Pregnant activist crashes glitzy arms industry dinner, urges guests ‘consider career change’

Screenshot from youtube.com/user/wwwcaatorguk

Published time: February 05, 2015 18:32
Edited time: February 05, 2015 21:50

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A pregnant political activist entered a glitzy arms industry dinner in Westminster, commandeered a microphone and warned assembled arms dealers and MPs that making profit “causing death and destruction around the world” is unacceptable.
After making her way to a microphone undetected, Anne Marie O'Reilly expressed concern her unborn child would face a world where arms dealers profit from human suffering and bloodshed.
The anti-arms activist’s unexpected intervention left the crowd somewhat stunned.
While O'Reilly's unassuming manner initially drew a warm reception, her criticism of the UK establishment’s links to the arms trade was followed by a long and awkward silence.
Before being escorted off stage, O'Reilly suggested arms dealers in the audience should reconsider their careers.

The UK arms industry, which profits from brokering arms deals with questionable regimes and conflict-ridden states worldwide, is backed and subsidized by the British government.
Tuesday’s annual dinner, which cost attendees £246 per head, was hosted by ADS – a trade body for British Aerospace, and other defense, security and space companies. The group represents a collective of the world’s 50 largest arms firms.
The opulent soiree was attended by Britain’s Business Secretary Vince Cable, the representatives of 100 arms firms across the globe, over 40 British MPs, 30 civil servants, and 30 Ministry of Defence (MoD) personnel.
Andrew Smith, of UK think tank Campaign Against The Arms Trade (CAAT), said the event was a hotbed of lobbying.
“The arms companies don't invite politicians because they want to be nice, it is because it's good for business,” he told RT.
“These arms companies couldn't sell their wares without the active support and promotion that comes from the UK government.”

Image from baesystems.com

CAAT was provided with a list of all MPs who attended the lavish dinner. The document also detailed their seating arrangements.
Tobius Elwood MP, a Foreign and Commonwealth Office minister, was seated at Cobham PLC’s table. The firm is one of the biggest arms companies in the world, and is headquartered in Dorset. Cobham has applied for arms export licenses to Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UAE and Turkey, according to CAAT.
Margaret Curran MP, shadow secretary of state for Scotland, was seated at the table of US-headquartered arms manufacturer Raytheon.
Raytheon makes the targeting system for the Reaper drone deployed by the CIA and other states to conduct strikes across the globe.The firm has also been linked to manufacturing components for bombs deployed in the 2014 Gaza conflict.
Business Secretary Vince Cable, who spoke at the event, sat at the top table beside Shadow Secretary for Defence Vernon Coaker and a group of ADS executives.
CAAT’s Andrew Smith said Cable’s decision to speak at the dinner was telling.
“The fact that a group like ADS is being addressed by Vince Cable MP, the Secretary of State for Business, is a sign of how powerful they are,” he argued.
Also present at the extravagant event were controversial arms firms Thales, BAE Systems and MBDA.
Thales is the eleventh largest arms firm in the world, and has sold military wares to some of the most oppressive regimes across the globe, according to CAAT.
BAE Systems, which had three MPs at its table, is Europe’s largest arms firm, and has also supplied multiple repressive governments. Among the regimes BAE Systems sells to are Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Mubarak's Egypt.
MBDA is a missile company partially owned by BAE. It sold military wares to Muammar Gadaffi’s government in 2007, and its military hardware was deployed by Britain and France in the 2011 bombing of Libya. The company’s missiles are also thought to have been supplied to rebel groups in Libya, CAAT says.
Probed on the impact of Britain’s government-backed arms trade, Smith said the UK facilitates rampant human rights abuses abroad.
“When the UK sells weapons to regimes like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain, it doesn't just provide military support, it also provides political support and a UK endorsement for the human rights abuses that are taking place,” he said.
Smith said it is “outrageous the government actively supports and promotes this deadly trade.”
“The fact that arms dealers were swilling champagne with over 40 MPs is a disgrace and shows the extent of the arms trade's connections and political lobbying,” he added.
READ MORE: ‘I won’t be used to peddle UK arms in Middle East’ – Prince Charles
On Tuesday, it emerged the Prince of Wales allegedly wants to end his role as a promoter of British arms in Gulf States.
The revelation was unveiled by an unauthorized biography documenting Prince Charles’ life, which was published on Thursday.

Is a Major Gold Scandal Going Mainstream?

Posted on January 27, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/ 

Allegation that Central Banks Have Rehypothecated, Leased or Outright Sold the Gold They Claim to Have Is Gaining Momentum

We noted in 2012 that there are serious questions as to whether the Fed and other central banks really have the gold holdings which they claim.
This story is starting to go mainstream.
The Financial Times writes today (h/t Zero Hedge):

A year ago the Bundesbank announced that it intended to repatriate 700 tons of Germany’s gold from Paris and New York. Although a couple of jumbo jets could have managed the transatlantic removal, it made security sense to ship the load in smaller consignments. Just how small, and over how long, has only just become apparent.
Last month Jens Weidmann, Bundesbank president, admitted that just 37 tons had arrived in Frankfurt. The original timescale, to complete the transfer by 2020, was leisurely enough, but at this rate it would take 20 years for a simple operation. Well, perhaps not so simple. While he awaits delivery, Herr Weidmann is welcome to come and look through the bars in the Federal Reserve’s vaults, but the question is: whose bars are they?
In the “armchair farmer” fraud you are told: “Look, this is your pig, in the sty.” It works until everyone wants physical delivery of their pig, which is why Buba’s move last year caused such a stir. After all nobody knows whether there are really 260m ounces of gold in Fort Knox, because the US government won’t let auditors inside.
The delivery problem for the Fed is a different breed of pig. The gold market is far more than exchanging paper money for precious metal. Indeed the metal seems something of a sideshow. In June last year the average volume of gold cleared in London hit 29m ounces per day. The world’s mines are producing 90m ounces per year. The traded volume was many times the cleared volume.
The paper gold in the London Bullion Market takes the familiar forms that bankers have turned into profit machines: futures, options, leveraged trades, collateralised obligations, ETFs . . . a storm of exotic instruments, each of which is carefully logged, cross-checked and audited.
Or perhaps not. High-flying traders find such backroom work tedious, and prefer to let some drone do it, just as they did with those money-market instruments that fuelled the banking crisis. The drones will have full control of the paper trail, won’t they? There’s surely no chance that the Fed’s little delivery difficulty has anything to do with the cat’s-cradle of pledges based on the gold in its vaults?
John Hathaway suspects there is. He worries about all the paper (and pixels) linked to gold. He runs the Tocqueville gold fund (the clue is in the name) and doesn’t share the near-universal gloom of London’s gold analysts, who a year ago forecast an average $1700 for 2013. It is currently $1,260.
As has been remarked here before, forecasting the price is for mugs and bugs. But one day the ties that bind this pixelated gold may break, with potentially catastrophic results. So if you fancy gold at today’s depressed price, learn from Buba and demand delivery.

And last week, Glenn Beck – hate him or love him, he’s got the 594^th most popular website in the world and many viewers on Dish network and various cable providers – did an entire 20-minute episode on the issue:

This story hasn’t yet made it to the New York Times, the Washington Post or network television … but it is gaining momentum.

RBS Pays $600 Million for Manpulating Interest Rates … But Big Banks Are Manipulating EVERY Market to the Tune of Trillions of Dollars

Posted on January 7, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog

(Washington is a genius, imho...) 

Interest Rates Are Manipulated

Bloomberg reports today:

Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc was ordered to pay $50 million by a federal judge in Connecticut over claims that it rigged the London interbank offered rate.
RBS Securities Japan Ltd. in April pleaded guilty to wire fraudas part of a settlement of more than $600 million with U.S and U.K. regulators over Libor manipulation, according to court filings. U.S. District Judge Michael P. Shea in New Haventoday sentenced the Tokyo-based unit of RBS, Britain’s biggest publicly owned lender, to pay the agreed-upon fine, according to a Justice Department Justice Department.
Global investigations into banks’ attempts to manipulate the benchmarks for profit have led to fines and settlements for lenders including RBS, Barclays Plc, UBS AG and Rabobank Groep.
RBS was among six companies fined a record 1.7 billion euros ($2.3 billion) by the European Union last month for rigging interest rates linked to Libor. The combined fines for manipulating yen Libor and Euribor, the benchmark money-market rate for the euro, are the largest-ever EU cartel penalties.
Global fines for rate-rigging have reached $6 billion since June 2012 as authorities around the world probe whether traders worked together to fix Libor, meant to reflect the interest rate at which banks lend to each other, to benefit their own trading positions.

To put the Libor interest rate scandal in perspective:

• The big banks have conspired for years to rig interest rates … upon which $800 trillion in assets are pegged

• This was the largest insider trading scandal ever … and the largest financial scam in world history

• Local governments got ripped off bigtime by the Libor manipulation

• Even though RBS and a handful of other banks have been fined for interest rate manipulation, Libor is still being manipulated.  No wonder … the fines are pocket change – the cost of doing business – for the big banks

Indeed, the experts say that big banks will keep manipulating markets unless and until their executives are thrown in jail for fraud.
Why? Because the system is rigged to allow the big banks to commit continuous and massive fraud, and then to pay small fines as the “cost of doing business”.  As Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz noted years ago:

“The system is set so that even if you’re caught, the penalty is just a small number relative to what you walk home with.
The fine is just a cost of doing business. It’s like a parking fine. Sometimes you make a decision to park knowing that you might get a fine because going around the corner to the parking lot takes you too much time.”

Experts also say that we have to prosecute fraud or else the economy won’t ever really stabilize.
But the government is doing the exact opposite.  Indeed, the Justice Department has announced it will go easy on big banks, and always settles prosecutions for pennies on the dollar (a form of stealth bailout. It is also arguably one of the main causes of the double dip in housing.)
Indeed, the government doesn’t even force the banks to admit any guilt as part of their settlements.
Because of this failure to prosecute, it’s not just interest rates. As shown below, big banks have manipulated virtually every market – both in the financial sector and the real economy – and broken virtually every law on the books.
And they will keep on doing so until the Department of Justice grows a pair.

Currency Markets Are Rigged

Currency markets are massively rigged. And see this and this.

Derivatives Are Manipulated

The big banks have long manipulated derivatives … a $1,200 Trillion Dollar market.
Indeed, many trillions of dollars of derivatives are being manipulated in the exact same same way that interest rates are fixed: through gamed self-reporting.

Oil Prices Are Manipulated

Oil prices are manipulated as well.

Gold and Silver Are Manipulated

Gold and silver prices are “fixed” in the same way as interest rates and derivatives – in daily conference calls by the powers-that-be.
Bloomberg reports:

It is the participating banks themselves that administer the gold and silver benchmarks.

So are prices being manipulated? Let’s take a look at the evidence. In his book “The Gold Cartel,” commodity analyst Dimitri Speck combines minute-by-minute data from most of 1993 through 2012 to show how gold prices move on an average day (see attached charts). He finds that the spot price of gold tends to drop sharply around the London evening fixing (10 a.m. New York time). A similar, if less pronounced, drop in price occurs around the London morning fixing. The same daily declines can be seen in silver prices from 1998 through 2012.

For both commodities there were, on average, no comparable price changes at any other time of the day. These patterns are consistent with manipulation in both markets.

Energy Markets Are Manipulated

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says that JP Morgan has massively manipulated energy markets in California and the Midwest, obtaining tens of millions of dollars in overpayments from grid operators between September 2010 and June 2011.

Commodities Are Manipulated

The big banks and government agencies have been conspiring to manipulate commodities prices for decades.
The big banks are taking over important aspects of the physical economy, including uranium mining, petroleum products, aluminum, ownership and operation of airports, toll roads, ports, and electricity.
And they are using these physical assets to massively manipulate commodities prices … scalping consumers of many billions of dollars each year.

Everything Can Be Manipulated through High-Frequency Trading

Traders with high-tech computers can manipulate stocks, bonds, options, currencies and commodities. And see this.

Manipulating Numerous Markets In Myriad Ways

The big banks and other giants manipulate numerous markets in myriad ways, for example:

• Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments. See this, this and this

• Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here

• Charging “storage fees” to store gold bullion … without even buying or storing any gold . And raiding allocated gold accounts

• Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them (and see this)

• Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers. See this, this, this, this and this. This would be like selling your car, and collecting money from 10 different buyers for the same car

• Cheating homeowners by gaming laws meant to protect people from unfair foreclosure

• Pushing investments which they knew were terrible, and then betting against the same investments to make money for themselves. See this, this, this, this and this

• Engaging in unlawful “frontrunning” to manipulate markets. See this, this, this, this, this and this

• Engaging in unlawful “Wash Trades” to manipulate asset prices. See this, this and this

• Otherwise manipulating markets. And see this

• Participating in various Ponzi schemes

• Charging veterans unlawful mortgage fees

• Cooking their books (and see this)

• Bribing and bullying ratings agencies to inflate ratings on their risky investments

The criminality and blatant manipulation will grow and spread and metastasize – taking over and killing off more and more of the economy – until Wall Street executives are finally thrown in jail.
It’s that simple …