Workers in Cambodia will hold a "people's tribunal" next week to investigate pay and conditions at factories working for fashion brands including H&M and Gap.

An international panel of judges will hear evidence from workers, factories and multinational brands including Puma and Adidas. H&M said it would not attend but would supply information about how it was addressing wages at its suppliers' factories in the country.

The two-day hearing aims to raise awareness of low pay and long working hours that workers say are partly responsible for a series of "mass faintings" involving hundreds of workers at factories supplying H&M, Gap and sports brands.

Up to 300 workers will give evidence about the fainting incidents and about living conditions resulting from low wages.

The minimum wage in Cambodia is the equivalent of just $66 (£42) a month, a level that human rights groups say is almost half that required to meet basic needs.

Ath Thorn, president of the Cambodian Coalition for Apparel Workers Democratic Unions, said: "Because the workers get low wages they try to work 10 to 13 hours a day to get the money they need for their family."

He said workers needed a basic wage equivalent to at least $100 (£63) a month to get by without putting their health in danger. "Workers are fainting because of long working hours and the environment in the factory," he said.

Fumes from chemicals, poor ventilation, malnutrition and even "mass hysteria" have all been blamed for making workers ill. ...

Banker bows to pressure from across the political spectrum to decline 3.6m shares offered to him by bank's board

Megaupload goes down

The head of Revenue & Customs is to retire in the wake of revelations about his organisation's decisions to waive millions of pounds owed by corporations.

Dave Hartnett, 60, will step down as the permanent secretary for tax next summer, a spokesman said . He will leave with a pension pot worth £1.7m.

Hartnett has admitted that his organisation made "a mistake" when he shook hands on a deal to excuse the US bank Goldman Sachs from paying around £10m in interest charges. His organisation has also been accused of allowing Vodafone off interest charges of more than £1bn.

His announcement came hours after the Guardian disclosed that Revenue & Customs is investigating the whistleblower who uncovered the Goldman Sachs deal and Hartnett's role in it.

Senior MPs are angry that Osita Mba, a solicitor who used the Public Interest Disclosure Act to tell the National Audit Office and two parliamentary committees about the deal, could face the sack or criminal prosecution. ....

Occupy movement: from local action to a global howl of protest

A month after its launch, more than 900 cities around the world have hosted protests affiliated to the Occupy cause

Esther Addley
Tuesday 18 October 2011

In Madrid, tens of thousands thronged the Puerta del Sol square shouting "Hands up! This is a robbery!" In Santiago, 25,000 Chileans processed through the city, pausing outside the presidential palace to hurl insults at the country's billionaire president. In Frankfurt, more than 5,000 people massed outside the European Central Bank, in scenes echoed in 50 towns and cities across Germany, from Berlin to Stuttgart. Sixty thousand people gathered in Barcelona, 100 in Manila, 3,000 in Auckland, 200 in Kuala Lumpur, 1,000 in Tel Aviv, 4,000 in London.

A month to the day after 1,000 people first turned up in Wall Street to express their outrage at corporate greed and social inequality, campaigners are reflecting on a weekend that saw a relatively modest demonstration in New York swell into a truly global howl of protest.

The Occupy campaign may have hoped, at its launch, to inspire similar action elsewhere, but few can have foreseen that within four weeks, more than 900 cities around the world would host co-ordinated protests directly or loosely affiliated to the Occupy cause.

The exact targets of protesters' anger may differ from city to city and country to country. But while their numbers remain small in many places, activists argue that Saturday's demonstrations, many of which are still ongoing – and are pledged to remain so for the foreseeable future – are evidence of a growing wave of global anger at social and economic injustice.

"This is not a battle by youth or Chilean society," said Camila Vallejo, a Chilean student leader who has become a key figure in that country's protests, and who this week travelled to Europe to forge alliances with protest movements there. "This is a world battle that transcends all frontiers." ...

The generation that opposed Vietnam has joined Facebook anarchists amid anger at tax breaks for the rich while ordinary folk tighten their belts

The Wall Street protests against economic inequality and corporate greed that targeted the nerve centre of American capitalism are no longer merely a New York phenomenon. This weekend, from Seattle and Los Angeles on the west coast to Providence, Rhode Island, and Tampa, Florida, on the east, as many as 70 major cities and more than 600 communities have joined the swelling wave of civil dissent. The slogan "Occupy Wall Street" has been suitably abbreviated to a single word: "Occupy"

"This could be the tipping point," said Dick Steinkamp, 63, a retired Silicon Valley executive at the Occupy Seattle protest being held in the heart of the city's shopping and restaurant district . He and his wife had driven two hours from their home in Bellingham, north of Seattle, specifically to join the rally and give it support from more conventional professionals.

"I marched against the Vietnam war before I was drafted into the army and this movement is now getting towards that critical mass," he said.

One of the favourite messages of the protesters is that almost 40% of US wealth is held in the hands of 1% of the population, who are taxed more lightly than the majority of Americans. Steinkamp was holding a sign saying "I am the 99%". And there is widespread anger that ordinary people have born the brunt of the financial crisis with dire job losses and house repossessions.

"I came here because I wanted to show it wasn't just young anarchists," said Deb Steinkamp, also 63 and a retired marriage counsellor, wearing a green cagoule and sensible shoes against the damp, chilly Seattle weather.

Protests broke out last week in Chicago, Boston, Memphis, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Austin, Louisville, Atlanta and dozens of other cities. Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Calgary are set to add themselves to the ranks next weekend. ...

Protests continue on Wall Street as the Occupy movement continues to spread. Follow the latest developments here

5.22pm: A class action lawsuit has been filed in Manhattan federal court today against Mayor Bloomberg and the New York police department, over the mass arrests on the Occupy Wall Street Brooklyn march on Saturday, according to NY Daily News.

Reporter Oren Yaniv tweeted that the action was filed this afternoon.

More than 700 protesters were arrested on Saturday. There were claims that demonstrators were misled into thinking it was ok for them to walk on the road section of Brooklyn Bridge, as opposed to remaining on the footpath, although others claimed police did warn protesters, at least initially, that they should remain in the pedestrianised zone. ...

Occupy Wall Street protests reach Boston, LA, St Louis and Kansas City, and are planned in cities across US and abroad

... The original call by the Canadian magazine Adbusters to occupy Wall Street drew hundreds of protesters on 17 September and 2,000 attended a march the following Saturday. But the movement, which organisers say has its roots in the Arab spring and in Madrid's Puerta del Sol protests, has been galvanised by recent media attention.

Last week, the Guardian reported that a NYPD police officer had been filmed spraying four women protesters with pepper spray. On Saturday, a peaceful march on Brooklyn bridge intended as a call to the other four boroughs of New York to join in resulted in 700 arrests. Some protesters claim the police trapped them.

There are now two investigations, including an internal police inquiry, into the pepper spraying incident.

Bruner said the protest had snowballed in the last few days: "The American people have realised that the American dream has been assassinated and the murderer is still on the loose." ...

The scale of the CIA's rendition programme has been laid bare in court documents that illustrate in minute detail how the US contracted out the secret transportation of suspects to a network of private American companies.

The manner in which American firms flew terrorism suspects to locations around the world, where they were often tortured, has emerged after one of the companies sued another in a dispute over fees. As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the mass of invoices, receipts, contracts and email correspondence – submitted as evidence to a court in upstate New York – provides a unique glimpse into a world in which the "war on terror" became just another charter opportunity for American businesses.

As a result of the case, the identities of some of the corporations involved in the rendition programme have been disclosed for the first time, along with the names of some of the executives who knew the purpose of the flights.

One unintended consequence may be that some of those corporations and individuals are now at risk of being sued in proceedings brought on behalf of the al-Qaida and Taliban suspects who were the victims of the programme.

The New York case concerns Sportsflight, an aircraft broker, and Richmor, an aircraft operator. Sportsflight entered into an arrangement to make a Gulfstream IV executive jet available at $4,900 an hour rather than the market rate of $5,450. A crew was available to fly at 12 hours' notice. The government wanted "the cheapest aircraft to fulfil a mission", Sportsflight's owner, Don Moss, told the court. But it was the early days of the rendition programme, and business was booming: the court heard that Sportsflight told Richmor: "The client says we're going to be very, very busy." ...



Makes me so proud to be Yankistani. /hurl

More than 100 priests from Madrid's poorest parishes have added their voices to the growing protest at the cost of Pope Benedict's visit to Madrid next week.

An umbrella group – the Priest's Forum – says the estimated €60m (£53m) cost of the papal visit, not counting security, cannot be justified at a time of massive public sector cuts and 20% unemployment in Spain.

Evaristo Villar, a 68-year-old member of the group, said he objected to the multinationals with which the Catholic church has had to ally itself to cover the costs of the "showmanship" of the event.

"The companies that are backing World Youth Day and the pope's visit leave much to be desired," he said. "They are the ones who, together with international capital, have caused the crisis. We are not against the pope's visit, we are against the way it is being staged."

The more than 100 corporate sponsors of the event include Coca-Cola, Telefónica and Santander. Opponents of the visit have set up a Facebook page calling for a boycott of the sponsors. Some 140 groups, among them the secular organisation Europa Laica (Secular Europe), are against the visit.

"Catholics can go wherever they like in Madrid but the freedom of movement of the rest of us is restricted," said Francisco Delgado, leader of Europa Laica, on discovering that the city had prohibited his group's proposed march.

Europa Laica plans to march under the slogans "Not a penny of my taxes for the pope" and "For a secular state". There is particular ire that the some 500,000 pilgrims expected in the city will get free transport. Madrid metro fares rose by 50% on Monday.

"With the economic crisis we are going through, we can't pay for this. The church should set the example," said a spokesman for the Indignados movement, which has staged high-profile protests in central Madrid. "They propose to spend €60m when the regional government has just cut €40m from the education budget." ...

... Interest in the Catholic church is on the wane among young people in Spain. A recent survey by the national statistics office showed that the number of believers aged 18 to 24 has fallen by 56% in the past 10 years. ...

The Wall Street Journal "could have done a better job" when it published an interview with proprietor Rupert Murdoch in which he said News Corporation had made only "minor mistakes" in managing the phone-hacking scandal, according to the paper's special editorial committee.

In a report published in the Journal on Monday designed to answer critics of its phone-hacking coverage, the committee – set up when Murdoch bought the paper in 2007 – admitted that its journalists failed to cover the scandal as promptly as its rivals. It also offered criticism of a one-sided interview earlier this month, just 24 hours before News Corp lost two of its most senior newspaper executives, including Les Hinton, who was responsible for the Dow Jones newswires.

"[The Journal] could have done a better job with a recent story allowing Mr Murdoch to get his side of the story on the record without tougher questioning," the report said, adding "We have discussed this with the involved editors."

However, in response to a political request for evidence that the US journalists were not involved in wrongdoing last week, the committee found "nothing to even hint that the sort of misdeeds alleged in London have somehow crept into [WSJ publisher] Dow Jones".

In one critical paragraph of the Journal's coverage of a scandal that has rocked the company, the UK political establishment and police authorities, the committee wrote: "The Journal was slower than it should have been at the outset to pursue the phone-hacking scandal story, in our opinion, though it is doing much better now with aggressive coverage, fitting placement in the paper, and unflinching headlines."

Last Friday, two days after Rupert Murdoch and his heir apparent James appeared before parliament, the Journal broke the news that the justice department is preparing wide-ranging subpoenas to gather evidence in the phone hacking case.

The committee had nothing to say about the WSJ editorial published last week that accused journalists at the Guardian and other news outlets for pushing coverage of the phone-hacking story for "commercial and ideological motives".

Much of the committee's evidence seems to have been gathered by asking relevant editors and reporters: "Is anybody putting political, ideological or commercial pressure on you to influence your news judgment?" The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is "no".

The report comes after the Journal, edited by Robert Thomson, a former editor of the Times in London, has come under heavy criticism from rival media organisations in recent weeks.

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, who has previously written in support of Murdoch ownership, said: "The Journal was turned into a propaganda vehicle for its owner's conservative views. That's half the definition of Fox-ification. The other half is that Murdoch's media outlets must shill for his business interests. With the News of the World scandal, the Journal has now shown itself willing to do that, too." ...

Don't let the door.....

Talks on resolving the European debt crisis have been plunged into disarray after the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting and attempting to rape a maid in a New York hotel.

Strauss-Kahn, 62, was taken from the first class cabin of a Paris-bound Air France flight at JFK airport by plainclothes officers before Manhattan police formally arrested him on charges of a criminal sexual act, attempted rape and unlawful imprisonment.

The charges threatened to create a leadership vacuum at the IMF, overseer of the global economy, and threw open next year's French presidential election, ending the hopes of the French Socialist who was favourite to beat Nicolas Sarkozy.

The allegation is a major embarrassment to the IMF, which has authorised billions of dollars of lending to troubled countries and played a major role in the eurozone debt crisis. The arrest will cast a cloud over the IMF's role in addressing the rescues and is likely to have a major impact on stock markets as traders react to yet more uncertainty in Europe.

Strauss-Kahn had been flying to Europe to discuss the worsening European debt crisis. He had been scheduled to meet the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, on Sunday and European financial ministers on Monday and Tuesday. The IMF leader was to have discussed how best to tackle Greece's worsening debt crisis and finalise Portugal's €78bn bailout package.

A senior Greek government official said the arrest would not change the IMF's policy in Greece but could cause delays in the short term. The IMF-led bailout has become increasingly unpopular with other IMF members amid growing doubts about the Greek government's ability and resolve to meet the commitments of the international aid package. ...

... The allegations spread panic among the left at an extremely awkward time in the runup to the Socialist party's internal battle for a candidate to beat Nicolas Sarkozy. Strauss-Kahn, seen as the biggest danger to Sarkozy, had already been accused of being a champagne socialist in what his allies said was a concerted campaign against him. When Moscovici recently warned against the use of "stink bombs" in the political campaign, many read between the lines that it was a warning about political opponents digging up aspects of Strauss-Kahn's private life and relationship with women.

The far-right politician Marine Le Pen said Strauss-Kahn's arrest in New York meant he could no longer run for president. "All of Paris – journalistic Paris, political Paris – has been abuzz for months about the rather pathological relationship that Mr Strauss-Kahn maintains towards women," she said. One rightwing MP from Sarkozy's ruling party compared Strauss-Kahn to JR in the soap opera Dallas.

The full implications of the shame raised by the allegations, on not just the Socialist party but the whole French political class, was apparent in New York's Daily News's headline: "Le Perv".

Even for the Lincoln Centre it was an unusual show, and an unscheduled one. Several hundred protesters turned up outside the arts complex on Manhattan's Upper West Side last week for the guerrilla screening of a short film. From a hotel on the other side of the street, a video was projected on to the centre's walls. The unwitting stars of the films were David and Charles Koch, the reclusive rightwing billionaire brothers whose secretive empire and network of influence and funding is emerging as a liberal rallying cause in America.

As bemused theatregoers watched the boisterous crowd, the videos depicted facts and figure showing Koch support for Tea Party groups, global warming sceptics and thinktanks seeking to strip away regulations on the environment, cut social security and oppose healthcare reform. On the David H Koch Theatre in the complex – renamed when one of the brothers donated $100m (£62m) in 2008 – activists climbed a ladder to post a giant sticker above the sign bearing Koch's name. "I am the Tea Party's wallet," it read. When the police vans finally arrived, the activists had gone.

For Koch Industries, one of the largest private businesses in America, it was another attempt by liberal groups to drag it into the public eye over accusations that it is corrupting US politics in pursuit of its business interests. There have been lengthy magazine articles investigating its activities, growing protests and a legion of bloggers scouring the company's every move. ...

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund and the man French Socialists hope will be the next occupant of the Elysée Palace, was arrested at JFK airport in New York on Saturday afternoon accused of a sex attack on a Times Square hotel maid earlier in the day.

He was taken off an Air France flight by officers from the Port Authority of New York and turned over to Manhattan police, according to a spokesman from the agency. Plainclothes officers boarded the flight at 4.45pm, moments before take-off, and took the 62-year-old out of the first-class cabin and into custody. He had been due to meet German chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday.

"It was 10 minutes before its scheduled departure," said John Kelly, a Port Authority spokesman.

Port Authority officers were acting on information from the New York Police Department, whose detectives had been investigating a brutal alleged attack on a woman employee at the Sofitel New York on West 44th Street in the heart of the city's theatre district.

The 32-year-old woman told police that she entered Strauss-Kahn's room at about 1pm on Saturday and he emerged from the bedroom naked, threw her down and tried to sexually assault her, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. She broke free and escaped the room and told hotel staff what had happened who called the police.

When New York City police detectives arrived moments later, Strauss-Kahn had already left the hotel, leaving behind his mobile phone and other personal items. "It looked like he got out of there in a hurry," Browne added. ...

The great corporate tax swindle

It's astounding how our politicians have bought in to firms' tax blackmail. But there is an alternative: workplace democracy

Financial Services Authority wants banks to speed up PPI payouts

• Barclays sets aside £1bn to cover compensation
• British Bankers Association drops case
• Payment protection insurance wrongly sold to millions

Britain's wealthiest residents have recouped their losses from the financial crisis and are now just short of the record registered before the 2008 financial crash.

While most of the country struggles through the fallout from recession and government cuts, the UK's 1,000 richest people are now worth £396bn, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List. That figure is just 4% below that recorded at the height of the boom in 2008, before the financial crisis hammered large dents in many fortunes.

There are now 73 sterling billionaires, an increase of 20 on last year's total and just two short of the all-time high. Meanwhile, a fortune of at least £70m is required to feature among the country's 1,000 richest, up from £55m in 2009 and £63m in 2010.

Chuka Umunna, a Labour MP and member of the Treasury select committee, said: "Clearly we are not all in this together. In this time of austerity many independent experts such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies have found that the impact is falling heavier on lower-income families and middle Britain.

"It is not indulging in the politics of envy to say that you want to find a more fair and equitable society. The challenge is to find a system that doesn't just work for the wealthy but also works for everybody else more effectively." ...

The prime minister, David Cameron, has denied that it was inappropriate for him to have dinner at the home of senior News Corporation executive Rebekah Brooks while the government was considering the company's takeover bid for BSkyB.

Cameron said Brooks, the chief executive of News Corp's UK newspaper publisher News International, was "married to a very old friend of mine" – a reference to her husband, Charlie Brooks, the racehorse trainer and writer. Both attended Eton.

He added that party leaders and prime ministers "have lunches and dinners with editors, journalists and proprietors all of the time" and he did not think "there's a problem at all" with him attending the dinner.

Cameron was quizzed about the dinner at the Oxfordshire home of the Brooks over the Christmas period on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Tuesday by presenter John Humphrys.

The dinner was also attended by James Murdoch, the News Corp chairman and chief executive for Europe and Asia, and took place while the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was considering whether to refer the company's bid to acquire the 61% of Sky it did not already own to the Competition Commission on public interest grounds.

It took place a few days after Cameron had stripped the business secretary, Vince Cable, of responsibility for media takeovers and given the powers to Hunt. Cable had been secretly taped by Daily Telegraph journalists saying that he was "at war" with Rupert Murdoch, the News Corp chairman and chief executive.

Humphrys said a lot of people thought attending the dinner was inappropriate and asked Cameron if he wished he had not done it.

"No. I've had absolutely nothing to do with the merger proposals that were put forward," Cameron replied. "I deliberately excluded myself from any part of that decision-making process. The first I knew of [Hunt's decision] was when the results were announced on the BBC.

"Jeremy Hunt had a quasi-judicial role to carry out, which he carried out in my view entirely properly, and it's quite right that he didn't consult the prime minister over that. He looked at the evidence and he made the decision and so I don't think there's a problem at all.

"Party leaders and prime ministers have lunches and dinners with editors, journalists proprietors all of the time." ...

Britain's banks will be forced to re-open thousands of claims over the mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI) and pay up to £4.5bn in compensation following a high court ruling.

PPI is insurance typically sold to consumers at the point of sale of personal loans, credit cards and other forms of debt, which is designed to meet their repayments in the event of accident, sickness or unemployment. Many customers have discovered after paying for PPI policies that they would never qualify for a payout due to exclusions in the terms and conditions, while others didn't even realise they had signed up to buy the insurance.

In December the Financial Services Authority introduced rules to stop mis-selling, which required providers to talk customers through the key features of a policy rather than assuming they will read any relevant documentation, and make it clear that the cover is optional.

But the banks, represented by trade body the British Bankers' Association, compained that the rules were unfair because they would be applied retrospectively. In January the BBA launched a high court challenge against the FSA and the Financial Ombudsman – but today's ruling found against them. They could now face a bill of up to £4.5bn – £1.3bn for new complaints received during the coming five years and up to £3.2bn as a result of reviewing previous PPI sales.

The high court judgment endorsed the approach taken by the ombudsman and the FSA, and the banks now have 21 days to appeal.

Several banks had put PPI complaints on hold until the outcome of the judicial review was known. However, the FSA made it clear they should still be dealing with complaints, and anyone whose bank has not dealt with their complaint within eight weeks is entitled to take it to the Financial Ombudsman Service.

The ombudsman service said the lack of cooperation from some financial businesses has made it difficult to progress PPI cases over this period. "However, the clear-cut judgment means that banks and other financial businesses should now be in the position to deal promptly, efficiently and fairly with their customers' PPI complaints," a statement said. ...

How much did your pay go up in 2010? How about your friends and family? Working people in America are hurting—that’s for sure. They’re lucky to have jobs at all—and if they have jobs, odds are their pay is pretty much flat, or worse.

Now, consider this: In 2010, the average pay of a CEO at a major American company went up by 23 percent—to $11.4 million.

Despite the collapse of the financial markets at the hands of many of these same executives less than three years ago, the disparity between CEO and workers’ pay has continued to grow to levels that are simply stunning.

Take a look at 2011 Executive PayWatch, released this morning, to find out just how outrageous things have gotten.

Instead of investing to create good middle-class jobs and grow the economy, corporate CEOs are hoarding $2 trillion in cash.

Except, of course, when it comes to their own paychecks.

Go to the site, www.PayWatch.org, to see some of the worst examples of CEO pay.

Although pay is more out of balance than it has been during most of our lifetimes, for the first time there is hope that things are changing.

That’s because of a new law—the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2011. It’s a law that’s working today.

This year, for the first time ever, every public company is giving its shareholders an advisory vote on CEO pay. And soon, companies will be required to disclose the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay for their median employee—which will publicize just how inequitable things are at individual corporations.

These powerful new rules already are under attack—congressional Republicans have announced their intention to repeal Wall Street reform.

Go to www.PayWatch.org to urge Congress to keep tools for reining in CEO pay, share ridiculous pay disparities with your friends on Facebook, and help us build a movement to keep Wall Street in check.

In 2010, while most Americans were learning the hard way how to make do with less, and small businesses all across the country were shutting their doors, CEOs at our largest companies and Wall Street executives still found a way to make out like bandits. That’s something that’s got to change.

Of course, corporate CEOs would prefer to keep the public in the dark about the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay at their company. And it’s no surprise they wish shareholders didn’t have a “say on pay” vote.

But it shocks me they have the nerve to argue for these policies in public—and lobby for them—after their companies drove our country off an economic cliff. As if this is an argument they actually can win. ...

A UK subsidiary of the world's largest commodities broker helped one of its African mining operations avoid paying tens of millions of pounds in tax, according to charities who have analysed a leaked review of its accounts.

The findings of a draft report into internal controls at Zambia's Mopani Copper Mines plc have been categorically rejected by its owner, Glencore, the giant fuel, metals and cereals trader based in the Swiss tax haven of Zug. The report, seen by the Observer, was carried out in 2009 by a Norwegian subsidiary of Grant Thornton, one of the world's largest accountancy firms, at the request of the previous Zambian government.

Its authors alleged the mine's owners "resisted the pilot audit at every stage", a claim denied by a spokesman for Glencore, which owns a 73% stake in Mopani through a company based in the British Virgin Islands, another tax haven.

The report claimed there had been an "unexplainable" increase in Mopani's costs between 2006 and 2008 that allowed it to minimise its stated profits and lower its tax bill. "We suggest the ZRA [Zambian Revenue Authority] does a new tax assessment based on the results of the audit," the report claims.

Glencore, which is preparing a £37bn listing on the London stock market, the capital's biggest ever flotation, said the auditors had failed to factor in rising fuel and labour costs over the period. The audit also suggested Mopani sold copper at artificially low prices to Glencore in Switzerland under a deal struck with the firm's UK subsidiary in 2000. The metal was then sold on, allowing Glencore to take advantage of Switzerland's ultra-low tax regime. ...

Granted, I'm from Detroit, where Paranoia = Wisdom, but something really huge is coming - something that will gazoople their profits, or they never woulda done this.

Ta much, dear MSiegel

A government commission is to unveil measures aimed at ensuring taxpayers will never again need to bail out Britain's banks, with recommendations that risk splitting the coalition and infuriating the banking sector.

Amid warnings from large banks such as Barclays, HSBC and Standard Chartered that they will leave London if the proposals by Sir John Vickers are too radical, the commission will seek to ringfence savers from riskier banking operations.

The commission has considered the potential impact of its proposals on the City and is expected to counter suggestions that they would encourage banks to move to New York or Hong Kong.

The report, thought to run to 200 pages, was handed to ministers late on Friday to be presented to the banks at 6am on Monday – an hour before its official release. It is expected to back away from proposals such as "narrow banks", which only take savings, and splitting high street banks from their investment banking divisions, which Vince Cable, the business secretary, previously alluded to as "casinos". ...

JP Morgan head Jamie Dimon pockets 51% pay rise

Wall Street firm gives chief executive a $5m cash bonus and pays for family's move from Chicago

The US supreme court heard oral arguments Tuesday on what could be the largest class action civil rights suit in US history. Or it could be the case that stops class action history in its tracks. Monster megastore Walmart is challenging a lower court's decision to permit women employed at thousands of Walmart stores to join together to contest alleged gender discrimination in pay and promotion practices.

"This has been a ten-year process," says plaintiff Edith Arana. What keeps the women of Dukes v Wal-Mart going, she says, is the belief that something bigger than them is at stake. (Walmart revised the form of its name a few years back.) Says Arana:

"I know what happened to me and it's not just me. The women of this lawsuit are the poster children for the all the women who couldn't do this, and they each have families and names and faces."

That, when it comes to class action lawsuits, is the whole point. Class action lawsuits have probably been the best tool since the passage of the 1964 civil rights act to bring forth claims and win cases against companies that discriminate. The case now before the court will decide not only if women like Arana and Betty Dukes experienced discrimination, but if an entire class of workers did.

It couldn't be a more contentious issue, at a more contentious moment. As Columbia University political science professor Dorian Warren noted on GRITtv this week, the Walmart case comes before a court that has been sceptical not just of discrimination cases, but of the very idea of "class action". And it comes before a nation that – from Madison to Main Street in just about every state – is in the streets over that very concept.

Coming up on 4 April is a nationally coordinated day of action by US trade unions and their allies: We Are One. The protesters will be recalling Dr Martin Luther King's legacy – on the anniversary of his assassination. But they could do worse than to take a tip from the Tea Party types and read the US Constitution while they're at it. Listen in to one of those Tea Party recitations and you'll find constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of speech, of the press and of the right peaceably to assemble and petition government for redress. For working Americans living in the most dramatically divided economy in a century, every one of those avenues is under attack.

Freedom of the press? Concentration of media ownership is consolidating press power into a few mighty hands. As in the recently approved NBC/Comcast merger, the power in question is the power to shut others out.

Assembly? After weeks of inconvenient public protest for labour rights and against draconian cuts to public services and the people who provide them, the city of Madison just restricted speech in the people's Capitol building to a small "free speech zone" – for the first time in Wisconsin history. In Albany, New York, protesters faced a sign that told them only "senators, staff and lobbyists" were welcome in the state's house. ...

US authorities are considering charging BP managers with manslaughter after decisions they made before the Deepwater Horizon oil well explosion last year killed 11 workers and caused the biggest offshore spill in US history.

Sources close to the process told Bloomberg that investigators were also examining whether BP's executives, including former chief executive Tony Hayward, made statements that were at odds with what they knew during congressional hearings last year.

The US justice department opened criminal and civil investigations into the spill last June. The department filed a civil lawsuit against BP in December and has not filed criminal charges. An official at the department told Reuters these charges could include manslaughter, but the official declined to confirm this was under consideration.

According to Bloomberg, authorities are investigating BP managers who worked both on the rig and onshore to determine if they should be charged in connection with the workers' deaths. The investigation aims to determine whether decisions by BP managers to cut costs and increase speed on the project led to fatal safety sacrifices.

As well as the testimony of Hayward and others before congress, investigators are reviewing emails and other documents to determine what BP officials and its partners in Deepwater Horizon knew when they testified last June.

In January, a presidentially appointed national commission filed its report on the Deepwater Horizon spill and concluded that the "explosive loss" could well have been prevented. In a final report Fred Bartlit, chief counsel of commission, laid considerable blame on BP.

Bartlit said BP had been aware of problems with lab tests of Halliburton cement used to seal the well for three years. He said BP decided not to install a safety device known as a lockdown sleeve in order to save $2m (£1.2m) in costs. He also said BP's well-site leader missed a critical test known as a negative pressure test that indicated something was wrong, a test he should have supervised. ...

An influential group of MPs is to investigate corporate tax avoidance as the clamour grows for action on companies seen as paying less than their fair share.

The inquiry, by the Treasury select committee, will raise the political temperature around the issue – already under scrutiny after questions over the tax bills of multinationals such as Vodafone and Barclays – and senior executives face the prospect of explaining their companies' tax structures to the committee.

George Mudie, the Labour MP for Leeds East and the chairman of the Commons Treasury sub-committee, told the Guardian that there was growing public interest. "When people see their standards of living fall and are paying their tax, and see huge salaries and questions over tax avoidance, then quite rightly they are interested in the issue," he said. ...

Eight charity workers in Malawi are suing Madonna after the collapse of her $15m (£9.4m) academy for girls cost them their jobs. The employees' lawyer said they are taking the US singer to court for unfair dismissal and non-payment of benefits.

The board of Raising Malawi was ousted after failing to start the building of an elite girls' school amid allegations of financial mismanagement, including lavish spending on offices, cars and golf membership.

Madonna, who adopted a boy and a girl from the southern African country, loaned $11m (£6.9m) to the charity and now sits on the board. The charity workers' lawyer, Mzondi Chirambo, said the singer had 14 days to respond to their concerns.

"Their employment was terminated by the trustees of Raising Malawi Academy for Girls ostensibly following the change of plan not to build the school as planned," he told Reuters news agency. "My clients are also being forced to sign a discriminatory termination agreement before they are paid their benefits."

The papers were filed with Malawi's industrial court, which handles employment disputes. Madonna's US representative was not immediately available for comment, but there were reports that the singer is considering filing a counter-suit. ...

Why Is Microsoft Seeking New State Laws That Allow it to Sue Competitors For Piracy by Overseas Suppliers?
Thursday, March 24 2011 @ 09:46 AM EDT

Microsoft seems to be trying to get its own personal unfair competition laws passed state by state, so it can sue US companies who get parts from overseas companies who used pirated Microsoft software anywhere in their business. The laws allow Microsoft to block the US company from selling the finished product in the state and compel them to pay damages for what the overseas supplier did.

You heard me right. If a company overseas uses a pirated version of Excel, let's say, keeping track of how many parts it has shipped or whatever, and then sends some parts to General Motors or any large company to incorporate into the finished product, Microsoft can sue *not the overseas supplier* but General Motors, for unfair competition. So can the state's Attorney General. I kid you not. For piracy that was done by someone else, overseas. The product could be T shirts. It doesn't matter what it is, so long as it's manufactured with contributions from an overseas supplier, like in China, who didn't pay Microsoft for software that it uses somewhere in the business. It's the US company that has to pay damages, not the overseas supplier.

Awful, I know. But the real question is, Why? Why is Microsoft doing this? Does Microsoft need a new revenue stream, now that folks are switching to smartphones instead of PCs? Or is it something worse, something Machiavellian? I ask that because I noticed two things, one, that Microsoft said that it came up with the laws because it is dissatisfied with patent law and two, something odd and frankly alarming in the Washington State version of this bill that leads me to suspect that this is Microsoft's Plan B in its litigation storm against Linux -- its Ace in the hole in case the Supreme Court decides that its software is unpatentable.

Not that Microsoft would mind having more than one way to harass Linux and it competitors in general, or two revenue streams without having to actually work to make better products. I'd like to show you how Open Source is deliberately excluded, though, a deliberate carve out.

How can there be state copyright-related statutes without conflicting with US Copyright Law, which is federal? You may well ask....



Ta much, dear Ar0cketman

Barclays has made it clear to the Treasury that if the government insists on forcing UK banks to split their high street retail operation from their investment banking work, then it could move its headquarters out of London to the United States.

The claim was made by the Sunday Times which said the bank's former chief executive, John Varley, made the "thinly veiled threat" in a private meeting last week with the Treasury.

Varley was one of several senior bankers called in to discuss the work of the Independent Commission on Banking, chaired by Sir John Vickers, which is expected to outline a break-up scheme of some kind when it reports on April 11.

It is believed that Varley stopped short of making an explicit threat to pull out of the UK - but that he made Barclays' feelings very clear. ...

Business digest: Bailed-out bank’s key staff paid £1.1m on average
MARCH 18, 2011

The Royal Bank of Scotland's top five bankers, none of whom are on the board, earned more than £20m in 2010, it was revealed yesterday. RBS was bailed out by the government during the financial crisis.

The news was a result of Project Merlin, an agreement to increase transparency, which was signed by the UK's four biggest banks and announced by the chancellor last month. HSBC had been the first to comply with the agreement by revealing that five of their bankers took home between £2.1m and £2.7m in 2010.

In line with new FSA regulations, RBS also revealed how much their 'code staff' – those deemed crucial to business operations – were paid. The 232 staff members deemed to fit these criteria were paid £1.1m on average in 2010, costing the bank a total of £375m. ...

BT, Sky and Virgin Media – along with the rest of Britain's leading internet service providers – will next week outline an industry-wide "code of practice" on how they explain controversial "two-speed internet" policies to customers.

The group will make their announcement at a ministerial summit on net neutrality chaired by culture minister Ed Vaizey – which will also be attended by Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the web and a strong supporter of net neutrality – on 16 March.

The ISPs plan to publish how they manage internet traffic – such as video viewing, music streaming and movie downloading – in comparison to their rivals. That will make clear if they throttle popular services such as the BBC's iPlayer to maintain capacity for all customers on their network.

However, the companies – whose ranks also include the leading mobile operators – will not commit to a minimum service standard, even though some phone companies believe that "there should be a basic commitment to let people browse everything on the internet".

The agreement follows a wide-ranging debate on "net neutrality" – whether ISPs should be allowed to charge content companies such as the BBC or Google for faster delivery to the nation's homes.

BT, TalkTalk and others argue that ISPs should be free to strike deals for more efficient delivery.

Under the plans, described as a "voluntary code of conduct" by people at the meeting, ISPs will be compelled to publish a "scorecard" of how they speed up and slow down traffic and for which companies. But internet providers will still be allowed to throttle public access to video and peer-to-peer services if they wish.

The Broadband Stakeholders Group, which has been facilitating meetings with ISPs on traffic management since late last year, will publish a statement shortly after the meeting. ISPs hope the move will head off an enforced code of practice by the communications regulator Ofcom. ...

The controversial former bank chief Sir Fred Goodwin is the latest high profile figure to obtain a superinjunction, it has emerged.

The existence of the measure – which bans the press from reporting that an injunction has been obtained – can be revealed after a backbench Liberal Democrat, John Hemming, raised the issue in the Commons.

"In a secret hearing this week Fred Goodwin has obtained a superinjunction preventing him being identified as a banker," said Hemming, the MP for Birmingham Yardley.

Hemming, who used parliamentary privilege to avoid the legal ban on reporting the use of superinjunctions, asked: "Will the government have a debate or a statement on freedom of speech and whether there's one rule for the rich like Fred Goodwin and one rule for the poor?"

Goodwin, who presided over the near collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland, was reported to have been angered by press coverage after he became popularly known as "Fred the Shred".

He attracted widespread media attention after he was forced to step down in 2008 as a non-negotiable condition of the bank's £20bn bailout by the taxpayer. Goodwin initially left RBS with a pension of £700,000 a year and a lump sum of nearly £3m. He agreed to reduce the payout following public outcry.

News that Goodwin has obtained a superinjunction – over issues that cannot be reported – has raised further questions about the use of the measures. ...

Once upon a time, when Apple was mainly a computer manufacturer, people used to liken it to BMW. That was because it made expensive, nicely designed products for a niche market made up of affluent, design-conscious customers who also served as enthusiastic – nay fanatical – evangelists for the brand. It was seen as innovative and quirky but not part of the industry's mainstream, which was dominated by Microsoft and the companies making the PCs that ran Windows software. This view of Apple was summed up by Jack Tramiel, the boss of Commodore, when Steve Jobs first showed him the Macintosh computer. "Very nice, Steve," growled Tramiel. "I guess you'll sell it in boutiques."

That was a long time ago. Now, with a market capitalisation of just over $331bn, Apple is the second most valuable company in the world – bigger than Microsoft ($220bn), Oracle ($167bn) or Google ($196bn). The quirky little computer company has grown into a giant. But not necessarily a giant of the Big Friendly variety, as the world's magazine publishers have recently discovered and as the music and software industries have known for some time. For Apple now controls the commanding heights of the online content business and it looks like doing the same to the mobile phone business. At the moment, it looks as though nobody has a good idea of how to stop it.

Every year, Fortune magazine polls a sample of US CEOs asking for their opinions of their competitors. The results for 2011 have just been released and they show that Apple is the "most admired" company in America. This is the sixth year in a row that it has held that title.

The reasons are obvious. On the product side, Apple creates beautifully designed, highly functional and user-friendly devices that delight customers and provide fat profit margins; it has a corporate culture that reliably delivers these products by specified dates; it's much more innovative than any of its competitors; and it has a unique mastery of both hardware and software.

On the strategic side, the company has displayed a deep understanding of technology and a shrewd appreciation of potential devices and services for which people will pay over the odds. Most CEOs would kill to run a company that possessed a quarter of these competencies. Apple appears to have them all. Its current dominance is built on three big ideas. The first is that design really matters. It's not something you can outsource to a design consultancy – which is what most companies do – and design is as much about ease of use as it is about aesthetics. The second insight was that the maelstrom of illicit music downloading triggered by Napster couldn't last and that the first company to offer a simple way of legally purchasing music (and, later, other kinds of content) online would clean up. And third – and most important – there was the insight that mobile phones are really just hand-held computers that happen to make voice calls and that it's the computing bit that really matters.

Most of the media commentary about Apple attributes all of these insights to Steve Jobs, the company's charismatic co-founder, on the grounds that Apple's renaissance began when he returned to the company in 1996.

This may well be true, though it seems unlikely that such a comprehensive corporate recovery could be the work of a single individual, no matter how charismatic. What's more plausible is that Apple's corporate culture took on some of the characteristics of its CEO's personality, much as Microsoft was once a corporate extension of Bill Gates, with all that implied in terms of aggression and drive.

Whatever the explanation, the fact is that Apple now has a dominant position in several key businesses (content distribution and mobile computing) and is having a seriously disruptive impact on the mobile phone industry. In particular, its iTunes Store gives it control of the tollgate through which billions of paid-for music tracks and albums, videos and apps cascade down to millions of customers worldwide. It levies a commission on everything that passes through that gate. And every Apple mobile device sold can only be activated by hooking up to the gate.

This gives Apple unparalleled power....

... In a speech earlier this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Americans For Prosperity-Michigan Executive Director Scott Hagerstrom revealed the true goal of his group and allies like Walker.

Speaking at CPAC's "Panel for Labor Policy," Hagerstrom said that even more than cutting taxes and regulations, AFP really wants to "take the unions out at the knees ." Knee-capping free labor has long been a goal of the Koch brothers and their many front groups. In the run-up to the 2010 elections, the Kochs worked with other anti-labor billionaires, corporations and activists to fund conservative candidates and groups across the country.

Now after viciously opposing pro-middle class policies for years, Koch Industries is trying to eliminate the only organizations which serve as a counterweight to its well-oiled corporate machine. Believing he was talking with David Koch, Walker told a prankster his plans to crush the unions. Koch's AFP operatives are now working with "state officials in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania to urge them to duplicate Walker's crusade in Wisconsin." ...

... According to EPA databases, Koch businesses are huge polluters, emitting thousands of pounds of toxic pollutants. As soon as he got into office, Walker started cutting environmental regulations and appointed a Republican known for her disregard for environmental regulations to lead the Department of Natural Resources. In addition, Walker has stated his opposition to clean energy jobs policies that might draw workers away from Koch-owned interests. ...




I don't give a fuck how they pronounce it - they're cocks.

Ta much, dear Anneliese

There is still a way to win this Murdoch media war

Vince Cable may have lost out over the BSkyB decision, but by fighting from the backbenches he could yet achieve victory

Polly Toynbee
Friday 4 March 2011

As certain as the sun rises in the sky was it that the owner of the Sun would be granted ownership of Sky outright. Few are surprised – but that doesn't stop most being shocked. Rupert Murdoch did what he has always done – defied regulators, governments and tax authorities to carve himself an anti-competitive market dominance with an unmatched global concentration of media power. Think how tightly he grips US politics between his Fox News foghorn and the Wall Street Journal.

In the next four years BSkyB will earn half of all UK television revenues – rising thereafter. Sky's turnover is nearly twice that of the BBC's, whose licence fee has been cut – as urged almost daily by Murdoch's papers. Watch his empire's earnings multiply as packages bundle together monopolistic sports, TV archive and film rights, combining advertising and sales offers across newspapers, their websites and all digital platforms, and making it impossible for new competitors to enter the market. Britain has the weakest media laws, weaker by far than America's.

Desperately needing growth in a stricken economy over-dependent on finance, the government praises Britain's successful creative industries. But News Corp is a dead hand, fostering little new UK talent or creative risk-taking, relying on ready-made successes from elsewhere. This is no way to nurture that industry.

The man who pretends to be a great free marketeer has built an empire almost entirely out of circumventing competition to throttle free markets. That is what Adam Smith warned businesses will do unless commerce is well-regulated by governments to keep healthy markets open. The paradox ignored by this government is that entrepreneurial capitalism needs a strong state to thrive: once markets ossify into monopolies, cartels, corruptions, briberies and intimidation of law-makers, they stagnate. That's why third world dictatorships fail economically. ...

Over the last half century, the richest Americans have shifted the burden of the federal individual income tax off themselves and onto everybody else. The three convenient and accurate Wikipedia graphs below show the details. The first graph compares the official tax rates paid by the top and bottom income earners. Note especially that from the end of the second world war into the early 1960s, the highest income earners paid a tax rate over 90% for many years. Today, the top earners pay a rate of only 35%. Note also how the gap between the rates paid by the richest and the poorest has narrowed. If we take into account the many loopholes the rich can and do use far more than the poor, the gap narrows even more.

One conclusion is clear and obvious: the richest Americans have dramatically lowered their income tax burden since 1945, both absolutely and relative to the tax burdens of the middle income groups and the poor.

...if the highest income earners today were required to pay the same rate that they paid for many years after 1945, the federal government would need far lower deficits to support the private economy through its current crisis; and second, those tax-the-rich years after 1945 experienced far lower unemployment and far faster economic growth than we have had for years.

The lower taxes the rich got for themselves are one reason why they have become so much richer over the last half century. Just as their tax rates started to come down from their 1960s heights, so their shares of the total national income began their rise. As the two other Wikipedia graphs below show, we have now returned to the extreme inequality of income that characterised the US a century ago. ...

Mervyn King has risked reopening the bitter argument over blame for the financial crisis by saying that government spending cuts are the fault of the City and expressing surprise there has not been more public anger.

The governor of the Bank of England said that people made unemployed and businesses bankrupted during the crisis had every reason to be resentful and voice their protest. He told the Treasury select committee that the billions spent bailing out the banks and the need for public spending cuts were the fault of the financial services sector.

"The price of this financial crisis is being borne by people who absolutely did not cause it," he said. "Now is the period when the cost is being paid, I'm surprised that the degree of public anger has not been greater than it has."

King has repeatedly pointed the finger at the City since the crisis erupted in 2007, but this was the first time he blamed bankers for the coalition's spending cuts.

It became clear during the hearing that King and his fellow members of the Bank's monetary policy committee, which sets interest rates, believe the crisis will have a lasting impact on the economy.

Asked when living standards enjoyed before the crisis would return, King said: "The research makes it clear that the impact of these crises lasts for many years. It is not like an ordinary recession, where you lose output and get it back quickly. We may not get the lost output back for very many years, if ever." ...

Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel prizewinning economist and so-called father of microfinance, faces being ousted from the bank that he founded to help poor people in Bangladesh and across the developing world.

Yunus, the managing director of the Grameen Bank, which has lent small sums to millions of deprived people to help them start or run their own businesses as a first step out of poverty since being created in 1983, has been caught in a bitter political battle in his homeland of Bangladesh.

The campaign to remove Yunus, mounted mainly by politicians, is to intensify this week ahead of a key board meeting next Monday, which his supporters believe will involve an attempt to force the 70-year-old to quit as managing director.

Last week, Bangladesh's finance minister said Yunus should stand down following alleged irregularities in operations.

Abul Maal Abdul Muhith called Yunus a "man of high standing and respect" but "now old". The minister, who is 77, said: "We need to redefine the bank's role and bring it under closer regulation."

Supporters of Yunus fear politicians want to bring Grameen under government control. Yunus did not respond directly to the minister's comments but told reporters: "Any transition [would] essentially require a friendly environment and support from the inside and outside stakeholders of the bank to ensure that we continue to be totally committed to our mission for and with the poor."

Other government comments have been less polite. In December, the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, accused Yunus of treating Grameen as his personal property and claimed the group was "sucking blood from the poor".

Supporters have branded the claim as grotesque, especially as Yunus has won a Nobel prize for his work on reducing poverty. ...

... The attacks on Yunus come at a time when microlending – once hailed as a model that would change the lives of hundreds of millions in the developing roads – faces increasing political hostility.

In India, politicians have accused bankers of profiteering from the poor and, in some places, banned further lending or recovery of debts. ...

Confusion caused by wording in a popular mortgage deal is costing Lloyds £500m as the bank is being forced to write to 600,000 customers and repay up to 300,000 of them.

Payments will range from a few to potentially thousands of pounds per customer.

Just days before it publishes 2010 figures expected to show £2bn of profits, the bank admitted it had reached a voluntary agreement with the Financial Services Authority about the mortgages, which were sold under the Halifax brand.

Lloyds rescued Halifax's parent company, HBOS, at the height of the banking crisis in September 2008 and has already been saddled with billions of pounds of bad debts caused by poor lending decisions in HBOS's corporate banking arm. Lloyds shares were among the largest fallers in the FTSE 100 on Monday.

The latest problem related to 600,000 Halifax customers who were sent a mortgage offer between 20 September 2004 and 16 September 2007 which contained information about the bank's standard variable rate (SVR).

Halifax, the country's biggest mortgage lender, was capping the SVR to customers who were also being locked into the mortgages through early repayment charges. The cap was originally set at 2% above the Bank of England base rate but in October 2008 this was lifted to 3%.

However, the bank did not write to all its customers at the time to tell them of the change, only contacting those who were locked in on mortgage deals.

Halifax hit a problem in January 2009 when the Bank of England cut interest rates by half a percentage point to 1.5% – at the time their lowest level – although they have since been reduced to 0.5%.

As a result of this interest rate cut, Halifax's SVR was more than 2% above the Bank of England's rate – leaving some customers confused, as they believed the rate was capped at 2% not 3%. In reality, the cap may not have applied to them at all if they were locked in through one of the bank's early redemption changes.

Lloyds is now agreeing to made a "goodwill payment" to some 300,000 customers, regardless of whether or not the deal had applied to them. Those who were warned of the change in the cap – customers facing redemption changes – will receive a flat payment of £250, while the others will receive payments based on the difference in repayments caused by the change in the rate. ...

Protesters have targeted more than 35 branches of Barclays bank, with pickets, poetry readings and even colouring competitions, in another of a series of days of direct action organised by the UK Uncut group.

They were highlighting Barclays' admission that it paid just £113m in UK corporation tax in 2009 – a year when it rang up a record £11.6bn in profits.

Several branches were closed to the public as protesters staged peaceful sit-ins, impromptu reading groups and creches in dozens of cities and towns across Britain, including Edinburgh, Birmingham, Liverpool and Lewes.

At Tottenham Court Road, one of eight branches of Barclays in London to be targeted, some 40 to 50 people heard comedian Josie Lawrence pledge her support, before a group of people held a two-hour sit-in in the bank.

Supporters of UK Uncut said the plan was not to shut the banks down but to "open them up", occupy them and transform them into "something people need but will be cut".

Ruth Griffiths, 36, a UK Uncut supporter, said: "Today we are transforming the banks into schools, leisure centres, and libraries and forests, because it's society that's too big to fail, not a broken banking system."

The group staged "debate" points outside several of the branches and invited passersby to discuss the cuts and the banks. Most of the gathered volunteers said people were angry at Barclays' chief executive, Bob Diamond, saying publicly that the time for banks to apologise was over. ...

Ta much, dear Ar0cketman

Barclays Bank has been forced to admit it paid just £113m in UK corporation tax in 2009 – a year when it rang up a record £11.6bn of profits.

The admission stunned politicians and tax campaigners. It was revealed on the eve of a day of protests planned against the high street banks by activists from UK Uncut, a group set up five months ago to oppose government cuts and corporate tax avoidance.

The Labour MP Chuka Umunna, who lobbied Barclays' chief executive, Bob Diamond, to reveal the tax paid by the bank, described the figure – just 1% of its 2009 profits – as "shocking".

The current rate of corporation tax in the UK is 28%, although global banks such as Barclays – which has hundreds of overseas subsidiaries, including many in tax havens – do not generate all of their profits in their domestic market.

Max Lawson, of the Robin Hood Tax Campaign, said: "This is proof that banks live in a parallel universe to the rest of us, paying billions in bonuses and unhampered by the inconvenience of paying tax.

"If banks paid their fair share we could avoid the worst of the cuts and help those hit hardest by the financial crisis they did nothing to cause."

UK Uncut, which has also campaigned against Vodafone, Boots and Top Shop, intends to take its first national day of action against the banks on Saturday with protesters expected to bring more than 30 high street branches of Barclays to a standstill.

On Tuesday – when Barclays announced 2010 profits of £6.1bn and a 23% rise in average pay in its investment banking arm, Barclays Capital – the tax campaigners turned a London branch of the bank into a library.

The disclosure of the size of Barclays' corporation tax bill was made in a letter by Diamond to Umunna, who had asked the Barclays boss about the tax paid by the bank when he appeared before the Treasury select committee of MPs last month. ...

More than 180 miles west of Barclays Bank's glistening skyscraper in the heart of Canary Wharf, a small group of tax protesters will gather outside one of its lesser-known branches.

At 10am on Saturday in Guildhall Square in Carmarthen, south-west Wales, a handful of campaigners will enter their local Barclays branch and unfurl their banner in protest against tax avoidance.

It will be one of 35 Barclays branches across the UK being occupied as part of UK Uncut, a viral protest collective set up five months ago to oppose government cuts and corporate tax avoidance.

The co-ordinated occupations of Barclays branches will mark the first national day of action against banks by UK Uncut, which has already forced the temporary closure of more than 100 high street stores.

The group has previously targeted companies such as Boots and Vodafone accused of avoiding millions of pounds in tax. Targeting Barclays has proved particularly popular, with more protests planned in large cities as well as smaller towns such as Grimsby, Hastings and Shrewsbury.

And as campaigners turn their attention to banks, and Barclays in particular, it emerged their Twitter-driven campaign has spread to the United States, where similar protests are being organised under the banner US Uncut.

"The folks in the UK who decided to stand up, organise and speak out are a daily inspiration to me and the rest of the movement in the States," said Carl Gibson, 23, one of the founders of the first US Uncut group in Jackson, Mississippi.

"The message is simple – before you sacrifice hard-working public-sector employees' jobs and necessary public programmes, why not first make the richest of the rich pay their fair share in taxes?"

Gibson, who started the first US group a week ago after reading an article in the Nation, said there were already US Uncut "chapters" in 20 states and at least 10 demonstrations planned for 26 February – the date of UK Uncut's second "day of action" against the banks. ...

An attempt by Barclays to suppress details of its allegedly massive tax avoidance schemes two years ago ended in farce. The high street bank went to court in the middle of the night to gag the Guardian but was outmanoeuvred by free-spirited souls on the internet.

It showed the legal system struggling to keep documents secret even after they were freely available on the web.

The story emerged in March 2009 when a whistleblower leaked internal Barclays memos to the Liberal Democrat MP Vince Cable.

The memos – passed on to the newspaper – described how a 2007 scheme called Project Knight proposed to save tax by manipulating loans totalling more than $16bn (£9.8bn), through a web of firms in the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg and the United States.

The memos also quoted advice from lawyers on how to blunt any challenges from HM Revenue & Customs. The whistleblower alleged: "It is a commonly held view that no agency in the US or the UK has the resources or the commitment to challenge [Barclays]."

Freshfields, Barclays' lawyers, toiled into the night to compel the Guardian to remove the documents from the website. Geraldine Proudler, a solicitor acting for the Guardian, was woken by a high court judge telephoning at 2am and asked to justify their publication. At 2.31am, Mr Justice Ouseley, over the phone, ordered that the documents be removed from the website, by which time 127 people had read them. ...

An Ecuadorian judge has ruled that Chevron was responsible for widespread contamination of the country's Amazon basin and fined the company $8bn. The oil firm blasted the ruling as a "fraud".

Pablo Fajardo, the plaintiffs' lawyer, told Associated Press the judgment at the provincial court of justice of Sucumbíos in Lago Agrio was "a great step that we have made towards the crystallisation of justice", but the fine was too small and he may appeal.

The epic and bitterly fought lawsuit over the "Amazon Chernobyl" has been going on for 18 years. It was brought on behalf of 30,000 people whose health and environment were allegedly damaged by chemical-laden waste water dumped by Texaco's operations from 1972 to 1990. Chevron bought Texaco in 2001.

The lawsuit alleges that Chevron should be held responsible for $27bn in damages from illness, deaths and economic loss suffered by the Amazon residents. The case was the subject of 2009's award-winning documentary Crude and has attracted celebrity supporters including Sting, Trudie Styler and Daryl Hannah.

The case goes back to the 1970s when Texaco partnered the government oil company PetroEcuador to drill wells. Texaco ended its Ecuadorian operations in the 1990s and was assigned responsibility for cleaning up sites proportional to its share in the project. The company spent $40m on the clean-up and argues that it was legally released from further claims or liabilities. But the suit claims the clean-up failed to address faulty drilling practices by Texaco that caused damage to wide areas of jungle and harmed indigenous people. ...

Three large energy companies have been carrying out covert intelligence-gathering operations on environmental activists, the Guardian can reveal.

The energy giant E.ON, Britain's second-biggest coal producer Scottish Resources Group and Scottish Power, one of the UK's largest electricity-generators, have been paying for the services of a private security firm that has been secretly monitoring activists.

Leaked documents show how the security firm's owner, Rebecca Todd, tipped off company executives about environmentalists' plans after snooping on their emails. She is also shown instructing an agent to attend campaign meetings and coaching him on how to ingratiate himself with activists. The disclosures come as police chiefs, on the defensive over damaging revelations of undercover police officers in the protest movement, privately claim that there are more corporate spies in protest groups than undercover police officers.

Senior police officers complain that spies hired by commercial firms are – unlike their own agents – barely regulated.

Sir Hugh Orde, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, which until recently ran the secretive national unit of undercover police officers deployed in protest groups, said in a speech last week that "the deployment by completely uncontrolled and unrestrained players in the private sector" constituted a "massive area of concern".

Revelations about Mark Kennedy and three other undercover police officers in protest groups caused a furore last month and led to four official inquiries into their activities.

Now a Guardian investigation has shed new light on the surveillance of green campaigners by private security firms whose intrusive operations include posing as activists on mailing lists and infiltrating full-time agents into campaign groups over many years. ...

At 8.04pm, an agent using the conspicuous alias Vandango007 received an email setting out the details of his deployment. The message had come from Rebecca Todd, chief executive of Vericola, a company spying on environmental campaigners on behalf of some of Europe's largest power companies.

It was September 2009, and green activists involved in the Climate Camp network were planning a major demonstration against Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire, owned by one of Todd's clients, the energy company E.ON. A meeting to plan the protest was being held at London's SOAS university, and Todd wanted someone on the inside.

"Hola Carlos," she wrote to Vandango007 – whose real name is Carl Bishop – in an email providing details of the rendezvous. "It should only last 2 hours … same people that you have met before."

Todd, 33, gave Bishop tips on how to explain his recent absence from the group. "Apologise for delay in getting back to them – you have had girlfriend issues!!!! That sounds better than family or work issues!!!" She added: "Use your own wording – do your own thing be yourself. Do not mention that your [sic] going to Munich – obviously they hate short haul flights." She signed off the email: "Over and out!"

The email was one of dozens of Vericola communications leaked to the Guardian as part of the ongoing investigation into surveillance of the protest movement.

Much of the evidence was gathered by environmental activists, who have been quietly investigating suspicious activities in their movement.

The disclosures come after four inquiries were launched into undercover police activities after a month of revelations concerning undercover officer Mark Kennedy and three other police spies.

Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, which ran the secret police unit Kennedy worked for, said he was "staggered" that espionage conducted in the private sector had not prompted similar outrage. In a speech last week he highlighted "the deployment by completely uncontrolled and unrestrained players in the private sector".

Privately, senior officers claim there are "without question" more corporate spies embedded in the protest movement than police officers. Among their number are former police officers cashing in on their surveillance skills for a host of companies that target protesters. ...

Britain's fastest-growing protest movement is to target scores of high street banks in the next stage of its campaign against government cuts and corporate tax avoidance.

Activists from UK Uncut have, over the past five months, caused the temporary closure of more than 100 branches of high street stores accused of avoiding millions of pounds in tax.

The group will stage its first national day of action against UK banks on 19 February.

"The idea this time is not to shut these places down but to open up high street banks, occupying them and using them for things that may be more useful for the community," said Daniel Garvin from the group.

He and other protesters have mobilised thousands of activists using the Twitter hashtag #UKuncut since the group was formed in October.

The protests, which come as banks reveal multimillion-pound bonus packages over the next few weeks, will involve a range of peaceful – and creative – direct actions.

"If libraries are being closed in their area, people may decide to stage a read-in in the bank," said Garvin.

"The housing benefit cap means people are losing their homes, so some groups may opt for a sleep-in. Theatres are being shut, so others have talked about staging a play.

"Health provision is being cut, so what about setting up a walk-in clinic? Education funding is being savaged so how about holding a lecture series?" ...

George Osborne's efforts to end the war on bankers were crumbling as Vince Cable, the business secretary, said he was still determined to end "unjustified and outrageous" salaries in the sector and his Liberal Democrat ally Lord Oakeshott left his party's frontbench after damning the government's attempts to curb bonuses.

Oakeshott, who was not in the government but spoke for the junior coalition partner on Treasury matters in the Lords, stood down shortly after he criticised officials working on the government's deal with the bankers and said: "If this is robust action on bank bonuses, my name's Bob Diamond."

Danny Alexander, the Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury, said Oakeshott had stood down by mutual consent.

Osborne hailed his deal as the moment to move beyond retribution to economic recovery. ...

Financiers in the City of London provided more than 50% of the funding for the Tories last year, new research revealed last night, prompting claims that the party is in thrall to the banks.

A study by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism has found that the City accounted for £11.4m of Tory funding – 50.79% of its total haul – in 2010, a general election year. This compared with £2.7m, or 25% of its funding, in 2005, when David Cameron became party leader.

The research also shows that nearly 60 donors gave more than £50,000 to the Tories last year, entitling each of them to a face-to-face meeting with leading members of the party up to and including Cameron.

The study shows the impact that Michael Spencer has had on party funding. He was appointed by Cameron as Tory treasurer in an attempt to reduce the influence of Lord Ashcroft, the party's former deputy chairman. Spencer was asked by Cameron to increase the number of relatively small donations of £50,000 to curb the influence of large donors such as Ashcroft, and for these smaller donations the City was place to look.

But there were still big City donations last year. David "Spotty" Rowland gave more than £4m. Stanley Fink, a hedge fund manager who was appointed the Tory treasurer last year in succession to Spencer, gave £1.9m while George Magan gave £485,000. Magan was also given a peerage. ...

The UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) was warned about Bernard Madoff in October 2008, two months before the fraudster confessed that his investment empire was a sham, according to a lawsuit unsealed in New York.

The allegation was made in a suit filed against JP Morgan, one of Madoff's banks, on behalf of the fraudster's victims.

According to the suit, filed by the court-appointed trustee Irving Picard, executives at JP Morgan allegedly told Soca that they were concerned about "investment performance achieved by its [Madoff's business] funds which is so consistently and significantly ahead of its peers, year-on-year, even in the prevailing market conditions, as to appear too good to be true – meaning that it probably is".

The lawsuit, which cites internal emails, claims that employees in the bank's "equity exotics & hybrids" desk found that the so-called feeder funds which brought in new investors knew little about Madoff's operations and asked few questions. "It's almost a cult [Madoff] seems to have fostered," one employee observed.

The suit is damning of JP Morgan's alleged role in the scandal. It claims that Soca was informed by JP Morgan "only in an effort to protect its own investments" and the bank did nothing further to stop the fraud even though it had informed the authorities. ...

Bankers and lawyers are believed to be high on the list of potential targets of a begging letter aiming to persuade them to make a donation.

The proposal, which is in its infancy, would help relieve some of the stress placed on council services and could mean some services which are currently facing the axe, such as libraries, survive.

Camden council in north London is proposing sending the open letter to selected residents. The scheme would be anonymous, completely voluntary and rely entirely on individuals’ generosity.

Councillors will point out that Camden, which covers Primrose Hill, Regents Park and Hampstead, is the fourth most wealthy borough in the country in terms of residents, but is facing severe cuts.

Bankers who might expect begging letters include Antonio Horta-Osorio, the chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group; Nigel Higgins, the chief executive of NM Rothschild; Michael Sherwood, the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs; and Lord Peter Levene, the chairman of Lloyds of London. ...

It should have been a chance to trumpet recovery in cosy Alpine surroundings. At Davos, David Cameron and George Osborne wanted to sell British austerity, discipline and economic stability to the world's most powerful people. It didn't quite work out like that.

The week started with dismal figures showing that Britain's economy had shrunk by 0.5% in the final quarter of 2010 and that questions were being asked about deficit-cutting without long-term growth. And instead of getting plaudits at the World Economic Forum's annual summit in Switzerland, wherever they went British ministers were confronted by economists casting doubt on British policy.

There was no respite when they met anxious financiers alarmed by "banker bashing". At a closed-door session today as the Alpine jamboree drew to an end, more than 40 bosses of banking and insurance companies met finance ministers from nations including Britain, Canada, France, South Africa, Turkey and Sweden.

A guest list obtained by the Observer reveals that those invited included Bank of America's boss, Brian Moynihan; Standard Chartered's chief, Peter Sands; the Lloyd's of London chairman, Lord Levene; the UK head of Santander, Ana Patricia Botín; and Aviva's chief executive, Andrew Moss.

In emollient form afterwards, Barclays' chief executive, Bob Diamond, said the get-together had been an opportunity to deliver "very heartfelt thanks" to governments for rescuing the banking system.

"We have to recognise, although there is some fatigue, that an awful lot has been achieved over the last few years," said Diamond. "We should say thanks to the central bankers and regulators because we're operating in a much safer system than a couple of years ago."

But France's finance minister, Christine Lagarde, made it clear that the discussion had been robust: "The best way for the banking system to say 'thank you' would be with good financing of the economy, sensible compensation packages and a refinancing of their capital."

Impatient with criticism of bonuses, tax avoidance and lending to small businesses, many banks used the occasion to turn up the volume in protest at what they see as undue punishment. JP Morgan's chief executive, Jamie Dimon, snapped last week that banks were not prepared to simply "bend over and accept it" from regulators. The Goldman Sachs president, Gary Cohn, declared that extra regulations on banks would simply encourage people to put their money into riskier hedge funds. ...

A former commodities trader threatened to torture his regulator until he would "beg to be killed", according to court documents.

Vincent McCrudden, founder of Alnbri Asset Management, was arrested in New York last month and charged with drawing up an "execution list" of more than 40 employees of the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and other agencies.

Details of one threatening email McCrudden wrote to Dan Driscoll, chief operating officer of the National Futures Association, have now been released in court papers.

McCrudden said he had hired "professionals" to torture and kill Driscoll. "They have things they will do to you that will make you beg to be killed, shot, anything to get away from the pain," he wrote. "And the great thing is, you will be the first, but not the last."

According to his website, McCrudden is a former professional football player and a 25-year Wall Street veteran. The CFTC filed a civil enforcement lawsuit filed against McCrudden in December, according to prosecutors, who also say that McCrudden has been the subject of various enforcement or disciplinary proceedings over several years. ...

Julian Assange vows to reveal tax details of 2,000 wealthy people

Swiss banker gives WikiLeaks founder data 'to educate society' about amount of potential tax revenues lost to offshore schemes

Esther Addley
Monday 17 January 2011

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, today pledged to make public the confidential tax details of 2,000 wealthy and prominent individuals, after being passed the data by a Swiss banker who claims the information potentially reveals instances of money-laundering and large-scale illegal tax evasion.

In a carefully choreographed handover in central London, Rudolf Elmer, formerly a senior executive at the Swiss bank Julius Baer, based in the Cayman islands, said he was handing the data to WikiLeaks as part of an attempt "to educate society" about the amount of potential tax revenues lost thanks to offshore schemes and money-laundering.

"As banker, I have the right to stand up if something is wrong," he said. "I am against the system. I know how the system works and I know the day-to-day business. I wanted to let society know how this system works because it's damaging society," he said.

Elmer will appear in a Swiss court on Wednesday charged with breaking Swiss banking secrecy laws, forging documents and sending threatening messages to two officials at his former employer.

He denies the charges. ...

Goldman Sachs has been left red-faced after the investment bank had to scrap plans for its super-rich American clients to become special friends with Facebook.

Earlier this month, Goldman Sachs invested $450m (£283m) in the social network company at a price that valued Facebook at $50bn. It was then reported that the bank was looking to raise $1.5bn for Facebook through an exclusive share offer, known as a private placement, for the bank's top clients.

Facebook is probably the hottest property on the planet at present. The seven-year-old company has more than 500 million users and recently passed Google as the most visited site on the web. The deal was a major coup for Goldman, which appeared to have found a way to get its clients in first.

The bank planned to set up a "special purpose vehicle" to allow its clients to invest in Facebook. The plan was widely seen as a way to circumnavigate rules that restrict to below 500 the number of US shareholders a private company can have. It subsequently transpired that Facebook was planning to address the 500 rule itself by going public or publishing full accounts.

While Goldman never commented on the private placement, the bank's officials believe the "intense media attention" that the deal generated around the world was threatening to scupper the deal in the US.

American law prohibits "general solicitation and advertising" in private offerings, banning banks from promoting an offer by taking out advertisements or communicating with media outlets. ...

Public release date: 7-Jan-2011
Rosanne Spector
Stanford University Medical Center

Evidence lacking for widespread use of costly antipsychotic drugs, says Stanford researcher

STANFORD, Calif. — Many prescriptions for the top-selling class of drugs, known as atypical antipsychotic medications, lack strong evidence that the drugs will actually help, a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and University of Chicago has found. Yet, drugs in this class may cause such serious effects as weight gain, diabetes and heart disease, and cost Americans billions of dollars.

"Because these drugs have safety issues, physicians should prescribe them only when they are sure patients will get substantial benefits," said Randall Stafford, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, who is senior author of the study to be published online Jan. 7 in Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. "These are commonly used and very expensive drugs."

Prescriptions for these drugs have risen steadily since they first came on the U.S. market in 1989, largely replacing the first generation of antipsychotics, which were mainly used to treat schizophrenia. The U.S. government's original stamp of approval for the new drugs was for treating schizophrenia, but they're used more today for other conditions, including other psychoses, autism, bipolar disorder, delirium, dementia, depression and personality disorders. And while some of these uses have recently been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, many have not.

For example, the FDA has approved quetiapine (brand name, Seroquel), the antipsychotic with the biggest U.S. sales, for treating schizophrenia and some aspects of bipolar disorder and depression, but the drug is also often used for anxiety and dementia, among other conditions.

These new drugs accounted for more than $10 billion in retail pharmacy U.S. prescription drug costs in 2008, representing the largest expenditure for any single drug class — nearly 5 percent of all drug spending, surpassing even blockbusters like statin cholesterol medications. According to a 2004 study, a quarter of all residents of U.S. nursing homes had taken them. Among the drugs are quetiapine, aripoprazole (brand name, Abilify), olanzapine (Zyprexa) and risperidone (Risperdal), each with annual U.S. sales exceeding $1 billion.

Stafford's new study adds to concerns about the drugs, which have been the focus of thousands of lawsuits, and as a class make up the single largest target of litigation filed under the federal False Claims Act. All major companies selling new-generation antipsychotics have either recently settled cases for hundreds of millions of dollars or are currently under investigation for skewing results or using questionable marketing tactics.

In 2005, the FDA issued its strongest type of caution, the "black box" warning, for use of new-generation antipsychotics, because of increased risk of death for dementia patients.

"Most people think, 'If my doctor prescribed this, the FDA must have evaluated whether this drug was safe and effective for this use.' That's not true," said Stafford. When doctors prescribe drugs for purposes other than those approved by the FDA, it's called "off-label" use. Though it's riskier for patients, there's nothing illegal about it, and can make sense medically in some instances, Stafford said, especially if there are no approved treatments or if a patient has not responded to approved drugs. ...

Another study is raising questions about widespread use of atypical antipsychotics. The newer schizophrenia meds have been adopted for a variety of other uses, including bipolar disorder and depression, but those uses aren't really warranted by the evidence, researchers concluded after reviewing data from prescribing physicians. Indeed, more than half of the 2008 scrips for atypicals were based on less-than-solid data, the Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety study found.

"What we see is wide adoption for the use of these medications far beyond the evidence base to support it," Dr. Caleb Alexander, a professors at the University of Chicago and an IMS Health consultant, told Reuters. "We're talking millions of prescriptions a year for antipsychotics in settings where there is uncertain evidence to support them." ...

More than 100 American cities could go bust next year as the debt crisis that has taken down banks and countries threatens next to spark a municipal meltdown, a leading analyst has warned.

Meredith Whitney, the US research analyst who correctly predicted the global credit crunch, described local and state debt as the biggest problem facing the US economy, and one that could derail its recovery.

"Next to housing this is the single most important issue in the US and certainly the biggest threat to the US economy," Whitney told the CBS 60 Minutes programme on Sunday night.

"There's not a doubt on my mind that you will see a spate of municipal bond defaults. You can see fifty to a hundred sizeable defaults – more. This will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of defaults."

New Jersey governor Chris Christie summarised the problem succinctly: "We spent too much on everything. We spent money we didn't have. We borrowed money just crazily. The credit card's maxed out, and it's over. We now have to get to the business of climbing out of the hole. We've been digging it for a decade or more. We've got to climb now, and a climb is harder."

American cities and states have debts in total of as much as $2tn. In Europe, local and regional government borrowing is expected to reach a historical peak of nearly €1.3tn (£1.1tn) this year.

Cities from Detroit to Madrid are struggling to pay creditors, including providers of basic services such as street cleaning. Last week, Moody's ratings agency warned about a possible downgrade for the cities of Florence and Barcelona and cut the rating of the Basque country in northern Spain. Lisbon was downgraded by rival agency Standard & Poor's earlier this year, while the borrowings of Naples and Budapest are on the brink of junk status. Istanbul's debt has already been downgraded to junk. ...

WikiLeaks cables: Julian Assange says his life is 'under threat'

• WikiLeaks founder says Swedish rape case is 'a travesty'
• Bank of America blocks WikiLeaks payments

David Batty
Saturday 18 December 2010

Julian Assange said today his life and the lives of his colleagues at the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks are under threat.

Speaking to reporters outside Ellingham Hall, the Norfolk house at which he is staying following his release on bail from prison, Assange said: "There is a threat to my life. There is a threat to my staff. There are significant risks facing us."

Assange is wanted in Sweden, after he was accused of committing sex offences. He denies the allegations and his lawyers have accused the Swedish authorities of waging a "vendetta".

He was initially remanded in custody but freed from prison on Thursday after a judge granted bail pending a court ruling on extradition to Sweden.

Assange said: "The case in Sweden is a travesty. No person should be exposed to that type of investigation and persecution.

"I have seen a statement from one of the witnesses that she was bamboozled ... I have heard a rumour that one has withdrawn her statement."

Meanwhile, Bank of America has become the latest financial institution to refuse to handle payments for WikiLeaks.

The bank released a statement saying it will no longer process any transactions that it believes are intended for the site, which has released thousands of secret US diplomatic cables.

"This decision is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments," the bank said.

The action comes as WikiLeaks says it plans to release information about banks.

Other financial institutions, including MasterCard and PayPal, have also stopped handling payments for the site. ...

What a scientist didn't tell the New York Times about his study on bee deaths
By Katherine Eban, contributor
October 8, 2010

FORTUNE -- Few ecological disasters have been as confounding as the massive and devastating die-off of the world's honeybees. The phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) -- in which disoriented honeybees die far from their hives -- has kept scientists, beekeepers, and regulators desperately seeking the cause. After all, the honeybee, nature's ultimate utility player, pollinates a third of all the food we eat and contributes an estimated $15 billion in annual agriculture revenue to the U.S. economy.

The long list of possible suspects has included pests, viruses, fungi, and also pesticides, particularly so-called neonicotinoids, a class of neurotoxins that kills insects by attacking their nervous systems. For years, their leading manufacturer, Bayer Crop Science, a subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG (BAYRY), has tangled with regulators and fended off lawsuits from angry beekeepers who allege that the pesticides have disoriented and ultimately killed their bees. The company has countered that, when used correctly, the pesticides pose little risk.

A cheer must have gone up at Bayer on Thursday when a front-page New York Times article, under the headline "Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery," described how a newly released study pinpoints a different cause for the die-off: "a fungus tag-teaming with a virus." The study, written in collaboration with Army scientists at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center outside Baltimore, analyzed the proteins of afflicted bees using a new Army software system. The Bayer pesticides, however, go unmentioned.

What the Times article did not explore -- nor did the study disclose -- was the relationship between the study's lead author, Montana bee researcher Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk, and Bayer Crop Science. In recent years Bromenshenk has received a significant research grant from Bayer to study bee pollination. Indeed, before receiving the Bayer funding, Bromenshenk was lined up on the opposite side: He had signed on to serve as an expert witness for beekeepers who brought a class-action lawsuit against Bayer in 2003. He then dropped out and received the grant.

Bromenshenk's company, Bee Alert Technology, which is developing hand-held acoustic scanners that use sound to detect various bee ailments, will profit more from a finding that disease, and not pesticides, is harming bees. Two years ago Bromenshenk acknowledged as much to me when I was reporting on the possible neonicotinoid/CCD connection for Conde Nast Portfolio magazine, which folded before I completed my reporting.

Bromenshenk defends the study and emphasized that it did not examine the impact of pesticides. "It wasn't on the table because others are funded to do that," he says, noting that no Bayer funds were used on the new study. Bromenshenk vociferously denies that receiving funding from Bayer (to study bee pollination of onions) had anything to do with his decision to withdraw from the plaintiff's side in the litigation against Bayer. "We got no money from Bayer," he says. "We did no work for Bayer; Bayer was sending us warning letters by lawyers."

A Bayer publicist reached last night said she was not authorized to comment on the topic but was trying to reach an official company spokesperson.

The Times reporter who authored the recent article, Kirk Johnson, responded in an e-mail that Dr. Bromenshenk "did not volunteer his funding sources." Johnson's e-mail notes that he found the peer-reviewed scientific paper cautious and that he "tried to convey that caution in my story." Adds Johnson: The study "doesn't say pesticides aren't a cause of the underlying vulnerability that the virus-fungus combo then exploits...."

At least one scientist questions the new study. Dr. James Frazier, professor of entomology at Penn State University, who is currently researching the sublethal impact of pesticides on bees, said that while Bromenshenk's study generated some useful data, Bromenshenk has a conflict of interest as CEO of a company developing scanners to diagnose bee diseases. "He could benefit financially from that if this thing gets popularized," Frazier says, "so it's a difficult situation to deal with." He adds that his own research has shown that pesticides affect bees "absolutely, in multiple ways." ...





Ta much, dear Ar0cketman, who asks,
"Bayer? It's that German for Monsanto?"

It will have 250 staff operating out of 150 countries and sounds like Ian Fleming dreamed it up. Yet the International Corruption Hunters Network (ICHN) is not something out of a James Bond novel, but the World Bank's latest initiative for stamping out bribery, fraud and the pilfering of money designed to alleviate poverty.

The idea is a good one. There are countless individual agencies around the world dedicated to stamping out financial crime: pooling their expertise should make it more difficult for the venal to get away with it. And not before time, since the taxpayers who last year provided the $70bn-plus spent by the World Bank in the field need to know that their money is not finding its way into numbered Swiss bank accounts or swelling the profits of unscrupulous companies.

Crackdowns on corruption are nothing new. James Wolfowitz arrived at the bank in 2005 vowing to root out wrongdoing but promised far more than he delivered. So what's different this time?

Leonard McCarthy is the bank's vice-president for integrity and the man responsible for the ICHN. Yesterday he published an annual report showing that his department's caseload involved 260 projects in 84 countries. As a result of the investigation, the World Bank debarred 45 firms, individuals, and NGOs, preventing them from participating in future bank projects for varying periods of time. The UK publishing house, Macmillan, was one of them - debarred for six years after admitting it had paid bribes to win a contract in southern Sudan. ...

'Slavery' uncovered on trawlers fishing for Europe
Exclusive: EJF find conditions including incarceration, violence, and confinement on board for months or even years
Felicity Lawrence
Thursday 30 September 2010

Shocking evidence of conditions akin to slavery on trawlers that provide fish for European dinner tables has been found in an investigation off the coast of west Africa.

Forced labour and human rights abuses involving African crews have been uncovered on trawlers fishing illegally for the European market by investigators for an environmental campaign group.

The Environmental Justice Foundation found conditions on board including incarceration, violence, withholding of pay, confiscation of documents, confinement on board for months or even years, and lack of clean water.

The EJF found hi-tech vessels operating without appropriate licences in fishing exclusion zones off the coast of Sierra Leone and Guinea over the last four years. The ships involved all carried EU numbers, indicating that they were licensed to import to Europe having theoretically passed strict hygiene standards.

"We didn't set out to look at human rights but rather to tackle the illegal fishing that's decimating fish stocks, but having been on board we have seen conditions that unquestionably meet the UN official definition of forced labour or modern-day slavery," EJF investigator Duncan Copeland said. A report on the abuses is published by the foundation today. ...

Vatican bank chief investigated over money laundering claims
In unprecedented move, judge freezes €23m held in account at financial institution with close church links
John Hooper in Rome
Tuesday 21 September 2010

The head of the Vatican bank has formally been placed under investigation in an inquiry into a suspected violation of Italy's money-laundering laws, judicial sources said today.

At the same time, a judge in Rome ordered a freeze on €23m (£19.5m) held in an account opened by the Vatican bank, the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), at another financial institution in the Italian capital. It was thought to be the first time such action had been authorised against the IOR in Italy.

Since last September, the Bank of Italy has classified the Vatican bank as a non-EU institution whose dealings with other banks are thus subject to especially close scrutiny.

The sources said that last Wednesday, on the eve of Pope Benedict's departure for Britain, a unit of the Italian revenue guard alerted prosecutors to an anomaly in an account owned by the IOR at the Rome branch of Credito Artigiano, which has close historic ties to the Catholic church. ...

Some of the biggest names on the British high street are at the centre of a major sweatshop scandal. An Observer investigation has found staff at their Indian suppliers working up to 16 hours a day.

Marks & Spencer, Gap and Next have all launched their own inquiries into the abuses and pledged to end the practice of excessive overtime, which is in flagrant breach of the industry's ethical trading initiative (ETI) and Indian labour law.

Some workers say they were paid at half the legal overtime rate. Gap, which uses the same factory as Next, confirmed it had found wage violations and gave its supplier a deadline of midnight last night to repay workers who lost out. M&S says it has yet to see evidence to support the wage claims.

Workers also say that those who refuse to work the extra hours have been told to find new jobs. Those in the factory supplying Gap and Next also claim staff who refused to work extra hours were threatened and fired, a practice defined under international law as forced labour and outlawed around the world. The factory has pledged to apologise and reinstate anyone who lost their job. ...

Times and Sunday Times start charging for online news as readers desert in droves
By Eliot Sefton
JULY 2, 2010

Rupert Murdoch finally put a paywall around the Times and Sunday Times today. Users will now have to pay £1 for 24 hours or £2 for a week of access to the two websites. It is the first significant move towards pay-per-view in the UK news website market.

The Times's rivals, the Guardian and Daily Mail have indicated they will maintain free access for now, but obviously they will keep an eye on developments at Wapping.

The signs so far are not good. The Times and Sunday Times introduced compulsory registration for readers at the end of May. Even though access was free, the papers’ market share fell from 4.37 per cent in the week ending May 22 to 1.81 per cent on June 23.

In an attempt to hold onto the few readers who remain, the Times and Sunday Times are starting off with an introductory offer of £1 for the first 30 days. ...

Arrests made amidst violent G20 protests
By Ashley Terry, Linda Nguyen and Mark Kennedy
Canwest News Service June 27, 2010 12:06 AM

TORONTO — Riot police arrested more than a hundred G20 protesters who rampaged through the city’s downtown core burning police cars and smashing windows on Saturday.

A small group of black-clad protesters were surrounded at a downtown intersection around 10 p.m. ET.

A police line in full riot gear began marching at the group, banging their batons on their shields, in hopes of preventing more protesters from moving towards the G20 security fence still located blocks away.

The mood was tense as a small number of protesters yelled obscenities. Helicopters could be heard overhead.

The officers loudly chanted: “Move, move,” as they marched.

One older man was pushed by police out of the way as he was seeking shelter from the pouring rain. ...

Media covering G20 caught up in arrests
Canwest News Service June 27, 2010 1:02 AM

TORONTO — Two National Post photographers were arrested Saturday night during anti-G20 demonstrations in downtown Toronto.

Brent Gundlock, a staff photographer for the Post, was tackled and taken away by several police officers in riot gear as they attempted to disperse protesters hanging around near the Ontario legislature.

Kier Gilmour, a photographer for Canwest News Service who witnessed the arrest, said the officers knocked Gundlock to the ground and then dragged him away. He had been standing with several other media photographers at the time.

"They slammed him down, onto his ass so to speak, then they dragged him back up and pulled him back to the police line," Gilmour said.

He said the photographer was not wearing his yellow media credentials at the time. He had taken the badge off because he was trying to stay close to members of the Black Bloc — the anarchist group believed to be behind many of the outbreaks of violence at the demonstrations — and they did not want members of the media among them.

Colin O’Connor, a freelance photographer working for the Post, was also apparently detained.

Gilmour said the police were being very aggressive in trying to disperse the remaining demonstrators near Queen’s Park, which is several blocks away from the secure zone where the G20 meeting is taking place. ...

... She was born on February 2, three weeks after the failed revolution of 1905. Her parents were Jewish. They lived in St. Petersburg, a city long governed by hatred of the Jews. By 1914 its register of anti-Semitic restrictions ran to nearly 1,000 pages, including one statute limiting Jews to no more than 2 percent of the population. They named her Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum.

When she was 4 or 5 she asked her mother if she could have a blouse like the one her cousins wore. Her mother said no. She asked for a cup of tea like the one being served to the grown-ups. Again her mother said no. She wondered why she couldn't have what she wanted.* Someday, she vowed, she would. In later life, Rand would make much of this experience. Heller does too: "The elaborate and controversial philosophical system she went on to create in her forties and fifties was, at its heart, an answer to this question and a memorialization of this project."

The story, as told, is pure Rand. There's the focus on a single incident as portent or precipitant of dramatic fate. There's the elevation of childhood commonplace to grand philosophy. What child, after all, hasn't bridled at being denied what she wants? Though Rand seems to have taken youthful selfishness to its outermost limits—as a child she disliked Robin Hood; as a teenager she watched her family nearly starve while she treated herself to the theater—her solipsism was neither so rare nor so precious as to warrant more than the usual amount of adolescent self-absorption. There is, finally, the inadvertent revelation that one's worldview constitutes little more than a case of arrested development. "It is not that chewing gum undermines metaphysics," Max Horkheimer once wrote about mass culture, "but that it is metaphysics—this is what must be made clear." Rand made it very, very clear.

But the anecdote suggests something additionally distinctive about Rand. Not her opinions or tastes, which were middlebrow and conventional. Rand claimed Victor Hugo as her primary inspiration in matters of fiction; Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac was another touchstone. She deemed Rachmaninoff superior to Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. She was offended by a reviewer's admittedly foolish comparison of The Fountainhead to The Magic Mountain. Mann, Rand thought, was the inferior author, as was Solzhenitsyn. ...

...what truly distinguished Rand was her ability to translate her sense of self into reality, to will her imagined identity into material fact. Not by being great but by persuading others, even shrewd biographers, that she was great. Heller, for example, repeatedly praises Rand's "original, razor sharp mind" and "lightning-quick logic," making one wonder if she's read any of Rand's work. She claims that Rand was able "to write more persuasively from a male point of view than any female writer since George Eliot." Does Heller really believe that Roark or Galt is more credible or persuasive than Lawrence Selden or Newland Archer? Or little James Ramsay, who seems to have acquired more psychic depth in his six years than any of Rand's protagonists, male or female, demonstrate throughout their entire lives? ...

...Rather than remake the world in the image of paradise, she looked for paradise in an image of the world. Political transformation wasn't necessary. Transubstantiation was enough. Say a few words, wave your hands and the ideal is real, the metaphor material. An idealist of the most primitive sort, Rand took a century of socialist dichotomies and flattened them. Small wonder so many have accused her of intolerance: when heaven and earth are pressed so closely together, where is there room for dissent?

Far from needing explanation, Rand's success explains itself. Rand worked in that quintessential American proving ground—alongside the likes of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Glenn Beck—where garbage achieves gravitas and bullshit gets blessed. There she learned that dreams don't come true. They are true. Turn your metaphysics into chewing gum, and your chewing gum is metaphysics. A is A.





*No wonder it was such a damn selfish, illogical c***.

SHAME!

A German-Canadian arms dealer who rose to prominence in the party funding scandal that damaged Germany's ruling Christian Democrats (CDU) in 1999 was today jailed for eight years.

A court in Augsburg, southern Germany, convicted 76-year-old Karlheinz Schreiber on six counts of tax evasion between 1988 and 1993. The verdict comes days before the CDU faces a key electoral test.

Schreiber was a central figure in a funding scandal involving Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU that forced the former chancellor, Helmut Kohl – who was then honorary party leader – to resign after he admitted accepting illegal party donations.

The court found Schreiber had cheated the tax authorities of €7.3m (£6.2m).

Passing sentence, the presiding judge, Rudolf Weigell, said: "The accused is the type of person only concerned with his own advantage, who will bribe anyone and anything if things aren't going to plan, and who will cheat the taxman in any way he can." ...

Prosecutors have seized £6.5m from a Russian businessman who allegedly tried to use a Scottish bank to launder money, it emerged today.

The cash confiscated from Anatoly Kazachkov, 64, a Moscow-based businessman linked to several British financiers, is the largest single seizure of money so far by Scottish prosecutors using proceeds of crime legislation and comes after a three-year inquiry that uncovered a trail of false documents and stolen identities.

Kazachkov has been under investigation by the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency and money-laundering unit after a tip-off about a suspicious transfer of $10m (£7m) from a bank in Hungary to the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2004.

The Crown Office, Scotland's prosecution authority, said its investigators "carried out extensive international inquiries" to trace the source of the funds. The trail led to Russia where, with the assistance of the Russian authorities, further evidence of false documents and stolen identities was uncovered.

"Anatoly Kazachkov and others provided an audit trail for the source of the funds, but this was discredited after Scottish and Russian investigators connected the funds to a Russian bank, which was bankrupted in 2004 in relation to money-laundering offences."

Press reports in 2005 said Kazachkov was under investigation for his links to a Scottish financier and his associates, and their attempts to transfer funds through accounts in Latvia, Hungary, Russia, the US and the UK. ...

Audit the Fed: Yes We Can

Our drive to bring transparency to the Fed is closer than ever. Seven Senators from Bernie Sanders and Russ Feingold on the left to Jim DeMint on the right have signed on as cosponsors to the Federal Reserve Transparency Amendment. The full list of cosponsors is in the box on the right.

Our amendment is simple. If we pass it, we will finally know to whom the Fed has lent trillions of dollars of our money. If we don't, we won't.

We're closer than ever before to bringing accountability to the Fed. Time is of the essence - a vote is coming any day now. Contact your Senators NOW and urge them to sponsor the Federal Reserve Transparency Amendment.

... The shareholders’ claims are scathing of Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman and chief executive of the bank, and Gary Cohen, the president, and the rest of the bank’s 12-strong board, which they said was made up of individuals too interested in their “grossly excessive” compensation and too closely connected to each other to run the bank properly. “The director defendants completely abdicated their oversight duties to the company,” one lawsuit said.

Instead, the bank’s leaders sold $65.4 million of “artificially inflated” Goldman stock while they — but not other shareholders — knew of the SEC’s impending charges, the legal action alleged. Goldman’s credibility had been “devastated” and its corporate image and goodwill “irreparably damaged” by the charges, shareholders asserted.

“For at least the foreseeable future, Goldman will suffer from what is known as the ‘liar’s discount’, a term applied to the stocks of companies who have been implicated in illegal behaviour and have misled the investing public,” one suit said.

Shareholders want Goldman Sachs to pay them damages and make corporate governance reforms. Mr Blankfein went on a public relations offensive at the weekend, doing an interview on The Charlie Rose Show in which he acknowledged that the bank, which is overhauling its internal rules for dealing with clients, “can’t exist in the current state that we are in”. He added: “We have a lot of work to do.”

Warren Buffett, the renowned investor who loaned Goldman $5 billion during the financial crisis in return for an annual return of $500 million, tried to boost the bank’s image at his shareholders’ meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, at the weekend.

“I don’t hold against Goldman Sachs the fact that an allegation’s been made by the SEC,” he said. “If it leads to something more serious, then we’ll think about it if it happens.”

Mr Buffett did not convince at least some of his own shareholders. “I hope they nail Goldman,” John Buckley, an Omaha native, told The Times. “It ain’t right, doing that to people.”

Shares in Goldman Sachs dropped by 9.4 per cent last Friday after the bank was downgraded by two analysts who cited the difficulty of predicting the outcome of the bank’s legal problems. The stock made a comparatively small rebound yesterday, rising by $4.37, or 3 per cent, to close at $149.57. ...

... In a hefty dossier circulated to media, the bank produced charts showing it never controlled more than 6% of the market for residential mortgage-backed securities or 9% of trade in collateralised debt obligations (CDOs). Mortgage-related products never exceeded 2% of group revenues between 2003-2008, the bank said. It denied engaging "in some type of massive 'bet' against our clients".

Correspondence in the dossier shows a discussion raging within the firm about appropriate exposure and the direction of the housing market. At one point in late 2006, a Goldman banker emailed colleagues bemoaning: "Sub-prime market getting hit hard – hedge funds hitting street, Wall Street Journal article. At this point we are down $20m today."

In another exchange, one trading executive writes that "the market in general underestimated how bad it could get", continuing: "While undoubtedly there will be some continued spillover, I'm not so convinced this is a total death spiral. In fact we may have terrific opportunities."

For Goldman's 30,500 staff worldwide, the next few weeks are crucial. Insiders say clients, so far, have been supportive in spite of the SEC's accusations that Goldman misled investors with Abacus, a mortgage derivative allegedly designed to fail. If the SEC's prosecution is successful, Goldman risks huge damage to its reputation and could suffer an exodus of customers and staff.

The bank's defence has been hindered by the release of a batch of emails sent by Fabrice Tourre, who refers to himself as the 'Fabulous Fab', to his girlfriend, Marine Serres. In the emails, the originator of the Abacus deal intersperses expressions of love and affection with banter about CDOs. In the messages, Tourre jokes that he has been selling Abacus to "widows and orphans" at an airport and he is scornful about the financial package, describing it as "a product of pure intellectual masturbation" that has "no purpose" and is "absolutely conceptual".

FABRICE TOURRE, the 31-year-old trader at the centre of the Goldman Sachs fraud allegations, dismissed the complex debt products he created for the bank as “pure intellectual masturbation”.

In a series of damaging emails released yesterday, Tourre also compared the products to a “Frankenstein” monster that had “turned against his own inventor”.

Other emails that emerged yesterday showed Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s chief executive, boasting about the money the bank made from the housing market collapse. “Of course we didn’t dodge the mortgage mess,” Blankfein wrote in November 2007. “We lost money, then made more than we lost because of shorts (bets against housing).”

The Blankfein emails were released by a Senate committee that will take evidence from him and Tourre this week. The committee is investigation the firm’s role in selling sub-prime mortgage products. The probe has been triggered by a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that alleges Goldman defrauded investors of $1 billion (£650m).

Senator Carl Levin, the committee’s chairman, described the bank and its Wall Street peers yesterday as “self-interested promoters of risky and complex financial schemes that helped trigger the crisis”.

Levin also accused the bank of making “enormous” profits by betting that house prices would fall — a claim rejected by Goldman. ...

Alistair Darling: the world will back IMF bank taxes
UK chancellor says that Britain, the US and the eurozone countries agree that banks need to be cut down to size
Larry Elliott and Jill Treanor
Wednesday 21 April 2010

The G20 group of rich and poor countries is likely to make rapid progress on a radical IMF plan to tax the world's financial institutions in the hope of reaching a deal by the end of the year, the chancellor, Alistair Darling, said today.

Speaking to the Guardian, the chancellor said that Britain, the US and the eurozone countries were agreed that action needed to be taken to cut banks down to size and to prevent another crisis putting pressure on public finances.

Despite opposition from Canada, which will host the next G20 meeting this summer, Darling said pressure from those countries with major financial centres would keep the issue high on the agenda. The resilience of Canada's banks during the three-year financial crisis has made Ottawa reluctant to discuss taxes on finance at the G20, but the chancellor said: "If everybody else wants to discuss it, nobody is going to keep it off the agenda."

Prospects for an international deal have improved since the Obama administration adopted a more aggressive approach towards Wall Street banks earlier this year. Darling said: "I hope that we will have the principles agreed by the end of the year, and convert them into practice later."

He added, however, that there would be no sudden introduction of either of the two charges proposed by the IMF this week: a financial stability contribution to fund any future bailout; and a financial activities tax on bank profits and pay. ...

Why we must break up the banks
Paul Krugman says it isn't necessary – but breaking up financial giants would at least give us hope that things can change
Dean Baker
Wednesday 7 April 2010

It's not often that I disagree with Paul Krugman, but there are occasions where at least one of us is wrong. And the treatment of too big to fail (TBTF) banks is one of them.

Krugman argued in a column last week that breaking up the TBTF banks is not a necessary part of financial reform. Krugman pointed to the example of Canada as a country with a well-regulated financial system. Canada did not experience a financial crisis in 2008 in spite of the fact that five big banks essentially account for the whole of the Canadian banking system. On the other side, Krugman noted that the collapse of large numbers of small banks can also create a crisis, pointing to the chain of bank collapses at the start of the Great Depression.

These are valid points, but to paraphrase Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz: "we're not in Canada anymore." While Canadian banking regulation appears to have been effective thus far (we may want to see how they cope with a yet to deflate housing bubble before pronouncing it a success), Canada is a very different country from the United States. In Canada, they have had universal Medicare for 40 years. As the first President Bush used to say, it is a kinder, gentler, country.

This matters for financial regulation, because there is a level of independence and integrity on the part of the regulators in Canada that does not exist in the United States. The line in Washington is that if you want to talk to someone from Goldman Sachs, call the treasury department. ...

Guillaume Rambourg, the star trader suspended last week from Gartmore, the fund manager, used the Bloomberg instant messaging system to “direct” trades for nearly a year.

Jeff Meyer, Gartmore’s chief executive, said Rambourg circumvented a company rule introduced on May 15 last year. Staff were given training sessions and asked to take a test to make sure they understood that they could no longer direct trades. “That is what has caused us the most concern about Guillaume — it’s a behavioural issue. He knew what the rules were but continued as he had before,” said Meyer.

Rambourg, who owns 4% of the firm, did not appear to have profited from his actions. “I’ll jump off this building if he was doing it for profit,” said Meyer.

The rule banned fund managers from telling Gartmore’s trading staff which brokers to use on share deals. Before it was introduced, fund managers would use the company’s own IT systems to pass messages suggesting that business be directed to a certain firm. ...

A tax break created by Gordon Brown to encourage millions of people to save has degenerated into a £3 billion a year rip-off that enriches the banks, according to a damning verdict from the statutory consumer watchdog.

Consumer Focus has made a formal complaint to the Office of Fair Trading alleging that cash Isas pay derisory rates of interest and that banks use unfair obstacles to stop people from switching to better deals. The OFT has 90 days to respond.

“It beggars belief that in 21st century Britain it takes a month to transfer information and funds from one bank to another,” said Mike O’Connor, chief executive of Consumer Focus. “The average Isa saver is getting a poor deal.” ...

The Times and the Sunday Times are to start charging for content online in June.

Users will be charged £1 for a day's access and £2 for a week's subscription for access to both papers' websites, publisher News International has announced.

The News International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, implied in a statement that its other titles, the Sun and the News of the World, would follow.

The papers will relaunch their websites in early May and will be available for a free trial period to registered users. Readers can register from today at timesplus.co.uk.

The Times and the Sunday Times are the first UK papers to fully charge for digital content. While a daily payment will give users access to both sites, the weekly subscription will also include an e-paper and new applications. Access to the digital services will be included in the seven-day subscriptions of print customers to the Times and the Sunday Times.

"This is just the start. The Times and the Sunday Times are the first of our four titles in the UK to move to this new approach," said Brooks. "These new sites, and the apps that will enhance the experience, reflect the identity of our titles and deliver a terrific experience for readers. We expect to attract a growing base of loyal customers that are committed and engaged with our titles." ...



Screw you, rupee murdick.

One of the biggest bonuses seen this year for any London-based banker was revealed today as HSBC announced it had given Stuart Gulliver, its head of investment banking, a £9.8 million package.

Mr Gulliver was awarded a £9 million bonus on top of his £800,000 base pay for his "exceptional performance" in trebling the profits of his division to $10.5 billion, HSBC said.

The payment came as Michael Geoghegan, HSBC chief executive, confirmed that he will give his £4 million bonus to charity.

HSBC disappointed investors after full-year profits fell by 24 per cent to $7.1 billion (£4.7 billion) following a big write down of the value of its own bonds. Its shares lost more than 5 per cent, down 37.1p, to 682.46p. ...

... Buffett has been criticizing overreaching corporate managers and complaisant directors for decades. But the question of how to motivate good corporate behavior has taken on new weight as Washington debates reining in the financial giants whose missteps brought the economy to its knees two years ago.

The Obama administration last month proposed separating banks' proprietary trading activities from their federally subsidized deposit-gathering and lending ones. Other proposed rules would increase the amount of capital banks hold against losses and how much cash they carry to deal with a surge of withdrawals.

But Buffett said there's a simpler way to cap risk-taking: Forcing lavishly compensated CEOs to take responsibility for assessing the risks at their firms -- and putting their own wealth at stake, to boot.

"It is the behavior of these CEOs and directors that needs to be changed," he wrote. "They have long benefitted from oversized financial carrots; some meaningful sticks now need to be employed as well."

The comment reflects a theme that has run through Buffett's letters to investors over the years: Shareholders are best served by managers who think like owners. More often, he has said, they are ill served by executives who instead pursue value-destroying mergers or pile up debt in a bid to boost returns. ...

Power companies have been accused of profiteering from the coldest winter for 30 years after a surge in corporate profits.

ScottishPower, which has more than 5 million British customers, saw profits rise by 7.9% last year amid fears that many people could not afford to heat their homes during the bitter winter. Results tomorrow from British Gas, the country's biggest supplier of gas and electricity with 15.6 million customers, are expected to show that operating profits rose 46% to £554m, up from £379m in 2008.

The increases were condemned by unions, customer groups and charities representing the elderly, and follow warnings this week from the regulator Ofgem that companies boosted margins by £30 for each dual fuel customer in the last three months as wholesale costs fell.

Gary Smith, national officer at the GMB union, said: "Buying cheap and selling dear will always add up to high profits in a natural monopoly. No great managerial elan or skills are needed. It is long overdue that the government should step in and take control of the energy sector and put in place proper plans for secure supplies at reasonable prices as happens in the rest of Europe."

David Hunter of McKinnon & Clarke, which buys energy for businesses across Britain, said: "Despite wholesale prices going into freefall, ScottishPower hasn't cut domestic standard tariffs in almost a year. Failure of the big six suppliers [British Gas, EDF, npower, ScottishPower, Scottish and Southern, and E.ON] to pass on to customers the massive reductions in wholesale energy prices which they have been enjoying since 2008 is scandalous." ...



Hey, our utilities are doing the same thing to us in Yankistan - and why the fuck haven't gasoline prices plummeted either?

... Faced with struggles across News Corp's digital businesses, Murdoch and his lieutenants have begun taking an aggressive approach, calling for news sites to charge readers for content and labelling Google a ­"parasite". He aims to put his newspapers, including the Times and the Sun, behind a paywall, something described by the co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone, as a vain attempt to "put the genie back in the bottle".

Wolff said that this was a result of Murdoch's fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between the technology and media industries. While the 78-year-old mogul craves leadership in the digital world, Wolff suggested that a career spent building traditional media businesses has left Murdoch struggling to understand the speed and innovation required on the internet.

"He absolutely has no idea," he said. "If people really quite understood how little feeling he has for this business, they would fall down laughing – or crying."

BAE deal with Tanzania: Military air traffic control – for country with no airforce
Claire Short and Robin Cook had tried to stop the sale of a hugely expensive radar to the poverty- stricken Tanzanians
Rob Evans and Paul Lewis
Saturday 6 February 2010

Tony Blair was at the centre of controversy over BAE's arms deal with Tanzania, just as he was in the Saudi contracts.

Cabinet ministers Claire Short and Robin Cook had tried to stop the sale of the hugely expensive radar to the poverty- stricken Tanzanians. But, as prime minister, he overruled them and insisted that the deal had to go through.

It left Cook ruefully muttering that it seemed that Dick Evans, BAE's then chairman, seemed to have "the key to the garden door of No 10".

The World Bank and the International Civil Aviation Organisation judged that the 2001 purchase was unnecessary and overpriced.

But the £28m deal started to look even worse when the SFO discovered that a third of the contract's price had been diverted into secret offshore bank accounts.

The SFO believed that this money was used to pay bribes to Tanzanian politicians and officials.

Yesterday Short, who resigned from the government, said : "Every way you looked at it, it [the deal] was outrageous and disgraceful. And guess who absolutely insisted on it going through? My dear friend Tony Blair, who absolutely, adamantly, favoured all proposals for arms deals.

"It was an obviously corrupt project. Tanzania didn't need a new military air traffic control, it was out-of-date technology, they didn't have any military aircraft – they needed a civilian air traffic control system and there was a modern, much cheaper one. Everyone talks about good governance in Africa as though it is an African problem, and often the roots of the 'badness' is companies in Europe." ...

Perseverance and bluff – how the legal deal was done that sees BAE pay £285m fines
That the arms giant has finally been forced to pay substantial penalties is due to the doggedness of a small group of prosecutors
David Leigh and Rob Evans
Friday 5 February 2010

Since the Guardian first exposed BAE's worldwide system of undercover payments to secure contracts in 2003, the company has fought hard to deny its guilt, using every lobbying tool at its disposal and exploiting its influence within the offices of the then prime minister, Tony Blair.

That the arms giant has finally been forced to pay substantial penalties is due to the doggedness of a small group of prosecutors, currently led by Richard Alderman, director of the Serious Fraud Office, and his US counterpart, Mark ­Mendelsohn, at the department of justice in Washington.

Alderman's predecessor, Robert ­Wardle, stepped down from his post at the SFO in 2008, a frustrated man, ­having seen BAE and its friends persuade Blair to intervene and force a halt to extensive and long running criminal inquiries into the £43bn al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

But that turned out to be the high-water mark of BAE's political influence. The US authorities promptly picked up the Saudi case which Blair had claimed would be so damaging to Britain's "national security".

Washington officials were vigorously attempting to enforce their own Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and were long suspicious of BAE's surprising arms deals in the Czech Republic, about which they had vainly protested at the time.

Meanwhile Alderman, when he succeeded Wardle at the SFO, insisted he was no patsy. He ordered renewed investigations into BAE's remaining suspect contracts in Tanzania, South Africa, Romania and the Czech Republic. Alderman staked much of his credibility on attempts to change the lumbering SFO style of investigation. ...

Supreme Court Ruling Spurs Corporation Run for Congress
First Test of “Corporate Personhood” In Politics

Following the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to allow unlimited corporate funding of federal campaigns, Murray Hill Inc. today announced it was filing to run for U.S. Congress and released its first campaign video on www.youtube.com/user/murrayhillcongress

“Until now,” Murray Hill Inc. said in a statement, “corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence peddling to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves.”

Murray Hill Inc. is believed to be the first “corporate person” to exercise its constitutional right to run for office. As Supreme Court observer Lyle Denniston wrote in his SCOTUSblog, “If anything, the decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission conferred new dignity on corporate “persons,” treating them — under the First Amendment free-speech clause — as the equal of human beings.”

Murray Hill Inc. agrees. “The strength of America,” Murray Hill Inc. says, “is in the boardrooms, country clubs and Lear jets of America’s great corporations. We’re saying to Wal-Mart, AIG and Pfizer, if not you, who? If not now, when?”

Murray Hill Inc. plans on spending “top dollar” to protect its investment. “It’s our democracy,” Murray Hill Inc. says, “We bought it, we paid for it, and we’re going to keep it.” ...


Ta much, dear MSiegel

...Moore has dug out of a South Carolina archive a piece of film buried away 66 years ago because it threatened to rock the foundations of the capitalist system as Americans now know it.

President Franklin D Roosevelt was ailing. Too ill to make his 1944 state of the nation address to Congress, he instead broadcast it by radio. But at one point he called in the cameras, and set out his vision of a new America he knew he would not live to see.

Roosevelt proposed a second bill of rights to guarantee every American a job with a living wage, a decent home, medical care, protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness and unemployment, and, perhaps most dangerously for big business, freedom from unfair monopolies. He said that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence".

The film was quickly locked away.

"The next week on the newsreels – and we've gone back and researched this – they didn't run that," said Moore. "They talked about other parts of his speech, the war. Nothing about this. The footage became lost. When we called the Roosevelt presidential library and asked them about it they said it wasn't filmed. His own family told us it wasn't filmed." Moore's team scoured the country without luck until they were given a tip about a collector connected to the university of South Carolina.

The university didn't have anything archived under FDR's speeches that fitted, but there were a couple of boxes from that week in 1944.

"We pop it in. It was all there. We had tears in our eyes watching it. For 65 years not a single American saw that speech, not one. I decided right then that we're going to fulfil Roosevelt's wishes that the American people see him saying this. Of all the things in the film, probably I feel most privileged that I get to share this. I get to give him his stage." It's a powerful moment not only because it offers an alternative view of American values rarely spoken of today – almost all of which would be condemned as rampant socialism – but also an interesting reference point with which to compare the more restrained ambitions of the Obama administration. ...

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today's president

Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington
Saturday 25 September 2004

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty. ...

Executive pay should be capped at 20 times average, says union leader
A Davos meeting was told executive pay had reached unsustainable levels compared with workers' pay
Larry Elliott
Wednesday 27 January 2010

A union leader representing 20 million workers worldwide tonight called for executive salaries to be capped at 20 times the pay of the average worker as he branded the system for rewarding business leaders "corrupt" and a "racket".

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Philip Jennings, general secretary of the UNI global union, said the pay gap between those running companies and their workforces had widened to "unsustainable levels".

High-profile support for the union argument was provided by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who said the current remuneration model could not be tolerated. "It is morally indefensible and we can't allow a tiny minority to skew the system", Sarkozy said.

The French president added that world leaders should not use recovery from recession as an excuse to slacken the pace of reform. "We need a revolution in world regulation to put labour standards on the same footing as those for trade."

Sarkozy said he couldn't understand why the International Labour Organisation, which tries to raise labour standards, had a lower status than the World Trade Organisation, which seeks to liberalise trade. ...

January 27, 2010
Barack Obama to fight ‘no limit’ ruling on election funding by companies
Tim Reid in Washington

President Obama is planning an aggressive response to a landmark Supreme Court ruling last week that cleared the way for US companies to spend unlimited amounts on political campaign advertising.

Democrats fear that the 5-4 ruling will help Republicans in November’s midterm congressional elections.

It swept away a century of limits on corporate political spending and gave companies and unions the right to spend unlimited amounts attacking or promoting candidates. The move dismayed Democrats, who are already bracing themselves for heavy losses in November.

“I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest,” Mr Obama said in his weekly radio address at the weekend. “The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections.” ...

Unequal Britain: richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest

• 1980s income gap still not plugged, say analysts
• Brown says equality panel report a 'sobering' read

Amelia Gentleman
Wednesday 27 January 2010

A detailed and startling analysis of how unequal Britain has become offers a snapshot of an increasingly divided nation where the richest 10% of the population are more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10% of society.

Gordon Brown described the paper, published today, as "sobering", saying: "The report illustrates starkly that despite a levelling-off of inequality in the last decade we still have much further to go."

The report, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK, scrutinises the degree to which the country has become more unequal over the past 30 years. Much of it will make uncomfortable reading for the Labour government, although the paper indicates that considerable responsibility lies with the Tories, who presided over the dramatic divisions of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Researchers analyse inequality according to a number of measures; one indicates that by 2007-8 Britain had reached the highest level of income inequality since soon after the second world war.

The new findings show that the household wealth of the top 10% of the population stands at £853,000 and more – over 100 times higher than the wealth of the poorest 10%, which is £8,800 or below (a sum including cars and other possessions).

When the highest-paid workers, such as bankers and chief executives, are put into the equation, the division in wealth is even more stark, with individuals in the top 1% of the population each possessing total household wealth of £2.6m or more. ...

January 27, 2010
Gap between rich and poor 'at its widest since the war'
Rosemary Bennett, Social Affairs Correspondent

The divide between rich and poor is greater after 13 years of Labour rule than at any time since the Second World War, according to the Government’s own report into inequality.

It concludes that Britain remains a nation riven by class “from cradle to grave”, despite programmes costing billions of pounds in the past decade designed to narrow the gap.

Social mobility measured by both income and profession is low, with worrying signs that the class divide now opens up among children as young as 3. Differences in educational attainment among pre-school children are so stark that researchers believe that each extra £100 a month in household earnings when children are very young is worth a month of cognitive development.

The educational background of mothers is also significant. Children entering primary school in 2005 whose mothers had degrees were assessed as six months ahead in verbal and other skills than those whose mothers had done poorly at GCSEs, obtaining grade D or below.

Overall it found that increasing inequality after 2004 meant that by 2007-08 it had reached its highest level in the years since figures began in 1961. “But comparison with measures based on tax records suggests that this is the highest level of income inequality since soon after the Second World War,” it said. ...

As those of you in the U.S. have undoubtedly heard by now, our Supreme Court just overturned over 100 years of statute and precedent by ruling that corporations can spend all the money that they want to influence elections. At a time when many of us are becoming increasingly convinced that getting big money out of politics is the only way to bring about meaningful change, this is terrible news.

Imagine what increased corporate ownership of our politicians will do to minority positions, such as atheism. It is unlikely that corporations will be interested in funneling money to anyone holding unpopular views for fear that it would reflect badly on them (assuming we knew they were behind the funding). And unlimited corporate investment may well make it impossible for all but the extremely wealthy and well-connected to compete in the political arena.

I just signed Rep. Alan Grayson's petition to support his "Save Our Democracy" platform, and I hope you'll consider joining me. The idea of having a government that is essentially owned by multinational corporations who do not necessarily have our best interests in mind is repulsive and anti-democratic. ...


Ta much, dear Anneliese

A “financial crisis responsibility fee” - I like it.

I like it very much, thank you.

see more Political Pictures

Ta much, dear Anneliese

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. "In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor," he said.

Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.

"Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities... There were signs that some banks were rescued that way." Costa declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drugs money, saying that would be inappropriate because his office is supposed to address the problem, not apportion blame. But he said the money is now a part of the official system and had been effectively laundered. ...

The banks' defence of Fortress Bonus is starting to crumble. Their claim that unilateral action against excessive rewards by the UK would damage the City has been a key plank of their case against bonus reform, but that has been demolished by the chancellor's bank levy in the pre-budget report.

In this column I have repeatedly argued that action by the UK, where the financial sector is so dominant, would send a powerful signal to the rest of the world and embolden other countries to follow suit.

So it has proved: Nicolas Sarkozy is introducing a similar tax, with one French official saying "There is no obstacle to doing it now if it has been done in London." Angela Merkel is making warm noises; the hope is that the rest of the EU and the United States will join in.

Politically, the tax surcharge was a clever move. By sparking international action, the sting has been drawn from the Conservatives' cry of "class war"; George Osborne and David Cameron could not oppose the measure without alienating an angry public. ...

Kucinich seeks 60 percent excise tax on TARP executive bonuses
By Sabrina Eaton, The Plain Dealer
December 10, 2009

Cleveland Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich wants to impose a 60 percent excise tax on the fat bonuses that were paid to executives of companies that took money from last year's bank bailout.

On Wednesday, he proposed an amendment to a pending financial industry reform bill that would do that and impose an additional 70 percent tax on TARP recipients' corporate profits.

"Without the extraordinary actions of the federal government, many of these institutions would have collapsed a long time ago," Kucinich told the House Rules Committee, arguing that his amendment would hold "to account those institutions and individuals that made the decisions that led to the crisis." ...

Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs has blinked in the face of a public outcry over its multimillion-dollar pay packages by suspending cash bonuses for its top 30 executives, in a concession to critics delivered as political momentum mounts for a crackdown on rewards in the financial sector.

Goldman is typically the biggest payer of any leading US bank, with a policy of distributing more than 40% of its revenue to employees, and it has faced furious protests over an anticipated handout of $23bn (£14.1bn) this year, an average of more than $700,000 per employee.

The bank yesterday announced that its senior staff, including six London-based executives, would receive shares vesting over a five-year period instead of cash bonuses. Under enhanced "clawback" powers, it will be able to reclaim shares from any employees found to have inflicted "material financial harm" on its businesses. In an unprecedented move for a major US bank, Goldman will put its remuneration policies before a yearly "say on pay" vote by shareholders at its annual meetings.

A Goldman spokesman said the bank had taken public opinion into consideration: "The motivation was that these are extraordinary times, that the firm has done well and that that has excited a great deal of comment and not a little criticism." ...

Cash please; small bills.

Judge wipes out couple's mortgage after bank's 'repulsive' behaviour
A New York judge was so angry with a bank's "harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive" behaviour towards a financially struggling couple that he wiped out their $525,000 (£316,000) mortgage.

By Tom Leonard in New York
Published: 12:06AM GMT 26 Nov 2009

In an unusual legal decision that may cheer ordinary homeowners but dismay lenders, Judge Jeffrey Spinner took a tough line on a California-based bank that he considered had been determined to foreclose on the couple's home in Suffolk County, Long Island.

His ruling against OneWest and its IndyMac mortgage division has relieved Greg Horoski and his wife, Diane Yano-Horoski, of the $291,000 they owed on the original loan as well as $235,000 in interest.

OneWest took $814 million in federal bailout money but has a reputation for foreclosing quickly on property owners who falls into arrears. ...

... The judge attacked the bank for repeatedly refusing to work out a deal, for misleading him about the sums in the case and for its treatment of the couple.

He wrote that OneWest's conduct was "inequitable, unconscionable, vexatious and opprobrious", cancelling the debt to deter it from "imposing further mortifying abuse" against the couple. ...

... Mr Horoski...told the New York Post, "I think the judge felt it was almost a personal vendetta. It was like dealing with organised crime."

Just when you thought the popularity of Wall Street bankers had hit rock bottom, top US financial institutions have caused uproar for allegedly muscling their way to the front of the queue to get hold of scarce swine flu vaccines.

Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley were among the first employers in New York to receive shipments of the widely sought after H1N1 antidote from public health authorities this week, prompting furious attacks from political critics who claim bankers are getting privileged treatment.

Christopher Dodd, Democratic senator from Connecticut, declared himself "stunned" that top banks had received vaccines when a shortage of doses has led to lengthy queues at clinics and hospitals across the US.

"Vaccines should go to people who need them most, not people who happen to work on Wall Street," said Dodd, who wrote a letter of protest to the US health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius.

New York's health department confirmed that vaccines had been shipped to banks - Citigroup, which asked for 7,200 doses, received 1,200 while Goldman Sachs, which applied for 5,400, was given 200. A spokeswoman said distributing vaccines in workplaces would "alleviate stress and pressure from community healthcare settings and hospitals".

She said pediatric and pregnancy clinics had already received doses and that banks were among the first 50 private employers to get vaccines simply because they were among the first to apply: "They were among the first to place orders." ...



...and some are more equal than others.

Britain's retail banks should be banned from paying out "significant" cash bonuses as part of a drive to plough profits back into new lending, the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, will declare tomorrow.

In the strongest attack by the Tories on banks, Osborne will say that bonuses should be paid in shares, which cannot be cashed in for at least three years, as he warns that billions of pounds in "subsidised profits" are threatening to worsen the credit crunch.

In a speech to Thomson Reuters in Canary Wharf, east London, Osborne will tell financiers: "We cannot wait for the promised land of a new responsible bonus culture which looks more remote than ever. We need to take emergency steps to support bank lending and move the economy forward.

"I am today calling on the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority to combine forces and stop retail banks paying out profits in significant cash bonuses. Full stop. Then the cash that would have been paid out should be put on to banks' balance sheets explicitly to support new lending. This should be a condition of continuing to receive taxpayer guarantees and liquidity support." ...

Alistair Darling has openly criticised Goldman Sachs over its plan to pay huge staff bonuses so soon after the financial crisis nearly crushed the banking sector.

Speaking at an event in London this lunchtime, the chancellor cited the Wall Street giant as an example of a bank that "manifestly" failed to appreciate how the City landscape had changed.

"What happened with Goldman Sachs last week sends the wrong signals," said Darling, who was attending an event at Canary Wharf. "I've spoken to all our banks and none of them would be standing here today if the taxpayer hadn't put their hand into their pocket."

Goldman Sachs itself does not appear to share Darling's concerns. Last night, Lord Griffiths, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International, claimed that huge salaries were a price worth paying.

"I believe that we should be thinking about the medium-term common good, not the short-term common good ... we should not, therefore, be ashamed of offering compensation in an internationally competitive market which ensures the bank businesses here and employs British people," said Griffiths. ...



I think you should fuck off, mr griffiths. I don't think any boss anywhere deserves pay that's more than 100 times what the lowest paid employees receive. I very much like the Japanese idea of bosses' getting no more than up to ten times what the lowest paid employees get.

THE state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland is planning to hand out record bonuses of up to £5m each in a snub to struggling taxpayers.

The move would see the average employee in its high-risk investment banking arm take home £240,000, with the top 20 staff in line for payments of between £1m and £5m.

The payouts by the investment banking division — from a total pay and bonus pot of £4 billion — would top the deals awarded at the peak of the financial boom in 2007 and are 66% higher than those paid last year.

RBS, then headed by Sir Fred Goodwin, had to be rescued from collapse by the Treasury last October with an initial injection of £20 billion. The taxpayer now has a 70% stake in the bank. ...

Former Wall Street financiers face criminal action

Former Bear Stearns hedge fund manager Matthew Tannin's private jottings show concerns about 'blow up risk' to investors

Andrew Clark in New York
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 11 October 2009

They are scribblings that may come back to haunt Matthew Tannin. The former high-flying Bear Stearns hedge fund manager – who goes on trial for fraud in a New York court this week – had a habit of recording his inner-most thoughts in emails sent to himself on a private Google Mail account.

"I am going to use this to keep my diary," he wrote. "I didn't want to use my work email any more."

In words never intended for public consumption, Tannin wrote of his worries about becoming dependant on an antidepressant, Wellbutrin, and a stress medication, Lorazapan, to cope with concern about the performance of his fund. He expressed satisfaction at earning close to $2m (£1.3m) in a year but alluded to a "religious crisis" and complained about "schlepping the kids around from place to place" during a holiday in London.

As his confidence in his money-making panache began to falter, Tannin pinpointed a meeting in 2006 when he realised that his Bear Stearns fund faced potential trouble: "I had a wave of fear set over me – that the Fund couldn't be run in the way that I was 'hoping'. And that it was going to subject investors to 'blow up risk'."

Tannin and his boss, Ralph Cioffi, ran two funds holding $1.4bn of clients' funds that collapsed in July 2007, an event widely viewed as the first clear signal of America's sub-prime mortgage crisis and the global credit crunch. The meltdown of these funds sparked a chain of events that contributed to the demise of Bear Stearns, an 85-year-old Wall Street institution, in early 2008. They have been charged by US prosecutors with defrauding customers by hiding the true condition of investments as prospects steadily darkened.

The first high-rolling financiers to face criminal action arising from the financial crisis, Cioffi and Tannin have become unwitting poster boys for perceived arrogance, recklessness and irresponsibility on Wall Street. Frustrated at not seeing higher-ranking bank bosses clapped in irons, the public and the US media are watching keenly. ...

...Metro Times: So, ultimately, do you feel government is more accountable than corporations? You can't walk across the street and talk to Fritz Henderson, but you can talk to your congressman. ...

Michael Moore: First of all, I think it's pretty crazy on GM's part to move us over here. I should be over there [at the RenCen] talking to people going in and out of my movie, but here we are, shuffled into some mini-ballroom across the street because I'm not allowed on the premises for my own premiere to talk to press. I can go over there and watch the film if I want, but I can't talk to you. What country are we living in here? Don't you and I own General Motors?

MT: You were very vocal about [former GM chairman] Rick Wagoner getting fired.

Moore: Oh yeah! One of the happiest days of my life was seeing Obama fire the chairman of General Motors.

MT: The first complaint of one of my conservative colleagues at the screening was, "He has money. He has a huge house. He's a hypocrite!"

Moore: This from people who like money.

MT: It's like Traverse City [where Moore now lives] is the south of France.

Moore: [laughs] I could see, too, around 1776: "Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams are wealthy landowners, they've done well under the king! They went to the king's college! The king has done well. What do they have to complain about?"

MT: Your entire career should have been nonprofit.

Moore: Actually, I have a whole nonprofit model created at the State Theatre up in Traverse City, for small towns in Michigan. But that's another story. ...

MT: But that's a fairly consistent attack on you; that you can't condemn the rich and be rich yourself.

Moore: It's because it really drives them crazy. They know somebody like me who gets some money, that's dangerous. Because I don't want to buy a big boat, what am I going to do with that money? I'm going to cause a ruckus with it. I'm going to be able to make my next film and the film after that and the film after that and no one can buy me. So you know what you're getting from my film. Nothing has been taken out to please a corporate boss at the studio, because if I don't do that [mock terror], "They won't let me make my next film. Oh, you won't let me make my next film? Oh, well, fine, I'll do it myself."

They understand that and that's why conservatives don't like it, because they know that it's fuck-you money, they know that it gives me the freedom to do and say what I want.

The International Monetary Fund today threw its weight behind a new tax on the global financial sector designed to limit risky speculative behaviour and help the world's poorest countries.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF's managing director, said banks and other big financial institutions were responsible for systemic risk and it was only right that they provided resources to mitigate those threats to the world economy.

While ruling out a so-called Tobin tax – a levy on foreign currency transactions proposed by the American economist James Tobin in the early 1970s – Strauss-Kahn said a high-level IMF team would work on proposals in the coming months.

"The very simple idea of putting a tax on transactions won't work for many technical reasons," Strauss-Kahn said at a press conference held in the run-up to the IMF's annual meeting in Istanbul next week.

"On the other hand, considering the financial sector is creating a lot of systemic risks for the global economy, it is fair that the sector pay some part of its resources to mitigate risks it is creating itself." ...



Hmmm. This is a lot like seeing Lucifer giving orders to Beelzebub, innit.

Gordon Brown is ready to leave Britain’s biggest defence manufacturer, BAE Systems, to the mercy of the courts over allegations that it paid millions of pounds in bribes to win contracts, The Times has learnt.

Senior Downing Street sources said last night that he was adopting a “strictly hands-off approach” to the case. It is understood that a plea from BAE for the Prime Minister to intervene — as Tony Blair did three years ago in helping to halt a previous investigation — has already been “firmly rebuffed” by officials.

Yesterday an ultimatum issued by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) for the arms giant to accept an out-of-court settlement expired. Instead, the agency charged with stamping out corruption by British business vowed to pursue claims that BAE paid out millions of pounds for lucrative defence contracts in Tanzania, the Czech Republic, South Africa and Romania. ...

Brown intervenes in bank charges standoff

PM tells bankers to settle long-running court battle over refunds for excessive charges 'without further delay' ...

The European Union will seek a global deal on clawing back or cancelling bankers’ bonuses at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh next week after agreement among the 27 European leaders last night.

Supervisory bodies should be given the power to “reduce compensations” for bankers if their bank performs badly, while “the major part” of bonuses should be deferred over time and “could be cancelled” in the light of poor outcomes, the EU leaders agreed at a pre-G20 summit in Brussels.

The leaders agreed a united front on bankers’ bonuses after Nicolas Sarkozy of France relaxed his call for a ceiling on bonuses in return for the tough-sounding general threat of bonus cancellation “in case of a negative development in the bank’s performance.” What this means in detail has yet to be thrashed out.

“The bonus bubble bursts tonight,” said Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Swedish Prime Minister and current holder of the EU presidency. “We particularly want to focus on the link between performance and compensation.” ...

Last month Harriet Harman made the perfectly commonsense observation that groups with different kinds of people in them tend to make better decisions than those composed of people who have the same background, experience and outlook. Her remarks proved explosive because she made the counterfactual joke that “Lehman Sisters” might not have made the same mistakes as their real-world brothers. In the ensuing deluge of indignation, few made the point that should really worry us: we have no prospect of discovering whether she is right, because so few women rise to the upper ranks of City firms.

The results of a major investigation released today by the Equality and Human Rights Commission show that, despite the genuine efforts of leading figures in the sector and the success of a handful of high-profile women, the City still has miles to go before it can honestly say that women are treated fairly.

The average woman working in financial services takes home less than 50p for every pound earned by her typical male colleague. Her bonus is a fifth the size of his. This isn’t just the result of old-fashioned bigotry, though there’s a bit of that. Schools and universities, for example, tend to steer girls away from the technical number-crunching skills that provide the greatest rewards.

But our study reveals that women in the City face unjustified inequalities at every stage of their careers. Ninety-five per cent of employers have at least one category or grade of job with a significant gender pay gap. This suggests women earn less than their male colleagues for doing similar work with similar responsibilities. Something is going wrong that needs to be righted. ...



Um, something's been seriously wrong with women's pay for an awfully long time. What took your damn ass so long to notice?

Déja vu!

Women earn around 80% less than men in performance-related pay at some of the UK's leading finance companies, revealing a "shocking disparity", according to an official inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Findings also show more than eight out of 10 women starting new jobs are paid lower average salaries than men.

The "massive gender gap" is one of the highest in the UK economy and entrenched by recruitment patterns, said the commission. It is calling for an overhaul in recruitment practices in the industry which provided 1.3 million jobs in Britain last year.

The disparity is revealed after the inquiry, the first of its kind, questioned 44 top firms which between them employ almost one quarter (22.6%)of finance sector workers. A key factor is believed to be the sector's age profile, where the majority of workers are between 25 and 39, the age at which women have childcare responsibilities.

The commission's inquiry found women earned an average of £2,875 in annual performance pay compared to £14,554 for men.

Meanwhile, there was a gap of 39% in annual basic pay between women and men – rising to 47% for total earnings taking into account performance-related pay, bonuses and overtime. Fewer than half the companies questioned were making any efforts to address the pay gap, and fewer than one quarter (23%) had undertaken an equal pay audit.

Previous figures have shown that, for the financial sector overall, women working fulltime earned 55% less annual gross salary than men. This compares to a pay gap of 28% for the economy in general. ...

Just move to chinastan already, gm. You've become so sucky I can barely keep myself from going down to your World Headquarters© at the Renaissance Center (Yeah, like you've done so much for Detroit's Renaissance, you bastards!) and screaming, "I hate you, gm! I hate your polluting ways, your overpaid executives, your fucking your workers by sending so many jobs to chinastan among soooo many other ways, your ugly cars that you keep making while you dump the cool ones, your lack of vision, your ignorance, and your stupidity!"

/rant

A secretive Russian billionaire has abandoned his libel case against the Economist magazine after it suggested he had benefited from his close relationship with Vladimir Putin, Russia's former president turned prime minister.

Gennady Timchenko said recently that while he and Putin knew one another, their relationship was one of casual acquaintanceship rather than friendship.

He agreed a settlement yesterday with the UK magazine in the high court in London.

Timchenko had hired the high-profile libel firm Schillings. Speaking in March, his aides said the oil tycoon was determined to go ahead with the case and had "nothing to hide".

According to the Russian newspaper Vedomosti, Timchenko's decision to sue in Britain could have forced him to reveal potentially embarrassing details of his private bank accounts and the ownership and asset structure of his Swiss-based oil trading company, Gunvor. ...

July 8, 2009
Bankers to face draconian pay veto
Suzy Jagger, Politics and Business Correspondent

City regulators will be able to veto the pay deals of bank executives under new proposals set out today by Alistair Darling.

Addressing MPs in the House of Commons, the Chancellor said that the Financial Services Authority (FSA) will monitor the structure of bankers' remuneration packages and produce a report on them every year.

Should the City watchdog find that an executive's pay encourages the financier to take risky investment decisions, it can order the lender to put aside more capital in reserve. Any such requirement would reduce a bank's profitability and, the Treasury believes, act as an effective veto.

"We need a change of culture in the banks and their boardrooms, with pay practices that are focused on long-term stability and not short-term profit," Mr Darling said. ...

July 6, 2009
FSA to triple fines and dock pay for market abuse
Patrick Hosking, Financial Editor

Companies guilty of the biggest financial offences could be fined as much as £50 million after the Financial Services Authority (FSA) today announced a step change in the size of penalties it wants to mete out.

The City regulator said some fines could treble in size as it seeks to address concerns that penalties thus far have not proved much of a deterrent in improving company behaviour.

It also announced proposals for a minimum fine of £100,000 for individuals found guilty of market abuse offences such as insider dealing. Up to 40 per cent of an individual's salary and benefits could be taken, it said.

Fines would amount to 20 per cent of turnover from the relevant product or business area over the period of the offences, the FSA said. ...

Where can I "earn" a million squid in just over three months?! Sign me up!

May 30, 2009
Quick-fix culture has to end
Patrick Hosking: On the money

Who could not be just a little jaundiced with capitalism these days? It is not only in the Palace of Westminster that leaders have been exposed as self-serving and unaccountable.

The disclosure this week that BT’s chief executive is being paid a “performance-related” (no sniggering please) bonus of £686,000, despite missing all his financial targets, supports the view that some of our rhino-skinned corporate bosses have no sense of duty to their shareholders, no sense of moderation and no sense of irony.

It’s not so much the rewards they pay themselves that rankle. It’s their single-minded determination to keep doing so while failing to produce any return for shareholders – not just for years but sometimes for decades. To repeat a point laboured perhaps too much in this column, capitalism just isn’t working – as tomorrow’s pensioners will discover.

Real long-term returns in excess of risk-free capital are difficult to achieve. In a world where chief executives on average last in their jobs for less than four years, the pressure to opt for measures producing a short-term spurt in the share price is irresistible. The temptation to indulge in deals or quick fixes is overwhelming. It’s easier and more exciting than the dull, quotidian grind of trying to provide customers with a better or cheaper product or service – the only way to create lasting wealth for shareholders. ...

Uzbekistan forced to stop child labour

Retailers refuse to buy cotton picked by children in inhumane conditions. Nick Mathiason reports
Sunday 24 May 2009

It is considered one of the most exploitative industries in the world. In Uzbekistan, gangs forcibly remove hundreds of thousands of children from schools, order them to pick cotton in the searing heat and live in squalid conditions on pitiful wages.

Blended by manufacturers thousands of miles away, Uzbeki state-controlled cotton is sold to the world's biggest retailers, making the repressive regime the third biggest exporter of "white gold" and earning the government $1bn.

But, in what has been described as a major breakthrough, a decision by some of the world's biggest clothing businesses has forced the Uzbeki government in recent weeks to sign International Labour Organisation conventions that commit the country to stop using child labour in its state-sponsored industry.

Retailers that have pulled out of the central Asian state include Tesco, Asda Wal-Mart, Marks & Spencer and Gap.

Steve Trent, director of the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), said: "This is a major step forward. Virtually nothing persuaded the government to change course. But the actions of retailers and campaigners are definitely now having an impact. But the key question that remains is whether the Uzbeki government will implement the conventions. They need to allow independent monitoring and work with civil society, which are basic requirements of the conventions they have signed up to and ratified. They are not doing this so the jury is out." ...

Angry shareholders ambush the top pay bandwagon

The eruption of anger at Shell's annual meeting will also hit directors of other companies - and the institutional investors who stand accused of complacency and collusion, writes Richard Wachman
Sunday 24 May 2009

In the City, a whiff of grapeshot hangs in the air after the unleashing of one of the biggest waves of shareholder anger in recent times. The target companies include big names such as Shell, BP, RBS, Xstrata, Next, Amec and Provident Financial.

All must bear the shame of knowing that their remuneration reports have been opposed by a majority or a sizeable minority of shareholders. Once again, bosses are accused of having their snouts in the trough during a period when capitalism was coming off the rails.

The onslaught comes after politicians, regulators and public opinion identified bonuses and sky-high pay packets as one of the prime causes of the slump. By linking pay with share price performance, managers were encouraged to make foolish short-term decisions that ultimately brought the edifice of capitalism crashing down. Now there is a backlash as shareholders target excessive pay and bonuses sometimes awarded even if a company does badly or misses its performance targets.

Few would disagree that executive pay has been spiralling out of control. According to remuneration specialists, the average FTSE 100 chief executive has seen his rewards jump 125% in the past 10 years, while the heads of smaller quoted firms have seen their pay increase by 80% in the same time span. ...

April 25, 2009
Get thee to a miserable Swiss tax haven
Millions are losing their jobs and others having their homes repossessed. How dare the rich whine at paying more tax
Janice Turner

In Hong Kong last weekend I'd expected to find excitement and verve, some wild fusion of ancient East and Western ultra-new. Instead there was only money. No culture, no community, no green space or any space at all. Just swarming, ill-tempered, listless crowds shopping, forever shopping. As if someone had turned the Bluewater centre into a city state. Across the bay in Kowloon were only air-sucked temples to Versace ringed by men in doorways whispering “fake watch, fake bag”.

Fake city. Let the rich, so stung and outraged by this week's Budget, flee there. They'll find so much to love. Up in your £500K one-bedroom “unit” on the 43rd floor you can rise at dawn, rush to your work-pod in the sky, pile up the cash and have no human distraction beyond how to spend it. All those “international luxury brands” tax-free! And income tax at 16 per cent - if you're mug enough to pay any at all.

Hong Kong was like those other tax havens I've visited: soulless, dead-eyed. Citizenship of Andorra must be like living forever in Heathrow Terminal 3, with its filthy food, rows of strange duty-free stores where Russians pick over bling, booze, Bensons and - bizarrely - great cut-price hunks of yellow cheese. Or empty-hearted Monte Carlo, with eerie candy-coloured skyscraper canyons blocking out every inch of the lovely bay and the sunlight with it, silent but for the growl of Ferrari sports cars, where every tax-exile pensioner has the hunted, dodgy mien of a cornered war criminal. ...

Go get 'em, Hopey!

Blimey! Bless yr heart, Mr Eric Massa!

That is sooooooo bay-ond tacky, Sugarplum. Y'all just cut that out naow, ya heah?

MSU to limit student credit solicitations
Colleges under fire for selling contact data to Bank of America; U-M to continue practice.
Marisa Schultz
The Detroit News
February 9, 2009

Amid growing national scrutiny over credit card companies aggressively marketing to financially naive college students, Michigan State University will no longer provide student information to Bank of America to solicit undergraduates for credit cards.

Under a seven-year contract worth at least $8.4 million, MSU gives the bank contact lists of students, alumni, ticket holders and employees as well as permission to use university logos and set up promotional displays on campus. In return, the university makes $1 for each new account and 0.5 percent of all retail purchases, among other payments.

"You get bombarded as soon as you enroll as a freshman -- credit card offers, loan consolidation," said MSU senior Whitney Gronski, 21. "You are trying to establish credit, but maybe opening a credit card and maxing it out is not the best solution to that. It seems ridiculous to target us." ...

Marcy Kaptur of Ohio is the longest-serving Democratic congresswoman in U.S. history. Her district, stretching along the shore of Lake Erie from west of Cleveland to Toledo, faces an epidemic of home foreclosures and 11.5 percent unemployment. That heartland region, the Rust Belt, had its heart torn out by the North American Free Trade Agreement, with shuttered factories and struggling family farms. Kaptur led the fight in Congress against NAFTA. Now, she is recommending a radical foreclosure solution from the floor of the U.S. Congress:

“So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes. Don’t you leave.”

She criticizes the bailout’s failure to protect homeowners facing foreclosure. Her advice to “squat” cleverly exploits a legal technicality within the subprime mortgage crisis. These mortgages were made, then bundled into securities and sold and resold repeatedly, by the very Wall Street banks that are now benefiting from TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program). The banks foreclosing on families very often can’t locate the actual loan note that binds the homeowner to the bad loan. “Produce the note,” Kaptur recommends those facing foreclosure demands of the banks.

“[P]ossession is nine-tenths of the law,” Rep. Kaptur told me. “Therefore, stay in your property. Get proper legal representation ... [if] Wall Street cannot produce the deed nor the mortgage audit trail ... you should stay in your home. It is your castle. It’s more than a piece of property. ... Most people don’t even think about getting representation, because they get a piece of paper from the bank, and they go, ‘Oh, it’s the bank,’ and they become fearful, rather than saying: ‘This is contract law. The mortgage is a contract. I am one party. There is another party. What are my legal rights under the law as a property owner?’

“If you look at the bad paper, if you look at where there’s trouble, 95 to 98 percent of the paper really has moved to five institutions: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wachovia, Citigroup and HSBC. They have this country held by the neck.”

Kaptur recommends calling the local Legal Aid Society, bar association or (888) 995-HOPE for legal assistance.

The onerous duty of physically evicting people and dragging their possessions to the curb typically falls on the local sheriff. Kaptur conditions her squatting advice, saying, “If it’s a sheriff’s eviction, if it’s reached that point, that [staying in the home] is almost impossible.” Unless the sheriff refuses to carry out the eviction, as Sheriff Warren Evans of Wayne County, Mich., has decided to do. Wayne County, [which includes] Detroit, has had more than 46,000 foreclosures in the past two years. ...

Charge the utility company with murder.

Levin livid over reported Citigroup jet purchase
By TODD SPANGLER
FREE PRESS WASHINGTON STAFF
January 26, 2009

WASHINGTON – Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan is beside himself over a report that Citigroup is buying a $50-million corporate jet considering that when the heads of Detroit’s automakers came to Washington in private jets to ask for aid they got blasted for it.

The federal government, after all, is into Citigroup for $50 billion under its package to rescue financial firms. Eventually — thanks to President George W. Bush — General Motors and Chrysler got a line on $17.4 billion, but only after agreeing to give up their corporate jets. (Chrysler didn’t own one, but now doesn’t even charter or lease one.)

No such requirement for Citigroup — or the other financial institutions getting money under the $700 billion Wall Street rescue plan — exists.

The New York Post, citing “a source familiar with the deal,” reported today that Citigroup executives authorized the purchase of a new Dassault Falcon 7X, which, according to the Dassault’s sales literature, seats 12 in leather seats and sofas and includes a custom entertainment center.

Citigroup decline to speak to the Post and didn’t immediately return a call to the Free Press today either. ...

Offshore tax shelters much too inviting
American companies, especially those receiving federal aid, should be expected to pay a fair share of U.S. taxes
BY RON DZWONKOWSKI
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
January 25, 2009

Pretty well buried under all the hoopla of President Barack Obama's inaugural was a report last week that could help the U.S. Treasury tame its way-out-of-whack balance sheet. The Government Accountability Office report looked at U.S. companies that stash money in foreign countries to shelter them from U.S. taxes.

U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who requested the report along with fellow Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, estimates that such companies are avoiding $100 billion in U.S. taxes. And many of them -- including Bank of America and Citigroup -- have lately been on the receiving end of billions of dollars in federal bailout money or fat federal government contracts.

Now, $100 billion may seem like pocket change when you're running a trillion-dollar budget deficit and carrying a $10.4-trillion national debt. But you know, every billion counts when you are trying to spend your way out of a recession. Unfortunately, this offshoring of taxable assets is entirely legal, which Levin and Dorgan hope to do something about.

Common sense, not to mention common decency, would seem to dictate that if you take tax dollars you also pay your full share of tax bills.

According to the report by the GAO, which is the congressional watchdog agency on government programs and spending, 83 of the 100 largest publicly traded U.S. corporations and 63 of the 100 largest publicly traded companies with government contracts have subsidiaries in places that are regarded as tax havens. There is no official definition of such places, but they have common characteristics, such as no or low local taxes, political stability, laws that keep financial dealings secret, and a tendency to promote themselves in the right circles as great places to keep your money out of reach of Uncle Sam or other tax-grabbing governments. ...

Lehman's Fuld sold Florida mansion to wife for $100
Mon Jan 26, 2009

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fallen Lehman Brothers Chief Executive Richard Fuld sold his $13.3 million (£9.8 million) mansion to his wife for just $100 (£73) last November, according to Florida real estate records.

The 62-year old executive, who could face civil lawsuits after overseeing the storied investment bank's collapse into Chapter 11 proceedings last September, transferred ownership of the 3.3 acres seaside home to Kathleen Fuld on November 10, records show.

The couple had jointly bought the home for $13.75 million in March 2004, as first reported by Cityfile.com.

Fuld has been blamed for Lehman's collapse on September 15 after it was weighed down by bad assets leading to the largest-ever U.S. bankruptcy when it was unable to find a buyer to come to its rescue.

He was widely criticized for not acting quickly enough to save the 158-year old bank. ...

January 25, 2009
MPs probe bank auditors
Iain Dey

THE government was under pressure last night to investigate the role of auditors in the collapse of British banks, after a Sunday Times investigation into fees paid to the “big four” accountancy firms.

The four banks that are expected to sign up to the government’s controversial toxic-asset-protection scheme have paid almost £650m in fees to their auditors since 2000.

Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS, Lloyds TSB and Barclays have paid their auditors almost as much for “other services” as they have for their official role in checking the books.

The findings resurrected cross-party calls for a probe into the relationships between auditors and their clients. ...

January 25, 2009
Madoff’s UK investors set to sue
Robert Watts

UK investors are planning legal action against HSBC, UBS, Barclays and Nicola Horlick’s Bramdean fund over advice received before the Bernard Madoff $50 billion (£36.8 billion) investment scandal.

One of the British victims had £36m invested in Madoff funds, according to a lawyer acting for the claimants.

Ten wealthy investors have approached the law firm Edwin Coe with a view to suing bankers, fund managers and other intermediaries for the full value of the money they have lost in the Madoff collapse.

The 10 claimants are said to include some of Britain’s richest people, with combined losses of about £87m. While their identities remain shrouded in secrecy, it is understood that most are entrepreneurs who amassed their fortunes by selling their businesses. ...

... consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he was doing.

In his devastatingly persuasive 17-page letter to the S.E.C., Mr. Markopolos saw two possible scenarios. In the “Unlikely” scenario: Mr. Madoff, who acted as a broker as well as an investor, was “front-running” his brokerage customers. A customer might submit an order to Madoff Securities to buy shares in I.B.M. at a certain price, for example, and Madoff Securities instantly would buy I.B.M. shares for its own portfolio ahead of the customer order. If I.B.M.’s shares rose, Mr. Madoff kept them; if they fell he fobbed them off onto the poor customer.

In the “Highly Likely” scenario, wrote Mr. Markopolos, “Madoff Securities is the world’s largest Ponzi Scheme.” Which, as we now know, it was.

Harry Markopolos sent his report to the S.E.C. on Nov. 7, 2005 — more than three years before Mr. Madoff was finally exposed — but he had been trying to explain the fraud to them since 1999. He had no direct financial interest in exposing Mr. Madoff — he wasn’t an unhappy investor or a disgruntled employee. There was no way to short shares in Madoff Securities, and so Mr. Markopolos could not have made money directly from Mr. Madoff’s failure. To judge from his letter, Harry Markopolos anticipated mainly downsides for himself: he declined to put his name on it for fear of what might happen to him and his family if anyone found out he had written it. And yet the S.E.C.’s cursory investigation of Mr. Madoff pronounced him free of fraud. ...

This is what Home Depot's founder Bernie Marcus said on a conference call yesterday:

"If a retailer has not gotten involved with this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to Norm Coleman and these other guys," Mr. Marcus said, apparently referring to Republican senators facing tough re-election fights, then those retailers "should be shot; should be thrown out of their goddamn jobs." ...




You just gotta love Yankistani capitalism.
Oh, wait. No you don't.
Anyone who's not at least a millionaire shouldn't vote rethuglican: they're the only folks that party likes, after all.

Do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it

Washington Mutual is largest U.S. bank failure
Thu Sep 25, 2008
By Elinor Comlay and Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Washington Mutual Inc was closed by the U.S. government in by far the largest failure of a U.S. bank, and its banking assets were sold to JPMorgan Chase & Co for $1.9 billion.

Thursday's seizure and sale is the latest historic step in U.S. government attempts to clean up a banking industry littered with toxic mortgage debt. Negotiations over a $700 billion bailout of the entire financial system stalled in Washington on Thursday.

Washington Mutual, the largest U.S. savings and loan, has been one of the lenders hardest hit by the nation's housing bust and credit crisis, and had already suffered from soaring mortgage losses. ...

Nutshell version: "Nothing we decide to do can be changed or even challenged by You The People; so sit down, shut up, pay your taxes, and be sure your family breeds great-grandchildren who will pay the debts we incur."

It Isn't The Economy, Stupid!
Sep 22, 2008
Rajinder Puri

Wall Street is in a shambles. The world is quaking. So what happened to the experts? They flunked. Never trust experts.

Fortunately this scribe is not an expert. He is ignorant about the economy. That gives him clear advantage over the experts. He is forced to rely on common sense. Billions worldwide do the same. Some experts are chortling over capitalism resorting to nationalization for damage control. So will this bring back the Soviet system? No. Does it spell the doom of the US system? Yes. Why did the first fail? Why is the second failing?

For the same reason. The success of a politico-economic system depends on how closely it empathizes with human nature. The Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat collapsed because of human selfishness. Everybody's property became nobody's responsibility. There arose a new class of unaccountable despots. Socialist promises degenerated into corruption-ridden state capitalism.

American free enterprise failed because of human greed. It degenerated into crony corporate capitalism. A few held economic power over many. Greed drove these few to subvert politics and media while relentlessly seeking profit and power. That is why American economy is in crisis.

If human frailties have caused the failure of systems is there no remedy because human nature is unchanging? There is a remedy. Failures cannot be eliminated. They can be contained. That can be done through democracy. The will of the many is a great leveler. It compels restraint on the few. But doesn't America have democracy? It has only political, not economic, democracy. To create economic democracy that might reclaim genuine free enterprise corporate management must be made accountable to labour and to the public in a real sense in each business unit. How can that be done?

Simple. In addition to the public sector and the private sector create a workers' sector. This sector need not replace either of the existing sectors. Let it compete and prove its superiority. In the workers' sector all employees would have ownership, profit sharing and management participation at different levels of operation. Provident fund of workers in failing units can be converted to controlling equity share. Workers would have a say on the choice of their management, raise loans, and have the freedom to collaborate with MNCs. The conduct of business would be transparent and accountable. ...

August 10, 2008
Why Microsoft and Intel tried to kill the XO $100 laptop
Nicholas Negroponte had a vision: to build a $100 laptop and give away millions to educate the world's poorest children. And then the fat-cat multinationals got scared and broke it...

..."I had wildly underestimated," says Negroponte, "the degree to which commercial entities will go to disrupt a humanitarian project." ...




The Powers What Am have never wanted the masses to be educated, especially women and children.

Nuff said, capitalist bitches.*




*Ed. Note: "Bitches" in this context refers to members of all sexes; Ithankyou.

Doubtless their legal team will reincarnate as cockroaches - again.

$2K a month average for Manhattan studio
By Verena Dobnik, Associated Press Writer
July 13, 2007

NEW YORK -- If you're looking for a Manhattan apartment, be prepared to shell out about $2,000 a month -- unless, of course, you'd like a bedroom to go with it.

Studio apartments in New York's most expensive borough went for an average of $1,995 a month last year, according to an analysis released Friday by Citi Habitats, a Manhattan rental brokerage firm. That's up from $1,659 in 2002.

The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment shot up to $2,737, compared to $2,227 in 2002, and two-bedroom apartments climbed to $3,893, from $3,198 in 2002. Three-bedroom apartments saw the largest percentage increase: more than 36 percent, from $4,059 in 2002 to $5,534 last year. ...




Obscene, absolutely obscene.

Shell set to post record profits
Fri Jan 26, 2007
By Tom Bergin

LONDON (Reuters) - Royal Dutch Shell is expected to post a 3 percent drop in its underlying fourth-quarter net profit on Thursday, due to easing oil prices and rising costs, but the oil major is still predicted to post a record-breaking $25 billion (13 billion pounds) full-year profit. ...




Every oil company is a muu altsaasan yanhan.

Enron's Skilling gets 24 years
Mon Oct 23, 2006
By Bruce Nichols

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Former Enron Corp. chief executive Jeff Skilling was sentenced on Monday to more than 24 years in prison for his part in the financial scandal that brought down the company and came to symbolize a dark era in U.S. business.

U.S. District Judge Sim Lake said Skilling, 52, would remain free with an electronic monitor on his ankle until he is ordered to report to prison.

Skilling, who has said he would appeal his conviction on 19 criminal counts, also was ordered to pay $45 million in restitution to Enron investors.

In May, Skilling and Enron founder Ken Lay were found guilty of defrauding investors by using off-the-books deals to hide debt and inflate profits. ...

FTP: Drugs companies 'inventing diseases to boost their profits'
By Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent
PHARMACEUTICAL companies are systematically creating diseases in order to sell more of their products, turning healthy people into patients and placing many at risk of harm, a special edition of a leading medical journal claims today.

The practice of "diseasemongering" by the drug industry is promoting non-existent illnesses or exaggerating minor ones for the sake of profits, according to a set of essays published by the open-access journal Public Library of Science Medicine.

The special issue, edited by David Henry, of Newcastle University in Australia, and Ray Moynihan, an Australian journalist, reports that conditions such as female sexual dysfunction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and "restless legs syndrome" have been promoted by companies hoping to sell more of their drugs.

Other minor problems that are a normal part of life, such as symptoms of the menopause, are also becoming increasingly "medicalised", while risk factors such as high cholesterol levels or osteoporosis are being presented as diseases in their own right, according to the editors.

"Disease-mongering turns healthy people into patients, wastes precious resources and causes iatrogenic (medically induced) harm," they say. "Like the marketing strategies that drive it, disease-mongering poses a global challenge to those interested in public health, demanding in turn a global response." ....



Many thanks to dear CaliVagabond

FTP: Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest publicly traded oil company, reported a record quarterly profit of $10.7 billion yesterday, capping the most profitable year in U.S. corporate history.
The results pushed up Exxon's profit for the year to a record $36.13 billion -- bigger than the economies of 125 of the 184 countries ranked by the World Bank.
The results exceeded Wall Street expectations, and Exxon shares rose, but some lawmakers expressed outrage at the industry's latest profit surge, renewing calls for a windfall profits tax and increased investment in alternative fuels.
Exxon's profit for the year was the largest annual reported net income in U.S. history, said Howard Silverblatt, a senior index analyst for Standard & Poor's. He said the previous high was Exxon's $25.3 billion profit in 2004.
"What do you expect when you combine record oil and gas prices and strong operations everywhere else?" asked analyst Fadel Gheit at Oppenheimer & Co. "Unless prices collapse, earnings in 2006 will make 2005 look like a cakewalk."


This muu altsaasan yanhan of a company is making more money than many entire countries. shrub won't tax 'em either.