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Everything is rigged, continued: European Commission raids oil companies in price-fixing probe

Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
Wed, 15 May 2013 11:05 UTC
Finance Workers
© Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesEuropean finance workers
We're going to get into this more at a later date, but there was some interesting late-breaking news yesterday.

According to numerous reports, the European Commission regulators yesterday raided the offices of oil companies in London, the Netherlands and Norway as part of an investigation into possible price-rigging in the oil markets.

The targeted companies include BP, Shell and the Norweigan company Statoil. The Guardian explains that officials believe that oil companies colluded to manipulate pricing data:
The commission said the alleged price collusion, which may have been going on since 2002, could have had a "huge impact" on the price of petrol at the pumps "potentially harming final consumers".
Lord Oakeshott, former Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said the alleged rigging of oil prices was "as serious as rigging Libor" - which led to banks being fined hundreds of millions of pounds.
The inquiry also involves Platts, the world's largest oil price reporting agency. The concept here is very similar to both the LIBOR scandal, which involved banks manipulating the benchmark rates for interest rates, and to the possible rigging of interest rate swap prices through the manipulation of ISDAfix, the benchmark rate for those instruments, which is also the subject of a regulatory probe.
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MIB

'Old-school' spycraft persists in digital age

Carl Schreck
RIA Novosti
Tue, 14 May 2013 19:11 UTC
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© FSBA table behind Ryan Christopher Fogle shows some of the items that were allegedly confiscated from him.
The alleged espionage arsenal that a purported American spy was carrying when he was caught Monday night in Moscow - including a compass and a map of the Russian capital - looks decidedly old-school in the age of iPhones and GPS navigators.

But when it comes to spy tradecraft, newer isn't necessarily better, a veteran clandestine services officer with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) told RIA Novosti on Tuesday.

"Just as espionage itself is very old, many of the tradecraft methods for espionage are still valid," said Peter Earnest, who operated intelligence collection and covert operations in Europe and the Middle East during a 35-year career with the CIA.

"Cell phones and text messages can be hacked," Earnest added. "By resorting to written messages and dead-drop sites, you may be ensuring the intelligence service and perhaps the agent a level of security that trying to talk on the phone or something else doesn't."
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MIB

Russia detains American diplomat, accuses him of espionage

Ellen Barry
The Indian Express
Wed, 15 May 2013 19:00 UTC
Russia's Federal Security Service announced Tuesday it had detained a CIA officer during an attempt to recruit a Russian agent, saying the American had brought lots of cash, technical devices and "appearance disguising means".

The FSB, the successor to Soviet-era KGB, identified the officer as Ryan Christopher Fogle and said he had been "working under the guise of" third secretary in the political department of the US embassy in Moscow. It said Fogle was detained Monday night.

Russia's Foreign Ministry summoned US Ambassador Michael A McFaul to appear on Wednesday to respond to the accusation.

Photographs that appeared on Russian news sites on Tuesday afternoon showed a man in a blond wig, a blue checked shirt and a baseball cap being pinned to the ground, evidently by a Russian officer, and later sitting at a desk in an FSB office, grim-faced.
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Stormtrooper

U.S. military 'power grab' goes into effect: Pentagon unilaterally grants itself authority over 'civil disturbances'

Jed Morey
Long Island Press
Tue, 14 May 2013 18:40 UTC
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© Senior Airman Sean Martin, U.S. Air ForceU.S. Troops in Afghanistan
The manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects offered the nation a window into the stunning military-style capabilities of our local law enforcement agencies. For the past 30 years, police departments throughout the United States have benefitted from the government's largesse in the form of military weaponry and training, incentives offered in the ongoing "War on Drugs." For the average citizen watching events such as the intense pursuit of the Tsarnaev brothers on television, it would be difficult to discern between fully outfitted police SWAT teams and the military.

The lines blurred even further Monday as a new dynamic was introduced to the militarization of domestic law enforcement. By making a few subtle changes to a regulation in the U.S. Code titled "Defense Support of Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies" the military has quietly granted itself the ability to police the streets without obtaining prior local or state consent, upending a precedent that has been in place for more than two centuries.

The most objectionable aspect of the regulatory change is the inclusion of vague language that permits military intervention in the event of "civil disturbances." According to the rule:
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USA

Outrage at Syrian rebel shown 'eating soldier's heart'


UK Independent
Tue, 14 May 2013 17:10 UTC
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Observers says the video shows Abu Sakkar - the prominent founder of rebel group Farouq Brigade - as opposition figures and Assad supporters condemn footage
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Target

Best of the Web: Rule Britannia for global crimes

Finian Cunningham
Press TV
Tue, 14 May 2013 16:17 UTC
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The Mau Mau, like hundreds of millions of others, suffered the direct and indirect consequences of the despotic and ruthless British regime
It's an anthem that is usually sung with chest-thumping pride and misty eyes by British imperialists. "Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves". This jingoistic celebration of Britain's former global conquest may yet degenerate into "Rue Britannia, Britannia rues the waves".

This is because, as The Guardian newspaper reports this week, the London government has at long last been forced into recognizing compensation payments for as many as 50,000 Kenyan nationals who were victims of torture and other crimes against humanity during that country's independence struggle in the 1950s. The eventual bill for compensation could run up to tens of millions of pounds.

But the bad news for financially bankrupt Britain does not end there. With this precedent established of compensation for past British imperialist crimes, that now leaves the way open for a global flood of similar claims.

Jingoistic British imperialists may therefore soon rue their often-made reference to Britain ruling the waves and so many countries the world over - at the height of the British Empire some 20 percent of the globe's land mass was under colonial domination. That's a lot of people who can claim recompense for past British horrors and deprivation.

Comment: There isn't a sinkhole deep and wide enough to bury Britain's crimes against humanity in. Much of the world's problems descend from - and continue to be perpetrated by - the nexus of British military, corporate and financial entities based in London.

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Bulb

When 3 gunmen shoot 19 at a Mother's Day parade, it's not "terrorism"

John Aravosis
Information Clearing House
Mon, 13 May 2013 16:21 UTC
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No terrorism please, we're gunmen. A bizarre story out of New Orleans, where two or three gunmen opened fire on a Mother's Day parade, injuring 19 people, including two children.

Sure sounds awfully familiar, almost like a redux of the Boston Marathon bombing. But you'd be wrong.

You see, when two guys use bombs to hurt people en masse at a marathon, it's instantly "terrorism." But when two to three people use guns to hurt people en masse at a parade, it's simply "the relentless drumbeat of street violence."

What's the difference?

A homemade bomb versus a gun, by the looks of it.
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USA

Eroding freedom in America

Stephen Lendman
Information Clearing House
Mon, 13 May 2013 16:13 UTC
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US democracy is illusory. America never was beautiful. It's not the land of the free and home of the brave. It wasn't created that way. More than ever, it's not now.

Freedom is a four-letter word. It's fast disappearing. It's an endangered species. Wealth, power and privilege alone matter. America's war on terror priorities advance them.

International, constitutional and US statute laws are spurned. Rogue state ruthlessness replaced them. Boston's unprecedented lockdown suggests what's coming. It covered a two hundred square mile area. An important threshold was crossed.

Martial law terrorized city residents. Constitutional rights were suspended. Perhaps it was prelude to what's coming. It can happen anywhere across America. It can show up nationwide.

Thousands of heavily armed militarized police, National Guard troops, FBI Swat teams, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operatives, Drug Enforcement Administration agents, and perhaps other federal, state and local enforcers showed what full-blown tyranny looks like.

Defying public diktats risked arrest or getting shot. Helicopters hovered low over neighborhoods. House-to-house searches ordered pajama-clad families outside.

Without probable cause, some were handcuffed and/or placed face down on sidewalks. Others were publicly strip-searched. Imagine what's coming next time. Freedom in America's on the chopping block for elimination.
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Vader

Best of the Web: How the Boston bombings may change the world for the worse!

James Petras
Voltaire Network
Tue, 14 May 2013 16:10 UTC
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The relation between the suspected Boston Marathon bombers and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Massachusetts State Police (MSP) and the Boston Police (BP) is a point of contention and controversy.

The FBI, at first, claimed no knowledge of the bombing suspects but later was forced to admit having received at least two sets of intelligence reports, one from Russian officials and another from the CIA, identifying one of the suspected bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as a potential security threat -linked to a Chechen terrorist organization. Testimony from Tsarnaev's mother and father indicates that the FBI was active in following, harassing and interrogating the suspect before the bombing. Despite general directives from the US Departments of Justice and Homeland Security mandating US security to aggressively pursue 'Islamist terrorists', the FBI claims to have made no effort to follow-up on the Russian and CIA security alerts, especially after Tamerlan Tsarnaev returned from Russian state of Dagestan last year where he allegedly met six times with a known Chechen terrorist, Gadzhimurad Dolgatov, in a fundamentalist Salafi mosque.

The official government and corporate media versions claim the FBI may have 'over-looked' the security risk posed by Tsarnaev. Congressional critics argue that the FBI was 'negligent' in following up leads provided by the Russians and the CIA. A more likely explanation is that the FBI was actively engaged with Tsarnaev and deliberately encouraged the conspiracy for self-serving purposes.
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USA

Best of the Web: Our American Pravda

Ron Unz
The American Conservative
Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:01 UTC
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© Michael Hogue
The major media overlooked Communist spies and Madoff's fraud. What are they missing today?

In mid-March, the Wall Street Journal carried a long discussion of the origins of the Bretton Woods system, the international financial framework that governed the Western world for decades after World War II. A photo showed the two individuals who negotiated that agreement. Britain was represented by John Maynard Keynes, a towering economic figure of that era. America's representative was Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury and long a central architect of American economic policy, given that his nominal superior, Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., was a gentleman farmer with no background in finance. White was also a Communist agent.

Such a situation was hardly unique in American government during the 1930s and 1940s. For example, when a dying Franklin Roosevelt negotiated the outlines of postwar Europe with Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Yalta summit, one of his important advisors was Alger Hiss, a State Department official whose primary loyalty was to the Soviet side. Over the last 20 years, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and other scholars have conclusively established that many dozens or even hundreds of Soviet agents once honeycombed the key policy staffs and nuclear research facilities of our federal government, constituting a total presence perhaps approaching the scale suggested by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose often unsubstantiated charges tended to damage the credibility of his position.
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