Category: Topics (All Other)

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Royal Dutch Shell Oil ‘Watchdog’ Website

03 Environmental Degradation, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption

Mission

royaldutchshellplc.com is an entirely non-commercial website

Our objectives are simple. We want Royal Dutch Shell executives to act at all times in accordance with Shell General Business Principles which include the claimed core principles of honesty, integrity, openness and respect for people in all of Shell’s dealings.

This is surely not an unreasonable ambition given that the principles were devised by Shell, are promoted by Shell and are supposedly current and binding on all Shell operations everywhere. In other words, we are only asking Shell executives to do what they already claim to be doing.

The plain fact is that if Shell executives had abided with the SGBP, scandals such as the reserves fraud involving blatant deceit and cover-up, the preventable Brent Bravo deaths which flowed from the Shell “Touch F*** All” safety culture on North Sea Platforms, and the more recent PR humiliations arising from outrageous examples of greenwash advertising, could not have occurred.

We do not believe that it is morally acceptable that Shell executives are indemnified so that even if they cheat, deceive and cover-up serious misdeeds, treating shareholders and the public as gullible fools, they are still able to walk away as winners. In the case of Sir Philip Watts, with a severance package/pension pot reportedly worth $18.5 million USD.  We think that this is disgraceful situation at odds with all ethical norms including the SGBP and will continue to say so on this website.

The SGBP is being been used as a PR tool to promote undeserved confidence in the scruples and honesty of Shell senior management.  For example, the SGBP featured in the Form 20F Declarations filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission thereby generating confidence in the proven reserves volumes which had been inflated i.e. were false.

While Shell execs continue to make pledges of ethical trading which they flout, we will continue our humble efforts to expose their hypocrisy and we welcome the support of others who like us are not prepared to put up with such deception.

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Reference: How Goldman Sachs Looted America

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
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Exclusive Excerpt: America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi's ‘Griftopia'

Matt Taibbi's unsparing and authoritative reporting on the financial crisis has produced a series of memorable Rolling Stone features. He showed us how Goldman Sachs, that “great vampire squid,” played a central role in creating not only the housing bubble but four other big speculative booms that filled its coffers while wrecking the American economy. He explained how Wall Street banks cooked up schemes that helped decimate municipal budgets and cost countless jobs, and how Wall Street lobbying led to a financial reform bill that won't prevent another meltdown. Taibbi builds on that eye-opening work in his new book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America , due out from Spiegel & Grau on November 2. In this exclusive excerpt, he describes how our cash-strapped country is auctioning off its highways, ports and even parking meters at fire sale prices — and finding eager buyers in the unregulated sovereign wealth funds of oil-rich Middle Eastern countries.

Read the exclusive Griftopia excerpt.

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Journal: Goldman Sachs Captures the White House

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Corruption, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth
Chuck Spinney Recommends...

.. why Henry Kissinger may end up looking good.

Obama Hires a Hustler

Posted on Oct 19, 2010

By Robert Scheer

One day as Wall Street was crashing, President George W. Bush had the temerity to plaintively ask his treasury secretary, Henry Paulson: “How did this happen?” Paulson, who headed Goldman Sachs before taking the Treasury job, remarks in his memoir: “It was a humbling question for someone from the financial sector to be asked—after all, we were the ones responsible.”

That’s an honest enough admission about the culpability of the financial community in bundling the toxic derivatives packages still disastrously undermining the economic health of the nation. Even more startling was Paulson’s admission in his memoir that he, at the time he was advising the president, still did not know that home mortgages were at the heart of those troubling securities that his former company had marketed to others with such wild abandon.

Were President Barack Obama to ask that question about the origins of this crisis of Tom Donilon, one of his closest aides whom he recently appointed to the critical job of national security adviser, Donilon would find it even more awkward to invoke the defense of ignorance. As the chief lobbyist for Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2005, he was far more intimately involved than Paulson in the manufacturing of this crisis. He successfully pressured Congress to give Fannie Mae the green light to speed past any sound regulation. Indeed, had Congress endorsed the barest semblance of regulation of the Fannie Mae-led housing scam, it would have been stillborn instead of being a very much alive Frankenstein creation.

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Phi Beta Iota: Henry Kissinger was and remains a de facto war criminal (see The Trial of Henry Kissinger) but he never actively cheated the entire US public or was party to the deliberate–with malice aforethought–destruction of the entire US economy in the intimate manner of the new “National Security Advisor,” one Tom Donilon.  Perhaps his title should be changed to Goldman Sachs Security Advisor.  Kissinger did assure the death of another 20,000 US soldiers by cravenly undermining the Paris Peace Talks the first time around, and he did approve of NATO/CIA “dirty tricks” that killed people in Europe, so perhaps it is a toss-up.  Relevant book:  Politics Lost–How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You’re Stupid (Hardcover).

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Reference: Bell System Technical Journal, 1922-1983

Technologies

The scientific discoveries and technological innovations produced by Bell System research and engineering were critical not only to the evolution of global telecommunications but, more widely, they had a considerable impact on the technological base of the global economy and, indeed, on our daily lives.

Bell Labs is the source of many significant contributions, of course, in the area of telephony, but also in memory devices, imaging devices, system organization, computers and software technology, as well as acoustics, optics, switching, transmission, wireless and data communication. New principles, new materials, new devices, and new systems from Bell Telephone Laboratories resulted in new industries, hundreds of new products, and thousands of new jobs. The invention of the transistor in 1947, and subsequent advances in related solid-state device and circuit technology formed the basis of a multibillion dollar global industry and ultimately enabled the digital world. Shannon’s seminal paper titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” published over 60 years ago, gave birth to Information Theory and has stood as the guiding foundation for communications scientists and engineers in their quest for faster, more efficient, and more robust communications systems ever since.

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Journal: Bank of America into Receivership?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth

‘FORECLOSE ON THE FRAUDSTERS'
White Collar Crime Expert Calls For FDIC To Take Control Of Bank Of America

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Charging that the ongoing foreclosure fraud epidemic is the work of precisely the same unrepentant bank officers whose fraudulent mortgage schemes crashed the financial system in the first place, two leading critics of the financial industry are calling on the FDIC to put some of the nation's biggest banks into receivership — starting with the Bank of America — and make them clean house.

William K. Black, a former regulator and white-collar crime expert who cracked down on massive fraud during the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, and his fellow economics professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, L. Randall Wray, write in the Huffington Post that it's time to “foreclose on the foreclosure fraudsters”. They write:

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TED Video on “Connectivity=Productivity” Growth of Bangladesh Telecom to Allieviate Poverty

01 Poverty, Commerce, Mobile, Technologies, TED Videos, Videos/Movies/Documentaries

Iqbal Quadir Creates a Culture of Entrepreneurship in Bangladesh

Why does poverty exist? That's no small question for an individual to ask, but in Iqbal Quadir's homeland, Bangladesh, there may be no other question that matters more.

His answer is twofold: First, European prosperity resulted from the devolution of authorities and the empowerment of citizens, while Western aid to developing countries simply empowered authorities to marginalize the citizenry. Even looking at oil-rich countries, the autocratic regimes grew spectacularly wealthy, while poverty remained entrenched. “Economic development,” Quadir concludes, “is of, by and for the people.” Second, his life experience had demonstrated that connectivity is a powerful weapon against poverty. The ability to communicate eliminates massive and avoidable waste in productivity, which in turn  creates greater commerce and economies.

In Bangladesh 12 years ago, only one in 500 people had access to a telephone. “In whole areas where 100 million people lived, there were no telephones,” he says. “Vast amounts of wasted time results. The only way people can depend on each other is to connect to each other, which leads to productivity.” He decided to bring cell phones to them all–although not to each of them individually.

The New York-banker-turned-Bangladeshi-entrepreneur faced the hurdles you would imagine, the most prominent being that poor people could not afford cell phones. But in fine entrepreneurial fashion, Quadir contended, “If a cell phone creates productivity, why would you worry about [people's ability to pay]?” With backing from microbank GrameenBank, Quadir started GrameenPhone, a locally based shared cell phone service. He approached a single woman entrepreneur in each village and provided her with a cell phone. The local woman would lease its access on a per-call basis, making cell phone communication available to more than 52,000 Bangladeshi villages and 80 million people. As for the women entrepreneurs, there are now 115,000 of them within GrameenPhone, each making a profit of $700 a year, far more than the average per capita income of the country.

Thanks to Entrepreneur.com for listing various TED videos

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