Obama's Green Mafia Gets More Ink

May 9, 2010 by Annie | Leave a comment

Wednesday 05/06/10 Investors Business Daily getting even closer to an outright charge of criminal abuse of power in this piece on Obama’s $10 trillion “green” corruption scheme. Complete text below & in screenshot at bottom. Highlights are mine.

Original link to article: http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=532610

Europe’s Carbon Mafia, and Ours
Corruption: The carbon trading system being pushed here has spawned crime and fraud across the pond. Cap-and-trade is not about saving the planet. It’s about money and power, and absolute power corrupting absolutely.

All across Europe authorities have been conducting raids, rounding up individuals involved in a new version of Climate-gate. This time the data aren’t corrupted. Europe’s Emissions Trading System is. The system is so sick, it’s turned out to be a scam built upon a scam.

Twenty-five people have been arrested in raids by British and German authorities as part of a pan-European crackdown on carbon credit VAT tax fraud.

U.K. officials announced raids on 81 offices and homes, nabbing 13 people in England and eight in Scotland. The operation involved 450 investigators from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs office.

German authorities raided 230 locations, including the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt and the offices of RWE, one of the largest energy firms in Europe. The German operation involved 1,000 investigators targeting 50 companies and 150 suspects.

The amount of money involved in carbon trading is huge and the temptations vast. While our Congress demagogues about banks and their “complex financial instruments,” they are simple compared to cap-and-trade, which as we have noted involves essentially the buying and selling of air. Throw in an oppressive value-added tax and you have a recipe for corruption and fraud.

Last December, Europol, the European criminal intelligence agency, announced that Emissions Trading System fraud had resulted in about 5 billion euros in lost revenues as Europe’s carbon traders schemed to avoid paying Europe’s VAT and pocket the difference. In announcing the raids, the agency said that as much as 90% of Europe’s carbon trades were the result of fraudulent activity.

“Carbon markets are highly susceptible to fraud, given their complexity and the fact that it’s not always clear what is being traded,” says Oscar Reyes of Carbon Trade Watch.

Climate change has been found to be a fraud. Now the system to fight it has been. Yet it’s that system the administration and others want to establish here through cap-and-trade legislation such as Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer.

As we also have noted, the mechanism for such phantom carbon trading here has already been established in the form of the Chicago Climate Exchange. The Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the seed money to start CCX when Barack Obama sat on its board.

CCX founder Richard Sandor estimates the climate trading market could be “a $10 trillion dollar market.” It is an invitation to fraud that would make Europe’s ETS scandal seem like petty theft.

In 2000, according to Joyce Foundation records, $347,600 was allocated to Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, where Sandor was a research professor, “to design a Midwestern pilot program for the voluntary trading of carbon dioxide and other emissions that cause climate change.”

Now President Obama would make such carbon trading mandatory, limit total emissions and make carbon as valuable a commodity as booze during Prohibition.

The Joyce Foundation’s two grants totaled just over $1 million. CCX has proved very lucrative for Sandor, whose 8 million shares in the exchange has grown to more than $260 million even before a national cap-and-trade system like Europe’s is established.

Al Gore, who recently increased his carbon footprint by spending $8.9 million on an oceanview villa near Santa Barbara, Calif., sitting on 1.5 acres with a swimming pool, spa, fountains, five bedrooms, nine bathrooms and no fewer than six fireplaces, is co-founder of Generation Investment Management LLP, the fifth largest shareholder in CCX.

The largest shareholder is, uh, Goldman Sachs. Other CCX founders include former Goldman Sachs partner David Blood, as well as Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris, also of Goldman Sachs. Presumably they know a lot about playing shell games with other people’s money.

What has happened in Europe is going to happen here and may already have begun. We, too, can save the earth for fun and profit.

Lawyers, Lawyers, Lawyers…

May 2, 2010 by Annie | Leave a comment

How much you wanna bet we’ll find some Obama linked lawyers to this firm? Hmm? From AmLaw Daily, unexpurgated article below.

April 30, 2010 4:55 PM
Simpson, Shearman on ICE’s Deal for Europe’s Leading Emissions Exchange
Posted by Zach Lowe

There may not be many companies that stand to gain as much from financial regulatory reform as IntercontinentalExchange Inc., which already operates a clearinghouse for credit-default swaps and would stand to receive lots more business should federal law require more derivatives move through clearinghouses or exchanges.

But ICE continues to look forward, and today it announced plans to acquire Climate Exchange PLC, which operates the leading emissions trading platforms in both Europe and the U.S., according to the Wall Street Journal and lawyers who worked on the deal. The deal is valued at $603 million and is contingent on shareholder and court approval in the U.K., where Climate Exchange is based, lawyers say.

A team from Shearman & Sterling represented ICE, which is not a surprise, because the firm helped create the derivatives clearinghouse (called ICE Trust) in early 2009 and has advised the company on several other transactions. (Shearman partner Bradley Sabel was named one of The American Lawyer’s Dealmakers of the Year for 2009 for his work on the creation of ICE Trust.)

Slaughter and May represented Climate Exchange, lawyers say. The Shearman team has been working on the deal in earnest for about two months, though the two companies have been close for years, says Lois Moore, who led the Shearman team along with Barney Reynolds. (ICE owned a small stake in Climate Exchange before this deal.) Climate Exchange controls about 90 percent of the market in emissions allowance trading in Europe and had been waiting patiently for the U.S. to implement a cap-and-trade system that could create a booming market here, the WSJ says. In the meantime, Climate Exchange’s main U.S. subsidiary, the Chicago Climate Exchange, operates a U.S. exchange through which companies can trade emissions contracts in various gasses, the WSJ reports.

Jeff Twentyman led the Slaughter and May team on the deal, lawyers say. He was not immediately available for comment.

Original post here.

CNBC on CCX

May 2, 2010 by Annie | Leave a comment

Unexpurgated story below:

Carbon Could Be No. 1 Commodity: Exchange Chief Sandor

Published: Monday, 26 Apr 2010 | 12:49 PM ET
By: Natalie Erlich
Writer/Producer

“Carbon, when it becomes worldwide, will be unambiguously the largest commodity in the world,” Sandor said in an interview. “The world emits 35 billion tons; it’s priced at $20; that’s $700 billion. Put a 10-20 multiple like you do on futures, [and] you’re talking about $10 trillion at maturity.” Sandor, who was a major player in the formation of the interest-rate futures market, created the Chicago Climate Exchange [CCX] as a market-based solution to global warming. Time Magazine named him “Hero of the Planet” in 2002, and the “father of carbon trading” in 2007.

“In ’89-’90 someone came to me and said, ‘you commoditize interest rates, do you think you can commoditize air?’” he said. “You could cap the emissions that any utility has, and if they go below that cap, they can sell their emissions, their rights to emit— and if you can go above it, you can buy someone else’s. So it drives compliance.”

The exchange is the world’s first and North America’s only voluntary, legally binding greenhouse gas cap-and-trade system, providing third party verification by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority [FINRA]. Its subsidiary, the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange is the world’s first environmental derivatives exchange that trades carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxides and nitrogen oxides.

Although the United States remains one of few industrialized nations not following the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty intended to reduce global warming, the country’s voluntary emissions market remains sizable. At 700 million tons of carbon, CCX is about one-third of Europe’s cap-and-trade program. In fact, that amount is larger than Germany’s industrial footprint, according to the exchange. However, this comes at a time when the U.S. climate bill sits on the brink of collapse, which could also have repercussions for the voluntary market.

“A lot of the voluntary investors were getting in because they wanted to get ahead of the curve,” said Terence Gallagher, an independent carbon strategist. “And now people are on the sidelines waiting to see what’s going to happen so you’re going to see less people willing to take the plunge and get into the voluntary market.”

The Senate was expected to unveil legislation today but the bill became stalled after a key GOP ally pulled his support because of an unrelated immigration reform dispute. The CCX has no comment on the situation at this time.

Another hurdle facing the carbon market is fragmentation on the national and international levels. While Europe currently has two types of credits which are generated in Kyoto signatory countries, the United States is divided between the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative [RGGI] and the California Action Climate Reserve, said Gallagher.

< span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;">“There’s too many markets,” he said. “It’s not there until we get a standard product that’s tradable across all different countries.” China, another nation often scrutinized for its large carbon footprint has also taken considerable interest in emissions trading, said Sandor.

“I have more ease in explaining cap and trade in China at universities, than I do in the United States,” he said. “There is an undergraduate emissions trading club in Peking University.”

In fact, the CCX has partnered with China’s largest oil and gas producer and supplier CNPC and the City of Tianjin to develop sulfur dioxide emissions and water pollutants markets. The exchange has also teamed up with China’s central bank to establish a research institute in Chicago and Beijing to advance corporate and industrial use of emissions markets.

“They have their eye on the ball,” said Sandor. “I had lunch with the chairman, Governor Zhou, and he’s like their Ben Bernanke. And Governor Zhou knows more about cap-and-trade than half or 75 percent of the people I know anywhere. So when a central banker can talk chapter and verse about emissions trading, it’s telling you something.”© 2010 CNBC.com

TOPICS:China | Politics & Government | Alternative Energy | Energy
Original post here.

"Crime Inc" or "The Chicago Mob's Excellent Adventure to the White House"

May 1, 2010 by Annie | Leave a comment

If you missed the Glenn Beck show this week (or believe him to be a fat, crying, rodeo clown with zero credibility so you always miss it) then you missed Monday’s & Thursday’s jaw dropping, stupefying, damned near death-defying expose he did on Obama’s little ten trillion dollar footsie game with a hitherto innocuous CCX (Chicago Carbon Exchange) and one not so innocuous Goldman Sachs. There are other players, notably Albert Gore. The whole pile of dough hinges on a little bill known as “Cap & Trade.” Note: our entire gross domestic product is roughly fourteen trillion. If this thing goes, it will mean ten trillion…. per year.

Getting the picture how big and bad and dirty this is? Does it clean it up at all to know that the whole thing got started the day after Obama was elected Senator in 2006 and culminated with a private Oval Office meeting with Goldman Sach’s poobah Blankfein about ten days before the congressional spanking they took for their oh so bad behavior? Beck was curious about the timing, too.

And then got curiouser and curiouser…

See his Thursday show notes/video here.

SOME incredibly talented individual put together this four page PDF of the CCX scandal. Don’t know who, but the link to the original site of the pdf is below. Someone on Twitter linked to it. WOW.