Category Archives: Corporate Welfare

Corporate Welfare, Health/Environment

California authorizes oilfield dumping into drinking water

Associated Press: February 5, 2015

Regulators in California, the country’s third-largest oil-producing state, have authorized oil companies to inject production fluids and waste into what are now federally protected aquifers more than 2,500 times, risking contamination of underground water supplies that could be used for drinking water or irrigation, state records show.

While some of the permits go back decades, an Associated Press analysis found that nearly half of those injection wells — 46 percent — were permitted or began injection in the last four years under Gov. Jerry Brown, who has pushed state oil and gas regulators to speed up the permitting process. And it happened despite warnings from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 2011 that state regulators were failing to do enough to shield groundwater reserves from the threat of oilfield pollution.

In California, “we need a big course correction. We need to get the system back in compliance,” said Jared Blumenfeld, regional administrator for the EPA. “Californians expect their water is not being polluted by oil producers … This poses that very real danger.”

The injections are convenient to oil companies because drilling brings up 13 gallons of wastewater for every gallon of petroleum. And one of the easiest disposal methods is simply to send that waste back underground.

(read the full article at Washington Post)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

I’ve seen the secrets of TTIP, and it is built for corporations not citizens

Molly Scott Cato
The Guardian : February 4, 2015

It appears that, even though I am past 50, my opportunities to become a spy have not expired. This is because, as an MEP, I have now been granted privileged access to the European parliament restricted reading room to explore documents relating to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal. But before I had the right to see such “top secret” documents, which are restricted from the gaze of most EU citizens, I was required to sign a document of some 14 pages, reminding me that “EU institutions are a valuable target” and of the dangers of espionage. Crucially, I had to agree not to share any of the contents with those I represent.

The delightful parliamentary staff required me to leave even the smallest of my personal items in a locked cupboard, as they informed me how tiny cameras can be these days. Like a scene from a James Bond film, they then took me through the security door into a room with secure cabinets from which the documents were retrieved. I was not at any point left alone.

This week hundreds of protesters against TTIP have descended on the European parliament. They are quite rightly concerned about the threat that this treaty poses to the British government’s ability to conduct its affairs in their interests. On a range of issues, from food safety standards and animal welfare to public services and financial regulation, there are deep concerns that the harmonisation of standards across the Atlantic really means a reduction of standards on both sides.

But how are we to know for certain? All discussions about TTIP have been hypothetical, since the negotiations are taking place in secret. In order to read even brief notes of what has been discussed I have to be reminded of my duties not to undertake espionage for foreign powers. Repeated complaints about secrecy from my fellow Green members have resulted in our being admitted to the restricted reading room but we are still not able to share what we discover there with our constituents or with journalists. What we do know is that 92% of those involved in the consultations have been corporate lobbyists. Of the 560 lobby encounters that the commission had, 520 were with business lobbyists and only 26 (4.6%) were with public interest groups. This means that, for every encounter with a trade union or consumer group, there were 20 with companies and industry federations.

What I am able to reveal from my visit to the library is that I left without any sense of reassurance either that the process of negotiating this trade deal is democratic, or that the negotiators are operating on behalf of citizens. The whole process, from the implicit accusation of industrial espionage, to the recognition about who is actually engaged in the negotiations, makes it clear that this is a corporate discussion, not a democratic one. I picture a room full of bureaucrats trying to find ways to facilitate the business of the world’s most powerful companies, many of which have a turnover larger than the economic activity of some EU member states.

So why would anyone want a world that contains a giant trading area stretching from Alaska to the Black Sea? I think the vision arises from a sense of the need to order and control; the sense that uniformity is equivalent to security. But it is also clear that the decisions about what this uniform system of regulation and trade would look like are devised by corporations whose very DNA is the profit motive, and which are legally required to serve shareholders at the expense of all others.

(read the full article at The Guardian)

—-
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Corporate Welfare, Privacy, Tyranny

The RCMP Spent $1.6 Million to Run an Unconstitutional Spying Program

Justin Ling
Vice: January 20, 2015

Canada’s federal police continued to snoop on Canadians’ cellphones and computers for at least a month after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, new documents prove.

Financial records obtained by VICE through the Access to Information Act show the extent to which the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) used federal legislation to obtain information on Canadians from all major phone companies without warrants. Instead, police paid small fees for each of these requests.

The Supreme Court ruled that practise illegal in its June 13, 2014, decision on R. v. Spencer, writing that police need judicial authorization before making those sorts of requests.

However, the records show Telus and Bell both continued to fork over Canadians’ information even after that decision was handed down.

The Newfoundland and Labrador detachment of the RCMP made 51 requests for a “phone search” to Telus between July 1 and August 1, 2014. They paid $76 for the searches. Over the course of July, the British Columbia detachment also made 129 phone search requests to Telus, and another 27 to Bell—two phone searches and 25 Service Profile Identifier (SPID) requests—running the west coast RCMP division $258.

SPID information is used to help police identify which phone lines they are able to put taps or traces on.

Many invoices cover the entire month of June, so it is unclear if the requests stopped exactly on June 13, or whether they continued later into the month.

VICE’s analysis of the records show that the RCMP paid over $1.6 million to Canada’s cellphone companies since 2010 in order to skirt the normal process of having these requests approved by a judge.

The documents only deal with the RCMP […] The documents do not include data from provincial police forces, who likely made the bulk of these Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) requests. Nor do they include the spy agencies Canadian Security Intelligence Service or Communications Security Establishment Canada, or the Canada Revenue Agency, which have also been known to use the process.

(read the full article at Vice)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Banksters, Corporate Welfare

Ten Reasons Why There Will Be Another Systemic Financial Crisis

Robert Lenzner
Forbes: December 8, 2014

1. The financial system is a fragile and complex network of financial relationships that has built into it a tendency for periodic disturbances that can produce “huge, unanticipated changes,” which at times spin out of control into a catastrophe as took place in 2008. This is the thesis Harvard professor Niall Ferguson put forth in his 2012 book The Great Degeneration, How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, a must-read for all economists, stock pickers and investment bankers. Fragile, as in “a system prone to crash,” says Andrew Haldane, today the chief economist of the Bank of England. “Lending within the financial system… raises inter-connectivity in the system, thereby amplifying systemic risk.” Ben Bernanke, former Fed chairman, puts the quandry in a pithy manner: “Assets are observable,” he says,” but the whole story is not observable.”

2. Wall Street is a highly concentrated politically powerful industry while the regulators of Wall Street are a highly fragmented group of institutions like the Fed, the SEC, the Treasury and the FDIC unused to working in tandem with each other. The financial system’s complexity of operations and nontransparent web of interconnections means that the worrisome problems of the financial institutions always slip below the regulatory radar.

3. The next crisis is bound to involve the Too Big To Fail Banks that have highly leveraged their hold on 68% of the banking industry’s deposits. As Federal Reserve Board Vice-Chairman Stanley Fischer has put it, “We should never allow ourselves the complacency to believe we have put an end to TBTF.” In short, real lasting financial stability requires reducing the system’s degree of concentrated risk in a mere handful of giant institutions that may be Too Big To Manage and Too Big To Regulate as well as Too Big To Fail. The dangerous bottom line: there is no pragmatic method that readily comes to mind that involves breaking up the TBTF banking system while maintaining a market-based financial system, according to former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

4. No one understands the derivative risk positions of the Too Big To Fail Banks, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. There is presently no way to measure the risks involved in the leverage, quantity of collateral, or stability of counter-parties for these major institutions. To me personally they are big black holes capable of potential wrack and ruin. Without access to confidential internal data about these risky derivative positions the regulators cannot react in a timely and measured fashion to block the threat to financial stability, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study.

5. The Dodd-Frank legislation does not reform Wall Street. Rather it preserves the system that existed prior to the 2008 crisis, according to Martin Wolf of the Financial Times of London. According to former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, “The goal of financial reform was to make the system safe for failure. It wasn’t to prevent the failure of individual firms that take on too much risk, but to make the aftershocks of failure less threatening to the system as a whole.” Most importantly, Dodd-Frank amended the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 to prohibit the central bank from bailing out an insolvent financial institution on the verge of bankruptcy. It can only lend or inject capital if the bank is solvent. According to Harvard economist Larry Summers the Fed is simply not capable of understanding even when a member bank becomes insolvent.

6. The Fed’s monetary policy model at present does not take into consideration any factual or numerical input from events either in domestic financial markets or global markets. This lack of input means the Fed will always have trouble spotting a bubble that is developing out of speculation in the financial or commodity markets.

7. Nor does the Fed have any oversight powers over the Shadow Banking System, which amounts to $75 trillion worldwide of financial activities by non-banks that in 2008 triggered runs on the system that threatened its stability. Shadow banking, which runs the gamut from money market mutual funds to short term repurchase financing agreements, commercial paper and other aspects of investment banking, are activities that can trigger panicky runs on the financial system. Shadow banking is also inherently fragile due to the lack of a central bank safety net or the deposit insurance that supports bank deposits. The whole inter-relationship between shadow banking and traditional banking is not very well understood. In short, shadow banking increases the likelihood that systemic risk will be triggered from the breakdown and gaps that exist between it and traditional banking.

8. Wall Street pressure has awed its government overseers into a deadly form of “regulatory capture” especially as regulators lack the resources, the motivation, and in the last resort, the knowledge, to keep up with the main players in the financial hierarchy, according to Martin Wolf, author of The Shifts and the Shocks, a recent book on the 2008 financial crisis.

9. There has been very little progress on building an international framework to resolve failed financial firms, according to a House of Representatives report prepared by the Republican staff of the Financial Services Committee published in July 2014. Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, described this absence of a cross-border regime for resolving large banks as “a gaping hole in the financial architecture” in a May 27, 2014 speech. Or as Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew put it in December 2013, “the failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that the absence of cooperation between domestic and foreign authorities to resolve a financial company can endanger the global financial system.”

10. The United States has experienced periodic financial panics or crises since its founding. From 1792, 1837, 1873, 1893, 1907 to 1929 and more recently 2000-2002 and 2008-2009 there have been bank closings, bankruptcies, massive stock market sell-offs and painful recessions. Many financial problems are hidden in the plumbing of the financial markets, which are not transparent and make the financial system exceptionally vulnerable. To some extent we are always flying blind. That is why we should have a serious fear of the unknown. As former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner puts it, “financial crises cannot reliably be prevented.” Its impossible to predict how and when the next financial crisis will occur. We can’t count on fallible central bankers to stop financial booms before they become dangerous, because by the time the danger is clear, it’s often too late to defuse the problem. There is a Black Swan tail risk in our future some day. We just don’t know when and how it will happen. ” There is no mechanism for determining when there actually is a crisis” says Yale economist Gary Gorton in his 2012 book “ Misunderstanding Financial Crisis Why We Don’t See Them Coming.”

(read the full article at : Forbes

Corporate Welfare, Original, Tyranny

Microsoft’s temporary foreign workers: Canada sets a dangerous new precedent in corporate welfare

AlternativeFreePress.com

Canada’s Conservative/Con-artist government has created a new loophole around labour laws, granting an exemption to Microsoft allowing them to use temporary foreign workers without even pretending to look for Canadians to fill the jobs first.

The feds ridiculously claim the arrangement will create jobs for Canadians. Apparently, the government expects you to believe that eliminating qualified Canadians from the pool of applicants and replacing them with a revolving door of temporary foreign workers will create more jobs for Canadians.

The CBC quotes Toronto immigration lawyer Lorne Waldman: “There is certainly no justification that I can see that would support granting an exemption to a large number of foreign workers to come into Canada to take away jobs that could easily filled by Canadians… On the one hand, the government is telling us they are protecting Canadian jobs; on the other hand they’re signing agreements with big corporations in which they’re allowing them to bring in foreign workers.”

Because foreign workers will be working in Canada for only 24 month periods, Citizenship and Immigration Canada spokesperson Sonia Lesage claims that the foreign workers are not going to be entering the Canadian workforce, and therefore won’t be competing with Canadian workers. Is Sonia Lesange completely out of her mind? How can any sane person make such claims and expect the public to take them seriously? These workers will be taking “jobs in Canada that require work permits, and they could find Canadian graduates from computer science programs to fill them”, says a source who works in immigration law.

Microsoft is in bed with the Harper government specifically to get around labour laws. Karen Jones, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, has said specifically that the deal will allow Microsoft to get around rules on visas for foreign workers. “The U.S. laws clearly did not meet our needs. We have to look to other places,” she told Bloomberg Businessweek. Obviously Canadian law did not meet their needs either, but Harper’s cronies are happy to make Microsoft exempt from the law.

As Waldman told the CBC: “There is no other exemption that is specific to a corporation, and it does not fall within any of the other categories where exemptions are normally given,”

This is a dangerous new precedent in corporate welfare.

Written by Alternative Free Press
Creative Commons License
Microsoft’s temporary foreign workers: Canada sets a dangerous new precedent in corporate welfare by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Source: Foreign workers: Microsoft gets green light from Ottawa for foreign trainees (CBC)

Corporate Welfare, Tyranny

Feds Prepare Canadian Wheat Board for corporate takeover, sans compensation

Foreign multinational could assume control without reimbursing Canadian farmers, taxpayers

Canadian Wheat Board prepares for corporate takeover

Janyce McGregor
CBC News : December 1, 2014

They called it “Marketing Freedom Day”: Prime Minister Stephen Harper stood in a Saskatchewan field and vowed that Prairie grain farmers would “never, never again” suffer at the hands of the Canadian Wheat Board.

What the politicians weren’t saying in 2012, when the monopoly that controlled where farmers could sell their product sank into the horizon, was that the liberation wouldn’t stop there.

Farmers and Canadian taxpayers will soon be completely free of the wheat board’s assets — but not with a conventional sale.

Under a sort of reverse-nationalization plan now taking shape behind closed doors, a private-sector investor will assume control without reimbursing the federal treasury for assets Canadians paid for, or at least indirectly financed.

Little is known about the board’s current financial health, because Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz exercises power given to him in 2011 to withhold information “detrimental to commercial interests.”

A report Ritz submitted to Parliament last July contained no financial statements. Many big players in the international grain business aren’t publicly traded.

How did this happen?

2011’s Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act gave a revamped wheat board — purged of farmer-elected directors and now run by a board of Harper government appointees — until 2016 to come up with a privatization plan and until 2017 to implement it. Otherwise, it will be dissolved.
Stephen Harper ends wheat board

Prime Minster Stephen Harper celebrated with Kindersley, Sask., farmers Robin, left, and Brenda Walde, right, on Aug. 1, 2012: the first day Canadian wheat, durum and barley growers were free to sell their grain on an open market. (Liam Richards/Canadian Press)

Parties involved in the talks are bound by confidentiality agreements.

The board’s website says it is “fast-tracking” and “intends to beat that deadline.”

President Ian White, who’s overseen recent purchases of new grain-handling facilities, wants to accelerate the process for fear the organization will be wound up.

With an uncertain future, farmers may be reluctant to sell it their grain. Post-monopoly, CWB has needed help from larger grain companies.

‘You can get cash from the sale of something, or you can get a return over the years as the economy grows.’- Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz

The board wants a large, international player as its majority partner. Any investment from that partner will remain within the newly privatized company it controls.

And grain farmers participating in a new farmer equity plan will have only a minority stake.

Fast-tracking could also see a deal before the next federal election. But this is not the sort of privatization that helps balance government books

(read the full article at CBC)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Corporate Welfare, Original, Tyranny

Harper commits Canada to contribute corporate welfare

AlternativeFreePress.com

On Sunday November 16, 2014 Stephen Harper said Canada is preparing to make a contribution to a United Nations climate change fund following a $3 billion donation from the USA.

The climate change fund is a scam, sold as channeling money “to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change”. That may sound nice, but, as we reported previously, there are several reasons why this is a problem…

1. Foreign Aid is Corporate Welfare.

In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins describes how he would convince the government leaders of underdeveloped countries to accept huge loans they could never pay off. He explains how those countries were then pressured politically so much that they were effectively neutralized and their economies crippled. Perkins describes the role of an Economic Hit Man as “a highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.”

Let’s look at an example of how nice sounding green initiatives are often just corporate welfare…

The BC’s Pacific Carbon Trust takes about $14 million dollars from taxpayers per year and transfers it to large corporations.

Jordan Bateman with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation explains that “taxpayer money flowed exclusively into the pockets of corporations, including some of the largest companies in the province. Lafarge, a $20 billion company, was paid by the Trust for 22,998 carbon credits. Encana, an $8.8 billion company, sold 84,276 credits. Canfor, a $2.5 billion company, sold 41,573 credits. Other sellers included TimberWest and Interfor.”

2. Binding Agreements & Loss Of Sovereignty.

While this climate agreement may not yet legally bind countries into the corporate welfare scheme, that is the endgame.

The New York Times reports that officials fear this type of agreement which will not will not bind countries to spend billions of dollars. They desperately want a binding agreement. Richard Muyungi, a climate negotiator for Tanzania is quoted “Without an international agreement that binds us, it’s impossible for us to address the threats of climate change… We are not as capable as the U.S. of facing this problem, and historically we don’t have as much responsibility. What we need is just one thing: Let the U.S. ratify the agreement. If they ratify the agreement, it will trigger action across the world.”

These international agreements seek to destroy nations sovereignty, they attempt to override laws of local, regional and national governments… and this has been planned for a long time.

The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 by David Rockefeller, it’s members include business leaders, Heads of State, UN bureaucrats, diplomats, politicians and government officials from all over the world.

In 1990 The Club of Rome published The First Global Revolution, where they outlined how they would create or exaggerate environmental threats with the intention of manipulating the public into giving up their sovereignty to one world government:

“The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

3. Debt.

This climate agreement is being presented under the guise of rich countries helping countries in need, but really it is countries already in debt, getting into more debt, in order to get other countries into debt.

The “rich” countries are not really rich when you consider their debt, every dollar of aid given is borrowed with interest owing and compounding. Increasing debt and devaluing the dollar.

The “developing” countries can certainly use help, but the strings attached to this type of help will leave them with more debt than they can handle. This will leave them vulnerable to exploitation and allow corporations to pillage resources.

Banksters (central banks) create fiat currency and loan it to the government, it is then given to banksters (world bank / IMF) who loan it to developing countries. Debt on top of debt, interest plus more interest.

Sources:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/harper-says-canada-will-contribute-to-poor-countries-climate-change-fund/article21604820/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/us/politics/obama-pursuing-climate-accord-in-lieu-of-treaty.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jordan-bateman/carbon-bc_b_1723907.html
http://www.green-agenda.com/globalrevolution.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man

Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Corporate Welfare, Health/Environment

Energy Executive Quits Pipeline Review, Calls NEB Process A ‘Public Deception’

Energy Executive Quits Trans Mountain Pipeline Review, Calls NEB Process A ‘Public Deception’

Emma Gilchrist
desmog: November 3, 2014

An energy executive is weighing in on the federal review of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion with a scathing letter that calls the National Energy Board’s review process “fraudulent” and a “public deception” — and calls for the province of British Columbia to undertake its own environmental assessment.

Marc Eliesen — who has 40 years of executive experience in the energy sector, including as a board member at Suncor — writes in his letter to the National Energy Board that the process is jury-rigged with a “pre-determined outcome.”

Eliesen is the former CEO of BC Hydro, former chair of Manitoba Hydro and has served as a deputy minister in seven different federal and provincial governments.

In his letter, Eliesen tells the National Energy Board (NEB) that he offered his expertise as an intervenor in good faith that his time would be well spent in evaluation Trans Mountain’s proposal.

“Unfortunately, I have come to the conclusion that the board, through its decisions, is engaged in a public deception,” Eliesen writes. “Continued involvement with this process is a waste of time and effort, and represents a disservice to the public interest because it endorses a fraudulent process.”

Eliesen writes that he was dismayed when the oral cross-examination phase was removed from the Trans Mountain hearings. He notes that oral cross-examination has served as a critical part of all previous Section 52 oil pipeline hearings.

“It is my experience that when a proponent does not face the spectre of oral cross-examination, their written responses to interrogatories suffer from a lack of detail and accountability,” Eliesen writes. “Still, I was willing to see the results of the Information Request process the board promised would be sufficient.”

When those information requests came back, however, Eliesen lost all hope in the process.

The unwillingness of Trans Mountain to address most of my questions and the board’s almost complete endorsement of Trans Mountain’s decision has exposed this process as deceptive and misleading. Proper and professional public interest due diligence has been frustrated, leading me to the conclusion that this board has a predetermined course of action to recommend approval of the project and a strong bias in favour of the proponent.

In effect, this so-called public hearing process has become a farce, and this board a truly industry captured regulator.

A regulator is considered ‘captured’ when it turns into more of a industry facilitator, rather than a regulatory watchdog.

Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion proposal would triple the amount of oil the company ships to Burnaby and increase the number of oil tankers travelling through Vancouver Harbour and the Gulf Islands seven-fold.

(read the full article at desmog)

Marc Eliesen’s letter:

Marc Eliesen Letter of Withdrawal from Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain expansion NEB process


Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Banksters, Corporate Welfare

Banksters laughing at slap on wrist for foreign exchange rigging – Now it’s back to “business as usual”

Mega Banks Are Fined for Foreign Exchange Rigging – Now It’s Back To “Business as Usual”

Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkrieg: November 12, 2014

Far from chastening the world’s biggest currency trading firms, the multi-billion dollar fines levied by regulators on Wednesday are more likely to draw a line under the affair and gradually allow a return to business as usual.

A year into a wide-ranging industry probe into charges that banks routinely fleeced clients over currencies, industry observers and politicians were frustrated by a deal they said showed the affair will end just with fines rather than any reform of what they say is the Wild West of financial markets.

– From the Reuters article: Banks pay up and carry on after FX fines

[…]

Absolutely nothing will change despite mega banks once again being caught in extraordinarily unethical behavior. [Reuters] admits the mega banks are essentially allowed to self-regulate in this market and will continue to do so. […]

But in essence, Wednesday’s rulings put the foreign exchange market, long “self-regulated” by banks and people who provide services to banks, well on the way to seeing off any risk of a new era of overarching global regulation.

“It seems to be business as usual — banks blow up, pay fines, and we move on. They just seem to be inventing new ways to break the rules,” said Mark Garnier, a former City financier and Conservative member of the UK parliamentary committee charged with overseeing finance.

They have fallen over themselves to play ball with the regulators and, given the complicated technical and financial nature of the probe, lawyers and consultants employed by banks have done much of the actual investigative work.

“The banks have been allowed to investigate themselves,” one source familiar with the investigation told Reuters. “The investigated decide what they want to investigate, what they admit to, and how much they will pay.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg (the media outlet) provided some snippets from the crooked traders’ chatrooms. Here are a few:

Traders worked together to “whack” the market, called themselves a “cartell” and congratulated each other for a job well done, according to transcripts released by regulators today.

“Ok, i got a lot of euros,” a currency trader at JPMorgan Chase & Co. said in an undated 3:51 p.m. message to his counterpart at Citigroup Inc. A minute later he says, “tell you what, lets double team it.”

In another excerpt, traders at Citigroup, JPMorgan, and UBS debate whether to invite a fourth into a private chat room. “Are we ok with keeping this as is .. ie the info lvls & risk sharing?” the UBS trader asks at 7:49 a.m.

A minute later the JPMorgan trader tries to ensure that the new member puts the interests of the group first. “You know him — will he tell rest of desk stuff — or god forbin his nyk…” referring to New York colleagues.

The Citigroup trader then chimes in, “yes — that’s really imp[ortant] q[uestion] — dont want other numpty’s in mkt to know,” according to the transcripts, which added the wording clarification.

“But not only that,” the trader added. “Is he gonna protect us like we protect each other against our own branches?”

You can’t make this stuff up.

No jail sentences, no reduction in criminality. This isn’t rocket science.

(read the full article at Liberty Blitzkrieg)

Corporate Welfare, Health/Environment

Kinder Morgan misleading public regarding Trans Mountain pipeline expansion

Study questions benefits of Kinder Morgan’s proposed Trans Mountain expansion

By Lauren Krugel
The Canadian Press: November 10, 2014

Kinder Morgan is overplaying the economic benefits and downplaying the costs of its proposed Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, according to a report released Monday.

Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Public Policy Research teamed with The Goodman Group Ltd., a California-based consulting firm, to examine the estimated impacts of the project.

The report “strongly recommends that the citizens and decision-makers of B.C. and Metro Vancouver reject this pipeline, which is neither in the economic nor public interest of B.C. and Metro Vancouver.”

The Trans Mountain pipeline currently ships 300,000 barrels of petroleum products per day from the Edmonton area to the West Coast. The $5.4-billion expansion would nearly triple its capacity to 890,000 barrels a day, enabling crude exports to Asia via the Vancouver area.

In its regulatory application to the National Energy Board late last year, Kinder Morgan included an analysis by the Conference Board of Canada, an economic think-tank based in Ottawa. The conference board estimated 36,000 person-years of employment in B.C. while the pipeline was being built.

Monday’s report disputes those numbers, saying expected employment during construction would be about a third of that — 12,000 person years, tops. That’s less than less than 0.2 per cent of total provincial employment.

The number of long-term jobs is also overstated, according to the SFU-Goodman report.

Kinder Morgan has projected 50 direct full-time jobs once the pipeline is up and running, with 2,000 resulting from the project’s spinoff benefits. The report pegs the spinoff jobs at closer to 800.

The report’s authors say B.C. government coffers will get a “tiny” benefit from the Trans Mountain expansion, with Alberta and oilsands producers the main beneficiaries. Property tax benefits for B.C. communities along the route would average less than one per cent of current total municipal revenues.

“B.C. is not getting its fair share of benefits from this project,” said Ian Goodman, president of The Goodman Group.

On the cost side, the report also takes issue with Kinder Morgan’s numbers. The company’s most expensive spill scenario puts the cost at $100 million to $300 million. Brigid Rowan, senior energy economist with the Goodman Group, said a large spill in a highly populated area like Metro Vancouver could cost up to $5 billion.

“Putting it all together, the benefits are not as good as we’ve been told, but the costs are much worse,” she said.

(read the full article at Vancouver Sun

—-
Alternative Free Press -fair use-