FWIW
Enviroment Pollution in USA on Thursday, 25 August, 2011 at 15:36 (03:36 PM) UTC.
Description
Oil is again bubbling to the surface of the Gulf of Mexico near the epicenter of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. Reporters from Mobile, Alabama’s Press-Register loaded into a boat Tuesday to inspect the site. Equipped with cameras, the reporters discovered “hundreds of small, circular patches of oily sheen” within a mile of the well. “Floating in a boat near the well site, Press-Register reporters watched blobs of oil rise to the surface and bloom into iridescent yellow patches,” the paper reported Wednesday. “Those patches quickly expanded into rainbow sheens 4 to 5 feet across.” According to the Press-Register, “Each expanding bloom released a pronounced and pungent petroleum smell. Most of the oil was located in a patch about 50 yards wide and a quarter of a mile long.” Petroleum engineers are concerned that oil is leaking from the floor of the Gulf near the sealed well. (Oil trade groups: Drilling deregulation could create 190,000 jobs) Louisiana State University chemist Scott Miles conducted a chemical analysis of the oil to identify its “fingerprint.” Miles said that, “It is possible it could be [from the Deepwater Horizon well] . It’s south Louisiana crude for sure.” BP said in a statement to the Press-Register: “We stand by what we said last week, neither BP nor the Coast Guard has seen any scientific evidence that oil is leaking from the Macondo well, which was permanently sealed almost a year ago.”
http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/site/?pageid=event_desc&edis_id=ED-20110825-32088-USA
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Heal yourself with Nature
I do not often agree with commercial products but this one is so connected to natural healing it feels ok. DL the PDF lots of information
Earthing is about “grounding” your body to naturally discharge inflammation, pain and stress. It’s simple and it’s free. All you have to do is place your bare feet directly on the earth. The Earthing products offered on this site are for “use” to conveniently ground you while indoors and during sleep.
To learn more we invite you to read the book “Earthing” click here for preview. Answers to the most common questions asked about Earthing are available at www.Earthinginstitute.net
For the last twelve years our mission was to scientifically demonstrate that Earthing affects our well-being. The mission is now to share this important information with you.
Source
Earthing is about “grounding” your body to naturally discharge inflammation, pain and stress. It’s simple and it’s free. All you have to do is place your bare feet directly on the earth. The Earthing products offered on this site are for “use” to conveniently ground you while indoors and during sleep.
To learn more we invite you to read the book “Earthing” click here for preview. Answers to the most common questions asked about Earthing are available at www.Earthinginstitute.net
For the last twelve years our mission was to scientifically demonstrate that Earthing affects our well-being. The mission is now to share this important information with you.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Lybia Update
Red= Liberated. Green=Gaddafi Pockets Yellow=Disputed
North Atlantic Terrorist Organization (NATO) Recent Operations In
Libya
May God keep and bless the Libyan people. May the Libyan people give the
Empire its first defeat leading to the downfall of the Oy-bummer regime. As it
looks, it may be coming very soon, in September even. This will cause a huge
hidden debate about how to get NATO to invade by land. But this will fail. The
Empire is already over-extended and the only way it could mount this current
expedition was to use its aviation resources and the scumbag mercanaries who
have so alienated the Libyans they have no possible chance to succeed.
Soon, like Ron Paul, the Yid Warcasters will seal off Libya from awareness and
it will cease to exist. Except in Africa. And China.
'Western countries fighting for Libya’s oil fields like piranhas'
Months of chaos await Libya if the NATO-led operation in the country topples Muammar Gaddafi, political analyst William Engdahl told RT, but regime change would suit Western oil interests.
“They are eventually going to topple Gaddafi," he said. “And I think what Libya is going to face after that is a period of prolonged chaos. Nobody knows the outcome.”
“What emerges from that, I think it suits some of the Western oil interests, especially the British and the French, who were fighting like piranhas over grabbing the most juicy oil fields for their own companies,” said Engdahl, author of "Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order.”
Engdahl says NATO’s actions in Libya have created a very virulent precedent.
“What we have going on in Libya for some months now is a major effort by the US and NATO forces to pour at least $1 billion by various estimates into the so-called Transitional National Council,” he said. “It’s rival tribal clan warfare that is going on in Libya. This is not a democracy movement by any stretch of the imagination.”
Engdahl said it is simply an insurgency being supported covertly by US-financed armed shipments to the rebels – in order, he claimed “to simply carve up the oil fields and get them into Western hands, rather than in Libyan state hands, which Gaddafi held firmly on to.”
David Maimela from the South Africans for Peace in Africa Initiative shared Engdahl’s pessimism about Libya’s near future.
“NATO has not achieved anything [in Libya],” he said. “Even if they are to remove Gaddafi and his government at the moment, what we are going to have is a greater form of political instability in the country and a further breakout of civil war in Libya,” he said.
libyafidammi libya fidammi
Amazing to think the actual liberation of #Tripoli last night more peaceful than #Tottenham in the #LondonRiots
5 minutes ago
peter os
P133RO peter os
libya NTC watch out for your own people and your assets please ignore handouts #libya #tripoli
5 minutes ago
sharon lynch
sharon_lynch sharon lynch
RT @Bseesa: Omg my aunt mashallah 3laha was just on AJA she was one of the women leaders of #Feb17 #Tripoli
5 minutes ago
Tripoli Youth
Libya17Feb Tripoli Youth
#Tripoli call: "We are waiting for Freedom fighters from outside Tripoli to arrive to Benashoor"
5 minutes ago
6.8 quake hits Fukushima
tsunami warning issued — Cracks in ground and escaping steam had been reported “after two large earthquakes in the last few weeks”
August 19th, 2011 at 10:03 AM
Strong earthquake hits north-eastern Japan, tsunami warning issued, DPA, August 19, 2011:
A magnitude-6.8 earthquake jolted north-eastern Japan on Friday and a tsunami warning was issued, the Meteorological Agency said.
The warning was issued for the coastal areas in the prefectures of Fukushima and Miyagi. [...]
The quake occurred at 2:36 pm (0536GMT) with its epicenter off Fukushima prefecture at a depth of 20 kilometers, the agency said. [...]
See also: Report: Workers say ground under Fukushima plant is cracking and radioactive steam is coming up — Melted core may be moving out of building (VIDEO)
Host: “Workers at Japan’s Fukushima plant say the ground underneath the facility is cracking and radioactive steam is escaping through the cracks” [...]
Dr. Robert Jacobs, Hiroshima Peace Institute: “It’s a very serious and alarming development because this started to happen specifically after two large earthquakes in the last few weeks, there was a 6.4 on the 31 of July 31 and a 6.0 on August 12″ [...]
Source
August 19th, 2011 at 10:03 AM
Strong earthquake hits north-eastern Japan, tsunami warning issued, DPA, August 19, 2011:
A magnitude-6.8 earthquake jolted north-eastern Japan on Friday and a tsunami warning was issued, the Meteorological Agency said.
The warning was issued for the coastal areas in the prefectures of Fukushima and Miyagi. [...]
The quake occurred at 2:36 pm (0536GMT) with its epicenter off Fukushima prefecture at a depth of 20 kilometers, the agency said. [...]
See also: Report: Workers say ground under Fukushima plant is cracking and radioactive steam is coming up — Melted core may be moving out of building (VIDEO)
Host: “Workers at Japan’s Fukushima plant say the ground underneath the facility is cracking and radioactive steam is escaping through the cracks” [...]
Dr. Robert Jacobs, Hiroshima Peace Institute: “It’s a very serious and alarming development because this started to happen specifically after two large earthquakes in the last few weeks, there was a 6.4 on the 31 of July 31 and a 6.0 on August 12″ [...]
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Wall Street Crimes SEC Coverup?
Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?
A whistleblower claims that over the past two decades, the agency has destroyed records of thousands of investigations, whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals.
by: Matt Taibbi
Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.
That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.
Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency's records – "including case files relating to preliminary investigations" – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term "Orwellian," devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or "Matters Under Inquiry" – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission's internal website. "After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation," the site advised staffers, "you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI."
Many of the destroyed files involved companies and individuals who would later play prominent roles in the economic meltdown of 2008. Two MUIs involving con artist Bernie Madoff vanished. So did a 2002 inquiry into financial fraud at Lehman Brothers, as well as a 2005 case of insider trading at the same soon-to-be-bankrupt bank. A 2009 preliminary investigation of insider trading by Goldman Sachs was deleted, along with records for at least three cases involving the infamous hedge fund SAC Capital.
The widespread destruction of records was brought to the attention of Congress in July, when an SEC attorney named Darcy Flynn decided to blow the whistle. According to Flynn, who was responsible for helping to manage the commission's records, the SEC has been destroying records of preliminary investigations since at least 1993. After he alerted NARA to the problem, Flynn reports, senior staff at the SEC scrambled to hide the commission's improprieties.
As a federally protected whistle-blower, Flynn is not permitted to speak to the press. But in evidence he presented to the SEC's inspector general and three congressional committees earlier this summer, the 13-year veteran of the agency paints a startling picture of a federal police force that has effectively been conquered by the financial criminals it is charged with investigating. In at least one case, according to Flynn, investigators at the SEC found their desire to bring a case against an influential bank thwarted by senior officials in the enforcement division – whose director turned around and accepted a lucrative job from the very same bank they had been prevented from investigating. In another case, the agency farmed out its inquiry to a private law firm – one hired by the company under investigation. The outside firm, unsurprisingly, concluded that no further investigation of its client was necessary. To complete the bureaucratic laundering process, Flynn says, the SEC dropped the case and destroyed the files.
Much has been made in recent months of the government's glaring failure to police Wall Street; to date, federal and state prosecutors have yet to put a single senior Wall Street executive behind bars for any of the many well-documented crimes related to the financial crisis. Indeed, Flynn's accusations dovetail with a recent series of damaging critiques of the SEC made by reporters, watchdog groups and members of Congress, all of which seem to indicate that top federal regulators spend more time lunching, schmoozing and job-interviewing with Wall Street crooks than they do catching them. As one former SEC staffer describes it, the agency is now filled with so many Wall Street hotshots from oft-investigated banks that it has been "infected with the Goldman mindset from within."
The destruction of records by the SEC, as outlined by Flynn, is something far more than an administrative accident or bureaucratic fuck-up. It's a symptom of the agency's terminal brain damage. Somewhere along the line, those at the SEC responsible for policing America's banks fell and hit their head on a big pile of Wall Street's money – a blow from which the agency has never recovered. "From what I've seen, it looks as if the SEC might have sanctioned some level of case-related document destruction," says Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose staff has interviewed Flynn. "It doesn't make sense that an agency responsible for investigations would want to get rid of potential evidence. If these charges are true, the agency needs to explain why it destroyed documents, how many documents it destroyed over what time frame and to what extent its actions were consistent with the law."
How did officials at the SEC wind up with a faithful veteran employee – a conservative, mid-level attorney described as a highly reluctant whistle-blower – spilling the agency's most sordid secrets to Congress? In a way, they asked for it.
On May 18th of this year, SEC enforcement director Robert Khuzami sent out a mass e-mail to the agency's staff with the subject line "Lawyers Behaving Badly." In it, Khuzami asked his subordinates to report any experiences they might have had where "the behavior of counsel representing clients in... investigations has been questionable."
Khuzami was asking staffers to recount any stories of outside counsel behaving unethically. But Flynn apparently thought his boss was looking for examples of lawyers "behaving badly" anywhere, including within the SEC. And he had a story to share he'd kept a lid on for years. "Mr. Khuzami may have gotten something more than he expected," Flynn's lawyer, a former SEC whistle-blower named Gary Aguirre, later explained to Congress.
Flynn responded to Khuzami with a letter laying out one such example of misbehaving lawyers within the SEC. It involved a case from very early in Flynn's career, back in 2000, when he was working with a group of investigators who thought they had a "slam-dunk" case against Deutsche Bank, the German financial giant. A few years earlier, Rolf Breuer, the bank's CEO, had given an interview to Der Spiegel in which he denied that Deutsche was involved in übernahmegespräche – takeover talks – to acquire a rival American firm, Bankers Trust. But the statement was apparently untrue – and it sent the stock of Bankers Trust tumbling, potentially lowering the price for the merger. Flynn and his fellow SEC investigators, suspecting that investors of Bankers Trust had been defrauded, opened a MUI on the case.
A Matter Under Inquiry is just a preliminary sort of look-see – a way for the SEC to check out the multitude of tips it gets about suspicious trades, shady stock scams and false disclosures, and to determine which of the accusations merit a formal investigation. At the MUI stage, an SEC investigator can conduct interviews or ask a bank to send in information voluntarily. In the Deutsche case, Flynn and other SEC investigators collected sworn testimony and documents indicating that plenty of übernahmegespräche indeed had been going on when Breuer spoke to Der Spiegel. Based on the evidence, they sent an "Action Memorandum" to senior SEC staff, formally recommending that the agency press forward and transform the MUI into a full-blown fraud case against Deutsche. Bumping a MUI up to a formal investigation is critical, because it enables investigators to pull out the full law-enforcement ass-kicking measures – subpoenas, depositions, everything short of hot pokers and waterboarding.
Breuer responded to the threat as big banks like Deutsche often do: He hired a former SEC enforcement director to lobby the agency to back off. The ex-insider, Gary Lynch, launched a creative and inspired defense, producing a linguistic expert who argued that übernahmegespräche only means "advanced stage of discussions." Nevertheless, the request to proceed with the case was approved by several levels of the SEC's staff. All that was needed to move forward was a thumbs-up from the director of enforcement at the time, Richard Walker.
But then a curious thing happened. On July 10th, 2001, Flynn and the other investigators were informed that Walker was mysteriously recusing himself from the Deutsche case. Two weeks later, on July 23rd, the enforcement division sent a letter to Deutsche that read, "Inquiry in the above-captioned matter has been terminated." The bank was in the clear; the SEC was dropping its fraud investigation. In contradiction to the agency's usual practice, it provided no explanation for its decision to close the case.
On October 1st of that year, the mystery was solved: Dick Walker was named general counsel of Deutsche. Less than 10 weeks after the SEC shut down its investigation of the bank, the agency's director of enforcement was handed a cushy, high-priced job at Deutsche.
Deutsche's influence in the case didn't stop there. A few years later, in 2004, Walker hired none other than Robert Khuzami, a young federal prosecutor, to join him at Deutsche. The two would remain at the bank until February 2009, when Khuzami joined the SEC as Flynn's new boss in the enforcement division. When Flynn sent his letter to Khuzami complaining about misbehavior by Walker, he was calling out Khuzami's own mentor.
The circular nature of the case illustrates the revolving-door dynamic that has become pervasive at the SEC. A recent study by the Project on Government Oversight found that over the past five years, former SEC personnel filed 789 notices disclosing their intent to represent outside companies before the agency – sometimes within days of their having left the SEC. More than half of the disclosures came from the agency's enforcement division, who went to bat for the financial industry four times more often than ex-staffers from other wings of the SEC.
Even a cursory glance at a list of the agency's most recent enforcement directors makes it clear that the SEC's top policemen almost always wind up jumping straight to jobs representing the banks they were supposed to regulate. Lynch, who represented Deutsche in the Flynn case, served as the agency's enforcement chief from 1985 to 1989, before moving to the firm of Davis Polk, which boasts many top Wall Street clients. He was succeeded by William McLucas, who left the SEC in 1998 to work for WilmerHale, a Wall Street defense firm so notorious for snatching up top agency veterans that it is sometimes referred to as "SEC West." McLucas was followed by Dick Walker, who defected to Deutsche in 2001, and he was in turn followed by Stephen Cutler, who now serves as general counsel for JP Morgan Chase. Next came Linda Chatman Thomsen, who stepped down to join Davis Polk, only to be succeeded in 2009 by Khuzami, Walker's former protégé at Deutsche Bank.
This merry-go-round of current and former enforcement directors has repeatedly led to accusations of improprieties. In 2008, in a case cited by the SEC inspector general, Thomsen went out of her way to pass along valuable information to Cutler, the former enforcement director who had gone to work for JP Morgan. According to the inspector general, Thomsen signaled Cutler that the SEC was unlikely to take action that would hamper JP Morgan's move to buy up Bear Stearns. In another case, the inspector general found, an assistant director of enforcement was instrumental in slowing down an investigation into the $7 billion Ponzi scheme allegedly run by Texas con artist R. Allen Stanford – and then left the SEC to work for Stanford, despite explicitly being denied permission to do so by the agency's ethics office. "Every lawyer in Texas and beyond is going to get rich on this case, OK?" the official later explained. "I hated being on the sidelines."
Small wonder, then, that SEC staffers often have trouble getting their bosses to approve full-blown investigations against even the most blatant financial criminals. For a fledgling MUI to become a formal investigation, it has to make the treacherous leap from the lower rungs of career-level staffers like Flynn all the way up to the revolving-door level at the top, where senior management is composed largely of high-priced appointees from the private sector who have strong social and professional ties to the very banks they are charged with regulating. And if senior management didn't approve an investigation, the documents often wound up being destroyed – as Flynn would later discover.
After the Deutsche fiasco over Bankers Trust, Flynn continued to work at the SEC for four more years. He briefly left the agency to dabble in real estate, then returned in 2008 to serve as an attorney in the enforcement division. In January 2010, he accepted new responsibilities that included helping to manage the disposition of records for the division – and it was then he first became aware of the agency's possibly unlawful destruction of MUI records.
Flynn discovered a directive on the enforcement division's internal website ordering staff to destroy "any records obtained in connection" with closed MUIs. The directive appeared to violate federal law, which gives responsibility for maintaining and destroying all records to the National Archives and Records Administration. Over a decade earlier, in fact, the SEC had struck a deal with NARA stipulating that investigative records were to be maintained for 25 years – and that if any files were to be destroyed after that, the shredding was to be done by NARA, not the SEC.
But Flynn soon learned that the records for thousands of preliminary investigations no longer existed. In his letter to Congress, Flynn estimates that the practice of destroying MUIs had begun as early as 1993, and has resulted in at least 9,000 case files being destroyed. For all the thousands of tips that had come in to the SEC, and the thousands of interviews that had been conducted by the agency's staff, all that remained were a few perfunctory lines for each case. The mountains of evidence gathered were no longer in existence.
To read through the list of dead and buried cases that Flynn submitted to Congress is like looking through an infrared camera at a haunted house of the financial crisis, with the ghosts of missed prosecutions flashing back and forth across the screen. A snippet of the list:
PARTY MUI # OPENED/CLOSED ISSUE
Goldman Sachs MLA-01909 6/99 - 4/00 Market Manipulation
Deutsche Bank MHO-09356 11/01 - 7/02 Insider Trading
Deutsche Bank MHO-09432 2/02 - 8/02 Market Manipulation
Lehman Brothers MNY-07013 3/02 - 7/02 Financial Fraud
Goldman Sachs MNY-08198 11/09 - 12/09 Insider Trading
One MUI – case MNY-08145 – involved allegations of insider trading at AIG on September 15th, 2008, right in the middle of the insurance giant's collapse. In that case, an AIG employee named Jacqueline Millan reported irregularities in the trading of AIG stock to her superiors, only to find herself fired. Incredibly, instead of looking into the matter itself, the SEC agreed to accept "an internal investigation by outside counsel or AIG." The last note in the file indicates that "the staff plans to speak with the outside attorneys on Monday, August 24th [2009], when they will share their findings with us." The fact that the SEC trusted AIG's lawyers to investigate the matter shows the basic bassackwardness of the agency's approach to these crash-era investigations. The SEC formally closed the case on October 1st, 2009.
The episode with AIG highlights yet another obstacle that MUIs experience on the road to becoming formal investigations. During the past decade, the SEC routinely began allowing financial firms to investigate themselves. Imagine the LAPD politely asking a gang of Crips and their lawyers to issue a report on whether or not a drive-by shooting by the Crips should be brought before a grand jury – that's basically how the SEC now handles many preliminary investigations against Wall Street targets.
The evolution toward this self-policing model began in 2001, when a shipping and food-service conglomerate called Seaboard aggressively investigated an isolated case of accounting fraud at one of its subsidiaries. Seaboard fired the guilty parties and made sweeping changes to its internal practices – and the SEC was so impressed that it instituted a new policy of giving "credit" to companies that police themselves. In practice, that means the agency simply steps aside and allows companies to slap themselves on the wrists. In the case against Seaboard, for instance, the SEC rewarded the firm by issuing no fines against it.
According to Lynn Turner, a former chief accountant at the SEC, the Seaboard case also prompted the SEC to begin permitting companies to hire their own counsel to conduct their own inquiries. At first, he says, the process worked fairly well. But then President Bush appointed the notoriously industry-friendly Christopher Cox to head up the SEC, and the "outside investigations" turned into whitewash jobs. "The investigations nowadays are probably not worth the money you spend on them," Turner says.
Harry Markopolos, a certified fraud examiner best known for sounding a famously unheeded warning about Bernie Madoff way back in 2000, says the SEC's practice of asking suspects to investigate themselves is absurd. In a serious investigation, he says, "the last person you want to trust is the person being accused or their lawyer." The practice helped Madoff escape for years. "The SEC took Bernie's word for everything," Markopolos says.
At the SEC, having realized that the agency was destroying documents, Flynn became concerned that he was overseeing an illegal policy. So in the summer of last year, he reached out to NARA, asking them for guidance on the issue.
That request sparked a worried response from Paul Wester, NARA's director of modern records. On July 29th, 2010, Wester sent a letter to Barry Walters, who oversees document requests for the SEC. "We recently learned from Darcy Flynn... that for the past 17 years the SEC has been destroying closed Matters Under Inquiry files," Wester wrote. "If you confirm that federal records have been destroyed improperly, please ensure that no further such disposals take place and provide us with a written report within 30 days."
Wester copied the letter to Adam Storch, a former Goldman Sachs executive who less than a year earlier had been appointed as managing executive of the SEC's enforcement division. Storch's appointment was not without controversy. "I'm not sure what's scarier," Daniel Indiviglio of The Atlantic observed, "that this guy worked at an investment bank that many believe has questionable ethics and too cozy a Washington connection, or that he's just 29." In any case, Storch reacted to the NARA letter the way the SEC often does – by circling the wagons and straining to find a way to blow off the problem without admitting anything.
Last August, as the clock wound down on NARA's 30-day deadline, Storch and two top SEC lawyers held a meeting with Flynn to discuss how to respond. Flynn's notes from the meeting, which he passed along to Congress, show the SEC staff wondering aloud if admitting the truth to NARA might be a bad idea, given the fact that there might be criminal liability.
"We could say that we do not believe there has been disposal inconsistent with the schedule," Flynn quotes Ken Hall, an assistant chief counsel for the SEC, as saying.
"There are implications to admit what was destroyed," Storch chimed in. It would be "not wise for me to take on the exposure voluntarily. If this leads to something, what rings in my ear is that Barry [Walters, the SEC documents officer] said: This is serious, could lead to criminal liability."
When the subject of how many files were destroyed came up, Storch answered: "18,000 MUIs destroyed, including Madoff."
Four days later, the SEC responded to NARA with a hilariously convoluted nondenial denial. "The Division is not aware of any specific instances of the destruction of records from any other MUI," the letter states. "But we cannot say with certainty that no such documents have been destroyed over the past 17 years." The letter goes on to add that "the Division has taken steps... to ensure that no MUI records are destroyed while we review this issue."
Translation: Hey, maybe records were destroyed, maybe they weren't. But if we did destroy records, we promise not to do it again – for now.
The SEC's unwillingness to admit the extent of the wrong doing left Flynn in a precarious position. The agency has a remarkably bad record when it comes to dealing with whistle-blowers. Back in 2005, when Flynn's attorney, Gary Aguirre, tried to pursue an insider-trading case against Pequot Capital that involved John Mack, the future CEO of Morgan Stanley, he was fired by phone while on vacation. Two Senate committees later determined that Aguirre, who has since opened a private practice representing whistle-blowers, was dismissed improperly as part of a "process of reprisal" by the SEC. Two whistle-blowers in the Stanford case, Julie Preuitt and Joel Sauer, also experienced retaliation – including reprimands and demotions – after raising concerns about superficial investigations. "There's no mechanism to raise these issues at the SEC," says another former whistle-blower. Contacting the agency's inspector general, he adds, is considered "the nuclear option" – a move "well-known to be a career-killer."
In Flynn's case, both he and Aguirre tried to keep the matter in-house, appealing to SEC chairman Mary Schapiro with a promise not to go outside the agency if she would grant Flynn protection against reprisal. When no such offer was forthcoming, Flynn went to the agency's inspector general before sending a detailed letter about the wrongdoing to three congressional committees.
One of the offices Flynn contacted was that of Sen. Grassley, who was in the midst of his own battle with the SEC. Frustrated with the agency's failure to punish major players on Wall Street, the Iowa Republican had begun an investigation into how the SEC follows up on outside complaints. Specifically, he wrote a letter to FINRA, another regulatory agency, to ask how many complaints it had referred to the SEC about SAC Capital, the hedge fund run by reptilian billionaire short-seller Stevie Cohen.
SAC has long been accused of a variety of improprieties, from insider trading to harassment. But no charge in recent Wall Street history is crazier than an episode involving a SAC executive named Ping Jiang, who was accused in 2006 of enacting a torturous hazing program. According to a civil lawsuit that was later dropped, Jiang allegedly forced a new trader named Andrew Tong to take female hormones, come to work wearing a dress and lipstick, have "foreign objects" inserted in his rectum, and allow Jiang to urinate in his mouth. (I'm not making this up.)
Grassley learned that over the past decade, FINRA had referred 19 complaints about suspicious trades at SAC to federal regulators. Curious to see how many of those referrals had been looked into, Grassley wrote the SEC on May 24th, asking for evidence that the agency had properly investigated the cases.
Two weeks later, on June 9th, Khuzami sent Grassley a surprisingly brusque answer: "We generally do not comment on the status of investigations or related referrals, and, in turn, are not providing information concerning the specific FINRA referrals you identified." Translation: We're not giving you the records, so blow us.
Grassley later found out from FINRA that it had actually referred 65 cases about SAC to the SEC, making the lack of serious investigations even more inexplicable. Angered by Khuzami's response, he sent the SEC another letter on June 15th demanding an explanation, but no answer has been forthcoming.
In the interim, Grassley's office was contacted by Flynn, who explained that among the missing MUIs he had uncovered were at least three involving SAC – one in 2006, one in 2007 and one in 2010, involving charges of insider trading and currency manipulation. All three cases were closed by the SEC, and the records apparently destroyed.
On August 17th, Grassley sent a letter to the SEC about the Flynn allegations, demanding to know if it was indeed true that the SEC had destroyed records. He also asked if the agency's failure to produce evidence of investigations into SAC Capital were related to the missing MUIs.
The SEC's inspector general is investigating the destroyed MUIs and plans to issue a report. NARA is also seeking answers. "We've asked the SEC to look into the matter and we're awaiting their response," says Laurence Brewer, a records officer for NARA. For its part, the SEC is trying to explain away the illegality of its actions through a semantic trick. John Nester, the agency's spokesman, acknowledges that "documents related to MUIs" have been destroyed. "I don't have any reason to believe that it hasn't always been the policy," he says. But Nester suggests that such documents do not "meet the federal definition of a record," and therefore don't have to be preserved under federal law.
But even if SEC officials manage to dodge criminal charges, it won't change what happened: The nation's top financial police destroyed more than a decade's worth of intelligence they had gathered on some of Wall Street's most egregious offenders. "The SEC not keeping the MUIs – you can see why this would be bad," says Markopolos, the fraud examiner famous for breaking the Madoff case. "The reason you would want to keep them is to build a pattern. That way, if you get five MUIs over a period of 20 years on something similar involving the same company, you should be able to connect five dots and say, 'You know, I've had five MUIs – they're probably doing something. Let's go tear the place apart.'" Destroy the MUIs, and Wall Street banks can commit the exact same crime over and over, without anyone ever knowing.
Regulation isn't a panacea. The SEC could have placed federal agents on every corner of lower Manhattan throughout the past decade, and it might not have put a dent in the massive wave of corruption and fraud that left the economy in flames three years ago. And even if SEC staffers from top to bottom had been fully committed to rooting out financial corruption, the agency would still have been seriously hampered by a lack of resources that often forces it to abandon promising cases due to a shortage of manpower. "It's always a triage," is how one SEC veteran puts it. "And it's worse now."
But we're equally in the dark about another hypothetical. Forget about what might have been if the SEC had followed up in earnest on all of those lost MUIs. What if even a handful of them had turned into real cases? How many investors might have been saved from crushing losses if Lehman Brothers had been forced to reveal its shady accounting way back in 2002? Might the need for taxpayer bailouts have been lessened had fraud cases against Citigroup and Bank of America been pursued in 2005 and 2007? And would the U.S. government have doubled down on its bailout of AIG if it had known that some of the firm's executives were suspected of insider trading in September 2008?
It goes without saying that no ordinary law-enforcement agency would willingly destroy its own evidence. In fact, when it comes to garden-variety crooks, more and more police agencies are catching criminals with the aid of large and well-maintained databases. "Street-level law enforcement is increasingly data-driven," says Bill Laufer, a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "For a host of reasons, though, we are starved for good data on both white-collar and corporate crime. So the idea that we would take the little data we do have and shred it, without a legal requirement to do so, calls for a very creative explanation."
We'll never know what the impact of those destroyed cases might have been; we'll never know if those cases were closed for good reasons or bad. We'll never know exactly who got away with what, because federal regulators have weighted down a huge sack of Wall Street's dirty laundry and dumped it in a lake, never to be seen again.
Source
A whistleblower claims that over the past two decades, the agency has destroyed records of thousands of investigations, whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals.
by: Matt Taibbi
Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.
That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.
Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency's records – "including case files relating to preliminary investigations" – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term "Orwellian," devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or "Matters Under Inquiry" – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission's internal website. "After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation," the site advised staffers, "you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI."
Many of the destroyed files involved companies and individuals who would later play prominent roles in the economic meltdown of 2008. Two MUIs involving con artist Bernie Madoff vanished. So did a 2002 inquiry into financial fraud at Lehman Brothers, as well as a 2005 case of insider trading at the same soon-to-be-bankrupt bank. A 2009 preliminary investigation of insider trading by Goldman Sachs was deleted, along with records for at least three cases involving the infamous hedge fund SAC Capital.
The widespread destruction of records was brought to the attention of Congress in July, when an SEC attorney named Darcy Flynn decided to blow the whistle. According to Flynn, who was responsible for helping to manage the commission's records, the SEC has been destroying records of preliminary investigations since at least 1993. After he alerted NARA to the problem, Flynn reports, senior staff at the SEC scrambled to hide the commission's improprieties.
As a federally protected whistle-blower, Flynn is not permitted to speak to the press. But in evidence he presented to the SEC's inspector general and three congressional committees earlier this summer, the 13-year veteran of the agency paints a startling picture of a federal police force that has effectively been conquered by the financial criminals it is charged with investigating. In at least one case, according to Flynn, investigators at the SEC found their desire to bring a case against an influential bank thwarted by senior officials in the enforcement division – whose director turned around and accepted a lucrative job from the very same bank they had been prevented from investigating. In another case, the agency farmed out its inquiry to a private law firm – one hired by the company under investigation. The outside firm, unsurprisingly, concluded that no further investigation of its client was necessary. To complete the bureaucratic laundering process, Flynn says, the SEC dropped the case and destroyed the files.
Much has been made in recent months of the government's glaring failure to police Wall Street; to date, federal and state prosecutors have yet to put a single senior Wall Street executive behind bars for any of the many well-documented crimes related to the financial crisis. Indeed, Flynn's accusations dovetail with a recent series of damaging critiques of the SEC made by reporters, watchdog groups and members of Congress, all of which seem to indicate that top federal regulators spend more time lunching, schmoozing and job-interviewing with Wall Street crooks than they do catching them. As one former SEC staffer describes it, the agency is now filled with so many Wall Street hotshots from oft-investigated banks that it has been "infected with the Goldman mindset from within."
The destruction of records by the SEC, as outlined by Flynn, is something far more than an administrative accident or bureaucratic fuck-up. It's a symptom of the agency's terminal brain damage. Somewhere along the line, those at the SEC responsible for policing America's banks fell and hit their head on a big pile of Wall Street's money – a blow from which the agency has never recovered. "From what I've seen, it looks as if the SEC might have sanctioned some level of case-related document destruction," says Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose staff has interviewed Flynn. "It doesn't make sense that an agency responsible for investigations would want to get rid of potential evidence. If these charges are true, the agency needs to explain why it destroyed documents, how many documents it destroyed over what time frame and to what extent its actions were consistent with the law."
How did officials at the SEC wind up with a faithful veteran employee – a conservative, mid-level attorney described as a highly reluctant whistle-blower – spilling the agency's most sordid secrets to Congress? In a way, they asked for it.
On May 18th of this year, SEC enforcement director Robert Khuzami sent out a mass e-mail to the agency's staff with the subject line "Lawyers Behaving Badly." In it, Khuzami asked his subordinates to report any experiences they might have had where "the behavior of counsel representing clients in... investigations has been questionable."
Khuzami was asking staffers to recount any stories of outside counsel behaving unethically. But Flynn apparently thought his boss was looking for examples of lawyers "behaving badly" anywhere, including within the SEC. And he had a story to share he'd kept a lid on for years. "Mr. Khuzami may have gotten something more than he expected," Flynn's lawyer, a former SEC whistle-blower named Gary Aguirre, later explained to Congress.
Flynn responded to Khuzami with a letter laying out one such example of misbehaving lawyers within the SEC. It involved a case from very early in Flynn's career, back in 2000, when he was working with a group of investigators who thought they had a "slam-dunk" case against Deutsche Bank, the German financial giant. A few years earlier, Rolf Breuer, the bank's CEO, had given an interview to Der Spiegel in which he denied that Deutsche was involved in übernahmegespräche – takeover talks – to acquire a rival American firm, Bankers Trust. But the statement was apparently untrue – and it sent the stock of Bankers Trust tumbling, potentially lowering the price for the merger. Flynn and his fellow SEC investigators, suspecting that investors of Bankers Trust had been defrauded, opened a MUI on the case.
A Matter Under Inquiry is just a preliminary sort of look-see – a way for the SEC to check out the multitude of tips it gets about suspicious trades, shady stock scams and false disclosures, and to determine which of the accusations merit a formal investigation. At the MUI stage, an SEC investigator can conduct interviews or ask a bank to send in information voluntarily. In the Deutsche case, Flynn and other SEC investigators collected sworn testimony and documents indicating that plenty of übernahmegespräche indeed had been going on when Breuer spoke to Der Spiegel. Based on the evidence, they sent an "Action Memorandum" to senior SEC staff, formally recommending that the agency press forward and transform the MUI into a full-blown fraud case against Deutsche. Bumping a MUI up to a formal investigation is critical, because it enables investigators to pull out the full law-enforcement ass-kicking measures – subpoenas, depositions, everything short of hot pokers and waterboarding.
Breuer responded to the threat as big banks like Deutsche often do: He hired a former SEC enforcement director to lobby the agency to back off. The ex-insider, Gary Lynch, launched a creative and inspired defense, producing a linguistic expert who argued that übernahmegespräche only means "advanced stage of discussions." Nevertheless, the request to proceed with the case was approved by several levels of the SEC's staff. All that was needed to move forward was a thumbs-up from the director of enforcement at the time, Richard Walker.
But then a curious thing happened. On July 10th, 2001, Flynn and the other investigators were informed that Walker was mysteriously recusing himself from the Deutsche case. Two weeks later, on July 23rd, the enforcement division sent a letter to Deutsche that read, "Inquiry in the above-captioned matter has been terminated." The bank was in the clear; the SEC was dropping its fraud investigation. In contradiction to the agency's usual practice, it provided no explanation for its decision to close the case.
On October 1st of that year, the mystery was solved: Dick Walker was named general counsel of Deutsche. Less than 10 weeks after the SEC shut down its investigation of the bank, the agency's director of enforcement was handed a cushy, high-priced job at Deutsche.
Deutsche's influence in the case didn't stop there. A few years later, in 2004, Walker hired none other than Robert Khuzami, a young federal prosecutor, to join him at Deutsche. The two would remain at the bank until February 2009, when Khuzami joined the SEC as Flynn's new boss in the enforcement division. When Flynn sent his letter to Khuzami complaining about misbehavior by Walker, he was calling out Khuzami's own mentor.
The circular nature of the case illustrates the revolving-door dynamic that has become pervasive at the SEC. A recent study by the Project on Government Oversight found that over the past five years, former SEC personnel filed 789 notices disclosing their intent to represent outside companies before the agency – sometimes within days of their having left the SEC. More than half of the disclosures came from the agency's enforcement division, who went to bat for the financial industry four times more often than ex-staffers from other wings of the SEC.
Even a cursory glance at a list of the agency's most recent enforcement directors makes it clear that the SEC's top policemen almost always wind up jumping straight to jobs representing the banks they were supposed to regulate. Lynch, who represented Deutsche in the Flynn case, served as the agency's enforcement chief from 1985 to 1989, before moving to the firm of Davis Polk, which boasts many top Wall Street clients. He was succeeded by William McLucas, who left the SEC in 1998 to work for WilmerHale, a Wall Street defense firm so notorious for snatching up top agency veterans that it is sometimes referred to as "SEC West." McLucas was followed by Dick Walker, who defected to Deutsche in 2001, and he was in turn followed by Stephen Cutler, who now serves as general counsel for JP Morgan Chase. Next came Linda Chatman Thomsen, who stepped down to join Davis Polk, only to be succeeded in 2009 by Khuzami, Walker's former protégé at Deutsche Bank.
This merry-go-round of current and former enforcement directors has repeatedly led to accusations of improprieties. In 2008, in a case cited by the SEC inspector general, Thomsen went out of her way to pass along valuable information to Cutler, the former enforcement director who had gone to work for JP Morgan. According to the inspector general, Thomsen signaled Cutler that the SEC was unlikely to take action that would hamper JP Morgan's move to buy up Bear Stearns. In another case, the inspector general found, an assistant director of enforcement was instrumental in slowing down an investigation into the $7 billion Ponzi scheme allegedly run by Texas con artist R. Allen Stanford – and then left the SEC to work for Stanford, despite explicitly being denied permission to do so by the agency's ethics office. "Every lawyer in Texas and beyond is going to get rich on this case, OK?" the official later explained. "I hated being on the sidelines."
Small wonder, then, that SEC staffers often have trouble getting their bosses to approve full-blown investigations against even the most blatant financial criminals. For a fledgling MUI to become a formal investigation, it has to make the treacherous leap from the lower rungs of career-level staffers like Flynn all the way up to the revolving-door level at the top, where senior management is composed largely of high-priced appointees from the private sector who have strong social and professional ties to the very banks they are charged with regulating. And if senior management didn't approve an investigation, the documents often wound up being destroyed – as Flynn would later discover.
After the Deutsche fiasco over Bankers Trust, Flynn continued to work at the SEC for four more years. He briefly left the agency to dabble in real estate, then returned in 2008 to serve as an attorney in the enforcement division. In January 2010, he accepted new responsibilities that included helping to manage the disposition of records for the division – and it was then he first became aware of the agency's possibly unlawful destruction of MUI records.
Flynn discovered a directive on the enforcement division's internal website ordering staff to destroy "any records obtained in connection" with closed MUIs. The directive appeared to violate federal law, which gives responsibility for maintaining and destroying all records to the National Archives and Records Administration. Over a decade earlier, in fact, the SEC had struck a deal with NARA stipulating that investigative records were to be maintained for 25 years – and that if any files were to be destroyed after that, the shredding was to be done by NARA, not the SEC.
But Flynn soon learned that the records for thousands of preliminary investigations no longer existed. In his letter to Congress, Flynn estimates that the practice of destroying MUIs had begun as early as 1993, and has resulted in at least 9,000 case files being destroyed. For all the thousands of tips that had come in to the SEC, and the thousands of interviews that had been conducted by the agency's staff, all that remained were a few perfunctory lines for each case. The mountains of evidence gathered were no longer in existence.
To read through the list of dead and buried cases that Flynn submitted to Congress is like looking through an infrared camera at a haunted house of the financial crisis, with the ghosts of missed prosecutions flashing back and forth across the screen. A snippet of the list:
PARTY MUI # OPENED/CLOSED ISSUE
Goldman Sachs MLA-01909 6/99 - 4/00 Market Manipulation
Deutsche Bank MHO-09356 11/01 - 7/02 Insider Trading
Deutsche Bank MHO-09432 2/02 - 8/02 Market Manipulation
Lehman Brothers MNY-07013 3/02 - 7/02 Financial Fraud
Goldman Sachs MNY-08198 11/09 - 12/09 Insider Trading
One MUI – case MNY-08145 – involved allegations of insider trading at AIG on September 15th, 2008, right in the middle of the insurance giant's collapse. In that case, an AIG employee named Jacqueline Millan reported irregularities in the trading of AIG stock to her superiors, only to find herself fired. Incredibly, instead of looking into the matter itself, the SEC agreed to accept "an internal investigation by outside counsel or AIG." The last note in the file indicates that "the staff plans to speak with the outside attorneys on Monday, August 24th [2009], when they will share their findings with us." The fact that the SEC trusted AIG's lawyers to investigate the matter shows the basic bassackwardness of the agency's approach to these crash-era investigations. The SEC formally closed the case on October 1st, 2009.
The episode with AIG highlights yet another obstacle that MUIs experience on the road to becoming formal investigations. During the past decade, the SEC routinely began allowing financial firms to investigate themselves. Imagine the LAPD politely asking a gang of Crips and their lawyers to issue a report on whether or not a drive-by shooting by the Crips should be brought before a grand jury – that's basically how the SEC now handles many preliminary investigations against Wall Street targets.
The evolution toward this self-policing model began in 2001, when a shipping and food-service conglomerate called Seaboard aggressively investigated an isolated case of accounting fraud at one of its subsidiaries. Seaboard fired the guilty parties and made sweeping changes to its internal practices – and the SEC was so impressed that it instituted a new policy of giving "credit" to companies that police themselves. In practice, that means the agency simply steps aside and allows companies to slap themselves on the wrists. In the case against Seaboard, for instance, the SEC rewarded the firm by issuing no fines against it.
According to Lynn Turner, a former chief accountant at the SEC, the Seaboard case also prompted the SEC to begin permitting companies to hire their own counsel to conduct their own inquiries. At first, he says, the process worked fairly well. But then President Bush appointed the notoriously industry-friendly Christopher Cox to head up the SEC, and the "outside investigations" turned into whitewash jobs. "The investigations nowadays are probably not worth the money you spend on them," Turner says.
Harry Markopolos, a certified fraud examiner best known for sounding a famously unheeded warning about Bernie Madoff way back in 2000, says the SEC's practice of asking suspects to investigate themselves is absurd. In a serious investigation, he says, "the last person you want to trust is the person being accused or their lawyer." The practice helped Madoff escape for years. "The SEC took Bernie's word for everything," Markopolos says.
At the SEC, having realized that the agency was destroying documents, Flynn became concerned that he was overseeing an illegal policy. So in the summer of last year, he reached out to NARA, asking them for guidance on the issue.
That request sparked a worried response from Paul Wester, NARA's director of modern records. On July 29th, 2010, Wester sent a letter to Barry Walters, who oversees document requests for the SEC. "We recently learned from Darcy Flynn... that for the past 17 years the SEC has been destroying closed Matters Under Inquiry files," Wester wrote. "If you confirm that federal records have been destroyed improperly, please ensure that no further such disposals take place and provide us with a written report within 30 days."
Wester copied the letter to Adam Storch, a former Goldman Sachs executive who less than a year earlier had been appointed as managing executive of the SEC's enforcement division. Storch's appointment was not without controversy. "I'm not sure what's scarier," Daniel Indiviglio of The Atlantic observed, "that this guy worked at an investment bank that many believe has questionable ethics and too cozy a Washington connection, or that he's just 29." In any case, Storch reacted to the NARA letter the way the SEC often does – by circling the wagons and straining to find a way to blow off the problem without admitting anything.
Last August, as the clock wound down on NARA's 30-day deadline, Storch and two top SEC lawyers held a meeting with Flynn to discuss how to respond. Flynn's notes from the meeting, which he passed along to Congress, show the SEC staff wondering aloud if admitting the truth to NARA might be a bad idea, given the fact that there might be criminal liability.
"We could say that we do not believe there has been disposal inconsistent with the schedule," Flynn quotes Ken Hall, an assistant chief counsel for the SEC, as saying.
"There are implications to admit what was destroyed," Storch chimed in. It would be "not wise for me to take on the exposure voluntarily. If this leads to something, what rings in my ear is that Barry [Walters, the SEC documents officer] said: This is serious, could lead to criminal liability."
When the subject of how many files were destroyed came up, Storch answered: "18,000 MUIs destroyed, including Madoff."
Four days later, the SEC responded to NARA with a hilariously convoluted nondenial denial. "The Division is not aware of any specific instances of the destruction of records from any other MUI," the letter states. "But we cannot say with certainty that no such documents have been destroyed over the past 17 years." The letter goes on to add that "the Division has taken steps... to ensure that no MUI records are destroyed while we review this issue."
Translation: Hey, maybe records were destroyed, maybe they weren't. But if we did destroy records, we promise not to do it again – for now.
The SEC's unwillingness to admit the extent of the wrong doing left Flynn in a precarious position. The agency has a remarkably bad record when it comes to dealing with whistle-blowers. Back in 2005, when Flynn's attorney, Gary Aguirre, tried to pursue an insider-trading case against Pequot Capital that involved John Mack, the future CEO of Morgan Stanley, he was fired by phone while on vacation. Two Senate committees later determined that Aguirre, who has since opened a private practice representing whistle-blowers, was dismissed improperly as part of a "process of reprisal" by the SEC. Two whistle-blowers in the Stanford case, Julie Preuitt and Joel Sauer, also experienced retaliation – including reprimands and demotions – after raising concerns about superficial investigations. "There's no mechanism to raise these issues at the SEC," says another former whistle-blower. Contacting the agency's inspector general, he adds, is considered "the nuclear option" – a move "well-known to be a career-killer."
In Flynn's case, both he and Aguirre tried to keep the matter in-house, appealing to SEC chairman Mary Schapiro with a promise not to go outside the agency if she would grant Flynn protection against reprisal. When no such offer was forthcoming, Flynn went to the agency's inspector general before sending a detailed letter about the wrongdoing to three congressional committees.
One of the offices Flynn contacted was that of Sen. Grassley, who was in the midst of his own battle with the SEC. Frustrated with the agency's failure to punish major players on Wall Street, the Iowa Republican had begun an investigation into how the SEC follows up on outside complaints. Specifically, he wrote a letter to FINRA, another regulatory agency, to ask how many complaints it had referred to the SEC about SAC Capital, the hedge fund run by reptilian billionaire short-seller Stevie Cohen.
SAC has long been accused of a variety of improprieties, from insider trading to harassment. But no charge in recent Wall Street history is crazier than an episode involving a SAC executive named Ping Jiang, who was accused in 2006 of enacting a torturous hazing program. According to a civil lawsuit that was later dropped, Jiang allegedly forced a new trader named Andrew Tong to take female hormones, come to work wearing a dress and lipstick, have "foreign objects" inserted in his rectum, and allow Jiang to urinate in his mouth. (I'm not making this up.)
Grassley learned that over the past decade, FINRA had referred 19 complaints about suspicious trades at SAC to federal regulators. Curious to see how many of those referrals had been looked into, Grassley wrote the SEC on May 24th, asking for evidence that the agency had properly investigated the cases.
Two weeks later, on June 9th, Khuzami sent Grassley a surprisingly brusque answer: "We generally do not comment on the status of investigations or related referrals, and, in turn, are not providing information concerning the specific FINRA referrals you identified." Translation: We're not giving you the records, so blow us.
Grassley later found out from FINRA that it had actually referred 65 cases about SAC to the SEC, making the lack of serious investigations even more inexplicable. Angered by Khuzami's response, he sent the SEC another letter on June 15th demanding an explanation, but no answer has been forthcoming.
In the interim, Grassley's office was contacted by Flynn, who explained that among the missing MUIs he had uncovered were at least three involving SAC – one in 2006, one in 2007 and one in 2010, involving charges of insider trading and currency manipulation. All three cases were closed by the SEC, and the records apparently destroyed.
On August 17th, Grassley sent a letter to the SEC about the Flynn allegations, demanding to know if it was indeed true that the SEC had destroyed records. He also asked if the agency's failure to produce evidence of investigations into SAC Capital were related to the missing MUIs.
The SEC's inspector general is investigating the destroyed MUIs and plans to issue a report. NARA is also seeking answers. "We've asked the SEC to look into the matter and we're awaiting their response," says Laurence Brewer, a records officer for NARA. For its part, the SEC is trying to explain away the illegality of its actions through a semantic trick. John Nester, the agency's spokesman, acknowledges that "documents related to MUIs" have been destroyed. "I don't have any reason to believe that it hasn't always been the policy," he says. But Nester suggests that such documents do not "meet the federal definition of a record," and therefore don't have to be preserved under federal law.
But even if SEC officials manage to dodge criminal charges, it won't change what happened: The nation's top financial police destroyed more than a decade's worth of intelligence they had gathered on some of Wall Street's most egregious offenders. "The SEC not keeping the MUIs – you can see why this would be bad," says Markopolos, the fraud examiner famous for breaking the Madoff case. "The reason you would want to keep them is to build a pattern. That way, if you get five MUIs over a period of 20 years on something similar involving the same company, you should be able to connect five dots and say, 'You know, I've had five MUIs – they're probably doing something. Let's go tear the place apart.'" Destroy the MUIs, and Wall Street banks can commit the exact same crime over and over, without anyone ever knowing.
Regulation isn't a panacea. The SEC could have placed federal agents on every corner of lower Manhattan throughout the past decade, and it might not have put a dent in the massive wave of corruption and fraud that left the economy in flames three years ago. And even if SEC staffers from top to bottom had been fully committed to rooting out financial corruption, the agency would still have been seriously hampered by a lack of resources that often forces it to abandon promising cases due to a shortage of manpower. "It's always a triage," is how one SEC veteran puts it. "And it's worse now."
But we're equally in the dark about another hypothetical. Forget about what might have been if the SEC had followed up in earnest on all of those lost MUIs. What if even a handful of them had turned into real cases? How many investors might have been saved from crushing losses if Lehman Brothers had been forced to reveal its shady accounting way back in 2002? Might the need for taxpayer bailouts have been lessened had fraud cases against Citigroup and Bank of America been pursued in 2005 and 2007? And would the U.S. government have doubled down on its bailout of AIG if it had known that some of the firm's executives were suspected of insider trading in September 2008?
It goes without saying that no ordinary law-enforcement agency would willingly destroy its own evidence. In fact, when it comes to garden-variety crooks, more and more police agencies are catching criminals with the aid of large and well-maintained databases. "Street-level law enforcement is increasingly data-driven," says Bill Laufer, a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "For a host of reasons, though, we are starved for good data on both white-collar and corporate crime. So the idea that we would take the little data we do have and shred it, without a legal requirement to do so, calls for a very creative explanation."
We'll never know what the impact of those destroyed cases might have been; we'll never know if those cases were closed for good reasons or bad. We'll never know exactly who got away with what, because federal regulators have weighted down a huge sack of Wall Street's dirty laundry and dumped it in a lake, never to be seen again.
Venezuela moving Cash & Gold Reserves
Venezuela Plans to Move Reserve Funds
By JOSé DE CóRDOBA And EZEQUIEL MINAYA
CARACAS—Venezuela plans to transfer billions of dollars in cash reserves from abroad to banks in Russia, China and Brazil and tons of gold from European banks to its central bank vaults, according to documents reviewed Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal.
The planned moves would include transferring $6.3 billion in cash reserves, most of which Venezuela now keeps in banks such as the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, and Barclays Bank in London to unnamed Russian, Chinese and Brazilian banks, one document said.
Venezuela also plans to move 211 tons of gold it keeps abroad and values at $11 billion to the vaults of the Venezuelan Central Bank in Caracas where the government keeps its remaining 154 tons of bullion, the document says.
Venezuelan officials were tight-lipped. Representatives of the ministry of finance and the central bank said there was no official comment, and no one was authorized to address the issue.
Lately, senior Venezuelan officials have criticized Venezuela's dependence on the dollar. Last Saturday, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said the world's financial system, based on the dollar, "had entered into a crisis of uncertainty and we are planning to construct a new international monetary system, and especially in South America, protect ourselves from this situation," he said.
The Bank of England recently received a request from the Venezuelan government about transferring the 99 tons of gold Venezuela holds in the bank back to Venezuela, said a person familiar with the matter. A spokesman from the Bank of England declined to comment whether Venezuela had any gold on deposit at the bank.
A spokesman for the Bank for International Settlements where Venezuela keeps $3.7 billion of its cash reserves, and 11.2 tons of gold, Venezuela values at $544 million, according to the document, also declined to comment.
Analysts said the planned move made little economic or financial sense, since Venezuela would be taking its money out of secure banks in safe countries and putting it in countries that are not as safe and perhaps in currencies such as the Chinese yuan or the Russian ruble, which are not reserve currencies. "It's a big risk," said José Guerra, a former official at Venezuela's central bank. Mr. Guerra said he also had heard about the documents whose authenticity was confirmed to him by Central Bank officials.
Mr. Guerra said one possible reason for the planned moves could be that Venezuela is afraid it could be compelled to pay billions of dollars in compensations to foreign companies that have gone to court to recover damages for companies Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has nationalized. Another reason could be that China may have asked for collateral for billions of dollars it has loaned Venezuela, Mr. Guerra said.
Venezuela faces a sizable bill from arbitration but it's difficult to pin down a reliable estimate.
"It's a wide range from $10 billion to $40 billion and beyond," says Tamara Herrera, chief economist of Síntesis Financiera, an economic consulting firm based in Caracas. "There are many ongoing negotiations; the major ones of course are with oil companies."
One of the documents outlining the moves appears to have been drafted by Jorge Giordani, Venezuela's planning and finance minister, in conjunction with Nelson Merentes, the central bank president, for Mr. Chávez's approval. It calls for the transfer of the cash and gold reserves as of Aug. 8 in a maximum of two months.
Another document prepared by Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro for Mr. Chávez's approval calls for Messrs. Giordani and Merentes to prepare a plan to safeguard Venezuela's international reserves given "the recent U.S. debt crisis and its impact on the dollar as a world reserve currency."
The crisis, the document says, "has lit all the alarm signals as to whether it's convenient to maintain our reserves in that currency."
The document also notes that "the powers of the North" have "pillaged" Libya's international reserves as a result of the sanctions applied to Libya. "That makes us reflect on the need to elaborate a plan to monitor and secure the funds that the Republic maintains in international banks to meet its commitments abroad.
For some analysts, the reference to Libya signaled a possible political motive. The charismatic Mr. Chávez, who has said he will run again for president next year's elections, is being treated with chemotherapy for cancer in Cuba. Neither Mr. Chávez's type of cancer nor Mr. Chávez's prognosis has been made public. Moving the reserves may signal that Mr. Chávez and his associates could be preparing some drastic political moves—such as canceling elections—that could incur international condemnation and perhaps trigger sanctions.
"It doesn't augur well for Venezuela," says Roger Noriega, a former high-ranking state department official during the Bush administration.
Opposition congressman Julio Montoya said he received leaked copies of the proposal to move the funds from concerned officials of the finance ministry.
"We don't know if (Chávez) has signed it," Mr. Montoya said during a press conference Tuesday. The congressman from Zulia state criticized what he called the "secretive" nature of the president's deliberation over the measure.
Mr. Montoya said that the proposal raised the question if Venezuela was being pressured into transferring its reserves because of its growing ties with China and Russia.
To fund the country's large-scale social programs, Mr. Chávez has turned to resource-hungry China for assistance on everything from financing to housing and machinery. Last year, Venezuela received a $20 billion credit line from the China Development Bank for housing, which it is paying back with oil shipments.
While China has been Venezuela's largest creditor in recent years, Russia has been a major arms supplier to the South American nation.
Most recently, Venezuela announced it was finalizing agreements for two additional credit lines of $4 billion each with Russia and China, with a portion of the Russian funds earmarked for the Venezuelan military. Venezuelan officials have also said they have recently reached an agreement with Brazil for a $4 billion line of credit.
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Source
By JOSé DE CóRDOBA And EZEQUIEL MINAYA
CARACAS—Venezuela plans to transfer billions of dollars in cash reserves from abroad to banks in Russia, China and Brazil and tons of gold from European banks to its central bank vaults, according to documents reviewed Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal.
The planned moves would include transferring $6.3 billion in cash reserves, most of which Venezuela now keeps in banks such as the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, and Barclays Bank in London to unnamed Russian, Chinese and Brazilian banks, one document said.
Venezuela also plans to move 211 tons of gold it keeps abroad and values at $11 billion to the vaults of the Venezuelan Central Bank in Caracas where the government keeps its remaining 154 tons of bullion, the document says.
Venezuelan officials were tight-lipped. Representatives of the ministry of finance and the central bank said there was no official comment, and no one was authorized to address the issue.
Lately, senior Venezuelan officials have criticized Venezuela's dependence on the dollar. Last Saturday, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said the world's financial system, based on the dollar, "had entered into a crisis of uncertainty and we are planning to construct a new international monetary system, and especially in South America, protect ourselves from this situation," he said.
The Bank of England recently received a request from the Venezuelan government about transferring the 99 tons of gold Venezuela holds in the bank back to Venezuela, said a person familiar with the matter. A spokesman from the Bank of England declined to comment whether Venezuela had any gold on deposit at the bank.
A spokesman for the Bank for International Settlements where Venezuela keeps $3.7 billion of its cash reserves, and 11.2 tons of gold, Venezuela values at $544 million, according to the document, also declined to comment.
Analysts said the planned move made little economic or financial sense, since Venezuela would be taking its money out of secure banks in safe countries and putting it in countries that are not as safe and perhaps in currencies such as the Chinese yuan or the Russian ruble, which are not reserve currencies. "It's a big risk," said José Guerra, a former official at Venezuela's central bank. Mr. Guerra said he also had heard about the documents whose authenticity was confirmed to him by Central Bank officials.
Mr. Guerra said one possible reason for the planned moves could be that Venezuela is afraid it could be compelled to pay billions of dollars in compensations to foreign companies that have gone to court to recover damages for companies Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has nationalized. Another reason could be that China may have asked for collateral for billions of dollars it has loaned Venezuela, Mr. Guerra said.
Venezuela faces a sizable bill from arbitration but it's difficult to pin down a reliable estimate.
"It's a wide range from $10 billion to $40 billion and beyond," says Tamara Herrera, chief economist of Síntesis Financiera, an economic consulting firm based in Caracas. "There are many ongoing negotiations; the major ones of course are with oil companies."
One of the documents outlining the moves appears to have been drafted by Jorge Giordani, Venezuela's planning and finance minister, in conjunction with Nelson Merentes, the central bank president, for Mr. Chávez's approval. It calls for the transfer of the cash and gold reserves as of Aug. 8 in a maximum of two months.
Another document prepared by Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro for Mr. Chávez's approval calls for Messrs. Giordani and Merentes to prepare a plan to safeguard Venezuela's international reserves given "the recent U.S. debt crisis and its impact on the dollar as a world reserve currency."
The crisis, the document says, "has lit all the alarm signals as to whether it's convenient to maintain our reserves in that currency."
The document also notes that "the powers of the North" have "pillaged" Libya's international reserves as a result of the sanctions applied to Libya. "That makes us reflect on the need to elaborate a plan to monitor and secure the funds that the Republic maintains in international banks to meet its commitments abroad.
For some analysts, the reference to Libya signaled a possible political motive. The charismatic Mr. Chávez, who has said he will run again for president next year's elections, is being treated with chemotherapy for cancer in Cuba. Neither Mr. Chávez's type of cancer nor Mr. Chávez's prognosis has been made public. Moving the reserves may signal that Mr. Chávez and his associates could be preparing some drastic political moves—such as canceling elections—that could incur international condemnation and perhaps trigger sanctions.
"It doesn't augur well for Venezuela," says Roger Noriega, a former high-ranking state department official during the Bush administration.
Opposition congressman Julio Montoya said he received leaked copies of the proposal to move the funds from concerned officials of the finance ministry.
"We don't know if (Chávez) has signed it," Mr. Montoya said during a press conference Tuesday. The congressman from Zulia state criticized what he called the "secretive" nature of the president's deliberation over the measure.
Mr. Montoya said that the proposal raised the question if Venezuela was being pressured into transferring its reserves because of its growing ties with China and Russia.
To fund the country's large-scale social programs, Mr. Chávez has turned to resource-hungry China for assistance on everything from financing to housing and machinery. Last year, Venezuela received a $20 billion credit line from the China Development Bank for housing, which it is paying back with oil shipments.
While China has been Venezuela's largest creditor in recent years, Russia has been a major arms supplier to the South American nation.
Most recently, Venezuela announced it was finalizing agreements for two additional credit lines of $4 billion each with Russia and China, with a portion of the Russian funds earmarked for the Venezuelan military. Venezuelan officials have also said they have recently reached an agreement with Brazil for a $4 billion line of credit.
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Radiation From Fukushima Affects America’s West Coast
Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster | Radioactivity measurement and levels | Nuclear fallout danger
http://techie-buzz.com/science/fukushima-california-radiation-sulphur.html
August 17, 2011
Japan’s Nuclear Problem Update: How Radiation From Fukushima Affects America’s West Coast
by Debjyoti Bardhan | Tuesday, 16th Aug 2011
The reach of atmospheric winds is long. The latest demonstration of this is coming from the ruined Japanese power plant Fukushima. Sea water around Fukushima, rich in neutrons from the nuclear matter, is causing a spike in the amount of atmospheric sulphur over the Californian coast. Sulfur is a toxic element in itself and forms oxides which are just as toxic. It is also a major contributor of acid rain.
Fukushima after the disaster
What happened?
This is what was happening. On 13th March, 2011, two days after the deadly tsunami wrecked Fukushima, engineers began pumping in sea water into the power plant, so as to keep the nuclear core cool, since the cooling system was not functioning due to loss of power. Lightly radioactive seawater was drained out of the power plant. Neutrons streamed out of the water, knocking against chlorine atoms in seawater, converting them into a radioactive isotope of sulfur. The sulfur combined with oxygen in seawater, especially since the warm water provided enough thermal energy for the chemical reaction. A part of this sulfur dioxide bubbled through the water and entered the atmosphere as a gas and another part dissolved in the sea water. Also, when water hit the hot core, it instantly vaporized, releasing large amounts of hot elemental sulfur into the atmosphere. Both air currents and ocean currents carried the sulfur rich air or water to the western shores of America.
The observed data and extrapolation
The sulphur peak in the atmosphere was noticed on March 28, 2011, 15 days after the pumping started. According to a study conducted by chemists at the University of California, San Diego, – the first quantitative study of the disaster – about 400 billion neutrons were released per square meter of the cooling pools of liquid in the power plant. This rate stayed constant from 13th March to 20th March. The mechanism of producing radioactive sulphur is well understood from cosmic ray studies, but this is the first time such a process is being noticed near the surface. The study measured 1501 atoms of radioactive sulfur in sulfate particles per cubic meter of air, much much higher than normal levels.
For the levels of sulphur noticed at California to be correctly correlated with sulphur levels over Fukushima, the team calculated that the levels of sulfur ought to be 365 times that over California.
As always, even disasters provide opportunity for science to study different processes. Thiemens, the Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at UC San Diego, says
We’ve really used the injection of a radioactive element to an environment to be a tracer of a very important process in nature for which there are some big gaps in understanding.
Maybe in this case, it’s just too inhumane to say that every cloud has a silver lining.
Author: Debjyoti Bardhan
Is a science geek, currently pursuing some sort of a degree (called a PhD) in Physics at TIFR, Mumbai. An enthusiastic but useless amateur photographer, his most favourite activity is simply lazing around. He is interested in all things interesting and scientific.
Debjyoti Bardhan has written 129 articles for us.
The author of this post can be contacted at debjyoti@techie-buzz.com
http://techie-buzz.com/science/fukushima-california-radiation-sulphur.html
August 17, 2011
Japan’s Nuclear Problem Update: How Radiation From Fukushima Affects America’s West Coast
by Debjyoti Bardhan | Tuesday, 16th Aug 2011
The reach of atmospheric winds is long. The latest demonstration of this is coming from the ruined Japanese power plant Fukushima. Sea water around Fukushima, rich in neutrons from the nuclear matter, is causing a spike in the amount of atmospheric sulphur over the Californian coast. Sulfur is a toxic element in itself and forms oxides which are just as toxic. It is also a major contributor of acid rain.
Fukushima after the disaster
What happened?
This is what was happening. On 13th March, 2011, two days after the deadly tsunami wrecked Fukushima, engineers began pumping in sea water into the power plant, so as to keep the nuclear core cool, since the cooling system was not functioning due to loss of power. Lightly radioactive seawater was drained out of the power plant. Neutrons streamed out of the water, knocking against chlorine atoms in seawater, converting them into a radioactive isotope of sulfur. The sulfur combined with oxygen in seawater, especially since the warm water provided enough thermal energy for the chemical reaction. A part of this sulfur dioxide bubbled through the water and entered the atmosphere as a gas and another part dissolved in the sea water. Also, when water hit the hot core, it instantly vaporized, releasing large amounts of hot elemental sulfur into the atmosphere. Both air currents and ocean currents carried the sulfur rich air or water to the western shores of America.
The observed data and extrapolation
The sulphur peak in the atmosphere was noticed on March 28, 2011, 15 days after the pumping started. According to a study conducted by chemists at the University of California, San Diego, – the first quantitative study of the disaster – about 400 billion neutrons were released per square meter of the cooling pools of liquid in the power plant. This rate stayed constant from 13th March to 20th March. The mechanism of producing radioactive sulphur is well understood from cosmic ray studies, but this is the first time such a process is being noticed near the surface. The study measured 1501 atoms of radioactive sulfur in sulfate particles per cubic meter of air, much much higher than normal levels.
For the levels of sulphur noticed at California to be correctly correlated with sulphur levels over Fukushima, the team calculated that the levels of sulfur ought to be 365 times that over California.
As always, even disasters provide opportunity for science to study different processes. Thiemens, the Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at UC San Diego, says
We’ve really used the injection of a radioactive element to an environment to be a tracer of a very important process in nature for which there are some big gaps in understanding.
Maybe in this case, it’s just too inhumane to say that every cloud has a silver lining.
Author: Debjyoti Bardhan
Is a science geek, currently pursuing some sort of a degree (called a PhD) in Physics at TIFR, Mumbai. An enthusiastic but useless amateur photographer, his most favourite activity is simply lazing around. He is interested in all things interesting and scientific.
Debjyoti Bardhan has written 129 articles for us.
The author of this post can be contacted at debjyoti@techie-buzz.com
Saturday, August 13, 2011
9/11 William “Willy” Rodriguez speaks out
“There was a huge explosion in the basement—several seconds BEFORE the plane hit the tower!”
by Richard Roepke
William “Willy” Rodriguez is the 9/11 hero who helped save hundreds of lives, and the last person to escape alive from the World Trade Center (WTC) Towers.
Although the thrust of this narrative is meant to be about the selflessness and nobleness of heroism, be forewarned.
In its effort to reveal the essential goodness that resides in the hearts of most human beings, it also inexorably exposes the vilest evil that festers in the minds of a few.
Once past the heroism, this story begins to slice through the slimy underbelly of a vile, pathological beast that controls our lives, and gives us glimpses of the innards of this creature that grins gleefully at our gullibility and simple innocence while trampling on our most basic human rights.
This story is a wake-up call to all citizens of planet Earth.
Decorated Hero
Employed at the WTC for 19 years as a maintenance worker, Rodriguez was responsible for the upkeep and safety of the stairwells within the 110-storey North Tower. On the morning of 9/11, Rodriguez was the only person at the WTC site with the master key to the North Tower stairwell doors. [For fire containment purposes, only doors on every fourth level were normally left unlocked.]
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Rodriguez personally rescued fifteen injured persons from the WTC by leading—often carrying—them to safety. Having evacuated the injured from the basement levels, he rushed back into the tower and led firefighters up the stairwells. Unlocking doors to various floors as they ascended, he aided in the successful evacuation of unknown hundreds of survivors.
At great risk to his own life, Rodriguez re-entered the structure three times, and even rescued people trapped between floors in elevator cars by lowering ladders down into shafts. Having helped lead everyone he could find to safety, he finally decided to exit the building.
Rodriguez is believed to be the last person to leave the collapsing North Tower alive.
He survived the building’s collapse by diving beneath a fire truck, where he lay trapped, completely buried in a mountain of dust and rubble for over two hours. Barely able to breathe, he thought he would “die for sure” under that truck where he was literally entombed.
An agnostic, he prayed for the first time in his adult life. As he now unshakably believes, God does listen to heartfelt prayers, and miracles do happen.
A policeman who had been standing across the street had caught a fleeting glimpse of Rodriguez as he leapt under the truck a split second before the tower collapsed in an avalanche of debris.
It was this officer who later returned with help believing that the man under that truck might still be alive.
Rodriguez has been spiritually transformed by this experience and has embraced his faith again with deep reverence.
For his outstanding heroism during America’s desperate hour, William Rodriguez received a special commendation for valor from President George W. Bush at a special White House ceremony.
And that is the extent of the official story as it pertains to William Rodriguez’s involvement relating to rescue efforts following the 9/11 attacks.
But, as you shall see, his incredible heroism was but the tip of the 9/11 iceberg.
“Bombs! Bombs!”
Heroism and accolades aside, what is truly incredible about Rodriguez’s story is a shocking fact that has been concealed from public knowledge, and remains largely unknown to this day.
Rodriguez and a handful of co-workers who were down in the basement at the time of the attack, actually heard and felt huge explosions beneath their feet in the lower basement levels.
While this anomaly in itself should have been cause for serious investigation, it is the timing of these explosions that is extremely troubling:
They occurred several seconds BEFORE the first airplane impacted the tower.
The first of these explosions, which occurred about 7-8 seconds before the plane struck the tower was so powerful it literally threw Rodriguez upwards, clean off the floor, as parts of the false ceiling collapsed onto and around him.
Rodriguez heard and felt at least three explosions going off down in the basement levels within seconds of each other.
Absolute pandemonium broke out, with screams of “Bombs! Bombs!” rising above the din as terrified workers scattered in all directions, frantically seeking ways to escape.
[NB: There were a total of six basement levels. Level-2, immediately below Rodriguez’s position and the apparent location of the first explosion, was a “Mechanical Floor”—a restricted access area.]
But the “bombs” were by no means confined to the basement levels.
During his subsequent rescue efforts on the upper floors, Rodriguez claims he heard explosions going off “all over the building.”
Felipe David, a colleague, who was working at the far end of basement Level-1 across from Rodriguez, fell victim to the second explosion. David was walking towards a supply room when the entire wall suddenly exploded in front of him.
Burned beyond recognition, David managed to stagger towards Rodriguez. Willy took one look at the man and froze.
The skin on his face had almost completely peeled away exposing raw, pink flesh, and the burnt skin of his outstretched arms was hanging horrifically, “like sheets of loose cloth.”
David was the first casualty whose life Rodriguez saved by carrying him up to paramedics at street level, after which he returned to the basement in spite of police orders.
The 9/11 Commission Hearing
At the closed-door 9/11 Commission hearing, Rodriguez testified under oath that explosions were going off in the basement of the North Tower before the first plane impacted the building.
He explained in great detail to the Commissioners the numerous cases of serious injuries he had personally witnessed that were caused by these explosions.
He even provided the panel with a list of firsthand witnesses to the explosions, people who were ready to testify under oath.
One of the individuals Rodriguez recommended the panel summon was his friend and fellow employee, John Mongello.
Mongello was in the lobby of the neighboring South Tower when the first aircraft plowed into the North Tower where Rodriguez was located.
It would be another sixteen minutes before the second aircraft would rip into the one Mongello was in.
Yet, within a minute of the first plane hitting the North Tower, an elevator in the SOUTH Tower exploded to smithereens right before his eyes!
Mongello and others were literally blown backwards by the blast, as people—many, horribly burned—began to run willy-nilly shrieking in pain, shock, and sheer terror. Thick, black smoke could be seen billowing out of the now exposed elevator shaft, and the pungent smell of “gunpowder” was very evident.
Again, just as with the North Tower, this explosion occurred inside a building that had NOT YET BEEN STRUCK BY A PLANE!
How could a plane crashing into the North Tower possibly have caused elevators in the SOUTH Tower to explode?
The esteemed 9/11 Commission never bothered to find out.
Worse, and to his utter disbelief, Rodriguez later discovered that his statements were completely omitted from the official record. As a result, not one word of this decorated hero’s startling testimony appeared in the much-ballyhooed 9/11 Commission Report, a document that continues to be touted as “the most detailed, definitive study of the events of 9/11.”
Furthermore, Rodriguez was told, quite emphatically, not to speak about the explosions to others until “further investigations” had been carried out. As the world knows, this has yet to happen.
As a result of much public pressure, the Commission’s investigation records were finally made public—seven years later, in January 2009.
Rodriguez was stunned to find that his testimony was among those marked “restricted,” and thus inaccessible to the public. His crucial evidence remains restricted to this day.
Read more at VT
Source
by Richard Roepke
William “Willy” Rodriguez is the 9/11 hero who helped save hundreds of lives, and the last person to escape alive from the World Trade Center (WTC) Towers.
Although the thrust of this narrative is meant to be about the selflessness and nobleness of heroism, be forewarned.
In its effort to reveal the essential goodness that resides in the hearts of most human beings, it also inexorably exposes the vilest evil that festers in the minds of a few.
Once past the heroism, this story begins to slice through the slimy underbelly of a vile, pathological beast that controls our lives, and gives us glimpses of the innards of this creature that grins gleefully at our gullibility and simple innocence while trampling on our most basic human rights.
This story is a wake-up call to all citizens of planet Earth.
Decorated Hero
Employed at the WTC for 19 years as a maintenance worker, Rodriguez was responsible for the upkeep and safety of the stairwells within the 110-storey North Tower. On the morning of 9/11, Rodriguez was the only person at the WTC site with the master key to the North Tower stairwell doors. [For fire containment purposes, only doors on every fourth level were normally left unlocked.]
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Rodriguez personally rescued fifteen injured persons from the WTC by leading—often carrying—them to safety. Having evacuated the injured from the basement levels, he rushed back into the tower and led firefighters up the stairwells. Unlocking doors to various floors as they ascended, he aided in the successful evacuation of unknown hundreds of survivors.
At great risk to his own life, Rodriguez re-entered the structure three times, and even rescued people trapped between floors in elevator cars by lowering ladders down into shafts. Having helped lead everyone he could find to safety, he finally decided to exit the building.
Rodriguez is believed to be the last person to leave the collapsing North Tower alive.
He survived the building’s collapse by diving beneath a fire truck, where he lay trapped, completely buried in a mountain of dust and rubble for over two hours. Barely able to breathe, he thought he would “die for sure” under that truck where he was literally entombed.
An agnostic, he prayed for the first time in his adult life. As he now unshakably believes, God does listen to heartfelt prayers, and miracles do happen.
A policeman who had been standing across the street had caught a fleeting glimpse of Rodriguez as he leapt under the truck a split second before the tower collapsed in an avalanche of debris.
It was this officer who later returned with help believing that the man under that truck might still be alive.
Rodriguez has been spiritually transformed by this experience and has embraced his faith again with deep reverence.
For his outstanding heroism during America’s desperate hour, William Rodriguez received a special commendation for valor from President George W. Bush at a special White House ceremony.
And that is the extent of the official story as it pertains to William Rodriguez’s involvement relating to rescue efforts following the 9/11 attacks.
But, as you shall see, his incredible heroism was but the tip of the 9/11 iceberg.
“Bombs! Bombs!”
Heroism and accolades aside, what is truly incredible about Rodriguez’s story is a shocking fact that has been concealed from public knowledge, and remains largely unknown to this day.
Rodriguez and a handful of co-workers who were down in the basement at the time of the attack, actually heard and felt huge explosions beneath their feet in the lower basement levels.
While this anomaly in itself should have been cause for serious investigation, it is the timing of these explosions that is extremely troubling:
They occurred several seconds BEFORE the first airplane impacted the tower.
The first of these explosions, which occurred about 7-8 seconds before the plane struck the tower was so powerful it literally threw Rodriguez upwards, clean off the floor, as parts of the false ceiling collapsed onto and around him.
Rodriguez heard and felt at least three explosions going off down in the basement levels within seconds of each other.
Absolute pandemonium broke out, with screams of “Bombs! Bombs!” rising above the din as terrified workers scattered in all directions, frantically seeking ways to escape.
[NB: There were a total of six basement levels. Level-2, immediately below Rodriguez’s position and the apparent location of the first explosion, was a “Mechanical Floor”—a restricted access area.]
But the “bombs” were by no means confined to the basement levels.
During his subsequent rescue efforts on the upper floors, Rodriguez claims he heard explosions going off “all over the building.”
Felipe David, a colleague, who was working at the far end of basement Level-1 across from Rodriguez, fell victim to the second explosion. David was walking towards a supply room when the entire wall suddenly exploded in front of him.
Burned beyond recognition, David managed to stagger towards Rodriguez. Willy took one look at the man and froze.
The skin on his face had almost completely peeled away exposing raw, pink flesh, and the burnt skin of his outstretched arms was hanging horrifically, “like sheets of loose cloth.”
David was the first casualty whose life Rodriguez saved by carrying him up to paramedics at street level, after which he returned to the basement in spite of police orders.
The 9/11 Commission Hearing
At the closed-door 9/11 Commission hearing, Rodriguez testified under oath that explosions were going off in the basement of the North Tower before the first plane impacted the building.
He explained in great detail to the Commissioners the numerous cases of serious injuries he had personally witnessed that were caused by these explosions.
He even provided the panel with a list of firsthand witnesses to the explosions, people who were ready to testify under oath.
One of the individuals Rodriguez recommended the panel summon was his friend and fellow employee, John Mongello.
Mongello was in the lobby of the neighboring South Tower when the first aircraft plowed into the North Tower where Rodriguez was located.
It would be another sixteen minutes before the second aircraft would rip into the one Mongello was in.
Yet, within a minute of the first plane hitting the North Tower, an elevator in the SOUTH Tower exploded to smithereens right before his eyes!
Mongello and others were literally blown backwards by the blast, as people—many, horribly burned—began to run willy-nilly shrieking in pain, shock, and sheer terror. Thick, black smoke could be seen billowing out of the now exposed elevator shaft, and the pungent smell of “gunpowder” was very evident.
Again, just as with the North Tower, this explosion occurred inside a building that had NOT YET BEEN STRUCK BY A PLANE!
How could a plane crashing into the North Tower possibly have caused elevators in the SOUTH Tower to explode?
The esteemed 9/11 Commission never bothered to find out.
Worse, and to his utter disbelief, Rodriguez later discovered that his statements were completely omitted from the official record. As a result, not one word of this decorated hero’s startling testimony appeared in the much-ballyhooed 9/11 Commission Report, a document that continues to be touted as “the most detailed, definitive study of the events of 9/11.”
Furthermore, Rodriguez was told, quite emphatically, not to speak about the explosions to others until “further investigations” had been carried out. As the world knows, this has yet to happen.
As a result of much public pressure, the Commission’s investigation records were finally made public—seven years later, in January 2009.
Rodriguez was stunned to find that his testimony was among those marked “restricted,” and thus inaccessible to the public. His crucial evidence remains restricted to this day.
Read more at VT
Flu Vaccine Use to Modify Human Behavior ?
For your information believe it or not but I have never and will never have pharmaceutical drugs
What you are about to hear is not science fiction or conspiracy theory but a glimpse of what is going on behind the closed doors of the United States Pentagon.
In a small auditorium labeled BC232 a man is presenting a discussion on how the military industrial complex can spread a virus and use a vaccine to extinguish what the pentagon calls undesirable human behavior. Specifically in this case religious behavior.
This is dark science my friends. With all the mandatory vaccine programs in the United States do not be deceived for a moment that something like this will not or possibly hasn't already been used on the American public.
What you are about to hear is not science fiction or conspiracy theory but a glimpse of what is going on behind the closed doors of the United States Pentagon.
In a small auditorium labeled BC232 a man is presenting a discussion on how the military industrial complex can spread a virus and use a vaccine to extinguish what the pentagon calls undesirable human behavior. Specifically in this case religious behavior.
This is dark science my friends. With all the mandatory vaccine programs in the United States do not be deceived for a moment that something like this will not or possibly hasn't already been used on the American public.
Cause of London Riots
An opinion that in my eyes is not far from the truth
Tehran's interim Friday Prayers Leader Hojjatoleslam Kazem Seddiqi blames Britain's colonial past for the unprecedented social unrest in the country.
“No one thought that Britain, which was once a pioneer in arrogance and colonialism, would one day be engulfed in the flames of its people's wrath,” IRNA quoted Hojjatoleslam Seddiqi as saying on Friday.
The Iranian cleric said the unrest in Britain was the direct result of the crimes and atrocities it has committed in other countries.
“The colonialists schemed and spent money to create chaos in [other] countries and today the result of their plotting is the events they have been stricken with.”
Seddiqi criticized the British government for its lack of media transparency and for imposing censorship on independent media.
He said Britain's military ambitions -- which have cost British taxpayers a fortune -- have led to social poverty and injustice in the country.
The cleric further criticized the West for propagating racial extremism and Islamophobia.
The unrest in Britain began on August 6 in the north London suburb of Tottenham, after a few hundred people gathered outside a police station to protest against the fatal shooting and killing of a black man, Mark Duggan, by the police.
Thereafter, violent protests erupted in major cities like Birmingham, Liverpool, and Bristol, contributing to Britain's worst riot since the 1930s.
Hojjatoleslam Seddiqi deplored the policies adopted by Western powers, the United States in particular, regarding African countries where famine is pushing Somalia and its neighbors towards a humanitarian crisis.
“The US has looted much of Africa's resources and today there are no reports of relief efforts by this country for the famine-stricken Somalis,” he stated.
Tehran's interim Friday Prayers leader pointed to the humanitarian aid convoys the Islamic Republic has sent to Somalia, encouraging more humanitarian supplies for about 3.7 million Somalis who are on the brink of starvation.
Source
HMV/MRS/HGH
Tehran's interim Friday Prayers Leader Hojjatoleslam Kazem Seddiqi blames Britain's colonial past for the unprecedented social unrest in the country.
“No one thought that Britain, which was once a pioneer in arrogance and colonialism, would one day be engulfed in the flames of its people's wrath,” IRNA quoted Hojjatoleslam Seddiqi as saying on Friday.
The Iranian cleric said the unrest in Britain was the direct result of the crimes and atrocities it has committed in other countries.
“The colonialists schemed and spent money to create chaos in [other] countries and today the result of their plotting is the events they have been stricken with.”
Seddiqi criticized the British government for its lack of media transparency and for imposing censorship on independent media.
He said Britain's military ambitions -- which have cost British taxpayers a fortune -- have led to social poverty and injustice in the country.
The cleric further criticized the West for propagating racial extremism and Islamophobia.
The unrest in Britain began on August 6 in the north London suburb of Tottenham, after a few hundred people gathered outside a police station to protest against the fatal shooting and killing of a black man, Mark Duggan, by the police.
Thereafter, violent protests erupted in major cities like Birmingham, Liverpool, and Bristol, contributing to Britain's worst riot since the 1930s.
Hojjatoleslam Seddiqi deplored the policies adopted by Western powers, the United States in particular, regarding African countries where famine is pushing Somalia and its neighbors towards a humanitarian crisis.
“The US has looted much of Africa's resources and today there are no reports of relief efforts by this country for the famine-stricken Somalis,” he stated.
Tehran's interim Friday Prayers leader pointed to the humanitarian aid convoys the Islamic Republic has sent to Somalia, encouraging more humanitarian supplies for about 3.7 million Somalis who are on the brink of starvation.
HMV/MRS/HGH
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Economic Collapse of the World Currencies
Below are comments by a man I have complete trust and faith in, his words sometimes are anti but mostly he rings true. He is responding to a youtube video link is below if you want to view it. I do not want to embed here. Like Micheal says Love Prevails
MWM responds: Thanks Janis for sending it. It is useful foil for what to avoid.
It is grade B propaganda for a theme and not at all prophetic. It has several
fallacies. Here's the basic. The pirate class pays the salaries of the world's
best mathematicians and computers. The inventors of "game theory" were Jews and
have been long hired up into the hierarchy. They know much better than anyone
about the relative values, potential moments of collapse, etc. The Masters of
the Ponzi are the Masters of the Ponzi World. Look, all currency collapsed for
good in the 1930's, that's what the Great Depression was about. They have been
running pure scams since then. This guy's logic is 80 years behind the
realities. The New World Order Scam has a lot more life to it, as they will
attempt to show us very soon. Additionally, keep in mind that portions of the
aristocracy has lived through many centuries in unbroken family successions and
collectively they have witnessed many currency collapses, imperial collapses,
etc. Some portions of them have developed an entirely different knowledge base
and ideological world understanding about how to manipulate their societies
through these deconstruction and fire-sale times. They live in a completely
different "reality" than you and I and we are almost completely ignorant of
their reality construct. We can merely guess at so far a distance, which is of
course exactly how they want it and go to great lengths to maintain. The
aristocracies learned this trick several millennia ago. Notice almost none of
them EVER speak publically about a serious issue. Wouldn't be seemly, as GHW
Bush might say. Do you think they are eunuchs? Nope, it is because they do
not think the public is entitled to be involved in their discussions. It is
always nobodies from nowhereland who seem to be speaking (hired finger puppets
on the stage). They are pros at stealing from Peter to pay Paul to rob Jack
blind, and so it goes.
Massive fear of the collapse of the dollar plays into the hands of their
bankster's hands in many ways. It makes absolutism and Darwinism socially
acceptable on many levels to allow autocratic measures to be used with maximum
force. But since THEY determine if the dollar is worth something, (it certainly
isn't you or I), I think you can smell the rat here.
Like wars, these crises are now merely tools of the Feudal Lords. In the long
historical struggle of several hundred years since the Renaissance, which pit
the feudalists against the merchant pirates, industrialists, the idealists of
the ideologies, and the organizers of mass movements, the Feudal Lords have more
or less won. For a while it looked like the isms would win out, but this turned
out to be an illusion. The aristocratic world view of conceited self-chauvinism,
otherwise known as narcissism, has clearly become the dominating and ruling
force in this generation and there is no other competition in formal view.
It is not a dollar collapse to fear, dear Janis, but a driving economic squeeze
to reduce the incomes of people to induce them into greater robotic behaviours
to support the next imperial military expansion under Dear Leader(s) who offer
Change We Can Believe so that more idiots can be sent abroad to murder more
little brown people to make the Never Never-Land Shining City On The Hill safe
and secure for some obscure myths called democracy and freedom.
The Whip and the Carrot. Laugh at them both, Janis, and the hand which
proffers them. Laugh, laugh, laugh, and when their fund raisers, pollsters, and
military recruiters call, tell them to go pick up a truckload of blue cheese on
the Moon.
Meanwhile stare down this video below and see through its mongering. Mind you,
the believable portion is that there will be violence in all of the places
mentioned. Yes, of course, that will all be part of the drama of the squeeze.
A lot of people need a good emotional release. The V meme is widely
distributed. When invited, some will go for a pig roast and barbeque on a
summer night.
However, it all goes, all this reactionary fleeing, to nowhere so long as the
pirate class owns the transmissions of intelligence and control the content of
the memes. The only way out of this madness is a consolidated universal push
for an exact agenda, call it the Human Agenda, which dissolves the aristocratic
humbuggery.
http://www.metasynmedia.com/
ONLY LOVE PREVAILS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3-vwYJiD8g&feature=youtu.be
MWM responds: Thanks Janis for sending it. It is useful foil for what to avoid.
It is grade B propaganda for a theme and not at all prophetic. It has several
fallacies. Here's the basic. The pirate class pays the salaries of the world's
best mathematicians and computers. The inventors of "game theory" were Jews and
have been long hired up into the hierarchy. They know much better than anyone
about the relative values, potential moments of collapse, etc. The Masters of
the Ponzi are the Masters of the Ponzi World. Look, all currency collapsed for
good in the 1930's, that's what the Great Depression was about. They have been
running pure scams since then. This guy's logic is 80 years behind the
realities. The New World Order Scam has a lot more life to it, as they will
attempt to show us very soon. Additionally, keep in mind that portions of the
aristocracy has lived through many centuries in unbroken family successions and
collectively they have witnessed many currency collapses, imperial collapses,
etc. Some portions of them have developed an entirely different knowledge base
and ideological world understanding about how to manipulate their societies
through these deconstruction and fire-sale times. They live in a completely
different "reality" than you and I and we are almost completely ignorant of
their reality construct. We can merely guess at so far a distance, which is of
course exactly how they want it and go to great lengths to maintain. The
aristocracies learned this trick several millennia ago. Notice almost none of
them EVER speak publically about a serious issue. Wouldn't be seemly, as GHW
Bush might say. Do you think they are eunuchs? Nope, it is because they do
not think the public is entitled to be involved in their discussions. It is
always nobodies from nowhereland who seem to be speaking (hired finger puppets
on the stage). They are pros at stealing from Peter to pay Paul to rob Jack
blind, and so it goes.
Massive fear of the collapse of the dollar plays into the hands of their
bankster's hands in many ways. It makes absolutism and Darwinism socially
acceptable on many levels to allow autocratic measures to be used with maximum
force. But since THEY determine if the dollar is worth something, (it certainly
isn't you or I), I think you can smell the rat here.
Like wars, these crises are now merely tools of the Feudal Lords. In the long
historical struggle of several hundred years since the Renaissance, which pit
the feudalists against the merchant pirates, industrialists, the idealists of
the ideologies, and the organizers of mass movements, the Feudal Lords have more
or less won. For a while it looked like the isms would win out, but this turned
out to be an illusion. The aristocratic world view of conceited self-chauvinism,
otherwise known as narcissism, has clearly become the dominating and ruling
force in this generation and there is no other competition in formal view.
It is not a dollar collapse to fear, dear Janis, but a driving economic squeeze
to reduce the incomes of people to induce them into greater robotic behaviours
to support the next imperial military expansion under Dear Leader(s) who offer
Change We Can Believe so that more idiots can be sent abroad to murder more
little brown people to make the Never Never-Land Shining City On The Hill safe
and secure for some obscure myths called democracy and freedom.
The Whip and the Carrot. Laugh at them both, Janis, and the hand which
proffers them. Laugh, laugh, laugh, and when their fund raisers, pollsters, and
military recruiters call, tell them to go pick up a truckload of blue cheese on
the Moon.
Meanwhile stare down this video below and see through its mongering. Mind you,
the believable portion is that there will be violence in all of the places
mentioned. Yes, of course, that will all be part of the drama of the squeeze.
A lot of people need a good emotional release. The V meme is widely
distributed. When invited, some will go for a pig roast and barbeque on a
summer night.
However, it all goes, all this reactionary fleeing, to nowhere so long as the
pirate class owns the transmissions of intelligence and control the content of
the memes. The only way out of this madness is a consolidated universal push
for an exact agenda, call it the Human Agenda, which dissolves the aristocratic
humbuggery.
http://www.metasynmedia.com/
ONLY LOVE PREVAILS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3-vwYJiD8g&feature=youtu.be
Diana Nyad abandoned her swim
GOM
Diana Nyad the swimmer from Florida to Cuba was forced to abandon her swim
Posted By: Nameless_one
Date: Tuesday, 9-Aug-2011 20:01:20
After the 53rd mile, Diana Nyad was forced to abandon her life-time dream of swimming the 103 mile swim. She felt nausiated and her shoulder started bothering her. Asthma set in and it became very difficult for her to continue.
Could the cause be "COREXIT"? I don't think anyone took in the idea that the culprit could have been a poisoned ocean. Maybe after all is said and done, we will hear more on what happened.
I wish her will. More to be revealed.
Mmmmmm.... Corexit. With 2-butoxyethanol, that stuff in Spot Shot carpet cleaner that makes your fingers numb. And n-hexane, which is metabolized to the neurotoxin, 2,5-hexanedione, which causes long-term neuropathy. I vote for 2-butoxyethanol as the culprit, it's much quicker acting.
[Sidebar: Don't you love when people have names that correspond to what they do? Nyad = naiad, a water nymph]
Diana Nyad the swimmer from Florida to Cuba was forced to abandon her swim
Posted By: Nameless_one
Date: Tuesday, 9-Aug-2011 20:01:20
After the 53rd mile, Diana Nyad was forced to abandon her life-time dream of swimming the 103 mile swim. She felt nausiated and her shoulder started bothering her. Asthma set in and it became very difficult for her to continue.
Could the cause be "COREXIT"? I don't think anyone took in the idea that the culprit could have been a poisoned ocean. Maybe after all is said and done, we will hear more on what happened.
I wish her will. More to be revealed.
Mmmmmm.... Corexit. With 2-butoxyethanol, that stuff in Spot Shot carpet cleaner that makes your fingers numb. And n-hexane, which is metabolized to the neurotoxin, 2,5-hexanedione, which causes long-term neuropathy. I vote for 2-butoxyethanol as the culprit, it's much quicker acting.
[Sidebar: Don't you love when people have names that correspond to what they do? Nyad = naiad, a water nymph]
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Rupert Murdoch's American Scandals
One could not even begin to speak of the Australian Scandals
All the corruption exposed in England – hacking, political payoffs, dirty cops, hush-money settlements – is also happening here
by: Tim Dickinson
As CEO, Murdoch not only tolerates employees and executives who push the boundaries of legality and good taste, he celebrates them — at least until the cops show up.
Rupert Murdoch would like you to believe that the voicemail-hacking scandal at the News of the World "went against everything that I stand for." In his recent testimony before Parliament, the 80-year-old billionaire insisted that the criminal wrongdoing at the London tabloid betrayed the 53,000 "ethical and distinguished professionals" he commands from the pinnacle of News Corp. — the world's second-largest media empire. Besides, he claimed, the scandal at the News of the World involved "a tiny part of our business," which he helpfully quantified as "less than one percent of our company."
At first glance, the systemic campaign of bribery and wiretapping at the News of the World certainly does seem extraordinary. Reporters and editors at what was the largest-circulation Sunday paper in the English-speaking world stand accused of bribing police, hacking the private voicemails of everyone from the royal family to the parents of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and paying more than $2 million in gag settlements to victims — allegedly with the full knowledge of Murdoch's son and heir apparent, James.
But the corruption exposed at the News of the World is not the work of a "rogue" element within News Corp. — it's a reflection of the lawless culture that defines the company. As CEO, Murdoch not only tolerates employees and executives who push the boundaries of legality and good taste, he celebrates them — at least until the cops show up. "There's a broader culture within the company," Col Allan, editor of Murdoch's New York Post, crowed in 2007. "We like being pirates." Whatever veneer of integrity News Corp. may have accrued after its purchase of The Wall Street Journal the very same year masks an ingrained corporate ethos that believes integrity is for suckers. The attitude passed down from the top, says one veteran of Murdoch's tabloids, is aggressive and straightforward: "Anything we do is OK. We're News Corp. — so fuck you and fuck your mother."
Indeed, an examination of Murdoch's corporate history reveals that each of the elements of the scandal in London – hacking, thuggish reporting tactics, unethical entanglements with police, hush-money settlements and efforts to corrupt officials at the highest levels of government – extend far beyond Fleet Street. Over the past decade, News Corp. has systematically employed such tactics in its U.S. operations, exhibiting what a recent lawsuit filed against the firm calls a "culture run amok." As a former high-ranking News Corp. executive tells Rolling Stone: "It's the same shit, different day."
HACKING AND HUSH MONEY News America Marketing, a News Corp. subsidiary based in Connecticut, has been accused of engaging in "illegal computer espionage," repeatedly hacking a rival firm's computer system between 2003 and 2004 — a period that happens to coincide with NOTW's voicemail hacking in London. According to a lawsuit against News America, which dominates the lucrative market for ads on supermarket shelves and shopping carts, the Murdoch subsidiary grew alarmed when a competitor called Floorgraphics Inc. entered the market in the late 1990s with a novel concept — ad decals pasted on supermarket aisles. Paul Carlucci, the CEO of News America, responded by convening a meeting with FGI executives and allegedly delivering a Mafialike ultimatum: Sell to Murdoch or be destroyed. "I work for a man who wants it all," Carlucci warned, "and doesn't understand anyone telling him he can't have it all."
When FGI rebuffed the takeover bid, according to a lawsuit the company filed in 2004, News America embarked on a campaign of "illegal, anti-competitive and unfair business practices." After hacking into FGI's database, the suit alleged, News America used the information to steal away top clients like Safeway, effectively destroying its rival's business. FGI petitioned Chris Christie, then a U.S. attorney, to launch a criminal investigation into the alleged hacking, but the future governor of New Jersey refused to file charges. By then, the damage was done. News America was able to snap up FGI for $30 million — not only achieving Murdoch's original goal of market domination but also quashing FGI's lawsuit in the process.
News Corp. shareholders have paid far more to hush up other complaints about News America's monopolistic abuses. To box out two more rival firms, Valassis Communications and Insignia, News America used its market position to hike ad rates for supermarket clients who refused to also advertise in Murdoch newspaper circulars. "It feels like they are raping us and they enjoy it," an executive at Sara Lee complained. In 2009, a Michigan court awarded Valassis $300 million for News America's illegal attempt to corner the market. News Corp. eventually silenced the affair with a $500 million payment to Valassis that blocked the threat of further litigation. It also reached a $125 million settlement with Insignia. The combined settlements of $655 million more than wiped out the profits News Corp. reaped from its record box-office smash Avatar.
THUGGISH REPORTING Instead of firing the man responsible for the legal and financial fiasco at News America, Murdoch promoted him. In addition to serving as CEO of News America, Carlucci was tapped in 2005 to become publisher of Murdoch's flagship American tabloid, the New York Post. Under Carlucci's leadership, the two businesses appear to have drawn inspiration from a similar source: organized crime. Carlucci reportedly encouraged teamwork at News America by showing his salesmen a clip from The Untouchables in which Al Capone brains a disloyal deputy with a baseball bat. And shortly after Carlucci arrived at the Post, the newspaper was rocked by a scandal in which a star Page Six reporter allegedly attempted to shake down billionaire Ron Burkle for "protection" from the gossip sheet, telling him, "It's a little like the Mafia."
Burkle secretly recorded Page Six reporter Jared Stern offering to go easy on him in the gossip sheet in exchange for a hefty payoff. "We know how to destroy people," Stern reportedly threatened. "It's what we do." To shield himself from character assassination, Stern allegedly suggested, Burkle could make a one-time payment of $100,000, followed by monthly installments of $10,000.
News Corp. axed Stern, dismissing him as a rogue reporter and calling his behavior "highly aberrational." But according to a 2007 affidavit by a fellow Post veteran, the alleged shakedown was an integral part of the company's culture. "The spineless hypocrites in senior management at the New York Post and News Corp. have always used 'expendable' employees as scapegoats for the misdeeds of its senior executives," Post reporter Ian Spiegelman testified. Spiegelman revealed that Page Six's top editor Richard Johnson and two others had accepted cash from a restaurateur whose business had received a positive mention the day before. Johnson also allegedly accepted a $50,000 all-expenses-paid bachelor party to Mexico from Joe Francis, the founder of Girls Gone Wild, whom the Post subsequently hyped as "the next Hugh Hefner." Spiegelman further charged that Col Allan, the Post's top editor, received free lap dances at the strip club Scores in return for favorable coverage by the paper.
News Corp. conceded that Johnson had accepted a $1,000 "gift," but Murdoch let the editor off with a reprimand. Indeed, as Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff later observed, the incident only served to enhance Johnson's reputation. "The bribery business actually seemed to confirm Johnson's status for Murdoch as an old-time, walk-on-the-wild-side, dangerous, rule-bucking, proudly cynical newsman," Wolff concluded. Insiders make clear that the worst impulses exhibited by the Post and other News Corp. publications come directly from the top. "Murdoch tries to wash his hands of everything when it's convenient and pretend he has no involvement in the day-to-day running of the paper — which is just nonsense," says a former Post reporter. "He's always been very hands-on. There were no major decisions taken, even at Page Six, where Murdoch's interests would not be considered."
POLITICAL CORRUPTION Murdoch has built News Corp. into a media empire second only to Disney by horse-trading editorial support for political favors, repeatedly persuading officials at the highest levels of government to bend, break or rewrite rules meant to safeguard the public interest. "Murdoch has made himself almost a partner of certain political movements," says Reed Hundt, who tried to rein in monopolistic practices by media giants like News Corp. as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. "Politicians believe he's going to win in the end, so why tangle with him?"
Long before the rise of Fox News, Murdoch used News Corp. to influence friends in high places. Shortly after purchasing the Post in 1977, he plucked Ed Koch out of obscurity and used the tabloid to propel him into Gracie Mansion. "I couldn't have been elected without Rupert Murdoch's support," Koch said later. "Suddenly I was mayor of New York." In 1980, when Jimmy Carter was battling Ted Kennedy for the Democratic nomination and badly needed a primary win in New York, the Post endorsed the president. Six days later, Murdoch received a $290 million loan from the federal government to bail out one of his Australian companies. News Corp. received an even bigger payoff after it gave House Speaker Newt Gingrich a $4.5 million book deal in 1994 — just as Congress began debating a new law that removed federal restrictions on Murdoch's media holdings. Under George W. Bush, who owed his election in large part to the inaccurate and biased reporting of Fox News, the FCC blocked the sale of DirecTV to a News Corp. rival, then rubber-stamped its acquisition by Murdoch.
But Murdoch's coziest political bond has been with Rudy Giuliani. In 1994, Giuliani was elected mayor of New York by a narrow margin, thanks largely to the full-bore support of the Post. With Giuliani in office, the Post continued to back the mayor so slavishly that Rep. Charlie Rangel took to calling it the City Hall Post. News Corp. even hired Giuliani's wife, Donna Hanover, as a Fox television reporter, quickly quadrupling her salary to $123,000.
Giuliani was not shy about rewarding his media patron. When Murdoch moved News Corp. into its current Midtown headquarters, the mayor secured the company a tax break worth more than $20 million. Then, when Time Warner tried to keep Murdoch out of the New York market in 1996 by refusing to give Fox News a spot in its cable lineups, Giuliani threatened to revoke Time Warner's cable franchise and offered to air Fox News on one of the city's public-access channels. A federal judge blocked the move, upbraiding the mayor for acting "to reward a friend and to further a particular viewpoint." But the rank political favoritism paid off: During Giuliani's first term, according to a study by researchers at the University of Southern California, not a single negative editorial about him appeared in the Post.
POLITCAL ENTANGLEMENTS Just as the News of the World scandal toppled the head of Scotland Yard, News Corp. also brought down one of America's top cops. In 2001, one of Murdoch's publishing chiefs, Judith Regan, signed New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik to a book advance worth six figures. In an affair worthy of Page Six, the News Corp. executive was soon literally in bed with the police czar, meeting for sex in an apartment overlooking Ground Zero that was intended to house exhausted recovery workers. Before long, Kerik was tasking NYPD officers as if they were Regan's personal bodyguards, at one point reportedly dispatching them to track down the publisher's lost cellphone.
According to a source familiar with details of the affair, the relationship soured when Regan tried to break it off. Unable to call the cops, she confided in fellow News Corp. executive Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, hoping he could get Giuliani to rein in Kerik. But Ailes was more concerned about the political fallout. According to legal filings by Regan, Ailes anticipated the damage the scandal could cause the mayor and personally confronted Murdoch, telling him that Regan was "out of control." Ailes grew even more concerned in 2004, when President Bush nominated Kerik — by then a senior vice president in Giuliani's national security firm — to head the Department of Homeland Security. If Regan disclosed her tawdry ties to the former commissioner, Ailes feared, it might harm Kerik's nomination and "more importantly, Giuliani's planned presidential campaign."
To keep the affair hush-hush, Ailes "advised Regan to lie to and withhold information from investigators," and even coached her on limiting her disclosures "as is typically done when Fox News on-air talent receive their 'talking points.'" The alleged obstruction of justice by Ailes has since made headlines, but Regan also fingered "another News Corp. executive," whom she claimed advised her "not to produce clearly relevant documents in connection with a governmental investigation of Kerik."
Regan laid these allegations bare in a wrongful-termination lawsuit she filed in 2007. As it did with its accusers in London, News Corp. moved to paper over the matter by reaching a settlement with Regan worth more than $10 million. The only one punished in the Kerik affair was Kerik himself, who was sentenced to four years in prison for lying to federal investigators and failing to report income from a News Corp. book advance to the IRS.
Murdoch may soon find himself in even deeper trouble for his dealings with New York police. The Justice Department is currently investigating allegations that News Corp. reporters tried to bribe a New York cop, seeking to hack the phones of 9/11 victims — a charge that has outraged even the staunchest Fox News Republicans. "It is revolting to imagine that members of the media would seek to compromise the integrity of a public official for financial gain in the pursuit of yellow journalism," Rep. Peter King of New York wrote in a letter to FBI director Robert Mueller, demanding that any wrongdoing be met with the "harshest sanctions available under law."
But the "revolting" practice that King describes is actually at the core of Murdoch's business model. Until the News of the World scandal became public, deplorable judgment and even outright criminal behavior have not been firing offenses for Murdoch's top deputies, either in London or New York. A willingness to push the boundaries of the law and common decency, in fact, is what has made Murdoch a billionaire nearly eight times over. Murdoch himself has bragged of possessing files, replete with photographs detailing the sexual escapades of prominent liberals. You know, for leverage. All of which makes laughable Murdoch's claim before Parliament that "I'm the best person to clean this up."
The phone-hacking scandal engulfing News Corp. has led members of the extended Bancroft clan that sold The Wall Street Journal to Murdoch to repent of their decision — even though they received what amounted to a $3 billion overpayment from News Corp. for the paper. "Murdoch thinks he is completely above the law, as he always has," former top shareholder Bill Cox III recently told ProPublica. "We made a deal with the devil."
The sharks are already circling in England, where politicians long cowed by Murdoch's bullying now appear determined to curb News Corp.'s influence. Labor Party leader Ed Miliband, decrying Murdoch for having "too much power over British public life," has called for a breakup of his U.K. holdings. Here in the United States, institutional shareholders filed suit in July, seeking to change News Corp. from the inside by reforming its board of hand-appointed cronies. The board, the suit claims, has "abdicated its fiduciary duties" by enabling Murdoch to run the publicly-traded News Corp. "without any restraints on his pursuit of his political and personal agendas, which has led the company to engage in improper and illegal conduct."
The lawsuit highlights Murdoch's outrageous pay: He's pocketed $75 million in compensation over the past three years, even as News Corp.'s stock has yielded a negative return. It also blasts his "rampant nepotism," noting the extravagant overpayment he made to acquire his daughter Elizabeth's production company, Shine — a deal that made her $250 million richer at the expense of the company. But even as Murdoch's children have come back into the News Corp. fold, his dreams of creating a media dynasty have never been more troubled. As the fallout from the hacking scandal continues in London, the News of the World's former editor is accusing heir apparent James Murdoch of lying to Parliament about his knowledge of the hush money paid to hacking victims.
As each News of the World revelation exposes the root and branch of corruption at News Corp., the increasingly desperate Murdoch has responded by hacking off branches. In removing Les Hinton, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, he cut off an executive he once said he would trust his life to. In getting rid of Rebekah Brooks at News of the World, he abandoned a deputy he favored like a daughter. Son James now looks like the next branch to go. But until Rupert Murdoch sees fit to remove himself, the root of all that's vile at News Corp. will remain the same.
This story is from the August 18, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.
Source
All the corruption exposed in England – hacking, political payoffs, dirty cops, hush-money settlements – is also happening here
by: Tim Dickinson
As CEO, Murdoch not only tolerates employees and executives who push the boundaries of legality and good taste, he celebrates them — at least until the cops show up.
Rupert Murdoch would like you to believe that the voicemail-hacking scandal at the News of the World "went against everything that I stand for." In his recent testimony before Parliament, the 80-year-old billionaire insisted that the criminal wrongdoing at the London tabloid betrayed the 53,000 "ethical and distinguished professionals" he commands from the pinnacle of News Corp. — the world's second-largest media empire. Besides, he claimed, the scandal at the News of the World involved "a tiny part of our business," which he helpfully quantified as "less than one percent of our company."
At first glance, the systemic campaign of bribery and wiretapping at the News of the World certainly does seem extraordinary. Reporters and editors at what was the largest-circulation Sunday paper in the English-speaking world stand accused of bribing police, hacking the private voicemails of everyone from the royal family to the parents of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and paying more than $2 million in gag settlements to victims — allegedly with the full knowledge of Murdoch's son and heir apparent, James.
But the corruption exposed at the News of the World is not the work of a "rogue" element within News Corp. — it's a reflection of the lawless culture that defines the company. As CEO, Murdoch not only tolerates employees and executives who push the boundaries of legality and good taste, he celebrates them — at least until the cops show up. "There's a broader culture within the company," Col Allan, editor of Murdoch's New York Post, crowed in 2007. "We like being pirates." Whatever veneer of integrity News Corp. may have accrued after its purchase of The Wall Street Journal the very same year masks an ingrained corporate ethos that believes integrity is for suckers. The attitude passed down from the top, says one veteran of Murdoch's tabloids, is aggressive and straightforward: "Anything we do is OK. We're News Corp. — so fuck you and fuck your mother."
Indeed, an examination of Murdoch's corporate history reveals that each of the elements of the scandal in London – hacking, thuggish reporting tactics, unethical entanglements with police, hush-money settlements and efforts to corrupt officials at the highest levels of government – extend far beyond Fleet Street. Over the past decade, News Corp. has systematically employed such tactics in its U.S. operations, exhibiting what a recent lawsuit filed against the firm calls a "culture run amok." As a former high-ranking News Corp. executive tells Rolling Stone: "It's the same shit, different day."
HACKING AND HUSH MONEY News America Marketing, a News Corp. subsidiary based in Connecticut, has been accused of engaging in "illegal computer espionage," repeatedly hacking a rival firm's computer system between 2003 and 2004 — a period that happens to coincide with NOTW's voicemail hacking in London. According to a lawsuit against News America, which dominates the lucrative market for ads on supermarket shelves and shopping carts, the Murdoch subsidiary grew alarmed when a competitor called Floorgraphics Inc. entered the market in the late 1990s with a novel concept — ad decals pasted on supermarket aisles. Paul Carlucci, the CEO of News America, responded by convening a meeting with FGI executives and allegedly delivering a Mafialike ultimatum: Sell to Murdoch or be destroyed. "I work for a man who wants it all," Carlucci warned, "and doesn't understand anyone telling him he can't have it all."
When FGI rebuffed the takeover bid, according to a lawsuit the company filed in 2004, News America embarked on a campaign of "illegal, anti-competitive and unfair business practices." After hacking into FGI's database, the suit alleged, News America used the information to steal away top clients like Safeway, effectively destroying its rival's business. FGI petitioned Chris Christie, then a U.S. attorney, to launch a criminal investigation into the alleged hacking, but the future governor of New Jersey refused to file charges. By then, the damage was done. News America was able to snap up FGI for $30 million — not only achieving Murdoch's original goal of market domination but also quashing FGI's lawsuit in the process.
News Corp. shareholders have paid far more to hush up other complaints about News America's monopolistic abuses. To box out two more rival firms, Valassis Communications and Insignia, News America used its market position to hike ad rates for supermarket clients who refused to also advertise in Murdoch newspaper circulars. "It feels like they are raping us and they enjoy it," an executive at Sara Lee complained. In 2009, a Michigan court awarded Valassis $300 million for News America's illegal attempt to corner the market. News Corp. eventually silenced the affair with a $500 million payment to Valassis that blocked the threat of further litigation. It also reached a $125 million settlement with Insignia. The combined settlements of $655 million more than wiped out the profits News Corp. reaped from its record box-office smash Avatar.
THUGGISH REPORTING Instead of firing the man responsible for the legal and financial fiasco at News America, Murdoch promoted him. In addition to serving as CEO of News America, Carlucci was tapped in 2005 to become publisher of Murdoch's flagship American tabloid, the New York Post. Under Carlucci's leadership, the two businesses appear to have drawn inspiration from a similar source: organized crime. Carlucci reportedly encouraged teamwork at News America by showing his salesmen a clip from The Untouchables in which Al Capone brains a disloyal deputy with a baseball bat. And shortly after Carlucci arrived at the Post, the newspaper was rocked by a scandal in which a star Page Six reporter allegedly attempted to shake down billionaire Ron Burkle for "protection" from the gossip sheet, telling him, "It's a little like the Mafia."
Burkle secretly recorded Page Six reporter Jared Stern offering to go easy on him in the gossip sheet in exchange for a hefty payoff. "We know how to destroy people," Stern reportedly threatened. "It's what we do." To shield himself from character assassination, Stern allegedly suggested, Burkle could make a one-time payment of $100,000, followed by monthly installments of $10,000.
News Corp. axed Stern, dismissing him as a rogue reporter and calling his behavior "highly aberrational." But according to a 2007 affidavit by a fellow Post veteran, the alleged shakedown was an integral part of the company's culture. "The spineless hypocrites in senior management at the New York Post and News Corp. have always used 'expendable' employees as scapegoats for the misdeeds of its senior executives," Post reporter Ian Spiegelman testified. Spiegelman revealed that Page Six's top editor Richard Johnson and two others had accepted cash from a restaurateur whose business had received a positive mention the day before. Johnson also allegedly accepted a $50,000 all-expenses-paid bachelor party to Mexico from Joe Francis, the founder of Girls Gone Wild, whom the Post subsequently hyped as "the next Hugh Hefner." Spiegelman further charged that Col Allan, the Post's top editor, received free lap dances at the strip club Scores in return for favorable coverage by the paper.
News Corp. conceded that Johnson had accepted a $1,000 "gift," but Murdoch let the editor off with a reprimand. Indeed, as Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff later observed, the incident only served to enhance Johnson's reputation. "The bribery business actually seemed to confirm Johnson's status for Murdoch as an old-time, walk-on-the-wild-side, dangerous, rule-bucking, proudly cynical newsman," Wolff concluded. Insiders make clear that the worst impulses exhibited by the Post and other News Corp. publications come directly from the top. "Murdoch tries to wash his hands of everything when it's convenient and pretend he has no involvement in the day-to-day running of the paper — which is just nonsense," says a former Post reporter. "He's always been very hands-on. There were no major decisions taken, even at Page Six, where Murdoch's interests would not be considered."
POLITICAL CORRUPTION Murdoch has built News Corp. into a media empire second only to Disney by horse-trading editorial support for political favors, repeatedly persuading officials at the highest levels of government to bend, break or rewrite rules meant to safeguard the public interest. "Murdoch has made himself almost a partner of certain political movements," says Reed Hundt, who tried to rein in monopolistic practices by media giants like News Corp. as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. "Politicians believe he's going to win in the end, so why tangle with him?"
Long before the rise of Fox News, Murdoch used News Corp. to influence friends in high places. Shortly after purchasing the Post in 1977, he plucked Ed Koch out of obscurity and used the tabloid to propel him into Gracie Mansion. "I couldn't have been elected without Rupert Murdoch's support," Koch said later. "Suddenly I was mayor of New York." In 1980, when Jimmy Carter was battling Ted Kennedy for the Democratic nomination and badly needed a primary win in New York, the Post endorsed the president. Six days later, Murdoch received a $290 million loan from the federal government to bail out one of his Australian companies. News Corp. received an even bigger payoff after it gave House Speaker Newt Gingrich a $4.5 million book deal in 1994 — just as Congress began debating a new law that removed federal restrictions on Murdoch's media holdings. Under George W. Bush, who owed his election in large part to the inaccurate and biased reporting of Fox News, the FCC blocked the sale of DirecTV to a News Corp. rival, then rubber-stamped its acquisition by Murdoch.
But Murdoch's coziest political bond has been with Rudy Giuliani. In 1994, Giuliani was elected mayor of New York by a narrow margin, thanks largely to the full-bore support of the Post. With Giuliani in office, the Post continued to back the mayor so slavishly that Rep. Charlie Rangel took to calling it the City Hall Post. News Corp. even hired Giuliani's wife, Donna Hanover, as a Fox television reporter, quickly quadrupling her salary to $123,000.
Giuliani was not shy about rewarding his media patron. When Murdoch moved News Corp. into its current Midtown headquarters, the mayor secured the company a tax break worth more than $20 million. Then, when Time Warner tried to keep Murdoch out of the New York market in 1996 by refusing to give Fox News a spot in its cable lineups, Giuliani threatened to revoke Time Warner's cable franchise and offered to air Fox News on one of the city's public-access channels. A federal judge blocked the move, upbraiding the mayor for acting "to reward a friend and to further a particular viewpoint." But the rank political favoritism paid off: During Giuliani's first term, according to a study by researchers at the University of Southern California, not a single negative editorial about him appeared in the Post.
POLITCAL ENTANGLEMENTS Just as the News of the World scandal toppled the head of Scotland Yard, News Corp. also brought down one of America's top cops. In 2001, one of Murdoch's publishing chiefs, Judith Regan, signed New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik to a book advance worth six figures. In an affair worthy of Page Six, the News Corp. executive was soon literally in bed with the police czar, meeting for sex in an apartment overlooking Ground Zero that was intended to house exhausted recovery workers. Before long, Kerik was tasking NYPD officers as if they were Regan's personal bodyguards, at one point reportedly dispatching them to track down the publisher's lost cellphone.
According to a source familiar with details of the affair, the relationship soured when Regan tried to break it off. Unable to call the cops, she confided in fellow News Corp. executive Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, hoping he could get Giuliani to rein in Kerik. But Ailes was more concerned about the political fallout. According to legal filings by Regan, Ailes anticipated the damage the scandal could cause the mayor and personally confronted Murdoch, telling him that Regan was "out of control." Ailes grew even more concerned in 2004, when President Bush nominated Kerik — by then a senior vice president in Giuliani's national security firm — to head the Department of Homeland Security. If Regan disclosed her tawdry ties to the former commissioner, Ailes feared, it might harm Kerik's nomination and "more importantly, Giuliani's planned presidential campaign."
To keep the affair hush-hush, Ailes "advised Regan to lie to and withhold information from investigators," and even coached her on limiting her disclosures "as is typically done when Fox News on-air talent receive their 'talking points.'" The alleged obstruction of justice by Ailes has since made headlines, but Regan also fingered "another News Corp. executive," whom she claimed advised her "not to produce clearly relevant documents in connection with a governmental investigation of Kerik."
Regan laid these allegations bare in a wrongful-termination lawsuit she filed in 2007. As it did with its accusers in London, News Corp. moved to paper over the matter by reaching a settlement with Regan worth more than $10 million. The only one punished in the Kerik affair was Kerik himself, who was sentenced to four years in prison for lying to federal investigators and failing to report income from a News Corp. book advance to the IRS.
Murdoch may soon find himself in even deeper trouble for his dealings with New York police. The Justice Department is currently investigating allegations that News Corp. reporters tried to bribe a New York cop, seeking to hack the phones of 9/11 victims — a charge that has outraged even the staunchest Fox News Republicans. "It is revolting to imagine that members of the media would seek to compromise the integrity of a public official for financial gain in the pursuit of yellow journalism," Rep. Peter King of New York wrote in a letter to FBI director Robert Mueller, demanding that any wrongdoing be met with the "harshest sanctions available under law."
But the "revolting" practice that King describes is actually at the core of Murdoch's business model. Until the News of the World scandal became public, deplorable judgment and even outright criminal behavior have not been firing offenses for Murdoch's top deputies, either in London or New York. A willingness to push the boundaries of the law and common decency, in fact, is what has made Murdoch a billionaire nearly eight times over. Murdoch himself has bragged of possessing files, replete with photographs detailing the sexual escapades of prominent liberals. You know, for leverage. All of which makes laughable Murdoch's claim before Parliament that "I'm the best person to clean this up."
The phone-hacking scandal engulfing News Corp. has led members of the extended Bancroft clan that sold The Wall Street Journal to Murdoch to repent of their decision — even though they received what amounted to a $3 billion overpayment from News Corp. for the paper. "Murdoch thinks he is completely above the law, as he always has," former top shareholder Bill Cox III recently told ProPublica. "We made a deal with the devil."
The sharks are already circling in England, where politicians long cowed by Murdoch's bullying now appear determined to curb News Corp.'s influence. Labor Party leader Ed Miliband, decrying Murdoch for having "too much power over British public life," has called for a breakup of his U.K. holdings. Here in the United States, institutional shareholders filed suit in July, seeking to change News Corp. from the inside by reforming its board of hand-appointed cronies. The board, the suit claims, has "abdicated its fiduciary duties" by enabling Murdoch to run the publicly-traded News Corp. "without any restraints on his pursuit of his political and personal agendas, which has led the company to engage in improper and illegal conduct."
The lawsuit highlights Murdoch's outrageous pay: He's pocketed $75 million in compensation over the past three years, even as News Corp.'s stock has yielded a negative return. It also blasts his "rampant nepotism," noting the extravagant overpayment he made to acquire his daughter Elizabeth's production company, Shine — a deal that made her $250 million richer at the expense of the company. But even as Murdoch's children have come back into the News Corp. fold, his dreams of creating a media dynasty have never been more troubled. As the fallout from the hacking scandal continues in London, the News of the World's former editor is accusing heir apparent James Murdoch of lying to Parliament about his knowledge of the hush money paid to hacking victims.
As each News of the World revelation exposes the root and branch of corruption at News Corp., the increasingly desperate Murdoch has responded by hacking off branches. In removing Les Hinton, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, he cut off an executive he once said he would trust his life to. In getting rid of Rebekah Brooks at News of the World, he abandoned a deputy he favored like a daughter. Son James now looks like the next branch to go. But until Rupert Murdoch sees fit to remove himself, the root of all that's vile at News Corp. will remain the same.
This story is from the August 18, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
London Riots
Such a shame that people have to resort to this type of protest
Smashed glass doors and windows and wrecked shutters of a betting shop and a jewelry shop in Enfield, north London, Aug. 8, 2011
Britain has been hit by two nights of riots taking place across London. Politicians say it’s been carried out by opportunistic criminals, but underlying social issues may also be playing a role.
"It was needless, opportunistic theft and violence - nothing more, nothing less, and it is completely unacceptable," said Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
Last Thursday a 29-year-old died in London, allegedly shot by police.
Two days later, on Saturday, a peaceful demonstration was held to mark his death. That turned into a violent riot with cars and buildings in north London set alight and shops looted.
Police were injured and dozens arrested. But that wasn’t the end of the story. More riots took place Sunday, spreading to the south of London.
Police called the further riots “copycat criminality”.
Professor of government at the London School of Economics, Rodney Barker says that’s a simplification.
"One will have seen across the world, quite recently actually, that whenever there is public unrest - whether it's in Iran, or Syria, or the United States, or the United Kingdom, the government says 'this is all the work of a small group of agitators, criminal elements, terrorists.' Governments always say that. But it isn't a criminal conspiracy. Any crowd in civil unrest is made up of all kinds of people with all kinds of motivations," said Barker.
He says last week’s death was a trigger. The broader context, he says, is social and economic.
He says spending cuts implemented by Britain’s current Conservative government have created a volatile situation.
"It's a bit like high speed in motor cars," he said. "You can guarantee that in areas where people drive faster, there will be more accidents because accidents are more likely to occur and to be more dangerous in those circumstances."
The riots come as Britain’s economy is suffering and the government is making deep public spending cuts and hiking up taxes.
Neil Prothero, an economist at London’s Economist Intelligence Unit, says the austerity measures, aimed at reducing Britain’s debt, are taking their toll on a local level.
“In real terms the actual spending reduction program is the most painful if it all came to fruition since the 1940s in terms of its actual squeeze on the levels of public spending," said Prothero. "It's something that the U.K. has not endured for many, many years.”
He says austerity is only just beginning and in the coming years spending cuts will have an ever larger impact.
"This is our slight concern is that the actual spending cut-backs, which affect vast swathes of the population in one way or another, whether it's through benefits or just reduced public services in general - that is still to flow through over the coming years," he said. "It's a concern and it's a worry as to what may happen in terms of the social unrest and the general economic weakness going forward."
Nearly 200 people have been arrested across London in relation to the riots.
Find this article at:
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/europe/Riots-Continue-in-London-127253623.html
Smashed glass doors and windows and wrecked shutters of a betting shop and a jewelry shop in Enfield, north London, Aug. 8, 2011
Britain has been hit by two nights of riots taking place across London. Politicians say it’s been carried out by opportunistic criminals, but underlying social issues may also be playing a role.
"It was needless, opportunistic theft and violence - nothing more, nothing less, and it is completely unacceptable," said Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
Last Thursday a 29-year-old died in London, allegedly shot by police.
Two days later, on Saturday, a peaceful demonstration was held to mark his death. That turned into a violent riot with cars and buildings in north London set alight and shops looted.
Police were injured and dozens arrested. But that wasn’t the end of the story. More riots took place Sunday, spreading to the south of London.
Police called the further riots “copycat criminality”.
Professor of government at the London School of Economics, Rodney Barker says that’s a simplification.
"One will have seen across the world, quite recently actually, that whenever there is public unrest - whether it's in Iran, or Syria, or the United States, or the United Kingdom, the government says 'this is all the work of a small group of agitators, criminal elements, terrorists.' Governments always say that. But it isn't a criminal conspiracy. Any crowd in civil unrest is made up of all kinds of people with all kinds of motivations," said Barker.
He says last week’s death was a trigger. The broader context, he says, is social and economic.
He says spending cuts implemented by Britain’s current Conservative government have created a volatile situation.
"It's a bit like high speed in motor cars," he said. "You can guarantee that in areas where people drive faster, there will be more accidents because accidents are more likely to occur and to be more dangerous in those circumstances."
The riots come as Britain’s economy is suffering and the government is making deep public spending cuts and hiking up taxes.
Neil Prothero, an economist at London’s Economist Intelligence Unit, says the austerity measures, aimed at reducing Britain’s debt, are taking their toll on a local level.
“In real terms the actual spending reduction program is the most painful if it all came to fruition since the 1940s in terms of its actual squeeze on the levels of public spending," said Prothero. "It's something that the U.K. has not endured for many, many years.”
He says austerity is only just beginning and in the coming years spending cuts will have an ever larger impact.
"This is our slight concern is that the actual spending cut-backs, which affect vast swathes of the population in one way or another, whether it's through benefits or just reduced public services in general - that is still to flow through over the coming years," he said. "It's a concern and it's a worry as to what may happen in terms of the social unrest and the general economic weakness going forward."
Nearly 200 people have been arrested across London in relation to the riots.
Find this article at:
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/europe/Riots-Continue-in-London-127253623.html
Downgrade of the United States' credit
The statement released Friday by Standard & Poor's explaining its downgrade of the United States' credit rating expressed greater concern about the inability of the American political system to handle troublesome economic realities than it did about those economic realities themselves. It read:
"The downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011."
Thus, what directly prompted the historic decision to downgrade the U.S. credit rating was worsening political dysfunction, not the "economic challenges" which Standard & Poor's described as "ongoing." The political, even geopolitical, repercussions of those challenges can only be expected to grow.
Noting liberal despair over the government's inability to combat economic depression, and conservative skepticism that traditional tools will be effective, John Judis of The New Republic argues that a global depression far longer and more severe than anyone expected now seems nearly impossible to avoid. Judis believes that the coming "depression" will be accompanied by geopolitical upheaval and institutional collapse.
"As the experience of the 1930s testified, a prolonged global downturn can have profound political and geopolitical repercussions. In the U.S. and Europe, the downturn has already inspired unsavory, right-wing populist movements. It could also bring about trade wars and intense competition over natural resources, and the eventual breakdown of important institutions like European Union and the World Trade Organization. Even a shooting war is possible."
Daniel Knowles of the Telegraph has noticed a similar trend. In a post titled, "This Really Is Beginning To Look Like 1931," Knowles argues that we could be witnessing the transition from recession to global depression that last occurred two years after the 1929 market collapse, and eight years before Germany invaded Poland, triggering the Second World War:
"The difference today is that so far, the chain reaction of a default has been avoided by bailouts. Countries are not closing down their borders or arming their soldiers – they can agree on some solution, if not a good solution. But the fundamental problem – the spiral downwards caused by confidence crises and ever rising interest rates – is exactly the same now as it was in 1931. And as Italy and Spain come under attack, we are reaching the limit of how much that sticking plaster can heal. Tensions between European countries unseen in decades are emerging."
Knowles wrote that posts three days ago. Since then it has become abundantly obvious that Europe will soon become unwilling or unable to continue bailing out every country with a debt problem. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy continues to chug along, to the extent it is chugging at all, on the false security offered by a collective distaste for one ratings agency and its poor mathematics.
That can't continue forever. The next few months will show S&P's downgrade to have been too little and too late, rather than too drastic and too soon. The Eurozone will fall apart. The American political crisis will will only worsen; the "super-committee" will utterly fail, true to design. Soon enough, we may all wake up to a "reckoning" truly deserving of the name.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/serious-people-are-starting-to-realize-that-we-may-be-looking-at-world-war-iii-2011-8#ixzz1UTho2B6g
"The downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011."
Thus, what directly prompted the historic decision to downgrade the U.S. credit rating was worsening political dysfunction, not the "economic challenges" which Standard & Poor's described as "ongoing." The political, even geopolitical, repercussions of those challenges can only be expected to grow.
Noting liberal despair over the government's inability to combat economic depression, and conservative skepticism that traditional tools will be effective, John Judis of The New Republic argues that a global depression far longer and more severe than anyone expected now seems nearly impossible to avoid. Judis believes that the coming "depression" will be accompanied by geopolitical upheaval and institutional collapse.
"As the experience of the 1930s testified, a prolonged global downturn can have profound political and geopolitical repercussions. In the U.S. and Europe, the downturn has already inspired unsavory, right-wing populist movements. It could also bring about trade wars and intense competition over natural resources, and the eventual breakdown of important institutions like European Union and the World Trade Organization. Even a shooting war is possible."
Daniel Knowles of the Telegraph has noticed a similar trend. In a post titled, "This Really Is Beginning To Look Like 1931," Knowles argues that we could be witnessing the transition from recession to global depression that last occurred two years after the 1929 market collapse, and eight years before Germany invaded Poland, triggering the Second World War:
"The difference today is that so far, the chain reaction of a default has been avoided by bailouts. Countries are not closing down their borders or arming their soldiers – they can agree on some solution, if not a good solution. But the fundamental problem – the spiral downwards caused by confidence crises and ever rising interest rates – is exactly the same now as it was in 1931. And as Italy and Spain come under attack, we are reaching the limit of how much that sticking plaster can heal. Tensions between European countries unseen in decades are emerging."
Knowles wrote that posts three days ago. Since then it has become abundantly obvious that Europe will soon become unwilling or unable to continue bailing out every country with a debt problem. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy continues to chug along, to the extent it is chugging at all, on the false security offered by a collective distaste for one ratings agency and its poor mathematics.
That can't continue forever. The next few months will show S&P's downgrade to have been too little and too late, rather than too drastic and too soon. The Eurozone will fall apart. The American political crisis will will only worsen; the "super-committee" will utterly fail, true to design. Soon enough, we may all wake up to a "reckoning" truly deserving of the name.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/serious-people-are-starting-to-realize-that-we-may-be-looking-at-world-war-iii-2011-8#ixzz1UTho2B6g
Monday, August 08, 2011
Comet Elenin Observing Guide
A fellow blogger with this information. I am finding this comet very interesting
Comet C/2010 X1 was discovered by Leonid Elenin (Lyubertsy, Russia) using the 45-cm astrograph and a CCD camera at the International Scientific Optical Network's robotic observatory near Mayhill, New Mexico. The comet has been well observed by observatories from the beginning of 2011 to the present, with visual observers finally picking up the comet on April 5. The comet began the year at a nuclear magnitude of about 19, and brightened to about 18 by February 1, 17 by March 1, and 16.5 by April 1. The January and February observations typical revealed a coma about 0.3' across and a tail extending 0.3-0.5'.
The comet will reach perihelion (0.48 AU) on September 10. The comet will pass 0.23 AU from Earth on October 16. On 7th August, the comet has been reported to be shining at magnitude 9.0 with angular diameter 3’. The comet is very low in the West at the time of evening twilight in August 2011 but it will get bright rapidly and will be shining at mag 6 on August 31st. It won’t be possible to observe this comet during September as it will pass the Sun.
The comet will emerge through the early morning eastern sky during the first week of October. This time the comet is predicted to be as bright as mag 4.8 or 5.0.
On October 14th, the comet (~mag 5.1) will be just 1.5 degrees from the 9th magnitude galaxy NGC 2903 in Leo.
On October 15th the comet will be within 6 degrees North of Mars.
On October 18th the comet will be nearly 6 degrees north of the Beehive Cluster (M44) in Cancer.
On October 22nd the comet (~ mag 5.8) will be just 1 degree from the star Pollux in Gemini.
On October 31st the comet (~6.8) will be 2 degrees E-SE of the Open Cluster Messier 37 in Auriga after midnight.
The brightness will start to decrease rapidly as November begins. The comet will be at magnitude 9 during November 15th. The comet will pass very close of the Pleiades (Messier 45) from November 20 to November 24. It will be just 42’ away from the stars of Pleiades on November 22. On November 23rd the comet will be just 31’ from Maia (the 3.8th mag star in Pleiades). During this time the comet will be shining at magnitudes 9.5.
Here, below the charts are given showing positions of this comet from 1st October to 25th November 2011.
http://skygazersbhuj.blogspot.com/2011/08/comet-c2010-x1-elenin-observing-guide.html
RAHUL'S ASTRONOMY BLOG: COMET C/2010 X1 ELENIN OBSERVING GUIDE
Comet C/2010 X1 was discovered by Leonid Elenin (Lyubertsy, Russia) using the 45-cm astrograph and a CCD camera at the International Scientific Optical Network's robotic observatory near Mayhill, New Mexico. The comet has been well observed by observatories from the beginning of 2011 to the present, with visual observers finally picking up the comet on April 5. The comet began the year at a nuclear magnitude of about 19, and brightened to about 18 by February 1, 17 by March 1, and 16.5 by April 1. The January and February observations typical revealed a coma about 0.3' across and a tail extending 0.3-0.5'.
The comet will reach perihelion (0.48 AU) on September 10. The comet will pass 0.23 AU from Earth on October 16. On 7th August, the comet has been reported to be shining at magnitude 9.0 with angular diameter 3’. The comet is very low in the West at the time of evening twilight in August 2011 but it will get bright rapidly and will be shining at mag 6 on August 31st. It won’t be possible to observe this comet during September as it will pass the Sun.
The comet will emerge through the early morning eastern sky during the first week of October. This time the comet is predicted to be as bright as mag 4.8 or 5.0.
On October 14th, the comet (~mag 5.1) will be just 1.5 degrees from the 9th magnitude galaxy NGC 2903 in Leo.
On October 15th the comet will be within 6 degrees North of Mars.
On October 18th the comet will be nearly 6 degrees north of the Beehive Cluster (M44) in Cancer.
On October 22nd the comet (~ mag 5.8) will be just 1 degree from the star Pollux in Gemini.
On October 31st the comet (~6.8) will be 2 degrees E-SE of the Open Cluster Messier 37 in Auriga after midnight.
The brightness will start to decrease rapidly as November begins. The comet will be at magnitude 9 during November 15th. The comet will pass very close of the Pleiades (Messier 45) from November 20 to November 24. It will be just 42’ away from the stars of Pleiades on November 22. On November 23rd the comet will be just 31’ from Maia (the 3.8th mag star in Pleiades). During this time the comet will be shining at magnitudes 9.5.
Here, below the charts are given showing positions of this comet from 1st October to 25th November 2011.
http://skygazersbhuj.blogspot.com/2011/08/comet-c2010-x1-elenin-observing-guide.html
RAHUL'S ASTRONOMY BLOG: COMET C/2010 X1 ELENIN OBSERVING GUIDE
Saturday, August 06, 2011
Lethal Levels of Radiation at Fukushima
TEPCO has discovered locations on the Fukushima plant site with lethal levels of external gamma radiation. Fairewinds takes a close look at how this radiation might have been deposited and how similar radioactive material would have been released offsite.
There are some very good updates at this link.
Source
Lethal Levels of Radiation at Fukushima: What Are the Implications? from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
There are some very good updates at this link.
Thursday, August 04, 2011
Tepco Reports Deadly Radiation Reading Fukushima Nuclear Plant
By Tsuyoshi Inajima and Kari Lundgren - Aug 3, 2011
Tokyo Electric Power Co. reported its second deadly radiation reading in as many days at its wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant north of Tokyo.
The utility known as Tepco said yesterday it detected 5 sieverts of radiation per hour in the No. 1 reactor building. On Aug. 1 in another area it recorded radiation of 10 sieverts per hour, enough to kill a person “within a few weeks” after a single exposure, according to the World Nuclear Association.
Radiation has impeded attempts to replace cooling systems to bring three melted reactors and four damaged spent fuel ponds under control after a tsunami on March 11 crippled the plant. The latest reading was taken on the second floor of the No. 1 reactor building and will stop workers entering the area.
“It’s probably the first of many more to come,” said Michael Friedlander, who spent 13 years operating nuclear power plants in the U.S., including the Crystal River Station in Florida. “Although I am not surprised, it concerns me greatly; the issue is the worker safety.”
The 10 sieverts of radiation detected on Aug. 1 outside reactor buildings was the highest the Geiger counters used were capable of reading, indicating the level could have been higher, Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at the utility, said at a press conference.
Upper Limit
“Ten sieverts is the upper limit for many dosimeters and almost equal to the amount that killed workers at the JCO nuclear accident in 1999,” said Tomoko Murakami, a nuclear researcher at the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan.
In that accident, then the world’s worst since Chernobyl in 1986, more than 600 people were exposed to radiation after workers inadvertently started a nuclear chain reaction while processing nuclear fuel at a plant near Tokyo. Two employees of JCO Co., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sumitomo Metal Mining Co., died from radiation exposure.
Tepco was forced to pump water into the three Fukushima reactors after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami disabled cooling systems. The company in May estimated there would be 200,000 tons of radiated water in basements and other areas of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant by December.
“If nuclear fuels melted through containment chambers, Tepco will find even higher radiation readings after water in building basements is removed,” said Tetsuo Ito, the head of the Atomic Energy Research Institute at Kinki University.
Radiation Leaks
Tepco has been criticized by the government for withholding radiation data and other missteps that have worsened the crisis. About 160,000 people have been evacuated from areas stretching 20 kilometers and more from the plant.
On May 27, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Tepco’s withholding radiation data was contributing to “public distrust.” The utility responded by saying it will publish in August the combined figures of radiation released into the atmosphere and in contaminated water. It hasn’t given a date for release of that information.
Radiation leaks from the Fukushima reactors have spread over 600 square kilometers, Tomio Kawata, a fellow at the Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Japan, said in a research report published on May 24 and given to the government.
Radioactive soil in pockets of areas outside the exclusion zone around the plant have reached the same level as in Chernobyl following a reactor explosion in the former Soviet Union, the report said.
Hot Spots
The threats to Japan’s food chain are also multiplying as radioactive cesium emissions from the Fukushima plant spread. Contaminated beef has been found on supermarket shelves around the country, forcing the government to ban cattle shipments from areas in northern Japan.
The latest high radiation readings are probably coming from materials released during early failed attempts to release pressure in containment vessels and vent hydrogen gas to prevent explosions that damaged reactor buildings, Matsumoto said. There were about 2,760 workers at the plant on Aug 1.
Tepco on April 17 set out a so-called road map to end the crisis by January, aiming to bring down radiation levels at the plant within three months and then achieve a so-called cold shutdown where reactor temperatures fall below 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit).
The utility needs to investigate other areas that may hold high radiation levels in line with the cold-shutdown and clean up, said Murakami at Energy Economics.
“Tepco workers and its subcontractors who know the Fukushima plant well may be the only ones that can discover such hot spots,” he said. “For people new to the plant it’s deadly.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Tsuyoshi Inajima in Tokyo at tinajima@bloomberg.net; Kari Lundgren in London at klundgren2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Langan at plangan@bloomberg.net
®2011 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Source
Tokyo Electric Power Co. reported its second deadly radiation reading in as many days at its wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant north of Tokyo.
The utility known as Tepco said yesterday it detected 5 sieverts of radiation per hour in the No. 1 reactor building. On Aug. 1 in another area it recorded radiation of 10 sieverts per hour, enough to kill a person “within a few weeks” after a single exposure, according to the World Nuclear Association.
Radiation has impeded attempts to replace cooling systems to bring three melted reactors and four damaged spent fuel ponds under control after a tsunami on March 11 crippled the plant. The latest reading was taken on the second floor of the No. 1 reactor building and will stop workers entering the area.
“It’s probably the first of many more to come,” said Michael Friedlander, who spent 13 years operating nuclear power plants in the U.S., including the Crystal River Station in Florida. “Although I am not surprised, it concerns me greatly; the issue is the worker safety.”
The 10 sieverts of radiation detected on Aug. 1 outside reactor buildings was the highest the Geiger counters used were capable of reading, indicating the level could have been higher, Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at the utility, said at a press conference.
Upper Limit
“Ten sieverts is the upper limit for many dosimeters and almost equal to the amount that killed workers at the JCO nuclear accident in 1999,” said Tomoko Murakami, a nuclear researcher at the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan.
In that accident, then the world’s worst since Chernobyl in 1986, more than 600 people were exposed to radiation after workers inadvertently started a nuclear chain reaction while processing nuclear fuel at a plant near Tokyo. Two employees of JCO Co., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sumitomo Metal Mining Co., died from radiation exposure.
Tepco was forced to pump water into the three Fukushima reactors after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami disabled cooling systems. The company in May estimated there would be 200,000 tons of radiated water in basements and other areas of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant by December.
“If nuclear fuels melted through containment chambers, Tepco will find even higher radiation readings after water in building basements is removed,” said Tetsuo Ito, the head of the Atomic Energy Research Institute at Kinki University.
Radiation Leaks
Tepco has been criticized by the government for withholding radiation data and other missteps that have worsened the crisis. About 160,000 people have been evacuated from areas stretching 20 kilometers and more from the plant.
On May 27, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Tepco’s withholding radiation data was contributing to “public distrust.” The utility responded by saying it will publish in August the combined figures of radiation released into the atmosphere and in contaminated water. It hasn’t given a date for release of that information.
Radiation leaks from the Fukushima reactors have spread over 600 square kilometers, Tomio Kawata, a fellow at the Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Japan, said in a research report published on May 24 and given to the government.
Radioactive soil in pockets of areas outside the exclusion zone around the plant have reached the same level as in Chernobyl following a reactor explosion in the former Soviet Union, the report said.
Hot Spots
The threats to Japan’s food chain are also multiplying as radioactive cesium emissions from the Fukushima plant spread. Contaminated beef has been found on supermarket shelves around the country, forcing the government to ban cattle shipments from areas in northern Japan.
The latest high radiation readings are probably coming from materials released during early failed attempts to release pressure in containment vessels and vent hydrogen gas to prevent explosions that damaged reactor buildings, Matsumoto said. There were about 2,760 workers at the plant on Aug 1.
Tepco on April 17 set out a so-called road map to end the crisis by January, aiming to bring down radiation levels at the plant within three months and then achieve a so-called cold shutdown where reactor temperatures fall below 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit).
The utility needs to investigate other areas that may hold high radiation levels in line with the cold-shutdown and clean up, said Murakami at Energy Economics.
“Tepco workers and its subcontractors who know the Fukushima plant well may be the only ones that can discover such hot spots,” he said. “For people new to the plant it’s deadly.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Tsuyoshi Inajima in Tokyo at tinajima@bloomberg.net; Kari Lundgren in London at klundgren2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Langan at plangan@bloomberg.net
®2011 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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