In the late 1980’s, 150 scientists figured out that there was a problem with Chlorofluorocarbons ( CFC’s) and that hairspray, refrigerators were depleting Ozone levels all over the planet. A minority group of ‘scientists’ with a political agenda declared that this was ‘alarmist’ and that there was no problem with CFC’s.

Many women in USA, however, stopped using any hairspray containing CFC’s. This forced hairspray manufacturers to dispense with using CFC’s in their products and this was enough to inspire real policy changes. In 1990, governments from all over the world agreed to phase out CFCs. Now our hairspray, refrigerators, and other products are CFC-free.  This success belongs to no one person, but to the scientific community and to the broader community, which acted on important scientific findings. (Refer “Merchants of Doubt”, by Naomi Oreskes & Erik M Conway, 2010)

Today, our goal is more far reaching; our goal is for a sustainable planet and a society that can exercise control over irrational social forces, corporations and institutions that threaten the survival of society — if not humankind itself.

The first requirement in the possible creation of the new society is to be aware of the almost insurmountable difficulties any such attempt will face.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012/politics/partying-like-its-the-end-of-the-world/

HSBC has put aside $2bn to cover the cost of money-laundering fines and customers' claims as it announces a sharp rise in profits for the first half of the year - $12.7bn before tax, 11 per cent more than the same period last year.
 
The bank was accused earlier this month of failing to prevent money laundering and Mexican drug cash going through the bank. The claims were revealed in a scathing US Senate report which said that the bank had allowed clients to shift funds from dangerous and secretive countries.
 
Stuart Gulliver, chief executive of HSBC, described the bank's failings as "shameful", adding: "It's embarrassing and it's very painful for all of us in the firm."

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/business/48228/hsbc-sets-aside-2bn-cover-mis-selling-and-laundering-costs#ixzz22AGFpHIG

see toon at top...  and still no-one is in prison.

Standard Chartered share price falls 16%, wiping £6BILLION from its value, after claims the UK bank laundered billions for Iran and Hezbollah

• Standard Chartered is accused of conspiring with Iran for a decade
• New York State Department of Financial Services called the bank a 'rogue institution' and said the bank's Iran affairs had been a threat to global peace
• Sixty thousand financial transactions were cited as suspicious
• Investigation quoted London-based executive saying: 'You f***ing Americans. Who are you to tell us, the rest of the world, that we’re not going to deal with Iranians?'
• Shares bounce back 8% to 1327p on the FTSE 100 by lunchtime today
  
• Bank says 99.9% of transactions complied with regulations and that any breaches were 'small clerical errors'
• Chairman cuts short Florida holiday to hold talks with bank's lawyers

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2184657/British-banks-links-global-terror-US-accuses-Standard-Chartered-laundering-billions-Iran-Hezbollah.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

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Meanwhile remember the good old days of exception...:

Despite sanctions and trade embargoes, over the past decade the United States government has granted special licenses allowing American companies to do billions of dollars in business with Iran and other countries blacklisted as state sponsors of terrorism, an examination by The New York Times has found.

At the behest of a host of companies — from Kraft Food and Pepsi to some of the nation’s largest banks — a little-known office of the Treasury Department has made nearly 10,000 exceptions to American sanctions rules, approving deals involving countries that have been cast into economic purgatory, beyond the reach of American business.

Most of the licenses were approved under a decade-old law mandating that agricultural and medical humanitarian aid be exempted from sanctions. But the law, pushed by the farm lobby and other industry groups, was written so broadly that allowable humanitarian aid has included cigarettes, Wrigley’s gum, Louisiana hot sauce, weight-loss remedies, body-building supplements and sports rehabilitation equipment sold to the institute that trains Iran’s Olympic athletes.

Hundreds of other licenses were approved because they passed a litmus test: They were deemed to serve American foreign policy goals. And many clearly do, among them deals to provide famine relief in North Korea or to improve Internet connections — and nurture democracy — in Iran. But the examination also found cases in which the foreign-policy benefits were considerably less clear.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/world/24sanctions.html?_r=1&hp

Gus: one knows it's the way to yamerikanise "hostile" countries into the empire... give then the taste of coke and kfc — and they will come to papa... see toon at top...

Standard Chartered shares have rallied after it agreed to pay $340m (£217m) to New York regulators to settle claims that it hid transactions with Iran.

The bank, accused of laundering as much as $250bn, had been threatened that its US banking licence may be revoked.

Shares opened 4.3% higher in London trade before easing slightly.

The bank had admitted that some of its transactions did break US sanctions, but said the amount totalled just $14m.

Ian Gordon, an analyst with Investec Securities, said the risk of further regulatory costs appeared to be "sufficiently contained" and that the deal may help the bank's shares rebound.

Oriel Securities, a stockbroker, upgraded Standard Chartered's shares to "buy" from "reduce", helping the recovery in investor confidence in the bank.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19264361

A New York hedge fund manager told the ADC Leadership Retreat at Hayman Island on the weekend that he expects US bankers to be led away in "handcuffs and pyjamas" pretty soon over Libor rigging.

What's more, he reckons, civil damages over the scandal could end up being greater than all bank capital.

Nobody believed him; the audience smiled politely and moved on, thinking: "Yeah, sure."

The market's not too worried either: Barclays shares are up 22 per cent from their post-Libor lows, and back to where they were in May, and shares in Standard Chartered Bank, which has been fined $340 million for breaking US sanctions on Iran, have gone up 16 per cent since that scandal broke.

But leaving aside the (remote) possibility of arrests over Libor rigging and the slap on the wrist for StanChart over Iran, you'd have to say the world's bankers have got away with the greatest two scams in history, which are the US Subprime Mortgage Affair and the Great Euro Periphery Heist.

Not only have they not been arrested in their pyjamas, they haven't had to give back their bonuses, regulators are getting nowhere, and governments are still bailing them out with cash and cheap money.

The difference between their treatment and that of the tobacco companies is rather stark, you'd have to admit.

In Australia, the banks didn't join in the two big scams, at least not much anyway, because they're better regulated and APRA wouldn't let them, but they're making hay now because their competitors have disappeared along with the swindle-ridden securitised mortgage market.

As a result they have rebuilt their net interest margins and have become the world's most profitable banks according to return on net assets. Of them, Commonwealth Bank is the stand-out: it's the world's most expensive bank by market value to net assets and yesterday broke $7 billion in profit (still only about a quarter of JP Morgan's profit).

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-08-16/kohler-the-banks-got-away-with-it/4202820?WT.svl=theDrum

The Bank of England's money-printing programme, intended to revive economic growth, has delivered a massive boost to the wealth of the most prosperous 10 per cent of households in Britain while delivering relatively scant returns for the poorest, a new analysis from the Bank indicated yesterday.

Click here to view the 'Quantitative Easing: How it works' graphic

In its report on the effectiveness of its controversial quantitative easing (QE) programme, the Bank said it successfully pushed up share prices and other asset values, delivering an overall boost to the net financial worth of UK households of around £600bn. The Bank said this worked out at an average benefit of around £10,000 per person.

However, financial assets are unevenly distributed around the population, meaning that the benefit was highly unequal. And an analysis by The Independent reveals that the wealthiest 10 per cent of households would have benefited from QE more than 240 times as much as the poorest 10 per cent.

The Bank's researchers suggested that the £325bn of sovereign-bond purchases enacted by the Monetary Policy Committee since March 2009 boosted asset prices across the economy by around 28 per cent. The most recent research on levels of wealth by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in July showed that the wealthiest 10 per cent of British households held £2.5 trillion in pension wealth at the end of 2010, while the poorest 10 per cent held just £2bn.

The ONS also estimated that the richest 10 per cent of households held £569bn in financial assets at that time, as against the poorest 10 per cent, who, in contrast, owed around £9bn

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/banks-stimulus-plan-has-lined-pockets-of-the-rich-8076938.html

The bank stimulus was like wanking... It does nor produce many offsprings...

Here in Australia, as Labor had the upper hand, the stimulus WENT TO THE PEOPLE directly, to the horror of the Liberals (conservatives) who thought the banks should get the stimulus so their rich mates could profit...

Result, the people bought things or paid their debts and the economy stayed on an even keel... This was a master stroke by Labor and this still has a lasting influence on the welfare and economic performance of this country... Giving money to the banks would have been like making sure the crew of the titanic was rescued before the women and kiddies...

Barclays has made as much as half a billion pounds in two years from speculating on food staples such as wheat and soya, prompting allegations that banks are profiting handsomely from the global food crisis.

Barclays is the UK bank with the greatest involvement in food commodity trading and is one of the three biggest global players, along with the US banking giants Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, research from the World Development Movement points out.

Last week the trading giant Glencore was attacked for describing the global food crisis and price rises as a "good" business opportunity.

The extent of Barclays' involvement in food speculation comes to light as new figures from the World Bank show that global food prices hit an all-time high in July, with poor harvests in the US and Russia pushing up the average worldwide cost of staples by an unprecedented 10 per cent in a month.

The extent of just one bank's involvement in agricultural markets will add to concerns that food speculation could help push basic prices so high that they trigger a wave of riots in the world's poorest countries, as staples drift out of their populations' reach.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/barclays-makes-500m-betting-on-food-crisis-8100011.html

Twenty years ago, Britain's greatest industrial companies were ICI and GEC. A third, Rolls-Royce, secured from hostile takeover by a government golden share, had a board that was boringly committed to research and development and to investing in its business. ICI and GEC, under colossal pressure from footloose shareholders to deliver high short-term profits, tried to wheel and deal their way to success. Neither now exists. Rolls Royce, free from concerns about hourly movements in its share price, has gone on to be almost our last remaining great industrial company.

Britain, as the Kay review on the equity markets reported, has far too few Rolls-Royces. Instead the report identified a lengthening list of companies – Marks and Spencer, Royal Bank of Scotland, BP, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyds and now BAE – which have made grave strategic errors, taken ethical short cuts or launched ill-judged takeovers, hoping to benefit their uncommitted tourist shareholders. Their competitors in other countries, with different ownership structures and incentives, have survived and prospered.

It is an unreported crisis of ownership that goes to the heart of our current ills. Over the last decade, a fifth of quoted companies have evaporated from the London Stock Exchange, the largest cull in our history. Virtually no new risk capital is sought from the stock market or being offered across the spectrum of companies. A share is now held for an average of seven months. Britain has no indigenous quoted company in the fields of car, chemical or building materials. They are all owned overseas, with design and research and development travelling abroad as well.

The stock market has descended into a casino, served by a vast industry of intermediaries – agents, trustees, investment managers, registrars and advisers of all sorts – who have grown fat from opaque fees. It has become a transmission mechanism for highly short-term expectations of profit driven into the boardroom. Directors' pay has been linked to share price performance, offering them the prospect of stunning fortunes. As a result, R&D is consistently undervalued.

British companies are now hoarding some £800bn in cash, cash they would rather use buying back their own shares than committing to investment. We have allowed a madhouse to develop. An important reason why Britain is at the bottom of the league table for investment and innovation is the way our companies are owned or, rather, not owned.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/30/will-hutton-new-model-capitalism/print

Gus: add, to the correction of this investment stupidity, the need for "capitalism" to PROPERLY look after the natural environment and take it into account in the ledgers — and bob might be your uncle...