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– That’s a tongue-in-cheek a title as I’ve seen in awhile.  

– When you read this, reflect that hundreds of people have spent time in jail recently for demonstrating against inequality and financial malfesance and yet, in spite of the massive global melt-down triggered by Wall Street’s greed in 2008, not one banker or Wall Street type has yet served jail time.

– dennis

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The Wall Street Journal reports today that between 2007 and 2010 a group of six big banks conspired to artificially manipulate a key interest rate, the yen London interbank offered rate, also known as yen Libor:

The yen Libor rate is set daily by a 16-bank panel, organized by the British Bankers’ Association. Around 11 a.m. London time every day, each bank submits estimates to the BBA of what rates it would pay to borrow from other banks for different time periods. The top four and bottom four quotes are then discarded, and Libor is calculated using an average of the middle eight quotes.

The Canadian watchdog [investigating the case] said lawyers acting for the cooperating bank had told it that traders at six banks on the yen Libor panel—Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings PLC, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC and UBS—”entered into agreements to submit artificially high or artificially low” quotes, according to the court documents.

The traders used emails and instant messages to tell each other whether they wanted “to see a higher or lower yen Libor [rate] to aid their trading position(s),” according to a court filing. Each of the traders would then “communicate internally” with the person at their bank who was responsible for submitting the Libor quote, before letting each other know if this attempt to influence the quote had worked.

Just a few rogue traders, I’m sure. Nothing to be concerned about. Move along now.

– To the original story… ➡

– I have to say that George Monbiot is one of my favorites out there on the Internet.  He always seems to be able to incisively cut to the heart of the matter on whtever subject he tackles.   The piece below will not disappoint.

– dennis

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Now it’s a straight fight with the billionaires and corporations.

Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the United States, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers(1).

It appears to have followed the script written by a consultant to the Republican party, Frank Luntz, in 2002. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”(2)

Luntz’s technique was pioneered by the tobacco companies and the creationists: teach the controversy. In other words, insist that the question of whether cigarettes cause lung cancer, natural selection drives evolution or burning fossil fuels causes climate change is still wide open, and that both sides of the “controversy” should be taught in schools and thrashed out in the media.

The leaked documents appear to show that, courtesy of its multi-millionaire donors, the institute has commissioned a global warming curriculum for schools, which teaches that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy” and “whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial.”(3).

The institute has claimed that it is “a genuinely independent source of research and commentary”(4) and that “we do not take positions in order to appease or avoid losing support from individual donors”(5). But the documents, if authentic, reveal that its attacks on climate science have been largely funded by a single anonymous donor and that “we are extinguishing primarily global warming projects in pace with declines in his giving”(6).

The climate change deniers it funds have made similar claims to independence. For example, last year Fred Singer told a French website, “of course I am not funded by the fossil fuel lobbies. It’s a completely absurd invention.”(7) The documents suggest that the institute, funded among others by the coal company Murray Energy, the oil company Marathon and the former Exxon lobbyist Randy Randol, has been paying him $5000 a month(8).

Robert Carter has claimed that he “receives no research funding from special interest organisations”(9). But the documents suggest that Heartland pays him $1,667 a month(10). Among the speakers at its conferences were two writers for the Telegraph (Christopher Booker and James Delingpole(11,12)). The Telegraph group should now reveal whether and how much they were paid by the Heartland Institute.

It seems to be as clear an illustration as we have yet seen of the gulf between what such groups call themselves and what they really are. Invariably, organisations arguing for regulations to be removed, top taxes to be reduced and other such billionaire-friendly policies call themselves freemarket or conservative thinktanks. But according to David Frum, formerly a fellow at one such group – the American Enterprise Institute – they “increasingly function as public-relations agencies”(13). The message they send to their employees, he says, is “we don’t pay you to think, we pay you to repeat.”

– To more of this most excellent article… ➡