UK fraud agency charges three ex-Barclays bankers over Libor

Source: Reuters

Britain's fraud agency started criminal proceedings against three former bankers at Britain's Barclays Plc on Monday for the alleged manipulation of Libor interest rates.

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said it has charged Peter Charles Johnson, Jonathan James Mathew and Stylianos Contogoulas with conspiracy to defraud between June 2005 and August 2007.

The SFO last year brought charges against three former employees of Swiss bank UBS and UK brokerage RP Martin, the first people to face trial in connection with a global investigation into a rate-rigging scandal that sparked intense criticism of standards across the industry.

Barclays paid $450 million in July 2012 to settle allegations from U.S. and UK regulators that it had manipulated Libor interest rates, prompting the resignations of its chairman and chief executive and a barrage of criticism about standards and culture.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/17/us-barclays-libor-charges-idUSBREA1G0NA20140217

The green of money.

Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find money cannot be eaten.
~ Cree Prophecy

Chief Seattle, chief of the Suquamis

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.
If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?
Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.
The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man --- all belong to the same family.
So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great Chief sends word he will reserve us a place so that we can live comfortably to ourselves. He will be our father and we will be his children.
So, we will consider your offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you the land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.
The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.
We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father's grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father's grave, and his children's birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.
I do not know. Our ways are different than your ways. The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring or the rustle of the insect's wings. The clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around the pond at night? I am a red man and do not understand. The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of a pond and the smell of the wind itself, cleaned by a midday rain, or scented with pinon pine.
The air is precious to the red man for all things share the same breath, the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days he is numb to the stench. But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.
The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow's flowers.
So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to accept, I will make one condition - the white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers.
I am a savage and do not understand any other way. I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be made more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive.
What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of the spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.
You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children that we have taught our children that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.
This we know; the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.
Even the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see. One thing we know which the white man may one day discover; our God is the same God.
You may think now that you own Him as you wish to own our land; but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for the red man and the white. The earth is precious to Him, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator. The whites too shall pass; perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.
But in your perishing you will shine brightly fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man.
That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires.
Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone.
The end of living and the beginning of survival.

All things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man... the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he do

BBC Documentary - Jesus was a Buddhist monk

Video - BBC

BBC Documentary - Jesus was a Buddhist monk

Video - BBC

The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks' Most Devious Scam

Banks are no longer just financing heavy industry. They are actually buying it up and inventing bigger, bolder and scarier scams than ever.


Call it the loophole that destroyed the world. It's 1999, the tail end of the Clinton years. While the rest of America obsesses over Monica Lewinsky, Columbine and Mark McGwire's biceps, Congress is feverishly crafting what could yet prove to be one of the most transformative laws in the history of our economy – a law that would make possible a broader concentration of financial and industrial power than we've seen in more than a century.

But the crazy thing is, nobody at the time quite knew it. Most observers on the Hill thought the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 – also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – was just the latest and boldest in a long line of deregulatory handouts to Wall Street that had begun in the Reagan years.

Wall Street had spent much of that era arguing that America's banks needed to become bigger and badder, in order to compete globally with the German and Japanese-style financial giants, which were supposedly about to swallow up all the world's banking business. So through legislative lackeys like red-faced Republican deregulatory enthusiast Phil Gramm, bank lobbyists were pushing a new law designed to wipe out 60-plus years of bedrock financial regulation. The key was repealing – or "modifying," as bill proponents put it – the famed Glass-Steagall Act separating bankers and brokers, which had been passed in 1933 to prevent conflicts of interest within the finance sector that had led to the Great Depression. Now, commercial banks would be allowed to merge with investment banks and insurance companies, creating financial megafirms potentially far more powerful than had ever existed in America.

All of this was big enough news in itself. But it would take half a generation – till now, basically – to understand the most explosive part of the bill, which additionally legalized new forms of monopoly, allowing banks to merge with heavy industry. A tiny provision in the bill also permitted commercial banks to delve into any activity that is "complementary to a financial activity and does not pose a substantial risk to the safety or soundness of depository institutions or the financial system generally."

< - >

Today, banks like Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs own oil tankers, run airports and control huge quantities of coal, natural gas, heating oil, electric power and precious metals. They likewise can now be found exerting direct control over the supply of a whole galaxy of raw materials crucial to world industry and to society in general, including everything from food products to metals like zinc, copper, tin, nickel and, most infamously thanks to a recent high-profile scandal, aluminum. And they're doing it not just here but abroad as well: In Denmark, thousands took to the streets in protest in recent weeks, vampire-squid banners in hand, when news came out that Goldman Sachs was about to buy a 19 percent stake in Dong Energy, a national electric provider. The furor inspired mass resignations of ministers from the government's ruling coalition, as the Danish public wondered how an American investment bank could possibly hold so much influence over the state energy grid.


Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-vampire-squid-strikes-again-the-mega-banks-most-devious-scam-yet-20140212#ixzz2tAfGg9H0



====

So if the price of oil, propane or gold goes up or down it's likely a maniipulation.

ROLLING STONE : ROTHSCHILD CORRUPTION GOES MAINSTREAM

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology.

You were right.

The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

MORE
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425#ixzz2t5OBMJ2H

BASEL III

Basel III

A comprehensive set of reform measures designed to improve the regulation, supervision and risk management within the banking sector.

Basel III (or the Third Basel Accord) is a global, voluntary regulatory standard on bank capital adequacy, stress testing and market liquidity risk. It was agreed upon by the members of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in 2010–11, and was scheduled to be introduced from 2013 until 2015; however, changes from April 1, 2013 extended implementation until March 31, 2018.[1][2] The third installment of the Basel Accords (see Basel I, Basel II) was developed in response to the deficiencies in financial regulation revealed by the late-2000s financial crisis. Basel III was supposed to strengthen bank capital requirements by increasing bank liquidity and decreasing bank leverage.

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Think-tanks such as the World Pensions Council (WPC) have argued that Basel III merely builds on and further expands the existing Basel II regulatory base, without questioning fundamentally its core tenets, notably the ever-growing reliance on standardized assessments of “credit risk” marketed by two private sector agencies- Moody’s and S&P, thus using public policy to strengthen anti-competitive duopolistic practices.[26] [27]
Basel III has also been criticized by banks, organized in the Institute of International Finance in Washington D.C. (an international association of global banks) with the argument that it would hurt them and economic growth. OECD estimated that implementation of Basel III would decrease annual GDP growth by 0.05–0.15%,[24][28] blaming regulation as responsible for slow recovery from the late-2000s financial crisis.[29][30] Basel III was also criticized as negatively affecting the stability of the financial system by increasing incentives of banks to game the regulatory framework.[31] The American Banker's Association,[32] community banks organized in the Independent Community Bankers of America, and some of the most liberal Democrats in the U.S. Congress, including the entire Maryland congressional delegation with Democratic Sens. Cardin and Mikulski and Reps. Van Hollen and Cummings, voiced opposition to Basel III in their comments submitted to FDIC,[33] saying that the Basel III proposals, if implemented, would hurt small banks by increasing "their capital holdings dramatically on mortgage and small business loans."[34] Others have argued that Basel III did not go far enough to regulate banks as inadequate regulation was a cause of the financial crisis.[35] On January 6, 2013 the global banking sector won a significant easing of Basel III Rules, when the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision extended not only the implementation schedule to 2019, but broadened the definition of liquid assets.[36]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_III


BASEL III IS HERE (MotherJones)

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/09/basel-iii-here

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/09/more-basel-iii

Hooray! Basel III is Working Pretty Well So Far
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/09/basel-iii-working-financial-regulation-leverage

Better Markets sues Justice Department over JPMorgan deal

Source: Reuters

The non-profit group Better Markets filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department on Monday to block what it called an "unlawful" $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase & Co over bad mortgage loans sold to investors before the financial crisis.

The record settlement, which was reached in November, does not release JPMorgan from potential criminal liability over the mortgages it packaged into bonds. But Better Markets said it was still appalled that the settlement gave the bank "blanket civil immunity" for its conduct without sufficient judicial review.

"The Wall Street bailouts were bad enough, but now taxpayers are being forced to accept a secretive backroom deal that may well have been another sweetheart deal," said Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of Better Markets.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/10/us-lawsuit-justice-jpmorgan-idUSBREA191ET20140210

NSA WHISTLEBLOWER SPEAKS OUT

Spotted Dick

I thought I would share my latest adventure in English puddings. I'm still gathering the things I'll need to try my hand at
a steamed pudding, but in looking over various pudding recipes I 'spotted' one with an unusual and provocative name called
Spotted Dick. Turns out it's a very common one and it sounded much like a fruitcake, at least in flavor and ingredients used.
The 'spotted' part of the name has to do with the spots of fruit in the pudding and the 'dick' part is thought to be one of those
distorted words for 'pudding' that stuck several hundred years ago.
Turns out a foodie friend had seen this product sold in a can and thought it might be a good idea to try it before settling on this
pudding for my first recipe. So I went on Amazon and ordered it - it comes in a can (made by Heinz). I had also read that it was often served with a simple custard and saw another canned product called Devon Custard by Ambrosia that is also sold in England. So I purchased that too. The items arrived yesterday and the instructions for the spotted dick provide a choice of either boiling the can for 35 minutes or removing it from the can and microwaving it. I chose to boil the can in keeping with the process of steamed puddings. I put a couple of pints of water in a big pot and just placed the unopened can of spotted dick in there.
When it was time I carefully removed and then opened the can and saw what looked like a very moist, dark and spongy cake (sized for one or two people).
I placed it on a serving dish and immediately poured some of the custard over the top. The custard tasted something like the Gerber's baby food custard if you've ever had a taste of that. It's not terribly thick or sweet and seems to be a pleasant enough topping for cakes. Anyway, I could barely wait to get my fork in it. For pudding and custard out of a can it was surprisingly homemade tasting (or at least it seems so - I'll have to try the real homemade version before I can be certain of that).
It was much lighter and spongier in texture than the dense fruit cakes most of us are used to, but the flavor wasn't all that different.
It was much sweeter than I normally like my desserts. So much so it almost made my teeth ache. If I were to serve this as a quick dessert again I would not combine it with custard but would use something to counter or cut the sweetness such as a cream cheese, or yogurt or something with a sour non-sweet taste. Anyway, that's my first adventure with English pudding! I think I will find another recipe for my first attempts at steamed pudding...something less sweet and not quite as rich.

Here's a picture of it I found on Wiki - the canned version looked just like this: