are losing their humanity then we must never stop showing them that we have it. We are undertaking this mission in the spirit of those who have fought and sacrificed their lives for our collective humanity, and to remind everyone who can see of the need to act on it.

Ewa Jasiewicz is a coordinator with the Free Gaza Movement (http://www.freegaza.org/).

May 17, 2010 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

“Israel” calls for expelling anyone marking Nakba from occupied Palestinian lands

Palestine Information Center | May 17, 2010

NAZARETH – Israeli minister of finance Yuval Steinitz called for withdrawing the nationality from everyone inciting against Israel and commemorating the 62nd anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe).

During the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, Steinitz said it was intolerable and unforgivable to see Arabs and some Jews challenging the mere existence of Israel.

The Israeli minister also condemned the recent remarks made by head of the Islamic Movement Sheikh Ra’ed Salah in which he highlighted the Arab identity of occupied Jerusalem and the Aqsa Mosque and defended the right of return.

For its part, the right-wing party of Yisrael Beiteinu led by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman called for opening investigation with Arab Knesset member Jamal Zahalka for his participation in a march organized to mark the Nakba anniversary.

In a separate incident, Israeli minister of education Gideon Sa’ar declared his intention to force the Palestinian high school students in the 1948 occupied lands to study the Nazi holocaust as of next year.

Yedioth Ahronoth on Sunday reported that Sa’ar also intends to send a delegation of Arab teachers and school principals to Poland to visit the alleged Nazi extermination camp in order to qualify them to teach this subject efficiently.

In the same context relating to Nakba, Palestinian officials and politicians called Sunday for pooling the efforts to protect the right of return and confront attempts to dilute this right and twist its concept into the idea of resettling Palestinian refugees in their current residential countries and compensating them.

They stressed during their participation in a conference on the Nakba held in Gaza the need for raising the awareness of the Arab nation about the right of return so as to sustain it.

Dr. Ahmed Bahar, the first deputy speaker of the Palestinian legislative council, stated in his speech that the right of return is a sacred right that belongs to all Palestinians and anyone waiving it is considered an apostate from the Palestinian national rank as stipulated by the right of return law.

Dr. Bahar stressed that the Palestinian people reject being resettled in alternative homelands and insist on returning to their homes which they were expelled from, adding that this right can come true only through the option of resistance and national unity.

May 17, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | 8 Comments

TO GAZA, WITH LOVE, FROM IRELAND: Video

Mickey Joe Harte sings “Israelity” – March 2, 2009

Tip of the hat to – irish4palestine

May 17, 2010 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | 5 Comments

Grapes withering on the vine

International Solidarity Movement | 17 May 2010
Souad has lost access to the land that provides her livelihood

Souad has lost access to the land that provides her livelihood

Souad lives in the beautiful village of Safa, south west of Bethlehem, close by the path of the apartheid wall. From her house in the village it is only a short walk to her land – an entire, rolling hillside, the summit of which has been stolen by the Israeli colony/settlement of Bat Eyn. No fence separates her fields and terraces from the settlement: Bat Ayn is one of only two colonies without such a fence in the entire West Bank, designed to make it easier, without a defining border, to make future land grabs.

The title deeds to Souad’s hillside have been in her family for over 100 years. Not that it does her any good – she cannot even graze her sheep without risking being fired upon by the settlers. She can only watch from a nearby hill while her peaches and grapes, soon ready for harvest, wither and rot on the vines and trees, or are stolen by settlers. She needs to work the land, to ensure the proof of continuing ownership and to keep the soil in good condition, but fears for her life if she was to venture there. She has watched helplessly as hundreds of fruit trees, replanted with help from international donors after the original trees were torched by settlers, were dug up and taken back to the settlement to be planted there.

Our presence on this nearby hill was soon noticed by Israeli soldiers patrolling nearby roads and we decided to move back to the village, lest the soldiers enter and fire tear-gas into the village as punishment for the presence of international observers. As we left Souad ruefully remarked, “My hill is gone. Where we are standing may be next.”

It is difficult to see how villagers such as Souad can carry on. She may say, “With God’s help we will survive”, but, dependent wholly for her livelihood on what her land produces, her future is precarious in the extreme. From these hillsides it is possible, on a clear day, to see well beyond the Green Line and, they say, to Tel Aviv. Such a beautiful land. The Stolen Land. And the disappearing land.

May 17, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Arabs shut out of Israeli public sector

By Jonathan Cook | The National | May 16. 2010

Nazareth// Unemployed computer engineer Morad Lashin would like to work in Israel’s Electricity Company, a large state utility, but admitted his chances of being recruited are slim.

The reasons were set out in graphic form this month when a parliamentary committee revealed that only 1.3 per cent of the company’s 12,000 workers are Arab, despite the Arab minority constituting nearly 20 per cent of the population.

The committee’s report presents a picture of massive under-representation of Arab citizens across most of the public sector, including in government companies and ministries, where the percentage of Arab staff typically falls below two per cent of employees.

According to Sikkuy, a group lobbying for greater civic equality, discriminatory hiring policies have left thousands of Arab graduates jobless, even though the government promised affirmative action a decade ago.

Mr Lashin, 30, from Nazareth, said his remaining hope was to find a job in the public sector after a series of short-term contracts in private hi-tech firms. “Everywhere you go, they ask if you have served in the army. Because Arab citizens are exempt, the good jobs are always reserved for Jews.”

Ali Haider, a co-director of Sikkuy, said: “What kind of example is set for the Israeli private sector when the government consistently finds excuses not to employ Arab citizens too?”

Ahmed Tibi, who heads the parliamentary committee on Arab employment in the public sector, said that even when government bodies appointed Arabs it was invariably in lowly positions. “The absence of Arabs in [senior] roles means that they have no say in the ministries’ decision-making processes,” he said.

The issue of under-representation in the public sector was first acknowledged by officials in 2000, when the Fair Representation Law was passed under pressure from Arab political parties.

However, no target was set for the proportion of Arab employees until 2004, when the government agreed that within four years Arabs should comprise 10 per cent of all staff in ministries, state bodies and on the boards of hundreds of government companies. Later the deadline was extended to 2012.

The new report found that overall six per cent of the country’s 57,000 public sector workers were Arab, only marginally higher than a decade ago.

But Mr Tibi noted that the figures were substantially boosted by the large number of “counter staff” in the interior, welfare, health and education ministries employed to provide basic services inside Arab communities.

On publication of the report this month, Avishai Braverman, the minorities minister, admitted there was no hope of reaching even the delayed target. He criticised his own government for not setting its sights higher, at 20 per cent representation.

The committee’s findings, said Mr Tibi, showed officials had systematically broken their promises on fair representation. He noted that even in the parliament itself there were only six Arab workers out of 439, or 1.6 per cent. “What does it say that in the temple of Israeli democracy there is such rank discrimination?”

Similar percentages were found in key government departments, including the prime minister’s office, the foreign ministry, the treasury, the housing ministry, and the trade and industry ministry, as well as such state agencies as the Bank of Israel, the Land Administration and the Water Authority.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, to which Israel acceded last week, reported last year that 15,000 Arab graduates were either unemployed or forced into work outside their professions, often as teachers.

Mr Tibi said he was particularly concerned that there were no Arabs in key roles inside government ministries. “Not by chance are there no senior Arab civil servants, no deputy directors in the ministries, no legal advisers,” he said.

He said the absence of Arab policy-makers was reflected in the lack of public services and resources made available to Arab communities. Poverty among Arab families is three times higher than among Jewish families.

Yousef Jabareen, director of the Dirasat policy centre in Nazareth, said increased recruitment of Arab workers by the government could solve at a stroke two urgent problems: the large pool of Arab graduates who could not find work, and the community’s lack of influence on national policy.

He added that discrimination against Arabs was “built into the institutional structure of a Jewish state”.

The report was received with hostility by some MPs. Yariv Levin, chairman of the parliament’s House Committee and a member of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, said the report was “delusional and ignores the fundamental fact that a significant portion of Israel’s Arabs are disloyal to the state”.

Saleem Marna, 37, who graduated as an information systems engineer 10 years ago from the prestigious Technion University in Haifa, said he had given up hope of finding regular work in either the private or public sectors.

Married with four children, he said he had applied to emigrate to Canada. “I am hopeful that being an Arab won’t count against me there.”

Hatim Kanaaneh, a Harvard-educated doctor who worked as one of the few senior Arab officials in the Israeli health ministry until his resignation in the early 1990s, documented the many battles he faced in the government bureaucracy in his recent book Doctor in Galilee.

Dr Kanaaneh said no Arab had ever risen above the position of sub-district physician he held two decades ago. Although the health ministry had the largest number of Arab employees of any ministry, he said none had ever been appointed to a policy-making position.

“In fact, people in the ministry tell me things have gone backwards under recent right-wing governments.”

He added that the lack of Arab policymakers in government had concrete consequences that damaged the Arab community. When he worked in the health ministry, he noted, the Arab infant mortality rate was twice that of the Jewish population. Two decades later the ratio of Arab to Jewish infant deaths, rather than declining, had increased by a further 25 per cent.

The prejudice faced by educated Arabs seeking employment was highlighted by a survey last November. It found that 83 per cent of Israeli businesses in the main professions admitted being opposed to hiring Arab graduates.

Yossi Coten, director of a training programme in Nazareth, said of 84,000 jobs in the country’s hi-tech industries, only 500 were filled by Arab engineers.

May 17, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Leave a comment

Genetically modified crops failing worldwide

Tom Lewis | Environmental News Examiner | May 17, 2010
Weeds like this pigweed, that have become immune to Roundup, are devastating American farms.
Weeds like this pigweed, that have become immune to Roundup, are devastating American farms.
Photo by H. Zell via Wikimedia

The Green Revolution — a misleading name applied by PR firms to the onset of globalized, chemical-intensive, industrial agriculture that is anything but friendly to the environment — is coming unraveled around the world, bringing devastation to farmers from the plains of China to the plains of America.

It was revealed last week that China is dealing with an explosive infestation of the formerly inconsequential mirid bug in its orchards and cotton fields. The bug’s population exploded as a result of widespread planting of cotton that had been genetically altered to be resistant to the bollworm, formerly cotton’s worst enemy. Cotton farmers stopped spraying insecticides, since their plants shrugged off the bollworms, and thus allowed other insects, especially the mirid bug, to multiply without interference.

According to a study published last week by Kongming Wu at the State Key Laboratory for Biology of Plant Diseases and Insect Pests in Beijing (reported by Reuters), the mirid bug is now laying waste to orchards and cotton fields in at least six provinces in Northern China, affecting 10 million farmers. Controlling one pest, as chemical companies boast frequently that they have discovered how to do, inevitably unleashes others in a cascade of unintended consequences. The lesson in this case, according to Wu, is that “We have to study the whole ecosystem.” Indeed.

Similar effects are being felt by farmers in the American breadbasket as the result of their reliance on a single chemical. For decades, chemical farming was limited by the fact that pesticides were terribly persistent and toxic, and while they could kill broadleaf weeds without affecting cereal crops with narrow leaves, they could not distinguish between narrow-leafed weeds and those cereal crops, such as corn. Then Monsanto came up with Roundup, a glyphosate killer of weeds both broad- and narrow-leafed, that broke down quickly into inert compounds, and it then introduced genetically engineered seeds that produced crops that were immune to Roundup. (For more details see my book, Brace for Impact: Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age by Sustainable Living.)

Thanks to massive advertising and public-relations campaigns (that shouted down repeated studies by the US Department of Agriculture and United Nations that showed no particular advantages to GM crops) within ten years over half of all American cropland was planted with Roundup-resistant crops.

One inevitable result of drenching large areas with a chemical designed to kill all weeds is that some weeds, by accident, will be immune to that particular chemical. They will reproduce and, finding much less competition around them, will flourish. All this was known by non-chemical farmers and scientists from the beginning of the Roundup debacle. Yet the New York Times was surprised, last week, to find that what could go wrong, had gone wrong. (See Deepwater Horizon, et al.)

Throughout the American heartland, farmers who were persuaded to stop cultivating, stop spraying more toxic weed sprays and give their faith to Roundup are being overcome by resurgent weeds. One of them, pigweed, is a mutant monster that can reach seven feet in height and can ruin a combine. The high costs of the modified seed, the increasing cost of applying more and more Roundup to less and less effect, added to the need to resume tilling and the use of older chemicals, adds up to “…the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” according to Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.

In response to the rising emergencies around the world, Monsanto is desperately at work on genetically altering plants so they will be resistant to, of all things, the carcinogen 2,4-D. Perhaps they should take a cue from Mr. Wu, and “study the whole ecosystem.”

May 17, 2010 Posted by | Environmentalism | 3 Comments

Arab League hails Iran nuclear declaration

Press TV – May 17, 2010

Arab League (AL) Secretary General Amr Moussa has praised Iran’s nuclear declaration as a positive step towards dispelling Western fears over its nuclear program.

Iran announced a nuclear declaration on Monday following trilateral talks with non-permanent UN Security Council members Turkey and Brazil — under which Iran agrees to swap its low-enriched uranium for reactor fuel in Turkey.

Moussa said he hoped the move would “solve the current problem regarding the Iranian nuclear file,” DPA reported. The AL chief also hailed efforts by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a fierce advocate of diplomacy in ending the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.

While Moussa and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, US Admiral James Stavridis, have welcomed the declaration, the European Union and Israel expressed skepticism and cast doubt on whether Iran’s latest concession would answer all concerns.

Both Brasilia and Ankara have opposed US-led efforts to slap tougher UN sanctions on Tehran over Western accusations that the Islamic Republic is harboring a covert nuclear weapons program.

Iran has denied the charges, insisting that its nuclear program is aimed at civilian purposes such as electricity generation and medical research. The nuclear declaration is the latest step in convincing Western powers that the country’s nuclear program is peaceful.

As a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Tehran stresses its civilian nuclear program is within a legal framework.

May 17, 2010 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism | 5 Comments

I’M SURPRISED ISRAEL DID NOT GIVE CHOMSKY THE ‘RED CARPET’ WELCOME

By Steve Amsel | Desert Peace | May 17, 2010

Yesterday a post appeared on this Blog dealing with Noam Chomsky being denied entry to Israel. In the report, Chomsky is referred to as a ‘Left wing American Jewish Intellectual’.In his own words, he admits that his barred entrance has nothing to do with positions he might hold about Israel. Take notice that he does not mention the FACT that Israel is in violation of International Law by determining who can or cannot enter the Palestinian Territories. This also indicates that the Occupied West Bank is under siege, not only the Gaza Strip.

Left  wingers do not oppose a boycott and divestment from Israel…. neither do they hold the views expressed by Chomsky in the following…

Audio: Challenging Noam Chomsky’s opposition to boycotting Israel (Ali Abunimah & Jeff Blankfort)

Why does Noam Chomsky oppose boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, and why does he think Palestinians should not talk about justice and redress for their ethnic cleansing from their homeland in 1948? Why does Chomsky dismiss any talk about the influence of the Israel lobby? His pathetic views on the Lobby can be seen in THIS video.

Click here to download the download the Abunimah and Blankfort response

or listen to it at Ali Abunimah’s Blog

Israel could have welcomed Chomsky with open arms. His non participation in the Movement is exactly the type of ‘left winger’ Israel loves.

Universities in the Palestinian Territories have scores of professors to chose from that hold views in support of their cause. Chomsky is definitely not one of them.

May 17, 2010 Posted by | Deception | Leave a comment

Half an hour of mobile use a day ‘increases brain cancer risk’

A landmark study into the health dangers posed by mobiles has found people who speak on their handset for more than half an hour a day over 10 years are at greater risk of brain cancer.

Telegraph | 17 May 2010

The World Health Organisation’s Interphone report, to be published this week, will say that “heavy users” are more at risk of developing glioma tumours.

It concludes that there is no increased risk of developing the disease in other users. However, the minimum amount of time which researchers designated at heavy use was just 30 minutes a day.

The study also excluded anyone under 30 from its results, prompting scientists to demand further research into the health implications of mobile ‘phone technology.

“Today mobile ‘phone use has become much more prevalent and it is not unusual for young people to use mobile ‘phones for an hour or more a day,” said the scientists in a statement.

The project conducted studies in 13 countries, interviewing tumour sufferers and people in good health to see whether their mobile phone use differed. It questioned about 12,800 people between 2000 and 2004.

A spokesman for the Mobile Operators Association has previously indicated that more than 30 scientific reviews had found no adverse health effects.

May 17, 2010 Posted by | Aletho News | Leave a comment

SEC Admits to Inadequate Tools to Conduct Investigation

Trader’s Harrowing Tape of Market Plunge Reveals Big Name Sellers

By PAM MARTENS | May 17, 2010

SEC Chair Mary Schapiro made a stunning admission during House subcommittee hearings last week seeking answers to the May 6 hit and run in the stock market which briefly trimmed 998 points off the Dow and caused massive losses to small investors who had placed stop loss orders on individual stocks.

According to Ms. Schapiro, the SEC has no consolidated audit trail that captures time and sales in a chronological order among the 40 or more electronic trading platforms and exchanges that constitute today’s deeply fragmented U.S. stock market.

Ms. Schapiro said in her testimony before the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and Government Sponsored Enterprises that there were 66 million trades on May 6, coming from the 40 or more stock trading venues.  The SEC has requested the individual trading records and must figure out how to review all the disparate trading in sequential time order.  Some trading records reside at unregulated entities like hedge funds.  Other trades are done by dark pools, internal matching of buys and sells inside brokerage firms (benignly called internalization) and over the counter derivative trades that could impact the stock market but have no oversight by anyone.  Ms. Schapiro said she has issued subpoenas but didn’t say to whom.

Ms. Schapiro’s testimony raises the question as to whether the SEC has been properly monitoring potentially rigged trading in real time up to this point.

As far back as five months ago, the SEC was gently coaxing Wall Street to let it police it with proper tools.  Below is an excerpt from a speech delivered by James Brigagliano, Deputy Director of the SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets on January 21, 2010 to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), the heavy handed trade and lobby association of Wall Street:

“Chairman Schapiro has expressed her commitment to improving intermarket surveillance.  As a step towards fulfilling that commitment, she created an inter-division task force to work with markets to explore ways to establish a comprehensive consolidated audit trail for orders and executions across all markets.  While we recognize that such a proposal would require a substantial effort by the SROs [Self Regulatory Organizations] and their members, a consolidated audit trail could be an invaluable regulatory tool to enhance the ability of the SROs and the Commission to detect illegal activity across multiple markets, and would greatly benefit investors and help to restore trust in the securities markets.”

Since when do real cops ask the perps for permission to police them?
Many eyebrows were raised among Wall Street skeptics when President Obama appointed Ms. Schapiro to head the SEC on January 20, 2009.  Ms. Schapiro came to the SEC from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the self regulatory watchdog of Wall Street, where she served as CEO.  Prior to that, she was the Chairman and CEO of the predecessor self regulator, NASD Regulation, which carried the stigma of running a private justice system for Wall Street that investors, industry employees and lawyers felt was rigged in favor of the industry.  Why Ms. Schapiro did not insist on creating a consolidated audit trail in her prior regulatory roles or after the four-decade Madoff swindle was revealed  remains a nagging question.

Another person to provide Congressional testimony on May 11 was Chief Operating Officer of the New York Stock Exchange, Larry Leibowitz, who was also unable to explain what caused the crash on May 6.  Mr. Leibowitz’ younger brother, Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, had upstaged the hearings the day before on his program “The Daily Show” with his own apt diagnosis.   Showing an endless stream of news anchors characterizing everything from the GM bailout to the mortgage crisis to the rescue of AIG as caused by the “perfect storm,”  Stewart said:  “I’m beginning to think these are not perfect storms.  I’m beginning to think these are regular storms and we have a sh*tty boat.”

My only quibble with Stewart’s analysis is that it’s not just that we have a sh*tty boat.  It’s that the pirates have a souped up speedboat with computers run by algorithms and have infiltrated the water patrol.

The Congressional testimony of Terry Duffy, Executive Chairman of the Chicago and New York based futures exchanges, known as the CME Group, Inc., raised more alarm bells.  Mr. Duffy told the House hearing that “The CME [Chicago Mercantile Exchange] markets functioned properly on May 6, 2010.”  “Functioned properly” is clearly a subjective term as his market came within 3 points of being locked limit down.  Locked limit down is when the futures market hits a preset percentage decline that automatically halts trading. Without the S&P 500 trading, the cash stock market would have had even less price transparency and this would have accelerated panic selling.

Speaking of the popular futures contract on the Standard and Poor’s 500 called the E-Mini, Mr. Duffy reported that “the market traded in a largely orderly manner…the bid/ask spread momentarily widened to 6.5 points…Market Regulation staff ultimately concluded that there were no anomalies represented by the level of activity or the trading strategies employed by market participants.”

Mr. Duffy’s testimony stands in stark contrast to a harrowing audio tape of the bungee jump  in the Standard and Poor’s 500 futures pit between 2:42 and 2:51 p.m. New York time; 1:42 and 1:51 Central time. The tape was made by Ben Lichtenstein, who has worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) for 17 years.  Starting out as a runner, then member, then trader, Mr. Lichtenstein launched a savvy service for private investors, traders and asset management companies who need to take the pulse of the futures market in real time.  Called TradersAudio.com, the service provides a live audio feed directly from the trading pit in Chicago with Mr. Lichtenstein calling out the play by play as trades occur.  He says it’s “like being in the pits without all the pushing and shoving.”

Mr. Lichtenstein has confirmed that this is an authentic tape of his broadcast during the plunge.

At several points on the tape, Mr. Lichtenstein clearly indicates that there is a 10 point spread between the bid and the ask.  Mr. Duffy told the House hearing that the spread reached a maximum of 6.5 points.  A 10 point spread shows a seriously illiquid market where big players have pulled their support.

At one point on the tape Mr. Lichtenstein yells out: “This is probably the craziest I’ve seen it down here ever.”  At another point he says the move through the figure was “just nuts,” meaning when the S&P 500 broke its support level of 1100 no buying support came in; a highly unusual occurrence.

Mr. Lichtenstein calls out the names of Salomon and Morgan Stanley as sellers as the plunge worsens.  Both of these firms received taxpayer bailouts and Salomon, a unit of Citigroup, is currently a ward of the taxpayer.  If these firms were shorting the market for their own in-house casinos, (their proprietary trading desks), the American people have a right to know and so does Congress.  It goes to the very heart of legislative proposals to ban proprietary trading at banks holding insured deposits.

In the brief morning comments that are broadcast in the audio, Mr. Lichtenstein calls out that Pru Bache is selling.  Stockbrokers I checked with were shocked to learn Prudential  Bache has miraculously arisen from the dead. The company was depicted in Kurt Eichenwald’s epic tome, “Serpent on the Rock,” regarding its massive securities fraud in limited partnerships in the 1980s and 90s.  The jacket cover reads: “Backstabbing. Lying. Embezzling. Coverups.  Just another day on Wall Street in history’s biggest corporate swindle.”  It’s less than comforting to know that the name Pru Bache is being called out on a day that looks like serious manipulation at work.

Nor is it comforting to hear that Salomon is selling.  Citigroup uses many monikers to trade around the world.  Salomon is one of them.  Here’s how Bloomberg described a trade  Citigroup code named “Dr. Evil” in 2004:

“On Aug. 2, 2004, between 10:28 and 10:29 a.m., Citigroup traders sold 11.3 billion euros of government bonds in 18 seconds using MTS, according to the Financial Services Authority. A further 1.5 billion euros of bonds were sold on other markets. At the time, an average 13.5 billion euros of bonds traded each day on MTS. The traders had planned to sell only 8 billion euros to 9 billion euros of bonds and weren’t expecting the system to work as well as it did, the FSA said. About seven minutes later, they started buying back 3.8 billion euros of bonds after the securities dropped in price. The Citigroup team also bought 66,214 futures contracts and booked an $18.5 million profit on the day, the FSA said.”

I asked the CME if they would aggregate all the trades done by Citigroup and its affiliates and subsidiaries (Citigroup, Citibank, Salomon, Smith Barney, etc.) to see if Mr. Duffy’s statement would hold up that there “were no anomalies represented by the level of activity or the trading strategies employed by market participants.”  The CME’s spokesperson, Allan Schoenberg, responded:

“Per your request for access to client trading information we do not provide access to that.  As for your question about Citigroup and access to their information specifically you would have to discuss that with Citigroup.  As CFTC Chairman Gensler noted, data that he and his staff have reviewed shows that the trades he referred to in his testimony appeared to be a bona fide hedging strategy.”

I took and passed the commodities licensing exam in 1986.  At that time, a bona fide hedger was a party like an oil company hedging the price of oil; or a farmer in the Midwest hedging the price of corn.  I don’t think securities laws intended that a Wall Street firm could trade for its own account, against the interest of its customers,  and call it bona fide hedging.  Until we know just what account these big firms were trading for and the aggregated volume of these trades by firm, we know nothing useful about their May 6 conduct.  And let’s remember that these firms are already under investigation for potential rigging of the credit default swap and collateralized debt obligation markets.

According to Mr. Duffy, there were 1.6 million (yes, million) contracts traded in the E-Mini S&P 500 in the pivotal hour of 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. New York time.  Each E-Mini trades at 50 times the level of the S&P 500 futures price.  At 1100 on the S&P, that would be $55,000 per contract or about $88 billion (yes, billion) in one hour, an astonishing amount.

Last week Reuters leaked an internal document from the CME showing that Waddell & Reed has sold 75,000 contracts during that period with the suggestion that it might have triggered the plunge.  The idea that this tiny Midwest mutual fund firm pulled something over on the Wall Street bad boys is specious at best and an intentional distraction at worst.  If the report is correct, Waddell & Reed’s contracts represented 4.7 percent of those traded in that hour.

The Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance and Investment is slated to pick up where the House left off this coming Thursday from 10:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.  Hopefully, the Senate will probe the issues raised above, along with the following:

During the House hearings, no mention was made of the fact that three of the largest market cap stocks in the S&P 500 suffered losses far in excess of the overall market decline on May 6, raising a strong warning sign of potential manipulation.

The S&P 500 is weighted by the market capitalization of the individual stocks. Market capitalization is the share price times the number of shares outstanding.  The impact of a price change in the S&P 500 index is proportional to significant price changes in the stocks ranking highest in market cap weighting. (Big price declines in a handful of the top tier stocks can crater the market index.) Apple Computer, GE and Procter and Gamble all fall within the top 10 component stocks of the S&P 500 and each of these stocks appears to have been targeted for excessive selling by some entity or algorithmic program on May 6. Sharp price declines in these pivotal stocks in the cash stock market quickly transmuted  into selling in the futures market, creating a frenzy in the highly leveraged Chicago futures pits.

According to Standard and Poor’s website on May 14, 2010, Apple Computer ranks number 2 in importance in the S&P 500; GE ranks 4th; Procter and Gamble ranks 5th.  At the worst point in the market, Apple had declined by 21.5 percent; GE by 16.6 percent; and Procter and Gamble by a whopping 36 percent.  The overall market at its worst level had declined by only 9.2 percent. (3M dropped by 21 percent at its worst point but does not rank in the top 10 of the S&P by market cap.)

Before our so-called fair and efficient markets become the brunt of jokes on more comedy shows around the globe, the Senate needs to stop trying to legislate reforms in the dark and get to the bottom of just how rigged Wall Street really is.

Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years; she has no security position, long or short, in any company mentioned in this article other than being long Procter & Gamble.  She and family members own less than 500 shares in Procter & Gamble.  She writes on public interest issues from New Hampshire.  She can be reached at pamk741@aol.com

May 17, 2010 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Economics | Leave a comment

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